John le Carré and the Cold War 1350036390, 9781350036390

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John le Carré and the Cold War

John le Carré and the Cold War Toby Manning

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Toby Manning, 2018 Toby Manning has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: News Stand in Foggy Street © Michael Darter / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Manning, Toby, author. Title: John le Carré and the Cold War / Toby Manning. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017031723 | ISBN 9781350036390 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350036413 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: le Carré, John, 1931–Criticism and interpretation. | Cold War in literature. | Espionage in literature. Classification: LCC PR6062.E33 Z77 2017 | DDC 823/.914–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031723 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3639-0 PB: 978-1-3501-2216-1 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3640-6 ePub: 978-1-3500-3641-3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to my parents: to my mother, Noreen Bamber, an English teacher, who gave me a love of fiction and the literal gift of le Carré’s books (Christmas, 1979); to my father, Brian Manning, a historian of the English Civil War, who gave me a belief in history and the lateral gift of questioning received wisdom. Given my parents’ own cold war – almost precisely contemporary with these novels – this volume probably represents the closest they ever came to détente.

Contents Dedication Acknowledgements

v ix

Introduction: ‘A Nation’s Political Health’ The enemy The state The nation Cold-War consensus to critical consensus

11

1

23

2

3

4

‘Murderers and Spies’: The Communist Threat and Call for the Dead ‘Mass philosophy’: The Cold-War enemy ‘A symbol of nothing at all’: The British state ‘Deep love of England’: Imagining the nation ‘Who was then the gentleman?’: Nation, state and enemy ‘Breeze Blocks and Barbed Wire’: The Berlin Wall and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ‘Party terms’: The communist enemy ‘Not quite a gentleman’: Leamas and the classless British nation ‘We are defensive’: English empiricism, ideology and the British state ‘Looking at His Own Reflection’: The Establishment and The Looking Glass War ‘A sort of Cuba situation’: Reflections of the enemy ‘Government hirings’: The Department, the Circus and the British state ‘The mystery of England’: The nation and class

1 6 14 16

24 33 40 45

51 54 62 66

75 78 84 92

‘Holding the World Together’: The Cambridge Spies and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 103 ‘The imminent collapse of the nation’: England and the establishment 107

viii

Contents

‘Russians taken over the government’: The infiltrated British state ‘Fanaticism’ and ‘mindless treason’: Enemy characterization ‘Haydon’s crooked deathmask’: State, nation and enemy

115 122 129

5

‘All One Vanishing World’: The Honourable Schoolboy, Colonialism and Communism 133 ‘Her colonial grip’: Britain, the Empire and the special relationship 136 ‘A spreading plague’: Communism and Southeast Asia 149

6

‘Only People’: Humanism, Populism, the Second Cold War and Smiley’s People 157 ‘Deniable blessing’: Smiley and the British state 160 ‘British to the core’: Smiley’s tour of the nation 166 ‘The danger is absolute’: Karla and communism 171 ‘Half-angels’ and ‘half-devils’: Smiley, Karla and the Cold War 176

Conclusion: ‘Man, Not the Mass’ The enemy The state The nation

183

Appendix: Plot Synopses Bibliography Index

195

187 188 191

198 220

Acknowledgements Thanks to all my secret sharers for help, criticism and advice – conscious or otherwise – during this book’s development: Ben Pritchett, David Johnson, Suman Gupta, Robert Clarke, Christine Berberich, James Smith, Patrick Henry, Adam Sisman, David Wilkinson, David Alderson, Scott McCracken, Maggie Studholme, Derek Rutter, Nathan Abrams, Sybil del Strother and Mary Potter. Love to Mary, Gus, Paddy and Gwilym. A considerably different version of Chapter 5 previously appeared in College Literature – thanks to the editorial team.

Introduction: ‘A Nation’s Political Health’

Sarratt, an old country house in the English home counties, is known among the secret service professionals of le Carré’s Circus as ‘the Nursery’. It is a public school for spies. Sarratt’s grandeur is somewhat tarnished by the time of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), like so many relics of aristocratic Britain. Dashing, blue-blooded Bill Haydon is precisely the type of character one would expect to find in a public school, a country house or a spy institution – although probably not under armed guard, covered in unexplained bruises, weeping, and with his nose bleeding. Haydon, brightest and best of the establishment, has transpired to be a communist ‘mole’, or Soviet penetration agent, burrowed deep into the British secret service, into the subterranean foundations of the state. In his cell at Sarratt, Haydon is interviewed by George Smiley, le Carré’s perennial spymaster who – bespectacled, overweight, decent, forever polishing his spectacles on the fat end of his tie – is our reassuring guide through Cold-War Britain in the six novels explored in this volume. It is Smiley who has unearthed and exposed his colleague, friend and rival, Haydon, as the mole. During the interrogation, Haydon tells Smiley: ‘Secret services [a]re the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious’ (le Carré 1999a: 379). The same might be said of secret service novels. With Haydon being an amalgam of Cambridge spies Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), like all the le Carré novels studied in this volume, is steeped in British Cold-War history and so taps into the unconscious of Cold-War Britain – its fears, hopes and desires. Quite how central, even structural, le Carré is to our conception of the Cold War is conveyed by that expression, ‘mole’, which tunnelled out of his imagination and burrowed into the national consciousness. Or did it? Karl Marx had deployed the image of the mole a century before to invoke the revolutionary spirit. ‘The revolution is thoroughgoing … It does its work methodically … And when it has accomplished … its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat

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John le Carré and the Cold War

and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!’ (Marx 1978: 606).1 Far from confirming the consensus understanding of le Carré’s work as itself mole-like – destabilizing, subverting, exposing – this volume argues that his work is a repository – a reassertion – of British establishment ideology: a kind of literary ‘containment’ or repression. Where contrary ideas do erupt and faultlines reveal themselves, the novels repair the breach and compact the fictional ground, embedding the dominant ideology in a restabilized Cold-War consensus. This is not in any way to denigrate these books. Le Carré’s Cold-War novels are among the finest cultural expressions of the Cold War: not just ‘better’ than other spy fiction, but on a par with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949 [henceforth 1984]) or Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), both as ColdWar texts and prime examples of the political novel. Yet neither the academic mainstream nor the growing field of Cold-War studies award le Carré much attention, the majority of such work being either on ‘literary’ fiction or on American authors.2 Usually marginalized as ‘genre’ rather than literary fiction, le Carré’s novels deserve to be appreciated not for their intricate, warren-like plots – skilful as they are – but for the vividness with which they capture the mood of the Cold-War world. Le Carré captures the character of the British power bloc, the establishment; the emotional pull of ‘England’, the nation; and the fearful lurch inspired by the political enemy, communism, with its threat to the stability of the very ground upon which Cold-War Britain stood. And under all of this, occasional revealing glimpses of the national unconscious: contradictory, in conflict with itself – chewing its own tail. Pitting East against West from 1947 to 1991, this war of ideologies without direct combat between its leading antagonists meant that spy fiction was – alongside news media – many Britons’ primary experience of the Cold War. Spies, ‘the infantry of our ideology’ (le Carré, in Bragg 1976, 90), were Britain’s unelected representatives, operating beyond public view and public accountability, acting on secret orders from shadowy officials. Britain’s intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, were not officially acknowledged until the Cold War was effectively over, while in 1963, the year that le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was

1

2

Digging deeper, Marx is alluding to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act I, Scene V). Hamlet says to his father’s Ghost: ‘Well said, old mole! Canst work i’ the earth so fast? A worthy pioneer!’. Marx is appropriating the acme of liberal humanist culture to advocate revolution – the spectre haunting Europe. American-focused Cold-War culture studies include Schaub (1991), Field (2005), Cordle (2008), Grausam (2011), Belletto (2012) and Belletto and Grausam (2012). Only Végsö (2013) (briefly) considers le Carré. Among British studies, Piette (2009) covers le Carré amidst primarily literary fiction; Caute (2016 [2010]) reviewed le Carré’s work but ignores ‘popular fiction’ and thus le Carré; Hammond (2013) prioritizes literary fiction.

Introduction

3

published, Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government attempted to deny the defection of Philby, and so successfully covered up the treachery of Blunt that he was able to become Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures. In such a patrician and secretive society, le Carré’s work came to be seen as probing the nation’s political unconscious, particularly as le Carré – cover name for David Cornwell – was rumoured to have been part of the secret, subterranean world of espionage himself (Gardner 1982: 77; Yildiz and Durmus 2013: 56). It later transpired that le Carré worked for MI5 from 1958 to 1960 and for MI6 from 1960 to 1964 (Sisman 2016: 184–258). For all his insider knowledge, le Carré’s novels of the 1960s and 1970s reveal relatively little of the reality of the intelligence services – what, for instance, are the secrets which spies, real or fictional, give away? What le Carré’s Cold-War novels do achieve – subtly, subliminally, subtextually – is to give body and voice to consensus British Cold-War ideology. These novels give the Cold War an ideological framework (communist expansionism and conspiracy; Western decency and defence), an iconography (Berlin Wall, tanks, barbed wire, prisons; versus venerable London institutions, verdant English landscapes, elegant country houses) and a mood (paranoid, secretive, anxious). To analyse how they do this is the project of this volume. It is worth pausing to consider the sheer scope and scale of le Carré’s popularity – a popularity that marginalized him from acceptance by the literary establishment, while giving his vision the kind of cultural dissemination ‘literary’ authors can only dream about.3 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) was an international bestseller that put Ian Fleming’s sales in the shade, let alone Len Deighton’s. Beyond the closed circuit of spy fiction, compare The Spy to the same year’s James Tait Black Prize-winner, Gerda Charles’ A Slanting Light (1963). Which book is still read and discussed, the literary or the generic? Le Carré’s follow-up, The Looking Glass War (1965), was an automatic international bestseller just as The Spy’s hugely successful film adaptation was released. Then after a sabbatical from East–West conflict, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) re-established le Carré as the Cold War’s preeminent chronicler, and returned him to the bestseller lists. Deighton’s own return to the Cold

3

Q. D. Leavis’s 1937 attack on detective novelist, Dorothy L. Sayers, categorized popular fiction as ‘debased’ ‘mass fiction’, as distinct from the Leavises’ canon of literary fiction (Eagleton 1996: 27). While greater acceptance of genre fiction occurred from the 1970s, both the canon and the slippage between ‘popular’ and ‘inferior’ continued (Shiach 1989: 15). This was even echoed on the literary left: Jerry Palmer’s emphasis on ‘the ideology of the thriller’ suggests thrillers are more reactionary than literary fiction (1978: 149); Roger Bromley suggests capitalism only creates ideologically loaded ‘mass’ fiction, not the canon of literary fiction (1978: 34–60). This conflation of form, content and reception patronizes the reader: ‘the notion of the people as a purely passive, outline force, is a deeply unsocialist perspective’ (Hall 1994: 459). This division is effectively a literary class system.

4

John le Carré and the Cold War

War, Spy Story, published the same year, has been largely forgotten. Thereafter le Carré was unstoppable: Tinker Tailor’s sequels The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979) were international bestsellers, with iconic television dramas made of both Tinker Tailor (Irvin, 1979) and Smiley’s People (Langton, 1982). All told, this body of work represents a massive cultural intervention in the Cold War as it was occurring. All le Carré’s 1980s novels were bestsellers, being adapted for film or television, although, with the exception of A Perfect Spy (1986), neither novels nor adaptations have endured in the popular imagination the way his 1960s and 1970s fiction has. There is a particular atmosphere to those central Cold-War years that le Carré captured with uncanny and evocative precision. Few could have predicted, therefore, that le Carré’s work would continue to have such currency long after the Cold War ended. For while le Carré had a post-Cold-War lull in the 1990s, The Constant Gardener (2001) inaugurated a new surge in his popularity. The date is hardly coincidental. Since 9/11 and the War on Terror, the West has been, as it was during the Cold War, on a permanent war footing, with the state granted emergency powers and promulgating a Cold-War-esque paranoia among the citizenry (Field 2005: 2). With the threat of nuclear war now revived, there is also a revival of Western Cold-War rhetoric towards Russia. Consequently the iconography, keywords and embedded ideology of Cold-War culture have acquired new relevance. In Absolute Friends (2003), le Carré linked a War on Terror narrative to a Cold-War narrative, and in both this novel and the press proved to be a far more caustic critic of the War on Terror than the Cold War (see: le Carré 2003). Meanwhile, Tomas Alfredson’s film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) was only one of the less politically aware of a spate of Cold-War heritage films, including The Legend of Rita (Schlondorff, 2000), Goodbye Lenin (Becker, 2002), The Lives of Others (Donnersmark, 2006) and Bridge of Spies (Spielberg, 2015). Similarly, since 2001, there has been an upsurge of Cold-War heritage fiction. These include: Joseph Kanon’s sequence of Cold-War thrillers (2001–), William Boyd’s Restless (2006), Charles Cumming’s Trinity Six (2011), Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (2012), James Naughtie’s Paris Spring (2016), Paul Vidich’s An Honorable Man (2016) and Eric Haseltine’s Spy in Moscow Station (2018).4 Now, following the success of the BBC’s Night Manager (2016), le Carré himself

4

Cumming appears to be using le Carré’s fiction as a historical source. ‘Donald [Maclean, Cambridge spy] had a very deep and profound hatred of America’ (Cumming 2011: 143) c.f. ‘[Haydon] hated America very deeply’ (le Carré 1999a: 370). Philby’s father, like Haydon’s, was a ‘monster’ (le Carré 1999a: 380; Cumming 2011: 100); Philby spied not out of conviction but ‘from some misguided sense of [his] own importance’ (Cumming 2011: 143), c.f. le Carré on Haydon (1999a: 380).

Introduction

5

has added to the canon with A Legacy of Spies (2017), a new George Smiley novel fifty-six years after the first and twenty-six years after the last, anxiously revisiting the Cold-War past. Additionally, there has been a crop of Cold-War heritage television dramas: The Americans (2013–18), The Game (2015) and Deutschland 83 and 86 (2015; 2018); while that ultimate Cold-War conurbation, Berlin, has become a War on Terror spy drama location (Homeland S05, 2015; Berlin Station, 2016–19). Le Carré’s fingerprints are visible on much of the above, as well as on contemporary-set works like Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb books (2010–) and the BBC’s Killing Eve S02 (2019). Both the British Spooks (2002–11) and the American Homeland (2011–19) often reference le Carré directly: and not just by deploying his jargon – scalphunter, babysitter, ‘turning’ etc. Homeland creator Alex Gansa stated: ‘Saul [Berenson]’s character is a direct descendent of … George Smiley … He became the paternal, grounding moral center of the intelligence universe for us’ (VanDerWerff 2012). Moreover, Homeland borrowed part of The Spy’s plot in 2013 (S03 E04-6) and regularly quotes le Carré verbatim in its depiction of the defence of a ‘civilized’ way of life against the aggression of an alien, murderous ‘other’: the home and the land against an ‘adversary culture’ (Rubin 2012: 5), Western freedom against foreign unfreedom, democracy against totalitarianism.5 Far from being a misuse of le Carré, these binaries are also the structuring principles of his Cold-War work. Where newspapers are thrown away and yesterday’s news is eclipsed by current events, le Carré’s Cold-War novels are re-read, reissued in new editions, re-reviewed, adapted for television, re-adapted into films, hommaged, referenced and reassessed again. Within this, a critical consensus has, for over fifty years, declared three things: that le Carré’s Cold-War fiction depicts a moral equivalence between East and West; that it critiques the behaviour of a cynical and ruthless British state and that it offers a nostalgic depiction of Britain in decline. This is the surface and, thanks to the filter of reviews and scholarship, the familiar, as well as being clubbily close to the author’s own account (le Carré, in Dean 1974, 306; see: Barthes 1977). The spy novel is an intrinsically conspiratorial form and so critics should be no more content with turning over the topsoil than George Smiley would be. The critic should be both detective 5

E.g. Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) redeploys Oliver Lacon’s ‘We are pragmatists. We adapt. We are not keepers of some sacred flame’ (le Carré 1980: 54). Lacon’s words advocate a softer, détente policy to Smiley; Adal’s encourage Smiley-figure, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), to be more hawkish. The fact that Smiley advocates hawkishness in the original suggests less misuse than that Smiley is the perfect icon for Homeland’s ‘liberal hawk’ approach. In S06, E12, now in prison himself as a ‘mole’, Dar Adal quotes Haydon’s lines from the start of this Introduction, but bafflingly credits their source not as le Carré but as ‘Graham Greene’.

6

John le Carré and the Cold War

and analyst, grubbing like Marx’s mole, digging down deep, exposing the subterranean structures upon which the familiar ground rests. For if Fleming stays close to that surface (is it any surprise Hugo Drax turns out to be the villain of 1955’s Moonraker?), le Carré is the absolute master at showing that surfaces are misleading – that there is another surface below, and another below that. Indeed Smiley is himself compared to a mole in the very first novel in which he appears, Call for the Dead (le Carré 1964a: 13) – myopic, but compensating with heightened other senses – before le Carré developed darker plans for that subterranean creature. Equally, in terms of deceptive surfaces, we might think of the Russian dolls within dolls to which the communist mole, Haydon is compared in Tinker Tailor (le Carré 1999a: 381) and which formed the iconic credit sequence of the novel’s revered 1979 BBC adaptation. In both these images, the idea of the unconscious is insinuatingly implicit. However, le Carré’s use of the colloquial ‘subconscious’ rather than the Freudian ‘unconscious’ for Haydon’s words (le Carré 1999a: 379) is telling. Distrust of the state is not the same as a thoroughgoing ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur 1970: 32), which in both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud comprehends humans as governed by unconscious structures. This volume will analyse the novels’ ideological implications, and also employ a more immanent approach, burrowing beneath the novels’ surface to reveal ‘the unconscious of the text’ (Macherey 1978: 92), what Alan Sinfield (1992) calls ‘faultlines’: textual anomalies that reveal contradictions within consensus thinking – in what we might term the national ego.6

The enemy This volume explores, first, the presentation of the Cold-War enemy; an enemy that was not, as in previous wars, a country, but an ideology: communism. The critical consensus is that le Carré is even-handed in his treatment of East and West, presenting each side as morally equivalent. For example: ‘the agents for liberal humanism and Communism are interchangeable’ (Bold 1988: 17); or ‘in the war of ideologies between the Soviet Union and the West, le Carré is saying

6

Analogous to le Carré’s mole, an immanent critique ‘“enters its object,” so to speak, “boring from within.” Provisionally accepting the methodological presuppositions, substantive premises, and truth-claims of orthodoxy as its own, immanent critique tests the postulates of orthodoxy by the latter’s own standards of proof and accuracy’ (Harvey 1990: 5).

Introduction

7

“a plague on both your houses”’ (Rothberg 1987: 62, and see also: Grella 1967: 136; Ambrosetti 1973: 111; Noland 1980: 54; Brady 1985: 286; Lewis 1985: 77; Homberger 1986: 52; O’Neill 1987: 187; Wolfe 1987: 82; Bradbury 1990: 135; Beene 1991: 1; Symons 1992: 281–282; Halperin 1998: 220; Hoffman 2001: 75–76; Hindersmann 2005: 27; Hammond 2013: 94; Lassner 2016: 177). This volume will argue that le Carré offers a trenchant condemnation of communism, in a characterization almost as Manichaean as that of his proclaimed polar opposite, Fleming. Manichaeism is a division into a moral schema of good versus evil: in Western Cold-War discourse the Soviets occupied the evil role, with communism not just the enemy of Britain, America, or even the West, but the ‘enemy of humanity’ (Medovoi 2012: 164). US president Dwight Eisenhower’s Cold-War declaration that ‘the forces of good and evil are massed and armed … as rarely before in history’ (Field 2005: 4) is a clear example of this tendency, which was equally evident in British post-war foreign secretary Ernest Bevin’s rhetoric (Kynaston 2007: 134). Communism, in Western Cold-War discourse and in le Carré’s fiction, is defined not by a political philosophy or an economic system but by domestic repression, international expansionism and murderous brutality on both fronts. As US defence secretary Robert McNamara said in 1962: ‘world Communism[’s] political tactics are terror, extortion, and assassination’ (in Field 2005: 1). Alan Nadel draws an analogy between the West’s Cold-War geopolitical strategy of ‘containment’ of communism and ‘a rhetorical strategy that functioned to foreclose dissent, pre-empt dialogue and preclude contradiction’ in ordinary society (1995: 14). The British government pushed an identical Cold-War narrative to that of America, naturalizing Western liberalism as common-sensical and Eastern Bloc communism as pathological, with even ‘objective’ British newsreels taking ‘a stridently anti-Soviet tone’ (Shaw 2001: 32). It is therefore useful to suggest ways of moving beyond this Manichean framework, beginning with a definition of the Cold-War enemy that remains so hazy in both le Carré’s work and British ideology. Communism aims to create a non-capitalist economic system, a non-hierarchical social system and a non-imperialist political system. Despite its real-world distortions, communism is a political philosophy centred on the greater good, and should be regarded as a humanism (Bottomore 1985: 215; Alderson and Spencer 2017). Dedicated to the redistribution of wealth, communism was fundamentally opposed to capitalism, and, committed to the levelling of class, communism represented an existential threat to the capitalist and landed classes alike. Consequently the 1917 Russian Revolution struck fear into the political establishment of both the United States and Britain, who both sent forces

8

John le Carré and the Cold War

to invade the Soviet Union in 1918–20 (Hobsbawm 1995: 63; Willett 2003). The USSR was believed to possess an ideology of expansionism, ‘encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world’, as US ideologue, George Kennan put it in his Cold-War defining ‘Long Telegram’ (1947: 581). A Western historiographical Cold-War consensus was built upon this understanding (May 1989: 4). This consensus elides various valid questions. Was the USSR any more messianic about its ideology than was the United States (Reynolds 1994a: 134)? Can the Stalinization of Eastern Europe be seen as a reaction to the Marshall Plan (1947) and the Truman doctrine (advocating the forceful ‘containment’ of communism)? Was the Warsaw pact of Eastern Bloc states (1955) an act of communist expansion or a defensive response to the perceived threat of the West’s formation of NATO (1949)? Did communism intend to ‘bury’ the West as per Khrushchev’s famous 1956 threat (Walker 1994: 6) or the West to bury communism as existential threat to capitalism? Was the 1962 Cuban missile crisis an act of pure hostility by the Soviets, or a response to the United States’ rarely mentioned missiles in Turkey (Isaacs and Downing 2008: 185)? Were the geopolitical tensions in Berlin the result of communist intransigence or legitimate Soviet paranoia, having been bloodily invaded three times via the Eastern European corridor (Reynolds 1994a: 132)? Is there a useful distinction to be made between Stalinism and the post-Stalin Eastern Bloc? Does it, in fact, matter, what the ‘reality’ of the Eastern Bloc was: in terms of liberal ideology, was what it represented not the crucial thing? A rejection of capitalism and liberalism. Should we, in all this, follow the leftist ‘revisionist’ school of William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber, or the conservative, post-revisionist school of John Lewis Gaddis and Christopher Andrew, which largely reasserts the Cold-War consensus? Such questions will be asked throughout this volume: not to defend miserable, despotic Eastern Bloc regimes but to suggest how the West’s good/evil, friend/enemy, self/other binaries distorted its presentation of both West and East, and how these Manichean binaries were deployed to distort the aims of the British domestic left. ‘Othering’ is a useful concept for analysing depictions of communism in British culture. Deriving from Frantz Fanon’s account of imperialist denigration of the colonized (2004), ‘othering’ represents the alien as both inferior and threatening (‘them’) and in so doing, defines a superior, reassuring ‘us’ (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 158). The Cold-War British ‘self ’ was entirely compatible with imperial attitudes, effectively replacing the concept of ‘race’ with that of ‘ideology’ as the defining facet of the alien’s otherness (Medovoi 2012: 167). Representing the communist ‘other’ as an existential threat to the British way of life, five of

Introduction

9

these six novels feature a communist incursion into British institutions (Call for the Dead, Tinker Tailor, Honourable Schoolboy) or into British territory (The Looking Glass War, Smiley’s People). If Britain is only defending its peaceable citizenry against communist aggression and is thus, as le Carré’s spymaster Control claims, ‘defensive’ (1964b: 20), then West and East are hardly morally equivalent. Le Carré’s few depictions of the East are defined by drab landscapes, fortified, patrolled borders and a pervasive paranoia. Britain, meanwhile, is defined by lush, mythically depicted landscapes (Oxford, Cornwall, the Quantocks, the West End), where paranoia is a rational response to real external threats. As such le Carré hardly provides a balanced picture of East and West. Where, for example, in le Carré’s Cold-War novels do we find a good communist? Again, it is not to defend the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi to point out the manipulation involved in le Carré’s presentation of communist characters that, variously, do not ever admit to being communist (Elsa Fennan, Call for the Dead); commit cold-blooded murders of their allies (Dieter Frey, Call for the Dead); espouse Stalinism a decade after Stalin’s death (Jens Fiedler, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold); swap communism for liberalism (Liz Gold, The Spy); never proclaim a communist motive for a lifetime spying on their own country (Bill Haydon, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy); and never speak throughout an entire trilogy named after them (Karla, Tinker Tailor).7 Sympathetic as some of these characters are, they remain enemy, an alien ‘them’ as opposed to the familiar, national ‘us’. Liberalism is normative; communism aberrant. This study is intended as a contribution to what Alan Wald celebrated as the ‘new voices … arising as a critical counterweight to the liberal anticommunist and neo-conservative political writers who dominate a potent journalistic and academic industry about post-Second World War [history]’ (2014: 1017). This volume opens up an important new avenue of debate in understandings of the cultural history of anti-communism. Moreover, with few of these new voices on the Cold War being British – and rarely addressing British writing (e.g. Grausam 2011) – this volume provides a crucial insight into British anti-communism. In histories and Cold-War studies it can sometimes seem that the Cold War was primarily America’s concern (see: Northedge 1974; Frankel 1975). In this formulation, Britain, enfeebled by decolonization and war costs, was in need of buoyant America’s financial

7

Ideology is such a loud absence in A Perfect Spy (1986) that it is hardly accurate to call the novel’s East German double agent, Axel, a ‘communist’: as to whether he is ‘good’, that is an even more moot point.

10

John le Carré and the Cold War

and political support (revealed via the 1956 bungle of Suez). Britain was thus coerced into America’s anti-communist preoccupation in Korea, the Congo and so on, when its primary international concern was managing the Empire. Insofar as le Carré scholars engage with history, the end of Empire tends to take priority over the Cold War. This volume takes a different view: for while it is crucial to keep reminding Britons of the ugly realities of Empire,8 it is also important to see decolonization in Cold-War terms. Britain played a key role in creating the Cold War (Reynolds 1994b: 80–82), shaping its ideology via such concepts as ‘containment’, ‘hearts and minds’ (Brendon 2007: 456), arms reduction and ‘détente’ (Greenwood 2000: 4, 163, 195), while it was a prime mover in the formation of NATO (Hennessy 1996: 182). Indeed it was precisely the sudden collapse of the British Empire from 1947 that catalysed the Cold War (Reynolds 1994a: 133). Moreover, Suez can be understood in Cold-War rather than solely end of Empire terms. British fear of the Soviet Union using Egypt as a ‘bridge’ to carry communism into the Middle East (Greenwood 2000: 138) mirrors that other key event of 1956, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, as an attempt to checkmate the ideological enemy. Suez became paradigmatic: as the British Empire haemorrhaged colonies year by year, communist influence was never far from anticolonial movements, so British decolonization and ColdWar concerns were united from nascence (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 138). Britain’s imperialist responses to the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) and the Kenyan Mau-Mau uprising (1952–60) were, equally, anti-communist actions. They also showed British power at its most brutal and racist, meaning that British ColdWar propaganda was constantly compelled to ‘counter Russian allegations of British imperialism’ (Shaw 2001: 25; Schwartz 2009: 30). Indeed the creation of Britain’s propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD), was directly prompted by embarrassment over Soviet criticism of British colonial labour camps (Aldrich 2002: 132). As Britain also retained an informal Empire via economic interests in former colonies (Anderson 1964b: 18), British accusations of Soviet expansionism take on a more complex, indeed, ironic dimension. Decolonization underlies all of le Carré’s fiction but comes into particular focus in Tinker Tailor Solider Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. Cold-War issues were also central to domestic post-war Britain: a fact often overlooked in both historical accounts and literary criticism. During

8

Imperial pride is dying a very slow death: in January 2016, 44 per cent of respondents to a British poll still declared ‘pride’ in the British Empire, down from 59 per cent two years previously (Yougov 2014).

Introduction

11

the 1960s and 1970s, British governments found themselves at odds with increasingly vociferous demands from unions, workers and the Labour left. Anti-communism – which equated leftism with regimentation, repression, and a low value put upon human life – was a key means of keeping the left in line. Although it was intrinsic to this process, the IRD goes unmentioned in the post-war histories of Tony Judt (2010), Alan Sked and Chris Cook (1993) and David Kynaston (2007, 2013, 2014). While subliminal anti-socialist tropes occur in The Looking Glass War and Smiley’s People, the more explicit links between British leftism and Soviet communism which this study highlights in Call for the Dead, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, were a common theme of Cold-War British culture. As an MI5 agent at Oxford, Cornwell informed on student leftists (Sisman 2016: 126–135), an act of duplicity which is regarded rather matter-of-factly in press commentary. In this activity, and in his fiction, le Carré’s position on communism was considerably closer to that of the British state than is critically acknowledged or popularly understood.

The state To declare Britain to be in danger from communism was to suggest, in the same breath, a physical or ideological attack on the British government, on British territory and on the ordinary British citizenry. This volume will consider these targets separately as the British state (government) and the British nation (citizenry and territory). The state occupies an unusually central position in le Carré, his novels focusing on the day-to-day activities as well as the drama of his fictional MI5/MI6 amalgam, The Circus. The Circus’s name derives from its (fictional) location in London’s Cambridge Circus, but – conveying a teeming, performative spectacle – also connotes some irreverence towards the institution. The standard conception in criticism and the media is that le Carré’s work condemns the state – is anti-establishment. Typical amongst le Carré scholars are Abraham Rothberg’s evocation of ‘the decent individual against the corrupt Leviathan of the state’ (1987: 63), Wesley Britton’s account of ‘manipulative bureaucracies […] whose means were more important than the ends’ (2005: 128) or Sam Goodman’s reading of ‘the pointless and inconsequential sacrifice of individuals for the maintenance of an anachronistic state’ (2016: 33. See also: Grella 1967: 136; Gillespie 1970: 59; Rockwell 1971: 336; Ambrosetti 1973: 95; Neuse 1982:

12

John le Carré and the Cold War

310; Sauerberg 1984: 53; Lewis 1985: 150; Monaghan 1985: 141; Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 81; Garson 1987: 74; Wolfe 1987: 35; Dobler 1989: 52; Beene 1991: 51; Holtmann 1991: 127; Powell 1991: 44; Bennett 1998: 44; Cobbs 1998: 139; Aronoff 1999: passim; Hepburn 2005: 167; Hindersmann 2005: 26; Paulson 2007: 325; Hammond 2013: 87). ‘Establishment’ conveys both a monolithic state and a particular class fraction connected by social links forged at public school and Oxbridge. Given that this social grouping dominates the state (Miliband 1973), the meanings tend to merge.9 ‘Anti-establishment’ can thus mean hostility to either the state apparatus or the social grouping, or an uncertain vacillation between the two. Le Carré captures the social tones and traits of the British establishment with more finesse than Deighton’s depictions of the W.O.O.C. (P) top brass – but also with more affection.10 It is telling that le Carré credits Peter Cook’s Beyond the Fringe team with pioneering anti-establishment satire (1991: viii) in the same era as le Carré’s early novels (1960–64): Cook’s mockery of Harold Macmillan actually rendered that patriarch – cultured, eccentric, doddery – distinctly endearing. This misapprehension about le Carré occurs, arguably, because of a superficial understanding of class in British culture in terms of ‘accent, clothes, tastes, furnishing, food’, rather than as a structural relationship between the ruling class – the establishment – and everybody else (Williams 1974: 24). Le Carré’s work thus offers an effective satire of establishment manners without any challenge to establishment structures. A harsher critique, le Carré’s depiction of state complacency, ineptitude and expedience represents an undoubted advance on the jingoism of Ian Fleming, but a retreat from the ‘realist’ (and leftist) 1930s–1950s spy novels of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, with whom le Carré is often grouped. There is, therefore, nothing

9

‘It is no longer true [as in] the early nineteenth century, that the ruling class is the state. The state has outgrown the ruling class; the working and middle classes are not excluded from the state apparatus, but their access is progressively attenuated at each step up its hierarchy, while the operation of the “establishment” guarantees an exceptional degree of harmony between the personnel at the top of the state apparatus and the representatives of capital, as well as of the media and other organs of class power’ (Leys 1989: 294).

10

Cornwell’s class position is complex: son of lower middle-class, convicted conman, Ronnie Cornwell, whose range of associates ran from criminals like the Krays to aristocrats. Groomed via prep school, public school and Oxford, as ‘fake gentry’ (le Carré, in Gross 1980, 33), David Cornwell was deemed sufficiently ‘establishment’ to teach at Eton (Sisman 2016: 166–185) and be informally recruited for MI5 (184). It is tempting to see these lower-class origins as lurking in the patrician, establishment le Carré’s own unconscious, creating some of the tensions in his novels.

Introduction

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in le Carré’s 1960s and 1970s novels akin to Ambler’s depiction of the dark forces of ‘capitalist exploiters’ as the enemy (Ambler 2001: 7).11 Le Carré’s ColdWar novels express some considerable anxiety about state means (exploitation, duplicity, the cost in lives), anchored in the state’s ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order’ (Weber 1978: 54, emphasis in original). However, these anxieties are largely resolved through the actions and personality of George Smiley, so le Carré’s work ultimately affirms British state ends and is an implicit defence of liberal democracy and capitalism. Implicit because in le Carré British ideology is elided, denied, repressed: only communists have ideology – ‘Karla is a fanatic’ insists Smiley (le Carré 1999a: 224) – however unspecific and sinister the fictional representation of that ideology may be.12 Britain is thus ‘outside politics itself ’, a vessel of ‘common humanity’ (Fisher 2013: 72), defending its institutions and citizens against that politically saturated ‘enemy of humanity’, communism (Medovoi 2012: 164). Yet however much liberalism presents itself as non-ideological, it is the political philosophy of the capitalist system. Le Carré’s Cold-War protagonists serve the British state in every novel and, after a period of denial and decrial, restore the state and the status quo: the ruthless controllers, the greedy careerists and even the myopic bureaucrats – in whom most of le Carré’s novels’ anti-statist sentiment is invested – all go on as before. The establishment is re-established. Liberal ideology is upheld – by force if necessary. In le Carré, a veneration of tradition and history embodied in institutions – represented by the Circus – ultimately overwhelms the venalities and stupidities of the individuals who inhabit those institutions. This is demonstrated evocatively in the ‘story the janitors tell’ in Smiley’s People, concerning Smiley’s final leave-taking of the Circus he has served so loyally:

11

12

Both Greene’s and Ambler’s radicalism was limited by a negative view of human nature: Greene, as a Catholic, believed man was riven by Original Sin, while for Ambler, ‘civilisation was a word … you still lived in the jungle’ (Ambler 1966: 51). This can be seen as a broadly Hobbesian view of humanity. Seventeenth-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes declared that, unrestricted by a dominant state – the Leviathan – mankind’s innate selfishness and competitiveness would result in a ‘war of all against all’ (1987: 185). With these unruly tendencies endorsed and harnessed by capitalism, Hobbes was very much the philosopher of the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie; of a red-toothed liberalism. Inevitably, by Judgement on Deltchev (1951) Ambler’s politics had acceded to the Cold-War consensus. In some of le Carré’s subsequent work we see more of these capitalist forces, especially The Night Manager (1993). Indeed, le Carré’s increasing radicalism – witness The Constant Gardener (2001), Absolute Friends (2003) and le Carré (2003b) – resulted in his being branded a ‘leftie’ by Conservative Michael Gove in 2013. Notably le Carré denied this (2013c). Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology (1960) was part of a wave of Cold-War writing in which ‘ideology’ became a synonym for communism (and leftism), and which lionized capitalism as a universal panacea (May 1989: 4).

14

John le Carré and the Cold War He was observed to stand for a long time in the rear courtyard … staring at the building he was about to take his leave of, and at the light that was burning weakly in his former room, much as old men will look at the houses where they were born, the schools where they were educated, and the churches where they were married. (le Carré 1980: 253)

Such passages are the core of le Carré’s appeal, without parallel in either Deighton or Fleming, being possessed of an unique allusiveness and richness via a mythic register that can invest institutions with emotion – nostalgia, reverence, regret – that blends the personal and political. This endows Smiley with a symbolic, fabled resonance. Smiley is, in these moments, a tragic hero, a national avatar, the light burning weakly in the window symbolizing honourable service in an unappreciative world – along with a trace of British decline. There is also a hint of traditional class hierarchy as the janitors reverently watch the gentleman. This too is very le Carré – and very far from anti-establishment: there is barely a flicker of satire in this passage emblematizing the British way of life via a state institution. Examining the bureaucratic detail, the social nuance and the ambiguous affect of le Carré’s depiction of the state, this volume opens up new scholarly avenues for analysing literary presentations of the British state.

The nation It is not just the British state that is threatened by communism in Cold-War ideology, but the British nation. Nationalism particularly tends to prompt le Carré’s mythic register, a metaphorical tremble in the narrative voice. In le Carré, as in British culture, treachery is never to the state, to the government, but to the nation – to postmen, butchers, nuns, housewives, white cliffs, village greens, Big Ben and Britannia. In reality, espionage involves the betrayal of state secrets: information so abstract and arcane that few ordinary Britons could comprehend it, although such secrets’ preservation is always presented as ‘for the common good’ and ‘in the national interest’. Where the nation features at all in le Carré criticism, it is claimed that these novels constitute a chronicle of national decline, depicting an enfeebled Britain at the fraying end of Empire (Barzun 1965: 175; Grella 1967: 128; Hughes 1981: 275; East 1983: 174; Atkins 1984: 176; Homberger 1986: 18; Garson 1987: 79; Rothberg 1987: 50; Holtmann 1991: 94; Inglis 1992: 202; Thompson 1993: 154; Goodman 2016: 301–310). This present volume suggests rather that le Carré’s Cold-War novels evince a complex response to Empire – simultaneously

Introduction

15

denying its existence and mourning its loss. However, to focus on Empire is essentially to subsume the nation into the state – what was British about the British Empire? – meaning the ordinary citizenry disappears, just as it did during Cold-War news coverage (Mitter and Major 2004: 3). The citizens that the establishment are – notionally – securing in these novels, are, in Control’s description in The Spy, sleeping safely in their beds, thus out of sight, passive, inert (le Carré 1964b: 20). This volume will attempt to locate the citizenry and landscape in these novels – the commoners and the commons of Britain, the organic corpus of the nation. ‘Nation’ has long been a volatile concept: contested at the start of modernity between the radical ‘common treasury for all’ of Gerard Winstanley – land in common (in Manning 1992: 109) – and the conservative ‘Common Wealth’ of Thomas Hobbes – nation yoked to the state for the decreed ‘Common Good’ (Hobbes 1987: 226) enshrined in Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth (1653–8). For the industrial bourgeoisie, coming into power after the French Revolution’s (Losurdo 2014: 129–130) enshrinement of ‘popular sovereignty’ (Wallerstein 2011: 22–23), the new concept of the British ‘nation’ was a means of binding the restive industrial proletariat to them via patriotism (Gellner 1983; Anderson 2006). Consequently, ‘official nationalism’ (Anderson 2006: 85) was fostered by the state through mid-nineteenth-century ‘invented traditions’ like the cult of monarchy (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983: 108) or the British Empire as civilizing mission (Powell 2002: 105). Newspapers and books were crucial in this process of ‘imagining’ a nation (Anderson 2006; During 1995: 126), and early twentieth-century spy fiction often played on fears of physical invasion of the British landscape itself – Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands (1903); John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915); anything by William Le Queux – to galvanize the patriotism that ultimately prompted a citizenry to fight in the First World War. So while deployed discursively and emotively, nation is imbricated in physical blood and soil, even when that soil may be the corner of some foreign field. In the Cold War, with the threat more ideological than physical, the national home front became a vital propaganda terrain: a line of defence against feared communist incursion into a national way of life. If novels construct rather than simply embody or represent national culture (Larsen 2001: 170), then le Carré’s novels effectively define what constitutes Britain and why this citizenry, landscape and national character are superior to that enemy, communism, the ‘other’ that threatens the national ‘self ’. To ‘put over the positive results of British attitudes’ was a key instruction of the British government to Cold-War

16

John le Carré and the Cold War

propaganda department, the IRD (Aldrich 2002: 129). As such, a potent national ideology underlies these novels, anchored in the idealized concept of Britain as, in Edmund Burke’s words from 1775, ‘the nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates’ (in Losurdo 2014: 288). Defining involves boasting, circumscribing, setting limits, and so the nation is a contested terrain in le Carré. Just as the commons have been continually appropriated by, and the commoners constantly displaced by, the establishment, a similar process occurs in le Carré’s novels. While gesturing to more democratic landscapes (suburbia, outer London), elite central London, the home counties and Oxford are far more vividly depicted in le Carré. While these novels nod to ‘ordinary’ citizens – Alec Leamas and Liz Gold in The Spy; Fred Leiser in Looking Glass – they are often state functionaries, or are simply under-characterized. Consequently the novels’ working-class characters have not, Leamas excepted, had the cultural endurance or the narrative endurance (being killed at the end of their respective novels) of le Carré’s luminous, recurring, establishment characters. More often than not, the avatar of the national, the paradigm of Britishness in these novels is (Saint) George Smiley, a notably gentlemanly – and politically powerful – national everyman. Decent, compassionate, cultured, devilishly clever, perpetually modest and polite, Smiley is as reassuring a representative of Britain as James Bond, and – despite le Carré’s disavowals (1964a: 7; in Gross 1980, 33) – quite as establishment. Whatever else he may or may not be, Smiley is a member of the British ruling class. Examining class in these novels is far from being a distraction from the Cold War: operating in parallel, as an analogue to the international antagonism, the class struggle is the Cold War’s home front and is a key battleground in every novel discussed in this volume. This study thus opens up a productive area of debate about how nationalism in fiction is narrated in specifically Cold-War terms.

