by Adam Sisman
‘Cornwell, Cornwell,’ the man mused. ‘Is that a common name in England?’
‘Spelt that way, no, not very,’ replied David.
‘But John le Carré’s father was called Cornwell.’
‘Yes, I believe he was,’ David conceded, meaning to leave it at that, before softening and admitting that he was John le Carré. The reaction was not the one he had anticipated.
‘You treated your father very badly,’ the clerk observed. ‘Ja, such a nice gentleman, you could have given him money.’3
In 1975 the Western-backed regimes in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos collapsed in a line of dominoes. There was a succession of excruciating scenes as Western diplomats clambered aboard helicopters taking them to safety, while those poor locals who had cooked their meals and cleaned their rooms clutched desperately at the gates outside. David was still writing The Honourable Schoolboy. In a bitter passage cut from the final version of the book, David satirised the indifference of the London literary world to the terrible events taking place on the other side of the world. Over lunch at the Garrick, Westerby’s literary agent is preoccupied with cricket, and advises his client against writing a novel set in South-east Asia. ‘Absolute death, to be frank, the East these days. Only have to whisper Vietnam to a publisher and you won’t see the fellow for dust.’
If David deplored the lack of interest his own countrymen showed in the tragedy unfolding in Indochina, he was still more critical of American interference in the region. As Graham Greene had done a generation before, he blamed American meddling for the developing disasters. In his notebook he poured out his loathing of the CIA men he had encountered: ‘I hate them more than I hate myself, more than I hate a hangover. They’re the one bunch I hate morally: I only have to see their Mormon haircuts and listen to their open-plan charm. I have only to hear them call Europe “Yurrp” and I start sweating at the joints.’ While staying at one of the Bangkok hotels he expressed his disgust at being served ‘one of those ghastly American sandwiches, full of wooden spikes’.
In The Honourable Schoolboy the Americans enjoy the fruits of Smiley’s success, thanks to the duplicity of those on the make in Whitehall – especially Smiley’s eventual successor as head of the Circus, Saul Enderby, whose mannered speech seems to Peter Guillam ‘the last stage of linguistic collapse’. Enderby appears in the follow-up book, ‘drawling in that lounging Belgravia cockney which is the final vulgarity of the English upper class’.4 Several bad eggs in later le Carré novels speak the same way.
The Honourable Schoolboy was the first of a succession of novels exploring the unequal relationship between the Circus and its American ‘Cousins’, with their much greater resources and longer reach. American bullishness, naïvety and eagerness to please are contrasted with British cynicism and world-weariness.
Knee-jerk anti-Americanism was latent in Englishmen of David’s generation; resentment of American influence was endemic in British culture. Anti-American sentiment is certainly present in David’s novels. One of his characters in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy states openly that he hates America very deeply – though this sentiment is undercut by being voiced by the traitor Bill Haydon. In his apologia Haydon echoes Greene:
He had often wondered which side he would be on if the test ever came; after prolonged reflection he had finally to admit that if either monolith had to win the day, he would prefer it to be the East. ‘It’s an aesthetic judgement as much as anything,’ he explained, looking up. ‘Partly a moral one, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Smiley politely.5
In January 1976 David gave a long television interview to Melvyn Bragg, broadcast on his book programme Read All About It. When Bragg asked if he had been a spy himself, he evaded the question. The interview explored the character of Smiley as ‘a committed doubter’. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy reflected David’s own view of life that every human relationship is ‘necessarily insecure … fraught with all kinds of nerve-wracking tension’.
I think all of us live partly in a clandestine situation. In relation to our bosses, our families, our wives, our children, we frequently affect attitudes to which we subscribe perhaps intellectually but not emotionally. We hardly know ourselves – nine-tenths of ourselves are below the level of the water. One of the greatest realities is sex, but we almost never succeed in betraying our sexuality to one another fully.6
In September David wrote to tell Vivian Green that he was ‘just putting the finishing touches to my novel’, and planned to leave for South-east Asia at the end of October ‘to check out a few details’.7
On this trip he would once again spend time with Yvette Pierpaoli, based in Thailand since the Khmer Rouge had overrun Cambodia in April 1975. She had begun visiting the refugee camps near the border, where tens of thousands of Cambodians who had fled from the Khmer Rouge were living in squalid conditions. Plying the border in a small car, she brought them food and medicine, and took back to her house in Bangkok as many children as she could carry.
