John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  The chairman’s face was that of an over-sensitive little soldier who had lost his horse, David would write later, ‘and you felt an irresistible urge to go and find it for him’. He was wearing a silver-coloured pistol and a perfectly pressed uniform. And he smelled of baby powder. The stubble on his cheeks, as they entered the traditional embrace, was silky, not prickly.

  ‘Mr John, why have you come here?’ he demanded, placing his hands on David’s shoulders, while scanning his eyes like a worried doctor.

  ‘Mr Chairman,’ David said, ‘I’ve come to put my hand on the Palestinian heart.’

  Arafat seized David’s hand and pressed it to his breast. His own hand was as soft as a girl’s. ‘Mr John, it is here, it is here.’

  As David was finishing his novel, real events threatened to overtake his fiction. In London, the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom was shot and seriously wounded by members of the Iraqi-backed Palestinian group run by Abu Nidal. The Israelis took this as sufficient provocation to launch air strikes against Palestinian targets, including the refugee camps, followed by a full-scale invasion, aimed at driving the Palestinians out of southern Lebanon. The fact that Abu Nidal had been expelled by the PLO, that the British police reported that PLO leaders were themselves on the hit list of the attackers, and that the Abu Nidal organisation was based in Syria and not in Lebanon, did not deter the hardline Israeli government. Some of the fiercest fighting took place around Fort Beaufort, the PLO’s strongpoint above the Litani River where David had gone with David Greenway some years before. The old Crusader castle was reduced to rubble.

  David had returned to Israel via the Allenby Bridge. On the day before the invasion, he visited the northernmost kibbutz in Israel, a strongpoint often targeted by cross-border raids from Palestinians based in southern Lebanon. The following night, while Israeli bombers pounded Lebanese cities, he was back in Jerusalem, being gently lectured by a distinguished diplomat on why it was quite impossible for the Palestinians ever to make peace. David stayed in Jerusalem to watch the funerals of the first Israeli soldiers killed in the war, their bodies returned from Lebanon. A journalist stepped out of the crowd and greeted him, almost manic with grief. He had lost a son in the war of 1973 and had come to the funeral because he knew the family of one of the dead men. ‘In ’73 we fought for the peace that was around the corner,’ he told David. ‘What do we fight for now? It goes on, and on, and on.’

  In an article for the Observer, David condemned the attack on Lebanon as ‘a monstrosity, launched on speciously assembled grounds, against a people who on the Israelis’ own admission constitute no serious military threat’.6 David would incorporate the invasion into the final chapter of his novel.

  And in the late spring at last, as soon as the Litani basin was dry enough for tanks … the long-awaited Israeli push into Lebanon occurred, ending that present phase of hostilities or, according to where you stood, heralding the next one. The refugee camps that had played host to Charlie were sanitised, which meant roughly that bulldozers were brought in to bury the bodies and complete what the tanks and artillery bombing raids had started; a pitiful trail of refugees set off northward, leaving their hundreds, then their thousands, of dead behind. Special groups eradicated the secret places in Beirut where Charlie had stayed; of the house in Sidon only the chickens and the tangerine orchard remained.

  By midsummer David was able to inform Goodall that he had finished his novel – ‘which includes blowing up your house in the Fasanenstrasse, which I knew you’d like’.7 As so often in the past, David toyed with a number of titles before settling on The Little Drummer Girl: among them ‘The Twice-Promised Girl’, ‘The Piper and the Tune’, ‘The Cage on the Roof’, ‘The Girl on the Casino Roof’ and ‘Taking One All the Way Through’.

