Friday
Listening to John Galsworthy’s Maid-In Waiting on disk, I’ve been thrown into a welter of identity confusion. I strongly identify with the gentry’s commitment to duty, even as I am turned off by their classism and racism. I root for them to succeed, even as I wince. Liberal and conservative impulses war within me.
The extended Charwell family reminds me of my Republican grandparents and great-grandparents, one strain of which had a brushing acquaintance with the English gentry. My great-great grandfather Thomas Scott was chief caretaker of Lord Bunbury’s estate in Chesire (possibly the inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury).
Perhaps that was the origin of my grandparents’ noblesse oblige. My grandfather Bates was third mayor of Evanston and looked over the community with a paternal air. Meanwhile, my grandparents on my mother’s side helped build the city of Peoria (literally as well as metaphorically as they ran a construction company). When I look at the burn-it-all-down Freedom Caucus and the Trump disciples who refuse to govern responsibly, I feel immense nostalgia for those other Republicans, who in my youth were known as Chuck Percy Republicans.
Robert Mueller is such a Republican and so is Jim Comey. That both men have been savaged by Trump Republicans shows how far the GOP has fallen.
Galsworthy gets at my inherited sense of duty when describing the Rev. Hilary Charwell:
But to ‘serve’ was bred into his blood and bone, as they serve, that is, who lead and direct. As a setter dog, untrained, taken for a walk, will instantly begin to range, as a Dalmatian dog, taken out riding, will follow from the first under the heels of the horse, so was it bred into Hilary, coming of families who for generations had manned the Services, to wear himself out, leading, directing and doing things for the people round him, without conviction that in his leadership or ministrations he was more than marking the time of his own duty. In an age when doubt obscured everything and the temptation to sneer at caste and tradition was irresistible, he illustrated an ‘order’ bred to go on doing its job, not because it saw benefit to others, not because it sighted advantage to self, but because to turn tail on the job was equivalent to desertion. Hilary never dreamed of justifying his ‘order’ or explaining the servitude to which his father the diplomat, his uncle the Bishop, his brothers the soldier, the ‘curator,’ and the judge (for Lionel had just been appointed) were, in their different ways, committed. He thought of them and himself as just ‘plugging along.’
Maid-in-Waiting is set in the years following World War I when England went through a major transition. As gentry lost their estates, a new egalitarianism challenged class privilege. This proves bad news for one of the Charwells, who kills a muleteer in Bolivia and faces extradition.
The facts are as follows. In charge of an archaeology expedition’s supplies, Hubert has the man flogged for the way he is treating the animals. (He sticks them with knives and “generally play[s] hell with them.”) After the muleteer attacks him with a knife, inflicting a long gash on his arm, Hubert shoots him in self defense. Galsworthy gets us to side with him against the Bolivians, whom he refers to as dagos, and to decry the new egalitarianism that won’t give a principled member of the gentry the benefit of the doubt.
Nigerian author Chinua Achebe took Joseph Conrad to task for failing to provide Heart of Darkness readers with the African vantage point, and one could imagine a South American author (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for instance) doing the same with Galsworthy. The author essentially accuses the British legal system of political correctness for treating Hubert like any other suspect. Can’t they see he is a man of deep integrity who keeps his word, as his father notes at one point:
I was thinking,” said the General, “what the people of this country would do if we didn’t sweat and risk our lives for them.” He spoke without bitterness, or even emphasis: “I was thinking why we should go on doing our jobs, if our words aren’t to be believed…Isn’t a man’s whole career to weigh a snap when a thing like this happens? I feel the insult to the Service, Dinny.”
Despite my own egalitarian leanings, I find myself sympathizing when Galsworthy points to the advantages of inherited position. It’s a version of John F. Kennedy’s “For of those to whom much is given, much is required.” Another of the Charwell brothers points out how tradition keeps the country running:
Tradition is extraordinarily strong, and in this country there’s a lot of machinery to keep it alive. You see, there are such a tremendous lot of directive jobs to be done; and the people most fit for such jobs are those who, as children, have had most practice in taking their own line, been taught not to gas about themselves, and to do things because it’s their duty. It’s they, for instance, who run the Services, and they’ll go on running them, I expect.
Then he adds, with a sentiment that resonates with me,
But privilege is only justified nowadays by running till you drop.
When I won my college’s Faculty of the Year award for service, I was immensely gratified but felt that I had to go out and work twice as hard—run till I dropped—to prove myself worthy of it.
From a certain point of view, this may sound crazy and one character calls duty “an admirable disease.” Yet it animates me as it animates the Charwells. It guided me in the choice of my wife and together we have passed it down to our sons.
Therefore, in spite of myself, I find myself cheering when the Charwells pull strings to save Hubert. We need their contributions to the nation and should thank the tradition that produced them.
But they must be distinguished from those who sacrifice the less fortunate to their own interests, say through high-end tax cuts that put the social safety net at risk. Trump is one of these, and those Republicans who follow him have sold out a noble tradition.
