by Adam Sisman
Lord seemed surprised by the controversy, and belatedly alarmed. He wrote to David avowing goodwill towards him. Meanwhile a copy of his outline found its way into its subject’s hands. One of the publishers to whom it had been submitted, Simon Master of Random House,* had telephoned Bruce Hunter to enquire about David’s attitude to the biography and had subsequently sent him the proposal, in confidence. Hunter showed it to David, without revealing its source. After some deliberation, David decided to try and stop the book. ‘I didn’t want him gumshoeing around my children, my ex-mistresses, my everything,’ he would say, years later.25 He wrote to Susan Kennaway (now using her married name of Vereker), proposing a ‘united front’ against Lord – ‘not to speak to him at all, not even to say one doesn’t want to speak to him!’26 His solicitors served a writ on Lord, alleging libel.27 Not only was the outline defamatory of their client, it also appeared to defame his ex-wife, by suggesting that she, like Smiley’s Ann, had been unfaithful, and as a result she too took legal advice. Nor was this the limit of Lord’s woes; Private Eye reported that his solicitors had received a letter from solicitors acting for Susan Kennaway.28 ‘If your client relies on the novel The Naïve and Sentimental Lover by le Carré and/or Some Gorgeous Accident by James Kennaway as evidence,’ their letter warned, ‘you should remind him that these novels are works of fiction.’
Faced with such pressure, Lord backed down. He abandoned the biography, and signed a letter apologising for the false imputations in his outline and undertook not to repeat them. In a letter to the Bookseller he fulminated that a publisher had acted ‘utterly shamefully and unprofessionally’ by ‘leaking’ a copy of his outline. This had been a ‘disgraceful breach of confidence, causing me to lose a legitimate book contract and costing me thousands in legal costs’.29 (At one point Lord’s solicitors threatened to sue David for spoiling his contract, but this was mere bluster.) Harris commented that Lord was ‘incredibly stupid to pinch my idea without giving me a call, and incredibly stupid to circulate an outline that was libellous – just mad’.30
By the early 1990s Hodder & Stoughton was struggling to maintain its position. During the previous decade British publishing had been transformed, from being an industry largely composed of small, family-run concerns to one controlled by vast international media conglomerates. Hodder faced relentless competition from well-financed groups such as Rupert Murdoch’s brutally named HarperCollins. Its bestselling authors were lured away one after another. In 1993 the company accepted a buy-out by a smaller publisher, Headline, founded only seven years earlier by the dynamic Tim Hely Hutchinson, who became chief executive of the newly merged Hodder Headline PLC. The takeover took place just as The Night Manager was published. The book reached no. 1 in the UK hardback fiction bestseller list, but only briefly. It was unfortunate that Jeffrey Archer’s first book for HarperCollins, Honour among Thieves, appeared almost simultaneously, and reportedly subscribed four times as many copies. The Sunday Times reviewed the two books alongside each other, with a cartoon showing the two bestselling authors as duellists. In fact both were outsold by Delia Smith’s latest cookery collection.31 David was irked by a succession of minor problems, which he felt had damaged sales. ‘I cannot remember an unhappier publication,’ he complained to Hely Hutchinson. ‘I don’t honestly know whether I can muster enough conviction for the future to remain with Hodder’s.’32
Understandably Hely Hutchinson was keen that John le Carré should stay. ‘He is indeed the jewel in Hodders’ crown,’ he wrote to Jane. For a while he dealt with David personally, before Roland Philipps, a capable and experienced editor, took over.33
With the support of a fresh promotion effort, The Night Manager re-entered the UK bestseller list in October, and sold strongly through the Christmas period. The Coronet paperback edition, published the following May, reached no. 2 in the UK bestseller list, selling almost 600,000 copies in the first three months, fewer than The Russia House (670,000), but more than The Secret Pilgrim (470,000).
