John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Yvette Pierpaoli, ‘the constant muse’, and the inspiration for Tessa Quayle in The Constant Gardener.

  David’s agent and close friend, Rainer Heumann, ‘the kind of man with whom one could steal horses’.

  A page of typescript from the book that became Smiley’s People, with David’s handwritten corrections, and a note in Jane’s hand. This is a draft of the opening page of chapter 24 (not 22 as shown here); readers may be interested to compare this with the final version. Gerdov was renamed Grigoriev at a later stage.

  David’s longstanding American editor, Bob Gottlieb. ‘I don’t think writers need all that sympathy,’ he would say. ‘They need to be told when their books are bad.’

  With Richard Burton in Dublin during the shooting of the film of The Spy Who came in from the Cold.

  With Alec Guinness on Hampstead Heath during the shooting of Smiley’s People.

  Two cameos, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (above), where David is glimpsed among the revellers at a Circus party; and A Most Wanted Man (below), in which he sits back-to-back with Philip Seymour Hoffman in adjoining booths of a Hamburg bar. David grew a beard for the part. He also plays a cameo in the film of The Little Drummer Girl and is due to play another in the forthcoming adaptation of The Night Manager.

  Surveying the charred ruins of a village destroyed by insurgents, north-east Thailand, February 1974, while in south-east Asia researching The Honourable Schoolboy. With David is H. D. S. Greenway of the Washington Post.

  Moscow, 1987, collecting material for the book that became The Russia House. This was David’s first visit to the Soviet Union.

  Marching to protest against the visit to Britain of President Bush, following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. With David is Anthony Barnett.

  Inspecting the mummified corpses of people slaughtered at Murambi in the Rwandan genocide, while on a research trip to Africa for The Mission Song, spring 2006.

  Flying low over south Sudan in a Buffalo cargo plane, while collecting material for The Constant Gardener, July 1999. David is seated on soy oil cartons carried for World Food Programme.

  * In the foreword to the book David would state misleadingly that Roberts ‘knew nothing of my dark intent’. He wrote this to protect Roberts from the reproaches of his Russian contacts.

  * Though neither of them could know this, Philby had not long to live; he would be dead within a year.

  † The building is no longer the British Embassy, and is now used as the Ambassador’s residence.

  * The letter had been written three months before it was published, in response to an enquiry from W. J. Weatherby, the Guardian’s correspondent in New York, who was writing a biography of Rushdie. It is not clear how this private letter came to be published.

  * Rushdie’s publisher, Viking Penguin, was reluctant to issue a paperback edition. Eventually the rights were returned to the author, and a paperback edition was issued in March 1992 (four years after the book had first appeared in hardcover) by an anonymous consortium, formed by Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie.

  * Yakov’s code-name was changed from ‘Goethe’ to ‘Dante’ for the film, because the latter was thought to be easier for audiences to spell.

  * The part was taken by Richard Dreyfuss.

  † Connery is fourteen months older than David.

  * An allusion to Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), and perhaps to the successful BBC Radio 4 series Plain Tales from the Raj, broadcast in 1974.

  * On delivering the book David learned that Ion Trewin was on his way to Australia, to attend the local sales conferences and see another of his authors, Thomas Keneally. He telephoned Michael Attenborough. ‘Get me a new editor,’ he said.

  21

  ‘Whatever are you going to write now?’

  It was often said that le Carré lost his subject when the Cold War ended. Friends stopped him in the street to commiserate. ‘Whatever are you going to write now?’ they would ask. No matter how often or how emphatically he rejected the idea that the destruction of the Berlin Wall meant the death of the spy novel, the impression persisted. In 1994 a cartoon by Jeff Danziger in the Christian Science Monitor showed David bowing his head to his Maker in grateful thanks at the revelation that Aldrich Ames, a CIA counter-intelligence officer, had been supplying secrets to the Russians.

