The Spy Who Came In for the Gold

By Stefan Kanfer

In its present emergency, Britain is no longer represented by the Lion and Unicorn. Its new emblem is an owl. His name is George Smiley and he is by all standards a most incongruous symbol. The man is a perpetual cuckold. He is portly, rumpled, bespectacled, with a tendency to puff when ascending stairs and to polish his glasses with his tie. He is donnish and vague. He is also the premier spy of his time.

Which seems fitting. Smiley's creator, John le Carre, 45, is the premier spy novelist of his time. Perhaps of all time. In part, of course, Le Carre's success is due to subject matter. Espionage is an immemorial tradition. In Sparta, undercover agents formed the Krypteia--the Secret Force. Two thousand years later the Krypteia remains forceful, but not quite as secret. Scarcely a month passes without some well-broadcast defection from Eastern Europe; hardly a week goes by without some new charge about intelligence excesses in the West. In the post-Watergate epoch, almost any revelation seems credible: accounts of CIA drug experiments and poison cigars, spy satellites and submarine salvage ships, assassination machinations, all more outlandish than any imaginative work. To compete against such headlines, the novelist has to do more than reiterate events; he has to heighten and humanize them. Enter George Smiley.

The spy genre has twin traditions: Great Bad Writing and Great Good Writing. In the Manichaean world of Great Bad Books, evil is always more compelling than heroism. Such works as John Buchan's The 39 Steps construct elaborate international conspiracies; Sax Rohmer's exemplary Fu Manchu series features a supervillain "with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race . . . the Yellow Peril incarnate." From there it is only a bullet's journey to Ian Fleming's Doctor No.

The higher road, paved by Eric Ambler and Graham Greene and improved by Le Carre, leads to an ambiguous plane where neither side has a moral exclusive. The flares of hot and cold wars illuminate enemies with human faces. The agent's mind is as balkanized as the lands he travels; betrayal becomes a way of life. The message no longer echoes national anthems but T.S. Eliot's Gerontion: "Think/ Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices/ Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues/ Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes."

Those impudent crimes are the subject of Le Carre's new volume The Honourable Schoolboy, published this week in the U.S. (Knopf; $10.95). Like the author's dazzling bestsellers, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the latest adventures of Smiley offer the genre a renewal, not a revolution. "When I first began writing," recalls Le Carre, "Fleming was riding high, and the picture of the spy was that of a character who could lay the women, and drive the fast car, who used gadgetry and gimmickry and escape. When I brought back, but did not invent, the realistic spy story, it was misinterpreted as a great new wave."

The old wave had a tidal force. Le Carre's first books proclaimed a new talent. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold became part of the language. Its antihero, Alec Leamas, was the personification of that burnt-out case, that necessary evil, the cold war spy. Tinker, Tailor earned more money than any other espionage novel, and The Honourable Schoolboy is about to smash its record. The novel, now in third printing before publication, is the October main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club; paperback rights have been purchased by Bantam Books for $1 million. The only arena in which Schoolboy has so far failed to win honors is Hollywood. Tinker, Tailor resisted adaptation; major movie producers judge the new book even harder to film. One executive recently asked his script department to provide the customary single-page synopsis, a job as hopeless as carving the Lord's Prayer on the head of a studio.

For like the ectomorphic Smiley, The Honourable Schoolboy resists shrinkage. Its events are febrile, its local color relentless and sometimes overlong. This often obscures suspense and the Le Carre trademark: a fine irony that smashes beautiful political theories with hard facts. That irony is apparent in the very word Circus (see box), center of British intelligence. Once a roiling three-ring operation, the place now resembles a shabby, peeling carnival depleted of funds and dignity.

No one excels Le Carre in sense of place--particularly when the place is secret service headquarters. The sunless corridors, the peculiar amalgam of research, bureaucratic fatigue and hostility are brilliantly rendered. Power struggles become palpable: Smiley's conversations brim with silences and ambiguities; throwaway lines can hang a man, and one quiet meeting results in a British victory over some brash "cousins" in the CIA. Cruelty abounds, but so does guilt. Smiley believes implicitly in the need for clandestine agents, but he knows that his scholarly gains will soon be absorbed by his dreaded allies--the Americans.

