Our Man in Disguise
Week 16
I finished reading Our Man in Havana by Grahame Greene. It’s an easy, funny read about Wormold, a vacuum salesman turned reluctant spy, who fabricates reports and draws sketches of military installations (which are actually just sketches of his vacuum parts) to keep funding a future for his posh daughter and his own lifestyle of drinks. When his fabricated stories start turning real, Wormold gets unintentionally creative, both to salvage escalating situations that seem increasingly out of his control and to maintain his charade. I think it’s an entertaining book. There are moments when Wormold comes close to being found out, and moments when he’s so immersed in his spy identity that he begins to almost think and feel like a real spy.
It reminded me of another book I read many years ago, The Guide by RK Narayanan, which deals with a similar idea. In The Guide, Raju is a conman who sinks deeper into the mess he creates until he lands in prison. Fresh out of prison and avoiding the disgrace of returning to his hometown, he hides out in a temple, where he’s then mistaken for a holy man. Villagers start leaving him food and donations from which he benefits without ever revealing his deceit. Like Wormold, Raju is eventually too far into his deceit—and too comfortable in his new benefits—to give himself up, even when things start to escalate beyond his control. This narrative pattern fascinates me, especially since it rings true beyond the boundaries of fiction. Can we be freer when we’re mistaken for someone else?
I think about how it sometimes feels easier to be ourselves when we assume a different identity. You hear this sometimes with solo travelers who say they had their deepest conversation with some stranger they’ve barely known for an evening, unburdened by the baggage or constraints of their real lives. We’ve all heard it said that opening up to strangers can be easier than confiding in those closest to us. Ankita Shah, in The truth in fiction, writes about something similar. By briefly taking on the identity of Felicity Frank to solve a murder mystery at a theme party, she found it easier to let go of the internal filters that otherwise may have held her back socially. Similarly, Henrik Karlsson, in Pseudonyms lets you practice agency, recalls the freedom he and his friend felt writing “movie reviews” under a pseudonym when they were younger. They could express random, disparate ideas freely—even almost as a joke initially—until one day when they received compliments for their ideas and clarity of thought that suddenly made it all feel real.
Back in my undergrad I took a creative writing class over a slow summer of 2012 where I really understood the feeling of writing without any constraints. No one in the class knew me or my story. Probably no one cared either. Because there was no baggage attached to our identities, it was easy to write whatever we wanted. Even our nonfiction assignments felt fictional to each other because we didn’t know anything about anyone’s life. Of course, we knew it was a nonfiction assignment, so in that sense, we knew these were real stories (or supposed to be), but because we didn’t really know the reader or the writer, we could be free to tell the stories as we wished. Without the weight of contraints or past baggage that comes with relationships, we wrote clearly and honestly. There were no forced metaphors or elaborate allegories disguised as real-life experiences, just the urgency of getting ideas from head to paper as quickly as possible. It was probably some of the best writing I’ve done and some of the best writing I’ve read, in that it all felt real, even if extremely unpolished.
Last night, while watching Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, a very short and tense documentary about James Baldwin in Paris, I was struck by the same question of identity, and particularly by Baldwin’s discomfort in accepting and rejecting certain layers of his identity. The movie begins with the filmmakers saying Baldwin had agreed to be filmed discussing his work without focusing on his identity as a black artist, but that he had since changed his mind on short notice. What follows is a tense 26-or-so-minute dialogue between Baldwin, his friends, and the filmmakers. Baldwin wants his identity known and established, especially his black identity, and he is unwilling to discuss his work without this being established and understood first. There is no hiding behind a nom de plume or a persona for him. He is who he is because of who he is, and that is at the very core of his work and the time he lives in. He resists the filmmakers’ efforts to simplify the conversation through acknowledgment and rejects the idea that they truly understand what it means for him to reject masks others seemingly want him to wear. To talk of his work without talking of his blackness-and thus himself-is unthinkable. Baldwin refuses to inhabit an identity that isn’t completely his own, yet acknowledges that his own identity itself is layered and complex. His resistance isn’t necessarily freeing; it creates tension. Yet, at the same time, he concedes that though his identity is something he wears openly, it is also something that doesn’t come into acount when it comes to the merit of his work. The merit of his work will be decided by others—specifically by the test of time—but the work is what it is simply because of who he is. It feels that for him, the work is only as real as the writer behind it, and so there is no question of authenticity that doesn’t account for his full and whole identity.
I’ve had the privilege and misfortune of having a few friends who are, in my opinion, excellent writers. Once, I had a friend who, though she never wrote publicly, wrote so well you would almost feel jealous of the skill. Her clarity of thought conveyed imagery and feeling that made you feel as if you were right there in the moment itself. When I first read some of her work, I thought it was perfect. I also felt incredibly jealous of that clarity and skill, which is the misfortune part of having good writer friends, but that is a separate issue. Because she was writing for herself, there was a different sense of liberation that allowed writing unencumbered by our self-made limitations. Any creative work, be it writing or something else, done under a pseudonym or behind a mask can feel freeing, yet there’s something compelling about working openly, without anonymity. For some people, it’s even critical.
I’ve been thinking about this because these weekly pieces have been getting harder and harder to put out. I started this mostly as an exercise to make sense of the content I consume and to offer it a counterbalance of creation. I intentionally wanted it to have no structure or “prompts” to make it easier. They were supposed to be attempts to write about ideas openly and loosely, even if they often come together messy and loosely formed on Sunday evenings. I’m not sure yet if it’s entirely working, and though that’s not a metric for judgment anyway, I have found myself filtering thoughts and ideas constantly. Many times, I write things that I discard because they don’t fit the overall theme. Sometimes I’m tired and need the help of ChatGPT to fix the grammar (ok, most times!). Mostly it’s just harder to try to write unstructured essays without also getting personal or journal-y, which I’ve tried to avoid but has seeped in anyway. Still, I’ve tried to strike a balance where I could, and I think just attempting that in itself without hiding is worthwhile enough… for now.
🥘 Food
📚 Reading
- Finished Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene
- Grokking Simplicity, for work book club. It is nice to have a work book club.
- ✨The tender things are those
we fold away.