John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Another reason why David preferred his books to be published first in America was that he felt he was taken more seriously there. In this case the American reviews were generally positive, though not unequivocally so. The anonymous reviewer in the Wall Street Journal thought the novel ‘a stunning story’. The British critic Karl Miller described it as ‘very lively throughout’ in an otherwise lukewarm New York Review of Books piece.37 The New York Times reviewer, Richard Locke, provided the kind of quotes that help sell a thriller: ‘thoroughly enjoyable … the plot is as tangled and suspenseful as any action fan could require … keeps one guessing right to the end’. In an assessment of le Carré as a novelist, Locke condemned The Naïve and Sentimental Lover as ‘a pretentious romantic story about a businessman, a writer and the woman they share – an inept psychosexual portrait of the bourgeois and the bohemian soul’. For him, this had been ‘a book that failed with both critics and public’. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, on the other hand, was ‘a full recovery, which in many ways consolidates le Carré’s career’:

  It reconfirms the impression that le Carré belongs to the select company of such spy and detective story writers as Arthur Conan Doyle and Graham Greene in England and Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald in America … When le Carré tried for depth in his last novel, he failed; modernism and the ironies of the literary novels of the 1960s are beyond him; but when, as in this new book, he shows the surface of experience in that good old-fashioned way, he is thoroughly entertaining.38

  Reviewing the novel for the American magazine the New Leader, the critic Pearl K. Bell acknowledged that le Carré was more sophisticated than other thriller writers, but argued that ‘it is myopic and unjust to link le Carré with high art’; it was more appropriate to evaluate him as a ‘master craftsman of ingeniously plotted suspense, weaving astoundingly intricate fantasies of discovery, stealth, surprise, duplicity and final exposure’. David was moved to reply, even though he had ‘always thought it foolish to take up correspondence with critics’; he thanked her warmly for her piece, ‘which touched me, and gave me a sense of usefulness’. He accepted the description of his books as ‘ “historical” novels, as near as I can make them, but above all stories. I would not wish anything better. I creep around miserably when I read that I am Sartre, or Camus, or anti-Fleming, or whoever; I am sure I don’t want to be anything but what you so kindly say I am.’39

  There were mixed opinions of the book in Britain. The anonymous reviewer* in the Times Literary Supplement declared that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy showed the author to be ‘at the height to his powers’. The reviewer recounted how The Naïve and Sentimental Lover had been ‘vilified in a striking display of small-mindedness. Perhaps wounded by this reception, Mr le Carré in his new novel reverts to the world of British intelligence; he does so, however, in a wholly original manner.’40 Many of the other reviews were equally favourable. ‘The spinner of spy stories and the poet of fantasy have met to produce a spy story that shoulders its way into the front ranks of the art,’ wrote H. R. F. Keating in The Times.41 For the Spectator, this was ‘a great thriller, the best le Carré has written’;42 for the Financial Times, it showed le Carré to be ‘the great master of the spy story’. The young Timothy Mo, whose first novel The Monkey King would be published in 1978, was another enthusiast. ‘I find it difficult to be temperate in saying how much I enjoyed John le Carré’s new spy story,’ he wrote in the New Statesman.43 Though he had some reservations about the book and thought it ‘far too long’, the Observer’s critic Maurice Richardson nevertheless thought it ‘the best book Mr le Carré has written since “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” ’.44 But for Derek Mahon, writing in the Listener, the novel was ‘twice as long as it needed to be’.45 In the Sunday Times Edmund Crispin agreed that it was ‘lengthy and diffuse, far more than its essentially simple material might have dictated’.46 The Guardian’s reviewer, Matthew Coady, was especially damning. ‘Mr le Carré strives for what Graham Greene called the sharp touch of the icicle in the heart. He never achieves it.’47

  Whatever some of the critics might have said, the public liked the book. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy took le Carré back to the top of the US bestseller lists for the first time since The Spy who Came in from the Cold. It became a no. 1 bestseller in both the UK and the US, selling strongly for month after month, and was still in the bestseller list on both sides of the Atlantic almost a year after publication. Looking back at the novel sixteen years on from its first publication, David felt vindicated by its success. ‘It restored my spirits after the miserable critical reception given to its predecessor,’ he wrote. The effort and care that he had put into writing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy had paid off.

