John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  I was so glad you picked up the references. I felt diffident about them, & it always amused me, secretly, that you didn’t seem to notice where so much of Smiley came from – his humanity, at least, his perception of human frailty & his difficulty about buying clothes! Nobody ever did so much to set me on my feet as you did, and probably nobody gave me the feeling of seeing me so clearly …45

  But Green was not his only source for Smiley. In an interview broadcast on BBC Radio’s Kaleidoscope programme, David was asked how he came to invent his most famous character. ‘I don’t really know,’ he replied.

  But I think that there was one prototype originally, certainly in appearance there was one man who had his features, his looks and many of his mannerisms – particularly the one of removing his spectacles and polishing them on the inside of the fat end of his tie. ‘He was one of London’s meek who do not inherit the earth’* – an absolutely forgettable man, the most forgettable man I ever met, who was also very intelligent. I worked with him for a while in the Civil Service. Then I think gradually, as with most of one’s characters, he becomes a vessel into which you put other things, and I think Smiley changes very much from book to book.46

  It happened that Bingham heard this interview. His reaction is unknown, but a woman who was with him at the time, one of his subordinates, protested on his behalf. In a letter to David, which she copied to Bingham, she deprecated his ‘sneering and belittling attitude’ and his ‘hurtful and cheap jibes’. She paid tribute to Bingham’s ‘unswerving loyalty to his friends and colleagues – even to you who hold loyalty in such contempt’. Though the letter was unsigned, the writer mentioned that ‘many years ago, before you transferred to other work, you did take me out to dinner’. She concluded, ‘I just wish you had never been part of us.’

  David thought the letter ‘loony’. He sent an emollient letter to Bingham, addressed from ‘Tax Haven, Hampstead’, a jokey reference to a jibe about his tax status. ‘You know the creative process as well as I do,’ he wrote, ‘so perhaps you can persuade her that no good character was ever made without deep affection (which, as I’m sure you know, endures blithely to this day).’ Bingham sent a good-humoured reply, as from ‘The Slaves’ Galley’. Somewhat awkwardly, he referred to himself in the third person:

  Smiley has never minded being called a Forgettable Man, and has even regarded it as a mild professional compliment to a man who can merge into the general background. He thinks that that and keeping a low profile are quite useful traits.

  On the other hand, to be perfectly frank – always difficult for Smiley – he has often been puzzled as to why you so frequently and harshly attacked his mob, directly in interviews or obliquely in books.

  You are far from being pro-Soviet Russia or pro-Communist, but I would think the attacks gave comfort and even pleasure and glee in some places.47

  There was no doubt that Bingham felt strongly about this. In a taped conversation with his wife,* Bingham acknowledged David as his friend, with the qualification that ‘I deplore and hate everything he has done and said against the intelligence services.’* Years afterwards, in an introduction to a new edition of one of Bingham’s novels released posthumously, David attempted to analyse the irreconcilable differences between the two of them, which he ascribed in part to the conflict between the generations. He paid generous tribute to his old friend’s qualities, both as an intelligence officer and as a novelist.48

  Bingham’s abhorrence of the way in which the intelligence services were represented in David’s novels was widely felt. David had repeatedly to endure the accusation that he had dragged the good name of the Service (or the Services) through the mud. ‘You bastard!’ a middle-aged intelligence officer, once his colleague,† yelled down the room at him, as they assembled for a diplomatic dinner in Washington. ‘You utter bastard.’49

  Such criticism focused on The Spy who Came in from the Cold, which portrayed the Circus as unscrupulous, and The Looking-Glass War, which had perpetuated that depiction and portrayed the Department as incompetent. That these were works of fiction, and that neither the Circus nor the Department existed, was little considered. It was the old problem of authenticity that had confused discussion of David’s work from the outset. Of course David had benefited from such ambiguousness; but it exposed him to the charge of disloyalty. Those who made such accusations failed to acknowledge Smiley’s triumphs in ‘The Quest for Karla’ trilogy. Indeed, one might make a case that in these novels David had exaggerated the significance and the effectiveness of British intelligence. According to the CIA agent Miles Copeland, George Kennedy Young had referred sourly to The Spy who Came in from the Cold as ‘about the only bloody double agent operation that ever worked’.

