by Adam Sisman
Perhaps some of that solitude and bitterness found its way into Alec Leamas. I know that I wanted to be in love, and that my own past, and my own inwardness, made this impossible. So, perhaps, the barbed wire and the machinations of the plot did duty for other obstacles that stood between myself and freedom.
I had been poor too long, was drinking a lot, I was beginning to doubt, in the deepest of ways, the wisdom of my choice of job. The familiar process of embracing an institution, then fighting my way clear of it, was taking over my relationship to my marriage and my work. Staring at the Wall was like staring at frustration itself, and it touched an anger in me that found its way into the book.34
It was perhaps not surprising that Ann was less than enthusiastic about the novel. David would later tell people that she had interrupted him repeatedly and deliberately during the writing of it. For some time she had betrayed signs of envy of his success as a writer, the profession she had hoped to make her own. She had typed A Murder of Quality under protest, but this time she declined, so David had to rely on the Embassy secretaries instead. In a letter to Ann written in June, he complained that ‘the new book drags along but the girls are all away and there’s no one to type it’.35
Another spy scandal broke just as David was finishing the book. John Vassall, an Admiralty clerk who in the 1950s had served on the staff of the Naval Attaché in the British Embassy in Moscow, confessed to spying for the Russians. A homosexual, Vassall had been blackmailed after compromising photographs had been taken of him at a drunken party.
The Cornwells needed a bigger house, particularly as Ann was pregnant again. They were helped by the arrival in Bonn of a new head of station, a replacement for Lunn, who had moved on to another posting. This was Arthur Franks, always known as ‘Dickie’, who had served in SOE during the war: an SIS high-flyer who would eventually rise to become its Chief. He and David formed a lasting friendship. In January 1963 there would be a new ambassador too, Sir Frank Roberts, a small, bustling man who did not share his predecessor’s lofty distaste for ‘Friends’.
With Franks’s help, the Cornwells secured a large house in Königswinter, with a garden running down to the Rhine. Under the new regime official disapproval of Embassy staff living on the ‘wrong’ side of the river had eased. The Königswinter house was equipped with counsellor-level furniture, much too good for a mere second secretary; when Ann accidentally stained the arm of a sofa, ‘Admin’ made a stink. Its dining room was capacious enough to seat a dozen; for dinner parties Ann relied on Frau Klampt, a refugee from the East, who at other times served as their housekeeper. Besides Frau Klampt they had a Spanish live-in maid, a daily woman who came in to clean and an old gardener, whose duties included stoking the large basement boiler that served the house. Ann’s eighteen-year-old cousin had been acting as their au pair; she now returned to Scotland, to be replaced by a sensible English nanny named Janet.
Each day David crossed back and forth on the ferry, sometimes parking his modest Hillman with its diplomatic plates alongside Adenauer’s huge armoured Mercedes as the Chancellor made his own way to and from work. There was excitement in Chancery when David was able to report which newspaper Adenauer was reading, and the press section was quick to deduce which leader writers might have influenced his mind. Sometimes David caught his eye, and occasionally it seemed to him that the Chancellor smiled at him; but the Old One was nearing ninety, and his lined face was as inscrutable as a Native American chief’s.36
David snatched every available moment to work on his new book, rising very early in the morning to write for a couple of hours before setting out for work, and making use of odd moments at his desk in the Embassy when he was not otherwise employed. He began a habit of carrying a small notebook with him, which he kept on the passenger seat of his car and often scribbled in as he crossed the Rhine by ferry.
One day Ronnie turned up unexpectedly at the house, attended by one of his camp-followers. Ann was unwelcoming, but the boys were fascinated to meet their notorious grandfather. Parked outside was a strange-looking vehicle, which Ronnie explained was an ‘Amphicar’, a new concept in locomotion: an amphibious automobile which a German company had recently begun to manufacture, largely for export. The fact that it was not much of a car and not much of a boat did not deter enthusiasts. ‘We like to think of it as the fastest car on the water and the fastest boat on the road,’ one proud owner was quoted as saying. A sceptical writer for Time magazine suggested that the Amphicar ‘promised to revolutionize drowning’.
