John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  David was lonely, living apart from Ann for much of the time and telephoning home every night to talk to his children. He was making little if any progress with his novel. So when Clark suggested that they might drive down to his chalet in Zermatt together, David accepted. This was the beginning of an unlikely friendship, which continued for several years after they returned to England. Clark was a dashing, impatient, amusing figure, who could be disarmingly frank. David found him exciting, often outrageous company: a man’s man. He wrote him affectionate letters, addressing Clark as ‘lover boy’ or ‘golden boy’, in much the same terms as he had written to James Kennaway.

  Clark was trying to establish himself as a writer. His military histories had attracted considerable success, though he lacked application, as his Oxford tutor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, had often complained. ‘Let’s face it, David,’ Clark remarked, ‘when you get to your desk in the morning what you need is a bit of a hangover, then you read through all the shit you wrote the day before, then you add a bit, then really you’re screwed and you want to go out for a couple of hours, so actually what you do is about a page a day.’ Clark’s novels had been less well received. He had read and admired The Spy who Came in from the Cold, and in some superstitious fashion he seemed to think that getting to know David might help him to become a more successful novelist.

  Like David, he had a difficult relationship with his father, the eminent art historian Kenneth Clark. Both felt damaged by neglect; together they discussed the point at which an unhappy childhood should cease to be an excuse for adult misbehaviour. David perceived an unreconciled anger in his new friend, and sensed that he too was trying to come to terms with the injuries that he felt had been done to him as a boy.

  Clark was an Old Etonian, with the sense of entitlement familiar to David from his time teaching there. Unlike David he had been born into privilege and had never known want; towards underlings he behaved with contempt. He embarrassed David by his rudeness to waiters – ‘he treated them like shit’, David would later recall39 – refusing to leave even a modest tip.* Clark made no attempt to conceal his extreme right-wing views, though when he expressed these, most people assumed that he was not serious, merely trying to shock. But they were sincerely held. For him, the most important question about Hitler was not whether he was good or evil, but whether he was a competent military commander. ‘Alan knew some appalling people,’ David would recall after his death. ‘He was great mates with Enoch Powell.’ Clark mixed with members of the neo-fascist National Front, and admired the right-wing historian David Irving. Together with a fellow backgammon player he joined a syndicate which aimed to buy Göring’s Mercedes.

  David detected in his friend an unusual capacity for evil. For him, Clark was a kind of Mephistopheles, whose wicked example he found both fascinating and repellent. Clark chased women with a predatory zeal that seemed to mirror his reckless driving, though except in bed he preferred men’s company. Reflecting on him after his death, David would observe that ‘women were the enemy for him’. Clark’s rooms in Albany were too public for him to feel comfortable about taking women there, so he often borrowed David’s penthouse flat for his assignations. This put David in an awkward position when he drove over to visit the Clarks at their pretty Georgian manor house in the Wiltshire village of Seend.

  The film of Call for the Dead was released towards the end of 1966. Columbia had renamed it The Deadly Affair, apparently because some high-up had decided that the original title suggested a horror movie. David was not involved in the production, so the first he saw of the film was in a huge and almost empty cinema in Kilburn one winter’s afternoon. The central character of George Smiley, played by James Mason, had been renamed ‘Charles Dobbs’, to circumvent the obstacle of the Paramount contract. The changed title reflected a radical change to the plot. In the film Dieter Frey, played by the handsome Maximilian Schell and no longer a cripple as he is in the book, has cynically seduced Dobbs’s wife in order to penetrate his guard.* The interplay between husband, wife and lover is at the centre of the movie. Dobbs’s wife Ann, who never appears in the novel, is present for much of the film, played by Harriet Andersson as a kittenish child bride, not the mature and sophisticated aristocrat of the novels. The sturdy Simone Signoret played Elsa Fennan, quite unlike the slight, frail figure David had depicted. Nonetheless he was enchanted by her performance, which would be nominated for a BAFTA award. Afterwards he walked all the way home, dreaming of tearing up the book and rewriting every scene, just for her.

