Snakes and Ladders

Will the hare ever learn the hedgehog’s wisdom? Isabel Colegate says not. Running too fast up society’s ladder Baldwin Reeves trips and falls…. So easy climbing those lower, middle rungs. Alas, only a different order of being to reach the very top: virtuosos, born or bred. But we are not sorry for this man. Heck no! We exult as he slides down that anaconda. The Blackmailer.

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An extraordinary myth. The most powerful of the 1950s. Though, like Mr Reeves, it has a weakness; it doesn't go all the way, doesn't follow the logic of its own invention, whip a new spanking truth out of the extremities of its fiction. But hey! This is a novel, Monsieur Reality has to come in somewhere; he will push his way through the door; insist on a cup of tea, and, in his officious manner, demand, in that most unctuous of voices, “a Victoria Sponge will do marvellously, madam.” An odd chap. He spins his bowler on the tip of his finger, like a circus master top hat on cane. Monsieur, after unbuttoning the hooks of Judith’s skirt, and steaming up the bedroom with his talk, leaves, suddenly, in mid-act; bamboozled by an insight: “you are a performer with too light a touch.” Judith triumphs. Wit defeats force. Life overcomes art. The problem of realism. Serve up too many details, insist on the prosaic, its fortunate peculiarities, and the allegory collapses; the master’s house overrun by its servants, their footsteps, their chatter. Myth, that requires broad outlines and clear-cut events, is weakened by detail, transforming it into a novel. Mrs Symbol resists; she rebels, she demands her rights, her need for form, that urge for meaning. Isabel tries again. To keep the allegorical realism psychological plausibility is momentarily lost; but the denouement is too fast, it is congested with incidents that climax too neatly. Our mistress admits defeat. The pressure of the realistic, its slow accumulation of fact and feeling, the past’s pull on the shirtsleeves of the present - gradual change, not a rapid overturning - prove irresistible. Like traffic outside the window, they cannot be stopped. This man doesn’t move in. After mucking about with the furniture Mr Reeves is shown the door.

There are tensions here: form and content no longer friends but rivals.

Trust an allegory to follow its own rules. Allow Mr Reeves his success. Then we’d have the greatest myth of the Fifties; not just a realist response to a new phenomenon, but a fable that foresaw Britain’s fate…that a Mrs Reeves would one day run the country, destroying the privileged few who helped her on her way.1 Judith should have lost not won.

This book, published in 1958, describes the Establishment’s fears about the meritocrats. Though it is not the blue blood aristocrats who are under threat; protected by their mythic past and a talent for diplomacy, they can deflect all challenges by their acres of inheritance and a few well-chosen words behind the scenes. They’re gonna be all right. It is the upper bourgeoisie, who have married their children, who have most to fear; for they have not yet acquired that self-assurance about their own unassailable worth.2 A few bad apples? Man, I own an orchard! Not some pesky detail but the noble idea is what determines a toff’s self-image. Judith, a daughter of the intellectual aristocracy, does not share such self-belief. She projects her insecurity onto the in-laws. Knowing her husband’s faults, his charisma a camouflage for a weak and sensual character, she is protective of the Lanes, to whom she is afraid of revealing this ugly truth. 

Since his death in Korea Judith lives to forget his awfulness. Safely ensconced in the upper echelons of British society, she finds this easy, as she has no need for that past, which will surely fade away; for she has a new life now, taking her in different directions; away from family, into business, into commerce’s uncertain future. A passive creature, brought up to decorate the leisure class, Judith has broken with her fate - that war in Korea helpful - to discover the happiness and meaning of a job (she is a partner in a small publishing firm). Judith a new kind of woman, on the rise since the 1920s: an haute bourgeois defining herself through work.

Judith Lane, the surname significant, is an intermediary between classes.3 Having crossed that most precious of all class divides - between the aristocracy and everyone else - she exists in a sort of social suburb, which has not quite settled down: her intelligence and culture suggesting a neighbouring bohemia; though her tastes are conventional, and she is highly reserved, with immense self-control: Mayfair or Kensington surely? In marrying Judith has joined a class quite other in sensibility and intellectual range, but whose mentality is similar, essentially the same; thus her easy acceptance into their ranks. The houses new, the people friendly, the gardens are waiting for summer….

She has come to like her in-laws, enjoys her visits to the hereditary home, and is prepared to acquiesce in the heroic myth of a dead husband. Absorbed into this class, she wants to protect it; even though their son showed a nonchalant disregard for her feelings: Anthony liked to seduce people, not love them. The pain of that marriage, with its difficulties of first adjustment - no doubt due to Anthony’s rebelliousness, his purposive discomforting of his parents, especially his mamma - are fading; this interstitial existence now soothing and rewarding. Social change does not have to be traumatic.

