Authors: Nigel Dennis
You will see from this that when I grew up and looked for a profession to attach my mystery to, Communism was just what I needed. Far from being, as people suppose, a creature which devours the identity, the Party is exactly the contrary: it is the most
special
thing in the world. Everyday life is killing to the identity; Party membership is so thrillingly individual that its rules and rigidities seem merely to be a frame for the self-portrait which one has painted for so long. Who would say billiards was unindividual because it is played on a walled table? Moreover, the Party supplies the thrill of discovering that the game becomes more and more individualistic the further one gets into it: the players become more and more select, the table is set up in a
more and more remote room; the face of the scorer grows increasingly grave: one leaves everything that can be described as average further and further behind. I felt I was entering the intimacy of demi-gods, and it did not take me long to put on the requisite appearance: soon, I could walk into a room with just the right tread, listen to argument with just the right blandness, and make my face suggest that simultaneously everything and nothing was taking place behind it. I also began to swot-up on Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and so on; and I must apologize to the public for having confessed that such reading
led
me into Communism. The opposite is true. It is only
after
one has begun to model oneself on selected demi-gods that one asks for the address of their tailor.
I did all this so well that the Communists in my union soon noticed that I was not an ordinary person. To climb, in any organization, one has to study not the theory on which it is based but the moods of those who put the theory into practice. Today, for instance, I can sense almost immediately the Abbot’s mood-of-the-moment, and when, without warning, his jesting face suddenly turns sour and he intones some smug, pious reprimand, I am never on the receiving end. I have always stopped joking a split second ahead of him. The great art in this, of course, is not to overdo it: the man who anticipates his superiors
too
consistently gets it where the chicken got the axe. The superior has had to work very hard to become an absolute chameleon, and the wise subordinate does not carry anticipation to the point where it makes the boss look like a mere traffic-light.
I mention this because people believe (as a result of reading our confessions) that hard work and overriding idealism make one a secret agent. Why, I could name dozens of men with these virtues who never got further than the most ordinary position in the Party and wouldn’t have been entrusted with the secret blue-prints of a button-hook! What’s more, most of them are in prison now, instead of in the Abbey. No, the way to get on is to make the right remark in the presence of the right person, to wear the right face in the right place. It is no different from the way young men get ahead as commercial travellers. The only difference between an insurance agent and a secret agent is that the higher the latter rises, the greater need he has of the former.
The day came when I was
recognized.
I mean, that when my superior
gave me some boring chore, I knew instinctively that he knew that I was capable of better things, which he would soon call on me to do. Soon, I found myself meeting Party members who were superior to those on whom I had modelled myself. The backs of their minds were set at even greater remove from the fronts, and their poise was so great that they had perfected the thrilling art of turning the whole method back-to-front: that is to say: they often stated quite frankly what was happening at the
back,
leaving one to wonder whether they kept their secret in the
front,
or if they had a back behind the back. I was an ambitious youth: it was not long before I regarded my old models as very ordinary, humdrum mortals and went to work on the more subtle design of manifold secret drawers. I made my Marxism more abstruse and less obvious: I relegated almost the whole of my real identity to regions which even I found it difficult to locate. This is why, as I have said, I never know when I am telling the truth: a confession which seems to come from the heart usually turns out to have been nesting in my head.
In the presence of these higher equivocators, I occasionally, very humbly, let fall a remark that indicated flights of thought of which my old heroes were quite incapable. My reward came when one of the dignitaries, in my presence, referred to one of these old heroes as ‘a good wheel-horse’. It was my first great test since Pa had thrown the circus at my feet! I remember looking back at the speaker with just the right degree of non-expression on my malleable visage: my look suggested that though I was too intelligent to deny the imputation, I was also too unpromoted to concur in it. When you can do that sort of thing with your face alone, imagine what you can do with the brain behind it!
