#79: John le Carré: Tradecraft

 

John le Carré

Le Carré, who died in 2020, left 1,237 boxes of documents to the Bodleian, and this exhibition delves into them to try to show his writing and thinking processes. It touches on many of his 26 novels, from the early ones such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy establishing George Smiley, MI5’s insider-outsider mole hunter, to the later post-Cold War work like The Little Drummer Girl, set in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and The Mission Song, about a Western-backed coup in the Congo.

Beyond the Cold War

We can clearly see how le Carré fearlessly tackled big issues, placing his characters in war zones, hospitals and in the middle of corrupt and criminal processes worldwide, whether as protesters, participants or somewhere in between. He didn’t hesitate to move beyond his Cold War novels, which made his name, to other conflicts. On display is a pithy typewritten summing up of geopolitics, describing how ‘Third World potentates’ buy guns instead of butter, adding to the ‘near-total poverty of their countries’ and how ‘We embargoed South Africa for decades, put a real tight ring around her. What was the result? The Israeli arms dealers had a field day, the South Africans built up their own industry, and now they are out there in the marketplace, the absolute leaders in crowd suppression.’

Who helped him?

Le Carré used a network of ‘friends and lovers, journalists, academics, authors, politicians and others’ to help with his research (not to mention his wife Jane, who typed everything out). There is a handwritten list of contacts for The Little Drummer Girl, given him by an Israeli journalist, which includes the Israeli ambassador in London and Knesset members who were the Minister of Police and and a former chief of Mossad (the latter has ‘articulate’ next to his name on the list).

Also on display is a letter to a friend, Ruth Halter, asking for help in finding out if there are controls on First World countries’ manufacturing of drugs for the Third World, and particularly: ‘… If there are any instances where there is a suspicion of dumping unserviceable pharmaceuticals on Africa, or using Africans as human guinea pigs to test drugs out for the Western market’. This query became The Constant Gardener. One may remember Tessa Quayle in the book or film resolutely refusing to go to a Western hospital, preferring the basic hospitals which most of the native population used in a country where indeed ‘guinea pigs’ are found and used to test an anti-tuberculosis drug.

How did he decide research questions?

A draft for The Mission Song shows clearly how le Carré identified research questions. The main part shows the ‘premise’, introducing Salvo, son of a Congolese woman and a Northern Ireland Catholic missionary. Questions in the right margin, to be researched, ask: ‘Is this broadly feasible? What was happening in the Congo around the boy as he grew up? Did the missionaries stay under Mobutu? Did the boy witness atrocities? ‘ One can see how these questions come to form the story itself.

The premise for The Mission Song on the left, research questions on the right

Getting to know his characters

Le Carré wanted to get to know his characters in depth. A document here shows him writing about the Cold War as Jim Prideaux, the brave agent in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: ‘the divisions of our time produce divided men and women on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain,’ says le Carré in Jim’s voice. ‘So many divisions, in fact, that one can hardly speak of sides. We have to ask ourselves what the real war is… A war between the divided ones and the absolute ones…’.

But by the time we get to the novel such explicit avowals disappear – Jim shows his loyalty in action, not words, agreeing to undertake a mission which he suspects is ‘poppycock’, for reasons which are unclear, perhaps even to himself. ‘What the hell does my motive matter in a damn mess like this?’ he tells Smiley. This shows how le Carré’s judgement that questions like motivation cannot be easily summarised. It also shows the submerged work le Carré did on his characters which never makes it explicitly into the novels but which, on this evidence, was needed for him to understand and present them as individuals. Is this depth of research partly why Tinker Tailor is such an intelligent book?

Le Carré's best novel, IMO

Matters of geography

And research was not only into psychology – here are painstaking evocations of geographical locations, perhaps more important in the pre-cyber days of dead letterboxes and paper. There is a partly fictional map of a few blocks next to the Berlin Wall, with a Turkish café which readers of Smiley’s People will recognise as where Smiley and Toby wait, over too much coffee, to see if arch-enemy Karla will appear over Checkpoint Charlie to surrender himself. Here too is a snap of the building at Cambridge Circus where in Tinker Tailor policeman Mendel waits at night for the mole to emerge from the building opposite, standing in the darkness ‘the way coppers stand the world over, weight on both feet equally, legs straight, leaning slightly backward over the line of balance’.

Partly fictional map of an area near the Berlin Wall

Could have been more literary

Generally I would have liked more of a literary element in the exhibition – for a writer who so often describes what happens when ideology and humans meet, there could have been more on literary craft, plot, characterisation. More on humans, less on ideology and politics, in other words. (The exhibition is called ‘Tradecraft’, after all). However, one display does focus more on the craft of writing and le Carré’s feelings about it. Speaking of Smiley’s People, he says: ‘it made me very sad to write it somehow – the spiritual death of a marooned Brit administrator, Smiley as a doomed anachronism, me as author – it all seemed so hopeless. Then somehow it became funny and somehow Toby helped.’ He is referring here to one of the MI5 bosses, the slightly dandified Toby Esterhase, who after being implicated in the admission of the mole to The Circus, moves on to run a gallery selling fake artefacts, but returns two novels later to play his part in Karla’s downfall.

The alchemy of the writing process

But perhaps it is less easy to trace the alchemy of the writing process, the repeated ‘somehow’ in le Carré’s comment above, than identify political stances. One example of this alchemy, for me, is in the description of Jim Prideaux in Tinker Tailor, after an informal interview with Smiley, walking back through a country church graveyard to the school where he teaches:

    The last Smiley saw of him was that lop-sided shadow striding towards the Norman porch as his heels cracked like gunshot between the tombs.

 The ‘Norman’ church hints at the result of earlier, long-ago battles, the incessant military struggles which go way back before the Cold War. Perhaps ‘gunshot’, as well as describing Jim’s curtness, hints at the threat of aggression, necessary abroad in order to protect peaceful country schools and churches at home.

Or back with Mendel at Cambridge Circus, watching for the mole:

    From his window he covered most of the approaches: eight or nine unequal roads and alleys which for no good reason had chosen Cambridge Circus as their meeting point. Between them, the buildings were gimcrack, cheaply fitted out with bits of empire: a Roman bank, a theatre like a vast desecrated mosque.

Here again are the faint influences from past imperial power struggles, present now only in decorative details, part of the same process of political rise and fall that has made Smiley ‘a doomed anachronism’.

My other criticism of the exhibition is my recurrent gripe about literature exhibitions – where are the books (apart from in the gift shop)? Let visitors pick them up and leaf through them, or project a quote on the ceiling, or put an extract on a text panel – let’s read the final magical product, which all the research was in aid of.

John le Carré: Tradecraft is open until 6 April 2025.