The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  He therefore had us to dinner in honor of his withdrawal, over Peter’s polite protests, from the field of literary creation, and the evening was a success. Doug Townshend’s house was a Federal-period Georgetown gem which by reason of his late divorce (first we’d heard of it) he was exchanging for a no-maintenance condominium in Bethesda. His companion for the evening was the widow of a noted diplomat and a functionary of the Kennedy Center; though bejeweled to the nines, she had an Alice Roosevelt Longworth caustic wit and was friendly besides. There were two other couples: a once-celebrated hardboiled-detective novelist, now old and stoical about his fallen fame, and his wife, a plain country lady with nothing to say; and an attractive young assistant professor of American literature—a Baltimore girl now teaching on the Eastern Shore and living in Annapolis with her rather older husband, a husky, gray-bearded, athletic-looking colleague of Douglas’s.

  Colleague at what?

  Assorted as we were, Doug had seen to it we would discover connections among ourselves as the evening proceeded. The diplomat’s widow had attended The Deniston School with Irma Shorter; had once even dated Henry Sherritt! The erstwhile-famous hardboiled-detective novelist claimed to Peter that it was himself, not Gaudier-Brzeska or Walter Gropius, who first said Less is more. What’s more, he cautioned, Least may be most: but Nothing is nothing. The assistant professor had begun her doctoral work in College Park just as Kath was finishing her master’s in library science there; she and her new husband, moreover—second marriage for him as ours would be for Kate—shared our love for sailing the Chesapeake. Even the plain country lady turned out to be a refugee from the Maryland marshes, whom the once-celebrated hardboiled-detective novelist—an old alumnus of Washington College in Chestertown, it developed, where young Professor Leah Talbott now taught—had met in their Depression youth when he was briefly a high school principal over there. She remembered Capn Fritz Sagamore, all right, and was moved to ask Katherine whether, when she cooked muskrat for her family, she served the beast with the head on or off. Peter can’t look at them, Kath declared; me, I crack their little skulls with a nutcracker and spoon out their brains: delicious. Said the lady Me too, honey, and patted K’s hand.

  Colleagues at what? Peter asked politely of Franklin Talbott, the professor-young lady’s rather older husband, who not only knew and liked Peter’s pre-Less-Is-More fiction but wanted to talk about it, whereas Peter wanted to talk about sailing. He had in fact no idea what Doug Townshend did for a living; had inferred from some remark or other that he was “with the government,” a safe enough inference in that neighborhood. They’re spies, rasped the Alice Roosevelt Longworth lady before Frank Talbott could reply. The nice kind, she added: all cloak and no dagger. Kate Sherritt believes she remembers Lee Talbott’s missing a beat here in their conversation and Douglas Townshend’s not missing a beat in his. Her own blood went momentarily cold: HOSCA, the Chilean coup, her disappeared ex-lover. Franklin Talbott frowned perceptibly enough to let the A.R.L. woman know that he did not find her brashness charming in this instance and then said pleasantly to Peter No cloak either, I’m afraid. Doug’s an analyst; I’m an editor. We’re supposed to make the difference between Information, which there’s always too much of, and Intelligence, which there’s never enough of. Said the Alice Roosevelt Longworth lady Less is more. Unless it suits their purposes, our leaders ignore what the CIA tells them anyhow.

  I can never remember, Frank Talbott said smoothly, whether it was Mies van der Rohe or Giacometti who said Less is more. Declared his wife It was Edgar Poe’s raven after hearing one stanza of that dippy poem.

  The ex-famous hardboiled-detective novelist drank off his wine. His wife smiled broadly and patted Katherine’s hand again. Leah Allan Silver Talbott, Douglas Townshend told us, is a putative descendant of Mister Poe. An imputation she denies, said Ms. Talbott, but enjoys. And Franklin Key Talbott, Doug went on, is directly and inarguably descended from the author of our national anthem. Said the Alice Roosevelt Longworth lady Long may it waver.

