by Adam Sisman
David’s first thought was that this must be some kind of hoax. He replied to Pendle expressing his astonishment. ‘I am appalled by the string of similarities you recite in your letter,’ he wrote. ‘Nothing so strange has happened to me for a long while.’
I sincerely ask you to accept that … I never heard of your father, never knew of him or anyone like him, and that Harry Pendel (named after the German Pendel meaning pendulum) is entirely a creature of my own imagination … People often claim to recognise themselves (always wrongly) & some hope for money, in vain. That’s par for the course if you’re a well-known writer. But if matters are as you describe, I can only share your distress and offer you abject apologies for being its unwitting cause.20
Sior Pendle took the matter no further.
The film of The Tailor of Panama, released in 2001, is inexplicably poor. Co-written by the experienced TV screenwriter Andrew Davies, the director John Boorman and David himself, and filmed partly on location in Panama, it stars Geoffrey Rush as Pendel,* Jamie Lee Curtis as Pendel’s wife Louisa, and Pierce Brosnan as Osnard. Harold Pinter appears in a cameo role as the ghost of Pendel’s Uncle Benny, and Daniel Radcliffe makes his screen debut as one of Pendel’s children. With such a strong team it is hard to explain why the result should have been so disappointing. Perhaps it just goes to show how difficult it is to hit the right note with black comedy.
John Boorman, the gentlemanly director of such films as Point Blank, Deliverance and Hope and Glory, had stepped into the role after Tony Scott, a more rumbustious personality, had withdrawn, but not before he had accompanied David, with several helpers, on a riotous scouting trip to Panama, funded by Columbia Pictures at colossal expense. They flew from California to Panama by private plane, equipped with a very expensive satellite phone which they were never able to work, and kept the plane with them in Panama while they reconnoitred, exploring in limos and helicopters and staying in the best hotel in town. At night, Scott went about his own explorations of Panama City’s hotspots; David didn’t go with him, though he enjoyed his ebullient, wayward company hugely. Scott never wore anything but frayed denim shorts, with a bottle of Tabasco in the pocket. He did not like to read, so one of his helpers either read to him or described to him passages from David’s novel. Soon after they returned, Scott had apparently put in a budget that was far too high for the studio’s taste, and they had engaged John Boorman instead.
Brosnan was then the incumbent James Bond. He introduces himself with ‘The name’s Osnard,’ an echo of Bond’s opening line. There is another knowing reference to the Bond persona when Pendel is measuring up Osnard for a suit, and Osnard selects a cloth. ‘I thought you’d like that one, sir,’ says Pendel. ‘Mr Connery’s choice. Matter of fact, when you came in I thought, “Who does he remind me of?” And that’s it. In the build, too. Golfer’s shoulders.’
In the New York Times Book Review, the novelist Norman Rush praised The Tailor of Panama as a ‘tour de force’, though he found the American characters ‘rather sketchily delineated’, which he thought might be ascribed to ‘Mr. le Carré’s famous ambivalence towards Americanity’. For Rush, a more substantial defect lay in a troubling aspect of Pendel’s character: ‘here we have, however little Mr le Carré intended it, yet another literary avatar of Judas’. The detail of Pendel’s background added to his unease. ‘As you read, the phrase “rootless cosmopolitans” scratches at the doors of your mind.’21
Rush’s review caused dismay at Knopf. The suggestion of anti-Semitism, in America’s greatest newspaper, was extremely damaging. After several anguished telephone conversations, David went into his publishers’ offices to discuss how he should respond. ‘The atmosphere was of near catastrophe and collective funk,’ David would write later. He was ‘deeply wounded’ by what he saw as a ‘smear’; he wanted to react strongly by writing a letter of protest to the New York Times, but as he offered one text after another for collective consideration, he discovered that he was only compounding his offence: ‘David, if you write that, your career in the United States will be ruined’; ‘David, are you trying to tell us that this city is full of Jews?’; ‘David, are you suggesting that the New York Times is Jewish-controlled?’ A further complication was that Rush, a past winner of a National Book Award, was himself a Knopf author.
