by Adam Sisman
Although it is a book which will provide critics with endless interpretations (the Germans will run on forever) it is also wonderfully entertaining. I do believe it is a masterpiece – that is all I am trying to tell you.
Don’t bother to reply to this, and please believe that I am neither trying to requite your generosity to me, nor secure it for the future. I am spellbound by a great novel in our own time and wanted to tell you so.6
Before returning to England David gave a magazine interview in which he outlined his working day:
Between 8 and 12 every morning is for original work. Always longhand – I never mastered the typewriter. First draft in blue Biro, revisions in red, final copy in green. In the afternoon, my secretary types out the sheets with green on …
I prefer to lunch alone, without the boys. My wife understands that. Then, in the afternoon, cutting, revision, selection. A lot of that … When I am working full steam, I suppose I am writing fourteen, fifteen hours a day.
I never pre-plot a book, plan what is going to happen in advance. For me, that would destroy the unpredictable, the surprising. The books take place around a theme and some characters, as The Spy shaped around a phoney defection. I haven’t yet had to search for themes that generate tension in me.7
One legacy of David’s involvement with James Kennaway was a feeling that he ought to be writing ‘serious’ novels. Kennaway shared the prevalent prejudice against genre fiction, believing it to be innately inferior. While acknowledging David’s talent, he was occasionally disparaging of his work. The enormous sales of The Spy who Came in from the Cold made it easier to dismiss. Like Ann, Kennaway saw popularity as vulgar. He may have felt sensitive about David’s success, especially once he appreciated that the two of them were in competition for Susan’s love. To Kennaway, his writing was bound up with his manhood. ‘More than David, I have connected living and writing, which is why I am writing more profoundly at the moment,’ he had written to Susan immediately after the crisis at Zell am See.8
Kennaway’s lack of enthusiasm for spy fiction seems to have influenced David. While still abroad he suspended work on the neo-Nazi thriller. One reason was his lack of conviction that Vienna was the right setting. ‘It is a city of incident, but no plot, a no man’s land after the war is over,’ he would write. ‘The tension is gone; only the clichés, like the incidents, remain.’9 But anyway he had a new idea, ‘which I think could be super,’ he told Ann. ‘I don’t want anyone much to know I’m on it – let the world think I’m doing the Nazi thing.’10
Almost half a century afterwards, David can no longer remember anything about this new novel, beyond a feeling that he was trying to find a way of addressing the central realities of his past: his father, his spying and his sense of utter isolation, as well as his sense of self-contempt about his involvement with the Kennaways.
At the beginning of May 1965 he was at last able to come back to England. Apart from brief visits, he had been away for almost four years. He told an interviewer that he had come home to settle. ‘I’ve made so much money that I can afford to live in Britain,’ he joked.
Since returning to England with the children, Ann had been living with her mother in the North Somerset village of Chew Magna; but, knowing that this would not suit David, she found a house to rent in Essex while they searched for a permanent home – ‘the Forever House’, as David referred to it in letters to the children. They looked at castles and stately homes, and one of the most beautiful houses in Bath, Widcombe Manor; at one stage they seemed set on moving to Wales, or at least to Herefordshire, on the Welsh border. Soon after they came back to England their eldest son, Simon, aged eight, started boarding school. Ann afterwards regretted the decision to send him away, and suggested that she had surrendered to pressure from David. Given that he had reacted so strongly against his own schooling, it seemed curious that he should have chosen to send his sons away to be educated; in retrospect David regards this decision as a tragic mistake. The preparatory school they chose for Simon, Frilsham, was only a few miles from St Andrew’s, the school which David himself had attended during the war.
While Ann and the children were in the country, David spent much of his time in London, working on the film script; he bought a penthouse on the thirteenth floor of a tower block in Maida Vale, a stone’s throw from Lord’s Cricket Ground. He had several jolly meals with Len Deighton, whose life had been similarly transformed by a string of bestselling books, all made into films. They used to eat at Mario & Franco’s Terrazza in Soho, then the most fashionable restaurant in ‘Swinging London’, patronised by actors, models and photographers. The two young writers marvelled at their shared experience of success. Deighton was the first person David knew who had a telephone in his car.
He and Ann exchanged recriminatory letters. To her, he was heartless, selfish and juvenile: ‘how I wish for a mature relationship’. To him, she was demanding, jealous and possessive: ‘blackmailing me with your tantrums’. In a letter written on the back of an estate agent’s circular, Ann complained that she was lonely and depressed. ‘I am looking for houses you are too busy to see,’ she wrote. ‘Even if we find a house, will you be there? There will always be someone else, a film, anyone more important than us. You’ll always be away.’ While Ann hated to be admired as Mrs John le Carré, she was furious about being ignored; she referred to her husband sarcastically as ‘the Great Man’. She wrote that she was thinking of leaving him. ‘It’s a pretty lousy life you offer me.’11
In the run-up to publication there was intense interest in The Looking-Glass War – especially in America, where The Spy who Came in from the Cold had been such an enormous success. Could he do it again?
