by Adam Sisman
But he remained resilient: bruised, but still standing. And he refused to succumb to resentment. ‘I love it all far too much to let them fuck it up for me,’ he wrote of his critics, in a letter of advice to a young novelist.1 In his next novel he would return to the genre in which he had made his name, the spy thriller. It would prove to be one of his most accomplished performances to date.
No doubt it helped that his personal life had stabilised. Jane’s unwavering belief in his work bolstered him. They were now settled at Tregiffian, spending holidays at the Wengen chalet. He sold the penthouse, using her flat in Primrose Hill when they came to London. In 1971 he had divorced Ann; on 2 May 1972 he and Jane were married in a private ceremony, with only John Miller and Michael Truscott present as witnesses. (The four of them spent their honeymoon together at the Budock Vean Hotel on the Helford River, playing a four of ping-pong before retiring for the night.) He gave up smoking, having realised after almost twenty years that he didn’t enjoy it. On advice from his accountant, he bought ‘a filthy great Rolls’: perhaps not the ideal car for negotiating the narrow lanes and bumpy tracks of West Cornwall.* Six months later Jane gave birth to a boy, whom they named Nicholas, and asked Truscott to act as his godfather. That same year Ann married Roger Martin, a diplomat whom she had met through the Margetsons. A little later she too gave birth to a son, whom they named Adam. She and David continued to meet from time to time, and talked regularly on the telephone. He sent her copies of his typescripts for comment. In due course Ann and Roger would come to stay at Tregiffian, and David and Jane would visit them at Coxley. If there was such a thing as a civilised divorce, they had achieved it.
The three children of his first marriage were welcome at Tregiffian, where Jane worked hard to make them feel at home. Perhaps the greatest tribute of all was that David put aside his writing while they were there. Simon remembers terrifying games of tennis with him on the local courts. At David’s instigation John Miller came over and taught Simon and Stephen to paint. All three boys were now boarding at Westminster. Simon had won a scholarship, though David insisted on returning the scholarship money to the school. In 1976, Simon would go up to Oxford, to read physics at Wadham, switching after his first year to French and German, the same languages that his father had studied at Oxford twenty years earlier. In due course the youngest of the three brothers, Timothy, would follow him to Oxford; earlier the middle brother, Stephen, had taken a degree in photography, film and television at the London College of Printing.
In 1974 the Cornwells bought a Georgian house in Islington. One of David’s motives was to provide a base for his sons from his first marriage. Ann and her husband were soon posted abroad, so it was no longer practical for the boys to spend weekends and other short breaks with their mother. Though pretty, the Islington house was small, and in 1977 the Cornwells would move again, to a larger house in Hampstead, close to the Heath.
Jane provided practical as well as moral support. She acted as David’s gatekeeper, protecting him from the outside world by screening telephone calls and dealing with routine business herself, which of course her background in publishing equipped her to do. He developed a disciplined routine for writing, which has persisted, largely unchanged, to this day, though the development of word-processing has made Jane’s typing less laborious. As before, he writes in longhand, often scribbling fragments of text on scraps of paper (sometimes headed paper), which Jane types up; he then cuts these into strips and arranges them as he wants by stapling them on to a fresh sheet, with handwritten interpolations, which Jane retypes into a fair copy. This process is repeated several times through a succession of drafts, often half a dozen and sometimes considerably more. One of the most impressive aspects of his work is his willingness to jettison dozens and even hundreds of pages if he thinks them unsatisfactory, and to keep revising for month after month until he reaches a text with which he feels content.
David is at his best in the morning. He rises early,* working through until lunchtime. In the afternoon he sets out on a walk on the Heath or along the cliff-top paths, carrying a notepad to jot down sentences as they occur to him. These are often snatches of dialogue, which he perfects by speaking them aloud; in Cornwall, locals have become used to hearing him apparently talking to himself in a variety of accents, and have learned not to interrupt him as he passes. Back at the house, he pours himself a Scotch, takes a look at what his wife has typed out and fiddles with it further. When he is working he retires early, at eight-thirty or so. He tries to go to bed while there is still something unresolved, so that he knows roughly, though not exactly, where to start the next morning; and sleeping on the problem always seems to deliver the answer. He has learned to respect the ‘black’ days, because they are usually an indication that something is wrong which he hasn’t yet recognised.
