John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Like several of David’s villains, Roper speaks ‘Belgravia slur, the proletarian accent of the vastly rich’. He justifies his deadly trade with a brutal, survival-of-the-fittest philosophy, using such Thatcher-era terminology as ‘the bottom line’. The book shows how Roper and his ilk corrupt government officials to allow them freedom to inflict suffering on innumerable defenceless victims. It is permeated with disgust for Roper and his cronies, amounting to a physical revulsion:

  And after the Frequent Flyers came the Royal & Ancients: the sub-county English debutantes accompanied by the brain-dead offshoots of the royal bratpack and policemen in attendance; Arab smilers in pale suits and snow-white shirts and polished toe-caps; minor British politicians and ex-diplomats terminally deformed by self-importance; Malaysian tycoons with their own cooks; Iraqi Jews with Greek palaces and companies in Taiwan; Germans with Eurobellies moaning about Ossies; hayseed lawyers from Wyoming wanting to do the best by mah clients and mah-self; retired, vastly rich investors gleaned from their dude plantations and twenty-million-dollar bungalows – wrecked old Texans on blue-veined legs of straw, in parrot shirts and jokey sunhats, sniffing oxygen from small inhalers; their women with chiselled faces they never had when they were young, and tucked stomachs and tucked bottoms, and artificial brightness in their unpouched eyes …

  After the Royal & Ancients came … the Necessary Evils, and these were the shiny-cheeked merchant bankers from London with eighties striped shirts and white collars and double-barrelled names and double chins and double-creased suits, who said ‘ears’ when they meant ‘yes’, and ‘hice’ when they meant ‘house’ and ‘school’ when they meant ‘Eton’ …11

  Pitched against Roper is Jonathan Pine, ‘the night manager’ of the novel’s title. At the beginning of the novel Pine is working for a smart Zurich hotel,* when Roper and his entourage arrive. A former soldier, without family or ties, Pine allows himself to be recruited by British intelligence in an operation against Roper. To entrap his victim Pine must first win his trust, going undercover at risk of his life. In the process he falls for Roper’s much younger mistress, Jed.

  The earliest surviving draft of the book is told in the first person by Pine, though subsequent versions are told in the third person. Nevertheless David seems to have awarded Pine aspects of his own story. ‘You give the air of looking for someone,’ a girlfriend tells him. ‘But I think the missing person is yourself.’12 Like David, Pine has undergone ‘a locked-up childhood’, one devoid of women: ‘the friends and sisters of his youth he had never had, the mother he had never known, the woman he should never have married, and the woman he should have loved and not betrayed’.13 Pine’s memories of his youth seem to draw on David’s own experiences:

  He relived his fear of everything: of the mockery when he lost and the envy when he won; of the parade ground and the games field and the boxing ring; of being caught when he stole something for comfort – a penknife, a photograph of someone’s parents; of his fear of failure, which meant failing to ingratiate himself; of being late or early, too clean, not clean enough, too loud, too quiet, too subservient, too cheeky. He remembered learning to be brave as an alternative to cowardice. He remembered the day he struck back, and the day he struck first, as he taught himself to lead from weakness into strength.* He remembered his early women, no different from his later ones, each a bigger disillusionment than the last as he struggled to elevate them to the divine status of the woman he had never had.14

  In a foreword to a reissue of the book, which appeared eight years after its original publication, David paired it with his later novel Single & Single, the story of a son, who for reasons of conscience, finds himself spying on his father. Although Pine is not Roper’s son, writes David, ‘he does come to look and feel like one, and Roper for his part assumes the father’s role’. To most readers this is a surprising interpretation: the two men are enemies, and not obviously from a different generation. David characterises their relations as ‘ambiguity, sexual rivalry and the submerged craving for one another’s destruction’ – though it is hard to see that Roper cares much about Pine one way or the other. The contest between the two of them, David writes, is a duel between ‘a father figure and a son figure fighting over the same young girl’.15 Perhaps this understanding of the book refers back to its original conception, before it was extensively rewritten. While the finished version of Roper is quite unlike David’s own father, the early sketches of his character (sometimes known as Sir, and later as Mr, Archibald Duffy) are reminiscent of Ronnie: ‘proletarian but senatorial … genial but menacing’. It is perhaps relevant that David had suspected Ronnie of trying to find an opening in the arms trade at the time of the Six Day War.

