by Adam Sisman
Some months later David was in New York, staying at the Plaza Hotel, when he learned that Susan was in town. He telephoned her and they arranged to meet. When she arrived at his hotel, she found him with Sydney Pollack. She chatted happily with Pollack until David became impatient and dragged her away. They spent that night together in his hotel room. Afterwards he relented and agreed to put money into her restaurant after all. He sent her a cheque for £3,000 with a note wishing her luck, to which he added a jokey postscript alluding to their night in New York – ‘the most expensive one since Liz Taylor in her prime!’*
At Susan’s request David provided a quote* for Kennaway’s posthumous novel The Cost of Living like This (1969), though afterwards he admitted that ‘of course’ he had not read the book. ‘I couldn’t possibly,’ he wrote to her. ‘I didn’t read the last one either. I haven’t changed that much!’41 Susan was keen to explore the possibility of publishing James’s letters and diaries, though to do so was potentially explosive, as they dealt in detail with his reactions to her affair with David. After consulting James’s agent, she wrote to David suggesting that they should meet for lunch to discuss the matter; she appears to have proposed that he might help edit the diaries. David replied that he did not want to ‘bury myself’ in them, because then ‘I shall be thrown completely for the book I’m now writing, and lose that very concentration which is my strength.’ He could only write without interruption or distraction.
I have lived and relived those ghastly scenes, and now they are pretty well asleep in me … I’ve a good idea what he has written about me, and for myself I simply don’t care …
It is like this for me: I feel a sentimental affection for you from old times. It simply doesn’t go beyond that – I haven’t a large register of emotion, some people are made like that, & I have made a fool of myself several times by playing in the league which I don’t belong to … I am weak, a sort of tart who pays, and the one thing I’m gradually learning is to keep to my own track. I have one ambition which makes me quite ruthless: I am going to get these books written, and I am not going to be walked over any more … I may say other things, think of other things for a few hours at a time, but the one bedrock of resolution is this: I am not in search of an ultimate in my life, but only in my work. I have that responsibility to an unfulfilled talent. There is nothing dishonourable to that – it’s simply a different scale of values from the one you’re used to. You say I’m for me, well, that’s another way of putting it. Who isn’t, at the end of the day?42
‘I think we should dissolve our marriage,’ David had written to Ann from Malibu. ‘I have played too many parts in the hope that I became one of them and now I must accept the pain of trying to live honestly.’ She was jealous of the fact that he would be able to take the boys on expensive holidays while she could not afford these; he protested against her plans to keep the children away from him. ‘You seem to see my father’s shadow everywhere: you seem to think that I’m going to fill them with champagne and urge women on them …’43 Their correspondence became increasingly strained. ‘Dear, dear Ann forgive me, I can’t go on and keep my dignity,’ David wrote a few months later, early in 1970. ‘I can’t, from moment to moment, face the life I lead and it is driving me to destruction. I am desperately, hopelessly sorry.’ After he had written to her from Wengen about the practical arrangements for a divorce, Ann reacted angrily. ‘You are surrounded by yes-men and have perhaps lost a little contact with reality.’44
David informed Vivian Green that he had left Ann. He had been putting off telling him as long as he could. ‘It’s all very sad and reprehensible but really I feel much better for my decision,’ he wrote. ‘It seemed to me that we had reached a very low point and that staying together was doing neither of us (nor the children) any good.’ He invited Green to come and stay at the chalet later in the summer, and explained that he might have a girlfriend staying. He was ‘wrestling with a book and dare not leave it for the time being’.45 Ten days later he wrote to Margetson to say that he was ‘now deep in a new novel which is going fast and quite well’.46 Around the same time he reported to Pick that he was ‘working very hard on the new novel. I put the thriller thing aside finally – it was just too brittle – and am working very happily on something more ambitious.’47
This was the story of Aldo Cassidy, a prosperous entrepreneur who lives a conventional married life until he becomes involved with Shamus and Helen, a bohemian couple, and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.
