John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  In mid-March the Cornwells, with their three children and a new nanny, travelled by train from Germany to Venice, where they were eventually able to board a boat bound for Crete – but not before David was obliged to bribe customs officials to release their impounded luggage.33 Four days after leaving Hamburg, at six o’clock on a grey March morning, they found themselves at the end of a long jetty in the port of Heraklion, surrounded by four large trunks and about twenty suitcases, while the children clutched various soft toys. Nobody else had disembarked. Agios Nikolaos was forty miles distant, across a mountain range. David left his family on the deserted quay and set off on foot, eventually returning with two taxis. A couple of hours later they arrived at their destination in torrential rain. Their youngest boy, Timothy, had been sick during the drive.

  Agios Nikolaos was not then the busy resort it would later become. In 1964 it was still a quiet little fishing port, shabby and dusty, with few facilities and only basic accommodation. Food was sparse. The local women were clad in black from head to foot, and the men often carried guns. Today thousands of tourists descend on the town every summer; in the early 1960s only a handful of foreigners ventured there, mostly what were then known as drop-outs.

  The plan was to spend a few days in a hotel while they looked for a house to rent. Still reluctant to spend too much money, David had reserved rooms at a modest pension rather than at the one smart hotel in town; since it had no restaurant, the Cornwells ate their meals at the simple café next door. David rashly let it be known that he was looking for a house to rent; within two hours he was standing on the steps of his pension, besieged by importunate locals like Gordon facing the mob at Khartoum. It seemed that every house in town was available for rent.

  After a few days they moved into an apartment: the top floor of a stone Venetian-style building set well into the rocks, with a long balcony overlooking the caiques moored in the bay below. The local sponge fishermen spread out their catch for sorting on a grassy slope beside the house. The view was splendid, the amenities less so. Running water was available for a maximum of three hours each day. Their landlady, who lived downstairs, scattered holy water around the house with a branch and crossed herself whenever Ann raised her voice; obligingly she informed them that their maid was a thief. Scorpions invaded the house and hid under the furniture, or crawled into the boys’ shoes. One night, while Ann was reading in bed, a large centipede dropped on to her book and scuttled away.

  For David, the months that followed were the most wretched of his married life. He regretted coming to this remote and inaccessible part of Greece, where no amount of money could procure comfort. He was repelled by the prevalent deprivation. ‘I find I cannot live close to poverty,’ he wrote at the time. ‘I cannot get used to the dispassion with which wealthy Greeks contemplate their impoverished compatriots; to the arid, crumbling villages where only the very young and the very old remain, waiting for their different kinds of release …’34

  As David did not feel rich enough to buy a second-hand car – and in those days there were no cars available to hire – they were dependent on buses and taxis to get around. It would take him a while to grasp that he could now afford almost anything he wanted. In the decade since he had broken with his father he had lived carefully; the habit took some time to wear off.

  Until the sun began to shine in May it was surprisingly cold, made worse by a strong wind; it snowed in mid-April. David found the apartment itself noisy and difficult to work in. There was little congenial company in the area, and it seemed that he and Ann now had nothing to say to each other. She wanted them to explore the Minoan sites on the island; he was determined to work. ‘I hate ruins,’ he admitted to a friend. During the months they spent in Greece he often went abroad, leaving Ann on her own with the children for weeks on end. While on Crete, he took long walks dreaming of his beloved, and telephoned his agent on the slightest pretext, though making overseas calls involved long waits in a booth at the local post office. A local official accused him of spying for the Turks and asked for a bribe as the price of his silence. Somebody claiming to be a Czech writer insisted on coming out to Crete to see him. Each time they met in local cafés, David was certain that they were under surveillance. He deduced that Czech intelligence was trying to recruit him, and felt sufficiently concerned to consult the head of the Athens station. It was as if he were Alec Leamas, just discharged from prison; life was imitating art.