  To some extent David was a victim of his own success. To most people, the name John le Carré was synonymous with the Cold War; more than any other writer of his generation, he had shaped the public perception of the struggle between East and West. ‘I saw the Berlin Wall go up when I was thirty and I saw it come down when I was sixty,’ David told an interviewer from the Guardian. ‘I was chronicling my time, from a position of knowledge and sympathy. I lived the passion of my time. And if people tell me that I am a genre writer, I can only reply that spying was the genre of the Cold War.’1

  David resented the notion that he was finished. He did not relish reading his own obituary. He argued that the spy story had been born long before the birth of the Cold War, and would not die with its demise; spy writers would just have to adapt.2 He pointed out that at least three of his novels (A Murder of Quality, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover and The Little Drummer Girl) had nothing whatever to do with the Cold War, and a fourth (A Small Town in Germany) not much. Communism might have been vanquished, but other enemies remained. There was still plenty of territory left for him to explore in the future. In 1989 he identified Angola, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Burma, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Chad and Libya as just some of the places where ‘spooks, arms dealers and phoney humanitarians’ were active. His next novel, The Night Manager, would describe an undercover operation by a branch of British intelligence against one such arms dealer, a man contemptuously indifferent to the victims of his trade.

  As David pointed out, the collapse of Communism did not mean the end of the Russian threat. ‘The Russian Bear is sick, the Bear is bankrupt, the Bear is frightened of his past, his present and his future,’ he said in a speech delivered in the summer of 1990, as the Soviet Union was already beginning to break up into its constituent parts. ‘But the Bear is still armed to the teeth and very, very proud …’3

  David was restless. In several letters to friends* he talked about leaving London for good and settling in Cornwall; or leaving England altogether, to live abroad, which he hoped might enrich his writing. Around 1990 he took out Swiss residency, because, as he would later tell a friend, ‘I really didn’t think that I could stand being English for another day, or in England.’4

  He had lost touch with John Shakespeare, along with almost all his other University friends, within a few years of leaving Oxford. In 1989 he received a letter from Shakespeare’s son Nicholas, then in his early thirties, who had just been appointed literary editor of the Daily Telegraph: he introduced himself as the son of John and Lalage, and asked David to consider reviewing Germaine Greer’s memoir Daddy, We Hardly Knew You – no doubt thinking of David’s troubled relations with his own father. To Shakespeare, David had been ‘a small speck on the windscreen’ all his life, whose outrageous stories and skills as a mimic and raconteur were fondly recalled by his parents. His silhouette of a boy stretching out towards a crescent moon, which he had given them as a wedding present, had accompanied the family around the world, from one Foreign Office posting to another.

  In a warm reply, David congratulated Shakespeare on his new appointment. Though he declined to undertake the review, a year later he gave Shakespeare an interview, to coincide with publication of The Secret Pilgrim. The two men formed an immediate rapport, despite the difference in their ages.* ‘In his company, I felt exhilarated and engaged,’ Shakespeare recalled. ‘I found him courageous, generous, complicated, competitive, touchy, watchful, suspicious, and incineratingly honest, although perhaps not in every single instance about himself, but then who is?’ Afterwards Shakespeare invited his new friend for a reunion with his parents over dinner at his North Kensington flat, where Davi
d entertained the party with a succession of hilarious stories, staying until 1.15 in the morning.

  At the time Shakespeare was struggling with a dilemma that must have sounded familiar to David: whether to give up his safe job in literary journalism for the hazardous existence of a full-time writer. In 1989 he had published his first novel, The Vision of Elena Silves, a critical success which had been translated into several languages; he had received the Somerset Maugham Award, a prize that David himself had received back in 1964 for The Spy who Came in from the Cold. Shakespeare wanted to press on with his second novel, but to do this he knew that he would have to leave the Telegraph, and he had no money. He found David ‘hugely supportive’ at this pivotal moment. As well as writing to Shakespeare to say that he had read The Vision of Elena Silves and believed in his talent, he offered practical help, in the form of a ‘safe house’ at Tregiffian, to borrow when he was not there, and to share occasionally when he was. This was the Long Barn, one side of a courtyard in the neighbouring farm, about 300 yards across the field from his own house, which the Cornwells had bought and converted into a two-storey cottage for their guests, with underfloor heating beneath the flagstones. There were two bedrooms upstairs, and a study downstairs looking over the field towards the sea.

