Edward Whittemore > Quotes

“… a night twenty years ago and forever and but a prelude to the century, but a shadow of the far deeper descent into darkness that was yet to come….”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“A gesture then, a photograph now, a cloak threadbare and resplendent from century to century. And the unsuspecting weavers of the cloak, spirits despised and triumphant, threads to the tapestry and names to the sands and seas, souls for recollection in the whispers of love that had come to weave the chaos of events into a whole and the decades into an era.

Love gentle and kind and ferocious, rich and starved and hallucinatory, damned and diseased and saintly. Love, the bewildering varieties of love. That and only that able to recall the lives lost in the spectacle, the hours forgotten in the dream.

Hopes and failures given to time, demons pressed into quietude, spirits released to memory in the chaotic book of life, a repetitious and contradictory Bible suggesting infinity, a Sinai tapestry of many colors.”
― Edward Whittemore, Sinai Tapestry

“… so it isn’t true any longer that we can just create ourselves. Now we must. Our childhood as a race is over and there’s no going back, no escape into barbarism, no way to lose ourselves in the mindlessness of our animal past. Now we have to be free in order to be at all. The child within us prefers its instinctual cage, and the wars of this century are the final tantrums of our childhood’s end, but the wars can’t go on and on and we all sense that. Our killing toys have become too clever and our killing fields have become the entire earth, and now we either have to put aside our childish ways or refuse to, and in refusing, renounce life. I mean destroy ourselves utterly….”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“What this amounts to, and what makes the critic with his nose for genre and structure so nervous, is that by all accounts this shouldn’t be a good book at all, should in fact be a really terrible book, and the Quartet a rambling, self-indulgent mess. It’s too clogged up with words to be straight forward action adventure, it’s too in love with the power of old-fashioned story telling to be a safe member of any experimental literary camp, it’s too bawdy to be a tastefully controlled work of the intellect (what other work about the primacy of Man’s soul contains a sizable section on the history and art of prostitution?), and it’s combination of travel and digression, action and introspection, while they remind one in flashes (those comparisons again) of writers like Chatwin and Theroux, are too loose, too much under the sway of Whittemore’s pack-rat, all-encompassing, constantly changing focus of attention. In the end, against all odds, the book works because something binds together its lofty ambitions and disparate parts and makes it, if not a whole, then at least the tantalizing shape of something about to come into being at any moment. That something is the force of Whittemore’s integrity of vision. Ben Gibberd New York City, 2002”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“Some twenty years after the end of the war with Japan a freighter arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue. The owner of the collection, a huge, smiling fat man named Geraty, presented a passport to customs that showed he was a native-born American about as old as the century, an exile who had left the United States nearly four decades before. The collection contained all the pornographic works written in Japan during the last three hundred and fifty years, or since the time when Japan first closed itself to the West.”
― Edward Whittemore, Quin's Shanghai Circus

“almost everyone who has ever been important in history was nobody to begin with, and that maybe the most important ones of all always stay that way? . . . Invisible, don't you know. Like a voice speaking the truth.”
― Edward Whittemore

“People cut off love for all kinds of reasons but generally it has to do with them, not with somebody else.”
― Edward Whittemore, Sinai Tapestry

“The conversation can be serious, too, taking on the form of a grave philosophical discourse as the characters take turns to expound their views of life. When Joe finally comes face to face with his elusive prey, Stern, the chit chat gives way to pure oratory: Revolution, said Stern. We can’t even comprehend what it is, not what it means or what it suggests. We pretend it means total change but it’s much more than that, so vastly more complex, and yes, so much simpler too. It’s not just the total change from night to day as our earth spins in its revolutions around a minor star. It’s also our little star revolving around its own unknowable center and so with all the stars in their billions, and so with the galaxies and the universe itself. Change revolves and truly there is nothing but revolution. All movement is revolution and so is time, and although those laws are impossibly complex and beyond us, their result is simple. For us, very simple. And yet, this is where Whittemore’s great strength comes in: just as we are beginning to accept that this is more a philosophical treatise than a spy story, a pleasant meta-fiction, Whittemore suddenly pulls the strings taut with a dramatic piece of action worthy of Le Carré (more comparisons).”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.”
― Edward Whittemore, The Jerusalem Quartet

“Munk Szondi used his unique knowledge of Levantine commodities to make money. According to the rules of the game, anything of value could be used in the betting. Thus when a pile of Maria Theresa crowns and chits representing Egyptian dried fish futures were on the table, Szondi would overplay his hand simply to get the fish. For Szondi invariably knew that Persian dinars were due to weaken in the next few days in relation to dried fish, and that a handsome profit would be his if he discounted the Maria Theresa crowns in Damascus, doubled the value of his fish futures by buying dinars on the margin in Beirut, sold a quarter and a third of each in Baghdad as a hedge against customs interference on the Persian border, and then saw to it that his courier with the fish futures arrived in Isfahan on Friday, a market day, when the fish futures would be most in demand.”
― Edward Whittemore, The Jerusalem Quartet