  * The ‘social baggage’ that came with driving a Rolls-Royce made him uncomfortable, and he soon got rid of it.

  * When he was younger he would often start work at four-thirty or five o’clock in the morning; nowadays eight o’clock is more typical.

  * Among the suspects for ‘Gerald’ in early drafts of the book are characters called Delaware, Greville, Zacharay and Swinburne. None of these appears in the final version.

  * Information provided by the defector, Michal Goleniewski, a colonel in Polish military intelligence, had led to the arrest of George Blake, and the rounding up of the Portland spy ring. Some of the intelligence he provided was much more questionable; like so many defectors, he may have embellished or even invented what he thought his interrogators wanted to hear in order to demonstrate his continuing worth. In public he claimed to be the Tsarevich Alexei, only son of Tsar Nicholas II, adopting the name Romanov while living in exile in New York.

  * There is a misleading account of this interrogation in Wright’s Spycatcher (pp. 320–5), which is inaccurate throughout.

  † The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World they Shaped (1975). Sampson’s next book would be The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed (1977).

  * In elaborating this story, David has Gottlieb grudgingly taking him to his local ‘diner’. Gottlieb insists this is an embellishment. ‘It wasn’t a diner, it was a perfectly respectable Indian restaurant.’

  * An ‘occasional’ in le Carré’s parlance.

  * Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution (1921).

  * Among his books was Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos (Charles E. Tuttle, Rutland, Vermont, 1975).

  * Troops from the Kuomintang army had invaded the Shan States of Burma in 1950, after the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war. Their progeny remain there to this day.

  * The city would fall to the Khmer Rouge the following spring, on 17 April 1975; less than a fortnight later Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese.

  * In The Honourable Schoolboy, Westerby breaks out of a car stuck in the tunnel and escapes by bounding though the stationary traffic towards the exit.

  * The names of most writers of unsigned TLS reviews have subsequently been revealed, but this one has not.

  17

  ‘You treated your father very badly’

  David began writing the novel that became known as The Honourable Schoolboy immediately after the publication of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It takes up the story where the last book left off. After the exposure of a Soviet mole at the highest level of British intelligence – ‘the fall’ in Circus parlance – Smiley takes ‘back bearings’ from intelligence that ‘Gerald’ had downgraded, distorted or suppressed, reasoning that this might uncover secrets that Karla did not want revealed. One of these is a ‘gold seam’, clandestine payments from Moscow that traced a tortuous route from one account to another. Smiley sends Westerby to Hong Kong, where he finds the end of the seam in the bank account of Drake Ko, a prominent if crude local businessman. This leads to the discovery that Ko’s beloved brother Nelson, one of the most important officials in Communist China, is a Soviet agent. Smiley launches Operation Dolphin, intended to secure the services of Nelson Ko for British intell
igence.

  Like its predecessor, the book went through numerous drafts, altering considerably in the process. Originally it was told in the first person by Steve Mackelvore, a character who had appeared briefly in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as head of the Paris SIS station. In the early drafts Mackelvore performs several of the actions undertaken by Westerby in the finished book, for example the ‘burning’ of the hapless Hong Kong banker Frost. Another character featuring in the early drafts and later omitted is Ailsa Brimley, who had played a substantial role in A Murder of Quality. She is one of several veterans whom Smiley brings back into the Circus following ‘the fall’. Smiley also co-opts Ribble, the junior Foreign Office official who had the temerity to question the ‘Witchcraft’ material in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, though he too is later dropped. Among the scenes that David wrote and then discarded is one in which Ko’s English mistress Lizzie Worthington comes to London and shops in Bond Street. The character of Lizzie – known by Ko as ‘Liese’ – was modelled on a German woman with a Chinese-Thai husband whom David met on one of his trips. He contemplated a Taiwanese dimension to the plot, and undertook a research trip to Taipei, though in the end he thought better of this.