  David had been in Crete only a few weeks when he received a terse telegram from Geoghegan: ‘COME OVER NOW’. He left the island with relief, stopping in London to collect two literary prizes, the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger* and the Somerset Maugham Award,† and flew on the next day, his head already reeling, to New York.

  His plane had already landed and was taxiing to its resting-place when he became aware that a ‘Mr Lee Carr’ was being paged. David identified himself to a stewardess and learned that special arrangements had been made for him on the ground: a limousine was waiting at the foot of the steps. Inside was his publisher, a handsome man in his mid-forties with dark wavy hair. The bemused young novelist was driven straight to a packed press conference at the Plaza Hotel. As cameras flashed and microphones were pushed towards his face, David realised that he was famous.

  At the press conference and in interviews afterwards, he tried to maintain the line that he had been nothing more than a simple civil servant. He was therefore thrown when a journalist ‘with connections’ told him out of the corner of his mouth that White himself had blown his cover to the former Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, who had made free with the information.35

  For the next week David was in ‘fairyland’. His book was already a sensation; now everything he said was news, or so it seemed. He couldn’t go into restaurants without being recognised. Wherever he went, people wanted to shake his hand. Everyone wanted a piece of him. He was interviewed in the press and on television. Women propositioned him. It was intoxicating, flattering and terrifying.

  One evening Geoghegan escorted David to the 21 Club for dinner. As they were being shown to their table, David was startled to spot Ronnie seated in a corner, behind a large brandy and ginger. It was immediately obvious to him that this was an ambush: his father had prevailed on his publisher’s good nature to arrange a rendezvous. Sure enough, Geoghegan suggested that Ronnie join them for dinner. Proudly patting David’s arm, with tears in his eyes, Ronnie told him that he hadn’t been a bad father, had he, son? And we’ve done all right together, haven’t we, then? Throughout the evening, as the champagne flowed, Ronnie made repeated and unsettling references to ‘our book’. His line seemed to be that, having paid for David’s education (or at least some of it), he was now entitled to share in the rewards. After all, Geoghegan added, ‘he put you through college, didn’t he?’ Out on the sidewalk afterwards Ronnie gave David one of his bear-hugs.

  ‘You may be a successful writer, son,’ he said through his tears, ‘but you’re not a celebrity.’ And leaving David with this warning, he set off nobly into the night.

  Arguably, Ronnie’s judgement was vindicated when David appeared with two lookalikes on the popular CBS television programme To Tell the Truth, sponsored by the manufacturers of ‘Easy-Off’ oven cleaner. Panellists were entitled to cross-examine three Englishmen before guessing which of them was the real John le Carré. One of the four panellists claimed to have read The Spy who Came in from the Cold, which, she judged, was ‘just peachy’. Nonetheless she, with all her fellow panellists, identified the wrong man.36

  Some while earlier, Burt Lancaster had withdrawn from the film of The Spy who Came in from the Cold. While David was in New York, it was reported that Richard Burton had been signed to play Alec Leamas instead, for a fee said to be more than a quarter of a million pounds, against 29 per cent of the gross take. David received the news in a telephone call from an ecstatic Jack Geoghegan. Burton was then a major movie star, not least because of his romance with Elizabeth Taylor, which
had made the pair perhaps the most famous couple in the world at the time. Their affair had begun when they co-starred in the big-budget epic Cleopatra, attracting enormous publicity. Since both were married, this created a public scandal, resulting in lurid headlines across the globe. Burton had since divorced his wife and married Taylor.

  He was in New York at the time, playing Hamlet in a production directed by John Gielgud, who spoke the part of the Ghost. This was one of the most talked-about shows on Broadway. After each night’s performance crowds gathered outside the theatre to catch a glimpse of Burton, and sometimes Taylor. An excited Geoghegan told David that he would take him to see the show, and afterwards introduce him to Burton.