  Thus was the subject changed. But we remarked the little voltage introduced into the room by those charged initials. Indignant Katherine restrained her urge to make a speech against the Agency’s role in destroying Chilean democracy. To Townshend and Talbott together, friendly Peter said Maybe you gentlemen can tell me whether the outfit that bought my parents’ place on Hoopers Island really is the CIA; we’re convinced it is. Doug Townshend replied easily We’re not in the real estate department and asked his colleague whether he knew Peter’s story “Part of a Shorter Work,” involving an Agency safe house on Hoopers Island and the narrator’s approach thereto. To our surprise, both Talbotts did; what’s more, though their own boat was a thirty-three-foot blue-water cutter, they knew and admired the Sagamore 25. The ex-hardboiled-detective novelist knew neither the boat nor the story nor the distinguished quarterly it had been published in. American fiction had long since gotten too fancy for his taste, he allowed; he wondered whether that had to do with the fact that our writers all drank table wine nowadays, like damn Frenchies. Wine wine wine, even for cocktails. Could we imagine Dashiell Hammett ordering a chablis spritzer? Douglas Townshend refilled the man’s glass; the plain country lady put her hand over hers.

  Later that year, Doug told Peter in Peter’s old BMW Some genuine writer needs to know what’s going on, not just the pop novelists and the exposeurs. My stories, Peter warned him, will never even be topical, much less political. And I’ve become a taker-outer instead of a putter-inner. Less is more, more and more. They had been driving around the Baltimore Beltway for ninety minutes; now they were parked in front of our Stony Run apartment. Said Doug It will show up somewhere. Don’t count on it, Douglas; you’ve picked the wrong priest to confess to. Doug Townshend smiled: If I had Herman Melville or Mark Twain for a friend. But I’ve got Jim Michener, Jim Cain, Herm Wouk, and you. Fine writers every one—but I’ll take you.

  His enrolling in Peter’s evening-college class turned out to have been a cover for meeting and sounding out its teacher, though his love of literature and his mild interest in writing were real enough. He kept abreast even of the literary quarterlies—more so than Peter himself. Thus he had tisked his tongue twice, so to speak, over “Part of a Shorter Work” and its terse successors: once at the radical minimalism, an aesthetic value he questioned in Peter’s case; once at the coincidence of the CIA material. For a special reason, he had been curious to meet the author and to learn what the author knew; in particular he wanted to find out whether there was any connection between the United States Central Intelligence Agency and the writer’s turn toward taciturnity.

  P could scarcely believe the man was serious. Did Doug really mean intimidation, KGB-style? He’d been writing long; he wanted to try short—or short wanted to try him. Who knows why we do what we do? The connection question had come up two or three social evenings later, by when we and Douglas Townshend were by way of becoming friends. When he had satisfied himself that no connection existed, that we were aware of, between his longtime employer and Peter Sagamore’s recent literary corner-turn; that the Sagamore-Sherritt household knew nothing about the CIA beyond what any attentive reader of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Republic could infer, and cared only as any stock-liberal Americans busy with their nonpolitical lives and careers might care—when, in short, he had come to know his man and his man’s woman—Douglas Townshend put into operation an odd idea he’d been entertaining for a quarter of a century.

  Male Townshends go to the Gilman School in Baltimore; thence to Princeton University; thence to law school, preferably Virginia; thence back to Baltimore or Washington, to divide their careers between legal practice and government service. The family is as old as white America. Townshends are always well-enough to do, but seldom really rich and never ostentatious. They take moderately high place for granted, but shun highest place as too conspicuous. Townshends are conservative, but high-principled and so profoundly fair
-minded—a sort of intellectual Henry Sherritt, Katherine came to say of Doug—that not infrequently they find themselves siding with the radical position on matters of civil rights and social justice. A Townshend despises jingoism, flagwaving, and bullying of any sort but is so deeply patriotic that he characteristically makes trouble not only for his department, to which he is finally less loyal than to the government as a whole, but also for the government as a whole, to which he is finally less loyal than to his ideal of it derived from knowledgeable allegiance to the Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights. In government work, this is the very recipe for trouble. Townshends believe in an aristocracy of neither blood nor wealth nor talent—though they would err on the side of talent—but of character, which they suspect some families and some schools may help transmit. What noblesse oblige obliges a Townshend to is nobility of thought and action, whatever the consequences. Oh, the very recipe for trouble.

