John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  ‘So it’s a game,’ said Bakatin, shaking his head. David asked him how he felt about the post-Communist era; not too good, Bakatin replied. He seemed to David a decent, honourable man, bewildered and indignant about what was happening to his country. Though he condemned the mistakes made by the Communist movement he remained loyal to the cause, still believing that ‘we were the moral force for good in the world’.

  ‘I believed in Communism then, and I believe in it now,’ he said with dignity.

  In place of the watchers who had followed him everywhere during his previous visit, David now had his own private bodyguard: Pusya, an all-Abkhazia wrestling champion broad enough to require two seats on an aeroplane, and so short that he seemed to skim the ground as he walked. As well as being immensely strong, Pusya was also a scholar and doctor of philosophy; while he escorted his British charges around Moscow he lectured them on the plight of Russia’s Muslim minorities. This was a recurrent theme during David’s stay in Russia: everywhere he went, it seemed, he encountered prejudice towards the Muslims of the Caucasus mountains, the ‘black-arses’, hounded and harassed when they were not being actively persecuted. One of those whom David interviewed was Issa Kostoyev, the policeman-turned-politician who had caught Andrei Chikatilo, supposedly the world’s most prolific serial killer. Kostoyev came from Ingushetia, a tiny Muslim republic* within the Russian Federation bordering Chechenia. He described his career within the police as a constant fight against Russian racism.

  To David, it was self-evident that the oppression of the indigenous peoples of the Caucasus could be lifted only by freedom from Russian rule. ‘Their recent history is so terrible,’ David would write, ‘and their cry for land and self-government so unanswerable, that even with the entire armoury of modern sophistry and news distortion to help us, it is hard to see another side to their argument.’47 He felt bitterly that the West had failed in its duty to such peoples. One of the principles on which the Cold War had allegedly been contested was the right of self-determination for small nations, the liberation of the victim from the tyranny of the bully: this was for him ‘a cornerstone of our anti-communism’.48 But, now that the Cold War was over, Western politicians could safely abandon them to their fate.

  His euphoria at the defeat of Communism had been shortlived. After his return from Russia he would argue that ‘we have squandered the peace that we won with the end of the Cold War’. The struggle against Communism had provided some kind of vision, some sense of purpose, even if, as he would say, ‘we distorted our own minds’. With its end, there was a desperate need for a ‘new romantic dream’, a crusade to unite the world in a common purpose, perhaps a new Marshall Plan or Peace Corps. He felt strongly that the West had failed to rise to the moment. He looked in vain for leadership from Western statesmen, and feared that this was ‘a time of absolute moral failure by the West to perceive its own role in the future’.49 His idealistic engagement with the West’s cause during the Cold War made his disillusionment afterwards hard to bear.

  David had found a subject for his next novel: the struggle of the Ingush for independence. In England he cultivated the company of expatriate Chechens and Ingushis, and established contact with the community of impassioned scholars ‘who talked and breathed nothing but the North Caucasus’. Meanwhile he arranged to visit Ingushetia and Chechenia with Issa Kostoyev, travelling by rail from Moscow. Though they planned to take several bodyguards, Kostoyev advised David to bring a few pieces of gold or other valuables to satisfy the bandits who inevitably raided the train on the way down to the Caucasus. David obtained a visa, and in Penzance he bought a rucksack and a money belt in anticipation of his trip, and attempted to get fitter, so that he would not disgrace himself in the highest mountains in Europe. Only forty-eight hours before he was due to leave, however, Kostoyev telephoned to advise him that his visit had been deemed ‘inappropriate’ for the time being. ‘The authorities would not be responsible for my safety, and wished me not to come until things had settled down,’ David wrote afterwards. ‘Which authorities, I never quite knew.’

  Though David was obliged to write the novel without having seen Ingushetia, this would not be a significant obstacle, as most of the story is set in England, and the action moves to the Caucasus only at the very end. In the foreground is the unstable triangle of three English characters: the narrator Tim Cranmer, a prematurely retired officer of ‘the Service’; his gorgeous young mistress, the waiflike Emma; and his former secret agent, Larry Pettifer.* Cranmer’s repression is contrasted with Pettifer’s exuberance: while Cranmer has retreated from the problems of the world into his Somerset manor house, Pettifer embraces the cause of the Ingush with Byronic zeal. The two men have known each other since their schooldays; though lifelong friends, they are also rivals for Emma, even enemies. Pettifer’s goading of Cranmer is reminiscent of Shamus’s mockery of Cassidy in The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. The novel explores themes of personal betrayal, the addictiveness and destructiveness of a life of deceit, and the responsibility that people must bear for their manipulation of others. Eventually, it is implied, Cranmer will take up the cause for which Pettifer has sacrificed his life.

