John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  David was scarcely less contemptuous of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He had been ‘thrilled’ by Labour’s victory in the 1997 general election, which seemed to offer fresh hope after almost twenty years of Conservative rule; but by the time of the next election in June 2001, disillusion had replaced his excitement. In an interview with the playwright David Hare, he said that he would like to ‘punish’ Blair in the coming poll, then only three weeks away. Not only had he failed to instigate much-needed reform, he had continued the Thatcherite legacy – ‘he would have privatised air if he could’. Worst of all, Blair had kowtowed to the Americans. ‘We don’t have a single member of the Blair administration lifting a public finger against the ecological ruin that George W is promising in the United States,’ he said. He deplored ‘the whimpering echo’ from Blair when the American President supported the drug companies in their legal action against the South African government. ‘I thought Blair was lying when he denied he was a socialist,’ David told Hare. ‘The worst thing I can say about him is that he was telling the truth.’

  Yvette Pierpaoli had introduced David to her close friend Stéphane Hessel, a diplomat and human rights activist. He and David became friendly, to the extent that Hessel and his wife would be guests at David’s seventieth-birthday celebration. Though born German, Hessel had become a naturalised Frenchman in 1939: he served in the French Resistance before being captured and interned in a concentration camp, where he had been tortured by the Gestapo. In later life he called for a new form of resistance to the injustices of the modern world; his short book Time for Outrage! became an international bestseller. After his death in 2013, at the age of ninety-five, David would pay tribute to him. ‘I admired Hessel immensely and shared, and supported, his views on the present world situation and the need for great popular anger.’ When Hare had suggested that David’s increasing engagement with politics was in the ‘great tradition of writers becoming radicalised in later years’, David responded by citing the German term Alterszorn – ‘the rage of age’. He recognised the danger that he might lose readers if his books became too polemical. ‘Story and character must come first,’ he said. ‘But I am now so angry that I have to exercise a good deal of restraint in order to produce a readable book.’27

  After finishing The Constant Gardener, David had submitted to an hour-long television interview, in which he spoke more frankly about aspects of his life than he had done in the past. The programme opened with an archive recording of David denying outright that he had ever been a spy, followed by a voiceover comment that ‘spies are not meant to tell the truth’. Towards the end of the programme David told the interviewer, Nigel Williams, ‘I feel now, I’ve forgotten how to lie.’28

  David admitted to spying on friends at Oxford, behaviour that still troubled him. He had been prompted to think afresh about the morality of his actions by Timothy Garton Ash, who had come down to Cornwall to consult him as ‘an expert on all varieties of loyalty and betrayal’. He had been a postgraduate student in Berlin in the late 1970s. After the collapse of East Germany, the Germans had opened the records of the disbanded East German State Security Service (the ‘Stasi’), where Garton Ash had found his own file, showing that the Stasi had set people to inform on him. He had decided to write a book* about his discoveries. As he and David walked along the Cornish clifftops, David spoke of his own career in intelligence, ‘with a mixture of nostalgia, irony and scruples’. Subsequently Garton Ash sent David a typescript of his book, and received a sixteen-page, handwritten reply. In his letter David asked Garton Ash not to present himself as a victim; according to him, ‘the real victims’ were ‘the poor East Germans’ who had informed on him – ‘crabbed, intimidated, blackmailed’. There was of course a similarity between the actions of those East German informers and what David himself had done; he acknowledged that ‘I betrayed, in your terms.’ Yet, he argued, it was justifiable to betray the trust of people whom you have befriended in order to gain information for the British state, as it helped to defend a free society. ‘For me – but I’m one of your bad guys in the end – you’re too fine, too unaccepting of the realities of having to do & act and protect what’s worth protecting.’ Garton Ash thought this ‘a marvellous but also a troubling letter’, which led to a further round of correspondence and conversation about what David called ‘a question that’s haunted me these forty-five years’.29

  The television interview with Nigel Williams sparked an outburst from David’s undergraduate friend Stanley Mitchell. He and David had lost contact after leaving Oxford; Mitchell had pursued a career as a university teacher and a specialist in Russian literature, producing a much admired translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. He had never surrendered his faith in the essential truth of Marxism, though he had become critical of Stalinist orthodoxy. Now, almost half a century later, Mitchell learned that David had been passing information about him to MI5 throughout most of the time that they had known each other.30 Some of David’s comments in the television interview only worsened the offence. ‘It felt like betrayal, but it had a voluptuous quality,’ he told Nigel Williams: ‘this was a necessary sacrifice of morality and that is a very important component of what makes people spy, what attracts them.’31

  Furious and upset, Mitchell sent David a strongly worded letter, denouncing him as a Judas. His old friend responded by inviting him to lunch; and, after some hesitation, Mitchell accepted. It seems to have been an emotional reunion, at which the two men were only partially reconciled. David confessed to Mitchell that he had spied on several other students at Oxford, including Newton Garver, whose girlfriend was believed to be a Communist. Mitchell felt that David was seeking his absolution for what he had done.