One evening Pierpaoli took David to meet her friend and fellow countryman François Bizot, one of the few Westerners to survive capture by the Khmer Rouge. Bizot was then living in northern Thailand, in a wooden house of his own design surrounded by enormous trees. They stood outside as the sun set, sipping whisky. Gradually Bizot let go of his reticence. Pierpaoli had already told David the outline of his extraordinary story, but it was another thing altogether to hear of his ordeal from this brooding, volatile figure in the gathering darkness. Back in 1971, while working as an anthropologist in the ruins of Angkor, Bizot had been taken by the Khmer Rouge and held captive in a jungle camp, chained to a post, accused of being an agent of ‘American imperialism’. After three months of deliberation, during which his every word was weighed and his life hung in the balance, he had suddenly been released. This terrible experience convinced him of the genocidal tendencies of his captors, at a time when other Western intellectuals often praised them as leaders of a ‘liberation struggle’. Four years later he had witnessed the entry of the Khmer Rouge troops into Phnom Penh, astonished to find themselves unopposed and standing about perplexed as they waited for orders. As a fluent Khmer speaker, he had become the primary point of contact between those sheltering in the French Embassy and the ruthless new masters of the city. He told David of a succession of surreal encounters, each a tragedy in itself, of frantic individuals seeking entry to the French compound, most of whom he had been forced to turn away to protect those inside. David would contribute a foreword to Bizot’s powerful memoir The Gate, published in 2003.
In the summer of 1977 the Cornwells took a family holiday in Corfu. Sitting outside at an open-air beach restaurant David overheard a familiar voice talking at a nearby table.
‘Reg?’ he asked tentatively.
‘What if I am?’
‘It’s David.’
The suspicious glare melted. ‘Ronnie’s boy!’
Reg had been one of the most faithful members of Ronnie’s Court. Several drinks later, he tearfully gave David what he called the bottom line: he had ‘done time for your father’. So had George-Percival, another courtier. So had Eric and Arthur. All four had taken the rap for Ronnie at one time or another, rather than see the Court deprived of its monarch.
And d’you know what, David? If your father rose from his grave today and asked me to do another stretch for him, I’d do it again, the same as George-Percival and Eric and Arthur would. So far as Ronnie was concerned, the whole lot of us was soft in the head.
‘We was all bent, son,’ Reg admitted, before adding a final admiring tribute. ‘But your dad was very, very bent.’
Since the mid-1960s David had been an employee of le Carré Productions Limited, on the advice of his accountant Hale Crosse. In 1973 there had been inconclusive discussions about selling the company to Booker-McConnell, to whom Hale had sold Georgette Heyer’s company in 1966. (Booker already owned rights in the works of several other bestselling authors, including those of Dennis
Wheatley and much of Agatha Christie.) In 1977 Hale came up with a new wheeze, setting up a company based in Switzerland, Authors Workshop, of which Rainer Heumann was sole shareholder and director. David became an employee of this company, as in due course did Jane too. All publishing and other contracts for David’s work were made direct with Authors Workshop, which therefore owned the copyrights. In exchange for these valuable assets, Authors Workshop paid David a salary with an annual bonus, and settled most of his work-related expenses direct. By the late 1970s he was receiving total payments of between £100,000 and £150,000 annually,* though this was considerably less than the earnings from his work, which accumulated in Switzerland. In 1978, for example, Knopf paid Authors Workshop $2.5 million in a two-book deal.
