John Le Carre
(1931- )
by George Leonard
"There are few people more dishonest," le Carre has warned us, "than
writers professing to recall how they came to do things." His pen name, he
said, "came from nowhere that I can really remember," but he finally
began telling "persistent" interviewers that he stole it from a shoe
shop he used to pass en roue to work. The shoe shop has never been located. He
has stopped telling the story. Much of the information about him is of that quality,
even when it comes directly from him.
So that is not his name. Later one discovers he never even worked "in the
Foreign Office." Britain does not officially admit to having an FBI and a
CIA for, respectively, domestic and international espionage--though everyone knows
that such agencies exist. When a person is a domestic spy the British press writes,
by long-standing gentlemanly agreement, that "he works in the Home Office";
if he spies on other nations, they write, "he works in the Foreign Office."
(Everyone understands, just as they understand that "his constant companion"
means "his mistress.")
We start then, fittingly, by removing his cover name and his cover job. We still
have a long way to go. Like Peer Gynt peeling the onion to find its center, when
we try to learn about le Carre we continually find cover stories within cover
stories.
The cover name, in French, means "John the Square" and though the critics
who long pondered it--John the Stolid? John the Straight Dealer?--have finally
dismissed it as unsymbolic, it is not insignificant. He once remarked he wanted
an upper-class-sounding name: that desire for upper-class status has been an obsession
of his characters. He is also, almost in spite of his friendliest critics, exceptionally
self-conscious of himself as the heir of the great spy novelists and loves to
make filial allusions to them. One of the first stars of the genre was William
LeQueux, whose The Great War in England in 1897 appeared in 1894. John Buchan's
famous The Thirty-Nine Steps, a poineering 1913 spy novel, was first published
under the pseudonym "H. de V." Too remote to have interested him? Le
Carre has a scholar's love of allusion. One of Smiley's cover names, "Mr.
Standfast," is the title of a 1919 Buchan novel.
The real-life David John Moore Cornwell was born on 19 October 1931. Before the
stories about his father began to surface, Americans frequently assumed that Cornwell,
an Oxford graduate and former Eton don, was a pillar of the Establishment, and
they projected those politics onto his novels and his hero Smiley. Nothing could
be further from the truth. He registers Labour party. Le Carre, although he has
the old-boy manners and credentials, lived in that world, he has told us, virtually
as a "spy." When he was three his mother left his father, Ronald Cornwell,
a high-living professional swindler who, despite a prison sentence during David's
youth, managed to accumulate two more wives and defraud enough people to achieve
a spectacular bankruptcy, in debt about thirty million contemporary dollars. All
the while David was in the exclusive Sherborne School he knew that "there
was absolutely no money," and that "there was a lot to hide: women,
the past, the present." His father sent him to school not to educate him
but to turn him into "fake gentry," to plant him in the Establishment
like a Russian "mole" in the secret services, to become useful later.
To make a "gentleman" out of David, my father always said he was prepared
to steal; and I'm afraid he did.
It sounds like a novel and it eventually provided material for one: A Perfect
Spy (1986). (In colloquial American English, the title means "a born
spy" or "a natural spy.") If we were studying Dickens, it would
make sense, at this point, to let the similarly autobiographical David Copperfield
(1852) flesh out the sketchy notes on his childhood Dickens left his biographer,
Forster. In le Carre's case, we have no less than four novels I consider autobiographical--indeed,
nearly confessional, sometimes obsessive. The plots of A Perfect Spy, A
Murder of Quality (1962), A Small Town in Germany (1986), and The
Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971) are perfunctory. The writer seems intent
on reliving an experience, understanding it, and exorcising it. "Factual"
biographical data is, he himself warns us, hard to come by. For years his life
involved matters still covered by Britain's Official Secrets Act. One thinks of
the narrator/lawyer of The Russia House (1989), who carries the Act around,
forcing people to sign. There are family considerations: he has been able to speak
about his father only since Ronnie Cornwell died, and even so it caused strain
on the family. Also, le Carre scholarship is in a primitive state: no autobiography,
no standard biography, no collected letters or even collected essays, no bestselling
expose by an ex-wife. But we are not at a loss for evidence. What does a born
spy, a habitually self-disguising person do when he has a need to "exorcise"
experiences? This one writes novels.
Enough is now known about our man too help us glean from the novels what we need--not names and dates, but something we want even more and which novels supply even better than a witness could: what certain events meant to the young David Cornwell emotionally; how they colored his novels; and how they probably led him to his most famous creation, George Smiley. When we see le Carre, at thirty, sit down to create Smiley, we will know who hi is. I will hold discussion of The Naive and Sentimental Lover, his novel of mid-life crisis, till its appropriate place in the middle of the story.
A PERFECT SPY
A Perfect Spy is only superficially the story of Magnus Pym/Titch/Sir
Magnus/Canterbury. (Le Carre's critics usually cope with his characters' many
names by resorting to slashes.) Clearly, the author's purpose in writing the
book was to depict his father, Ronnie (revealed in the book in the character
of Rickie), and whenever this character is offstage the tension drops.
A Perfect Spy is an endless novel written in le Carre's lamented late lax style;
its main interest is autobiographical. At the book's start Magnus has holed
up in a room he keeps in Devon and is beginning a long memoir addressed to his
son Tom. Meanwhile his wife, Mary, and his father-figure boss, Jack Brotherhood,
ransack his home, because the CIA is claiming "the Firm" has been
infiltrated by a Czech double agent, and Magnus has promptly disappeared. Inside
Magnus' chimney they find a "small, clever-looking" Czech camera used
for photographing documents (ch. 3). With this discovery all suspense ends,
although the book will not for another four-hundred-odd pages. Unfortunately
Jack and Mary, both in love with Magnus, need hundreds of pates to arrive at
the same conclusion the reader has, and sitting with them while they come to
their senses takes patience.
Crosscuts to Magnus' letter to Tom slowly reveal that Jack Brotherhood, when
he recruited Magnus to the Firm in Berne, after the war, persuaded him to finger
his best friend, the charismatic, war-wounded Axel, as a possible Russian agent.
Magnus heard Axel taken away in the night. When he joyfully found Axel/ Sgt.
Pavel later in Austria, both of them were minor Army intelligence agents, but
on opposite sides. They started trading secrets, advancing each other's careers.
Some years later, a full-fledged agents, Magnus was arrested in Czechoslovakia
and saved by Axel, who claimed him as a double agent, and since then he has
been one, partly to take revenge on Jack Brotherhood--mostly, however, to sweep
away, as Axel says, "the churches, the schools..., the class systems"
and all the corrupt institutions and people who have produced "such sad
little fellows as Sir Magnus" (ch.15). Particularly people like Magnus'
father, Rickie.
After his parents' separation, le Carre stayed with his father, whom he describes as a "colorful and curious personality" and, more significantly, as "a Micawber character." But Micawber