“Charles McCarry”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

His family from The Berkshires area of western Massachusetts, McCarry was born in Pittsfield and he lived in Virginia.^[9]

Approach to writing

McCarry believed that "the best novels are about ordinary things: love, betrayal, death, trust, loneliness, marriage, fatherhood."^[10] He also said "if you write a political novel, you're writing what you believe instead of what you know."^[10]

McCarry said, "the themes of my novels have been ordinary things – love, death, betrayal and the American dream."^[12]

McCarry's books are not thrillers; thrillers maintain suspense mostly by letting the reader know more than does the character being depicted; e,g, someone with a knife is waiting in the dark room. In contrast, as you read a Paul Christopher novel, you rarely see or know anything that Christopher does not see and know.

In a 1988 essay published in the Washington Post, McCarry wrote, "[I]n 1973 when I turned in the manuscript of my novel The Tears of Autumn, [the publisher] 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?"

McCarry wrote that: "After I resigned [from the CIA], 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."^[12]

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."^[13]

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?"^[14]

McCarry's first published novel came out in 1973, which means he was 43;^[15] in contrast, most successful novelists have their first novel published while they are still in their twenties.^[16]

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.”^[17]

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.^[18]

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^[19] Rereading The Tears of Autumn one critic called it "a perfect spy novel."^[20]

Regrets

McCarry said in 1995, "If I had to do it over again, I would have written novels about a pediatrician, anonymously."^[21] Why? Because he thinks of himself as a novelist, not a writer of spy fiction. And yet, almost of his novels—including the non-Paul Christopher books—have a strong focus on espionage.^[22]

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;^[23] 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."^[24] In the late 1950s, he accepted a post with the CIA for whom he traveled the globe as a deep cover^[25] 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^[26]^[27] 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."^[28]

In the mid-to-late 1970s, several books^[29] 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.^[30] 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 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 says 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."^[31]

As commentator and book reviewer

Paul Christopher series

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 a lone operative for a U.S. government entity that is clearly the Central Intelligence Agency.^[32]

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.^[33]

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.” ^[34]

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^[20]

"Old Boys is a large yarn that will make yummy reading between long looks at Nantucket Sound this summer. (And a boffo movie in the right hands.) 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.^[35]

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.^[36] These judgments are based on the work of Robert Snyder.^[37]

In 2007, novelist and former presidential speechwriter Patrick Andersson wrote that “a new generation of American spy novelists soon began [in the 1970s] 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” ^[38]

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

McCarry's fiction: Insights into the CIA

Torture and assassination—and the Rule of Law

Training of CIA "Singleton" agents

Can and Should Journalists Serve as CIA Operatives?

Technological and other predictions in McCarry's fiction

—Computer algorithms that analyses media content and specify—with accuracy—when a physical war between two countries will break out. The Better Angels, 1979.^[48]—Terrorist suicide bombers appear in Better Angels (1979); the New York Times first reported this form of terrorism in 1983, when describing the Lebanese civil war.^[49] Suicide terrorists use fully loaded passenger planes as weapons in Better Angels^[50]—which did not occur in real life until September 11, 2001.

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 (2006): "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."^[55]

Symbolism and recurrent themes

Satire

McCarry v. le Carré

How McCarry responded to the Accepted Wisdom of his time

McCarry challenged accepted wisdom about JFK by hypothesizing that Kennedy caused his own death;^[69] asserting that efforts to force Richard Nixon from the White House constituted a coup.;^[70] and giving Ronald Reagan credit for triggering the collapse of the Soviet Union.^[71]

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 after McCarry was when he wrote it; after Tears, Christopher spends twenty (unseen) years at hard labor in a remote Chinese prison camp, and then is a minor character in his own rescue.^[72]

The former spy as novelist

The novelist Alan Furst has written in The Book of Spies that "[Graham] Greene, [John] le Carré, [Somerset] 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..."^[73] In its subtitle, Furst's book calls such writing "literary espionage."

McCarry on being alone

A Hero with No Name

"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." ^[79] 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 Elision's

Invisible Man has no name at all. Named characters fill McCarry's last three novels, but each book's hero (in one case, heroine) never has a name; one has a "funny name" that is used for payroll and administrative paperwork, but is fictitious and meaningless.^[80] 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 (1982), starring Sean Connery, was loosely based on McCarry's novel, The Better Angels (1979).^[81]

Paul Christopher, J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and J. P. Donleavy's Sebastion Dangerfield in The Ginger Man (1955) are among the post-World War II literary heroes who have stymied Hollywood efforts to depict them.^[82]

Influences

McCarry is an admirer of the work of W. Somerset Maugham, especially the Ashenden stories. He was also an admirer of Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Prizzi's Honor (1982), and numerous other novels.^[9]

Other books and publications

Non-Paul Christopher novels

Non-fiction

Collections that include McCarry's work

Harlan Coben, ed. The Best American Mystery Stories: 2011, includes "The End of the String."^[86]

Alan Furst, ed. The Book of Spies, includes excerpt from The Tears of Autumn.^[87]

Short stories (fiction)

Magazine articles (non-fiction)

Published poems

Note: The fictional Paul Christopher had several books of poetry published before he joined the CIA;^[90]

References

1. ^{{Cite web |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/05/charles-mccarry-obituary |title=Charles McCarry obituary |last=Carlson |first=Michael |date=2019-03-05 |website=The Guardian |language=en-GB |access-date=2019-03-19}}
2. ^https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/charles-mccarry-cia-officer-who-became-a-pre-eminent-spy-novelist-dies-at-88/2019/02/28/9696b2f0-3b77-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html
3. ^{{cite news|url=https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/05/09/an-ex-cia-agents-novel-take-on-spying-in-china/|title=An Ex-CIA Agent’s Novel Take on Spying in China|last=Trachtenberg|first=Jeffrey|date=May 9, 2013|work=The Wall Street Journal|via=|access-date=June 7, 2017}}
4. ^August 4, 1979, pp. 42–43.
5. ^Agents of Change, p. xiii.
6. ^Zinsser, William, "Paths of Resistance: the Art and Craft of the Political Novel," 1989.
7. ^"The Powers that Be," Washington Post, June 4, 1995.
8. ^[https://www.weeklystandard.com/pj-orourke/no-country-for-old-men P.J. O'Rourke, "No Country for Old Men," The Weekly Standard,September 13, 2004.]
9. ^¹{{cite web|url=http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/birnbaum_v_charles_mccarry.php |date=2004|title=Interview: Birnbaum v. Charles McCarry |author=Birnbaum, Robert |work=The Morning News |accessdate=June 9, 2010}}
10. ^¹McCarry, Charles, "A Strip of Exposed Film, " in ='Paths of Resistance, p. 69.
11. ^¹McCarry, Charles, "How to Write Spy Novels; the Best Books are Collaborations Between the Writer and Reader," June 19, 1988.
12. ^McCarry, Charles, "Between the Real and the Believable," Washington Post, December 11, 1994.
13. ^McCarry, Charles, "The End of the String," a short story published in Agents of Change, 2010, p. 7.
14. ^McCarry, Charles, [https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/opinion/11mccarry.html "Under Cover of Ineptitude"], The New York Times, July 10, 2010.
15. ^McCarry was born in 1930, and The Mierick Dossier came out in 1973.
16. ^Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926 when he was 27; and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948, when Mailer was 25.
17. ^"The Art of the Sentence," Tin House', January 8, 2013.
18. ^e.g."Under Cover of Ineptitude," NYT, July 10, 2010.
19. ^{{cite web|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61581-2005Apr17.html|title=Passing the Test of Time (washingtonpost.com)|website=www.washingtonpost.com}}
20. ^¹{{cite web|url=http://www.laweekly.com/news/the-great-american-spy-novel-2139722|title=The Great American Spy Novel|first=Brendan|last=Bernhard|date=March 31, 2005|publisher=}}
21. ^Jonathan Karp, "A Dramatist on the Dark Side of Politics," At Random, Summer 1995
22. ^See his most recent books, Mulberry Bush and The Shanghai Factor.
23. ^Agents of Treachery, pp. xii–xiii
24. ^Labor Day Statement by the President, September 7, 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers
25. ^Agents of Treachery, p. xii.
26. ^{{cite news |author= |title=Nathan McCarry, Founder, President & CEO at Pluribus International|url=http://www.executiveleadersradio.com/mccarry-nathan-4238.aspx |work=Executive Leaders Radio |location=executiveleadersradio.com |date=March 13, 2014 |access-date=June 7, 2017 }}
