by Adam Sisman
This is not necessarily a paradox. Confronted with the opportunity to meet Philby, David recoiled from an encounter that he had been willing to contemplate in principle. Such discrepancies, if they are discrepancies, are not, in my opinion, examples of bad faith, but merely evidence that David, like all of us, edits his past as he revisits it, which he does more than most people. He has reimagined incidents in his past for his fiction, and what he remembers afterwards tends to be the fictional reimagining rather than what actually occurred. In my narrative I have occasionally drawn attention to what seem to me examples of false memory on David’s part, and I hope that readers will find these interesting rather than a distraction.
In case there should be any doubt on the matter, I wish to state unequivocally that this book is my responsibility, and mine alone. David has helped me by drawing my attention to inaccuracies or distortions, but I know that there remain passages in it which he dislikes, or even disputes, while recognising the fallibility of human memory, and his own in particular. I can only say that I have tried to tell the truth as it appears to me.
As this book shows, David is still active in his eighty-fourth year – perhaps as active as he has ever been. This book is therefore a work-in-progress. I hope to publish a revised and updated version of this biography in the fullness of time, and I should like to take this opportunity to encourage anybody who feels that he or she may have something to contribute to David’s story, especially letters from him, to write to me, care of my publishers.
Even now, after twenty-three novels over a period of more than fifty years, John le Carré’s reputation remains curiously ambiguous. He has received very high praise from some: being compared to Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, and having been described by Blake Morrison as ‘the laureate of Britain’s post-imperial sleepwalk’, and as a keeper of the country’s conscience, analysing the national psyche. Writers ranging from William Boyd to Carlos Ruiz Zafón have written admiringly about his work.2 However, there has always been, in some quarters, a prejudice against him, as a writer of ‘mere’ spy stories. ‘Mr le Carré’s talents cry out to be employed in the creation of a real novel,’ wrote Anthony Burgess in 1986, reviewing A Perfect Spy – the book described by Philip Roth as ‘the best English novel since the war’.
The condescending attitude taken by some towards le Carré is explained in part by the idea that ‘genre’ novels are innately inferior. But that raises the question of whether, as is sometimes said, his writing transcends the genre. ‘I think he has easily burst out of being a genre writer and will be remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain,’ Ian McEwan wrote in 2013. ‘Most writers I know think le Carré is no longer a spy writer. He should have won the Booker Prize a long time ago. It’s time he won it and it’s time he accepted it. He’s in the first rank.’3
In a New York Times series entitled ‘Writers on Writing’, David Mamet stood this argument on its head, arguing that ‘for the past 30 years the greatest novelists writing in English have been genre writers: John le Carré, George Higgins and Patrick O’Brian’.4
To me, the argument about whether a genre novelist can ever be ‘literary’ is a circular one. The very distinction is meaningless. Is Jane Austen a genre novelist? Is Nineteen Eighty-Four a genre novel? or A Tale of Two Cities? or Wolf Hall? or The Quiet American? All that one can usefully say is that there are good novelists and bad novelists.
I confess that I stand among le Carré’s admirers. I first encountered le Carré as a teenager, and have been reading him ever since. Like all readers of all writers, I like some of his books more than others; but then I have always subscribed to the view that one should judge a writer by his best books, and his best books have given me pleasure even on the fourth or fifth reading. I am among those who believe that he is one of the most important English writers of the post-war period; when future generations look back to the end of Empire, the Cold War and the collapse of Communism, they will turn to his books to understand how these momentous events appeared to the people living through them. But it is the writing itself which provides the most satisfaction: what William Boyd has described as ‘the sheer aesthetic pleasure’ of reading le Carré. He is a writer of silky skill, with a finely tuned ear for the nuances of speech, a craftsman capable of evoking a character in a snatch of dialogue.
I suspect that his enormous success has prejudiced some critics against le Carré. If a writer is so popular, he must have lowered himself to the level of the masses. Quite apart from being manifestly untrue, this is no more than snobbery. We should delight in the fact that such a sophisticated and subtle writer has so many readers. A further problem for le Carré is that his books are often tense, exciting and even thrilling – qualities not often present in literary fiction, and ones that perhaps disqualify him from entering the pantheon.
I see an analogy with Alfred Hitchcock, a filmmaker whose artistry was often overlooked in his lifetime because he made the mistake of being popular. The novels of le Carré blend art and entertainment, a mix to be relished by those who have the taste to enjoy it.
Adam Sisman
June 2015
1
Millionaire paupers
It is a Saturday afternoon in the late 1920s, in Parkstone, a suburb of Poole on the Dorset coast, a Free Church stronghold. A team representing the Parkstone Tabernacle has just won a football tournament; the successful players line up beside the pitch for the presentation ceremony. The cup is being presented by a local dignitary, the former chairman of Poole Football Club and Liberal candidate for East Dorset, Alec Ewart Glassey, whose middle name is taken from that of the Grand Old Man himself, Mr Gladstone of blessed memory – and why not, since he came into the world while the GOM was highest in the land? Now in early middle age, Alec Glassey is an imposing figure, six feet four inches tall, his head held upright by a stiff collar, his hair scraped back from his forehead, his massive lower jaw suggesting firmness. Glassey is a prominent person in the Congregational Church, who in time will become chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. As a lay preacher, he is renowned locally for his oratorical skill and his beautiful diction; as a politician, he is known for passionate sincerity.
