Eric Ambler - Siege at the Villa Lipp

There is a supplementary condition. While Professor Krom has the greatest respect for the publishers concerned, of whose reputation for integrity he is well aware, he must still insist upon receiving a final corrected proof of the book before it goes to press. He will wish to see for himself that the nominal price he has asked for his blessing has been fully and properly paid.

The publishers tell me, with evident satisfaction, that the Professor’s conditions are entirely acceptable to them.

They assume that his conditions will also be acceptable to me.

Well, of course they are acceptable. They must be. If I want my voice to be heard at all, I obviously have no choice in the matter.

The Professor’s Commentary is translated from the original Dutch.

I have read the edited version of Paul Firman’s book [he writes] with the keenest pleasure, the liveliest professional interest and yes, a good deal of wry amusement too. It has in it so much of what I always felt was there but failed completely to bring out myself. The reasons for my failure are plain. When the investigator-subject relationship is clouded by a basic personality conflict, the best that can be hoped for is that the investigator will ultimately succeed in functioning as a catalyst. To that modest extent, at least, I may claim success. My colleagues, Henson and Connell, both thought this subject exceptionally difficult, the latter going as far as to say, with defences arrayed in such depth, one had to ask oneself not simply what was behind them, but whether there would be room enough for a recognizable fellow creature. The simile he offered, that of a battle tank with armour so thick that it could accommodate a crew consisting only of trained mice, did not seem fanciful.

Well, Mr Firman has now set our minds at rest. The defences are formidable, yes, but there is a human being inside them. What kind of human being still remains, I think, to be seen; but we have available now a much clearer view of him. A self-serving effusion such as this, written by a delinquent of Mr Firman’s rare calibre, will always reveal more about its author’s internal world than the attempt at self-appraisal of an equally complex but less irresponsible mind. The scatological excesses of a Genet tell us more than the managed insights of a Gide.

Let us take a closer look at the material of Firman’s outer defences. At the Villa Lipp, I compared his clouds of verbiage with octopus ink, a comparison which the octopus himself faithfully reports. It is surprising, however, to find the comparison holding good for his written word. Any spoken one — its meaning so easily changed by the voice and body-language of its speaker at the moment — lends itself naturally to deception. Comedians, evangelists, fortune-tellers, demagogues, all who traffic in the human personality, know and depend upon the fact. The written word is usually less obliging. It can be examined more than once. It can be analysed and parsed. Doubters suspecting soft spots may prod and poke at it. Only those accustomed to appealing to the semi-literate, or those as full of bile and adverbs as Mr Firman, can make the mistake of believing that, if a statement is made with sufficient vehemence and a neat turn of phrase, the conviction it seems to carry will always be unquestioned.

At one point in the book, Mr Firman has much to say about the technique of the ‘smear’. By no means all of it was said, as he claims at the Villa Lipp, but no matter. To anything Mr Firman has to say about ways of smearing an adversary, I am prepared to listen. He is an expert on the subject.

Consider, for a moment, his descriptions of me and the way that I behave, socially as well as professionally.

Few men are without their vanities, idiosyncrasies and petty weaknesses. Many, I among them, possess visible physical peculiarities as well, although I am in no way abnormally handicapped. About his appearance, a sensible man of my age will have only vestigial illusions; and, if he has been much photographed at conferences and heard his platform voice coming back at him through television and radio, he will probably have dispensed with even those vestiges.

I have a prognathous upper jaw and what are commonly called ‘buck’ teeth. Because they are so prominent I try always to keep them very clean. I express disgust or disbelief by making a hawking sound in the throat. When we were young, my wife tried unsuccessfully to cure me of the habit which she thought unbecoming, and at times offensive. I also suffer from an arthritic condition of the spine that my doctor calls ‘parrot’s beak’ and is properly known as spondylitis. If afflicts many other people my age, causing discomfort or inconvenience in varying amounts. Long, hot journeys made in small, nervous cars on mountain roads are bad for parrot’s beak. In my case, such a journey will result in muscle spasm and lower back pain; and, until I can take recuperative rest, my gait will be affected.

What does Mr Firman make of all this?

A monster, naturally; a staring blue-eyed monster with gleaming white fangs and circumflected lip, a monster who slobbers down all that lovely wine as if it were water, sprays his flinching companions cheerfully with gobbets of saliva, insults the food and then reels away, supporting himself with practised ease on the furniture as he goes, to sleep it off. The monster does not speak, he only yelps, yaps and blares. The monster does not take a bath, as Dr Henson does for the benefit of the eavesdropping microphones, he only breaks wind.

As the monster’s creator himself would say, ‘And so on.’ Mr Firman must be taken with many grains of salt.

Where then, I may be asked, is the human being we were promised? Is there truth at all here? Is this merely dreamstuff, clinical casebook material that will only become useful when it has been processed and interpreted?

By no means. As Mr Firman admits, indeed claims, many of the conversations. he reports are transcribed from the tapes he took with him from the villa. I have consulted my colleagues, Henson and Connell, on the point and both agree with me. As long as one disregards Firman’s interpolated comments, though some of them have evidential merit of their own, his accounts of what was said are in the main accurate.

When he is reporting from memory, however, we have to be very much more careful.

The recollections of his adolescence have yet to be checked. The passages concerning his war experiences have been read by a German scholar, a friend of mine who served as an infantry soldier in the Italian theatre from 1943 to 1945. He reports one error. The only German army pistols he can remember as having been issued were the Walther and the Sauer. However, while a prisoner of the Americans, he had heard German pistols referred to as ‘Lugers’ as if the word were a generic term for every type of German automatic hand-gun. Firman’s reference to ‘Lugers or Walthers’ may be dismissed then as a mistake belonging to another time and place. It is not his memory that is at fault.

The same cannot be said of his mistakes over certain vital dates. All of a sudden he is grossly unreliable. He cannot even place correctly the year of my identification of him in Zürich!

Was the blunder intentional? I really don’t think it can have been. Firstly, because I had already published the correct date in my Notes for a Case-study, and I can’t see him passing up an opportunity to pour scorn on any factual statement: of mine with which he disagreed. Secondly, because Mr Firman is far too astute to make mistakes that lock as if they could have been intentional, unless he wished for some reason to draw special attention to them. But why should he? The Zürich date, for one, is among the ‘neutral’ facts that nobody disputes. A secretarial error then? No, because the rest of his typescript is singularly free of error. The editorial assistant must have accepted those wrong dates too, so presumably they were given him by Mr Firman.