27. ^{{cite news |author= |title=Authors: Charles McCarry|url=http://mysteriouspress.com/authors/charles-mccarry/default.asp |work=Mysterious Press|location=mysteriouspress.com|date=|access-date=June 7, 2017 }}
28. ^Washington Post, December 11, 1994.
29. ^e.g. Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence; Philip Agree Inside the Company; and Frank Snepp, Decent Interval
30. ^"Victor Marchetti, 88, Who Exposed Workings of a Covert CIA, Dies," N.y. Times, Thursday, November 1, 2018.
31. ^December 11, 1994.
32. ^{{cite web|url=https://www.goodreads.com/series/93807-paul-christopher|title=Paul Christopher Series by Charles McCarry|website=www.goodreads.com}}
33. ^{{cite web|url=https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/mcgfic|title=The Fictional Christopher Nolan By Todd McGowan|author=|date=June 5, 2012|publisher=|access-date=March 2, 2019|via=utpress.utexas.edu}}
34. ^Glimmer Train, pp. 208–09.
35. ^{{cite web|url=http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/07/26/mccarrys_thriller_old_boys_is_a_trip_past_believable/|title=McCarry's thriller 'Old Boys' is a trip past believable – The Boston Globe|website=archive.boston.com}}
36. ^Clues [an academic journal], 10/2018, Volume 36, Issue 2
37. ^e.g. Snyder, "McCarry's Recursive Fiction," Clues, October 2018
38. ^Anderson, Patrick. Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction, 2007, p.123
39. ^{{cite web|url=http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/66294/index6.html|title=If You Liked My Book, You’ll Love These|website=NYMag.com}}
40. ^¹p. 100.
41. ^p. 51.
42. ^NYT, "Mrs. Nhu Recalls Saigon Coup In a Message to Mrs. Kennedy," November 25, 1963.
43. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0058|title=Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, 1775–1966|author=|date=|website=www.masshist.org|access-date=March 2, 2019}}
44. ^See any of the Paul Christopher or the Man with no Name novels.
45. ^Shelley's Heart, p. 16.
46. ^Christopher Lehman-Haupt, "Weaseling a Mole Into the White House", July 13, 1998.
47. ^p. 200.
48. ^p. 284
49. ^Thomas Friedman, "Marines Seemingly Did Little to Deter a Car Bomb Attack," The New York Times, October 25, 1983.
50. ^p.25
51. ^The Better Angeles, p. 299.
52. ^Better Angeles, p. 334.
53. ^By Brian Carney, the deputy editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe
54. ^See LIFE 3.0 (2017) by MIT physicist Max Tagmark, co-founder of MIT's Future of Life Institute.
55. ^"Old-Fashioned Espionage," April 2, 2006
56. ^From Tears of Autumn with a few word changes, e.g. "men" to "people."
57. ^p. 126.
58. ^p. 73.
59. ^p.
60. ^xx
61. ^xxx.
62. ^Inner Circles, p. xxx.
63. ^p. 125.
64. ^p. 71.
65. ^see The Secret Lovers and Tears of Autumn
66. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=The+Shanghai+Factor|title=The Shanghai Factor by Charles McCarry|website=www.groveatlantic.com}}
67. ^Patrick Anderson, "The Spymaster Adds to his rich legacy", Washington Post, September 2, 2017.
68. ^A Legacy of Spies, 2017.
69. ^¹The Tears of Autumn
70. ^Inner Circles
71. ^Wall Street Journal
72. ^See The Secret Lovers and Old Boys
73. ^Alan Furst, The Book of Spies, 2003, p. ix.
74. ^p. 131.
75. ^The Tears of Autumn, p. 34.
76. ^In Harlan Coben, The Best American Mystery Stories.
77. ^The End of the String
78. ^Rabalais, Kevin. “Interview with Charles McCarry.” Glimmer Train Stories 76 (Fall 2010): 208–18
79. ^Jan Scruggs, To Heal a Nation, p. 38.
80. ^The Mulberry Bush, p. 28
81. ^{{cite web|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084920/|title=Wrong Is Right|date=14 May 1982|publisher=|via=www.imdb.com}}
82. ^see "J.P. Donnelley, 91, Author Who Stirred Controversy With 'Ginger Man,' Dies," The New York Times, September 14, 2017.
83. ^{{cite news |last1=Kakutani |first1=Michiko |title=The Modern Political Novel as a Mirror of the Bizarre |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/10/daily/facetime-book-review.html |accessdate=15 June 2018 |publisher=New York Times |date=January 12, 1999}}
84. ^{{cite news|work=Grove Atlantic|url=http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=The+Shanghai+Factor|title=The Shanghai Factor}}
85. ^pp. 141–166.
86. ^Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
87. ^N.Y: The Modern Library, 2003.
88. ^2010.
89. ^Fall 1992.
90. ^Tears of Autumn. p. 3
91. ^¹{{cite news| url = https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/le-carre-goes-back-into-the-cold/534189/| author = David Igantius| title = Le Carre goes Back into the Cold| work = Atlantic magazine| date = September 2017| accessdate = 2019-03-09| quote = }}

Early life