by Adam Sisman
Nineteen-sixty-eight was a year of upheaval, when the hopes of the Prague Spring were crushed by Soviet-led tank squadrons, when students fought running battles with policemen in the centre of Paris and when protests against the Vietnam War deeply divided the American public. The clashes in the streets, and the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, both leaders advocating peaceful change, suggested a disastrous spiral of revolution and counter-revolution. Some interpreted the events taking place across the world as a conflict between the generations. It was also a time of radical innovation in the arts, when existing conventions were subject to challenge. Perhaps this background helps to explain David’s blank-verse poem ‘The Night of the March’, published on the ‘Opinion’ page of the Telegraph Magazine in July of that year: though surely it has autobiographical origins also. Addressed to his father (the boss of a corporation) by a son who has died in some form of apocalypse, it is a remonstrance for his neglect. Indeed the son is a Christ-like figure:
Father, don’t weep I beg you
I can’t stand your tears …
I heard these hammers beating, driving in the nails …
… My vision
is a little indistinct
and my side is aching painfully …
Look, please don’t be upset
Because there is the age gap
We will very soon
Be cleared away.
Truly. What are three bodies in a town like this,
Two murderers and me?8
Around this time David wrote another blank-verse poem, entitled ‘It’s a Long Way Home, Dickie Ann’. This does not seem to have been published anywhere. Perhaps the most impressive attribute of this almost entirely incomprehensible poem is its length: thirty-six manuscript pages.* What it suggests is a restless creativity in David, seeking a new outlet.
It had been frustrating for Pick to see the Philby book, with David’s introduction, at the top of the British bestseller list in the early months of 1968. He had been hoping for another le Carré long before this – as had Jack Geoghegan. The Looking-Glass War had been published back in 1965. In January 1967, when Pick had spent a weekend with David, he had been led to believe that the next novel was imminent. ‘It is finished, but David needs another four to six weeks before letting me see it,’ Pick wrote confidently afterwards.9 But weeks passed, with nothing to see. ‘I must ask you to bear with me patiently a little longer,’ David wrote to Pick in mid-May. In the summer of 1967 he spent a fortnight with Pick and his family at their London flat,† working hard on the book. In the autumn he took his new secretary with him to California to try and make progress away from any distractions. But the novel remained unfinished. Several times he was close to abandoning it altogether.10
Geoghegan urgently wanted another le Carré bestseller. He had already told David that The Looking-Glass War was not the follow-up he had been looking for. In February 1967 he had hinted that ‘the next le Carré’ must be commercially a ‘big book’ so that a scheme to offer Coward-McCann shares to the public would be successful – a suggestion that David found ‘very unattractive’. His American lawyer, ‘Mort’ Leavy, warned they were in for a considerable struggle with Coward-McCann ‘on the financial side’. Geoghegan missed no opportunity to tell him that prices were going down.11
Eventually David took himself off to Germany in great secrecy, with a briefcase weighed down by hundreds of pages of handwritten manuscript, and worked in a hotel room overlooking the Rhine in Remagen, about a dozen miles upriver from Bonn. There, with the help of a ‘kind angel’, he at last succeeded in bringing the book to a completion. He entitled it A Small Town in Germany, an ironic reference to the anomalous status of Bonn as the Federal Republic’s capital.
David left for New York soon after delivering the typescript of A Small Town in Germany to Heinemann. ‘I am going away at once to write a book and come to terms with life,’ he wrote to Ann. He referred to ‘my great failure to find happiness’.12 It was implicit that he would not be coming back to Coxley. He had found sanctuary with his friend and former agent John Miller, who lived at Sancreed House, not far from Land’s End, a former Georgian vicarage surrounded by subtropical gardens. David took the top floor on a semi-permanent basis. ‘It was because of you that I came to Cornwall at the lowest point in my life,’ David would say in his funeral oration for Miller in 2002, ‘just as so many others came to you in their distress.’
At the time Miller and his companion Truscott were selling antiques; Miller, who would become a renowned and successful artist, was then just beginning to paint, selling his work in pubs for a fiver a time, while Truscott would become an accomplished potter and picture restorer. Miller’s beloved mother ‘Reni’ lived in the converted barn next door. It was a warm, welcoming set-up: a place where David could relax, work and bring his children and other guests, confident that they would be welcome. At the centre of this alternative extended family was Miller himself, a calm, benign presence, while Truscott cooked delicious meals and entertained them with sharp one-liners. Neither was especially camp, which was perhaps just as well, because David expressed dislike of ‘fairies’. But he felt comfortable in their company, and relaxed about addressing each of them as ‘lover’, a term of affection his male characters would use towards each other in the novel he was writing.
In the gardens at Sancreed were a number of wooden cabins that served as holiday homes. Most of those who came to stay were male couples. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 had decriminalised homosexual relations between adults, but nevertheless this remained a furtive, underground activity, tolerated but not altogether accepted. Sancreed House was a haven for homosexual men, a place where they could relax and be themselves, without having to hide. David observed some surprising visitors to the ‘fuck huts’ at Sancreed, including prominent married politicians and other famous figures accompanied by their boyfriends.
The break-up of a marriage is seldom tidy; typically it is a tangle of departures and returns, quarrels and reconciliations. The Cornwells’ was no exception. That summer he took a villa not far from Venice and invited Ann to join him there with the children, though his invitation seemed half-hearted: ‘we can put the world’s affairs to rights’.13 In any case she chose not to go. Afterwards he moved on to Paris, where he worked on a film treatment for his new novel. Again he suggested that Ann joined him there, and again she declined the invitation. She had been very upset to discover a love letter from a woman whom she knew; he tried to assure her that the liaison was ‘brief, worthless and forgotten’.14 In an undated letter she referred to the ‘extremely painful’ possibility of ‘hearing about fresh adulteries, possibly with other acquaintances’.
David’s letters at this time repeatedly stressed his concern for his children. He asked John Margetson to act as an intermediary with Ann. He hoped to live at Sancreed when he was in England, to visit the children at school and receive visits from them in the holidays. ‘I have no attachments outside the family,’ he wrote to Margetson. ‘I like to work in Sancreed, and have no intention of remarrying or getting closely involved with other women for a good time; I want to spend a bit of time each year abroad.’ David asked Ann to consider an arrangement that would allow him to return to Coxley for specific periods of the year, according to a predetermined and fairly strict routine. ‘I have had a lot of affairs whereas she has had none. I know that sustained affection/love is beyond me and I have chosen a fairly lonely road. But I also have conditions to make: that she sees her mother when I am not there; that she does not punish me and rebuke me because it is not a whole relationship …’15
In an attempt to understand why his marriage was failing, David had consulted a psychiatrist, to whom he sent a long document of self-analysis. He wrote that he did not think he was capable of ‘that total abdication of intellect which real passion, or love, may demand’; instead he was searching for ‘a relationship which is dignified, and liberates me for my work and protects me a litt
le at the raw points’. He admitted that he had found:
a mistress who might very well provide me with the happiness I speak of – and whom I in turn can please with my success, if it returns, and my talent, if it has not left; but she has the rare gift of not pressing me, and we have no particular plans. In the time we have been together – admittedly never long – I have been content, and have written a great deal. When this last book was in shreds, it was she who helped me piece it together and make something of it. I find her compassionate, understanding and remarkably intelligent.
This was (Valerie) Jane Eustace, the ‘kind angel’ in Remagen who had helped him bring A Small Town in Germany to completion. They had met at an otherwise dreary books event in Birmingham. The daughter of a dentist, she was then aged thirty (seven years younger than David), unattached, and living alone in a flat in Primrose Hill. A friend described her as ‘a pretty pink-and-white English rose who looked as though she had been raised in a vicarage’.16 For the past decade she had worked in publishing, first as secretary to the literary agent George Greenfield, and then in publicity for the publishers Hodder & Stoughton. After six months she had been promoted to become foreign rights manager. At her first Frankfurt Book Fair, a German publisher came to the Hodder stand asking for ‘Miss Eustace’ which he pronounced ‘Oystace’: a story that later amused David, and ‘Oysters’ became his nickname for her, often abbreviated to ‘Oy’, or sometimes just ‘O’. Modest and retiring, she nevertheless knew her own mind and could be forceful when required. ‘She carried out her duties with warmth and exemplary efficiency, and became well known in the publishing trade,’ wrote Greenfield.17 Though she was not, as she has often been mistakenly identified, an editor, she possessed qualities that would be very helpful to David: practical and organisational skills, combined with publishing savvy. Most important of all, she had an unshakeable faith in David’s writing, a faith that would sustain him through periods of self-doubt.
Jane understood that David’s work was sacred to him. If the truth had to be lived to be discovered – as it did for Faust – then live it, and pay the price. In Jane, David had found a helpmeet, a companion, who would support and encourage him in his writing for the rest of his days. She recognised from early in their life together that she would have to share him with other women. The restless, self-destructive search for love is part of his nature. It has led him into impulsive, driven, short-lived affairs; none of them has threatened the stability of his relationship with Jane. ‘I think we’re more monogamous than most couples,’ he told one guest. For him, she would always be his best friend, his wise counsel and his anchor through every storm.
David’s infidelities have created a duality and a tension that became a necessary drug for his writing, often brought about by deliberate incongruity. The secrecy involved and the risk of exposure have themselves been stimulating, bringing a dangerous edge to the routine of everyday existence. From an early stage in their relationship Jane has suffered David’s extramarital adventures, and tried to protect him from their consequences. Though it has not been easy for her, she has behaved with quiet dignity. ‘Nobody can have all of David,’ she said recently.
In October 1968 David received a letter from an unexpected source: Stanley Thompson, his old housemaster. Thompson had been prompted to write after hearing David take part in the long-running BBC radio programme Any Questions?, as one of a panel* answering questions from the public at Poole Technical College. David wrote back on Coxley notepaper. ‘I lead an odd life, partly here, partly in Paris, and partly in the States,’ he told Thompson. ‘It is mainly films which take me away so much, and a desire for change I suppose.’
