John le Carré

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John le Carré
John le Carré in Hamburg (10 November 2008)
John le Carré in Hamburg (10 November 2008)
Born David John Moore Cornwell
19 October 1931 (1931-10-19) (age 78)
Poole, Dorset, England
Occupation Novelist
Nationality British
Genres Spy fiction
Notable work(s) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John le Carré is the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell, a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for MI5 and MI6, before leaving to work as a writer upon the success of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), his third novel.

Contents

[edit] Early life and career

On the 19th of October of 1931, David John Moore Cornwell was born to Richard Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1906–75) and Olive (Gassy) Cornwell, in Poole, Dorset, England, UK. He was the second son to the marriage, the first being Tony, two years his elder, a retired advertising executive; his younger sister is the actress Charlotte Cornwell, and Rupert Cornwell, a former Independent newspaper Washington bureau chief, is a younger half-brother.[1] [2] John le Carré said he did not know his mother, who abandoned him when he was five years old, until their reacquaintance when he was twenty-one years old. His relationship with his father was difficult, given he had been jailed for insurance fraud, and was continually in debt; a biographer reports:

His father, Ronnie, made and lost his fortune a number of times due to elaborate confidence tricks and schemes which landed him in prison on at least one occasion. This was one of the factors that led to his fascination with secrets. His father was also the inspiration for the lead character in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977).[3]

Later, in the novel A Perfect Spy (1986), father Ronnie featured as ‘Rick Pym’ the scheming con-man father of protagonist ‘Magnus Pym’.

Cornwell’s formal schooling began at St. Andrew’s preparatory school, at Pangbourne, Berkshire, then continued at Sherborne School; he proved unhappy with the typically harsh English public school régime of the time, and disliked his disciplinarian housemaster, Thomas, and so withdrew. From 1948 to 1949, he studied foreign languages at the University of Berne. In 1950 he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Austria, working as a German-language interrogator of people who crossed the Iron Curtain to the West. In 1952, he returned to England, to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where worked for MI5, spying upon far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents.

When Ronnie declared bankruptcy in 1954, Cornwell quit Oxford to teach at a boy's preparatory school; however, a year later, he returned to Oxford and graduated with a First Class Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in 1956. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, afterwards becoming an MI5 officer in 1958; he ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines, and effectd break-ins.[4] Encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who pseudonymously wrote crime novels as ‘John Bingham’), whilst an active MI5 officer, Cornwell began writing Call for the Dead (1961), his first novel. Moreover, Lord Clanmorris was one of two inspirations — Vivian H. H. Green being the other — for George Smiley, the master spy of the Circus. As a schoolboy, Cornwell first met Green when he was the Chaplain and Assistant Master at Sherborne School (1942–51), and then later as Rector at Lincoln College.

In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under ‘Second Secretary’ cover in the British Embassy at Bonn; he later was transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There, he wrote the detective story A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), as John le Carré, a pseudonym required because Foreign Office officers were disallowed publishing in their names; in the event, Cornwell left service in 1964 to work full-time as the novelist ‘John le Carré’ — ‘John the Square’, in French.[4] His intelligence officer career was ended by the betrayal of the covers of British agents to the KGB, by Kim Philby, a British double agent (of the Cambridge Five). Le Carré depicts and analyses Philby as ‘Bill Haydon’, the upper-class the traitor, code-named Gerald by KGB, the mole George Smiley hunts in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974); after publication, the novelist revealed that spymaster Smiley’s model was Vivian H. H. Green.

In 1964 he won the Somerset Maugham Award, established to enable British writers younger than thirty-five, to enrich their writing by spending time abroad.

In 1954, Cornwell married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp; they had three sons, Simon, Stephen, and Timothy; they divorced in 1971. In 1972, Cornwell married Valérie Jane Eustace, a book editor with Hodder & Stoughton; they had one son, Nicholas, who writes as Nick Harkaway. Le Carré has resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, UK, for more than forty years where he owns a mile of cliff close to Land’s End.

