Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  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 mysteri
es.

  Personally, I am doubtful about trusting posterity too much. The public ‘line’ of worship is very changeable and the lime-pits of this world are full of unaccepted martyrs. A full public confession while one is still alive is a better idea; not only does it make the martyrdom occur immediately, when one is still alive to enjoy it, but it also takes precedence over the career, which it amply excuses. Moreover, if the joints squeak or the wrong bones rattle in the first edition, they can be replaced in a later one, like a Revised Authorized Version. Personally, I believe that our Abbey will never run short of funds so long as the public keeps its highest favours for those who have plundered it; and there is not likely to be a change of attitude so long as the leading thinkers go on insisting that there is no better Paul than a former Saul, no clergyman more moving than one who is too drunk to stand, no prayer so deep as a hymn of blasphemy, no man more devout than an atheist. There are always periods in history in which everyone stands on his head to stress the importance of his feet: I trust the present one will persist until we maudlin sinners go underground for the last time.

  It is the function of our good Abbot to keep an eye on all this. A day may come, for instance, when Communism no longer matters; its agents will then become useless, and converts such as myself totally uninteresting. The Abbot is even now preparing for that grievous day, confident that with God’s help he will switch us to another, serviceable line. What is likely to happen is that with their dearest menace removed, people will be driven back on themselves and will need new scapegoats. All the shrewd gentlemen who looked into the hearts of men and found them to consist of warring ‘ideas’ occurring in a frame of ‘history’ will hurriedly decide to see real hearts there instead – and will they wallop the public for not having realized this all along! The new emphasis will be on strictly personal things; it will be inexcusable to say that one was led astray by an idea. Everyone will be expected to examine his conscience, rather than depend on guilt to see him through. This is the moment for which the Abbot is making ready; the moment, perhaps, which Brother Herbert sought to anticipate. We shall all write our confessions anew and they will all be along the lines I have sketched in this brief introduction. We shall confess, as we have so often confessed, that our previous confessions served only to disguise the truth. We shall wallow in little ignominies; the pears which St Augustine stole will become less-than-pears in our case. We will put the public in the place we have just vacated: we will remake ourselves in the form of pygmies. We will substitute a hundred petty vices for our major crimes: we will make ourselves look so humble that the public will feel thoroughly ashamed of its bloatedness. Poor public! I feel sorry for it already. It takes at least a generation for leading ideas to seep into the suburbs, which means that just when we great sinners decide to take up the role of simple bourgeois, they, in turn, will have just started careering off into our old ways of secret charades, drunkenness, and pious blasphemy. What a spectacle it is going to be: the priest, sober as a judge at last and quite able to stand erect in the pulpit, preaching to a congregation that swigs away from hip-flasks and screams aloud the most shocking confessions of murder, incest, suicide, and treason! Oh well, God bless the public anyway, and God bless the newspapers and the Russians: we owe them a debt we shall never repay. And God bless the people who think ‘ideas’ are so much more important than behaviour that anyone with a large enough theory can confess away with bloody murder. And God bless, above all, that great Thermostat, our good Abbot, who knows which time is ripe for what confession, and which seeds to sow in the wet springtime of a guilty world. Which reminds me – God bless guilt, the thinkers’ darling, who, unlike conscience, comes only when the bloody act has been safely performed and ushers in the ecstasies of publicized remorse. May great royalties forever bear his train!

  *

  P.S. We shall not always have an Abbot. Eventually, he will wither away.

  *

  I had barely written these words when my radiator sang out: ‘Caution! Abbot approaching!’ I seized my manuscript and stuffed it into the radiator, which has a secret compartment for such trifles. With so much pneumonia about, it is foolish to overheat one’s cell.

  The Abbot walked in. He was followed by Brother Nimpy and Brother Kapotzky, his bodyguard.

  ‘Always scribble, scribble, scribble, brother!’ said the Abbot, smiling. ‘And what is it this time, may I ask? Not another confession, I hope? Have mercy on your poor Abbot whose nihil obstat is beginning to look scrawled and jaded.’

  ‘Only a children’s book this time, Father,’ I replied with a smile, indicating the stooge MS. which is always open on my desk.