  In his dressing room Burton was very charming and spoke graciously about the book. David responded that his Hamlet was better than Olivier’s – better even than Gielgud’s, he went on recklessly, though amid this torrent of mutual compliments he was secretly uneasy about the prospect of Burton playing Leamas.37

  While in New York, David replied to a ‘wonderful letter’ from C. P. Snow, who had written to say that he and his wife (the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson) ‘rejoice in your success’. Snow had already given Gollancz a favourable quote for The Spy who Came in from the Cold, but in this letter he went much further. ‘People don’t seem to realise what a deep novelist in the deepest and fullest sense, you are,’ Snow wrote tautologously. ‘You make most writers look like ignorant and bad-mannered school children.’ Snow was then at the height of his fame, an influential figure in the worlds of literature, politics and academia, bestowing patronage on young novelists of whom he approved. Attention from such a source was flattering; David sent an effusive letter of thanks. ‘There is no one, no living writer, whose judgement I value more than your own,’ he replied; and suggested that he might call on Snow once he returned to England from Greece the following year.38

  David’s arrival in America to promote the book boosted sales of the novel, which by mid-May approached 180,000. Eventual sales were well over 200,000 in hard cover. The Spy who Came in from the Cold remained at the top of the US bestseller list for thirty-five weeks, becoming the bestselling novel of 1964. It was still one of the top ten bestsellers more than a year after publication. No other spy novel had ever done so well. For Coward-McCann, which became Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, it was the best year in the firm’s history. Even for Walker & Co., the book proved a bonanza. On the back of its success, they were able to sell paperback rights in David’s first two novels for a substantially higher price than they might otherwise have expected. Walker reissued them in a single omnibus volume entitled The Incongruous Spy, which became a Book of the Month Club Alternative Selection.39

  The Spy who Came in from the Cold changed David’s life irrevocably. As he was slowly coming to appreciate, he would never again be short of money, provided that he kept writing. While this opened up many possibilities, it also created problems. His enormous success would attract envy, even in those who loved him. An early indication of this came at Coward-McCann’s stylish party for David, held at the 21 Club. Among the guests was David’s brother Tony, who had protected him at school and comforted him throughout his motherless boyhood. Tony aspired to write the Great Novel; for years he had tried to save his earnings to buy himself time to write. By a strange coincidence he dreamed of escaping to a Greek island where he could work undisturbed. But the ambition seemed more elusive than ever; he had become a husband, and then a father, and now had a steady job in advertising to pay the mortgage. It was painful for him to watch David being lionised as a novelist, the very thing he wanted most for himself. It seemed to Tony that his little brother had left him far behind. At the party Tony tried to drown his jealousy in drink, with predictable results. Distressed to see him in such a state, his wife dragged him away.

  Afterwards Tony was mortified by his behaviour. Almost half a century later he wrote David a letter in which he tried to explain his feelings, and apologised ‘with all my heart’.

  * Born in November 1962, while they were living in Königswinter. His godfather was John Margetson.

  * Apparently one of the inspirations for the character of Widmerpool in Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels, ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’. Bernard Levin nicknamed him ‘Bullying-Manner’ because of his rudeness in court; after Manningham-Buller’s elevation to the peerage as Lord Dilhorne, Levin had dubbed him Lord Stillborn. His daughter Eliza became Director-General of MI5 in 2002.

  † Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister on 9 October 1963.

  * Just over £1,600 at the exchange rates then prevailing.

  † He no longer knows what he meant by this comparison.

  * The Perfecto-Zissbaum Motion Picture Corporation features in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse.

  * David has often claimed that his own name was passed by Philby to his Russian controllers. It is difficult to understand how this could be so, since Philby was unlikely to have had access to the names of new entrants by the time David joined SIS in 1960. In a television interview in 2000 Mikhail Lyubimov, a former KGB officer in London, stated that Philby had passed David’s name to his Russian controllers in the late 1940s, after he was recruited as an agent by the Bern SIS station. Lyubimov’s assertions should be treated with caution.