I hated teaching at Eton, was deeply depressed by the Foreign Service, and still have my gloomy memories of Sherborne. Isn’t it odd? I suppose that after shaking off all those gruesome family ties, and then getting out of Sherborne, I have just been determined not to accept any institution at face value any more.
He mentioned the satisfaction he gained from writing. His was, he wrote, ‘a curious, godless, lonely life all the same, and still treading that arrogant moral search!’18
Heinemann’s edition of A Small Town in Germany was published on 28 October 1968. Ominous political developments in the Federal Republic suggested that the book might be prophetic in predicting a revival of the extreme right. In March the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party* had secured a markedly increased proportion of the votes in municipal elections; polls suggested that it might rise high enough in the forthcoming national elections to straddle the 5 per cent hurdle for parties aspiring to send delegates to the Bundestag. ‘To my mind this is the finest novel he has ever written,’ Heinemann’s editorial director Roland Gant wrote to Malcolm Muggeridge a week before it was published, ‘and it looks as if events in Germany are going to catch up with his fiction.’19 A German translation of the novel was rushed through. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted both le Carré’s ability ‘to observe and listen’ and his understanding of German political psychology, ‘particularly hurt pride’. The writer thought that it would only be possible to judge the accuracy of his vision of the near future in ten or twelve years’ time.20 Just before publication it was announced at a press conference in New York that film rights had been sold to Avco Embassy Pictures. David would be writing the screenplay.
Once again David had been dreading what the critics might say. In a letter to Vivian Green, he quoted his publishers as claiming that A Small Town in Germany was ‘my most ambitious book, whatever that means …’21 He had been demoralised by Heinemann’s offer of an advance against royalties of £22,000, which had fallen far short of his expectations.22
‘The book is, quite simply, too long,’ wrote the anonymous Times Literary Supplement reviewer.† ‘Like Greene (he must be sick of the comparison) he can be glib. But like Greene he has the right obsessions, and works on them with the right mixture of device and rawness.’23 Writing in The Times, the crime novelist H. R. F. Keating seemed to find the novel pretentious. ‘The whole structure is ridiculously undermined by one omnipresent vice. The writing is overpoweringly literary.’ Keating diagnosed that ‘Mr le Carré has too much time on his hands now that he no longer needs to work for his bread-and-butter.’24 Even Neal Ascherson, who as an Observer correspondent in Bonn had become friendly with David, thought A Small Town in Germany ‘overloaded’.25 On the other hand C. P. Snow, in an article for the Book of the Month Club, considered him to be ‘on the peak of his form’; he is, he wrote, ‘one of the most interesting writers alive’.26* The publisher Tom Rosenthal, reviewing the novel in the New Statesman, pronounced it to be ‘certainly at least a near masterpiece’ (a piece of curiously qualified hyperbole).27 And the English critic Richard Boston praised it in the New York Times as ‘an exciting, compulsively readable and brilliantly plotted novel’.28
A Small Town in Germany was far from being a commercial failure. By the end of the year Heinemann had sold more than 50,000 copies, plus a further 20,000 to a book club. In America, the book went straight into the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for twenty-eight weeks, reaching no. 2. Its net hardback sales in the USA would be 66,000, an improvement on the 59,000 sales of The Looking Glass War. But after the phenomenal success of The Spy who Came in from the Cold this seemed disappointing. Jack Geoghegan had taken to telephoning David late at night, often when he had been drinking. On one of these occasions he told David bluntly that he hadn’t ‘had the balls’ to follow up The Spy who came in from the Cold.
A few days after publication, David wrote to Charles Pick about the reviews:
I know you are terribly disappointed at the reception my book has received; deep down, you seem to be more depressed than I am. I know it is my best book by far, and I know what I have to do for the future. Equally, it is not a perfect book, and I am one of those writers whose imperfections are a great deal more interesting than their virtues. To be honest, I am even alarmed at how seriously the reviews affect you:
and by now The Times will have driven in the extra nail; it is an unanswerable charge, and therefore cheaply made, that I am too rich, too pretentious, too much all the rest. For critics, you must try and realise, I am simply too much altogether: too fluent, too young, and too capable. This is why, after ‘The Spy’, I recognised, as I believe you must, that personal publicity about me is very ill-advised … This is something Jack and I have learnt at great cost in the States: I am in an extremely equivocal position. A thriller-writer with pretensions? A novelist who hasn’t the guts to drop the thriller form? An FO smoothie doing his upper-class PR and [illegible] the Establishment he lampoons …
At the moment, this is the anti time.29
With some further financial help from his sons, Ronnie had returned from the East. While remaining an undischarged bankrupt, he resumed business as a ‘property and financial consultant’; and though now based in England, he continued to pursue interests overseas. He telephoned David from Zurich, reversing the charges.
‘Son, it’s your old man.’
‘What can I do for you, father?’
‘You can get me out of this damned jail, son. It’s all a misunderstanding. These boys just won’t look at the facts.’
Ronnie had been arrested for hotel fraud. ‘How much?’ David asked wearily. There was no answer, but a long pause, and then the gulp of a man fighting back tears. David found himself weeping too.
‘I can’t do any more prison, son.’