Social Class in Robert Ludlum's Novels

I remember years ago reading James William Gibson's comment on the Tom Clancy-style military techno-thriller as a white collar counterpart to the "blue collar" paramilitary novel, reassuring middle class men that they, too, have "what it takes" to be like the Mack Bolans and Dirty Harrys and John Rambos--to, when it was called for, spring into action and save the day.

Looking at the protagonists of the techno-thriller I was increasingly less persuaded of that reading of those books. Certainly Clancy's Jack Ryan can look like he is a world away from Dirty Harry--former stock broker, college professor, published historian, and let us not forget, the son in law of a Merrill Lynch VP who has also been knighted by the Queen, Jack also literally Sir Jack--making a meteoric rise up the ranks of the security state to end up President of the United States scarcely a decade after The Hunt for Red October. Yet Ryan's roots are as blue collar as those of Bolan or Harry, Sir Jack born the son of an Irish-American cop and nurse, not a WASP blue blood; it just so happened that Ryan was one of the blue collar kids who "made good," and just maybe because of the fact that they are a blue collar kid who made good have a mettle that the born-rich kids do not (that father-in-law of Ryan's not coming off looking particularly good in their confrontation in Patriot Games). The result is that the books are more persuasive as a fantasy of social mobility--and affirmation of the conservative's belief in America's possibilities for that mobility--than as reassurance to white collar types that they too have "what it takes."

However, what Gibson wrote in that article seems to me to be more applicable to the works of Robert Ludlum, whose politics were less the right-wing populism that has dominated the action genre than a centrism of '70s vintage--which in some respects can look relatively leftish today in this age of casualness about government torture and assassination, but in others look far from leftish indeed, with, in line with the tendencies of centrism, his politics in regard to class genteely conservative in type. As one quickly finds reading their way through his books Ludlum is deeply respectful of professionals, deeply respectful of elites--admiring and flattering of people who have wealth and position, to the point that one can add to the well-known list of Ludlum's literary tics (the melodramatic italics and exclamation points and lapses into passive voice, the relentless use of synonyms for "said," etc.) the tendency to characterization consisting mainly of a profligate use of superlatives, here, there and everywhere endless verbose tribute to the brilliance, integrity and other fine qualities of the all-but-superhuman individuals in question. (Indeed, a search of The Parsifal Mosaic showed that Ludlum used the word "brilliant" at least twenty times to refer to various characters in that one book alone. Twenty times.)

Moreover, while one might add that while Establishment corruption and treachery are major themes of his work, these only rarely, if ever, give the sense that they reflect on the caste in question--the more in as, rather than being outsiders to that world as in those more populist narratives, his heroes are, to a man of that same background, solidly Eastern Establishment bourgeois-professional types, as with professors James Matlock and David Webb, or TV executive John Tanner, or architect Noel Holcroft. (This is, not coincidentally, the background of the New York City-born, Rectory School-Cheshire Academy-Wesleyan University-educated Robert Ludlum himself--writing what he knows, but unlike, for example, his colleague John le Carrè, doing so with enormous respect and affection, rather than with a critical eye.1)

In fairness, if Ludlum bestows endless praises on the blue blooded he at least refrains from pouring scorn on the less fortunately situated. Still, where this matter is concerned a particular passage in his later book The Apocalypse Watch has long stuck in my mind. In it two characters are talking about the motivations of traitors and, those who are induced to betray by monetary gain or ideological principle apart (dismissed here as people "who identify with a fanatical cause that makes them feel superior"), characterized as "the malcontents who are convinced they've been shafted by the system, their talents unrewarded"--people described here as not going "further legitimately" mainly because "they're generally lazy, like students who'd rather go into an exam with crib notes . . . than study for it."

This view--which, not incidentally, is deeply centrist in its "psychologism" and consequent treatment of dissent, or even discontent, as a symptom of mental illness--is entirely consistent with the esteem for those on top. Essentially the world is a big meritocracy, where people generally what they deserve. Those who are on top are there because they deserve to be so. The same goes for those not on top, all the way right down to the bottom. And anyone who has problems with how things went for them is basically crazy.

It is not a cheering thought for most. And if it does not seem to have been much of a problem for Ludlum's pursuit of bestsellerdom, I would be unsurprised if it did not cost him a measure of affection on the part of those readers who would have been happier to see the patricians looking down on them their whole lives taken down a peg--as they so often were in more "blue collar"-oriented action-adventure.2


NOTES
1. I find that the biographical information of celebrities available online tends to be vague with regard to indicators of class origin--their parents' occupations or wealth, such connections as may have helped them later in life, etc.--but we often are told what schools they attended. Their having gone to a private school charging $60,000+ (the median household income of an American family) per student tells you something about that background. And one finds that those who have been able to make it in the arts, contrary to the stupid rags-to-riches stories about people randomly "being discovered," very often did go to such schools, with all that implies about who gets a shot and who does not.
2. Looking back the closest Ludlum comes to an exception would seem to be The Matlock Paper (1973). In that novel the genteel facade of Connecticut's prestigious "Carlyle University" (an obvious stand-in for Ludlum's alma mater of "Little Ivy" Wesleyan) is torn away and one sees behind it real rot as the Pacific war hero and "grand old bird" of the Romance Languages Department Lucas Herron, and even university president Adrian Sealfont, are revealed as literal, drugs-and-prostitution racket-operating gangsters.