John le Carré

Eric Homberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000652413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the heyday of Ian Fleming's fantasy superspy James Bond, the novels of John le Carré have held up to readers across the world a sombre, fascinating picture of decline, deception and ethical ambiguity. In this study, originally published in 1986, the first to include an interpretation of A Perfect Spy, Eric Homberger argues that within the tradition of the spy thriller of John Buchan and 'Sapper' a 'space' was created by Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene for serious writing. From The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) to The Little Drummer Girl (1983) and A Perfect Spy (1986), le Carré has used that space to make a searching investigation of the nature of post-Imperial Britain. In the process he has become the peer of Conrad and Greene in the recognition that the spy novel is a literary form capable of the highest artistic seriousness.

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SPIES AND SPY STORIES

When the senior KGB officer Vitali Yurchenko ‘defected’ to the Americans in 1985, it was rather ironically pointed out that Yurchenko was the greatest coup for western intelligence since Karla went over to the British in the late 1970s. The Yurchenko affair seemed particularly le Carréan, complex, subtle and devious. When the Russian walked out on his American minders during lunch one afternoon and strolled into the Soviet Embassy in Washington, life was doing its level best to imitate art. If Yurchenko was a ‘fake’ defector on an operation against the CIA, Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, another such fake defector, showed us how meticulous such a plan had to be, and how devastating an effect it could have on the other side. The fake defector was a riskier operation than the long-term penetration agent, the ‘mole’: all that was required of Bill Haydon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was that he remain in character, while Leamas had to invent a ‘legend’, a grievance and a disintegration, which would have been quickly exposed if any detail was wrong. The intelligence war now being conducted between the KGB and their eastern friends, and the CIA, MI5, DGSE, Mossad, NSA, and so on, is a kind of ultimate chess game in which all of the moves are well-established and are studied with inordinate care. Spy stories themselves are combed for new and potentially useful twists. Dino de Laurentiis’ film, Three Days of the Condor (1975), shows a research agency within the CIA which analysed spy stories from everywhere in the world. The head of Israeli Military Intelligence once said that the books of John le Carré were virtual textbooks for their agents. (There must have been some interesting sessions on The Little Drummer Girl.) As is well-known, real spies have written quite a few spy stories. And, like the Mafia, whose opinions of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and the films made from the novel are not without a certain professional interest, spies have occasionally commented on their fictional counterparts. Gordon Lonsdale, a Soviet ‘illegal’ (an agent with a false identity working outside the official body of accredited Soviet diplomats in the west) who was sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment in 1961 for his role in the Portland spy case, bemusedly noted in his memoirs that he had not had ‘passionate leave’ in the manner of James Bond after completing his assignment. Sir William Stephenson, wartime head of the British Security Coordination agency in North America, advised Ian Fleming, who had worked as his subordinate during the war, that Casino Royale couldn’t be a success: ‘It will never sell, Ian. Truth is always less believable’. Richard Helms, who rose through the ranks to the very top jobs within the CIA, was once interrogated over dinner by Senator Eugene McCarthy: what was the wine served with dinner? The sauce on one of the dishes? The name of the flowers in the table centrepiece? When Helms admitted that he didn’t know, the senator, then urging Senate oversight of the CIA, slyly remarked that James Bond would have done better. Ironically, Helms, like many men in Washington, admired Fleming’s novels. He gave E. Howard Hunt formal Agency permission to write spy thrillers, hoping perhaps that he might prove to be an American Fleming. Before his arrest and imprisonment over the Watergate break-in, Hunt wrote more than forty spy stories under a variety of pseudonyms. The spymaster Allen Dulles firmly believed that the right kind of spy story could strengthen popular support for the Agency. He sometimes passed on suggestions for plots to no doubt grateful thriller writers.

