John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  The German critics were equally divided. Jochen Schmidt, reviewing A Perfect Spy for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, judged the novel to be ‘by far le Carré’s best’.39 But Eberhard Falcke, writing in Süddeutsche Zeitung, thought it ‘overly long’.40

  In the New York Times Frank Conroy, who in 1967 had published his own highly acclaimed memoir Stop-Time, assessed A Perfect Spy as ‘a first-rate espionage novel, perhaps the best of his already impressive oeuvre’.41 In the Los Angeles Times, Morton Kamins suggested that le Carré had been stalking Proust – successfully, as he had come home with his trophy, ‘the masterly welding of an intricate page-turning spy thriller with the infinitely complex exploration of time and a man’s memory’. Kamins reckoned that A Perfect Spy was ‘easily le Carré’s best book’. He went further, believing it to be ‘one of the enduring peaks of imaginative literature in our time’.42 Noel Annan reviewed the novel for the New York Review of Books, rating it as ‘le Carré’s most brilliant achievement’. As a grandee of English academic life with connections everywhere, whose book Our Age (1990) would provide a ‘portrait of a generation’, Annan was well placed to make a wider evaluation of le Carré’s work. ‘For some time astute judges have seen in le Carré far more than a writer of spy stories,’ wrote Annan. ‘He seems to be capable of leaving the allegory of the spy story and evoking in fiction his society and spelling out Britain’s decline.’43

  A Perfect Spy was another no. 1 bestseller in America, muscling its way to the top past such blockbusters as Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Supremacy and Judith Krantz’s I’ll Take Manhattan. In Britain the novel outsold Wilbur Smith’s Power of the Sword. Thus a novel considered by serious reviewers to be a work of the highest literary merit had sold at least as well as the most unpretentious airport fiction. It was a remarkable achievement.

  When the telephone rings in the opening chapter of A Perfect Spy, the maid who answers the call has instructions not to disturb ‘Herr Pym’ unless it is essential. Magnus is busy telling a funny story to his dinner-party guests, ‘in that perfect German of his which so annoys the Embassy and surprises the Austrians’. He is like David as a young diplomat, who could delight his hosts in Bonn with his irreverent impression of the Ambassador’s German. Like David too, Magnus can do an Austrian accent on demand or, funnier still, a Swiss one.

  Herr Pym can put you a row of bottles in a line, and by pinging them with a table knife make them chime like the bells of the old Swiss railway, while he chants the stations between Interlaken and the Jungfraujoch in the tone of a local stationmaster and his audience collapse in tears of nostalgic mirth.44

  Over the years he has expanded his repertoire and perhaps polished his technique, but David is still doing the same thing that he did as a boy, when he entertained Ronnie’s guests with his stories and his mimicry.

  ‘You go to a dinner-party with David,’ Al Alvarez has said, ‘and he will put on a show for you.’

  He always sings for his supper, in a very amusing way, telling stories tirelessly. I have been with him at parties where we’ve both been clearly bored out of our skulls, and David has never ever let up. He’s terribly well-mannered, but it’s purely an act so the evening won’t sink into some slough of despond.45

  But in his own ears David’s comic turns ring hollow. Often he is filled with self-disgust after excelling in one of these performances.

  Through Alvarez, David had become friendly with Philip Roth, then living in London with his long-term companion Claire Bloom. Like David, Roth was an entertaining mimic. The two novelists met regularly at dinner parties, where they would urge each other on. They admired each other’s work; Roth thought highly enough of A Perfect Spy to rate it as ‘the best English novel since the war’.46 From the publishers’ point of view, this was as good an endorsement as could be, comparable to the quote that Graham Greene had provided for The Spy who Came in from the Cold more than twenty years before.

  ‘Dad would have been delighted to have a book,’ Charlotte told an interviewer from the New York Times. Mimicking Ronnie’s voice, she uttered his imaginary protests. ‘I don’t know where he got the idea for this,’ she said huffily: ‘it’s absolutely not true.’ Reverting to her own voice, she said, ‘Deep down, he would have been thrilled.’47 She respected David for his honesty.