  As always, David took great care with the details. For the meeting at the Foreign Office in which Smiley seeks authorisation to launch Operation Dolphin, he drew a diagram of the table to show where everyone present is seated. He had the usual difficulty in settling on a title: among those he considered were ‘Operation Limberlost’, ‘The Twelfth Direction’,* ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ (again), ‘The London Occasional’ and ‘A Spy for Reasons of Politeness’.

  Once again, Guillam is used to provide a perspective on Smiley, who is portrayed as both masterly in his handling of the operation and fatally innocent in his lack of political nous. The story is narrated as if in retrospect by a Circus insider, who at various points poses rhetorical questions, suggesting what might have been. One effect is to imply from the start that things are not going to end well. Operation Dolphin itself is a complete success; but the prize is snatched from Smiley at his moment of triumph. The novel provides the reader with a vivid impression of South-east Asia on the verge of collapse, in its last days before the Communist deluge.

  David made several further trips to the region while researching the background to the novel. In Saigon he re-read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which drew on Greene’s experiences in French Indochina as a war correspondent in the early 1950s. In his bookkeeper’s ledger David recorded that ‘Greene is my influence, not Hemingway. The difference between Greene and myself (and between our characters) is the weight of ignorance on my shoulders. G writes as someone who oversees his landscape, with an assured wisdom. I write without any knowledge of what lies on the other side of the mountain, let alone under it.’

  On returning to England in November 1974 he contacted Greene. ‘After our passage of arms over Philby a while back it is a little difficult for me to write to you,’ he began. ‘But I should hate you to think that the dispute either soured my gratitude to you ten years ago, nor [sic] – for what it’s worth – my admiration for your work.’

  I am moved to write by my visits to the Far East this year, and particularly to Indo China: The Quiet American which I re-read in Saigon seems to me still as fresh as it did nineteen years ago, and it is surely still the only novel, even now, which does justice to its theme. But the sheer accuracy of its mood and observation, is astonishing. The book seemed more real on location, even, than away from it; I was really very moved and felt I had to tell you. It is, of course, all quite hideous in Saigon. Phnom Penh is still beautiful, but not for much longer, and the rest of Cambodia is heart breaking.

  Greene replied that he had ‘never for a moment felt that our little passage of arms over Philby was a serious one’. He had been asked to return to Vietnam by the Sunday Times only a month before, but ‘felt a strong disinclination’.

  I had enjoyed so much – in so far as one can enjoy a war – life in Saigon and Hanoi and the beautiful countryside and I knew I would be made miserable by the present Saigon. It would be a great pleasure if one day you were down near Antibes and I could hear from you about Indo China. I wonder whether the bowler hat with an ostrich feather is still in the Royal Museum in Phnom Penh!

  In a further letter, David reported that the museum had closed after a rocket had fallen near by. ‘The new Saigon is absolutely unvisitable,’ he wrote, ‘the present regime is even more frightful than one would suppose, but above all the charm is dead. You are an extraordinarily cherished absentee there, a reminder of times lost. “He sat here, he sat there,” at the Continentale.’1*

  Back in England, David was having dinner at the house of his friend Eddie Nowell one Sunday evening when he was called to the telephone. It was his stepmother Jean, to tell him that Ronnie was dead. He had suffered a heart attack while watching cricket on television, after a hearty lunch of roast lamb, pudding and cheese. He was sixty-nine years old.