  Another ghost from David’s past emerged a few weeks later. Vivian Green copied out for David a letter extracted from the Lincoln College files, written to the Rector almost fifty years earlier by David’s housemaster at Sherborne, R. S. Thompson, advocating that David should be made to wait a year before being admitted to the college. David wrote to thank Green. ‘I found his letter very sad,’ he wrote, ‘– a sense of personal failure turning outward into a rather pitiful and petty suggestion that I be made to cool my heels for a year to teach us Cornwells that we can’t always have our own way!’ In the same reply David paid tribute to Jane, ‘my extraordinarily loyal and ever-decent support for 30 years now’.

  And you, dear Vivian, even in the times when we barely communicated, have been one of those lifelong secret sharers to whom I owe a debt I can never repay …

  Yes, we must both keep writing, keep creating, it’s the only weapon against death. When I’m writing properly I still feel 23. When I’m not, I can hardly sleep for despair: such an awful life in so many ways, and looks so terribly impressive from the outside. But the inside has been such a ferment of buried anger and lovelessness from childhood that it was sometimes almost uncontainable.32

  Once again David began to draft a memoir. Though headed ‘The Novel of My Life’, it was really about Ronnie, or at least about David’s relationship with him (in a later draft he would head it ‘Son of the Author’s Father’). Attentive readers would notice a distinctly Dickensian flavour to the subheadings, ‘On being Born, and Other Adventures’, ‘In which I have My First Taste of Prison’, ‘In which I hire Detectives to Investigate the Real Me’, and so on. These echo the chapter titles of David Copperfield – one of the greatest of all autobiographical novels, but not an autobiography, and not necessarily a reliable guide to Dickens’s early life. Perhaps the memoir should be read in this light. Like Dickens, David had endured the shame of his father’s bankruptcy and imprisonment, and the ruin of all his prospects. There is a further connection. One reason why Dickens chose the name David Copperfield was because the initials were an inversion of his own. And of course these are the same as David Cornwell’s.

  By early summer he had written about 15,000 words, which he sent to Roland Philipps. It was a fine piece of writing, ironic, self-d
eprecatory and humane; but it was not a book: it was much too short, and to expand it would only weaken its punch. ‘I was wrong,’ David wrote to Philipps after they had discussed it together.

  When I got home, I re-read (by coincidence) the S. Times stuff for tomorrow,* and then dug into A Perfect Spy a bit, then looked at the accumulated bits of short writing I’ve done – intros, newspaper articles. An autobiography would be a duplication/rehash of so much of it, even if the slant were neater – as it is in the stuff I sent you. In some cases it’s a triplication, to my embarrassment, and I wd be hard-pressed to re-style it at all. So I’ve shoved it all aside, I hope for the last time, and I’m going to stick to the novel.

  David thanked Philipps for helping him ‘think straight’. Instead of continuing with the memoir, he would publish what he had already written, virtually unchanged, as an article in the New Yorker – no longer edited by Tina Brown – under the title ‘In Ronnie’s Court’.

  In his letter to Philipps, he mentioned as an aside that he had withdrawn from a planned appearance on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs, which traced the life of guests through a choice of their favourite recordings. ‘No more regurgitations of the past, I hope,’ he commented. It seems that he had not yet let go of the idea, however. In another letter to Philipps a couple of months later, he divulged that he had ‘started a second chunk of memoir & binned it, to our shared relief’.33

  Roland Philipps and his wife Felicity (Hilary Rubinstein’s daughter) were among the guests at David’s seventieth birthday celebration in October 2001, which took place in Italy. There were some thirty to thirty-five in all, mostly family, with a few close friends. David’s first wife Ann came, with her husband Roger. By this time all three sons of his first marriage were married with young children. Simon was living in London, after a period abroad including five years working for a refugee organisation in Thailand, where he had met and married Mimi, a Thai working for the UN; Stephen had become a screenwriter living in California, after working initially as a photojournalist, and was married to Clarissa, an Englishwoman whom he had met through his youngest brother; and Timothy was a journalist based in Edinburgh, married to Alice, daughter of David Greenway. The party stayed in a hotel a few miles outside Siena, a cluster of converted medieval buildings. The birthday party itself was held in the city centre, on the piano nobile of a ducal palazzo overlooking the Campo. The many-roomed apartment was packed with antiques, which looked to the anxious parents as though they had been placed there deliberately for the children to break, though no damage was done. The group was entertained by a nightclub singer; when the cake arrived, she began crooning ‘Happy birthday, dear John’, and could not understand why everyone burst out laughing.

  * So far as I have been able to ascertain, this was a quote solicited by Scribner’s.

  * In the earliest draft she is named Prunella, then Miranda, Julia and eventually Tessa.

  * The File: A Personal History (1997).

  * That is, ‘Son of a Swindler’.

