A POEM FOR JOHN LE CARRÉ

I don’t normally like to have this blog be the first outlet to publish my poems, preferring to let others judge the quality of my work.

But I’m a journalist as well as a poet, and I’m driven to get timely material out in front of readers as fast as I can. Thus, as it’s been ten days since the death of John le Carré, a novelist who has drawn me into the world of his concerns as few others have, I feel compelled to share the poem below with you.

At its core, le Carré’s fiction catches a certain strain of our current zeitgeist, a time when longstanding social, political, ethical, linguistic, and perceptual ways of being seem to be vanishing before our eyes with nothing yet there to replace them. There’s a realistically elegiac quality to his books, which radiate with the sense of the passing of an old order—an order that represented anything but a Golden Age.

I don’t share the pessimism of his bleakest characters. In fact, I very much look forward to seeing what the world will look like after our current rough beast has vaporized—but I remain stirred by the essential suspense of le Carré’s mournful, intricately nuanced, and ultimately moral music. His stories, often conveyed in the elliptical code of aging spies, lament the loss of a code of honor and service no one really believes in any more—if they ever did. The first line of the poem I’m sharing with you woke me up on December 17, five days after the novelist’s death.

David M. Katz

The Code

i.m. John le Carré, 1931-2020

They were muttering in half-understood languages now,

Half-wanting to be known, half-wanting to know,

Half not and half not. They were in the lobby now,

Exchanging the code, partly overheard, the bellhops

Inured to it by now as they hustled 

To the ever-ringing bell in their tight red coats

In the grandly named hotel--

Grandly named but named so many times

It had lost all but a smidgen of its grandeur.

Was the code tapped out in their syllables?

Everyone faintly wondered, even the spies

Themselves as they tried to work out what it was 

They were assigned to do, even though

They were mostly on their own, or at least partly so.

The code was fading, that much was certain,

Like the paint on a repairman’s shack 

In a long-forgotten duchy. The honor of the code,

The honor of the service, those were surely things

That were part of long ago, the outer trappings 

Faded now, but the intended meanings too.

© 2020 DAVID M. KATZ

Photo Credit: "John le Carré" by tonynetone is licensed under CC BY 2.0