Cold-War consensus to critical consensus ‘Consensus’ is a Cold-War keyword. The years 1945–79 constitute the period of Britain’s post-war consensus, whereby, via an all-party commitment to Keynesian economics, capitalism was diluted by elements of social democracy, and the market’s every-man-for-himself harshness was tempered by the welfare state. As a swing to the left swept Europe post-war (Reynolds 1994a: 126–127), this managed consensus was effectively an anti-communist front, stealing communist thunder to ensure capitalism’s survival (Hobsbawm 1994: 84), while

Introduction

17

concurrently espousing a consistent hostility to the Soviet system. Thus this volume follows Hammond (2013: 3) in deploying the term ‘Cold-War Britain’ – and from that, ‘Cold-War consensus’ – rather than the conventional ‘post-war Britain’ and ‘post-war consensus’. Le Carré’s work is both an exemplification of, and a channel for, a Cold-War consensus so pervasive it was often not perceived as an ideology but simply as common sense. Le Carré’s novels are written in ‘free indirect discourse’ (Cohn 2000: 8) – shifting occasionally into omniscient narration but largely closely focalized by one character or another. While this makes it harder to pin down the narrative’s bias, this is not the same as it being ‘neutral’: the narrative is perennially casting this or that light on events – here a shading, there a framing, here a slant, there an area kept dark. The critical consensus on le Carré, like the Cold-War consensus within which it developed, posits a liminal space beyond politics, whether that common ground be Britain, liberalism or literature. Hammond cites a series of Cold-War-era fiction studies that ignored the Cold War altogether (2013: 14). Similarly, le Carré scholars often treat the Cold War as background to what Greene called ‘the more important private life’ of the fictional characters (1980: 227). ‘It would be misleading to call [le Carré] a political novelist’, declares Eric Homberger (1986: 14); Peter Wolfe finds in le Carré a ‘clash between individuals not ideologies’ (1987: 59), while, despite Cold-War studies embracing everything from sci-fi to J. D. Salinger, Sarah Martin still advocates studying le Carré ‘without the Cold War trappings’ (2011: 48). Literary criticism is no more neutral than literature itself. Such attitudes are the legacy of Leavisism, for F. R. Leavis is still the dominant figure in British literary criticism. Presenting himself as a neutral, objective interpreter, Leavis relied on ‘common sense’, consensus understandings of ‘life’ to analyse literature. Nadel sees ‘common sense’ as a key tool in Cold-War containment culture, manufacturing consent (1995: 297), because as Gramsci suggested, common sense represents the ‘orthodox convictions … conforming socially to the general interests of the ruling classes’ (1971: 340). So when a le Carré scholar claims that ‘the Berlin Wall [was] built to quarantine West Berlin and seal desperate East Germans from freedom’ (Beene 1991: 49) she simply affirms Western anti-communist propaganda portraying the East as normatively repressive and the West as synonymous with freedom, such as Ernest Bevin’s use of ‘freedom-loving nations’ (in Aldrich 2002: 131). Critical neutrality here becomes an assertion of the normative, the liberal Cold-War consensus. Indeed, in a somewhat hysterical incorporation of Western Cold-War ideology, some le Carré scholars refer to communism as ‘evil’ (Ambrosetti 1973: 103; Barley 1986: 6;

18

John le Carré and the Cold War

Rutherford 1987: 14; Wolfe 1987: 19; Dobler 1989: 363; Cobbs 1998: 36). Even so, scholars often affirm Western political neutrality: ‘liberal democratic life offers no utopian goals [or] absolute ideologies’ (Dobel 1988: 200). Aronoff asserts such Western neutrality in his approval of le Carré’s ‘revulsion against doctrines and ideologies [that] reflects his underlying liberal temperament’ (1999: 4; Hammond 2013: 94). Presumptions of Western neutrality and critical objectivity unite here: both are a fantasy (Jameson 1983: 43). This volume makes no bones about its political stance and uses cultural materialist analysis to interrogate the liberal ideology of le Carré’s Cold-War fiction and provide a historicized understanding of these novels. Alan Sinfield suggests that ‘literature contribute[s] to the processes whereby cultural norms come to seem plausible, even necessary’ (2004: xxxiv). George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is a notable example of how literature helps create consensus: during the Cold War it helped frame Western anti-communist propaganda (Caute 2016: 99) but since the collapse of communism, ‘Read your Orwell’ has become shorthand for ‘left-wing ideas aren’t practicable’ (see: Webb 2013). A work of fiction has, via critical consensus, become a paradigmatic political truth: leftism results in Stalinism. Stuart Hall claims books ‘intersect with the deep semantic codes of a culture and take on additional, more active ideological dimensions’ (Hall 1980: 133). Fiction thus operates as a form of soft power – as recognized by the CIA’s bankrolling of the arts, notably the British literary magazine Encounter (Stonor Saunders 2000), via the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The IRD’s cultural patronage meanwhile embraced Arthur Koestler, Malcolm Muggeridge (Wilford 1998) – and George Orwell, the IRD heavily promoting his Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 worldwide (Aldrich 2002: 132). Literature, le Carré included, is rarely straight propaganda, however. Authors are not simply ‘allies and instruments of larger, structurally and politically rooted ideological forces’ (Wald 2014: 1023). This volume proposes something more subtle and subliminal than a mechanical ‘reflection’ of dominant Western attitudes (Lukacs 1971: xxxvii) in le Carré’s novels. Louis Althusser showed that ideology is so ingrained in society that it becomes part of citizens’ consciousness, their psychology, their identity, via ‘interpellation’ (2001: 109). The present volume, following Sinfield, Jameson, Williams and Gramsci (1985: 93), prioritizes a subclause in Marx, where he refers to ‘the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out’ (Marx 1992: 426, emphasis added). The ‘conflict’ here is the class struggle, and ideology in this framing is dialectical: ideology becomes as much a field of contestation as a force of coercion. Underneath the

Introduction

19

surface – that is, in ideology and in the unconscious – is where contradictions can coexist, where the most interesting ideas grub, tunnel and occasionally erupt. So while this volume argues that le Carré’s work projects a consensus liberal ideology – the national superego – literary analysis reveals that it also unconsciously projects that ideology’s contradictions, its anxieties, its weak spots, even occasionally its rebuttal. The following six chapters examine six le Carré novels of the Cold War, in chronological order, three apiece from the 1960s and 1970s, all of which feature the iconic character of George Smiley. Each of these novels is analysed via the themes of the enemy, the British state and the British nation. Each chapter will begin with a survey of reviews and scholarship, because these have served to ‘fix’ the meanings of these novels in the popular and scholarly imaginations. The historical period of this volume, 1961–79, covers a discrete period of le Carré’s work and a defined era of the Cold War, from the Berlin crisis to the end of détente, and throughout, these novels will be reinterpreted in the light of these historical events. The period also traces a discrete era of Cold-War Britain, with the Keynesian post-war consensus abandoned by prime minister, Margaret Thatcher from 1979. This time-frame also represents a specific period of the hegemony of British spy fiction over American in sales and profile: from the 1980s – starting with Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October (1984) – spy fiction caught up with geopolitical reality. Le Carré’s 1960s and 70s work is thus a vivid, resonant and hugely entertaining depiction of a 20year stretch of the 44-year Cold War: an unreliable guide to that period of history perhaps, but a reliable guide to British Cold-War consensus ideology. Chapter 1 reads Call for the Dead (1961) as a shrill warning of the dangers of communist infiltration in the wake of historical British spy scandals. The communist enemy is presented as an existential threat to British verities and the novel warns of the culpable naiveté of leftists and anti-fascists. The infiltration of communism into the British state is associated with post-war bureaucratization, while an older, ‘amateur’ establishment sensibility is valorized. Through its emphasis on the domestic, Call for the Dead declares that communism presents a danger not just to the state but to the nation, to ordinary life, while presenting an establishment vision of the Britain that is being defended. Chapter 2 shows how The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) deploys the Berlin Wall as a symbol of communist aggression and ideology. Presenting the West as ‘defensive’, while expressing some anxiety about British methods, The Spy still ultimately endorses a stringent containment of communism. It also offers a highly partisan picture of life in East Germany. A depiction of Britain’s early 1960s social democratization via new, ‘classless’ hero,

20

John le Carré and the Cold War

Leamas, is highly equivocal, with the novel throughout reasserting the social and economic status quo as being as solid and immovable as the Berlin Wall. Chapter 3 explores how The Looking Glass War (1965) apparently satirizes the inefficient, outmoded establishment’s endurance within the British state, as exemplified by the Department. But the novel then undermines this satire via the positive presentation of a rival establishment synecdoche, the Circus. Similarly, the novel sets up a picture of an economically declining British nation, localizing this decline in working-class areas of London, while depicting establishment Oxford as possessing an enduring potency. Finally, the novel appears to question the reality of the communist threat, while, in depictions of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) it reasserts that communism is politically toxic. Chapter 4 reads Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) as fictional redress for the humiliations the Cambridge spies brought upon the nation. This is enacted in the novel through the successful search for a communist ‘mole’ inside the British state. Set in prep schools and gentlemen’s clubs, an establishment vision of Britain saturates the book. Although the state’s penetration by communism is blamed on bureaucratization, Smiley both relies on the state’s monopoly of violence to ensnare the mole and ascends the state’s bureaucratic hierarchy at the novel’s end. Finally, Karla – Smiley’s nemesis in three 1970s novels – is a particularly Manichean portrait of communism, while the communist ‘mole’, Bill Haydon, is presented, paradoxically, as non-ideological. Set in Southeast Asia in the dying days of the Vietnam War, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) is read, in Chapter 5, in two ways: as a postimperialist and as an anti-communist text. With European colonies imploding in the plot’s background, the chapter first focuses on the novel’s treatment of British imperial decline, which it analyses as being alternately denied and mourned. In this, the chapter focuses on two fractious relationships between ostensible allies: that between controller Smiley and agent Jerry Westerby and that between Britain and its Cold-War ally, America. The chapter then demonstrates how colonial and anti-communist concerns, strategies and language are effectively fused in the novel and thus in broader British Cold-War culture. Chapter 6 reveals how Smiley’s People (1979) depicts Soviet communism as repressive, ruthless and murderous, via its portrayal of Soviet spymaster, Karla. The British state – the intelligence bureaucracy; the Labour government – is presented as culpably complacent about communism, as expressed through the policy of détente. In an abrupt reversal, Karla’s murders are revealed to be attempts to protect his disturbed daughter: information Smiley deploys to force Karla into defecting to the West. So while Smiley’s People complicates its dismissal of détente and

Introduction

21

its negative depiction of Soviet communism by humanizing communism’s representative, Karla, and apparently de-humanizing the liberal Smiley, ultimately the old polarities between East and West are reasserted. This study will show that le Carré’s 1960s and 1970s work upholds the Cold-War consensus: as a defence of liberal democracy over communism, but, in tandem, as a valorization of the establishment over the social classes beneath it – an affirmation, ultimately, of the social, economic and political status quo. This volume will function as spy, detective and analyst combined, probing the texts for what is said but also what is significantly left unsaid – dogs that don’t bark.13 This study will thus be alert for stylistic tics, imagistic and linguistic repetitions; for intertextual and psychological resonances; for flaws, contradictions and inconsistencies. Because, while brashly proclaiming its own virtue, its perfect ‘self ’ against the toxic communist ‘other’ in the novels considered here, liberalism, like the individual, like the national ego – indeed like Cold-War Berlin – is split, divided within itself. It is Smiley’s role in these novels to embody that split in the British national ego, to attempt to resolve Cold-War liberalism’s contradictions. Such an impossible operation is beyond even Smiley’s storied abilities – exposer of plots, solver of mysteries, cracker of cases – and often results instead in exposing liberal society’s contrary impulses. Mirroring the class conflict, these impulses are sometimes more radical and sometimes more reactionary than the liberal Cold-War consensus. It is the task of this study both to expose these impulses and to reveal their repression in the 1960s and 1970s work of John le Carré: novels that constitute some of the most widely disseminated, the most broadly influential and indeed the best literary products of the Cold War. ***

13

The reference is to Conan Doyle, ‘Silver Blaze’, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), wherein the clue of the dog’s silence provides the solution to the entire mystery (Doyle 1950: 32).

1

‘Murderers and Spies’: The Communist Threat and Call for the Dead

Call for the Dead sounded the alarm that the Cold-War enemy presented an active threat to Britain. This threat came not from invasion but more covertly, from infiltration of Britain’s institutions, and more insidiously, the infection of its everyday life. The novel’s key clue – the domestic detail of the early morning call – emphasized both the urgency, the alarm of the communist threat and what everyday, familiar forms that threat might take. This new, elusive enemy was revealed here to be burrowed into the state’s most humdrum institutions, nurtured in the nation’s conventional suburbia and even lurking among the victims of the last war. Published in June 1961, Call for the Dead was clearly prompted by the historical spate of communist penetration scandals that shook Cold-War Britain. Alan Nunn May’s and Klaus Fuchs’s theft of nuclear secrets in the late 1940s and the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean from MI5 in 1951 are all cited in the novel (le Carré 1964a: 12, 76), while the trial of MI6 agent, George Blake, was front-page news as Call for the Dead was published (e.g. Daily Express 1961, 1). The novel’s publication was also concurrent with the exposure (January 1961) and trial (March–June 1961) of the Portland spy ring, within which the Krogers, whose Ruislip house was packed with espionage equipment, were, like the Fennans in Call for the Dead, both suburban and Jewish. Dowdy and downbeat as it was, Call for the Dead was also quite electrically contemporary. Very little of any of these issues features in critical commentary. Call for the Dead’s scant reviews hailed its ‘realism’ as against Fleming’s spy romances: Francis Iles called it ‘fresh and exciting ... with what seems to be a wholly authentic background’, while Maurice Richardson called it ‘highly intelligent, realistic’, noting Call for the Dead’s unusual focus on the bureaucratic institution: ‘a secret service now departmentalized and hyper-obsessionally

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red-taped’.1 Notably, ‘realism’ was also used by Cold-War liberals like Lionel Trilling as a synonym for anti-communism, following on from George Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ (Schaub 1991: 5–13). Among subsequent scholars, Barley ignores the novel, but most regard Call for the Dead as a useful introduction to le Carré’s Cold-War themes – the state as an institution (Panek 1981: 248; Homberger 1986: 42), often negatively portrayed (Ambrosetti 1973: 101; Homberger 1986: 46; Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 159; Rothberg 1987: 53; Dobel 1988: 201; Beene 1991: 31; Cobbs 1998: 35; Lassner 2016: 172), although scholars take little note of the nation. Regarding the Cold-War enemy, some scholars read the novel as depicting moral equivalence between East and West (Garson 1987: 77–78; Bradbury 1990: 138; Beene 1991: 34; Buzard 1991: 166), while several see the novel as positively pro-communist (Lewis 1985: 27; Rothberg 1987: 54; Beene 1991: 36). Despite its slimness, Call for the Dead provides an effective and entertaining introduction to le Carré’s Cold War fiction’s preoccupations and motifs, not least for introducing the character of George Smiley. This chapter will first examine Call for the Dead’s representation of three communist characters, analysing what these characterizations suggest about the Cold-War enemy’s intentions and ideology. Secondly, it will explore the presentation of the British state, focusing on the clash between bureaucratic careerist Maston and amateur individualist Smiley, assessing the distinctive anti-statist current established here that characterizes le Carré’s Cold-War fiction. Thirdly, the chapter will consider the ordinary ‘way of life’ upon which the novel’s political events intrude so violently, focused on sedate suburbia, and ask what is thereby being conveyed about the British nation? Finally, the chapter brings all three themes together in a consideration of the novel’s climactic Cold-War confrontation on the banks of the Thames. ***

‘Mass philosophy’: The Cold-War enemy While Britain never pursued an anti-communism on the scale of McCarthyism, this should not sustain Britain’s self-image as a beacon of civilized tolerance and 1

Francis Iles, ‘Criminal Records’, Guardian 15 July 1961, 5; Maurice Richardson, ‘March Past of the Spies’, Observer 18 June 1961, 25. Also commending the novel’s ‘realism’: Violet Grant, ‘Scenes of the Crime’, Daily Telegraph, 16 June 1961, 18; Percy Hoskins, Times Literary Supplement, 23 June 1961, 392; Nicholas Blake, Sunday Telegraph, 30 July 1961, 15.

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political pluralism. Anti-communism was inscribed deep in Cold-War British culture, not just among Conservatives but across the right wing of the Labour Party, from Bevin to Gaitskell to Healey. Communists were banned from public service by a Labour government in 1947, purged from the civil service in the 1950s and spied on by the secret service in universities, trade unions, the peace movement and the British Communist Party throughout the Cold War (Andrew 2009: 410). As a member of MI5 (British counterintelligence and security), le Carré was involved in at least one break-in to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s headquarters (Sisman 2016: 203). Call for the Dead asserts in what ordinary, friendly or sympathetic guises communism might appear: student organizers, a likeable chap at the office, a victim of Nazism, a suburban housewife, a German anti-Nazi, a comrade from the war. Strikingly, in all three cases, communism as an ideology – a political philosophy; a legislative programme – is mediated, kept at an innoculating distance: muffled, silenced or simply denied. With characterization in fiction often creating a faultline that reveals dominant political attitudes (Sinfield 1992: 54), Call for the Dead’s three primary communist characters will now be considered in turn.

‘The Eastern sun’: Characterizing communism Call for the Dead’s plot is kick-started by an anonymous letter accusing Foreign Office official, Samuel Fennan of having been a communist. When Smiley conducts a vetting interview with Fennan, Fennan is presented vividly as personable and attractive (le Carré 1964a: 18); he and Smiley stroll on Hampstead Heath like weekending friends and have a convivial espresso together (coffee bars since the 1950s being a talisman of British cultural modernity). Fennan readily admits to his student communism and assures Smiley he has subsequently recanted. In relating Fennan’s student radicalism, the narrative’s language is neutral, noting how widespread leftism was in the 1930s: ‘the party was respectable then: the failure of the Labour Party and the Coalition Government had convinced many intellectuals that the Communists alone could provide an effective alternative to Capitalism and Fascism’ ( le Carré 1964a : 68). A key context here is the Popular Front, whereby from 1934 to 1939 socialists and social democrats allied with communists against fascism (even briefly forming governments in France and Spain). With the Popular Front later accused of being a Stalinist front – often inaccurately ( Miller 2013 : xi) 2 –

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the text’s subsequent shift in tone suggests le Carré’s shift from Greene and Ambler’s Popular Front realism into that aforementioned liberal anticommunist ‘realism’ ( Schaub 1991 : 5–13). Communism becomes something Fennan ‘had outgrown and must leave at Oxford with the days of his youth’ (le Carré 1964a: 70). Fennan thus follows the common Cold-War retreat from 1930s leftism to liberalism (Schaub 1991: 3–24), itself often presented as a journey from immaturity to adulthood. This was a tendency exemplified in Britain by the essay collection, The God That Failed (1949), in which former communists volunteered recantations of their own youthful naiveté. Not so Fennan’s communist colleagues, however, as the student leftists’ encounter with a march by striking Welsh miners shows. The communists ‘were not men, but children, who dreamed of ... one world tomorrow, who ... with a child’s pleasure bought beer for starving elves from Wales; children who had no power to resist the Eastern sun, and obediently turned their tousled heads towards it’ (le Carré 1964a: 70). Gradually, in the text, communism bleeds into fascism. With fascism now anathematized in the Western consensus, its equation with communism was common in Cold-War discourse (Aldrich 2002: 129) and, following Trotsky, Arendt and Orwell (1970a: 161–164), this became known as ‘totalitarianism’. Such lines as ‘a philosophy which exacted total sacrifice to an unassailable formula’ (le Carré 1964a: 70) are clear invocations of communism as totalitarianism. Yet what communist ideology’s ends are remains opaque in Fennan’s ‘formula’ – a compassion for, even eroticization of, poverty is the most Call for the Dead provides. The same is true in totalitarianism theory, with communism posited simply, emotively but vaguely as ‘the destruction of humanity’ (Arendt 1994: viii): as negative in its ends as fascism. Communism, as an ideology, therefore, as an ideal, can be seen to be repressed – in Cold-War culture, in Call for the Dead – and thus silenced. On the one hand, Fennan’s distant, mediated, muffled voice – the half-truths he speaks; his words’ filtering via Smiley’s liberal consciousness; the letter he writes that Smiley only receives after his death (le Carré 1964a: 43) – can be regarded as the unheeded call of communism’s victims. The ‘dead’ of the title thus evoke the millions murdered in Stalin’s purges. The first Western history of this episode, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, would not be published until 1968. On the other hand, Fennan’s youthful leftist 2

Historian – and SIS associate of Philby’s – Hugh Trevor Roper castigates ‘a common liberal illusion of that time’, warning that communism was ‘a religion ... which can still totally paralyse the mental and moral faculties of its converts’ (1968: 6).

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associations lead, cumulatively, to a conspiracy against the British state and a series of murders in the communist cause – not least Fennan’s own, making his naiveté ultimately, ironically, culpable. Where there is leftist smoke, suggests the novel, there is Stalinist fire. That fire, however, cannot be given the oxygen of publicity: communist ideology cannot be heard. Call for the Dead’s second communist character, Elsa Fennan, is ultimately revealed to be the novel’s communist spy, but so complex is the plot that this information is only pieced together retrospectively. Her ideological position can only be comprehended by being assembled from gaps – what she does not say (a very Freudian conundrum) and what she attributes to her husband. Mrs Fennan is introduced as a repository of sympathy – a widow to the apparently murdered Samuel Fennan, but before that a Jewish refugee, a survivor of the Nazi camps (le Carré 1964a: 21). In her ‘confession’ to Smiley part way through the novel, when Smiley has only half-solved the case, Mrs Fennan attributes what can only be her own communist views to her dead husband, but such is her eloquence that her pretended anti-communism is more convincing than her never-articulated actual communism. Mrs Fennan claims that communism is a revival of the fascism she suffered first-hand in the camps, which merge with the gulags in her speeches. She says communism means ‘the same guns, the same children dying in the streets ... Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour’ (105). Ideological means merge with ends here – dream becomes blood. The dream is economic planning and social control, nullified for Mrs Fennan by the negative, Hobbesian, ‘human nature’ she witnessed under the systematic brutality of Nazism: ‘I have seen what human beings are. How could I believe in a formula for human beings?’ (101). Communism’s sinister ‘formulas’ bleed, in the passage, not just into Nazism but into socialism: the planning of Clement Attlee’s post-war government, whose interventionist policies Winston Churchill linked with Nazism (Ward 2004: 107) in a common post-war trope (Matless 2016: 268–270). Indicating how effectively Mrs Fennan’s performed – indeed melodramatic – anti-communism eclipses her actual communism is Peter Guillam’s question, ‘Was she a communist?’, as Smiley wraps up the case (le Carré 1964a: 156). Such a question should not be necessary in a novel sounding a warning about communist infiltration of the British state. This is a faultline: a messy working over of unruly material which results, superficially, from Mrs Fennan’s projection of her communism onto her husband. More structurally this confusion results from the novel’s repression of the communist voice, its silencing of communist ideology in the case of all three of its ‘communist’ characters. Smiley’s summation of Mrs

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Fennan’s actions – ‘I don’t think she liked labels. I think she wanted to help build one society which could live without conflict’ (156) – is effectively a justification of this muting of the communist voice. Mrs Fennan, in Smiley’s formulation, was not an ideological communist, but was motivated by her experience of the camps (101), by fear of a resurgent Germany (106), thus a Popular Front-ist, collaborating with communism only to combat fascism, thereby making ‘bad choices for good reasons’ (Wald 2014: 1017). In all this we can see that Call for the Dead is ‘haunted by the Holocaust’ (Lassner 2016: 169). The emphasis on the camps creates a sympathy for Mrs Fennan which – alongside the narrative’s sheer complexity – occludes her complicity in the political murders of her own husband and of scrap-merchant Adam Scarr, and thus represses her ideological commitment. Yet Mrs Fennan’s support for Soviet communism survives the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (the Soviet-Nazi Germany alliance from 1939 to 1941, which caused many to leave the Party) and Stalin’s Jewish pogroms of the 1950s, while the indifference Mrs Fennan attributes to her husband regarding the Soviet invasion of Hungary (cause of a further Party exodus) is – convolutedly – her own indifference (le Carré 1964a: 105). All of which not only suggests a deeper ideological commitment to the communist cause than either Lassner (2016: 168–194) or Smiley allow: it actually positions Elsa Fennan as a hard-line Stalinist. As a murderous conspirator for the communist cause, Mrs Fennan’s claim upon liberal sympathies should be undermined: the ideological enemy lurks even among the victimized of history. The fact that a third communist spy, Dieter Frey, is another Jewish survivor of the camps, on one hand grounds Call for the Dead in Cold-War history, given Jewish Cold-War spies the Krogers and George Blake. On the other hand, it reasserts the ‘Jewish quotidian’, whereby Jews are, by ‘nature’, ‘suspected of dual, sometimes conflicting loyalties’ (Lassner 2016: 73). This was certainly the case in Cold-War Britain (Kushner 1989: 133; Webster 1998: 41; Kynaston 2007: 270), especially within the intelligence services. Nevertheless the narrative’s surface – immediate – impact is the negation of communism. In this ‘conscious’ sense, Mrs Fennan is barely a communist character at all: she articulates only anti-communism – emotionally, eloquently – with all the moral authority of a concentration camp survivor who sees fascism occurring again through communism. It is only deep in the text’s unconscious, therefore, that Mrs Fennan is, in fact, an enemy of Britain. Dieter Frey, the mastermind of Call for the Dead ’s communist plot is a less ambiguous characterization of communism. Frey is introduced into the narrative as a friend – to Smiley; to Britain, as Smiley’s resistance colleague

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in Nazi Germany (le Carré 1964a: 95–7). Frey is highly attractive (92); he is also a victim – disabled, Jewish, incarcerated by the Nazis (94). Yet Frey’s characterization reaffirms the more covert suggestion regarding Mrs Fennan, that the Second World War’s victims were not its victors’ natural allies in the Cold War. Where Mrs Fennan never entirely becomes ‘other’, however, Frey, for all his putatively sympathetic characteristics, is little else. Frey is introduced late into the narrative, already associated with the present communist plot rather than his past friendship with Smiley. However, Frey’s ‘extremity’ dominates Smiley’s sketched account of this friendship, meaning there is an undertow of Frey as suspect, ‘other’, from his first appearance. Frey quotes Kleist – a Romantic who became a fascist icon – and Goethe (96) – whose Faust famously sold his soul to the devil. With little to suggest affection, companionship, the Smiley/ Frey friendship narrative only serves to foreshadow what is to come – political extremity; murder – and to sound the alarm that the Cold-War enemy can present itself in attractive, sympathetic, friendly forms. By the time of his dramatic first physical appearance – aptly in a theatre – Frey is pure enemy and is being described in ever more heightened terms: ‘He was the same improbable romantic with the magic of a charlatan: the same unforgettable figure which had struggled over the ruins of Germany, implacable of purpose, satanic in fulfilment, dark and swift like the Gods of the North’ (131). This is Wagnerian in pitch, Wagner’s Romanticism often being perceived as protofascist and approved/appropriated by the Nazis (Zizek 2005: ix). So, far from rendering him a victim, Frey’s disability, his limp, presents him as Byronically potent (le Carré 1964a: 92), even, in this theatrical context, melodramatically monstrous like Shakespeare’s Richard III. The text, by the end, has shifted towards symbolic rather than personal description: Frey is ‘larger than life, undiminished by the moderating influence of experience. He was a man who thought and acted in absolute terms, without patience or compromise’ (131). Experience as moderating factor to an unruly – Hobbesian – human nature was a key facet of Cold-War liberalism (Schaub 1991: 7, 12). Anti-communist liberals spoke of a ‘dangerously romantic, optimistic, utopian view of human nature’ (Dewey, in Schaub 1991: 12). The description of Frey also recalls Kennan’s account of communists being ‘unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise’ (in Medovoi 2012: 168). ‘Absolutism’, meanwhile, is how le Carré will refer to communism throughout these novels. Where most scholars simply recycle the term ‘absolutist’ (Sauerberg 1984: 58; Monaghan 1985: 62; Rothberg 1987: 53; Wolfe 1987: 82–83; Dobel 1988: 198; Bradbury 1990: 131; Aronoff 1999: 93; Beene 1991: 54; Buzard 1991: 165), it deserves some exploration.

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‘Absolutism’s origins lie in classical liberalism’s rejection of state ‘tyranny’ (Losurdo 2014: 2), but was repurposed for the Cold War in Clement Attlee’s 1948 antiSoviet speech invoking ‘the absolutists who suppress opposition masquerade under the name of upholders of liberty’ (in Schwartz 2009: 42).3 ‘Absolutism’ links the Soviet Union to Tsarist absolutist monarchy in despotic brutality, but links it also to Nazi Germany – the consensus anathema – via totalitarianism.4 We see this in Smiley’s observation that ‘[Dieter] cared nothing for human life: dreamed only of armies of faceless men bound by their lowest common denominators; he wanted to shape the world as if it were a tree, cutting off what did not fit the regular image’ (le Carré 1964a: 138). Yet how does Smiley know this about Frey? With Frey only speaking two words (140) and one reported sentence (93) throughout the book, his ideology is, again, repressed and we have to take the silent, barely characterized Frey purely at Smiley’s word. And, as the overwrought language suggests, there is nothing objective about Smiley’s word when it comes to Frey. ‘Armies of faceless men’ (138) channels the Western ideological depiction of communist society as militarized, anti-human, and committed to aggressive expansionism (Shaw 2001: 32). But this is only Smiley’s subjective view of the effects of communist ideology, rather than its content and serves therefore to pathologize communism. Articulating an established anti-communist trope (Bennett 2015: 5), Smiley continues: ‘Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for ... the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favour of the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?’ (le Carré 1964a: 138). ‘Mass’ here is ‘a new word for mob’ (Williams 1993: 198), a framing of the working class as threatening, frightening (Williams 1993: 300) – again a characteristic liberal position from the nineteenth century to the Cold War (see: Mill, in Losurdo 2014: 199; Manning 1976: 18–19). From Smiley’s elitist perspective, the ruling class are individuals; the working class is always a crowd – communism and fascism indistinguishable through their populism, tainting post-war socialist collectivization as mob rule.

3

4

Despite being a socialist, Attlee was entirely of the gentlemanly establishment (Hennessy 2010: 101) and while the other most senior figure in the post-war Labour government, Ernest Bevin, was decidedly not, Bevin was equally as ardent a defender of the Empire (Kynaston 2007: 433). In popular culture, fascist and communist tropes often merged in a generalized totalitarianism, characterized by Hugo Drax in Fleming’s Moonraker (1955) and the titular Dr. No (1958); the Graubachs in James McGovern’s Fraulein (1957); the Fearless Leader in US cartoon, Rocky & Bullwinkle (1959–1964) and the titular scientist in Dr Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964).

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Smiley later declares that the desire for a ‘socialist world’ caused Frey to be ‘one of those world-builders who seem to do nothing but destroy’ (le Carré 1964a: 156). The destruction in Call for the Dead is murder, visceral manifestation of the communist threat through the deaths of Samuel Fennan, Adam Scarr and Elsa Fennan – all either commissioned or committed by Frey. Many scholars comment on the generic conflation of the murder mystery and the espionage novel in Call for the Dead as if this were a purely formal matter (e.g. Lewis 1985: 128; Hayes 1990: 115; Goodman 2016: 115). The merger of murder and espionage is ideological, however, brutality and conspiracy being depicted not just as communism’s modus operandi, but effectively its meaning. Reduced to ‘ends’, what all this Machiavellian scheming and murder is supposed to achieve is elided: where Frey’s communist ideology should be there is instead ‘a determinate absence ... an eloquent silence’ (Macherey 1978: 79): something repressed – a dog that didn’t bark. Mute, barely alive, then dead, Frey’s characterization is a casualty of figuring communism as evil. Frey is, of course, guaranteed by genre conventions to be evil. So pervasive is the mythic register – indeed overwriting – in the presentation of Frey that he comes to resemble a folktale villain — ‘a dragon, a devil’ (Propp 1968: 27) — writhing up out of the mist by the ancient river. The romance of St George and the dragon is particularly apposite here: Saint George Smiley of England slaying the dragon, Frey, the devil, ‘Satanic in fulfilment’ (le Carré 1964a:131). But where le Carré’s many genre-focused critics, under the influence of Northrop Frye (e.g. Merry 1977, Palmer 1978, Denning 1987, Most 1987, Hepburn 2005) make genre the endpoint of analysis, fiction becomes simply about other fiction, not the historical events which produce it. Genre motifs are themselves politicized: ‘the “other” ... is not ... feared because he is evil; rather he is evil because he is Other, alien, different ... unfamiliar’ ( Jameson 1983: 101). The evil ‘other’ is itself a product of a particular historical moment and political imperative, not an organic, natural category. The West but specifically Britain, here, created the diabolical communist as its ideological ‘other’ during the Cold War. In so doing Britain also affirmed, in dialectic, its own benign, perfect, non-ideological ‘self ’ (Said 2003: 49; Easthope 1999: 20). Western propaganda continued to blur the distinction between communism and Stalinism throughout the Cold War (Leffler 2007: 151–259; Hatherley 2015: 447),5 and Call for the Dead taps this equation of Eastern Bloc murderousness 5

One historian states that in one American sphere of influence, Latin America, between 1960 and 1990, the United States was responsible for far greater numbers of ‘political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters’ than the entire Eastern Bloc in that same period (Coatsworth 2010: 220–221).

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after de-Stalinization and the dismantling of the gulags. British communists and leftists were also tarred by Stalinism, despite the revelation of Stalinist horrors prompting the realignment known as the ‘New Left’, the anti-Stalinist, anti-Soviet leftists whose work is regularly cited in this volume – Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson and Perry Anderson. This was a distinction the IRD, heavily involved in exposing ‘subversive’– aka leftist – activity (Lashmar and Oliver 1998: 119), had little time for. The IRD’s Christopher Mayhew declared, ‘Stalinism was an evil thing and certainly IRD’s propaganda coincided with a considerable political defeat of the extreme left in the Labour Party’ (in Lashmar and Oliver 1998: 113). As E. P. Thompson noted, ‘Anti-Communism [became] the main means by which orthodox social democracy (sometimes in active liaison with employers, the popular press, or the State) has sought to isolate the Left’ (1965: 347). The linkage of leftists with Soviet communism is also subliminally referenced in Smiley’s concluding elegy to Mrs Fennan, when he notes of her desire for ‘peace’ that ‘peace is a dirty word now’ (le Carré 1964a: 156). Jenks states that ‘by 1953 the word “peace” had been thoroughly debased in British political discourse’ and even deploys the same phrase as Smiley: ‘peace had become a dirty word’ ( Jenks 2006: 126). This resulted from the British government’s black propaganda against the 1950 Sheffield ‘Peace Partisans’ ( Jenks 2006: 119–122) and other peace groups, alongside Western derision of Khrushchev’s policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ (see: Observer 1961, 10). In cinemas, Gaumont-British newsreels were ‘condemning pacifists as “Reds” who threatened “the Free World”’ (Shaw 2001: 32). If the Peace Partisans did have Soviet connections, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) did not, but its supporters were still smeared as Soviet dupes by government (Kynaston 2014: 37) and cultural commentators (e.g. Crawley 1963: 99). The influence of the peace movement also worried the Labour right, and the Party’s 1960 Conference vote against nuclear weapons was reversed the following year through leader Hugh Gaitskell’s efforts, as part of a general drive to outmanoeuvre the left (Leys 1989: 226–227) and disassociate Labour from communism.6 Call for the Dead was therefore providing subliminal commentary on a live political debate. Summing up the case, Smiley says of Dieter Frey and Elsa Fennan: ‘they dreamed of peace and freedom. Now they’re murderers and spies’ (le Carré 6

Gaitskell failed in a parallel bid to jettison Labour’s commitment to the nationalization of industry with its communist-sounding, ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ (Kynaston 2014: 47–49). Tony Blair would achieve this thirty-four years later, in 1995.

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1964a: 156). Call for the Dead presents naïve dreams of ‘peace’ – leftist, antifascist, peace protesters – as being easily perverted into support of communism, a political system defined, in the novel, not by ideology but by murder. That communist ideology is the novel’s ‘not said’ (Macherey 1978: 84), lurking in the ‘unconscious of the text’ (92), and that no such loss of life was associated with communist activity within Britain during the Cold War, means the pitch of the novel’s anti-communist alarm is disproportionately shrill. ***

‘A symbol of nothing at all’: The British state Although most Cold-War spy cases involved penetration of government institutions (Burgess, Maclean, Blake, Vassall)7 and Cold-War histories usually focus on matters of state (Mitter and Major 2004: 3), Call for the Dead’s intensive focus on the state apparatus was still unusual in espionage fiction. Where Fleming and even Deighton focus on fieldwork and the individual operational agent, le Carré focuses on dowdier desk work and the bureaucratic spy, with his files, dossiers and interviews, creating much of his fiction’s drama in – and from – the civil service workplace. Anchoring the dramatic in the routine in this way, shining a desk-lamp on the machinery of state operations, le Carré’s approach would prove hugely influential in spy fiction, as evidenced by the very titles of The Ninth Directive (Adam Hall, 1966), The Miernik Dossier (Charles McCarry, 1973) or The Sixth Directorate (Joseph Hone, 1975). Call for the Dead’s central narrative uses its depiction of the workplace to dramatize the communist threat, to sound an alarm. It also provides a revealing depiction of how the British state was attempting to repair its notorious security breaches post-Burgess and Maclean: less drama than the very grain and grind of bureaucratic civil service life – the interview, the file, the dossier, the debrief. The United States was pushing Britain to dispel the clubby atmosphere of its intelligence services (Hennessy 2010: 101), with negative vetting (checks on MI5 and Special Branch files) felt to have failed (Fuchs had been vetted six times [Hennessy 2010: 95]). Churchill introduced more intrusive positive vetting 7

Closeted homosexual admiralty clerk, John Vassall, was entrapped while working in the Soviet Union, and in October 1962 was coerced into selling British secrets (Hennessy and Thomas 2011: 136–137).

