by Adam Sisman
Most nights David would stay up late in his room recording his impressions while they were still ‘oven-fresh’: the omnipresent reek of petrol, the procession of anonymous grey buildings, the rusting ironmongery of Communist insignia, the hostility of those serving meals. One especially grim morning, when David joined John Roberts in the hotel canteen to queue for breakfast, they found that the only knife had disappeared, they were forced to share a plate, there was no tea or coffee, and the woman behind the counter seemed to be deliberately taking her time to open the tin of orange juice so as to needle them. The two Westerners found this both hysterically funny and a sad metaphor for the economic mess of the Soviet Union. From such trivial incidents David deduced ‘that a country so congenitally inefficient, extraordinarily incompetent and frequently lazy could not nurse at its centre a flawless, superefficient military capability’.4 This insight would be central to the plot of his new novel. Since the 1950s the superpowers had assumed that each possessed the retaliatory power to destroy the other, even after a surprise attack, the so-called ‘first strike’. This was the ultimate nuclear deterrent, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, which had (according to its proponents) kept the peace throughout the Cold War. To question this capability was therefore profoundly disturbing to both sides.
Notwithstanding the frustrations of his stay, David developed a strong sympathy for ordinary Russians. ‘Nobody who visits the Soviet Union in these extraordinary years, and is privileged to conduct the conversations that were granted to me, can come away without an enduring love for its people, and a sense of awe at the scale of the problems that face them,’ he would write in the foreword to his novel. One of their most endearing qualities was their earnestness. When the cleaning lady came to his hotel room to settle up for the laundry, she astonished David by mentioning that she had seen his picture in the Literary Gazette; Roberts hazarded the thought that not many of her British counterparts read the Times Literary Supplement. ‘You go for a walk in the countryside and end up arguing with a bunch of drunk poets about freedom versus responsibility,’ David has his British hero say of the Russians. ‘You take a leak in some filthy public loo, somebody leans over from the next stall and asks whether there’s life after death.’
Both men attended a lunch hosted by Genrikh Borovik, the Writers’ Union board member responsible for international contacts. A typical member of the nomenklatura, Borovik behaved aggressively towards Roberts and unctuously towards David. He explained that he was a friend of the ‘patriot’ Kim Philby, and invited David to meet ‘Kim’ over a glass of wine.* David declined, explaining that he was attending a reception given by the British Ambassador the following evening; he could not possibly sup with the Queen’s representative one night and the Queen’s traitor the next. Borovik spluttered that Philby was no traitor. They could continue the discussion at the reception, he said; David agreed, but pointed at the chandelier, warning that they would have to be very careful of the microphones. ‘For a lovely moment, he gave a stage nod, and the complicity was absolute,’ David wrote of this exchange in a letter to John Margetson. ‘Then to his credit, he let out a wild whoop of laughter, remembering too late they were his mikes.’5
The reception was held in the white-and-gold ballroom on the first floor of the Embassy, offering a view of the Kremlin across the river.† The Ambassador had agreed with David to invite as many KGB operatives as possible to the reception, and they all came; nobody could remember such a large KGB presence in the building. It seemed that they were all le Carré fans, despite the difficulty of obtaining his books in Russia. In Cartledge’s view, David handled the situation superbly; he had the KGB people ‘eating out of his hand’. He was both charming and polite, ‘a born ambassador’.
One afternoon David spent a couple of hours answering questions from a select audience of postgraduate students and literati at the Library of Foreign Literature, repository for books thought to be too ‘dangerous’ for the Soviet public. The atmosphere was excitable, almost euphoric. ‘What is your idea of good government?’ someone asked him. ‘One that gives the greatest freedom to the greatest number of people,’ he replied, to greedy applause. Questions came thick and fast. ‘What do you think of Marx, Lenin, Engels?’ asked someone else. ‘I love them all,’ David said, prompting a burst of laughter. Another member of the audience asked him to define the line between individual conscience and social responsibility. How far could one go in defending a society and be sure it was still worth defending? The question went to the heart of David’s work. Afterwards a group of students took him downstairs to a common room and showed him a television set where they had covertly watched a video of the series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. David has recently described this occasion as ‘one of the most moving moments of my life’.6
David had arrived in Russia with only a misty idea of his two central characters, nothing more; but by the time he left he had accumulated enough material to begin writing on his return. As usual for him, the first chapter was the most demanding, and he was still revising it three months later. Gradually the plot took shape. Barley Blair is a small-time, middle-aged publisher who comes to Russia for a book fair. He becomes expansive during a boozy lunch at a Moscow dacha with a group of Russian intelligentsia. ‘If there is to be hope, we must all betray our countries,’ he tells his listeners round the lunch table. In particular he quotes the American poet May Sarton: ‘One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.’7
‘Sovs are the only people daft enough to listen to my bullshit,’ Barley remarks ruefully afterwards. One of his listeners is Yakov, a brilliant physicist racked with guilt about his work on weaponry and longing for peace. He is stirred into action by Barley’s careless talk. Through his former lover Katya, an editor in a Soviet publishing house, Yakov sends Barley a manuscript, which is intercepted by the Circus. Yakov hopes to influence the West not to start a dangerous new arms race. ‘The American strategists can sleep in peace,’ writes Yakov. ‘Their nightmares cannot be realized. The Soviet knight is dying inside his armour.’ The message is both exciting and alarming to the inhabitants of the ‘Russia House’, the section of the Circus that spies on the Soviet Union, and to their American ‘Cousins’: exciting because, if verified, it suggested that their assumptions were mistaken, and the enemy was less formidable than they had thought; alarming, because it might be part of a deception operation, intended to undermine Western resolve to invest in a new generation of weapons.
