by Adam Sisman
‘What kind of fucking scene would that be?’
David explained, and suggested that a new character was required to explain why the police were there.
‘Well you write it. And you fucking well play it.’
So the cast was reassembled for a night shoot. David played a plainclothes policeman, in raincoat and fedora hat. He had only one sentence to speak,* but Hill was not satisfied with the way he delivered it, and by the end he had been humiliated by having to do seventeen takes.†
In 1983 David’s sister Charlotte became involved in a legal action for defamation. Her performance in the ITV television series No Excuses (written by Barrie Keeffe) had been denigrated by Nina Myskow of the Sunday People, in Myskow’s ‘Wally of the Week’ column. An indication of Myskow’s qualities as a critic was provided by the byline she used in her subsequent incarnation as television critic for the News of the World, ‘The Bitch on the Box’. In this case she had written of Charlotte: ‘She can’t sing, her bum is too big and she has the sort of stage presence that jams lavatories.’
Charlotte was outraged by the review, which she thought malicious. She had a professional reputation to defend. Her performance in the 1976 television series Rock Follies, together with her fellow members of the girl band the Little Ladies, Julie Covington and Rula Lenska, had shown that she could sing. Though David’s lawyer advised her not to sue, and so did David, she persisted. The case came to trial in 1985. Counsel for the plaintiff alleged that this had been ‘a vulgar, vindictive, personal attack’; the defence pleaded fair comment. The barrister acting for Charlotte caused hilarity in court when he quoted a remark made by her solicitor, the libidinous and flamboyant Oscar Beuselinck, ‘I’ve looked at the bottom and it’s beautiful.’ The court found that the words used by Myskow were malicious and awarded Charlotte damages of £10,000, later increased on appeal to £11,000. This was a pyrrhic victory: the damages were nowhere near enough to cover Charlotte’s legal costs. She was forced to sell her flat to pay these; together David and Charlotte’s brother Rupert bought the flat and put it in trust for Charlotte’s daughter.
After the trial Charlotte restated her belief that Myskow’s article had gone way beyond fair comment. She hoped that the action would help to define ‘the limit between what is fair, however adverse, and what is mere personal abuse’.24
For a quarter of a century or more David had wanted to write about Ronnie. The notion had been with him long before he became a professional author. Even as a young man he had scribbled and plotted. For David, writing about Ronnie was part of his wider struggle to establish an identity distinct from that of his overpowering father. It was a form of autobiography, illuminating the secret places of his childhood, the influences that had shaped him into the man he had become. In exploring what had made him who he was, he would surely produce his masterpiece. Again and again he tried to write such a book, but in vain. His first effort, dating from 1959, was written in the self-conscious manner of Gosse or Ackerley,* ‘willing the reader to believe that I was a tender soul crushed by a tyrant’. The son assumed a kind of weary cultural superiority over his father, as if the sheer effort of living in the parental shadow had left him exquisitely drained. In retrospect David would view these early drafts as ‘perfectly sickening’.25
Over the ensuing twenty-five years, whenever he was between books, David would return to the yellowing heaps of manuscript that testified to his frustrating inability to write about his father – until his next novel took hold and he would shove them aside once more. He took consolation in proxy father figures, in George Smiley most of all, and burdened them with his unfocused broodings on love and loyalty. Successive failures caused him to despair of ever writing the ‘big book’; all his other novels seemed to him satellites, circling round a missing centre. Nevertheless he did make the occasional feint at the subject. Aldo Cassidy’s father in The Naïve and Sentimental Lover is a watered-down version of Ronnie – so much so that he had threatened a libel suit, until David paid him off.* It had been difficult to write honestly about his father during his lifetime, but his death in 1975 had removed this obstacle. Jerry Westerby’s father in The Honourable Schoolboy is another study for the finished portrait, as is Charlie’s father in The Little Drummer Girl.
Autobiography is risky for David. He has examined himself closely, with a penetrating writer’s eye; his observations have not always been favourable. He often quotes Graham Greene’s aphorism that childhood is the credit balance of the writer, a balance not to be drawn on too heavily lest it be exhausted. Rainer Heumann cautioned him against draining the reservoir from which all his success has been drawn.