When readers last left Smiley, he had just ferreted out Soviet Spy Bill Haydon--a "mole" who for years had unobtrusively buried himself in the British Secret Service. Haydon was manifestly based on Kim Philby, a principal strategist of British intelligence who defected to Russia in 1963 after two decades of spying for the Soviets. Britain's real Secret Service had to be rebuilt after the Philby scandal; the fictional one is equally shattered and in need of repair in the post-Haydon era.

Derided as the "captain of a wrecked ship," Smiley tries to find a coup so stunning it will restore the Circus' reputation--and funding. From the outset, he has one obsessive target: Karla, head of Soviet agent operations, whose spectral face stares down from its frame in Smiley's office. The relationship of the opposing spymasters, playing international chess for men's souls, is worth a book in itself. Karla is an evil genius who once instructed his mole to seduce Smiley's wife--to make the Briton doubt his motives for suspecting Haydon. Smiley's pure, patriotic zeal is simplified, and distorted, by his thirst for revenge.

An opportunity for vengeance occurs one afternoon when attention is drawn to a "gold seam"--a flood of currency--spilling out of Moscow and into Southeast Asia. Is it bankrolling enemy operatives? Is it used to push heroin in the People's Republic of China? Is Drake Ko, an amoral Hong Kong millionaire, a conduit? Drake's brother Nelson is one of the two dozen most important men in Peking and perhaps also a Karla mole, one even more important than Haydon had been. Are the siblings estranged? Or is their relationship thicker then blood? Smiley backtracks through archives and files to find names, places, references once suppressed by Haydon. Midway through the paper chase, coherence emerges. A devious plan unfolds, vouchsafed piecemeal to the anxious reader. The opening moves are made with Jerry Westerby, an aristocratic refugee from occasional Circus assignments now living in the Tuscany hills, where his bookish habits have earned him the sobriquet "the Schoolboy." Westerby carries the spy's classic cards of identity: robust health, womanizing instincts and moral numbness. With words that could have been set to music by Sir Edward Elgar, Smiley reminds his operative of a historian who "wrote of generations that are born into debtors' prisons and spend their lives buying their way to freedom. I think ours is such a generation. Don't you?" Jerry laughs: "Sport, for heaven's sake. You point me and I'll march. Okay?"

The aging adventurer is pointed to Hong Kong, then to Southeast Asia and programmed intrigues--and unexpected sellouts. The Schoolboy's odyssey is both official and personal. As colleagues perish, as the enigmatic Ko brothers become more comprehensible, as loyalties dissolve, Jerry finds himself questioning his own motives and, finally, his orders, the discipline of his "tradecraft." The object of his sudden, intense affection is Drake Ko's beautiful mistress, Lizzie Worthington, an involvement that jeopardizes Westerby's entire mission. The carefully engineered defection of Nelson Ko becomes a ploy within a ploy with apocalyptic result.

Such bare-bones plotting gives only a hint of The Honourable Schoolboy's glistening social observation, its luminous intelligence and its immense and varied cast. Among the principals: the incomparable Lizzie, a daydreamy beautiful loser, "punchball" for many lovers, whose flaws prove even more compelling than her easy virtue: "not just the claw marks on her chin, but her lines of travel, and of strain ... honourable scars from all the battles against her bad luck and her bad judgement." Connie Sachs, Circus Sovietologist beyond compare, "a huge, crippled cunning woman, known to the older hands as Mother Russia." Fawn, Smiley's recessive factotum and "scalp hunter"--professional killer; Craw, an old China hand of archbishoprical speech and mien, shamelessly based on the form and choler of Sunday Times Correspondent Richard Hughes: "We colonize them. Your Graces ... we are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils." Ricardo, the mercenary Mexican pilot: " 'How it happened,' he said. 'Listen, I tell you how it happened.' And then I'll kill you, said his eyes." Smaller roles are no less memorable: "My minor characters are always getting out of scale," confesses their creator. "I keep promising them a treat in the next book if they'll just keep quiet now."

He made good that promise with George Smiley, who was a walk-on in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. But these Circus clowns and aerialists will no longer live on promises: in The Honourable Schoolboy they jostle and clamor for the reader's attention. Fieldmen, office workers, a parade of journalists and reprobates (The Honourable Schoolboy finds the two synonymous), half-castes and Orientals give the book the richness of a Victorian novel of manners.