  The Deadly Affair often feels more like an early James Bond than a le Carré. The mood wavers between early 1960s faux-sophistication and gritty realism, reflected in the settings, which vary from the self-consciously modern Serpentine restaurant to grimy Victorian backstreets. The combination is an uneasy one. The cool, jazzy score by Quincy Jones and the bossa nova theme tune are at odds with the seriousness of the story. Nevertheless the film was reasonably well received, attracting five BAFTA nominations. David would develop a cynical attitude towards film adaptations of his books. ‘You sit there and watch this great cow you’ve designed reduced to a bouillon cube,’ he would tell an interviewer, years later – ‘and then you have to drink it.’

  In August 1967 David informed Charles Pick that he was now the proud owner of a Mercedes 250SE. He had been personally attended to by Mercedes UK’s head of sales. ‘We finished up on Christian name terms, with luncheon at the Caprice at the expense of Mercedes-Benz. Nobody could ask fairer than that.’40

  Pick forwarded to David a message asking him to contact his father’s ‘Austrian lawyer’. It seems that Ronnie was being held in custody for his old trick of failing to pay his hotel bills. There was a further complication, in that he had gulled a rich old lady into allowing him to get her paintings cleaned for her, and had sold them instead. David flew to Vienna to bail him out. Afterwards he gave him lunch in the grill room of Sacher’s, one of the city’s most elegant and luxurious hotels. Ronnie outlined a succession of business proposals; when David showed little interest, he came to the point: ‘£20,000 would get me out of all my difficulties’. David refused, privately noting that his father seemed pretty well informed about how much money he was earning. Ronnie then invited his son to reimburse him for the cost of his education, plus interest of course; David again refused, protesting that he had not selected those schools and would not have done so. Ronnie reverted to a favourite topic, his dream of a pig and cattle farm in Dorset. David offered to buy him a farm in which he could live rent-free, and to give him an allowance on top of any income he made from farming, but insisted on retaining ownership, aware that if his father owned any property he would instantly mortgage it. ‘You want to pay your own father to sit on his arse,’ protested Ronnie. He burst into a torrent of tears, in full view of waiters and other diners. No matter how many times David had seen this performance, it never failed to stir him, and he began to feel tearful himself. ‘You go back to your wealth and family and all the advantages I gave you,’ his father sobbed. ‘All I want now is for you to put me in a cab.’ With David’s arm around his shoulders, Ronnie allowed himself to be led out of the hotel, sweating and heaving. Outside David helped him into a taxi. Still in tears, Ronnie wound down the window. Father and son sobbed at each other for a while, until Ronnie said, ‘I’ve nothing to pay the cabbie with.’ David paid the driver direct.

  Earlier that summer there had been glimpses of Ronnie in Beirut, and in Cairo, where he had introduced himself on his arrival as ‘John le Carré’s father’. It was the time of the Six Day War between Israel and the Arab nations; David suspected that Ronnie might have been trying to get into arms dealing.

  Following his arrest in Singapore Ronnie had been given the airfare to Hong Kong, where he was once again arrested, briefly imprisoned and then deported. David had next heard from him in a letter from Delhi. Ronnie recounted a hunting expedition he had just made in the company of a famous maharajah. ‘His Highness asks me to assure you that you
will be royally welcome at the Palace whenever the winds of fate cast you on these lonely shores,’ wrote Ronnie. David would be pleased to hear that the Maharajah had appointed him ‘sole administrator, manager and bailiff’ of his affairs, with powers to do whatever he deemed best, on behalf of himself and his heirs. A postscript to the letter asked for a thousand pounds in cash (‘no cheques please’) to be cabled as soon as possible, care of Mrs d’Arcy, whose late husband, the colonel, had tragically died some years back. Understandably sceptical, David had made enquiries about the Maharajah at the Indian High Commission in London. He learned that the Sultanate about which he was asking had ceased to exist in the year 1948. Within twelve months of its abolition the sole heir to the title had been killed in a motoring accident in the south of France.