The Glasseys have been ‘chapel’ for generations: narrow in their beliefs, strict in their observance, and of course teetotal. Alec Glassey’s late father was a respected Congregational minister, who died of pneumonia in his forties after conducting a funeral on a cold night, leaving his widow penniless – but providentially Alec married the daughter of a rich Barnsley coal merchant, so that he no longer needs to earn his living by giving lessons in elocution, as he did in the bad old days after the Reverend Mr Glassey’s death. (For her part, the coal merchant’s daughter has gained a presentable husband, three years her junior, in the process shedding her maiden name of Longbottom, which has always been a torment to her.) In 1929, Alec Glassey will be elected to parliament, one of fifty-nine Liberal MPs, no fewer than thirty-two of them nonconformists. There he will win admiration for his deep, strong, melodious voice, free of any taint of accent, though his pulpiteering manner and sermonising style will be less welcome.1
For all their advantages, the Glasseys are a miserable pair. They live at The Homestead, a substantial half-timbered house in Lower Parkstone, more sought after than Upper Parkstone because it is nearer the shoreline. Accordingly it is in Lower Parkstone that one finds most of the larger residences, while Upper Parkstone has more modest artisan dwellings, and even a gypsy settlement. The Homestead is a large, sprawling property in the Arts and Crafts style, with many gloomy rooms, surrounded by grounds extensive enough to host church parties, with a monkey-puzzle tree, an old orchard and several grass tennis courts.
As Mr Glassey moves along the line of players shaking hands, his sister Olive trails after him, pinning a rosette on the chest of each member of the victorious football team. Thin and bony like her brother, she is a shy young woman eighteen
years his junior, effectively an orphan from childhood, as her mother, the Reverend Mr Glassey’s widow, a resident in a nursing home since she was a little girl, is now no more. Olive was despatched to a boarding school for the children of dissenting ministers, and parcelled out from place to place in the holidays; and since leaving school has lived at The Homestead, where she is treated as if she were still a child, though she is in her early twenties, with a modest inheritance. Her sister-in-law, a small, managing woman, never tires of scolding her, unless she is telling her how lucky she is. Olive is kept away from visitors to the house, especially the former leader of the Party, that old goat David Lloyd George, with whom the Glasseys are on surprisingly good terms. She is rarely allowed out, except under escort. But she will not be a dependant much longer, because they have found her a suitable partner in life, a Bournemouth solicitor, to whom she is engaged to be married.
First in line is the captain Ronald Cornwell, who plays centre forward, a young man of Olive’s age. Though shorter than average – he is only five foot seven – Ronnie has a presence which demands attention. Olive has met him before, at a meeting of the Young Liberals, for whom he acts as treasurer. He is too cheeky for Glassey, who gazes down on him unsmiling. Though young Cornwell’s father is a town councillor and managing director of a local firm of motor engineers, he began his rise as a tiler and bricklayer; he still wears the lace-up boots of a manual labourer, and speaks in a West Country accent which betrays his humble origins. Nor is his wife any better, being Irish; it is believed that she came to England in service. Moreover the Cornwells are Baptists, which in the narrow world of Dorset dissent is a step down. Doctrinally Parkstone Congregationalists and Baptists are similar, but socially they are distinct. The Baptists are concentrated on the wrong side of the Ashley Road, in Upper Parkstone. (The Cornwells’ house is on the correct side, but only just.)
As Olive fixes the clasp of the rosette, Ronnie emits a playful cry of pain and sinks to one knee. He clutches his breast, declaring that she has pierced him to the heart. Her brother frowns his disapproval, but Olive laughs aloud, a gesture of independence, almost of rebellion. Thawing a little, Glassey accedes to Ronnie’s request to be allowed to visit The Homestead on Sunday afternoons, ostensibly to pay his respects to a housemaid with whom he has struck up an acquaintance. It will emerge later that this is no more than a blind for courting Olive. She breaks off her engagement to the solicitor, much to the annoyance of the Glasseys. Worse still, she becomes pregnant by the upstart Cornwell, and gives birth to a child out of wedlock, a boy named Anthony, only three months after her brother is elected to parliament.
