by Douglas Messerli
Wendy Walker The Secret Service (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon
Press, 1992); reprinted (Tough Poets Press, 2021).
In 1982 Wendy Walker, at the suggestion of Charles Bernstein, sent me
the manuscript of The Secret Service. In retracing the long history of
that book, I’ve discovered that it wasn’t quite yet finished at the time; the
author completed it later that year. While I quickly accepted it, given my
This year (2006), I decided to
revisit or to “review” the work—in the true meaning of that word. What I
discovered is what I had known all along, that the work is a true masterpiece.
But I think, perhaps, it has taken me these 23 some years to truly appreciate
its multiple themes and its overall significance. The critics of 1992 certainly
did not fully comprehend the fiction, and sadly, it long remained out of print—but
was fortunately recently reissued in 2021 by Tough Poets Press.
*
The story of The Secret Service—and Walker’s works, unlike so
many other books I have published, can truly be described as having a plots—is
a knotted tale of intrigue. Agents of the British government Secret Service
have discovered, based on an anonymous message, that the King—as a result of a
series of perfidious acts the author describes as “an enormous vengeance,”
involving a switch of babies by the French Marchioness of Tralee—has married
his own sister. Not only is the future of the royal house, accordingly, based
on an incestuous relationship, but, as it becomes apparent, other French and
German figures are plotting to publicly reveal this information, and so bring
down the Church of England and destroy the monarchy, replacing the Queen with a
French pretender.
In order to discern the
machinations of that transformation and ascertain the timeframe of the plot,
the Secret Service springs into action. Rutherford, his young new inductee
Polly, and Rutherford’s aging mentor, the Corporal, along with a local agent,
posing as a keeper of a flower shop, have perfected a system, combining various
theories of the transference of time with the power of opals to produce
visions, in which human beings can be changed into objects. Knowing of the
three villains’ passions—Baron Schelling’s devotion to glass and porcelain,
Cardinal Ammanati’s love of sculpture, and the Duc D’Elsir’s admiration of
roses—they transform themselves into appropriate objects: Polly into a perfect
Baccarat wine goblet, the Corporal into a bronze statue of Thisbe, and
Rutherford into a salmon-blossomed Albertine rosebush—all awarded the three
foreigners by their supposed friend and ally, the King of England.
Things go swimmingly along
until the three, admiring each other’s treasures, accidentally break the
goblet—potentially destroying Polly, who has been kept in the dark by
Rutherford and the Corporal about the pernicious plots the enemies are
hatching. Rutherford must seek out the broken object, revealing himself to a
young woman the Baron holds in a tower. That woman, we later discover, is
actually the stolen princess (believed dead, but saved, it is later revealed in
a wry Dickensian-like tale, by another exchange of infants by the
late-Marchioness’s nanny), and it is her young lover, Ganymede, himself a sort
of changeling, who ultimately retrieves Polly/the broken goblet from the
Baron’s locked chambers.
Brought back to England,
Polly undergoes recuperation, recounted in the longest chapter of the fiction,
Chapter Nine, as a series of adventures Polly imaginatively experiences, filled
with dozens of different dream images and structures from Freud and Jung to
literary fantasies suggested by writers as various as Poe, Borges, Nabokov,
Barnes, Calvino and García Marquez.
Meanwhile, the plot
thickens as the malefactors, now aware of the nature of their gifts, speed up
their machinations. Agents foil and ultimately destroy the Duc and Cardinal,
but the Baron, who has also covered his own body in a porcelain sheen (polished
with the bones of infants) which protects him and proffers him eternal life,
plans to embalm his young charge. She resists, offering up only one arm for
experimentation, before Rutherford and his men arrive on the scene. Meanwhile,
in a paranoid delusion that all objects about him may be inhabited by his
enemies, and suffering from horrible side-effects from the application of his
porcelain coating, the Baron goes mad, tearing up his mansion and, eventually,
destroying his own body in an attempt to break through his new “skin” to the
blood and bones behind it.