  There is some evidence that the book was still more autobiographical in its original draft, which has not survived. In the summer of 1991 David stayed with his friend, the film studio executive John Calley, and his partner Sandy Lean (widow of the director David Lean), at Calley’s thirty-five-room mansion on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound. Afterwards he wrote to thank them for their hospitality, and ‘all the generous help with the book … for the faxes and maps and creative hints, the everything’. His letter suggests that he discussed the book in detail with his hosts:

  The book has everything to thank you for. Gone is the wimp factor & the self-flagellation; enter a Jonathan renewed and a new stable of characters, a new Baddie and much more zip. You midwifed a much better, stronger baby, which now cries healthily for attention. I’ll contemplate my soul later, do the book now.16

  In his research for the book, David consulted his friend and neighbour Anthony Sampson, who had written about the arms trade in his book The Arms Bazaar (1977). He wandered the halls of Miami gun fairs, chatting to healthy young saleswomen in short skirts and groomed young men in suits and ties. He flew to Panama to talk to semi-legitimate arms dealers. ‘The thing you quickly learn about arms dealers is that they’re always the good guys,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘The bad guys are somewhere totally else, and the good guys wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole.’ The arms trade in the Americas in the early 1990s was interlinked with the multi-million-dollar drug trade. David spent time with operatives of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, watching with them through one-way mirrors at Miami airport as they scrutinised passengers and baggage emerging from planes out of Bogotá. He lay in wait with them in disused airfields for drug shipments that failed to materialise.17

  As always, David took enormous care with his prose, tirelessly rewriting until he was satisfied. Nicholas Shakespeare, who witnessed the process, was impressed by his capacity to go back to the start after writing more than 300 pages. Surviving drafts of typescript show that he produced at least sixteen different versions of the opening sentence of the book, one small indication of his diligence.

  David had his usual difficulty in settling on a title for the novel. Among those he considered before settling on The Night Manager were ‘A Woman of Cairo’, ‘The Junior Leader’, ‘The Unknown Soldier’, ‘The Underground Soldier’, ‘The Last Clean Englishman’ and ‘The Camel’s Nose’. In a jokey fax to John Calley, David listed some variations on his eventual title, including ‘Knight Manager’, ‘He Managed by Night’ and ‘One Flew over the Night Manager’.

  In 1992 David became involved in what Newsweek described as ‘a celebrity slugfest’. An item in the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column poking fun at his friend William Shawcross had offended him. The short piece, by the English journalist Francis Wheen, referred to Shawcross’s biography of the newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch, published in Britain but not yet available in America. It suggested that in Shawcross Murdoch had found his ‘Boswell’, that Shawcross had become Murdoch’s ‘hagiographer’, that he had been ‘beguiled’ by Murdoch, had been ‘wooed and flattered and given every kind of assistance’, and that in return he had produced ‘a remarkably sympathetic’ study of his subject. Wheen had already reviewed the British edition of the book in
the September number of the Literary Review, where he had characterised Murdoch as a ‘pornographer’ who had made billions selling ‘excrement’ in his newspapers. The book was ‘a long tedious chronicle’, Wheen had commented, ‘written in a species of American thrillerese which is as euphonious as a pneumatic drill’.

  The New Yorker item had appeared in only the second issue edited by Tina Brown, who had recently replaced Bob Gottlieb. Her appointment had caused consternation among traditionalists, startled that someone whose experience had been entirely in lightweight glossy magazines should have been handed control of such a revered American institution.

