Each of Us Has Only a Quantum of Compassion

[are_youready]

'I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. What do you think of it?'

This quote. "Each of us has only a quantum of compassion." It's the kind of thing you'd expect to be The Thing You Get Out Of A Book. It seems important. It's the kind of thing you'd read on a goodreads quote page, or in a quote of the day calendar. A philosophical statement, memorably phrased.

Except.. the thing is I always found it to be a bit of a non-sequitur. I could never figure out why it was there, why Smiley says it.

One could, if one wanted, connect it to the Karla scene, the scene in which it appears. Certainly that scene is about, among other things, the trauma of not being allowed the sin of compassionate feelings for one's fellow man. You could twist the "quantum of compassion" quote to be about that; George certainly self flagellates about his moment of weakness and compassion for Karla almost as much as he self flagellates about "failing to save" him. So perhaps it's simply that: Smiley's unhappiness with the emotional travails of his profession, a common enough theme in a le Carre novel. Karla and Ann are stray cats; that George cannot keep from lavishing his concern upon them is his greatest humiliation, and his greatest professional failing. If I had to guess, this is the intended meaning of the words, the reason Smiley said them.

But that's not really a satisfying answer, is it? Now, there is a lot to analyze in the Karla scene. I've usually been content to skip over "quantum of compassion" as a question for another day, because it's surrounded by such a rich field of thematic importance. But the other day I was thinking about it, and googled it. This NYT article seems to have a pretty different reading of things:

This concept of necessary, if lamentable, sacrifice in the face of the Soviet monolith helped define the espionage masterpieces of the cold war. Such statements gave fans a rush of pleasure, partly aesthetic, partly clandestine — the feeling they were gaining a bit of secret Machiavellian wisdom.

It seems to be implying that one of the main themes of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is... It's important and necessary to sacrifice morality in service of fighting the Cold War. And that just isn't correct.

If you asked me what the main themes of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are, I would probably just stare at you blankly. But that's not because TTSS is one of those novels which you can twist to say whatever you want. No, Tinker Tailor has very specific points to make. It just makes a lot of them, in a subtle and intertwining way that makes it difficult to pinpoint a single thing that the book is saying above all others. But if I had to choose just a sentence or two that expressed my favorite theme to pull out of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it would be "Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?"

Le Carre's whole body of work is about how espionage and the Cold War are pointless wastes of money and, more importantly, lives, setting two fundamentally identical monolithic powers against each other in a meaningless forever conflict.

To be fair to the New York Times article, it mentions that quote only so that it can claim that le Carre's later, post Cold War body of work refutes that premise, but I still think claiming the premise exists in Tinker Tailor in the first place is a misreading of the text. Le Carre's novels aren't about how the Cold War is tragic but necessary, they're about how it's tragic and inevitable, a faceless force that destroys loves and lives. Every piece le Carre wrote before 1991 is a requiem for the smiling, waving children in the back of a sedan, crushed between two giant semi trucks, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In fact, this makes it pretty clear that Smiley, being the le Carre protagonist with perhaps the most agency and choice out of all of them, is also the most despicable. I read, somewhere, that le Carre said that Leamas made the right choice and Smiley the wrong one at the ends of their respective novels (I think he was referring to Call for the Dead when he said Smiley's novel). Smiley continues to make those cold sacrifices of the Cold War, while Leamas chooses death instead.

Perhaps Smiley's "immoral" theory is meant in the text as a criticism of Smiley himself, as a way of showing the unsentimental brutality of him and those like him as immoral. But I don't think so. Le Carre has a very strange relationship to Smiley; Smiley is the consummate spy, with power and agency. He could stop doing his job and often considers doing so, but he never does. He has a very active moral consciousness, but never listens to it. All the things that give le Carre's usual protagonists moral clean slates: naivete, being only semi-conscious of what they are doing, simply following orders, etc. are absent from Smiley. he is fully culpable for his actions.

And yet he is still a hero. From Smiley's People:

As she continued her vigil, the little man took a slow step forward till his face, distorted like a face under water, was an she could see in the lens; and she saw for the first time the fatigue in it, the redness of the eyes behind the spectacles, the heavy shadows under them; and she sensed in him a passionate caring for herself that had nothing to do with death, but with survival; she sensed that she was looking at a face that was concerned, rather than one that had banished sympathy for ever.

Descriptions like this litter the novels in which Smiley appears. His humanity and decency are emphasized, despite the fact that I don't think you could call a man like Smiley humane or decent in real life. Le Carre twists the world and his own convictions constantly to set up Smiley as a paragon, despite the fact that he is more suited to the role of villain. So I don't think le Carre meant to call out Smiley's unemotional professional evil. And frankly, I don't think that's my preferred adversarial reading, either, even if it's a reasonable one.

I think, if I were to take "if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things" and apply it to George Smiley, I would say that his moral failing is that he does lavish his concern on every stray cat: stray cats like Ann, and Karla, and Dieter Frey, and Samuel Fennan, and Liz Gold, and Tatiana, and General Vladimir. And yet he never gets to the center of things. He never stops doing the evil work of espionage. All he does is cry crocodile tears for its victims. He thinks that his care for the stray cats absolves him, even though he does nothing to help them.

I still don't think I've solved the question of why, within the text, Smiley makes that little speech. I still find that frustrating. But reading the sentiment itself against Smiley, it provides some insight into his character.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

yesss it makes sense to me more as an aspirational comment by Smiley -- what he thinks he should be like though he never follows through