James E Hartley

Mr Ripley and You

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet

J. Alfred Prufrock meet Tom Ripley.

Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is, according the Library of America, one of the five best American Noir novels of the 1950s. Hard to argue with the Library of America.

After publishing this novel in 1955, a quarter of a century later, Highsmith returned to Ripley for another novel. Then again in 1974, 1980 and 1991. Five novels (the Ripliad!) but 25 years between the first and the second.

I was quite surprised to learn about the other four novels once I finished this one. There is nothing in this novel which suggests four sequels. Knowing nothing about Highsmith, I have no idea why she decided to turn this into a series after two decades. It is also odd that we do not yet have a Made-for-Streaming-Service Ripliad series. The plots of the first five seasons are good to go.

The first novel really is a made for TV plot. Tom Ripley, an American of dubious moral character, cons his way into a free trip to Europe to meet with the son (Dickie) of a wealthy New Yorker, and then travels about a bit in an idle way reminiscent of The Beautiful and Damned. Eventually, and you knew this would happen because the book is in the collection Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, Ripley gets around to murdering Dickie so he can impersonate him and live off Dickie’s income. The bulk of the novel is solving all the problems that come about when trying to pull off a con of this magnitude. Suffice it to say: it is not easy to kill someone and take on their identity. You might want to think again about your plan to do so.

At that level, the novel is a pleasant enough read. Highsmith’s prose is good and the Reader gets to spend lots of time trying to imagine how to weasel out of the latest difficult as Ripley is trying to figure out the same thing. Plenty of intellectual puzzles to keep the pages turning.

There is, however, a deeper matter well worth pondering. Tom Ripley has found his way to Sicily, imitating Dickie, but has run into yet another snag:

Beyond Sicily came Greece. He definitely wanted to see Greece. He wanted to see Greece as Dickie Greenleaf with Dickie’s money, Dickie’s clothes, Dickie’s way of behaving with strangers. But would it happen that he couldn’t see Greece is Dickie Greenleaf? Would one thing after another come up to thwart him—murder, suspicion, people? He hadn’t wanted to murder, it had been a necessity. The idea of going to Greece, trudging over the acropolis as Tom Ripley, American tourist, held no charm for him at all. He would as soon not go. Tears came into his eyes as he stared up at the campanile of the cathedral, and then he turned away and began to walk down a new street.

Tom Ripley likes pretending to be Dickie Greenleaf. It isn’t really about the money at all; it is about the thrill of pretending to be someone he is not. Why is that a thrill?

Highsmith cleverly sets the stage for this aspect of Tom’s personality early in the novel. Before heading to Europe, Tom in involved in an elaborate scam. Having stolen some letterhead from the Department of Internal Revenue, he sends letters to artists, writers, and other free-lance workers informing them that there was an error in their income tax forms and they owed more money. Fake phone number to call; fake address to which to send the money. The scam works; rather than fight over adjustments to their tax bills, people dutifully send checks to the fake address. Ah, but here is the twist. The checks are inevitably made out to The Department of Internal Revenue. Tom cannot cash the cheeks. He never makes a dime off the scam. He knows he will never earn anything from the scam. The scam, pretending to be someone he is not, is the whole point. Again, why is this a thrill?

There is another interesting feature of Tom Ripley’s psyche. He like to imagine things; he likes to imagine himself in situation after situation. He sets the scene, and works out the whole conversation. He goes over the situation time after time. Eventually, the imagined situation takes on the aspect of reality for Tom. He is good at pretending to be Dickie because he plays out the role of Dickie time and again in his mind. You can see the effect in the passage quoted above. Tom ruminating about how he really wants to go to Greece as Dickie, internally notes, “He hadn’t wanted to murder, it had been a necessity.” Note, Tom is not saying this to anyone but himself. Yet, it is not true. It is not even remotely true. There was absolutely no reason for Tom to have murdered Dickie; no necessity at all. Yet Tom has imagined the narrative so much, it has become reality.

Why is Tom like this? Perhaps the more interesting question is: are you really that surprised that Tom is like this? Tom spends a lot of time crafting an image of himself to be seen by the world. The images he crafts happens to be those of Internal Revenue agents or wealthy sons. The images he creates of himself have different names than the one he received at birth. They aren’t really him, of course. When we think about how he is pretending to be someone he is not, we focus on the different name. Tom and Dickie are not the same person.