Western assessment of Soviet missile capabilities was of crucial strategic significance in the 1980s, once President Reagan had announced the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), an ambitious plan to provide a comprehensive defence against all-out attack. This required a vast increase in military spending: planners envisaged using space-based weaponry to shoot down incoming missiles. The plan was thought by many to be unrealistic, even unscientific, and was derided in the press as ‘Star Wars’. But it raised the prospect of a new arms race, threatening to destabilise the ‘balance of terror’ that had kept the peace between the heavily armed superpowers. The Russians feared that they would be unable to compete. Without their own equivalent missile defence system, they would be vulnerable to nuclear blackmail by the West. They could scarcely be expected to argue that SDI was unnecessary because their existing weaponry was outdated and decaying.
Barley is sent back to Russia to establish Yakov’s bona fides, in an operation designated ‘Bluebird’ by the Russia House. Despite several failed marriages Barley remains a romantic; he falls headlong in love with Katya, a single mother with two children. In the end Barley is faced with a choice: whether to betray his country and save Katya and her family, or to remain loyal and lose the woman he loves. For him the decision is obvious: ‘real people in exchange for unreal arguments’:
As to his loyalty to his country, Barley saw it only as a question of which England he chose to serve. His last ties to the imperial family were dead. The chauvinist drumbeat revol
ted him. He would rather be trampled by it than march with it. He knew a better England by far, and it was inside himself.8
As David acknowledged, his story bore some resemblance to that of Oleg Penkovsky, described by authoritative sources as ‘the most important Western agent of the Cold War’.9 Though not a scientist, Penkovsky had supplied invaluable intelligence about the inadequacy of Soviet missile systems. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Penkovsky’s assessments of Khrushchev’s capabilities and intentions had directly influenced President Kennedy’s decisions. His conduit had been Greville Wynne, like Barley Blair a businessman with only sketchy training in intelligence operations. David had written about the case in a review of Wynne’s autobiography back in 1967.10
During the writing of the book David broke with his usual practice by consulting the American journalist and Soviet specialist Strobe Talbott, whom he had met in Israel in the early 1980s while gathering material for The Little Drummer Girl. Talbott provided handwritten notes on David’s draft chapters.
He made a second visit to the Soviet Union in September 1987, in time to attend the Moscow Book Fair, where he would set a scene of his novel.
The publisher Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, offered him an introduction to the most eminent dissident of them all, Andrei Sakharov, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 in absentia because the authorities had refused him permission to attend the prize-giving ceremony. As a young physicist Sakharov had played a key role in the development of Soviet thermonuclear weapons; subsequently he had become concerned about nuclear proliferation. In the 1960s, twenty years before Reagan’s SDI, Sakharov had written a paper urging ‘bilateral rejection by the USA and the Soviet Union of the development of anti-ballistic missile defence’, to avert an arms race in this new technology which would increase the danger of nuclear war. He had not been allowed to publish his arguments and had suffered persecution by the state; he and his wife, the human rights activist Yelena Bonner, had spent the early 1980s in internal exile, before Gorbachev had allowed them to return home. David met them both for lunch in a busy restaurant in Leningrad, where they were forced to shout to be heard above a loud gypsy band, as KGB hoods circled them, taking photographs with old-fashioned hand-held flashbulbs. Sakharov questioned David about those British nuclear physicists who had spied for the Russians – particularly Klaus Fuchs, whom he had evidently met in East Germany. David did not ask why Sakharov was so interested in Fuchs and could only speculate afterwards on his reasons. ‘He was thinking that in an open society Klaus Fuchs had chosen the path of secret betrayal; and that Sakharov, in a closed society, had suffered torture and imprisonment in order to speak out.’11
On his return to England, David decided to tear up the beginning of the book and start again.12 In sculpting the character of Yakov, David imagined how a younger Sakharov might have chosen to do as Fuchs had done, to betray his country for the sake of a higher principle.
The pianist Alfred Brendel and his wife Irene, neighbours of the Cornwells in Hampstead, introduced David to the poet Joseph Brodsky, who was staying with them. David invited Brodsky to lunch at a local Chinese restaurant. They had arrived, and were seated chatting, when ‘Reni’ Brendel burst in, with the news that the house was under siege by the media.
‘Joseph, come home immediately,’ she said. ‘You’ve won!’
‘Won what?’
‘The Nobel! They’ve given you the Nobel!’