In a whimsical draft, David imagined a bestselling author, born like himself in 1931, contemplating a saga of his childhood, written as if posthumously in the Dickensian style. The ghost of the narrator expresses guilt for his philandering, doubts his own talent and expresses the ‘sad conviction’ that he lacks ‘the dignity of labour’. He is not comforted by his agent’s cry of ‘Jesus Christ, John, you’re not just a great artist, you’re a great industry!’
In 1979, after finishing Smiley’s People, David had made yet another attempt on Ronnie. He was again planning a memoir, perhaps stimulated by Geoffrey Wolff’s book about his father, The Duke of Deception, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, which Greenway had sent him. (This was the ‘completely different’ book that he had discussed with Goodall during their walk along the Rhine.) He considered hiring a researcher to follow Ronnie’s trail through his years of his exile abroad, but he soon lost faith in this idea. Ronnie was a slippery figure; as soon as one tried to grasp him, he slid away. David told himself that since his father’s view of the world had been essentially imaginative, the truth about him was more likely to emerge through a work of fantasy than through the specious arrangement of documentary detail. Besides, David was a novelist; even as he wrote fact, it blended into fiction. The notes he made for a memoir became the skeleton of a novel. In an opening chapter, set in 1930 and rich in period detail, a young man named Rick, obviously based on Ronnie, welcomes worshippers to Sunday-morning service at a Methodist chapel.
Once again David became distracted, by writing the novel that became The Little Drummer Girl. In doing so, he proved to himself that he did not need Smiley any more. Afterwards it would occur to him that by elbowing Smiley aside, he had made space to write about Ronnie. The proxy father made space for the real thing. Once The Little Drummer Girl was finished, he returned yet again to his father, but this time by a completely different route – as a play. He wrote a first act, which he sent to George Roy Hill for his opinion; though Hill made constructive comments, he never heard anything more from David. No doubt this was because David had thought better of the idea. He had found yet another way forward: he would write about his relationship with Ronnie in a spy novel – or to put it another way, he would write an autobiographical novel in an espionage setting. Until this moment he had resisted connecting the two sides of his life, but now he saw a link that made sense to him. He had long recognised that his own exaggerated rush into marriage, respectability and a conventional career had been a flight from his father, and from his father’s way of life. Now he saw too that as a young man he had given himself to his country to expiate Ronnie’s misdeeds; he had dedicated himself to a life of service to atone for a life of selfishness.
David recognised that portraying Ronnie as the villain of the story was problematic. Books that set out to denigrate one character to the advantage of another had an unhappy way of producing a contrary effect, as he had discovered. Readers find their sympathy flowing in the opposite direction from the one intended. The villain becomes the hero, while the narrator become less and less appealing. David could not find a way to write about his father’s wrongdoings without appearing unpleasantly self-satisfied, even sanctimonious. There had to be a balance of culpability between father and son. There had to be love in the midst of revulsion, pity in the midst of revenge, and humour in
the midst of resentment. With this realisation he was at last able to write the book that he had been contemplating for so long.
The story begins with a telephone call, from which the son Magnus Pym, head of the MI6 station in Vienna, learns of the death of his father Rick, a bewitching con man. ‘I’m free,’ he tells his wife, who doesn’t understand. Magnus subsequently disappears and is assumed to have defected. In fact he has sought refuge in a boarding house in a south of England seaside resort, run by the motherly Miss Dubber.* Much of the narrative takes the form of an extended confession, in which Magnus tries to explain what has brought him to this point to his own son, the schoolboy Tom. Magnus visits Tom at school after Rick’s death, as Tom later tells Magnus’s Circus patron, Jack Brotherhood. ‘I think he was telling me that if I was unhappy I should run away,’ Tom says. He quotes from ‘a great long letter’ Magnus has written him. ‘He said Granddad had gobbled up the natural humanity in him and he didn’t want to gobble it up in me.’26 In a farewell letter, written just before he shoots himself, Magnus tells Tom, ‘I am the bridge. I am what you must walk over to get from Rick to life.’†
Magnus writes about his younger self with amused detachment, switching between the first person and third person to heighten this effect of dissociation. For years he has been betraying his country – but out of love for his friend Axel, not out of ideology. Axel grants Magnus an imaginary knighthood, and tells him that he is ‘a perfect spy’.
