John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  In his letter David acknowledged the ‘close and friendly personal relationship’ which the two of them had always shared. ‘I do not deceive myself that this news will not be a great blow to you,’ he wrote. ‘I know that I mean a lot to you, and I am very, very sorry to cause you personal distress … But I believe that, with the great professional wisdom you have always brought to publishing, you will find it in you to agree that when an author feels he needs a change, he should make it.’ In conclusion, he emphasised that this had been his decision, and his alone. No doubt he wanted to stress that he had not been influenced in his decision by his girlfriend.60

  David’s departure was ‘completely unexpected’ for Pick. ‘How could I help feeling embittered?’ he told an interviewer almost twenty years afterwards. ‘I think I now knew what Victor must have felt when he moved to us.’61

  David would say later that he had been dismayed by the ‘shoddy’ production values of the Heinemann edition of The Looking-Glass War. It was also true that Heinemann’s list was essentially middlebrow – fine for spy thrillers, but perhaps not ideal for a novelist attempting something more serious. In retrospect, Pick felt that a dispute over the division of paperback royalties had contributed to the break, though David had made no mention of this in his letter. Now that most hardback and paperback publishers are integrated, authors usually receive full paperback royalties. But in those days, when most hardback and paperback publishers were separate, it was customary for the hardback publisher to retain a percentage of the royalties received from the paperback publisher. The standard authors’ rate was 50 per cent; David received 60 per cent, as much as any other author on the Heinemann list, but even that was not enough for him. David told Pick that he wanted to ‘break the system’. In an emotional telephone call from New York that lasted more than an hour, David begged Pick to relent and pay even 5 per cent more. Pick told him bluntly that, with so many top authors on the Heinemann list, he could not afford to make exceptions.

  Pick’s point of view was understandable, but then so was David’s. One only had to consider the Pan edition of The Spy who Came in from the Cold to see his point: it had sold around a million copies, earning tens of thousands of pounds in royalties, of which half was retained by Gollancz as the original hardback publisher – though their original advance of £175 had been earned many times over in sales of the hardback edition.

  David left Heinemann without knowing his destination. He had some thought of moving to a smaller, more literary publisher. Greenfield produced a shortlist of likely British publishers, listing the pros and cons as he saw them. As it turned out, Jane’s former employers fulfilled most of David’s requirements. Like most British publishers in the 1960s and 1970s Hodder & Stoughton was still a family firm, run by the Hodder-Williamses and their cousins the Attenboroughs. The company had been famous between the wars for publishing thriller writers such as John Buchan, ‘Sapper’ (author of the Bulldog Drummond stories), Edgar Wallace and Leslie Charteris (the Saint). Under the leadership of a new generation the company was beginning a resurgence that would make it one of the most powerful forces in British publishing by the early 1980s. Jane thought especially highly of Robin Denniston, Hodder & Stoughton’s managing director. David too warmed to him; he seemed more bookish and less corporate than other publishers. According to Greenfield, Denniston could almost have been a character out of a le Carré novel himself:

  Westminster and Oxford, a trained parachutist from National Service days, the son of a Royal Navy officer who served with real distinction in the Secret Intelligence Service during the Second World War,* he had that vague, slightly shambling air that concealed a sharp and incisive mind. Untidy, with the knot of his tie screwed round almost under one ear and, more often than not, a spot of blood on his collar where he had nicked himself shaving, he did not resemble the prototype of the smart young executive. He kept a harmonium in his room at St Paul’s House* and played it at times of high emotion.62

  After David had dined with Denniston and Greenfield at Boulestin, Hodder became his choice. For his part, Denniston jumped at the opportunity to publish John le Carré. A colleague had never seen him move as fast as he did when she told him, ‘There’s somebody called David Cornwell on the phone’.