Or so the story goes. But is it true? In fact the boy was born ten months after Ronnie and Olive married in October 1928, a discrepancy which casts doubt on the rest of the narrative. There may have been no football team, no line-up and no presentation. It is possible that they met at a cricket match, because Ronnie was joint honorary secretary of the Poole Park Cricket Club from the age of eighteen; or at one of the successful dances which he organised for the Club. More likely is that they met at a tennis tournament which he directed at The Homestead in the summer of 1924, as part of a social event for the East Dorset Liberals hosted by their newly chosen candidate; or perhaps a few months later, at a garden fête held in the grounds of The Homestead to raise funds for the Upper Parkstone Baptist Church, which had included a sale of work by the Sewing Guild, tennis and croquet tournaments, and a concert after tea. Though they had thrown open their grounds Mr and Mrs Glassey were unfortunately unable to be present for the occasion, and in their absence Olive had received their guests alone. But perhaps not, because Ronnie was recovering from an accident, after he had collided with a coach while riding his motorcycle towards Penn Hill Avenue, the road on which The Homestead stands.2
The story of the football match first appeared in print in 2002, more than seventy years later, in a piece published in the New Yorker, written by Ronnie and Olive’s younger son David: the events it tells of had taken place before he was born. He gave as a source a conversation with his mother in the early 1950s. Half a century later, she was long dead, and unable to confirm or deny the story. Perhaps she embellished it; perhaps he did; perhaps she never told it to him in the first place. He has a powerful imagination, capable of inventing such a story and realising it so fully that it becomes impossible to say whether it really happened, even for him.
To be fair to David, the story was family lore, not his own fabrication. He had already alluded to it in his autobiographical novel A Perfect Spy, published in 1985, some seventeen years before the New Yorker article. In the novel, the affronted MP pays a substantial sum to the seducer to leave the area, taking his fallen sister away, so that he should not be shamed by her continued presence.
In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer. It is possible that Olive never pinned a rosette on Ronnie’s chest. But perhaps the anecdote is symbolically true, even if not literally so. Olive felt herself to be a prisoner in her brother’s house; she loathed what she later termed the ‘Bible-punching hypocrisy’ of her background; she longed to escape, and Ronnie came to her rescue, winning her affection with a characteristically flamboyant gesture, and carrying her off – though not out of the area, as he does in the novel. They were married locally, at the Richmond Hill Congregational Church in Bournemouth, and Olive’s brother gave her away, no doubt holding his nose as he did so. Far from taking flight to another part of the country, the newlyweds had a house built less than a mile from The Homestead, on a plot of land that Ronnie had purchased only a few months before they married, in an area of Parkstone then being developed, known as Lilliput. On an adjacent plot they erected a tennis court. This was an enviable home for a young couple in their early twenties. There was ‘help’, which was just as well, because Olive confessed to being clueless about the practical aspects of domesticity. She was naïve and gullible, ill equipped for adult life. Ronnie called his young bride ‘Wiggly’ and treated her like a princess, showering her with presents. For her, at first, ‘everything was marvellous’. Ronnie was the most exciting person she had ever met – ‘a ball of fire’, she said of him later. Only gradually did she come to perceive that he had been unfaithful to her from the beginning. In their new house, which they called Ambleside and which Ronnie promptly mortgaged, their second child was born, on 19 October 1931: a boy whom they named David John Moore (a family name), who in adulthood would become famous as the writer John le Carré.
In later life Ronnie would boast that he had never read a book. He had left school at the age of fifteen, and worked two years for an insurance broker in Bournemouth before entering into a partnership with his father as F. Cornwell & Son, Insurance Brokers and Claims Assessors. The management of the business was left almost entirely to Ronnie, and at first it was considered highly successful, generating profits of between £1,500 and £2,000 annually, of which each partner received a half share. For Ronnie’s father Frank, this was a logical development of his existing motor-engineering works. There was a synergy between the two concerns: one made and repaired coaches and charabancs, the other insured them. Frank Cornwell was a self-made man, who had built a thriving business, using the profits to buy cheap houses, which then provided rental income. Among David’s early memories was the weekly round of rent collecting in the Morris 8 with one or other of his aunts: ‘there was always a Mrs Somebody who pretended she wasn’t in’.
Much later, long after Frank Cornwell was dead, Olive would intimate to her sons that her father-in-law had been just as crooked as her husband.3 He had been a black-marketer during the First World War, she said. And there is a fragment of evidence to support Olive’s claim: at a dinner party, decades later, Ronnie’s daughter would be told by a fellow guest (on unknown
authority) that her grandfather had been no better than her father.
If this was true – and after so much time has passed it is difficult to tell – it was not apparent to the citizens of Poole. Outwardly, Frank was a beacon of respectability: a pillar of the Baptist Church, a successful businessman, a founding member of the local Chamber of Commerce and a freemason, Master of two local lodges. In 1922 he had been elected to Poole town council, where he served successively as councillor, sheriff, mayor, deputy mayor and alderman.4 There may have been some connection between these affiliations, hinted at by a dissident speaker during the Council meeting at which Frank Cornwell was chosen mayor. The speaker ‘had referred to the borough maces as clubs’, and stated that ‘he also knew of another kind of club, a secret place where things were done that should be done in the Council Chamber’ – referring to meetings of the local masonic lodge. Several of those present expressed their vehement approval of the speaker’s interjection.