Quote of the Day (John le Carre, on the British Embassy in Cold War West Germany)

“Imagine a sprawling factory block of no merit, the kind of building you see in dozens on the western bypass, usually with a symbol of its product set out on the roof; paint about it a sullen Rhenish sky, add an indefinable hint of Nazi architecture, just a breath, no more, and erect in the rough ground behind it two fading goalposts for the recreation of the unwashed, and you have portrayed with fair accuracy the mind and force of England in the Federal Republic.”— British-Irish spy novelist David Cornwell, a.k.a. John le Carre (1931-2020), A Small Town in Germany (1968)

Over the course of his remarkable half-century of writing, John le Carre produced countless vivid descriptions such as this, leading historian Simon Schama, after the novelist’s death late last year, rightly hail him, in a Financial Times retrospective, as “a sketch-artist of fateful topography.”

There is more than a little truth to the contention by former British national security official Dr. Lynette Nusbacher, in a blog post for The Times of Israel, that le Carre “increasingly tended towards caricature of Americans as ridiculous, absurdly zealous, but immensely powerful; and towards America’s enemies as blameless.” 

But his best work will survive him for the manifest gifts on display: not just a new level of realism in spy novels, but also vivid description, an ironic narrative voice, and sharp dialogue.

Quote of the Day (John le Carre, on His Con-Man Dad and Writing)

“Ronnie the con man could spin you a story out of thin air, sketch in a character who did not exist, and paint a golden opportunity where there wasn't one… if all that isn't part and parcel of the writer's art, tell me what is.”—John le Carre, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life (2016)

“Ronnie"’s son is David Cornwell, but readers know him better as spy novelist John le Carre, born 85 years ago yesterday.

Deceit and betrayal lie at the heart of the espionage trade, and nobody might have been better at inculcating the traits of mind needed for it than David’s father, a con man extraordinaire who cheated people right and left—even friends and family—of their money, with occasional breaks for prison and bankruptcy.

When le Carre became rich as a result of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, he had to deal with a string of his father’s unpaid hotel bills. At one point, Ronnie even seduced a woman by claiming to be his famous son!

Le Carre aficionados have already known the basics of this story since the publication of one of his more autobiographical novels, A Perfect Spy, but a chapter in his newly released The Pigeon Tunnel lays out in considerably more detail a legacy of Dickensian shame over a father who always seemed in trouble.

(For more on le Carre’s theme of betrayal, see this prior post of mine on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the first installment of his superb “Quest for Karla” trilogy about the hunt for a mole at the highest reaches of Britain’s intelligence system—and the consequences of it.)

This Day in Literary History (Le Carre Unleashes Mole Hunter Smiley)

June 17, 1974—A decade after making his first career splash with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, former British intelligence officer David Cornwell—better known by the pseudonym John le Carre—reached what is probably the artistic zenith of his career with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  At least partly inspired by the treason of Kim Philby, the novel popularized the term “mole” to denote the particular nature of the latter’s offense: a highly placed enemy at the heart of a national intelligence service.

So successful was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that it spawned a 1979 TV miniseries starring Alec Guinness (pictured here) and a more recent film starring Gary Oldman. Both adaptations gave the lead actors one of their most prized roles as le Carre’s donnish spymaster George Smiley. The spy thriller also was the opening novel in a trilogy, The Quest for Karla, in which Smiley pursues his cunning, ruthless counterpart at Soviet intelligence.

“Karla”’s double agent at the highest levels of British intelligence engages in a devastating series of national and personal betrayals with implications not just for Britain agents and their minders but also for their American “cousins.” The damage was similar to that perpetrated by the spy ring recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s and centered around Philby, the highest-ranking British intelligence officer to serve the Soviet Union as a double agent.

Bill Haydon in Tinker contains characteristics of three other notorious spies who joined the Communist Party while at Cambridge in the 1930s—Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean—but Philby, another spy with upper-class connections, a famous father specializing in Arab studies, and links to U.S. intelligence, was the most obvious model for the character. Le Carre recalled, in an interview with Jon Snow of Britain's Channel 4 a few years ago, that he had special reason to loathe Philby, "a bad lot": the novelist, before his writing days, had used the cover of a British diplomat to run agents and lure defectors in Germany—until Philby blew his cover in the early 1960s. Le Carre would not meet the dying double agent in Russia in 1988 because of his memories of a man whom he "wouldn't have trusted...with my cat for the weekend."

