by Adam Sisman
Simms became the prototype for Jerry Westerby, second son of an ennobled press magnate, the eponymous ‘honourable schoolboy’ of the novel, with the same distinct gestures and mannerisms. Westerby’s grubby shirt, buckskin boots and old-school vocabulary (‘Gosh, super, Sport’) were instantly recognisable to anyone who knew Simms. Westerby had appeared briefly in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but without any of these distinct characteristics. In the new novel he would move centre stage, and in the process emerge as a complex, tragic character. At first he is an uncomplicated patriot, ready to do the bidding of his masters without question; but as the novel progresses he comes to recognise the human cost of the operation of which he is the spearhead. Finally Westerby, like Lord Jim, sacrifices himself to atone for the wrong he has unwittingly caused.
Simms had given David the name of H. D. S. (David) Greenway of the Washington Post, who had been reporting on the region out of Hong Kong for a number of years, as someone who might be able to ‘show him around a bit’. David would later acknowledge his gratitude to Greenway, and his ‘huge good luck’ in being able to slipstream behind him, ‘for he had a reporter’s courage, and a reporter’s canniness’.27 Greenway’s initial impression of David was of ‘a large, rather shy man with enormous eyebrows that gave him a rather quizzical air’. At their first meeting David was soft-spoken and polite; only later did the zany side of his personality emerge. ‘A master raconteur and a mimic, he turned out to be like a cooler Scaramouche, “born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad” ’* – highly desirable qualities if you wanted to spend any time trying to work in South-east Asia in those days. They agreed that David would travel with Greenway, posing as his photographer; to support this cover story he equipped himself with an SLR camera in a metal camera case. In due course his photographs began to appear in the Washington Post, credited to ‘Janet Leigh Carr’. Greenway’s foreign editor sent him a stuffy letter, rebuking him for travelling around South-east Asia with this unknown woman when he had a wife back at home.28
After a look round Hong Kong and Macao, the two men took a swing through Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Under his arm David carried an enormous bookkeeper’s ledger, in which he jotted down every mood and anecdote that caught his imagination. These jottings would then be typed up into notes, consisting of (as one member of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club remembered) ‘descriptions of terrain, jungle, villages, hot and bouncy journeys in local buses, character sketches of people he’d met, possible plot developments which could grow out of these travels – an impressive demonstration of why his books are set so firmly in their landscapes and carry such conviction’.29
David was willing to take risks that even most journalists would shirk. In Vientiane, capital of Laos, he choked on opium pipes in one of the city’s most sordid dens. In those days of uneasy cease-fire, Vientiane was a centre of intrigue, where American, Russian and Chinese diplomats circled round each other at cocktail receptions. David was entertained to dinner by the British Ambassador, Alan Davidson, known for his serious interest in food;* on the menu that evening was a local speciality, pa beuk, a giant catfish found only in the Mekong.
From Vientiane Greenway planned to spend a few days driving around northern Thailand, one of the poorest regions of the country, the scene of a low-level Communist insurgency. They would be escorted by the local Washington Post stringer, a young man called John Burgess. Crossing the Mekong on a small wooden ferry, they arrived at an immigration post on the far bank, at the top of some steep steps. From there they were pedalled on tuk-tuks to a waiting car. Their first stop was a village that had been largely burned down by the Thai army in January in the belief that it was harbouring insurgents. It was eerily quiet. Wandering through the charred stilts and twisted corrugated roofing, they came across a farmer searching through the wreckage of a house. Later Burgess took them to another village, known as a centre of insurgent operations. They drove in from the east, passing roadblocks and covering stretches of deserted and very dusty road. Burgess took them to meet the local commander, an American-trained colonel from Thai Special Forces. The taciturn colonel received his guests dressed in fatigues, his house protected by sandbags and armed guards. Burgess noticed some spy novels, in English, on a shelf: thinking this might break through their host’s reserve, he was on the point of revealing the identity of his English companion when he became aware that David was silently signalling him not to do so. The interview with the Thai colonel would provide another scene in David’s novel.
Throughout the trip Burgess occupied the front seat of the car, while the two older men sat behind. He remembers the atmosphere as relaxed and friendly, with plenty of jokes coming from the back. It impressed him that David was willing to mix with the local people and eat at roadside stalls, unlike some visitors from the West.
