John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  David’s distress at the position in which he had found himself led him to want to give something back. Previously he had made ad hoc donations to family and friends, rather as Ronnie had always claimed to want to ‘see everybody right’; but now he aimed to make philanthropic donations on a more systematic basis, both privately and, increasingly, through a registered charitable trust, set up in 1992. Gordon Smith advised him that ‘if you were Jewish, it would be 10% of your gross income’, which seemed to David an admirable principle; to date he has paid into the Trust approximately two and a half million pounds. The Cornwell Charitable Trust particularly favours local causes: providing the entire cost of a playing field, and a Community House in St Buryan, or a new wing on the village school; and has funded other local institutions such as the air ambulance service in Cornwall, one of Britain’s poorest counties. But the Trust’s donations are by no means confined to Cornish causes: for example, it has made substantial pledges to Lincoln, enabling the college to provide bursaries to undergraduates from poor families who might otherwise be deterred by the costs involved; and it has financed a charity founded by Yvette Pierpaoli to undertake humanitarian work.

  In 2000, after a bruising battle with the farmer who in the 1960s had sold him Tregiffian and who now wanted to erect a large cattle shed overlooking the coastal path, David donated most of his land to the National Trust, with an endowment to help preserve it from ‘human predators’. He retained only the gardens surrounding the house itself.

  The Inland Revenue inquiry into David’s affairs had been precipitated by its investigation into the affairs of another author, Noel Barber, who had become a successful novelist in his seventies following a career in journalism. Like David, Barber had been represented by George Greenfield, and he had attempted to make similar arrangements to minimise his tax liability. When the Inland Revenue questioned his tax status, Barber pleaded, ‘Well, they told me it worked for John le Carré.’

  By October 1988 David had finished a first draft of the new book. He had considered entitling it ‘The Biggest Toys in the World’ or ‘Thinking Like a Hero’, before deciding on The Russia House. He still had a number of changes to make in the final stage of the revision. The novel is narrated by Harry Palfrey, the Circus’s lawyer, a decent man who has settled for a safe pension and a loveless marriage. In the final rewrite David made much more of Palfrey and his wife Hannah. ‘I hope the effect will be to contrast Barley’s redemption by love with Palfrey’s permanent imprisonment by compromise,’ he wrote to his Hodder editor, Ion Trewin. ‘By extension, I hope the two parallel love stories will point up the looming political choice that faces us: have we the courage to grasp the chance of peace in the future, or do we prefer the status quo?’20

  David was uncertain whether to give the novel a happy ending. In the final pages of the story, Barley is in Lisbon, decorating his apartment in preparation for the arrival of Katya and her family. He seems confident that the Soviet authorities will honour their agreement to allow her to join him in the West. In some drafts Katya and her family arrive at the end. David was still hesitating about this when he delivered the book to the publishers, and revised the ending afterwards. Eventually he decided to leave the outcome open. The novel ends with the sentence ‘Spying is waiting.’

  The Russia House is dedicated to Bob Gottlieb, ‘a great editor and a longsuffering friend’. There is no doubt that David greatly valued Gottlieb’s input into his books. But the dedication was double-edged, because in 1987 Gottlieb had become editor of the New Yorker, in succession to the long-serving William Shawn. He had been replaced by Sonny Mehta, who had earned a reputation in London publishing as an editor with taste and flair. The arrangement was that Gottlieb would continue to edit David’s books in parallel with his new role, though inevitably he would not continue to influence every stage of the publishing process as he had been able to do as editor-in-chief.

  Knopf’s first printing was 350,000 copies. Once again David’s timing was fortuitous. The Russia House was published in America in June 1989, just as the first cracks had appeared in the Iron Curtain. In May the Hungarians began dismantling their border fence with Austria, allowing thousands of people from neighbouring Eastern bloc countries to cross freely into the West. Meanwhile partially free elections in Poland had demonstrated overwhelming popular support for the non-Communist trade union movement, Solidarity. A series of revolutions followed, which would overthrow Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, ushering in a ‘New World Order’.