David would later say that he had been talked into these tax-saving arrangements and felt ashamed of having done so. But at the time he was unsure of his capacity to continue to turn out bestselling books and feared that his income might decline rapidly in the future. For his own financial security, and for that of his dependants, he felt the need to minimise his tax liabilities while his earning capacity lasted. This was a period of exceptionally high tax rates: in 1974 the top rate of income tax in the UK had been raised to 83 per cent, with a further 15 per cent surcharge on investment income. Any doubts that David may have felt at the time were allayed by the fact that the scheme had been approved by a leading firm of accountants, legally tested at an advanced level, and was widely used by corporations.
For the scheme to be acceptable to the Inland Revenue, it was necessary to maintain that David’s assets had been transferred to the company for sound commercial reasons, not for the purposes of avoiding liability to tax. It was a condition of the Revenue’s acceptance that David had no interest in the company, either present or future. There was an element of sleight-of-hand in this, of course: in his management of the company Heumann could be relied upon to act in David’s interests. In that sense he was a trusted nominee, not unlike those nominees that Ronnie had used to control his property empire.
Before The Honourable Schoolboy was published David hosted a party at his house in Hampstead for the Hodder sales force. Nowadays much bookshop buying is centralised, and the importance of salesmen has diminished; but in the 1970s they could still make a significant contribution to a book’s success. Publishers’ representatives, known as ‘travellers’, were the footsoldiers of the forces of publishing, in the front line; David recognised their value.
The British edition was published in September 1977, with the American edition following a few weeks later, so that the critical response came almost as a single chorus. The reviews tended to reflect the background of its critics: literary reviewers and political journalists slapped it down, while crime aficionados praised it.8
The most unstinting praise came from one of le Carré’s regular reviewers, H. R. F. Keating, writing in The Times. ‘I think it may justly be said that with this book the spy novel comes of age,’ Keating wrote. ‘Le Carré has produced something on a whole new scale. He has used a spy story … to penetrate a whole world in the way of the great comprehensive novels of the nineteenth century.’9 For the crime-writer and academic T. J. Binyon, reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, le Carré had ‘triumphantly succeeded in … writing a thriller which is at the same time a substantial novel in its own right’.10 Similarly, the novelist Thomas Hinde, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, argued that the book ‘is not merely a splendid example of the genre but offers more in the way of characters, setting [and] relevance to life than the majority of ordinary novels’.11
Some reviewers complained that The Honourable Schoolboy was too long, with too much padding. The Observer’s Maurice Richardson grumbled about ‘a mass of topographical detail’.12 The New Statesman deplored ‘a deadeningly spun-out display of unassimilated guide-book information’.13 For Clancy Sigal, writing in the Guardian, the book was ‘overlong and fussily written’. Sigal argued that le Carré had ‘stumbled this time because he’s bent on creating “serious literature” à la Graham Greene’.14
Anthony Burgess, writing in the New York Times Book Review, came to a similar conclusion about The Honourable Schoolboy. ‘Does it have anything to do with literature?’ he asked: ‘the answer has to be no.’ He complained that the book was too long and boring, and he was one of several reviewers to compare it unfavourably with Greene’s The Quiet American.15 But Rudolf Walter Leonhardt, writing in Die Zeit, reckoned that the novel held its own alongside The Quiet American, as novels ‘that provide us in the West with a better understanding of the Far East’. For Leonhardt, ‘le Carré’s development from The Spy Who Came in From the Cold to The Honourable Schoolboy represents a literary gain, bought at the cost of a loss of suspense’.16 To Jürgen Busche, the reviewer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Honourable Schoolboy was an ‘exquisite’ thriller. ‘John le Carré has significantly extended the genre with this book.’17
The most mocking review came from the British-based Australian critic Clive James, writing in the New York Review of Books. He branded The Honourable Schoolboy ‘tedious’ and its prose style as ‘overblown’.
