Work closed early because of snow and so it makes a cozy night of reading at home. I pulled Helen MacInnes (so underrated, I think) off the shelf and am really liking While Still We Live.
Not too long ago, the New York Times ran an article largely about her and the times she was writing about in her novels:
This year’s news felt disarmingly retro. Israel bombing Gaza. Russia invading portions of Ukraine. A nuclear arsenal ramp-up by both America and Russia. Had we traveled back in time to the 1980s, albeit with a millisecond-long news cycle sped up by smartphones and social media?
My response was to time-travel too, after a fashion. If the present is explained by the past, might espionage fiction, especially the 20th-century variety, help us understand the cycles of history and perhaps even help us make better choices?
Choosing the right guide was critical: Eric Ambler seemed too distant. John le Carré, too in tune with the present. Robert Littell or Charles McCarry? Adam Hall or Len Deighton? All excellent in varying ways, but not quite right. Instead, I chose the only major female spy novelist, unsurprisingly the most ignored by her peers, the kind of woman writer Ken Follett derided as producing plots that were “just a channel through which a love story can flow.”
Highet first worked for the British Security Coordination (an umbrella organization encompassing MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 and others that operated out of Rockefeller Center) during World War II. He would maintain links to MI6, preparing influential psychological profiles of Nazi leaders including Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Himmler, supposedly anticipating many of their decisions, and at the end of the war was tasked with drafting a key report that was rejected for being “too dry and academic” (it was revised in part by Roald Dahl).
It’s tempting to imagine Richard and Frances Myles, the adventurous married couple of MacInnes’s debut, “Above Suspicion,” as stand-ins for the Highets — and indeed MacInnes based the novel on diary entries she kept while on her honeymoon in Bavaria. Troubled by Nazi activity, she documented the instances of violence she witnessed and, years later, revisited her notes to create the story of a couple looking for an anti-Nazi agent while seemingly on holiday.
The flavor of much of MacInnes’s work — some 21 novels including “Decision at Delphi,” “The Salzburg Connection” and “Message From Málaga” — depended on a vibrant sense of place, suspense and Iron Curtain paranoia. The specter of Soviet influence as antagonist hovered over the volumes, be it in the form of disinformation techniques like mind control (“The Venetian Affair”), journalists naïvely swearing fervent oaths to the Communist cause (“Neither Five Nor Three”) or details from a propaganda conference (“Ride a Pale Horse”). No wonder MacInnes counted the C.I.A. chief Allen Dulles as a loyal fan.
But I found myself gravitating toward MacInnes’s heroines: “While Still We Live,” which chronicles the transformation of a young Englishwoman into a resistance fighter, or “I and My True Love,” in which the suspense derives as much from a woman’s love for a possible Communist spy as it does from her attempts to escape her smothering and much older diplomat husband. The most addicting quality of MacInnes’s novels is her utter lack of sentimentality. She was entirely without illusions about human nature. Her characters choose mates as much for love as for practicality; they are full of ambivalence and wary of ideology. To them, Communism, religion, nationalism are invitations to moral corruption and violence.
But her pragmatism was not without wit and optimism. “We have paid too much attention to political differences, just as we used to pay too much attention to religious differences,” she wrote in “While Still We Live.” “Nowadays the word Communist or Fascist rouses the same emotions as Protestant and Catholic once caused. If these religious factions can learn to live together by giving up all persecution and forms of torture, it is quite possible that a future world will see many forms of political ideology living and working side by side.”
Seventy years later, that hope remains, yet it seems we must learn these lessons anew. And if, in our ignorance of history, we are too overwhelmed to reckon with it outright, the novels of Helen MacInnes provide the grim lessons we need under the guise of suspenseful entertainments.
The entire article can be found here:
