Charles McCarry


Charles McCarry was an American writer, primarily of spy fiction, and a former undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency whom The Wall Street Journal described in 2013 as the dean of American spy writers; The New Republic magazine calls him "poet laureate of the CIA."; and Otto Penzler says he has produced some "poetic masterpieces". William Zinsser calls him a "political novelist:" Jonathan Yardley, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post, calls him a "'serious' novelist" whose work may include "the best novel ever written about life in high-stakes Washington, DC." P.J. O'Rourke called him "the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue." O'Rourke learned about McCarry from a working covert operative who called McCarry "very realistic."

Early life

His family came from The Berkshires area of western Massachusetts, McCarry was born in Pittsfield, and he lived in Virginia.

Approach to writing

McCarry believed that "the best novels are about ordinary things: love, betrayal, death, trust, loneliness, marriage, fatherhood." He also said "if you write a political novel, you're writing what you believe instead of what you know."
McCarry said, "the themes of my novels have been ordinary things – love, death, betrayal and the American dream."
In a 1988 essay published in the Washington Post, McCarry wrote, "n 1973 when I turned in the manuscript of my novel The Tears of Autumn, summoned me to New York and, in his office high above lower Park Avenue, banged the manuscript on his desk. ‘This book is talky, it's slow, and nobody is going to believe a goddamn word of the plot,’ he said. ‘Where's the car chase? Where's the torture scene? Where's the sex? Where's the good Russian? Do you call this a thriller?’ ‘No,’ I said. He didn't hear me."
McCarry wrote that: "After I resigned , intending to spend the rest of my life writing fiction and knowing what tricks the mind can play when the gates are thrown wide open, as they are by the act of writing, between the imagination and that part of the brain in which information is stored, I took the precaution of writing a closely remembered narrative of my clandestine experiences. After correcting the manuscript, I burned it.
What I kept for my own use was the atmosphere of secret life: How it worked on the five senses and what it did to the heart and mind. All the rest went up in flames, setting me free henceforth to make it all up. In all important matters, such as the creation of characters and the invention of plots, with rare and minor exceptions, that is what I have done. And, as might be expected, when I have been weak enough to use something that really happened as an episode in a novel, it is that piece of scrap, buried in a landfill of the imaginary, readers invariably refuse to believe."
Throughout McCarry's fiction are statements and descriptions such as "the average intelligence officer is a sort of latter-day Marcel Proust. He lies abed in a cork-lined room, hoping to profit by secrets that other people slip under the door."
Snippets from McCarry's CIA years can be found in his non-fiction writing for newspapers. For example, "In the early days of the cold war, a colleague of mine who had worked his way through college playing the saxophone was recruited by a certain United States intelligence agency. For his first assignment, he was posted to Cambodia and told to find an apartment near the royal palace, open the windows at night, and play “Muskrat Ramble.” Prince Sihanouk, the eccentric ruler of the country, was reputed to be an amateur musician who loved jazz and had his own band. Who knew but what he might hear that plaintive sax in the jungle night and invite the nice young American to come on over and sit in?"
A critic for Tin House magazine approaches McCarry through what the critic calls "the art of the sentence," citing as an example a description in the opening pages of McCarry's The Secret Lovers: “The sun shone feebly through the overcast, like a lamp covered by a woman’s scarf in a shabby hotel room.”
A recurrent statement found in McCarry's non-fiction writing is that events in real life are so strange that if presented as fiction no one would believe them.
McCarry's novels were all republished in 2005—which means major critics revisited his work—some of which was more than a third-of-a-century old Rereading The Tears of Autumn one critic called it "a perfect spy novel."

Regrets

McCarry said in 1995, "If I had to do it over again, I would have written novels about a pediatrician, anonymously." Why? Because he thinks of himself as a novelist, not a writer of spy fiction. And yet, almost all of his novels—including the non-Paul Christopher books—have a strong focus on espionage.