Back in England, David wrote to Vivian Green that his six weeks’ tour of Asia had been ‘fascinating and stimulating’.30 Within a month or so he was back there. For a while he based himself in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, exploring the illicit growing and refining of opium poppies in the ‘Golden Triangle’, the mountainous area that spans the highlands of Thailand, Burma (Myanmar) and Laos. Much of this trade was controlled by armed rebels fighting against the Burmese government. Through the offices of one branch of the Shan State Army David succeeded in getting himself escorted along its supply line into the heart of the opium-growing area. For this privilege he was obliged to make a contribution of $1,000 to their fighting fund. He also found it prudent to make a donation to the remnants of the Kuomintang (Chinese nationalist) army, which supplied the bodyguards for the opium caravans.*
In Vientiane David made contact with an ex-Air America (CIA) pilot, who was running heroin and diamonds into Cambodia. For a contribution of $500 he allowed David to fly with him as far as Pailin in north-western Cambodia, near the Thai border. In another plane David then accompanied the merchandise on the short hop to the regional capital of Battambang. From there he took another flight across Communist-controlled territory to Phnom Penh, flying with the grandly named Royal Air Lao, in a rackety DC-8. As David would subsequently try to explain to his accountant, Royal Air Lao operated on an informal basis, issuing neither tickets nor receipts.31
By this time Cambodia was an archipelago. The Khmer Rouge held the countryside, while the government, with American support, clung to the towns. Phnom Penh itself was ringed by Khmer Rouge forces, in a radius of three to six miles from the centre. There were nightly artillery bombardments and incoming rockets. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from the countryside had sought safety in the city, with more arriving all the time as the defence perimeter steadily collapsed. These people were helpless and desperate, with little food, shelter or medical care. Their condition worsened as Khmer Rouge forces gradually gained control of the banks of the Mekong. From the riverbanks, their mines and gunfire deterred the river convoys from bringing relief supplies of food, fuel and ammunition to the slowly starving city. Many of the foreign residents had left, fearing the worst.* The wealthier journalists stayed mostly at one big old hotel with gardens and a swimming pool. David took shelter with an old friend from his Bonn days, Baron Walther von Marschall, now the most senior of the few diplomats remaining in the city, whose residence was only a hundred yards from the Presidential palace. One night the artillery was especially loud, and von Marschall became concerned for the safety of his guest. He knocked at David’s door and suggested that they move to a cellar, where they would have some protection from the incoming fire. The disadvantage was that they would have to sleep in armchairs. Weighing danger against discomfort, David chose to remain in bed. They discovered the next morning that it had been outgoing fire anyway.
On another evening, over a stylish dinner at von Marschall’s house, served to the clatter of machine-gun fire, David met a Frenchwoman in her mid-thirties, whose small stature belied her toughness and energy. This was Yvette Pierpaoli, whom he would describe as ‘by tur
ns vulnerable and raucous, and enormously empathetic’. David was fascinated by her:
She had all the wiles. She could spread her elbows and upbraid you like a bargee. She could tip you a smile to melt your heart, cajole, flatter, and win you in any way you needed to be won.
But it was all for a cause. And the cause, you quickly learned, was an absolutely non-negotiable, visceral requirement in her to get food and money to the starving, medicines to the sick, shelter for the homeless, papers for the stateless, and, just generally, in the most secular, muscular, business-like, down-to-earth way you could imagine, perform miracles. This did not in any way prevent her from being a resourceful and frequently shameless businesswoman, particularly when she was pitched against people whose cash, in her unshakable opinion, would be better in the pockets of the needy.
Pierpaoli and her companion Kurt ran a trading company called Suisindo, which owned a couple of clapped-out, twin-engined cargo planes, used to fly supplies into places cut off by road or rail. (David would depict a similar partnership in the novel he was writing, between the bush pilot Tony Ricardo and his girlfriend Lizzie Worthington.) With Pierpaoli, David flew the delivery round of the besieged towns of Cambodia, each one swelled with refugees from the countryside. ‘Mme Yvette’ was greeted everywhere as a patron saint, the adoptive mother of delighted children, the quiet friend of the bereaved, the bringer of hope and courage, as well as of the necessities of life.
Members of the local press corps reckoned that flying in such planes was more dangerous than playing Russian roulette, especially as the Chinese pilots appeared to be high on opium most of the time. David remembered returning to Phnom Penh at night, to land on a bomb-pitted, unlit runway ‘while the city winced with gunfire’.
I was never quite sure what we carried on that plane, and I don’t think Yvette knew, either. But I know that while the plane was slaloming between craters, and I was praying to whatever divinity came fleetingly to mind, Yvette was laughing like a child at a fireworks party.
She and David became intimate friends, and would remain so. ‘Over time he has become part of me,’ she would write in her autobiography, published almost twenty years later. In due course she would become a friend of Jane’s as well as his, and visited them more than once in Cornwall, though never, to her disappointment, during an Atlantic storm. She would write or telephone the Cornwells from outlandish places, preferably with outlandish news, at all hours of the day or night, confident that they would be happy to hear from her, which they always were. ‘Dearest Jane and David,’ she would write, twenty years later, ‘I wanted to tell you that you are the most precious companions of my life, even if we don’t see each other much.’32 After the fall of the Western-backed regimes in South-east Asia, she returned to France, but continued to devote her formidable energy to helping the world’s wretched, particularly the women and most of all the children, in Guatemala and Bolivia, in Mali and Niger, in Burma and Bangladesh. In 1992 she published her autobiography, Femme aux Mille Enfants; while writing it she had kept faxing passages to David, impatiently expecting his immediate comment. She was a profound influence on him, his ‘constant muse’. He was touched by her courage and her commitment, and delighted by her vitality and flirtatiousness. After her death he would write that she, ‘like almost no one else, had opened my eyes to constructive compassion, to putting your money and your life where your heart was’.33
In Phnom Penh David again linked up with David Greenway. The pair of them decided to go and find the fighting. It was the habit of journalists during that time to hire taxis to drive them out into the countryside, at a rate rising according to the distance travelled and the hazards they might endure on the way. It was dangerous to venture out of the towns; more than thirty journalists lost their lives in this way, but it was a risk most judged acceptable. The fight for Cambodia then was a fight for the roads. The Khmer Rouge would block them and the government would send out troops to open them again. Reporters covered the war by ‘running the roads’: by following the government soldiers in their armoured personnel carriers, they would sometimes run into a firefight. The rule was that you turned back if you didn’t see any traffic coming the other way, because that meant the Khmer Rouge was somewhere up ahead.