I soon reached that select circle of Communism in which everything of importance is relegated to indefinable areas of the mind and the common-or-garden front has only two functions: (1) to deepen the mystery of the back parts by non-committally grunting at the right moment, and (2) to relax the tension of secrecy and mystery by swapping sneers about the stupidity of the average Party member. I was too young then to know that every élite is rooted in mockery of the tier below it: I thought my laughter was part of the very top-laughter. Today, when I know better, it makes me wince to think that in distant Moscow my little élite was considered so contemptible that it was not even worthy of our masters’ jokes. Well, I must confess that we are
much the same in our Abbey conversation: we never lack for a joke about the mundane worshippers of this world. Somewhere on high, I don’t doubt, there is a Comintern of archangels to whom our great Abbot seems exceedingly comic. God alone doesn’t join in such laughter, which is why we self-made men always feel comfortable sitting at His feet He alone, I know, will never point a calloused finger at the back of my mind, and shout with a loud guffaw: ‘What’s
that
for?
I
never put it there. You made it yourself!’
When I look back on it all, I see that one of the greatest secrets of the Party was in knowing how to protect its members from ridicule. There is not a single tenet of Marxism about which select Marxists do not make jokes, but they
never
joke about the ways in which the theory is put into practice. The more absurd a practice is, the more solemn they are about it.
Take, for example, the unspeakably childish routine which is inflicted on secret agents. Its only purpose is to make the agent believe that he is somebody who matters very much. One is given half of page 24 of the Sundays Only London-to-Brighton time-table. One is told that on Wednesday the 5th of March at four-thirty p.m. one will walk down Lavender Grove wearing an Edwardian bowler hat and that under the second lamp-post one will see a gentleman in a mackintosh reading
John
Bull.
Him one will approach, and murmur the symbolic words ‘Can you give me a light?’ On his producing his matches, one is to observe in his free hand the other half of the Sundays Only time-table, at which point one is to show one’s own half. But this, ladies and gentlemen, is merely the beginning of the ridiculous acquaintance! The mackintoshed man, oneself in pursuit, disappears into the next-to-nearest Underground station, boards a train, changes at Gloucester Road, changes at Baker Street, gets out at Hyde Park, and hires a penny chair – the pursuit of theology itself is not more complicated! You, if you have managed to hang on, then take a chair beside him, and mutter some prearranged nonsense like: ‘Wilfrid hopes the bunnies will have fine weather,’ to which he earnestly replies: ‘Bunnies believe in deeds, not words.’ Then,
and
only
then,
do you hand him the stolen plans of the new rocket.
When I look back on this, I would burst out laughing, were it not that I myself was involved in many such meetings and, though I love penance, I cannot bear to feel absurd. But was there ever such childishness?
As I have said, the point of it all was to make the agent feel distinctive, to reassure him that his years of rehearsal were not going to be wasted. Moreover, this charade was
so
like
the
real
thing;
it was as if what I have called the back-of-the-mind had been changed into the exciting terms of back-of-the-act. Its object was to make us happy.
But oh, when I look back on my past, I really
am
grateful to God for having taken such episodes out of my life! The number of time-tables, dollar bills, and cigarette packets I have dismembered: the number of
streets
I have walked, from Budapest to New York; the number of dismal
parks
in which I have sat; the number of
trains
and
platforms
into and on to which I have scurried; the times without number I have kept assignations before the Mona Lisa, the left-hand lion outside Pennsylvania Station, Mozart’s statue in Salzburg, the Albert Memorial, the Tombe des Invalides! The awful little cafés I have ended up in; the occasions when I have found a dog vying with my mackintoshed contact for use of the second lamp-post; the trains that have broken apart in tunnels as soon as I boarded them or slid-to their doors at my approach! I think now with sympathy of the English comrade who went quite out of his wits over the whole business. After years of formal spying, such as I have described, he fell to pieces. When he got on the track of something interesting, he would go to a
public
telephone
and
call
up
his superior! When he stole a document, instead of contacting ‘Wilfrid’ and awaiting orders for the usual pancake-race, he would put a
post-card
in the
letter-box,
addressed
to Wilfrid and saying: ‘Dying to see you; lots to show.’ And then sign it with his real name! Poor fellow, he only did that once!