  For Shakespeare, this generous gesture was enough to tip the balance, and he resigned from his job at the Telegraph. ‘I am pleased if I gave you a little extra shove,’ David wrote to him in reaction to the news, ‘and I wish you from the heart the fulfilment of your art, and all the pleasure & magic of the journey.’

  I hope you will not be pulled too often by the quick fixes of journalism, but you’ll work out a balance between the sprint & the marathon. I hope you get the right woman to write with, and to. And I hope you keep your generosity of spirit when they (the hacks & worst of all the fellow novelists) go for you, because your writing has great humanity, & so have you.5

  Shakespeare arrived for his first visit a few months later. On his first evening the two men sat up talking until 2.00 in the morning, over malt whisky.

  David had proposed that they should write separately during the day and meet in the evenings, but on his very first day Shakespeare found himself invited to join David’s regular post-lunch walk along the coastal path, which lasted an hour and twenty minutes. Jane collected them in the car. As she strode across the field towards them, an elderly whippet trailing by her side, David smiled wryly. ‘I always have this fantasy’, he said, when she joined them, ‘that you’re coming to tell me that I’ve won the Nobel Prize.’

  He took Shakespeare to visit Derek Tangye. ‘He’s the local writer,’ David explained; women knocking on the door at Tregiffian and asking for ‘the writer’ invariably wanted him. One had said to David, ‘Aren’t you in one of his books?’ – ‘thereby reducing me to the level of Raulo the fisherman and Ambrose the cat’.

  This was the first of at least a dozen visits Shakespeare made to Tregiffian over the next twelve years, as he wrote his next two novels, The High Flyer and The Dancer Upstairs,* and his highly praised biography of Bruce Chatwin. He would usually stay for about a fortnight, working hard, invariably joining David on his daily afternoon walk when he was there, and often having dinner with him and Jane, or whoever might be staying. They played pool together, or, in fine weather, croquet (David always won both). They would walk along the cliffs to see Tangye, or drive over to see John Miller or Karl Weschke. On several occasions Shakespeare brought a girlfriend with him; David likened one of these, the novelist Donna Tartt, to the elfin Françoise Sagan. ‘I was always utterly candid with him about almost every aspect of my life,’ Shakespeare recalled, ‘and he reciprocated.’

  We had interests and prejudices in common, knew many of the same countries, were intrigued by similar people. There was also his sense of humour. He was one of the funniest mimics I’d met, and it was impossible not to rejoice in most of his targets. He put an extraordinary amount of himself into his performances (and I gathered from Jane that he felt drained at the end of them). He was an exhibitionist and charmer who moulded himself according to his audience in a way that reminded me of Bruce Chatwin, of whom one friend memorably said: ‘Think of the word seduction, it doesn’t matter if you are male, female, an ocelot or a tea cosy.’

  Shakespeare sensed that this was not a friendship that could be taken for granted. Though the two men became very close, David was not someone whom he felt able to ring up and have a chat with. While very open with him when they were together, David was at the same time immensely private, and guarded his privacy to a ruthless degree, frequently changing his telephone numbers to exclude unwanted callers. Shakespeare appreciated that this ruthlessness derived from David’s commitment to writing, a quality that would become even more apparent as he came to know him better. He rationed his time in the city: ‘ten days at a time are all I can handle before I want my solitude again,’ he wrote to a London friend, and explained his need to escape to Cornwall:

  Mostly, my withdrawal has to do with the husbanding of resources. We follow a strict regimen; I’m always asleep by 10.00 pm. I know that if I shine at dinner I don’t shine next morning; I walk, loaf, plot new stories, do not neglect the bottle, thank God, and read only sparingly because my best hours go to the work. The price I/we pay is that we have lost almost all our friends, or lost touch with them; we are up to date on almost nothing in the way of theatre, movies & the rest, which to many people is incomprehensible.6