No doubt Ronnie was trying to secure the concession to sell this radical new product in Britain – though it would have been impossible for him to do so in his own name. In 1962 another petition had been filed against him, presumably by someone unaware that he was already bankrupt. A receiving order would be issued against him in December 1963.
Keen to impress his grandsons, Ronnie looked longingly at the Rhine flowing past the end of the garden, but decided against an experimental dip – a prudent decision, as one disadvantage of the Amphicar was that it proved not to be watertight; its continued flotation was dependent on the ability of the bilge-pump to keep pace with the leakage.37
The winter of 1962/3 was the coldest for many years. The Rhine itself froze over, providing a welcome halt to the otherwise unending barge traffic. Ice stretched out five yards or more from each bank, and even in the middle where the sluggish flow prevented it from freezing solid, large blocks formed. Only the ferry continued to cut its way through the ice, carrying David back and forth to work.
On 22 October 1962, President Kennedy delivered a nationwide televised address, in which he revealed that Soviet missiles equipped with nuclear warheads had been deployed in Cuba. America would not tolerate the installation of nuclear weapons so close to its mainland: Kennedy demanded their withdrawal. The President announced a blockade of shipping bound for Cuba, enforced by the US Navy.
This was the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, when tension between the superpowers stretched almost to breaking point. For Kennedy, the crisis in Cuba was intertwined with the crisis in Berlin. In his speech to the nation he explicitly linked the Cuban blockade to the Russian blockade of West Berlin in 1948–9, and declared that the United States would not deny Cubans ‘the necessities of life’, as the Soviet Union had done to Berliners.
There was a general perception that, should war break out, Germany would be ‘the first place to go’. When news came through of Kennedy’s ultimatum, decorators working on the Cornwells’ dining room quietly washed their brushes, packed up and went home, to prepare for Armageddon. Meanwhile senior Embassy staff met in secret conclave to discuss contingency plans for evacuation.
The stand-off ended when Khrushchev backed down. He agreed to dismantle the offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, in exchange for an American agreement never to invade Cuba. Secretly, the United States also agreed to dismantle its missiles with nuclear warheads deployed against the Soviet Union in Turkey and Italy.
The Cornwells’ marriage had been under stress for a while. When a married woman of the Bonn expatriate community made a pass at him during a dinner party, David, after some hesitation, had reciprocated. This was a love affair rather than a flirtation, although it had no sexual outcome; but it was a source of anguish rather than joy, since the lovers could only rarely arrange to be alone together, and then usually in public places such as on the largely deserted Eifel hills outside Bonn or in municipal parks.*
David was tormented by guilt. He felt ‘unfrocked’ by the affair; he became a pariah in his own eyes, and the self-hatred in Alec Leamas reflected the tumult in his own mind. Indeed Leamas’s decision to allow himself to be killed at the end of the book could be interpreted as a manifestation of David’s own death-wish. As Leamas falls from the Wall in the final sentence of the book, an old nightmare recurs to him: the image of a small car crushed between two lorries, with children waving cheerfully through the window. During the Cuban Missile Cr
isis, which was raging as David was finishing the book, he had been full of apprehension for his boys. More generally, the sense of futility pervading the book may stem from his sense of being trapped in an unhappy marriage. Tellingly, when the novel was complete he gave it to his would-be lover to read before showing it to his wife.
It seems that in its original draft The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was much longer than its finished form. Among the passages that David cut were those dealing with Leamas’s failed marriage.38 In subsequent years David has often said that he wrote the book over a period of about five weeks, but the record suggests that it took him considerably longer.39 It would be more than eight months from the letter in March 1962 in which he mentioned to Ann hitting on ‘a very good plot’ for a new book until he delivered the typescript to his agent in November. Indeed its origins went back further than March: he had planned Mundt’s reappearance in print while he was writing Call for the Dead, two years earlier. And the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 had stimulated him to start thinking seriously about a new book in which the Wall would play a symbolic part.40 In a television interview in 2000 he suggested that he had written the book in response to the news of the Wall going up. ‘I think for forty-eight hours I didn’t sleep at all,’ he told the interviewer. ‘When I got back to Königswinter where we lived, I was in a state of what I think shrinks called “fugue”,* I was tremendously high, and in five weeks I wrote a huge, overlong version of what became The Spy who Came in from the Cold.’41 This seems to be another example of false memory: when the Wall went up in August, David was still working on A Murder of Quality, which would not be delivered to the publisher until the following January.