You do the same thing, of course. You too spend idle minutes imagining the future, picturing conversations yet to be had in your mind. You too craft an image of yourself to present to others. You do this every day. You prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

You even have multiple faces that you have crafted. You play your roles in different ways depending on the situation in which you find yourself. Sure, all these faces have the same name as you, but they are distinct personalities, distinct people, with slightly different mannerisms and ways of speaking and even, most likely, dress. You don’t really think of these images of yourself as different people than you. They really are you. Honestly. Yeah, they act a bit different than you do here or there, but it’s not like you are pretending to be someone else. Just the new you. The better you. The you that you would be if you could be. The not-so-boring you.

Tom Ripley is a cold-blooded murderer. You (hopefully) are not. But, the murder isn’t the thrill of Ripley’s life. The thrill of his life is pretending to be someone he is not. You and Tom Ripley aren’t really all that different. You too have a role you would love to be able to play for the rest of your life, to start again as that new and better person without all the baggage and problems of your current life. You have imagined many times what that life would be like. You and the Talented Mr. Ripley are not really all that different. He is just better at it than you.

Philosophizing With a Hammer

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”
Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?
Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?
And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?
And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you one day create with me?
For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.
Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze—harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.
This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard!

With that, Nietzsche closes his book, Twilight of the Idols or, How One Philosophizes With a Hammer. It is quite natural for someone to wonder about the content of a book. After all, if you are choosing which philosophy book to read, you might be interested in knowing the subject of the books you are contemplating. This book has a fairly simple subject matter. The topic is “Nietzsche’s Ego.”

That Nietzsche had a large ego is obvious to anyone who has ever read anything he wrote. That close of the book reprinted above, for example, is a passage from one of Nietzsche’s other books; after all, he is so brilliant, he might as well quote himself. This is the guy whose wrote an autobiographical book entitled Ecce Homo with four sections: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and “Why I Am Destiny.”

So, to say Twilight of the Idols is about Nietzsche’s Ego may seem a bit underdefined. All Nietzsche’s books put his ego on display. What makes this one different is that it is nothing other than a roundabout paean to Nietzsche’s genius. His last book published before he went insane (insert the usual joke that he was always insane), it is in one way just a summary of his previous books, but as he notes in one of the maxims which lead off the book, “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” No system here folks. Just Ego.

After 44 of the enigmatic aphorisms he loved so much, Nietzsche sets out to take down Socrates. One can see why Nietzsche needed to do this. Who is the wisest and most enjoyable philosopher of all? Nietzsche wants you to think of him, but, alas, you answered “Socrates.” So, what is “the problem of Socrates”?

Whenever authority still forms a part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons.

The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is no idiot: he makes one furious and helpless at the same time. The dialectician renders the intellect of his opponent powerless. Indeed? Is dialectic only a form of revenge in Socrates?

And there you have it. You might think that reasoned philosophical discourse is a good way to think about Truth. You buffoon. You have bought into the Greek lie that there is only one choice “either to perish or—to be absurdly rational.” You want “Reason-virtue-happiness”?

The most blinding daylight; rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts—all this too was a mere disease, another disease, and by no means a return to ‘virtue,’ to ‘health,’ to happiness.

With that Nietzsche is off on his usual themes, philosophizing with a hammer, not a stiletto. The message of the book is clearly written on every page: “I, Nietzsche, am right. All others are wrong.”

Beyond the fact that he is right, what is the philosophy he is summarizing here? This is where talking about Nietzsche always gets one into trouble. No matter what you write, it needs qualifications and elaboration. Nietzsche was not systematic; he explodes on the page in prose so wild, your jaw just gapes as you follow the wild ramblings. I want to say that Twilight of the Idols is not a good starting place for reading Nietzsche, but truth be told, there is no good starting place for reading Nietzsche. The art of reading Nietzsche is to dive in and go along for the ride until the shape of things begins to appear. While at times (or more accurately, while most of the time) he is totally incomprehensible, his prose is so carefree, it is an easy matter to just keep going looking for a place to stand.

