by Adam Sisman
Hodson tactfully left them alone. A few minutes later James burst into the room, having driven back from the station. At first it seemed as if all would be well. James began opening bottles, laughing and joking, as ebullient as he had ever been, while the others sat in comparative silence. In his heightened state James had decided to make a present of Susan to David, and wanted them to go off together that very night. There was more than an echo of Jules et Jim, in which the husband, anxious that his wife will leave him, gives his blessing for his friend to begin an affair with her, so that the three of them can remain living together. James seemed to relish such parallels: he had already accused Susan of ‘behaving like a bloody dentist’s wife’, a reference to Graham Greene’s play The Complaisant Lover,* in which both lover and husband (a dentist) gallantly agree to indulge the wife’s desire for a dalliance. Indeed the adulterous triangle was a recurrent theme in his own novels.26 ‘How wonderfully close fiction and life have suddenly become,’ James would write in his journal, a few weeks afterwards.27
With an embarrassed Hodson making up the four, the party descended the mountain to a restaurant in Zell am See. The atmosphere was restless and uneasy. Neither David nor Susan challenged James, not wanting to upset him further. Towards the end of the meal James began to discuss the practical arrangements for their departure: train timetables, packing, had she remembered her passport? When David betrayed signs of hesitation, James was quick to suggest that maybe he did not want Susan after all. Abruptly he stood up from the table, asserting that David should pay for the meal as he had more money. He grabbed Hodson and the two of them left the restaurant.
Stunned, Susan and David remained seated, uncertain what to do next. Then Hodson returned. There was a train in about an hour’s time, he told them. James was ensconced at the station bar. Susan accepted Hodson’s offer to escort her up the hill to collect her things. At the lodge she hurriedly packed a bag and changed into going-away clothes. Then she and Hodson made their way back down the hill, Susan slipping and sliding in the snow. They found James and David together at the bar, ‘old chums, old friends, comforting and swearing and laughing and crying all at once’. James called out to her that she ought be ashamed of herself, leading a young man like David (who was only a year or so younger than her) by the nose. ‘My God, this is going to make a good book,’ he said to David, and the pair of them started laughing. Irritated that they were ignoring her, Susan flounced out, and had to be persuaded to return. By this time it was late and the train had left. Eventually they found themselves in the lobby of the deserted station, shouting and screaming at each other in the cold, James pulling Susan by one arm and David tugging her by the other. ‘It isn’t Jules et Jim, can’t you see,’ Susan raged through her tears: ‘it’s James and Jim.’ James began howling. Hodson dragged him away. The two lovers slunk round the corner and found a hotel, where they spent a miserable, sleepless night. Susan sensed that David was anxious about James and needed to see him again. It was now obvious to her that she would not be leaving with David the next morning.
It was therefore with some relief that, as they were sipping coffee at breakfast, they saw Hodson walk into the hotel. Shaking the new snow off his shoes, he told them that they had better come back to the house. ‘I think James is going mad,’ he said. The three of them climbed the hill again to the Haus am Berg. More than a decade later Susan related what happened when they arrived:
we went into the big bedroom, where James was lying curled on the bed in his vest and pants unshaven, in the foetal position, crying. It had been snowing in the night and the white flakes piled up high against the window panes caused both a strange lightness and a shadowless gloom in the room. David went straight to the bed and sat across the end of it. ‘Old Jim, old chumbo, old chum, come on,’ he said, and James peeped through his fingers, and their conversation began.28
Susan left the two friends alone. She locked herself into an attic bedroom, took some sleeping pills and fell asleep. By the time she woke it was dark and David had gone.