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(interviewing associates) in 1952 (Hennessy and Brownfeld 1982: 970), which was stepped up in 1955, following Maclean’s and Burgess’s exposure (Hennessy 2010: 104). Cornwell had himself very recently conducted such vetting interviews, as a member of MI5 (le Carré 1992: 6–7). There was significant political resistance to the intrusiveness of these vetting procedures, with even positive vetting’s architect, A. J. D. Winnifrith concerned about impugning ‘men of blameless life and unblemished reputation within their own departments and ... neighbourhoods’ (in Hennessy 2010: 99; Andrew 2009: 395). That Fennan’s suicide note cites just such humiliation – ‘under a cloud of disloyalty and suspicion’ (le Carré 1964a: 33) – traces this concern with some precision: the state as an intrusive, illiberal, even totalitarian force. For in contradiction to Call for the Dead’s depiction of the state at threat is a rhetorical anti-statism that will underwrite all of le Carré’s Cold-War novels. This has almost nothing to do with leftist critiques of the state: the relationship of capitalism to the state (Marx and Engels 1985: 12; Miliband 1969), for instance, is invisible in le Carré.8 These Cold-War novels’ antipathy to the state is, rather, the enduring legacy of classical liberalism, which viewed the state as antithetical to individual freedom, J. S. Mill decrying, ‘the great evil of adding unnecessarily to [the state’s] power’ (in Losurdo 2014: 200). This is the liberal legacy that causes the British state to append terms like ‘royal’ or ‘national’ to its institutions, as opposed to State Mail or State Opera House (Wood 1991: 33). Nevertheless, politicians of all stripes have tended to increase state power – including liberals, who regard the state as the guarantor of individualism (Wallerstein 2011: 10). This contradiction is channelled in the novel by Smiley espousing critical, antistatist attitudes while upholding – and pursuing – intrusive state activity, and in Smiley resigning from the state (le Carré 1964a: 44) only to continue to serve and – ultimately – to save that state. As with liberal and conservative critiques of the state (Losurdo 2014: 247), much of the novel’s anti-statism is targeted upon bureaucracy.

‘The cumbersome machinery of bureaucracy’: Bureaucracy and the state Bureaucracy had been growing steadily in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century, to regulate an expanding workforce, service the Empire, and, under the post-war Labour government, administer the welfare state (Hobsbawm 1999: 8

‘The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels 1985: 12).

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224). Long regarded as one of the most ‘despotic’ aspects of the intrusive state by liberals (Wallerstein 2011: 15), bureaucratization was increasingly compared to communism in Cold-War Britain (Whitfield 1996: 23), a tendency enshrined in Orwell’s 1984 (1949) – standard reading in schools by the early 1960s, thanks to the IRD (Shaw 2001: 104). A review of the 1956 film adaptation invoked ‘the bureaucracy-run-mad world which Orwell foresaw as the future’ (in Shaw 2001: 112), and ‘bureaucracy’ became a byword for a state-controlled society and the (declared) routine, dullness and joylessness of communist countries. Like other anti-totalitarian tropes, anti-bureaucracy motifs are often anti-socialist: Orwell felt forced to issue a statement denying that 1984 was a critique of the post-war Labour government (Sinfield 2004: 112), whose interventionism and bureaucratization was a largely democratizing process, as bureaucracy historically tends to be (Anderson 2006: 76). Bureaucracy also served to tighten the equation of communism with the consensus evil of fascism. Smiley’s invocation of ‘armies of faceless men’ and of Mundt as a ‘soulless automaton’ routinely obeying Frey’s murderous orders (le Carré 1964a: 138) carries clear echoes of Nazi bureaucrat, Adolf Eichmann, whose trial was British front-page news from April 1961. Eichmann became paradigmatic of the ‘amoral technical expert who treats ends as given’ (du Gay 2000: 28), his obedient service to a morally corrupt state, oblivious to ‘the human and moral significance of his actions’ (Arendt 2006: 287–288), short-circuiting his common humanity.9 The examples of both Eichmann and the July 1961 Milgram experiment suggested a plausible drift from bureaucracy’s desk-bound, hierarchically compartmentalized emphasis on procedure to a mechanical instrumentalism in which empathy disappears. The anxiety, the alarm, that these totalitarian impulses might affect liberal, reasonable Britain is found in the Director of Personnel declaring of Smiley’s interview with Fennan that, ‘Security had got out of hand – Gestapo methods which were not even mitigated by a genuine threat’ (le Carré 1964a: 18). Smiley’s superior, Security Adviser Maston, also (more insinuatingly) decries intrusive government vetting (19, 43), while Elsa Fennan speaks with the authority of a concentration camp survivor in declaring the fascist core of bureaucracy: 9

Call for the Dead was published by leftist Victor Gollancz, formerly Orwell’s publisher, known for raising awareness in Britain that Jews were being persecuted in Nazi Germany (Lassner 2016: 213). Gollancz also famously opposed the death penalty for Eichmann (‘A Jew Pleads for Eichmann’s life’, Daily Herald, 9 June 1961, 10).

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John le Carré and the Cold War The mind becomes separated from the body: it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes ... the files grow heads and arms and legs and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it? ... It’s like the State and the People. The State is a dream, too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness ... But States make war, don’t they, and imprison people? ... You call yourself the State, Mr Smiley; you have no place among real people. You dropped a bomb from the sky; don’t come down here and look at the blood or hear the scream. (27)10

Mrs Fennan moves here from an eloquent condemnation of bureaucratic process to a vision of the state itself as fundamentally fascist. A female character thus depicts the state in terms of hyper-masculinity – war, punishment, control – far from the feminized, nurturing ‘nanny state’. Mrs Fennan accuses Smiley of state violence via administrative process (du Gay 2000: 4): effectively of driving her husband, Samuel Fennan, to suicide via that vetting interview. In this understanding, welfare and warfare are not contradictions within the liberal national ego, represented by Smiley, but kin. Even before we know that Mrs Fennan has been culpable in her own husband’s murder, thus understands totalitarian expediency all too intimately, there are several faultlines within her speech. First, there is the injustice of this accusation against Smiley. At the very start of the novel, as a university lecturer in 1930s Weimar Germany, Smiley is depicted as hating ‘the bawdy intrusion of the new Germany, the stamping and shouting of uniformed students’ (le Carré 1964a: 11). Here again is a mob – a mass – linking thematically to the communist ‘mass’ Smiley disparages (138). Smiley, in the novel’s terms, is pro-humanity, anti-totalitarian, anti-extremity (though ‘duty’ will always be his blind spot). Second, Mrs Fennan’s speech overlooks the concept of the ‘greater good’: for whether she references the fire-bombing of Dresden (her birthplace [120]; Frey’s hometown [120]; by 1961 in the GDR) or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each was rationalized by the Western states as for the greater good of defeating fascism (Alperovitz 1995: 316–330). Smiley’s intrusion into the Fennans’ privacy, his initial investigation of Fennan’s communist past, is, in the novel’s terms, enacted for the British greater good. Given that Samuel Fennan was hiding something (his wife’s espionage) and that four deaths occur as a result, Smiley’s investigation of Fennan if anything didn’t go far enough. This faultline in the text is indicative of a central, irresolvable and 10

Cornwell later paraphrased Mrs Fennan’s speech in an interview, ‘Then suddenly there comes a moment of crisis when all files grow arms and legs and then it isn’t funny any more’ (in Bonfante 1964, 72).

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anxious contradiction in liberalism, between the freedom of the individual and the imperative of the state. ‘Liberalism has always been in the end the ideology of the strong state in the sheep’s clothing of individualism’ (Wallerstein 2011: 10). The anti-statist rhetoric of Call for the Dead therefore can be seen as an example of what Roland Barthes dubbed ‘Operation Margarine’, the strategy in advertising whereby a product – for example, margarine – or an institution – for example, the police – is apparently decried, but wherein ‘a little “confessed” evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil’ (Barthes 1991: 41–42). In this understanding, the anti-state rhetoric of Call for the Dead is deployed to uphold the intrusive activity of vetting state employees with leftist associations. This contradiction creates an acute tension in the novel between Elsa Fennan’s eloquent broadsides against bureaucracy and the political consequences of state inaction to counter communism. As it always will, this tension resides in Smiley.

‘Inspired amateurism’: Democracy, the establishment and the British state The establishment had become an important concept in Britain by the early 1960s,11 referencing, simultaneously, the social elite and the state apparatus which that elite called its own. The legacy of the ‘angry young men’s attack on the establishment (‘the polish of manner, the habit of command, the calm superiority of bearing’, Braine 1959: 149) was observable in satirist Peter Cook’s nightclub, The Establishment (which opened in October 1961) and would soon attach itself to le Carré. However, any claim for Call for the Dead as anti-establishment (Noland 1980: 56; Dobel 1988: 201; Aronoff 1999: 52) is utterly undermined by the presentation of the struggle between Maston and Smiley. Early on, the text declares that, since the Second World War, ‘the inspired amateurism of a handful of highly qualified, under-paid men had given way to the efficiency, bureaucracy, and intrigue of a large Government department, effectively at the mercy of Maston’ (le Carré 1964a: 12–13). That passing word ‘amateurism’ is absolutely key here. ‘The famous amateurism of the English “upper class”’ (Anderson 1964a: 41) was the basis of the pre–Second World War state apparatus, predicated on informal recruitment within a public-schooled, Oxford-educated elite, requiring no training or specialist skills beyond being a 11

Henry Fairlie (1924–90) is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary for the term ‘the establishment’: ‘By the Establishment, I do not only mean the centres of official power ... but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.’ The Spectator, 23 September 1955.

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gentleman (Anderson 1987: 38). The aristocratic amateur was not (in theory) driven by financial necessity and thus was ‘pure’ in his ‘service’ to the nation-state and this concept of disinterested service invests both ‘civil service’ and ‘secret service’. That this service is ultimately only to a self-serving elite (Williams 1993: 339) is disguised by the notion of the ‘national interest’ (Anderson 2006: 144). Nothing could therefore be more pro-establishment than Smiley’s valorization of amateurism. Public-schooled Smiley is recruited informally via elite connections at Oxford, with no professional training – blooded in the field (le Carré 1964a: 9). That Smiley is a scholar of German literature is not just a tribute to Graham Greene’s D (The Confidential Agent, 1939) but an historically accurate depiction of the humanities-orientated solipsism of the British civil service. The amateur system was chipped away at by the Northcote Trevelyan reforms of the mid-nineteenth century (Anderson 1987: 38; Gowan 1987: 4–34) and again by the post-war Labour government’s professionalization of the mushrooming civil service. The professional middle class expanded by 50 per cent between 1938 and 1951 (Sinfield 2004: 60), and Maston is of this intake: ‘the professional civil servant from an orthodox department’ (le Carré 1964a: 13), embarked on a state career, a deskman with no field experience. Maston’s function is sarcastically said to be ‘to integrate the brilliance of his staff with the cumbersome machinery of bureaucracy’ (13) – collective, professional bureaucracy hampering but taking credit for amateur, individualist inspiration. The Smiley/Maston clash forms much of the novel’s narrative and depicts two particular sensibilities, what Weber (1978: 1002) calls the ‘cultivated man’ (Smiley) and what Weber calls the ‘specialist’ (Maston), or the amateur’s common-sense empiricism versus the bureaucrat’s instrumental rationality (Mandel 1992: 181). Thus Maston’s ‘rational’ rejection of Smiley’s view that Fennan was murdered: ‘Facts? ...What facts? ... On the one hand we have your suspicions ... against that we have the opinion of trained detectives’ (le Carré 1964a: 42–43). Later Smiley elaborates this amateur versus professional polarity: ‘Suspicion, experience, perception, common sense – for Maston these were not the organs of fact. Paper was fact’ (45–46). Maston’s bureaucratic focus on the factual not only fails to identify the communist plot – that link between bureaucracy and communism becoming culpably sharper – but leads to an instrumental disregard for individuals: Maston is more interested in the reaction of his state superiors than in justice for Samuel Fennan (45–6).

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Far from providing a radical critique of the state, however, the text’s presentation of this clash simply affirms the residual prejudices of the amateur class fraction towards the professional class.12 A series of snooks cocked at Maston’s social vulgarity include his sartorial choices (18) and his ‘businessman’s cutlery’ (21) and culminate in Smiley calling Maston ‘a barmaid’s dream of a real gentleman’ (19). Maston, for Smiley, has not lost what was regarded as ‘the taint of trade’ (Laski 1972: 24) in his social ascent. Given that to anyone below the gentlemanly line Maston is as establishment as Smiley, the depth of snobbery here is arresting. Pursuing this gentlemanly issue, that Smiley can only save Britain by resigning from and working outside the bureaucratized state recalls Sherlock Holmes, with Smiley as Holmes – independent, inspired, efficient – and Maston as Lestrade – bureaucratic, pedantic, bumbling. But as genre is not a closed circuit, the political effect of prioritizing the inspired amateur investigator over the plodding police is here (as it was in Doyle) to valorize the elite amateur over the lower-class professional: to reassert the superiority of the gentleman. An entrenched defence of the establishment was a quixotic position at a time when not especially radical politicians like Hugh Gaitskell (Collins 2002: 105) or Anthony Crosland were blaming aristocratic amateurism for British decline: ‘An aristocratic tradition, persisting strongly in the public schools, has bred a cult of the amateur, the gifted dilettante [regarded as] patently superior to the drab, despised professional or technician’ (Crosland, in Kynaston 2014: 152–153). In regarding the new breed of bureaucrats, emblematized by Maston, as so paralysed by procedure that they both imitate communism in their collectivist, anti-individual working practice and inadvertently allow actual communists to infiltrate their organization, Call for the Dead sounds a distinctly false alarm about the state. This derives from a contradiction within both the novel and the Cold-War consensus, decrying the state’s small change (bureaucracy) while upholding the state’s capital (liberalism; democracy; capitalism itself). Consequently – and contradictorily – the state in Call for the Dead is attacked and defended simultaneously, slaking anti-statist sentiment whilst bowing before the Leviathan. ***

12

Raymond Williams defines ‘residual ideology’ as ‘the residue of some previous cultural institution or formation … which may have an alternative or even an oppositional relation to the dominant culture’ (1985: 122).

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‘Deep love of England’: Imagining the nation Near the beginning of Call for the Dead, Smiley’s service to the state is described as being driven by a ‘deep love of England’, a phrase which invokes, in the same breath, a government, a citizenry and a physical territory – but also something more elusive, emotional and numinous. This prompts the textual equivalent of a montage sequence in a British war propaganda film: ‘Oxford[’s] beauty, its rational ease ... windswept autumn holidays at Hartland Quay ... long trudges over the Cornish cliffs’ (le Carré 1964a: 10–11). Only Big Ben and Noel Coward are missing from the sequence. Geographical territory is a key facet of how nations define themselves – ‘the landscape itself ... the peculiar beauty of “our” hills and mountains, our rivers, lakes and fields’ (Smith 2001: 32). So this is the national landscape that Smiley defends against the communist threat, edging here into the mythic register which will become so familiar in future le Carré novels. For into this landscape is written the British ‘way of life’, wherein Oxford is the traditional, historical emblem of national cultural achievement. Cornwall meanwhile conveys a nation of walkers, rooted in an agrarian sensibility originating with the upper classes but being democratized post-war as ‘the heritage of the whole nation’ (Scott Report, in Matless 2016: 335). This shows how imagining a nation in Benedict Anderson’s terms, also defines that nation. It is a clear demonstration of how invoking a ‘way of life’ can be used not to embrace the whole population (as it is in Raymond Williams) but to set limits upon what constitutes that nation (as it is in T. S. Eliot [Mulhern 2000: 54]): who is common and who has the wealth.13 So just as Second World War propaganda presented the nation via exclusively establishment iconography (Collins 2002: 100), the ‘England’ for which Smiley has such a deep ‘love’ and that he defends from communism is an essentially establishment England.

A brief tour of Britain: Battersea, suburbia, housewives and the establishment When a working-class locale is introduced into Call for the Dead ’s English landscape, Adam Scarr’s working-class Battersea demi-monde is represented as both insalubrious – Smiley is ushered out of the pub where Scarr conducts 13

‘Such signifiers of [national] homogeneity always fail to represent the diversity of the actual “national” community for which they purport to speak, and, in practice, usually represent and consolidate the interests of the dominant power groups within any national formation’ (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 135).

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his daytime business by Inspector Mendel (le Carré 1964a: 56) – and dangerous. Smiley is battered about the head minutes after arrival in Battersea (58). If this were not alarm call enough, the working class is presented as an active threat to the British way of life via an alliance with communism when Scarr is revealed to have assisted Mundt in the plot against the British state. That this alliance is forged from greed (62) rather than ideology (64) does not diminish its damning equation of communism with the working class – a common cultural trope of the era (e.g. Crawley 1963: 100–101) that bespoke both distaste and fear. That Scarr operates a one-man car yard on a former bomb site (le Carré 1964a: 53) – a glimpse of the reclaimed commons – subliminally connects to then-contemporary awareness that the British motor industry was failing. That the yard is a semi-legal affair, while its owner spends much of the time in the pub (55) when not involved in off-the-books deals (57), only adds to the notso-subliminal suggestion of the grasping working class – the commoners – undermining Cold-War Britain’s best interests: as enemy ‘other’. Beyond the motor industry the picture was no prettier: the British economy was stagnating (Sunday Express 1961), its growth poor relative to vanquished West Germany (Kynaston 2014: 122)14 – and more on a par with communist East Germany. There was even a widespread (and inaccurate) belief that Britain was falling behind the planned economy of the Soviet Union (Kynaston 2014: 37, 51). In British media and political discourse the laggardly economy was blamed on trade unions (Kynaston 2014: 150), ‘unions’ being, in Cold-War Britain, largely interchangeable with ‘working class’ (Leys 1989: 140–148). With 2,832 strikes in 1960 (Kynaston 2014: 145), unions were a lightning rod for establishment fear of the working class: dubbed ‘the peril in our midst’ in a 1956 polemic by IRD associate, Woodrow Wyatt (Jenks 2006: 106); negatively portrayed in film (The Angry Silence, 1961); and accused – sometimes accurately – of being communist enclaves (Lashmar and Oliver 1998: 107; Kynaston 2014: 124). As such, the working class was being blamed for British economic decline,15 and in Call for the Dead, Frey’s espionage only formalizes the trope of the working class as a fifth column for communism already inherent in Scarr’s character and activities. The failure of industry or government to invest and modernize 14

15

Rehabilitated Nazi steel magnate, Alfried Krupp is mentioned concurrent with Mendel railing against the prospect of West German rearmament (le Carré 1964a: 53). Highlighting such fascist linkages helped create a Cold-War culture that supported the solution of a divided, thus weakened, Germany. Despite all the protests about the Wall, a divided Germany entirely suited British geopolitical ends (Greenwood 2000: 187). While public approval of trade unions dropped from 71 per cent in 1954 to 57 per cent in 1961 in Gallup polls, Kynaston fails to note that this remained a healthy majority (2014: 151).

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(Anderson 1964a; Leys 1989: 45) was excised from this cultural narrative, as was the post-war settlement’s failure to deliver on its promise of prosperity for all. Macmillan’s claim in July 1957 that Britain had ‘never had it so good’ did not match the experience of all sectors of the nation (Kynaston 2013: 360). In this charged climate of national economic failure and national blame, Adam Scarr, the only working-class character in Call for the Dead, pays for his betrayal of Britain to the Cold-War enemy with his life. Just to underline the connection with communism, the manner of Scarr’s death is identical to that of communist mastermind, Dieter Frey: drowning in that most iconic of British rivers, the Thames (le Carré 1964a: 137). Situated in a liminal space between the novel’s ruling-class locales and its degraded working-class demi-monde, midpoint between the urban and the rural (23–24), the very English compromise of suburbia in Call for the Dead evokes a national way of life at its most humdrum, conventional and domestic. The suburban home was a perfect example of how avowedly neutral Western spaces were entirely politicized. During the Cold War ‘private life was shaped by geopolitical dynamics’, with the domestic in America and Britain fetishized to represent ‘the secure and fulfilling life to which postwar men and women aspired’ under capitalism (May 1988: 14). The home was a key facet of British cultural propaganda of the 1950s and the 1960s (Ward 2004: 131–132), with the 1957 Ideal Home Exhibition achieving record-breaking audiences: affirming, broadcasting – and shaping – an authorized British way of life. In this ColdWar home front the suburban home became the synecdoche of the domestic: ‘proof of capitalism’s superiority to communism’ (May 1989: 5). With its modern furnishings and technological luxuries (televisions, toasters, washing machines) as against austere, anti-human – and technologically backwards – communism, this ‘subtopia’ or suburban utopia (Matless 2016: 333) was subliminally but intrinsically capitalist. Meanwhile, the suffocating social conformity which accompanied suburbia’s self-conscious social mobility operated as the home front of containment (Nadel 1995: 4, 297): not just of communism, but of gender roles, sexuality, difference, imagination. It is therefore significant that it is the sanctity of this suburban home that is defiled by the two central narrative acts of Call for the Dead. One act is understood initially as a suicide – shocking and shameful enough – later as a murder, and the act occurs in the Fennans’ kitchen. The second act is the Fennans’ communist espionage. That communism nurtures murder and treason in a postwar home designed to raise healthy young British children (Matless 2016: 328) is a particularly perverse politicization of private life – an alarm call indeed.

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Politicized in this way, the location of the murder also resonates with the recent ‘kitchen debates’ between Nixon and Khrushchev in 1959 (May 1989: 5). There is an echo of this defiling of the home by communism when Frey’s murderous henchman, Mundt breaks in to Smiley’s Chelsea townhouse, answering Smiley’s own door to Smiley (le Carré 1964a: 46) – a turning inside-out of bourgeois privacy. Smiley is forced to seek shelter in Mendel’s reassuringly cosy suburban home (48). That communism opposes private property, a central tenet of liberal philosophy (Wallerstein 2011: 18; Losurdo 2014: 120), is strikingly apposite to these incidents centred upon property and privacy. Women had a central role on the Cold War’s home front. ‘Women’s domestic roles needed to be infused with a sense of national purpose’ (May 1988: 102) after their experience of the workplace during the war. Consequently, traditional feminine domestic roles were fetishized post-war to constrain and contain wartime freedoms, and such apparently trivial practices as women wearing trousers were discouraged (May 1988: 88). Traditional roles also provided a bulwark against communism’s conception of equality across the sexes (Matless 2016: 327): the Cold-War Western wife operated within capitalism’s endorsement of patriarchy. A woman’s domestic role to nurture capitalist men and raise capitalist children was encouraged by government (May 1988: 68, 73) and glorified in 1950s and early 1960s’ films and advertising (61–63), while women were rewarded by the tide of labour-saving devices introduced into the market place. Purchasing was itself patriotic (73). In Call for the Dead, the main female character’s unnaturalness is emphasized: that Mrs Fennan has no children in a ‘pro-natal’ environment after the decimating effect of war (Matless 2016: 328) is conventionally suspect and, retrospectively, a clue to her communism. Even more perverse, it transpires that Mrs Fennan wears the trousers in the Fennans’ suburban household, in that it is she who is the communist spy rather than her husband. In a final act of unnaturalness and anti-femininity, Mrs Fennan accedes to her husband’s murder by Mundt and covers it up for political reasons. Private life has not just been politicized, it has been perverted. There are echoes of this thematic elsewhere in the novel: when the solicitor’s daughter from the local repertory theatre – the epitome of middlebrow suburban respectability – swoons over murderous communist, Mundt (le Carré 1964a: 88); or when Ann Smiley – another suspectly childless woman – deserts domestic life for a Cuban (7) at the time of the Cuban revolution. Women are far from the liberal doyennes of domestic containment here: they are the midwives to evil in the nation, conduits for communism and a fifth column in the Cold War. Ultimately then,

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Call for the Dead offers a very uncertain assertion of suburbia as the domestic heart of the nation, largely eclipsed by a gentlemanly homosocial suspicion of women – an alarm call about the ‘other’. The only truly reliable numen of the national then is George Smiley. Like all protagonists of spy stories, Smiley represents his country literally, as an agent of the British state, and figuratively, as an embodiment of England, a national avatar (Lewis 1985: 149; Buzard 1991: 155; Lassner 2016: 174) — the national ego. It can be no accident that he is named after Britain’s patron saint, Saint George. With the war being a ‘universal reference point for mythic national cohesion’ (Rau 2013: 3), Smiley’s war experience is a crucial facet of his characterization. Under cover as a lecturer in Germany, observing Nazis burning books, when Smiley ‘triumphed that he knew his enemy’ (le Carré 1964a: 11), Smiley – thus Britain – is established from the off as not just anti-fascist but an embodiment of decency, of moderation, of common humanity. The comparison to Frey, Elsa Fennan and communism is implicit throughout. As a national everyman, Smiley is very far from a man of the people, however. The text’s laboured insistence on Smiley’s non-aristocratic status appears defensive – ‘without labels in the guard’s van of the social express’ etc. (7) – because Smiley, viewed from outside his wife Ann’s aristocratic set, is a gentleman of the establishment, marked even by such apparently neutral characteristics as his trademark reticence and politeness (Collins 2002: 94). So to posit Smiley as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’, as Ann does on the novel’s opening page (7), renders public schooling, Oxford education, informal recruitment to the secret service, membership of an exclusive gentleman’s club and marriage into the aristocracy ‘ordinary’. The establishment was a sutured class: the industrial bourgeoisie ‘became’ gentlemen, by being groomed via the new public schools – ‘factor[ies] for aristocrats’ in Chesterton’s wry phrase (2009: 122) – buying country houses, styling themselves after the aristocracy and marrying into it (Anderson 1964a: 32). This also meant that an aristocratic conservatism survived the suture and infected liberalism, including Cold-War liberalism (Schaub 1991: 7–10). Thus Smiley’s conservative Leavisite cultural attitudes are attuned to Cold-War liberal concerns about populist ‘mass culture’ as ‘a form of domestic totalitarianism’ (Schaub 1991: 62): ‘[Smiley] hated the press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass media’ (le Carré 1964a: 138). That ‘mass’ in ‘mass media’ – and mass culture – dismissively conflates low-quality products created by capitalism with the working classes who were the targeted consumers of those ‘mass’ products. The common – the democratic – becomes instead the ‘common’, the inferior. With an elite, propertied individual – Smiley – being upheld meanwhile

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as a national everyman, all this is in fundamental contradiction with the liberal concept of Britain as a land of equal opportunity. In a Cold War waged against a credo that called for the levelling of class – the ‘mass philosophy’ of communism – to valorize the gentlemanly class in this way is a hatch-battening conservatism, indeed a positively feudal reflux (Wood 2012: 189). We see in Call for the Dead then a British nation mapped out in distinctly conservative terms: a landscape whose latitude and longitude encompass iconic establishment locales, degraded working-class environments and compromised suburban spaces. In this landscape the suburbanites nurture murderers and spies, the working classes succour traitors and treachery, while only our male, establishment guide and compass, Smiley, remains unsullied, pure, loyal: an embodiment of all that is best about Britain, and the ideal champion of the nation against the depredations of communism – a gentleman. Thus it is telling that, at the book’s climax, it is the very term ‘gentleman’ which becomes unstable, briefly undermining much of what has been carefully mapped out so far, before the liberal status quo is quickly reasserted. ***

‘Who was then the gentleman?’: Nation, state and enemy George Smiley’s execution of Dieter Frey on the foggy banks of the Thames forms the climax of the plot of Call for the Dead and coalesces its portrayal of enemy, nation and state in a scene that vividly demonstrates each concept’s ideological contradictions. The scene, steeped in the mythic register, most immediately summons the British nation, invoking Old Father Thames, iconic protective spirit of the British capital located in its very lifeblood; Sherlock Holmes, reconfigured into a national saviour of two World Wars via His Last Bow (1917) and the film The Voice of Terror (Rawlins, 1944); and of course, St George defending his nation, vanquishing the communist dragon. In this scene, which cries out ‘allegory’, Smiley embodies civitas: ‘the personification of the total body of the citizens’ (Weber 1978: 697), expunging the extreme, alien ‘other’ of communism in defence of a moderate, decent, traditional way of life. It is worth quoting the scene’s key passage in detail. Dieter was dead and he had killed him. ... Dieter had let him do it, had not fired the gun, had remembered their friendship when Smiley had not. They had fought in a cloud, in the rising stream of the river, in a clearing in a timeless

46

John le Carré and the Cold War forest: they had met, two friends rejoined, and fought like beasts. ... Dieter, mercurial, absolute, had fought to build a civilization. Smiley, rationalistic, protective, had fought to prevent him. ‘Oh God,’ said Smiley aloud, ‘who was then the gentleman ...?’ (le Carré 1964a: 145)

The immediate problem here is that, if the British nation represents moderation and decency, ‘the highest exemplar of Western civilization’ (Shaw 2001: 85) as Cold-War government propaganda had it, then how does this square with Britain’s national avatar (Smiley) attacking and killing his disabled friend (Frey)? Smiley has reverted to Hobbesian brutishness to preserve British civilization. Where initially Smiley shouts ‘swine’ at Frey (141), they both become ‘beasts’ in this passage, fighting ‘in a clearing in a timeless forest’ – a metonym for civilization — reduced to the ‘state of nature’ (Freud 2010). In the passage the word ‘civilization’ is transferred from Smiley to Frey, from West to East, and is thus a faultline. While British civilization was proclaimed as such a quintessential characteristic that it was bestowed upon much of the world through the British Empire,16 imperialism was a repressive and brutal enterprise: ‘governmental terror creatively and legally applied as a mode of political administration and economic exploitation’ (Gilroy 2004: 51). As Walter Benjamin noted, ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (1973: 258). Indeed for Arendt, totalitarianism owed much to British imperialism’s ruthless example (Arendt 1994: 123–304; Medovoi 2012: 177), licensed by a Hobbesian understanding of human impulses (Arendt 1994: 142–3) – an aspect of Arendt’s work far less regularly cited than her linkage of communism and Nazism. Empire was the proudest creation of the British gentlemanly class, and the gentleman was often seen as the proudest creation of imperial Britain (Collins 2002: 91; Berberich 2007: 12). Smiley’s use of the term ‘gentleman’ is a faultline that opens up contradictions in national ideology. Despite the term’s etymological evolution from feudal aristocrat to an ideal of courteous or humane behaviour as the aristocracy merged with the bourgeoisie – decency, fair play (Collins 2002: 94) – ‘gentleman’ remained a totem, a standard, a positive even in the Cold War. The gentlemanly code prized ‘duty before personal interest, the good of the group (read: society) before that of the 16

Imperial ideologue, Joseph Chamberlain, declared Britain ‘the predominant force in the future history and civilization of the world’ (in Schwarz 2012: 89), linking this to ‘national character’ (Gilroy 2004: 68). John Buchan’s employer and mentor, Lord Milner, declared in 1903 that ‘the white man should rule’ on ‘the ground of superior civilisation’ (in Schwarz 2012: 98). Stanley Baldwin in 1924 gave this national ‘civilisation’ a specific moral character: ‘[the British] go overseas, and take with them what they have learned at home: love of justice, love of truth and the broad humanity that are so characteristic of English people’ (in Schwarz 2012: 101).

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individual’ (Berberich 2007: 6). Yet the gentleman sat astride a history that was far from gentle, defined by a violence that was first feudal, then industrial, then imperial. By the gentlemanly Smiley invoking ‘gentlemanliness’ as a disjuncture between his behavioural ideals and his execution of Frey, the historical realities transmuted by the term are revealed, and the gentlemanly nation Smiley defines and defends is called into question. The instability of the term ‘gentleman’ is revealed more immanently by the fact that Smiley is quoting in the Call for the Dead passage discussed here (Lewis 1985: 37; Walling 1988: 28). ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ is the chorus to the folk song ‘Adam Was a Gentleman’ (first transcribed c. 1830)17 and derives from a sermon by John Ball, a Lollard preacher involved in Britain’s 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. Advocating social equality at feudalism’s height, Ball continued, ‘from the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men’. In song and sermon, invocation of an Edenic natural state rejects class distinctions and thus, if gentlemen are parasitic idlers, also rejects the positive qualitative connotations of gentlemanliness. Such contradictions can be seen as ‘polyphony’ (Bakhtin 1981: 327), or as a ‘tissue of quotations’ which ‘blend and clash’ (Barthes 1977: 146), subverting the ideology of the text. Here, the hierarchical gentlemanly nation that Call for the Dead has established is disrupted by a glimpse of levelled, democratized Britain emerging from the national unconscious. From the fulcrum of this Thames-side scuffle, this Cold-War struggle – Smiley against Frey, Britain against the GDR, West against East – surges a glimpse of a radical British tradition running through the Peasants’ Revolt, the Diggers, Levellers, Luddites, English Jacobins, Owenites, Chartists, Socialist League of William Morris and so forth: a national radical tradition in which ‘Jerusalem’ trumps ‘Rule Britannia’ as patriotic anthem, within which the green and pleasant British land is integral, in a radical rather than a conservative sense – Winstanley’s ‘Common Treasury for All’18 in which the people delve, dig, gather and grub. This offers an immanent rebuttal to the national ideology the novel has hitherto parlayed – its assertion of a hierarchical, class-stratified British nation, its antipathy to democratic impulses

17

18

http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/title/Adam%20was%20a%20gentleman. As David Cornwell was infiltrating left-wing meetings while at Oxford, given 1950s links between the Communist Party and folk music, and communist historian, Christopher Hill’s presence at Balliol, it is plausible – if entirely speculative – that Cornwell could have heard this song in this context. G. Winstanley, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced (aka the First Digger Manifesto), 1649: ‘That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth’ (in Manning 1992: 109).

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from bureaucracy to trade unions to the peace movement. The silence where communist ideology should have been in the novel is now briefly filled with this home-grown radicalism. Out of the very nub of British conservatism – the notion of the ‘gentleman’ – erupts its rebuttal. Tantalizing as this is, this understanding is immanent indeed: the surface of the text simply presents the enactment of justice upon an enemy of Britain, Frey – a Machiavellian conspirator and murderer, as Smiley reminds Guillam and Mendel at the novel’s end, in his gentleman’s club (le Carré 1964a: 155–6). So that brief vision of the common nation is repressed, the grubbing mole buried, Smiley’s remorse forgotten. Or is it? Smiley’s remorse is one of the most memorable aspects of the novel – more memorable than the intricacies of its complex plot; certainly more memorable than the barely coherent coil of explanations Smiley offers throughout, and is still unknotting in Call for the Dead’s last pages. The source of that remorse, this chapter argues, is the very essence of the liberal state. For as well as being the embodiment of the British nation in this Thames-side scene, Smiley is also the representative of the state: he has been effectively thestate-outside-the-state ever since his resignation (44): snooping, surveilling, breaking into buildings (113–4), interviewing suspects (99–108) with a state official’s moral entitlement.19 Frey thus becomes a representative of all those real-world British state infiltrations that were left frustratingly unresolved: Nunn May only served six years and later publicly defended his actions; Fuchs served nine years and then emigrated to a high-profile science career in the GDR; Maclean and Burgess successfully defected; Blake escaped from prison, avoiding his draconian sentence; Portland spy, Gordon Lonsdale was traded with the Soviets after only three years’ imprisonment. In Call for the Dead, the communist spy – Dieter Frey – is resoundingly, completely, defeated: without risk of escape, return or rehabilitation. Smiley’s agonizing occurs because the problem of violence is written into liberalism, which, while espousing an intrinsic mildness, decency and ‘fair play’ (Lukacs 2013: 8), was, like its ‘gentleman’ champion, forged in exploitation and violence, at home and abroad (Losurdo 2014: 299–300). That contradiction is found also in the tension between the harshness of classical liberalism (laissez-faire individualism) and the humane philosophy of ‘rights’ of social liberalism. This 19

Rubin glosses Agamben’s theory of the ‘state of exception’ (2005) as explaining circumstances where ‘the law could be suspended in the interest of upholding national security’ (Rubin 2012: 14). Smiley’s action is almost the inverse of Goodman’s application of this state of exception to spies: ‘simultaneously outside and inside the realm of legality’ (2016: 27). Instead the law is simultaneously outside and inside Smiley. Smiley incorporates the state, national security, into himself, the political into his personality, to enact the exceptional power of the state.

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could be characterized as masculine versus feminine facets. Submerged by the pro-war national consensus, liberalism’s contradictions were exposed by anticommunism, with Britain’s recent complicity in the Korean War (Hennessy 1996: 183–184) and its contemporary bloody Cold-War campaign in Malaya running counter to the humanist values enshrined in the welfare state – warfare eclipsing welfare. Following Tony Barley (1986: 95), Mark Fisher argues that Smiley ‘cannot be read as a cipher for liberal ideology because the incoherencies and impasses of his own position are never resolved’ (2013: 72). On the contrary, it is precisely because of these unresolved ‘incoherences and impasses’ that Smiley embodies liberalism – he is the very vessel of its contradictions which are, by definition, unresolvable. As such, Smiley represents the national ego: split, struggling to reconcile the ideological demands of the liberal ‘cultural superego’ (Freud 2010: 136) and the authoritarian impulses of the national unconscious. At the end of Call for the Dead, Britain’s liberal decency is asserted via Smiley’s agonized regret, simultaneous with an aggressive assertion of anti-communism, an unequivocal defence of the realm, a triumphal reassertion of the British state. This means that the faultlines are never entirely sutured, the authoritarian, feudal, counternarrative never entirely repressed, meaning the contradictions in Cold-War liberalism, in the national ego, continue to haunt the text. *** This chapter has shown how Call for the Dead sounds an alarm about communism’s threat to Britain’s institutions (the state) and way of life (the nation). The novel’s presentation of the enemy introduces motifs that recur throughout le Carré’s Cold-War work: communism as naiveté (Samuel Fennan), as response to fascism (Elsa Fennan) and as murderous fanaticism (Dieter Frey). Nowhere is communism characterized as an ideology or an ideal. Communism is seen first to threaten the British state, and as such Call for the Dead justifies the disputed historical process of negative vetting for state employees. In decrying bureaucracy within the state, however, Smiley rejects democracy via his rejection of professionalization and, by valorizing amateurism, reasserts a gentlemanly domination of the state. The novel’s presentation of the nation depicts the working classes as debased, suburbia as an insecure repository of domesticity but the establishment as the essence of Britain, with Smiley its avatar and everyman. Smiley ultimately saves both nation and state by solving the espionage plot and executing the communist

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enemy, Frey. For all the ambiguities of Call for the Dead, le Carré’s Cold-War fictional calling-card unambiguously reveals both the violence at the heart of the liberal state and a residual social conservatism in the national unconscious, without quite repressing more radical impulses. Given that the changes in the administration of the British state and the social reconstruction of the nation were fairly limited, and that Eastern bloc expansionism was distinctly exaggerated, the tone of anti-communist alarm in Call for the Dead is notably shrill, resulting in an over-assertion of traditionalist, conservative and establishment values in liberal, Cold-War Britain. *****

2

‘Breeze Blocks and Barbed Wire’: The Berlin Wall and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Built in August 1961, the Berlin Wall became the symbol of the Cold War. Inscribing the division of Germany, like the world, into communist and capitalist spheres, the Wall was the Iron Curtain rendered physical – breeze blocks and barbed wire – and, during the early Cold War, seemed the likely location for the Third World War’s ignition. The creation of the Wall was the East’s response to the rumbling crisis over geopolitical control of Berlin – and Europe (Reynolds 1994b: 82) – and soon resulted in a face-off between Eastern and Western tanks at Checkpoint Charlie in October 1961. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was thought by the Americans to be a Soviet response to the Berlin crisis (Judt 2010: 254). With President Kennedy asserting Western rights to Berlin in June 1963 (Taylor 2007: 503) while sharply raising defence spending, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (published in September 1963) acutely captures the contemporary fear of impending Armageddon. ‘We can’t give covering fire’, says a Berlin Wall sentry in the book, ‘they tell us there’d be a war if we did’ (le Carré 1964b: 9).1 That The Spy Who Came in from the Cold begins at, is intersected by and ends at the Berlin Wall, meant it both channelled and made history, helping inscribe the Wall into the cultural imagination. Cold-War Berlin is potentially a liminal space, an interstice, embracing East and West, communism and capitalism. However, the effect of Berlin in The Spy is not to create common ground but to polarize; not to facilitate dialogue but to reassert division; not to cross borders but to reassert them. As a result Berlin simply becomes a synecdoche of Cold-War schisms. As such, despite being widely regarded as quite the opposite, The Spy is a paradigmatic 1

‘President Orders Defence Build-Up to Meet Berlin Threat: Kennedy Warns Khrushchev “We’ll Fight if We Have To”’. Evening News, 26 July 1961, 7. In response to such tensions, Harold Macmillan had sponsored the Partial Test Ban Treaty in summer 1963, coming into effect in October.