Nietzsche doesn’t like the world in which you live, that world in which you believe there is a moral code, that you are a mere human who needs to care about human rights, that world in which the weak rule the strong. Nietzsche is screaming that you should liberate yourself from all such thoughts, that your trust of reason is simply denying your animal desires, that we should all rise up and live true human lives, that the strong should no longer be told to act like the weak, that the tarantulas have poisoned the society so that you no longer are willing to acknowledge your will to power and seize what you can. That description of Nietzsche is woefully incomplete and inaccurate.

Why read Nietzsche? When he is wrong, he is spectacularly wrong in ways that help make clear the important questions. But, he isn’t always wrong; sometimes he is right for the wrong reasons, which means he makes the Truth even clearer than it otherwise would be. A couple of examples. First:

Anti-natural morality—that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preached—turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts, now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, ‘God looks at the heart,’ it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life and posits God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch. Life has come to an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins….One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem.

Fascinatingly, that is about as good a description of the theology of Christian morality as could be written by any Christian theologian. Remove Nietzsche’s sneering tone and you are left with the statement that morality is a denial of human instincts and that the only way to examine the value of human life and thus the need for a moral code is to have a starting place outside of humanity. Without that standpoint outside of humanity, it is an unapproachable problem. This is exactly what Christians say: man is born with original sin, and the Law and Grace were both provided to allow man to lead a more properly human life, a life that runs counter to the sinful desires of the flesh, and that such a law is found only from outside humanity, in the revelation of God Himself. Nietzsche and the most devout Christian theologian ever agree that all attempts by humans to create a moral code independent of the existence of a God are doomed to fail because they are grounded on nothing.

A second example:

In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our ‘higher schools’ are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet ‘finished,’ or if he did not yet know the answer to the ‘main question’: which calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like ‘callings,’ precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of ‘finishing’: at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.

Here again, one does not have to agree with Nietzsche’s story of the slave revolt and the rise of the weak and the sickness of Western Civilization to see in that description one of the best explanations for the collapse of the liberal arts even in the liberal arts colleges.

To read Nietzsche is to experience the thrill of watching the guy with the hard hammer smash everything in his sight. Reading Nietzsche is work; he never even tries to make his ideas clear to the reader. But reading Nietzsche is fun if you give up the attempt to finish reading him, if you start by saying, “I am only a beginner, a child, reading Nietzsche;” then you find therein whatever you find therein.

The Dark Night Returns

“I call, I cling, I want … and there is no One to answer … no One on Whom I can cling … no, No One. Alone … Where is my Faith … even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness … My God … how painful is this unknown pain … I have no Faith … I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart … & make me suffer untold agony.”

“So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them … because of the blasphemy … If there be God … please forgive me … When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me … and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

“As for me—The silence and the emptiness is so great—that I look and do not see;—Listen and do not hear.”

Mother Teresa, the nun who spent her life caring for the most destitute people in the most destitute city on earth, wrote those words. They were part of series of letters she wrote to her confessor over her lifetime. Published a decade after her death, they sent shock waves through the Christian community. How could a women who epitomized the love of God write such things, not once or twice, but over and over for decade after decade?

Such sentiments run directly counter to the message on a typical Sunday morning in churches everywhere. Come to church, meet Jesus and experience the Joy of Christ. Draw closer to God and be happy. If you are feeling distant from God, the problem is not that God has moved; the problem is obviously that you have wandered away. Come back and be happy. If tragedy strikes do not despair. God is there. Be happy.

That message is misleading. Knowing God is not one long experience of joy and feeling ever closer to God. This is not a new thought. St John of the Cross, a 16^th century Spanish monk, described in excruciating detail the agony that comes to some Christians as they follow Christ. The book: The Dark Night of the Soul. When your soul is in that dark night, you would write things exactly like Mother Teresa’s thoughts above. This dark night, according to John, is not a wandering away from God; it is rather something that God brings to some Christians in order to help them draw closer to Him.

How to describe the Dark Night? It is hard, if not impossible:

We may deduce from this the reason why certain persons—good and fearful souls—who walk along this road would like to give an account of their spiritual state to their director, are neither able to do so nor know how….But this capacity for being described is not in the nature of pure contemplation, which is indescribable, as we have said. For the which reason it is called secret.

This is a general problem with discussing the work of the spirit. Paul notes that such communication happens in “groanings too deep for words.” Eliot repeatedly laments the failure of words to describe deep thoughts. Our language fails us.

Nonetheless, John does grapple with what is going on in the Dark Night. “God leads into the dark night those whom He desires to purify from all those imperfections so that he may bring them farther onward.” What is happening?