One of the biggest book clubs in America, the Literary Guild, had already chosen The Looking-Glass War as its September Choice, splashing out the largest advance it had ever paid. Ladies’ Home Journal bought the serial rights for a staggering $75,000 – presumably sight unseen, since it is hard to believe that they could have thought it an appropriate choice had they read the book.
David was invited to give an address to the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), the largest English-language book-related event in the world, to be held that year in Washington in early June. On Memorial Day 1965 (the last Monday in May), he arrived in New York, accompanied by Ann. They stayed at the Plaza Hotel; Coward-McCann hosted a reception for him at the Canadian Club in the Waldorf-Astoria. An interviewer from the New York Times wanted to know how the success of The Spy who Came in from the Cold had affected David. ‘I am only slightly less happy than I was before it happened,’ he said. Asked if he planned to continue to write spy stories, he replied, ‘I’m not going to plod like an old athlete around the same track because it makes money.’ Although his next book would probably not be a spy story, it would retain the element of suspense.* He would like to write all kinds of things, including plays, he said; but he intended to remain ‘a storyteller’. He told the New York Times that he admired Graham Greene’s work: ‘the marvellous search for moral values, mixed with the adventure story’.12
David and Ann stayed with the Geoghegans in Weston, Connecticut, as he had done on his previous visit. From the start Geoghegan treated David with exceptional care. In later life Geoghegan’s son could not remember any other author being invited to the house, let alone coming to stay.
One weekend they took a jaunt across Long Island Sound to stay at the Sea Spray Inn, on the dunes facing the ocean in East Hampton. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood: there was lots of storytelling, laughter, good food and wine. After dinner, they strolled out on to the beach in the darkness to watch the Gemini space capsule pass overhead. Geoghegan was clearly anxious about something; that night he stayed up late, while his wife tried unavailingly to calm him. Later he would tell his son that he had been worried by David’s desire to stop writing spy thrillers.
David’s speech to the ABA, entitled ‘The Book Machine’, was perhaps not what his aud
ience was expecting. Instead of the upbeat rallying-call usual on such occasions, they were given introspective angst. David teased his audience briefly by dilating on the parallel between the writer and the spy: ‘like a spy his real work is done alone … like a spy he needs secrecy’. But this was a digression from his main theme, which was to warn of the hazards of success for the writer: he becomes ‘caught in the machine … he has become a property’.
Geoghegan was impatient with David’s soul-searching. He led David to a high vantage-point above the cavernous central concourse of Grand Central Station. It was rush hour, and the station was thronged with hurrying commuters. ‘Look down there,’ Geoghegan commanded: ‘do you want to be one of them?’
British publication of The Looking-Glass War was set for 21 June 1965. To commemorate the occasion Charles Pick threw a party at his Knightsbridge flat. David was apprehensive about the critics: rightly so, as it turned out. Maurice Richardson in the Observer thought it ‘slightly disappointing … I got the impression that le Carré had been attempting an exercise that was just a little too difficult for him’;13 in the Sunday Telegraph, Anthony Curtis confessed that he had found the middle section of the book ‘tedious to a degree … Mr le Carré, mistakenly, sacrifices danger to irony.’14 Much of the review coverage could be summarised as ‘jumped-up thriller with not enough thrills’.15 The most damaging review came in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘In The Spy who Came in from the Cold Mr le Carré’s talents were held in poise: character, theme and plot worked together,’ began the reviewer. ‘Here they have fallen apart disastrously.’
The spy thriller in this case just does not seem the right vehicle for him, and his prose style is too thin as fuel. He may have been hit over the head with Graham Greene. On this showing, he deserves to be coshed again. Far too much reads like a pastiche of England Made Me or one of the later entertainments.16
The anonymous reviewer was Alexander Cockburn, then just twenty-four years old.
David was very hurt by the criticism. He characterised The Looking-Glass War’s reception in Britain as ‘outright abuse’.17 In fact the book was reviewed favourably in the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, and the New Statesman had plenty of good things to say about it too.18 But the good reviews failed to soothe the wounds he received from the bad.
It was a similar story in America, where Orville Prescott, writing in the New York Times, described the book as ‘even harsher and angrier than its predecessor, but not nearly as interesting as a novel’.19 The New York Times Book Review gave the book faint praise:
In The Looking-Glass War, le Carré has written a story with some of the suspense of the spy thriller and also with some of the psychological, social density of a novel. But the two modes do not mingle well … As the writer of a thriller that says something about the world, le Carré ranks with Greene and Chandler. But as a true novelist he has a long way to go.
By contrast, the Atlantic’s notice was favourable, and the reviewer in the New York Review of Books hailed le Carré as ‘the legitimate heir of Greene’.20 In Life magazine, the veteran spy novelist Eric Ambler went out of his way to praise the book as ‘very well written and very exciting indeed’.