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anti-communist text on a par with Orwell’s 1984.2 Indeed, the subliminal meaning of le Carré’s ‘in from the cold’ is perhaps the novel’s strongest legacy: often redeployed in headlines and books,3 the phrase stands alongside Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Newspeak’ as a Cold-War neologism. Superficially, ‘cold’ equates with the espionage ‘field’, being operational, under cover, in danger – living without sympathy, as Control puts it, without human contact or the comforts of home (le Carré 1964b: 19). But in Western Cold-War culture, communism connects iconographically to coldness via stock images of snow-covered steppes, news reports and memoirs of Siberian gulags and the very idea of an ‘ideological’ society, a politicized private life. No matter that the gulags were largely dismantled by 1960 (Coatsworth 2010: 220): in Western culture, communism produced the cold of both The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’s title and the Cold War itself. Indicative of how widely disseminated was its vision of the Cold War, The Spy remained on top of the US bestsellers lists for over a year,4 outselling Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service two to one (Boucher 1964, 7), before being made into an equally successful film (Ritt, 1965). The Spy was also culturally trendsetting, with Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin (1964), Adam Hall’s The Berlin Memorandum (1965), Derek Marlowe’s A Dandy in Aspic (1966) and Ian Fleming’s The Living Daylights (1966) all being subsequent Berlin-set espionage bestsellers figuring the Berlin Wall as the faultline, battle-line and dividing line of the Cold War. US cultural pulse-monitor, Life, analysed the phenomenon of this ‘new-style thriller’, defined by a Berlin setting and an anti-Bond ‘realism’. ‘Realism’ – in the sense of plausibility – was a key motif in The Spy’s reception. Amongst almost unanimously positive reviews, Robert Harling wrote, ‘here is no bogus superman stuff but what must be something like the real thing’; Francis Iles called it ‘a spy story documentary’; David Holloway declared, ‘The spies are not playing Bond-like games: they operate nastily, unspectacularly’ calling it, ‘a brilliantly bitter novel with a deal of truth behind it’.5 Running 2 3

4

5

One 1984 adaptation (Radford, 1984) even shared The Spy actors Richard Burton and Cyril Cusack. E.g. Henry A. Zieger, Ian Fleming: The Spy Who Came in with the Gold (Duell 1965); Jonathan Steele, Socialism with a German Face: The State That Came in from the Cold (Cape, 1977); The Spy Who Went into the Cold: Kim Philby, Soviet Super Spy, BBC4 documentary, 19 November 2013. The phenomenon of The Spy’s success was analysed in Conrad Knickerbocker, ‘The Spies Who Come in from Next Door’, Life, 30 April 1965, 13; New York Times, Daily Express, 14 February 1964, 1; Time 1965; Mandrake 1965, 19. Robert Harling, ‘Something Near the Truth?’ Sunday Times, 15 September 1963, 33; Frances Iles, ‘Criminal Records’, Guardian, 11 October 1963, 9; David Holloway, ‘Recent Fiction’, Daily Telegraph, 13 September 1963, 19. Reviews claiming The Spy as ‘realist’: Patrick Gaffney, ‘Crime Calendar’, Scotsman, 21 September 1963, 6; The Times, 12 September 1963, 13; Peter Phillips, ‘Crime Shelf ’, Daily Herald, 14 September 1963, 4; Maurice Richardson, ‘Agents and Victims’, Observer 15 September 1963, 22; ‘More le Carré Capers’, Time, 29 May 1964, 62–63; John Clarke ‘Not Exactly an Agent in the Bond Image’, Evening Standard, 17 September 1963, 10.

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with ‘realism’, some even saw The Spy as providing inside information: Julian Maclaren Ross noted a ‘stamp of authenticity seldom found in stories of this nature’; Kenneth Allsop found its ‘dossier-like knowledge of undercover Europe’ telling, while Newsweek declared, ‘It bristles with details about the CIA and Britain’s MI6 and its author[’s] inside credentials make it all chillingly plausible’; again this was a common critical trope.6 A far less common view was of The Spy as ‘realistic’ in the sense the novel is now commonly understood, as negatively critiquing the British state. Richardson invoked ‘the homicidal wickedness and unscrupulousness of our side’, Peter Phillips was equivocal, ‘Leamas [is] betrayed by his own side for a “higher purpose”’, while The Times, interestingly, ratified British actions: ‘it may be, suggests Mr le Carré, that the end justifies the means, but the means are very terrible indeed’.7 No contemporary critic mentioned the novel’s key innocent victim: Liz Gold. Invocations of the Cold War were extremely rare in reviews, with few even mentioning the Berlin Wall that is so integral to the book’s iconography,8 while only Maclaren Ross acknowledged the social realism of The Spy’s Leamas: ‘a consciously new-style hero: brusque, disillusioned, non-U’ (693). Leamas’ class status hardly figures in le Carré scholarship (whereas it is a key concern of this volume). Focusing on Control’s cynical plot, the critical orthodoxy is that the novel is ‘radical’ (Noland 1980: 54; Neuse 1982: 300; Homberger 1986: 56; Symons 1992: 282; Hoffman 2001: 75–76) or anti-establishment (Grella 1967: 131; Rockwell 1971: 336; Homberger 1986: 52; Knight 1986: 88; Bradbury 1990: 135; Aronoff 1999: 142–143; Boyd 2010). Communism is widely regarded amongst scholars as presented as morally equivalent to liberalism: ‘No one system is better than another’ (Grella 1967: 136); ‘the West is no different to the East … in the ideology of the novel’ (Thompson 1993: 158; see also: Gillespie 1970: 58; Ambrosetti 1973: 111; Panek 1981: 255; Homberger 1986: 56; Bradbury 1990: 135; Beene 1991: 53; Booth 1991: 151; Powell 1991: 59; Symons

6

7

8

Julian Maclaren Ross, ‘Limits of Control’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 September 1963, 693; Kenneth Allsop, ‘Is This the Private Nightmare of a Master Spy?’ Daily Mail, 12 September 1963, 10; ‘Inside Job?’ Newsweek, 3 February 1964, 81. Other reviews suggesting insider knowledge: ‘Bitterly authoritative’, New Yorker, 25 January 1964, 112; Katherine Gauss Jackson, ‘Told from the Inside’, Harpers, 1 January 1964, 106; Orville Prescott, ‘The Brutal Business of Espionage’, New York Times, 10 January 1964, 27. Other reviews on The Spy as critical of British state: Prescott; Elizabeth Coxhead, ‘Fiction of the Week’, Sunday Telegraph, 15 September 1963, 15, who found the ‘depths of double-dealing that would make Machiavelli look an absolute beginner’ unconvincing; Anthony Boucher, ‘Temptations of a Man Isolated in Deceit’, New York Times Book Review, 12 January 1964, 5. Reviews mentioning Cold War: Maclaren Ross; G. W. Stonier, New Statesman, 25 October 1963, 580; Robert M. Adams, ‘Couldn’t Put it Down’, New York Review of Books, 3 May 1964, 13. Berlin Wall in reviews: Daily Mail, New Statesman, TLS, Harpers and Atlantic (March 1964).

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1992: 282; Hoffman 2001: 75–76). Only a handful of scholars see the novel as anti-communist (Monaghan 1985: 112–113; Barley 1986: 28; Dobel 1988: 194; Aronoff 1999: 93). This chapter first examines the novel’s presentation of the GDR, then asks how apparently sympathetic characters, Jens Fiedler and Liz Gold, impact upon the representation of communism. Then, as an exploration of the representation of the nation, the chapter analyses how, via Leamas, the novel channels the contemporary concept of ‘classlessness’ in early 1960s Britain. Finally, the chapter will examine the presentation of a ruthlessly expedient British state and interrogate whether this state is endorsed or condemned and, consequently, whether the novel can be rightly regarded as anti-establishment. ***

‘Party terms’: The communist enemy By beginning and ending with citizens gunned down at the Berlin Wall, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’s very iconography bespeaks an intransigent Eastern communism. The creation of the Berlin Wall was seen by the West as an aggressive act, material manifestation of Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’, and thus of the concept that communists started the Cold War. Le Carré later called the Wall ‘a perfect symbol of the monstrosity of ideology gone mad’ (1990: 6), echoing Arendt on totalitarianism: ‘the difference between ends and means evaporates … and the result is the monstrous immorality of ideological politics’ (1994: 249). ‘Ideology’ morphs in the course of Arendt’s sentence from political principle to mechanism of pure power, while the West is implicitly exempt from ‘ideological politics’. For Western propaganda already presenting the Eastern Bloc as a vast prison camp incarcerating its citizens (Shaw 2001: 74–75), the Wall’s fortifications and armed guards were perfect ammunition: here was ideology militarily enforced upon citizens’ ordinary lives (Medovoi 2012: 167). Leamas sees the Wall as ‘a dirty, ugly thing of breeze blocks and strands of barbed wire, lit with cheap yellow light, like the backdrop for a concentration camp’ (le Carré 1964b: 10). ‘Concentration camp’ pushes the Eastern Europe-asprison theme (a GDR safe house is also compared to a prison camp, [126]) and invokes the links between communism and fascism enshrined in the concept of ‘totalitarianism’. Disregarding ideological ends in this way, the Wall stands in The Spy for repression and power for their own sakes.

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How then to refute Western Cold-War rhetoric without defending the GDR’s miserable system? It is undeniable that the East German state’s response to defectors crossing the Wall was summary, yet ‘the East German economy was being bled to death’ by emigration (Isaacs and Downing 2008: 191) and so some attempt to deter defectors was inevitable. The Wall certainly increased the authoritarian atmosphere of East Berlin, but it also actualized genuine Soviet fears of a reunified Germany (Reynolds 1994b: 82) and may well have helped keep the Cold peace, as both President Kennedy and British ministers admitted (Judt 2010: 252–253). Yet in The Spy the Berlin Wall is solely a symbol of communist aggression. ‘Your Party’s always at war, isn’t it?’ Leamas will later snap at Liz, ‘I never heard that Communists preached the sanctity of human life’ (le Carré 1964b: 229). Echoing Control (20), Leamas is suggesting that the West only responds in kind to the East’s intrinsic inhumanity: ‘Sacrificing the individual to the mass’ (229). The language suggests a sinister, cultish quality, a topsy-turvy inversion of normality, the ‘mass’ dominant rather than subservient. Leamas calls this ruthless utilitarianism ‘party terms – a small price for a big return. One sacrificed for the many’ (230; emphasis added) – meaning that the West’s own accounting logic is therefore simply imitative. Communism is thus defined by inhumanity, and consequently the East effectively puts the ‘cold’ in the Cold War. Very much in the shadow of the Wall, The Spy offers rare scenes in le Carré’s work of a communist country, when British communist, Liz Gold visits the GDR. These scenes set in Leipzig as an East German everytown present an Orwellian vision of ideology controlling ordinary life, with citizens who ‘talked politics at every meal’, meaning ‘it was like living in a religious community’ (175). This is communism as cult – a common trope of British government papers (Reynolds 1994b: 82): fanatical, faintly sinister. There are, as in 1984, endless shortages, a lack of the sensuous ‘ordinary’ things of Western life: the house Liz stays in is small, ‘dark and meagre’, the food poor – ‘you felt the world was better for your empty stomach’ (le Carré 1964b: 175). Leamas has similar experiences (125–126). In fact East Germany from 1960 had vastly increased in prosperity (Taylor 2007: 517–518), with economic growth on a par with Britain. The Spy presents a lack of popular support for the regime: thus the poor attendance at the Party Branch Meeting (le Carré 1964b: 176–177); the dusty bunting around the picture of Lenin, a communist icon neglected, unloved (177), the communist ‘literature’ unsold (177). The regime is depicted as maintained through coercion – Frau Ebert’s fear of the Party official (178) recalls the pervasive fear of officialdom in 1984. Le Carré later declared: ‘Our

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Western propaganda was … entirely true: the East German regime was indeed hated by those it governed’ (1990: 7). The concept of communism as an alien parasite upon the human host was a common one in Western Cold-War culture (Heinlen in Medovoi 2012: 168; Crawley 1963: 96). This disjuncture between citizen and state culminates in the prison where Liz is incarcerated being full of citizens who ‘fail to recognise Socialist reality’ (le Carré 1964b: 219), according to its ideology-spouting commissar. This scene then is a synecdoche of the Eastern Europe as prison camp motif: a prison packed with ordinary, innocent citizens. So in the novel’s terms, despite all the talk of politics and infusion with ideology, life in the GDR offers no greater good, no economic redistribution, only the power of elites over ordinary citizens. Or rather because of the infusion with ideology: this, the novel says, is the reality of ideological society – life in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, a warning of the dangers of leftism of all stripes. Dramatizing the communist elites in action, the secret Tribunal scene recalls the Soviet show trial of British spy Oleg Penkovsky in May 1963 (Hennessy 2010: 44). Leamas sees the Tribunal’s President with her ‘small, cruel eyes’ (le Carré 1964b: 217) as grotesque, acknowledging her gender with a shiver (179): this, alongside the prison commissar, is a characterization just as unsubtly Manichaean – and as misogynist – as Fleming’s Rosa Klebb (From Russia with Love, 1957). In a scene pitched somewhere between heightened, shadowy German expressionism and Kafka’s everyday surrealism, the elite is shown to be driven by power, not principle, and so delivers a travesty of justice, acquitting the real-life Penkovsky, the fascist, Mundt and arresting and probably executing his Jewish deputy, Fiedler (le Carré 1964b: 228) as a mole. As Liz and Leamas’ personal relationship is exposed in this political context (like Winston and Julia’s in 1984), the eclipse of ordinary life by ideology is represented by the only colour in the scene being saturated in a suspended Red Star. Yet this saturation of GDR society by ideology is problematized by the absence in the novel of ideology in any substantive, philosophical form. This is demonstrated by the novel’s presentation of its primary communist character, Fiedler.

‘A savage little bastard’: Characterizing communism – Fiedler Personable, intelligent, patient with the truculent Leamas, Jens Fiedler is lionized by liberal scholars as a ‘good communist’ and exhibit A in the ‘moral equivalence’ argument (Neuse 1982: 299; Homberger 1986: 56; Wolfe 1987: 113; Tracy 1988: 23 Beene 1991: 54). But there is a fundamental contradiction involved in this critical position. For while there is no denying that Fiedler is an appealing

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character – especially viewed via Oskar Werner in the film adaptation – there is also no denying that Fiedler’s ideology is anathema to the Cold-War consensus that characterizes most le Carré criticism. Fiedler stands in the shadow of the Berlin Wall: it is Fiedler, not the more melodramatically monstrous Mundt, who is the novel’s ideologue of totalitarianism, its equivalent of 1984’s O’Brien. In fact for Liz – and liberal scholars – to see Fiedler as ‘kind and decent’ (le Carré 1964b: 230) goes beyond Cold-War liberalism’s veneration of ‘ambiguity’ (detailed in Schaub 1991: 35; see: Aronoff 1999: 201–214) and into the purely contradictory. For rather than presenting the personal and political in Fiedler as in tension, the text carefully suggests that Fiedler’s personality and politics are one. Prior to meeting him, Leamas calls Fiedler a ‘savage little bastard’, and claims the ‘remorseless’ Fiedler tortured a British agent (le Carré 1964b: 118). In person, Fiedler articulates an ideology as ruthless and inhuman – in the novel’s terms – as these accounts would lead one to expect. It is worth examining one speech in detail: It is not fashionable to quote Stalin – but he said once ‘half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.’ … a movement which protects itself against counter-revolution can hardly stop at the exploitation – or the elimination, Leamas – of a few individuals. … I myself would have put a bomb in a restaurant if it brought us further along the road. Afterwards I would draw the balance – so many women, so many children; and so far along the road. (134–135)9

The surface here asserts communism as integrally inhumane, human life devalued, death bureaucratized into balance sheets. A deeper reading suggests the parallels between the communist state and the British state for which the novel is noted – Stalin sarcastically articulating the contradictions in the ‘greater good for the greatest number’ shared by communist and liberal states alike. More subtly still, the imagistic continuity of the traffic accident connects Fiedler’s speech to the climactic deaths of Liz and Leamas. However, to invoke Stalin and the subject of large-scale civilian deaths, eliding this moment of Stalin’s repudiation in the Eastern Bloc (Taylor 2007: 516; Kemp-Welch 2011: 219), is to skew this apparently ‘balanced’ equation. With the deaths of Liz and Leamas on a ‘traffic accident’ scale being incomparable to the deaths of millions in Stalin’s gulags and purges, the trope of moral equivalence is thus being deployed to subliminally valorize liberalism and condemn communism. 9

The veracity of this quotation is somewhat open to question. http://quoteinvestigator. com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/

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Moreover, as the British state has been claimed by Control to be prompted by ‘benevolent’ ideals, the comparison is again a dishonest one: communist ideals remain sinisterly unspecific in what has been depicted as an ‘ideological’ nation. What is the road that the bomb gets Fiedler’s state further along? Where are communism’s ends? Where is redistribution, social equality, the novel’s own theme of classlessness? Communist ideology is again repressed: it is the ‘not said’ of The Spy (Macherey 1978: 84). The only end Fiedler cites is preventing counter-revolution – regarded in Western Cold-War culture as a euphemism for communism retaining power by military force. This then presents a content-free communism as per O’Brien’s statement in 1984: ‘The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake … Power is not a means, it is an end’ (Orwell 2013: 301–302). Ends and means have merged in Fiedler’s characterization, but contrary to Arendt’s assertion (1994: 249), there is nothing of ideology left in that merger. So, later in the novel, when Fiedler declares moral equivalence between East and West, the comparison is, again, not an equal one: like is not being compared with like. Fiedler asks Leamas whether the British state would kill ‘an innocent man’, citing himself as an example. Leamas replies, ‘it depends on the need’ and Fiedler declares, with satisfaction, a commonality between the opposing sides (le Carré 1964b: 174). It will eventually turn out that Fiedler describes almost exactly Britain’s expedient intention: yet, as we shall see, the British ‘need’ has been established in Control’s briefing speech to contain ‘ideals’, a ‘benevolent’ way of life and thus a greater good (20), while communism, in The Spy’s terms, possesses no greater good, just will to power. All this is not to defend the authoritarian regime that developed in the GDR but to argue that critical claims that The Spy presents a moral equivalence between East and West deny the novel’s subliminal anti-communism. By tunnelling, infiltrating into the national unconscious, compacting and solidifying the ColdWar consensus, this antipathy to the communist ‘other’ both ramps up ColdWar tensions and casts suspicion on British leftists by association. This can be seen in the characterization of the novel’s British communist, Liz Gold.

‘She knew; she had been told’: Liz Gold and communism As a British communist, Liz Gold is not so readily ‘othered’ as an Eastern communist. So while her communism is still presented as cult-like and sinister, Liz is redeemed by this being in perpetual internal conflict with her native British liberal decency. A Jewish anti-fascist (le Carré 1964b: 156) and an English rose who attends Evensong (176), Liz embodies the struggle of East

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versus West, cold versus warm, ‘other’ versus same. With the Cold War thus being played out through her body and mind, Liz’s presentation vacillates between being naïvely culpable – the weaker sex as weak link in the liberal chain; the feminine as fifth column again – and nationally innocent: an ordinary, decent, English girl. On the one hand, Liz evinces a hard-line inhumane Stalinism, whereby communism is ‘demonstrated in history, individuals must bow to it, be crushed by it if necessary’ (177). That her Communist Party branch official, Ashe, is also Leamas’ GDR liaison makes British leftist links with the Cold-War enemy crudely clear (50, 156). On the other hand, Liz is kind and patient with Leamas (32, 35–36), empathetic to the poor (155), and intuits commonality with the emblematically English, perennially decent Smiley (108). We see Liz’s struggle often in the course of a single passage. Reflecting on her local London Communist Party Branch, Liz denigrates the Party and calls it a ‘fraud’, before correcting herself: ‘Of course – that was the explanation. She was suddenly filled with a feeling of warmth and gratitude towards the Party. They really were decent people and she was proud and thankful to belong … Centre was such a wonderful thing – stern, benevolent, impersonal, perpetual … People who fought for peace’ (156–157). The empirical throat-clearings (‘of course’) locate Liz in a ‘reasonable’ English idiom; but ‘gratitude’ suggests Liz’s insecure need to belong, the warm British embrace of individualism perverted by the cold Eastern clutch of authoritarian control. This is also found in the formulation ‘she knew, she had been told’ (156): the text conveys clearly that the English Liz has been ideologically brainwashed by what was culturally regarded as ‘a foreign disease’, communism (Crawley 1963: 96). Again, as with Fiedler, there is no ideological content in such formulations, no discernible greater good. ‘Peace’ in such a context only summons the discredited Peace Partisans (see: Chapter 1) or Khrushchev’s derided ‘peaceful coexistence’, and thus merges with the ideological perversion of language caricatured in Orwell’s Newspeak. Communist philosophy is again repressed in the text. The fight within Liz is not a fair one, therefore: while presented as close focalization, fictional objectivity always smuggles in opinion (Barthes 1975a: 263), and Liz’s thoughts are being parodied here as, effectively, loving Big Brother: brainwashed, deluded. Given this closed, sexist dialectic between innocence and naiveté, Liz tends to be underestimated by scholars both male and female (Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 166; Beene 1991: 58; Powell 1991: 72; White 2007: 31–32). Liz, however, plants a small feminist flag in barrenly masculine terrain. The tone of affectionate condescension with which the narrative voice and Leamas both treat Liz – Leamas laughs at her when she first declares her communism (le Carré 1964b: 36) – is

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countered by a subtle current of what Williams calls ‘emergent ideology’ (1985: 121). Liz conveys a trace of the looming counterculture, a foreshadowing of second-wave feminism, with Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique out in 1963 and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel published in 1964. Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘Annus Mirabilis’ offers a summation of these countercultural currents: ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three ... Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP’ (1988: 167). The Communist Party is characterized somewhat incoherently as both redoubt of sexual perversion (homosexuality) and traditional heterosexual threat: ‘Perhaps [Ashe] had a crush on her; perhaps he wasn’t queer but just looked it’ (le Carré 1964b: 156).10 Superficially Liz functions here as innocent prey; lost little girl amongst the wolves. However, as Liz is discreetly but unapologetically sexual, making the first moves with Leamas, never speaking of marriage, aware of her sexual power, she is rather more self-possessed than is usually allowed. Liz continues to channel the Cold War’s conflicts, body and mind, after the GDR Branch Meeting. Beset by doubt in the face of the empirical ‘reality’ of communist East Germany of shortages, privation and fear of officialdom, Liz’s internal struggle becomes ever more visceral. ‘Peace and freedom and equality – they were facts, of course they were. … Alec was wrong: truth existed outside people, it was demonstrated in history’ (177). These self-persuading formulations pit Liz’s decent, liberal instincts (that empirical ‘of course’) against the ideological talk of ‘history’: nature against ‘science’, warm against cold, body against mind. Here, finally, is some indicator of a greater communist good – ‘freedom and equality’ – but so mired in Newspeak that, like ‘peace’, it can only suggest bad faith. The cumulative effect of the planned, cold ‘reality’ of Eastern Europe – the Eberts’ meagre home, the empty Branch Meeting, the unloved Party, the authoritarian Tribunal – will gradually cause Liz’s Western warmth to neutralize her Eastern coldness. By the end of the novel Liz is espousing individuals’ ‘love’ against the ‘wicked’ collective state (229) – love being the sine qua non of humanist liberalism (but always in tension with harsher, laissezfaire liberalism).11 In so doing, Liz now repudiates the communism she had previously preached, as Leamas reminds her (230). Liz insists that ‘It’s far more terrible, what they are doing: to find the humanity in people … and use it to hurt and kill’ (231). Although she is technically critiquing the British state, 10 11

Like Vassall, Ashe is also homosexual and has a Dolphin Square flat (le Carré 1964b: 60). ‘Liberal humanism [is] concerned … with the unique value of the individual and the creative realm of the interpersonal’ (Eagleton 1996: 36)

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what is being expressed here is an unequivocal victory in the struggle within Liz of warmth over cold, humanity over ideology, liberalism over communism. By the time Liz dies, her dead body, with the rain falling on her face (240), contains only warmth – vulnerability, innocence, love, nurture – her communism essentially forgotten, the cold now located outside her, in the GDR’s strip of no-man’s land. Liz is declared in Leamas’ dying vision as the Cold War’s collateral damage: ‘a small car smashed between great lorries’ (240). The ColdWar conflict between liberalism and communism that has been waged within Liz’s mind and body is now brought to its logical, destructive conclusion. This conclusion represents a victory for liberalism (however tarnished) and a defeat for communism – a defeat that is political, emotional and moral, symbolized by the dead bodies sprawled at the foot of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall, as a symbol of inhuman ideology and communist aggression, has loomed over the events in The Spy: never more so than in this final scene, at the physical Wall itself, up against the barbed wire and breeze blocks – ‘the coarse, sharp contact of the cinder brick’ (le Carré 1964b: 239). Such is the symbolic and iconographic imperative of the novel’s anti-communism that it overwhelms all other considerations. Communism owns the coldness of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the Cold War too.12 In narratively urgent succession, we see: a show trial (179–217); a prison commanded by an ideological automaton commissar (218–222); an escape from a communist prison (223–225); the grey, intimidating bulk of the Berlin Wall (239); searching, surveilling searchlights (238–239); an innocent – a woman – escaping to the West (239) and – most of all – shots coming from the East (239). Liz’s death at the Wall replays and embodies so many Cold-War scenes – most iconically, the caught-on-camera death of Peter Fechter on 17 August 1962 (Taylor 2007: 475). Consequently, that there was an edict forbidding shooting female escapees (457), that none of the differently estimated 86 to 227 actual deaths at the Wall (657–659) were British citizens, or that, in the novel’s own logic, the West almost certainly ordered the shots to be fired, all fades from view.13 Liz, now embodying Western values, becomes communism’s victim, attempting to escape to the West’s warmth, refuge and 12

13

Indeed, Cavallaro straightforwardly invokes ‘Liz’s death at the hands of the East German police’ (2010: 669). Showing also how communist mud sticks, Crawford and Martel overlook Mundt transpiring to be a Western ally and claim le Carré ‘portray[s] communism as a façade for Nazism and anti-Semitism’ (1997: 297). In fact, East Germany was somewhat freer of Nazis than West Germany (Taylor 2007: 530–2). Liz’s death is ambiguous, but close reading suggests that she is shot on Mundt’s – indeed possibly Control’s – orders, to eliminate the risk Liz herself notes she now poses to Mundt’s cover, and thus to Britain’s security (le Carré 1964b: 229). Moreover, it is only Mundt, within the East German state, who has knowledge of Liz’s ‘escape’ (223), having engineered it himself.

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humanity, embodied here by Smiley, calling the lovers from the Western side of the Wall (le Carré 1964b: 240), affirming, hailing, interpellating them as Western subjects (Althusser 2001: 109). But Liz and Leamas are trapped forever in the East, the Wall’s shadow looming over their dead bodies, imprisoned for all time by the defining cold of communism. ***

‘Not quite a gentleman’: Leamas and the classless British nation Beyond the looming presence of the Berlin Wall, the most memorable aspect of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is its hero, Alec Leamas – classless, roughhewn, irreverent: rude in an endearing way. This chapter will show that these two features of the novel are more closely related than would at first appear. Leamas in The Spy, like Smiley in Call for the Dead, represents Britain, both literally (as state functionary) and figuratively (as national everyman). Plebeian, anti-establishment Leamas as hero suggests a very different Britain to that of gentlemanly, establishment Smiley. The characterization of Leamas, hard on the heels of Deighton’s nameless lower-class hero in November 1962’s The Ipcress File, democratized the spy novel quite as much as the American hard-boiled genre democratized the genteel detective novel during the 1940s (Mandel 1984: 36). Leamas is thus a metonym of contemporary 1960s’ modernity, and it is no coincidence that he is promoted over Smiley’s archaic gentlemanly amateurism at this particular cultural moment. One achievement of the Labour government of 1945–51 was a moderate recalibration of the rigidities of Britain’s class system through the welfare state, progressive taxation and the expansion of white-collar work.14 By the early 1960s, this social shift was being proclaimed as creating a broad ‘classlessness’ within Britain, with workers becoming a ‘new middle class’ (Kynaston 2014: 61). This classlessness was evident in Swinging Britain’s cultural topography, from self-made professionals like fashion designer Mary Quant or pop artist Peter Blake, to pop culture celebrities like The Beatles, to ‘ordinary’ people like airline pilots, sociology lecturers (Sunday Times 1962, 1) and politicians like new 14

https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed: ‘the share of income going to the top 10% of the population fell over the 40 years to 1979, from 34.6% in 1938 to 21% in 1979, while the share going to the bottom 10% rose slightly’.

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Labour leader, Harold Wilson. Described as ‘a contemporary classless figure … a sort of homespun Kennedy’ (Observer 1963, 8), Wilson famously proclaimed that Britain could no longer remain ‘a nation of Gentlemen in a world of Players’ (Wilson 1963: 139). The definitively establishment Conservative governments of Macmillan and then Lord Home were discredited by the Profumo scandal (March–June 1963);15 Kim Philby’s shock defection (July 1963); the British Empire continuing to haemorrhage colonies (Kenya, Zanzibar, Aden in 1963 alone) and the Long Boom visibly flagging. Dolorous state-of-the-nation treatises abounded in early 1960s Britain (Sampson 1962; Shanks 1962; Guardian 1963; Howard 1963; Koestler 1963; Muggeridge 1963; Anderson 1964a). The promised solution of prime-minister-in-waiting, Wilson, was to push redistribution further: to make socialism and national regeneration the same project, boosting Britain’s international potency by boosting its citizenry. This was Wilson’s vision of modernity in his ‘white heat of technology’ speech of 1 October 1963, mere weeks after The Spy’s publication. Wilson’s speech also had a rarely noted ColdWar function: citing the need for Britain to meet ‘the formidable Soviet challenge’ in education and technology (1963: 140), Wilson’s vision thus both challenged and channelled communism during the 1960s’ worldwide shift to the left. While what was being proposed by Labour was tame stuff compared to communism’s true ‘classlessness’ – the levelling of class distinctions; a true common wealth – Wilsonian socialism and communism were clearly – and for the establishment, alarmingly – connected. In The Spy the correlation is repressed: class is one of a long list of communist concerns to which putative communist ideologue, Fiedler never alludes. Viewed through the national filter of spy fiction, contemporary classlessness was captured well by the casting of working-class-boys-made-good Michael Caine (The Ipcress File [Furie, 1965]), Sean Connery (in the new James Bond film franchise, starting with Dr. No [Young, 1962], chosen in zeitgeist-tapping preference to gentlemanly David Niven) and Richard Burton (The Spy itself [Ritt, 1965]). The white raincoat Burton sported as Leamas recalled Wilson’s characteristic ‘classless’ Gannex raincoat (Haseler 1989: 33)16 whilst channelling 15

16

Conservative Secretary of State for War, John Profumo resigned in June 1963, but this ‘sex and spying’ issue still ricocheted that September with the Denning Report front-page news (‘In the Clear, or Very Nearly So’, Evening Standard, 17 September 1963, 1). Cornwell was present at Christine Keeler’s trial in an MI5 capacity (Sisman 2016: 242). The case was the probable cause of Macmillan’s resignation in October. The Gannex brand was owned by Joseph Kagan, who, as a refugee from the Soviet zone and a friend of Wilson’s, became a key component of MI5 suspicion of Wilson having Soviet Union links (Gladwell 2014). The Gannex ‘worker’s’ raincoat thus actually became a key player in the class struggle.

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Burton’s previous anti-establishment role in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Richardson, 1959). Leamas is clearly this classless ‘new kind of man’; an amalgam of working and middle class (Orwell 1970c: 36). ‘[Leamas] looked like a man who could make trouble, a man who looked after his money, a man who was not quite a gentleman’ (le Carré 1964b: 15). Orwell claimed ‘classlessness’ displaced ‘the old distinction between a man who is a “gentleman” and the man who is “not a gentleman”’ (Orwell 1970c: 36). The focalization of an airhostess (a typically classless, modern profession) suggests Leamas is ‘North Country’ (le Carré 1964b: 15) – shorthand for working-class origin. Leamas has a ‘non-U’, utilitarian style of dress (15) and an irreverent and abrasive manner (‘Shut up’: 6; ‘the lot of you are bastards’: 134) – both ‘utilitarian’ and ‘abrasive’ being 1960s ‘keywords’ (Booker 1970: 23–30). Leamas went to grammar (not public) school (le Carré 1964b: 24), while, far from attending Oxford, he has no degree (24). Suggestive of a new social porousness, Leamas has entered the establishment-dominated Circus and risen to head of its Berlin Station. In terms of Wilson’s modern Britain, Leamas’ sojourn in technocratic, whitecollar Banking Section is key, while Leamas’ lover, Liz, as a librarian, is also putatively classless. To argue about the pair’s precise class status (as many did about Wilson’s) is beside the point: what Leamas and Liz are clearly not is establishment. Fleming’s and Deighton’s contemporaneous heroes, with their stylish London flats (Fleming 2002: 77–80; Deighton 2009: 90), fashionable clothes and modish consumer objects, combine a ‘classless’ social status with an embrace of the modernity, dynamism and desirability of capitalism (Greenwood 2000: 167). Leamas, by contrast, doesn’t own a television, his flat is austere (le Carré 1964b: 27) and his clothes unstylish (15). For all his social mobility then, Leamas’ national landscape actually evokes traditional working-class stereotypes: a pub (29; dissolution), a Labour Exchange (30; idleness), a grocer’s offering credit (44; poverty), a prison (45–47; criminality) and a strip club (63; debauchery). The line between Leamas’ spy-plot ‘cover’ of lumpen (stereo)type and his ‘true’ personality is, the text makes clear, a thin one (140): Leamas really is a violent, feckless, rude, drunk. This depiction of Britain as a very particular ‘common wealth’ – riven by who is common and who has the wealth – is attested throughout The Spy. Early on, upper-class Fawley reminds Leamas of his status in the hierarchy, ‘You haven’t got a pass, have you?’ (17): that pass – access, inclusion, status – is potent not just within the state but within the nation. For while the walls

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of the establishment had proved permeable for the bourgeoisie (Anderson 1964a: 32) and to some extent the middle classes (Leys 1989: 294), workingclass social mobility is represented as being as challenging and little likely to succeed as crossing the Berlin Wall from the wrong side of the border. The classless remain out in the socio-economic cold, rendered literal by Smiley’s and Control’s possession of real fires in their elite rooms (le Carré 1964b: 17, 54) while Leamas’ dingy bedsit has only a gas fire (41). Classlessness is thus shown to be only the ‘small change of the system’, while the true class system ‘remains unaltered in any major way’ (Williams 1974: 24). This then is a depiction of the nation in fundamental contradiction with Britain’s liberal ideology of equality and democracy – so crucial to its Cold-War propaganda (Samuel 1989: xxvii) – and one which proffers a fairly damning picture of Britain at the dawn of the Swinging Sixties. But having revealed this breach in national ideology, the text again repairs it; represses it. The Spy satirizes and dismisses Liz’s Communist Party colleagues’ analysis of the class struggle. When a branch member declares Leamas’ attack on the grocer to be ‘a straight case of protest … of social awareness and hatred against the boss class’ (le Carré 1964b: 108), the reader already knows the assault is a set-up. Leamas has nothing against the grocer: he is simply acting out the part prescribed by the real boss class, the gentlemanly Control. Moreover, a selfemployed grocer is hardly an example of the boss class – he is petit bourgeois at best. The communists are thus presented as both cynical and credulous in their conception of class war. There is, moreover, no indication that Leamas has anything against the ‘boss class’, his boss’s class: the establishment. Anti-establishment for Leamas is a veneer of irreverence, a contempt for the ‘Gentility Principle’ (Alvarez 1988: 21) – he manifests some impatience with Control’s donnishness (le Carré 1964b: 17) – masking a strikingly passive adherence to traditional social hierarchies. Leamas has already served the establishment with distinction in the World War (77–78) and now does the same in the Cold War: enduring social isolation, prison, exile, interrogation, beatings, torture at the establishment’s command. Leamas does articulate some class resentment when he fully comprehends how manipulated and deceived he has been by Control’s intellectually intricate plot: ‘I can see them sitting round a fire in one of their smart bloody clubs’ (227). Note that warm fire in a book suffused with images of warmth and cold. Even so, Leamas also makes a very strong defence of that plot (231). Moreover, Leamas effectively offers his life to secure the establishment at the end of The Spy: the ruling class gives the orders, the working class does the dirty work and the dying.

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However despairingly, however hopelessly, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the lower orders themselves – in the representative form of Leamas – affirm and uphold the establishment and thus the social hierarchy of a classriven Britain. ***

‘We are defensive’: English empiricism, ideology and the British state ‘I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don’t believe it’s driven by Father Christmas’ (le Carré 1964b: 36). This is how, famously, Leamas responds to Liz’s question about what he believes in, just before she declares her own communism. Leamas’ statement suggests the level of imbalance in the novel’s putative parallels between East and West: for, after all the emphasis on Eastern ideology, the West, it turns out, has no ideology. Leamas deals, we are to understand, only in what he sees in front of him – his very terseness and rudeness performs calling a spade a spade. ‘Leamas was not a reflective man and not a particularly philosophical one’ (13). Although couched in an apparently rebellious, ‘angry young man’ demotic, Leamas’ plaintalking here has nothing to do with being anti-establishment. For at this very point that Leamas laughs at Liz’s politicization and asserts the transparency of surface meaning, Leamas is acting a part. Leamas is only pretending to be a disillusioned, dissolute drunk on the orders of his establishment state superior, Control, as part of an elaborate anti-communist – thus ideological – operation. Far from Leamas’ attitude being subversive, his empiricism is the discursive mode through which the establishment is actually upheld and British ideology disseminated. Empiricism is the assertion of sensory experience as the basis for knowledge. English empiricism, like so much of Western thought, is associated with Hobbes (Easthope 1999: 35) and Locke. Correctly, it is ‘pseudo-empiricism’ (Anderson 1966: 39): subjective ‘evidence’ based on common-sense assumptions rather than the accumulated data of scientific empiricism (Nairn 1962: 31). Thus Winston Smith’s cry of ‘It exists!’ (Orwell 2013: 283) or an IRD executive’s insistence that the 1948 ‘Foundations of Stalinism’ document ‘was not propaganda, it was simply a collection of facts’ (Smith 2010: 114). This then is ‘the philosophical pretension to nonphilosophy’ (Derrida 1978: 152) but going further, empiricism

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is, in British Cold-War thinking, the opposite of ideology, as encapsulated in 1984’s interrogation scenes.17 We might also recall Arendt’s suggestion that the West is exempt from ‘ideological politics’ (1994: 249). In The Spy, empiricism is the expression of Western warmth as against Eastern cold, concrete against abstract – it is the demotic of the Cold-War consensus, naturalizing capitalism, liberal democracy and anti-communism as common sense, as beyond ideology. Communism, as we have seen, is nothing but ideology. Leamas’ words’ immersion and investment in the humdrum are the very grain of English empiricism. Leamas scoffs at ordinary life (‘crummy’; ‘moronic’, le Carré 1964b: 231) but also yearns for it, to come in out of the cold. Thus his scorn is shot through with everyday images of taking a bus, a hint of British family life via Father Christmas; thus Liz. Later at a safe house in Holland, Leamas watches a woman feeding birds on a beach and decides: ‘He knew what it was then that Liz had given him … it was the caring about little things – the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity … It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess … he would go back and find it; he would make Liz find it for him’ (100). Here again are two evocatively banal British ‘way of life’ motifs: the seaside holiday and feeding the birds. Leamas sums up his – imagined – rejection of the political for the private with the phrase ‘come in from the cold’, meaning that Liz, here, represents hearth, home, contained sexuality: warmth.18 Scholars interpret this beach scene as Leamas’ assertion of privacy against the state (Lewis 1985: 77; Homberger 1986: 50; Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 167; Beene 1991: 58; Hepburn 2005: 170; Woods 2008: 125; Boyd 2010; Yildiz and Durmus 2013: 53); warmth against cold; a space beyond politics. But if cold, as this chapter argues, signifies communism rather than just ‘the field’, then warmth signifies liberalism: indeed, the primacy of privacy and the assertion of liminal space beyond politics are inherently liberal concepts. Far from being apolitical, they are anti-communist – and ideological – concepts. As chief of the Circus, Control’s briefing of Leamas is the novel’s only real exposition of British ideology. This briefing is an evasively empirical affair,

17

18

With 1984 citing the ‘empirical method of thought’ as what has been defeated by the Party (Orwell 2013: 218), The Spy’s Fiedler/Leamas scenes parallel 1984’s interrogation scenes. Under interrogation, Winston tries to cling to the empirical against O’Brien’s ideological brainwashing. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes?’ Winston cries (287). The beach scene recalls Winston and Julia watching a woman washing clothes in 1984 (Orwell 2013: 250–251): the observation of ordinary life affirms ordinary love. However their liminal personal space (the secret room above Charrington’s antique shop) turns out to be a political trap and they are arrested moments later.