[edit] The writer

Stylistically, the first two novels, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) are mystery fiction wherein the hero George Smiley (of the SIS, the Circus), resolves the complex riddles explaining the deaths investigated; the motives are more personal than political. In A Small Town in Germany (1968), the novelist commands dialogue to relate most of the story; characters delineate, illuminate, and define themselves through speech. Graduation from genre writer to novelist is evidenced in the later espionage novels; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and The Night Manager (1993), develop story, plot, and character novelistically, rather than generically; developed, not presented.

The spy novel œuvre of John le Carré is a dispassionate response to the high adventure of the James Bond thriller genre established by Ian Fleming (1906–64) in the mid nineteen-fifties; the le Carré Cold War features unheroic men, spies aware of the amorality of their work, for being mere political function. They experience few action thriller occasions, have few gadgets, and practice only the violence necessary to propel the plot — the dramatic conflict being among the characters’ motives, i.e. action-is-character and character-is-action.

Unlike the manichean moral certainty of Fleming’s British Secret Service adventures, Le Carré‘s Circus spy stories are morally complex, and apprise the reader of the fallibility of Western democracy and of the secret services protecting it, oft implying East–West moral equivalence, the obverse and reverse of the counterfeit coin of national security. Therefore, the patriotic, Good vs. Evil simplicity of Fleming’s Secret Service in combating Britain’s political and apolitical enemies — SMERSH of the Soviet Union, and SPECTRE, a criminal private business enterprise — is antithetical to the spies of Le Carré’s Circus, professionals who spy for love of the art, not for love of country. Moreover, the existential ambiguity of espionage — that apparently genuine intelligence might prove either a provocation or a trap or both — devalues everything: the information stolen, the spies, the Circus, and the enterprise of national security; the by-word is ‘scepticism’.

A Perfect Spy (1986), chronicling the boyhood moral education of Magnus Pym, as it leads to his becoming a spy, is the author’s most autobiographic espionage novel — especially the boy’s very close relationship with his confidence man father. Biographer Lynndianne Beene, describes the novelist’s father, Richard Cornwell as ‘an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values’; le Carré reflected that ‘writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised’.

Most of John le Carré’s novels are spy stories usually occurring during the Russo–American Cold War (1945–91); the notable exception is The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), an autobiographic, stylistically uneven, mainstream novel of a man’s post-marital existential crisis. As a journalist, he wrote The Unbearable Peace (1991), a non-fiction account of Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire (1911–92), the Swiss Army officer who spied for the USSR from 1962 until 1975. [1] In 2009, he donated the short story ‘The King Who Never Spoke’ to the Oxfam ‘Ox-Tales’ project, comprising four short-story collections, based upon the four elements of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, written by thirty-eight British authors; Le Carré’s story was published in the Fire book of short stories.[5]

[edit] Politics and honours

In January of 2003, John le Carré published the essay ‘The United States Has Gone Mad’ in The Times, protesting the US’s war against Iraq, saying:

“ How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger, from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. ”

He is the author of a testimonial in The Future of the NHS (2006) (ISBN 1858113695) edited by Dr. Michelle Tempest.

[edit] Best novels list

In an interview of John le Carré, broadcast 5 October 2008 on BBC 4, Mark Lawson asked him to name a Best of Le Carré list of books; the novelist answered:

  • The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
  • Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
  • The Tailor of Panama
  • The Constant Gardener

[edit] Adaptations

Film

In 1965, Martin Ritt directed the first film adaptation of a John le Carré novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with Richard Burton as protagonist Alec Leamas. In 1966, Sidney Lumet directed The Deadly Affair, an adaptation of Call for the Dead, with James Mason as Charles Dobbs (George Smiley in the novel). In 1969, Frank Pierson directed The Looking Glass War, with Anthony Hopkins as Avery, and Christopher Jones as Leiser.