  As the years passed, John Bingham’s wife Madeleine had convinced herself that George Smiley was nothing other than her husband under a pseudonym. In her mind, David owed his success to Bingham. It seemed to her therefore that he should be entitled to share the wealth that had accrued from the Smiley novels. The fact that he disapproved of the books themselves was for her no obstacle. Nothing could shake her from this opinion.

  But if Bingham was Smiley, it followed that she was Lady Ann, the unfaithful wife, a characterisation that she resented.* She wrote a memoir, ‘Smiley’s Wife’, which Hamish Hamilton agreed to publish in 1980. A letter from Michael Attenborough to a colleague in New Zealand asked to be kept informed of any information that Hamish Hamilton put out about the book. ‘Our author is more concerned than we are about the book’s publication, although I dislike the title intensely.’ As it turned out the Office refused permission for the book to be published. Aggrieved, Madeleine Bingham wrote ‘Smelly’s People’, described by Bingham’s biographer Michael Jago as ‘a farcical, outdated story about a Polish defector whose memoirs were banned by MI5’.50 This too remained unpublished.

  David encountered the Labour politician Denis Healey at a dinner party given by the lawyer and former minister Hartley Shawcross. As a former Secretary of State for Defence, Healey knew more than most politicians about security matters. ‘I know who you are,’ cried Healey, hand outstretched, as he walked towards David from the doorway. ‘You’re a bloody Communist spy, that’s what you are, admit it!’ So David admitted it, and everybody laughed, including their startled host.51

  Out of the blue David received an invitation to lunch with the Queen. Jane drove him down to Buckingham Palace and dropped him by the pedestrian gate, which had to be unlocked to let him in. ‘You should have driven in,’ the policeman on duty told him. There were eight people at lunch. David sat at the Queen’s left; on his other side was the Dean of Windsor. On the Queen’s right was the actor Alec McCowen, who was enjoying a success in performing his own adaptation of St Mark’s Gospel on the stage. Ten days later a letter arrived offering David a CBE. He wrote back, courteously declining. Another letter arrived, this time from the Prime Minister’s office, renewing the offer. David wrote again, saying that he ‘would like to go on record as not wanting that sort of award’.

  Interest from a Canadian academic had revived Susan Kennaway’s ambition to edit James’s letters and diaries. She undertook the task herself, adding extracts from his novel Some Gorgeous Accident, and interspersing the material with her own memories of the time. In doing so she felt an obligation not to censor what he had written to suit herself or anybody else. She had little thought then of commercial publication. ‘I wanted to write a love story, about James and me, and how such frightful scenes could end in a sort of peace and reconciliation,’ she wrote recently. ‘I wanted to show, I am ashamed to say, that it was me that he really loved.’52

  When James’s agent asked to read the typescript, she innocently gave it to him, scarcely imagining that he would offer it for sale. She was therefore disconcerted by a telephone call from Tom Maschler, editorial director of Jonathan Cape, who told her that he wanted to publish the book. Susan warned him that the material was very personal: she was especially concerned at the da
nger that the character identified only as ‘David’ might be revealed as the world-famous author, John le Carré. According to her, Maschler was adamant that this would not happen. ‘Why would I put Cape in jeopardy by letting the name get out?’ he asked.

  Susan allowed herself to be convinced. Maschler was offering an advance of £3,000, a tempting sum at a time when she was short of money. She was tempted too by the opportunity to give her own version of the story. ‘Both James and David had written fantasies that some people believed to be the truth,’ she wrote; ‘why not let the little pig in the middle write what really happened?’ Moreover she felt a duty to promote her late husband’s writing. Believing in its importance, she was keen to do everything possible to bring it to public attention. ‘Most of all I hope that the publication of these papers will lead to a revival of James’s work,’ she told a reporter.53

  When Susan wrote to David suggesting that they should meet to discuss the proposed book, he replied that he would prefer to read ‘whatever material you would like to publish’ before discussing it. In sending him ‘the unexpurgated version’, she expressed her willingness to ‘alter some of the more obvious things’.

