8
The Stable
Jan. 26
Dear Harry,
I was awfully annoyed by your last letter. It isn’t the brothel. Of course, you have to explore some of the good and bad experiences these women have to offer. I confess that I did go into a silent tantrum of sheer envy at the way you men are free to explore your sexual curiosity and alter yourselves in the process. I hope not for the worse. Yet what is freedom ultimately but the right to take serious chances with one’s soul? I do believe that somewhere in sexual excess—at least for good people, brave people—there is absolution. Am I babbling? Do I sound like that smelly old libertine, Rasputin? What a swath he would have cut with some of the Washington ladies I know!
At any rate, I’m still annoyed with you. First, for shipping off dubious pieces of jewelry whose history you are insensitive to, and now for coming in like an overfed bull to trample over my terminology. It left me grateful for the first time in moons that my theories, for all effective purposes, are sealed in TSS and I am no household name. Because I do not dare to think of how the nuances of Alpha and Omega would be crunched by the magazine public when even you expose a gross misconception of what it’s all about.
I will lecture you, then, one more time. I promise not to go on too long. The key principle in Alpha and Omega is that they are not to be seen as the equivalent of containers for the psyche, the one to the left collecting whores and business routines and baseball games and drunken evenings, while the other broods on philosophy and reads your mail. That’s the pitfall for everyone. They start to see it that way. As two carry-all bags. Put part of your experience into one, other part into the other.
Nothing to do with it. I am saying: Multiply by two the complexities of human personality. Postulate two complete and different persons in each of us. Each of these characters is more or less equally well developed. Trickier to grasp is that each is as complex and wholly elaborated as what we usually think of as a complete personality. So, Alpha and Omega can not only be neurotic, but possess the power to form vastly different neuroses. (That dire situation is, of course, reserved for terribly sick people.)
All right, I next postulate that one of them, Omega, originated in the ovum and so knows more about the mysteries—conception, birth, death, night, the moon, eternity, karma, ghosts, divinities, myths, magic, our primitive past, so on. The other, Alpha, creature of the forward-swimming energies of sperm, ambitious, blind to all but its own purpose, tends, of course, to be more oriented toward enterprise, technology, grinding the corn, repairing the mill, building the bridges between money and power, und so weiter.
Given these highly delineated and separate personalities of Alpha and Omega, we should be able, if we possess the skills—which, alas, we do not at present—to separate them out from the murky confusion with which we pretend to analyze individuals. In psychology, we try to understand patients by the aid of schemata that are equal to plumbing systems (Freud), or blunder about on the assumption there is only one psyche and it is oceanic (Jung). Harry, I am beginning to think that the world is filled with geniuses, but only a few survive. The rest perish in the desperation of having to repeat themselves. (Since I am certainly no genius, perhaps I will endure.) But I certainly must repeat, over and over, that Alpha and Omega are individual people. Each Alpha, each Omega, is different from all others. One Omega can be artistic, night-dwelling, a seer; another Omega can be Omega only in name, even as you can find a Sicilian, I suppose, with blue eyes, a cheerful manner, and blond hair. Ditto for Alpha. Sometimes Alpha and Omega borrow or steal each other’s properties. They are, after all, wed together like the corporeal lobes of the brain. They can influence each other, or spend their lives in all-out strife for power over the other. The model is marriage. Or, if you prefer, the Republicans and the Democrats. Or the Czarists and the Bolsheviks—is that why the Russians tear themselves apart, and get drunk all the time? Your Chevi Fuertes is a superb example of Alpha and Omega in constant tug of war. You say it yourself when you remark that he is 51 percent with us and 49 percent against, and functioning in great depression. All right, sir, fundamental concepts in place, let us take up your whorehouse capers. “Very little or maybe no Omega is in the act,” you write squiffily, as if you were a parson trying not to sniff his fingers after touching a dog turd. Then you are crass enough to go on about Alpha and his grabbies. God, you are a farce. Forgive me if I’m rude, but I’m also becoming aware of how irascible is the territorial imperative in me. So, don’t make weak gropes at my terminology. The point about sex is that both Alpha and Omega enter the act and digest the separate experiences they receive. Indeed, they digest them as individually as two people at a play for an evening can sit side by side and come away with separate critical reactions. And somewhat different memories of what they saw. When you say, therefore, that Omega was not in the act, you reveal merely that in sexual matters, Alpha is ruling your ship with an iron hand. Alpha does not listen to any of Omega’s variant interpretation of the experience. This is analogous to fascism. Your smug acceptance of a full half of sexual indifference in yourself is a way of stating that you, unbeknownst to yourself, are a sexual fascist. There, it’s true, and I’m glad I said it.
Do you find me vengeful? I’m a mother now. Each time Christopher begins to scream in the middle of the night, and this has happened on several inexplicable occasions since your brooch popped up in the mail, I have been ready to curse you, and once almost did, but then didn’t—curses are a serious matter with me.
An hour later—I’ve just fed Christopher
Now I’m fond of you again. I just gave Christopher the best of both my temperamental jugs, and he seemed to like it. We drew closer and closer and by the end were spanning little universes. His fingers kept tapping my breast like a fat man rubbing his own belly after a good meal. This never happened before.