  Years later, after Ronnie’s death, David tried to reconstruct how his father had come to write that letter. He imagined Ronnie driving out from Delhi to the Maharajah’s derelict palace in Mrs d’Arcy’s decrepit car. He pictured broken statuary, grand staircases leading to gutted upper rooms, ant-infested carpets, great halls full of giant bats hanging from the rafters, all gradually succumbing to the encroaching jungle. He heard Mrs d’Arcy telling Ronnie how her husband used to shoot tiger from the back of the Maharajah’s elephant. He imagined the feasts that went on all night, all the little attentions that the Maharajah had showered on the honoured guests, the diamonds that he pressed on Mrs d’Arcy, which she had been obliged to refuse. Perhaps she had even let slip that his highness had asked the colonel to abandon his military career and take on the role of ‘sole administrator, manager and bailiff’ of his affairs.

  David saw his father sitting at the colonel’s desk, having done his duty by Mrs d’Arcy, an enormous brandy and ginger by his side, composing the letter to his son.

  And by culling her images and adapting them to himself, by placing himself upon the Maharajah’s elephant, he allows himself to be fired by the grandeur of that elusive vision, to be assumed by it, possessed by it, to the point where, if the bedroom door were flung open, and a pair of murderous Dervishes burst in – why, he would be on his feet in a second, his military revolver in his hand; he would have felled the brutes where they stood, plugged them with a shot apiece, before returning to his dispatch.

  He mused on this ‘process of heady abstraction, of deliberately controlled vertigo, in which life’s components break and remake themselves according to a wished-for formula and become a story, to be understood as truth and allegory at once’. And he reflected, not for the first time, that Ronnie, in his own way, had been as much of an addict to the process of artistic creation as he was himself.41

  * More than £50,000; the conversion rate was then $2.80 to the £.

  * Mann’s Tonio Kröger (1903) and Death in Venice (1912) explore the feelings of the artist as an outcast from respectable, bourgeois society. ‘To be an artist,’ Kröger comes to believe, ‘one has to die to everyday life.’

  * Later in the year he would tell the American men’s magazine Playboy that his next book would ‘definitely not be in the suspense/spy genre’.

  * One of the lawyers involved contacted David after the publication of A Perfect Spy. They had laughed so much and had such a good time with Ronnie, he wrote, that they had not resented being taken for a ride, but had simply written it down to experience.

  * No doubt it was more prudent for Ronnie to come home via the back door.

  * He was researching locations for The Looking-Glass War.

  * According to Madeleine Bingham, after David had taken them out to dinner in the first flush of his new success, her husband had remarked on how rude he had been to the wine waiter. But she was far from being a dependable witness.

  * This plot device recurs in le Carré’s later and more famous novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was not published until almost a decade later. David himself resists the speculation that he may have taken the idea from the film.

  15

  Rich but restless

  The news that Kim Philby had written his memoirs, soon to be published in the West, prompted a fresh wave of interest in him. An investigation by the Sunday Times Insight team revealed that he had risen much higher within MI6 than had previously been acknowledged; his treachery had been correspondingly more damaging. Philby’s personal life also came under scrutiny, as a book was due too from his estranged American wife, Eleanor. She had followed her husband to Moscow, and then had made a humiliating return to the West after he began an affair with Melinda Maclean, wife of his friend and comrade Donald Maclean. This double betrayal – of Maclean as well as of Eleanor – fed the appetite for stories about Philby.