And when the soul suffers the direct assault of this Divine light, its pain, which results from its impurity, is immense; because when this pure light assails the soul, in order to expel its impurity, the soul feels itself to be so impure and miserable that it believes God to be against it, and thinks that it has set itself up against God. This causes it sore grief and pain, because it now believes that God has cast it away…For by means of this pure light, the soul now sees its impurity clearly (although darkly), and knows clearly that it is unworthy of God or of any creature. And what gives it most pain is that it thinks that it will never be worthy and that its good things are all over for it.

Again, there is a strain of Christianity that instantly rebels against descriptions of the Dark Night, insisting that we should never feel separated from God. And yet, we have a very reliable account of someone experiencing exactly this Dark Night. I don’t mean Mother Teresa.

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Why does Christ scream out about God forsaking Him? It is not that Christ Himself has wandered away from God; God forsakes Him because He bears our sin. All of it. Christ walks into the Dark Night of the soul because He bears your sin and he no longer believes that God is there when He feels in his own Being the enormity of your sin.

What is the advantage of enduring this Dark Night?

But there is a question which at once arises here—namely, since the things of God are of themselves profitable to the soul and bring it gain and security, why does God, in this night, darken the desires and faculties with respect to these good things likewise, in such a way that the soul can no more taste of them or busy itself with them than with these other things, and indeed in some ways can do so less? The answer is that it is well for the soul to perform no operation touching spiritual things at that time and to have no pleasure in such things, because its faculties and desires are base, impure and wholly natural; and thus, although these faculties be given the desire and interest in things supernatural and Divine, they could not receive them save after a base and a natural manner, exactly in their own fashion. For, as the philosopher says, whatsoever is received comes to him that receives it after the manner of the recipient. Wherefore, since these natural faculties have neither purity nor strength nor capacity to receive and taste things that are supernatural after the manner of those things, which manner is Divine, but can do so only after their own manner, which is human and base, as we have said, it is meet that its faculties be in darkness concerning these Divine things likewise. Thus, being weaned and purged and annihilated in this respect first of all, they may lose that base and human way of receiving and acting, and thus all these faculties and desires of the soul may come to be prepared and tempered in such a way as to be able to receive, feel and taste that which is Divine and supernatural after a sublime and lofty manner, which is impossible if the old man die not first of all.

Suddenly the problem Christians have is evident. Someone comes to have faith that Christ is indeed Lord and Savior of all. The next step is to learn more and draw closer to God. Eventually, the person becomes a “mature” believer, someone who has grown up and is no longer like those people in the hour they first believed. Mature believers starts to feel good about their walk with God. They feel close to God. Indeed, they become a bit proud of how much they have grown in faith.

The Dark Night, the terrible and awful and nearly unendurable Dark Night, is a purgation of that pride. God feels distant; the Christian feels abandoned. To endure the Dark Night, you must keep going, humbling yourself before God, continuing to follow the path that God has set forth, climbing what John calls the ladder of love which begins with the first rung when the soul “can find no pleasure, support, consolation or abiding-place in anything soever.” Having hit that point, only then can the soul proceed to the second rung of seeking God without ceasing, without distractions of any kind. And even at that point, there are still eight rungs to go before becoming “wholly assimilated to God.” Few reach this last rung. Yet, in the Dark Night, there is nothing to do but steadily go up.

The Dark Night of the Soul is, at its root, a devotional book, but it is nothing like the modern day examples of books in that genre. Christians don’t talk much about the Dark Night. Perhaps they should. The Dark Night has no easy answers; it may well last the rest of your life; it is a place of spiritual agony. It is a place where there is nothing left but faith.

Going Home

“Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers—things utterly without value? Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.”

What is housekeeping? Indeed, what is a home? Given the title, it is not a surprise that Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is a reflection on that question.

The book is curious in a way. It is a novel with characters and a plot and a noticeable beginning, middle, and end. But, you’d never notice that while you are reading it. Sure, you notice the people and that there are things happening, but the reading experience is akin to being immersed in a sleepy timeless realm where nothing really changes. You just watch the events pass by as if you were a stowaway on a railroad car, hearing the steady drumbeat of the engine, but you aren’t really coming from or going anywhere in particular.