While Walker’s story is
certainly engaging, it is her writing that utterly captivates the reader.
Unlike so many works of contemporary fantasy and folktale that seem to be only
half-committed to the reality of their creations—the writers appearing to have
one eye on the constraints of the story and other on the enchantment they are
busy weaving for the child-like reader—Walker is completely convincing; without
sacrificing irony, she apparently believes in the transformative acts she is
describing and is utterly committed to the adult art with which she is engaged.
I can think of few other contemporary works with such authoritative stylistic
flourishes as The Secret Service. A single quotation must serve as evidence in
a near-encyclopedic work of astonishing writing. The following, a dreamscape of
the wonderful city of thieves, is as compelling as a De Chirico landscape:
“As she neared [the domed building], …[it] gave the impression of a
basilica. Its walls were sheer and high, like the walls of all the houses in
the city, and marked only by the thinnest and longest of windows, like slots in
a box prepared for the trick insertion of knives. The dome rested on a square
base, from which a varying number of apses ex- truded, tall semicylinders on
each face. All around the houses of the city clustered up almost to touch the
building, but as its main entrance lay right in the line of the street, she had
little difficulty finding her way to the threshold.
Passing under the deep
archway she entered a radiant grey half-light. Hundreds of people were quietly
milling about in the great circular space, while the hemisphere, its
circumference pierced by many windows, floated above them. The floor was inlaid
with a pattern that sprung from the center in beams fragmented into lozenges.
The crowd massed in irregular groups on top of this pinwheel grid, punctuating
it as trees do a flat landscape. Polly stood just inside the door a few
minutes, accustoming her eyes to the light, watching the crowd shift, and
wondering where to go. Then, as though it were the sea parting, the crowd, with
no evident purpose, moved away to either side, leaving a clear path to the
heart of the pinwheel; and there, Polly beheld three men of astonishing height
in long red robes, the middle one with his back turned toward her, the other
two facing away to the left and the right.”
Walker’s world is a world of
mystery, castles, architectural wonders, secrets, changelings, doubles,
madness, terrorism, and death—in short, as she herself prefers to characterize
this work, she is writing in the tradition of Gothic fiction, horrible and
terrifying in its revelations. If her writing style outshines even her
inventiveness of story, these two work in tandem to create themes that for some
may be even more overwhelming. For Walker’s world is also one of eternal
change, constant alteration where humans and landscape morph into one another
and, in so doing, transform experience into a series of encounters dangerous
for those who prefer tranquil stasis. Just as the characters change into
goblets, roses, and sculptures, so too do her sentences arch each over the
next, reforming the text as it moves forward until we can no longer recognize a
single “truth,” which is, obviously, the very nature of all great art.
After her multitude of
adventures, real and imagined, Polly discovers that fact once again as she
attends a play in Paris, a melodrama clearly intended for popular audiences.
The plot of the story and the dramatic flourishes of its actors—the drama
parallels what Polly knows to be the “true” story of the imprisoned princess
who has now disappeared—convince her that she is observing the princess and her
lover Ganymede themselves. She rushes backstage only to discover a
forty-year-old tragédienne, sponging “a grimy veil of moisture from her ripe
cleavage.” Yes, we suddenly realize, art is a terrorist act!
It is fascinating to read
this great text of transformation, as I did, in late 2006-early 2007, in a time
when we are asked by our government to be on the lookout for possible
terrorists and their activities, when a large city like Boston can come to near
standstill on account of a few light boards strategically placed to advertise a
television cartoon series. Walker’s 19th century British Secret Agents
ultimately destroyed their enemies only to realize their enemies had themselves
been deluded; neither side knew the “truth.” As The Secret Service
reveals, perhaps, that truth, in the minute foreignness of our memories, can
only exist as a forgotten dream.
Los Angeles, February 3, 2007
Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 8 (March-May
2007).
Reprinted in My Year 2006: Serving (Los Angeles: Green Integer,
2009).