  David’s novel was set two years earlier, and contained no suggestion that Communism was about to collapse. But in 1989 anything to do with the Soviet Union seemed topical. Newsweek again made it a cover story. ‘John le Carré, master of the spy story, ushers in a new era with a remarkable – and surprising – thriller,’ trumpeted the news magazine. ‘The days of Smiley and Karla are over.’ It predicted that The Russia House would shoot up the bestseller list like a Minuteman missile.21 In fact the novel went straight into the bestseller list at no. 1, and remained at the top for twelve weeks. This was le Carré’s third no. 1 US bestseller in succession.

  For Newsweek, The Russia House was ‘faster and leaner than anything le Carré has done in years – a taut spy story embracing a lean romance’. Its rival news magazine Time also praised the book, as ‘a thriller that demands a second reading as a treatise on our times’. The New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who had written a damning review of The Naïve and Sentimental Lover eighteen years before, admired the ‘superb’ dialogue and the ‘convincingly authentic’ settings; but felt that the love affair between Barley and Katya seemed ‘forced’. Not every reader, he suggested, would agree with the underlying assumption that ‘only American militarism stands in the way of world peace’.22 The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien also thought the book marred by anti-American bias, though he rated it as ‘vintage le Carré’:

  … much of the story hinges on the fraught relationship between the British and American ‘intelligence communities’. The Americans come across as hard-boiled and cynical, the British as decenter, in their own devious way, but having in the end to take their lead from the Americans. Significantly, the only character who is consistently presented as despicable, in everything he says and does, is Clive, a senior figure in British intelligence, who is entirely in the pockets of whichever American intelligence faction appears to be on top.

  Early on in the story, the narrator establishes the Britons’ view of their domineering cousins. The Americans, in the view of Harry Palfrey, think of themselves as ‘the larger beneficiaries … the majority shareholders’. The Americans throw their weight around in a manner distressing to British sensibilities, since the British have more refined and cryptic ways of throwing their weight – as we Irish know. Palfrey despises the American ‘frank enjoyment of power and money’. Americans, he thinks, ‘lack the instinct to dissemble that comes so naturally to us British’.23

  In advance of the American publication David had given a long interview to Vanity Fair, recently revived by a new editor, the ambitious young Englishwoman Tina Brown. Lord Snowdon was commissioned to photograph David for the piece.

  ‘Do you mind if we use Christian names?’ asked Snowdon.

  ‘Well, no,’ replied David, ‘you’ve got more to lose than I have.’

  T. J. Binyon reviewed The Russia House for the Times Literary Supplement, as he had done The Honourable Schoolboy. ‘The sentimental strain which marred the conclusion of The Little Drummer Girl and ruined The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, re-emerges,’ wrote Binyon. ‘As an optimistic fairy story the book still perhaps works; but not as a novel which engages reasonably seriously, as the earlier novels did, with reality.’24 The novelist Salman Rushdie reviewed the book for the Observer. ‘John le Carré … wants to be taken very seriously indeed,’ he wrote. ‘Much of the trouble is, I’m afraid, literary. There is something unavoidably stick-figure-like about le Carré’s attempts at characterization.
’ His summary damned the book with faint praise. ‘Le Carré is as serious a writer as the spy genre has thrown up. Close, but – this time anyway – no cigar.’25

  David had met Rushdie some years earlier, when he had been persuaded by his sister Charlotte to take part in an event in support of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, on a Sunday night at the Piccadilly Theatre. The show had been delayed, so the participants, including Rushdie and Harold Pinter as well as David, had all spent some time in the Green Room, chatting amiably about writers and their political involvement as they waited to go on stage.

  By the time he reviewed The Russia House Rushdie was living in hiding, under police protection. Earlier in the year the Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran, had declared his novel The Satanic Verses to be ‘blasphemous against Islam’, and issued a fatwa, calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers. Iranian officials had offered a bounty for his death. The book had drawn mass protests in Muslim countries and fire-bombings of bookshops in the West: several people had died as a result.