  There was intense excitement about the book in advance of publication, especially in America, where the Palestinian point of view was rarely enunciated. Warner Brothers bought the movie rights. The Book of the Month Club made The Little Drummer Girl a main selection. Bantam bought the paperback rights for $1 million, the same sum they had paid for The Honourable Schoolboy. CBS ran a feature on the book on the evening national news. This was the kind of publicity that no amount of money could buy. ‘It seems to be a book whose time has come,’ commented Knopf’s director of publicity. ‘Rarely is a novel as tied in to current headlines as le Carré’s is,’ commented George Will in his syndicated column.8

  Newsweek made it a cover story, meaning that David had achieved the rare double of cover stories in both the major American news magazines. Newsweek’s reporter Ed Behr spent no fewer than eight days with David in Wengen, and accompanied him to Beirut. Behr was a seasoned foreign correspondent who had covered the conflicts in Algeria, Indochina and Lebanon and had been Newsweek’s bureau chief in Hong Kong.* He described David as ‘tall and handsome, with the offhand, self-deprecating charm and marbled accent of the well-born Britisher’ – a strange expression for Behr to use since, though he wrote for American periodicals, he was English, with connections that he was able to exploit in writing his piece.

  The Little Drummer Girl sold more copies in a single day (59,000) than any previous book published by Knopf in its sixty-eight-year history. David’s American agent Georges Borchardt claimed that it was the fastest-selling novel by an English writer ever to have appeared in America. Knopf had ordered a bullish first printing of 200,000 copies, but nevertheless the book reprinted three times before publication, bringing the number in print to 400,000. Naturally it went straight in to the US bestseller list at no. 1.9

  In the New York Times Book Review the conservative columnist and broadcaster William F. Buckley Jr praised The Little Drummer Girl as a spy novel ‘that transcends the genre’:

  ‘The Little Drummer Girl’ is about spies as ‘Madame Bovary’ is about adultery or ‘Crime and Punishment’ about crime. Mr le Carré easily establishes that he is not beholden to the form he elects to use. This book will permanently raise him out of the espionage league, narrowly viewed … He is a very powerful writer. His entertainment is of a high order. He gives pleasure in his use of language. And his moral focus is interesting and provocative.10

  Acclaim from this source was especially sweet because Buckley was himself a prolific author of espionage novels. Some reactions were less favourable. In the conservative, Jewish-themed magazine Commentary, the historian Walter Laqueur accused David of being ‘a PLO propagandist’ who took ‘a pro-Palestinian line’.11 George Will suggested that he had acted as a conduit of Arab propaganda. To David Pryce-Jones, who reviewed the book in the New Republic, it was obvious that he believed ‘the Palestinians are good, the Israelis are bad’.12 In an introduction to a subsequent edition of the book, David recorded that he had endured ‘the cheap jibe that anyone who criticizes Israel is anti-Semitic’. He had received ‘some foul letters from American Jewish organisations, but some remarkably moving ones from individual Jews’. In a discussion on CBS news Chaim Herzog, President-elect of Israel,* praised the book as ‘realistic’; while the leading Arab-American commentator Edward Said dismissed it as ‘the usual stuff about Arabs as terrorists’. Within Israel itself, the response had been largely positive.13

  A few weeks later The Little Drummer Girl was published in Britain. Here too the excitement was considerable. On ITV, Melvyn Bragg devoted a whole edition of The South Bank Show to an extended interview, built around it. The Observer serialised the book on three consecutive Sundays, beginning with an interview by Hugh McIlvanney. Perhaps unsurprisingly their reviewer, John Gross, praised it as ‘a first-rate piece of story-telling’, though he admitted to being puzzled by Charlie’s motivation.14 Writing in the Sunday Times, Julian Symons admitted that he had disliked all le Carré’s books since The Spy who Came in from the Cold. ‘Happily “The Little Drummer Girl” is different and far better, perhaps the equal of “Spy”,’ he wrote. ‘A few years ago he had not yet written the book he would want to be buried with. Perhaps he has done so
now.’15 The Guardian’s reviewer, the novelist Robert Nye, could not share in the enthusiasm, dismissing the book as ‘an agreeable if somewhat turgid yarn’. He thought that ‘the melodramatic if downbeat conclusion reads (not for the first time in le Carré) like a parody of Graham Greene’.16

  In Germany The Little Drummer Girl was published under the title Die Libelle (‘The Dragonfly’), an allusion to a Heine poem. Here too the critical response was uneven. Alfred Starkmann, reviewing the book for the pro-Israeli Die Welt, argued that the book was slanted in favour of the Palestinians. He was one of those reviewers who felt that le Carré had outgrown the genre of the spy thriller. ‘In literary terms le Carré is treading water,’ wrote Starkmann. ‘If he really means to be a great writer he will have to leave this milieu.’,17 Peter Laemmle, reviewing the book for Süddeutsche Zeitung, admired his technical skill. ‘Nobody in Germany could write a book like this,’ he asserted.