Later, David would write that he very much regretted moderating his response, to calm the ‘tumult of alarm’ raging within his publishers. If so, his instinct must have been to write a very strong letter indeed, because his published response was certainly robust. It was obvious that he resented ‘the attempt to tar me with the anti-Semitic brush’. David made a case for Harry Pendel as ‘the most lovable character I have created’. In conclusion, David wrote that ‘Mr Rush has reviewed not a book but a mirage. He has attributed to me a premise that derives from his poor head, not mine.’
Rush’s reply was printed below David’s letter. He denied that he had either said or implied ‘that Mr. le Carré is an anti-Semite, and I do not think it’. Nevertheless, he insisted, ‘Pendel–Judas parallels, however inadvertent, are inescapable.’
David was unwilling to leave it at that, and another letter of his appeared in a subsequent issue of the New York Times. He was delighted, he wrote, to learn from Norman Rush’s reply:
that he doesn’t think I’m an anti-Semite, because he could have fooled me. Not one of the whole army of literary agents, editors, publishers and friends who commented on my novel ‘The Tailor of Panama’ on its way to publication expressed a whisper of discomfort about my treatment of Pendel’s Jewishness. No other reviewer in Britain or America has referred to it.
As to your own wisdom in giving currency to such non-accusations, I trust your readers will form their own opinion. Mine is unprintable.22
In an interview with George Plimpton of the Paris Review, conducted in front of an audience while David was still in New York promoting The Tailor of Panama, he was asked about the charge of anti-Semitism. ‘I have had some pretty big tomatoes thrown at me in my time, but this one missed,’ he told Plimpton. ‘All my life … I have been fascinated, enchanted, drawn to and horrified by the plight of middle European Jews … It is the one issue in my own life on which I may say I have a clean record.’23 An article in the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz dismissed the accusation of anti-Semitism in The Tailor of Panama as ‘rubbish’.24
After the publication of The Spy who Came in from the Cold David had been been ostracised or at least mistrusted by many of his former colleagues in MI5, and especially in MI6. There was a prevalent sense that he had let the side down, disloyally depicting British intelligence as unscrupulous or, worse, incompetent. In recent years there had been signs of a change of attitude, culminating in an invitation to lunch at MI6 with the reigning ‘C’.
David Spedding (Sir David Spedding since 1996) was a generation younger than David, and had not joined the Service until 1967, some years after David had left. Like David, he had been educated at Sherborne and then at Oxford; after serving mostly in the Middle East he had been appointed Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in 1994. As an intelligence officer he had earned a reputation as dedicated, methodical and hard working. ‘Chiefs of secret services are generally portrayed in books and on screen as devious, callous and calculating,’ wrote one of his subordinates, thinking perhaps of Control: ‘David [Spedding] was quite properly the latter in professional matters, but in person he was cheerful, decisive, gregarious and straightforward, well liked and rightly trusted.’ As Chief, Spedding had overseen the Service’s move to an expensive new building in Vauxhall, on the south bank of the Thames, criticised by some as ostentatious. In 1998 he would invite Dame Judi Dench to MI6’s Christmas lunch, after the actress, who had played ‘M’ in recent Bond movies, expressed interest in learning more about her real-life counterpart.25
‘We want to thank you for what you have done for our image,’ Spedding told David when they met. Taken as a whole, David’s oeuvre had portrayed Br
itish intelligence as highly effective in the Cold War – arguably, as much more effective than it had been in reality. George Smiley could scarcely have been more different from James Bond, but he had been equally successful in countering the Soviet threat. In the Cold War, perception was all, and Spedding recognised the significance of popular culture in shaping public perception of British intelligence, abroad as well as at home. Bestselling fiction was therefore an extension of ‘soft power’. Spedding’s predecessor Sir Colin McColl told a friend that ‘the Firm likes the le Carré stuff, because it makes us look so good’. David’s invitation to lunch with the Chief marked his welcome back in from the cold.