Le Carre's astringent, melancholy tones will be familiar to anyone who has read his works or those of such eminences as Eric Ambler (The Mask of Dimitrios) and Graham Greene (The Third Man). Still, Ambler's works are written from the outside with sardonic imagination. Greene's achieve more intimacy, but he is careful to label them as mere "entertainments," like a student caught doodling when he should be cramming for exams. Le Carre carries no such liabilities or self-deprecations. His books are written from the inside out. "There is a kind of fatigue which only fieldmen know" observes The Honourable Schoolboy, "a temptation to gentleness which can be the kiss of death." And, "It is a charming arrogance of diplomats the world over to suppose they set an example--to whom, or of what, the devil himself will never know." Such sly aperc,us are those of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, a man who served his term as foreign officer and intelligence operative. As such, Le Carre makes no apologies for his work. "The spy form is expanding for me as much as I want," he finds. "I think it's possible to do wonderful things with it." As for the spies themselves, from the sedentary George Smiley to the hyperkinetic Westerby, they too are written from an internal viewpoint: all are refractions of autobiography.

Graham Greene once observed that a writer's capital is his childhood. On the cliffs of his Penzance retreat, the reclusive David Cornwell, alias John le Carre, assayed that capital in a series of rare interviews with TIME Correspondent Dean Fischer. "From early on," the writer confesses, "I have been something of a spy." The espionage began when David was five. His father Ronnie left school at 14 and hungered ever after for social prominence. A financial-page Barnum, Ronnie made and lost several fortunes in post-Depression England. "He was like Gatsby," says his second son. "He lived in a contradictory world. There was always credit, but we never had cash, not a penny. My father would occupy a house and default, then move to another one. He had an amazing, Micawber-like talent for messing up his business adventures."

Like Micawber, he ended in the dock. Shortly after Ronnie's first jail sentence for fraud, David's mother Olive permanently abandoned the family to live with one of her husband's business associates. David was not to see her again until his 21st year. Deprived of one parent permanently and another frequently, the boy became crucially dependent on his older brother Tony, his senior by only two years. "I helped to bring him up,'" says Tony Cornwell, now creative director of a Manhattan advertising agency. "But I had no parental skills. All I could do was protect him from the school bullies and pretend to play games and study while we listened for revelations in the talk of relatives." The code was difficult to crack. A mention of Olive to his grandfather, a nonconformist lay minister, elicited stern silence. His grandmother responded with "Shhh!" Ronnie's absences were unexplained; Pater was simply "away." "I wondered if my father was some great spy who went off and did nationally vital things," says David. "I soon became tremendously wary of promises. Promises like 'I'll come down and take you out from school on Sunday,' and then I would walk down to the end of the drive and wait, and my father wouldn't appear, and rather than go back and lose face I would just walk around and miss lunch and come back and pretend at 5 o'clock that I'd had a great day. Duplicity was inescapably bred in me."

The deceit was resumed at home. "Ronnie could charm the birds out of the trees," recalls Tony. "And he charmed dozens. Some of them became girl friends or mistresses or one of his three wives. I remember one lady in whom he was interested; David and I looked her over and decided she was quite unsuitable as candidate for wife and mother. Naturally, he brought her home to live." Preternaturally, he continued his fraudulent and sometimes profitable speculations.

Resolved to make his sons independent overachievers, Ronnie sent them off to schools 30 miles apart. The separation was insupportable; many Sundays the boys bicycled halfway to share food that Tony had scrounged. The Dickensian experience did little to erode David's spirit. When his father entered him in Sherborne boys' school, scene of the musical film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, David conformed to the image of all-round student for a couple of years, then refused to return. "I went to my housemaster," says Cornwell, "and he said, 'Well, this is the moment of choice; you choose between God and the Devil.' "

It was a hell of a decision. Furious, Ronnie exiled the stubborn boy of 16 to the University of Bern. There David's gift for mimicry and his cassette-recorder ear made him a quick study of foreign tongues. Within a year he had delved into German letters and discovered new modes of expression and thought. "You might say," he claims, "that I rather belatedly developed a second soul."

After his Swiss sojourn, Cornwell joined the army intelligence corps. His fluency won him an assignment in Vienna where he added human dimension to his fresh literary perceptions. "I spent a great deal of time with extraordinary victims of half a dozen wars," he remembers with the air of an old warden. "Estonians, for example, who had been imprisoned by the Germans, fought for the Germans, been imprisoned by the Russians, imprisoned again by the Americans." He met R.A.F. officers who had bombed Berlin in 1945 and returned for the airlift of 1948-49. The ironies altered his life. "It was," he says, "like reading the right book at the right time. I saw the right things at the right time."