“From the decks of the warships the foreign sailors watched the massacre through binoculars and took pictures. The navy bands played late and phonographs were set up on the ships and aimed at the quay. Caruso sang from Pagliacci all night across a harbor filled with bloated corpses. An admiral going to dine on another ship was late because a woman’s body fouled his propeller.”
― Edward Whittemore, Sinai Tapestry

“The psyche adjusts to trauma in so many different ways, we just can’t assume anything yet. But the resilience of the human spirit is a wondrous thing, truly limitless. Despair passes and anything can be born from it, anything at all. And Assaf is very young and he’s strong inside, so we’ll wait and watch and listen, and we’ll see what we can do to help him regain his footing.”
― Edward Whittemore, Jericho Mosaic

“It seems that’s it for me and what’s a soul to do then? What’s a soul to do?”

“Simply go on loving her.”

“So I seem to be doing but what’s the sense of it? Where does it lead?”

The frail hand tightened on his and then was gone. Haj Harun knelt in front of him and held him by the shoulders, his face serious.

“You’re still young, Prester John. Don’t you see it leads nowhere? It’s an end in itself.”
― Edward Whittemore, Sinai Tapestry

“This heady mixture of the philosophical and the dramatic runs throughout the book, the one underlying the other, and the result, unlikely though it may be, is a seamless unity rather than an awkward tugging of opposites. Life is talk, after all, lots of it—crude, bawdy, serious, occasionally transcendent—and that’s what Whittemore gives us. It’s also a world of action and of unthinkable violence—in this century particularly like no other—and Whittemore gives us that, too. Because of the stream of conversations, memories, theories and thoughts that make up so much of the book, it’s easy to overlook the significant amount of violence contained within it.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“Something else apart from this heady fusion draws us in to Nile Shadows, though, and that’s a certain compulsive quality that, as in all great novels, appears to be beyond the author’s control. On the one hand Whittemore is the master story teller, weaving his tale of good and evil with its great cast of characters over its great span of time, while on the other he is also telling a much simpler story, a story about himself, one feels, and telling it again and again.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“I ask you, what do I have to hide? The fact that I’m not half the man I wanted to be? The fact that these little pieces of wisdom I string together add up to not much at all?”
― Edward Whittemore, The Jerusalem Quartet

“The real protagonists of the Quartet are surely the parched and beautiful deserts of the biblical lands, with their oases and ruins, and above all the Holy City of Jerusalem itself. Whittemore is profoundly in love with these, and it’s a love that shines forth in all the books. Much of the “talky” nature of the book comes not just from his characters endless speculations and declarations, but from their loving memories of past nights spent idling by the Nile, or the magnificence of the pyramids at dawn, or the smell of a scented garden during some long-ago secret assignation. What you come to realize as you read, unconsciously at first, and then with growing awareness, is that these are not really digressions at all, but rather the very meat of the book. The land speaking to the people, and the people speaking to each other in an endless cycle is the closest definition of what it’s all “about”, if one needs to pursue its meaning into some final corner. The book, and the whole Quartet, is a monument to digression, to the necessity of the circuitous and the roundabout as the only way to truth. Certainty of vision, unquestioned clarity of purpose, leads only to oppression—as the ruthless and single minded Nazi presence hovering in the background serves to remind us.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“surely it is in our fancy, not in reality, that the basis of our lives is to be found”
― Edward Whittemore

“Once again, Whittemore escapes what might be a fatal mistake in another author. Far from the funhouse hall of mirrors one might expect from such endless fracturing, the compulsive replication of this same idea only intensifies the book, turning it into a single mirror and magnifying the image. What is the true nature of man? How close can one ever come to it? Is there something worthy and strong enough inside that will outlast our more barbaric impulses? The repetition of these themes by so many voices exerts a hypnotic sense in the end, like listening to an endless choral chant. It might almost be called “the poetry of self-exile”, if that didn’t strike too pretty a note for a book that for all its abstract bent is so firmly planted on the ground of historical fact and place.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“Yes. Despite the ultimate mystery of the universe there’s still one small truth we can live by. Choice. Never merely to take what we are given or inherit, but to choose. It may not seem like much but it’s the difference between meanings and memories that disappear in the sand, and something that doesn’t. Choice is the arrow. For then, at least, we play a part in making ourselves.”
― Edward Whittemore, Jerusalem Poker

“most general officers never had a headache but they did invariably suffer from constant indigestion, a result of their inability to expel the gases that accumulated in them in the course of a day spent agreeing with everything their superiors said.”
― Edward Whittemore, Quin's Shanghai Circus

“Nor is it only the natures of great men that Whittemore reveals. Like Dickens, he understands the tragedy of great souls with small destinies. And so we’re given Halim’s closest friend, Ziad, the hack-journalist and Baath party hanger-on, of whom Tajar remarks, “I wouldn’t imagine he’ll go very far. But then most people don’t … anywhere, do they?” The ellipses are Whittemore’s—and Tajar’s. The simple truth is that Ted Whittemore was one of the best and least-known writers of a lowdown, dark, and dishonest age. The books that he’s given us, beginning with Quin’s Shanghai Circus, are among the great “war novels” of our time as luminous as The Red Badge of Courage, as chastening as The Naked and the Dead. That the wars are fought without “lines” or uniforms hardly matters: the wounds go just as deep, and sometimes deeper than, bullets.”
― Edward Whittemore, Jericho Mosaic

“Ah well, he thought, we do what we can. It makes little difference but we have to do it anyway. Stern’s words, he suddenly realized. Stern’s very own words spoken to him long ago, whispered now in the shadows in another time and place altogether. Strange, he thought. Time is.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“there's no shape to time at all but what we give it.”
― Edward Whittemore

“… and just as suddenly he was with Stern and it was a night twenty years ago in a city once called Smyrna, once long ago in the century before the age of genocide, before the monstrous massacres had come swirling out of Asia Minor to descend on Smyrna while Stern and Joe were there … the massacres ignored then by most of the world but not by everyone, and not by Hitler, who had triumphantly recalled them only days before his armies invaded Poland to begin the Second World War…. Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? The world believes in success alone.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“INTRODUCTION IT LOOKS AND FEELS like a book, I know, but I promise you that what you hold in your hand is an axe. A paper axe, it’s true, but an axe nonetheless. I’ll explain. Jericho Mosaic is the capstone of Ted Whittemore’s Jerusalem Quartet, one of the most ambitious literary endeavors of the 20th Century. Like Robert Musil’s Man of Qualities and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Whittemore’s magnum opus explores the great themes of this and every other age. War and peace, friendship and death, loss and betrayal. Dreams. An historical novel of subtle and ferocious dimensions, Jericho Mosaic is, above all else, a tale of espionage inspired by the tragic heroism of a spy named Eli Cohen.”
― Edward Whittemore, Jericho Mosaic

“And how true it is that the turnings on the path are often so subtle, so unsuspected at the time, that we pass them by with a wave and a smile and a near arrogant ease. Yet when we look back in life the reasons for our choices seem unbearably flimsy and silly, which is confusing and even frightening. A totally different life which could have worked just as well as the one we have? That’s something none of us likes to think about. Instead, we try mightily to forget our other worlds that might have been, and with good reason. But all the same those rare and beautiful moments from the past live on within us, no farther away than the smell of an olive wood fire or the sound of rain beating softly on a garden, time’s unquiet ghosts, haunting our memories with secret whispers of what if? …”
― Edward Whittemore, Jericho Mosaic

“The distant rumble of gun fire and armored vehicles is the rumble of history itself, bearing down on Whittemore’s characters as they engage in their desperate machinations to avoid defeat. And yet what do those characters do in the face of such pressure? They talk, is what they do, and they talk and talk and talk. Each conversation leading on to something else, which in turn leads to something else, and suddenly a new character is introduced—a thumbnail sketch surely, a literary prop, no more—but no, suddenly he starts growing in front of our eyes, acquiring a languorous history stretching out over pages and pages while we think, Quick! Do something! The enemy is coming! At times there is something outright perverse about this compunction to hold forth.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“Like many authors belonging to that large and unfortunate caste, “the unjustly neglected”, Whittemore suffers from being an embarrassingly good read. He also suffers from a bigger crime, in that he is almost impossible to pigeonhole. Reviewers’ comparisons bounce from Pynchon to Nabokov, Greene to Calvino and Fuentes to Vonnegut, only to hastily assert that he is, of course, very much his own man. Reading Whittemore, I found myself adding my own—a touch of Hesse here, I thought, a dash of Robertson Davies there, yet without what could be termed a debt to either of them. Each new reader will inevitably supply more. So what is it that makes Nile Shadows, and the rest of Whittemore’s works, so infinitely flexible? Are they simply baggy monsters into which one can throw whatever one wants? In a sense they are, and it’s not a criticism to say that Whittemore is probably one of the baggiest writers this century—his books represent that most vain of ambitions and the downfall of more than one literary great: a complete explanation of everything. Nothing less than a unified theory of human history is what Whittemore is after, and it’s a sign of his mettle that he realizes such an ambition is doomed from the start, yet undertakes it anyway.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“And you’ll like him, the cobbler, you’ll all like him. He has amusing stories to tell and he’s much better on dates than I am, and also he goes back much further, having already been a man when I was still a boy. I know we will. Certainly we will. Haj Harun smiled distantly. Well I think I’ll come down now. I think it’s time we began our rounds. Truly, yes do that. According to the once portable sundial in the front room, it’s almost o’clock.”
― Edward Whittemore, Jerusalem Poker