  In a letter published in the Guardian, David suggested that Rushdie should have known better. ‘Anybody who is familiar with Muslims, even if he has not had the advantage of Rushdie’s background, knows that, even among the most relaxed, you make light of the Book at your peril.’* He indicated that Rushdie had, ‘perhaps inadvertently’, provoked his own misfortune. ‘His open letter to the Indian Government seemed to me to be of an almost colonial arrogance.’ Free speech was always curtailed, David insisted. ‘Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity.’ He argued that anyone who wanted to read The Satanic Verses had already been given ample opportunity to do so. To David, Rushdie’s attitude was a mystery. ‘How can a man whose novel, for whatever twisted reasons, has already been the cause of so much bloodshed, insist on risking more?’ He failed to understand both why Rushdie had not withdrawn the book until a calmer time and why he was ‘inviting further bloodshed’ by insisting on its publication in paperback. ‘It seems to me that he has nothing further to prove except his own insensitivity.’ David noted the ‘elitism’ of Rushdie’s most vociferous defenders, who claimed ‘great literary merit’ for the book, even that it was ‘a masterpiece’. He saw this as a dangerous and self-defeating argument. ‘Would the same people have leapt to the defence of a Ludlum or an Archer? Or are we to believe that those who write literature have a greater right to free speech than those who write pulp?’26

  A few weeks later Rushdie retaliated in a Newsweek article, in which he implied that David was an isolated critic. ‘Slowly, slowly a point of view grew up, and was given voice by mountebanks and bishops, fundamentalists and Mr John le Carré, that I knew what I was doing,’ wrote Rushdie. ‘I must have known what would happen; therefore did it on purpose, to profit by the notoriety that would result.’27 In his autobiography Joseph Anton, published more than twenty years later, Rushdie would single out le Carré as ‘one of the few writers who had spoken out against him when the attack on The Satanic Verses began’.28 He seemed to have forgotten that at the time plenty of other prominent people were calling for The Satanic Verses to be withdrawn, or for the paperback to be postponed: among them such varied figures as the former American President Jimmy Carter, the writer and critic John Berger, the novelist Roald Dahl and the political journalist Hugo Young.29 In December 1990 Rushdie himself would make a volte-face: he signed a declaration affirming his Islamic faith, and publicly called on his publisher neither to issue the book in paperback nor to allow it to be translated – a call he retracted once it became obvious that the fatwa would not be lifted. His estranged wife, Marianne Wiggins, told the Sunday Times that Rushdie was not man enough to fill the role history had given him.30*

  It was later suggested by the journalist Mark Lawson that David’s criticism of Rushdie had been provoked by his review of The Russia House.31 This explanation was generally accepted, though David himself describes it as ‘sheer nonsense’. One could equally well argue that it was the other way round, that Rushdie’s review was itself the product of a grudge. In May 1989, a couple of months before it had appeared, David had spoken about The Satanic Verses in an interview with the New York Times. He condemned the fatwa as outrageous. But he also expressed mystification that Rushdie had not withdrawn the book, given that people were dying because of it. ‘I have to say that would be my position,’ David told the New York Times reporter.32

  The Russia House was a worldwide bestseller. Since The Spy who Came in from the Cold, each new le Carré novel had been published in at least thirty languages. The French, German and Italian editions of David’s books, for example, sold in large quantities, and attracted serious review attention – more serious, arguably, than the English-language equivalents. One mark of David’s status in France was an invitation to appear on the prestigious television programme Apostrophes. This was a French institution, of a kind hard to imagine in English-speaking countries. For the past fifteen years its presenter, Bernard Pivot, had been interviewing many of the world’s most highly regarded authors, including Umberto Eco, Milan Kundera, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe. Despite its dauntingly highbrow content, Apostrophes went out live at prime time and regularly attracted six million viewers, making it one of the most watched shows on French television. It was recognised that an appearance on the programme could generate thousands of book sales.

