by Adam Sisman
The British diplomatic community insisted on distinctions of rank: those on different grades were not supposed to mix socially. ‘The A’s … tend to have different tastes as well as different intellectual interests to the B’s,’ maintains one of the characters in A Small Town in Germany, the only senior woman in the Embassy, even as she confesses to an affair with a junior colleague.23
After she had been in Bonn a month Ann complained in a letter to John Margetson that she found ‘the Embassy people so dull – wives especially – very concerned with their vanishing status socially and just as I imagine colonial wives to be’.24 The women were as dutiful as their husbands in adhering to Embassy protocol. In A Small Town in Germany David provides an ironic description of how, ‘with a little gesture of surprise’, the senior wife present leads the others into the English Church on Sundays, and how they follow, ‘quite by accident’, in the order of succession which protocol, ‘had they cared about such things’, demanded.25
Several of the diplomatic wives made it obvious that they thought Ann an unsuitable partner for David. ‘I wonder why so many clever men have such dull wives?’ one of them murmured pointedly. David himself complained that she did not talk enough at dinner parties. He told her that it was embarrassing for a man in his position to receive CND mailings through BFPO (British Forces Post Office), and asked her to cancel her subscription.
In his first few months in Germany David’s duties took him several times to Berlin, then in the front line of the Cold War. If armed conflict broke out between the superpowers, it was most likely to begin there. No longer the capital of Germany, it had become the world capital of espionage, with hundreds of agents passing back and forth between East and West.
Since the airlift in 1948–9 there had been constant friction between the Western powers and the Soviet Union over access to West Berlin. The Russians had found excuses to halt trains, to block the roads along which supply convoys were sent, to prevent barges sailing down the Elbe and to close the air corridors along which aircraft were permitted to fly into the city. ‘Berlin is the testicles of the West,’ the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had told Mao Zedong. ‘Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.’
For the Western Allies, Berlin was an island of freedom in a sea of Communist-controlled territory, with enormous symbolic significance. For the Russians, and their East German allies, it was a leaking wound. In recent years there had been a huge exodus of Germans from East to West, draining the young GDR of skills and talent. It was estimated that by 1961 a total of 3.5 million Germans, 20 per cent of the population of East Germany, had emigrated to the West. The East Germans were understandably anxious to block this outflow of talent. Though they were able to secure their principal frontier with West Germany, their citizens continued to escape through West Berlin in large numbers.
By the time that David arrived in Germany to take up his post at the British Embassy in Bonn, the position in Berlin had reached a crisis. That very month Khrushchev gave notice that at the end of that year he would terminate the agreement made between the four occupying powers guaranteeing unobstructed access to West Berlin.
In August 1961 David attended a rally of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Nuremberg. During the proceedings the mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, made a dramatic announcement. ‘We have a finger-tip feeling that something is about to happen in Berlin,’ he declared. On the long drive back from Nuremberg David decided to file his report before going home, though it was late in the evening by the time he reached Bonn. He was surprised to find all the Embassy lights still burning. Brandt was right: something was happening in Berlin. The East Germans had closed the border with West Berlin, tearing up streets to make them impassable to vehicles and surrounding the Western sectors of the city with rolls of barbed wire, manned by armed soldiers. Within weeks, they began building the permanent concrete barrier that became known as the Berlin Wall. Passage between the Western sectors and the East was permitted only through strictly controlled checkpoints. Those who tried to climb the Wall, or tunnel underneath it, were liable to be shot.
The United States responded to this escalation by reinforcing its Berlin garrison, though President Kennedy knew that his troops would be unable to resist the much greater forces under Soviet command should they move to take control of the city. To keep his pledge to protect the people of West Berlin, his only recourse would be to threaten a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union – ‘a hell of an alternative’, as he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Berlin was a magazine, ready to explode at the smallest spark. The next few months were especially tense, culminating in a confrontation between Soviet and American tanks armed with live munitions, their engines running, at the main checkpoint.
David saw the Wall for himself when he arrived in West Berlin with his Foreign Office colleague James Bennett; they had flown in because of fears that the Soviets might close the roads. As they stared at the blank faces of the armed East German Volkspolizei (‘Vopos’) standing guard at the checkpoint, Bennett told David to wipe the grin off his face. ‘I was not aware that I had been grinning,’ he wrote later, ‘so it must have been one of those soupy grins that comes over me at dreadfully serious moments.’ Inside he felt nothing but disgust and terror, which he decided was exactly what he was supposed to feel; ‘the Wall was perfect theatre as well as the perfect symbol of the monstrosity of ideology gone mad’.26
Call for the Dead had been published only a week after David had left England for Bonn. It was well received: the Guardian reviewer, Francis Iles, found it ‘outstanding’; in the Observer, Maurice Richardson praised it as ‘highly intelligent, realistic’; Julian Symons, reviewing the book for the Sunday Times, thought this new young author ‘undoubtedly a find’. Indeed the reviewer for John O’London’s speculated that, because the book was so well written, it must be the work of an established author using another name.