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dizzying in its circular arguments, its claims to be only articulating common sense (‘You can’t … can you now?’) and its irrational appeals to reason (‘Do you think that’s fair?’ le Carré 1964b: 20).19 Control’s constant use of ‘you’ is inclusive but dogmatic: Leamas is being coerced where he appears to be being consulted, and by extension, so is the broader ‘you’, the reader. This is particularly apparent in Cyril Cusack’s masterful realization of Control in the 1965 film, all gentle, nohands persuasion and soft-spoken insinuation. It is worth attempting to unpick Control’s speech in some detail. Initially, Control claims an equivalence of ‘methods’ between the East and the West (20) but, easily missed, Control makes three key statements that underlie – and undermine – this apparent claim of moral equivalence. First, Control says, ‘We are never going to be aggressors … We do disagreeable things but we are defensive’ (20). This was standard Western propaganda: ‘the Soviet Union was consistently presented as expansionary and offensive in contrast with the West, which was presented as essentially defensive’ (Lashmar and Oliver 1998: 128). Control’s assertion elides Western provocations like missiles in Turkey, the United States nurturing European capitalism via the Marshall Plan, West German rearmament (from 1954) and Western interference in communist regimes throughout the world. Indeed Control’s own operation against the GDR is a synecdoche for just such Western offensives. Control’s pseudoempiricism does violence to the concept of ‘defensive’, unless one regards communism’s very existence as ‘aggressive’. The double and triple meanings of ‘we are defensive’ (‘we are sensitive to criticism’; ‘we have a guilty conscience’) are faultlines within both Control’s speech and British propaganda and provide an immanent critique of both, bubbling under the surface of the text, repressed, but to make their return. Second, Control declares: ‘we do disagreeable things so that ordinary people … can sleep safely in their beds at night’ (le Carré 1964b: 20). So Britain defends ‘ordinary life’, not an ideology: in a standard image of innocence, its citizens sleep like children, rooted in the humdrum, the domestic. Third, Control carefully separates ‘benevolent’ British state ends or ‘ideals’ (as distinct from ideology), from state ‘methods’ (means) to protect those ideals: ‘You can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?’ (20). This suggests both that communist means and ends are the same (pursuit of power) and that the British state, in doing ‘very wicked things’ (20) – for example sacrificing Liz

19

See: F. R. Leavis’ similarly coercive empirical formulations: ‘This – doesn’t it? – bears such a relation to that; this kind of thing – don’t you find it so? – wears better than that’ (1962: 63).

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to safeguard Mundt’s position – is first, simply keeping up with Eastern bloc utilitarianism, and second, pursuing ‘benevolent’ liberal ends that are thus superior to communist ends. Control’s speech overall then is empiricism as sophistry ( Easthope 1999: 93–94), naturalizing political partisanship as common sense: ‘the Western ideology which proposes that the West has no ideology, that it has only its cherished “way of life”’ (Buzard 1991: 157). Scholars often suggest that Control is satirized in this scene, even condemned (Panek 1981: 249; Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 165; Wolfe 1987: 122; Dobler 1989: 184; Beene 1991: 50; Scott 1991: 2; Cobbs 1998: 60). While in a novel written in ‘neutral’ free indirect discourse, this is a matter of interpretation, Control is presented in a dowdier, flatter version of the mythic register deployed for Smiley in Call for the Dead. Indeed the text evinces such an awed fascination with the gentlemanly Control’s cleverness, with his very sophistry, that le Carré would later feel the novel was ‘like a fan letter to the British secret establishment’ (1991: vii). Nothing in the novel – not the alliance with Mundt, nor the death of Liz – fundamentally challenges Control’s assertion of the undergirding greater good to British aims, particularly as a response – as Control carefully asserts – to the consensus evil of communism. Leamas’ lack of interest in motivation, only in action, is essentially a visceral version of Control’s intellectual empiricism: ‘You don’t want to think, you don’t dare!’ Liz tells him (le Carré 1964b: 37). Leamas, posing as a defector to East Germany, will again deny having any philosophy to his communist interrogator, Fiedler: ‘What do you mean, a philosophy? … We’re not Marxists, we’re nothing. Just people’ (133). Here, again, communists have ideology, while Westerners are ‘just people’ (communists are not people). 20 Westerners are ideologically neutral: ‘nothing’. A double meaning of ‘nothing’ is a faultline in socially stratified Britain: ordinary people being ‘of no account’; ‘expendable’ (as Leamas will prove to be), meaning that again an immanent critique seeps between the cracks. But the dominant ‘message’ conveyed here is that Britain has no ideology, a view articulated by le Carré himself (1965; in Bragg 1976, 90), 21 his critics (e.g. Halperin 1998: 217) and throughout contemporary Cold-War commentary (see: Schwartz 2009: 34 ).22 20

21 22

‘Western democracy seems to have only one unifying force … that individuals are more valuable than philosophies’ (le Carré 1964c: 18). ‘Combatants of the Cold War are non-ideological’ (le Carré 1965: 4). ‘In the ensuing ideological confrontation, the West was at a philosophical disadvantage; it … had no appealing affirmative doctrine to counter Soviet ideology’ (Beene 1991: 47). ‘Leamas believes that philosophies are dangerous because they make people willing to destroy for their sake’ (Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 161). See also: Lasseter 1990: 107; Hoffman 2001: 12.

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At the point that Leamas claims this ideological neutrality, however, he is risking his life to operate undercover on behalf of the British state, having already endured prison for the sake of this elaborate anti-communist operation. Even Leamas’ eventual justification of the operation to Liz empirically couches a trenchant anti-communist action as non-ideological. Leamas snaps: ‘They need [Mundt] so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night … They need him for the safety of ordinary crummy people like you and me’ (le Carré 1964b: 231). We should not be distracted by the bogus nihilism of ‘moronic’ or ‘crummy’: these are rhetorical synonyms for ‘ordinary’ people, in which Leamas includes himself and Liz (again, communist citizens are not ordinary people). Not only is Leamas defending Control’s ‘foul operation’, he does so by parroting Control’s justification: to ensure ‘ordinary people … can sleep safely in their beds at night’ (20). Leamas thus justifies a British alliance with a Nazi to combat communism as being non-ideological – not so much politically neutral as humanly natural. Mundt’s role in the novel reflects British Cold-War ‘realism’, whereby alliances with right-wing totalitarians were considered an improvement on allowing communist totalitarians room to manoeuvre. In the name of the Cold War, Britain supported an Olympic relay of dictators in Greece (Metaxa, Kollias, Papadopoulos); Suharto in Indonesia (Lashmar and Oliver 1998: 1–10); and a phalanx of former Nazis in West Germany – Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s chief of staff from 1953 to 1963, Hans Globke; Bundestag member Ernst Achenbach and so on (Kupferberg 2002: 166).23 While that other meaning of ‘we are defensive’ hangs over this issue, Leamas effectively resolves it via that statement of the ‘greater good’: ‘They need [Mundt] for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me’ (231), and that key reminder: ‘This is a war’. Indeed, Leamas invokes an even greater good: to prevent the Cold-War ideologues from ‘blowing each other sky high’ (231) in a nuclear war – espionage helping maintain the balance of terror, keeping the Cold Peace. Leamas is the novel’s primary protagonist (its emotional heart) and its main focalizer (its brain), so the reader only knows what Leamas knows, and to an extent can only think what Leamas thinks. Leamas upholds Control’s and the British state’s imperatives, including the alliance with Nazi, Mundt. It is the death of Liz that causes Leamas’ final existential despair. With Liz’s dead body held in Leamas’ arms, he turns to face the bullets at the Berlin Wall. Whether this image 23

In 1965, the publication in the GDR of Albert Norden’s Brown Book, listing 1,800 former Nazis in West German public life, would be branded Stalinist propaganda, yet later turned out to be true (Taylor 2007: 528–530).

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represents a condemnation of the consequences of assertive British state action or whether Leamas is effectively upholding, in Liz’s body, the contradictions of the liberal state, is open to question. That George Smiley is present at the death, standing at that frontier, calling out, ‘The girl. Where’s the girl?’ is entirely apposite (le Carré 1964b: 240). Smiley’s role has been distinctly ambiguous throughout the novel. In this we can comprehend him again as the crucible of liberal contradictions, contradictions which are played out here through his body, just as the Cold War is played out through Liz’s. Smiley is said by Control to have resigned from the Circus (22) but keeps appearing in an apparently official capacity. Smiley colludes in Leamas’ deception by deceptively ‘briefing’ him on Mundt (22); Smiley is said to disapprove of the Leamas operation (56) yet also to see its ‘necessity’ (56) – a key distinction;24 Smiley lends his house to the plot but is absent during Control and Leamas’ meeting (54–56); Smiley’s visit to Liz evinces compassion but, with the GDR watching her, links Leamas to British intelligence, compromising him (106–112). Smiley makes unbilled cameos throughout the novel (38, 73, 107, 108): observing, watching over. He is never named, and his purely physical presence can only be recognized by those familiar with Call for the Dead. Smiley’s appearances are therefore ambiguous: simultaneously sinister – the surveillance state – and reassuring – the nanny state – and so these appearances contain the contradictions inherent in the liberal conception of that state. Most significantly of all, Smiley oversees the operation’s conclusion at the Berlin Wall (239–240), a conclusion which is a personal tragedy for Liz and Leamas, but a political triumph for Britain. The key contrast to Stalin’s cynicism is the moral end – if not the moral means – of the British operation, if we accept, as the novel appears to, the greater good in the operation’s intended containment of communism. That Smiley should officiate over this ending is entirely apposite, a continuation of his role in Call for the Dead. It is a scene whose Berlin Wall location and liberal dilemma will be revisited in the conclusion of Smiley’s People sixteen years later, and again, even more directly, half a century later in A Legacy of Spies. Is the sacrifice of individuals in the political strategy of anti-communism, these novels ask, morally justified for the ‘greater good’ (le Carré 2017: 242)?

24

Radio 4’s The Complete Smiley (adapted by Robert Forrest) furthered this ambiguity by Smiley both having a more central role in the ‘ghastly trick’ and telling Leamas not to accept the mission.

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Scholarly division on this issue is indicative of the contradictions inherent. Some scholars see Smiley as endorsing the operation (Bell 1974: 15–16; Sauerberg 1984: 54; Lewis 1985: 65; Rutherford 1987: 17; Aronoff 1999: 93), while Boyd (2010) goes so far as to claim Smiley’s question – ‘Where’s the girl’ – is to confirm her intended death. But this is to misunderstand the liberal dilemma being explored in the book. With Smiley established by Call for the Dead as a moral figure, representative of the compassionate state – a role he will fulfil in increasingly fabled tones in future novels – Smiley cannot be seen as a purely Machiavellian, instrumental figure. Smiley’s ambiguous role in the plot (and the state) only hints at the Mundt alliance representing ‘the fascist core within the national security state’ (Piette 2016: 189) – while also ensuring that Smiley cannot be seen in The Spy in entirely untainted moral terms (le Carré 2017: 240-41). Smiley’s role therefore is once again to express moral misgivings about the collateral damage resulting from state actions, but ultimately to endorse those actions for the greater good of upholding British power and defeating the established anathema of communism.25 This is the fundamental contradiction within liberal attitudes to the state. ‘The strong state as the only sure ultimate guarantor of individualism’ (Wallerstein 2011: 10) results, often enough, in the sacrifice of individuals. The ruthlessness of Hobbes’ Leviathan and the mildness of social liberalism are in perpetual tension within the national ego. *** Beginning and ending with citizens shot down at the Berlin Wall, the Wall stands over The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as a symbol, a threat, a warning – a material manifestation of communism in barbed wire and breeze blocks. This shadow falls so heavily across the novel that its parallels between East and West are unequal, are what Control himself calls ‘dishonest comparisons’ (le Carré 1964b: 20). Where communism is presented as pursuing an expedient ideology lacking any greater good, Britain is presented as pursuing a ‘benevolent’ greater good lacking any ideology. Where the instrumentalism of the communist state is equated with the millions killed in the purges, the instrumentalism of the British state is equated with a small-scale sacrifice of life. Where the East German 25

Le Carré’s own later judgement smacks of second thoughts. Emphasizing ‘the humanist ethic that the individual is worth more than the collective’, he claims if ‘Western man sacrifices the individual to defend the individual’s right against the collective’ then this is ‘Western hypocrisy, and I condemned it because I felt it took us too far into the Communist camp, and too near to the Communist evaluation of the individual’s place in society’ (le Carré 1966a: 5). Le Carré’s ‘humanism’ is notably liberal, emphasizing the individual over the social.

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elite is presented as imposed upon the nation’s citizenry, the British citizenry is presented as upholding the establishment elite. While its skewed alignments and deceptive parallels appear to suggest conciliation beyond borders, The Spy actually redraws Cold-War battle-lines – frontiers, Walls – and thus reasserts the status quo in clear contradiction to its radical reputation. Although the Berlin Wall remained the iconic symbol of the Cold War, never again would it be seen as the flashpoint for the Third World War (Taylor 2007: 501). Most major players in the Berlin crisis, Kennedy, Khrushchev, Adenauer and eventually Ulbricht, were either killed, deposed or sidelined. Willy Brandt’s conciliatory Ostpolitik began in earnest in 1964, emphasizing ‘convergence’ rather than conflict (Taylor 2007: 509–512) – sameness rather than ‘otherness’ – and from 1966, when Brandt became Foreign Minister, and 1969, when he became Chancellor, this conciliation gradually became centralized and officialized. Consequently, escapes, tunnels and anti-communist rhetoric became almost as discouraged on the Western as on the Eastern side of the Wall. The iconography of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – breeze blocks, barbed wire and dead bodies – has consequently long outlasted historical changes on the ground, representing Cold-War relations frozen in time at early 1960s sub-zero levels. *****

3

‘Looking at His Own Reflection’: The Establishment and The Looking Glass War

As Department director, Leclerc shows his staff photographs of what he believes are East German missiles targeted at Britain, he is described as ‘smiling a little, like a man looking at his own reflection’ (le Carré 2011: 52). This marvellously suggestive image implies not only that, in imagining the enemy ‘other’, Leclerc is simply seeing a reflection of himself, but that to do so is pleasurable: an affirmation of self – narcissistic, vain. Indeed the espionage operation the Department mounts on the basis of these blurry, distorted images is apparently a vanity project, waged as much to confirm and ratify the Department’s own identity and importance as to combat any genuine danger to Britain. Arriving in the midst of détente, in June 1965, with the Cold War thawing from its early 1960s low, The Looking Glass War’s plot appears to deprioritize the East–West conflict, reflecting instead the world of work, of interdepartmental tensions, of personal psychology. Such, indeed, is the novel’s critical reputation. To the contrary, it actually faces the geopolitical conflict full on, albeit with some subtlety. Because, with the Department a synecdoche of Britain, Looking Glass is a dramatization of how ideology distorts perception: how the Eastern ‘other’ might actually be a reflection of the Western ‘self ’ – all done with mirrors. Rather than being merely a chimera, that lack of clarity was all the more dangerous in a post-Cuban missile crisis, nuclear hair-trigger world, détente notwithstanding. The term ‘reflection’ is colloquially misused to mean an exact replication, whereas mirrors are a representation – an inverted, thus altered image, distorted by subjectivity, the ego and thus effectively by ideology.1 We

1

Marx utilized a very similar image, that of the nineteenth-century inverting camera obscura, as an analogy for the operation of liberal ideology on human consciousness: ‘If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process’ (Marx 1977: 154).

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see always through the lens of our own – or our national – psyches, subjectivities and ideologies. The motif of the mirror captures the essence of The Looking Glass War: that the Cold-War enemy’s intentions may be the West’s ideological reflection; how rival state factions function as (colloquial) mirror images of one another; and how the nation’s class divisions are predicated on the ‘other’s reflection of the ‘self ’. Following The Spy’s success, Looking Glass was highly anticipated, securing major advances from le Carré’s new UK and US publishers,2 whilst being serialized in the British Daily Express (‘the fictional event of 1965’) and the American Ladies’ Home Journal – middlebrow totems of popular success. Heavily marketed as The Spy’s follow-up (the UK hardback and paperback both had The Spy’s title almost as large as Looking Glass’s), the release of the international hit film of The Spy with Richard Burton and Claire Bloom can only have boosted the new novel’s sales. However, Looking Glass’s poor reviews, swift fall-off in sales and far less successful film adaptation (Pierson, 1969) meant its currency gradually depleted. While its title retained a cultural half-life through being reused by other authors,3 these were essentially reflections of a reflection, and so the original image – the novel – is now largely forgotten. Yet while flawed, The Looking Glass War is a fascinating reflection – and distortion – of its time, a product of the fear, distrust and paranoia that pervaded not just the international Cold War but class-stratified Britain – the home front – in the mid-1960s. The literary class system asserted itself in reviews of The Looking Glass War, with the critical establishment largely closing ranks. Contemporary reviewers often condemned Looking Glass for attempting to ‘transcend’ the spy genre: Anthony Curtis opined, ‘He has stopped writing straight thrillers; he has not started writing novels’.4 Amongst frequent complaints of ‘dullness’, Alex Campbell pondered, ‘maybe fun died with Fleming’

2

3

4

Le Carré switched from Gollancz to the more ‘literary’, Heinemann, selling UK paperback rights to Pan for £50,000, and US rights to Dell for $400,000 (Time 1965). See: E02 of Dominic Sandbrook’s 2013 BBC Cold-War documentary; Frank Beddors’ Looking Glass Wars fantasy series (2004–); G. Edward White, Alger Hiss’s Looking Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy (2005). Reviews on genre limits: Maurice Richardson, ‘Le Carré Tries Too Hard’, Observer 20 June 1965, 27; Hilary Corke, Listener, 24 June 1965, 949; Richard Mayne, ‘Carré on Spying’, New Statesman, 25 June 1965, 1013–1014; Peter Dickinson, ‘Blood Count’, Punch, 12 July 1965, 99; George P. Elliott, New York Times Book Review, 25 July 1965, 5; Orville Prescott, ‘The Smell of Failure and Incompetence’, New York Times, 23 July 1965, 27; ‘Spy to the Slaughter’, Newsweek, 26 July 1965, 64–65; Anthony Curtis, ‘Work Out for a Keen Spy’, Sunday Telegraph, 20 June 1965, 19.

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– le Carré, it seemed, was getting above his thriller station.5 Rare positive reviews by Julian Symons, Saul Landau and Eric Ambler noted the book’s negative internal focus on the intelligence institution, with Newsweek citing the novel’s ‘scorn and anguish directed … at the system, the Establishment’. Several reviewers focused on bureaucracy, with William Barrett calling Department agent, Leiser, ‘a pawn of the bureaucracy … just like the ordinary citizen in our society, a victim of excessive organization’. This state focus was frequently viewed as non-political, however, with Robert Ostermann’s view widely shared: ‘ambition and its corrosive effects … is the theme … making its intelligence-work setting of secondary concern’.6 Although The Times’s reviewer complained that Looking Glass ‘exposed the falsity of British patriotism [and] public school camaraderie’, British decline made no other appearance in British reviews, but was a regular theme of American reviews, with Landau claiming, ‘the aristocratic leftovers from Kipling have convinced [Leiser] that he is doing this for the Empire’.7 Many reviewers felt the Cold-War enemy was absent in Looking Glass (Curtis, Ostermann, Newsweek, Elliott, Otten, Landau), although Ambler perceived the novel to depict ‘a Cuban situation in Europe’, a view echoed by Marcus and Ostermann, while Hicks invoked another Cuban reflection: the United States’ Bay of Pigs invasion. Scholars have also tended to depoliticize Looking Glass, many seeing it as a novel of office politics rather than global politics (Neuse 1982: 302; Barley 1986: 48–65; Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 170–171; Denning 1987: 35; Rutherford 1987: 19; Cobbs 1998: 66; Bennett 1998: 47–48; Aronoff 1999:

5

6

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Reviews on ‘dullness’: Patrick Gaffney, ‘Spy Time’, Scotsman, 26 June 1965, 3; A. C. Cockburn, ‘Twenty Years After’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 June 1965, 533; Howard Enzenberger, ‘Up the Circus’, Spectator, 25 June 1965, 827; Richard Bury, ‘Fiction’, Books and Bookmen, August 1965, 35; P. L. Buckley, New Review, 2 November 1965, 995; Andrew Leslie, ‘The Spy Who Went Out’, Guardian, 25 June 1965, 9; ‘New Fiction’, The Times, 24 June 1965, 15; Ernest S. Piske, ‘More Mist Than Mystery’, Christian Science Monitor, 29 July 1965, 6; Alan L. Otten, ‘Thrills and Chills’, Wall Street Journal, 2 August 1965; Alex Campbell, ‘Thrillers for Eggheads’ New Republic, 3 July 1965, 26. Reviews on anti-establishment theme: Julian Symons, ‘A Spy Goes Out’, Sunday Times, 20 June 1965, 42; Saul Landau, ‘Alice in Bondland’, Ramparts, December 1965, 74-78; Eric Ambler, ‘John le Carré Escapes the Follow-Up Jinx’, Life, 30 July 1965, 8; Newsweek; Bury; Mayne. Reviews on anti-bureaucracy: William Barrett, ‘Tradition of the Spy’, Atlantic (August 1965), 124– 125; Campbell, 26; Bury, 35. Reviews on state as non-political: Robert Ostermann, ‘In the Looking Glass War, Some Sharp Reflections of Characters’, National Observer 26 July 1965, 19; ‘Giving Up the Game’, Time, 30 July 1965, 82; Kirkus, 15 June 1965. British reviews on British decline: Elizabeth Berridge, ‘Losing Heart in South Africa’, Daily Telegraph, 24 June 1965, 23. US reviews on British decline: Steven Marcus, ‘Grand Illusions’, New York Review of Books, 5 August 1965, 20; Granville Hicks, ‘Spies without a Sense of Mission’, Saturday Review, 24 July 1965, 39–40. Le Carré made the Bay of Pigs connection himself, claiming J. K. Galbraith and former CIA director, Allen Dulles, had done too (le Carré 1991: viii).

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94; Hammond 2013: 102; Goodman 2016: 120). Some anti-establishment sentiment is also detected by literary scholars (Homberger 1986: 57; Hoffman 2001: 77) and there is wider comment on Looking Glass’s depiction of British decline (Sauerberg 1984: 170; Homberger 1986: 58; Aronoff 1999: 65): ‘the Department is … emblematic of postwar and postimperialist England … living not in the present but in its collective memory of greatness’ (Lewis 1985: 90–91). There are, in this chapter’s reading, four, possibly five looking-glass wars: the Cold War; a turf war between state departments; the ‘old war’, the Second World War, which itself proves to channel an even older war: the class war. Hanging over all these, meanwhile, is the mushroom-shaped shadow of the Third World War, never so tangible as in the mid-1960s, in the uneasy aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. This chapter will, first, explore the effectiveness of the novel’s implicit questioning of communism’s threat, depicted as a reflection of Western assumptions, and then ask how this is affected by the novel’s depictions of the physical territory of the GDR. Second, the chapter will consider whether the presentation of the Department as a synecdoche of an establishment-dominated British state can be regarded as satirical. How therefore, does a competing synecdoche of the state, the Circus, affect such a satire? Third, the chapter will examine how Looking Glass’s presentation of the British nation reflects the perennial class tensions of Cold-War Britain, providing a domestic analogue of the era’s more familiar geopolitical tensions. ***

‘A sort of Cuba situation’: Reflections of the enemy The Looking Glass War initially, tantalizingly, appears to offer a debunking of Western Cold-War ideology in line with the period’s revisionist historians (see: Williams 1972 [1959]; Fleming 1961; Horowitz 1965; LaFeber 1972 [1967]). In such an understanding, the Cold War is largely the West’s own paranoid reflection, the West ascribing aggressive intention to the East on the flimsiest of evidence. In Looking Glass an unreliable source hears GDR soldiers at Rostock claim that, ‘whatever they had in the sheds could blow the Americans out of West Germany in a few hours’ (le Carré 2011: 50), and obtains blurry photographs of what appear to be missiles. Looking Glass thus posits an Eastern mirror image of the real-world Cuban missile crisis (Noland 1980: 60; Lewis 1985: 84).

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The revelation of the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba – within striking distance of America – and resultant East–West test of wills hypnotized a fearful world only three years earlier, seeming likely to spark a hot war (Leffler 2007: 151–160). While, like the fictional missiles in Looking Glass, the Americans’ information was also based on reconnaissance overflights, unreliable sources and unclear photographs, the Soviet missiles transpired to be real enough. But the panicked projections about Soviet intentions revealed how much of the Cold War was based on unreliable or inconclusive evidence, guesswork and assumptions (Greenwood 2000: 190). Kennedy’s staff were convinced the missiles were a bargaining chip for Berlin (Hershberg 2010: 73–76), while a Soviet intelligence source sent the alarm that the USSR was about to attack the United States (Aldrich 2002: 625). Viewed through the ideological filters of paranoia and suspicion, ‘intelligence was part of the problem as well as part of the solution’ (Aldrich 2002: 625; see also: Hennessy 2010: 18–19). Indeed, a key player in the Cuban missile crisis was James Jesus Angleton, who, as chief of CIA counterintelligence from 1954–75, used the phrase ‘wilderness of mirrors’ (from T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’) to invoke the disorientating nature of interpreting fragmentary intelligence, ‘lured deeper and deeper … pursuing the traces of Soviet plots, both real and imagined’ (in Sisman 2016: 193). In the coming years, Angleton would lead the CIA ever deeper into this paralysing, paranoid wilderness. This wilderness of mirrors finds its reflection in the novel. The photographs of the putative rockets at Rostock are blurry and indistinct (le Carré 2011: 52); the intelligence source is a long-termer who needs to justify his continued salary (60); while there is no solid evidence that the Department’s representative, Taylor, was executed collecting illicit overflight film of the rockets in Finland (12–13). Taylor’s death may have been a drunken traffic accident (17), resonating with The Spy’s imagery: a personal tragedy, not a political trigger. Towards the book’s close, the Department’s deputy director, Adrian Haldane discovers that the rocket photographs have previously been declared to be fake (192). Haldane keeps this information to himself, being too heavily invested in the operational superstructure the Department has built upon this insecure conceptual base. ‘[The Rostock photograph] is for [the Department] a dialectical guarantee of the Department’s continuing importance: the photos must be seen to show the efforts of a “live enemy” in order to support this Western collective subject’ (Buzard 1991: 161). ‘Britain’ readily substitutes here for ‘Department’, yet while this is key, it is not only a matter of asserting a declining Britain’s importance in the world (Rhodesia exiting the Empire this year; Guyana and Barbados next year). As Buzard hints, the rockets also provide a ‘dialectical guarantee’

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that the communist enemy has aggressive intentions, functioning therefore as a reaffirmation of Western Cold-War ideology (Greenwood 2000: 182). Leclerc tells the Department, ‘The Ministry believes it is conceivable we are dealing with Soviet missiles under East German control … a sort of Cuba situation all over again, only … more dangerous’ (le Carré 2011: 54). The emphasis is present in the original – ‘conceivable’ – and simultaneously asserts uncertainty and urgency: a very Cold-War combination. But contrary to reviewers’ and scholars’ tendency to downplay the political aspects of the novel, the Ministry initially takes the Department’s findings very seriously. Indeed, the British executive branch’s readiness to imagine the worst of the Cold-War enemy is both historically accurate (Greenwood 2000: 190) and ideologically laden. This is the Lacanian projection of aggression onto the enemy ‘other’ in order to maintain a pure national ‘self ’. The communist ‘other’ thus becomes ‘a reflection of [the British state’s] own chosen weakness’ (Said 2003: 207). The Under Secretary accurately notes that the existence of the rockets ‘alters our entire defence position. In fact it alters everything’ (le Carré 2011: 79). The Under Secretary’s remark hints at the widespread fear in the early 1960s that nuclear weapons would proliferate beyond the superpowers (Gavin 2010: 400–7), creating from an already volatile situation an imbalance of power. Reflecting this chapter’s opening image of Leclerc’s pleasure in imagining the missiles, there is also more than a whiff of national pride in the Under Secretary’s remark: if the missiles are real, then – through being singled out as a Cold-War military target – Britain’s declining importance in the world is enhanced (56). Never explicitly attested by the text, given that Eastern Europe officially had no nuclear weapons (later disproved), missiles in East Germany would only be a mirroring of Britain’s own nuclear deterrent. Not to mention mirroring the weapons Britain and West Germany held for their own superpower ally, America (Gavin 2010: 399). Similarly, that Soviet missiles in Cuba were a reflection of American missiles in Turkey (Hershberg 2010: 82) – Russia’s backyard – was elided within the Western Cold-War consensus. In both politics and fiction the East was posited as aggressive and the West as defensive. So the state’s readiness to believe in the missiles is ideological, as it affirms Western Cold-War verities. In fact, the Soviets were keen to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of their satellites like the GDR, and thus were pushing hard for a non-proliferation treaty throughout the mid-1960s (Gavin 2010: 409).8

8

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was finally ratified in 1970 (Gavin 2010: 411).

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Intended to elicit information about imagined aggressive enemy intentions, Leiser’s operation is itself incendiary, and echoes how, historically, Gary Powers’ 1960 U-2 spy-plane operation over the Soviet Union became an international Cold-War incident.9 Leiser crosses the frontier illegally on an intelligence mission (le Carré 2011: 220–223), while the West’s forces create the book’s first confirmable Cold-War casualty, when Leiser kills an East German border guard (223). Leiser’s operation thus recalls another Cuban Cold-War episode: the CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (Aronoff 1999: 65). The parallels are striking: a nation-state’s intelligence agency mounting a secretly trained, covert operation using anti-communist exiles, invading a communist country, meeting a swift defeat, resulting in cover-up and government denial. Le Carré later said: ‘the Bay of Pigs … really was the result of men who had generated a collective perception of their own heroism and, drawing from that romantic past, were engaging in something that was almost fantasy’ (in Streitfeld 1992: 15). This links neatly to le Carré’s earlier commentary on The Looking Glass War: ‘“committed” men who are committed to nothing but one another and the dreams they collectively invoke’ (1965: 7). Contra le Carré, however, there was a strong ideological component to the Bay of Pigs invasion: that of anticommunism. A similar elision of anti-communism occurs in the characterization of Leiser, whose home country, Poland, was, in 1965, under communist rule (Naimark 2010: 178) and was regarded in the West as a Soviet puppet regime (Reynolds 1994b: 85). Given that many Polish European Volunteer Workers stayed on in Britain after the war due to their opposition to communism (Webster 2000: 269) and that Leiser readily participates in a one-man ColdWar invasion of his erstwhile neighbours, East Germany, this is a striking lacuna in the text, even a repression. It leaves ‘a determinate absence’ (Macherey 1978: 79) within which the political reasserts itself. Where we began this chapter with an analysis of how Looking Glass subverts anticommunist ideology, we now return to anti-communism simply being elided – by the text itself, by le Carré’s own commentary and by liberal critics. The very idea of communism is repressed within the British national ego.

9

Francis Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviets, and, after his arrest, the incident became a significant Cold-War crisis (Judt 2010: 251). Looking Glass replays the Powers case when a re-routed passenger plane from Finland is strafed by Soviet MiGs (le Carré 2011: 13) and the novel also obliquely references Powers (56).

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‘The darkness of indifference’: Enemy territory That The Looking Glass War is not merely a crude ideological ‘reflection’ of capitalist imperatives as per the understanding of early Marxist literary criticism (Jameson 1983: 39) is indicated by the contradictions and ambiguities this chapter has been outlining. ‘Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. But at present even the handling of a hammer is taught with the help of a mirror’ (Trotsky 2005: 120). Trotsky, writing in 1924, was referencing this leftist belief that art is purely ideological, and declaring that even liberal, capitalist art has value. Nevertheless, Looking Glass is still a product of the Cold-War consensus, in which anti-communism was endemic, an anti-communism that, for all the novel’s ambiguities, is fairly unambiguously reasserted late in the novel, in the scenes set inside the GDR. As Leiser watches from the border between West and East Germany, prior to crossing into communist territory, the text declares ‘the East German guards seemed to fear that one of their own number might slip away unseen’ (le Carré 2011: 207). Here again is the idea of a regime maintained under coercion, imposed against civil unpopularity. Indeed one of the guards does slip away unseen, to be killed by a representative from the West: Leiser – crossing borders was a life or death business in the Cold War. The frontier itself is described in apparently conciliatory tones: ‘Those who look eagerly for dragon’s teeth and substantial fortifications will be disappointed’ (211). The Western side, however, is ‘adorned with the grotesque statuary of political impotence: a plywood model of the Brandenburg Gate, the screws rusting in their sockets’ (211; emphasis added), as if the border – or the existence of East Germany – were a defeat. Once inside the GDR, the imagery is uniformly bleak, as per standard Western presentations of the communist East. In Kalkstadt, a block of flats has not been named (268); the inn is deserted, apparently unstaffed, with no customers (233); Leiser’s hotel room is darkened with damp (239). The entire country is paradoxically neglected by its very monolithic, centralizing, all-controlling state: ‘There were no signposts and no new buildings … that was where the peace came from, it was the peace of no innovation – it might have been fifty years ago, a hundred … There were no street lights, no gaudy signs on the pubs or shops. It was the darkness of indifference’ (225). These details could be interpreted as positive facets of a non-corporate society: no ‘gaudy signs’ relentlessly persuading people to buy the products of capitalism’s endless ‘innovation’. Instead it was precisely Eastern European technological developments that Harold Wilson wished to mirror in Britain (Wilson 1963;

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Edgerton 1996: 57). Equally, ‘peace’ immanently implies that not only are the East’s intentions peaceable but that capitalism may engender aggression. Yet that final ‘indifference’ nails the negative judgement: the indifference is that of an authoritarian state that cares nothing for its citizens. Planning here is functional, uncaring – in the now-standard designation, cold. In this, again, we see an anxious Lacanian reflection of the national ‘self ’ in the enemy ‘other’: a grim Britain vainly attempting to plan itself out of decline. In the novel, the East German citizenry has withdrawn from the public, collective landscape of communism and retreated into capitalist privacy. The villages are all ‘empty of life’ (le Carré 2011: 225), the town’s streets deserted. As with The Spy, fear and suspicion pervade all conversations Leiser has with GDR citizens. This is the land of the feared Stasi, with its network of informers (Taylor 2007: 103). Leiser encounters a fearful old man who gives him food (le Carré 2011: 229); a mistrustful railway official (230); an elderly guard who informs on him (232); a ‘frightened’ girl (235) with ‘deceitful eyes’ (238) at the inn. Repeatedly Leiser’s – presumably ‘Western’ – speech and manners provoke a negative reaction. The train guard responds to Leiser’s questions by telling him he is mad (232); the girl says, ‘Don’t you know it’s forbidden to ask that?’ (234); an old woman at the workers’ hostel says, ‘Don’t you know it’s forbidden, staying in a town and not reporting your presence to the police?’ (252), and an official tells Leiser, ‘the granting of lifts is forbidden’ (230). That recurring ‘forbidden’ suggests the voice of the impersonal state channelled through all these individual voices, their very demotic conformist, an assimilation of authoritarianism, the personal perverted by the political. This, in the novel’s terms, is the logic of the ideological state: social planning leading not to communality but to social atomization – fear, suspicion, distance. By the last few pages, there are tanks and Soviet soldiers everywhere in the town (256– 257, 268–270), reflections of Cold-War news footage of the Soviet repression of rebellions in Poland and Hungary in 1956. Such standard Cold-War imagery – patrolled borders; grim landscapes; fearful citizens; rolling tanks – is a Western reflection of the East: seen through the camera obscura of Cold-War ideology. As such, it is in tension with the novel’s earlier implication that the communist threat may be merely the West’s own reflection. To put it another way, Western ideology is questioned; then Western ideology is reasserted. The liberal superego prevails. As such, The Looking Glass War reflects back the Western Cold-War consensus, albeit unsteadily. ***

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‘Government hirings’: The Department, the Circus and the British state In contrast to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which focuses on operations in the field, the state is the central focus in The Looking Glass War. The spies are in from the cold, embraced by the warmth of the Department – described, unequivocally, as a ‘refuge’ (le Carré 2011: 42). Even Smiley’s outsider/insider push and pull of denial and defence about the relationship with the state is absent.10 Until the final chapters, most of such action as occurs takes place either in the Department, its Oxford safe house surrogate or in rival intelligence department, the Circus. The Spy’s depiction of the espionage field is thus largely replaced in Looking Glass by an equally vivid depiction of the espionage desk – the file, the office, the meeting room – with the Oxford training sessions for agent, Leiser, even managing to make fieldwork bureaucratic. Reviewers, scholars and le Carré himself have represented Looking Glass as a novel of work which just happens to have a Cold-War espionage setting: office politics eclipsing geopolitics. ‘The kind of chaps you meet in my books are the kind of people you work with in the office. Intrigue, treachery, loyalty, these are the things you can find’ (le Carré, in Mandrake 1965, 19).11 Following the novel’s poor British notices, le Carré sent a letter to American reviewers asserting that ‘the “motor” of [the Department’s] energy lies … not in the Cold War … but in their own desolate mentalities’ (1965: 7). Yet the Department is an organ of the state, participating, in however subaltern a role, in the defence of the realm, and partaking of the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence, as a result of which three people are killed. Hardly the norm of most people’s offices. There is therefore a political implication to the Department’s every action, however inept, and to reduce the novel to a turf war between departments is to relegate the Cold War to background colour. This belittles

10

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Maintaining The Spy’s metaphor, the field in Looking Glass is uniformly cold: snow-covered Finland (le Carré 2011: 3), the howling wind that blows across the border in Germany, which is ‘the same wind … that had tugged at Taylor’s frozen body’ (200). It is also – politically – the same wind in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story ‘His Last Bow’ (1917): ‘Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast’ (2014: 243). Note the year of this story. Denning’s claim that spy novels are escapist fantasies for white-collar workers makes sense regarding the glamour and heroics of Fleming (Denning 1987: 35), but not given the dowdiness of espionage in le Carré. Moreover, le Carré’s novels’ most dramatic elements – the fates of lower-class Leiser, Leamas or Taylor (A Small Town in Germany) – are hardly empowering for such workers.

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the novel’s political meaning, and, in so doing, diminishes the depth and quality of the novel in aesthetic terms.12

‘That secret elite’: The Department, the establishment and the state Arriving at the dawn of the Swinging Sixties, The Looking Glass War notably evokes an apparently archaic 1940s or 1950s society – stiff, socially stratified, middle-aged, austere. This operates in acute contrast to the vibrant, youthful jauntiness of many of 1965’s other cultural productions – The Beatles’ Help! (Lester), The Knack and How to Get it (Lester) and even the ultimately downbeat Darling (Schlesinger). The only youthful character in The Looking Glass War is John Avery, aide to director Leclerc, and Avery is hardly countercultural, wishing only to emulate his elders. ‘That secret elite’ is how Avery describes the Department (le Carré 2011: 72). There is a distinct yearning in the phrase as Avery is not entirely secure of his position within that older, gentlemanly elite. As the closest thing the novel has to a protagonist, Avery serves to frame the reader’s responses: Avery’s attitude both to Leclerc and to the Department’s activities is that of an implicated onlooker, half-aghast, half-reverent. Le Carré used the phrase ‘secret elite’ of MI6 a few years later (1969: 36), and while ostensibly the phrase refers to the secret subworld of spies, it is readily understood as synonymous with ‘the establishment’. For, Swinging London and the 1960s cultural insistence on the ‘modern’ notwithstanding, Perry Anderson had recently argued that the ‘amateurism and nepotism’ of the establishment’s continued grip on the state had led to an enervated capitalism (1964a: 51), essentially blaming the amateur class for Britain’s geopolitical decline and domestic recession. Anderson’s was only the latest in a sequence of such analyses (Crosland 1962; Sampson 1962; Howard 1963), which emanated even from those politically far from the left (Shanks 1962; Koestler 1963; Muggeridge 1963). Rising on this anti-establishment tide, new Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson (from October 1964), also blamed British decline on the amateur elite, and Wilson’s attempts to modernize the British state were well under way as Looking Glass was published (Leys 1989: 79–81). As discussed in Chapter 2, there was a Cold-War component even to 12

Given that Looking Glass is readily compared to Greene’s Our Man in Havana (again that Cuban connection), it is notable that Greene’s text also insists on a personal interpretation of its political content: ‘I wouldn’t kill for my country, I wouldn’t kill for capitalism or Communism or social democracy or the welfare state – whose welfare? … A family-feud had been a better reason for murder than patriotism or the preference for one economic system over another. If I love or if I hate, let me love or hate as an individual’ (Greene 1974c: 186).