The American hardcover of The Night Manager reached no. 3 in the New York Times bestseller list: a disappointment, given that the four previous John le Carré novels had all gone to no. 1. Knopf reported to the trade magazine Publishers Weekly ‘a respectable in-print figure’ of about 350,000 hardcover and one million softcover, but suggested that these figures fell short of the sales necessary to make the book profitable, given that it had been purchased for an advance of $5 million.34*
Perhaps predictably, many of the reviews of The Night Manager had addressed the question of what the future held for le Carré now that the Cold War had ended. ‘John le Carré’s marvellous new novel leaps free of Smiley’s Circus entirely,’ wrote Michael Ratcliffe in the Observer.35 Julian Symons, reviewing the book for the New York Times, rated it more highly than its recent predecessors, ‘a brilliant performance, executed with an exuberance, a richness of detail and a narrative drive that have been absent from Mr. le Carré’s writing for a decade …’ Nevertheless he thought it marred by an implausible conclusion, and a ‘romanticism about women that leads to the creation of a pipe-dream fantasy rather than a character in Jed, Roper’s mistress’.36 Several other reviewers made the same criticism: Penny Perrick in the Sunday Times, for example, wrote that ‘weaving unconvincingly through this otherwise formidably authentic account of wheeler-dealer weapon supply is a love story that Dame Barbara Cartland might find a trifle over the top …’37
Soon after the book was published David received an unexpected letter of appreciation, addressed to him as John le Carré. ‘I just wanted you to know the pleasure you have given this retired Prez, the retired CIA guy,’ wrote George H. W. Bush, who had been President of the United States, 1989–93, and Director of the CIA, 1976–7. In due course there would be another letter from Bush, thanking David for an advance copy of his next novel.38
In the New York Review of Books, David Remnick took the opportunity to review David’s oeuvre. ‘So much of the pleasure of le Carré’s cold war novels lay in the way he created a shadow world that the reader imagined, somewhere, to exist,’ he wrote. ‘Now it has cruelly and suddenly disappeared. I can think of no other novelist associated with a specific atmosphere – not Faulkner, not Waugh – who ever had to deal with such complete and instantaneous obliteration.’ In Remnick’s reckoning The Night Manager was ‘as taut a spy novel as one could hope for’. But it lacked some of the qualities that had made le Carré’s novels of the Cold War so fascinating: ‘shading, ambiguity and doubt’. For Remnick, the warring parties in The Night Manager were, ‘by le Carré’s standards, stock figures’. Like other reviewers, he saw Jed as a caricature, albeit ‘numbingly gorgeous’. At moments The Night Manager seemed to Remnick like a James Bond novel written by a superior Ian Fleming, ‘a Goldfinger for grownups’.39
Remnick complained of being dazzled by the ‘glittering locations’ and ‘establishing shots that speak too clearly of the screenplay to come’. They seem to have spoken to Sydney Pollack, who persuaded Paramount Pictures to buy film rights in the book and hired Robert Towne, best known for scripting Chinatown, to write the screenplay. But Pollack was notorious for falling in love with novels, getting the studio to buy them and then losing faith in the project: he had already done this with A Small Town in Germany, and now he did it again with The Night Manager, quoting Towne to the effect that there was no way to end the movie. To prove him wrong David wrote an ending to the story himself and sent it to Pollack for Towne’s use. Subsequently the three men held brainstorming sessions in Los Angeles, but failed to reach a satisfactory outcome. ‘We bought some sculpture and some pictures for Tregiffian after Paramount paid me a stupid amount of money for “The Night Manager” and then promptly ditched the project,’ David told Alec Guinness in a letter afterwards.40
Before Pollack had become interested David had given first option on the film rights in The Night Manager to Stanley Kubrick, whom he had known since 1980. After some discussion Kubrick had passed, saying that he co
uld not find a way to compress the plot into a two-hour movie ‘without flattening everybody into gingerbread men’.41 Ten years earlier he had passed on an opportunity to film The Little Drummer Girl. Kubrick, who was obsessed with guns, sent detailed technical notes to David about the weaponry used by Roper. ‘Isn’t he an asshole?’ David scribbled on one of these before forwarding it by fax to their mutual friend, the studio boss John Calley.