But this brings me to the heart of the matter – the real dead-centre of my
true
confession. The reason why we never laughed at our ridiculous antics was that we were all people who are killed by laughter. Had we been asked to drop our information in the letter-box we would soon have begun to lose all sense of backness-of-mind and felt like quite ordinary people. I have told you about the wonderful sense of personal identity that grows stronger and stronger as one grows in invisibility, and how with each stage of Party ascent one becomes more-and-more a select, rare, chosen individual. Well, if you add the elements of scurrying melodrama and utter secrecy to this sense of self, you really begin to get near the condition of uniqueness which is the goal of every agent. This uniqueness was my aim then, as it is now: I
am one of the few men in the world who has been first uniquely secret and then Uniquely loved.
The only word for this is conceit, or vanity. But the Abbot does not allow these words in our confessions, because pride is a much meatier word and is more elevating to him who confesses to it. Moreover, if I call it vanity, will you ever grasp its magnitude? Vanity, as I practise it, is hardly conceivable to you; how can you begin to imagine what grandeur and supremacy of self were the reward of me and my comrades? Any one of you has climbed up into a select circle and looked down on the thousands of little figures in the routine below, but few of you can picture how intoxicating this view becomes when the peak on which you stand is invisible, and you yourself an enigma! To know that you are the exact opposite of what nearly everyone thinks you are; to sit in a crowded train, disguised as a passenger, knowing that you are a spy and that no one else in the carriage is aware of it – there’s identity for you! You can talk of great actors playing to roars of applause, but that only shows them to be the most ordinary of men. Wait until you have spent most of your adult life playing a leading role in a play that is real, before an audience who, thanks to your skill, is not aware that a play is going on at all! The contrast between their dumb innocence and your own supreme awareness must be experienced to be felt: only mystical experiences are comparable, which is why we of the Abbey have so many. And mystical experiences take place the other way round, of course, with oneself the innocent party for a change. I will only say that the magnificent prayer of Archimedes – ‘Give me where to stand and I will move the world’ – is granted the secret agent in a golden whisper. Never, never, will I know again the passion of identity that possessed me in the days when, lever and fulcrum in hand, I stood invisible upon the Party heights – and saw the world move!
*
I know this sounds as if we agents were selfish people with no love for human beings; but this is not the case. We have no interest in people when we enter the Party; indeed, we enter it in order to get away from them. But, just as we read Dostoyevsky
after
joining rather than before, so we develop a deep love for humanity once we have reached a point where we need an excuse for our behaviour. The higher we
climb, the greater our secret grows and the more we become an unknown menace to ordinary people. It is imposible for us not to feel pity for the innocent friends and relatives who still trust us, and this pity exists side by side with our determination to go on deceiving them. Most of you have experienced something of this kind when you have been betraying your husband or your wife with one of your best friends’ husband or wife, but it has only made you feel ashamed. The agent is not ashamed: betrayal of his nearest-and-dearest is his favourite duty, not his sensual whim. He suffers dreadful torments, but they are the blessed agonies of a martyr; the more he suffers, the more admirable he becomes; the more he loves humanity, the more he exalts himself as its dutiful seducer; the more people he executes, the more splendid is his own pain. Often he thinks, as he mixes his poisons in the living-rooms of those who love him, that one day, probably long after he is dead-and-gone, his secret will be told to a revolutionized world and his victims will weep when they think of the misery
he
must have experienced in the course of deceiving
them.
Many agents consider this posthumous worship as a martyr more exciting than the brilliant deception of their lives, particularly if they have a large number of
close
innocent friends, to say nothing of children and a wife. They argue that the supreme secrecy of the career gives them one priceless identity, and the exploding of the secret a second – in short, two bags full, one to enjoy on the spot, the other to imagine in the hands of posterity. Many of them, following the theological example, even reach the point of insisting that the living identity is inferior to the one which will come after death: they rather look down on the comrades who derive their ecstasy solely from being
living
mysteries.