Who is Don Draper? And who is Charles Ryder?

The virtues of mad men
This is the first in a series of posts that will draw parallels between Mad Men and Brideshead Revisited. Not because there is any deep affinity between the works but because I am reading Brideshead this Advent.

In an interview with Matt Weiner earlier this year, Alan Sepinwall mentioned the opening question of this season, "Who is Don Draper?" And then he went on to speculate about how the audience is supposed to answer this question. Weiner doesn't answer that question but instead rebukes Sepinwall for missing the point:

The question isn't for the audience to figure out who Don is. It's for Don to figure out who Don is. Thematically, that's what it's about. You take away the institution of marriage, your fatherhood, your home, car, the corporate environment that is way safer. Took away every aspect of his life like that, for a guy who is all about this contrived identity - knew he wanted to be the man in the suit with the wife and the car and all the stuff that the writer talks about in the first episode - that he doesn't have anymore. To me, that leaves Don with a moment of saying, "If I can't define myself with that list of attributes, who am I?" 

He's right, of course. The right way to read novelistic fiction (and the right way to watch it) is to concern ourselves with the characters. It is to care enough about someone who is not us to try to imagine what it is like to be them for a while. We rarely trouble ourselves enough to bother. We either treat a story as if it were mystery novel wherein the point is to try and completely decipher the characters weaknesses so we can toss him or her on the pile of discarded personalities or we treat him as a stand in for the author so we can dismiss not just the creation but the creator. Okay, done him, who is next?

It's another thing altogether to care enough about Don Draper to give the question back to him and see him struggling with it and respect him for that.  Read most TV critics and not a few bestselling novelists* and you will see that they fail this test. Any time we catch someone, or ourselves, saying of a character that he or she is just an empty human being, or that they are too shallow, too selfish, too artificial or whatever, we should stop dead and think about it.

Just about everyone, especially me, actually is too this, or too that but the mark of a real reader is to see a whole that is greater than its faults in everyone. It is not to just read them, nail them and their faults to the wall and brush them off. If you read, for example, the commentary on Mad Men that ran on Slate this year you will notice that every single character in the show gets that brush-off treatment.

Leaving Mad Men for a moment, this tendency should especially trouble us with a great writer like Evelyn Waugh or Jane Austen. Any time we feel ourselves casually sneering at a Lady Catherine de Bourgh or a Bridey Marchmain or a Boy Mulcaster that should tell us that we aren't doing our job as readers. Great writers put a lot of love into creating characters like these and we should return the favour when reading about them.

But what is the answer?
And who is Don Draper once he discards his pile of what Weiner calls "attributes"? Well he is nothing.

The funny thing is that we sneer at him for that. I wonder why?

First off, these things—marriage, your fatherhood, your home, car, the corporate environment—are not really attributes, they are roles. Yes even your car. Lifestyle advertising is not pointless. We buy a car to establish an identity and we have to live up to that identity once we have the car. Even if we make ourselves out to be anti-car and don't buy one but always take the bus, then there is a role that goes with that and people will judge me based on it. And I will judge myself according to the standards of the role.

If you were to take away my roles, there would be very little left. Man, husband et cetera is all that I am. If I lost the Serpentine One I would lose most of myself. There is no core that is the real me left over after you peel all the onion skins away. It is one of the odd obsessions of modernity that we think there should be something else.

I guess the really odd thing, when you think about it, is that we think the question deserves an answer at all. At no other time in history did people think we needed to be something once all our roles are peeled away. In ancient Egypt, classical Greece, biblical Palestine, Medieval Germany, Renaissance Italy or Restoration England, to ask who a person really was was to ask what their proper roles were and how well they fulfilled those roles. Bring anyone from those eras into our era via a time machine and they will see Don Draper in a completely different way. They will see him as a man who has lost everything precisely because he has lost his roles.

By the way, if you rewatch episode one of season four, you will notice that Don deals with the question of who Don Draper is by first telling a story about himself that is not strictly true about who he is but is strictly true about who he is trying to be. That doesn't work, so later he tells another story that is more about who others want him to be.

That is probably one of the reasons we resist the idea of our being our roles. A role is not something we can define privately; we must accept other people's judgment of whether we fulfill the role. I may set out to be a Casanova but others will sneer and say, "You'd better lose some of that weight you've put on the last few years and actually, you know, seduce a few women if you want us to believe this." Or they may say, "Maybe once in your life you might have but now you are too old so stop living in the past and deal with what you are now."