Their affair had not ended: over the months that followed they continued to see each other from time to time, while she lived apart from James. But the crisis was past. Susan increasingly came to believe that David would never leave his wife. When her father was dying, James came to the nursing home to support her. Eventually the two of them were reconciled. They sold the house in London and began living together again in the house in Gloucestershire. ‘The difficult years are behind,’ James would write to Susan in 1967.29
In a confessional letter David had told Susan that he wanted to give his family ‘a home and land before I burst out, if I do … Once home is established I am going to travel for six months or so – I have to collect for a new book, that’s the story.’30 He portrayed ghastly scenes of sobbing and ‘small madnesses’, interspersed with ‘massive statements of generosity’ from Ann and spells of coolness and detachment – ‘not so different from James actually’. David tried to explain to Susan why he could not commit to her:
I’ll tell you what I am: a painkiller, a concession man, grown-up on negotiating other people’s emotions. A great big fat fraud. Poor love; I’ve been more brave with you than with anyone, and still I’ve been a coward. I can’t hurt – it’s as simple as that … I can’t bear discord; you can blackmail me any time with the simplest disapproval … I tried to warn you; I love you, but take care; I love you, but I’m a hollow oak … I am filled with the smell and energy of you, the life and the courage, sheer beauty and friendship; but I can’t destroy.
Later in the letter he reflected on his relations with James. ‘I suppose I am growing up – I can’t cope with him any more.’ He commented sadly that ‘it’s certainly my own fault and it’s certainly true; I’ve lost the best friend I ever had’.31
He wrote a letter of remorse to Kennaway himself, addressing him as ‘Dearest James’. David insisted that ‘I failed you most terribly,’ and asked forgiveness. ‘I describe you in conversation as my best friend,’ he wrote. ‘If you can, say the same.’ He would never see Kennaway again.
The affair with Susan set a pattern that would recur in David’s life: the compulsive search for love. He felt he had been swept up in a piece of bad theatre, that he had protested emotions he did not afterwards feel, had betrayed those whom he most loved and had paid a heavy price for it. He had said the unsayable, things that had been banking up in him and then poured out, that he was a stranger to happiness, and all the rest. He could not take the words back, any more than the deed. In his own words, one part of him longed for a return to captivity, for the children’s sake, and for Ann’s. But the other half yearned to make up for his womanless youth, his sexual inexperience and his longing for real connection. There would be other Susans, some brief, some more enduring, a few even rewarding. But David’s longing for stability was as powerful as his longing for experience and his thirst for knowledge, and it would lead him to search for a partner who could manage these seemingly irreconcilable needs, and give them a home.
It was little consolation to Ann that her husband had not left. She believed that she was no more than ‘a tie from the past he hasn’t the heart to cut’.32 She accused him of being cold and calculating, an emotional eunuch, incapable of real passion. For her, as for James, only ‘real’ emotion counted. Privately, David suspected that she despised him for not having the guts to go off with Susan. In his lowest moments he felt that he had been branded by all three of them as a sexual inadequate, an opinion that he shared.
Ann loathed James, and felt if anything more jealous of him than she did of Susan. She formed the theory, which she expressed to David often, that he had consummated a homosexual love affair with the wife of his lover. Susan too came to believe that there had been a homosexual element in their friendship, though she compared them to David and Jonathan, more like brothers than lovers.33 David himself could not accept Ann’s theory, though he thought about it a lot; he said that he had never felt physically attract
ed to James, even if he had been enormously stimulated by Kennaway’s energy and zest. James too addressed this idea, in a letter to his wife. ‘Nothing clearer has come out of this than that neither he nor I are queer, not one bit. We are men. You’re woman, and we’ve all pushed ourselves to the edge of civilization, the case being special only in that we all love each other.’34
Theories of homosexuality were never far from Ann’s thoughts as she tried to analyse her errant husband. He was attractive in a boyish, almost feminine way, and he used his charm effectively on men as well as women. Denys Hodson remembered him as simply the most charming man he had ever met. There is some evidence that David may have enjoyed playing on Ann’s suspicion that he could be homosexual. For example, in a letter to her from Bern, where they had been staying together, written just after she had left, he mentioned picking up a twenty-three-year-old boy in the Casino for ‘a lark’. Together they had gone to a homosexual restaurant, where they ‘sat around and got minced at for a bit’. A few years later in Bath he and Robin Cooke judged it prudent to quit a pub abruptly, after their exuberant behaviour had led them to be taken for ‘a couple of queers’.
