'I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways' | The Remains of the Day, Prologue, Chapters 1 & 2

Today, we begin our reading of The Remains of the Day. Here’s the schedule:

• June 30: Prologue, Chapters 1 & 2

• July 7: Chapters 3-5

• July 14: Chapters 6-7

• July 20: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

You can join that Zoom call and gain access to all paid posts by becoming a paid subscriber.

The Remains of the Day begins as a rather ordinary story. Stevens, a butler to Mr Farraday, is going on a trip. He’s been told by Farraday that he ought to take a few days off while Farraday is away on business, and so he does. The Remains of the Day is the story of a road trip, you might say.

Yet, it isn’t only a road trip. It isn’t merely a pleasant drive. Stevens has concocted a professional reason for this trip as well. He will visit Miss Kenton, a former staff at Darlington Hall, to see if she might return to employment. Miss Kenton will help the house run more smoothly, as Stevens explains in some detail in the prologue.

Already, we see themes emerging — and that’s good, considering that this is a very short novel. We need to get to the point. Stevens is a man of duty. But it is a duty that threatens to tear him apart, as we will see.

Recall what Salman Rushdie wrote of The Remains of the Day in a review:

The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.

The Dismissed Servant

Characters reveal themselves in their thoughts, dialogue, and actions, of course. I find with Stevens it is most revealing when he is evaluating someone else. As he stops in Salisbury, he evaluates the wallpaper, the bed, the condition of the room — in actuality, he is sizing up the woman who runs the inn. He evaluates other butlers and staff, and he even evaluates his societal betters. There’s one metric that is applied to all, though: do they fulfill their role?

Mr Farraday’s bantering, for instance, is explained in terms of his Americanness. Of course, Stevens reasons, he banters — that is what an American gentleman ought to do, just as an American bartender exchanges crude jokes with his customer. That is the way things are.

Stevens is a man of order. As a butler, he is responsible for the workings of a large house, Darlington Hall, which includes the workings of a staff. While this staff is currently quite small, necessitating that some of the house is made inaccessible, Stevens maintains the operation of the house via a staff plan. His duty is to serve Mr Farrady and operate Darlington Hall; he discharges this duty in part through overseeing the labor of the rest of the staff, Mrs Clements and the two young girls.

Thinking back to the book we just read, it seems to me that Stevens is one who has bought into the Noble Lie: he believes that there are certain kinds of people and that the world should be arranged accordingly. While he says there is much you can do to cultivate particular virtues, he believes some are made fit to rule. There are gentlemen, and then there are those who aspire to serve these gentlemen: ‘It has been my privilege to see the best of England over the years, sir, within these very walls,’ he says to Mr Farraday in the prologue.

For Stevens, duty and loyalty, expressed through discretion and fastidiousness, are the ultimate virtues. Even bantering with Mr Farraday is seen as a matter of duty: ‘But I must say that this business of bantering is not a duty I feel I can ever discharge with enthusiasm.’ A good butler serves, accommodating nearly anyone's request, though some things go too far.

We see this in the story of Stevens’ father, who tolerates drunkenness and personal insults from guests of his employer, Mr Jack Silvers, but when those guests take Silvers as their target, his father draws a line. He opens the door of the car, looms over the guests, and gives no indication of his intentions. Only when the guests admit that they ‘were talking a little out of turn there’ and assure him that this will not happen again does he return to the driver’s seat.

He reminds them of their duties, of their place in the world, and then he resumes his own.

This goes even further when Stevens’ father is tasked with throwing a party for a general (‘the General’) responsible for his other son’s death — or, rather, he tasks himself with throwing a party. Mr Silvers knows that this is asking too much and offers Stevens’ father time off while the General visits. His father declines. He even serves as the General’s valet for four days.

Yet so well did my father hide his feelings, so professionally did he carry out his duties, that on his departure the General had actually complimented Mr John Silvers on the excellence of his butler and had left an unusually large tip in appreciation — which my father without hesitation asked his employer to donate to charity.

Stevens narrates these stories in service of a point: that his father possessed the dignity of a butler, indeed of a butler of the highest caliber. ‘“Dignity” has to do crucially with a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits.’ This requires emotional restraint, a restraint that can apparently only be had in England. There is a parallel here with a butler and with Great Britain, a land that ‘knows its own beauty…its own greatness’ and yet ‘feels no need to shout it.’ And when one encounters them, ‘one simply knows one is in the presence of greatness.’

His father was a great man, yet eventually he was unable to carry out his duties. He became the under-butler of Darlington Hall and Stevens afforded him some additional honors, like requiring Miss Kenton to refer to him as ‘Mr Stevens senior.’ But he became old; his hands trembled; his nose dripped. Eventually, Stevens had to relieve his father of many of his duties.

This raises a critical question: if we are defined by our duties, what happens to us when we can no longer discharge them?

The interaction between Stevens and his father, often referred to in the third-person (‘Father has become increasingly infirm’) is cold. It lacks all ornament, much like the rooms they stay in. There is very little in the way of filial piety or paternal affection. There is duty — principally, duty to Lord Darlington and the operation of Darlington Hall.

It is the great test of Stevens’ loyalty to Lord Darlington, as well as an expression of Stevens’ greatness, that he must attend to Darlington Hall while Lord Darlington seeks to assist Germany in being freed from the peace treaty that followed the Great War. This lends an air of gravity to the goings-on of the house, with Mr Stevens senior and Miss Kenton being noticeably affected. Darlington is hosting a conference with many great men who may be sympathetic to Germany’s plight; they need to convince an ill-tempered Frenchman, Dupont, to join their mission. Stevens’s duty is to serve Lord Darlington’s mission by keeping the affairs of the conference in order.

It is a difficult task, especially given the influence of the American Mr Lewis. Here we see a new way of viewing the world arising: amateur gentlemen are no longer relevant to the world’s affairs, and instead, the professionals will handle the matter:

So much hog-wash has been spoken here these past two days. Well-meaning, naïve hog-wash. You here in Europe need professionals to run your affairs. If you don’t realize that soon you’re headed for disaster. A toast, gentlemen. Let me make a toast. To professionalism.

Something you might expect Stevens to appreciate — except this clashes directly with what Lord Darlington calls ‘honour.’

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Some scattered observations:

• The longest passages of dialogue are found with Miss Kenton. Perhaps this is because they are peers of sorts, operating the two sides of the house. Yet, this ends with Miss Kenton requesting that they speak through a messenger.

• There is at least one extended passage of dialogue with Lord Darlington, though it reads differently. It is Stevens being given an unusual task: explaining sex to a scholarly twenty-three-year-old.

• Stevens is unable to communicate on anything other than work with his father, even when his father begins to reach out on his sickbed. This extends to everything about his father. His first words upon hearing that his father has died: ‘I see.’ Being able to to carry on his duties, Stevens thinks, is what his father would have wanted, and it is the closest he has come to greatness.