In 1984, George Roy Hill directed The Little Drummer Girl, with Diane Keaton as Charlie. In 1990, Fred Schepisi directed The Russia House, with Sean Connery as Barley Blair.

In 2001, John Boorman directed The Tailor of Panama, with Pierce Brosnan as Andy Osnard, a disgraced spy. In 2005, Fernando Meirelles directed The Constant Gardener, with Ralph Fiennes as Justin Quayle, set in the slums in Kibera and Loiyangalani, Kenya. The poverty so affected the film crew that they established the Constant Gardener Trust to provide basic education to those villages. John le Carré is a patron of the charity.

Television

In 1979, the BBC adapted Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to television, with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Two years later, in 1981, he reprised the role in Smiley's People. The BBC did not adapt The Honourable Schoolboy, featuring Jerry Westerby (Joss Ackland in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), because production in South East Asia was prohibitively expensive.

In 1987, Peter Smith directed the television adaptation of A Perfect Spy, with Peter Egan as Magnus Pym, and Ray McAnally as Rick. In 1991, Gavin Millar directed A Murder of Quality, with Denholm Elliott as George Smiley, and Joss Ackland as Terence Fielding.

Radio

The 1994 BBC radio adaptation of The Russia House, features Tom Baker as Barley Blair. The Complete Smiley is an eight radio-play series, based upon the novels featuring George Smiley, that commenced broadcast on 23 May 2009 on BBC Radio 4, beginning with Call for the Dead, with Simon Russell Beale as “George Smiley”, and concluding with The Secret Pilgrim, in April of 2010 .[6]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

[edit] Non-fiction

  • The Unbearable Peace (1991)

[edit] Short stories

  • Dare I Weep, Dare I Mourn? (1967) published in the Saturday Evening Post January 28, 1967.
  • What Ritual is Being Observed Tonight? (1968) published in the Saturday Evening Post November 2, 1968.
  • The Writer and The Horse (1968) published in The Savile Club Centenary Magazine and later The Argosy.
  • The King Who Never Spoke (2009) published in Ox-Tales: Fire July 2, 2009.

[edit] Omnibus

  • The Incongruous Spy (1964) (containing Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality)
  • The Quest for Karla (1982) (containing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People)

[edit] Screenplays

  • End of the Line (1970) broadcast June 29, 1970
  • A Murder of Quality (1991)
  • The Tailor of Panama (2001) with John Boorman and Andrew Davies

[edit] Executive producer

  • The Tailor of Panama (2001)

[edit] Actor

  • The Little Drummer Girl (1984, as David Cornwell)

[edit] References

  • Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 33, pp. 94–99.
  • Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 3 (1975); Vol. 5 (1976); Vol. 9 (1978); Vol. 15 (1980); Vol. 28 (1984).
  • Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 87: British Mystery and Thriller Writers Since 1940, First Series, (Detroit: Gale, 1989).
  • Lynndianne Beene, John le Carré (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992).

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ - Rupert Cornwell's Independent newspaper profile
  2. ^ - Time Magazine page citing Rupert Cornwell as le Carré's half-brother
  3. ^ John le Carre Biography. - BookBrowse LLC. - BookBrowse.com.
  4. ^ a b Garton Ash, Timothy. - Life and Letters: "'The Real le Carre'". - The New Yorker. - March 15, 1999.
  5. ^ Oxfam: Ox-Tales
  6. ^ "The Complete Smiley". BBC - Radio 4 - Drama. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/smiley-season/. Retrieved 2009-05-23. 

[edit] Further reading

  • Hindersmann, Jost (2005). "The right side lost, but the wrong side won: John le Carré's Spy Novels before and after the End of the Cold War". Clues: A Journal of Detection 23 (4): 25–37. ISSN 07424248. 
  • Bruccoli, Matthew J.; Baughman, Judith S., eds. (2004), Conversations with John le Carré, University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 1-57806-669-7 

[edit] External links

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