Baldwin Reeves is a poor boy making good through his cleverness; thanks to an educational system open to academic talent. Like Anthony he has charm, but of a more self-consciously, instrumental kind; thus a little forced, mechanical. His undoing. Anthony was a natural, people couldn’t help liking him; he could charm them against their will: his charm a game he played for the fun of it; a game all enjoyed, Anthony most of all. There is something grubby about Mr Reeves’s version, because he uses it to further his career. He lacks authenticity. To undo him.

Baldwin Reeves is neither one thing nor t’other; but unlike Judith he hasn’t created his own niche, where he is comfortable. Always going up, he has no fixed identity; this gives him power; for mobile and fluid, he embodies force and movement; he is expected to do things, change places, succeed. But such success, because so dependent on his surroundings, that need to flatter, to manipulate, to control, relies too much on others, thus artifice, image. He is vulnerable to those who can intuit the inauthentic, the sham; also to those attuned to more subtle and sophisticated tastes. Then the biggest danger: that he’ll go too far; for not bounded himself he doesn’t know where the boundaries are; doesn't know when to stop. This too will be his undoing.

Always performing. To escape his class he turned his education into a game; pretending not to work - essays were written at night; in class he ostentatiously read novels - so as to win the plaudits of the pupils, who abuse and ridicule a swot; stupidity the great leveller. In university he erased his accent, and played the role of the clever bourgeois. A master at it. Today, the act is the star barrister, the coming politician. A public persona which prospers for as long as it skates the social surface. His charm is in his ability to persuade people into liking him just enough to satisfy his career. Never get too close. 

Baldwin Reeves is a horrible man.

‘What we feel for each other is really a passion for power,’ said Judith. ‘We want to destroy each other by making the other fall in love with us - we challenge each other, that’s all. You want to revenge on me the fact that you love Anthony, I on you the fact that I sometimes hated him. But reason, as you say, has destroyed all it all.’…

Judith is unfair to herself. This is no literal definition of ‘power’ (or ‘love’ or ‘hate’). She is too cool, too temperate, too indifferent, to exercise much power over others; too much the intellectual, prone to complex rationalisations of odd feelings, to play on the crude desires of others. Here she is justifying an emotion - a disturbing love - of which she has to make intellectual sense; meaning more important than feeling, which she abstracts into symbols and literary patterns. Her talk a kind of art; feeling and words mingling to create a mental atmosphere, the kind evoked in poetry; that crucible of the mind, where meaning is condensed into spirit; words felt more than thought. 

The intellect of Mr Reeves is of a different kind; its concrete simplicities well suited to success in life; the reason he over-rates it; and projects his own estimation onto Judith. Fool! He is swimming out of his depth. Having left the paddling pool of school and university, he now says bye bye to the safe waters of work, to flounder in a sea, whose octopus currents are too strong for him (too deep even to be seen). An intelligence perfect for exams; it has little culture, and lacks penetration.4 Baldwin Reeves is a clever but superficial person, one whom Judith quite rightly describes as having “a passion for power”; a substitute for intellectual finesse and virtuosity.

Such characters are the real class warriors; not the proletarian stuck in the ruts of work and family, but the man who barges and bashes his way into the crowded bars of society’s high-flyers. Knowing the weaknesses of these superior people - education and war handy learning experiences - he uses their sense of propriety and honour against them. Such exquisite facades so easily trashed (or so it seems). Mr Reeves to use the threat of exposure to gain make his place at the ancestral estate. Such a bore. A bully. It is why he is prepared to destroy the myths of those above him. As if their world is all illusion.

Baldwin Reeves is no radical. He wants to join the Establishment; thus his fondness for Anthony Lane. His talent for mimicry suggests he’ll succeed. But it is harder than he thinks. Climbing in the foothills the summit looks a long way off; quick progress suddenly slows down, doubts creep in.… His first mistake. He seeks a shortcut to the top. He blackmails Judith. It’s not that he wants to expose the lies and evasions of these aristos; break the heroic memories of their charming but unstable members. No. This to endanger his own ascent. No one wants to unnerve the leader when the expedition’s half way up the mountain.

It is why he targets the newcomer Judith. Less socially secure, not rooted in the feel of rule, she has the outsider’s view of the mores and beliefs of this class. She thinks the myth more important than it is. Only when the truth comes out, Sir Ralph accepting it easily, Mrs Lane repressing it with fantasies even more wild and heady, does Judith recognise her mistake. Brought up in a culture - that intellectual aristocracy - where words and stories have their own intoxicating truth she over-values them, thus her susceptibility to Baldwin’s arguments.

Held to ransom! If you don’t let us join you, say these social inferiors, we’ll destroy the whole shebang. Isabel Colegate has exposed the great myth of the 1950s, so revealing a little dirty secret: it wasn’t the workers but the little bourgeoisie who made all the noise. No class war here. Rather, a peevish servility that bridled when its requests to join the party were denied.5

At first Baldwin Reeves is only interested in cash and the exercise of his power; that joy in humiliating the rich and powerful. But emotions once aroused are uncontrollable; soon he is falling in love with Judith; is seduced by her class, her style, her beauty, her intelligence. An exotic bird he wants for his cage.