  * The fact that ‘the Department’ was based in Baker Street during the war suggests an identification with SOE.

  † The story has never been published.

  * Olive had been left destitute in Canada, when John Hill had run off to Las Vegas with a couple of girls and spent everything they had; but after she sent him a photograph of herself Ronnie had come to her rescue, providing £100 in travellers’ cheques and air tickets back to England, both for her and for her daughter Alex. He had set her up in a Suffolk cottage; but some while after she had moved in, she received a letter informing her that she would have to leave, as the property was now in the hands of the Official Receiver.

  * The Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) has long taken the view that thriller writers qualify for their awards. In 1988 David would be awarded the CWA’s Diamond Dagger, only the third writer (after Eric Ambler and P. D. James) to receive it. The award, a silver book with a diamond-encrusted dagger plunged into the pages, has become recognised as the highest accolade a crime writer can earn. It is given for a lifetime of achievement: the career of the winner ‘must be marked by sustained excellence’, and he or she ‘must have made a significant contribution to crime fiction published in the English language’. To celebrate the golden jubilee of the Gold Dagger in 2005, CWA members voted for the ‘Dagger of Daggers’; the winner was The Spy who Came in from the Cold.

  † Awarded jointly to John le Carré for The Spy who Came in from the Cold and to Dan Jacobson for Time of Arrival.

  13

  Naïve and sentimental love

  David flew back to Crete via Rome, laden with presents for the family. Ann met him at the airport, obviously tense: she lost her temper with a young woman at the counter when David’s luggage appeared to have gone astray. On the drive back to Agios Nikolaos, she showed no interest in what had happened to him in New York, and spoke only of scorpions.

  Ann’s attitude to David’s success felt to him grudging and ungracious. His achievement apparently meant nothing to her. She seemed anxious to reclaim him, from a life of excitement and glamour to one of tedium and routine. In New York he had been fêted; in Crete he received nothing but disapprobation, or so it seemed. She gave him no credit for the restraint he had shown in resisting advances from other women while he was away – though she could hardly have done so, because he had not told her about it. Ann was wary of the brash, moneyed, ‘Americanised’ milieu into which he had been introduced, which seemed alarmingly like Ronnie’s world, the world from which she had rescued him. For her, The Spy who Came in from the Cold was a source not of pride but of danger; in later years she would say that its success had ruined their marriage. Nevertheless she undertook to type the firs
t draft of his new novel.

  Both were appalled when an American agent, Alvin Ferleger of Ashley-Famous, followed David to Crete in an attempt to persuade him to write an outline for a television series – one that, he promised, would ‘net you millions’. Ferleger and other similar suitors were all too reminiscent of Ronnie’s business associates. David felt confused and alienated at becoming ‘a property’.

  Ann’s mother was a further strain, now divorced from her second husband and a regular visitor to the Cornwell household. David’s initial affection for her had become replaced by a strong dislike. To him, she appeared preoccupied with needless feminine detail that sheltered her from having to recognise the important things in life. Her experiences with men had led her to brand them as innately unreliable, callous, lecherous and brutal; and David felt that she was perpetually looking for signs of these qualities in him. Her repeated presence in Crete was one of the reasons why he fled abroad on the slightest pretext.

  Besides, there was a new lure to draw him away. David had become closer to the Kennaways, to James in particular. Earlier in the year he had stayed with them at the manor farmhouse in Gloucestershire which they rented from Susan’s father. Writing about this visit years afterwards, Susan recalled ‘lots of jokes, funny voices, excursions … David telling stories to the boys, conjuring shillings out of their ears and generally making himself an extremely amiable guest’. The two young writers talked all the time, ‘discussing George Orwell or Ortega y Gasset * or the novel or the film, or just themselves’.1 Repeatedly they explored ways to ‘beat the system’. James saw himself as an artist, perpetually at war with the crassness and corruption of the commercial world. Under James’s influence, David began to refer to agents, publishers, accountants and other professional advisers as ‘con men’.