How the butler was made to do it: the perverted professionalism of "The Remains of the Day.".

• Author: Atkinson, Rob

O wad Pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

I wad frae monie a blunder free us

An' foolish notion:

What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,

And ev'n Devolition!(1)

INTRODUCTION

Somewhat counter to prevailing academic tradition, I have prefaced this Essay with a prayer. But essays on professionalism are a rather special genre. Most have the distinctive air of the sermon about them,(2) and sermons generally begin with some sort of invocation. Furthermore, my epigraph is a rather unorthodox prayer. For one thing, it is not exactly addressed to God. For another, although it is most definitely canonical, at least in a literary sense,(3) it was offered by a prophet, Robert Burns, who was more often inspired by the third muse than by the third person of the Trinity.(4) It is based on an epiphany in a sacred place, but the vision is marvelously mundane and the spirit fervently iconoclastic: Burns offered his prayer at the end of a poem he entitled To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church.

Burns's poem implies that we see others--indeed, see through others--clearly, and prays for similar insight about ourselves. Not without gratitude for Burns's intercessory prayer, I nevertheless doubt that we will ever see ourselves as well as we see others, especially when the others have been revealed to us in all their messy humanness by literary masters like Burns himself. Other students of professional ethics have suggested that one way to approach this insight--to begin to see ourselves as others see us--is to look for important aspects of ourselves in the others we see so well in works of literature.(5)

That is why I have chosen as the text for my professionalism homily a passage from Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.(6) In its depiction of the tragic life of an aging English butler, recounted in his own voice,(7) Ishiguro's novel invites us to take seriously the title of the ABA's encyclical on professionalism, In the Spirit of Public Service,(8) and, more fundamentally, that document's insistence that all lawyering involves service.(9) Like the ABA's report, Ishiguro's story reminds us that (to paraphrase Milton) those who serve are not only those who stand and wait.(10)

The Remains of the Day depicts the tragic consequences of flawed professional visions. Closely analogous visions figure prominently in the contemporary debate on the professionalism of lawyers.(11) In the two contexts, there are parallel dangers. On the one hand is the risk of embracing, individually or collectively, flawed perfectionist ideologies of professionalism, mirages that seduce us with the promise of either moral nonaccountability or easy moral answers.(12) On the other hand is the risk of discarding all forms of professionalism as discredited ideology or hypocritical cant, thus despairing of meaningful professional lives. A careful analysis of The Remains of the Day reveals a mediating, tragic vision of professionalism,(13) somewhere between the perfectionist and the nihilistic. It is a professionalism that accepts the imperfection--indeed, the imperfectibility--of both individuals and institutions without rejecting the possibility of virtuous professional lives and cultures.

In this Essay, I add my voice to the voices of those who believe that professionals, and perhaps even professionalism, can be redeemed, though never perfected.(14) A principal means of that redemption, Ishiguro shows, lies in the inseparable and almost sacramental acts of telling one another stories and analyzing them together. The Remains of the Day is a story about professionalism with a protagonist and narrator who explicitly insists on moral analysis. That story implicitly invokes its complement, a moral analysis of the professions that accounts for their members' need to tell stories.

Part I outlines the butler's story, focusing on a particular incident that set him at odds with his closest colleague, the head housekeeper. Part H identifies parallels between their respective positions and two contemporary theories of lawyer professionalism: "neutral partisanship" and "moral activism." This part then traces the butler and the housekeeper's common lapse into moral isolationism, which is not a logical consequence of either theory. Part III explores the causes and consequences of that lapse, particularly its undermining of two critical professional dialogues, those between professionals and their principals on the one hand and those between professionals and their colleagues on the other. Finally, the conclusion suggests how careful attention to stories can supplement general theorizing and save other professionals, including lawyers, from similar lapses.

