A Poet and a Spy
MANN, JAMES
A POET AND A Spy Henry Adams's Democracy Updated by Ward Just By James Mann Ward Just's new novel Echo House repeatedly invokes Henry Adams's Democracy (1880). In Adams's black comedy,...
...Appalled at Ratcliffe, at Washington, and at herself for being tempted, Madeleine flees, never to return...
...In an instant he infers her judgment on his life and realizes that he shares it...
...Just depicts Axel's quietly triumphant career in great detail, and with such intense admiration that at times Echo House reads like Hemingway on toreadors...
...Sylvia, unlike Madeleine, receives no last-minute intelligence that nerves her to flee...
...In Adams's black comedy, Washington's leading power-broker, James Mann is a lawyer in Washington, D.C...
...The bridge was the point, and the applause, when it came, would never be heard by the spectators below...
...in the seventies, he helps throw a congressional committee off the scent of it...
...That was its value...
...men in danger humming show tunes...
...For Axel's calling is, in its own way, an instance of the same macho cult of elite professionalism: He saw his chores literally as building bridges [and] identified with the agile and imperturbable New York Indians, the Mohawk who balanced on the footwide beams, a thousand feet to the treacherous river below...
...tight-lipped middle-aged men carrying torches for long-dead foreign girls...
...The denouement is brutal and public...
...Finally, when they are both in their eighties, she materializes at a party for him...
...Within a few years, Washington becomes unbearable to Sylvia...
...In the 1940s and 1950s, he hosts weekly lunches for CIA operatives at his Rock Creek Park mansion and sets up a money-laundering operation...
...Just has shown the reader all of this many times before...
...So she comes back from time to time, not visiting her ex, but poking around in his house (their son lets her in) and moving in what used to be their common milieu...
...And yet, despite these problems, Echo House is not only a riveting novel but also a timely examination of the "inner Washington...
...And the danger was not the point...
...Initially inclined to accept, she learns at the last moment that he once gave a quid pro quo for a large corporate contribution to his party's national committee...
...Consider this terribly cute exchange, between the poet and a colleague of the insider's: Sylvia managed a smile and shook her head...
...a return to traditional values as a personal cata-strophe—these timely jokes are of a blackness well beyond anything in Henry Adams...
...the glory of acrobats (or in this case, Axel's Mohawks on the bridge...
...Two lovers, one of whom is French, are named "Alec" and "Sandrine...
...Echo House is about what would have happened to a mid-twentieth-century incarnation of Democracy's protagonists if they had gotten married...
...His confronting this dilemma, selecting the wrong option, and repenting too late is what gives the book its tragic heft...
...Senator Ratcliffe, needing a wife for his coming presidential campaign, conveniently falls in love with Madeleine Lee, a rich, young New York widow who has moved to Washington to learn how the town functions...
...references to The Great Gatsby...
...Maybe that's why he called the book Echo House...
...It's difficult to tell exactly what he does, although it is clear that he serves as an independently wealthy eminence grise of the "intelligence community," integral to the operation of a complicated spy network...
...But a more precise parallel is to the well-known words of Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII: Had I but serv'd my God with half the zeal I serv'd my King, he would not in mine age Have left me naked to mine enemies...
...The danger was a given...
...The insider's self-image and career have depended on his thinking that right and wrong were categories irrelevant to his daily "chores," and he discovers too late that those categories are very relevant indeed...
...in the late eighties, he helps pull the wool over the eyes of an ambitious investigative reporter trying to put the pieces together...
...Morality as a trauma...
...Axel's repression of his values may be necessary if he is to render optimal service to the state...
...It also shows that, in a Washington career like Axel's, conventional morality is a trauma that has to be repressed if the career is to go forward...
...Madeleine is disgusted by Ratcliffe's gaminess, but she's also fascinated by it, and while she keeps him at a distance she doesn't reject him outright...
...here a banker is named Longfellow...
...Axel soldiers on to the top of the Washington establishment...
...Equally annoying is that Just is an irrepressible punster...
...More believably, she and the insider wed...
...But she can never quite figure her ex-husband or Washington out, and her appalled fascination with them persists...
...Meanwhile Sylvia pursues her own career with some success...
...Just focuses on Sylvia, a poet from New York who gets involved with Axel Behl, a shadowy Washington insider...
...Macbeth comes to mind...
...She's a poet, Ed...
...Bishop...
...It shows that the correlation of forces in a divorce is rarely what it seems—or even what the parties believe it to be...
...And he has packed into Echo House all the tics he's displayed in his previous books: functionaries who ironically bear the surnames of artists (in an earlier book a lawyer was called Mozart...
...At length Ratcliffe proposes marriage, outlining with hilarious bluntness the practical rewards that will be Madeleine's if, with her help, he can get elected president...
...Echo House is often irritating...
...Elizabeth Bishop says that this is our worst century so far, and I think I agree with her...
...The couple divorce, and she returns to New York...
...When this repressed morality reasserts itself, the consequences won't be benign...
...If you were successful, your labor and the elegance with which you went about it were noticed only by your fellow aerialists, those who shared the heights...
...Isn't she over at the Democratic National Committee...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 30