What is housekeeping? The narrator Ruthie has a sister, Lucille who knows. Housekeeping is most definitely not what is going on in their home. Adult caretakers move through their lives but the house itself, which may seem solid, is decaying around them.

An example. The children, who never knew their father, are further bereft when their mother commits suicide. They are cared for by a grandmother, a widow, who then too dies. A couple of great aunts come along, but they too soon leave when Sylvie, their aunt, shows up to watch them. Sylvie likes to eat in the dark, so in the summer they would have dinner at 11. A typical meal:

The table would be set with watermelon pickles and meats, apples and jelly doughnuts and shoestring potatoes, a block of pre-sliced cheese, a bottle of milk, a bottle of catsup and raisin bread in a stack. Sylvie liked cold food, sardines aswim in oil, little fruit pies in paper envelopes.

The house itself is like that dinner. Whatever happens to be there is there. The turning point in Lucille’s life comes one evening when she suddenly turns on the light in the kitchen.

We saw that we ate from plates that came in detergent boxes, and we drank from jelly glasses. (Sylvie had put her mother’s china in boxes and stacked them in the corner by the stove—in case, she said, we should ever need it.) Lucille had startled us all, flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes, the two cupboard doors which had come unhinged are were propped against the boxes of china….Everywhere the paint was chipped and marred. A great shadow of soot loomed up the wall and across the ceiling above the stove, and the stove pipe and the cupboard tops were thickly felted with dust. Most dispiriting, perhaps, was the curtain on Lucille’s side of the table, which had been half consumed by fire once when a birthday cake had been set too close to it. Sylvie had beaten out the flames with a back issue of Good Housekeeping, but she had never replaced the curtain.

The back issue of Good Housekeeping is all you really need to get the picture. It is not long before Lucille, just entering her teenage years, decides to move in with a friend and build a normal life in a house which is kept according to conventional norms, a house where Good Housekeeping is more likely to be read than used to beat out a fire.

What does it mean to keep a house, to build a home? You know the answer to that. Housekeeping is bringing order to a disordered world. Housekeeping is establishing normality amongst chaos. Housekeeping means your door is a gateway where you leave the messy world outside and enter a world which is kept. Lucille grows up to realize that she longs for that kept house and she moves out of her childhood house in order to find it.

The narrator Ruthie is given every opportunity to follow Lucille into that world of tidy homes. She does not. Why? It is not inertia. It slowly dawns on the reader as the story moves by that Ruthie sees something essential: she is not at home in this world. It is not that the physical house in which she lives is not her home. There are no locations on earth which are home.

Ruthie is a fugitive and a vagabond in the world. Ruthie is Cain.

Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be reconciliation and return.

Housekeeping is a reminder to all of us that this world is not our home. We trace our lives mourning by mourning. The state of Ruthie’s childhood home is merely an emblem of the sadness and decay that make up her existence. Yet Ruthie does not despair; she never despairs. She realizes that her life is rootless and thus never pretends she has roots.

Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand.

It sounds from this description that Housekeeping is a novel of despair and sadness, but it is not. It is a beautifully written tale of prophecy: “So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.” We begin in a garden. We end in a garden. And in between we are restless wanderers. What then is life? We are just seeing the fragments.

Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion—that everything must finally be made comprehensible—then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. Or why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that out thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, in not to be knit up finally?

Robinson is echoing Eliot: “Surely the great poet is, among other things, one who not merely restores a tradition which has been in abeyance, but one who in his poetry re-twines as many straying strands of tradition as possible.”

Housekeeping tells us that we are merely vagrants and wanderers on this earth. It also tells us, however, that the law of completion is real, that everything must finally be made comprehensible, that the strands will be knit again into a pattern, and that when that pattern is complete and order and beauty are established, it will be home.

Celebrating the Mundane

The Origin Story is a staple of Superheroes. But what about heroes who aren’t super? Do they also merit an origin story?

How does a perfectly normal person become a hero?

John Le Carre’s Call for the Dead is the origin story of George Smiley. Le Carre is a pen name for David Cornwell, who was a mid-level intelligence agent in the British spy service. Coincidentally, George Smiley is a mid-level intelligence agent in the British spy service.

Le Carre became famous writing spy novels, the best of which feature George Smiley and are canonical in the genre. (He also write some truly awful novels; a rather hit or miss author.) Smiley himself is memorable; in the movies he gets played by Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman, which is not bad at all.