  A letter written while David was immersed in the book gives a sense of his engagement with the subject. ‘If this is age, give me more of it,’ David wrote to Sydney Pollack. ‘I’m having a wonderful time writing, the calm and the anger are both nicely in place.’50 He delivered the first draft to his publishers in September 1994. His provisional title was ‘The Passion of his Time’, picking up a remark made by Cranmer’s superior Jake Merriman at his leaving interview. ‘Done your job, Tim old boy,’ drawls Merriman. ‘Lived the passion of your time. Who can do more?’† Roland Philipps suggested that this was not as instantly memorable as a title ideally should be. Among other titles David considered were ‘The Road to Honeybrook Farm’, ‘A Man of the Caucasus’ and ‘The Free Servant’. They settled on Our Game, a reference to the special form of football played at Winchester,* the school where Cranmer and Pettifer had met; and perhaps to Bakatin’s remark about spying being a game.

  As so often in the past, his timing was fortuitous. When he turned in the first draft of the book, his American agent asked him in good faith whether Ingushetia was a made-up name or really existed. Two months later she had her answer. The simmering tension on Chechenia boiled over: Russian troops entered the republic and began laying siege to the capital under the gaze of television cameras. ‘Le Carré continues to stay ahead of the news,’ reported Publishers Weekly.

  ‘Poor David needs friends,’ Ann told Robin Cooke. At her suggestion, he wrote David an apologetic letter, though he remained unconvinced that he had done anything that required an apology. David replied by fax: ‘don’t give it another thought’. Despite this civil exchange, the friendship was not resumed.

  David contributed an essay to a volume of tributes to Alec Guinness, published to mark the actor’s eightieth birthday on 2 April 1994. Guinness was not grateful for his birthday present, indeed he was annoyed, though he did consider David’s essay, entitled ‘A Mission into Enemy Territory’, ‘remarkably perceptive’ – so much so that he used it as a preface to a volume of his diaries published two years later.51

  David’s sixty-third birthday in October 1994 was celebrated in an upstairs private room at a restaurant in Hampstead, the Villa Bianca. The guest of honour was Strobe Talbott, now US Deputy Secretary of State in President Clinton’s administration, with a special brief to manage the consequences of the break-up of the Soviet Union. Talbott brought along his Russian opposite number, Georgiy Mamedov, whom he knew to be a le Carré fan. Talbott’s bodyguards sat at one table, the Russian bodyguards sat at another. Other bodyguards prowled the street.

  Mamedov had been suspected of being a KGB spy when he had served in the Soviet Embassy in Washington during the 1970s. In the course of a toast David cited the evident camaraderie between the two senior diplomats, the Russian and the American, as evidence of why he ha
d been obliged to look beyond the Cold War in seeking raw material for his novels.

  A few years later Yevgeny Primakov, the Russian Foreign Minister and former head of the Russian intelligence service, would visit London as part of a Russian effort to warn against Nato expansion. The British Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, presented him with a copy of Smiley’s People, inscribed by the author. That evening David arrived in person at the Russian Ambassador’s residence in Kensington Palace Gardens for a private dinner with Primakov, his Estonian wife and a handful of other Russian diplomats.52

  A couple of months afterwards Talbott and his boss, the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, were guests of Primakov’s at his apartment in Moscow. Over vodka and dumplings Primakov reminisced about his dealings with Donald Maclean, while serving as a KGB agent in Washington under journalistic cover. The conversation turned to espionage in fact and fiction. Primakov mentioned his dinner in London with David. His knowledge of David’s plots and characters was evidently comprehensive, and he appreciated the way in which they had captured an era that he had known well. The Secretary of State asked him if he identified with Karla. ‘No,’ he replied; ‘I identify with George Smiley.’53

  * ‘I hate London,’ he told Vivian Green in 1987, ‘and have decided more or less not to be there much more.’

  * Shakespeare was the same age as David’s eldest son, Simon.