‘I have decided to cultivate that intense, worried look and to start writing brilliant, untidy letters for future biographers,’ David wrote to John Margetson’s girlfriend, Miranda Coldstream, signing himself ‘The Author’.27 He suggested to Rubinstein that a reprint might be needed because of the good reviews. The first impression of 2,500 copies soon sold out, to be followed by a second impression of 650 copies a couple of months after publication. Paperback rights were sub-licensed to Penguin for £250, and American rights sold to Walker & Co., which described itself as ‘a small American house with a line in English mysteries’, and which in turn sub-licensed American paperback rights to New American Library. French and German rights* were sold also. All in all, this was a very good start. David planned to write a thriller every year to supplement his salary. While living alone in the Bad Godesberg pension he had resumed work on A Murder of Quality, the book that he had begun at Eton. ‘I wrote the book lying down, on beds, in notebooks, in the few snatched hours left to me by my family and the diplomatic life,’ he would explain later.28
Once again George Smiley was his central character, this time acting as a private investigator rather than as an intelligence officer. A Murder of Quality is in many ways an old-fashioned murder mystery, though one with a strong undercurrent of social criticism. Carne, the school where the novel is set, is depicted as snobbish and self-satisfied. The chippiness that David had felt at Eton comes through strongly, and perhaps too his resentment of the treatment he and Ann had received from some of his colleagues in the Embassy. Physically the school resembles Sherborne, a risk that David would attempt to mitigate at the editing stage by altering the school motto he had devised for Carne to avoid any similarity with Sherborne’s. David showed the typescript to his colleague David Goodall, who protested that it presented a ‘not altogether fair’ picture of a public school. ‘My dear chap,’ responded David, ‘I’m writing a novel, not a despatch.’
A Murder of Quality was submitted to Gollancz in January 1962. The publisher’s reader, Sheila Hodges, clearly had mixed feelings about it,
as did Gollancz himself. ‘I agree with you entirely about this,’ she wrote to him:
you don’t want to stop reading; the wit and the urbanity, and the generally civilized atmosphere, are extremely attractive; but the detection is thin and disappointing. Moreover, I became rather bored with all the U and Non-U business* … I only hope, though, that for his next book he will return to espionage, which he handles so outstandingly well.29
For this second book, Gollancz increased the size of David’s advance from £100 to £150.
A Murder of Quality was published on 26 July 1962. Once again the reviews were favourable. Reviewing the book for the Sunday Times, Julian Symons rated it as ‘the best crime story with a school setting since Nicholas Blake’s first book, A Question of Proof, was published nearly thirty years ago’. Nicholas Blake himself (the pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis, who had been educated at Sherborne) found it ‘vastly entertaining’. The Illustrated London News reviewer was perhaps extravagant in his praise. ‘I believe that Mr le Carré is a phenomenon such as can be expected only in every two or three generations,’ he raved. ‘If he continues at this level, he will soon soar above any of the great names of this century.’
The first impression of 3,000 copies sold quickly, and a second impression of 600 copies was put in hand in the first week of publication.
At first Penguin did not want this second book, but reversed this decision and paid £250, the same amount as for Call for the Dead. Both books were published in the newly redesigned ‘Penguin Crime’ series, which retained its distinctive green covers but added striking visual images. Once again American rights were sold to Walker.
Meanwhile the Crime Writers’ Association had nominated Call for the Dead second on their list of the ‘Best Crime Books of 1961’. David had been invited to the prize-giving ceremony, but the Foreign Office refused permission for him to attend. It was ‘a relief really as the fares would have been excessive for such a venture’, he argued in a letter to Ann. ‘Peter Watt said it was really better to miss it than come second and Madeleine was slightly acid about John [Bingham] not having won it!!’30
David was writing from London, where he was escorting a party of young members of the Bundestag who were being encouraged to look favourably on Britain’s application to join the Common Market. He took the opportunity to discuss his prospects with his employers. ‘FO says don’t worry about being a long time in Bonn,’ he told Ann afterwards. ‘We can stay as long as we can stick it, then probably East to Poland.’ David reckoned that they should expect to remain in Germany another three or four years: long enough to make it worth looking for somewhere more comfortable to live.
The young German politicians whom David was shepherding around London enjoyed their stay. On the evening of their arrival, they insisted on being taken to a ‘traditional English pub’. By the time the pubs closed, they had explored several, and sampled Scotch whiskies as well as warm English beer. On the steps to the hotel, they went into conclave and determined that the night was still young. ‘We want to meet some girls,’ they told David. In vain he argued that they would benefit from an early night. Consulting his conscience, he decided that it was his duty to see it through. He telephoned a contact at Special Branch, who recommended an establishment that turned out to be shut. Further research led to an address in Mayfair offering ‘French lessons’, then a common euphemism. The large lady who answered the doorbell wore a pink nightdress and a red bandana. She was not impressed to be confronted by an assembly of beaming Bundestag members, and was about to close the door on them when their leader stepped forward and made a solemn announcement: ‘We are German, and we wish to learn French!’