For once nature has produced a perfect match … All you need is a cause. I have it. I know that our revolution is young and that sometimes the wrong people are running it. In the pursuit of peace we are making too much war. In the pursuit of freedom we are building too many prisons. But in the long run I don’t mind. Because I know this. All the junk that made you what you are: the privileges, the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the schools, the athers, the class systems, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside, the little lords of big business, and all the greedy wars that result from them, we are sweeping that away for ever. For your sake. Because we are making a society that will never produce such sad little fellows as Sir Magnus.27
Axel understands an essential truth about his friend. ‘Magnus is a great imitator, even when he doesn’t know it,’ Axel tells Mary, Magnus’s wife. ‘Really, I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow.’
Magnus has betrayed Axel too, and his father, and his friend Jack. ‘Love is whatever you can still betray,’ he reflects at one point.* ‘Betrayal can only happen if you love.’28 Thus the son is as guilty as his father; and as innocent.
Betrayal becomes an obsession for Magnus. ‘We betray to be loyal,’ he writes in his unfinished novel, as his wife discovers when she sneaks a look at the manuscript:
Betrayal is like imagining when the reality isn’t good enough … Betrayal as hope and compensation. As the making of a better land. Betrayal as love. As a tribute to our unlived lives. On and on, these ponderous aphorisms about betrayal. Betrayal as escape. As a constructive act. As a statement of ideals. Worship. As an adventure of the soul. Betrayal as travel: how can we discover new places if we never leave home?29
Rick is recognisably Ronnie. Magnus’s SIS career is similar to Philby’s, but his background is almost identical to David’s – so much so as to tease the reader into speculating whether David himself may not have been a traitor. ‘How much of Magnus is in le Carré himself remains a tantalizing speculation,’ wrote one of the reviewers, and several others would pose the same question. After reading the book Ann would say that she had always suspected David of working for the other side. But, unlike David, Magnus is no novelist; he tries to write, but fails. ‘If Magnus’s writing had ever worked for him, he’d have been okay,’ suggests Grant Lederer III,† the CIA man who is both friend and enemy to Magnus. ‘There is just too much inside him. He has to put it somewhere.’30
David succeeded where Magnus failed. A few years later he would tell an interviewer that he had never been to ‘a shrink’;* but writing the novel about his relations with his father ‘is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised me to do anyway’. In A Perfect Spy he was able to externalise aspects of his past about which he had felt extremely uncomfortable. Finishing it at last, after so many failed attempts, was ‘a tremendous catharsis’ for him: ‘I cried and cried when it was over.’31
After the worldwide success of The Little Drummer Girl, David was very much in demand. Penguin made a ‘blind bid’ for the new book, offering to buy it sight unseen. Though this was rejected, the management at Hodder & Stoughton was conscious of the need to work hard to keep him. The new novel from le Carré would be the first to be published in Hodder’s paperback imprint, Coronet. This was a bold move, since Pan had published every le Carré novel since The Spy who Came in from the Cold, selling more than 650,000 copies of The Little Drummer Girl. For the new book Hodder set a target of 100,000 sales in hardback and 750,000 in paperback.† They paid an advance against royalties of £525,000, rising to £600,000 if Canada was included: ‘a cool half-mil’, as Michael Attenborough put it to George Greenfield.32 By 1985 Hodder had a string of bestselling authors, including Jeffrey Archer, James Clavell, Stephen King, Harold Robbins, Maeve Binchy, James Herbert and Fay Weldon. But none of the others commanded such serious critical attention as John le Carré.
This would be the last le Carré book to be sold by George Greenfield, who announced his intention to retire in September 1986. He had prepared for his departure by merging his firm, John Farquharson, with the biggest literary agency in Britain, Curtis Brown, back in 1982. Nevertheless David decided that he did not want to remain with Farquharson after Greenfield had left. After consulting Rainer Heumann, who recommended several agents, he picked Bruce Hunter to represent him in the traditional British Commonwealth area, including Canada and Australia. In a way the choice was ironic, as Hunter worked for the firm co-founded by David Higham, described by Greenfield in his autobiography as ‘the only really unpleasant agent I met in those post-war years’.33 But Hunter was a very different character from Higham, who had in any case died in 1978. A Canadian, Hunter was a large man, whose studious demeanour was undercut by a mischievous twinkle. David made it clear to him that he wanted a business rather than a social relationship. He did not mix in literary circles; he did not want to be invited to parties, especially those at the newly formed Groucho Club; he valued discretion highly and loathed gossip. David made it obvious to Hunter that he was not looking for an agent to discuss what he was writing and provide comments on what he had written; he wanted him to reach lucrative deals, and to ensure that his publishers were doing everything they could and should be doing for his books. Hunter set up a system to this end: for the period from the delivery of a new book until three months after paperback publication (that is, about eighteen months for each book) he would attend a monthly meeting at Hodder, at which every detail of the publishing process was discussed. It was extremely unusual, and possibly unique, for an author’s agent to be admitted into a publisher’s decision-making operation in this way.