It was Calley who had introduced David to Kubrick. At the time Kubrick had recently finished filming The Shining, which was due to be released a few weeks later. He invited David to a private screening at Shepperton Studios, followed by dinner at his Hertfordshire manor house Childwickbury. Kubrick, who expressed great enthusiasm for David’s work, talked about Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story, which he had wanted to film ever since first reading it in 1968. Would David be interested in adapting it for the screen? After reading the book David spent a day with Kubrick outlining his ideas: he wanted to set the story in an inhibited, priest-ridden, walled city such as Wells and play upon the hypocrisies of a small community and its sexual obsessions. Kubrick listened and then politely declined; he had already decided to set the story in New York.
Later he tried to interest David in scripting a film based on research which suggested that a network of British agents operating in France during the Second World War had been betrayed as part of a massive deception operation. David didn’t believe the story and didn’t want to put his name to it. Then Kubrick wanted to make a film of A Perfect Spy; when David told him that the BBC proposed to adapt it as a series, he said, no problem, he would direct it for them. David passed this suggestion to Jonathan Powell, who ‘had a fit’: Kubrick was certain to go vastly over budget, he said, and would probably take seven years to make the series anyway.
Also present at the Childwickbury dinner had been Michael Herr, author of Dispatches (1977), described by David in a quote given to the publishers as ‘the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time’. Herr was living in London at the time, and he and David had become friendly; David had suggested to Kubrick that he might join them. In due course Herr would collaborate with Kubrick on the script of his film Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Kubrick would try to interest him too in the Schnitzler novella. ‘His idea for it in those days was always as a sex comedy,’ Herr recalled, in a memoir of Kubrick. ‘He’d talked about this book with a lot of people, David Cornwell and Diane Johnson* among them, and since then David & Diane and I later talked about it among ourselves.’ But none of them was seriously tempted to adapt it for him.† ‘Stanley was a terrible man to do business with, terrible.’42
In an interview with the journalist Zoë Heller,* David claimed to have read not a single English review of The Night Manager. ‘I never do,’ he said. ‘I cannot make it sufficiently clear that I have never been part of that world. I don’t know the people who review me, I don’t go to their parties – I never will … I have the most profound contempt for the system – a total alienation from it.’ In her profile of him, Heller referred to ‘an aura of spikey dignity – of lonely honour and unassailable privacy’ attached to his public image. ‘His writing has occupied an uneasy position, at the very perimeter of literary respectability,’ she suggested, citing Rushdie’s jibe that ‘le Carré wants to be taken seriously’. She attributed David’s ‘fabled spikiness’ to his sensitivity to critical opinion. ‘Le Carré affects not to be bugged by the literary caste system,’ she wrote, quoting his statement that his novels were influenced by the German Romantics. ‘They are for me a kind of Bildungsroman,’ he told her. ‘I don’t really expect, on an intellectual level, to be understood here anyway.’ He wrote for the average reader rather than the critics. In his experience, he said, his readers were ‘a great deal more responsive, sensitive and understanding than the people who presume to speak for them’. When Heller took issue with his avowed populism, David insisted that the opinions of ordinary people were worth more than the ‘corrupt’ literati. ‘If you move in those circles,’ he told her, ‘you trip over connections at every point. You feel – I always feel – that every time I’ve put one foot in front of the other in English life, I’ve made an enemy. I know the scale of the envy market. I know the way such minds work …’43
David told Zoë Heller that he did not compete for literary prizes. A profile in the Sunday Times deplored the fact that none of le Carré’s novels had been nominated for the Booker Prize, ‘though his best stories are indisputably superior to most Booker winners’.44 This prompted a letter to the newspaper from Martin Neild, Hodder’s managing director. ‘The reason that his books have never been nominated is that author and publisher have always agreed not to submit them,’ wrote Neild – omitting to mention that Booker Prize judges are entitled to ‘call in’ novels not submitted by the publishers if they think them worthy of consideration. In a comment omitted from the abbreviated version of his letter published in the paper, Neild referred to ‘John le Carré’s determination to let his work be judged solely on its own merits, unhampered by personal relationships and prize aspirations’.45
The starting-point for David’s next book would be a visit he made to Russia in 1993 with his son Nick, then just twenty and a Cambridge undergraduate.46 Since his first visit in 1987 the country had undergone radical change: in those few years both the KGB and the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist, after several of its constituent republics had declared themselves independent. David was curious to see how the rump of the Russian Federation was holding itself together, now that the ideological glue provided by the Party had come unstuck and the control exerted by the forces of state security had been relaxed. Several of the Islamic states of the North Caucasus were clamouring for autonomy; Chechenia, the most strident of them all, was demanding independence.