Spedding retired early when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and died in 2001, at the age of only fifty-eight. After his retirement he had brought his family to Tregiffian for a day. He told David that he admired him most for escaping from Sherborne at an early age, a thing that he wished he had done himself. In a conversation about the changed realities of spying, Spedding said, ‘You can’t imagine how disgusting our world has become.’26
In 1997 David was invited to speak at the annual dinner of the Anglo-Israel Association. It was suggested, perhaps mischievously, that he might care to say something about ‘the oversensitivity of the Jews of the diaspora’. David took the opportunity to examine ‘the mystery of what I may call my Jewish conscience’, tracing his experience of Jewish people from childhood, and the portrayal of Jews in his work. Norman Rush’s review of The Tailor of Panama formed his starting-point. The implied charge of anti-Semitism, he said, ‘hurt me more deeply than any other brickbat that has been tossed my way in forty-odd years before the literary mast’. As someone who felt himself to be ‘an outsider in his own country’, David claimed ‘a spiritual kinship’ with Jews, ‘that embraces what is creative in me, and forgives what is despicable, and shares with me the dignity and solitude and anger that are born of alienation’. In his conclusion, David hit back at ‘the whole oppressive weight of political correctness, a form of modern McCarthyism in reverse’. He insisted on his right, as a non-Jew but as a convinced supporter of the nation state of Israel, to condemn Israeli actions without being branded an anti-Semite. He vigorously asserted his right to depict Jewish characters in his novels with as many flaws as any other. His talk was a plea for tolerance and openness, with respect but without inhibition. His closing exhortation encapsulated his message: ‘Take me back to Israel, where people are free to speak their minds!’
When an extract from this talk appeared in the Guardian, Salman Rushdie could not resist the opportunity to snipe at him. ‘John le Carré complains that he has been branded an anti-Semite as a result of a politically correct witch-hunt and declares himself innocent of the charge,’ wrote Rushdie, in a letter published in the newspaper. ‘It would be easier to sympathize with him had he not been so ready to join in an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer.’
Though eight years had passed since David had urged that the paperback edition of The Satanic Verses be postponed, it seems that Salman Rushdie was still smarting from his criticisms. His letter was the opening discharge in an increasingly vituperative exchange between the two novelists on the letters page of the Guardian.
David was shocked by Rushdie’s charge that he had ‘eagerly, and rather pompously, joined forces with my assailants’, and was sufficiently upset to ask a lawyer whether this phrase was not defamatory, but was advised not to pursue the matter. Instead he retaliated with a letter of his own. ‘Rushdie’s way with the truth is as self-serving as ever,’ he wrote, in a letter published two days later. He denied joining Rushdie’s assailants. ‘My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.’ He reiterated his belief that by the time of his letter anyone who wanted to read the book had been able to do so. ‘When it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie’s work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin Books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie’s royalties,’ he continued. ‘My purpose was not to justify the persecution of Rushdie, which, like any decent person, I deplore, but to sound a less arrogant, less colonialist, and less self-righteous note than we were hearing from the safety of his admirers’ camp.’
The tone of the letters rapidly deteriorated. ‘I’m grateful to John le Carré for refreshing all our memories about exactly how pompous an ass he can be,’ Rushdie wrote in a letter published the following day. ‘We have the freedoms we fight for, and we lose those we don’t defend. I’d always thought George Smiley knew that. His creator appears to have forgotten.’
On the same day Christopher Hitchens leaped into the fray with a characteristically colourful contribution to the debate, comparing le Carré’s conduct to ‘a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head’.
This had become a slanging match, played out in public. In response, David referred to ‘the cockeyed logic of these two fairly vile letters’. He expressed doubt that the friendship between his two opponents would last: ‘I am amazed that Hitchens has put up with Rushdie’s self-canonization for so long.’* He claimed back Smiley to his cause. ‘Smiley, if he stood for anything, stood for tolerance, compassion, humility, self-doubt and respect for the beliefs of others,’ he wrote. ‘Above all, he was a man of compromise. Rushdie and Hitchens would do well to brush up on him.’