  In a faxed letter, David labelled the ‘Talk of the Town’ item ‘one of the ugliest pieces of partisan journalism that I have witnessed in a long life of writing’. He deplored what he saw as a decline in the ‘noble standards’ of the venerable magazine. ‘God protect The New Yorker from the English,’ he thundered. David was enraged at Wheen’s ‘vulgarity’ in dragging in the subject of Shawcross’s ‘lovelife’, by referring to the fact that Shawcross had recently left his second wife for Olga Polizzi, daughter of the property tycoon Lord Forte. He argued that the new editor should have revealed that the book being mocked in the ‘Talk of the Town’ piece was critical of her husband Harold Evans, who had worked for Murdoch as editor of The Times before being sacked. Shawcross, who had once worked for Evans, had portrayed him as a bad manager and a capricious editor, sycophantically willing to do his master’s bidding.

  Tina Brown called this a ‘sexist’ accusation: ‘the idea that I would bang the drum for my husband is silly’. She offered to publish David’s letter of protest if he would condense it to a single paragraph, which she argued ‘might pack a little more punch than sounding, as a couple of the editors here thought, like a choleric Colonel in Angmering-on-Sea’. In a further fax David refused to allow this. ‘Within weeks of taking over The New Yorker, you have sent up a signal to say that you will import English standards of malice and English standards of inaccuracy,’ he wrote. ‘Mr Wheen’s piece may be as trivial as the common cold, but my subject is the ethics of the great magazine of which you are now the editor.’

  The spat was covered widely in the American press; a Washington Post story was headed ‘The Tiff of the Town’. The Boston Globe quoted Ms Brown as saying, ‘le Carré has somehow gone very choleric.’ Asked by the New York Times if it was unusual to publish an item about a book not yet published in America, she said that the book had been the object of much talk in New York as in London. ‘It was much discussed in the Hamptons this summer,’ she told the Times reporter. For Newsweek, ‘the flap at The New Yorker had all the dignity and relevance of a vice-presidential debate’.18 It was one curiosity of this row that, with the exception of Murdoch, all the principals concerned – Wheen, Brown, Evans, Shawcross and David – were British.

  David’s defence of his friend was commendable, though perhaps he took the item too seriously; ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces were supposed to be humorous, whimsical or eccentric vignettes. To some observers it seemed incongruous that he should appear to be siding with those who defended Murdoch, generally regarded with horror by the British intelligentsia. But only a year before David had complained privately to Murdoch about an item in The Times (which had misleadingly suggested that he had demanded an extortionate copyright fee from a small Polish theatre company) and received a courteous response. In recompense Murdoch had bought him lunch, at the Savoy Grill (Ronnie’s favourite).19*

  As for Shawcross, he was best known for his book Sideshow (1979), about the bombing of Cambodia. Handsome and charismatic, he had once been regarded as ‘a poster boy of the anti-Vietnamese war Left’.20 In the 1970s he and his first wife, the writer Marina Warner, had made a glamorous couple in leftist London. But by the 1990s he was moving to the political right, just as David seemed to be moving left. In due course he would become one of the most vociferous British supporters of the Iraq invasion; the scourge of Nixon and Kissinger would become a cheerleader for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Wheen implied a connection between his rightward drift and his new girlfriend, a Conservative councillor and a friend of Mrs Thatcher’s. ‘Some say that Shawcross’s turnabout is genetically programmed,’ Wheen had written: ‘his father, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was a socialist politician who veered off to the right in the 1950s and earned himself the nickname Sir Shortly Floorcross.’

  From time to time aspiring biographers surfaced. In 1989, for example, the prolific Jeffrey Meyers recognised the potential in a life of le Carré, set to work with characteristic zeal and then responded ungraciously when his subject chose not to co-operate. A couple of years later David was approached by Robert Harris, a journalist who wrote a weekly column for the Sunday Times. Though only in his mid-thirties, Harris had already written or co-authored five books, including an authoritative and highly entertaining account of the ‘Hitler Diaries’ affair, Selling Hitler (1986). ‘I have long been an admirer of your work,’ wrote Harris. ‘Apart, perhaps, from Graham Greene, it seems to me that you are the only modern British writer who has tackled the big themes of our time and country – most notably, our position as a declining power, poised between the American and Soviet empires.’