  * Both titles suggested by David.

  * David has said that his model was the Dolder Grand, ‘before it was developed and ruined’.

  * A favourite phrase of David’s.

  * Murdoch amazed David by asking him about Robert Maxwell. Only days before their lunch, the naked body of the publishing tycoon had been retrieved from the sea, after disappearing over the side of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, then cruising off the Canary Islands. ‘Who do you think killed Maxwell?’ Murdoch asked David quietly. David recalled this as ‘a gorgeous moment: Rupert, the man of hard fact, imagining that I knew what had become of Maxwell!’

  * Harris’s publishers, Hutchinson, were part of Random House; it was perhaps incautious of Gordon to have submitted Lord’s proposal to another publisher in the same group.

  * By comparison, Hodder had paid an advance of £525,000, against hardback royalties of 20 per cent and paperback royalties of 12½ per cent, in each case considerably higher than the norm.

  * Diane Johnson had collaborated with Kubrick on the screenplay for The Shining.

  † The Schnitzler novella formed the basis of Kubrick’s last movie, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The writer was Frederic Raphael, who wrote a rueful memoir of working with Kubrick (Eyes Wide Open, 1999).

  * Daughter of Caroline Carter, whom David had known and admired when they were both undergraduates at Oxford, though neither of them made the connection.

  * Kalugin disputed David’s account of this interview (New York Times, 19 February and 2 April 1995). ‘I was then and still am his fan,’ insisted Kalugin, ‘for few writers are so convincingly good in their description of the intricate world of espionage.’ David wrote a robust riposte.

  * Its population was then fewer than 300,000.

  * Physically Pettifer is a reincarnation of Jerry Westerby, with dangling forelock and ‘disgraceful buckskin boots’.

  † See this page for David’s own use of this phrase.

  * David consulted Nicholas Shakespeare, who had been at school there – as had his father John and Hugh Peppiatt, as well as David’s brother Rupert.

  22

  ‘He makes us look so good’

  In February 1995 David sent a pre-publication copy of Our Game to Stephen Fry, then taking part in warm-up performances of Cell Mates, about to open in the West End. Written and directed by Simon Gray, the play centred on the spy George Blake and his former cellmate Sean Bourke, who had helped him escape to Moscow after five years in prison. Fry had been cast as Blake and his fellow comedian, Rik Mayall, as Bourke. The pair had appeared together in a previous play of Gray’s, The Common Pursuit, in 1988.

  Our Game seems to have appealed to a strong strain of romantic nostalgia within Fry; for him, it was ‘a Greenmantle* for the 90s’. In a letter thanking David he compared Larry Pettifer to the volunteers who had joined the International Brigades to fight in Spain:

  … Englishmen who wanted to do something. The fire has gone out and fanning the dead embers of Englishness may be regarded by some as fatuous. At least, however, at least there is one spark alive; the language and the ‘culture’ still contain enough to produce works like ‘Our Game’. You are all we have left to be proud of – and your message is how ashamed we should be.

  The two men had been in intermittent contact since 1991, when Fry had sent David a fan letter. ‘Dear Mr. le Carré,’ he had begun, ‘I felt I simply had to write to you, after finishing, this morning at 3.00, The Secret Pilgrim. The English dam can withstand the pressure of fifteen years of admiration and affection no longer and I have done the unthinkable and taken up my keyboard to pester you.’ Fry praised The Secret Pilgrim as ‘your most magnificent work to date’, rivalling Flaubert. ‘The only writer I’ve ever written to apart from yourself was P. G. Wodehouse, when I was twelve,’ he revealed; ‘I’m afraid, twenty years on, I’ve reverted to schoolboy gushing.’ He claimed ‘a small connection’ in Simon Langton, the director of the television series of Smiley’s People, who had directed the second series of Jeeves and Wooster, in which Fry played Jeeves and his friend Hugh Laurie played Wooster. ‘Thank you for this novel and for all the novels that have gone before and, in advance, for all the novels that are to come,’ he wrote in conclusion. ‘England, for all its recent descent, is a much, much better place for having you in it, loving and despairing of it as you do.’

