In 1947, a 16-year-old David Cornwell left the British boarding school system where he'd spent many unhappy years and ended up in Switzerland, where he studied German at the University of Bern—and caught the attention of British intelligence. As the restless child of an estranged mother and a con-man father, and a precocious student of modern languages to boot, the young wayfarer was a natural recruitment target for the security services, which scooped him up in the late 1940s to be “a teenaged errand boy of British Intelligence,” as he put it in his 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. Over the next 15 years, those little errands would continue and grow, furnishing Cornwell with the material that would fill the whopping 25 spy novels he wrote under the pen name John le Carré.
John le Carre, who worked for the British intelligence services in the 1950s and 1960s, has 25 novels to his credit and one memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel (2016). I n 1782, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ’s Les Confessions was published – the first modern autobiography and, two and a half centuries on, still something of a shocking, startling read. Pigeon Tunnel was published just after the very good biography, John Le Carre’, The Biography. Pigeon Tunnel may be the results of his collaboration with Adam Sisman. Having stirred up so many memories he may have decided that he should have his versions and his thoughts about specific aspects of. The John Le Carre` books that made of him more than an author of popular popular fiction are those about espionage, the cold war and later the competing demands of take all capitalism and the protection of human dignity. The subtext for all of these books are the. Sep 08, 2016 I n 1782, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ’s Les Confessions was published – the first modern autobiography and, two and a half centuries on, still something of a shocking, startling read.
It would be true to say that he was the finest spy novelist of all time, but in fact he was one of the greatest novelists of the last century. In a blow to his millions of readers, le Carré died of pneumonia on Sunday, at the age of 89.
“I spend a lot of odd moments these days wondering what my life would have looked like if I hadn't bolted from my public school, or if I had bolted in a different direction,” le Carré wrote in his memoir. “It strikes me now that everything that happened later in life was the consequence of that one impulsive adolescent decision to get out of England by the fastest available route and embrace the German muse as a substitute mother.”
During his parentless, wandering days in Switzerland and Germany, and indeed throughout his life, German was more than a mere second language to le Carré. He was fond of quoting the axiom, often attributed to Charlemagne, that “To possess another language is to possess another soul.” Among his adored German authors, le Carré was particularly fierce in his love for Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; the latter is a love that le Carré shared with his most famous creation, the portly, diffident, all-seeing George Smiley, who appears in nine of le Carré's novels.
In part as a result of his youthful devotion to Goethe, a strain of romanticism runs through nearly all of le Carré’s books: an idealism and an affinity for tragic beauty that serves as a natural counterpoint to his pessimism and career-long obsession with betrayal. These two impulses, the sentimental and the cynical, were fundamental to his fictional world. His uncanny ability to harmonize them in a witty, lyrical style marked by a fatigued but spry irony redefined what the modern spy thriller could be: ambivalent, complicated, unflashy and capable of sophisticated humanitarian argument, with rich characters and a literary depth one doesn’t find in (say) Ian Fleming.
Le Carré’s own intelligence career, typical for men of his education, race and class during this period, was on and off, with the two often blending together. His most serious work seems to have been abroad, running clandestine operations in Bonn and Hamburg around 1960. “In all, I don’t suppose that I spooked around for more than seven or eight years,” he told writer George Plimpton in a 1997 interview. He was apparently well liked in MI-5 and MI-6, both of which he served in. The quality of “clubbability” mattered a great deal at this time, and le Carré had no shortage of the requisite pedigree: He had earned a degree from Oxford and taught at Eton, where he spotted potential talent and reported suspected dissidents on behalf of Her Majesty.
During a period of active service, he began his literary career in 1961 with the short novel Call for the Dead. (He adopted his famous pseudonym at the behest of his bosses at MI-6, who didn’t want one of their boys’ names plastered across the covers of a spy thriller.) He wrote his next two novels under similar operational circumstances and made his fortune with the third, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold—a barbed wire of a spy novel, plotted with virtuosic tightness and narrated with a weary irony befitting the gray areas its characters so tragically inhabit.
Le Carré left the service after one of the most embarrassing moments in its history: Kim Philby, the former head of MI-6’s anti-Soviet desk, was revealed in 1963 to have been a double-agent for the Soviet Union, and an investigation showed he had blown the covers of many British officers and agents across Europe, including the young novelist. In 1964, le Carré was reportedly asked to leave MI-6. Luckily for him, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold Free rider. was on its way to becoming an international bestseller. He now had the cash to devote himself full-time to writing, an arrangement he had desired for at least a decade.