  David thanked Harris for his interest, but declined to collaborate, explaining that he didn’t believe in ‘authorised’ biographies or ‘authorised’ critiques. He mentioned that ‘half a dozen or so’ studies of his work had already been published. ‘I’m very leery of the critical process anyway, & prefer where I can to stay completely clear of it: even to the point of not reading what is written about me when I can avoid it, which is the case with all the books that have so far appeared,’ he wrote. ‘But of course I would not obstruct you or discourage you.’ Harris was sufficiently heartened to persist.21 Through his agent, Pat Kavanagh, he sold the book to his publisher, Hutchinson. Subsequently the biographer and his subject met by chance in a Fitzrovia restaurant, where Harris was dining with a friend, the writer and publisher Robert McCrum. At the time Harris’s first novel Fatherland was at the top of the bestseller list. ‘You must be on a roll,’ the older man said in an avuncular way. Harris said that he still wanted to write the biography, and suggested meeting for a drink. ‘A drink, yes,’ said David, ‘but not an interview.’

  Towards the end of 1992 another journalist, Graham Lord, put himself forward. He had recently retired as literary editor of the Sunday Express, a post he had held for more than twenty years. In this capacity he had interviewed David back in 1971, and had been one of the few reviewers to write favourably about The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. ‘For a couple of months afterwards there was a flicker of friendship between us,’ claimed the Pooterish Lord, ‘but the budding friendship foundered when I wrote unflattering reviews of two of his books.’ He suspected that as a result he had been on le Carré’s ‘blacklist’ for a while, ‘but more recently we have maintained a wary truce’. After writing to David and receiving a not unfriendly response, Lord set out his credentials for prospective publishers in an outline entitled ‘The Quest for le Carré’. He referred to his recent success with a biography of the hard-drinking journalist Jeffrey Bernard. Le Carré too was ‘a ferocious drinker whose capacity for booze astonishes even other heavy drinkers’, he revealed.

  Lord showed a commendable critical distance from his subject. ‘I admire some of his books but find several of them grossly overwritten and a touch pretentious,’ he declared. Nevertheless he thought his biography certain to be ‘a huge bestseller’. Among the ‘many secrets’ he promised to expose was ‘le Carré’s weird, three-in-a-bed, adulterous, semi-homosexual relationship with author James Kennaway and his wife Susan’. He had been in touch with Susan, and with Liz Tollinton, who had acted as an intermediary between Susan and David. ‘A le Carré biography and I are made for each other,’ he boasted.

  Lord’s agent, Giles Gordon, submitted the outline to nine publishers. The covering letter from Gordon stated that Harris had abandoned his plans to w
rite a biography. ‘This was, to say the least, disingenuous,’ wrote Private Eye’s columnist ‘Grovel’.22 It was true that Harris had written to David, offering to drop the idea of a biography if that was what he wanted; but, far from accepting his offer, David had encouraged the scheme. Hutchinson issued a statement declaring that any publisher interested in Lord’s biography should be aware that Harris fully intended to proceed with his. Kavanagh insisted that Gordon make this known to the publishers considering the proposal, some of whom consequently withdrew bids. Lord maintained that it had been a misunderstanding. ‘Robert and I have talked about this, and sorted it out between us,’ he told the Bookseller.23 At least two publishers were undeterred. Little, Brown bought the book for a sum reported to be £75,000.

  ‘I’d be very glad if they would both do something different,’ David said when contacted by the press about the furore. He affirmed that he would provide no assistance to either writer. But then he added, ‘I’d rather be written about by a winner than a loser.’24