  David had sought Charlotte’s agreement, and that of his other siblings, before publishing a long piece in the Sunday Times, ‘Spying on my Father’, one of a pair about the truth behind the fiction of A Perfect Spy.48 The article upset Ronnie’s sisters Ruby and Ella, who expressed their distress in a letter to David. In reply, he told them that he had consulted ‘just about everybody except yourselves’ before publishing the book. He had sent it to all three of Ronnie’s wives, and to his own first wife, Ann. ‘My mother felt that it was a fairy-tale by comparison with the reality,’ he wrote. ‘Jeannie admired it greatly, and Joy, on second thoughts, waived her initial objection.’ In retrospect he was sorry not to have consulted his aunts also. ‘Perhaps I knew subconsciously that you would not approve, although I believe that I have written about Ronnie with tolerance and love, both in the article and the fictionalised portrait of him.’ His good relations with his aunts continued undamaged, and they subsequently visted him at Tregiffian. Though he was sorry to have upset them, he defended his actions, referring to the pain Ronnie had caused to those around him. ‘In writing as I have done, I believe that I have not only alleviated my own pain, which has been prolonged and crippling, but lightened the burden of others.’49

  A BBC mini-series based on A Perfect Spy, co-written by David and Arthur Hopcraft, was screened in the year after the book was published. Hopcraft noticed how fact and fiction had become intermingled in David’s imagination. ‘Rick is a character in his own right,’ he said, ‘but it’s noticeable that since finishing the book, when David’s talking about Rick, he’s really talking about Ronnie. In his mind, the two have merged.’50

  By this time Jonathan Powell had been promoted twice, first to become head of drama and then controller of BBC 1, so his involvement was limited to that of executive producer. In the view of most dispassionate observers this third BBC series adapted from a le Carré novel lived up to the very high standards set by the first two, though David disagreed. ‘Did you see “A Perfect Spy” on the telly and did you find it as embarrassing as I did?’ he wrote to Alec Guinness a couple of years afterwards. ‘Somehow they took all the bounce out of it in the first hour and never put it back. I shall always remember it, along with the film of “The Little Drummer Girl”, as one of the unadulterated disasters of my professional life.’51

  It was perhaps not to be expected that le Carré would be comfortable with a film that so closely depicted his own life, especially as the main disappointment in an otherwise excellent cast was the actor playing the adult Magnus Pym, the character le Carré had modelled on himself.* Ray McAnally won both BAFTA and Royal Television Society awards for his outstanding performance as Rick.

  Around this time David was presented with another chance to act himself. The German director Wim Wenders wrote to him, having seen his face on the back of a book. Knowing that David spoke fluent German, Wenders wanted him to play the part of the sea captain Dollmann, in a television film based on Erskine Childers’s novel The Riddle of the Sands. ‘It was a distraction that I couldn’t resist,’ David would tell an audience at the National Film Theatre: ‘I thought it could be a second profession.’ It was arranged that David would meet Wenders and a friend for lunch at the Connaught Grill. Waiting for them to arrive, he was startled to see two ‘Neanderthals’ come in, wearing frayed jeans with bite-marks in them. ‘I got them out of the Connaught immediately.’

  Wenders insisted on speaking English, despite a thick German accent. ‘Vot is required here is six months in ze Baltic,’ he said. ‘Zere vill be no women. Also you vill have to fall about sixty metres off ze back of ze boat, into ze water. Is zat OK?’

  ‘Of course,’ David replied pol
itely.

  He took the script home and read it; then made an excuse to withdraw.

  The more evasive David was, the more people suspected that he had something to hide. His authority on intelligence matters was assumed, however much he protested his ignorance. As a result he was sometimes placed in a false position. Such experiences made him feel a phoney and caused him to avoid, whenever possible, interviews in which he was to pose as an intelligence expert. They also made him suspicious of others who professed such expertise.