  Douglas Townshend took his baccalaureate in English literature at Princeton in 1942 and, through family and university connections, got himself assigned to “Wild Bill” Donovan’s wartime Office of Strategic Services, first as an intelligence analyst under the supervision of Herbert Marcuse and young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later as a behind-the-lines liaison agent among resistance troops in occupied France, finally as a counterintelligence officer in the OSS’s X-2 division in the Balkans, where the Other Side was already the Communists rather than the Nazis. After the war he dutifully took his law degree, but fresh upon receipt of it he rejoined his comrades in Allen Dulles’s new CIA. Under the “open cover” of being once again a mid-level information analyst, he grew more and more involved in liaison work between the covert gatherers of information and its overt interpreters; thence he moved into a darker liaison between counterintelligence and covert operations, or Clandestine Services. He found himself at odds with certain of his colleagues and superiors, while being defended, protected, and promoted by others. When his adversaries were in the ascendancy, he would be eased from Covert to Overt; when the weather changed, he would—while still overtly Overt and on the outs—be covertly welcomed back.

  His problem (Doug told us early on, in our apartment) was that while helping the Agency learn what it wanted to know about the nation’s presumable or potential adversaries, he had learned one appalling thing after another about the Agency itself, and therefore about the nation. Even in wartime, Douglas Townshend had had reservations about the OSS’s paramilitary adventures, as opposed to its intelligence-gathering escapades. But war is war; he had set his reservations aside. Quite another matter, in Doug’s opinion, to conduct such operations in peacetime. The NKVD and later the KGB, his colleagues naturally pointed out, were doing the same thing, all over the world: Whole secret shooting-wars were mounted, like Frank Wisner’s Ukrainian and Baltic campaigns against the Russians during Harry Truman’s second term.

  If we’re going to fight a war, Douglas Townshend believed, Congress ought to declare one. His closest colleague, Frederick Talbott (older brother of the chap we’d met at Doug’s, who had preceded his younger sibling into the Agency and risen like a rocket in Clandestine Services), would reply There’ll never be another declared war, Doug, except among small-timers.

  If we’re against the CP in Turkey and Greece and France and Italy, Douglas Townshend truly believed, we should help their opponents openly. Even the French government doesn’t know everything we’re doing in France! Frederick Talbott would reply with a smile that to do those things openly would be to meddle in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state: unAmerican and inefficient.

  If we’re going to shelter hundreds of Nazi war criminals in the United States, Douglas Townshend truly believed, our president should tell us so and explain why and take the consequences. Our president doesn’t know half of what we’re up to, Frederick Mansfield Talbott would reply, and he wished he didn’t know half the half he knows. Plausible deniability, et cet. Presidents come and go; the Company gets it work done.

  If we’re going to deceive and therefore corrupt our official friends both foreign and domestic, Douglas Townshend truly believed, and secretly harass, subvert, and even arrange the killing of unofficial enemies foreign and domestic, and traffic with the vilest people we perceive to be possibly useful, and lie as necessary to the people whose interests we’re supposed to be defending, what on earth are we defending, and why? How are we better than the other side? Who says we’re better than the other side? Rick Talbott would ask. What we mainly are is on the other side from the other side. In my opinion, Doug, you lack the Tragic View. In my opinion, Rick, you lack any moral view whatever. Spoken like a scoutmaster, Douglas, which you aren’t. Spoken like the Prince of Darkness, Rick, which you aren’t.

  Though that is what we called him, Douglas Townshend told Peter Sagamore, zipping around and around the Beltway, and still do, and they soon got to calling me Mister Clean, though my hands were soiled enough.

