by Adam Sisman
David Greenway had left the Washington Post and had begun covering the Middle East for Newsweek, working out of Jerusalem. He received a telephone call announcing the imminent arrival of ‘ace photographer Janet Leigh Carr’. This was the first of a dozen or more trips David would make to the region over the next few years. On this occasion he and Greenway undertook a perilous drive to the extreme south of Lebanon, only a few miles from the Israeli border, where the PLO was ensconced in the old Crusader castle of Beaufort, perched on a cliff high above the Litani River. Greenway had obtained an interview with the PLO’s military chief Khalil al-Wazir – also known as Abu Jihad, meaning ‘Father of the Struggle’ – a man responsible for planning a succession of military operations in Israel and elsewhere. As they climbed into the mountains the passengers were alarmed, both by the sporadic Israeli sniper fire from the valley below and by the technique of their Druze driver, who grunted a prayer each time he flung them into another hairpin bend.
Greenway took David on a tour through Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel.24 By the time they reached the Allenby Bridge, then the de facto frontier between Israel and Jordan, David was stricken by dysentery. A long line of lorries stood between them and the checkpoint. As David crouched miserably in the back of the car, Greenway strode confidently down the line of stationary traffic and, by throwing out the name of every local dignitary he knew, persuaded the guards to let them jump the queue.
In Israel, the two men went in search of an old prison on the outskirts of Jerusalem where Jewish paramilitaries had been held during the British mandate, since converted to a museum. They stopped to ask the way of an old man. ‘Have you come to see where they hanged the Jews?’ the old man angrily demanded. From David’s tropical suit and polished brown shoes, he had taken him for a former policeman who had come back to his old haunts to gloat.
In reality David had felt sympathetic towards Jews from an early age, and had consistently portrayed Jewish characters such as Fiedler or the Fennans sympathetically in his novels. Like many of his contemporaries, he supported the creation of a Jewish national home and admired the energy and courage with which the Israelis had built a modern state. But his visits to Palestinian refugee camps showed him the other side of the story. He came to believe that ‘a great injustice’ had been done, to salve the conscience of Europeans for their own crimes against the Jews. ‘We gave them a country which was not ours to give,’ he would say later. A people had been first driven from their homes and then demonised as terrorists. In his new novel David resolved to put ‘a human face upon the Palestinians’.25
Around the New Year David went back to Israel with John Miller. They stood side by side on the Mount of Olives, gazing wonderingly at old Jerusalem, still intact despite everything. David found Miller an ideal travelling companion. ‘Few creative people have much natural company within their own profession, least of all when they are actually at work,’ David would write. ‘But the accident of my friendship with John Miller has taught me that between a painter and a writer a wonderful harmony is possible.’26
The intended starting-point of David’s novel would be the Circus’s receipt of intelligence from a highly placed source about an imminent Israeli attack on Lebanon. The premise was prescient: in 1978 Israel would indeed invade Lebanon, provoked by Palestinian raids launched from across the border. In the winter of 1977/8 David wrote three chapters in which he tried to develop this theme. Yet again he planned to call the book ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’. But he found himself unable to write convincingly about Smiley in such a setting. ‘I couldn’t find the right plot for him there,’ David would say later; and indeed it is hard to imagine Smiley operating in such an environment. Eventually David scribbled ‘poor stuff’ on the manuscript and abandoned the attempt.