Oddly enough, I had read the last two-thirds of The Quest for Karla, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People, more than 30 years ago, but not Tinker until I began researching this post. I discovered that inadvertently, I had saved the best for last.  Le Carre had introduced Smiley in two mysteries written in the early 1960s, Call for the Dead,” and A Murder of Quality, and part of the compulsive power of Tinker is simply as a whodunit. Cashiered from the highest levels of British intelligence, “Circus” (so nicknamed for the location of MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, at Cambridge Circus in London) after a failed operation, Smiley is now called out of retirement, because he has no connection to the suspected current treachery, to ferret out the mole among four principals in Circus who are code-named Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Poor Man.

Although the propulsive thrust of the novel came from adhering to the detective and spy genres, its richness derived from its depictions of the intelligence profession as half-calling, half-bureaucracy. The high priests of the intelligence services in the book struggle with loss of faith in their mission, even as they cling to the mysteries at the heart of their work. At the same time, rather than the dashing derring-do of a James Bond, they engage in pitched turf battles with each other, in memos replete with their own in-house vocabulary, such as “lamplighters” (a section that provided surveillance and couriers), “babysitters” (guardians of safe houses used to accommodate defectors) and “scalphunters” (strong-arm men responsible for assassination, burglary, abduction, and the like).

James Wood, in How Fiction Works, criticizes le Carre’s form of “commercial realism,” terming one passage from Smiley’s People “a clever coffin of dead conventions.” That criticism is itself too clever by half. Seldom in the history of the spy story—a genre that has produced other notables such as Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene—has a writer brought to the form such precise attention to atmosphere and almost Dickensian characterization.

The one problem I have with le Carre’s work, actually, is its Anti-Americanism. In his novels—especially with the passing of the years, when the Soviet Union at least reminded him that another political and economic system could rival and surpass the capitalist West in ruthlessness—the United States looms balefully large. The moral ambiguity between the two Cold War superpowers, as strong an element as the weather in these novels, often shades into moral relativism.

The novelist has been at pains to deny it, saying that it’s not Americans he resents but their government. Some might find his vitriolic criticism of the foreign-policy adventurism of the Bush administration bracing. But even his early spy novels, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and A Small Town in Germany, were written with liberal Democrats in the White House and controlling the American intelligence services.

And consider this: If he finds Americans as individuals all right, why do you seldom if ever find a good one in his work? Why are they often depicted as outright villains? Even in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, why is the traitor’s eventual explanation of his turn to the Soviet Union (“The United States is no longer capable of undertaking its own revolution”) regarded by Smiley in this way: “it was the tone, rather than the music, that alienated him”?

 

Quote of the Day (John le Carre, on Film Adaptations)

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bullion cubes."—Attributed to novelist John le Carre

Given that the theme week at the Chautauqua Institution, where I’m vacationing right now, is the American intelligence system, the temptation was irresistible to use this quote by one of the premiere—perhaps the premiere—practitioner of the espionage novel.

(Incidentally, at a class I took this morning, two retired CIA case officers said that two novelists generally favored by those in the bureau were le Carre and Graham Greene, both of whom worked in the British intelligence service before they wrote their spy thrillers. (Tom Clancy, on the other hand, got a thumbs’ down from the couple.)

I came across this delicious quote in, of all things, a Roman Catholic weekly church bulletin. Perhaps it’s not so bizarre a find, on second glance. After all, it requires a real act of faith for an author to trust that his material will be treated sensitively in a different medium often more guided by the dollar than by aesthetics.

The closest source I could find for this quote traces it to the author’s feelings after watching how his The Tailor of Panama was translated to the big screen. I’m not sure if le Carre’s feelings about that adaptation were as ambivalent as this quote suggests (the film wasn’t that bad, after all). Actually, the novelist has been far better served than most writers by the entertainment industry. (See especially The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.)

When I went to le Carre’s official Web site, I discovered news that sure seems to validate his faith. It seems that a new film adaptation is going to be made of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. For the life of me, I can’t imagine how Hollywood could improve on the 1970s version of the first third of his Quest for Karla trilogy. For one thing, the first pass at his book was turned into a mini-series, allowing for greater opportunity to dwell on character and plot points. Additionally—perhaps even more crucially—it had Sir Alec Guinness in a tremendous career-capping role, as quietly dogged (yet troubled) spycatcher George Smiley.

But le Carre appears very, very high on this remake, this time produced for the big screen. That’s what having Gary Oldman (taking over the Smiley role) can do in boosting an author’s faith in the men who make the movies.