Novels elevated spy genre from pulp to high art
KIM Philby, the notorious Soviet mole who burrowed into the upper echelons of Britain’s Cold Warera intelligence services, was a subject of feardriven fascination for novelist John le Carre.
The two men, le Carre felt, had far too much in common as upperclasshating sons of dissolute fathers ‘‘so oversized that your only resort as a child was to subterfuge and deceit’’.
For le Carre, who died on December 12, aged 89, Philby’s traitorous life could have been his own.
‘‘I knew, if you like, that Philby had taken a road that was dangerously open to myself, though I had resisted it,’’ he wrote in the introduction to a 1991 edition of his Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy novel of deceit, double agents and moral ambiguity.
‘‘I knew that he represented one of the — thank God, unrealised — possibilities of my nature.’’
Still, le Carre was not above subterfuge. As part of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, he worked for British intelligence, a role from which he drew fodder for his novels and that necessitated he adopt a pen name to hide his true identity of David Cornwell.
Fittingly, after Cornwell was outed and had to leave the service, his real name faded into the shadows as le Carre became the multimillionselling novelist whose spy novels transcended the pulp genre to, in the eyes of some critics, occupy the realm of literary art.
‘‘He’s a brilliant writer for whom spies are merely subject matter,’’ Robert Gottlieb, who edited some of le Carre’s books for Alfred A. Knopf in the 1970s and ’80s, told the New York Times Magazine in 2013.
‘‘Calling him a spy writer is like calling Joseph Conrad a sea writer, or Jane Austen a domestic comedy writer.’’
In a career that began in 1961, le Carre wrote 25 novels ranging from postWorld War 2 espionage in Europe to the post9/11 struggle against terrorism, with side trips to Panama, Nigeria and Gibraltar, among other places.
Although best known for his spy stories, he also wrote about Russian money launderers (Our Kind of Traitor), Africans caught up in the turmoil of the Congo (The Mission Song) and a British actress drawn into an Israeli plot to assassinate a Palestinian terrorist (ifThe Little Drummer Girl).
With fellow Briton Graham Greene, le Carre helped redefine the spy novel, and showed that, when done well, such works could be read as high art.
He won few literary awards — primarily because he refused to enter the contests and routinely declined nominations.
At least seven of his works were adapted to film, beginning with The Spy Who Came In From the Cold in 1965 and including the Oscarnominated Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in 2011 and The Constant Gardener in 2005, for which Rachel Weisz won a best supporting actress Oscar.
Although most spy novels focus on action, le Carre’s work stood out for his obsession with the grey areas of morality, human weakness and failure, and the machinations of governments, which can become meat grinders of the truth.
David Cornwell was born on October 19, 1931, in Poole, England, one of Ronald and Olive Cornwell’s two sons. His father was a mercurial conman who spent time in prison for insurance fraud but who also connived his way into London’s upper society. It made for a fractious fatherson relationship, which found its way into several of le Carre’s novels and a memoir published in the New Yorker in 2002.
Le Carre’s mother ran off with another man when le Carre was 5, and he spent most of his childhood in boarding schools, an experience that fuelled his dislike of the British class system.
Having a knack for languages, he worked with British army intelligence, interviewing Germanspeaking defectors from the Eastern bloc, then in 1951 entered Oxford, where he studied modern languages, and worked for MI5, England’s domestic intelligence agency, trying to ferret out Soviet agents.
By 1960, le Carre was working for MI6, the foreign intelligence service, in Hamburg and Bonn. And he was writing. His first novel, Call for the Dead, came out in 1961. His superiors forbade him to publish under his real name, and for reasons that in ensuing years he lied about, obscured or seemed to have forgotten, he came up with the le Carre pen name.
That first novel also introduced George Smiley, the rotund and unkempt spymaster who would become the main or side character in at least eight of le Carre’s novels. Unlike the most famous literary spy of the era, Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the debonair womanising man of international action, Smiley was a plodding, bureaucratic everyman with a razorsharp mind, a dogged nature and an ability to be immediately forgotten.
The first two novels received little attention, but his third, 1963’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, a cynical exposition of the moral failings of both the East and the West, was an international bestseller. He made so much money from it he stashed away his realworld cloak and dagger and devoted himself to writing full time.
The fame was overwhelming, and le Carre initially didn’t handle it well.
‘‘I made an awful mess of my first marriage,’’ he said in the New York Times Magazine interview. ‘‘It was hard to live with me being me.’’
He and his wife, Alison, with whom he had three sons — Simon and Stephen, who are involved in film adaptations of le Carre’s novels, and Timothy — divorced in 1971. The next year, he married Valerie Jane Eustace, a former book editor. They had one son together, the British novelist Nick Harkaway.
In his novels, le Carre sought to mix real terminology from the spy world with invented terms and uses, such as ‘‘honey pot’’ for the use of a pretty woman to seduce a target, ‘‘scalphunter’’ for an assassin and ‘‘lamplighter’’ for someone who gathers information from surveillance and couriers.
Le Carre was surprised to learn that over time many of his invented phrases found their way into the spy world’s lexicon; some even credit him with coining the word ‘‘mole’’ for a highly placed spy, though he said he believed he took the term from the KGB. —