What to read if...you've turned up the collar of your trenchcoat

Assets

It used to be the custom to commemorate moments of national humiliation or disaster by applying the adjective ‘black’ to the day of the week concerned. The pages of European history are, so to speak, bespattered with the records of Black Mondays and Black Thursdays. It may be that in this twentieth century, an almost daily acquaintance with large-scale catastrophe has deprived the custom of its point. Black and white have tended to merge into a drab grey.

Cause for Alarm Eric Ambler

Plus ça change, of course; but as well, we can see here the 20thc in the process of making itself: defining itself by its lack of clarity; a bleakly smudged image that needs interpretation. This is the world our spies - Davies and Carruthers in The Riddle of the Sands (Erskine Childers); Nicky Marlow in Cause for Alarm; and Ashenden in the Ashenden stories (W. Somerset Maugham) - have to examine, interpret and negotiate.

Ways of seeing develop concomitant ways of showing, and the espionage narrative swiftly acquired its own instantly recognisable iconography, directly related to the conflicts, politics, advances and social shifts of the age that bred it: the trenchcoat (from the trenches), the soft hat (rather than the hard bowler or top hat) as social codes softened, the camera (exemplar of functional modernity); even the cigarette, that essentially 20thc pleasure (accessory, unrecognised toxin, and recreational drug) - all directly derive from the sources of its being: metonym, metaphor and metamorphosis synthesised. (An iconography so powerful, everybody wants it: think of Alain Delon in the film Borsalino. Trenchcoat, check. Soft hat, tick. Cigarette - come on! Set in the 1930s, made in 1970. And Delon’s character is a gangster.) But - as we’ve already seen - there’re also the classics: night, darkness, fog. The Hungarian photographer Brassai (several of whose images you’ve seen here) said:

Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbs and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.

- which also serves as an excellent description of the crazed, looking-glass world of espionage, its imperatives, and the consequences inevitably contingent on these.

And, of course, spying is nothing if not contingent. Interestingly, both Ambler and Maugham use the same motif, in slightly different ways, to express this. Here's Ambler's Nicky Marlow on the decision from which all else flows:

[I]t seems to me that a state of society in which such trivialities as the desire of an insignificant engineer for a hot bath are capable of influencing the destinies of large numbers of his fellow-creatures, has something radically wrong with it.

Like Paris and the apple as the cause of the Trojan Wars, the focus here is on a choice with unforeseen and unintended consequences; but also a comment on the entire situation, because of course - as stated later in the novel - Marlow has no choice: he doesn't know he's making one.

Back in Geneva, during the First World War, “the police had drawn a blank” and:

Ashenden was lying comfortably in his bath…[He] sighed, for the water was no longer quite so hot; he could not reach the tap with his hand nor could he turn it with his toes (as every properly regulated tap should turn) and if he got up enough to add more hot water he might just as well get out altogether. On the other hand, he could not pull out the plug with his foot in order to empty the bath and so force himself to get out, nor could he find in himself the will-power to step out of it like a man. He had often heard people tell him that he possessed character and he reflected that people judge hastily in the affairs of life because they judge on insufficient evidence: they had never seen him in a hot, but diminishingly hot bath.

Maugham's commentary, meanwhile, applies equally to the manoeuvres and machinations of spying, and the political situation itself; as applicable to a political landscape - the late 1930s - that neither he nor his protagonist have yet seen, as it is to the current “now,” in which Ashenden soaks in the bath.

And, of course, both images are drawing our attention to the way a spy’s career hinges on the tiniest details: the compound eyes of a fly.

It's also impossible to ignore the intertwining of the espionage narrative with that other burgeoning art form of the 20thc, the cinema. The spy novel and the cinema are made for each other, both trading in manipulation through mirrored constructions of reality: no wonder they've collaborated so frequently; and consequently developed an iconography so interconnected that it's almost impossible to distinguish who's the innovator. Even as supposedly distinct worlds, they bleed constantly into each other, constantly confusing any analysis of blood type: because a spy is, of course, an actor - but an actor wants to be seen, to be known, to be famous (probably) - and a spy very much doesn't want any of those things. Expression of this synthesis reaches its apotheosis in General Vagas’s apparently ruminative remarks to Nicky Marlow at La Scala, in Cause for Alarm:

‘[T]he ballet interests me enormously. It is, I believe, the final expression of a disintegrating society. The idea of the dance, you know, and the preparation for death have been inseparable since the human animal first crept through the primaeval forest. Ballet is merely a new rationalization of society's instinctive movement towards self-destruction… In the years before nineteen-fourteen it drew larger audiences than ever before… Now it is popular again. If I never read a newspaper, Mr. Marlow, one evening at the ballet would tell me that once again society is preparing for death.