  David responded promptly. ‘I think about 500 different things,’ he wrote, ‘but let me try to separate them, some of them.’

  Firstly, it was about people I no longer know, and in some ways, perhaps, never knew. To that extent, I don’t really care what anybody writes about me all those years ago, or wrote about me …

  The professional in me, incidentally, questions the viability of the material at any level except the most prurient. James may be a great literary name in fifty years, but at the moment, like so many writers after their deaths, he is temporarily unknown, too young to be a classic, too old to be fashionable. In case the publishing world doesn’t say those things to you, perhaps I should. This puts his connection with me in a far more commercial light than my connection with him …

  As James’s friend, sometimes familiar, admirer, fan – what you will – lover – I think I disagree with you quite deeply about the quality of the diaries (where you quote from them) and their significance. Much of what you include is plain bilge, in my view … The diary is worst, I think, where it is most self-conscious and aware of other, later eyes.

  I think you have succeeded in doing yourself and James an injustice, and leaving me – very sweetly – blank but intact, which is probably how James would have described me anyway!54

  Susan wanted to call the book ‘James and Jim’, but Cape preferred The Kennaway Papers. The book attracted a number of positive reviews, though ironically several of them commended Susan at the expense of her late husband. ‘His continual self-dramatizing and self-justifying, coupled with boasts of sexual conquests, add up to an unattractive personality blinded by a sense of his own importance,’ wrote James Campbell in the Times Literary Supplement. For Campbell, ‘the most engaging parts of the book are written by Mrs Kennaway herself. Her writing has a frankness and simplicity and sense of humble regret which her late husband evidently never achieved.’55 In the London Review of Books the Scottish novelist Allan Massie praised her ‘rare candour’, as well as ‘the beautiful lucidity of her writing’.56 Philip Oakes, writing in the Sunday Times, judged it ‘a courageous and healing book’, and ‘truth-telling of a high order’.57 But others disapproved of putting so much private material into the public domain. ‘Strictly for snoopers’, sniffed Paul Bailey in the Observer. ‘Only a person addicted to the sight and smell of old, dirty linen could possibly take pleasure in the revelations.’58 In The Times, Philippa Toomey speculated on whether the book was ‘an act of homage, reparation or revenge’.59

  Even before The Kennaway Papers appeared, Susan’s belief that David’s anonymity could be preserved was shown to have been naïve. The Sunday Times was due to serialise the book; a listing of their forthcoming features included one entitled ‘John le Carré: his secret love’.60 On seeing this, Susan failed to make the connection with her own book; she assumed that it must refer to some other dalliance. But when she telephoned the newspaper to ask whether they needed photographs to illustrate the serialisation, she was told, ‘Oh, we already have a very nice one of John le Carré.’ She was disconcerted, and then horrified when she learned that the extracts they planned to publish were almost all about David. Much to Maschler’s annoyance, her solicitor obtained an injunction preventing the Sunday Times from publishing material from the book. But soon it was obvious that David’s identity was widely known. The Daily Express ran a story on the book, predictably entitled ‘The Lover who Stayed out in the Cold’. The Evening Standard review, by Valerie Grove, had been headed ‘The Wife who Came in from the Cold’, illustrated with photographs of Susan, James and David.61 George Greenfield was quoted as saying that his client had gone away and would make no comment. Susan could not understand how everybody in the press seemed aware that her character of ‘David’ was John le Carré. At a dinner with friends she met the journalist Jill Tweedie, who told her why this was: copies sent out to reviewers had contained a note, to the effect that ‘Mrs Kennaway doesn’t want you to mention that the person named David in this book is really John le Carré.’ Susan felt that she had been deceived: she found it difficult to avoid the conclusion that Cape had taken on the book in the hope of its becoming a succès de scandale. Afterwards she could not stop crying. A doctor told her that she was having a nervous breakdown. Her attempt to pay homage to her late husband’s memory had become ‘a nightmare’.