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this domestic agenda: an attempt to compete with the Soviet Union, not just in terms of productivity but also in the transformation of British society through planning. Not least to revolutionize the structures of the state itself (Leys 1989: 80). If Looking Glass initially seems a fittingly radical counterpart to Wilson’s first hundred days, then both would prove disappointingly ineffective in the face of the entrenched British status quo.13 Department director, Leclerc strikingly resembles Anderson’s descriptions of this anachronistic but still potent British ruling class. Leclerc is an amateur, ‘defined not by acts which denote skills but by gestures which reveal quintessences’ (Anderson 1964a: 41): thus Leclerc’s judgements have ‘an unearthly, oracular immunity’ (le Carré 2011: 208). Already we see here, pulling against the satirical impulses, a shift towards the mythic register. Anderson cites the establishment’s aristocratic styling (1964a: 41): whatever Leclerc’s real economic status (he lacks an old school tie [le Carré 2011: 25]), Leclerc wears suede shoes on Fridays to suggest he is en route to a country house (24) and also belongs to a gentleman’s club, however shabby (70). Gentlemanliness is a style, a manner, an attitude, a ‘coagulated conservatism’ (Anderson 1964a: 40): thus the local café isn’t good enough for Leclerc (le Carré 2011: 35) and he won’t queue for a bus (36). Anderson asserts the amateur’s veneration of ‘traditionalism’, and likewise the Department is hidebound by atavistic hierarchies, instigated by Leclerc: ‘tradition demanded that the junior staff arrived at half past nine; officer grades at ten or quarter past’ (86). This hierarchy also reflects the realities of the civil service’s tiered, ‘class’ system – and the glass ceiling for ‘specialists’ – which Wilson aspired to alter via the Fulton Commission (Leys 1989: 80). Leclerc hands down to the Department what Anderson calls the establishment’s ‘mystagogy (towards institutions)’ (1964a: 40). As so often in le Carré, state institutions prompt the mythic register: ‘For its servants, the Department had a religious quality’ (le Carré 2011: 72); for Avery, the Department ‘was not a place where he worked, but where he lived’ (86). In this we can see, again coexisting with the satire, a reverence towards not just the institutions of the establishment but the class composition of the establishment. Not the individuals per se: it is the nature of the mythic register to render the individual representational, for them to be plural, historical, national. Thus the deployment of the choric voice, the Department presented as a collective, indeed ‘mystical’ (72) entity: ‘It was 13

It is worth noting that Cornwell quit the UK c. May 1964–May 1965, writing Looking Glass in Crete. Probably aiming to avoid the hike in income tax associated with Labour governments, it is indicative of Cornwell’s contradictory politics that he apparently rethought this position by returning, under the same government (Sisman 2016: 258–260, 264–265, 272).

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their practice in the Department: antique and understated’ (27); ‘They ascribed … legendary qualities to one another’ (72, emphasis added). There is mockery here, certainly, but a modicum of gentle mockery is readily encompassed by the mythic register, again suggesting the limitations of satire (see: Coe 2013). Leclerc and his Department of establishment war nostalgists are anything but the modern technocratic, professional ‘new men’ of Wilson’s vision. We see throughout Looking Glass’s plot not the roaring white heat but the fizzingout failure of technology – fuzzy photographs, botched aeroplane overflights, car accidents, malfunctioning Morse-coding machines, static-saturated radio signals. The Department’s members are precisely the kind of reliquary of traditionalist gentlemen of which Wilson was attempting to rid the civil service, instituting a ‘wide range of institutional reforms designed to modernise the structure of the state’ (Leys 1989: 80). Increasingly, establishment incompetence was being seen as complicit in British decline. This decline, as we are seeing, was measured not just against capitalist countries like former enemies, West Germany and Japan (Gilroy 2004: 118), but even against the supposedly austere, hidebound economies of communist countries. Thus the Department’s jokes about having a ‘spot of trouble with the Germans’ (le Carré 2011: 48) and ‘tak[ing] another crack at the Jerries’ (95) are not only an expression of a Blimpish confusion about who the enemy is, but also of discomfort with the post-war resurgence of even East Germany.14 In a further indication of the Cold-War component of British decline, anti-communist avatar, Arthur Koestler’s special edition of the CIAfunded Encounter, Suicide of a Nation had decried the British establishment’s ‘cult of incompetence’ (Rees 1963: 39) and its ‘taboo on expertise’ (Aubu 1963: 82) while also lambasting the left (see: Crawley 1963). This serves as a salient reminder that to evince anti-establishment sentiment is not necessarily to envisage any wholesale structural transformation of the state: it was a sentiment easily assimilated into Cold-War liberalism. In the novel, Leclerc is a literal amateur, being bumbling and inept. But he is also party to the state’s monopoly of power over life and death – a somewhat chilling combination. Vain, prissily particular about personal slights to himself, but haughtily indifferent to the personal danger of others, Leclerc risks children’s lives via diverting a domestic flight from Finland to the GDR for surveillance 14

Greenwood claims a divided Germany suited the British state (2000: 187) and this – rather than le Carré’s Teutophilia – may also explain the recurring preoccupation with Germany throughout le Carré’s 1960s novels, coming to a head with A Small Town in Germany (1968) at Britain’s precise swing from growth to recession.

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(le Carré 2011: 12–14). Leclerc puts untrained bureaucrat, Taylor, in danger to collect the illicit film from the Finnish pilot, costing him his life (3–17); sends his untrained aide, Avery, into presumed danger in Finland to retrieve the film without adequate cover, (73–77, 82–85, 89–92). Leclerc finally sends Polish garage mechanic, Fred Leiser, into enemy territory with outmoded equipment whilst symbolically unmanning Leiser by depriving him of his gun (220–273), then abandons him to his death when the operation goes awry (264–266). This lethal incompetence is a fairly damning depiction of the establishment’s role in the state. Even so, Leclerc is never entirely condemned by le Carré: viewed mainly through Avery’s weak, rather watery, eyes, Leclerc is always treated with affection and that recurring mythic register, with only intermittent queasiness and resentment. Finding these feelings in himself, Avery represses them and reaffirms his commitment to the operation, to the Department, to the establishment. Consequently le Carré’s depiction of Leclerc and the Department both channels contemporary commentary about the establishment and implicitly challenges it. This is the kind of ‘ambiguity’ by which le Carré is often characterized in scholarship (Lewis 1985: 23; Rothberg 1987: 51; Halperin 1998: 218; Aronoff 1999: 201–214; Hindersmann 2005: 27; Goodman 2016: 108; Lassner 2016: 172). However, this ambiguity also means that le Carré’s work offers a limited, equivocal, somewhat conservative critique of the establishment in contrast to the political commentaries of his contemporaries.

‘Handled not known’: The Department and bureaucratic instrumentalism What Leclerc is essentially pursuing is the kind of British totalitarianism only hinted at in The Spy. Yet Looking Glass’s sharpest tone is reserved for Leclerc’s deputy, Haldane: he is the primary proponent of – and apologist for – this bureaucratic instrumentalism. Sickly Haldane (le Carré 2011: 51), indisputably a desk – rather than field – man in le Carréan terms, is tellingly in charge of ‘research’ (61). The most bureaucratic of bureaucrats, Haldane is ever-ready with an argument for inaction (47, 49, 51, 53), while mechanically, dogmatically, sticking to the plan once action is agreed. The novel sets up a dialectic between Haldane as agent of the instrumental state and Avery and Leiser as agents of individualism – the Cold War played out again in microcosm: Haldane as totalitarian, Avery and Leiser as liberals. This individualism is expressed through that established liberal humanist redoubt of love: Looking Glass’s narrative expends considerable energy on semi-ironic – yet still homoerotic –

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conceits of Leiser and Avery as lovers. The pair walk arm-in-arm in the rain in Oxford’s Port Meadow during Leiser’s training, Avery ‘holding Leiser’s hand captive’ (161). Avery is described as responding to Leiser like ‘a guilty lover’ (180) and gives Leiser a token with which to go to war when Leiser crosses into the GDR (218). Later, in the GDR, Leiser recalls Avery via romantic clichés: ‘Avery’s young face in the rain’ (recalling Liz at another GDR frontier) and the standard romantic conceit that Leiser and Avery look at the same star, ‘like divided lovers’ (242). The film adaptation took this homoeroticism to absurdist levels, with Christopher Jones as a far-too-young Leiser spending much of the time with his shirt off, while the suited and bowler hatted gentlemen of the Department appraised his . . . abilities. In both film and novel this can be seen as mildly satirizing the homosociality of the establishment (Collins 2002: 94) but in the novel the mythic register, the romantic language, sentimentalizes rather more than it satirizes. What is upheld, therefore, is the liberal humanist emblem of love – Leamas and Liz Gold at the Wall; Winston and Julia versus the Party – as a touché to totalitarianism. Ironically, Haldane, who lives with his sister (le Carré 2011: 71), is an implicitly homosexual product of this homosocial environment. Yet he is defined by his inability to love, a characteristic associated both with bureaucracy (du Gay 2000: 56) and with totalitarianism. Keeping the world at arm’s length, Haldane’s libido is austerely repressed and he evinces a democratically misanthropic hostility to everyone, particularly Avery – for being young (le Carré 2011: 114) – and Leiser (128) – whom he declares, with distaste, is to be ‘handled not known’ (137). Haldane recalls Bauman’s description of bureaucracy as ‘a moral sleeping pill’ (in du Gay 2000: 38). Haldane is also one of a number of distinctly mean-spirited, insinuatingly implicit homosexuals in le Carré (see also: Ashe in The Spy, Leclerc, Roddy Martindale in Tinker Tailor). Haldane cynically calls love, ‘whatever you can still betray’ (le Carré 2011: 224). This alone defines him as illiberal. At the end, to Haldane’s instrumentalist sneers, a weeping Avery abhors the Department’s abandonment of Leiser, and demands they listen to Leiser’s last transmission ‘for the sake of … love’ (265). Everybody ignores him. As suggested, this is a Cold-War conundrum played out in microcosm. The negative depiction of bureaucratic instrumentalism exemplified by Haldane is less a critique of the activities of the intelligence services than of the broader political concept of planning. This was particularly pertinent given the contemporary Wilson administration’s planning emphasis (Leys 1989: 79–81). Cold-War liberals like Sidney Hook saw state interference in social and economic life as ‘a

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conspiracy against human freedom’ (in Belletto 2012: 20), centralizing, collectivist socialism as not just, effectively, communism, but totalitarianism.15

‘The old rivalry’: The Circus, the establishment and the state Having established this already equivocal satire of the British state, via the Department, Looking Glass undermines it further by creating a rival synecdoche of the British state: the Circus. The Department’s rivalry with the Circus was not present in the original manuscript of The Looking Glass War:16 blaming this change on the advice of his American editor, le Carré later regretted having drawn the book’s teeth.17 With the Circus scenes awkwardly inserted and Smiley in particular under-used, this subplot is a faultline – an aesthetic flaw highlighting a political difficulty: how to critique the British state’s culpability in British decline without asserting the need for its restructuring. In terms of class composition, the Circus command is just as establishment as that of the Department. In conventional usage, therefore, they mirror each other. Efficient Control is of the same generation and amateur class as inept Leclerc; Smiley was an Oxford contemporary of Haldane’s (le Carré 2011: 61) (Haldane is a sickly reflection of Smiley, by this token). Smiley is a member of a rather better gentleman’s club than Leclerc (139), which at the height of the classless Swinging Sixties, Smiley still chooses for his work meetings (140–144). Control’s criticism of Leclerc is at the distinctly gentlemanly level of manners (‘Leclerc’s so vulgar’, 249). What’s more, Control and Smiley are no more ‘technocratic’ than Leclerc and Haldane: Control has a gentlemanly distaste for the ‘modern’ telephone (Ross 1956: 13; le Carré 2011: 249) and is just as much an anti-Wilsonian anachronism as Leclerc, a figure of the old world, not ‘modernity Britain’ (Kynaston 2013). Moreover, although British ideology is a glaring absence in this novel, there is nothing to suggest that Control and Smiley’s Cold-War agenda is any way different to that of Leclerc and Haldane. In terms of the social composition of

15

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Le Carré made a similar point the year after Looking Glass’s publication: ‘It seemed to me that the western dilemma of the small man is that the institutions we create to combat the ideology to fight the Cold War are getting so big that the individual himself is losing his identity in our society, just as he is in eastern society’ (in Crutchley 1966, 548). JLC 1, Bodleian Library, Oxford. In a later draft, Smiley only makes two appearances, Control is still absent and Smiley does not shut down the operation (JLC 2: 74). ‘I should not … have bothered with the Circus or George Smiley at all … I should not have pulled my punches … I should have let the Department exist where … Britain herself existed … in a vapour of self-delusion and class arrogance, in a gung-ho world of we’ve-never-had-it-so-good’ (le Carré 1991: viii).

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the ruling class, therefore, the Circus subplot only serves to blunt the novel’s satire and thus its political critique. Where the Circus’s mirror image of the Department does become an inversion it hardly presents a more coherent critique of the state. Control is one step ahead of the Department throughout the plot: watching; handicapping; possibly sabotaging the Department’s operation (le Carré 2011: 251). Rather than enhancing the novel’s critique of bureaucratic instrumentalism, however, Control’s role undermines it. For where Haldane’s unfeeling accounting logic is unmediated by the ineffectual Leclerc, Smiley’s compassion pulls against Control’s expedient tendencies, creating a synecdoche of an efficiently functioning – if contradictory – liberal state: the ruthless Leviathan and the nurturing nanny state combined. Smiley’s main activity in Looking Glass is to warn the Department against focusing on ‘technique’. First he warns Avery (6), then Leclerc (141), then finally Haldane, the amoral technical expert personified: ‘You’ve made technique a way of life,’ Smiley tells Haldane, ‘like a whore, technique replacing love’ (264). ‘Technique’ has caused some scholarly confusion (Neuse 1982: 301– 302; Monaghan 1985: 38–39; Barley 1986: 60). On one level it is spycraft, but ‘technique’ here is also bureaucratic procedure, a dedication to rules and systems over human instincts and needs: planning. Smiley’s words to Haldane echo Avery’s clash with Haldane, with love again invoked as bureaucratic instrumentalism’s compassionate, humanist other. If Haldane is a ‘whore’, Smiley himself is a faithful lover, an analogy that connects his political humanism to his personal fidelity to his unfaithful wife, Ann – not to mention to the inconstant British state.18 So when the Ministry sends Smiley to Germany to shut down the Department’s operation, ‘there was nothing in [Smiley’s] face but compassion’ (le Carré 2011: 261). The end result, as with The Spy, is a state that encompasses both compassion and instrumentalism – Smiley balancing Control, the Circus balancing the Department – a paradox that arises from fundamental contradictions in liberal thinking. ‘The liberal intellectual … knows there is something wrong at the heart of the system but will not envisage a radical alternative’ (Sinfield 1992: 107). Such an arrangement of balancing binaries means that there is no real critique of the actual state in The Looking Glass War, only of a department of the state,

18

Making that connection between personal and national loyalty clear, in The Honourable Schoolboy, when interviewing another cuckold, Peter Worthington, Smiley chooses the cover name Mr Standfast (from John Buchan’s 1919 novel of the same name).

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effectively corrected by another department of the state. Thus the national ego ‘contains’ its competing impulses, affirming the status quo. The status quo was restored in reality, as Wilson’s attempts to reform the British state failed (Leys 1989: 81), partly through external resistance, partly through timidity of intention. Reform of the civil service foundered when the resisted Fulton Report was only partially implemented (Leys 1989: 283–284); Wilson’s attempt to break the status monopoly of the older universities via the Open University and expanding access to higher education did not unseat Oxbridge’s hegemony within government institutions (Leys 1989: 293). With the integral problems of capitalism never addressed by Wilson’s programme, it was the gentlemanly nerve-centre of financial capital, the City that eventually derailed Wilson’s government via a fusillade of financial crises (Leys 1989: 82–83). Britain’s modernization, its radicalization of the state, was abandoned. After Wilson’s defeat at the polls in 1970, incoming Conservative prime minister Edward Heath’s pick for foreign secretary was Alec Douglas – aka Lord – Home. The man Wilson had previously derided as an ‘elegant anachronism’ selected by an ‘aristocratic cabal’ was back (Collins 2002: 105): there could be no clearer indication that Wilson’s reform of the state had failed. Notably, Ralph Richardson as Leclerc in the Looking Glass film adaptation (Pierson, 1969) both physically and sartorially recalls Home. In the last we see of Leclerc in the novel, the dapper Department chief is forging alliances with Smiley (le Carré 2011: 265–266) and his ominous final words are ‘we’re still operational, you know’ (266). The establishment remains in control: the gulf between liberalism and communism, West and East, is reasserted. ***

‘The mystery of England’: The nation and class The mid-1960s were a time of attempted reconstruction of British society from the top-down by Wilson’s government (visible in the novel) and from the bottom-up by the counterculture (markedly invisible).19 Each aspired to break the shackles of tradition and create a national way of life that would 19

Frank Pierson inserted a speech into his 1969 film adaptation of Looking Glass where Avery (Antony Hopkins) says: ‘We’re fighting a very lonely battle. We’re in the dark. Nobody thanks us for it, but my God, they sleep at night, don’t they? That’s pretty bloody unswinging, isn’t it?’ The implication is that the establishment liberalism the counterculture rejects is also a precondition for such a counterculture’s existence – and that such a movement could not exist in the Soviet Union.

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both counter and channel the challenges of communism. As such we see subtly dramatized in the novel another war. This is an older war than the Cold War but one which is intrinsically related, parallel, indeed a near-homonym for The Looking Glass War: the class war – the split in the national ego. In this, once again, the British nation is revealed to be far from the bastion of democracy and freedom so integral to its liberal self-image and to its Cold-War propaganda.

‘They called it patriotism’: London, the mass and the nation With no clear British champion in this novel – Smiley sidelined, Leclerc satirized, Avery feeble, Leiser foreign – Looking Glass’s evocation of the British nation rests heavily on buildings and landscapes: the Department itself, Taylor’s estate and Oxford’s suburbs. As ever, much of the richness of le Carré’s writing is found in that allusive, mythic register, suggesting resonance beyond surfaces, the general emerging out of the particular, moment eclipsing this moment. The mythic is thus a mode always particularly suited to invocations of the national. Looking Glass makes a repeated metonymic connection between the Department and the British nation, and so Jameson’s notion of a ‘national allegory’ (1986: 89) is a pertinent critical concept here. ‘[The Department’s] survival was like the mystery of England’ (le Carré 2011: 24); ‘Their faith in the Department burnt in some separate chapel and they called it patriotism’ (72). In such an allegorical reading, the grimy, stained Department building, with its ‘controlled dilapidation’ (24), represents British decline. ‘A house eternally for sale’ (24) invokes Britain’s dependency on America – living on American credit via the Marshall Plan (Mandel 1980: 463), the Empire essentially being passed along. Meanwhile the nearby ‘warehouses with barbed wire across their gates, and factories which produce nothing’ (le Carré 2011: 107) evoke the enervated state of contemporary British industry (Anderson 1964a). As an allegory of Britain, this is a rhetorically gloomy one, in acute contrast to, say, The Avengers’ jaunty celebrations of the Swinging Sixties, but just as superficial and selective a depiction. The Department is just one of a series of symbolically laden, significantly dilapidated London landscapes, however. Most scholars see these landscapes as forming a national allegory: ‘Descriptions of London … define the social and spiritual malaise of a nation experiencing its decline and fall’ (Lewis 1985: 91; see also: Monaghan 1985: 48; Homberger 1986: 58). Others see the novel more broadly as a chronicle of British decline (Seed 1990: 153; Hindersmann 2005: 30; Goodman 2012: 67). With decline often presented in terms of

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discourse (prestige, symbolism, the idea of the nation), the economic basis of British decline – bankrupted after the war; overextended by Empire; struggling to achieve growth (Reynolds 1994b: 83) – is usually absent from such accounts. So it is not commonly noted that these decaying London landscapes in Looking Glass are all working class: the Department’s grim, grimy Blackfriars domicile (le Carré 2011: 23–24); Leiser’s Park Royal neighbourhood, ‘dying without violence and living without success’ (99), and where the grass is like ‘grass on a grave’ (100). Then there is the run-down Alias club in seedy Charing Cross (95), where the railing needs replacing (92) and only the lower-ranks still attend (93); and, most tellingly of all, Taylor’s estate in Kennington. All these working-class London locations are associated with decay, decline and death. Avery and Leclerc travel to Kennington in order to inform Taylor’s wife of her husband’s death, but are disconcerted by the material reality of the aspirational Taylor’s bleak environment: They stood at the top of a rise. It was a wretched place. The road led downward into a line of dingy, eyeless houses; above them rose a single block of flats … A string of lights shone on to the glazed tiles, dividing and redividing the whole structure into cells. It was a large building, very ugly in its way, the beginning of a new world, and at its feet lay the black rubble of the old. (38)

Taylor’s high-rise block is a social housing scheme of modernist flats (the ‘new world’), a planned environment created to replace the bomb-damaged slums of the war to house the urban poor. As such it is a typically utopian scheme emerging from the Wilson government’s ‘technocratic optimism’ (Hatherley 2009: 36). Again municipal socialism is used to parallel communism (think of the similarly bleak block of – unnamed – flats Leiser visits in the GDR). Hatherley asserts such British projects’ relationship to the balancing, redistributive impetus of the welfare state (40) and, through tapping aspiration, to ‘classlessness’ (30), and argues that those which have survived of these estates are now the British landscape’s ‘most persistent reminder of British socialism’ (40). Yet in Looking Glass this redistributive project is introduced as ‘wretched’. The wretchedness is, in this instance, the perception of the onlookers rather than the experience of the inhabitants, however. Judged by Leclerc on aesthetics, the new estate compares poorly to the ruins of the ‘old’ world, suggesting the fetishization of ruins in gentlemanly culture (the ‘follies’ created on the grounds of country houses). Leclerc was – unwittingly – seeking his own reflection in his visit to Taylor’s widow and instead sees something that he does not recognize, and that far from giving him pleasure, affirming his solipsistic vision of the world, causes him pain. That pain

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is ideological. Taylor’s building combines the artificially modern (Bakelite flat numbers [le Carré 2011: 39]) and the austerely municipal (‘the smell of that liquid soap … in railway lavatories’ [39]). Just as we saw how ‘mass culture’ conflates inferior-quality products with attitudes towards their socially ‘inferior’ consumers in Chapter 1, Avery and Leclerc view the ugliness of Taylor’s estate’s architecture as expression of the ugliness of the working class. In the nearby shops displaying ‘the sad muddle of useless things which only the poor will buy’ (39), who is to blame for the ‘sad muddle’, the producer or the consumer? The passage’s reference to the tower’s structure being redivided into ‘cells’ suggests prisons, and by invoking criminality again muddies whether the incarceration is imposed or deserved. Although the representation of the estate in Looking Glass would become the standard view of such ventures (Kynaston 2014: 279–306; Matless 2016: 333), modernist municipal estates had not yet started to dilapidate in the mid-1960s, and indeed still commanded considerable political support (Kynaston 2014: 8, 279). The negative framing here is subjective, therefore: rhetorical, ideological, the inverse of ‘gentlemanliness’ as moral criterion. From his elevated vantage point, Leclerc is looking down on the estate both literally and figuratively. Leclerc evinces distaste, fear of, and alienation from what he sees: ‘to think that a member of Leclerc’s staff should daily trudge from the breath and stink of such a place to the sanctuary of the Department’ (le Carré 2011: 380). Leclerc rejects the lived reality of the working class from his vision of the British nation: ‘This was not the society they protected, these slums with their Babel’s Tower: they had no place in Leclerc’s scheme of things’ (38). Nor, via that Babel reference, do immigrants – like Leiser – have a place in Leclerc’s scheme of things: they are equally ‘other’. Leclerc’s vision of Britain simply reflects back his ‘self ’, the establishment England that he knows and understands. For Leclerc, therefore, it is reality that is a distortion, his subjective vision, truth. In the scene Avery’s focalization of Leclerc becomes hard to detach from Leclerc’s own observations, so totally does Avery inhabit Leclerc, and consequently subjective focalization begins to resemble ‘objective’ – omniscient – narration. This means there is little distance between Leclerc and the narrative voice, so the narrative’s treatment of Leclerc is more sympathetic than satiric. Avery looks at Leclerc and feels ‘somebody had been there, and gone; perhaps a whole world, a generation; somebody had made him and disowned him’ (37). Leclerc becomes meta here, via the mythic register; plural. Leclerc in such moments is a tragic hero – flawed, even slightly foolish but revered nevertheless as representative – a kind of national institution. As they leave Taylor’s estate, Avery sees in Leclerc ‘a deep sadness, like the bewilderment of a man betrayed’ (42). At

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a surface level, the betrayal is Taylor misleading Leclerc about his class status. Symbolically, it is the betrayal of the amateur gentlemanly class through postwar professionalization at home and the crumbling of Empire abroad (Powell 2002: 208), a trope that will recur in Tinker Tailor. Avery focuses the reader’s sympathy on Leclerc and not the object of his gaze: the working class. Rather, Taylor’s estate functions for Avery and Leclerc as mere abstract symbol of declining British geopolitical prestige rather than the lived material reality of ordinary people. In fact, both the poverty of the working classes and the poverty of Britain were the creation of the very class hierarchy atop which Leclerc stands, looking down in all senses: ‘self ’ regarding ‘other’. As such, as Said shows (2003: 209), establishment flaws are projected onto the ‘other’, here the working class. While stopping short of the contemporary conservative impulse and blaming the working class for British decline, the working class is conceptually linked to decline in this scene and in all Looking Glass’s London locations via images of death and decay.20 With the working class politically and culturally tied to Labour, the Department building and the council estate being municipal, state-owned landscapes, and the factories producing nothing being the responsibility of the Labour government, there is a potent political insinuation to all these London scenes. Paralleling the novel’s depictions of the GDR (le Carré 2011: 225), there is a sense of central state neglect: the state planning of socialism and communism both intrusive and indifferent; the interventionist state’s monolithic structures both ineluctable and inefficient. Through these depictions of London, Looking Glass subliminally rejects the modernized social democratic Britain of Harold Wilson’s Labour, all high-rise estates, technology, the Beatles, classlessness, collectivity and Gannex raincoats. This is all the more apparent once these images are seen as operating in a dialectic, a mirror image – an inversion – of the novel’s presentation of Oxford as an idealized Britain.

‘They chose Oxford’: Establishment Britain The Department’s choice of Oxford as location for the safe house for Leiser’s training is indicative of their establishment veneration of tradition over modernity. The Oxford scenes comprise a full third of the novel (le Carré 2011: 20

This conservative view of the working class as causing British decline was articulated in the rightwing press (see: Kynaston 2014: 122; The Times review of Looking Glass); in the views of Philip Larkin (MacPhee 2011: 56); and the work of Ian Fleming. In You Only Live Twice (1964), Fleming finally conceded national ‘impotence’ but blamed the working class, citing the ‘debilitating’ welfare state and trade union militancy (Fleming 2009: 491). In the eponymous villain of Goldfinger (1959; filmed in 1964), Fleming memorialized his loathing of modernist architect, Ernesto Goldfinger.

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134–199). Several Department members attended Oxford University, so ‘it was a place they could understand’ (134). The pedagogical function of training Leiser mirrors the work of the university, whose fame and iconic status means that the town itself comes to represent centuries of elite culture, the establishment, the path to power (Goodman 2012: 69). Key to the novel, however, is a wistfulness to the characters’ responses to Oxford. A few rungs below the gentlemanly class, Avery has never quite fitted in: ‘[Oxford] was a world he had known about once; for a time he had almost fancied he was part of it’ (le Carré 2011: 138). Avery, tellingly, looks in on a series of private Oxford locations from outside – this is the distance of longing not of objectivity, a reverse-image of Leclerc’s disdainful gaze. From the public street Avery watches ‘grey-haired figures moving across the lighted windows, velvet-covered chairs trimmed with lace, Chinese screens, music stands and a bridge four sitting like bewitched courtiers in a castle’ (138). The loving detail is far from satirical: the music stands represent culture; bridge, the upper class; velvet, wealth and sophistication; ‘castle’ the ‘Englishman’s home’ – privacy, in the sense of both tranquillity and ‘not public’. ‘Bewitched’ meanwhile is magical, the mythic register, found again in the houses’ ‘modest stateliness’, with their ‘turrets of Avalon’ and the fanciful – imperial – images of the houses as ships, with their ‘romantic hulls redecked’ (146). Leiser is also an observer, an outsider even inside these Oxford dwellings. ‘[Leiser’s] eye ran fondly over the heavy furniture, the tallboy elaborated with fretwork’ (174). The Englishness this ‘classless’ Pole craves is encapsulated by Oxford, crucible of the establishment (Weiner 1992: 22) – that journey again from country house to public school to Oxford to imperial service. ‘Lovingly [Leiser] revisited the handsome women at croquet, handsome men at war, disdainful boys in boaters, girls at Cheltenham’ (le Carré 2011: 174). The text lingers as lovingly as Leiser does over these lush interiors, itemizing potpourri, chandeliers, Bible table, Cupid statue and fireplace blackamoors (199). This is the gentlemanly bourgeois’ ideal home (Benjamin 1999: 701), replete with imperial booty, the pictures and bric-a-brac traditional, defiantly un-modern, the ‘stifling pile-up of historicist detritus that made up the bourgeois aesthetic’ (Hatherley 2009: 3). Again, far from satirizing Leiser’s attitude or the objects of his gaze, the gentle, mythic tone deployed for the Oxford locations is striking in comparison to the harsher, realist register used for London locations. Where the London landscapes’ age was associated with death, in Oxford age is equated with tradition, the recurring twilight imagery offering not shadows and gloom (as in London) but

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flattering soft focus. ‘The whole house gently asserted an air of old age’ (le Carré 2011: 139). This is the nostalgic, Oxford-centred ‘heritage culture’ invested in tradition and elitism found in Evelyn Waugh’s elegiac, patrician, Brideshead Revisited (1945), Edmund Crispin’s magical realist detective novel, The Moving Toyshop (1946) and more mutedly – but sharing a sense of wistful aspiration with Looking Glass – Philip Larkin’s university novel, Jill (1949). This heritage culture was a conservative current to which leftists were hostile (Hatherley 2009: 5). Not unrelated, these Oxford locations are private spaces, in contrast to the public, municipal locations depicted in London, again highlighting that contradiction in British liberal ideology between a common ground of democratic opportunity and the primacy of private property. In contrast to the symbolism of British decline in Looking Glass’s drab depictions of London – associated with the working class and modernity – the reverent evocations of Oxford proclaim an enduring British potency – associated with the ruling class and tradition. This is the society the Department is defending; in Oxford is the ‘mystery of England’ revealed. There is no satire in this, the mythic tone is simply too reverent, too romantic. The novel’s dualisms are thus conservatively hierarchical: private over public, upper over working-class, tradition over modernity, aestheticism over functionalism and ultimately potency over decline. These structuring binaries represent not just a rejection of Wilson’s socialist vision of a modernized, classless Britain, but also – via mirroring – a subliminal assertion of the superiority of liberalism over communism, West over East: the Cold War fought on the home front, the British landscape its battleground.

‘Their custom dated from the war’: The Second World War, the British nation and Leiser Despite the ‘angry young men’ and the counterculture’s shared antipathy for war memorialization, the Second World War was still a consensus marker of national pride and unity in Cold-War Britain. The war was a ‘universal reference point for mythic national cohesion’ (Rau 2013: 3) – memorialized even in the preferred name for that era: post-war Britain. Most of the war histories emerging in the early 1960s, such as A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War (1961) and Hugh Trevor Roper’s Blitzkrieg to Defeat (1964), stayed close to official narratives, depicting a nation united in a common purpose, a ‘people’s war’, in which Britain led the world. The old war thus served a nationalist galvanizing purpose within the Cold War: a reassertion of British traditions, of a British way of life and of British military potency contra communism.

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War memorialization spotted Call for the Dead and The Spy but saturates The Looking Glass War. To survey the latter, briefly: Taylor affects the demeanour of a war veteran (le Carré 2011: 3); Leclerc carries a cigarette case from a dead war comrade (26); and war photographs dominate Leclerc’s office (27–28). The reason for the characters’ preoccupation is overt: the war was the Department’s finest hour. Haldane recalls the Department’s ‘operational’ rather than administrative era in almost Biggles-esque terms: ‘Rubber boats on a moonless night; a captured enemy plane’ (67). The Department clearly functions as a metonym for Britain here, its Cold-War role in the world now reduced from its Second World War pinnacle of esteem and influence. Haldane perceives that Leclerc hopes, by proving the existence of the Rostock rockets, to repeat Britain’s discovery of V2 installations at Peenemunde in the war (69), reasserting Britain’s role in the world. The entire Leiser operation can be seen as a war memorialization, re-enacting national glories: Leiser was a wartime recruit to the Department (69–70); he is trained by Leclerc’s wartime combat specialist (95) and wartime wireless operator (94); and is given war-era equipment by the Circus (144). These war throwbacks will prove to be the operation’s undoing, however: Leiser is too old; the pre-war radio system too cumbersome; and the warera hierarchy too subservient to Leclerc’s gentlemanly disinterest in detail. Thus the Department’s operation founders; old war glory turns to Cold War ignominy. This then is a satire of war nostalgia (Sauerberg 1984: 170; Lewis 1985: 90–91; Homberger 1986: 58; Aronoff 1999: 42, 65; Goodman 2012: 66–67). What is missing from these scholarly accounts is how this Second World War remembrance functions in Cold-War terms. The Department’s nostalgia for the war resuscitates a Britain that had yet to be democratized by the 1945 Labour government’s redistributive policies. The welfare state and the huge expansion of the civil service discussed in Chapter 1 diluted the gentleman’s dominance.21 The Department is described as providing ‘shelter from the complexities of modern life, a place where frontiers still existed’ (le Carré 2011: 72). Consequently, even lower middle-class Woodford relishes the Department’s retention of the prewar class hierarchy (86), and when Woodford visits the Alias veterans’ club, it is revealed without rancour that officer-class Leclerc never attends (96). To each his station in the past. Despite Woodford’s enthusiastic avowal that, since the Leiser operation, ‘the Department is working wonderfully. As one man. And what a spirit! … And no rank’ (184), evoking the common image of the democratic,

21

This theme was particularly prominent in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945); more mutedly so in Anthony Powell’s Valley of Bones (1964).

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‘people’s war’, Woodford’s subaltern status is emphasized when Haldane won’t let him meet Leiser (185). Woodford, like Leamas, doesn’t have the correct pass. Class tension is thus a key component in Looking Glass, but hardly in radical terms. Woodford, like Leamas, simply falls into line with the other ranks. The Department’s residual ideology enforces a near feudal hierarchy. On one level, The Looking Glass War offers a counter-narrative to conventional accounts of the ‘people’s war’. Building on le Carré’s reference to the plot as a ‘ritual sacrifice’ (1965: 2) and Goodman’s suggestion that Leclerc views the war in terms of sacrifice (2012: 67), it is the class of the sacrificial victim that is significant here. En route to memorialize the death of lower-class Taylor, Leclerc says, with chilling wistfulness, ‘It was simpler in those days … we could say they’d died for their country’ (le Carré 2011: 38). Even in the Second World War a utilitarian accounting logic relied on the working class giving their lives for the greater good of the greatest number, the nation. This reframes ‘the people’s war’ in terms of who paid the highest cost in casualties (see: Calder 1992). Workingclass sacrifice is a key ‘custom that dated from the war’ for the Department, but it is one rejected by Mrs Taylor: ‘What do you mean [died] gallantly?’ she snaps at Leclerc. ‘We’re not fighting a war. That’s finished, all that fancy talk. He’s dead’ (le Carré 2011: 73). This allows the war being waged to be reframed not as the Cold War, or the revisited Second World War but an older war than either: the class war. From such a perspective, each class’s hostile image of the other reflects back their own fears and anxieties. Thus Haldane’s patronizing, stereotypical assumptions of degeneracy in lower-class Leiser: ‘He dresses like a bookie’ (131); he is ‘Common, in a Slav way’ (131). With Leiser’s foreignness making him doubly ‘other’ – ‘Slav’ is the origin of the word ‘slave’– this last reflects contemporary racist attitudes to European Voluntary Workers, fanned by the press (Webster 2016: 36).22 Leiser vividly sees in both his revered Haldane (le Carré 2011: 149, 155, 163) and the upper-class homes in Oxford a reflection of his desires (131). For this aristocratic England Leiser gives up his garage, trains in intensive physical combat and radio transmission, isolated from his lover for a month, and risks his life: ‘aspiring after a way of life which he only imperfectly understood’ (165; emphasis added). Avery’s words hold an utterly distorting mirror to Leiser: ‘You’re one of us, Fred. You always were’

22

Historically, many Poles volunteered from displaced persons camps to help Britain fight the Nazis and swell the domestic workforce as European Voluntary Workers (Rau 2016: 16; Webster 2016) and then, like Leiser, stayed on in Britain afterwards, as per a pledge by Churchill (Webster 2016: 35).

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(218). In Leiser’s aspiration to alter his own social identity there is a desire for an erasure of self that the novel’s plot consummates via his death.23 Aspiration – classlessness – is dismissed here: the porousness of the class system and the inclusivity of the imperial mother nation are shown to be illusions. But the problem with viewing the treatment of Leiser as an immanent critique of the class system is that the two classes are so unequally represented. As so often in le Carré’s fiction, establishment locations – Oxford; Smiley’s gentleman’s club – and characters – Leclerc, Haldane, Smiley, Control – are vivid and colourful. They are a magnet for the characters within the text (everyone drawn to Oxford; Leclerc envious of Smiley’s club [140]; Leiser drawn to Haldane [163]) and for the reader outside looking in. Looking Glass’s lower-class locations – Taylor’s estate; Leiser’s garage – and lower-class characters – Taylor, Woodford, Pine, Leiser – are grey and colourless, unappealing to other characters (Avery is awkward with Pine [25, 34]; Leiser has no friends [120, 127]; Haldane feels ‘distaste’ for Leiser [148]) and to the reader. The reflection is unequal. Leiser is little more than a caricature Polish ‘Casanova’ (Webster 2016: 37), but his love-life is sterile (le Carré 2011: 170), lacking jouissance in the sense of sexual release or actual pleasure (Barthes 1977: 183). Unlike Leamas, that previous lower-class character in le Carré, Leiser lacks warmth: he remains cold, inert, meaning that his death is starkly diminished in its tragic affect because he is barely alive as a character in the first place. Indeed, aside from Avery, Leiser’s death barely impacts upon the Department. Even Smiley, present again at the death, reserves his ‘compassion’ (le Carré 2011: 261) not for Leiser but for the Department, even when the respective losses – life and status – are themselves unequal reflections. The exact same words are used of Leclerc and Leiser in our last view of each of them: ‘a man once more intent upon appearances, conscious of tradition’ (266, 273). But rather than suggesting a sympathy between the men, a reflection of ‘self ’ in the ‘other’, gentlemanly Leclerc – impressive, vivid, even in defeat – has effectively subsumed working-class Leiser, who simply fades out of the novel. Leclerc is remembered; Leiser forgotten. This imbalance in representation mirrors the imbalance in society: it reinscribes the class system via affect. In its depiction of the British nation, therefore, Looking Glass offers an opposition between the establishment and the lower classes; a division in the national consciousness. A distorting mirror is held up between working-class

23

There are two interesting resonances here: one is with classlessness as erasing working-class identity (Williams 1993: 331); the second is with Cornwell’s own class position, where he had overwritten his uncertain class origins and remade himself as establishment. Here we see class as a palimpsest.

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London – associated with modernity and British decline – and establishment Oxford – associated with British tradition and potency. A similarly distorted reflection is projected between the officer class (Leclerc) and the ‘other ranks’ (Leiser). While there is a critique here of the attitudes of the dominant class, throughout the novel the sharper focus is always with the establishment – and so is the textual sympathy. Looking Glass’s presentation of Britain thus asserts old national polarities of class that transfer readily to the polarities of West and East and subliminally promote a Cold-War conservatism.

