John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  After the screening David sent a similar tribute to Arthur Hopcraft. ‘Seeing it all put together, I was overwhelmed by how well served I had been; by the quality of the acting, direction, and, of course, your script, which seemed to me to work with quite amazing ease,’ he wrote: ‘just as we could not have had a better Smiley, so we could not have had a better writer than yourself. Thanks for your craft, & the ingenuity, and the beautifully done additions – Ann at the end, Roach in the chapel, etc.’18

  Before the series began the BBC gave a grand lunch for the cast and the crew. Everyone had arrived and was standing around, drinking champagne, except Bernard Hepton, who played the part of Toby Esterhase, one of the four suspected of being the mole. Guinness became impatient, suspecting that Hepton was deliberately late, as actors so often are. Eventually Hepton arrived, wearing a green tailored suit. ‘Oh Bernard,’ said Guinness, ‘you came as a frog.’

  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was due to be broadcast on BBC 2 on Monday evenings at 9.00 p.m., and repeated on Sunday evenings at 10.30. The first episode went out on 10 September 1979. There was much uncertainty about how it would be received: especially whether viewers would tolerate such a complex plot. Early comment was cautious, with some exceptions. (‘Don’t dream of missing it,’ wrote Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian.) Gradually, though, the critics began to realise that this was an exceptional piece of television. The fact that some of the critics as well as many of the viewers found much of the story incomprehensible merely added to its mystique. Terry Wogan, then presenting the breakfast show on the BBC’s Radio 2, ran a quiz, ‘Does anyone know what’s going on?’ The series became a national talking-point. Its success was enhanced when the Association of Cinematographic Television and Allied Technicians called its members working for the ITV companies out on strike, taking the ITV channels off air and leaving the BBC free of competition for viewers. This helped the series achieve viewing figures of eight and a half million, plus a further three million watching the repeats.

  The music accompanying the end-credits by the composer Geoffrey Burgon, an arrangement of Nunc Dimittis (‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace’) from the Book of Common Prayer, became a top 10 hit in the UK singles chart, an indication of the popularity of the series. Burgon would win an Ivor Novello award for his score.

  Despite the evident success of the series David was nervous. Richard Ingrams, television critic of the Spectator, had labelled it ‘pretentious’:

  Le Carré, who started out as a writer of excellent espionage and murder stories … grew more prolix the more successful he became, and began to fancy himself as a cut above the mere writer of thrillers. The flattery which has been accorded to him by people like Melvyn Bragg, who called him in a recent interview ‘one of the two or three leading novelists of his generation’, has not been good for him …

  The adaptation suffers from the same fault as the Melvyn Bragg interview in that it seriously over-rates le Carré’s talent.19

  After a long talk with David, the chairman of Hodder & Stoughton, Philip Attenborough, reported that ‘there is much on his mind’:

  The knives are out, and the articles in the New Statesman* and The Spectator have hurt, and the stuff in the Express about his connection with Sir Maurice Oldfield (ex head of MI5)† has brought back old rumours, all inaccurate, that he thought were forgotten … He is beginning to be nervous (in the light of the above) about the critical reception for the new novel and implores us to warn our salesmen not to be disappointed …

  ‘This very sensitive man is forever feeling on behalf of others, particularly those in the front line,’ commented his brother, Michael Attenborough.20

  Once the final episode had been screened, David wrote a letter of tribute to Guinness. ‘Dear Alec,’ he wrote, ‘how perfectly marvellous it was. I shed tears over the last episode, not least because the lights seemed to have gone out on your wonderful, wonderful Smiley; but of course they never will.’