Undeterred by this failure, David began another novel, the last in the ‘Quest for Karla’ sequence, now reduced to a trilogy. The story was one of small beginnings leading to a momentous conclusion. Ostrakava, a Russian woman living in Paris, is approached by the KGB hood Oleg Kirov, ostensibly to ask whether she would like her daughter to join her in exile. Her suspicions aroused, she contacts Vladimir, formerly a general in the Red Army, now leader of a group of exiles campaigning for independence for the Baltic states. Vladimir despatches Villem, son of one of his former comrades and now a long-distance lorry-driver, to Hamburg to collect ‘proofs’, evidence with which he hopes to ensnare his enemies. He tries unsuccessfully to contact Smiley, known to him by the code-name Max. ‘Tell Max it concerns the Sandman,’ he insists – ‘the Sandman’ being the code-name for Karla. He is murdered by the KGB on Hampstead Heath, but not before he has hidden a negative print, which Smiley retrieves. From this single clue Smiley accumulates evidence that Karla is ‘making a legend’ (a cover story) for a young woman, who turns out to be Karla’s own daughter, being treated for schizophrenia in a Swiss sanatorium. Karla has abused his position to place her there and misappropriated state funds to pay for her keep, through a harmless stooge, Grigoriev; Smiley is able to exploit these facts to induce his great rival to defect. The book reaches its climax in Berlin, when Karla crosses the checkpoint between East and West, into the arms of Smiley’s people. In the first book of the trilogy Smiley tells Guillam that fanaticism is Karla’s weakness, though ironically it is Karla’s humanity, his love for his daughter, that proves his undoing.
The spur to the novel in its final form was an encounter on the Heath with an old Russian gentleman, an émigré who had escaped from Petrograd in the early days of the Revolution, the inspiration for the general, called Valentine in early drafts and only later changed to Vladimir. (Villem was originally called Stefan.) His Estonian wife reminded David of the sadness of small exile groups, waiting with diminishing hope for the day when their homeland might once more be free. Madame Ostrakava was inspired by an old lady whom he found slumped over in a Paris street near the Gare de Lyon. When David offered his help, she answered in what seemed to him a Russian accent: Je souffre d’une manque d’haleine.
This time there would be few wrong turnings. Once he started writing, he went hard at it and threw comparatively little away. Indeed, some deleted scenes from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy were incorporated into this new novel. Even so, he wrote at least one chapter that he decided not to use, in which Smiley goes to see Lacon to seek protection for Villem and his family. Both Prideaux and Mendel appear in early drafts of the book but are later eliminated, as is Ostrakava’s son Nikita.
While writing the book David allowed himself visits to Paris and Hamburg to scout locations, rather as Smiley journeys to Hamburg on Karla’s trail. In the novel Smiley boards the ferry across the Alster, retracing Villem’s route. An old friend, the journalist Haug von Kuenheim, took David to Amphore, a sex club on the Reeperbahn, the model for the Blue Diamond, the club where Kirov is framed, and where Smiley follows after Vladimir’s murder. David’s own feelings are detectable in a passage later redrafted, describing Smiley’s emotions on arriving in Hamburg seems to reflect his own feelings: ‘he felt the involuntary sensations of kinship, assimilation and dread, which assailed him like old friends whenever he set foot on German soil. Germany was his second nature. Its literature was in his blood and in his childhood. He put on the language like a uniform …’*
The first draft of the novel was completed in ten months. ‘I’ve just finished my new book, which is not the one we discussed, not the Middle East one, but a totally different story which ran away with me,’ David wrote to John Margetson in December. ‘I’ll revise it through the winter and deliver it in late March.’27 The first reaction from his publishers was enthusiastic. ‘It is magnificent,’ wrote Michael Attenborough, one of Hodder & Stoughton’s directors who ran the Coronet paperback imprint. ‘We have a major bestseller on our hands.’ In April David would make another trip to Germany and Switzerland, to check on locations. As so often in the past, he wanted to entitle the book ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ or, failing that, ‘The Giant Hunter’. He settled on
Smiley’s People only at a late stage.
One of the revisions David would make after finishing the first draft was to introduce Ostrakava at the start of the story; originally her encounter with Kirov had been described second hand, as part of her debriefing to Guillam, near the end. In the process of revision David tightened up the text: for example, the insistent ‘Tell Max it concerns the Sandman’ replaced the much less powerful ‘Inform Max the Sandman has a Little Girl.’ At proof stage, David decided to rewrite the ‘burning’ of the hapless Grigoriev with meticulous care, making small changes to almost every sentence.