*** The Cold-War enemy is apparently deprioritized in Looking Glass, but the novel does not refute the Cold-War consensus’ conception of the communist threat. The presentation of East German society in Looking Glass ultimately offers a routine condemnation of the communist system as ideologically driven authoritarianism. Looking Glass focuses more than ever on the workings of the state – encompassing both the new Department and le Carré’s established Circus – slowing the novel’s ‘thriller’ elements to a crawl. Through this state focus Looking Glass evinces some anti-establishment sentiment, satirizing the Department’s gentlemen as anachronistic, whilst a British totalitarianism is suggested via the bureaucratic instrumentality that sends Leiser to his death for the Department’s glory. However, this critique is undermined by the interdepartmental subplot, with the Circus presented as a preferable version of the state (and equally of the establishment). In terms of the nation, the novel affirms that same establishment as the essence, the ‘self ’ of Britain, by way of its contrasting representations of a public, drab, dilapidated London and a private, affluent, cultured Oxford. In this divided Britain, the Department’s war nostalgia is framed as a yearning for an elite, undemocratic Britain, in which Leiser simply becomes lower-ranks cannon fodder. After initially channelling more radical contemporary currents, therefore – the modernizing programme of Wilson’s Labour government; countercultural antipathy to the establishment; leftist questioning of the Cold War – The Looking Glass War ultimately, if unsteadily, reflects the Cold-War consensus. As if the establishment were simply looking at its own reflection. ******

4

‘Holding the World Together’: The Cambridge Spies and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The case of Cambridge spy, Harold ‘Kim’ Philby – gentleman and traitor – haunted the British national unconscious. Scion of the establishment, Philby rose to head of MI6’s counterintelligence section but came under suspicion when his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union in 1951. With MI5 unable to make charges stick, Philby was publicly cleared by foreign secretary Macmillan in 1955, before finally defecting to the Soviet Union in 1963 (Andrew 2009: 341-351, 430-438). MI5 were so shaken by these events that even in 1974 they were still obsessively, destructively, trying to locate the ‘fourth man’ of this Cambridge spy ring (503–521). Published in June 1974, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was not the first Philby-inspired work to arrive at this historical moment,1 and neither would it be the last: it is, however, both the best and the best-known.2 The question is: why this national haunting of the national unconscious by Philby – the tail-chasing in MI5 and the cultural tracing and retracing of the Philby tale? A case that had effectively closed some eleven years prior to Tinker Tailor’s publication. A partial answer is that the Cambridge spies – Philby, Burgess and Maclean – were a national humiliation that enduringly damaged Britain’s geopolitical standing. Certainly there is a broad – and erroneous –

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See: le Carré’s teleplay, The End of the Line (1970); Joseph Hone’s The Private Sector (1971); Dennis Potter’s teleplay, Traitor (1971); Alan Williams’ Gentleman Traitor (1974). In the immediate aftermath: Dorothea Bennett, The Jigsaw Man (1977; filmed in 1984); Philby, Burgess and MacLean (Curteis, 1977); Graham Greene, The Human Factor (1978); Ted Allbeury, The Other Side of Silence (1981); Julian Rathbone, A Spy of the Old School (1982); Frederick Forsyth, The Fourth Protocol (1984). Further examples in Scanlan (1982) and Bedell (1993). Since then, Philbyinspired cultural productions include John Banville, The Untouchable (1997); Tim Powers, Declare (2001); Robert Littell, The Company (2002; adapted for television, 2007); Cambridge Spies (Fywell, 2003); William F. Buckley, Last Call for Blackford Oakes (2004); The Good Shepherd (De Niro, 2005); A Different Loyalty (Kanievska, 2005); Charles Cumming, The Trinity Six (2011).

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association in the novel between British decline and the mole’s subversion of the state. More pertinently, there was, within the British establishment, the sense of a live left-wing threat. An international crisis of capitalism encompassed the 1973 ‘oil shock’ and a worldwide recession, which triggered the collapse of right-wing regimes in Portugal and Greece in 1974 and Spain in 1975 and the proliferation of communist anti-colonial movements in the Third World. Domestically, the Conservative government of Edward Heath was brought down in March 1974 by British industrial unrest: ‘the most spectacular single victory of labour over capital in British history ... the only time in modern European history that an economic strike has precipitated the political collapse of a government’ (Anderson 1987: 64). The Labour left was in the ascendant (Medhurst 2014), and with Tony Benn taking control of Trade and Industry in the new Labour government, to Conservatives this was effectively a mole burrowed into the British state. As a panicked MI5 investigated a range of ‘subversives’ preparing for ‘communist takeover’ (Medhurst 2014: 47–52; Wright 1987: 369–370) – trade unionists, MPs and even increasingly rightwing prime minister, Harold Wilson – the search for the elusive ‘fourth man’ appeared to make little distinction between the democratic domestic left and authoritarian Soviet communism. The parallel impetus of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is to unearth its own fourth man and to reveal the dark secret in Britain’s unconscious to be leftism, a national psychic wound that is healed in the novel by Smiley. Thus the title of this chapter, from Smiley’s only semi-mocking view of his role: ‘one, fat, middle-aged spy is the only person capable of holding the world together’ (83) – of saving the establishment. Le Carré had experienced poor reviews and exponentially declining sales for a non-Cold-War political novel, A Small Town in Germany (1968)3 and a romance, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971) – whose only Cold-War reference was to the Cambridge spies. Tinker Tailor returned le Carré to The Spy’s era, its topic – penetration agents – and its level of sales. The Bodleian manuscripts reveal that le Carré spent a year fruitlessly working on Tinker Tailor,4 before deciding that the familiar character

3

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The Spy hit no. 1 on the US bestseller lists; Small Town in Germany managed 7; Tinker Tailor, 4 (Sauerberg 1983: 102–103). It is striking that le Carré’s essentially non-Cold-War novel, A Small Town in Germany should focus on right-wing populism and student demonstrations in West Germany, when the year of its publication, 1968, was marked, in West Germany – as elsewhere – by left-wing demonstrations. To associate the student movement with Nazi war criminals is quite a reversal of political reality. The first manuscript is dated September 1971 (JLC 23); Smiley’s first appearance is in JLC 18, 13–15 September 1972.

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of George Smiley would be a ‘consoling’ guide through its plot’s complexity (in Gross 1980, 35) – or indeed contemporary politics’ complexity. Despite the reverence in which Tinker Tailor is now held, its initial press reception was mixed. Both Graham Lord and Julian Symons deemed it ‘a sad disappointment’. Maurice Richardson called it ‘far too long … hard to follow’, and the complexity and length of the novel were common complaints.5 Even some positive reviews deprecated Tinker Tailor as non-political genre fiction, as what Peter Prescott called ‘straight … entertainment’ and Benjamin Stein called a comforting ‘cocoon’ against the ‘real world’, while Pearl Bell claimed le Carré’s work lacked any relationship to ‘Larger Issues’.6 Even within these depoliticized readings, the lack of any reference to Philby in twenty-four reviews is still arresting.7 Anthony Troon’s review called a mole the ‘nightmare of politicians and espionage agencies … the damage such an agent could wreak would be phenomenal’, apparently unaware that just such a ‘nightmare’ had already occurred. The scant reviewers who did cite Philby tended to dismiss the ‘mole’ theme as dated, declaring the Cold War effectively over.8 Similarly, reviewers continued to treat le Carré’s work as depicting office politics rather than geopolitics, Matthew Coady calling Tinker Tailor ‘a portrait of the secret agent

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Graham Lord, Sunday Express, 30 June 1974, 6; Julian Symons, New Review, 4 July 1974, 60–62; Maurice Richardson, ‘The Spy Circus’, Observer 30 June 1974, 33. Reviews negative on complexity and length: Roger Sale, Hudson Review, Winter 1974–75, 626; Maurice Edelman, ‘Spy Gone Cold’, Sunday Telegraph, 30 June 1974, 14; Edmund Crispin, ‘Moling Away’, Sunday Times, 30 June 1974, 41; Michael Maxwell Scott, Daily Telegraph, 4 July 1974, 9; C. P. Snow, ‘Smiley Comes Back’, Financial Times, 19 July 1974, 19; Derek Mahon, ‘Dolls within Dolls’, Listener, 4 July 1974, 30; ‘Hunt the Sleeper’, Times Literary Supplement. 19 July 1974, 10; Symons; John R. Coyne Jr, ‘Twentieth Century Heroes’, National Review, August 1974, 880; William B. Hill, America 16, 1974, 300. Peter Prescott, ‘Smiley vs. the Mole’, Newsweek, 17 June 1974, 104. Reviews on Tinker Tailor as non-political: ‘Crime Compendium’, Spectator, 5 July 1974, 21; Benjamin Stein, ‘Fireside, Armchair, Secrets, Smiles’ American Spectator, January 1975, 21. Reviews not mentioning Philby: Crispin; TLS; Maxwell-Scott; Edelman; Lord; Coady; Prior; Spectator; Symons; H.R.F. Keating, ‘Life without Roots’, The Times, 4 July 1974, 10; Timothy Mo, ‘The Human Spy’, New Statesman, 12 July 1974, 52; Andrew Hope, Evening Standard, 3 July 1974, 25; John Robbins, ‘I Spy… a Red Herring’, Evening News, 4 July 1974, 5; George Thaw, ‘A Winner from the Spy Master’, Daily Mirror, 4 July 1974, 23; Mark Kahn, ‘Le Carré’s on the Spy Trail Again’, Sunday Mirror, 30 June 1974, 27; ‘Books, Briefly Noted’, New Yorker, 22 July 1974, 83; Kirkus, 1 June 1974; Dick Datchery, Critic, October 1974, 91. Anthony Troon, ‘Gathering of the Spies’, Scotsman, 29 June 1974, 3. British reviews on Philby: Snow; Mahon; Richardson (implicated in the Cambridge spy ring); Reg Gadney, ‘Triple Agents’, London Magazine, October/November 1974, 73–77 (Gadney invoked Philby in his 1987 novel, Nightshade). Philby cited in US reviews: Miller; Richard Locke, ‘ The Spy Who Spied on Spies’, New York Times, 30 June 1974, 1; Atlantic, August 1974, 88; Washington Post, 8 December 1974, 1; Burke Wilkinson, ‘Turncloak in the Dark’, Christian Science Monitor, 3 July 1974, 11. Reviews declaring Cold War/ Philby irrelevance to 1974: Edelmann: ‘the Cold War spy story … is really old literary stuff ’; Snow; Gadney; Allan Prior, ‘When Mr le Carré Came in from the Cold’, Daily Mail, 4 July 1974, 7; George Grella, ‘Murder and Loyalty’, New Republic, 31 July 1976, 23–25.

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as bureaucratic man’, depicting ‘the power battles, the detailed organization and the tedium’; while Edmund Crispin saw its spies ‘less concerned with defeating the Kremlin than with interdepartmental bickering’.9 With Wilson’s previous administration having withdrawn British presence ‘east of Suez’ in 1968 (Greenwood 2000: 174), there was some acknowledgement of British decline among British reviewers,10 while among American reviews, Karl Miller declared ‘le Carré’s tales, for all their disenchantment, seem to be trying to make Britain great again by feigning a situation in which she still has secrets that the world covets’.11 Most le Carré scholars note the novel’s connection to the Kim Philby case,12 and its anti-bureaucracy theme (Panek 1981: 253; Broyard 1982: 23; Sauerberg 1984: 172; Holtmann 1991: 66–67; Paulson 2007: 325; Woods 2008: 129), while tending to confirm le Carré’s presentation of the mole as a non-ideological traitor (Noland 1980: 64–65; Lewis 1985: 134; King 1987: 69; Masters 1987: 229–230; Rothberg 1987: 57; Lasseter 1990: 109; Beene 1991: 91; Bennett 1998: 25; Cobbs 1998: 119). Perfecting this personalization of the political, Paulson goes so far as to say that ‘the “mole” Bill Hayden’s [sic] real evil lies not in his betrayal of the British Empire but in his betrayal of his best friend’ (2007: 324). This chapter posits Tinker Tailor as central not just structurally to this volume, but to le Carré’s Cold-War canon, a distillation of the themes of these Cold-War novels – and not coincidentally, their creative pinnacle. This chapter will first examine the novel’s vision of the nation, centred on a prep school and on Smiley as national avatar, asking what, in the mid1970s, this suggested about Britain. Second, the chapter will explore how le Carré’s by-now familiar preoccupation with bureaucracy is connected in the novel to the British state’s penetration by the mole. Third, the chapter will examine Tinker Tailor’s representation of the enemy, communism: Karla, who gives his (code) name to the 1970s trilogy of which this is the first

9

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11

12

Matthew Coady, ‘Our Sort’, Guardian, 4 July 1974, 9. Reviews on office politics: TLS; Lord; Crispin; Symons; Prescott; Timothy Foote, ‘Playing Tigers’, Time, 24 June 1974, 108; Helen R. Stephenson, ‘Betrayal at the Foreign Office’, Wall Street Journal, 24 July 1974, 10; John R. Coyne Jnr, ‘Twentieth Century Heroes’, National Review, August 1974, 880. Michael Dean, ‘John le Carré: The Writer Who Came in from the Cold’, Listener, 5 September 1974, 306; Mahon; Spectator. Karl Miller, ‘Gothic Guesswork’, New York Review of Books, 18 July 1974, 24–27. Other US reviewers on British decline: Stephenson, Locke, Prescott; Foote; Atlantic; Grella 1974. Bennett (1998: 62), Halperin (1998: 230) and Hoffman (2001: 135) even cite the Volkov incident, when Philby inadvertently incriminated himself (Andrew 2009: 344–345), echoed by the Irina episode in Tinker Tailor (le Carré 1999: 45–76). Philby is not mentioned by Noland (1980), Everett (1991), Hughes (1981) or Jackson (1993).

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volume, and Bill Haydon, the mole himself. The chapter will ask: what are the implications of the absence of communism as an ideology from a novel about a communist spy? ***

‘The imminent collapse of the nation’: England and the establishment It is with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that the cult of Smiley truly begins in British culture. It is hard now to see Smiley past the twinkling lugubriousness of Alec Guinness’ portrayal in the 1979 BBC televisation – as Gary Oldman, who modelled his performance in Tomas Alfredson’s film (2011) on Guinness’, could not. Yet this popular canonization only confirmed the critical response to the novel. Contemporary reviews hailed Smiley as an embodiment of national character: ‘Smiley is one of the last English gentlemen … an honorable, decent fellow … humanity at its decent English best’ (Locke); Smiley ‘provides a sense of a moral center … the embodiment of British decency’ (Grella). Among Tinker Tailor scholars this equation of Smiley with a British national character became even stronger: for Sauerberg, ‘[Smiley’s] deep sense of human decency [is] the product of the best in the liberal and individualistic tradition [and] English culture’ (1984: 60). Rothberg claimed, ‘le Carré wishes us to consider George Smiley the epitome of the best England has to offer’ (1987: 49), while Dobel made that spirit specific: ‘at the core of liberal democracy and of George Smiley lies respect of the worth and dignity of individuals’ (1988: 209).13 Why this avalanche of approbation? The response is conditioned by le Carré’s narrative technique: for although le Carré’s mythologizing of Smiley was there from the off – Smiley and England already conflated in Call for the Dead – this tendency reaches a new pitch in Tinker Tailor. Circus gossip Roddy Martindale, running into Smiley in Heywood Hill, even deploys the mythic register in ordinary speech, declaring in loud, establishment tones: ‘If it isn’t the maestro himself! They told me you were locked up with the monks in St Gallen or

13

Further post-televisation testimonials for Smiley in Tinker Tailor: ‘Like Mr Standfast, [Smiley] is the spirit of England’ (Noland 1980: 63), ‘A man of conscience’ with ‘a code of loyalty, of fidelity’ (Rutherford 1987: 24–25); ‘emblem of British decency, probity and fairness’ (Rothberg 1987: 55); ‘Loyalty… idealism… honesty and compassion’ (Lasseter 1990: 107); ‘Decency, integrity, kindness, sympathy, and compassion (Aronoff 1999: 15–16). Class is largely absent from these testimonials.

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somewhere, poring over manuscripts! … Are you well? Do you love England still? How’s the delicious Ann? … I say, you’re not back on the beat are you? Don’t tell me it’s all cover, George, cover?’ (le Carré 1999a: 25). Fleshy, epicurean Martindale renders Smiley fabled, the personal and political commingling, and bestows on Smiley a sense of moment in present actions, and a history that is venerable, steeped in tradition, possibly glorious. Certainly, Martindale mocks Smiley, but as we saw in the treatment of Leclerc in The Looking Glass War, an element of mockery only enhances the mythic register, as does an undertow of melancholy, discernible here: inklings of decline and a suspicion of reliance on past glories, an autumn that is both Britain’s and Smiley’s. Indeed at one point the novel was to be titled The Reluctant Autumn of George Smiley (JLC 20; JLC 28, March 1973). It is easy to get swept up in this, to get carried away with Smiley, as le Carré does, as critics do, as readers do – but the question is why? Why Tinker Tailor’s mythologization of Smiley? Why the abandonment of the more democratic heroes who, however equivocally, were centre stage in The Spy, Looking Glass, and A Small Town in Germany (1968)? Why the disappearance, indeed, of the lower classes, bar the occasional porter or waiter, from the British landscape altogether? In terms of that British landscape, Tinker Tailor moves at glacial pace from a prep school in chapter one to a gentleman’s club in chapter two. Were we to map the novel’s England – for as the text says of Bill Haydon and Rupert Brooke, it is always England not Britain (le Carré 1999a: 166) – it would encompass: elite Chelsea in chapter three; Ascot, where Oliver Lacon’s country house and estate has its own paddock and horses in chapters four to ten. Thereafter it encompasses Cambridge Circus, in London’s West End, centrifuge of national and imperial power in chapter eleven; then the storied lanes of Oxford in chapter twelve. Amid these lines of longitude and latitude we encounter few locations that would be unfamiliar to the establishment: they map the ‘conservative cult of countryside and club, tradition and constitution’ (Anderson 1987: 41). There is as little glimpse of the commons as is there is of the commoners. This is the most luminous that we have seen the English landscape in le Carré. In a book that contains so much Arthurian imagery (Everett 1991) – Lacon’s ‘Berkshire Camelot’ (le Carré 1999a: 39); source Merlin (80); Ann as a betraying Guinevere – England is very far from a wasteland even as it awaits the healing touch of Smiley’s Galahad. There is actually very little sense of ‘the imminent collapse of the nation’, as an apocalyptic Fleet Street pub bore has it (263). Even the dowdiness once so characteristic of le Carré is now incorporated into the mythic register, tingeing the glamour with melancholy: we see this in heroically

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down-at-heel Thursgood’s prep school; we see it in the shabby gentility of Connie Sachs’ Oxford; we see it even in the awful Islay hotel where Smiley holes up for the investigation, where the hotel’s pigeons, class pretensions and peeping Toms are transformed into the fabled fifth floor of the Circus, with its typists, night-coding clerks and the scent of Control’s jasmine tea (136). Again, this prompts the question: why? Let us map these landscapes more closely to attempt to answer this question.

‘Passionate Englishness’: The public school ethos and Britain To begin a novel about Soviet communist penetration of the British state with a detailed depiction of life at a provincial British prep school is an audaciously lateral and original approach.14 It takes time to be revealed that Thursgood’s school is serving as both cover and refuge for former public schoolboy, former spy and perennial English patriot, Jim Prideaux (le Carré 1999a: 82). Life at Thursgood’s is endowed with too much detail for purely plot-furthering purposes, however. With little other evidence of the citizenry in the novel and children always a useful embodiment of apolitical innocence, the school exemplifies the British nation, its hallowed way of life, and offers an evocation of what is being defended in the Cold War. This creates a very particular picture of Britain: English, traditional, establishment, agrarian – Thursgood’s being set, as many independent schools were, in a rural environment, the Quantocks in Somerset, thereby recalling the aristocratic country house. The schoolboy, Bill Roach, through whose admiring eyes we observe Jim Prideaux, is declared by the narrative to be the ‘prototype’ for Smiley (23) – a deft distillation of how the nexus of prep school/public school/Oxbridge creates the future gentlemanly administrators of both state and Empire (Hobsbawm 1995: 178; Powell 2002: 113). This occurs through the social network but also through the attitude created by such an education: a sense of entitlement to power – over other sections of society; over other nations. Central to the British Empire, ‘the public schools became … intertwine[ed] with patriotic and imperialist endeavour. The games field came to be seen as a preparation for war’ (MacKenzie 1984: 5–6). The resultant public school code

14

In the many drafts in the Bodleian manuscripts, the novel always commences at the school, with Prideaux as lead character. Linking spy establishment and public schools, one character says to Prideaux, ‘Trust you to swap one crummy English institution for another’ (JLC 24, 4 December 1971: 5). Cornwell had taught at Eton, Sisman citing his ‘ambivalence towards the institutions of the establishment, loving them and criticizing them simultaneously’ (2016: 167).

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thus harnessed the Hobbesian, red-toothed strain of liberalism to patriotic purpose, and propounded a ‘national’ morality: ‘a spirit of fairness, amateurism and manliness’ (Denning 1987: 33). All these elements are distilled in Henry Newbolt’s iconic poem, ‘Vitae Lampada’ (1897): ‘England’s far, and Honour a name / But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: / “Play up! play up! and play the game!”’ Indeed we see Prideaux giving his all to the sports field at Thursgood’s (le Carré 1999a: 18), and fervently hacking his way on regular route-marches through the Quantocks (18), while also displaying a facility for channelled violence by efficiently snapping the neck of an injured owl that descends from a chimney into his classroom (19). The public school ethos undergirded imperial spy fiction. It was mildly satirized in Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928);15 was celebrated in Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond books (1920 -1937) and Fleming’s Bond; came in for sharper satire in films like If (Anderson, 1968) and The Ruling Class (Medak, 1971); but was revived in le Carré’s 1970s novels (one of which would even be entitled The Honourable Schoolboy). In Tinker Tailor, Thursgood’s has seen better days: it has a history of second-rate teachers (le Carré 1999a: 9, 20); while the Dip where Jim parks his caravan, part of fabled pupil ‘folklore’, was dug for a planned swimming pool before funds dried up (11). Yet, quite apart from the fact that a public school is still a private entity, steeped in wealth, and that national everyboy, Roach, is the scion of enormous affluence (10), thereby rendering down-at-heelness extremely relative, all of this – teachers, Dip, school – is described in the mythic register throughout. The choric voice of the school is a particularly effective deployment of that mythologizing tendency in le Carré. The staff speculates about Prideaux (19–21); he becomes a legendary subject to the pupils, who endow him with a suitable nickname, Rhino (18), which in an early manuscript is offered in tribute to ‘the dignity of a dying breed’ (JLC 24, 8 February 1972) – the imperial English gentleman. Prideaux is notably age-worn (le Carré 1999a: 12), and is virtually crippled from a (war) wound in his back (12), so his body lists like his caravan (14–15). In all this he embodies and represents both Britain and the gentlemanly ideal and, like both of these, Prideaux has been betrayed – literally shot in the back. Again, however, these mists of melancholia only add to Prideaux’s mythic heroism, captured even in the staff ’s cynical speculations, ‘“He’s been somewhere”

15

Ashenden’s controller says of a foreign spy, ‘He hasn’t the advantages of a public school education. His ideas of playing the game are not quite the same as yours or mine’ (Maugham 2000: 56).

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said [headmaster] Thursgood morosely, staring across the windswept gardens towards the Dip’ (21). So there is something defensive in Prideaux’s inculcation of his ‘passionate Englishness’ into his pupils, bellowing, ‘Best place in the whole damn world’ (17) and reading aloud from Biggles (W. E. Johns), Percy Westerman (18) and John Buchan (286) – imperial adventure stories, the dusty propaganda of decaying Empire. Prideaux derides Chinese and Russian communism as indistinguishable, irredeemable ‘other’ (18), thus socialism as un-patriotic – his beloved car, his Alvis, is out of production ‘thanks to socialism’ (127). Yet for all his assertiveness and ebullience, there is a sense that Prideaux is repressing some troubling knowledge: he has buried his gun (231); ‘Sometimes he thought of the wound as a memory he couldn’t keep down’ (282); he has ‘drawn a line’ and is dedicated to ‘forgetting’ (291). Prideaux sets his pupils to watch out for strangers (16, 128), bogeymen. When such a spectre is eventually spotted lurking in the school’s shadows (128–129, 283–284), what it – in fact, Smiley – brings into the light is the communist penetration of British intelligence (289): precisely the knowledge, it transpires, that Prideaux has been repressing (308). If the deep dark secret in the national unconscious is communism, then surely Prideaux’s willed forgetting and his anti-leftism are connected, attempting to resist the return of the repressed? Communism, it will turn out, is not just lurking in the heart of the state, or even of the nation, but in the foundations of the establishment. Communism was thus nurtured in a prep school very like Thursgood’s; in a public school such as Prideaux attended; and at Oxford, where Jim Prideaux first met his best friend, Bill Haydon.

‘Halcyon days’: Oxford, the establishment and Britain For no immediate narrative reason, each episode of the 1979 televisation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ended with an image of Oxford’s iconic neoclassical Radcliffe Camera library beneath the closing credits. Accompanied by an elegiac, children’s choral setting of the ‘Nunc Dimittis’, this evoked tradition, Englishness, innocence beyond politics once again. Oxford – in the drama’s credits; as Connie’s domicile (le Carré 1999a: 106–122); in Smiley’s memories of his youth (105); in the tales of Prideaux and Haydon’s student days (273–276) – stands for England, or again a particular England: traditional, cultured, establishment, imperial. Bill Haydon is an exemplary product of this elite world, just as Kim Philby was. Haydon’s textual comparison to T. E. Lawrence (166) and mention of blue blood (95) show that Haydon, like Philby, epitomized two strands of the

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gentlemanly ideal: the muscular Christian athlete and the delicate creative aesthete (Berberich 2007: 122). Haydon, like Philby, is establishment family, and so betrays his entire class – a culture; a way of life – as well as his country to communism. So the serenely melancholy strains of the singing children also suggest a nation brought low not by economics, geopolitical competition or simply time, but by the depredations of communism. Exactly these same sentiments saturate the Connie Sachs scene, forever now associated with Beryl Reid’s haunting realization of the character in that same BBC adaptation. Smiley’s first action after he is commissioned by Oliver Lacon to hunt the mole is to visit his old Circus colleague, Connie Sachs, now an Oxford don. Connie’s overwhelming presence somewhat obscures a crucial fact: that from prep to public school to Oxford to gentleman’s club to Cambridge Circus, le Carré’s world, like that of the establishment, is not just an elite world, it is a male world (Collins 2002: 94). With women usually onlookers in these novels – innocents, admirers, occasionally critics – Connie hymns (hims) just this gentlemanly world, her ‘lovely, lovely boys’ (le Carré 1999a: 122), her elegy delivered, like her entire scene, deep in the mythic register. ‘Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye world’ (122). Sachs hails both Haydon and Smiley as the last gentlemen (122) and speaks nostalgically of a time ‘before Empire became a dirty word’ and ‘when Englishmen could be proud’. Instead now, ‘all over the world beastly people are making our time into nothing’ (121). The Empire has finally emerged into the light in these novels from the national unconscious: the endpoint of that gentlemanly journey from country house through prep school, public school, Oxford, the civil service and out into the imperial world. Connie associates the dismantling of Empire with the destruction of her family’s country house, Millponds, to make way for a motorway (122) and her fear that the Circus’s public school, Sarratt will be abandoned. The democratic, planned modern world is destroying the institutions of an imperial, amateur, aristocratic Arcadia. This was a common conservative trope by the 1970s, with country houses increasingly treated as emblems of English tradition vulnerable to vandal planners (Matless 2016: 375–376) and other uncultured ‘new men’. This was a potent theme of Brideshead Revisited, which was adapted by Granada concurrent with the BBC’s Tinker Tailor (indeed the companies had competed for Brideshead’s rights [Oldham 2013: 731]). Both dramas are early examples of the 1980s heritage trend, which, amidst economic recession, yearned for an elite, imperial Britain, co-opting a broad class consensus to this regressive yet potently attractive vision (Oldham 2013: 740). Tapping the gentlemanly

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‘residual ideology’ (Williams 1985: 122) within the national unconscious, Connie Sachs is a case study in ‘postimperial melancholia’ (Gilroy 2004: 98): ‘the morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige in a determinedly postcolonial world’ (Gilroy 2004: 117). Rather than challenge Connie’s chauvinist lament, most scholars simply recycle its nostalgia for an imperial, elite Britain (Monaghan 1985: 4; Homberger 1986: 18; Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 181; even the Marxist, Denning [1987: 130]). As Connie is reacting to Smiley’s confirmation of the mole she long suspected (le Carré 1999a: 119), her lament blames the decline of Britain and of the gentlemanly world on the left — British socialism (planning; anti-imperialism) channelling Soviet communism (the mole). Even so, there is in Connie’s speech, for all her tears and bitterness, a strange serenity: a comfortable sadness, a gratifying yearning that saturates the novel’s treatment of the establishment: eulogy eclipsing elegy. Peter Guillam is another product of the gentlemanly nexus of public school and Oxford: he is ‘chivalrous’ (87), with ‘a notion of English calling’ (361) and consequently, present at the metaphorical death of the gentleman. Haydon’s eventual unmasking as a traitor leaves Guillam feeling ‘orphaned’, as Haydon is ‘of his own kind’ (365). Again, Guillam, far from coherently regards communism as the cause of national decline, just as Prideaux and Connie did. The betrayal here is of a class as much as of a nation – or more precisely, of a class which regards the nation and itself as indistinguishable. This then is a partial answer to that earlier question: Why the fabular reverence for Smiley? Why the mythic potency of the English landscape? Because, throughout these books, a residual social conservatism is being asserted in the face of the communist challenge. The establishment is being claimed as the true Britain, and so its heroes, its landscapes, its haunts are being hymned. Once again, this is entirely contradictory to Britain’s liberal self-projection as a bastion of democracy. Indeed the image of a level-playing field can, in Tinker Tailor, only summon up a public school games field rolled and lined by groundsmen for the pursuit of rugger or cricket. Key to the Cold War as this is – its home front, the class struggle as a mirror held to the East–West conflict – there is a more immediate Cold-War imperative for Tinker Tailor’s insistent mythologization of Smiley and its luminous descriptions of the English landscape. As a Kim Philby figure, Bill Haydon as the Cold-War enemy is not ‘other’ like Dieter Frey or Jens Fiedler or Liz Gold – neither Jewish, nor working class, nor indeed female. Haydon, quite as much as Smiley, is a product of the hallowed English homosocial history of prep and public school

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and Oxford, of the gentlemanly ideal, of Empire and the long lineage of English exceptionalism of which liberal democracy was only the latest manifestation. The gentlemanly class produced a Haydon: in order to maintain its historical facility for survival (Anderson 1964a: 32) it must also produce a Smiley to counter him. To heal the nation, yes, but more importantly to preserve the establishment, the English tradition of the gentleman atop which Smiley stands: to reassert that tradition’s potency, its integrity, its truth. Smiley is not alone in this: the novel’s quartet of establishment saviours – Smiley, Guillam, Prideaux, Westerby – is effectively an answer to the suspect cabal, a refutation apiece of tinker, tailor, soldier and spy. These bruised and battered gentlemen reassert their class’s heroism and virtue through a genteel division of labour. Smiley is the regent in exile; Guillam his cup-bearer; Westerby provides the vital clue; Prideaux finishes the job in muscular Christian style by executing his erstwhile friend and lover, Haydon, with his bare hands (379). The gentlemanly impulse in the national unconscious here reasserts itself, sorts the mess out, plays up and plays the game. Now we can also understand the doting depictions of the establishment landscape: again it is this England of prep school, public school and Oxford that has produced the communist traitor, a traitor who has found refuge in the establishment’s private foxholes, stood at the centre of its public parades. So this landscape must be reclaimed, reaffirmed, the gentlemanly England that has undergirded le Carré’s ColdWar novels must be upheld, its true – superior – nature reasserted in refutation of Haydon/Philby’s immanent critique. So it is entirely apposite that prep school teacher, Prideaux, should kill Haydon on the cricket field in the bucolic grounds of ‘The Nursery’, Sarratt, prep school for spies, the place where he and Haydon were ‘trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves’ (122). Just as latter-day historians are too quick to hail the death of the gentlemanly ideal (Cannadine 1990; Collins 2002), so too are le Carré scholars (Brady 1985: 291; Hoffman 2001: 113). After executing Haydon, Prideaux returns to Thursgood’s, and, after a decent – but not mawkish – spell of mourning, we see him putting on the school play with his pupils (le Carré 1999a: 382), reasserting tradition, training the next generation of the governing class. Chivalrous Guillam rides into further sunsets with further damsels in tow; Oliver Lacon remains at the helm of the spy establishment: both will reappear in the next two le Carré novels, as indeed will Connie Sachs. Smiley’s exposure of Haydon and ascent to ringmaster of the Circus restores order, decency, tradition and prestige to Britain – but again, crucially, the establishment is re-

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established.16 The novel’s very last words, focalized via schoolboy Bill Roach, are that everything that has occurred ‘was all a dream’ (382). Roach knows nothing of moles or communists or espionage, but he knows that his world has been shaken, undermined, disturbed. Roach is thinking of the gun he saw Prideaux digging up (231). That never-fired gun is now figuratively buried – repressed – but it still lies in the unconscious, like the communist mole itself: half-known, half-denied. However, far beyond Bill Roach’s schoolboy imaginings, the gun can be seen as signifying the leftism in the unconscious of the British nation, buried deep in its very soil. ***

‘Russians taken over the government’: The infiltrated British state The British state in Tinker Tailor is so toxic, so rotten with corruption that Smiley has to work outside it, at times against it, in order to save it from itself. Indeed all the novel’s national avatars operate at some remove from the British state they once served: Prideaux ‘retired’ and a schoolteacher; Guillam ‘exiled’ from Cambridge Circus to a Brixton substation; Westerby, a journalist. That the state has been toxified due to communist penetration renders literal the residual conservative antipathy to the state as creeping totalitarianism. Marx’s mole has grubbed well indeed. The novel’s molehunt narrative, while stemming from the same source as real-world events, turns those events inside out. The British state’s intelligence services certainly were engaged in a hunt for a mole in the mid-1970s, the elusive ‘fourth man’ of Philby’s Cambridge spy ring (note the four characters in the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy formula). Similarly, the hunt was focused on the highest echelons of the intelligence apparatus: suspects included MI5’s former director general, Roger Hollis, and his deputy.17 However, the real-world search was

16

17

This recalls le Carré’s A Murder of Quality (1962), set in another public school, where again the establishment, through Smiley, cuts out its own cancer. More pertinent still, in the wake of Burgess and Maclean (and Blunt) – and here Haydon (le Carré 1999a: 236, 372) – is Murder’s linkage of homosexuality with immorality (murder in the earlier novel; murderous communism in Tinker Tailor). Although Cornwell was no longer involved in the security services, he certainly knew about MI5’s investigation, socializing with Hollis while it was happening (Sisman 2016: 304). Wolfe libellously references ‘Sir Roger Hollis, the Kremlin spy who served as Director General of MI5’ (Wolfe 1987: 188), indicative of how the Cold-War mud of communist accusation stuck. Hollis and his deputy, Graham Mitchell, were both cleared of espionage charges (Andrew 2009: 839).

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the work of a maverick right-wing cabal (Wright 1987) against the top brass, while the cabal in Tinker Tailor – Alleline is described as ‘somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan’ (le Carré 1999a: 139) – is itself the intelligence service’s top brass. Moreover, the results of these real-world investigations were hardly such a triumph as Smiley’s investigation in Tinker Tailor: to the contrary, they were tail-chasing, divisive and destructive (paralleling – and feeding – James Jesus Angleton’s Philby-inspired paranoia within the CIA [Martin 1980: passim]). Peter Wright’s never-verified, never-disproved claim that his maverick cabal plotted a coup against the Labour government (1987: 368–372) gives the novel an additional political resonance.18 Tinker Tailor invites the reader to accept, if not quite a coup, a decidedly undemocratic process: theft of state files, violence toward and intimidation of witnesses, kidnapping, and ultimately an execution without judge or jury. While this is the ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2005) common to the spy, this sovereignty is claimed by Smiley from outside the state, going beyond Agamben’s theory and making Smiley an embodiment of the higher purpose of the state – the state as an abstraction (Marx 1977: 31). In the by-now familiar le Carré pattern, even as Tinker Tailor exalts Smiley’s defence of the state, it also expresses a suspicion – a conspiracy theory – about the state. Again, either of these approaches could be said to be standard fare in spy fiction: it is the combination of pro- and anti-state elements that makes Tinker Tailor a key political novel, mining contradictory liberal attitudes in the established le Carré manner. Once again, the problem of the state is ‘resolved’ by Smiley in this novel: by his restoration of the status quo ante.

‘Bureaucratic meddling’: The corrupted British state Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s opening chapters insistently convey two pieces of information: that there is a communist traitor in the British state and that the intelligence services are being run by a bureaucratic cabal. The ideological and narrative impetus of the novel is that these two facts are both philosophically and practically connected. In chapter two of Tinker Tailor, conjuring up the bureaucratized intelligence apparatus, Whitehall gossip Roddy Martindale speaks of ‘little reading rooms at the Admiralty, little committees popping up with funny names … people

18

Wilson certainly believed in a plot (Observer 1977, 1), which was probably a contributing factor to his unexpected retirement in 1976. Official MI5 historian, Christopher Andrew, denies there was a plot (2009: 642). Neither witness might be said to be entirely objective.

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one’s never heard of getting medals for nothing’ (le Carré 1999a: 28). Through bureaucratic iconography, Martindale suggests wrongness, foreignness, queerness (Martindale’s implied homosexuality is apposite). That an outsider like Martindale is apprising former insider Smiley of these events is evidence of the inside-out state of affairs: the wrongness at the heart of the state. In chapter four, archetypal fieldman Peter Guillam derides the cabal’s jargon and methodology of ‘lateralism’ (38), a desk-bound consolidation of departments that shores up the cabal’s power and unaccountability. ‘They share their own secrets and don’t mix with the proles’, Guillam tells Smiley (38). The flippant class language reveals how Guillam is outside the in-group, ‘banished’ to working-class Brixton – reminiscent of the pass Leamas doesn’t have in The Spy: the familiar le Carré dialectic of insider and outsider, establishment and anti-establishment. Guillam feels the cabal’s bureaucratic methodology ‘accounted for the Circus’s inertia at working level’ (90) – desk eclipses field: always an evil in le Carré. Field agent Ricki Tarr also complains of bureaucratic inertia (60–61, 74), stranded out in the espionage field without central input. By this point, the penetration of a mole has been confirmed (67–70) – and it is strongly implicit that the mole is one of the four-man bureaucratic cabal. This controlling cabal is centred upon Bill Haydon (26, 80), who, despite his heroic fieldman past (166), now anchors his power via the desk – through bureaucracy. Percy Alleline, however, as a Maston protégée (140), is a natural bureaucrat – like his mentor, he prizes career over country. Martindale dismisses Alleline as a ‘striver’ (28): ‘Percy Alleline would sell his mother for a knighthood and this service for a seat in the House of Lords’ declares Control (142), explicitly equating careerism with treachery. Alleline’s power resides in bureaucracy: the secret intelligence of the ‘Witchcraft’ files source ‘Merlin’ provides on the Soviet Union (80, 144), access to which is restricted to the four-man executive. Marx calls the secret ‘the universal spirit of bureaucracy’, which bureaucracy ‘secures internally by its hierarchy’ (Marx 1975: 108). The secret is, again, the pass that the ‘proles’ don’t have, only the elite insiders. The wrongness of the Witchcraft material is conveyed both by its name – evoking trickery, bamboozlement, a spell – and by the suspicion with which it is regarded by trusted espiocrats, Smiley (le Carré 1999a: 80, 145) and Control (143). Operation Witchcraft will indeed transpire to be at the centre of the ‘very clever knot’ (329) that the mole has tied. That the perennially sympathetic Smiley has been dismissed (26, 80, 89), alongside the text’s implication that he has been sacked for his suspicions about a mole (77) caps the cumulative sense of malaise surrounding the state, the novel’s ongoing association of bureaucracy (the cabal) with communism (the treacherous mole).