Yvette Pierpaoli resolved to come with them. She had heard of a woman capable of amazing predictions who lived in a Khmer village a few miles into the jungle. Greenway was less than keen, and David was too ignorant to know whether to be keen or not, but ‘when Yvette was determined to have her way there wasn’t much you could do about it’. As the only Khmer speaker, she gave the driver instructions. What happened on that drive would appear in the novel – ‘not just the way it was’, Greenway recalled, ‘but with the drama heightened to show the pointlessness and, in the end, the hopelessness of all that was happening in Cambodia’.
In a tribute to Yvette Pierpaoli after her death a quarter of a century later, David would recall an incident on that drive:
We drove for an age. The road was a dead-straight canyon cut through mile-high teak trees. Tropical rain was falling in sheets. Through the teeming windscreen, we saw a sinister brown lorry roll out of the jungle in front of us. It stopped, blocking our way. Two boys with guns dismounted, inspected us, and returned to the lorry, which rolled back to let us pass. We were not the quarry they were waiting for. Abandoning our search, we returned to Phnom Penh. I was still shaking when we reached the hotel, and even Greenway looked a little sallow. But Yvette was in a state of grace. She had touched the high mark. She had lived another day.34
Greenway’s recollection is different. He remembers ‘passing a truck’, but not being looked over by boys with guns. He is certain that, had they been stopped, they would have been killed. Nor, according to him, were they ever close to any fighting during that drive. Perhaps, then, in recalling what happened on that day, David was recalling his own fictional recreation of the incident, rather than what really happened.
Later Greenway was present at a dinner when David related one of their adventures together. After the meal was over, he took David aside. ‘That wasn’t the way it happened,’ he said.
‘Your job is to get things right,’ David replied; ‘mine is to turn them into good stories.’
The two men returned to Vientiane, before taking the ferry across the Mekong to catch the overnight train back to Bangkok. As they queued for tickets, they pondered the choice of travel: third class, on slatted wooden seats, among saffron-robed monks sitting cross-legged eating rice out of lotus leaves, Thai soldiers drinking beer, and the odd scruffy young Westerner; or first-class, in a modern sleeping-car with beds and air-conditioning. Greenway recalls telling David that if they went third class, he would get a real feel for South-east Asia, even if they had to sit up all night. It was David who suggested that they should travel first class. ‘Let Jerry go third class and tell us about it later.’
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was about to be published. David had asked Greenway to look through the segments set in Hong Kong. Early in the novel Ricki Tarr describes to Smiley his anxiety after Irina has failed to appear at a rendezvous: on a hunch he had decided to go down to the airport. The airport was then in Kowloon, across the water from Hong Kong Island. ‘I took the Star Ferry, hired a cab, and told the driver to go like hell. It got like a panic,’ Tarr tells Smiley.
‘Does this novel take place in the present?’ asked Greenway.
‘Yes, why?’
‘So if he’s so anxious to get to the airport quickly, why doesn’t he just jump in a cab and go through the tunnel?’ The Cross-Harbour Tunnel linking Hong Kong Island to Kowloon had been opened in 1972.*
‘Oh God!’
As soon as they reached Bangkok, David contacted his publishers: though the American edition had already gone to press, it was not too late to change the passage in the British edition.
He found a pile of telegrams waiting for him in Bangkok, with encouraging updates on the prospects for the novel. After the batt
ering that The Naïve and Sentimental Lover had received, such news was especially welcome. Still grubby and frayed from the rigours of their tour, he promptly checked into the Somerset Maugham Suite of the Oriental Hotel and ordered up bottles of champagne. The suite overlooked the swimming pool; afterwards Greenway could recall a serious discussion between the two of them, of the ballistics and trajectory necessary to bombard the German stewardesses lounging by the pool in their bikinis with corks from well-shaken bottles of Mumm.35
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was published in America a few weeks before it appeared in Britain. This was partly for complex reasons to do with book clubs, but it was also a reflection of economic realities. ‘When I publish a book, the English reaction, apart from personal pride and so on, is absolutely secondary to the American reaction, the German reaction and even the French,’ David told an interviewer. ‘The French market is probably more important to me financially than the English one.’36