Usually he starts a novel without knowing how it will develop, though like a film director he often has a vision of what the audience will see at the end, the last image in their minds as they emerge from the cinema. By allowing the story to advance spontaneously, in unexpected and unpredictable directions, David hopes to feel the same nervousness and excitement as the reader at the twists and turns of the plot. At each stage he aims to live the part of his characters like an actor preparing for a scene, trying to evoke internally the tension that he or she might feel at that particular moment. ‘When I write as an Ingush, I try to be an Ingush,’ he wrote to a reader who asked whether he shared the anti-Russian prejudice expressed by one of his characters.2
David likes to begin a book with at least one strong character in conflict with something or somebody. ‘ “The cat sat on the mat” is not the beginning of a story,’ he often says, ‘but “the cat sat on the dog’s mat” is.’ His characters are often torn between loyalty to individuals and loyalty to institutions. He writes far more than he can use, particularly about the minor characters, with the result that he has to cut much of what he has written to keep them in scale. But this effort is not wasted because he sweeps up the discards – which he calls ‘industrial waste’ – to use again in future books. ‘I promise them a treat in the next book,’ he told one interviewer, ‘if they’ll just keep quiet now.’3
David collects characters, whom he stores for future use. ‘They mature in the bottle, sometimes for decades,’ he would tell an interviewer in 2008. For instance, there was an old man he met in St John’s Wood, seated on a bench with a week’s shopping at his feet, weeping. When David asked him why, he replied that his wife’s scolding had become unbearable to him and he couldn’t find the courage to go home. He has tried to fit the old man into one of his novels, but has yet to find a place for him.4
When a novel is going well, he writes fast; it is not unusual for him to write a chapter in a day. The first hundred pages, and the first chapter in particular, always take much longer than the remainder. If a novel curdles in the middle, it’s the first chapter that he returns to. He likes to come into the story as late as possible; the later the reader joins the story, the more quickly he or she is drawn in. But beginning late requires a lot of retrospection, which creates its own problems.5
David is not one of those writers who telephones his editor at two in the morning to say that he’s going through a crisis and about to slit his wrists. ‘I don’t want to see my publishers, editors or anybody until I’ve produced my baby,’ he says. This ensures that, when they do read his book, they will respond like ordinary readers, without any prior knowledge of its content. Even if he is struggling to make his story work, he will never seek help, but always continues until he has resolved the problem somehow himself.6 The exception to this rule is Jane. When he is writing a novel, they ‘talk book’ at every opportunity. She still types his drafts, and then they work through them together. She is reluctant to criticise what he has written, though he knows how to read her responses. He speaks wryly of Jane’s ‘hairy eyebrow’ rising in mute disapproval; but that is the full reach of her influence.
As
soon as the editing process is finished he likes to get the next one under way as quickly as possible, so that he is undaunted by the pessimism of publishers or negative reviews. He tends to start his novels in London, and then continue in Cornwall. For a while he kept a flat in London where he went to write, whose whereabouts he kept secret so that he could not be disturbed there, first in St John’s Wood and then nearer at hand, in Hampstead High Street.
David is a professional, who expects that same professionalism from his publishers and representatives. His attitude is encapsulated in a letter from Jane to a new publisher, written in the 1990s:
His standards for himself, and for everybody around him, are the highest.
He was Foreign Office trained and wants the world to function at that level.
He is meticulous about everything; he hates to be late; he hates inaccuracy; he double checks everything; he follows up everything; he has fallbacks if things should, in spite of everybody’s efforts, go wrong.7
For David, writing has been both a vent for the unrest within him and a source of misery. It has provided him with fulfilment and frustration. It is often a way for him to bring himself up again out of depression. He recognises that he is obsessive about his work, that it is a kind of ‘joint madness’ into which he has drawn Jane. Spells of over-excitement about what he has written have been followed by periods when none of it has pleased him.
David’s new book was planned as the first in a sequence of interlinked novels. He talked of seven, or even more: perhaps as many as ten or fifteen.8 The overall theme would be the struggle between the Circus and the KGB, in particular the contest between George Smiley and Karla, the mysterious and apparently all-powerful head of the ‘Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre’. The ‘Thirteenth Directorate’ was an imaginary body, though ‘Moscow Centre’ was real slang used by KGB agents themselves.
For David, the actions of the intelligence services revealed the true, hidden nature of the state they represented. The Circus was England in miniature, looking back with nostalgia and contemplating the future with foreboding. Smiley’s generation of senior officers, now approaching retirement, had been among England’s most gallant knights in the crusade against Nazism; their reward had been to see their country reduced to the status of a second-class power, humiliatingly subservient to America. ‘Poor loves,’ laments a drunken Connie Sachs, the Circus’s dismissed head of research. ‘Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye world.’ She is nostalgic for a golden past, of the exploits of courageous young men; she does not want to hear that one of them might have betrayed his country. ‘I want to remember you all as you were. Lovely, lovely boys.’
Taken as a whole, therefore, the sequence of novels provided an opportunity to train a light not just on the secret state but on the state itself, in its painful attempt to come to terms with its post-imperial role. This was a scheme that went far beyond the limits of the genre, on the scale of similarly ambitious projects in post-war fiction by such ‘literary’ writers as Paul Scott, Anthony Powell and C. P. Snow.9 Once again David’s inspiration was Balzac. ‘I had originally intended to do an espionage Comédie humaine of the Smiley–Karla stand-off, and take it all over the world,’ he would tell an interviewer in 2002, ‘a kind of fool’s guide to the Cold War.’ This of course was a throwaway comment: his real aim was to examine the state of the nation, by exposing its secret underside.