With The Looking-Glass War John le Carré may not exactly have done it again but he has done something almost as reassuring. He has made it plain that The Spy who Came in from the Cold was not a fluke, and that those of us who like good spy novels and good writing may expect a long and mutually profitable relationship with him.21
A review of the German edition in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung speculated on what lay ahead for le Carré. The reviewer thought it ‘barely conceivable’ that he would be prepared to write spy novels again. Like so many of the Anglophone reviewers, she suggested that he might well be ‘a worthy successor to Graham Greene’.22
A quarter of a century later David would feel able to joke bitterly that the book had been received, in Britain, ‘with such wholesale derision from the critical community that, had I taken it to heart, would have persuaded me to follow a different profession, such as window-cleaning, or literary journalism’.23 But there was nothing funny about it at the time. At this stage in his career it was natural for him to feel sensitive towards suggestions that The Spy who Came in from the Cold had been a one-off; he could not know what he might be capable of in the future. He gave Susan a copy, inscribed thus: ‘Susie, from David with Love. Rotten reviews all round; le Carré no good any more, but what was good, you had. D.’
In publishing terms, The Looking-Glass War was far from being a flop. Coward-McCann’s edition was thirteen weeks in the New York Times bestseller list, reaching number 5; while Heinemann’s edition sold almost 50,000 copies. But sales fell short of the very high expectations raised by The Spy who Came in from the Cold. After three years Heinemann still had almost 10,000 copies of the first printing unsold, plus a further 15,000 unbound sheets.
The general view among the Cornwells’ friends was that he had written a dud. ‘I expect you are now rather relieved you didn’t get “The Looking-Glass War”,’ John Bingham wrote to Gollancz a couple of months after it was published.24 Bingham disliked the bleakness and the nihilism of the book. The Spy who Came in from the Cold had presented the Circus as fiendishly cunning, if disturbingly amoral; The Looking-Glass War portrayed the Department as incompetent and deluded. For David’s former colleagues in MI5 and MI6, his satirical depiction of a botched operation by fools living on past glories made uncomfortable reading. Some of them resented it, or found it offensive. ‘I suppose it is better to foul one’s own nest by remote control after one has left it,’ Bingham commented to his wife.25
David decided to dispense with Peter Watt’s services. ‘I feel that the emphasis in my affairs is now so altered as to make the services of an agent redundant,’ he wrote to Hale Crosse.26 Increasingly he was asking his accountant to perform the tasks normally done by a literary agent. He had come to the conclusion that ‘John le Carré’ was a business, requiring professional management. He felt that Watt was not equipped to handle movie deals; in particular, he held Watt responsible for the problems caused by the Paramount contract for The Spy who Came in from the Cold, which had given the film company control over the use of his characters in film or television. The restriction on the use of the characters elsewhere had proved a continuing irritant, jeopardising the sale of film rights in both The Looking-Glass War and Call for the Dead. This was exasperating, as these sales were much more lucrative than the original Paramount deal. There was a particular problem with the character of George Smiley, who had appeared in all David’s books. Though Smiley plays only a small part in The Spy who Came in from the Cold, the contract applied to him as it did to the central characters in the story. Michael Horniman, one of Watt’s colleagues, suggested that the problem could be overcome by changing Smiley’s name; David did not like this at all, but it was the solution eventually adopted.
He was an exacting client, requiring rapid and repeated attention, always pushing at the boundaries of conventions generally accepted in the business. Like James Kennaway, he wanted to ‘beat the system’. He had formed the view that the publishing world, once you stripped away the literary veneer, was as grasping and unprincipled as Ronnie’s, ‘and dreadfully incompetent’. According to Bingham, David had been riding his agent very hard to obtain better terms.27 Though Watt liked David and indeed had become fond of him, he had come to dread his telephone calls. The agency maintained the tradition of ‘morning prayers’, when incoming letters were opened and shared among the principals. Horniman remembered a letter arriving from David in Vienna, insisting on a reply on the issue of the Paramount contract; ‘You’ve got to deal with this, Peter,’ he had said, but Watt had merely shrugged his shoulders.
Nevertheless Watt was distressed when he learned that David no longer wanted him to be his primary representative. The agency would continue to handle routine business on a reduced commission, but would not be involved
in the most important negotiations, which would henceforth be handled by Hale Crosse, as David’s personal manager. For Watt, this meant a severance in their personal relations. Not only had he lost the agency’s most valuable client: he had lost contact with a man whom he had come to think of as a friend. A few weeks after receiving David’s announcement of his departure, Watt died suddenly of a stroke, at the age of only fifty. His early death was perhaps not altogether surprising, given that he was a heavy drinker and a chain-smoker; nonetheless his widow sent David an angry letter, accusing him of responsibility for her husband’s death. ‘I imagine David may be slightly blaming himself, justly or unjustly, for poor Peter’s demise,’ Bingham wrote to Gollancz.28 A few years later David would receive a similar letter from Gollancz’s widow.
David’s morale was further dented when Jack Clayton rejected his screenplay. He received no comfort from Ann, who thought screenwriting unworthy of a serious novelist. Understandably she associated the project with James and told her husband that he had been ill advised to undertake it in the first place. The combined effect of several blows – the poor reviews (as he saw them) for The Looking-Glass War, his inability to make progress with another novel and Clayton’s rejection of his script – plunged David into despondency. His involvement with the Kennaways had stripped away his protective covering, and the continuing unhappiness in his marriage kept him raw. He felt a failure. Secretly he feared that the critics might be right, that he had nothing left to give and that his talent had run dry.