More than half a century later Michael Horniman, an agent at A. P. Watt in the 1960s, remembers the proprietor coming into the office one morning, tired but excited after staying up late into the night reading the typescript of David’s new book. ‘I think we’ve got something,’ Watt told his colleagues.
* According to the official historian of the Service, Christopher Andrew, this character was inspired by the flamboyant Alexander Kellar. In the novel Mendel lets slip to Smiley that Maston is known as ‘Marlene Dietrich’ within Special Branch.
† Not Markus Wolf, head of the foreign intelligence division of the East German Ministry for State Security (‘Stasi’), which le Carré called the Abteilung, though it has often been erroneously suggested that Wolf, known as ‘The Man without a Face’, was the model for Mundt’s rival Fiedler, or indeed for Smiley’s arch-enemy Karla. David has repeatedly denied any such connection, for example on the front page of the Guardian on 6 May 1993.
‡ ‘Chunk’ Smith in David’s account, but I suspect that this spelling originated in a typo.
* Readers should be aware that David prefers to remain silent on his covert role in Germany, though he is the first to admit that it was negligible. The information in this paragraph is gleaned from other sources, and he says that it provides an incomplete description of what he did.
* The German edition was entitled Schatten von Gestern (‘Shadow of Yesterday’).
* Gollancz made this connection in their advance publicity, stressing the author’s ‘wit and urbanity’ and claiming that ‘he writes as ravishingly as Nancy Mitford’.
* Guinness himself apparently considered this his best performance on film.
† It has been suggested to David that he drew the idea for the book from Agatha Christie’s short story ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’ (1933), which later became a play and then a film. (The play opened in London in October 1953; the film was released in 1957.) The premise of the story is that a witness has planted evidence that will discredit her own testimony, thereby discrediting the prosecution. In a letter dated 11 April 2012 to one of those who made this suggestion, US federal Judge Jon O. Newman, David admitted that he had seen the play, though he could not remember whether this had been before or after he devised the plot for The Spy who Came in from the Cold. ‘But I am sure that the notion did not consciously present itself to me during the short and turbulent time of writing. I think there are a whole bunch of influences that kick around in one’s head at such a time, and one draws on them because they are apposite, often without recognizing where they come from. Maybe that happened in this case, though I am inclined to doubt it. I had, for a short time in my life, been close to all manner of deceptions, and the process of inside-out thinking was very familiar to me!’
* The Circus appears to combine the functions of MI5 and MI6. Its colloquial name is a reference to its supposed location in Cambridge Circus, at the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road in central London. The title ‘Control’ is perhaps a nod to the ‘Chief’ (‘C’).
* ‘We were lovers but we hadn’t been to bed. It was very grown-up,’ says Hazel Bradfield, the unfaithful wife of the Embassy’s Head of Chancery in A Small Town in Germany.
* In fact the term ‘fugue’, as used by psychiatrists, is a disorder associated with amnesia.
12
Becoming John le Carré
Peter Watt’s submission letter conveys his sense that the new book, provisionally entitled ‘The Carcass of the Lion’, was special: ‘to my mind, this, his third novel, fulfils all the promise of the first two’.1
Hilary Rubinstein had wearied of his uncle’s autocratic rule and was on his way out of the firm, so Watt had submitted the novel to Victor Gollancz himself. Though now in his seventieth year, Gollancz had lost none of his zest for the book business. Recognising that the new novel was a leap forward from its predecessors, he argued that it should be published in a different form. ‘After a second reading (by another of my directors) and a thorough discussion, I have come to the conclusion that we ought to make the gamble of taking this right out of the thriller and le Carré category, and of launching it as a high spy-adventure story by a completely new name,’ he wrote to Watt. He proposed publishing it under the title The Spy who Came in from the Cold, picking up on a phrase used by Control early in the novel, as he briefs Leamas on his mission: ‘We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible, of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really. I mean … one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold … d’you see what I mean?’2 Control tells Leamas that he wants him to stay out in the cold a little longer.