  Now, it goes without saying, reader, that Frederick Talbott and Douglas Townshend never said exactly those things to each other in exactly that way. Professionals don’t talk like that. Nevertheless, those things got said. Same goes for these exchanges between Douglas Townshend and Peter Sagamore. What Doug wanted Pete to understand was that though his in-house criticism of the Agency’s skullduggery had been at first unrelenting, and though there were lines he was not invited to cross because it was understood he would not cross them, no knowledgeable colleague doubted him to be the most trustworthy of critics. On more occasions than he enjoyed remembering, he had participated in operations he disapproved of, in order to remain as much as possible in the know. To this end, once he had made clear his general position he came to leave off asserting it, lest he cut himself off from learning as much as he could of what we were doing, and how and why we were doing it.

  The Faust of the CIA? Peter Sagamore wondered. That’s my first question, Doug: your motive. My second—

  Said Douglas It’s obvious what your second is; don’t ask it yet. As to your first: This Rick Talbott fellow is your Faust of the CIA. His middle name’s Mansfield, but if I were a novelist I’d make it Manfred, after Lord Byron’s Prince of Darkness. Quite a different chap from his brother Frank! Douglas Townshend’s interest in knowing the worst we’re up to, he declared, was never knowledge for its own sake, much less (like Frederick Mansfield Talbott’s) the secret making of history for its own sake. It was—at first simply and then less simply—to do what he could to temper or stop what he judged to be a betrayal of what he valued about his country. When he found, early, that his in-house criticisms were acted upon only when they addressed the relative effectiveness of particular agents and techniques, not the general morality of means and ends, he kept his own counsel and did his share of the devil’s work with the intention of writing a thoroughgoing expose of what we had become by deluding ourselves that fire must be fought with fire. As the first such exposés began to appear, however, he had realized that their publication virtually ends the author’s critical effectiveness. Franklin Key Talbott, Doug happened to know, was at work upon such a book, as were others. Once the author resigned from the Agency to complete it, he would have nothing more to expose except what little he might learn at second hand from his former colleagues. Moreover, while such exposés are necessary and valuable to a democracy, their effectiveness, too, is limited. Aroused public opinion might temporarily encourage and enable a congressional watchdog committee; might even lead a president to appoint a strong and scrupulous Agency director. But the likes of Frederick Mansfield Talbott would be constrained thereby merely to work that much more carefully and covertly, not to terminate their work.

  Doug Townshend had therefore come to and acted upon a different resolve, not an easy one for a person of his fastidious character. The Agency had crews of “mole hunters,” whose job it was to uncover and neutralize double agents among its officers. He himself had had a hand in such investigations, where the leaks were plausibly damaging the
nation’s security. In fact, however, the most deeply penetrative mole he knew of was himself.

  At this stage of their acquaintance, Peter Sagamore did not know Douglas Townshend well and had not yet had his Obvious Second Question answered. He felt his skin thrill unpleasantly at the above declaration, made perhaps in their second private conversation. Not a mole for the KGB, Doug assured him. They’re a nastier outfit than us, from a nastier government. Believe it or not, I became a mole for the USA. And not even in the elevated cause of general morality, mind; simply in the cause of legality. Plus one other cause.

  In this self-appointed capacity, he gave Peter uncomfortably to know, he had become in recent years the chief anonymous source of inside information on the Agency’s illegalities and excesses: the “Deep Throat” of the CIA, he would call himself after Watergate. Under exquisitely careful cover, he had provided to certain members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to certain newspaper reporters, and to certain Agency ex-officers writing responsible exposes of their former employer, all the information on such illegalities and excesses that he could reveal without revealing himself and getting his colleagues killed. His disclosures had been to some good effect, he judged, though less so than he had hoped; he expected them to be more effective in the current, no doubt temporary public reaction against the Agency in the wake of our Vietnam war. He hoped to be of particular assistance to Senator Frank Church’s investigative committee and to Franklin Key Talbott’s book KUBARK (the Agency’s cryptonym for itself), though neither man would ever know for certain his informant’s identity.