  Nothing to report except the clear and belated recognition of a triumph. There are just too many indications around that the public was flattered, finally, to have its intelligence appealed to; responded, & ended up very, very pleased with itself in consequence. I’ve stopped reading the reviews, but I’m astonished by the correspondence columns & the continued (posthumous now) radio comment … Le tout St Buryan* – which is where it really counts – was ecstatic, & everyone is your personal friend there, & your longstanding advisor on Cornish affairs, drama, & intelligence matters. My bank had a sweepstake on who the mole was, so did my accountants; Hugh Trevor-Roper, a lifelong enemy, wrote nicely about it in the Mail,† & so it all ends – happily & with the clear message that we’ve set new standards, broken new ground etc. etc.21

  The critics had been won over. ‘Baffling, slow moving, uncompromising and ultimately completely gripping, it was far and away the serial of the year,’ wrote Bill Grundy in the Evening Standard, and this comment was typical of many.22 ‘Quite obviously, it’s been the best drama serial of the year,’ was the judgement of the anonymous Time Out reviewer.23 The high quality of the production, and of the acting, would be formally acknowledged when the series amassed nine BAFTA nominations, with Guinness taking the award for Best Actor and the cameraman, Tony Pierce-Roberts, the award for Best Film Cameraman.

  Soon after the television series had ended, a letter arrived from – Smiley. Colonel David Smiley had been an army officer, who had served with distinction with SOE in Albania and South-east Asia. After the war he had been seconded three times to SIS and had trained agents to infiltrate Albania (all of whom had been betrayed by Kim Philby).‡ He asked in his letter what had made David choose the surname Smiley. ‘I had two sons at Eton when you were a beak there* and wondered if you had picked the name off the school list?’† David admitted that he could not provide a definite answer:

  Well, now, I just don’t know! Maybe I did pinch your name from the school list, but it would only have been unconsciously, since Smiley was not a twinkle in my eye till a year after I gave up teaching. But the memory plays strange tricks, and I have no other solution to the choice … I embarrassed myself by stealing one name wholesale from The New Statesman (Roy Bland, their writer on East European educational affairs). He wrote to me very sweetly, rather than suing me, and wished me luck.

  So I’m inclined to believe, on balance, that your hunch is right, and that I owe you, if not an apology, at least a debt of thanks! And thanks, too, for writing – I’m glad you like my books, & hope you enjoy the new one, just coming out, called – what could be more apt? – ‘Smiley’s People’!

  Smiley thanked him for his reply. ‘Incidentally you have done me a good turn as shops now know how to spell my name correctly!’24

  The series was a big commercial success, being sold to more than thirty countries, including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Philippines, Portugal, Trinidad, Turkey, Venezuela and Zambia. But it was thought to be too demanding for the US networks, so Americans had to wait a year before it was shown, compressed into six parts, on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Each episode was introduced by the Canadian journalist Robert MacNeil, whose function was to explain the workings of the Circus to the baffled but fascinated American viewers. Newsday announced it as ‘the big event of the public TV season’, and so it proved, attracting almost universal praise. The Washington Post reviewer was not untypical in describing the series as ‘one of the most madly atmospheric and enjoyably literate films ever done for television’.25 On the other hand the series was reckoned a ‘disastrous flop in France’, and far too complex for the Germans to bother with, despite excellent reviews.26

  One of the few who did not share in the general enthusiasm was the Observer’s television critic, Clive James. Following his mocking review of The Honourable Schoolboy in the New York Review of Books, James had taken another swipe at David in a review of Graham Gree
ne’s The Human Factor, which he likened to ‘one of those good, solid early le Carré novels, plus the moral overtones which the later le Carré vainly tries to add by cramming on hundreds of extra pages, but what [sic] Greene can’t help generating from the first sentence, simply because he sees life in a certain way’.27 By contrast, T. J. Binyon had compared The Human Factor unfavourably with le Carré’s works. ‘With this novel Graham Greene has ventured into territory previously explored by John le Carré,’ he wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘If the map he has brought back is sharper in its outlines, surer in its delineation of major features than those of le Carré, it lacks their detailed topography, their shading and their relief.’28