  Two years later David sent Fry an inscribed copy of The Night Manager. ‘It really is one of the most magnificent things you’ve ever done,’ wrote Fry after reading it. ‘That a story so international manages to say more about England than any novel I have read for years is an astounding achievement in itself.’ Fry was very struck by the anger in the novel, ‘the anger that you make the reader find in himself as well as (I assume) the fury in which you wrote’. He commented perceptively on David’s writing:

  I have always thought that a greatly overlooked quality of yours is an observation one might call Nabokovian if one was being pompous (which one is), but which I think of more often by suggesting that if you hadn’t been a writer you would have made a great stand-up comic. You just notice things better than anyone else. Not only vocal mannerisms, tricks of speech and phrasing, but also the (often sad) psychology of [a] character’s gestures and gait … TNM is full of such moments of supreme character observation of which any actor or comic would be proud. Corkoran* alone is worth the entrance money … The meetings, as always, you do incomparably: the horse-trading, the committee atmospheres, the heartily second-hand metaphorical dialogue of the functionary. No one ever made more drama out of a smoke-filled room or a cabinet full of files.

  By this time they were on first-name terms. Gratefully acknowledging ‘your wonderful letter’, David referred to Sydney Pollack’s plan to film The Night Manager. ‘For my money, I would ask you to play Corkoran tomorrow, but we are dealing with minds, if that is the word, that operate on other planes, so they will probably give it to Dicky Attenborough.’ Later that year Fry sent David a proof copy of his second novel The Hippopotamus, ‘laid at your feet with all respect, gratitude and admiration’. He emphasised that this was ‘not a request for a “quote” as publishers call them’. Towards the end of 1994 Fry and Laurie came to David’s sixty-third birthday party at the Villa Bianca. ‘I do hope we meet again soon,’ Fry wrote afterwards.1

  Fry’s letter about Our Game was sent from a hotel in Osnabrück in northern Germany. He had fled England after walking out of Cell Mates only three days into its run. The production of Cell Mates would close a few weeks later; its producers were threatening to sue him for breach of contract. Fry’s disappeara
nce was a big news story, creating headlines day after day. There was intense press speculation about where he might be, and fears for his safety. It was reported at the time that he had suffered an attack of stage fright. Later he disclosed that he had been diagnosed as bipolar. ‘I am quietly riding out the storm of flight from Britain,’ explained Fry. ‘Not sure I’ll return for much longer than it takes to “settle my affairs”. Perhaps I’ll live on here in N. Saxony or Münsterland – it’s as good a spot as any other, and like you, and unlike most Britons, I rather love the German language and land.’ In a faxed letter David responded warmly to Fry’s predicament:

  I know something about acquiring huge audiences I don’t want, and about being spoken for by assholes, and about being good at everything, and never hitting the mark … I think you’re a polymath, école Coward, with the same gravitas and the same rhythms of engagement, challenge and escape … I completely relate to your duck dive & it fascinates me that the German muse sang to you at that moment, and I am instinctively fond & protective of you … I escaped from Sherborne to Bern (at 16), dived into a monastery in an effort to escape marriage, escaped to the spooks, escaped the spooks to writing, nearly at times escaped writing for the ultimate escape, and now I’m 63 and who gives a fuck anyway? … Cornwall is my feeble substitute for exile.

  He suggested meeting in Zurich in the middle of March. The Dolder Grand, he advised, was completely discreet. But he was willing to meet Fry anywhere in Europe; ‘have suitcase, will travel’, he wrote. ‘PS: Fuck them all.’2

  By the time he replied Fry had found a new refuge in the south of France, where he was staying under the alias ‘Colin Melmoth’, a nod to Oscar Wilde.* His chum Hugh Laurie was driving down by motorbike to keep him company for a few days. ‘Your letter made me laugh, bounce and cheer,’ he wrote to David by fax. ‘I can’t tell you how much it meant to me.’ He revealed that he had returned briefly to England by private plane, to see his parents and meet his lawyers. The two men planned to spend a few days together walking in the forest around Zurich, but illness forced David to cancel his trip. ‘Poor David, I hope he recovers soon,’ Fry wrote in a fax to Jane. ‘I may in fact be returning to England at the w/end,’ he continued. ‘A Daily Mirror photographer bagged me in Uzès yesterday and it’s only a matter of time before they track me to this little retreat. I may as well be in England and in the horrid world of “prepared statements” as be hunted to a lonely lair in France.’3 Fry returned to England and checked into a London hospital, where he was said to be receiving treatment for depression.