The new title was an inspired suggestion, a gift to tired sub-editors, who have drawn on it ever since. Gollancz also proposed that the book should be published under the name ‘Leamas’, rather than le Carré. On behalf of his client Watt accepted the first of Gollancz’s suggestions but not the second.3 David had responded to the latter by telegram: ‘RELUCTANT PUBLISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY DEAD SPY’.
Arguing that this was ‘in effect, a “first novel” ’ for David, Gollancz offered an advance of £150, no more than he had paid for A Murder of Quality. Under pressure from Watt, he grudgingly increased his offer to £175.
In the meantime the book had been cleared by the authorities. On a visit to London at the end of January, David had been informed that it had been passed for publication by MI5. ‘It will now go to the F.O. for a final vet,’ he told Ann: ‘no trouble expected there.’4 He was right: MI6 raised no objection either. It was perhaps surprising that neither of his two previous employers objected to the novel, since it presented British intelligence as devious and unscrupulous. In retrospect, David felt that they had allowed the book to be published because they had known that it was not based on authentic experience – the very antithesis of what the public would come to believe.
‘I have just finished another book which will be coming out in July,’ David wrote to Vivian Green early in February 1963. ‘We expect to stay here for a year or two longer, and while the present mess continues, I for one am content to see it out. We now have three sons (the third called Timothy).* They are all down for Westminster, and two of them will be going to the Dragon School first, providing
that the royalties keep rolling in.’5
David was in England again in late February, to act as escort for Fritz Erler, the deputy leader and leading political intellectual of the SPD, tipped as a future defence minister in an SPD administration. (Indeed it was believed that Erler might have risen to become Chancellor had he not died prematurely of leukaemia.) During the war he had been interned in Dachau as punishment for his opposition to the Nazi regime.
Erler spoke good English, but nevertheless wanted David to act as interpreter. He had come to England to discuss the control of nuclear warheads sited in West Germany with the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, a subject he had already discussed with President Kennedy. In David’s company Erler also met other prominent British politicians, including the leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, and the Minister of Defence, Peter Thorneycroft. Immediately before seeing Macmillan, Erler had been to see the Lord Chancellor, Lord Dilhorne, formerly Reginald Manningham-Buller,* at the House of Lords. The limousine that was supposed to take them to Downing Street afterwards did not turn up. As there were no taxis either, David decided that drastic action was necessary. He stepped out into the road and stopped a passing car, a modest vehicle with a working-class couple inside. ‘We’re going to see the Prime Minister,’ David explained to the incredulous duo. Erler produced his card in supporting evidence. ‘Oh go on, let them in,’ said the wife.
The door of 10 Downing Street was opened by Macmillan’s private secretary, Philip de Zulueta. They were shown in to see the Prime Minister, whose opening statement set the tone for an unsatisfactory exchange. ‘Well,’ Macmillan began, ‘I suffered in the First War and you suffered in the Second War, so we have a lot in common, don’t we?’ Erler tried to steer the conversation towards the topic he had come to discuss. Flustered, Macmillan consulted a sheet of paper on his desk, shielded beneath a thick plate of glass. ‘Well,’ he began again, ‘I suffered in the First World War, you suffered in the Second.’ When Erler tried to press the point, Macmillan became more vague: ‘You know, bombs fall here and bombs fall there, and you never can tell what they are going to do …’ Embarrassed, Erler thanked the Prime Minister and terminated the conversation. On the way out he whispered to David, ‘Dieser Mann ist nicht mehr regierungsfähig’ (‘This man is no longer capable of government’).†