1. THE STORY

   1. The Setting

      The larger story is about an English butler looking back over his career in one of the great English country houses. The butler's name is Stevens,(15) and he has been in service for most of his professional life to the fictitious but typical Lord Darlington. His retrospective is set in 1956, when the great era of the country house is over, and with it the age of the classic English butler.(16) The Labor Government's wealth transfer taxes have begun to break up the ancestral estates of people like Lord Darlington. Members of the aristocracy are now opening their houses to throngs of tourists or, worse still, conveying them to the National Trust or, worst of all, selling them to foreign, even American, millionaires. This last indignity has befallen Lord Darlington's house.

      Even for those with the money, like Darlington Hall's new owner, things are not what they were. In Stevens's words, "finding [staff] recruits of a satisfactory standard is no easy task nowadays."(17) Even in the old days, as Stevens frequently laments, the less ambitious often opted out of domestic service to marry and raise families of their own.(18) Stevens himself, however, has no children; he has never been married. For that matter, he has never taken a vacation.

      When Stevens's new American employer learns of this, he insists that Stevens take the estate's Ford out for a week's holiday in the late summer when he is himself away in the United States. Stevens eventually assents, but only when he is able to convince himself that the trip has a professional purpose. He has just received the first letter in a long while from a former head housekeeper at the Hall, Miss Kenton, and he interprets this to mean that she may be ready, after twenty years of married life, to leave her husband'9 and return to domestic service. He recalls "her great affection for this house.... her exemplary professionalism."(20) His taking a trip to her home in the West Country, he persuades himself, may convince her to return in her former professional capacity. But we begin to suspect that he has been interested in more than her exemplary professionalism, and that her affection was not always limited to the house.

      In the course of his trip, Stevens reflects that social life in the country house is not all that has suffered since the war; the personal reputation of the recently deceased Lord Darlington is at a low ebb as well. In the mid-thirties, he had hosted several "unofficial" meetings between the British Foreign Secretary and German Ambassador von Ribbentrop, in an effort, as we would now say, to reanchor Germany in the West. In recognition of his good offices, he had been rather graciously received in the reconstituted Reich. Stevens is at pains to point out that many entirely loyal English aristocrats were initially inclined to trust the new German leadership, and that Lord Darlington was not the last to realize the true nature of Nazism.(21) More ominously, Stevens admits, Darlington had flirted, intellectually and otherwise, with a female member of the British Union of Fascists and had entertained that organization's leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, at the Hall.(22) But Stevens tries to minimize Darlington's association with the Black Shirts, reducing it to a very few incidents over a very brief time.(23) It is on one of those incidents that I want to focus.

   2. What the Butler Did

      One summer afternoon Lord Darlington calls Stevens into the study, and, after the usual pleasantries, asks whether there are any Jews on the house staff. When informed that there are two Jewish housemaids, Lord Darlington tells Stevens, "`Of course, you'll have to let them go.'"(24) Apparently prompted by Stevens's barely perceptible surprise, Lord Darlington explains: "`It's regrettable, Stevens, but we have no choice. There's the safety and well-being of my guests to consider. Let me assure you, I've looked into this matter and thought it through thoroughly. It's in all our best interests.'"(25)

      Because the two maids are under Miss Kenton's direct supervision as housekeeper, Stevens thinks it appropriate to inform her of their dismissal. He brings the matter up that very night at their routine meeting for cocoa in her parlor.(26) Stevens offers Miss Kenton the opportunity to speak with the maids herself before sending them along to his pantry for their dismissal the next morning. Miss Kenton expresses outrage and warns Stevens that if the maids are dismissed, she will leave as well.(27) But Stevens carries out the order, and Miss Kenton does not leave.

      Before examining the incident in more detail, I want briefly to reassure the skittish, those who are beginning to wonder how this tale can possibly relate to the practice of law other than perhaps to imply a deprecating comparison between lawyers and domestic servants. Thus, for those of you who think the assertedly parallel lines are diverging, let me offer a brief aside. Suppose Lord Darlington, punctilious in all his affairs, had called his London solicitors to confirm that his firing of the maids was legally proper. He might have asked for a written opinion on the subject and for carefully drafted dismissal papers to effect their discharge. Predictably, Lord...