Many of the late changes highlight similarities and contrasts between Smiley and Karla. A number of them came in response to Gottlieb’s comments. Originally the book had ended, ‘They walked slowly towards the car, shirking the halo on their way.’ In the final version, the ending was more characteristic of Smiley.
‘George, you won,’ said Guillam, as they walked slowly towards the car.
‘Did I?’ said Smiley. ‘Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.’
Three of the first four le Carré novels had been made into films, but none since. Various directors showed an interest in filming The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, but nothing came of these discussions. As for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, its complexity was said to have been the deterrent. In a letter to a friend who had offered to raise money to purchase the rights and finance a screenplay, Karel Reisz said that it was ‘not for me’. Though he thought the book ‘brilliant’, it was not, in his opinion, a movie. ‘David’s plots are enormously intricate and complex, and adapting them always involves one in very painful and unsatisfactory reducing, which I don’t think ever quite works,’ he wrote.28 Movie producers judged The Honourable Schoolboy even harder to adapt. One studio executive asked his script department to produce the customary one-page synopsis of the novel, only to receive the reply that this could not be done.29
Barry Levinson, then just beginning his career in the industry after working in television, had approached David about the possibility of filming Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but after the two of them had lunch together, David had the feeling that ‘this cannot go to America’. Having wasted, as he saw it, the better part of a year in the late 1960s working on film projects that failed to come to fruition, he was ‘very leery then of the short form’ and feared that the novel could not be compressed to the necessary length.30 ‘I have had film offers but they stank,’ he had told Margetson early in 1975.31
London Weekend Television (LWT) wanted to make Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as a series, with Paul Scofield playing Smiley, or perhaps James Mason again, and a script by Harold Pinter, later replaced by another writer specialising in television adaptations, Julian Bond, a contemporary of David’s from Sherborne. LWT made a deal with Paramount, but the project stalled because David did not like the scripts.32 So the matter remained for some years, until a succession of chance occurrences brought Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to the television screen.
* Refers to a section of Moscow Centre directed at the Chinese target.
* Greene was a long-term resident of this hotel; several scenes in his novel The Quiet American are set there. It was a popular rendezvous for foreign correspondents, politicians and businessmen.
* The following passage describing Jerry Westerby’s feelings about his father was cut from The Honourable Schoolboy during the editing process: ‘I think that was what amazed him: the licence that his father had enjoyed with what these days we call the institutions. I think that deep inside he surveyed his father’s life and saw it not as a failure at all, but as a statement of personal freedom: freedom to strive, to love, even the freedom if necessary to fail … And I do believe that the part of his father which Jerry loved was the part that beat the system.’
* In 1979, average ‘original household income’ in the UK was little more than £5,000 a year.
* The final version, from the opening page of chapter 16, reads as follows: ‘Germany was his second nature, even his second soul. In his youth, her literature had been his passion and his discipline. He could put on her language like a uniform and speak with its boldness.’
18
‘Does anyone know what’s going on?’
For years the BBC had been negotiating with the estate of Evelyn Waugh for the rights to adapt Brideshead Revisited into a drama series. Jonathan Powell, then in his early thirties, had recently been appointed staff producer for BBC’s ‘Classic Serials’; he wanted to adapt more contemporary novels for the small screen, but had been frustrated to find rights in many of them owned by American film companies. This was one reason why securing Brideshead Revisited was so important to the BBC, which jealously guarded its dominant position as the broadcaster of quality television. Powell was sitting in his little office overlooking Shepherd’s Bush Green when his boss Graeme MacDonald burst in. ‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said: ‘we’ve lost Brideshead.’ At the last moment the Waugh estate had sold the rights to Granada, the only commercial television company that really frightened the BBC.1 Powell himself had worked at Granada before joining the corporation. The loss left a hole in the BBC’s schedule. ‘You’ve got to do something,’ MacDonald told Powell.
