“Matters of Honor”
by Louis Begley
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
307 pages

“Matters of Honor,” Louis Begley’s eighth novel, opens in the early 1950s at Harvard. Three new freshmen roommates, with very different family backgrounds and personalities, meet for the first time and begin a lifelong relationship with each other, their personal and professional lives intersecting for more than 50 years.

Begley—best known for his first novel, “Wartime Lies,” and for “About Schmidt,” which became a popular movie starring Jack Nicholson—began publishing books at the age of 57 while still in the midst of a highly successful and active law career. Like several of his other novels, “Matters of Honor” uses events very similar to those of his own fascinating life: his precarious survival as a Jew in wartime Poland, the family’s emigration to America after the war, his education at Harvard and his career as an international lawyer.

The novel’s main characters are Sam Standish, the adopted son of alcoholic parents (his father a banker from an old distinguished family) who is supported by a mysterious trust fund; Archibald (“Archie”) Palmer III, the son of an Army general, whose good looks and smooth manners lead him to pretend to be part of a wealthy and elevated social class; and Henry Weiss—the focus of the book—a highly intelligent and ambitious non-observant Jewish refugee from Poland, educated at a Brooklyn public high school, an only child whose anxious mother, fearful of losing him to the outside world, seeks to control him through guilt and frequent contact. Henry’s unusual relationship with one woman is a key feature of the novel.

All of the major characters (and most of the minor characters) come from dysfunctional families, often with secrets to hide. In a sense, the novel is a demonstration that  each character’s path follows from the consequences of his family background. Begley seems to be implying that a certain determinism cannot be escaped: unhealthy families raise troubled children. Henry consciously tries to construct a new identity and flee his family history and parents’ neuroses, but ultimately they are acted out in his career and in his personal life.

An intense loyalty develops among these men, who make great efforts throughout their lives to stay in touch with each other. They are continually gathering for meals, drinks or parties and talking on the telephone to stay current with each other’s work, marriages, loves, health problems, travels and general status. Perhaps Begley is indicating that, through this bonding, they seek to replace the missing support of stable families.

There are some strange omissions: Sam, the narrator, becomes a successful writer (like Begley), but we learn nothing about his novels or what pleasure he gets from writing. Sam is also in psychoanalysis for many years with several different analysts, but we are given no description of what issues are the focus of his analysis or what self-knowledge he gains from therapy. Sam also refrains from critically reflecting on his friends’ behavior. He is almost always the loyal, non-judgmental observer, as Begley quite likely believes is the proper role of any writer. In general, in an era of growing psychological sophistication, the characters display remarkably little self-reflection or insight.

A strong current of anti-Semitism runs throughout the book. Henry and his parents, for example, interpret most of their painful experiences in this context, which greatly contributes to Henry’s sense of being an outsider and not fitting in with many of his colleagues and friends’ families. He specifically rejects the easy choice of joining a well-known firm of Jewish lawyers in order to challenge the system and eventually win a partnership in a prestigious Eastern establishment “Wasp” firm. Several families in the novel have members who seek to hide their Jewish relations. Henry himself has ambivalent feelings about revealing his roots and history in Poland during the war years.

Anti-Semitism was a much more overt part of mid-century American life. Many colleges and universities had quotas for Jewish students and faculty. Yale University, for example, did not end an admission policy that restricted Jewish enrollment to about 10 percent until the early 1960s, when the Yale chaplain Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr. convinced the school’s president, A. Whitney Griswold, to issue a memo to end this policy (as described in Dan Oren’s “Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale”). In 1922 Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, proposed a quota on Jewish admissions (then about 20 percent), which was rejected by Harvard’s overseers after strong protests from students and the Boston press. 

There was also housing discrimination—my parents told me of signs advertising apartments for rent in the 1930s and ’40s that explicitly said Jews were not welcome—and bars and restaurants may have notices posted in their windows saying “Members Only” (I remember seeing one in the early 1950s) that were widely understood to exclude Jews. And of course, many companies hired no Jews.

It is difficult to assess the relationship between Begley’s own life and the lives of his principal characters, like Henry in the current novel, who share many similar details and experiences with their author. This is always a dangerous and speculative undertaking, with writers frequently warning us not to try to find too much of the writer in the words. In a 1994 “New Yorker” interview (www.louisbegley.com/espen.htm), Begley said, “You fall victim to the popular fallacy if you try to find the writer all over the place. He is all over the place, but not in any simple way.”

Of course any writer uses his own experiences, knowledge and feelings in his work. But writing is also an opportunity for authors to imagine how things might have been different or to explore alternative universes quite unlike their own. We all sense parts of ourselves that seem not fully realized by our actual lives—unlived parts of ourslives thatmight have otherwise led us in very different directions.

Despite all of these warnings, it is hard for me not to speculate that Begley, now in his 70s and retired from his law career, may have used this novel to more freely express some of his beliefs and feelings as he looks back over a fascinating and complex life. For example, I find it interesting that at the very end of “Matters of Honor” Henry rejects the ambition and obsessive dedication to his law career and unquestioning admiration of former clients that dominated his working life. His observations on the shallowness, selfishness and general unpleasantness of much of the wealthy and privileged class, both in America and Europe, are quite pointed.

Begley has a good story to tell, with an appealing plot, a large and varied cast of characters and an important historical and social context, but I find the actual telling of the story to be somewhat awkward and not able to fully engage the reader. Much of the plot, especially in the second half of the novel, is recounted during conversations between the characters, reviewing events that have already occurred. Because the action and personal struggles are not described as they are happening, they lose much of their vibrancy.

Unlike his best books, “Matters of Honor” is rather subdued and generally unsympathetic to its main characters. To me, it is full of suppressed sadness, regret and anger. I found myself intrigued by the plot, but not very emotionally connected to the characters or their lives.