  ‘Indeed? Of what nature, pray?’

  ‘A day in the life of a rabbit, Father.’

  ‘How full of possibilities! May I glance at it? I am fond of children’s books. And while I’m looking at it, you won’t mind if Nimpy and Kapotzky search you?’

  ‘I have nothing to hide, Father,’ I replied, thanking God that this was now true.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘And nowhere to hide it.’

  While Nimpy and Kapotzky frisked me, the Abbot leafed through my manuscript. He ignored the top and bottom pages and rippled through the middle ones, his eyes darting brilliantly from point to point. From time to time he held a page against the light, in search of code pin-pricks. ‘It seems perfectly all right,’ he said at last, ‘but make the rabbit a giraffe, will you?’

  ‘I could make it become one in the course of the tale. Father,’ I said. ‘It could be transformed.’

  ‘No, from the very beginning, if you don’t mind. If you consider the principal feature of the giraffe you will see why it is much more desirable, symbolically, than a rabbit.’

  ‘Nothing to report, Father,’ said Nimpy.

  ‘Good,’ said the Abbot. ‘You two boys can go now. Pray for me.’

  Nimpy is a dear old man. He forgets continually which monastery he is working in, which Abbot he is spying for. Now, he gave the Abbot a Hitler salute, genuflected, and withdrew. Kapotzky gave a big grin and followed him out.

  When they had gone the Abbot gave a sigh of relief and threw himself into a chair. I say ‘threw himself’, but that is only a way of speaking. It is not easy to master the art of tossing a heavy, hairy, robe about, and the Abbot does it perfectly. One brisk, coordinated gesture and there he was, a replica in brown of Whistler’s ‘Mother’. He finessed his profile, and sighed.

  ‘You look tired, Father,’ I said.

  ‘I am. Poor Herbert’s death has upset me. I don’t like pneumonia in the Abbey. It’s so infectious.’ He gave me a sharp look and said: ‘You saw a lot of him, didn’t you? How are you? No colds? Sore throats? Virus?’

  ‘I am in the pink of health, Father,’ I said.

  ‘Do your best to remain so, then. Everything in moderation. See?’

  I bowed. After a pause, he dropped his stern tone and said in a friendly voice: ‘I hope you didn’t mind our little search. Pure routine, as you know. Frankly, I wanted your advice on a point that is worrying me. So do wipe all that sweat off your forehead.’

  I obeyed. One of the great things about our sort of life is that signs of terror cannot be taken as evidence of guilt. If they could be, we would all have died of pneumonia long ago.

  ‘Would you say?’ he asked, ‘that you are just about the best man here in the matter of the Divine ontology?’

  ‘God’s identity is rather my speciality,’ I said. ‘Brother Thomas is better on its history, but I am the more up-to-date, particularly where the gracious and merciful aspects are concerned.’

  ‘You did mercy for the Encyclopedia, did you not?’

  ‘And love, Father.’

  ‘I thought so. Did you run into any trouble?’

  ‘Oh, no, Father. The Scriptures are perfectly in line.’ Suddenly curious to the point of audacity, I exclaimed: ‘Is there going to be a switch, Father?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said testily, and added sharply: ‘
And don’t talk like that. Why does everyone here treat me as if I were plotting something?’

  I blushed. He asked suddenly: ‘What do you know about the Divine patience?’

  How exactly like him – to drop the crucial question without warning! ‘Patience, Father?’ I said. ‘Why, there are many references to it.’

  ‘To the Almighty’s patience? To ours, yes. What about His? Can you give me, for instance, one powerful, authoritative quotation?’

  ‘There is St John the Divine, Father, “… in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ”. But I am not sure that the word had the same meaning in those days.’

  ‘We never argue from Revelations, anyway.’

  ‘How about “long-suffering”, Father?’

  ‘Now, that’s an idea. It means patience, does it not? Is it also incomprehensible and infinite?’

  ‘I would hardly say so. There is no mystery about it, and as it is usually mentioned just before the delivery of some violent punishment, it can’t be considered infinite. I could, of course, put up a good argument for its being so, should you need one.’