Oswald's Tale is bit of a "dog's breakfast"; the first forty-percent of the book is a close consideration of Oswald's time living in the Soviet Union. Mailer and associates spent about six months locating and interviewing people who had contact with Oswald, ranging through love interests, co-workers, and KGB agents who spied on Oswald. Information gained from these interviews is supplemented with knowledge gained from documents produced during that time, primarily by Soviet state agencies. The second, sixty-percent of the book consists of Mailer's quoting at length from already-published works, interspersed with his own, rather unique speculations about Oswald's activities and motivations.
The first portion of the book is intriguing, and seems to bring some new insights to discussion of Oswald. The second is far more troubling, in that it offers little in the way of insights, and overwhelms with its dubious psychoanalysis and conjecture.
Mailer does try to use observations from the first section to ground some of his ideas developed in the second. For instance, based on some (rather dicey) proposals that Oswald may have been engaged in some kind of homosexual contact during his stint in the Marines, as well as later in Russia, Mailer later tries to propose that Oswald was perhaps receiving money from a male lover in Texas during the year preceding Kennedy's assassination. Mailer suggests also that Oswald's sapiosexuality might explain his sexual relationship with his wife, which apparently went through lengthy periods of non-interest.
Mailer's ideas are generally fairly loosely developed. While this can suggest openness, it can also lead him into excess. Evidence? Read the two following quotations.
Pg. 491: “All through February and March he prepares himself to strike at Walker. The notion that the General was a Hitler in the making was key to choosing him for a target. The soft underbelly, however, of so lofty a notion – stop the second Hitler before he arises - comes in large degree because of Oswald’s concealed sense of himself – even from himself! – of also being a putative Hitler. A physical resemblance between the two men had to be, consciously or unconsciously, in Oswald’s mind. One need only pencil in a mustache on any photograph of Oswald in profile to feel the force of the resemblance. In his fantasies, would Oswald have refused a Faustian pact? Allow him to steal Hitler’s powers of ascendancy, and he could convert them to his own vastly more idealistic vision. But first he must kill a minor god.”
Pg. 551: “It was as if his murderous impulses could only be gathered if he was without sexual release. To continue his marriage was to condemn himself, therefore, to a life of mediocrity, yet – there is no other explanation for so many of his actions – a sizeable part of him adored Marina, and this quite apart from his full affection for June. For that matter, devotion to June was like an open display of his infatuation with himself. But Marina he loved as his woman, his difficult, caustic contrary, and often wholly attractice wife – even if he could hardly tolerate her for most of the month. Are half of the young husbands in existence all that much unlike him? Or young wives?”
I found Mailer's consideration of history writing, particular when trying to understand the motivations of historical characters, intriguing.
Pg. 605: “This book, however, was undertaken without a fixed conclusion in either direction; indeed, it began with a prejudice in favor of the conspiracy theorists. All the same, one’s plan for the work was to take Oswald on his own terms as long as that was possible – that is, to try and comprehend his deeds as arising from nothing more than himself until such a premise lost all headway. To study his life in this manner produced a hypothesis: Oswald was a protagonist, a prime mover, a man who made things happen… Indeed, this point of view has by now taken hold to a point where the writer would not like to relinquish it for too little. There is the danger! Hypotheses commence as our servant – they enable us to keep our facts in order while we attempt to learn more about a partially obscured subject. Once the profits of such a method accumulate, however, one is morally obliged… to be scrupulously on guard against one’s own corruption. Otherwise, the hitherto useful hypothesis will insist on prevailing over everything that comes in and so will take over the integrity of the project.”
You can read the final two chapters of the book here, on the Frontline website.
A good review of the book by Thomas Powers can be found in the NY Times.
If you are interested in the Kennedy assassination, I have previously discussed the following:
- Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (2007)
- Jeff Greenfield, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan (2010)
- David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (2009)
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