While in London David went to dinner with Dick Edmonds’s sister Susan and her husband James Kennaway, who lived in an elegant house in Highgate. Until this point David had known Kennaway only slightly, but now their shared experience of writing and publishing gave them more to talk about. Kennaway had achieved an enviable level of success, enough to enable him to give up his publishing job to concentrate on writing full-time. He had adapted his novel Tunes of Glory into a highly praised film, starring John Mills and Alec Guinness;* his screenplay had been nominated for both a BAFTA and an Academy Award (Oscar). As a result he was much in demand, and well paid. The Kennaways were able to spend long spells abroad, employing a governess to teach their four children. They were a glamorous couple, depicted by one of their friends as ‘Scott and Zelda, with manners’.31
When David raised with his agent the possibility that he might tackle a ‘straight’ novel next, Watt warned that he would be ‘bonkers’ to do so if he wanted to make money out of writing. In fact David was already thinking about a new spy story, as he told Ann: ‘I’ve just hit on a very good plot (I think) for another.’32
The plot for the new book was a fiendishly clever one. It concerned Mundt, a senior officer of the Abteilung, the East German secret service, who appears fleetingly in Call for the Dead. Unknown to the reader, Mundt has been ‘turned’ and is now working secretly for the British. To counter growing suspicion that he is a traitor, the Circus manipulates an innocent witness to testify against him, having planted evidence that will undermine the witness’s testimony. The premise is that once an accusation has been made and the supporting evidence shown to be false, the accusation itself is discredited.†
Though the idea of a double agent highly placed within East German intelligence may have been founded on the Heinz Felfe case, David’s central character was inspired by someone with whom he never spoke, whose name he never knew. He was seated at a bar in Heathrow Airport when a middle-aged man wearing a stained raincoat sat down near by. David noticed the deadness in his eyes; he looked as if ‘he’d had the hell posted out of him’. The stranger fished in his pocket, drew out a handful of coins in different currencies and denominations, and slammed them down on the bar, demanding a large Scotch, in what seemed to David to be a faint Irish accent. Between him and the barman, they sorted out the money. In that moment, Alec Leamas was born.
At the beginning of The Spy who Came in from the Cold Leamas is a jaded British intelligence officer operating out of Berlin, whose agents have been rounded up by the East Germans one by one. Back in London he is ordered to trail his coat, posing as a heavy-drinking, burned-out former spy, willing to defect to the East – a bait which is duly taken. Until almost the end of the book he believes that his mission is to destroy Mundt. But Leamas has been deceived by his own masters: in reality, he is a mere instrument in what he eventually realises is a ‘filthy, lousy operation’ to divert attention away from Mundt at the expense of his rival Fiedler, a much more sympathetic character – ‘to save him’, as Leamas bitterly explains, ‘from a clever little Jew in his own department who had begun to suspect the truth’. Two innocent people are sacrificed to protect Mundt’s cover; the fact that both of them are Jews and Mundt a former Nazi makes an ugly operation hideous.
Leamas’s boss, the subtle spymaster ‘Control’, head of the organisation known simply as ‘the Circus’,* is unabashed in admitting that the methods used by both sides in the Cold War have become much the same. ‘I mean,’ he muses aloud to Leamas, ‘you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?’33 Control’s cynical speech derives from the one given by George Kennedy Young to the MI6 trainees. The Spy who Came in from the Cold presents British intelligence as no better than the enemy, and in some ways worse. There is good and bad on both sides: Leamas and Fiedler alike are flawed individuals struggling to preserve their humanity, in a conflict without honour or principle.
Leamas’s outburst at the end of the book is a fervent protest against the bad things he has been asked to do in the service of his country. ‘What the hell do you think spies are?’ he asks his distressed girlfriend: ‘moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not! They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunk
ards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.’ This was a very different depiction of spying from the one presented in Ian Fleming’s bestselling novels. The moral ambiguities of The Spy who Came in from the Cold are in marked contrast to the unquestioning certainties of the James Bond books, in which the goodies and baddies are clearly delineated. To readers in the early 1960s, accustomed to the messy compromises of the Cold War, they seemed far more truthful. Similarly, le Carré’s squalid settings seemed more realistic than the glamorous five-star hotels, high-rolling casinos and expensive restaurants frequented by James Bond.
Overshadowing the novel was the image of the Berlin Wall, in all its stark, inhuman brutality: ‘a dirty, ugly thing of breeze blocks and strands of barbed wire, lit by cheap yellow light, like the backdrop for a concentration camp’. The book opens at the Wall, when a man is shot while trying to cross over to the West, and closes there, with two more corpses lying at the Wall’s foot, raked by searchlights.
In retrospect David would link his revulsion against the Wall to his own inner misery:
I know that I was deeply unhappy in my professional and personal life, and that I was enduring the extremes of loneliness and personal confusion.