Call for the Dead is not only the first Smiley novel, it is the first novel Le Carre wrote. It shows. Later in life, Le Carre’s novels tended toward becoming overly lengthy endurance tests for the reader. This first novel is short and crisp.

The obvious comparison for George Smiley is James Bond. Bond had been around for about 8 years before Smiley. Bond was flashy, daring and saved the world over and over. A very popular hero; the first movie came out a year after Call of the Dead. In the movies, Bond was, of course, played by Sean Connery.

The difference between Connery and Guinness tells you a lot about the difference between Bond and Smiley. Bond is handsome and amazing and gets the gorgeous girl. Smiley is physically unattractive, boring, and…is married to a wealthy gorgeous woman! Alas, the beautiful woman runs off after two years of marriage for a hotter, younger man.

Smiley is, in other words, nothing like James Bond. He is so bland that he actually makes a good spy; nobody ever suspects the really boring guy is a spy. He just plods along through life, shocked that a beautiful woman married him, not surprised that she left him. He is smart and puzzles things out in a very plodding way.

His superiors don’t listen to him, so he quits his job as a spy. But, he still keeps thinking about the case before him. No drama. Just the equivalent of steady police work. There is spy stuff in the story, but not the crazy gizmos of the James Bond movies. Just regular boring spy stuff. How to arrange a meeting. How to pass documents to another person. How the spy organizations are structured.

Call for the Dead achieves the rare feat of making spy work seem like a thoroughly non-exciting thing. Just another day at the office as a mid-level bureaucrat doing the same sorts of things mid-level bureaucrats do in any bureaucratic large organization. What makes George Smiley heroic? Well, nothing. He isn’t heroic at all. Just a guy plodding along doing his job.

Even the title of the book is a sign of how remarkably unexceptional everything in this novel is. Smiley is looking into an apparent suicide The phone rings in the house; it is from the service that arranges to call you at a set time, like an alarm clock. The call for the dead guy is the clue that tells Smiley something is off; why would a guy about to commit suicide set an alarm clock for the following morning? Well, he wouldn’t.

No call for the dead; no story. A boring spy just happens to be there when the phone rings for a boring reason and then he plods along and works out what just happened.

So, the novel now sounds perfectly dull. But it isn’t. Le Carre writes well; he story moves along at a nice clip, and you get to watch Smiley puzzling out the big picture and then figuring out how to catch all the culprits. This isn’t a s good as the great Smiley novels (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and The Spy Wo Came in from the Cold), but the great novels do have the same plodding pace.

Is there a lesson here? Is there anything that makes this book rise up above a decent way to spend an evening? Sure. Reading a decently crafted tale by an author who can write well is exactly the sort of small detail that actually makes up the bulk of our lives. Most of life is not exciting events worthy of a major motion picture starring Sean Connery. Most of life is just a nondescript person like you or me doing the sorts of things we all do. I read books and write about them. I read Call for the Dead and I am writing about it. You read what wrote. This is not a bad description of life.

Sometimes it is worth reminding ourselves that a life can be worth living, and a book can be worth reading, even if it is not accompanied by trumpets and fanfare.

The Roaring or Boring ’20s

“As Charles Lamb said of Godwin, he had read more books not worth reading than any man in England.”

That is from Bring on the Girls by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. It is not quite an accurate description of the book in which I read the quotation. But, it is too close for comfort.

Back in the 1920s Wodehouse and Bolton were collaborators writing a swath of Broadway Musicals. Many of them were hits. Big hits! They were famous! Bring On the Girls is a memoir of those years. It tells the behind the scenes tales! All the juicy gossip! Character assassination galore! Girls and more girls!

And it is the 1920s! The Roaring 20s! Flappers and speakeasies and, did I mention, girls! For reasons which elude me, there is an incredible fascination with the era. The Great Gatsby is one of the Great Books on the Most Beloved lists of my students. When I ask why, the answer is inevitably some variant of “Duh. It’s about the 1920s.” (No, my students do not actually say “duh.” They just give me that look. You know the one.)

And then, we have P.G. Wodehouse! That man can write! He is funny and witty and hysterical and amusing. Guy Bolton? You probably have never heard of him unless you are an aficionado of 1920s Broadway musicals. But, no matter. Wodehouse Himself in a co-author!

