Hi again~I really need to ask your opinion on Bill Haydon: What could be his internal and external conflict? What are his values and beliefs? How his development changes in TTSS? What was his backstory? And anything on his relationship with Prideaux will really help me. Thank you 100x times in advance!
Bill is a mess to analyze, tbh. All the lies that spies tell of themselves are doubly compounded in his case, and as we never get in his head it’s hard to know how he sees himself. His backstory is the easiest, I think: he comes from pretty blue-blooded stock (cousins with Ann, who is certifiably a Lady), and I think it’s mentioned that he has sisters and that his domineering father (whom Ann called “The Monster”) was a judge. So he probably did the usual boarding schools pretty much all the way up, and then Oxford, where he met Jim and they fell together.
I personally read Bill as a frustrated upper-class aesthete, of sorts, who seeks some freedom from his father through art but who is objectively not actually a very good artist (certainly not enough to ever make a living as an artist). At the same time, I don’t think he was politically wild or extreme at Oxford; he at least played at being politically conservative despite the whole artist thing. He falls into the secret service because he has an aptitude for expert lying/deception/living multiple lives and because it’s a way to serve your country. Almost immediately he and Jim get drawn into WWII that way, which is a huge break in normalcy in a lot of ways.
At some point (according to what Bill tells George it’s the Suez Crisis in the 1950s) Bill’s disillusionment with his father turns into a general disillusionment with Britain as a whole. George’s thoughts on the matter are that Bill, like George himself, was bred to rule the British Empire, and by WWII it had become clear that there would not BE a British Empire anymore (India got its independence not long after the war, for example, and in the Suez Crisis Britain lost a lot more bargaining power and it was becoming clear that the US was the new superpower on the scene). Bill claims that he became “aesthetically” disillusioned with that and with the dangers of the US as a superpower and decided to serve the Soviets at that point, but I personally don’t think Bill was ever a true-blue Communist in any real way; I think “aesthetic” disillusionment is a polite way of saying that Bill saw the world he had been bred as an upper-class Englishman to believe in (the British Empire, ruling the waves, yadda yadda yadda) completely slipping away and the place he had been implicitly promised in that empire (by virtue of his birth and schooling) completely disappearing and so he basically was like “well then fuck you too, Britain, I never liked you anyway, I’ll go help the enemy then.” He sees Britain becoming impotent post-war, feels as though he was entitled to better, and says “fuck it.” Also, Bill has a certain streak of drama and playacting in him and I think it would have appealed to him to be the center of everything, directing the chaos around him, even if no one else knew that he was doing that.
To a certain extent the sympathetic part of me thinks Bill got drawn in over his head. Over the years Bill commits awful treason, treason that directly and indirectly leads to the injury and death of a whole bunch of other Circus operatives as well as the non-British civilians who served in their networks. George thinks at some point that “treason is a habit like any other” or something like that, and I think that’s a pretty good way of describing how Bill continues to do what he does, even as it escalates to sacrificing the person he ostensibly loves the most (to the extent that a spy wrapped up in 20 different selves at all times is capable of love); he’s addicted to the game, to the sense of sneaky power it gives him, maybe even believes that everything will be okay no matter what, that he will escape to the Soviet Union when his time has come, and so he just kind of elides over all the chaos and harm that happens to others (humans are great at deluding themselves and justifying their actions no matter what, of course). Testify sort of reminds him of the danger, I think, in that it’s Jim getting blown and then Jim who potentially nearly dies, only to be hauled out after all by Karla (who is the one in control here, really, and not Bill, despite Bill’s probable lies to himself that he has more control than he really does). Nonetheless, Bill keeps on trucking, because really, what is he going to do? If he stops serving the Soviets they’re not just going to let him drop quietly off the map, and the British aren’t going to just warmly welcome him back into the fold if he’s all “I was serving the Soviets for 10+ years but I’m better now, lol!!!!! What’s up guys!!!” He’s never going to be able to do anything but straddle the crack between the two worlds once he’s started, and I think his sense of pride also won’t let him consider backing off.
Values and beliefs in general, I’m not sure. What are anyone’s values and beliefs in the Circus? Serving the country probably factored in at one point for many, particularly those drawn in during WWII, but that only goes so far, and I think it gets lost after a while in all the different lives they begin to live. I think Bill has a strong streak of self-love (not necessarily greedy acquisitive selfishness, but love of himself above most other things) and vanity and a certain artistic flair. Consciously he does what he does for the power it gives him, the drama it allows him to soak his life in, the sense of control he has (note that the actual power or control he has is probably not quite what he might like to think). It makes everything that much more vibrant and alive, to be living multiple lives, serving two sides, and balancing them constantly, and he avoids thinking of what will happen if and when that wave he’s riding collapses. Unconsciously, I think Bill has a desperate need to feel in control, to feel important, to get attention from the outside world that he was not able to get from his domineering/cold father or from his mediocre art and that he feels slipping away as Britain continues to fall after World War II and becomes less and less important on the world stage. So he’ll make his own niche to serve, of two worlds, and damn the moral consequences (which are murky to begin with in the world of espionage, even if you’re not a double agent).
He and Jim are almost officially canonically lovers, at least during the youth/Oxford period. Whether that sexual/romantic aspect carried on into their later years is more uncertain. I think they got a lot from each other regardless, blurring the boundaries between artist/desk jockey and athlete/fieldman throughout their lives until the end. Bill’s vibrancy and charisma attracted a lot of people to him, whereas Jim’s steadiness is attractive as a grounding point for Bill. Jim is also a remnant of a time in his life when Bill was not entirely duplicitous, when the war hadn’t happened yet and they could all still dream that their bluebloodedness alone would be enough to ensure their places in the world, ruling an empire in some way or another. When Bill allows Jim to be sacrificed in Testify, it’s the beginning of the end for a lot of things, and symbolically in some ways Bill’s last break with recognizeable British upper-class humanity and fellowship. And to me personally it is so beautiful that, amidst all the professional amorality involved and the question of who can judge Bill, the answer is Jim, a very personal answer; Bill has blurred the lines to make it hard to separate the jolly personal man from the horrendous professional crimes he contributed to, the man from the nation he betrayed, so of course it has to be Jim, who was betrayed both personally and professionally in the deepest of ways (by his lover), who judges and kills Bill (an act I consider simultaneously revenge and mercy, keeping Bill from the Soviets).
Anyway, this is meandering as hell, and I apologize for that! Hopefully at least some of what you wanted is in here. The reality is that Bill is intentionally impossible to judge for certain, a forever-cipher of all sorts of concepts without a resolution, in many ways a theme/concept/question more than a full character, so all we can ever do is speculate.
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