He spent the next half-century and more between homes in Cornwall and Switzerland, writing some of the most ambivalent, moving, psychologically deft thrillers about the Cold War—and, eventually, about much more. It's fair to say that he blew the possibilities of spy fiction wide open with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), with its shambling, middle-aged hero George Smiley patiently chasing a mole placed in British intelligence by Smiley's KGB counterpart, the mysterious, omniscient-seeming Karla. Still, le Carré's fictional world was much bigger than the Cold War. Some critics liked to say that he lost his muse when the Iron Curtain fell (“Since the [Berlin Wall] came down, his writing has often seemed a little uncertain,” a New York Times reviewer wrote in 2004), but le Carré never depended on one metaphor, or one war, for his livelihood. A post-Glasnost world saw le Carré telling tales of Ingush rebels in Chechnya (Our Game, 1995); addressing the erosion of civil liberties and the entrapment of Muslim refugees in A Most Wanted Man (2008); and dramatizing the brutal, world-spanning consequences of pharmaceutical corruption (The Constant Gardener, 2001).
In his later life, le Carré took greater creative control of film adaptations of his novels, even co-writing the screenplay for 2001’s The Tailor of Panama. But with or without his oversight, his novels have been keeping movie audiences reliably rapt for decades. Actors who starred in le Carré adaptations include some of the most famous of the last 50 years: Richard Burton, James Mason, Anthony Hopkins, Ralph Richardson, Gary Oldman, Sean Connery and Alec Guinness, who brought Smiley to vivid life in the 1979 BBC miniseries of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” (After that character-defining performance, even le Carré couldn’t think of Smiley without picturing Guinness: “George Smiley, whether I liked it or not, was from then on Alec Guinness—voice, mannerisms, the whole package,” he wrote in an introduction to Smiley’s People.)
Throughout his career, le Carré was never content to research his subjects from a chair, or to settle for government reports—though, thanks to abiding connections within the intelligence services, he had access to various official secrets. The novelist sometimes treated his work as though he was a wartime journalist. To build characters and scenes for The Honourable Schoolboy, set in southeast Asia in the mid-1970s, le Carré visited perilous zones throughout the region and reportedly dodged bullets in Cambodia by diving under a car. (I happen to know the African correspondent who served as one of le Carré's consultants for his 2006 novel about the Congo, The Mission Song; she came away impressed with his punctiliousness.)
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Even people who haven’t read his novels are likely familiar with the many words and phrases from the world of intelligence that le Carré introduced: “honeytrap,” for instance, and, most famously, “mole.”
Le Carré lived a bit like the characters in his books: He traveled widely, skied at speeds beyond his own capacity, had affairs, and dined with eminences and kings while remaining suspicious of ostentation and charm—perhaps because, after the Philby affair, le Carré said he could never trust charisma again.
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He sometimes chafed at being dismissed as a simple spy novelist, or else would deny that he cared about those who considered his work to be pulp: “I honestly believe that critics will gradually come round to what the public has long recognized, that the spy novel is as flexible, as valid a theme in our time as any other major theme, as valid as the love story,” he told the Washington Post in 1977.
He’s largely been proven right. Philip Roth has called A Perfect Spy (1986) “the best English novel since [World War II].” In 2013, Ian McEwan echoed this sentiment, saying le Carré would “be remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain.” The critical consensus has largely moved in the same direction. Like Graham Greene, le Carré crafted stories that evoke the alienation of having to move through worlds shaped by secret forces beyond our control. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or J.R.R. Tolkien, he created a host of recurring characters whom his readers could follow through new books as old friends (or enemies). Like Joseph Conrad, he was deeply attuned to the human capacity for casual barbarism, and to the bloody consequences of colonialism. His novels are as much anti-spy novels as they are spy novels, standing indictments of genteel imperial bureaucracy. Despite this lack of apparent glamour, the world never stopped reading.
One of John le Carré’s boyhood memories is clutching his mother’s hand while waving to his father, who stood high up behind a prison wall. Ronnie Cornwell was a charming rogue, a confidence man who ran frauds and visited jails all over the world. He once sent the teenage le Carré to St. Moritz to talk a hotel manager out of an overdue bill — “and while you’re there, have yourself a steak on your old man.” Yet his love for his sons overflowed in guilty tears, and his longest con was to finagle expensive private educations for them. (He later sent a bill.) As for waving to him in prison, however, Cornwell insisted that le Carré had misremembered. Cornwell had done a stretch at Exeter Jail, yes — but everyone knows that at Exeter you can’t see into the cells from the road.
Is the memory real? This question in various forms drives le Carré’s remarkable memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Le Carré began his career working for British intelligence and went on to revolutionize the intrigue genre with over twenty intricately wrought novels, like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy andThe Constant Gardener. Now eighty-four, he finds that pure memory is elusive “after a lifetime of blending experience with imagination.” He believes what his father said, but he also knows that after that remembered day, a part of him never saw Cornwell wearing anything but a convict’s uniform. One of the most haunting scenes of the book recounts the way the otherwise exuberant Cornwell would stand meekly at doors, waiting for them to be opened. As a prisoner, he had not been able to do this himself. And yet this memory is filtered as well: it comes secondhand, from le Carré’s mother, who abandoned him in childhood and was an enigma thereafter. It, too, is clouded by time’s opaque haze.
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The Pigeon Tunnel is an episodic rather than a chronological memoir, jumping from scene to scene in le Carré’s fascinating life. The deeply affecting chapter on Cornwell is not merely the best part of the book, it may well be the best thing le Carré has ever written. Other sections are less personal. Le Carré avoids writing about his marriages, friendships, and children, focusing instead on the relationship between his work as a spy and his chosen life as a novelist. The two careers have much in common with one another and with his father’s line of work, he asserts, not least because they involve a complicated relationship to the truth. “To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing.”
Parts of this book sing a little too much. Fans of le Carré’s intricate novels will recognize here his jargon-filled, world-weary dialogue and suspect embellishment. Such dialogue fills the chapter on spymaster Nicholas Elliott, who interviewed the traitor Kim Philby after Philby defected to the Soviet Union. Similarly, le Carré seems to make a good story even better as he recounts trying to collect a debt for his father from the Panamanian ambassador to France at age sixteen. He writes that the ambassador’s wife, “the most desirable woman I had ever seen,” played footsie with him under the table and then nibbled on his ear as they danced into the night. Such print-ready scenes are evocative but not entirely believable, and once again implicate the fraught relationship between memory and the creative act. Le Carré’s biographer Adam Sisman contends that le Carré “enjoys teasing his readers, like a fan dancer, offering tantalizing glimpses, but never a clear view of the figure beneath.”An air of mystery suits a thriller writer — especially one who used to be a spy.
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The Pigeon Tunnel shows that le Carré is at his best not when he renders scenes or snappy dialogue but when he simply observes. He has a marvelous eye. His diplomatic cover in the 1960s required him to escort dignitaries from place to place, including translating for a German politician meeting with Harold Macmillan. The British prime minister’s “patrician slur . . . was like an old gramophone record running at a very low speed,” le Carré writes. “A trail of unstoppable tears leaked from the corner of his right eye, down a groove and into his shirt collar.” Le Carré briefly describes his great-grandfather, “whom I remember as a white-bearded D. H. Lawrence lookalike riding a tricycle at ninety.” Best of all is a surreal meeting with Yasser Arafat, which occurred while le Carré researched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a novel. As they embraced, le Carré sized up his man, whose brown eyes were “fervent and imploring.” Arafat’s famously patchy beard “is not bristle, it’s silky fluff. It smells of Johnson’s Baby Powder.”
The meeting with Arafat illustrates a central concern of le Carré’s working life: his commitment to research. It is an ironic preoccupation for a self-confessed fabulist. Although his early spying looms large in the public imagination, le Carré has gathered far more material for his novels during civilian trips to dangerous places. Many of the memoir’s chapters recount these adventures. He spent time in the eastern Congo and Khmer Rouge Cambodia; he interviewed Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern terrorists. In every town he tried to find the watering hole where spies, diplomats, journalists, and men of fortune sought comfort and camaraderie. These settings and characters worked their way not just into his fiction but into his consciousness; they have set his novels apart from all other stories of intrigue. “An old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination,” he confesses, late in this book. And among John le Carré’s many talents, a splendid imagination looms large.