John Le Carre - High Spy

John Le Carre - High Spy

The wave has broken. The opinion-formers have stepped ashore, raising their surfboards to the sun. It’s a long way from Islington to Mallorca but they made it! Thumbs are up. High fives have never been higher or fivier. Time for cool wine on a marble terrace and a complementary seat next to a gently-dozing old party called David Cornwell. Apparently the set crew forgot to wake him when they moved on. But he’s here. And he’s a seer, all-knowing when it comes to spies and tradecraft. Plus, of course, The Night Manager is an unqualified triumph. And the cast – well my dear! Perfect in every way. A true television event and cheap at £3M an episode.

John Le Carre has been doing this sort of thing for decades.

     David Cornwell is smarmed by Pine, post-Corky

How did it happen that a moderately competent spinner of yarns, which uncomfortably suggest that Britain was post-war and remains today in thrall to a clique of sex-terrified public schoolboys, came not only to be revered but actually believed? And that a structure devoid first of credible women and then of any semblance of humour in particular and real life in general was accepted as historically sound and admirable?

Perhaps it was the alias that did the trick. Or pen-name, as it would be called were any less self-avowedly mysterious figure involved. Maybe it was the gagging credulousness of generations of reporters who bought his qualifications as an “insider” and believed the shadows he cast were cool shade indeed. Then again, why blame journalists alone when the high-end literary world has conspired so enthusiastically in the Le Carre elevation? If Philip Roth, no less, announces that 1986’s A Perfect Spy is “the best English novel since the war,” it must surely be true. Peak Le Carre was reached in that year and he has been roaming unfettered in the uplands of approbation ever since.

Of course I exaggerate. A little. There is the Le Carre whose reputation as a writer is based more on TV adaptations and Alec Guinness than true literary worth - but is still undoubtedly and fairly rooted in the virtues of his best book, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. And there is the Le Carre, as we have seen, accepted by lazy journalists and come-day media types as the go-to guy for spy lore and far-sighted power prophecy. The man who designates the baddie without challenge as “the worst man in the world” and who decides that the MI6 building at Vauxhall Bridge is known in government circles as "The River House."

    The worst man in the world

Which brings us back to The Night Manager. When David Cornwell played Hitchcock, sitting at lunch as an extra in that terrace restaurant scene, suffering a tongue-lashing from Corky and then a soothing smooth-over from Pine, even he could scarcely have anticipated the unlicensed critical salivating which the series would provoke. No matter that the sharp angles of Tom Hiddleston’s face and his ultra-exquisite pronunciation raised a hint of Kenneth Williams. Irrelevant that Olivia Colman turned in another in a long line of Olivia Colman performances, this one as Connie Sachs reborn, improbably pregnant and even more questionably at large in a twenty-first century office with 1950s-style broken radiators. Forget the impossible prospect of Hugh Laurie, immortal leader of the Trinity College Tiddlywinkers, being menacing. And, above all, overlook the fact that absolutely none of what happens in The Night Manager is remotely based on real power, real espionage or real criminality.

This would be fine were it not for the fact that Le Carre imposes upon his flimsy inventions the veneer of certainty-via-experience. 
It is, as it has been for fifty years, Le Carre’s truth.  And therefore to an extent both alarming and risible, our history

Philip Larkin - Right Angle and Wrong Angle

What Trigger and Philip Larkin had in common

When Trigger was awarded a medal for services to road sweeping in Peckham, it came out that his broom of 20 years had had 17 new heads and 14 new handles. “How the hell can it be the same bloody broom, then?” croaked Sid from behind the caff counter. “Well ‘ere’s a picture of it – what more proof do you need?” said Trigg.

Though he had just described it, Trigg probably didn’t know about Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus paradox. Well let’s say he definitely didn’t know.  

   

  

Of course there’s no reason at all why John Sullivan shouldn’t have read his Plutarch.

Theseus. Founder of Athens.  Fought many sea battles. Ship preserved after his death for centuries as a memorial.  Every part of the ship renewed or replaced as the wood rotted over the years. Was it or wasn’t it the same ship at this point?

But I wonder whether some echo of another source might have filtered through to Sullivan as well. This one for example - recorded in a letter from Philip Larkin to an old love, Winifred Bradshaw, in November, 1976:-

Anyway, it’s hard to afford both drink and petrol. Yes I have a car (though I don’t talk about it). I learned to drive in 1964 – long after your few patient lessons on the outskirts of Lisburn! I’d forgotten the Mrs Beeton: I’m writing with a pen they presented me with in 1955, except that it’s had several new nibs and barrels and caps since then. But in spirit it’s the same.

Later, maybe, Larkin made one of his rare London forays and sat down for lunch and booze with his oldest friend, Kingsley Amis.  Might Sullivan have been at the next table? Perhaps, as you do when deep philosophical writing tool-related topics are gnawing at you, Larkin brought up the pen nib/cap/barrel issue in conversation as he had in his letter - a bit like this:-

PL

You see, Kingsley, we have an old saying that’s been handed down by generations of university librarians – “Look after your fountain pen!”

(Pause)

KA

 (hopefully) And your fountain pen will look after you?

PL

(blankly) No, Kingsley. It’s just “Look after your fountain pen!”

And maybe he sat on it, thought about it until the ‘80s and Only Fools and Horses - and ultimately gave Trigger one of his best lines and finest moments.

So did Sullivan draw his inspiration from a 2,000 year-old Plutarchian Paradox or a restaurant-based Larkinesque Coincidence?

I know which option I prefer…

And what Jimmy Savile and Philip Larkin didn’t

In 1993, Alan Bennett wrote for the London Review of Books a long and brilliant review of Andrew Motion’s recently-published biography of Larkin. There was a great deal of tough love in Alas! Deceived. Bennett’s analysis gave full reign to his fondness for Larkin but sharply challenged and debunked many of the then-prevailing Larkin mythologies. Talking about Larkin’s 1965 Monitor film in which he was interviewed by John Betjeman, Bennett wrote:-

Striding down the library in the Monitor film, Larkin thought he looked like a rapist. (The producer) reassured him, but walking by the canal in the same film there is no reassurance; he definitely does. Clad in his doleful raincoat with pebble glasses, cycle-clips and oceanic feet, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Reginald Halliday Christie. Haunting his cemeteries and churchyards he could be on the verge of exposing himself and whether it’s to a grim, head-scarved wife from Hessle or in a slim volume from Faber and Faber seems a bit of a toss-up

.

This is hilarious in an uncomfortable way - more so when Bennett links it with Larkin’s supposed   binocular-snooping on the courting couples in Pearson Park from the high

windows of his flat.  

Late in the review, Bennett talks about Larkin’s obsession with and terror of death. He separates himself from the general approval given to the last despairing major poem, Aubade. And here a major jolt of retrospect from our later vantage point occurs. Shortly after Larkin died in 1985, Bennett had taken part in a commemorative event at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith. Recalling it years later in the review, he quotes his diary entry:-  

We finish at half-past ten and I go straight to Great Ormond Street, where Sam is in Intensive Care. See sick children (and in particular one baby almost hidden under wires and apparatus) and Larkin’s fear of death seems self-indulgent. Sitting there I find myself wondering what would have happened had he worked in a hospital once a week like (dare I say it?) Jimmy Savile.

What we know now about what Savile did in hospitals provokes a shudder from that closing sentence. Bennett, like almost everyone aware of Savile at the time, took his activities as based in a benign if eccentric will to help others. Now that we know differently (and I don’t doubt that Bennett would agree), it seems reassuringly bizarre, even with the spread of phobias, misogyny and racism revealed in his letters and diaries, to suggest that Larkin should have looked to him as a role model.  Larkin may have looked like a rapist but certainly wasn’t one. Savile looked like one (we all missed it) and was.

As for death itself, I can’t see that pushing trolleys round a hospital would have done much to salve Larkin’s horror at the prospect of extinction. And think of the effect on patients of waking from anaesthetic torpor to find Larkin’s lugubrious dial looming over them. Larkin knew hospitals after all. He’d written about them often – for example in this vein:-

This place accepts. All know they are going to die.

Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,

and somewhere like this. That is what it means,

this clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend

the thought of dying, for unless its powers

outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes

the coming dark…

Somehow, the road to cheeriness by true good works did not lie there.