It is revealed in the opening pages of the first novel that there is a Soviet ‘mole’ at the heart of British intelligence, controlled by Karla. ‘A mole is a deep penetration agent so called because he burrows deep into the fabric of Western imperialism,’ explains Irina, an unhappy Russian agent wanting to defect. The unidentified mole, code-named ‘Gerald’, is said to be ‘a high functionary in the Circus’.* This discovery presents the authorities with a dilemma. ‘We can’t move,’ laments the Minister’s adviser, Lacon:
We can’t investigate because all the instruments of enquiry are in the Circus’s hands, perhaps in Gerald’s. We can’t watch, or listen, or open mail … We can’t interrogate, we can’t take steps to limit a particular person’s access to delicate secrets. To do any of these things would be to run the risk of alarming the mole.
‘It’s the oldest question of all, George,’ Lacon says to Smiley: ‘Who can spy on the spies?’ The answer is of course Smiley himself, who has been sacked from the Service for suggesting that there was a traitor in their midst. He is called out of retirement to lead the mole-hunt.
In this first novel of the sequence, which would be published as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, David wanted to explore ‘the inside-out logic’ of a double-agent operation. He would show the mayhem that could be caused by such an agent in a strategic position within the intelligence services, as Philby had been. For all the startling revelations about Philby, Blake and others, few people fully understood what David called ‘the pushmepullyou nature of the double agent’s trade’:
For while on one side the secret traitor will be doing his damnedest to frustrate the efforts of his own service, on the other he will be building a successful career within it … The art of the game … is therefore a balancing act between what is good for the double agent in his role as loyal member of his service, and what is good for your own side in its unrelenting efforts to pervert that service, to the point where it is doing more harm to the country that employs it than good; or, as Smiley has it, where it has been pulled inside out.10
Instead of burying himself below ground, the mole Gerald has been hiding in plain sight, as controller of a supposed double agent within the enemy camp named Polyakov, source of the much prized ‘Witchcraft’ material. Gerald has persuaded his colleagues that he should provide Western secrets in exchange, supposedly so that Polyakov can maintain his cover by claiming to have access to an agent within the Circus. Thus Gerald is overtly playing the part of a double agent while secretly acting as one, and each side is supplying the other with secrets to keep up the pretence. ‘The only problem arises when it transpires that you’ve been handing Polyakov the crown jewels and getting Russian chicken-feed in return,’ says Smiley. In fact Smiley does not appear at all in the first draft of the novel. A letter to Vivian Green written more than two years later, after the book was finished, suggests why. ‘My demon American lawyer has at last liberated George Smiley from the lock of Paramount Pictures so that I was able to use him, and can do so in the future, without them owning anything …!’11
The evolution of the book through successive drafts demonstrates two of David’s qualities as a writer: his ability to develop and manage an exceptionally complex plot without a pre-planned scheme, and his commitment to rework what he has written over and over again until he achieves the result he wants. ‘Tinker, Tailor was the most difficult book I ever wrote,’ he would recall five years after it was published. He claims to have destroyed two versions of it in despair before he came up with one that he thought worked.12
As usual, David had begun with a character, in this case ‘a big, rugged fellow with a limp’, a schoolmaster colleague of his at Edgarley with some connection to MI5, who provided the outer shell for the character of Jim Prideaux, originally known as ‘Billy’.13 In the first draft Billy is living on a Cornish cliff, embittered and alone, discarded by the Service after he had been wounded in a disastrous operation behind enemy lines in Czechoslovakia. It is clear to him that he had walked into a trap, but he does not know who has betrayed him: as he eventually discovers, it was someone he loves. As the book opens he is holding a bucket in his hand, on his way to feed the chickens; he has paused to stare up at a black car weaving down the hillside towards him. This brings ‘Rod’ Tarr, the troubled Chief of the intelligence service known as ‘the Tank’, who suspects the existence of a mole within the organisation. Tarr is a closet homosexual, married to a ‘dragon’ wife; one of the early drafts opens with him picking up another man in a south London park. Billy is interrogated by Tarr in a saf
e house, just as in the finished version Tarr (now named Ricki) is questioned by Smiley.
David’s original plan had been for Tarr to put Billy back in harness, to provoke the traitor into trying his hand again, thereby revealing himself. The story would be narrated by Billy in the first person. David intended to tell the whole story in real time, without flashbacks, but found that he was painting himself into a corner: ‘I could think of no plausible way to pursue a linear path forward while at the same time peering back down the path that had brought my man to the point where the story began.’ After months of frustration, he took the manuscript out into the garden and burned it.14 Or so he says, though if he did this was a departure from his usual practice, which was to keep rejected drafts. Perhaps he burned a copy of the manuscript as a symbolic gesture, in the knowledge that another identical or similar copy had been preserved.
In what appears to be the second draft of the book, dated November 1971 and still told by Billy in the first person, he has relocated to Thursgood’s, a boys’ preparatory school in the West Country, where he is happily involved with Sal, the school’s assistant matron. Only in a later draft did he revert to being the gruff, damaged loner who inspires the devotion of the unhappy schoolboy Bill Roach. The published book opens and closes with these two, though the relations between them are irrelevant to the main narrative – a device which adds humanity and perspective to the whole story.