  David returned to the dinner table, where a fellow guest was holding forth about the BBC, which he labelled the Communist Broadcasting Corporation. David sat silent, keeping his news to himself. He felt no sadness, no loss; on the contrary, he would later claim that he felt liberated, even jubilant. ‘I never mourned him, never missed him. I rejoiced at his death,’ David would write to Tony, many years afterwards.2 Yet that night he ran a high fever, and vomited repeatedly. Before going to bed he telephoned some members of the family, including his sister Charlotte, who was tearful. ‘Father was in good shape, really,’ he assured her: ‘he’s beaten the system.’*

  Next afternoon David arrived at Ronnie’s flat in Tite Street, Chelsea, which he was curious to see. He noticed only one of his books on the shelves, a copy of A Small Town in Germany, though he knew that in the past Ronnie had ordered his books by the boxful in order to be able to sign them ‘from the author’s father’. Charlotte was already there, with Ronnie’s third wife Joy and her daughter by an earlier marriage. David advised them all not to pay any bills. ‘How can you talk about money at a time like this?’ asked his sister. In death as in life, David was made to feel in the wrong for his coolness towards his father.

  Joy did not share Charlotte’s reticence. ‘He’s taken everything I’ve got,’ she told David. Ronnie had bought the flat in her name, but neglected to inform her that he had raised a loan on it, at compound interest, so that more was now owed than it was worth, and the outstanding amount was increasing all the time. Over the months that followed, she would be hounded by the building society that had supplied the loan. After she appealed to David for help, his lawyer succeeded in persuading the lenders that it was pointless to pursue her further, because ‘the poor woman is destitute’. David would be nonplussed therefore when, six months later, she revealed that she owned a couple of Old Master paintings, and asked his advice on the best auction-house through which to sell them.

  At Ronnie’s office in Jermyn Street David had found a scene of chaos, reminiscent of one near the end of the film Zorba the Greek, when the villagers plunder the rooms of Madame Hortense as soon as she is dead. Arthur Lowe, Eric Bent and other members of Ronnie’s Court were ransacking the place, searching through papers on their hands and knees. Eventually someone found the key to the safe, which proved to be disappointingly empty. David was amused to learn that two ‘working girls’ inhabited the top floor of the building, known affectionately as ‘Sausages’ and ‘Mash’.

  It turned out that most of Ronnie’s ‘assets’ – the house in Maidenhead, the two cars, the racehorses – were owned by one or other of his bogus companies, all of which of course were insolvent. In fact there was no money anywhere, not even enough to pay his employees at the office to the end of the week. Ronnie had been living on air. In recent years he had pinned many of his hopes on a valuable piece of land in Cobham, which he had obtained planning permission to develop. He had sold it on to the house-builders Wimpey (now Taylor Wimpey), but the local counc
il had withdrawn the planning permission and Wimpey had refused to pay. Since then Ronnie had been pursuing parallel lawsuits against both the council and the house-builders. ‘One day I’ll be paid for that land and everyone will be seen right,’ had been his refrain. Indeed he had mortgaged his anticipated pay-out to fund his legal costs. Soon after his death the case came to court, and was decided in his favour. At Ronnie’s moment of posthumous triumph a man stood up and identified himself as a representative of the Inland Revenue. As ‘preferential creditor’, the Revenue had first claim on the estate; and in settlement of their claim they took the lot.

  David paid for his father’s funeral costs. He attended the cremation in London, but chose not to go to the subsequent memorial service, held at the Parkstone Baptist Church. Charlotte was so offended by David’s absence that she refused to speak to him for almost two years afterwards. Tony did not come back to England at all after his father’s death. The service was otherwise well attended: among the mourners were members of the family and a solid phalanx of local businessmen in black suits and ties, many of them seemingly masons. It was conducted by David’s cousin Brian Haynes, wearing clerical robes. In his address he recalled being similarly attired on another occasion, when he had been officiating at a wedding. Ronnie had come breezing up to him and quipped, ‘I may be the Prodigal Son but you’re certainly the Black Sheep.’

  Not long after his father’s death, a woman in Brussels contacted David. Her name was unfamiliar to him, though it rapidly became obvious from her communications that she believed them to have conducted an affair together, on the train from Rome to her native city. After a while the penny dropped: his father had been passing himself off as the world-famous author, John le Carré.

  Ronnie continued to haunt his son, who learned to dread such questions as ‘Are you by any chance related to Ronald Cornwell?’ He braced himself for trouble whenever an immigration officer hesitated over his passport. More than a decade after Ronnie’s death he handed his credit card to a clerk at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna.