Now, our analysts had been largely trained in the Ivy League humanities, with more degrees than a thermometer, and their readings tended to confirm whatever method they wished to validate. They could not understand a fully contradictory work which apparently had no preconceptions, much less any self-promotion; they could not imagine what it feels like not to know. I suppose there will always be people who believe that art comes from ideas, culture from values, and politics from ideology. These are people who are bound to be finally ignored and disappointed, because when such notions are not confirmed by life experience, they don’t amount to a hill of beans. But nothing, not the most humiliating rejection, seems to stop them. What I found truly astounding about our analysts is that they never had a strategy in mind in case their interpretation turned out to be totally wrong. Indeed, it was only after many rereadings that I came to understand that there was no symbolic resonance to Iulus’s reticence, and that this was the key not only to understanding him, but an insight into how and why books come to be written at all — that it’s expediency and exhaustion, not ideals, which inform the edges of all art. For Cannonia, in truth, is like a seal over a seal over a seal, where the symbolic cannot penetrate and only reinforces the forgotten ancient truth that everyone is based on someone else.
My superiors kept after me, rubbing their abstractions together to see if they could make a fire, and I began to glimpse the poor distended privates of that warped modern marriage between artist and recipient. Their interrogations over casual aseptic cafeteria lunches were incessant, and somehow both infantile and patronizing. Why had I not pressed to solidify our relationship? In what percentile did his work rank in the area of its peer expertise? In private, the questioning became even more breathless. I saw that my credibility, not to mention my clearance, was on the line. To save my ass, I would have to give a little seminar.
As to not following up upon our acquaintanceship, I could have simply pled our no-fraternization policy. But in fact I learned a long time ago to avoid meeting those whom you admire. Those whom you look up to ought to be kept under constant but respectful, discreet, and distant surveillance. It’s a question of manners, really, though I hesitate to even mention that word nowadays — the truth is that personal encounters are invariably less satisfying than the paper trail which establishes them. And the only thrill of espionage, when you get right down to it, is that it sexualizes the gathering of trivia. When you embrace a document, just as when someone flirts with you, you understand from the first that while the drama is addressed to you, it is also (this is the hardest thing for a young person to understand) aimed at the not-you. You are merely the momentary custodian of the transaction, and one must be on guard not to over-interpret it, as well as accept the fact that its author may not be a whole person, or perhaps even a historical person with a fictitious name and feelings. And so to my superiors, I had further to say — here is something which is not just all for you, boys — and that acceptance is what separates the men from the boys. Wasn’t it tough old Berdyaev who said that all culture rests on the open and voluntary admission of inequality? And one can only observe that a writer who has actually known a number of interesting and remarkable people has a tremendous advantage over his peers, for Iulus, in truth, was sufficiently well-placed to observe the last generation in western society with its psyche intact. What I came to admire most about Iulus was that his was not a tale of personal suffering, though he has proven to be the ultimate survivor in every sense. He did not consider himself a victim, and unlike most immigrants, he didn’t lie. He knew that in the modern world it is necessary to turn oneself into a character in a drama if one desires to act at a high level of ethicality. He was determined to contradict experience and emerge stronger from exile.
What the Company was interested in, of course, was not an “appreciation,” much less some “interesting interpretation,” or even what they euphemistically referred to as “evaluation.” What they wanted was knowledge. By reconstructing the past, unraveling his operations, they thought they could extrapolate his future behavior. They didn’t really want to catch him, any more than they really wanted to read him. What they wanted, desperately, was to demonstrate that as good theoreticians, they were closing the net, reducing his options.
But proper knowledge is in no way proper judgment. The one thing the soldier-life has taught me is a profound suspicion of professionalized knowledge. You can professionalize force. You can professionalize etiquette. You can even professionalize the erotic. But you cannot professionalize intelligence. Intelligence fails when the first shot is fired. Battle plans are everything, but worthless once the battle is joined. Von Clausewitz was right to say that unless you cross the battlefield, no permanent happiness can be yours; but he neglected to add that when you are in the midst of fighting it, the battle does not exist. Espionage is a lot like literature in that it is invariably about loss, and full of folks busily writing away for people who no longer exist. History is driven by failed artists. And the main lesson of the intelligence business is this — it takes a long time to learn just how much intellect to smuggle into any transaction without ruining it, and this is as true in love and art as well. The effortlessness of the smuggling is in direct proportion to the affect of the intelligence, a fact not widely understood by our illustrious higher pedagogy. It’s not exactly that the intelligence is mostly wrong. It’s that you have the capacity to believe, when the intelligence is right. In our business, strange to say, it is the most radical skepticism which often leads to the gravest errors, our pushing of metropolitan fancies to ridiculous extremes, just like the Russians.
Further, the essential strategy of intelligence has been misunderstood by the earnest moralizers who seem to take to American soil like soybeans. Breaking the code is just the first step. Secrecy, leverage, and momentum are only marginal effects. What you really want enemy intelligence to have is sufficiently accurate information to allay their paranoia and thus hold the more maniacal of their politicians at arm’s length. It’s easy enough to create disinformation, to mislead, to ensnare, to corrupt, to assassinate. What’s difficult is to create the illusion in the worried reader’s mind that he is getting the right information in spite of us, rather than with our specific assistance. Naturally, you will need a safe house on occasion to let down your hair and hatch a plot or two, but your real safety resides in the fact that your own agencies are riddled with your opposite number, that you know what they know about what you are doing. Wasn’t it Persius who said that knowing really means nothing to you, unless somebody else knows that you know it.
The fact of the matter is that most agents never learn anything of consequence in their entire careers and so must continually inflate the significance of their observations — a driving force of history which makes the class struggle look like a game of whist. Young men seeking academic promotion, old men seeking publicity — all of it worthless rot, worthless, worthless. Thus, espionage is mostly the story of some poor fellow being shadowed by another, and who by throwing away his brown paper lunch bag invites a generation of tortured analysis and brilliant speculation. What was remarkable about Iulus is that he never inflated his own significance, never gave undue meaning to his dreary routines. To climb the ladder in this business you must entertain the last conclusion that you would expect your training and temperament to lead you to, and that is this: The world in fact does not depend in the end of the individuality of the speaker, but upon the transmission of other voices, which somehow overflow into our world.