Steve Reads

For a long time I associated The Remains of the Day with two things:

1. A certain brand of very boring Merchant-Ivory film in which not much of anything happens. (Eddie Izzard noted, incidentally, that if Merchant-Ivory were adapted for American audiences, the representative film would be renamed from A Room With A View And A Staircase And A Pond to A Room With a View Of Hell!; another would be Staircase of Satan.)

2. The Remains of the Day lunchbox, included at the end of Waiting for Guffman, right next to My Dinner with André action figures.

And that’s where it stood for going on 15 years.

I’m happy to report that it’s actually an exquisite little book. The story goes like so: Stevens, the butler at Darlington House — one of those British manors that has stood for longer than most nations, including ours — takes a rare holiday, driving off into the British countryside to see the country that he apparently has had very little time to see in his many years of butlering. Indeed, it’s possible that he’s never left Darlington House: he seems to spend most of his rare bits of free time tucked away in his windowless, badly-lit office. Such has been his life for perhaps half a century.

But it’s after World War II, and Britain is not what it once was. The Darlington Houses, and their dozens of servants, have fallen into disuse; whenever someone mentions another manor home, the many unused rooms are invariably covered with plastic sheeting. It’s a sad time to be a butler.

Darlington House has passed into the ownership of a wealthy American man who, while he’s a gentleman by American standards, is more crass than Stevens is used to. He tries to banter with Stevens in a very American way, and Stevens just cannot make head or tail of it. Some of the funniest scenes in The Remains of the Day center on Stevens’s attempts to return the verbal play in his restrained British butler’s style; they’re met with only puzzlement.

That restrained butler’s style is the source both of the book’s comedy, and its heartbreak. A truly great butler, says Stevens, must be a butler to his core. He cannot be a dignified butler one moment and a bantering, jocular everyman the next. The only times when he may let his guard down are when he is completely alone.

Note that: alone. A butler, one assumes, would make a terrible husband. Stevens is incapable of interacting with other human beings the way the rest of us would. A feisty, strong-willed, passionate woman joins the staff at Darlington House, and all Stevens can do is stare.

We only occasionally can pierce through the veil of his butlerish self-restraint, and only then when he describes what other people say to him. Most of the time, the world desires that he be just as he is: courteous to a fault, merely the vehicle for his master’s desires — a cipher to everyone including himself. But every now and again, others would enjoy interacting with a human. Stevens doesn’t know how to be a human. Only once does he admit to himself that he is experiencing a human foible. That ends, and back he returns to his master.

It’s a 200-page read, and a brisk one at that. It is a tiny, exquisite sculpture of a man.