  Soon after the publication of A Perfect Spy David received a telephone call from the Italian Cultural Attaché: apparently President Francesco Cossiga was a huge fan of his novels and wished to invite him to lunch at the Quirinal Palace. This was an offer David could not refuse. Before flying to Rome to meet the President David had a copy of The Spy who Came in from the Cold specially bound for him. The lunch itself was a bemusing experience. On emerging from his hotel David found a limousine waiting for him, with an escort of police motorcyclists; he was driven the short distance to the Palace with the ceremony befitting a head of state. As he walked up the steps of the Palace itself halberdiers stood to attention, while photographers snapped his picture. Inside he was shown into an enormous and beautiful room, where a crowd of men assembled at a distance. Nobody spoke to David until an elegantly dressed man, whom he took to be his host, approached him. ‘Mr le Carré,’ he said, without introducing himself, ‘such a pleasure … All my life.’ He proceeded to entertain David with some talk about their surroundings. ‘In this room we are keeping Galileo while he considers his future.’ At the appropriate moment David produced his gift. ‘I brought this for you,’ he explained; but his interlocutor declined the offering. ‘Why don’t you give it to the President?’ Belatedly David realised his mistake.

  He was led up to the penthouse, where a table was set for twenty-four, and seated next to the President, a weaselly-looking man who wore spectacles with lemon-tinted lenses. He spoke poor English, but he and David found that they could converse in French, so they were able to dispense with interpreters. It seemed that David was the guest of honour, perhaps the only foreigner present, and that the others were senior representatives of rival Italian intelligence services; every time he or the President spoke, they all fell silent, which inhibited the free flow of conversation. A succession of delicious dishes arrived, but were whisked away before he could take his fill. Then the President departed. David was left with the grey men of Italian intelligence, who studiously ignored him. He felt like ‘a performing flea’.*

  * Judi Dench had accepted the part, before she snapped her Achilles tendon during rehearsals for Cats. Simone Signoret was also considered.

  * In 1978 Behr published a volume of memoirs, memorably entitled Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? To his irritation his American publishers insisted on giving it the much blander title Bearings: A Foreign Correspondent’s Life behind the Lines.

  * He took office two days later.

  * For example in 1980, when, during an interview for the Observer, Miriam Gross asked him if he had ‘ever been talent-spotted for the Secret Service’, he replied, ‘No, but I’ve stopped beating my wife.’

  * Airey Neave, an ally and close associate of Mrs Thatcher’s, was murdered by Irish republicans in 1979, shortly before the general election that brought the Conservatives to power. It has been suggested that the explosives that killed him may have originated from Palestinian militants, supplied through a German far-left terrorist group. Mrs Thatcher’s assertion that the bombers had been trained by Palestinian militants may have been based on secret intelligence; it does not seem to be supported by any published sources.

  * The ensuing scandal forced the Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, to resign from his post, though he was soon active again in Israeli politics and became Prime Minister in 2001.

  * ‘She’s running, if that’s what you want.’

  † Graham Greene played a cameo in La Nuit Américaine (‘Day for Night’). According to the film historian Philip French (Guardian, 25 July 2010), he was introduced as a retired English businessman living on the Côte d’Azur, and the director François Truffaut was unaware of his real identity until the shooting was well under way.

  * Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907); J. R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself (1968).

  * Ronnie withdrew his threat of a libel suit only when David paid him $14,000. In another version of this story (interview with Lire, summer 1986) Ronnie threatened to sue when David failed to mention him in an interview.

  * Robin Cooke’s landlady, when he was an undergraduate living in digs, was a Miss Dubber.

  † See the last paragraph of the book.

  * An echo of The Looking-Glass War (chapter 18): ‘Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.’

  † To Gottlieb’s complaint that Lederer read like ‘a parody American’, David replied, ‘You don’t meet the ones I meet.’

