Mister 8

Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.

‘I’m letting you take over this whole department,’ [Dalby] said at last. ‘Now don’t get all excited, it’s only going to be for about three months, in fact less if I’m lucky. You are a bit stupid, and you haven’t had the advantage of a classical education.’

Dalby was having a little genteel fun with me. ‘But I am sure you will be able to overcome your disadvantages.’

‘Why think so? You never overcame your advantages.’

One of the things I like best about British literature, film, television, and general media, is the constant presence of class issues, whether on the surface, or bubbling underneath. I grew up a working class American — when I was a kid, my dad supported our family of four on a factory salary (and this was during the Reagan years!) — and, until I started expanding my reading horizons, I felt fairly alone in the world. Admittedly, our class situation is a little different: our accents don’t betray us, and for the most part, we’re all piled into the same schools regardless of class. But still, we definitely have class issues in America, though most of our socially conscious art focuses on multi-culturalism.

As touched upon in the post about the Angry Young Men, class issues also permeate The IPCRESS File. The narrator character and his cinematic counterpart are often noted for their working class roots, compared to the globe-trotting playboy image set forth by other spy franchises. And, again, it’s noteworthy to point out that author Len Deighton was also from a working class background himself.

One of the interesting ways in which class issues are presented in The IPCRESS File is in the narrator’s description of the other characters and their backgrounds. For each of them, their class or financial background is addressed, usually as part of the narrator’s judgment of their character. During his time as head of department, he would have likely had access to personnel reports, and so we can’t ever be sure if these judgments are from the official documents, or casual observations.

CHICO:

Chico always looked glad to see me, it made my day; it was his training, I suppose. He’d been to one of those very good schools where you meet kids with influential uncles. I imagine that’s how he got into the Horse Guards and now into w.o.o.c.(p) too, it must have been like being at school again. His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap. He stood 5 ft. 11 in. in his Argyll socks, and had an irritating physical stance, in which his thumbs rested high behind his red braces while he rocked on his hand-lasted Oxfords. He had the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it.

Chico seems to be the character for whom our narrator has the least respect, and it seems directly related to the fact that he didn’t really earn his job, but had it handed to him by virtue of his background. This is probably the reason that he’s not very good at the job (though it may be worth noting that our narrator may not give a reliable account of Chico’s abilities), and might also explain why he goes missing for half of the book and no one seems to give a damn.

DALBY:

Dalby was an elegant languid public school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury. He was a little taller than I am: probably 6 ft. i in. or 6 ft. 2 in. He had long fine fair hair, and every now and then would grow a little wispy blond moustache. At present he didn’t have it. He had a clear complexion that sunburnt easily and very small puncture-type scar tissue high on the left cheek to prove he had been to a German University in ’38. It had been useful experience, and in 1941 enabled him to gain a D.S.O. and bar. A rare event in any Intelligence group but especially in the one he was with. No citations of course.

Public school in the UK, it should be noted, means pretty much the opposite of the US connotation. The Heidelberg duelling scar has always been one of the more interesting demarcations of class — a hideous disfigurement so posh that people often stabbed themselves in the face to get one. Dalby often seems to go against his class, and the societal niceties that come with it, but seems to still carry some superficial prejudices. Dalby’s interactions with the narrator, as seen in the excerpt that opens this post, often involve his pointing out the narrator’s education shortcomings and, occasionally, his surprise at his ability to transcend them.

CARSWELL:

On Tuesday I had Carswell in for a drink in the office. He seemed a bit depressed. He had three beers in quick succession and then began to tell me of his childhood in India. His father had insisted upon Carswell going into the regiment. The polo, the pig-sticking, the punitive actions against the tribesmen who enjoyed the fighting as much as the young English aristocrats did, the sun, horses galloping in the open hill country, drinks and mess dinners, the other young subalterns wrecking the mess in horseplay. All these things were things of his father’s life, and when his father died he immediately asked for a posting to another unit. He chose a unit as diametrically opposed to his father’s as he could think of; Indian Army Statistical Office,
Calcutta. He had no interest or aptitude for the work. He did it as a quiet rebellion against his life until then.

…Carswell must have been the only officer in the entire British army who had deliberately thrown away a commission in a crack cavalry regiment in exchange for a dreary office job that had left him nudging sixty, a substantive captain, with little or no prospect of a move past substantive major, if that.