But writing was still far from his mind. Ronnie had plans to make the Cornwell boys experts on the law he had so often flouted. "David and I used to joke about our careers," says Tony. "We were allowed to be anything we wanted, so long as it was a barrister or a solicitor." Tony's filial severance came when he finished reading law at Cambridge. The day after he was called to the bar he left England for the New World and a new career. More impressionable, David opted for Oxford and the life of a don. "My father longed to make of me a respectable guy," says Cornwell. "The attraction which institutions had for me was an extension of his own longing. In those years I was always looking for somebody who didn't exist. In fact, I'm not by nature in the least respectable."

Nevertheless, the honourable schoolboy did all that was expected of him. He won a first in modern languages, married Ann Sharp, daughter of a much-decorated R.A.F. air marshal, taught at Eton, then joined the Foreign Service, "always seeking the brand names, the Good Housekeeping certificate of professions." From 1961 to 1963, Cornwell served as Second Secretary in the British embassy in Bonn; for two years after that he was a consul in Hamburg. "Again," he says, "I was plunged into an institutional life; again I felt completely alienated from it."

To compensate for his restlessness as a diplomat, whose functions included those of intelligence operative, he began to write fiction. The Foreign Office forbids its staff to publish under their own names; Cornwell claims to have seen the name Le Carre ("the square") on a London shop window, though the shop was unlisted in any city directory. "Perhaps," he admits, "it's a lie I've come to believe."

Like one of his fictive double agents, the pseudonymous author scribbled in trains, constructing the character who was to be his later ego. George Smiley bears no physical relationship to his ruddy, unconventionally handsome creator. But like Le Carre, he is an Oxonian, an avid student of German literature and an intellectual manque. He too was married to a lady named Ann from whom he was to separate.

Cornwell's marital break did not come at once. The first thriller, Call for the Dead, based on the German connection, and A Murder of Quality, with its Etonian background, convinced critics that Le Carre was a real writer, not a civil service dilettante. But the books sold modestly; David Cornwell clung to his true identity and his salary. Upon the publication of his third book, the novelist instructed his accountant to wire in the unlikely event that his bank account reached -L-20,000. At the time, Cornwell was the father of three growing boys; the magic figure was what he required to become a full-time writer.

It was the author's next-to-last act of naivete. For The Spy Who Came In from the Cold earned enough to bankroll the whole Foreign Office staff. Graham Greene granted it a rare encomium: "The best spy novel I have ever read." Three and a half million readers agreed. Cornwell handed in his resignation and assumed the identity of John le Carre, thriller writer.

But he neglected to take his equilibrium along. "Success often catches a writer at his most morbid time," Le Carre theorizes, "when he has finished a book. He has been to the end of his talent. It is a frightening view. I went a bit crazy." Flung into the celebrity circuit, he was "eaten alive, asked questions which I felt invasive and impossible to answer." He produced another book, The Looking Glass War, but it brought little satisfaction; reviewers said the adventure could not compare with its smashing predecessor. Le Carre traveled to Dublin to assist in the script of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. "I did it," he insists, "because Richard Burton was sulking and couldn't say his lines. That was my first and last taste of show biz."

After completing another spy novel, A Small Town in Germany--also underrated by critics--the author attempted a "serious" work, The Naive and Sentimental Lover. The knowledgeable thought it a roman `a clef, a riposte to Some Gorgeous Accident, written by Cornwell's close friend, the late novelist James Kellavar. Both books concerned misadventures of two men in love with the same woman. Lover had not a belted trench-coat in sight--and the book proved the sole bomb of the Le Carre career. It also coincided with the end of the Cornwell marriage. "Like all divorces, it was awful," he concludes tersely. "We both very quickly remarried, and we both have second families." Ann married a British diplomat; a year after his divorce, David wed Jane Eustace, editor at Cornwell's English publishers, Hodder & Stoughton. After Son Nicholas was born in 1972 the new family centered on the cliff house in Cornwall. To go farther west from London and still dwell in England, the citizen would have to be a lighthouse keeper. In a way, Le Carre is precisely that.

During his periodic bouts of isolation, the writer can be seen walking over Cornwall's shaven hills, "populating them with the creatures of my imagination." Those creatures light up corners of the dark world that everyone knows about but few have seen--the world of the spy.

How real is the Le Carre construction? Do his plots correspond with true moral quandaries? Says one American CIA official: "We know that our work plays havoc with our personal lives. We know that an awful lot of what we have to do is slogging through file cards and computer printouts. Poor George Smiley. That's us."

As to the surroundings and situations, Le Carre's worlds may not be precise, but they carry the air of verisimilitude--and that is enough. The author is, after all, not a master spy but a master spy novelist. His success at simulation comes as much from research as from instinct. For The Honourable Schoolboy, for example, Cornwell made five trips to Southeast Asia. Pinned down by automatic weapons fire in Cambodia, he dived under a car and coolly noted his impressions on file cards.

For the next Smiley novel, Le Carre is on a Middle East shuttle. Though his plot is still incubating, the author has already uncovered a significant anecdote: "A member of Israeli intelligence told me that he once climbed a telephone pole, snipped the lines on one side with a wirecutter, turned to the other side, severed those--then went down with the telephone pole. A central metaphor for the area."

David, Jane and Nicholas now divide their time between the Cornwall residence, a rambling house in Hampstead and a ski chalet in the Swiss Alps. His sons by the previous marriage, Simon, 20, Stephen, 17, and Timothy, 14, are frequent visitors, irrevocably tied to the man who confesses himself "a soppy father." The close relationships are an open repudiation of his own deprived childhood--and of the father who died in 1975 without a reconciliation.

David's epitaph on that relationship is as cold as a mirror: "You reach the point of emotional bankruptcy; the only thing you can do is walk away from it." Such bankruptcy is a frequent emotion of his characters; they too walk away--from spying, from each other, sometimes from life itself. But his more successful operatives are those who somehow manage to retain a human, familial touch and a sense of the land. This reflects Cornwell's present state of mind. For a decade, England has taken more than 80% of his income. Yet, tempted to seek overseas tax havens, he admits, finally, "I can't live elsewhere: this country is the source for me. I understand the choreography here."

The stately minuets of Smiley, the waltzes of his subordinates, the frugs and polkas of his rivals and enemies are all perfectly timed and performed in Le Carre's works; the choreographer does indeed know his nation and its people. Nevertheless, the thoroughly English writer relies a bit too heavily on foreign literary sources. Turgenev is a longtime enthusiasm, and Balzac is a novelist toward whom he is idolatrous. The Frenchman, insists Le Carre, is unparalleled for "sheer narrative thrust: everything has a material connection. There's no style, just fact, fact, fact." He has a special affection for an imagined cast: "I can see myself, like Balzac, inquiring after them on my deathbed." Such admiration can be as seductive--and as lethal--as a spy's gentleness. For despite its style and tongue-and-groove plotting, The Honourable Schoolboy sometimes displays a Balzacian tendency to turn urges into passions, to exaggerate expression into melodrama. Moreover, facts, facts, facts are better left to the journalist-reprobates. Le Carre's long suit is not, after all, reportage, but a "second soul" that amplifies the century's dilemmas.

The author can understand Kim Philby not only as a traitor but as "an extraordinary, disappointed man who wanted to get his own back on the institutions that maimed him." Le Carre regards Soviet persecution of dissenters as one of the greatest contemporary evils (it is significant, he notes, that the Soviet Union has produced great spies but ngreat spy novelists). Yet his name appeared on an ad favoring British sanctuary for American Army deserters. Clearly such an author has not only written about but lived a central paradox. Allen Dulles, onetime head of the CIA, acknowledged the paradox when he wrote: "The question is whether we can improve our security system, consistent with the maintenance of our free way of life and a free press."

"We say in the West," says Le Carre, "that we want to produce the loosest possible system which gives the greatest amount of individual freedom to each individual and minority. But in the defense of the individual we have to turn ourselves into a collective. Whatever wars rage outside, there remains a constant one inside: the open society versus the closed one."

The dissection of these wars is a risky business for novelists as well as for governments. Too far in one direction and a book is something to kill time--for those who like it dead. Too far in the other direction and a novel becomes pretension in a dust jacket. The author of The Honourable Schoolboy manages to skirt both terminals. But even he comes too close for comfort. Can the spy novel continue to grow without losing its value as entertainment? For David Cornwell--John le Carre--George Smiley, it is, in every sense of the word, a vital question for British intelligence.--Stefan Kanfer

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