  Jack Geoghegan read the typescript of The Naïve and Sentimental Lover with dismay. The book did not work for him; he was certain that there was no market for it in America. He felt strongly that David was not ready to write an autobiographical novel and had taken a wrong turn; he should have stuck to the genre which he had created, the literary spy thriller. Geoghegan was in a quandary: on the one hand, he was desperate not to lose David as an author; on the other hand, he had no confidence in the book. He was so upset that he asked his wife to read it; she felt as he did. They discussed the dilemma for days, in the kitchen, in the library, even in bed at night. The problem was exacerbated by David and Jane’s imminent arrival in America; the Geoghegans had been close to Ann, and felt awkward about meeting the new woman in David’s life. Geoghegan did make an offer, but this was rejected. No doubt his misgivings about the new novel had become obvious.

  Jane introduced David to Bob Gottlieb, editor-in-chief at Alfred A. Knopf, perhaps the most prestigious literary publisher in America. He had built a reputation both as an effective publisher and as a dedicated and skilled editor, reckoned by many to be the best in his time. Some years before he had met Jane on a scouting trip to London, and the two of them had become friends. But he had lost contact with her after she left Hodder, until they were reunited at a dinner party given by Tom Rosenthal. Jane had telephoned him beforehand, to say that they would be meeting at Rosenthal’s and that she was bringing David Cornwell, with whom she had been living. Afterwards, on the way back to where they were staying, Gottlieb told his wife of his suspicion that the evening had been orchestrated so that he and David could meet. ‘This is a guy who is so cloaked, so armoured, so deep,’ he said of David. ‘This guy’s mind is a lot more complicated than mine – than anyone’s – so, whatever this is about, I’m not ever going to try to out-think him, because I can’t.’ The next morning Jane telephoned to ask if he would like to read ‘the new le Carré’. He had been vetted, and presumably had passed muster.

  Jane explained that she could not give Gottlieb the typescript because it could not be allowed out of David’s hands; so he came over to her flat to read it there. Afterwards he told David that he liked the book very much and wanted to publish it, but asked him to understand at the outset that it couldn’t possibly have the success of his previous books. David took the point. This was the beginning of a satisfying relationship with Knopf, and with Gottlieb in particular, which would continue for the next quarter of a century.

  Geoghegan was devastated by the loss of his star author. It felt like a death in the family. Though he would go on to publish other eminent authors, David remained the most important. For the rest of his career in publishing Geoghegan kept a photograph of the two of them on his desk, sitting in a Cornish field, having a picnic together. His son never once saw his father without the subject of David coming up in the conversation. He was still talking about him on the day before he died.

  On 13 March 1971, a diary piece appeared in the trade magazine the Bookseller. The diarist, a hack who went under the pen name ‘Whitefriar’, had read a typescript of The Naïve and Sentimental Lover and pronounced it a ‘masterpiece’. ‘I’m going on record to say that this book may be hailed as the Great English Novel. It is funny, sad, poignant, and, I believe, absolutely wonderful as a publishing proposition. Lucky old Hodder.’63

  Two days later David wrote to Pick, expressing cautious willingness to meet if it would serve any useful purpose. ‘I don’t quite know how matters lie between us,’ he began, and continued by saying that if Pick was going to make the easy point that ‘Jane has simply lined me up with her old associates, I don’t think we have much to discuss’.64

  Some months before The Naïve and Sentimental Lo
ver was published in September David sent a copy to Susan Kennaway, perhaps at her request. His accompanying letter has been lost, but a deleted extract from a draft gives some idea of his thinking:

  Please try to remember that my book is absolutely not a portrait of you, James and me.* I showed it to you because it had obvious resonance, but neither the events nor the relationships nor the characters have factual similarities with [passage missing] … not least a year’s preoccupation with the Fitzgeralds – let alone the processes of creation themselves – which make the novel in fact and in theory totally different from the events which set it in action. I don’t need to tell you that – but perhaps you have mistaken the baying of the trade for a true word upon the book itself.