It would be hard to imagine the novels of John le Carré receiving such exalted patronage from within MI5 or MI6. He has done more than any writer of spy stories in Britain in this century to hold the security services up to public ridicule. ‘You bastard. You utter bastard’, was the way le Carré was greeted by a middle-aged intelligence officer, once a colleague, at a diplomatic dinner at a British Embassy (Sunday Times, 23 March 1986). Arguably he has done what no previous writer of spy stories has done, by taking the small world of spies and making it stand, in all of its moral seediness, for the state of British society. He began working within the territory of genre fiction, and in mid-career has been recognized as a major creative presence. We do not need a literary top-of-the-pops to recognize the stature of le Carré and his importance in contemporary fiction. He is one of the very few English writers of his generation to command a large readership in the USA, despite his many hostile presentations of the ‘Cousins’ in the CIA, an attitude, by all accounts, warmly reciprocated. Richard Helms distiked The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for its mood of defeat, disillusionment and betrayal. An organization (in Helms’s view) which deceived its own agents, as Leamas was deceived, soon destroyed the trust needed to maintain an intelligence service. Helms’s son Dennis said that his father didn’t just dislike le Carré’s book, he detested it. Leamas understood the need for betrayal: there were solid reasons for saving the fascistic Mundt and destroying the ‘good’ communist Fiedler. That was the price which had to be paid, Leamas angrily explained to Liz Gold, to enable ‘the great moronic mass’ to sleep soundly in their beds at night. The belief-system of espionage and betrayal was left intact at the end of the book. What was so uncomfortable was that the human cost of that act of betrayal had been stripped of sanctimoniousness. It was a desolating and inhuman cost. Le Carré’s novel was simply too honest for the likes of Richard Helms.

For somewhat different reasons Kim Philby also disliked The Spy:

The Spy is very disappointing [he wrote to his wife Eleanor in 1963]. It was a relief to read a somewhat sophisticated spy-story after all that James Bond idiocy, and there are some well-thought out passages. But the whole plot from beginning to end is basically implausible, and the implaus ibility keeps on obtruding itself – at any rate, to anyone who has any real knowledge of the business! (E. Philby, 1968)

That Leamas was a fake defector, that Haydon might be a Russian mole, or, for that matter, that Philby himself was a double agent, seemed no less implausible. In the grey world of espionage the yardstick of ‘plausibility’ was itself problematic.

There are aspects of espionage which are extraordinarily subtle, devious and artful. The skills required for deception, disguise, for the artistic feigning of reality, demonstrate imagination at a high level. Many intelligent and literate people in the west have been attracted by intelligence work – on both sides, theirs and ours. Christopher Andrew noted the irony that the Russians began recruiting at Cambridge several years before MI5. The same is undoubtedly true of Harvard and the City College of New York. On the other hand, the most effective spies seem to be people like Philby and Leopold Trepper, little more than functionaries: their gift lay in a mediocrity which made them virtually invisible. The particular imaginative arts required for espionage may explain the many cases of spies being tempted to transform the fictions of their work into full-blown (or half-cocked) novels. The romantic novelist A. E. W. Mason, author of The Four Feathers (1902), served under Admiral Sir Reginald Hall in naval intelligence during the First World War. Mason sailed around the Mediterranean in 1915 and 1916, posing in the Ashenden manner as a rich yachtsman seeking diversion from the war. He later used some of his adventures in his books. Somerset Maugham had similar experiences and, as we shall see, gave spy fiction a more realistic literary demeanour. The ethos of the gentlemanly amateur still prevailed in the secret service of their day but, as Christopher Andrew has pointed out (1985), the practice of spying became less and less amenable to amateurs and gentleman novelists. Sophisticated techniques of decoding raised ‘elint’ and ‘sigint’ (electronic and signals intelligence) over the sadly named ‘humint’. The lonely vigil of Richard Sorge in the German Embassy in Tokyo, passing on to Moscow the details of the German plans to invade the USSR in June 1941, inevitably captures the imagination. (Leopold Trepper sent the exact number of divisions which the German army high command planned to send east for the invasion, full details of the plan of attack and the final date for the invasion to his Soviet superiors, but his intelligence reports were assumed to be based upon forged German or British documents. As ever, the analysis and not the collection of intelligence was the most vulnerable stage in the process.) But the future of spying was at Bletchley Park with the codebreakers, and not with the butler with a Minox camera silently entering the minister’s study. Spying lost some of its romantic appeal as it increasingly became technological and bureacratic. It took a long time for the romance to disappear from spy novels. In a sense, it remains an intensely romantic activity still.