Like ballet (incidentally, Vagas isn't demonstrating some proto-Bond villain affinity as a shorthand for villainy - he really is interested in ballet, has views on Fokine and Diaghilev), the espionage novel now has its own mimes of communication. So when Marlow goes down the stairs of his office building at night, after work and

They were in darkness, but from a half-opened door on the third floor a shaft of light cut across the landing

we know exactly how to read this, 20th or 21stc, no loge seat or opera glasses required; influences more than apparent; but the ideas packed into Vagas’s short speech are equally characteristic of the espionage novel - as seen here - and at its best; one of the reasons for writing very clearly being to initiate these conversations with the reader, draw attention to current situations and ideas; and, by entertaining, engage the reader’s consideration, however momentary. (Maugham is slightly different in that, ever the professional, he recognises good copy when he sees it; the conversation an inevitable contingent rather than a declared purpose: but it is inevitable. When he describes a blinded soldier singing on a train to Petrograd in 1917 “you felt that this was a being apart, sundered from the joy of this enchanting world. He did not seem human.” As for the other soldiers,

There was a disdainful anger on their side and unmeasurable pity on ours; but no glimmering of a sense that there was but one way to compensate that hopeless man for all his pain.

As a metaphor, perhaps all too clear; but as immersive commentary on experiences and perspectives of the First World War (but any war, really), this needs nothing else. Any war, because any espionage narrative worth reading enjoys a double currency: both in and of its time but also, if written with any integrity, enduringly contemporary whenever it’s read.)

But spying itself has changed - inevitably - syncopated into professional choreography by the performances of real life Ashendens and Zaleshoffs; (impossible not to hear, probably around the time of the Cold War, an echo of Edmund in King Lear hissing “Now God stand up for bastards!”). The modern spy is far more likely to wear a hoodie and trainers (nights at La Scala probably unnecessary unless to supply fictional glamour to a streamed series); the days of autonomy and vast budgets definitely belonging to another era. (Although not for the realisation of the fictions: there's still gold in the pretended double-cross and its accoutrements.) In our increasingly polarised world of rapid social regression, entrenchment, received ideas and certainty are once more achieving hegemony; the concept of ambiguity becoming laughable in the face of aggressively espoused ideologies; the spy now a cog (which seems a riposte to all those productivity and time-and-motion studies that were so fashionable in the early 20thc) in a lumbering, largely privatised espio-industrial complex. If modes of spying illustrate their age, we’re probably looking at the ultimate (penultimate?) expression of capitalism servicing its own continuance; regardless of any professed ideologies on any side; especially as we're now nominally in the Age of Transparency: the most cursory online search throws up sprightly links incorporating helpful glosses in case there's anyone who doesn't know - MI5: the Security Service; SIS: (MI6) - accompanied by first-person rhapsodies on personal career development in the supportive environment of the espionage services. This could be you! So, obviously, the real stuff is happening elsewhere: where there's muck, there's murk (brass, understood¹); maybe not that far from its origins after all.

Rich fodder for the espionage narrative, of course, for any writers interested in engaging with the ideas (WTRI, fearless in research on your behalf - i.e. recently watched a lot of spy twaddle - observes a tendency to duck the big questions, assumptions of moral equivalence, portentousness tipping into pomposity, and a kind of ethical recycling - everybody's the bad guy (which, I hear you saying irritably, is not the same as suggesting there are no good guys, but what can one do?) - that relies on the ethical ambiguities and uncertainties of the 20thc narrative, without ever engaging in the interrogation which was also an inherent part of its conversations. Laziness, in short. We shall see).

But - to reiterate - written with integrity, whenever it's written, these stories are as apposite, as current, as when they were written. Here's Zaleshoff, in 1937, on a world run mad:

‘He’s escaped from everybody's insanity into his own private one. But you and me Marlow, we’re still in with the other nuts. The only difference between our obsessions and Beronelli’s is that we share ours with the other citizens of Europe. We're still listening sympathetically to guys telling us that you can only secure peace and justice with war and injustice, that the patch of earth on which one nation lives is mysteriously superior to the patch their neighbours live on, that a man who uses a different set of noises to praise God is your natural born enemy. We escape into lies. We don't even bother to make them good lies. If you say a thing often enough, if you like to believe it, it must be true. That's the way it works. No need for thinking.’

([D]arkness liberates forces within us which are dominated by reason during the daytime.)

But, it's impossible to read a good espionage narrative without thinking: a recessive Socratic dialogue the negative lying beneath the surface, awaiting development by the reader’s imaginative engagement. Questioning of the status quo is at the heart of any espionage operation, by the simple fact of seeking to change it by covert intervention; the transgressive means a further interrogative confrontation: so, one could extrapolate the espionage narrative as not only a question but a radically democratic question, targeting all the official versions that are rendered down into the way it works.

We escape into lies. Stories, on the other hand, can offer both escape and freedom. Zaleshoff is still worth listening to.

1. For anyone who hasn't encountered this (Northern) English colloquialism: Where there's muck there's brass means there's money to be made in dubious undertakings.