Ann told him frequently that he knew nothing of women, having grown up in a family in which women were absent. She argued that the poverty of the female characters in his books showed his ignorance. It was certainly true that there were far more men than women in his novels, as they were set in a world in which men predominated. The Looking-Glass War depicted a platonic love between Leiser and Avery; these two men make a closer connection than they are able to make with the women in their lives. But the women who did enter this world – Elsa Fennan, Shane Hecht, even Liz Gold – were vividly drawn. The most enigmatic of them was a character introduced in the opening paragraphs of his very first book, who nonetheless had yet to appear in person in his fiction – Smiley’s wife, Lady Ann. It was curious that David should have used his own wife’s name for the wife of his principal character. On the face of it, they were as unlike as could be: Ann was conventional, monogamous and middle class, while Lady Ann was bohemian, promiscuous and aristocratic. Perhaps Ann was right in at least one respect: Lady Ann represented the essential unknowableness of women to Smiley, and by extension to David.
* José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), influential Spanish philosopher and essayist.
* ‘The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.’7
* One of Gollancz’s more endearing qualities was his apparently inexhaustible stock of Jewish jokes.
* In November 1963 David had given her a copy of The Spy who Came in from the Cold, inscribed ‘To Liz, with love from John le Carré’ and illustrated with cartoons of ‘Rugged Leamas’ and ‘Mixed-up Liz’, which suggests she may have been the inspiration for Leamas’s girlfriend, Liz Gold.
† After many changes Country Dance was eventually staged at the Hampstead Theatre Club in 1967 by the director James Roose-Evans, and afterwards had a short run at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. It was adapted into a 1970 film starring Peter O’Toole and Susannah York, released in the USA under the title Brotherly Love.
* By 30 December 1966 the Pan edition had sold 850,000 copies.
† A payment of £99,714 on signature of the contract, followed by the sterling equivalent of $70,000 on 31 March 1966, plus a further £22,500 in two more stages.
* Some of the desolate scenes of East Berlin were shot in London’s Docklands, then of course still undeveloped.
* In his journal he referred to this play as The Complaisant Husband.
14
Caught in the machine
In March the Cornwells’ landlady in Vienna gave them notice; she wanted the apartment for the opera director Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson. Ann took the children back to England, while David remained to serve out another month of tax quarantine. ‘I know I am a great louse, but Mousey I do so love you still,’ he wrote to her while they were apart.1
David’s German publisher, who also published Graham Greene, told him that Greene was coming to Vienna and wanted to meet him. David was in awe of Greene. While still in Agios Nikolaos he had received a letter from him, writing in his capacity as a director of The Bodley Head: he had enquired whether David might be interested in publishing his next book with the firm. Presumably he was responding to gossip in the publishing business about David’s discontent with Gollancz. He seemed unaware that The Bodley Head had rejected David’s work in the past. In response, David had said that he feared it was now too late, as he was in negotiation with another publisher, though he promised to get in touch if the negotiations fell through. Greene’s letter was very welcome nevertheless:
You have given me an opportunity to write to you, which I have long wanted to do, to thank you most sincerely for your support: I do not need to tell you what this has meant to me, both practically, since it contributed immeasurably to the success of my last book, and morally, because there are few writers, living or dead, whose support I would appreciate more.2
In a letter to Ann, David referred to Greene’s In Search of a Character: Two African Journals, which he said was ‘really his notebooks while collecting material for his novels: very interesting to compare Greene’s with my own way of looking at people, his technique of slipping into the role of the character he’s putting together, his horror of being affected by other writers, e.g. Conrad’.3
Greene turned out to be a tall man, with very pale blue eyes and a trailing voice, with a stammer like Philby’s. They lunched together with their German publisher, and later spent a ‘pissy’ evening à deux. Mischievously Greene asked David whether he had been in SIS, and when David denied this, commented that he was quite right to do so: ‘You never know where these conversations will lead.’ He mentioned that he kept a flat in Paris, and extended an invitation to David to call on him when he was there.
David was still working on a script for The Looking-Glass War. Film rights had been sold to Columbia for $150,000,* plus a further $12,500 for the screenplay. Karel Reisz had dropped out, but another director had taken his place: Jack Clayton, whose first film, Room at the Top (1959), had pioneered the British ‘New Wave’ in cinema, incidentally picking up two Academy Awards. David met Clayton in Paris, where Susan joined him for a few days. Afterwards he travelled to Bad Godesberg, where he stayed with his former Foreign Office colleague Julian Bullard and his wife Margaret while trying to make progress with his new book. He was finding it a struggle to write anything at all, and what he did produce seemed to him ‘wretchedly bad’. One problem was the number of distractions. Now that he was a bestselling author he was in demand to give talks and interviews and to broadcast on radio and television. At first this was new and exciting, but the glamour quickly palled. Moreover he received a steady stream of requests to write short stories, feature articles and book reviews, all of which were less daunting to undertake than a full-length novel. For example, in 1967 he would be persuaded to contribute a short story to the first number of Student magazine, edited by the seventeen-year-old Richard Branson.
Like James Kennaway, and so many other novelists, David was tempted by the allure of screenwriting. He was fascinated by cinema and relished the challenge of adapting his talent to this different form: in the next few years much of his time would be spent scripting his novels. He dabbled in television, too, and put forward a rather perfunctory proposal for a series of four television plays under the umbrella title ‘The Face of Conflict’. This was not taken up. In 1969 Thames TV would broadcast his hour-long drama End of the Line in its ‘Armchair Theatre’ slot, after it had been offered to the BBC and unexpectedly declined. ‘I must say that I admire your courage in turning down a play by John le Carré,’ commented his agent.4
As well as The Looking-Glass War, Columbia had bought the rights in Call for the Dead. The film would be directed by Sidney Lumet, from a screenplay by Paul Dehn, the scriptwriter of The Spy who Came in from th
e Cold. This time David was not involved with the production.
One evening David was taken by his French publisher to a beautiful house on the Île St Louis, home of James Jones, the American author of From Here to Eternity. There were about thirty people present and the atmosphere was self-consciously bohemian. At the centre of the enormous living room was a medieval pulpit; the rule of the evening was that anybody who had something important to say should step into the pulpit, and everyone else must shut up. David recalled that Jones spent most of the time in the pulpit, while he himself lounged beside Françoise Sagan, talking quietly to her amid the hubbub. Sagan’s first novel Bonjour Tristesse (1954) had made her famous at the age of only eighteen. The two young authors discussed the effect of success on their work, and agreed that it was negative.
While in Paris, David took the opportunity to call on Greene. His host offered him a drink; David noticed with amusement that the Great Writer drank green Chartreuse. On the bookshelves of his tiny flat David spotted many of the erotic and avant-garde books published by Girodias: works by Henry Miller, Frank Harris, Anaïs Nin and others.
David would be in occasional contact with Greene over the next few years. Early in 1966, for example, he wrote a letter praising Greene’s The Comedians, which he had just finished reading for the second time. ‘I find it quite excellent – for my taste, your greatest novel,’ he wrote. ‘I do hope you realise that that is the common talk of everyone one meets.’ He had been ‘disgusted’ by Kingsley Amis’s mocking review,5
which seemed to me the cheapest thing I have read for a long time. Why does no one dwell on the construction? There can be few plots in our time which can so perfectly move the idea, and few characters which so innocently move the plot. It was, is a really wonderful book. I am too stuck with German ideas I know, but I could not help equating the thesis of the book to that of the Thomas Mann short stories – the notion of the ‘artist’ and his relation to ‘citizen’.* You say quite casually in humanist terms what Mann contrived in mechanical terms; what Mann blared at us with an orchestra you play gently in clear, solitary themes, and having established your distinctions you continually rearrange them. You have also done strange and marvellous things with motive: ‘I am behaving like this because people are watching me’ is not an easy notion to express!