  As the television series of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy began broadcasting, James renewed the attack on le Carré in his Observer column. ‘The first instalment of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” fully lived up to the standard set by the original novel,’ he wrote after the first broadcast. ‘Though not quite as incomprehensible, it was equally turgid.’ Two weeks later he had another go. ‘What’s going on is a concerted attempt to inflate this book into a fat series,’ he alleged. ‘It might have made two mildly riveting episodes on television. Spaced out over a whole series, it grips you like a marshmallow.’ The following week he tried again. ‘Anything can improve, even “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” of which the latest episode was marginally better than the first three. People have written to ask whether I am conducting a personal vendetta against John le Carré …’

  Le Carré’s early books were excellent genre fiction – a far better thing for a book to be than third-rate literature. The kind of book-reviewers who are daunted by real literature, and who are always on the lookout for a more easily readable substitute that they can call literature instead, called them literature.

  In the resulting climate of worship le Carré’s sense of proportion, it seems to me, became somewhat scrambled. The books became bigger and bigger with less and less in them …

  I shall watch to the end but I fear that what should have been a thriller is turning out to be only marginally better than plain dull.29

  David was provoked into writing a letter of response to the Observer, in which he scoffed at James’s television reviews as ‘no more than a warmed-up rehash’ of his review of The Honourable Schoolboy. ‘I look forward to reading it again when my new novel appears next February.’ Perhaps he decided in the end not to send this letter, because it was never published. Later he wrote a spoof letter to the Guardian suggesting that there never had been a mole within the Circus, and that the whole thing had been a devious trick on Control’s part.30

  David’s sensitivity to criticism was evident in a letter he wrote to Mary-Kay Wilmers, co-founder of the new London Review of Books, which was established while the Times Literary Supplement had suspended publication because of an industrial dispute. Explaining his decision not to review a novel by John Cheever, after originally agreeing to do so, he outlined ‘a firm principle which I made when I first became a full-time novelist – namely, never to get involved in the London reviewing scene, never to confuse the production industry with the service industry’.

  I think that Cheever is a magnificent story-teller, but I know that when I say that in the context of a London literary journal, I appear to be making a case for narrative writers like myself to the detriment of more fashionable trends … I suppose what I am saying really is that I find the business of being a successful English novelist living in England hard enough already – there is nothing like the flak of home guns – without walking into the minefields of the London literary scene as well.31

  Even as the Tinker, Tailor series was still being filmed, there was talk of a follow-up. The BBC passed on The Honourable Schoolboy, on the basis that it would be too expensive to shoot on location. David sent a typescript of Smiley’s People to Guinness. ‘Of course I’m thrilled at the idea of having another and better stab at Smiley – but you should see the whole of Tinker Tailor before morally committing yourself,’ replied Guinness.32 By June 1979, more than six months before it was published, David’s representatives had already received two offers for the film rights in the new book. It was taken as self-evident that Guinness would play the part in any feature film. But the discussions dragged on. ‘The waiting is such a bore, and half of me at least says let’s do another BBC TV thing & to hell with movies,’ David wrote to Guinness as the Tinker, Tailor series reached the end. ‘But I hope sincerely that we shall be able before long to present you with a choice between one & the other, best of all with John [Irvin] once more at the helm.’33 Guinness had been very comfortable with the team that had made Tinker, Tailor and ‘tremendously pleased’ with its reception. He disliked the thought of the project being touted around Hollywood; he was acutely conscious that he was not regarded as a big enough star to carry a film on his own, and he became increasingly unhappy at the thought that other ‘name actors’ would have to be dragged in to shore up the production. He announced that he would rather go back to the BBC.34 Mort Leavy asked £40,000 for the television rights in Smiley’s People; the BBC offered £18,000, and they settled on £25,000.