Career

Military, U.S. presidential speechwriter, CIA

McCarry began his writing career in the United States Army as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes. Afterwards, in the 1950s, serving as a speechwriter in the early Administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower; a typical McCarry item was the 1953 Labor Day Proclamation, which read, in part, "Free American labor has won for itself the enjoyment of a standard of living unmatched in history. The contemporary world knows no comparison with it. There is only brutal contrast to it. To this, there is no more pitiful and dramatic testimony than the food which this free people has been able to send to feed hundreds of thousands suffering the peculiar torments of the proletarian paradise of Eastern Germany." In the late 1950s, he accepted a post with the CIA, for whom he traveled the globe as a deep cover operative—his son, Nathan McCarry, CEO of Pluribus International Corporation, in 2014 described his father's work for the CIA as "trying for the family." He left the CIA, in 1967, becoming a writer of spy novels McCarry rarely spoke or wrote directly about those years, saying simply, "For a decade at the height of the Cold War, I worked abroad under cover as an intelligence agent."
In the mid-to-late 1970s, several books by former CIA operatives helped trigger and fuel what became known as the U.S. Senate Church Committee hearings that resulted in legislation limiting the power and secrecy of the CIA. McCarry had been "outed"—publicly identified as a secret CIA operative—in 1975, but was never called to testify.

As an editor and writer

McCarry was an editor-at-large for National Geographic and contributed pieces to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Saturday Evening Post, and other national publications.
In as essay published by the Washington Post, he said that "for a writer in America, going out to dinner is like living as an American in Europe: Total strangers think they can say anything they like to you."

As commentator and book reviewer

Ten of McCarry's novels involve the life story of a fictional character named Paul Christopher, who — in McCarry's telling — grew up in pre-Nazi Germany, and later became an operative for a U.S. government entity that is clearly the Central Intelligence Agency.
These books are, in order of publication:
Alternately, in chronological order of events depicted:
The Paul Christopher novels, together and separately, resemble a Christopher Nolan movie in that time sequences become jumbled; e.g. only as Paul Christopher becomes an old man do readers learn about his parents and childhood.
One critic notes that “As far as recurring characters go, one must look to John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom books or Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman novels for equivalents in the scope and breadth of what McCarry accomplishes with one character and his movements through the events of the twentieth century.”

Reviews

"It’s tempting to say that Charles McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn is the greatest espionage novel ever written by an American, if only because it’s hard to conceive of one that could possibly be better. But since no one can claim to have read every America espionage novel ever written, let’s just say that The Tears of Autumn is a perfect spy novel, and that its hero, Paul Christopher, should by all rights be known the world over as the thinking man’s James Bond — and woman’s too."—Brendan Bernard, "The Great American Spy Novel," March 31, 2005', LA Weekly
"Old Boys is a large yarn that will make yummy reading between long looks at Nantucket Sound this summer. But it is a tale that travels from the outlandish to the absurd. As long as readers don't expect the taut realism we have come to expect from the man, they'll be fine. If they're looking for vintage McCarry, though, this will produce unhappy campers. The book does not approach his better grownup fiction. It is not in the same league, for example, with The Miernik Dossier, the small gem that made McCarry's career. Rather, it is something of a "Treasure Island" for lovers of spook fiction, a near-juvenile adventure that entrances adults who know better with fabulous writing. What they do get is a fleeting reprise of McCarry's great creation, Paul Christopher. Christopher, the spy whom many first met in McCarry's bestseller The Tears of Autumn, is now an opaque older man and an ascetic survivor of a Chinese prison camp."--Sam Allis, "McCarry's thriller 'Old Boys' is a trip past believable," Boston Globe'', July 26, 2004.

McCarry and Literary Criticism

McCarry's most recent work has been cited for its "postmodern skepticism" and "epistemic aporia"--"literary reconstruction that profess to unmask" state-sponsored secrecy. These judgments are based on the work of Robert Snyder.
In 2007, novelist and former presidential speechwriter Patrick Andersson wrote that “a new generation of American spy novelists soon began to produce a body of work that has surpassed that of current British writers. The four most important are Charles McCarry, Robert Littell, Daniel Silva, and Alan Furst”

McCarry and the JFK assassination in real life and in his fiction

--"...the most credible account of President Kennedy’s assassination. You will believe it’s what really happened."--New York magazine on Tears of Autumn—In Lucky Bastards, JFK seems to have an illegitimate son. In real life, no such person is known to exist.
--In Tears, Paul Christopher wakes up ten days after the JFK killing and intuitively and instantly knows "who had arranged the death of the President"—the family and followers of recently assassinated South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and his two brothers. In real life, the wife of one of Diem's murdered brothers attracted media attention for predicting the JFK assassination, and later telling reporters that JFK had got what he deserved.
--McCarry was a top aide to Henry Cabot Lodge, traveling with him as chief speechwriter in 1960, for example, when Lodge was the Republican Party's vice presidential candidate. After losing the election, Lodge served as U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam under JFK, and in that capacity played an active role in the plot to assassinate Diem—which McCarry used as the center of action in The Tears of Autumn.

McCarry's fiction: Insights into the CIA

Note: In McCarry's fiction, the CIA is called "the Outfit."
—Computer algorithms that analyses media content and specify—with accuracy—when a physical war between two countries will break out. The Better Angels, 1979.—Terrorist suicide bombers appear in Better Angels ; the New York Times first reported this form of terrorism in 1983, when describing the Lebanese civil war. Suicide terrorists use fully loaded passenger planes as weapons in Better Angels—which did not occur in real life until September 11, 2001.
--Suicide bombers begin to blow themselves up at American iconic sites like the Alamo. The Lincoln Memorial and Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol soon follow,.—On June 10. 2004, the Wall Street Journal published a review entitled, "He Has Seen The Future: It's in His Work; Charles McCarry's novels keep coming true. And his new book is about the end of the world."—Someone who thinks he is JFK's "love child" becomes President of the U.S..--Lucky Bastard
--ARK has people equipped with "artificial hornets as their primary defensive weapon;" as of 2017, experts discuss the impending possibility of "drones the size of bumblebees that could be programmed to kill certain people, or certain categories of people, by grabbing their skulls with tiny metal talons and drilling into their head."—Worsening and more frequent earthquakes and severe storms like hurricanes threaten society in Ark.
--Soviet KGB has long-term operative control over a person who becomes President of the U.S.-- Lucky Bastard—A thirty-person expedition lands on Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons--The Better Angels, p. 164.

China as America's chief enemy

After the collapse of the USSR, McCarry turned to China in The Shanghai Factor, Old Boys, Second Sight and Last Supper.

Morality (political and personal) in McCarry's fiction

—Jacob Heilbrunn writes in the N.Y. Times : "McCarry never succumbs to a bogus moral equivalence in which Western operatives are as nefarious as their Communist counterparts. He instructs us that the real problem is not so much moral quicksand as incompetent scheming. At a moment when the C.I.A.'s travails are evoking nostalgia for a golden age when it supposedly operated effectively, McCarry offers a useful reminder that such an era never existed."
--"The truth, once discovered, is of no use: people deny what they have done, forget what they had believed, and make the same mistakes over and over again."—Paul Christopher is eating dinner with a beautiful young woman in wartime Saigon. They discuss the morality of killing. "So you believe in nothing," she says to him. "I believe in consequences," he responds.--Tears of Autumn
--"You think the truth will make men free. But it only makes them angry."--Tears of Autumn.

Symbolism and recurrent themes

McCarry challenged accepted wisdom about JFK by hypothesizing that Kennedy caused his own death; asserting that efforts to force Richard Nixon from the White House constituted a coup.; and giving Ronald Reagan credit for triggering the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Autobiographical elements in McCarry's fiction

How an aging McCarry depicts aging in his fiction

Paul Christopher as a central character never is older than his forties—see Tears of Autumn—which is the same as McCarry was when he wrote it; after Tears, Christopher spends twenty years at hard labor in a remote Chinese prison camp, and then is a minor character in his own rescue.

The former spy as novelist

The novelist Alan Furst has written in The Book of Spies that "Graham Greene| Greene, le Carré, Somerset Maugham| Maugham, and McCarry write with a kind of cloaked anger, a belief that the world is a place where political power is maintained by treachery and betrayal..." In its subtitle, Furst's book calls such writing "literary espionage."
"Your name is the one key thing that cannot be taken from you," says Jan Scruggs, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, "It captures who you are and what happens to you throughout your life." In Existentialist literature, lack of a name—or of a full name—symbolizes human aloneness; the hero of Franz Kafka's The Trial, for example is "Michael K.," and the hero of Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man has no name at all. Named characters fill McCarry's last three novels, but each book's hero never has a name; one has a "funny name" that is used for payroll and administrative paperwork, but is fictitious and meaningless. While McCarry's heroes with no name are different people in each story, the Man with No Name in three Clint Eastwood movies from the mid-1960s is the same person.

Adaptations in other media

The film Wrong is Right, starring Sean Connery, was loosely based on McCarry's novel, The Better Angels.

Influences

McCarry was an admirer of the work of W. Somerset Maugham, especially the stories. He was also an admirer of Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate, Prizzi's Honor, and numerous other novels.

Other books and publications

Non-Paul Christopher novels

--Stories include: In March 1981, shortly after taking office, Ronald Reagan was shot; Secretary of State Haig appeared in the White House press room and announced, "I am in charge here!"
Otto Penzler, ed.:
Note: The fictional Paul Christopher had several books of poetry published before he joined the CIA;