The Woes of Employing a Personal Secretary

It looked like a cruel day from the window. Pedestrians were grimacing against the wind, and even dogs on walks looked aggrieved. But when I stepped outside, it was downright balmy. I had so many layers on it felt like Florida. Suspiciously warm weather prompts a kind of giddiness, a wash of near-escape. Like a stern-looking letter from the local authorities that turns out to be an invitation to a neighborhood picnic. It will just be a bunch of bureaucrats eating potato salad in ill-fitting shirts, but for a second, you’re elated at the prospect. Same with the weather today. It couldn’t have been a degree above 13, and the clouds were bruise-colored, but I felt like whistling (I’m unable to whistle, so it never goes farther than the urge to do so) as I struck out down the sidewalk.

My home office is an avalanche of leaving. Everything to outfit my double life as an American citizen in Virginia, like a good old spy compiling their documents and rehearsing their identity. Passport, US SIM card, checkbook. I feel the heart lag, already, of crossing over, slipping into, reassuming.

As if his spy novels weren’t enough, I recently acquired Conversations with John le Carre. John’s face on the cover is cautiously sympathetic, as though he has just heard you say your pet rabbit died, and he’s worried that you’re going to tell him more about it. In one of the book’s interviews, from 1969, Le Carre is asked about his sense of belonging and loyalty:

Interviewer: There are those who are going to say that because of this latest book of yours [A Small Town in Germany], you have been disloyal to the class from which you come, to the group to which you belong. And in the Spy Who Came in from the Cold you certainly didn’t belong anywhere. Do you belong?

Le Carre: I’ve never felt I belong anywhere. I’ve been very lucky in that respect. I’ve had a very rich life up to now, I’m not talking about money, but I’ve come from a lot of places and none… I’ve led a lot of lives in an odd way. I don’t feel that I belong to any of them.

Interviewer: And have you been disloyal?

Le Carre: That is just the point. The only disloyalty I’m concerned about is disloyalty to myself. … Let me put it this way, one of the results of early success is confusion, a sense of indirection. And coupled with it is the obligation to live a romantic life. By romanticism I understand that one identifies one’s private standards and adheres to them. This doesn’t lead one to solid conclusions, and it doesn’t restrain one with intellectual discipline. It leaves you on your own.

Why is le Carre so oddly cavalier about his unbelonging and being left on his own? Perhaps it was a unseasonably warm winter’s day that made these comments come out as praise rather than complaint. On his website, le Carre writes: “I hate the telephone. I can’t type. I ply my trade by hand. I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. Three days and nights in a city are about my maximum. I don’t see many people. I write and walk and swim and drink.”

Those four verbs have a nice ring. What also has a nice ring is a note on the righthand side of the page, saying “Make sure to follow my personal secretary’s notes on Twitter.” Given the scarcity of the tweets, and the old-man tone of them, I’m guessing that le Carre dictates them to said personal secretary every other month, when he remembers the Internet exists. But for a second, I also liked the idea of le Carre making a plug for his personal secretary, a sniveling nephew who spends all day whining about not having enough Twitter followers, until le Carre feels bad for him and offers to help him out by asking his readers to follow him. At this generous offer, the personal secretary lights up for a full second before mournfully reporting to le Carre that his pet rabbit recently passed away.