  Smiley’s People was due to be published early in 1980. A few weeks beforehand the Cornwells moved again, just a hundred yards or so closer to the Heath, to Gainsborough Gardens, a gated enclave of private houses arranged informally around communal gardens. The new house, dating from the late Victorian period, was a large red-brick building in the Arts and Crafts style.

  This time the American edition was published first. Publishers Weekly had already announced that Smiley’s People was ‘superb, with le Carré writing at the height of his powers’. Knopf’s first printing was 150,000 copies. In Britain, subscription sales* amounted to 79,224, then the highest total for a fiction hardback published by Hodder & Stoughton since the firm was founded in 1868. ‘The book sells prodigiously,’ David wrote to an old friend a few weeks after publication: ‘93,000 so far, plus 120,000 book clubs – I’ve never known such figures in England.’35 Smiley’s People turned out to be the bestselling novel of the year, according to the Sunday Times. It may have helped that both Canada and Australia screened Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in January, and the series was repeated on BBC 1 as two 150-minute episodes in February/March. Sales may also have benefited from the excitement surrounding the revelation that Sir Anthony Blunt, the former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, had spied for the Soviet Union. The ‘mole’ Bill Haydon was an amateur painter who appreciated fine art, as of course did Blunt, and who had a homosexual side, like Blunt. The actor who had played Haydon, Ian Richardson, resembled Blunt physically. Haydon even had something of Blunt’s hauteur – albeit redeemed by a mischievous wit. Several of the reviewers commented that life was imitating art.

  The critical reception was mixed. In the New York Times Book Review, Michael Wood judged the writing ‘a little tired, and the whole book a little bland’.36 In his Guardian review, Matthew Coady described the novel as ‘an unexpectedly old-fashioned adventure’.37 The Times Literary Supplement gave the book to the Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford, who criticised Smiley’s taste in German literature.38 For C. P. Snow, on the other hand, writing in the Financial Times, this was ‘the best single thing that le Carré has done’.39 Also very positive were the reviews in The Times and the Sunday Times; in the former, Michael Ratcliffe likened ‘The Quest for Karla’, in its scale and ambition, to ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’.40

  The book was generally well received in Germany. ‘George Smiley has now become a figure with few equals in the literature of our time,’ wrote Rudolf Walter Leonhardt in Die Zeit. Commenting on reports that le Carré had taken his leave of Smiley and of spy stories, he asked ‘Who or what can replace him?’41

  Perhaps the most interesting assessment came from the writer and critic Al Alvarez, a neighbour of David’s in Hampstead with whom he had recently become friendly. Alvarez was wary of reviewing a book by someone he
knew socially, but David assured him that nothing he wrote would make any difference to their burgeoning friendship.42 Fortunately Alvarez thought Smiley’s People ‘a marvellous book, stylishly written, intricate, absorbing’.

  Yet although it is bound to be a vast popular success, there is still a tiresome intellectual snobbery which fixes a gulf between strong plot and psychological depth, what Graham Greene called ‘entertainments’, and serious novels. It has, I think, always been a spurious distinction, and we have the novels of Walter Scott, Conrad, Hammett and Greene himself to prove it.

  Alvarez rightly stressed le Carré’s ‘mimic’s ear for variations in pitch and cadence’, which gives each of his characters ‘his distinct, recognizable voice’: ‘One of the many pleasures of reading le Carré’s novels is in hearing the different voices come argumentatively and irrepressibly to life on every page, like the instruments of an orchestra heard through a very good hi-fi.’43 Alvarez and his wife Anne, a psychotherapist, held lively dinner parties at their house in Flask Walk, to which David and Jane were often invited. There David met his fellow spy writer Len Deighton, whom he had not seen since the 1960s. Afterwards Deighton wrote to Alvarez that it had been ‘wonderful’ to see David again. ‘I feel a curious affinity with him, like two people who have shared some weird experience.’44

  Soon after Smiley’s People was published, David received an appreciative letter about the book from Vivian Green. ‘My dear Vivian,’ he replied: