‘Intrigue’, there is no more feminine word in the language and yet the entire province, at least as far as its fiction is concerned, is solely male.
All the great fiction writers to specialise in the subject from the elder Dumas, who almost invented it, to Somerset Maugham, whose Ashenden stories were, until now, the most convincing – have been men.
Moreover, espionage is not a field in which females excel except, presumably, for a few ‘beautiful spies’. Practically speaking, it is not an all male world.
Doubtless this is why women are the natural readers of secret service stories. We want to know about this lonely art of our men folk and the arrival of a new master of the genre is a thrill for all those feminine fans who, like myself, can never have enough of the excitement and the vicarious terrors of the half-dark country of the spy.
In the last two years John le Carré has arrived. To my mind, here is the first new writer for a decade who has been able to produce the true enchantment of a spy story which is yet factual and which sacrifices nothing of that typical off-beat bitterness which is this era’s keynote. This last is a very subtle attribute, very important and peculiarly our own today. What it amounts to is a trace of ‘scorched earth’ in heart and mind; no soil has a better potential.
It is true that this same decade has produced Ian Fleming and his stupendous James Bond – Spy Catcher Extraordinary. But Fleming belonged to those immortals who do not permit themselves to alter with the facts. The Sax Rohmers, Phillips Oppenheims, William Le Queux and Edgar Wallaces, each entertained the millions in their day and so does Fleming, but le Carré is different. Le Carré is authentic as well.
I made a note to find out what he thought about Bond but meanwhile what I wanted to hear first was if the happenings in his remarkable books were taken from real life. He had been in the diplomatic service: was it like that?
His answer was interesting. He said, quite rightly, that all experience is reflected in a novel and a novel, if it is any good, can only reflect personal experience. “But,” he went on; “I was not a spy. I had no direct experience in spying. I wаs a bureaucrat. That is to say I was part of a large Government machine with all its inherent virtues and defects. I developed a great deal of interest in the mechanics of running such a machine and, when I translated that into the world of the secret services, it naturally prompted me to deduce how one would manage a registry which contained nothing but top-secret papers, or how one could operate the ‘need-to-know’ theory when everything was secret.
I asked myself who were the people who really knew? How much did one intelligence officer know about the agents whom his colleagues controlled? All these problems were related to my bona fide experience in the British Foreign Service and I was able to see to some extent, how the secret services rate as power factors in world politics.
“In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and again in The Looking-Glass War I write about a cold war as it is fought in a divided Germany. I spent three and a half years studying the internal politics of Germany in the Foreign Service and I made great use of this as background material. Germany became for me the battlefield of the Cold War. Spies were the infantry and I saw them and drew them as an army of mercenaries.”
All this was most convincing and I wanted to know if there was any particular difference in the craft of writing a novel of espionage from that of any other kind. Le Carré said he thought not. With him, as with most sincere novelists, the characters always came first.
“I try to assemble real people who, when they collide, will create a given state of affairs,” he said. “And from that point the plot develops. It is the characters and not the writer who make the story and in The Spy Who Came in from Cold this became a considerable problem to me because I also wanted to compare the two sides of the Iron Curtain. I wanted the employees of the secret services in the East and West to relate to their own masters in their own ways. But of course the main balance which one has to find in writing a story of suspense is always between the compulsion of the characters on the one hand and the overall intention of the writer on the other.”
As a writer myself I agreed with him but I wondered if the spy element was in danger of typecasting him.
He was reassuring: “No, because in a sense,” he said unanswerably, “a writer is a spy. A writer lives with the crowd and yet must stand apart from it. He is an illusionist if you like. He has to allow his emotions to be engaged but he must always keep his private life apart. He must allow a corrosive eye to rest on anything which can serve as material. Also, a writer, like a spy, is a lonely man. He has very little to console him and very little to help him. Nobody else can write his book for him.”
He conceded that this was true of every kind of book but went on to explain, very fairly, that a detective story differs from a spy story mainly in the loneliness of the central character. “However tough a time a detective has,” he said, “he can at least go back and tell his friends or his wife about it. A spy has no such consolation. I see him confined in appalling solitude as he goes through the whole spectrum of human emotions alone. That is a horrible picture. A horrible way of life.”
It seemed to me that he had a valid point there and I wondered what he thought made people so anxious to read fictional mystery with all its dangers and agonies of suspense. Why did we want to savour all the outrageousness of it at second-hand when most of us were, in fact, absolutely terrified of such things?
“Oh,” he said, “I think it’s probably because we are so terrified. We want to be titillated. To be taken a little further towards the limit of our toleration. We are fascinated and horrified by death too, of course. It is the one experience which can never be reported and any study of it, or any related product is almost bound to absorb us.”
He was not quite sure if this was morbid but in his essentially modern, honest way was prepared, I think, to accept it in himself even if it was. However, he went on to agree that the really first-class spy or detective story is never entirely dependent either on dying or on the many ugly ways there are of doing it. He said he thought unnecessary violence and sadism were depraving and, more particularly, “because they are hideous and to make a cult of the obscene is socially unforgivable.”
This was much what I had always thought myself, but in my own experience a thirst for either usually spells some tragic weakness or inadequacy. I supposed one could just translate that as obscenity. At any rate, it is perfectly evident that a great many world beating best-sellers, and thrillers at that, have been without a trace of either. Indeed, if a book is to survive at all their absence is a necessity, for the savagery and cruelty of one age are apt to appear as the ridiculous horse-play of the next and so on for ever, as the see-saw of public manners and opinion alternates.
Particularly, I wanted to ask le Carré how he felt about the movies which are being made of his two latest books. These are The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Looking Glass War and, as so often happens nowadays when one is thinking of films, James Bond came into the discussion. Once again le Carré was delightfully frank.
“I have seen one Bond film and it was very entertaining,” he said. “It was nothing more – it didn’t pretend to be any more. Of course,” he added seriously, “I don’t believe Bond is a spy as I understand the profession. Bond is more an international detective, with the immunities of a diplomat, the facilities of a millionaire and the attributes of a Casanova. To me he is the original consumer-goods figure. But in the terms of the massive ideological conflict between East and West he does not seem to me to play any real part.”
On the subject of the women in Bond’s life he was enlightening. “Women react to Bond with gratitude,” he said firmly, “because the use of violence robs them of decision. His women are highly tuned, sensual instruments on whom he plays with rough sympathy. I see Bond the lover as essentially therapeutic – curing neuroses and complexes. Above everything else, the Bond method compensates for the inadequacies of previous lovers. He presents the violent one time cure for all sexual problems, and restores the belief that men are for battle and women are for tents. Besides,” he concluded practically, “Bond breaks clean after every love affair which must give women confidence in his discretion, as well as in his potency.”
I found this an interesting theory without going along with all of it but I wanted to know if he thought there was any reality in Ian Fleming’s villains.
He was most discreet. “Fleming was an extremely skilful writer,” he said, “and a traditionalist. May I put it this way? As long as the divisions of political belief are made clear, then literature can continue to produce black and white figures, but in many ways Bond is not a particularly modern hero. Although I do not think Fleming was ever aware of it, Bond is a most complicated public image and really belongs to the perfected state rather than to a perfected ideology. He is a sybarite in a consumer state. My idea of a spy is rather different. The kind of spy I like to talk about is the man who is unable to engage in life and so engages in espionage. He cannot fit in with the world and so he moves into a private, secret region. Insufficient, inadequate characters often attempt to banish their doubts with action, and of course secret services are constantly at war.”
The aspect interested him and he went on without any persuasion: “Women do not make good spies; their record is poor. Perhaps it is because they are badly equipped for the total independence which it demands. At any rate, this is a profession in which women are still not taken seriously. Persuasive women are sо often apt to inspire disbelief, or at least they do in me. I do not expect some of the high-power saleswomen will agree with me, but I cannot help it.”
I liked his obstinacy but it was reality I wanted most to know about. It seemed to me that many of the secret services on both sides of the Curtain had put up quite a number of blacks in the past few years. Le Carré pointed out that it was the failures one heard about. Successful spies passed silently about the world, unrecognised and largely unrewarded. Grey, lonely figures, escaping from themselves as well as from their enemies. He was interesting about the Petroff case in Australia. That, he said, was the one that stuck most firmly in his memory.
“Petroff,” said le Carre, “was the man who had the rank of Colonel in the Soviet Secret Service. He occupied a fairly humble position inside the Soviet Embassy in Canberra and had therefore, as it were, two caps. By day he was a normal diplomat but in the evening, and at night, he conducted a secret service station inside an embassy. He was a highly paid man; well thought of and had the rank of full Colonel; but nevertheless he had no authority to spend more than about $45 without consent from Moscow! He was not permitted to meet a man on a street corner, to hire a car, or to conduct any of the ordinary mechanics of life let alone spying without the active consent of “Centre”, the Moscow parent organisation, thousands of miles away.
The most trivial details in his daily life were controlled like this. My impression of him, and indeed, of the others who have lived in the same circumstances, is that they come to need the control that secrecy demands. In fact they come to depend on this kind of parental discipline and when Petroff finally did defect I believe it was not so much a great ideological reversal but the angry strike of the dissident child against his parents. I think secrecy can come to mean that to this sort of person. It becomes a drug – a way of life. They grow to see themselves as men apart; men who walk alone in the crowd and can say to themselves: ‘I am one up. I am different. I have an international passport.’ I think secrecy can become intoxicating, corrupting and dangerous.”
It was natural to enquire if such men were recognisable to each other. ” Oh, ” he said, “I think there is a masonry of espionage in the same way as there is a masonry of the medical profession, or the legal brotherhood. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold I tried to indicate that professional spies and spy-runners have more in common with one another than those who control them.” After a while he reverted to the fact that, on the whole, intelligence services make headlines through their failures. “It is Powers, it is the Bay of Pigs, it is Commander Crabbe: those are the cases which became public knowledge simply because they are scandalous,” he said. “Of the two I would like to consider, one is British and one American and they reflect, I think, very vividly the character of both intelligence services.
“In the Plane Powers case, a pilot flying a U.2. plane over the Soviet Union was brought down by secret means. He was captured and came to trial in Russia. The Commander Crabbe incident occurred during the visit to England of Kruschev and Bulganin. Commander Crabbe was a professional frogman who swam out at dead of night to take some kind of underwater photographs of the bottom of the Russian ship in which the heads of state had arrived. In my in-expert opinion both operations, American and British, were conducted inefficiently from the start. It appeared afterwards that both manoeuvres had been very widely known to a large circle of people before they were mounted. However, one can study the reactions of the C.I.A. in the Powers affair and also those of the British whatever-it-is (one cannot speak of the British Secret Service because the British do not acknowledge its existence) in the Crabbe case.
“In both unhappy businesses the muddle which occurred afterwards and the attempts to cover up the futile lies which were issued and contradicted, indicated, to me at least, that here must be two large unwieldy bureaucracies at work. Both were unable to function in a situation where no rules existed.
In the Powers business, which certainly was an example of secret service activities getting right out into the broad stream of politics, Powers had the most magnificent aeroplane, high-flying, supersonic. But when, poor man, he was brought down, he was found to have in his pockets a big pistol and some gold coins. Frankly, I can’t imagine that anybody who was supposed to melt into the Soviet population and make his own way out of the country could be best equipped with such unsuitable items.
“Exactly the same fault was apparent in the affair of Commander Crabbe. It emerged afterwards than Crabbe was too old for the job anyway; he was not fit, his equipment was antiquated and as soon as the scandal broke when his dead body was hauled out of the sea, what happened? A ‘faceless man’ went to the hotel in Portsmouth from which Crabbe had embarked and tore a page out of the registration book, – a gesture so crude and indicative of panic that one had a sudden glimpse of ordinary mediocre bureaucrats on the run, trying to put right a mistake when it was too late.”
We seemed to have strayed a long way from the movies and I was anxious to know if le Carré had any particular film star in mind for the role of his hero, George Smiley.
“Yes,” he said honestly, “I have always wished, he could be played by Alec Guinness, but whether that will ever really happen is rather a different matter.”
I found this a little curious because Guinness, one of the great actors in an age when perhaps there are more of them than at any other time in history, is not, essentially, a glamorous figure. Le Carré agreed that this was true and gave his reason for wanting him for the part.
“The Bond films are escapism,” he said. “But I hope the films of my own books will reflect the tone of the tales themselves. When I write about spying I am concerned to reflect the problems of ordinary life, both in a political and a personal sense. My spies are often unhappily married or divorced; they have unsuccessful affairs. As I said, it is because they are unable to engage in life successfully that they have become spies at all. Frequently I write to shock; I aim to reveal; and to force readers to react to certain problems. Ian Fleming was doing precisely the opposite. He was asking his people to detach themselves from their problems. He invited his readers to sail away on a magic carpet to the super harems of Istanbul and to move in a free and fearless world where survival was self-evident from the beginning. In my own case, my hero’s survival is pretty unlikely from the start.”
I was fascinated. He made no bones about it; here was the realist talking – the modern. He stuck to it that he was determined to present the truth as he saw it and it was evident that he had the courage to face the fruits of truth however bitter they might prove to be. Now, these are tremendous virtues in a novelist but they are not necessarily great best-selling attributes in films and books and yet le Carré’s work, as we know, does possess just those qualities.
As a rule, those books which achieve best-sellerdom for anything like the time that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was holding its place at the top of the list, have a pretty extensive emotional or sex content. Honesty alone does not add up to the requisite magic and for a moment I wondered if the public fancy would remain with his more inhibited characters. Le Carré gave me the answer himself, suddenly.
He was considering a question about his heroine, whom I had found heartrending. “In The Looking Glass War, he remarked, women are aware that their men are in flight from them.” A statement of quite extraordinary insight. And then again, a moment later, he spoke of his character Leamas, “taking refuge in the girl” and I saw at once that his success was assured. On reading The Spy Who Came in from the Cold I had thought I had detected a green leaf appearing in the scorched earth of his philosophy; I had found the quality of emotional strain in the final chapters almost unbearable and I asked him if he knew it was there. The question was not very well put and he misunderstood it.
“An old-fashioned romantic streak?” he said. “Yes, I know. In The Looking Glass War it has gone underground but it is there. It is dangerously sentimental, perhaps, but I can’t suppress it and it just comes out.”
So there it was, plain to see. Once one notices it, it becomes apparent in all his work, just below the surface – the one essential, live ingredient which can make a story be read, and read again and passed on from hand to hand.
I probed no further because of course there is nothing new to me about the parched ground which more than half a century of cynicism’s bilious acid has produced in the youth of the world. To my personal knowledge the cult has been in fashion with thinking people for upwards of thirty five years and there was little new about it then. Now none of its epigrams and paradoxes are even amusing. Some of them one even wrote oneself. The truly fresh, nineteen-sixty-five element in le Carré’s work is a strong, virile streak of unmistakably genuine sentiment and real compassion. This fierce stuff is a good deal livelier, more potent and probably more violent in effect than any celluloid aphrodisiac.
Compassion of this dynamic kind is a life force and here it leaps up starkly, even shockingly, from the familiar desert like the First Flower in the classic Thurber strip. Sentiment, or if one prefers the old word ‘feeling’, is always a positive, always powerful and on the move. It differs from sentimentality as wine differs from dishwater or love from the libidinous.
In the last year or so several young writers have betrayed this tendency to burst into bloom but the fashion for frustration has defeated them. The old cult which got its new blood from each fresh war has proved too strong.
But here is a new young man who cannot prevent himself from feeling and growing and, what is more, is not prepared to try. That is the most exciting thing about his approach. Despite the hidebound gloom of his subject and the savage truthfulness of his tale-telling, the force for growth and construction and future is so strong in him that he is not prepared to get in line and even try to suppress it. It seems to me that this is going to be invincible. I believe he has come to stay and that the le Carré books will remain in the best-seller lists. His films too, should be successful if the gods of Hollywood do right by him. I hope they give him his Guinness which would be good for him.
Without any disrespect to James Bond whom I adore, I believe that the le Carré success will persist long after Dr. No has joined Dr. Fu Manchu of unhallowed memory and perhaps until a Dr. Pe Kin is menacing some new Bill Beefcake in the nineteen-nineties.
After all, there are best-sellers and best-sellers. Once upon a time there was a writer called Hemingway and there is still a powerful spell-binder when he feels like it called Graham Greene.
margeryallingham.org.uk 