We don't like that. The notion that I really am something deep down under all the roles is really a modernist defense mechanism. It is to claim that nothing—not even death or God— can take me away from me. We must know what a foolish hope that is but we cherish it.

"Take your hat off!"
Other keenheads may remember that line. Don is in the elevator and there are two guys talking about women in explicit terms not caring that they are making a woman actually in the elevator with them uncomfortable. Don orders one of them to take his hat off as a way of reminding this man he has a social role to live up to.

It also tells us something about Don in the first three episodes. One of his roles is that of being the chivalrous, knightly man who keeps trying to make this old fashioned role (he doesn't just drink them, he is one) work in the modern world.

It's an interesting role because we know that Don is chivalrous in public but that out of the public eye he pursues women with predatory zeal. And we might be tempted to say, "What a hypocrite," and write him off because of it.

Except for this, there is nothing about the contradiction I have just described in Don Draper that isn't also true of Sir Lancelot. The knightly role isn't outdated at all. It never will be. Think of just about any knightly character you can and you have a contrast between the public role of courtly lover and the guy who wants to get this woman alone so he can really ... well, I don't have to explain what he really wants to do to her do I? Because you know don't you? If you're a man, you know about the contrast between the ways you behave and think about a woman when you're in public mode and what happens when you finally really get her. And we don't have to pretend anymore that most women are anything but unhappy (under the right circumstances) about men wanting to do these things to them.

We are, however, still in denial about this. A lot of people tortured themselves trying to not so much as explain as explain away the deep attraction Don Draper has for a lot of young women. I wrote about this last April.

At first it might seem to us that it is odd that the knightly role should still appeal to us. We might think, but this is a role full of contradiction and hypocrisy. Or that it is just a role after all. But the strength of it is that it always has been a role full of contradiction. This is true of Roland in the song of. It is true of Lancelot, of Gawain, of the troubadours, of young Prince Harry in Shakespeare. It is more subtly true of Jane Austen's men but it's there (at least in Willoughby and Darcy). It's really there in spades in Keat's Porphyro who, after reassuring the old woman who is his accomplice in wooing Madeline that he has nothing but the purest intentions, watches Madeline get undressed and then has sex with her while she is still half asleep. The contradictions are there in Phillip Marlowe and in John Wayne.

Most of all though, for my purposes today, these contradictions are also to be found in Charles Ryder. He is one of two characters in Brideshead Revisited who really embraces the knightly role (the second may surprise you). The man who tries to keep knightly virtue alive is featured in every Waugh novel by the way. But there is a telling difference in Brideshead for it is only in this novel that the role is treated in a mostly positive way. Early knightly characters are either figures of fun such as Basil Seal or the targets of the most gruesome black humour such as Paul Pennyfeather and Tony Last. In his last books, the Sword of Honour trilogy, knightly aspiration (both on the field and in the bedroom) becomes something that Guy Crouchback ends up atoning for.

Only in Brideshead does Waugh really get behind the ideal. Doing so was, I will argue, an act of courage for him. It is only in this book that he sheds ironic distance and allows us a peak at who he really wanted to be. Charles Ryder is not Evelyn Waugh but he is the representative of values that really mattered to Waugh.**

As to Don Draper, who knows? I'll be honest, it is the knightly aspects including (perhaps particularly) the contradictions in him that make the show attractive to me. Take those away, and I dread that Weiner may be warming up to do just that, and I'll stop watching. To me Don is one of the few really manly characters left who functions in a more or less normal world. Today, Knightly characters exist only in fantasy fiction from Batman to The Walking Dead. Mad Men makes a commitment to realism that makes the character more of a challenge as does Brideshead.


*The execrable John Le Carre, for example, has made a career out of appealing to our sense of moral superiority. We can read his books and think, I may well be a trivial figure ion the great political events of my time but at least I can feel morally superior in my little world.

** Jane Austen does the same, I would argue, in her brilliant Mansfield Park and in the less successful Persuasion. Neither Fanny nor Anne are, nor should they be mistaken for, autobiographical but in both we can see Austen letting us see the virtues that really matter to her, the chief of which is constancy.