Yet another letter from Rushdie appeared on the Guardian’s letters page the next day. By now, any pretence at civility had been dropped. ‘If he wants to win an argument,’ began Rushdie, ‘John le Carré could begin by learning how to read.’ He used the same metaphor as Hitchens had done, but to less comic effect. ‘It’s true I did call him a pompous ass, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. “Ignorant” and “semiliterate” are dunces’ caps he has skilfully fitted on his own head. I wouldn’t dream of removing them.’ He referred sneeringly to ‘our Hampstead hero’, and affected to welcome criticism from le Carré. ‘Every time he opens his mouth, he digs himself into a deeper hole. Keep digging, John, keep digging. Me, I’m going back to work.’27
The press relished the dispute, giving it extensive coverage. ‘Writers’ Eight-Year Feud Erupts’ read a headline in the Sunday Telegraph. ‘The Insults Fly in a Poisonous War of Words,’ trumpeted the Daily Express. The American press, less used to invective, delighted in the mudslinging. ‘All is Not Lost: Art of Insult Survives “New Britain” ’, read a headline in the international edition of the New York Times.
‘I actually feel very proud,’ David wrote to his son Tim, by now a journalist himself. ‘I’ve said what everybody says in secret and nobody has the balls to say aloud.’28 David’s clash with Rushdie distanced him still further from the bien-pensants who dominated the literary landscape. ‘I have never felt so right, or so lonely – or until yesterday when I heard that Willie Shawcross was going to the barricades for me,’ he wrote to his editor at Hodder, Roland Philipps. ‘Otherwise the only sound was the tiptoeing of one’s friends out of the back door.’29
In 1992 David had sprung to the defence of his friend Shawcross; now Shawcross returned the favour – though it was awkward for him to do so, as he was chairman of the human rights organisation Article 19, which existed to defend freedom of expression and which had co-ordinated the campaign to defend Rushdie. In an article for the Guardian he made it clear that he was a friend of le Carré’s, writing in a personal capacity. Rushdie’s allegation that le Carré had ‘eagerly … joined forces with my assailants’ was not only untrue; it was ‘outrageous’. He referred to ‘a stink of triumphalist self-righteousness which one might expect from some of Mr Rushdie’s followers, but not from the persecuted writer himself’.30
When Rushdie was telephoned by the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, to ask if he wanted to respond to Shawcross, he declined. ‘If le Carré wants to get his friends to do a little proxy whingeing, that’s his business,�
�� he told Rusbridger: ‘I’ve said what I had to say.’ In fact Rushdie had sent Shawcross a furious fax, copied to his colleagues, questioning his ability to remain chairman of Article 19.
David withdrew from the field of battle, though he was keeping his powder dry, as he indicated to Shawcross. ‘For self preservation, having decided I would say no more pro tem, but a lot when I have finished my novel, I closed the door on the whole fuss & went back to scribbling.’31
Rainer Heumann had died suddenly in 1996, at the age of seventy-two. David was one of several speakers at the memorial gathering in Zurich. In a touching tribute he looked back over their thirty-five years of association. There was never a bad day, he told the mourners. ‘We never disagreed about anything, except possibly what we wished for one another,’ he said. ‘He was the perfect agent, and the perfect friend.’32 The paperback of The Tailor of Panama would be dedicated ‘In memory of Rainer Heumann, literary agent, gentleman and friend’.
Heumann’s death led to a shake-up in David’s representation. A few years before he had left his longstanding American lawyer, Mort Leavy, for Michael Rudell, an entertainment lawyer who also handled the crime writer Patricia Cornwell (who of course was no relation). In 1997 he left Lynn Nesbit, his American agent for the past dozen years. Bruce Hunter of David Higham Associates took over from her, thus becoming David’s representative in America, as he had been in Britain since the late 1980s. Hunter was responsible for selling the next le Carré novel, entitled Single & Single. In the summer of 1998 it was announced that John le Carré was leaving Knopf, his American publisher for almost thirty years; his new American publisher would be Scribner’s, a long-established house with a proud history, though now no more than an imprint of Simon & Schuster, itself part of the conglomerate Viacom.