  That the atmosphere of the book sometimes becomes so oppressively close has something to do with le Carré’s subtle powers of observation, with his photographic eye which puts seemingly insignificant details into the picture, thereby making them significant. It is not surprising that the screen adaptations of his books, which are themselves so filmic, have so far never been able to satisfy him.

  The book leaves one with a sense of pointlessness and absurdity. Events take their course inevitably, inexorably. Le Carré’s pessimism, with which we are familiar from his previous books, has reached a peak here. It is as if he has lost belief in human reason once and for all.18

  The Newsweek profile had confirmed what many had suspected for a long time: that David had been a ‘spook’ himself. ‘I have nosed around the secret world,’ Behr quoted David as saying. ‘But it was a long, long while ago.’19 In the simultaneous Observer profile, David expressed an anxiety that if his activities with British intelligence were to be disinterred, he should at least ‘be known as a writer who had been a spy rather than as a spy who became a writer’.20

  For David, this was ‘a kind of exorcism’. Over the years interviewers had often quizzed him about whether he had been a spy, but he had either denied it or deflected the enquiry.* In his James Tait Black Memorial Lecture in 1978, he had raised the question himself – without answering it.

  When people ask me whether I am a spy – ‘are you now, or have you ever been?’ – I am tempted to reply with a hearty – ‘Yes, and since the age of five.’ For a state of watchfulness must surely be the first requisite of a writer, as it is of a secret agent. A writer, like a spy, must prey upon his neighbours; like a spy he is dependent on those whom he deceives; like a spy he must somehow contrive to keep a distance from his own feelings and by doing so conjure up a package that will meet with the approval of his masters. Like a spy, he is not merely an outsider, but implicitly a subversive …21

  Despite his enormous success, David remained sensitive to negative reviews. Though he claimed not to read these, he was obviously aware of them, as his former pupil, Old Etonian Alexander Chancellor, was to discover. Chancellor was then editor of the Spectator, which had republished from the New Republic David Pryce-Jones’s ferocious attack on The Little Drummer Girl, this time under the heading ‘Drumming up Hatred’.22 Oblivious to any offence this might have caused, Chancellor approached David, reminding him of their connection and asking him if he would like to write a piece for the magazine. Of course I remember you, David replied: ‘how could you possibly expect me to write for The Spectator after you published that review?’ Some time later Chancellor tried again, and received the same response: ‘I’ve told you already!’

  Shortly before The Little Drummer Girl was published, David received an abrupt telephone call from 10 Downing Street inviting him to lunch with the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Though he had never voted anything but Labour, he had been impressed by the Conservative leader, who, he believed, had shown courage and determination in sending a task force to retake the Falkland Islands when many of her Cabinet had been willing to accept the Argentine invasion as a fait accompli. A friend of David’s from Sherborne, the historian Hugh Thomas, was chairman of Mrs Thatcher’s think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies. Some months before the lunch at Downing Street, he had given a dinner for Mrs Thatcher to meet writers and intellectuals at his house in Ladbroke Grove. Among those who came were Al Alvarez, Isaiah Berlin, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Anthony Powell, V. S. Pritchett, Stephen Spender, Tom Stoppard and Mario Vargas Llosa. David was invited, but declined, pleading a prior commitment, and asked Thomas to give his good wishes to the Prime Minister if the opportunity arose. ‘I never thought I would find her admirable, but I do somehow, even though the immediate consequences, at least, are so wretched,’ he wrote in reply to Thomas’s invitation, ‘perhaps because I really do believe she is an honest & extraordinarily brave person.’23

  There were eight people at the Number 10 lunch, which had been arranged for the visiting Dutch Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers. David was seated next to Mrs Thatcher, facing Lubbers on the other side of the table. ‘Now Mr Lubbers, you may not know that Mr Cornwell is John le Carré,’ Mrs Thatcher explained – ‘surely you’ve heard of John le Carré?’ Lubbers said no, he had not. Nobody said much except David and the two prime ministers. It became obvious to David that Mrs Thatcher had ‘tuned into’ The Little Drummer Girl. At one point she turned to him and asked if there was anything that he wanted to say to her. He said yes, he thought that the Palestinians deserved greater sympathy from the British government. The Prime Minister’s face darkened. ‘They were the people who trained the people who killed my friend Airey Neave.’*

  If The Little Drummer Girl marked the apogee of le Carré’s career as a bestselling novelist, the film of the book, directed by George Roy Hill, which appeared a year later, represented the nadir of his movie career. It was blighted above all by a disastrous piece of miscasting: Diane Keaton in the central role of Charlie. The public was asked to believe that the ditzy New Yorker was a young radical, capable of convincing suspicious Palestinian terrorists that she was one of them. Very few of those who saw the film were able to make this leap of imagination.

  David had lobbied for his sister or, if not her, some other English actress to play the part, but the studio’s desire for a big star in the central role overruled any other considerations. As a result Charlie’s character was transformed from a twenty-something Englishwoman into a thirty-something American. The only other actress seriously considered was Meryl Streep. Keaton’s stock was high as a result of her performances in Annie Hall (1977), for which she had won an Oscar, and in Reds (1981), for which she had received an Oscar nomination. Here, she received sole name above the title, a mark of her importance to the movie. Hill found himself unable to resist her demands, which extended to choosing her own costume designer after she had told him, ‘My fans would not want me to be seen in these clothes.’ Fatally, there was no chemistry between Keaton and the Greek actor playing Joseph, Yorgo Voyagis.

  Like many directors, George Roy Hill had been an actor first. He had played a cameo in his own film The World According to Garp, a fact that may have inspired him to suggest that David should do the same. Hill was best known for his two very successful ‘buddy’ movies with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). By the time of The Little Drummer Girl, he had begun to suffer the first symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease, though he concealed this from the studio. One effect was that he struggled to maintain his concentration. Nevertheless before shooting began he was still able to take David through the whole movie, script in hand, a tour de force that impressed everyone present.

  The screenplay was by Loring Mandel, a close friend of Hill’s, who introduced him to David in New York. It was obvious to Mandel that David would have preferred to script it himself. He was dismissive of previous films adapted from his work. At an early stage in the process they took a trip to Beirut, putting up at the Commodore Hotel, where the
y spent long hours in the bar, a favourite meeting-point for reporters. Mandel observed that David never seemed happier than when ‘rubbing shoulders with the journos’. As they travelled around the ruined city by taxi, they were stopped every few blocks at checkpoints and scrutinised by armed men. ‘Let them see your hands,’ David advised his fellow passengers. Together they visited the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where only months before hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians had been massacred by Lebanese militiamen after the camps had been overrun by the Israeli army.* As they were walking down the street, a gunshot rang out; David shoved Mandel to the ground.

  David was present on the set during much of the filming. One morning on location in Munich, Hill invited several of the crew, plus David and Mandel, up to his apartment, which was reached through a garden from the hotel where most of them were staying. Hill had gone ahead: a door had slammed shut behind him, leaving his followers stranded. ‘Well, there’s nothing for it,’ said David reluctantly, and he set about picking the lock. He had it open in seconds.

  Once the film was in rough cut, Hill brought it to London for a screening to an invited audience. Afterwards he asked whether anyone had any comments. A fourteen-year-old girl whispered into her father’s ear. When she had finished he raised his hand and said, ‘My daughter can’t understand why the police went to Charlie’s flat.’

  Hill never spoke without using the F word. He turned to David and asked, ‘Why did the fucking police go to Charlie’s flat?’

  ‘Well, we had it in, George, it was in the script, but it got taken out.’

  ‘What do we do about that?’

  ‘Well,’ David said, ‘we’ll have to put a scene in.’