Hunter began a process of reverting rights in the earlier le Carré books from Gollancz and Heinemann, and licensing them to Hodder & Stoughton, who began reissuing them in ‘Lamplighter’ editions with new forewords (redesignated in later editions as introductions). He obtained considerably better terms in the process, while Hodder were able to market the books much more effectively once they had all of le Carré’s backlist in Coronet paperback editions.
At the same time that he moved to David Higham Associates, David moved to a new agent in America, Lynn Nesbit of International Creative Management (ICM), a close friend of Bob Gottlieb’s.*
‘As I told George, the book seems to me to be some kind of a summation of all my work till now,’ David wrote to Attenborough after the deal was made, ‘and it was very expensive of spirit, which I hope doesn’t show too much! I have no confidence at all that it will be sym
pathetically reviewed here: to the contrary, a sort of inverse ratio seems to exist which should guarantee us the usual critical misery …’34
The novel was dedicated to ‘R’ – Rainer Heumann, ‘who shared the journey, lent me his dog, and tossed me a few pieces of his life’. David used some of what Heumann had told him of his experiences in the war and afterwards under the occupation in forming the character of Axel, Magnus’s controller and his dearest friend, known by his code-name ‘Poppy’.
Until this point in his career David had always submitted his novels to his former employers for clearance, and in all these years he had only once been asked to make a change, to his very first book, Call for the Dead. Now he chose not to submit his new book, arguing that by this time, twenty years after he had resigned from MI6, he was ‘out of quarantine’.
In editing the book, Bob Gottlieb identified passages that seemed more reminiscence than fiction. It was not easy to write a novel that drew so deeply on personal experience without it becoming embarrassingly autobiographical. ‘What we left on the cutting room floor still makes me blush,’ David would say afterwards.35 As usual, he hesitated between several titles. The original working title was ‘Agent Running in the Field’; others he considered included ‘The Burn Box’, ‘A Man with Two Houses’ and ‘A Spy with Excellent Manners’. All were rejected in favour of ‘The Love Thief’, which remained his preferred title right up to the editing stage, when Gottlieb suggested A Perfect Spy.
A Perfect Spy was published first in Britain, to a mixed reception. For Julian Symons, reviewing the book in the Guardian, it was ‘a flawed, overlong but still very interesting novel’. He acknowledged that le Carré was more than just a writer of ‘spy stories’, but questioned whether he was ‘a major modern novelist’. The psychiatrist Anthony Clare, writing in the Sunday Times, was less stinting in his praise. ‘This is a psychological study and it copes well with the burden of such a label … without doubt it is his masterpiece.’36 But Anthony Burgess remained unconvinced. ‘Mr. le Carré’s talents cry out to be employed in the creation of a real novel,’ he pronounced in the Observer. Burgess’s review inspired letters of protest from Ann Alvarez, and from another friend of David’s, the journalist William Shawcross, son of Hartley Shawcross.37 In a perceptive review in the Times Literary Supplement Blake Morrison praised A Perfect Spy as a rich work, adorned with ‘unerringly suggestive’ social detail. He recognised that this was a spy thriller overlapping with a Bildungsroman, and dismissed criticism of le Carré as a mere espionage writer. ‘To say that A Perfect Spy is about the intelligence service is like saying that The Mayor of Casterbridge is about the Corn Laws,’ wrote Morrison. ‘There is enough here to silence those who have urged le Carré to abandon spy fiction and write a conventional novel, a plea which ignores the fact that he has already beaten the genre trap – not, though, by venturing outside, as in The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, but by finding unexpected room within, as in A Perfect Spy.’38