Le Carré’s new novel is about twice as long as it should be. It falls with a dull thud into the second category of le Carré’s books – those which are greeted as being something more than merely entertaining. Their increasingly obvious lack of mere entertainment is certainly strong evidence that le Carré is out to produce a more respectable breed of novel than those which fell into the first category, the ones which were merely entertaining. But in fact it was the merely entertaining books that had the more intense life …
There is no possible question that le Carré has been out there and done his fieldwork. Unfortunately he has brought it all home …
But the really strength-sapping feature of the prose style is its legend-building tone …
Outwardly aspiring to the status of literature, le Carré’s novels have inwardly declined to the novel of pulp romance … Raising le Carré to the plane of literature has helped rob him of his more enviable role as a popular writer who could take you unawares.18
But David could afford to snap his fingers at the critics. The Honourable Schoolboy was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary award. The British edition of the book sold 78,500 copies in hardback, a substantial increase on the 52,000 copies sold of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The paperback edition would sell more than half a million copies, which made it the third highest-selling paperback of the year.19 The American edition of the novel reprinted twice before publication; it was selected as the October main selection for the Book of the Month Club, a very big deal in those days; and Time put him on its cover, an accolade only very rarely granted to writers. Paperback rights in The Honourable Schoolboy were sold to Bantam for a million dollars – a huge sum, more than half a million pounds, at a time when average annual earnings in the UK were less than £3,000. In the wake of this success George Greenfield claimed to have received ‘sight unseen’ offers from reputable American publishers offering almost $5 million for the next two books from le Carré.20
‘I have ordered The Honourable Schoolboy,’ Kim Philby wrote to Phillip Knightley, one of the co-authors of the book based on the Sunday Times Insight team’s investigation. ‘From le Carré’s introduction to your book, I get the vague impression, perhaps wrongly, that he didn’t like me. But we are generous, and have no objection to contributing to his vast affluence.’21
To coincide with publication of The Honourable Schoolboy David wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine, ‘In England Now’, in which he looked back over his childhood with quite startling bitterness. ‘Like many writers, I consider myself to have been born in captivity,’ he began. ‘And after 46 years I am still there, still have not tired of examining in wonder the bars and stones that incarcerate me: their blemishes, which are like the claw marks of my own hands, their truly terrible homeliness.’ The article
concentrated on his schooling, which he depicted as barbaric and cruel. Even now, David told his readers, he still shuddered as he drove past his preparatory school on the motorway.
That was thirty years before; but the public schools were doing brisker trade than ever. He admitted to sending his own sons to them. The result was disillusion, a sense that nothing would ever change. The prison is in our minds, he believed.
All my adult life I have watched, you see, in the institutions which I have served – whether they be educational, or administrative or, as now, artistic – the same sourceless, unled bigotry at work that characterised the bedlam of my childhood. I have watched how it poisons communication between British men and women … how the knotted shadows of our childhood become the very snares with which we trip our own children.
‘How many more generations of honourable schoolboy must we produce’, asked David in a rhetorical finale, ‘before we can finally achieve the maturity to look each other in the eye?’
It was not entirely clear what he was trying to say in this piece. David’s contemporaries thought his portrayal of his schooldays distorted to the point of caricature. What was obvious was his continuing sense of alienation from the society in which he lived, notwithstanding his enormous success. The anger ignited within him as a boy still blazed fiercely.22
By this time David had scaled down his plans for ‘The Quest for Karla’, from the original seven or more novels to a quartet.23 The third book would be set in the Middle East, another turbulent region. The Arabs had never accepted the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been displaced and were still living in refugee camps, demanding the right of return. A succession of wars between Israel and the surrounding Arab states had failed to improve their plight. Palestinian militants had mounted a succession of high-profile terrorist operations, especially against Israeli citizens abroad. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) had established itself in southern Lebanon, drawing strength from the refugee camps, which came under its control. The PLO constituted a state within a state, challenging the authority of the Maronite Christians who had traditionally dominated the country. From 1975 onward there had been civil war in Lebanon. Beirut had been devastated by the fighting, and by repeated Israeli air attacks.