Le Carre's People
O'Lessker, Karl
With the publication of Smiley's People* John le Carr~ brings to a conclusion what has turned out to be a trilogy--a set of three spy novels, chronologically ordered, involving the conflict...
...Karl O'Lessker, senior editor of The American Spectator, is professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University...
...That may not be as pleasing a picture as we (and Richard Helms) might like to gaze upon, but it is an accurate one...
...Given that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is even better and The Spy Who Came in from the Coldat least as good, there can be little doubt that the literary establishment will one day accord ie Carr6 the kind of status his legions of devoted readers--I among them--think he truly deserves...
...Another point against it, in my view, are certain improbabilities of plot...
...If we accept, as I have no doubt we must, that his work is significantly higher up the ladder of art than that of Fleming or Ludlum or Len Deighton, we may still want to deny it certification as literature...
...The attempted intimidation by a KGB thug of an otherwise nondescript Russian woman in Paris and the murder in London of an elderly Russian emigr6 leader, formerly of British Intelligence, are the "two seemingly unconnected events" that intertwine to pull Smiley out of the London Library in St...
...That's the unexpurgated edition, by the way, where I get into food poisoning as practiced by the Borgias...
...A good, hard look, with special attention given the jugular, because if there's one idea I want you to take out of this course, it's that trust is something you set up for your kids after you've made your bundle...
...Moreover the characterizations are masterful even down to the most fleeting actors: each has his own distinct voice and mannerisms...
...The rest of us, however, recalling all those "literary novels of the 1960s," written in disproportionate numbers by university professors and crammed full of unsatisfied New York housewives, suffering adolescents, and adulterous academicians, may just be able to stifle our disdain for le Carr6...
...Smiley's People begins, as I have said, with "the summons of Mr...
...Three generations earlier Santayana had said that nothing will repay a man for becoming inhuman...
...You figure out the dollar exchange, I can't keep up with it...
...Though Smiley had appeared as the unprepossessCarre s two one ing heroofle "' first books, a spy story, the other a conventional murder mystery,t and as a walk-on in three later spy novels, beginning with the one that brought ie Carr6 international fame, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963),:I: it was not until Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) that his creator moved him to or near the pinnacle of British Intelligence and invented Karla as his Soviet foil...
...of Cal/ for the Dead (1961) and A Murder o f Qua/i(I' (1962...
...Both have just been republished by Bantam Books...
...But it is clear that our literary culture today places a very heavy burden of proof upon writers like le Carr6 to show that they are not in fact guilty of committing popular entertainment...
...meet the standards of the other two, it is nevertheless a marvelous " r e a d . " Each of the three stands by itself as a complete novel, but the rewards are richer if you read them consecutively...
...One simply doesn't believe, for instance, that the Chief of Britain's Secret Service would permit 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 himself to engage in routine field work (the interrogation of Lizzie Worthington's husband and parents), nor that he would have the heads of his Soviet and Chinese research sections conduct other interrogations on their own...
...We called it pomp and pageantry...
...For the moment let me only say that in my judgment Tinker, TalTor, Soldier, .Spy is the best spy novel ever written, with the current Smiley's People not far behind...
...Ostrakova, whose troubles set in motion the whole elaborate chain of events that leads to the final confrontation between Smiley and Karla...
...I f we can put aside our prejudice in this regard and settle down to judge a le Carr6 novel on its own merits we can begin to identify the failures as well as the successes of his formidable technique...
...So accustomed have we become to the notion that serious writers must only concern themselves with the ordinary trials of ordinary people (there are notable exceptions, to be sure, like Thomas Pynchon and John Barth), and so heavy-laden are the paperback book racks with "thrillers" bearing not a leaf-trace of literary merit, that even the most accomplished spy novel must seem frivolous almost by definition...
...Yet the fact remains that what is exotic is not necessarily nonexistent...
...One more item: If this happens to be your first presidential campaign, let me caution you that 1980 shapes up as one of the dirtiest political years of the century...
...Anthony Burgess, for example, argues that "literature is recognizable through its capacity to evoke more than it says, is based on artful selection, throws up symbols, suggests a theology or metaphysic of which the story itself is a kind of allegory," and on this basis dismisses le Carr6's novels as having "nothing to do" with literature...
...Before we begin, though, I want you to take a good look at the friendly candidate seated to your left...
...In the latter, Guillam falls in love with a flower child flute student named Camilla...
...Thus the briefest of walk-ons in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Jerry Westerby, becomes, next to Smiley himself, the central figure in The Honourable Schoolboy...
...Vic Gold, author of PR as in President, lives in Washington...
...Double-cross and triple-cross are the norm, with one's own agents as much at hazard from one's own acts as from the enemy's...
...You call it show biz...
...it sounds invented--the sure sign of a character who, though she has an important narrative function to serve, has never really taken root in the author's imagination...
...And like the rest of us the}' are hostage to their own loves and hates and beliefs and Iongings...
...The Honourable Schoolboy, for all its many excellences, seems to me to have more than its share of creative errors...
...Niccolo Machiavelh (1469- ) is a consulrant to the Carnegie Council on World Peace...
...One more dozer like that last race and they'll have to offer door prizes to get voters to the polls...
...Along the way he reactivates many of his old associates from the earlier books--Peter Guillam, Connie Sachs, Toby Esterhase--and wearily drags himself across the face of Europe to a final climactic encounter at the Berlin Wall...
...Le Carrd replies, in effect, but that was before the invention of totalitarianism...
...Similarly, we can't help being jolted out of our immersion in the story when we are hit with the reflections of a minor character (a police superintendent) who glances at Smiley's face and thinks to himself: "Not one face at all, actually . . . . More like your whole range of faces...
...Now that the trilogy is complete, it is worth asking two separate but important questions about the genre and le Carr6's place in it...
...Specifically, can a spy novel embody any political ideas other than the most rudimentary...
...Little wonder that the real-world spymaster Richard Helms found The Spy Who Came in from the Cold not only uncongenial but hateful: It was not just the violence H'elms minded, but the betrayal, the mood of defeat, the meanness, the numb loneliness of a man for whom loyalty has become a joke . . . . Le Carr6 was undermining the very bedrock of intelligence, the faith of men in the meaning of their work . . . . [Helms] didn't just dislike le Carr6's hook...
...Purity against Mr...
...For one thing, it is too long: Too many of its 500-plus pages are superfluous, full of narrative and des~ riptive details that neither advance the story nor illuminate character but are merely self-indulgences on the part of a writer who revels in his own prowess...
...If you want the exact quote, spring for the 4,000 lire...
...and the manner of his portrayal can hardly avoid embodying a political idea...
...It's the same principle I expounded to Lorenzo the Magnificent back in 1512: "Lorenzo," I told him, "politics is one mean frigging business...
...By that standard, surely, le Carr~'s spy novels are the best we have...
...Taken all in all, the Smiley trilogy is a grand achievement, beyond question the finest series of international intrigue fiction in our language...
...And it is not only the name that emigrates from one book to the other: The individual touches that brought Westerby so vividly to life in the former are meticulously elaborated in the latter...
...With the publication of Smiley's People* John le Carr~ brings to a conclusion what has turned out to be a trilogy--a set of three spy novels, chronologically ordered, involving the conflict between George Smiley, sometime Chief of the British Secret Service, and "Karla," head of the KGB's Thirteenth Directorate...
...The}' exist, they intrigue, the}' suffer, they die...
...And the League of Women Voters actually wonders why the turnout was light...
...Less important to the plot, and for that reason perhaps more revealing, is le CarrCs carelessness in portraying Peter Guillam's (he is Smiley's principal assistant) romantic attachment in The Honourable Schoolboy in contrast to an identical subplot in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy...
...What you're dealing with here is a nation with an insatiable appetite for entertainment...
...Chosen to occupy that Chair for the political year ahead was none other than the dean of pragmatic poh'tics himself, Niccolo Machiavelli, who, following a Berlitz crash course in Madison Avenuese, dehvered his virgin lecture in a classroom full of attentive Presidential candidates shortly before the primary season got underway...
...Still the question remains whether be is a good novelist, by which I mean, does he create believable characters operating in complex and significant relationship to each other and to their environment, and does he do so in supple and effective prose...
...Politics in your country, as I perceive it, isn't that much different from politics in 16th century Florence...
...A little heavy by 1980 standards, but you never can tell when an outbreak of botulism at an opposition barbecue might come in handy...
...granted le Cart6 "originality and distinction as a popular novelist" but accused him of being " s i m p l i s t i c . . . s e l f - comforting...essential[v naive," and in the cruele,st cut of all declared that "modernism and the ironies of the literary novels of the 1960s are beyond him...
...Yet it is precisely because these lapses are so rare in Smiley's People and the plot and characterizations generally so strong that it strikes us finally as an achievement well beyond the reach of any other popular novelist writing today, and of most other novelists whose claims to "seriousness" are accepted without challenge by the critics...
...In Smiley's People, too, though a leaner, tauter book, there are occasional failings that cause me to rank it below (though close to) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy...
...Though we do see and hear her on several occasions as well as read about her in her lover's thoughts, she never becomes more than an author's strategem and an inexplicable one at that...
...As 1 have already implied, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a practically flawless performance...
...Clearly Greene, a man of high intellectual and artistic ability, knew precisely what he was doing, politically, and why...
...Well, perhaps...
...Nothing of the sort...
...All right, for the late arrivals: My name is Machiavelli and this is Poli Sci 501, Pragmatic Presidential Politicking, from A to Z, Aaron Burr to the Zimmerman Telegram...
...Though we get only the briefest direct glimpse of her--most of what we " s e e " and " h e a r " o f her is recorded in Guillam's thoughts--she is so artfully drawn that she seems to be an important presence in the story...
...But not, as the British would say, bloody likely...
...James' Square, away from his research in German baroque poetry, and onto the trail, not of one of Karla's agents, but of Karla himself...
...Save your rumor-mongering for the final week of the campaign when it can do the most damage...
...It seems to me his severest impediment to recognition as "serious" is the exoticism of his stories...
...B~at how good are they simply as novels...
...spies are not unicorns...
...The plot is intricate but not at all tricky, the characterizations superb, the evocation of place masterly, the technical detail impeccable...
...Many years ago, in Politics and the Novel Irving Howe talked about the importance " o f that quality we loosely call 'true t o life,' or here more pertinently, true to the moral complexities of political behavior...
...George Smiley from his dubious retirement...
...For as Helms' biographer makes clear, such le Carr6 themes as the psychological destructiveness of a long career in * * Thomas Powers, The Man FP'ho Kept the Secrets, p. 55...
...So it was that in this journal some months ago I wrote harshly about Graham Greene, who in his most recent novel, The Human Factor, contrasted through their respective intelligence agents a brutal, corrupt, racist, and incompetent West to a quietly efficient, even humanitarian, Soviet Union...
...Another way to see how good le Carr6 can be is to examine the instances in which he has misplayed his hand...
...C l a s s called to order...
...And now that public hanging is considered gauche, and cockfighting pass6, and the National Football League has seen fit to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 19...
...To anyone who has ever worked diligently at writing fiction that comment tells a good deal about ]e Carrd's craft...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 17 intelligence and the use of one's own agents, unknown to them, as stalkinghorses can be documented in the record of the CIA...
...l keep promising them a treat in the next book if they'll just keep quiet now...
...If that is anything like an acceptable definition of the novelist's craft, I have no hesitation in stating my own judgment that he is indeed a good novelist...
...It is altogether a superlative performance by the former British civil servant, David Cornwell, turned peerless spy novelist, .John le Carr6...
...The first has to do with politics...
...Positively filthy, and about time...
...I.e Carr6 himself is unembarrassed in insisting that, in espionage at least, the end justifies the means...
...So there is nothing inherently impossible about writing serious fiction involving spies...
...But he is back now, called once more to service by his successor: " . . . g i v e n , in late age, a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them after all...
...Whether it is also literature is another question, to which I shall want to return a bit later...
...Reduced to simplest terms, le CarrCs novels portray a world in which Western agents commit vile acts in pursuit of a good cause, while Soviet agents commit even worse acts in pursuit of a bad cause...
...To be single-minded in defence of our disparity...
...My minor characters are always, getting out of scale," le Carr6 once told an interviewer...
...But he is artist enough to play it straight with his readers--to show the terrible moral costs of being "inhuman in defence of humanity"--and let us make our own hard judgments...
...Spies, and especially spymasters, are moral basketcases...
...To say that his characters are neither as vivid as TrolIope's nor as complex as Dostoevsky's, that his sense of moral ambiguity falls far short of Conrad's, that in subtlety he is no match for Henry James and in the beauty of his prose no competitor to Scott Fitzg e r a l d - t o cite all these shortfalls is hardly justification for denying him the status of serious novelist...
...It was just a matter of dull casting and a wretched plot...
...The reason is obvious...
...Now the smiling candidate seated to your right...
...It is almost impossible for us today to consider a spy novel as anything but popular entertainment...
...E v e n . . . o f different faiths...
...Ford...
...Nothing new there, really...
...And if The Honourable Schoolboy doesn't quite " Knopf, $10.95...
...Our text, needless to say, is my masterpiece, The Prince, revised, annotated, and currently selling for 4,000 lire at your nearest bookstore...
...To gain any worthwhile end they will resolutely sacrifice the innocent...
...Where does this leave the casual reader as a moral judge...
...an earlier reviewer in the New York Times Book Review, Richard Locke...
...It wasn't, as Joe Kraft and other columnar airheads would have you believe, because the electorate was disillusioned by Watergate, Vietnam, and the system...
...What follows is a transcript of that historic disquisition (copies ofwhich may be obtained throug h the professor's American agent, Vic Gold...
...And this, for reasons which I shall certainly not reveal here, is the last time we may hope to see him locked in combat with the extraordinary Karla...
...Something to that effect...
...I have particular trouble accepting the psychological credibility of Mine...
...More your patchwork of different ages, people, and endeavors...
...he detested it...
...Similarly...
...Besieged by undergraduate demands for a curriculum more relevant to an age of politicaI Stfirm und Dreck, the Carmine DeSapio School of Public Affairs recently endoweda Chair in Pragmatic Campaigning...
...The superintendent's metaphysical flight, one feels, is not so much a case of a minor character's "getting out of scale" as of the novelist's reaching for a kind of significance that is much better left to the reader to infer...
...But Guillam's mistress in The Honourable Schoolboy, a girl called Molly Meakin, is utterly lifeless...
...This was followed by The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), populated by many of the same characters and ending with Smiley's forced retirement as Chief...
...Once an author gets above the good-guys-versus-bad-guys level (as in, say, Ian Fleming's or Robert Ludlum's books, which are as innocent of ideas as a Tom Swift story), it seems to me the writer can hardly avoid portraying the interplay of ideology and individual...
...Throughout the trilogy he has Smiley making the point that the West, whatever its shortcomings, is by any moral criterion incomparably superior to its Communist antagonists Even in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, morally the most problematical of his books, we hear Smiley sounding remarkably like Senator Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention, calling upon Western agents " t o be inhuman in defence of our humanity.., harsh in defence of compassion...
...Without passing judgment on Helms' own morals or performance, one has to wonder whether there isn't here an element of overreaction, of protesting too much...
...The plot is outstanding--Smiley is called out of retirement to track down a "mole" (a Soviet agent) at the very highest level of British Intelligence--and le Carr~ handles its development with care and restraint, letting its inherent melodrama unfold with no unnecessary tricks or ornamentation...
...A rather more familiar approach--which probably owes its origins to le Carr6's own The Spy Who Came in from the Cold-claims a kind of ideological neutrality by simply portraying espionage as a dirty business no matter in which nation's interest it is performed...
...Decency: Carter vs...
...And we know of course that he has often kept his promise...
...t The Looking Glass War (1965) and A Small Town in Germany (1968...
...You candidates in the back row, knock off the chatter...
...It is hard to escape the conclusion that Helms' anger at le Carr~ is, as much as anything, the resentment of a man forced to confront an unwelcome moral reality...
...Too often the interior monologue which le Carr6 ascribes to her simply doesn't ring true...
Vol. 13 • March 1980 • No. 3