The novel is obviously autobiographical, a reworking of his involvement with the Kennaways. Shamus, a dissolute writer who constantly goads Cassidy to discard his inhibitions, is clearly based on James Kennaway; indeed his very name is Gaelic for James. Many of the scenes read like re-enactments: a riotous adventure in Paris; a catharsis in the snow-covered Alps, when Shamus offers Helen to Cassidy in a mock wedding; even a climax at the railway station. In many ways the novel is a love letter to his dead friend. Though Cassidy becomes involved sexually with Helen, his relations with Shamus – who calls him ‘lover’ throughout – seem much more vivid. At the end Cassidy withdraws. Though he is sent a copy of Shamus’s novel Three for the Road, he never reads it – just as David claimed never to have read Some Gorgeous Accident. ‘As to Shamus, with time Cassidy forgot him entirely,’ the book concludes. ‘For in this world, whatever there was left of it to inhabit, Aldo Cassidy dared not remember love.’
In retrospect, David felt that The Naïve and Sentimental Lover had more in common with the rest of his work than the critics acknowledged:
Aldo Cassidy, like Smiley, is a naïve Hamlet, constantly havering between institutional commitments and unattainable hopes. Like Smiley, or another character close to me later in my work, the luckless Magnus Pym of A Perfect Spy, Cassidy seems to invent inside his own head the dilemma from which he can never escape, since it is made up of the unfordable gulf between dream and reality.48
Like Some Gorgeous Accident, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover is very much a novel of the 1960s. It is packed with autobiographical elements – not least Cassidy’s father, an old monster like Ronnie. Cassidy himself is a motherless child, who finds difficulty in relating to women. His success – ‘the sudden wealth, the fame, the recognition of his talents’ – has led to ‘a deep and tragic change, a frightening loss of appetite for life’. It is hard not to believe that David felt at least some of this himself. ‘There’s no fun any more,’ says Cassidy. ‘Having money takes all the joy out of achievement.’
But Cassidy’s angst is undercut by self-parody throughout. Though most critics would fail to recognise it, the book is meant to be funny. ‘I wrote it as a sad comedy about the hopes and dreams of a middle-class, inhibited, senior management, public-school Englishman caught in a mid-life crisis at a moment in our social history when followers of the sexual revolution saw themselves locked in mortal combat with the slaves of convention,’ he would write later.49
Even the philosophical idea behind the book is subverted by being articulated by Helen, remembering what Shamus has told her.
Shamus had developed a theory, she said, which he had worked into his latest book. It was based on someone called Schiller who was a terrifically famous German dramatist actually but of course the English being so insular had never heard of him, and anyway Schiller had split the world in two.
‘It’s called being naïve,’ she said. ‘Or being sentimental. They’re sort of different kinds of thing, and they interact.’
Cassidy knew she was putting it very simply so that he could understand.
‘So which am I?’ he asked.
‘Well, Shamus is naïve,’ she replied cautiously, as if remembering a hard-learned lesson. ‘Because he lives life and doesn’t imitate it. Feeling is knowledge,’ she added rather tentatively.
‘So I’m the other thing.’
‘Yes. You’re sentimental. That means you long to be like Shamus. You’ve left the natural state behind and you’ve become … w
ell part of civilisation, sort of … corrupt.’50
Versions of Schiller’s dichotomy, a recurrent theme in German literature, had long interested David. ‘Thomas Mann was obsessed by the attraction/repulsion, mutually, of the artist and the citizen,’ he had written in one of his last, anguished letters to Kennaway, though typically he had lightened this with a joke: ‘I’ve bored you with this before …’51
David toyed with a variety of titles for the new novel before settling on The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. Some of these other titles were drawn from his own past, reflecting the autobiographical nature of the book. Among those he considered were ‘The Two-Stroke Lover’, ‘All My Life I Have Been Terrified of Ridicule’, ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’, ‘The Love Thief’ and ‘The Death of Christopher Robin’. The book would be dedicated ‘For John Miller and Michael Truscott, at Sancreed, with love’.