As a young man in Russia, Brodsky had been publicly denounced and then confined to a psychiatric hospital before being sentenced to five years’ hard labour in Siberia for ‘social parasitism’. His case became a cause célèbre in the West, attracting protests from prominent Russian intellectuals as well as foreigners. In 1972 he had been suddenly expelled from the Soviet Union. Brodsky was savagely critical of Western fellow-travellers; he would write a celebrated essay condemning the decision of the Soviet authorities to honour Kim Philby with a postage stamp.
Brodsky looked miserable at the news, but David ordered champagne. ‘Joseph, if not now, when?’ he asked. ‘We’ve got to be able to celebrate our life at some point.’
In the street outside Brodsky hugged David. ‘Now for a year of being glib,’ he said.13
‘I hope it is not too much of a shock hearing from me after so long,’ wrote Charles Pick. He explained that before retiring three years earlier he had commissioned John St John, a director of Heinemann who had been with the firm thirty-five years, to write its official history, in time for it to be published in the company’s centenary year, 1990. ‘As a courtesy Johnny is showing authors who are mentioned in the book the relevant pages,’ Pick continued. ‘As he has never met you he asked if I would send you the enclosed.’ His letter ended with an invitation to David and Jane to ‘drop in for a drink one day’.14
St John’s text quoted at length from two of David’s letters. Commenting on David’s letter to Pick about the disappointing critical reception of A Small Town in Germany, St John wrote, ‘le Carré was highly sensitive of his reviews’. The other letter cited was the one David had written to tell Pick that he had decided to leave Heinemann. ‘Pick recalls his shock on opening this letter,’ stated St John. He suggested that le Carré had left Heinemann ‘at least partly because of a refusal to meet his financial demands’, though he hinted that ‘there were in addition complex personal reasons’.
If Pick assumed that David would have little or no objection to such matters being aired after twenty years, he was soon disabused. ‘I find the piece thoroughly offensive,’ David told him.
I am astonished that your ethical judgment, and that of Heinemann’s, will allow you to make free with house correspondence, in which incidentally I have the copyright, and with confidential matters relating to finance and taxation in the case of a living author.
I also find the entire passage contemptible in its selection of that correspondence, and in its tendentious presentation of my behaviour towards Heinemann; and most of all my reasons for leaving.
He sincerely hoped that Pick would take steps to correct ‘what I regard as a cavalier abuse of a trusted if brief professional relationship’. He referred to Pick’s invitation to drop in for a drink. ‘I am always happy to drink with anyone who was my publisher, confidant and friend,’ he wrote. ‘Let me know.’15
Pick’s suggestion of a meeting between the three of them was rebuffed by David. ‘I wish for no part of this book,’ he said. He continued to insist that his letters and verbal confidences should not be quoted, and that his ‘contractual, financial, taxation or other business details should not be aired’. He warned that unless Pick desisted, and provided him with an assurance that he would henceforth give him the protection to which he was in honour entitled, he would take the matter formally to Heinemann through his solicitors, and, ‘since a very large matter of principle is at stake’, to the Publishers’ Association.16
St John then appealed to David ‘as one author to another’ – which seems to have enraged him. ‘My position is unchanged and will remain so,’ he responded. ‘I find the project totally dishonest, and I wish no part of it. I find it unethical and, in a “fellow author”, uncomradely. And I shall exercise the rights I have in order to protect myself.’17
After David had complained to St John that he had not received a response from Pick, the retired publisher wrote to point out that he was no longer employed by Heinemann and did not control the Heinemann archives. (It was perhaps a little disingenuous of him to disclaim responsibility in this way, since he had commissioned the book in the first place.) Pick argued that he had forwarded the relevant passages from St John’s text in good faith. He promised David that ‘I have not revealed (and would not do so) any of the confidences you shared with me during our few years [sic] association.’ He understood that St John had agreed ‘to remove the passages about your financial matters, which I agree are confidential, and he assures me that he always intended to ask permission to quote from your letters’.18
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There would be no quotations from David’s letters in the final text of St John’s book, nor would there be any explanation of his decision to leave Heinemann.19
In 1987 an inquiry into David’s affairs had been launched by the Special Office of the Inland Revenue. The arguments on both sides were highly technical, but essentially the Revenue contended that the company that owned David’s copyrights, Authors Workshop, was no more than a device for avoiding tax. Though David defended his position, it became clear to him that he should make a change. He and Jane had become deeply uncomfortable with the existing arrangements, even if they were justifiable on legal grounds; and they were concerned about the future of the copyrights in his books. Moreover, there was less incentive for such a scheme now that the tax regime had changed: under Margaret Thatcher the top tax rates had been reduced to 60 per cent, and would be reduced further, to 40 per cent in 1988. David’s relations with Hale Crosse, once close, had deteriorated over the years, and he sought advice from a new accountant, Gordon Smith of Citroen Wells, who negotiated with the Inland Revenue on his behalf. It was with a sense of relief rather than resentment that at the end of these negotiations David signed a very large cheque for backdated tax liabilities. Authors Workshop was wound up, and he became a self-employed UK taxpayer.