  Alec Guinness consulted David about the choice of title for his autobiography, which he proposed to call ‘A Halfway Man’. David protested that this was over-modest. Expanding on the theme, he declared it absurd that Graham Greene should have entitled his autobiography A Sort of Life, ‘as if being a bestselling novelist for 50 years, living in the South of France, having lots of money & ladies and discovering God into the bargain added up to very little. Whereas for most people, pains and all, his life is the nearest man can get to perfection. I think one has to remember that somehow.’62 Perhaps chastened by this outburst, Guinness adopted a new title, Blessings in Disguise.

  Later in the year, David wrote to Greene ‘in great embarrassment’ after an interview had appeared in The Times, ‘in which I appear to claim a far greater and more significant acquaintance with you than was ever the case’. The interviewer, Nicholas Wapshott, had referred to ‘a close friendship’ between the two novelists; and had written that Greene had ‘dumped him’ after David’s introduction to the Philby book had appeared in 1968. Another of Wapshott’s howlers was a reference to the novel The Dishonourable Schoolboy.63

  The embarrassment may have been exacerbated by the fact that David had taken part in a BBC radio tribute to Greene on his seventy-fifth birthday in 1979, produced by the film critic Philip French. Greene had written to French afterwards to say that he had found David’s tribute patronising. Shortly thereafter Greene’s brother Hugh had written a hostile review of the television adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

  A few days after Wapshott’s piece, a letter from Greene was published in The Times. ‘I am only too accustomed to the errors which appear in almost every interview to blame Mr John le Carré for what has been put into his mouth by your reporter,’ he began.

  Certainly Mr le Carré would never have described Sir Maurice Oldfield as the head of MI5 and I am sure that Mr Wapshott (perhaps I should describe him as Mr Badshott) is responsible for his description of my relationship with Mr le Carré.

  I think Mr le Carré and I have only met twice – once over drinks with our German publishers in Vienna, and once by chance when we sat together at a musical in Paris in which our French publishers had an interest …*

  I never took him ‘under my wing’ (I haven’t wings wide enough) and we have never been ‘close friends’ – ‘casual acquaintances’ would be more accurate – nor have we ever drunk ‘for hours’, ‘swapping stories’, any more than I have ever ‘dumped’ him.64 />
  Greene replied privately to David’s letter of apology. ‘Of course I never for a moment imagined that you were responsible for that interview, and it was amusing to stick a knife into the ribs of Mr Wapshott,’ he wrote. ‘I have suffered too much from people of that kind myself to attribute it to the person interviewed.’ He expressed the hope that one day ‘our friendship will be a less casual one’.65

  In his embarrassment about this matter David had consulted Greene’s publisher, Max Reinhardt. Afterwards he wrote to Reinhardt to thank him for his good offices. ‘GG wrote a very super letter,’ he began. ‘I owe him so much, in spirit, in sheer literary scale, and it made me sick to think that I seemed to be chucking his name around. It makes me fairly sick to be compared to him too; for I am content to know he is an immeasurably greater talent. Period.’66 A little later Greene received a letter from Moscow, from his old friend Kim Philby, who referred to Wapshott’s interview with le Carré in The Times.

  I had been startled by the news that you had broken up a close friendship for so trivial a cause as le Carré’s attack on me. I was happy to learn that there had been no close friendship and therefore no breach. I don’t think that le C’s preface could have added much to his reputation, except perhaps as a writer of fiction. Over confident, long-range analysis of someone you have never met, is a risky business. Some time ago, he was quoted (I think in the NYT Review of Books) as saying that I had described his novels as nonsense; he was pleased, he was alleged to have said, because it showed that he had ‘stung’ me. In fact, I never said anything of the sort. What I actually wrote was that, although his plots were more complicated than anything within my own experience, they were good reading after all that James Bond nonsense – a rather different judgement. Actually, I have all his books, and have enjoyed them all, except The Honourable Schoolboy; it was so long and so far fetched that it faded long before the end …67