Before this chat, the narrator had been frustrated with overseeing Carswell’s dead-end statistical work, but I feel that afterwards, there’s a bit more respect from one class anomaly to another.

MURRAY:

I talked to Murray about everything except the job. Murray was a tall and large-muscled man who, had he been a few years younger would have made a John Osborne hero. His face was large, square and bony, and it would be equally easy to imagine him as an R.S.M. or the leader of a wildcat strike.

He was efficient and responsive to orders in a way that more than faintly criticized his superiors by its very efficacy. It reminded me of those N.C.O.’s who drilled officer cadets. His hair was tightly arranged across his lumpy skull. His eyes, thin slits, as though he constantly peered into a brightness, would wrinkle and smile without provocation. Unlike Chico, Murray’s smile wasn’t motivated by a desire to join other men – it separated him quite deliberately from them. We talked about Bertold Brecht and the 1937 Firearms Act, and it amused Murray that I was probing around amongst his acquisition of knowledge. He’d not liked the peacetime army and it was understandable, there was no place in it for a man with a paperback edition of Kierkegaard in his pocket. The sergeants tried to talk like officers and the officers like gentlemen, he said. The mess was full of men who’d sit in a cinema all the weekend and come back with stories about house-parties on the river.

‘Georgian houses,’ Murray said, and he had a great love for beautiful buildings. ‘The only Georgian houses they’d ever been to were George the Fifth ones along the by-pass.’

Note the mention of John Osborne, whom we discussed before. Note also that in Murray and the narrator’s view, there’s seemingly a checklist for class pretension (“Attend party at Georgian house? Check Yes or No.”) that both misses the point, and breeds rebels like the two of them.

JEAN:

Even though Led’s wasn’t the place, she passed me a pale-green filing card, It was about six by ten inches. It was a personnel-type card, such as any large commercial firm might employ, but in the space for name and address there was only an irregularly spaced series of rectangular holes. Under this in panels was information. Born twenty-six years ago in Cairo. Norwegian father, Scottish mother, probably not short of the stuff since she went to school in Zurich between ’51 and ’52, and decided to live there. Perhaps working for British Diplomatic Service in Switzerland – it wouldn’t be the first time an Embassy typist came into the department. Her brother holds Norwegian citizenship, works for a shipping firm in Yokohama – hence presumably H.K. then Macao – where she worked part-time for the tourist bureau there – a Portuguese set-up. The panel marked T was bursting with entries. She spoke Norwegian, English, Portuguese, German, French, ‘FSW, that is, ‘fluent in speech and writing’, and Mandarin, Japanese and Cantonese ‘SS some speaking’. Her security clearance was GH7 ‘non stopped’ which means that nothing had been found to prevent her having a higher clearance if the department wanted to classify her higher.

In reading over Jean’s file, the narrator seems to comment in passing on Jean’s class background, mostly because he’s preoccupied with other things (“she was still my very first beautiful spy”).

The character on whom we get the least background info is Alice, the department secretary. We also get brief nuggets on our hero — he’s from Burnley, an industrial town in Lancashire, worked briefly with the CIA, and is described as, “a dark-haired, round-faced character; deep sunk eyes with bags under horn-rim glasses, chin jutting and cleft. On the back of the photos was written ’5ft. 11 in.; muscular inclined to overweight. No visible scar tissue; hair dark brown, eyes blue’.”

I don’t want to be too presumptuous, but the working class narrator seems to be a fictional manifestation of Deighton himself. In addition to a similar physical build, they also share a knowledge of fine foods. This, along with the narrator’s appreciation of culture and history, might at first seem pretensions themselves, but the narrator uses them in his class rebellion, using his wit and knowledge as weapons against those who underestimate him. The intelligence community is populated by elitists (still smarting from the well-educated upper class Cambridge graduates who’d been working for the Soviets — Burgess, Philby, McLean, Blunt & Cairncross — actually, they were still hunting Cairncross, I think) and in some ways, the narrator is able to succeed because of his background and his ability to recognize and function outside of class niceties.

For what it’s worth, Deighton didn’t see himself as a class warrior, but a mere chronicler of the class situation. Discussing the situation in a BBC interview (transcribed here), Deighton said: “I think at the time someone said, ʻyouʼre against the class system,ʼ and I said, ʻWell, Iʼm not against the class system, itʼs just Iʼm recording the fact thereʼs a class system, and I think I might be more against it if I noticed around me anyone who was against it.ʼ”