“And what is the moral of the story?” Roth asked, in a lecture at Stanford University, in 1960.
Simply this: that the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
Roth would no doubt have hungered for every detail of the tale of Jensen Huang, the Taiwanese American chip gazillionaire, who has resigned as the C.E.O. of Nvidia amid reports of affairs with three women (at last count), including two employees and, most damningly, Alice Huang, a Chinese technology executive who was allegedly acting not as an earnest paramour but as an asset of the People’s Republic of China and its Ministry of State Security. (Officials in Beijing have called reports of her intelligence ties a “pure fabrication out of thin air.”)
The global and financial stakes are immense. Launched from a Denny’s in San Jose, Nvidia became the first company to reach a market capitalization of five trillion dollars. Its chips are crucial to the revolution in artificial intelligence and to America’s technological competition with China. The reported means of gaining influence over Nvidia’s leader, however, are rather less cutting-edge than its products.
All involved in l’affaire Huang may take some comfort in the lineage of mobilizing erotic attraction as a weapon of espionage—or, to use the term popularized by John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1974), the “honey trap.” In the Hebrew Bible, Delilah, a “woman in the Valley of Sorek,” is bribed by the Philistines to extract from Samson the source of his superhuman strength. Not to give too much of the story away, but Samson’s hair is cut and his eyes are gouged out, all before he takes his revenge by bringing a temple crashing down—rather like Nvidia’s stock price. In the Book of Judith, Holofernes, an Assyrian general intent on conquest, allows himself to be beguiled by an alluring Jewish widow. Big mistake! Instead of getting the happy end he was hoping for, Holofernes is decapitated. Small recompense, surely, to be immortalized in paintings by artists ranging from Caravaggio to Tina Blondell, whose contribution is titled “I’ll Make You Shorter by a Head.” And lest we over-index on the Western canon of early sexpionage, in ancient China the celebrated beauty Xi Shi was said to have been deployed to catch the eye of the King of Wu. He lost his kingdom. An expensive date.
The movies knew a good thing when they saw it. Fritz Lang’s “Spies” (1928), a bewitching silent thriller, features Sonya, a Russian spy who has been assigned to seduce a government agent. In Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” (1946), Ingrid Bergman marries a Nazi conspirator in Rio de Janeiro to obtain his secrets. Hitchcock returned to the device in “North by Northwest” (1959), in which Eva Marie Saint’s work as an American agent involves being the mistress of an enemy spymaster, played by James Mason. When she sets about tempting Cary Grant, the already thorny plot grows curiouser and curiouser. With the honey-trap conceit, filmmakers had found an agreeable way of satisfying the box-office demand for attractive people in compromising situations.
Offscreen, the casting could be less predictable. Two years before “North by Northwest,” the owlish columnist Joseph Alsop, a pillar of the Washington establishment, visited Moscow, interviewed the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and ended up having sex with a young man (code name: Boris) who was working for the K.G.B. Intelligence officers soon confronted Alsop with photographs and a proposition: he could coöperate and “assist the cause of peace” or face humiliation at home. Rather than accede to their demands, Alsop bravely informed American officials about the incident and went about his work.
Novelists have long grasped the possibilities. Ian Fleming served up such enticements in his James Bond novels nearly as often as Bond was served a Martini; le Carré preferred grimier rooms and less lithesome objects of erotic attention, but the idea was the same. Onstage and onscreen, the complications multiplied. For one thing, the genre allows for feats of self-deception, as in David Henry Hwang’s play “M. Butterfly” (1988), inspired by an affair between a French diplomat and a Chinese opera performer. And then there is that reliable twist: the seducer falls in love. In Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” (2007), the operative develops feelings for the dupe which contribute to the operation’s undoing. A classic case of mission interruptus.
In “The Americans,” the TV series that began airing in 2013, erotic espionage is a family business. Our adorable undercover Russian-spy couple resident in suburban D.C., Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), deploy their honeyed selves with such frequency and commitment that you would think it would shred their marital bonds. But nyet. Marriage counselling must be a delicate business when the assignations are assignments on behalf of one’s superiors in Lubyanka.
The hapless Huang, meanwhile, appears to have practiced at least one successful seduction of his own. His sustained courtship of Donald Trump has secured a loyalty that has so far survived the revelations. For reasons evident to even the most guileless observer, Trump, ordinarily the most unforgiving of souls, invariably condones the marital and erotic trespasses of other rich and powerful men. “When you’re a star . . . you can do anything.”
Presidential loyalty, however, could not save Huang and his leadership of Nvidia. As an innovator and an entrepreneur, he helped foster an age in which machines can write computer code, diagnose diseases, compose (bad) sonnets, and supply a plausible excuse for almost anything. Yet the alleged plot that helped bring him down was familiar in Biblical times. Philip Roth complained that American reality was forever outdoing fiction. Well, sometimes. It also has a weakness for reruns. ♦
Source: www.newyorker.com