Early on, David had formed the habit (which continues to this day) of sending copies of the typescripts of his novels to people for comment. Those to whom he regularly sent typescripts tended to be friends whom he trusted, not necessarily those with any special literary qualifications; among them were John Margetson and Eddie Nowell. He sent the typescript of The Naïve and Sentimental Lover to his old friend Robin Cooke, who was slow to react, distracted by the demands of a young family and the business he had started with his wife Charlotte, the toy retailer Tridias. There had been some suggestion that David might put money into Tridias, to fund its expansion, but Hale Crosse had discouraged the scheme. Another reason for his delay was that Cooke was offended by what he took to be thinly disguised references to Ann, and was hesitant about how to respond. When David telephoned for the second or third time to ask what he thought of the novel, he was unsparing in his criticism. ‘I think I’ve hurt David,’ he told Charlotte after the telephone conversation ended. Some while later he received ’a ‘letter of dismissal’ from David, terminating their friendship.
It had been clear for some time that the arrangements for David’s representation were not working satisfactorily. Though Hale Crosse was competent to handle the most important negotiations, he had neither the time nor the expertise to deal with the multitude of lesser matters which arose day to day. An author of the stature of John le Carré, published in numerous different editions around the world and constantly in demand to write short pieces and give interviews, needed a first-class agent who would give concentrated attention to his affairs. David was discontented with the service provided by Watt’s successors in the agency, particularly in his foreign markets.52 One minor grievance lodged in his memory. During a period when he was living in Paris, one of the agents had proposed coming over to see him. David had booked a table at Laserre, a gastronomic restaurant in the huitième frequented by artists and film stars. When the bill came, it was very large. ‘I’m terribly sorry, I can’t pay for this,’ said the agent, with obvious embarrassment. David had no option but to settle the bill.
David’s German agent, Rainer Heumann, could not have been more different. ‘He was generous without limit,’ David would say at his memorial service in 1996; ‘it took me years of tough negotiation to buy Rainer my first meal.’ When David first visited him in Zurich, where his agency, Mohrbooks, was based, Heumann had taken him to dinner at the Kronenhalle, one of the finest restaurants in the city. David found him to be excellent company, a man of great warmth and sophistication, an Anglophile who dressed beautifully and enjoyed the good things of life, without being possessed by them. Afterwards David had remarked that ‘Rainer was the kind of man with whom one could steal horses’ – a German expression, meaning a dependable ally.
Heumann’s life story fascinated David. He had been born in Saxony, in the city of Chemnitz (known since 1953 as Karl-Marx-Stadt), into a cultured family, and had been raised in a household surrounded by books and paintings. His father, who had a fine collection of German Romanticist art, would be killed trying to rescue his treasures during an Allied bombing raid. As the product of what the Nazis would call a ‘mixed marriage’, his father a Jew and his mother a gentile, Heumann had been denied higher education, and instead had accepted an apprenticeship in a factory in Munich: there he had been briefly imprisoned for distributing poems by Erich Kästner, whose books had been burned by the Nazis. Being a half-Jew in Nazi Germany, Heumann was living on borrowed time; in 1944 he had been deported to a forced-labour camp in the Harz mountains, from which he had escaped and gone into hiding until the Americans arrived. In the months following liberation he had made repeated crossings into the Russian zone, risking both his freedom and safety, to bring the surviving members of his family back to the West, together with his father’s precious art collection.53
‘Rainer spoke to the middle European in me,’ David would say. ‘I knew who he was and I understood his enthusiasms and his endearing determination to be a gentleman – his passion for beautiful English cars and his interest in people and in the world at large.’ The two men became intimate friends. ‘I loved him & looked up to him as my elder brother at least, and always as the most wise and honourable and stylish friend,’ David would write to Heumann’s son Andreas after his death in 1996.54 ‘We spoke about everything in our lives,’ Heumann would say of their friendship. ‘I think those two guys are gay,’ Heumann’s second wife Inge once remarked half seriously, perhaps a little jealous of their closeness.
Heumann became David’s primary agent throughout the world. The decision to ask Heumann to handle his business affairs was founded on friendship and trust, but it also reflected the increasing significance to David of the German market. The fact that his books often had German subjects, his fluency in the German language and his strong feeling for German culture combined to make him one of the biggest-selling foreign authors to be published there. His most recent novel, A Small Town in Germany, had of course been especially topical to German readers.