  * This was not strictly true; in the late 1960s he and Ann had consulted a psychiatrist about their marriage. But he has never been psychoanalysed – except by himself.

  † By 29 April 1988 they had exceeded this target.

  * ICM was the product of a merger between the Creative Management Agency and Ashley-Famous, the agency that had courted David back at the time of his first success.

  * Magnus as a boy was played by twins, Jonathan and Nicholas Haley; and as a young man by Benedict Taylor. The adult Magnus was played by Peter Egan.

  * P. G. Wodehouse’s A Performing Flea (1953) was a volume of letters to his friend from schooldays, William Townend. The title alludes to a disparaging comment about Wodehouse made by Sean O’Casey, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph in 1941.

  20

  Moscow Rules

  David felt that he had ‘touched the limits of my ability’ in A Perfect Spy, and feared that he might have written himself out. It seemed to him important ‘to put another card down fast’.1 He decided to set his next novel in the Soviet Union, where a new leader had instituted a process of change. Soon after taking office in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had announced the need for ‘new thinking’: he introduced policies of perestroika (‘restructuring’), glasnost (‘openness’) and democratisation. David’s book would be written as these changes gathered momentum. Gorbachev took a much more positive approach in international affairs, recognising that foreign relations and internal reform were linked. After the long winter of the Cold War there were signs of a thaw. A visit to the Soviet Union by the British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, had helped to melt the frosty relations between the two nations.

  Nevertheless it remained difficult for most Britons to travel within the Eastern bloc countries. Except for a few forays into East Berlin while he was serving in Germany, David had never been behind the Iron Curtain. His previous attempts to obtain a visa to visit the Soviet Union had met with stony silence. The Soviet press had demonised him for ‘elevating the spy to the status of a hero in the Cold War’. Only two of his books had been judged acceptable enough to be published there: A Murder of Quality, which explored the class tensions in a ‘bourgeois’ public school; and A Small Town in Germany, which predicated a resurgence of nationalism in ‘fascist’ West Germany.

  David sought the help of Sir Bryan Cartledge, British Ambassador to Moscow, taking advantage of a personal connection: half a lifetime before they had been officer cadets in the same platoon at Eaton Hall. Cartledge put him in touch with John C. Q. Roberts, director of the Great Britain–USSR Association, a body funded by the British government to promote and facilitate cultural and other non-political contacts. Roberts was in a position to introduce David to people he would never meet through the normal diplomatic channels. When the two men met for lunch at the Connaught Grill in January 1987, David explained that he wanted to find potential prototypes for characters in his new book, literary apparatchiks as well as dissidents.* Roberts agreed to do what he could to help through his contacts in the Sov
iet Writers’ Union. ‘Selling the Soviets the idea of a le Carré visit is not proving easy,’ Roberts wrote in his diary; but in April, after weeks of silence, a message arrived from Russia confirming that they were expected in mid-May.2

  David’s first experience of the Soviet Union was a long wait while the KGB frontier guard at Moscow airport scrutinised his documents. ‘Why do you look older than the photograph in your passport?’ he asked. ‘Because I have been disappointed in love,’ replied David. Not even a flicker of a smile greeted this quip. Eventually allowed through into the baggage hall, David found that his suitcase had gone missing. Two days later it appeared unannounced beside his hotel bed, obviously ransacked. His room was crudely searched every time he left it, and he was followed everywhere by two watchers – except after a dinner with a group of Western journalists, when they followed his half-brother Rupert (then Moscow correspondent for the Independent) by mistake. On another evening, at the home of a dissident journalist on the outskirts of Moscow, David stayed up drinking into the small hours of the morning, until his host fell asleep on the sofa. David emerged from the house rather drunk, with no idea how to find his way back to his hotel. Fortunately the two watchers were still outside, sitting bleary-eyed on a bench. Communicating by sign language, David explained his predicament. His tails became his guides: they led him through the Moscow streets to the steps of the hotel, where the three men shook hands.3