Writers have been attracted to the figure of the spy, perhaps because as le Carré has suggested, there is a correspondence at a deeper level between the view of the world of spy and writer. They are both of necessity solitaries, obliged to keep others at a distance while extracting from them the ‘material’ for their work. It is this which the spy ‘sells’ to his or her clients and which the writer ‘packages’ for his readers. The writer-spy is forced to seek anonymity, while passing back and forth unobserved. ‘“’E’s a spy”, Mr Savory added,’ in Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train (1932): ‘“’E’as to see everything and pass unnoticed. If people recognized ’im they wouldn’t talk, they’d pose before ’im; ’e wouldn’t find things out”’ (pt II, ch. 1). The writer like the spy knows that nothing is ever quite what it seems. Novelists must, like spies, accept the role of ‘committed doubter’, as le Carré once characterized Smiley (Bragg, 1976), and function with the suspicion that we can never be quite sure we can trust those upon whom we must depend. The spy is an artist, a practitioner of deep artifice, strategem and contrivance. His triumph is ultimately a successful performance. So, too, the artist is a spy, a secret sharer, committed to the discovery and betrayal of our deepest secrets.

Throughout most of its brief history the spy story has been a lowly, hysterical, rather nasty variety of the popular thriller. It was born of the spy hysteria in Edwardian England, and used by ambitious press barons, brass hats and politicians to scare the reading public and thus to win support for increased expenditure on imperial defence. Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) appeared against the background of a growing threat of German naval power. The book ends with an epilogue, discussing the military implications and feasibility of the German plan, and a postscript, dated March 1903, welcoming several signs of increased public awareness of the German threat. This is not clever fictionality, in the post-modernist sense, but a writer in desperate earnestness recording some signs that his message has begun to get through to politicians and the public. The ingenuity and plausibility of the plot, which showed that a fleet of small vessels could carry a German invasion force across the North Sea, had not in fact escaped the notice of German military planners. A similar scheme for a small boat invasion had been considered by the Germans in 1897, but was abandoned, as Paul Kennedy (1981) has shown in his fascinating note on the context of Childers’s novel, in favour of the ambitious shipbuilding programme of Tirpitz. Childers was warning of a danger which, even when he was writing, had begun to recede into the past and to be replaced by something altogether more ominous from a British point of view. But the vividness of the narrative prompted the Admiralty to request a staff investigation of the dangers of an invasion along the lines suggested by Childers.

The lonely adventures of Davies and Carruthers became something of a model for the amateur spies of the Edwardian era. When two British naval officers were arrested in the Frisian islands for spying in 1910, they had a copy of Childers’s novel with them, and said that it was an essential part of their equipment. It was not the last time when spies and spy novels were so closely linked together. Childers’s book has become a naval classic, a ‘yachtsman’s Bible’. The description of navigating a small boat in difficult waters is so well done that its other qualities have been lost to view. It is a book about the amateur spirit, and is imbued with the games-playing, patriotic ethos of the public schools. The heroes are above all gentlemen, and the heroine, Clara, steps right out of the romantic fiction of the day:

‘Clara!’ said Davies, ‘will not you trust us?’

I heard a little gasp from her. There was a flutter of lace and cambric and she was in his arms, sobbing like a tired child, her little white feet between his great clumsy sea-boots – her rose-brown cheek on his rough jersey, (ch. 28)

The ‘education’ of the Foreign Office clerk Carruthers follows thoroughly conventional lines. What is memorable about The Riddle of the Sands is the author’s relaxed comfort within the literary conventions of the novel (while showing, at the same time, a near-paranoid apprehension of German plots and deviousness): there is no hint of self-conscious irony or self-parody in the narration, no doubts about the values or character of Englishness as Childers represents it. The Riddle of the Sands is, like the ethos it describes, a splendid example of literary amateurism.

In the wake of Childers’s success other writers, more narrowly professional, rushed in to satisfy the public’s growing enthusiasm for spy stories. The most prolific of these was undoubtedly William Le Queux, whose account of a German attack on England, The Invasion of 1910, made a sensational impact when it was first serialized in Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail in 1905. He soon acquired the reputation of being someone who knew a great deal about spying. When Major James Edmunds became head of the Special Section (later renamed MO5) of the Directorate of Military Operations in the War Office, where he found that his staff consisted of a fellow officer and a retired police detective, Edmunds turned to his friend Le Queux for current information on the German spy menace. Le Queux’s books were a heady mixture of fantasy, political conspiracy and downright villainy and, with E. Phillips Oppenheim and ‘Sapper’, long reigned supreme at the popular end of the market. Le Carré described them both as ‘talentless posturers’ (Sunday Times, 23 March 1986).

The spy thriller was quick to establish its basic conventions. Over the years the procedures of the spy story have remained remarkably tenacious. Conventions established by the 1920s survived well into the age of Ian Fleming. They survive today, appropriately modernized, because they convey a certain kind of reading experience. Such books do not have to be well written, or to show subtleties of characterization or plot, but they must be exciting, tell a story which is capable of sustaining the interest of a mass readership and convey knowledge of things customarily hidden from public scrutiny. The literary conventions of all forms of popular writing – the plots, tricks of characterization and techniques of narratives – are essentially devices for the mass-production of literature. The formulae serve to establish interchangeable novelist components which greatly reduce the complexity of writing genre fiction. The components can be ideological as well as technical, ways of seeing and understanding as well as devices of narrative and description. Such formulae also had an important meaning for readers of spy stories, and of many other kinds of popular fiction. They drastically simplified the act of reading, no less than the business of literary production. The conventions governing the appearance, behaviour and values of hero and villain, the twists and turns of the plot and the ending served to remove uncertainty from the transaction between reader and writer, and became as clearly established as those which govern popular romantic novels. So rigid were the conventions of the formulae genre that Umberto Eco in a memorable essay in 1965 described the plots of the James Bond novels as ‘a machine that functions basically on a set of precise units governed by rigorous combinational rules’.

Much of what has been written on spy stories and thrillers generally has followed Eco’s view that what should interest us in such works is the structuring, the mechanism, of their procedures. The other major trend in the interpretation of popular culture regarded such books as bearers of ideological messages which were themselves generated by the current state of society. All of this was, marginally, an improvement on the moralistic way that thrillers were written about a generation ago. It is hard to recall the real fervour with which writers like Dorothy L. Sayers were once praised (‘definitely among the great writers’ – Observer) and condemned. Defenders of serious cultural values like Q. D. Leavis (who described Sayers as ‘odious’, ‘nauseating’ and ‘vicious’ in a memorable Scrutiny review), and an unlikely companion, Raymond Chandler (who described Sayers’s Gaudy Night as ‘sycophantic drivel’) regarded the evident enthusiasm for detective stories as a cultural drag which threatened the fate of literature itself. Nicolas Freeling, one of the contemporary masters of the detective story, once referred to the Bond books as ‘a vulgar romp for the retarded’. We are today more likely to find a value-free, technologico-criticism being written about thrillers (see Merry, 1977). They scarcely seem worth attacking with the energies of Edmund Wilson’s famous diatribes, and literary criticism today has no serious vocabulary of praise. As will be clear from what follows, I have not found very much nourishment in what has been written about spy stories, and have sought my own way to read le Carré.

John Buchan, the most expert of the writers of spy thrillers, followed closely on the example of Childers. The Thirty Nine Steps (1915), hurriedly written in the first four months after war broke out in August 1914, describes the foiling of a German plot to obtain secret intelligence by the impersonation of a senior military figure. The book is above all an adventure story, with approximately the same kind of ‘love interest’ as Childers was compelled to introduce at the behest of his publishers. The politics of Buchan’s novel are conservative and perfunctory. Buchan is incurious about the mentality of spies, or indeed in the mentality of any of his characters. He is more comfortable with moral categories: evil is assumed (Buchan’s father was a Free Church minister and he was raised in the strictest Calvinism) and may be identified by the act of ‘reading’ a man or, les...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the texts
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 Spies and Spy Stories
• 2 Closed Communities
• 3 The Reasonable Man at War
• 4 Families
• Bibliography