  ‘I’m totally bewildered but I think delighted about it,’ Susan responded. ‘The thunderous Seamus† rang a lot of bells; likewise Cassidy.’ She did not recognise herself in the character of Helen, though she accepted that some of the scenes in the novel resembled ones which had actually taken place. ‘I was more worried about what you might have written about James,’ she continued, ‘but in fact you seem to have written about the shit-Shamus with a degree of admiration – might even say love?’

  Susan had discussed her late husband’s diaries and letters with a potential editor, Lynn Hughes, who received a warning from George Greenfield. ‘Would you tell George to stop panicking about the letters?’ asked Susan. ‘I’m not that mad!’65 David expressed the hope that his own letters would be destroyed. She told him that a publisher wanted to bring out James’s diaries to coincide with ‘a major publishing event in the autumn’, that is The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. David discouraged this proposal. ‘You can be sure that a book which is published “in the slipstream” of another book is never going to be a prestigious publication,’ he advised.

  Most relevant of all the slipstream, by the sound of it, is created by misinformed gossip, by people who have read neither my book nor James’s. The very nature of the offer makes their venture inappropriate. My book is not what they seem to think it is. I cannot speak for James’s since I have not read it, but I’m sure it deserves better than to be published for such vulgar and tenuous reasons.66

  ‘The Naïve and Sentimental Lover is widely regarded as the blip in my work, the aberration, or, more baldly, the turkey,’ David would write almost thirty years later. ‘British critics fell gleefully on it, welcoming it almost with one voice as the proof, if proof were needed, that I should stick to the “genre” novel and not aspire to “real” literature, to which they alone held the golden key.’67

  The tone of bitterness is understandable, given the savagery of some of the criticism. ‘The book is a disastrous failure,’ was the verdict of the anonymous reviewer* in the Times Literary Supplement.68 ‘The narrative limps along,’ according to the Listener’s critic.69 ‘Sporadically dazzling, but running to fat,’70 wrote Claire Tomalin in the Observer. In the Spectator, Auberon Waugh condemned the novel as ‘the product of self-indulgence and intellectual laziness’.71

  On the other hand H. R. F. Keating, who had found A Small Town in Germany overblown, welcomed le Carré’s decision to abandon spy novels as ‘wonderfully liberating’, when he reviewed The Naïve and Sentimental Lover in The Times. ‘It has enabled him to give us a mainstream novel at once both delightful and considerable.’72 To the Sunday Express’s Graham Lord it was ‘the most interesting novel I have read this year’.73 Frederic Raphael’s review in the Sunday Times gave as it took away:

  The Naïve and Sentimental Lover is an interesting experiment and it is often painfully funny but its tone is so world-wearily whimsical and so cutely acute that there is something platitudinous, déjà vu even, in its originality. Paradoxically, entertainments like The Spy who Came in from the Cold and A Small Town in Germany can seem more serious, more passionate and more pertinent than this highly personal and doubtless genuine cri de coeur.74

  The reviewer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jochen Schmidt, read The Naïve and Sentimental Lover as a satire, both of those who ‘attempt to give their lives a deeper meaning through the love of art and artists’ and of ‘those who – under the guise of artists – exploit society without contributing one iota to its development’.75 For Georg Hensel, writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the book dragged, to the extent that by the time he reached this page he was ‘gripped by a wild yearning for secret agents’; he claimed to have been delighted by the discovery of an agent on this page, ‘even if it was only an insurance agent’.76

  The response of American critics was similarly damning. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Geoffrey Wolff saw many virtues in the book. ‘All that’s missing from the novel’s inventory of virtues is the most important thing,’ he wrote: ‘it doesn’t do what Le Carré thinks it does. It does not penetrate the character of Aldo Cassidy.’ Wolff went on to suggest a problem in the depiction of Shamus, and was by no means the only critic to do so. ‘It is a sign of this novel’s fundamental indecisiveness that we cannot know whether the value Shamus’s wife puts on his work, “he’s altering the course of world literature”, is played straight or for laughs.’77

  The New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt concluded that ‘le Carré has simply failed to transform life into art’:

  What we are left with is really what it sounds like in summary – a slapstick potboiler about a London businessman being conned by a pair of overwrought aesthetes – a story shy of deep symbolic meaning, penetrating psychological insight, genuine wit, or any other quality that might have enriched its all-too familiar theme. In other words, it is a triteness disguised as something more, but finally most interesting for the time it takes to reveal itself as something less.78

  The Naïve and Sentimental Lover is a raw book: perhaps too raw. There is a sense that the writer has not yet fully digested some very distressing experiences. Perhaps Geoghegan was right to think that it was too early for David to write a novel which drew so directly on his own experience. Of course the very fact that it did so made the criticism feel more personal. David had opened up his private feelings to public scrutiny and been mocked for it. Small wonder that he was ‘extremely hurt’ by the book’s reception.79

  Nevertheless he put on a brave face. In a letter to an American friend, he affected not to care about the reviews: ‘I am sick of reading them anyway, they just annoy me.’80 When the book appeared he had just written a long and generous tribute to one of his favourite authors, P. G. Wodehouse, for the Sunday Times, due to be published to coincide with the Master’s ninetieth birthday; he wrote from Tregiffian to thank the literary editor, J. W. Lambert, for sending him a copy of the piece.81 David’s message was defiant: ‘Weather’s gorgeous, reviews foul, but the weather wins every time. A pox on Raphael et al – it’s a marvellous book.’82

  * A favourite phrase of David’s, deliberately ambiguous, deriving from Conrad’s novella The Secret Sharer. David generally used it of a character within his novels with whom he identified.

  * E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946), prolific and successful author of cliché-ridden spy thrillers.

  * David has suggested that he may have been drunk when he wrote it.

  † Pick’s daughter (then twenty years old) gave up her room for him.

  * The other members of the panel were Quintin Hogg MP, Malcolm Muggeridge and the progressive writer and teacher Baroness Stocks.

  * Then led by Adolf von Thadden, enabling David’s quip: ‘one Adolf is enough’.

  † Francis Hope.

  * In 1970 David repaid his debt to Snow with an elegiac Sunday Times piece looking back at his ‘Strangers and Brothers’ sequence of novels.

  * It has been suggested that the fire was caused by Shaw smoking in bed, after he had had too much to drink.

  † A basketball player of the 1960s and early 1970s, considered one of the greatest ever. His nickname derived from the fact that he was over seven feet tall.

  † Pollack borrowed the name ‘
Turner’ for the protagonist (played by Robert Redford) of his 1975 film Three Days of the Condor.

  * Susan repaid the loan in 1973.

  * ‘More than any other of his books, it testifies to his extraordinary poetic talent and the power of his insight. The theme is man’s triumphant conquest over his own insufficiency: he was equal to it.’

  * Alastair Denniston, head of the Government Code & Cypher School (Bletchley Park), 1919–42.

  * The offices of Hodder & Stoughton in Warwick Square, near St Paul’s Cathedral.

  * Years later, while watching the quiz show University Challenge on television, Denys Hodson would be startled by a question, posed by the quizmaster Bamber Gascoigne, asking for the names of the real people on whom the fictional characters in The Naïve and Sentimental Lover were based.

  † She misspelt the name.

  * Julian Symons.

  16

  Keeping the bitterness at bay

  ‘My hardest duty to myself was to keep the bitterness at bay,’ David would recall of this time twenty years later. Those who have not published a book may not appreciate how destructive critical reviews can be. Years of effort can be dismissed in a few glib sentences. The Naïve and Sentimental Lover was his third novel in succession to receive a critical pasting. Much of the criticism had been ad hominem; it was even suggested that le Carré’s career had run its course. To be denigrated in print is painful, of course; but more dangerous was the threat to his self-belief. Without confidence that what one produces is worthwhile, it is difficult, if not impossible, to write. David’s recovery from the drubbing he had taken would be as much a test of character as of talent.