16 June 2016
A Private Life in Public View
A portrait of a great writer
by J.R.Thomas
The Shaw Sheet likes to be first with what is fascinating the world, but sometimes we feel it best to take our time and brood on things. And when the subject of the brooding is a biography of a complex life, one of Britain’s most interesting writers, scrutinised in candid detail over 652 paperback pages, then slow thorough thinking is probably the best approach.
Writers reputations rise and fall with the tides of history. Anthony Trollope’s ebbed after his death but in the second half of the twentieth century rose as he became popular once again. His near contemporary, Charles Dickens, has of course never fallen from public popularity, though many schoolchildren probably wish he would. Another contemporary, more popular, more feted, was Bulwer Lytton. It is not often one meets a Bulwer Lytton fan, or indeed anybody who has ever heard of him, though his house and papers still remain in the possession of his descendants. If he is remembered it is for one phrase: “It was a dark and stormy night…” with which he began his novel Paul Clifford. It is not a bad phrase to be remembered for, though much giggled at by the literati.
A favourite post supper entertainment is to argue who amongst modern writers will be read in a hundred years time. Graham Greene seems a likely contender, though going through a low period just at the moment. Ian McEwan must remain amongst the greats; John Updike perchance, but let’s not venture into the USA – let alone France. Zadie Smith will figure surely? How about John le Carré? It is he who is the subject of the recently published biography by Adam Sisman, a fascinating insight into a man who, although famous for being private, has not failed to seize many opportunities to shine in public. Le Carré , like Dickens and Trollope, has shone a fiercely invasive light onto British society; in his case mainly into bad behaviour on the upper decks. He is himself ostensibly a product of the upper echelons of that society, a public school boy, from wealth and comfort, who went to Oxford, moved on to teach at Eton, and then joined the secret services, before he wrote The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, an instant best seller. He was able to leave MI6, or perhaps was gently pushed out, and has since devoted his life and ink to the shining of that light. He has, according to Sisman, made several attempts to turn the torch onto himself, but each attempt to write an autobiography has been abandoned. One reason for that is that his fiction is remarkably revealing of his own self, his drives and contradictions, his struggles internal and external.
He is not at all what he seems. As most people must know by now, his name is not his name, his time in the secret service is a mystery, his private life unconventional. For much of his life he seemed a conventional product of his background, but he has moved steadily to be an open member of the left, where his heart has long been. Most of all, he is not from the comfortable wealthy middle class background that his contemporaries and acquaintances assumed; his father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a major fraudster who did time on several occasions, lived a lavish fantasy life at others’ expense, and treated those around as instruments of his dishonesty.
Much of what Le Carré writes in his novels is about fatherly characters, some good – George Smiley musing affably along as the earthly angel achieving solutions and closures – and some appalling, most of all Rick Pym, father of the troubled and morally compromised Magnus Pym, a defecting British spy, in A Perfect Spy. This book is the closest Le Carré has come to an autobiography; Rick Pym is undoubtedly a detailed sketch of Ronnie; and le Carré has also said that during his MI6 career he mused on whether he might defect to the Russians – not for ideological reasons, but to “learn the truth” as to what motivated them in the Cold War.
Le Carré does not flinch from the realities of the human condition; his heroes tend to be flawed; even Smiley is weakened by his inability to deal with his wife’s philandering and tendency to wander off. His villains are human villains; they usually have redeeming features or at least their villainy is explicable (a rare exception being Richard Roper in the recently televised The Night Manager, who is without any human merit whatsoever).
Le Carré ’s life flows through his books, sometimes concealed from view, sometimes in a torrent. Sisman has had access to Le Carré , to much of his paperwork, to many of his friends and ex-friends (of whom there are quite a number). Le Carré read the book but had no editorial input other than to point out a few errors. It is a remarkable piece of biography with an emphasis, seldom seen, on the subject’s childhood and youth.
There can be no doubt that Le Carré was created, to an extent unusual even amongst those with domineering or vicious parents, by both his father’s charming roguery and his mother’s abandonment. Le Carre’s mother did a runner early in his life, leaving her two sons for a lover with whom she had a new family; his elder brother, who became in many ways his mother and protector, got out as soon as he could. But Le Carré himself climbed the conventional ladder, moved in the milieu in which his father was so anxious to succeed. In his late teens and early adult years he carried out several missions for his father and knew at least some of what he was up to. Later he claimed to have cut off communication and distanced himself, though Sisman hints that even then Ronnie’s charm and overwhelming ability to manipulate his son kept them closer than Le Carre has admitted. He has for instance a picture of Ronnie in tails and topper at the signing of the register at Le Carre’s first wedding, though Le Carre has always claimed his father merely gate-crashed the reception.
Le Carré’s male characters are generally very compelling, but his female players less so. He almost seems to have difficulty delineating them other than as madonnas or whores; they lack the human depth of his men and their motivations are rarely suggested. His lead women are always stunningly beautiful and desirable, and often very inclined to betrayal. It is clear where this may have come from but odd that a writer of Le Carré’s scalpel wielding skill cannot overcome some very deep drivers in himself.
Which brings us back to where Le Carré might rank in lists of great story tellers in fifty or one hundred years’ time. His analysis, whether of the rapid decline of Britain as a world power, her flawed attempts to continue to punch above her weight in the world, the transmutation of her political class from something derived from noblesse oblige to something more corporate and grasping, will surely always be read for its understanding of our times, albeit seen through a framework of espionage and crime. His writing must surely still be admired as technically brilliant – he writes beautifully, if sometimes given to over loquacity. He is known to draft and redraft and even to scrap great masses of text and begin again, and that attention to getting the words right, to getting the running sea of prose which carries readers along with delight, shows through in everything.
If he has a failing, apart from his delineation of women, it is that he has written too skilfully about the secret worlds of spying and betrayal. He is seen above all as the insider who has exposed the real life failings and weakness of the secret agencies. Those settings were perhaps always, and certainly became, vehicles for his pen to depict a flawed world. It will be ironic if they lead to him being too little valued as a truly great novelist and to be seen as just a spinner of spying yarns.
“John Le Carré – The Biography” by Adam Sisman was recently published in paperback by Bloomsbury and is widely available
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