What It's Like to Be Hired
even worse, promoted
Robert Littell’s The Company is a novel it’s hard to describe without using the word “saga.” An encyclopedic account of the birth of the C.I.A, it follows the tortuous espionage games of the Cold War. One of the main narratives involves a Russian mole living in the U.S. under a false identity, or a “legend” as the spy lingo has it. Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin is told that he “must settle into each legend as if it were a new skin.”
Yevgeny is given two legends, a backup in case one is ever burned. The first is Eugene Dodgson, a name only Russian spy-masters and Cold War fictioneers could concoct. The alias contains his personal history by way of assonance. “Eugene” points back to “Yevgeny” even for those of us who don’t speak Russian. Even better, Eugene Debs, the iconic American socialist, hovers as an aural echo. Yevgeny is comfortable as Eugene. The narration even switches to “Eugene” as his primary designation. He is a new man.
Then one day the legend is compromised. The FBI are on to Mr. Dodgson and he must become someone else a second time. A third person must be pulled from inside Eugene just as Eugene was pulled from inside Yevgeny. Appropriately, he becomes Gene Lutwidge. The hint of “Yev” is shed completely. Just Gene.
When I read The Company sometime in college, or shortly thereafter, this scene stuck in my mind. I’m not sure why. There was something miraculous about Yevgeny’s ability to sink into a new self more than once. Before he leaves the motherland, his Russian instructors insist that he must never again react to his given name. Yevgeny? Who could that be?
In the last few years, this specific scene and its blunt depiction of self-creation has recurred to me. For the first time in my life, I have a career. A career, of course, is more than a job. Careers are the effect of needing a job, are a special case of job-having in the same sense that a square is a special kind of rectangle. A job is a task standing between oneself and the unforgiving maw of not paying the bills. “I’m just doing a job,” we say when we want to indicate our indifference, our separation. A career requires that something of yourself become mixed with the tasks, with the job. A portion of your psyche, of your sense of self, is drafted into the work.
The central paradigm for discussing identity and work, for some years, has been imposter syndrome, the idea that many of us fear being exposed as frauds. We go to meetings, we email, we teach, we give patients advice, we perform some set of required tasks with competence but also with a sense of deceit. Fake it until you make it, and don’t forget to worry that you’re a fake. This has produced an inevitable, and perhaps sometimes accurate, backlash: “You don’t have imposter syndrome. You are simply bad at your job.”
There’s an inverted issue, though, that I’ve found more intractable. You are hired to do a job. By Russians, maybe. You shed Yevgeny, that yokel of the steppes, and you become Eugene Dodgson. When you get a promotion, you let Eugene go for the sake of Gene, the All-American. The slippage comes with the work. The danger isn’t that you’re a fraud, but that you might go local. You might lose yourself in the work, so to be speak. And even if you never become a company man, your career still begins to dictacte which of your multitudes—we contain them, I’m told—are salient.
The persons we pull into existence through circumstantial demands aren’t infinite, of course, but there are a lot more than I ever considered possible. I felt this when I went to graduate school, when like an accident I went to graduate school again, and certainly when I worked for both the University of Colorado and the University of Denver in full-time admin jobs. The peripatetic nature of those years—of bouncing from full-time work to full-time school to part-time work to full-time parenting—meant that slipping into a new type of public self was suggested, but never fully realized.
Take a totally fictitious and extremely impersonal example: you become a librarian. You plan library events, curate the collection, act as an intellectual waiter for anyone who comes to the reference desk. Displays and event prep and creativity abound. But there’s a vacuum in the leadership, and you’d rather become a competent manager than suffer any more hierarchical missteps. You’re promoted. Individual vision must now give way to bureaucratic peace-making, which you were already doing. You lead a larger team, so “process” and “systems” and “documentation” also grow as portions of your daily pie. Oh, and there are local, state, and federal laws which libraries must know and incorporate and respect, and you are now the person who must know them best.
In short, the administrative side of being a librarian is the only aspect of yourself that has been promoted. The rest of what led to your promotion is sloughed from your shoulders. Promotion is thus a narrowing of one’s individuality, at times, even as it’s billed as an expansion—more money, more power, more whatever. More freedom, really, is the great carrot that’s dangled in service work. And in most cases, that’s true. You no longer man the reference desk. You can separate yourself from the front of house constrictions regarding your schedule. Mostly.
The good news, if you’re doing your job well, is that the FBI will still want to find and question you. Yevgeny, Eugene, or Gene: the cause continues.1
Reading:
Oddly, I began this post before stumbling across Charles McCarry’s The Miernik Dossier (1973). Every good spy novelist is compared to le Carré at some point, but McCarry has a pretty good claim to being “the American le Carré,” as he’s often labeled. The book is magnificent, if also sex-soaked in that grim and salacious way novels from the '70s, and especially genre novels, seem to enjoy. McCarry served undercover for the CIA and, as with reading le Carré, it’s hard not to come away feeling that you have a better sense of the actual men and women playing espionage games—at least during the period in question—than you once did.
I could see many people I admire hating it, and with good reason. But it’s one of the best spy novels I’ve read in a long time.
I love you all.
Meaning library stuff and not the success of Russian belligerence. Just, to be clear.