  ‘For me, he was a model to follow, in terms of his discipline, his respect for plot, and his narrative technique,’ wrote Shakespeare. He learned certain tips from the older man: begin the story as late as you can; write out key sentences and put them on the wall; rewrite; don’t be afraid to throw away eighteen months’ work. Shakespeare never forgot coming back to his London flat to find a handwritten fax from David, about three yards long, curling out of his study into the hallway; he had just read a draft of The Dancer Upstairs and was keen to point out ways in which it could be improved. His advice ran to twelve or more pages, ‘all of it good’. He urged Shakespeare ‘to go the extra mile’, commenting that ‘there have been times in my own career when I wish someone I trusted had been able to say the same to me …’7

  David affected a kind of rivalry, itself a form of compliment. ‘I told Jane if that fucker’s writing a masterpiece, he can go,’ was how he greeted Shakespeare on one of his arrivals at Tregiffian. The pair held passionate discussions about those writers whom they admired (Marquez, Waugh, Wodehouse) and those they didn’t (Anthony Powell, for example). They shared a special interest in Graham Greene, whom Shakespeare admired greatly and had met several times, as of course David had done. On Greene’s death in 1991, David wrote to Shakespeare about him:

  First to Graham: yes, it’s a big gap, the General is dead, and he won. He won his war, if not all his battles; he left imperishable work and the self-perpetuating memory of a very large man with all sorts of fascinating smallnesses – a lot of them sprang from boredom, from too much ease with his talent, but a lot of them were diligently tended by himself in order to keep the child in him alive. I think that was why he was such a writer’s writer: he was all of us, but more so. To write to you this way is already to pray to him: he woke the agnostic in all of us! – and put it to work.8

  ‘I have made no friends in Oxford I have kept,’ David told Shakespeare. ‘I have no nostalgia for it.’ On one occasion, when David and Jane were elsewhere, Shakespeare’s parents came to stay a weekend at Tregiffian, with the Cornwells’ blessing. In a letter of thanks, John Shakespeare wrote that he would love to meet again some time, and invited David to lunch at his club, the Garrick. ‘I’m afraid that the Garrick is one of my no-go areas,’ replied David. The friendship was not resumed.

  David celebrated his sixtieth birthday in October 1991 by inviting guests to a dinner at the Savoy, cooked by the hotel’s maître chef des cuisines, Anton Edelmann. Toasts were called by Ann’s husband, Roger Martin. Vivian Green m
ade a speech proposing David’s health, David proposed the health of the guests, and David Greenway responded for the guests, who were invited to respond for themselves, ‘or not’. John Margetson did respond, and afterwards David wrote to thank him for his ‘elegant and affectionate speech’. He confessed that he had been tempted to publicise how they had met, though it would have been a breach of the Official Secrets Act – ‘but who’s counting, these days?’ He would love to have told the guests how Margetson had been at his elbow when the news came through to Fort Monkton that Call for the Dead had been accepted for publication by Victor Gollancz – ‘if only VG had known where we were at the time, what a scoop! And what a giggle.’9

  In a similar letter of thanks to Vivian Green, David commented on how the age gap between them had shrunk:

  I was so struck by the circularity of our acquaintance – it must happen to you all the time, and the Savoy was no place to speak of it that night. But we touched on it – how much I owe to you, how much of my life you have been able to observe and even share and then suddenly the age gap between us is academic: we both have made our main experiences, and have only the conclusions to draw. So very strange, and interesting. How the autobiography does pull!10

  David’s next novel followed on from The Secret Pilgrim, in that Sir Anthony Bradshaw, the ‘entrepreneur’ whom Ned confronts but fails to shame in the final story of The Secret Pilgrim, becomes a minor character in the new book, which David would call The Night Manager. In fact he had begun the novel back in November 1989, before he wrote most of the stories that made up The Secret Pilgrim, but had then laid it aside for twelve months or so to concentrate on them. David had originally intended Bradshaw to be the villain of the new novel, but came to think better of the idea: through a succession of drafts he mutates into the sleek and loathsome arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper, ‘the worst man in the world’. Roper is unequivocally evil, lacking any redeeming virtue; there is never any doubt in the reader’s mind that he should be destroyed if possible. In The Night Manager the goodies and the baddies are clearly differentiated; there is none of the moral ambiguity that had marked David’s books from the very beginning.