Trevayne
FOR GAIL & HENRY
To the Savoy! To Hampton!
To Pont Royale and Bernini!
And everything else
My thanks
Introduction
Every now and then throughout the human odyssey, forces seem to almost accidentally come together, producing men and women of startling wisdom, talent, and insight, and the results are wondrous, indeed. The arts and the sciences speak for themselves, for they are all around us, embellishing our lives with beauty, longevity, knowledge, and convenience. But there is another area of human endeavor that is both an art and a science, and it, too, is all around us—either enriching our lives or destroying them.
It is the guardianship of a given society under the common laws of governance. I’m not a scholar, but the courses in government and political science that I was exposed to in college indelibly left their marks on me. I was hooked, fascinated, smitten, and were it not for stronger proclivities, I might have become the worst politician in the Western world. My «cool» levels off at around 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
For me, one of the truly great achievements of man is open, representative democracy, and the greatest of all the attempts throughout history to create such a system was the magnificent American experiment as expressed in our Constitution. It’s not perfect, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s the best damn thing on the block. But wait.
Someone’s always trying to louse it up.
That’s why I wrote Trevayne nearly two decades ago. It was the time of Watergate, and my pencil flew across the pages in outrage. Younger—not youthful—intemperance made my head explode with such words and phrases as Mendacity! Abuse of Power! Corruption! Police State!
Here was the government, the highest of our elected and appointed officials entrusted with the guardianship of our system, not only lying to the people but collecting millions upon millions of dollars to perpetuate their lies and thus the controls they believed were theirs alone to exercise. One of the most frightening statements to come out of the Watergate hearings was the following, delivered, in essence, by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
«There’s nothing I would not do to keep the presidency …» I don’t have to complete the exact sentence; the meaning was clear—to keep it ours. The presidency and the country was theirs. Not yours, or mine, or even the neighbors across the street with whom we frequently disagreed in things political. Only theirs. The rest of us were somehow neither relevant nor competent. They knew better, therefore the lies had to continue and the coffers of ideological purity kept full so that the impure could be blitzkrieged by money and buried at the starting gates of political contests.
I also had to publish Trevayne under another name. I chose Jonathan Ryder—the first the name of one son, the second a contraction of my wife’s maiden name—not because of potential retribution, but because the conventional wisdom of the time was that a novelist did not author more than a book a year. Why? Damned if I could figure it out—something to do with «marketing psychology,» whatever the hell that is. But wait. All that was nearly twenty years ago.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, say the French. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or perhaps history repeats its follies ad nauseam because man is a creature of helter-skelter appetites and keeps returning to the troughs of poison that make him ill. Or perhaps the sins of the generational parent are borne by the offspring because the kids are too stupid to learn from their parent’s glaring mistakes. Who knows? All that’s been truly documented from time immemorial is that man continues to kill without needing the meat of his quarry; he lies in order to avoid accountability or, conversely, to seize the reins of accountability to such an extent that the social contract between the government and the governed is his alone to write; he endlessly seeks to enrich himself at the expense of the public weal and, while he’s at it, tries all too frequently to turn his personal morality or religion into everyone else’s legality or religiosity, no quarter given to the unbelievers of pariahdom. Good heavens, we could go on and on. But wait.
Last year our country witnessed two of the most disgraceful, debasing, inept, disingenuous, and insulting presidential campaigns that living admirers of our system can recall. The candidates were «packaged» by cynical manipulators of the public’s basest fears; «sound-bite zingers» were preferable to intelligent statements of position; image took precedence over issues. The presidential debates were neither presidential nor debates but canned Pavlovian «responses» more often than not having little or nothing to do with the questions. The ground rules for these robotic pavanes were drawn up by glib intellectual misfits who thought so ill of their clients that they refused to allow them to speak beyond two minutes!
The orators of the cradle of democracy that was ancient Athens, wherever they are, can be heard vomiting. Perhaps one bright day in the future we’ll return to legitimate, civilized campaigns, where an open exchange of ideas can be heard, but this will not happen, I’m afraid, until those who convince us to buy deodorants hie back to the armpits. They’ve worn out their welcome in the election process, for they have committed the two cardinal sins of their profession—at the same time. They’ve made their «products» appear simultaneously both offensive and boring. Of course, there’s a solution. If I were either candidate, I’d refuse to pay them on the grounds of their moral turpitude—hell, it’s as good a reason as any. Which of those imagemakers would go into court expounding one way or the other on that one? Enough. The campaigns turned off the country.
This numbing fiasco followed barely twenty-four months after we citizens of the Republic had been exposed to a series of events so ludicrous they would have been a barrel of laughs but for their obscenity. Unelected (?) officials fueled the fires of terrorism by selling arms to a terrorist state while demanding that our allies do no such thing. Guilt became innocence; malfeasance brought honor-to-office; zealous, obsequious poseurs were heroes; to be present was to be absent; and to have creatures soiling the basement was a sign of efficient house management. By comparison, Alice’s looking-glass world was a place of incontestable logic. But wait—all right, you’re ahead of me.
Someone’s always trying to louse it up. That great experiment, that wonderful system of ours based on open checks and balances.
Mendacity? Abuse of Power? Corruption? Police State?
Well, certainly not with lasting effect as long as citizens can voice such speculations and shout their accusations, however extreme. We can be heard. That’s our strength and it’s indomitable.
So, in a modest way, I’ll try to be heard again in that voice from another time, another era, always remembering that I’m fundamentally and merely a storyteller who hopes you enjoy the entertainment, but perhaps will permit me an idea or two.
I have not attempted to «update» the novel or adjust the licenses I took with actual events or geography, for they served the story I was writing. As anyone who has built or remodeled a home will tell you, once you start tinkering, you may as well throw away the schematics. It becomes a different house.
Thanks for your attention.
ROBERT LUDLUM
a.k.a. (briefly) Jonathan Ryder
November 1988
PART 1