Judith hates him. A mistake. Passion is unstable; it generates emotions which surprise and disturb, and can metamorphose cruelly; hate, given the right circumstances - a moment of tenderness, a kiss - is swiftly transformed into affection or worse. Walking from the living-room Judith is repelled by this horrible man. Showing him out the front door she loves him. Psychologists call this Stockholm Syndrome; a grand name for a common reaction. For passion, the body’s typhoon, which blows where it will, has no value. 

She loves him…. An horrific moment, which makes us queasy. The author is kind, she pats us on the hand, and orders a cup of tea: would you like Darjeeling, and is it cake or scone? She carefully elucidates. After the initial surprise, that mental turmoil, Judith accepts this feeling as natural; the psychological tension appearing to dissolve. But can such a peculiar emotion, so staggering a surprise, be so easily accommodated? The Darjeeling warms us up, we relax, think of other things, and yet lingers here, like scent, a question, some unease. Surely Mr Reeves cannot change so quickly? To scamper up the greasy pole will leave at least some grease on hands and feet; while Judith is so fastidious.

The haute bourgeoise, with their liberal imagination, its tolerant detachment, close to indifference - feelings giving way to generous thoughts - tend to gloss over life’s uglier aspects. A fine line of cedars hide a row of dilapidated cottages. Yet it takes years to grow such a beautiful scene…. Judith is changing too quickly. A failure of plot. A social myth is being squeezed too rapidly into a work of realist fiction, whose details refuse to be so easily evicted. No aristocrat gives up the family home without a fight. Centuries of breeding not so speedily undone by a few endearments.

Sir Ralph said gently, ‘Mr Reeves knows why I am unable to recommend him to any position of trust.’

Judith, who had been waiting for this, had not guessed that it would be administered so directly. After a moment of admiration for the old man, she found her eyes full of tears. She had not realised until that moment how much she had wanted a husband.

Judith hasn’t succumbed completely to the Reeves’s charm; her ear for social nuance acute she instantly recognises a faux pas, when he hams up his reactions to a kiss. She is too cool to be mad with love. Her mind remains strong and in control. It is why what appears a moment of weakness - these tears - is in fact a granite-like insight: she wants a husband nor Baldwin Reeves; this desire fooling her, allowed her feelings to be stolen by this unsympathetic man. She ends the relationship abruptly. Judith to go on as before she met this blackmailer. She has found her niche in life; how it will continue is left uncertain.

‘It’s a long time since I had to put love into practice, so I find it hard to remember. All the same, there are things I love. Perhaps you are right in thinking one of them is stability…’

An ambiguous phrase. To maintain her present lifestyle, is this what stability means? Or is it to marry again, and so secure the traditional order through the status and prestige of a distinguished husband? There is doubt, the future is open: something has changed.

The Lanes have been damaged. Under pressure of Judith’s revelation Mrs Lane reveals her own anger at Anthony marrying below his status. We assume the two women will grow distant. Some of the shine has gone; these aristocrats losing their hold, much depending on their manners, their charisma. Are they to fade away in these changing times, stuck too rigidly to the tiny details of life, lost to the fairy tales of some mythic past? I am reading too much into one relationship? Not so much has altered.

Baldwin went too far too quickly. He told Thomas that he was marrying Judith even before they were engaged. Then trying for a seat in Sir Ralph’s constituency: hubris of the most egregious kind. Also a terrible ignorance. Arrogant with his high-powered intelligence he doesn't see that it is too powerful for grasping the social niceties, the complex subtleties, of such a civilised culture. Digging a flower bed with a jack-hammer. He is not delicate enough to tip-toe those last gossamer steps to the princess’s tower. Mr Reeves: you must be content with a successful bourgeoisdom. The aristocracy is closed to you. So is the cultivated milieu of the haute bourgeoisie; you lack their tact, their literary sensibility, their ability to read the surface of things, to which they give they own sophisticated meanings. Those tears mistaken for love. No, Mr Reeves, they mean quite the opposite: she doesn't love you at all! The cleverness needed for passing exams and getting ahead is that of a hard, rational intellect, one that lacks Judith’s refinement, the canniness of Sir Ralph: he knows how to govern people without causing pain and ugliness.6 Not enough tact, Mr Reeves; too much the plebeian.

The rabble are rising. They have been stopped for now. Soon they will come again; and again, endless waves…we think of Ballard’s The Garden of Time. These clever scholarship kids, never to stop until they smash the old palaces down.

Review: The Blackmailer

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1.  Compare this novel with Simon Jenkins’s account of Margaret Thatcher in Thatcher & Sons.

2.  Changed now of course: Benjamin Markovits: The Meritocracy Trap.

3.  With hindsight: between epochs.

4.  For a variation on this theme, but down the social scale, Emyr Humphreys’s masterpiece, A Toy Epic.

5.  The full story: Harry Ritchie, Success Stories: Literature and the Media 1950-1959.

6.  For a wonderful description of the education of this class: Alan Macfarlane: A History of My Mind.