What could go wrong with a book like this? You can imagine the birth of the idea. It’s the early 1950s. Wodehouse is world famous. People buy his books. So why not a memoir with Bolton about their time together in the 1920s? Instant Best-Seller.

Structurally, the storyline is perfect. They meet, they work together, and their first musical is a smash hit. Elation! Their next few, mixed bags. Depression! But, wait, then come more hits! Hooray! More hits! Double Hooray! And then, the crowning achievement. They get contracts to go to Hollywood! To write for the movies! They travel West! They arrive! Book ends: “And they knew they were really in Hollywood.”

Should you rush out and read this book? Not so fast. All that promise. The payoff? Eh.

Have you ever been to one of those cocktail parties where you end up getting stuck talking to the guy who is an inveterate name-dropper? The whole conversation is just one long exercise in listening to stories whose sole function it to allow the person to mention a famous person. Painful, right?

Now imagine 294 pages of name-dropping. Nonstop name-dropping. This book even has an index, so you can look up all the names. It is an eight page index. There are over 300 individual people listed in that Index. Do the math. The book has more than one name dropped per page.

Ah, but surely it is wonderful to read about Wodehouse (P G. Himself!) hobnobbing with all these famous people, right? Well, to be fair, you have never heard of almost all those 300+ people. Well, I suppose if you study the world of Broadway in the 1920s; then you might have heard of more than half of them. There are some famous people here, though, that even we regular people will recognize. If you read this book, you will see those famous people mentioned. Like these marvelous tidbits:

You have heard of Clark Gable, right? Here he is:

Sylvia Hawkes was not only pretty, she had a pretty sense of humour. George Gershwin was swept off his feet by her, so was Lord Ashley, heir of the Earl of Shaftesbury, so was Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, so was Lord Stanley of Alderley and so, finally, was the very sure-footed Mr Clark Gable.

That is the only mention of Clark Gable in the book. But, how about Ring Lardner or Oscar Hammerstein? Well, they share a sentence:

There were other neighbors. Eddie Cantor for one, Ring Lardner for another, Elsie Ferguson and, most esteemed of all, a young man named Oscar Hammerstein, who was just beginning to make a name for himself in the musical comedy field.

Charlie Chaplin? He gets a whole paragraph! It’s a description of a sketch he did in a variety show on a boat. O’Henry? He gets half a page! A conversation in which he says nothing. And so on.

To be fair, George Gershwin gets a bit more face time, since he collaborated with Wodehouse and Bolton. Flo Ziegfeld and his Follies get mentioned often for the same reason. Fred Astaire shows up too! W.C. Fields get a few pages!

The bulk of the book is just watching names drop by for a brief visit. Surely, you object, there must be some Wodehousian moments. Some levity and funny stories. Yep. They are there. Some of them are straight out of Wodehouse’s other stories. Or in one case, the other way around. There is a tale of Bolton’s misguided involvement with an Umbrella Club. The story reappears in Wodehouse’s novel French Leave:

“I was thinking of my Umbrella Club.”
“What’s that?”
“Haven’t I mentioned it to you? It’s an idea I got from a delightful book of reminiscences by a couple of musical comedy writers”

Now that is funny—a character in a Wodehouse novel has read Wodehouse’s memoirs! But, if you want to learn more about the mysteries of the Umbrella Club, French Leave is a much better book to read.

This isn’t the only cross-reference. Wodehouse has a butler, for example, who acts and talks exactly like Jeeves. I mean, exactly like Jeeves.

The appearance of Jeeves under a pseudonym gives up the game. This is not a reliable account of the 1920s. A brief hunt around reveals the story. Guy Bolton wrote the bulk of the text. He is undoubtedly responsible for the endless, pointless name-dropping. Wodehouse, who was famous for writing funny books, then comes along and tries to make the book funnier by adding in some comic relief.

The best summary of Bring on the Girls is in the book itself in a description of one of the stars of the day: “There are no doubt by this time a whole generation of voting-age who will fail to see the significance of all this enthusiasm.” Exactly.

This isn’t really a bad book, it is just a thoroughly disappointing book. The only type of person to whom I could recommend it is someone who thought Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was fantastic. If you like rambling anecdotes about the 1920s which do little other than offer an excuse to drop a name or two, then you’ll love this book. If you just want to read Wodehouse being Wodehouse, look elsewhere.