It so happened that Powell had recently read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, perhaps because he was dating Emma, daughter of James and Susan Kennaway. It had struck him at the time that it could make ‘an amazing piece of television’. The next day he took the book along to MacDonald’s office and proposed it as a possible replacement for Brideshead Revisited. ‘Nice idea,’ replied MacDonald, before adding that, as in so many other cases, the rights were not free: the BBC had made enquiries back in 1976, only to discover that LWT owned them. Powell decided to check. He telephoned George Greenfield, who rang him back with the message, ‘David will see you this afternoon.’ It turned out that LWT’s option had expired the previous day. Powell went home and changed into a suit before going to meet David. A tall man, he squatted on his haunches as he attempted to convey his enthusiasm for the story. ‘We will do your book properly,’ he told David. He tactfully kept quiet about his involvement with Emma Kennaway; nor did he mention that he too had been at school at Sherborne.
The BBC paid a fee of £14,000 to make Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in seven fifty-two-minute episodes. It was stipulated in the contract that American rights must be offered to Paramount, and that the choice of the producer and the writer of the series were to be ‘subject to our client’s approval’. In fact David would be involved at every level of the production. Powell reassembled a team with which he had worked successfully at Granada, bringing in John Irvin as director and Arthur Hopcraft as writer. Irvin was a dynamic young television director with a background in documentary filmmaking; Hopcraft was a former football journalist who had come to scriptwriting late, whom David would describe as ‘ex-Manchester Guardian, north country and very unyielding’.2 When they met for supper at David’s house in Hampstead, everyone present agreed that casting Smiley would be crucial to the project. As David put it, ‘the plot, narrative and heart are all sustained by one character – George Smiley’. They were unanimous that Alec Guinness would be ideal in the role, if he could be persuaded to take it on, but Irvin doubted that he would be willing to make the six-month commitment necessary for a series. Though one of the most highly regarded of all living screen actors, who had starred in innumerable successful films, Guinness had done very little television. In 1958 he had won the Best Actor Academy Award for his role in The Bridge on the River Kwai; in the following year he had been knighted for services to the arts. More recently, in 1977, he had achieved a new prominence for his part as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first of the Star Wars trilogy.
With Powell’s agreement, David made the initial approach to Guinness. It was of course highly unusual for the author of a novel being adapted for the screen to take the initiative in this way, but the tactic would prove successful. ‘I write to you as an unbounded admirer of your work for many years,�
�� David began, before stressing the importance of the part to the story: ‘Smiley is the “motor”, as the Germans call it …’ He identified the key members of the production team. ‘All of us are agreed on one thing: that if we were to cry for the moon, we would cry for Guinness as Smiley, and build everything else to fit.’ You, he said, have the right ‘existential manner’ for Smiley. He asked Guinness to read the book and consider the proposal. ‘The truth is that ever since I started writing about Smiley, I dreamed of your playing him one day.’3
Guinness replied the next day. He was ‘thrilled’ at the prospect. ‘There is no question but that I would love to have a shot at playing Smiley,’ he wrote, despite ‘a few reservations’ about his ability to do so satisfactorily. He feared that at sixty-four, as he would be shortly, he was too old for Smiley, though he supposed that make-up and acting could make him appear younger. He had a further concern about his appearance. ‘Although thick-set I am not really rotund and double-chinned …’ Perhaps more serious was the problem that he had done very little television, and never a series. ‘What worries me about the likely schedule, so far as a series is concerned, is my slow memorizing.’ He had no trouble in the theatre if he could get the script two or three weeks before rehearsal started, but was anxious that ‘hasty learning would fuss me no end and interfere disastrously with performing’. He professed also to be ‘rather anxious’ about the fact that Arthur Lowe, ‘an actor I greatly admire’, had recently played Smiley on television – though this had been no more than an eight-minute dramatised sequence from Call for the Dead in a BBC 2 programme about le Carré’s work. ‘I must add that I’ve enjoyed hugely your books I’ve read – all but three I think,’ Guinness concluded.4