  24

  ‘Mr Angry’

  ‘The time drags awfully when I’m not working,’ David had written to Philipps in January 2001.1 Far from slowing down in his seventieth year, he was impatient to accelerate. But in the aftermath of The Constant Gardener, he had no new novel to fill his hours. ‘I’m back to empty at the moment,’ he told an interviewer from the New York Times.2

  The period between finishing one book and starting another was always difficult for David. Three months after his letter about the time dragging, he wrote again to Philipps, apologising for cancelling a weekend en famille. ‘I felt it was the wrong time for a jolly because I’ve been trying, & continue to try, to cut free of the last book and enter the magnetic zone of the new one, & I’m not good company while I swing between half-made choices,’ he explained. ‘I have a feeling that the only way to find out is [to] give myself a good shake, and the pieces too, & see where they/we end up.’3

  Soon, however, a story was forming in his mind. At its core would be a man whose radical past has caught up with him in middle age. David envisaged a naïve young Englishman isolated in Berlin at the end of the 1960s, who drifts into revolutionary anarchism; thirty years on, he is living quietly in Munich when he is contacted by his old comrade Sasha, whom he suspects of planning an act of terrorism. While writing The Constant Gardener David had attended meetings of anti-corporate groups: he had seen for himself the frustration of the young at what they perceived as the exploitation of the Third World, wrecking the lives of the powerless. His experiences led him to speculate that this anger might be breeding a new generation of young terrorists – rather as an earlier generation of terrorists had emerged from the radical left in the 1960s and 1970s. David himself had witnessed violent student demonstrations in Paris in the late 1960s. Investigating what had become of the 1960s firebrands, David found that many of them were now orthodox citizens: a paediatrician neighbour of his in Hampstead, for example; or Lothar Menne, once a comrade of Angela Davis and Tariq Ali, now one of the pinnacles of his German publishers, Ullstein. Some were still active, like the campaigning journalist John Pilger. Timothy Garton Ash put David in touch with Anthony Barnett, a former member of the committee of New Left Review, who had visited communes in Berlin and Frankfurt in the late 1960s, and who still described himself as a revolutionary in his seventies.

  An accidental comment by Alfred Brendel’s German-born wife Reni touched David on a sore spot. They had been talking about her brother, a radical activist in Berlin in the 1960s. ‘He might not wish to think that he was providing material from his own life for a big bestseller,’ she remarked, over an otherwise agreeable lunch. David was stung by this and brooded on it afterwards. He decided that he had to explain himself, to ask her ‘whether you knew how clearly you had expressed the prejudice I have lived with for years’:

  In the eyes of so many of my peers I have never been a novelist at all – just a maker of successful artefacts, a rich nonentity. Maybe you can imagine what it’s like, therefore, to walk into a roomful of fellow writers & artists, particularly in England. Or as Roger Hilton, the artist, said to me in front of an amused group, ‘Ah yes, I know who you are. The little boy who had the smash hit.’* Maybe it would have been better to sell less, but it doesn’t feel like that at the time. Any more than Alfred, presumably, would enjoy playing to empty houses. I write this because you lamented, very kindly, that I was given to disappearing from society. But I have my reasons for being wary, & reckon I know more than most about envy. Certainly I’m very tired of apologising for my success.4

  ‘I want terribly to bring a sensitive understanding of Germany to my large, anglophone audience,’ David assured Reni Brendel: ‘my intentions are entirely protective.’5 The protest movement in Germany had been harsher than elsewhere. Young people throughout the Western world had been in revolt against the mindless materialism of their parents in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but in Germany their protests had been more urgent, because of the conviction that the Nazi past had been conveniently forgotten; until the poison was purged, democracy could never be healthy. The angriest of them had formed the Red Army Faction (better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang), which had carried out bombings and assassinations, and made common cause with the revolutionaries of the Third World, Palestinian terrorists and others. David had known some of the BND officers charged with hunting them down.

  In constructing his central character, Ted Mundy, David awarded him elements of his own past. Like David, Mundy has a loving father and an absent mother; like David, he has fallen in love with the German muse; like David, he has acted in a schoolboy production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; like David, he has attended a boarding school in the West Country. And like David too, he has become involved in spying, so that now ‘he no longer knows which parts of him are pretending’.6 Mundy’s marriage has broken down under the strain of living a double life. David felt that he knew Mundy’s background, because it was so similar to
his own. To remind himself of what it was like, he arrived at Sherborne one evening, heavily disguised, and strolled around the playing fields in the gloom, immersing himself in the place that had once been so familiar. But where was Mundy living now, and what was he doing? With Jane, David took a ‘thinking holiday’ in southern Germany in the early summer of 2001, on the lookout for models: could he be the maître d’hôtel in the restaurant where they were eating, could he be driving their cab, or carrying their luggage? For a guided tour of the Linderhof, one of the three lavish palaces built by Ludwig II in the late nineteenth century, they joined the queue with the other English-speakers, as Jane did not speak German; their guide was a tall, balding Englishman with the robust heartiness of a traditional seaside entertainer. By the end of their twenty-minute tour David had found his character. He slipped effortlessly into this new role himself; in his mind he was conducting the obedient audience round Ludwig’s dream castle, entertaining them with his repertoire of feeble jokes.7