Suddenly I realized I’m in debt to you. I was sweet with the baby because my nasties had been liberated by writing a letter bound to wound you in all your soft places. Well, as Hugh might say: It’s time you toughened up.
I will reveal that I’ve been keeping a plum for you in absolute velvet wrappings. You won’t believe how fortunate you are. Hugh and I decided a couple of weeks ago to find out a little more about your Chief of Station Designate, so we invited Howard Hunt, and his wife, Dorothy, to dinner. Oh, Lord and sweet peas, do I have stuff to tell you. Now, you must wait for the next letter. My husband’s key is in the lock.
After midnight
Hugh, for once, is asleep ahead of me, and I want to present you with your plum.
Not instantly, however. You do need the background. You see, Howard and Dorothy were invited to dinner as part of the Montague Plan. Hugh never does anything without a reason. While this is certainly not one of his charms, I confess I’m amazed at how often he can get me to carry on like a loyal subaltern, considering how spoiled I was when we commenced our marriage. I do end up working away for his notions, grand or silly. In this case, concerning the Hunts, Hugh, while not about to admit it, did resent the now-legendary High Thursday when his peers came so close to pulling off their palace revolt. I’ve never talked to you about this, but there is an unspoken War of Succession going on as to who, eventually, will replace Allen. The old boy’s gout is getting more frequent in its attacks.
The next question obviously is who will replace him? Is it to be a bang-juice paramilitary and propaganda specialist, a Wisner? Or Dick Bissell? Or, says Hugh to me, do we try to remember what we’re all about, and continue to gather intelligence? Since we’re not really supposed to fight those small nasty wars the Joint Chiefs are always looking to pass on to us, Hugh keeps tugging on that side of Allen which is responsive to espionage and counterespionage. Hugh feels the Russians are preparing deceptions on a grand scale, and the Berlin tunnel, for example, may have been stage-managed by a KGB mole in MI6 from the beginning. Of course, I don’t know when my poor ice-climbing goat is going to find time to mine that Berlin mountain of files. He has so many urgent tasks. My father used to be a prodigious worker, but Hugh does put him to bed.
Yet, with all this work load, and me coming to term with Christopher last fall, why, no matter, “Let’s have some candidates over to dinner,” he said to me soon after the near-fiasco of the High Thursday.
In consequence, a group of worthies has been arriving in twos and fours for dinners twice weekly ever since you’ve been gone. Hugh’s passion is to find someone in the line of succession who will be reasonably sympathetic to his purposes, and by now he has been able to take a look at just about all of the leading possibilities for the next Director. Poor Hugh. Having gotten everywhere by his excellence, he’s now telling himself that he should play politics. He may be right. Once Allen goes, the Succession becomes all important to our Montague. Hugh’s present role is perfect for his talents. Only a romantic like Allen Dulles could ever have set Hugh up in the role that Allen, if younger, would have chosen for himself. You spoke half-facetiously about GHOUL. Oh, dear boy, GHOUL! I’ve told Hugh a hundred times to change it to GATES or MANSIONS or MEWS, but no, his grottos call for GHOUL. Well, GHOUL is top-drawer. Am I drunk? I’m sipping a fair lot of sherry as I pen away on this. Hundred-year-old sherry makes me love the very wood of the table I’m writing on. So there we have Hugh and Allen with GHOUL—both boys got their wish. A sanctum sanctorum for two. GHOUL’s outer office, however, contains scores of super-equipped specialty people with super-secret files all working for Hugh, one nonattributable step removed from Allen. They are ferreting out little trouble spots all over our Company universe, and Allen’s successor must prove able to comprehend the value of GHOUL. So, Hugh invites people over to size them up, and his present but glum choice is Dickie Helms. Helms will never come down with two feet on one side of a dividing line until he’s located all the shoes on either side. On the other hand, Helms will be inclined, thinks Hugh, to support the continued existence of GHOUL.
Well, by the time we used up every likely in-town GS-18, Hugh had developed a taste for the game and we started inviting some second-rank people to cast new light on the top-drawer faces. That was when I decided to put all this up for some use by my team. “Let’s have Howard Hunt,” I said.
“Do you mean E. Howard Hunt?” Hugh asked. “How will we address him? As E? E Howard? How Eee?” This is Hugh’s private humor. That is why you never see public signs of it. He’s about as funny as a hee-haw cowboy. Don’t forget—Hugh, along with all else, could ride a mustang before his legs were long enough to reach the pedals on his kiddie bike. Just a Colorado cowboy.
I talked Hugh into inviting How Eee. Pointed out to my beau that Hunt was in on the Guatemala move. Hugh thinks that may yet prove to be the most catastrophic American victory of all. Smash an oxymoron, and you will encounter the Light! Yes, darling, catastrophic victory. Hugh feels it has pointed us in the wrong direction for decades to come. He wouldn’t speak to Allen for weeks after the Agency, via Hunt and some of his pals, got Arbenz pushed out. So I had to talk Hugh into studying Mr. E. Howard Hunt, and wife.
Darling, I can’t go on. I’m not being a bitch. I will finish tomorrow. Don’t know why I got into the sherry. Yes, I do know. I’m revealing too much, and feel unfaithful to Hugh. But I do want secret letters from you and must pay the price. On that note, I excuse myself. Christopher is stirring.
K.