  As well as Pivot, there were two other journalists present, a man and a woman. David’s French was good enough for him to be able to cope with the ninety-minute interview, helped by the fact that the loquacious journalists’ questions were often longer than his replies. The talk was not confined to intellectual matters. Pivot was interested to know why David had chosen a French nom de plume: David provided two replies, the dull vérité and the more entertaining mensonge, of seeing the name on a shopfront from a bus window. Pivot himself gave an account of a ceremony in Capri, at which both he and David were to receive a prize; he told how he had been mortified to find himself at this formal event ‘sans cravate’, in contrast to David, who was immaculately turned out. ‘Voilà John le Carré,’ Pivot told his audience, ‘un vrai Anglais … il connaît savoir vivre.’ He explained how David, ‘dans une geste magnifique’, had taken off his own tie and handed it to him: at this point Pivot removed the tie from around his own neck and showed it to the viewers. It was this very tie, he said, and offered it back to his guest. ‘Vous pouvez le retenir,’ said David, laughing.

  The broadcast was still winding up as he left to have dinner with his French publishers, Laffont. Emerging on to the street, David commented that it was empty. ‘Where is everybody?’ he asked. ‘Tout le monde regarde la fin d’ Apostrophes, his publisher replied.

  David’s mother died in 1989. For some years she had been a resident in a nursing home, once ill-health had forced her to give up the cottage that David had bought for her. In clearing out the cottage he retrieved the white hide suitcase which Ronnie had given her for their honeymoon, and which she had taken with her when she slipped out of Hazel Cottage that night so many years before, leaving her boys sleeping innocently upstairs. Beneath the leather handle were the initials O.M.C., for Olive Moore Cornwell, a relic of a life left behind. David took it back to his house in London and kept it there, an object of intense speculation, perhaps a key to his lost childhood.

  In a dark drawer in Olive’s cottage David found a studio photograph of his brother and himself, aged seven and five, posing with carefully combed hair in their new uniforms of St Martin’s boarding school, inscribed with handwritten greetings from each of them, David’s signed ‘love from david’, with a small ‘d’. This made no sense to him: if Olive had fallen into immoral ways, and perhaps died as a result, which was what Ronnie had suggested to them at the time, why would they have signed the photograph for her? David could remember posing for the photograph, but he had no memory of writing such a message. He speculated that
his inscription, and maybe his brother’s too, had been forged by their father.

  In recent years he and Jane had been more regularly in contact with Olive, visiting her from time to time, sending her presents at Christmas and on her birthday, and letters or faxes full of his news. These were written in affectionate, even sentimental terms, and usually addressed to ‘my dearest mother’. It might seem that he had forgiven her for all the hurt she had caused him; but the tone of the letters rang false, as though he was striving for feelings that he could not find. The truth was that he found her irritating. He paid her nursing-home fees, and, after her death, distributed handsome gifts to the matron and her assistant. As a dutiful son he came to her funeral, though he discouraged his brother from flying across the Atlantic to attend. Indeed he organised it and gave an address. ‘Why didn’t you ever buy me orchids, darling?’ his mother had asked him at their final leave-taking, as so often in the past mistaking him for Ronnie. He placed an enormous bunch of orchids on her coffin. Some of the mourners were comparative strangers, who apparently came merely to gawp at the famous author. His Canadian half-sister commented sourly that it was like a ‘dog-and-pony show’.

  In January 1989 the East German leader, Erich Honecker, had predicted that the Berlin Wall would stand for another fifty or even a hundred years. But only months later, following the outbreak of mass demonstrations across the country, Honecker was forced to resign. The chorus of discontent rose to a climax in early November, when half a million protestors gathered in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. It became obvious that the East German authorities were no longer willing to authorise the use of force to prevent people crossing into West Berlin. The vastly outnumbered soldiers started to open the frontier checkpoints to allow free movement back and forth. Demonstrators began to climb the Wall, and to take chunks out of it with sledgehammers. The unnatural division of a city, and of a people, was ending. Within the year Germany would be reunified. Across Europe there were celebrations as a succession of uprisings brought down hated regimes. The Cold War was over. Less coherent than usual, David wrote happily to Alec Guinness: ‘if life and politics ever give a chance to celebrate, which they don’t, we really should. Because, for all our faults, WE were right, and for all their proclaimed ideals, THEY were a bunch of corrupt, foul-minded piglets. Which is a calumny against piglets. So please read, swine.’33