But though Heumann became David’s lead agent, he still needed an English-language representative. Jane’s former boss George Greenfield was a shrewd, foxy operator, with a mischievous streak. ‘There were as many Georges as he had books inside his head,’ David would write after Greenfield’s death in 2000:
The raffish exterior, the beastly little brown cigars, the David Nivenish urbanity, concealed a multitude of identities and a silent credo. There was the secret sceptic who was never surprised by human foible. There was the Cambridge double first and Leavis disciple who liked to keep his intellectual gifts out of sight until he saw the whites of his adversaries’ eyes. There was the imperturbable officer and gentleman who would have you think that he had pottered his way across the Western Desert complaining about the people and the noise. And there was another man – though he very seldom declared himself – who too often felt that he had risked his life and lost good friends for values he could no longer see around him … At 25 he knew more about the world than most men of 50, and it gave him an edge on people a few years younger than himself. If you had served as a peacetime soldier, as I had, George was your senior captain with a bunch of campaign medals across his chest.55
As Greenfield sold more books to Hodder & Stoughton than to any other publisher, it was natural for him to keep in touch with Jane Eustace after she had left the agency to work there. They occasionally lunched together, and once or twice she had invited him to make up the numbers at her dinner parties. But Jane had kept her relationship with David secret, so he was surprised when he arrived at her flat one Friday evening to find David present. Greenfield had been introduced to him before, at a publishing party for Jack Geoghegan, and he would have recognised him anyway from press photographs. The three of them passed a relaxed evening at an Italian restaurant. The following week David telephoned Greenfield at his office to propose that the three of them meet again, this time for lunch. After a long and convivial meal, washed down with three bottles of good wine and several glasses of malt whisky, David asked Greenfield whether he would be interested in becoming his agent. For a moment Greenfield wonder
ed if it was the wine talking; but once he realised that David was serious, he readily accepted the offer.56 Soon afterwards Jane resigned from Hodder and was taken on to the books of le Carré Productions, initially as a secretary, later as an editorial assistant. Subsequently Georges Borchardt was appointed David’s representative in America.
Since becoming his British publisher in 1964 Charles Pick had become friendly with David. Their relationship had widened to embrace the two families; David enjoyed the company of Pick’s children, both in their early twenties, while the Picks were happy to entertain David’s eldest son Simon on half-holidays. David would sometimes stay in their Knightsbridge flat; he liked to work there because it was empty during the day, and quiet. Pick had learned that it was pointless to press David to deliver a book until he was ready to do so; he had become accustomed to periods of silence while David was immersed in writing. In April 1970 Pick received a note from Sancreed House: ‘a voice from the wilderness to say that I am writing happily …’57 In another letter two months later David was writing ‘with subdued excitement’, and said that he hoped ‘to have something for you not too long away’. In the same letter he explained that he had separated finally from Ann.58 ‘My dear David,’ Pick replied, ‘I am sorry this has happened but I do so understand how you are feeling.’ Several times over the past year he had been tempted to get in touch, he continued, ‘but I felt that you knew I was here and if I could be any help, you would always call on me.’ He offered to come out to Wengen to read the book when it was ready.59
Pick had no reason to think that anything was amiss. It was with a shock, therefore, that he received a letter from David that November terminating their professional relations:
This is a very sad and difficult letter for me to write. I think it is time that I had a change of publisher. I have reached a moment in my writing career where, for good or ill, I have taken leave of the type of book that has made my reputation, and as never before I need to have absolute confidence in the way the transition is handled. In the last two months, as the book neared completion, I found myself worrying more and more about whether I was really suited – in this new role – to the house of Heinemann. The last two books, it seemed to me, had found no real acceptance outside the framework of ‘The Spy’ – I even remember your telling me in Paris that had you known me better you would have perhaps dissuaded me from publishing The Looking-Glass War at all. Just what it is that I fear for the new book I don’t know; perhaps that very commercialisation which is also the admirable strength of Heinemann …