He arrived in Moscow with suitcases full of gifts: ballpoint pens, Harrods ties, American cigarettes and packets of tea, coffee, soap and toilet paper, all products hard to obtain in Russia the last time he was last there. But the country had changed beyond recognition in the previous six years. Where there had been scarcity, now there was excess: the shops were crammed with luxury goods, albeit priced far out of reach of ordinary citizens. The economy was in free fall, but the new rich were prospering. A line of Mercedes and Rolls-Royces waited outside GUM, the old state department store, while inside millionaire wives chose and chattered and left their chauffeurs to pay their bills in dollars. ‘I began to feel more like a disenchanted Communist than a victorious westerner surveying the people he had notionally helped to free,’ David wrote in an article about his visit.
He already had some useful contacts in Russia, including Mikhail Lyubimov, a retired KGB colonel with literary ambitions, a former head of the Residency in London, and Vladimir Stabnikov, at that time involved with Moscow PEN. He told them that he wanted to meet the bosses of the new Russian Mafia, former KGB men and cops – ‘and not too many writers, thank you’. David found himself in a nightclub in the small hours of the morning, squatting on his knees before a huge bald man wearing pitch-black Ray-Ban sunglasses. This was Dima, chief of one of the Moscow area’s most ferocious criminal gangs. While Nick gyrated on the dance floor with a beautiful Russian girl, David was forced to yell to make himself heard above the pounding music. Dima’s minder Sergei, a former special forces man with a rearranged face and a shoulder-holster, had already asked him where he got his ideas from, and whether his father had been a writer before him. After extracting from Dima the detail that his rackets had made him worth in the region of $50 million, David was emboldened to ask, ‘When are you going to start putting something back?’ The interpreter relayed this rash question to Dima, before pausing for the gangster’s reply. Then Dima began speaking, so softly that the interpreter had to lean close to his mouth to hear, and continued for a long time. When at last he was done, the interpreter appeared embarrassed as he searched for the right reply. ‘I regret to tell you,’ he said finally: ‘Mr Dima says, “Fuck off�
�.’
David was taken to meet the former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, at his opulent apartment in the Moscow hills. As a young KGB officer, Kalugin had served under cover in Washington, posing as a journalist and later as a press officer. He had been rapidly promoted to become the youngest general in the agency’s history, and had risen to become head of foreign counter-intelligence (K Branch of the First Chief Directorate). ‘My friend, you are welcome!’ he said to David when they met. ‘Listen, do you know I am your best fan?’ David was persuaded to sign several of his books in Kalugin’s collection. Over Scotch, pretzels and hors d’oeuvres, his host reminisced about his ‘dear friend Kim’. He had been one of Philby’s principal minders in Moscow. ‘Kim was fine man,’ he assured David. Kalugin went on to boast of his part in the murder of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian émigré writer assassinated in London (with a poison pellet fired into his leg, via a gun disguised as an umbrella). David was repelled, but as a guest felt too embarrassed to do more than protest that he did not think Markov a good topic of conversation.*
Through Lyubimov David gained an introduction to the last chairman of the KGB. Vadim Bakatin had never heard of John le Carré, but after Kalugin had persuaded him to read A Small Town in Germany, he agreed to meet in the offices of David’s Russian publishers. Bakatin was not a career spy; an engineer by profession, he had been a member of the Communist Party Central Committee and Minister of Internal Affairs before being appointed by Gorbachev to clean up the KGB. ‘You know far more about spying than I do,’ he suggested to David.
‘But that’s not true,’ David replied, ‘I really don’t. I’m a novice too. I did the work for five minutes when I was young, nothing spectacular happened except that we discovered a clutch of KGB spies in our ranks and I got out. That was more than thirty years ago. I’ve been living off my wits ever since.’