On February 23rd, famed lyric poet John Hollander gave a talk entitled, "Fictive Espionage", this year's installment of the continuing Percy Graham Turnbull Lecture Series. Hollander's talk dealt with the similarities between espionage and writing poetry and fiction, as well as the shared characteristics of their agents.
Hollander began the talk with a broad comparison of spying to poetry. He held that poets and spies are similar in their reliance upon false realities. He referred to the fake identities and histories used by spies as "legends," decoys similar to the oblong method used by poets of "saying one thing in order to show another."
"Since spies have to lie about who they are and what they do, we should examine the relationship between poetry and lying," he said. "Poetry's not literally but figuratively lying."
Hollander then moved on to an examination of spy narratives, ranging from Rudyard Kipling to Joseph Conrad to Graham Greene. He spoke of the evolution of the genre as a reflection of the various crises that necessitated espionage.
Hollander also pointed out the way words had changed in meaning due to the fact of spying. "Agent," he pointed out first, comes from the same Latin verb as "actor." "Betrayal" began in the 17th century as meaning strictly a material turn-over of goods to the enemy in a show of national disloyalty but broadened into its modern sense by way of popular usage.
The development of the notion of betrayal helps make some of the cheap melodrama found in spy stories, Hollander explained. In the case of a spy romance, the question of betraying one's country for the sake of love on the other side provides the conflict behind 90 percent of pulp spy fiction.
The spy genre appeals to writers for the same reasons as do war and crime, Hollander said. In each of these genres, common morality is suspended, and the possibilities of behavior and action become almost unlimited.
He ended his historical overview with a look at the first proper spy novel, John Wirt's 1803 novel Letters from a British Spy. Hollander could not resist pointing out that the narrator's frustration with approaching his work could be read in two ways: literally, as the spy despairing in his failed attempts to disclose the secrets of his target; or, more literarily, as a novelist speaking of his own writing.
Hollander then explicated in more detail the art of writing as proper espionage. He compared poetry to coding, or ciphering. "Poets may be living a lie; however, their work is transmitting truth covertly." He also compared writers to field agents. "A novelist spies out the land's actual experience and sends out a report to his commanding officer, his imagination."
He drew a distinction between the notion of scouting and that of spying, or reconnaissance versus espionage. Whereas the former makes it a point to remain unseen, the latter can work only when hidden in plain view. The original spy was thus Homer's Sinon, who allowed himself to be captured by the Trojans in order to explain the Greek horse and also to tell the warriors inside when it was safe to come out and open the city gates to the soldiers waiting outside. Far from merely learning of the Trojans and reporting on their state, Sinon manipulates them and uses his craft to bring about something greater than mere reconnaissance might accomplish.
Hollander concluded with the idea that both spies and writers must appear to be other than they are. "The artist must keep hidden his passion for his trade," he said, meaning that artistic overzealousness runs the risk of compromising the agent and his quarry.
He finished his talk saying, "Whoever we are, each of us is an agent in the field of himself." A brief question and answer session, consisting of a single thoughtful question, ended the lecture.
For the second year running, the lecturer suffered from lack of amplification, as was the case in last year's discussion of Yeats by Helen Vendler, who could hardly be heard beyond the first five rows of seating. Hollander projected well enough, but his murky voice had a hypnotic quality that often obscured his meaning. He drew scarcely a chuckle when he quipped, "Unlike law or rhetoric, poetry does not try to convince the reader that it is not fiction." Many in attendance dozed, perhaps because the speaker could be and often was overpowered by a single person's coughing.