  David was asked to write a long article about him for the Sunday Times Magazine. It was too good an offer to refuse, though his novel was still unfinished and he could ill afford the distraction. ‘I have put the book aside,’ he confessed to Charles Pick. ‘I’m afraid I just have too much to contend with – most of it of course of my own making!’1

  His piece on Philby was an attack on the complacency and stupidity of ‘the Establishment’; but it was also autobiographical. He envisaged Philby as his ‘secret sharer’,* as the person he might easily have become himself. Though they had never met, he felt that he understood Philby’s motivation because it mirrored his own. Like David, Philby had a monster for a father; like David, Philby had served out time in institutions from which he felt alienated. ‘Philby, an aggressive, upper-class enemy, was of our blood and hunted with our pack,’ he wrote:

  he could hardly fail, when his father delivered him over to the Establishment for his education, to feel already that he was being trained in the enemy camp … Through his father, and the education which his father gave him, he experienced both as a victim and as a practitioner the capacity of the British ruling class for betrayal and polite self-preservation. Effortlessly he played the parts which the Establishment could recognize – for was he not born and trained into the Establishment?

  David thought that he understood Philby’s relations with women: ‘Women were his secret audience. He used them like he used society: he performed, danced, phantasized with them, begged their approbation, used them as a response for his histrionic talents, as a consolation for a manhood haunted by his father’s ghost. When they came too close, he punished them or sent them away …’ Philby himself he referred to as ‘spiteful, vain and murderous’. He had given himself body and mind ‘to a country he had never visited, to an ideology he had not deeply studied, to a regime which even abroad, during those long and awful purges, was a peril to serve; he remained actively faithful to that decision for over 30 years, cheating, betraying and occasionally killing’.

  David’s piece articulated a theme that he would later develop, of the secret services ‘as a microcosm of the British condition, of our social attitudes and our vanities’.2

  David’s Sunday Times article was used as the introduction to a book based on the Insight team’s revelations, Philby: The Spy who Betrayed a Generation, which became a no. 1 bestseller. Due to a mix-up at the newspaper Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had served alongside Philby in MI6 during the war, had been commissioned to write the same article. The literary editor, Leonard Russell, was forced to send him a cringing letter of apology, explaining that the le Carré piece had already gone to press. Trevor-Roper was mortified to be displaced in this way. His Philby article was published in Encounter, and later expanded into a short book.

  David happened to be in one of the two wooden telephone booths in the Savile when he overheard his own name mentioned, and realised that the eminent Oxford don was speaking in the other. ‘I think his introduction is ridiculous,’ he heard Trevor-Roper say, ‘and I look forward to confronting him.’ David deduced that he was speaking to the book’s publisher, André Deutsch. He crept away unnoticed. Soon afterwards he met Deutsch, a dapper Hungarian émigré, fondly described by one of his authors as a ‘mid-European leprechaun’.3 When David came to write his novel Tinker, Tailor, S
oldier, Spy, he would draw on Deutsch for his character Toby Esterhase, who like his original would speak his own form of English.

  ‘First of all fantastic,’ enthused Deutsch. ‘I am huge admirer.’ He referred to Trevor-Roper’s Encounter article, implying that there was a large measure of agreement between the two men. ‘I should like you to appear on platform together for launch of book in Oxford,’ he said.

  Graham Greene reviewed Philby: The Spy who Betrayed a Generation in the Observer. Like Trevor-Roper, he had worked alongside Philby during the war, and he remained loyal to his old friend. Greene’s biographer Norman Sherry, who interviewed his subject at length, recounts that he responded very angrily to being questioned about Philby, apparently the only time in all their interviews that he lost his temper.4 Philby’s memoir My Silent War had appeared with an affectionate foreword from Greene, who played down Philby’s treason. To the charge that Philby had betrayed his country, Greene answered, ‘Yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?’ Though Greene was not blind to Communism’s faults, he nevertheless seemed to favour the East over the West. ‘If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States of America, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union,’ he had written in a letter published in The Times in 1967.5

  In his review, Greene mocked the fact that the term ‘Establishment’ was used seventeen times in an introduction of fifteen pages. ‘It is true that the introduction is written by someone who calls himself John le Carré,’ he continued, ‘… but there is no copyright in pen names, and I can hardly believe that these wild Phillips Oppenheim* speculations and the vulgar and untrue portrait of Philby at the end are by the distinguished author of The Spy who Came in from the Cold.’6 This clash between the two spy novelists over Philby was itself the subject of an article in the American magazine Time.7