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Western bureaucracies echo communism for conservatives by a centralizing interference with individual ‘liberty’ and by bureaucracies’ tendency to increase social liberalization (Giddens 1985: 309). The British welfare state increased social mobility and bureaucracy in tandem.19 The British state in Tinker Tailor is almost literally communist, the intelligence services essentially being run by Moscow Centre – ‘Russians taken over the government’ (le Carré 1999a: 267) as Jerry Westerby says in a different context.20 Smiley, consequently, has to operate outside the state to achieve his aims – which only really formalizes Smiley’s regular modus operandi – sidestepping the state’s hampering bureaucracy in order to get the job done more efficiently. This results in a series of symbolically anti-state images: Guillam illicitly photographing documents in the Circus Registry (90); Guillam stealing Circus files (179–186); Smiley pressurizing prissy bureaucrat, Lacon into surreptitiously accessing top-secret files: ‘[Lacon] made it clear he detested the irregularity’ (135); Smiley and Guillam kidnapping even prissier Circus bureaucrat, Toby Esterhase (323–339) in a state-owned safe house. Lacon, complicit in the communist plot through his defining bureaucratic complacency, becomes a repository for Smiley’s – and the novel’s – antibureaucratic sentiments: a kind of human swear-box. Smiley scorns Lacon’s careerist ambition (79); Connie Sachs posits Lacon as the bureaucratic barbarian invading the amateur world (108); Sam Collins disparages Lacon’s ruthless instrumentalism (240) and so on. But throughout Tinker Tailor Smiley works for Lacon (82) – not, as it sometimes appears, the other way round. Moreover, Smiley is working to secure the state to which he, not just Lacon, is dedicated, and restore the reputation of the establishment of which both Smiley and Lacon are members. Smiley does so, moreover, by using methods that are themselves distinctly – ironically – bureaucratic: reading files (139–51); conducting interviews (109-122, 202-206, 238-249); amassing information, transforming the seedy Islay hotel into the Circus’s hallowed Fifth Floor (136). The crucial difference, in the logic of the novel, is that Smiley, deskman and fieldman combined, brings memory – ‘the files knew nothing so plainly human’ (144) – and amateur intuition (Ginzburg 1989: 256) to mere

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Le Carré later berated the Callaghan government’s bureaucratism: ‘a supposedly Socialist party cutting public spending … while maintaining unchanged the vast army of bureaucrats who made these very services so costly in the first place. To rule the whole of India and a third of the world to boot, we never needed half of this impossible, self-consuming structure’ (le Carré 1977: 86). Smiley later declares, ‘in those days the Circus was largely run by a Moscow Centre agent’ (le Carré 1980: 54).

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information. Smiley brings humanity and warmth to the calculation and coldness of the bureaucrat. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has built up its entire narrative energy around the ensnaring of the mole. In one reading that energy is generic – the relentless forward push of the ‘hermeneutic code’ (Barthes 1974: 18–20), the mystery/ detective narrative – whodunit – mode in which Tinker Tailor is imbued. But in a Cold-War novel, that energy is also ideological: the urgency of Smiley’s operation is the need to restore the liberal order. Yet when Haydon is exposed and ensnared at the Witchcraft safe house, something very interesting occurs – Smiley feels ‘a surge of resentment against the institutions he was supposed to be protecting. “The social contract cuts both ways, you know,” said Lacon. The Minister’s lolling mendacity, Lacon’s tight-lipped moral complacency, the bludgeoning greed of Percy Alleline: such men invalidated any contract: why should anyone be loyal to them?’ (le Carré 1999a: 359). Is this just a rhetorical reflex to distance Smiley from the state at the very moment he saves it? Is it completion anxiety, now with the goal so close? Or is this an example of Bakhtin’s ‘polyphony’, such as occurred at the climax of Call for the Dead, again as the communist molehunt neared its close? Located in such close proximity to the grubbing, undermining mole, a contrary emotion surges out of Smiley’s and the text’s unconscious: lambasting the establishment that the Minister represents; rejecting Alleline’s ‘greed’ (bureaucracy merging with capitalism); castigating Lacon’s ‘complacency’ (emblematic of all the contradictions that liberalism elides). The passage even, via that ‘social contract’, current in the news that year, implicitly rejects the hypocrisy of a Labour government’s attempts to use the demotic of democracy to blackmail the working class into pay restraint (Anderson 1987: 65). This impulse is quickly repressed: immediately afterwards Smiley will ensnare the mole, Haydon, then secure the political foundations that the mole has destabilized: reinstate the ‘true’ state; re-establish the establishment; restore the status quo. If the Russians had taken over the government, now the British are back in charge, indeed the best of British. With Smiley rewarded with the keys to the very kingdom he supposedly disdains, as head of the Circus he is inseparable now from the state. The problem, it can be concluded, was not with the liberal state itself, but the leftist perversion of that state. Consequently, for all his earlier protestations, Smiley will indeed be loyal to Lacon and to the Minister to whom he is related by marriage (le Carré 1999a: 79), and abide by the social contract at its most conservative. Smiley, once again, channels but finally represses liberalism’s rebellious internal impulses into social conformity.

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‘I won’t have bloodshed’: The state and violence ‘I won’t have bloodshed’ is Lacon’s injunction to Smiley and his cohorts just before the molehunt ends with the entrapment of the communist traitor at Camden Lock Gardens (le Carré 1999a: 360). Yet not only will the mole, Haydon, ultimately be executed in cold blood on state property but – despite his claim to be ‘outside’ the state – Smiley’s entire investigation into the mole has only been possible because it is ‘guaranteed by violence’. This is because ‘legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state’ (Weber 1978: 314). The spy, however, can take this violence further: it is this ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2005) which gives James Bond his ‘license to kill’ and which, in Tinker Tailor, allows Prideaux – again, nominally ‘outside’ the state – to kill Haydon without punishment. However frivolously violence is treated in Bond, and however generic such an exception may be to the spy novel, a historicist understanding of le Carré must take state violence seriously in these novels, because it is always an ideological faultline in liberal culture. As has been discussed throughout this volume, liberalism possesses an ontological queasiness about state violence, because such violence contradicts liberalism’s professed ‘mildness’ (Foucault 1991: 227). In the Cold War it became particularly necessary to reassert this liberal mildness in contradistinction to Eastern Bloc communism, communism being constituted in violence, through the rhetoric or practice of revolution. However, the perceived threat of communism also prompted liberal violence both theoretical (the threat of nuclear war) and bloodily practical (the suppression of communist regimes worldwide). What this meant in ideological practice was that, in the ascendance of centrist liberalism over laissez-faire liberalism, the state’s violence was simply occluded, hidden away. Thus the end to the feudal ‘punishment as spectacle’ (Foucault 1998: 8) of stocks and public hangings, and the substitution of the modern prison and jury system. Where the death sentence continued in the liberal era (it was abolished from 1965 in Britain), it was conducted beyond public view. Again, feudal impulses lurk in liberalism’s unconscious. In line with this liberal approach, in Tinker Tailor violence is consistently occluded: the strong-arm Scalphunters, specialists in ‘murder and kidnapping’, are segregated in ‘hateful Brixton’ (le Carré 1999a: 192), out of sight of the Circus and Whitehall (192), and disavowed by all (38). Despite letting out a ‘shudder’ when he discovers Guillam is now head of the Scalphunters (37), Smiley exploits the connection to deploy Scalphunters Fawn and Ricki Tarr to provide vital assistance in the mole operation. That the vicious Fawn is ironically named a

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‘Babysitter’ represents self-conscious play with this faultline of violence. The bureaucratic separation between the commissioners and executors of violence reflects the class hierarchy this volume has been exploring in these novels. After Smiley taints himself with direct, hands-on violence in Call for the Dead, the state’s upper echelons will never do so again: Control and Smiley delegate violence to Leamas in The Spy; Leclerc delegates it to Leiser in Looking Glass. In Tinker Tailor the Scalphunters do the jobs ‘too dirty or too risky for the residents’ abroad (38) and for Smiley at home, the lower classes doing the gentlemen’s dirty work for them. The novels make a clear association between the working class and violence – as with the example of Leamas, the lower classes enjoy violence – which parallels the Western association between communism and violence and renders both as ‘other’. The pivotal role of the Scalphunters means that violence is built into the very structure of Tinker Tailor’s plot. The revelation about the mole comes from Scalphunter, Tarr (45–76), whom Smiley himself inducted into British intelligence (41) and whose colonial background and name summon the viciously loyal mongoose in Rudyard Kipling’s imperialist fable, ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ (1894).21 Tarr is also pivotal to the plot’s conclusion, by violently assaulting a superior at Smiley’s behest, in order to flush out the mole (342–343).22 Like the liberal state, Smiley relies upon violence, but by means of that distancing shudder and of bureaucratic delegation, keeps a delicate distance from it. Illustrating the liberal state’s occlusion of violence, Fawn’s violence is always disturbingly invisible. In the Essex safe house: ‘There was blood in [Tarr’s] mouth, a lot of it, and Guillam realized Fawn must have hit him but he couldn’t work out when’ (206). Later Haydon’s co-conspirator Polyakov berates ‘Fawn for hitting him, heaven knows where’ (363). That Fawn’s violence is both occluded and kept at a distance from Smiley does not altogether disguise Smiley’s reliance upon it, nor that this violence is legitimated by Smiley’s – denied; distanced – relationship to the state. The novel’s occluded violence – offstage, ‘unconscious’, the responsibility of neither Smiley nor the British state – will climax in the murder of Bill Haydon. In conclusion, the state in Tinker Tailor is presented ambiguously, contradictorily: it is both the source and the solution to the problem in the

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A subliminal theme of imperial violence is found in Tarr’s involvement in the Malayan Emergency (le Carré 1999a: 41–42) and against the Kenyan Mau Mau (42), both notable for British brutality (Brendon 2007: 563). The information on Philby actually came from Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, who in 1961 named a ‘ring of five’ (Andrew 2009: 380; Gladwell 2014).

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novel and the nation. Whether the state is negative or positive is therefore not structural, ideological, or even social: it is simply a matter of to which establishment individual the bureaucracy and violence of the state is entrusted. Smiley, as lodestone of liberalism, can tame the Leviathan. ***

‘Fanaticism’ and ‘mindless treason’: Enemy characterization Tinker Tailor’s immersion in the past via the Philby case makes for an anachronistic portrayal of communism in the mid-1970s: it is a novel of containment in a time of détente. Britain had, of all the Western nations, been sceptical about détente (Greenwood 2000: 176–179). When the United States was opening relations with Red China and discussing arms reductions with the USSR, while West Germany was immersed in Willy Brandt’s conciliatory Ostpolitik, Britain was resistant to arms reductions (179) and continued to see ‘the Soviet Union as an ideologically driven monolith’ (177). In reality the USSR was falling apart economically and represented little military threat to the West by 1974 (190). That this was unknown reveals quite how opaquely ‘other’ the Soviet Union remained to the West, espionage notwithstanding (190–191) – communism seen through a glass darkly. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy contains two of only four face-to-face East–West confrontations in these Cold-War novels, and so the framing in both scenes is arresting. The major scene of each character – Karla, Head of Moscow Centre’s Thirteenth Directorate, mastermind of the mole plot, and Bill Haydon, the mole himself – is an interrogation, which in each case takes place inside a prison cell and features George Smiley as both interlocutor and jailor. Crucially, in neither case does either of these communist ideologues articulate an ideology: indeed Karla does not speak a single word throughout his one appearance in the novel. By the familiar imagistic association of a prison with communism and in the absence of any articulated political beliefs, these characters’ setting effectively becomes their ideology: closed, incarcerating, repressive. Although, in neither case is the interrogation presented as a Western victory (quite the reverse), by virtue of Smiley’s jailor function these scenes give Britain a symbolic primacy in the Cold War that it did not possess in reality. Despite all the scholarly talk of moral equivalence therefore, the balance between East and West in Tinker Tailor is unequal yet again.

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‘Karla is a fanatic’: Characterizing communism Arrested by the Americans early in his Cold-War career, and about to be repatriated to the USSR, Karla is interviewed by Smiley in a Delhi prison in 1951, where Smiley attempts to persuade him to defect. Relating the encounter to Guillam, Smiley makes the scene’s symbolic ramifications as Cold-War encounter clear: ‘I felt that the entire responsibility for fighting the cold war had landed on my shoulders’ (le Carré 1999a: 216–217). As such, the characterization of Karla – hostilely silent, imperviously secretive, inhumanly austere – suggests dialogue is not possible with the Cold-War enemy. ‘Karla is a fanatic’, says Smiley (224). No sympathy is possible with such a character or, more accurately, with something so lacking in character. Characterizing communism as an abstraction has cancelled out the fictional construct of ‘character’. Smiley, by contrast, is all character. Consequently, the scene demonstrates that Western conciliation will be regarded only as Western weakness, with Karla’s theft of Smiley’s lighter – with its vulnerable, revealing dedication from Ann – a demonstration of what Koestler derided as ‘Bolshevik Machiavellianism’ (Lukács 2013: 8). Framing this Cold-War encounter not as a summit, therefore, but as a battle, Karla’s characterization effectively condones the ideology of containment in the era of détente. With every novel of the Karla trilogy returning to this interview, it becomes that trilogy’s anti-communist manual: le Carré’s equivalent of Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’. Scholars, however, regularly cite this scene as evidence of moral equivalence (Halperin 1998: 220; Aronoff 1999: 216; more equivocally in Barley 1986: 94): one reviewer of the same scene in the 2011 film even decried its partisan pro-communism (Roberts 2011). The Delhi prison is a classic le Carré location: a no-man’s-land – a liminal, politically neutral space. During the Cold War, India was ostensibly part of the non-aligned movement, but since the 1950s seen as more inclined to the Soviets, while this former colony’s cooperation with Britain in this fictional scene suggests a latent Western leaning. The issue is not which of these is more accurate, but that no-man’s-lands are contested spaces and often adhere to one side or another. Just as liberalism presents itself as liminal terrain, beyond ideology, Smiley presents himself to Karla as neutral: ‘Don’t you think it’s time to recognise there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?’ (le Carré 1999a: 221). Smiley even tells Guillam that he felt that he ‘lacked … philosophy’ (216) – this is English empiricism again: the claim of liberalism as neutrality. Yet Smiley has travelled over continents to represent the British state as a ‘travelling salesman’ for liberal democracy, attempting to persuade stranded, disillusioned

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or disowned Soviets to defect (211). Demonstrating the disingenuousness of his claim, Smiley attempts, during the interview, to frame Western ideology as common ground, Western territory as neutral ground. First, Smiley offers Karla the lure of money (215) which naturalizes Western capitalist acquisition, and suggests communism’s anti-capitalism is simply ideological window-dressing over base human instincts, to be dropped at will. Second, Smiley invokes self-preservation, suggesting Karla should ‘question the integrity of a system that proposed cold-bloodedly to shoot him for misdemeanours he had never committed’ (222). This naturalizes liberal individualist self-centredness. Moreover, Smiley never acknowledges that his assumption about Karla’s fate is proved incorrect: far from being shot, Karla ascends the Soviet hierarchy. Yet when Karla rejects these offers and opts to return to the USSR, Smiley disparages Karla as an ideological fanatic (224) and declares with contempt, ‘Karla would rather die than disown the political system to which he was committed’ (222). Smiley concludes that the interview with Karla was a failure. ‘I believed, you see, that I had seen something in his face that was superior to mere dogma, not realising that it was my own reflection. I had convinced myself that [Karla] ultimately was accessible to ordinary human arguments’ (221). This dismisses communism as abstract ‘dogma’ but posits liberalism as vessel of the ‘ordinary’, the ‘human’. The image also recalls The Looking Glass War and, in this case, ‘reflection’ first hints at moral equivalence between East and West and then is used to do exactly the opposite – to reduce Karla to an inhuman object: a mirror. Indeed Smiley’s self-castigation is itself revealing: ‘I was a soft fool, the very archetype of a flabby Western liberal’ (223). We hear often that Smiley is overweight but rarely do we get this kind of vocabulary (‘flabby’; ‘soft’) or such visceral manifestation of Smiley’s physicality – Smiley’s sweat is described throughout the scene (215). Smiley’s body here is the vessel of Western-ness, of Britishness, of ‘common humanity’ (Fisher 2013: 72). But that humanity is politicized: ‘flabby’ suggests the good living of the capitalist economy: Karla, by contrast, is priest-like, wiry (le Carré 1999a: 214), ‘tiny’ (215). Smiley bemoans having talked too much (219) but his loose tongue represents a democracy’s freedom of speech; while Karla’s silence summons a closed society where free speech is prohibited. Even Smiley’s sweat can be seen to represent liberalism’s expressive humanity, as does his inadvertent exposure of his love for Ann. Karla, by contrast, does not sweat (215), indeed denies his physical needs (not eating; refusing the cigarettes Smiley proffers [221]), reveals nothing of his own emotional attachments and will later use Smiley’s love for Ann for political

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leverage (213–223). The West/Smiley is human, ‘soft’, physically weakened by compassion; the East/Karla is strong, inhuman, rock-hard (216), physically stiffened by ideology. This scene is presented as a Western political defeat, but is, in the text’s own liberal terms, a Western moral victory. The framing both insists on a symbolic, political reading and makes it impossible to empathize with the Eastern side of that equation. Karla’s silence helps to pitch the scene in the mythic register, gives it the quality of legend, while also rendering him unreachably alien and ‘other’. But to read Karla as ‘fanatic’ is to take him at Smiley’s word, as scholars often do (Dobel 1988: 198–199; Cobbs 1998: 118; Hoffman 2001: 149; Boyd 2011). As Karla never speaks, there is a huge gap where his defining fanaticism should be: indeed Karla is, in Smiley’s revealing words, ‘all gap’ (le Carré 1999a: 217) – is effectively not a character. Parsing Macherey, Sinfield suggests that ‘characters … fall silent at the moments when their speech could only undermine the … attempt at ideological coherence’ (Sinfield 1992: 74). Were Karla to speak he would destabilize the text’s conflation of means as ends, which in the novel are seen to be: conspiracy (conceiving the mole operation), brutality (torturing Prideaux [le Carré 1999a: 305–307]) and ruthlessness (murdering Prideaux’s Czech networks [291]). As it is, the characterization of Karla strongly reasserts communism as alien ‘other’ and as political and physical threat, and thus serves to reassert the necessity of its containment. At the same time a different kind of containment is at work – repression – meaning that the ‘fanatic’ communist (Karla) and his ideology (communism) remain silent, unheard. Clearly the one is connected to the other through a thoroughgoing anti-communism. This Western ideology is enhanced by a third strategy, embodied in the representation of the communist mole, Bill Haydon as non-ideological.

‘Mindless treason’: Bill Haydon The narrative energy of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is invested in establishing first the existence, then the identity of a communist mole. Having unearthed that mole, Bill Haydon, and thus having exposed communism as the dark secret in the British national unconscious, grubbing away beneath the serene English landscape, the novel’s narrative energy dissipates, its plot sags and threatens to cave in. The interviews between Smiley and Haydon have little of the drama of the Smiley/Karla face-off, being repetitive while unrevealing, politically and psychologically superficial but narratively slow, constantly telling rather than showing. Indeed so mediated is Haydon by Smiley that these scenes have the

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removed, liminal quality of a dream, which, like most dreams, is broken, fragmentary, frustratingly incomplete, and ‘banal’ (le Carré 1999a: 369). The text returns again and again to the assessment – reassessment; over-assessment – of Haydon’s motivation, creating a ‘superfluity of meaning’ (Sinfield 1992: 77) that adds to this section’s atmosphere of unreality. This faultline can be understood in genre terms – who wishes to stay on in the library after the detective has revealed whodunit? – but the plodding insistence of the text’s treading over and over of the same ground has an anxious, caged, neurotic aspect. Smiley himself concedes a sense of ‘limbo’ (le Carré 1999a: 367) and that ‘the more he tried to make sense of Haydon’s rambling account, the more the contradictions became obvious’ (380). To a critical hermeneutic of suspicion, such repetitions, limbos and contradictions are always ideological, indicating liberal incoherences. The first explanation of Haydon’s motivation follows logically from Connie Sachs’ earlier ‘poor loves, trained to Empire’ speech – recalled by Smiley at Sarratt as he interrogates Haydon (359): Haydon’s treachery as a response to British political decline. This is a curious concept – unfulfilled imperial entitlement leading to national betrayal – and one le Carré later applied to Philby: ‘[Born] as an Empire baby, to rule: ... he entered a world where all his toys were being taken away by history’. Le Carré called this ‘a much more cogent motive for betrayal than any half-cock pro-Stalinist Marxism’ (in Gross 1980, 35).23 Haydon appears to confirm this interpretation of his actions: ‘The Suez adventure in fifty-six finally persuaded him of the inanity of the British situation’ (le Carré 1999a: 374); as do scholars (Noland 1980: 64–65; Lewis 1985: 134; King 1987: 69; Hempsted 1989: 240; Bennett 1998: 67; Boyd 2010). But as le Carré’s comment makes clear, this dismisses communist ideology as a motivation for either Haydon’s or Philby’s actions: allying with communism is comprehensible only as a negative reaction, emanating from injured national pride or thwarted personal ambition. Poor loves, indeed. Indicating the ideological faultline here, this imperial explanation is contradicted when Haydon, the next day, declares a ‘lifelong relationship with Karla’ (le Carré 1999a: 373). As Smiley acknowledges, if Haydon was recruited at university in the 1930s, like many of his class (380), then his relationship with

23

The absence of ideological motive in betrayal is a recurring trope of le Carré’s: it is in The Spy: ‘respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a Departmental canteen’ (1964b: 67); articulated by Haldane in Looking Glass: ‘I mistrust reasons. I mistrust words like loyalty. And above all … I mistrust motive’ (2011: 145); it was in le Carré’s own pronouncements in the press (e.g. 1964c, 18). This channelled a common view, especially regarding British communists (Crawley 1963: 95).

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the Soviets predated post-war British decline by a decade. The 1930s is always a point of return in liberal assessments of communism – see Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), and le Carré’s own Call for the Dead – a left-leaning era ideologically reframed as The Climate of Treason in Andrew Boyle’s influential account of the Cambridge spies (1980). Given that early Tinker Tailor manuscripts had the mole participating in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), the thinness of the 1930s return in the finished text is marked: a brief scrap of documentary reminiscence about Haydon and Prideaux attending leftist meetings (le Carré 1999a: 273–277). Smiley tries to imagine ‘Moscow’ – not Marx – as Haydon’s ‘historical and economic solution’ but dismisses it as ‘too sparse’ (380). Indeed the whole passage is ‘too sparse’, the sense of palimpsest potent. Repressed here is the historical reality of the 1930s as the era not just of treason but of the ideological optimism of the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front and the first Labour government. Repressed therefore is any sense of a greater good, a principle to Haydon’s betrayal of Britain. The glimpse of a radical alternative nation that erupted at the end of Call for the Dead – again face-to-face with a communist spy – is, in Tinker Tailor, absent. The next explanation proffered for Haydon’s treason is anti-Americanism. ‘[Haydon] spoke not of the decline of the West but of its death by greed and constipation. He hated America very deeply, he said, and Smiley supposed he did’ (370). Note both the distancing paraphrasing and Smiley’s dismissive, even disinterested, interposition. Smiley’s mediation throughout is a reminder of propaganda talk of communist ‘contagion’ (Crawley 1963: 96; Greenwood 2000: 167–188; Field 2005: 3) – keeping communism at a quarantining distance. Yet Haydon’s justification here is barely even ideological – his assessment of America isn’t so far from that of his patriotic friend, Prideaux (le Carré 1999a: 18), or Control (141): indeed Haydon explicitly claims the ‘East’ is simply the lesser of two evils (370). Betrayal once again is a negative choice, not a positive, pro-communist choice. It is striking how Haydon’s character changes following his unmasking as a communist. Up until his exposure, Haydon, though not a major presence, had been one of le Carré’s archetypal establishment creations – aristocratic (94, 186), dashing (28), handsome (29), loyal to friends (88), eccentric (95) ironic (39, 95), but also brilliant (96) and heroic (166). All that attractiveness evaporates once Haydon is revealed to be the mole, to be a communist. Now Haydon is austere (369), sloganeering (370), self-indulgent (371), pompous (370), a grab-bag of communist stereotypes but also, by contradictory contrast, the character traits of a pampered English aesthete idly entertaining himself with treason.

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This contradictory process continues even after Haydon’s death, with Smiley continuing to rehearse different theories of Haydon’s motivation. Smiley posits several psychological explanations, such as ‘the ghost of Bill’s authoritarian father … the Monster’ (380, c.f. Philby’s ‘rather horrendous father’ [le Carré, in Gross 1980, 33]). The digging into the unconscious is distinctly shallow here – pop psychology, simply turning over the topsoil. Smiley also imagines Haydon’s ‘Marxism making up for his inadequacy as an artist’ (le Carré 1999a: 380); then a self-indulgent desire for drama, with Haydon ‘standing at the centre of a secret stage’ (380), recalling le Carré’s own comments on Philby’s ‘overwhelming vanity’ (in Gross 1980, 33) and that of US spy Richard Sorge (le Carré 1966b: 8). Without full development, however, a fictional character like Haydon does not have a psychology to probe, and so these formulations – occurring on the novel’s second-to-last page – are superficial and unsatisfying, repressing quite as much as they expose. Nevertheless scholars largely accept the text’s barely coherent evaluations at surface value (Sauerberg 1984: 199; Homberger 1986: 74; Rothberg 1987: 57; Rutherford 1987: 23; Lasseter 1990: 109; Beene 1991: 91; Cobbs 1998: 119; Hoffman 2001: 132). More apposite is Sinfield’s analysis of such aesthetic faultlines: ‘When a part of our worldview threatens disruption by manifestly failing to cohere with the rest, then we reorganize and retell its story, trying to get it into shape’ (1992: 46). Finally, Smiley summons that image of Russian dolls within dolls to explain Haydon (le Carré 1999a: 381). A deft distillation of detection and psychoanalysis, the metaphor is actually a refusal of explanation, as the ‘last little doll’ (381) is left as a mystery, inexplicable, but crucially, empty of content.24 Throughout all this the repressed word, the concept, the explanation ‘communism’ still communicates from the unconscious of the text. For in the novel’s welter of explanations and counter-explanations of Haydon’s treachery, ‘communism’ is not mentioned once: not by name, nor by any discussion of its political content: communism, crucially, is the ‘not said’ in a novel about a communist spy.25 With the novel’s narrative energy invested in the discovery of the dark secret deep in the national unconscious, after revealing that secret to be communism, leftism, Tinker Tailor then anxiously tamps down and compacts

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Illuminatingly, le Carré said of Haydon’s real-world analogue: ‘I do not much believe in the political motive of Kim Philby’ (le Carré 1969: 29). Philby refuted le Carré’s statement (Knightley 1989: 257), as did his friend, Graham Greene, and Greene and le Carré fell out over it (Greene 1968). Words pertaining to communism – ‘Marxist’, ‘communist’, ‘left-wing’, ‘socialist’, ‘pink’ – amount to 18 instances in a 117,000-word novel.

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the ground, attempting to erase the traces, to fill in the faultlines, repressing the very thing that it has hitherto been dedicated to exposing. An illustration of both the unconscious of the text and its conscious repression occurs very early in the novel. Ricki Tarr is reading aloud a letter from his lover, Soviet agent, Irina, the novel’s first proof of the mole’s existence. Irina writes: ‘Most of the English moles were recruited by Karla before the war … others, afterwards, disappointed that the war did not bring Socialism to the West…’ It kind of dries up here’ says Tarr to Smiley (68). This sudden breaking off prevents any further exploration of ‘Socialism’: this is the last we will hear of it in the novel. Yet ‘in its every particle, the work manifests, uncovers, what it cannot say. This silence gives it life’ (Macherey 1978: 84). Communism, leftism, socialism, for all their repression throughout Tinker Tailor – Karla’s silence; Haydon’s overdetermination; Smiley’s mediation – are still perceptible, tangible, grubbing away beneath the surface of the text, haunting it. ***

‘Haydon’s crooked deathmask’: State, nation and enemy The national unconscious evoked in Tinker Tailor is in conflict with itself: the gentlemanly and the leftist impulses at war, this domestic class war a synecdoche of the international Cold War, with each side apparently set on the destruction of the other. Such contradictions are a defining feature of the unconscious. This is evident in the novel’s climactic scene, the death of Bill Haydon, which, appropriately for this notion of the national psyche, occurs offstage, unseen, unheard. Occluded like modern punishment, it is beyond consciousness. Haydon is held for interrogation at the Sarratt ‘Nursery’, and there is a sense from the start that the security arrangements at this public school for spies are lax. With Tinker Tailor having been full of narrative urgency up until Haydon’s exposure, the narrative tension has progressively slackened, until, in these final pages, it enters a distinctly dream-like slow motion and unreality. In line with this, the slack Sarratt security arrangements are responded to with characteristic complacency by Lacon (le Carré 1999a: 369) and unusual passivity from Smiley, who is surprisingly easily fobbed off by the head of Nursery being inexplicably ‘unavailable’ (369). Lacon’s louchely aristocratic Minister has already expressed doubts about Smiley’s plan to trade Haydon with the Soviets

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(367–368), fearing Haydon, in Moscow, would ‘leap on a soapbox and laugh his head off about all the people he’s made fools of ’ (319). These then are the mixed feelings of the state, and the Minister’s anxiety about Haydon lurks in the unconscious of the text throughout the ensuing Sarratt scenes. After his interview with Prideaux (317), Smiley shifts from watcher to watched, dogged by the feeling that he is being followed (324, 327, 335) – the sense of a shadowy figure just beyond perception perfectly suggesting the unconscious. ‘Peter, I want you to watch my back’ (338) Smiley says, trying to shake his shadow: Smiley’s language suggests unconscious knowledge of his follower’s identity – Prideaux was shot in the back in Czechoslovakia as a consequence of Haydon’s treachery. At Sarratt, realizing Prideaux must have warned Haydon that Control suspected him, Smiley mentally notes: ‘Jim was watching your back for you right till the end’ (376; emphasis added). Guillam also unconsciously knows the follower is Prideaux, realizing days afterwards that, ‘the figure, or the shadow of it, had struck a chord of familiarity in his memory’ (339). Smiley and Guillam thus unconsciously draw Prideaux to Sarratt. Prideaux, emblem of Britishness – separated from the state, retired from service, working in the private sector – functions as the nation’s unconscious, acting out the nation’s desire: the death of Haydon. Several scholars interpret Prideaux’s as a purely personal revenge (Scanlan 1982: 541; Sauerberg 1984: 198; Homberger 1986: 83; Paulson 2007: 324). Yet a personalized reading is hardly upheld by the text’s lack of interest in Haydon and Prideaux’s friendship: even in flashback we never actually see them together (le Carré 1999a: 273–277). Subsequent events hardly trouble an interpretation of the death of the Cold-War enemy, the national traitor, Haydon as the unconscious desire of both nation and state. Neither Lacon nor the Minister seems especially perturbed by the incident (379); no inquest is held; even Smiley appears relieved (379).26 With Smiley realizing the killer’s identity, Prideaux, the British patriot, escapes punishment while Haydon, the British traitor, does not. As such the novel achieves a resolution that never occurred in history. Unlike the novel’s Tarr/Irina incident, the real-life Volkov case, which incriminated Philby, did not result in Philby’s unmasking: it was an inept fudge (Andrew 2009: 344–345). Despite general suspicion, Philby was never exposed by a clever colleague – he was given an OBE. Philby was not caught in the act of selling Britain’s secrets to Russia and arrested,

26

In the BBC adaptation, Smiley tells Lacon, Guillam and the Alleline cabal, ‘We will all, of course, have to account for our movements last night’ after Haydon’s murder, while later Smiley tells Ann he wanted to shoot Haydon (E07).

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as Haydon is: Philby was shunted from MI6’s highest echelons, but continued to have contact with both the USSR and MI5 and MI6 (Andrew 2009: 432-433) until at his leisure, he defected to the Soviet Union nearly twenty years into his espionage career. Philby was not properly interrogated: back in the 1950s he defeated MI5’s real-life Smiley, Jim Skardon (427); a week before he defected he fooled both MI5 chief, Roger Hollis and MI6 head, Dick White (436). Unlike Haydon, Philby was never silenced and instead wrote his self-justifying memoirs, My Silent War (1968) in his Moscow apartment, exactly as the novel’s Minister feared of Haydon. Philby would later adorn a commemorative Soviet stamp. The Philby affair was a British failure, while Tinker Tailor narrates a British success, a reaffirmation of national efficiency and restoration of British dignity to which Haydon’s death is the elegant apex. By rendering Haydon’s death almost unconscious, the traitor is punished without the British getting blood on their hands: Smiley, meanwhile, can retain his role as exemplar of British probity and decency. The ending of the novel thus represents a victory within the conflicted national unconscious for the gentlemanly ideal. The competing element, the leftism in the national unconscious, is not entirely repressed by this plot resolution, however: the idea of the mole – communism, leftism – continues to haunt the novel and the national unconscious. An equally messy resolution of the class struggle occurred in the real world. Tony Benn was removed from the Department of Trade and Industry and Wilson dropped most of the left-wing elements from his legislative programme. When Wilson abruptly retired and passed the reins to Labour rightwinger Jim Callaghan in 1976, Callaghan brought in the International Monetary Fund in what amounted to a soft coup for neoliberalism. *** In conclusion, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy presents a particularly partisan picture of the British nation – a landscape of prep school, Oxford and Whitehall reasserting the establishment, personified by Smiley, as the essence of the nation in the face of the national treachery of establishment scion, Bill Haydon. This depiction of ‘England’ is as illiberal – on the novel’s own ideological terrain – as it is appealing, a Brideshead Revisited for Cold-War Britain. From Tinker Tailor’s title on in, the British state is presented negatively, with a complacent, proceduretransfixed post-War bureaucracy blamed for nurturing the communist mole in the very structures of the state. This critique is troubled by Smiley effectively working for the state throughout the novel, relying on its monopoly of violence

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to ensnare the mole, thus climactically securing the state, and thereby attaining state power for himself. Finally, the very concept that energizes Tinker Tailor, the mole – thus communism, leftism – upon being unearthed in the persons of Bill Haydon and his Soviet controller, Karla, is abruptly buried, denied, repressed. Communist conspiracy and treachery are dismissed as mere mechanisms of power and personal vanity, lacking any ideological impetus. The Cold-War consensus is thus reasserted, the ‘world’ held together in Smiley’s narrowly defined terms (83), the liberal superego prevailing, while still revealing a residue of insecurity and uncertainty in both the novel and the British national consciousness. As such the novel parallels – or channels – the historical events of 1974: the repression of leftist hopes via the defeat of Bennism; the re-assertion of the establishment. But beneath the surface – of fiction, of current events, of official history – the mole continues to grub away. *****

5

‘All One Vanishing World’: The Honourable Schoolboy, Colonialism and Communism

During the Cold War, Hong Kong’s role in Asia resembled that of West Berlin in Europe: an isolated Western island in a vast Eastern sea, a capitalist showroom in an anti-capitalist ‘desert’ — both a Cold-War buffer and a Cold-War provocation. In addition, Hong Kong was an enduring vestige and symbol of Empire in an increasingly postimperial world. In the East, Britain had previously held ‘dominion over palm and pine’ (Kipling 1977: 130) in India (until 1947), Ceylon (1948), Burma (1948), Malaya (1960) and Singapore (1963), so Hong Kong was one of the last remaining jewels in Britain’s increasingly tarnished imperial crown. To anchor the second volume of the Karla trilogy in Hong Kong centralizes the imperial issues previously only subliminal in le Carré. Indeed, so potent are the novel’s evocation of postimperial collapse and its depiction of the Cold-War ally – America – that these threaten to obscure the Cold-War enemy, communism. China is the elephant in The Honourable Schoolboy’s room, with the Soviet Union no more clearly focused, while the Vietnam War and a cavalcade of other Eastern communist uprisings drop into a colourful, nostalgic background to imperial preoccupations. Richly detailed, politically saturated and inventively plotted, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), the second, overlooked, part of the Karla trilogy, deserves to be better known. It occupies the anomalous position of a forgotten bestseller: ‘There’s a book in the middle actually’ as Smiley actor, Gary Oldman, put it (in Child 2011). With The Honourable Schoolboy initially outselling Tinker Tailor, le Carré became one of few writers to be granted a Time cover story (Kanfer 1977). Thereafter, with The Honourable Schoolboy dismissed by reviewers and scholars and twice passed over for screen adaptation,1 le Carré has effectively repudiated

1

The BBC serialized Tinker Tailor and Smiley’s People but left out Honourable Schoolboy; Tomas Alfredson directed Tinker Tailor (2011) and was reported to be filming Smiley’s People.

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the novel: ‘Be warned. You are reading an historical novel, written on the hoof ’ (le Carré 1990b: 7). It is, however, this very embedding in history that makes The Honourable Schoolboy a key text of the Cold War, while the sense of immediacy has the urgency of history being made. By the time of The Honourable Schoolboy, le Carré’s novels had begun to drift from the thriller to the literature sections of newspapers. This represented a recalibration, not a dismantling of the literary class system, however. So Honourable Schoolboy tended to be highly rated by more ‘populist’ reviewers,2 but ridiculed by ‘literary’ reviewers. Among the latter, novelist Clancy Sigal claimed le Carré had ‘stumbled … because he’s bent on creating “serious literature” a la Graham Greene’; Clive James judged that while ‘outwardly aspiring to the status of literature, le Carré’s novels have inwardly declined to … pulp romance’; Anthony Burgess asked, ‘Does [Honourable Schoolboy] have anything to do with literature? … The answer has to be no’.3 The Honourable Schoolboy’s similarity to Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American (colonial Eastern setting; journalist hero; love triangle) meant that Greene – broadly regarded as ‘literature’ – was used as a measure of this genre/literary division.4 This was ironic, given that Quiet American was the point at which Greene jettisoned his own dubious distinction between ‘novel’ and ‘entertainment’. Most reviews treated Honourable Schoolboy’s Eastern setting (which le Carré spent eighteen months researching) as incidental. Anthony Curtis noted the ‘exotic settings’; James called le Carré’s descriptions of the ‘mysterious East’ nothing but ‘inventories … of flora and fauna’; while Louis Finger complained that ‘research thrusts itself from almost every page in the form of huge, inert slabs of topography and local colour’.5 Consequently, Vietnam, despite being

2

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Positive reviews from populist writers: crime writer, T. J. Binyon, ‘A Gentleman among Players’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 September 1977, 1069; spy author, Thomas Hinde, ‘Spy Story Plus’, Sunday Telegraph, 18 September 1977, 14; crime writer H.R.F. Keating; quiz writer George Thaw; film critic David Ansen and bestselling novelist, Mollie Panter Downs, ‘Briefly Noted’, New Yorker, October 1977, 163. Clancy Sigal, ‘Smiley’s Villains’, Guardian, 8 September 1977; Clive James, ‘Go Back to the Cold!’ New York Review of Books, 27 October 1977, 29; Anthony Burgess, ‘Peking Drugs, Moscow Gold’, New York Times Book Review, 25 September 1977, 9, 45. Other reviews on ‘literary’ pretension: Finger, Fenton, Holloway, Hope and Cox. Reviews comparing le Carré unfavourably to Greene: Stern, Fenton; Sigal, West, Curtis, Vaizey; favourable comparisons in Prior, Ansen and Holloway. Anthony Curtis, ‘Yellow Mole’, Financial Times, 8 September 1977, 14; Louis Finger, ‘The Manly One’, New Statesman, 23 September 1977, 414f. Similar reviews on research and travel writing: Eliot Fremont-Smith, ‘Thriller of Dignity’, Village Voice, 24 October 1977, 103, 105. Maurice Richardson, ‘Our Man in a Maze’, Observer 11 September 1977, 25.

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headline news, was mostly mentioned by reviewers as a country not a war.6 Several foreign correspondents were commissioned to review the novel, with Richard West and James Fenton both finding its details ‘inaccurate and unconvincing’ (Fenton, 34). But with Fenton, West and H. D. S. Greenway all disagreeing about what was and wasn’t ‘accurate’, even these ‘political’ reviewers deemed neither postcolonialism nor communism to be relevant reference points in their reviews.7 Britain’s decline in favour of America was acknowledged in two British notices (Holloway; Richardson) but was denied by Lord Vaizey and Peter Grosvenor. US reviews were blunter about British decline – with Fremont Smith declaring, ‘Smiley’s job is to patch [the Circus] up (like England)’ – and more alert to the novel’s negative presentation of America. In all the novel’s reviews the Cold-War enemy, communism, is absent, colonialism barely mentioned, and so Laurence Stern effectively speaks for all: ‘le Carré eschews the larger issues of political combat between the competing systems’.8 In later analysis, genre is deprioritized as an area of concern, but scholars still treat the book as an exotic diversion from the ‘real’ Cold War. Barley calls his Honourable Schoolboy chapter ‘Sideshow’ (1986); Cobbs calls his ‘Cold War in the Wings’ (1998); while Lewis sees the East as mere background ‘colour’ of ‘destruction and desolation’ (Lewis 1985: 141). Scholars tend, like reviewers, to pass over both colonialism and communism and treat the conflicts depicted in the novel as personal rather than political (Panek 1981: 254–255; Lewis 1985: 141–161; Barley 1986: 117–118; Beene 1991: 100–104; Holtmann 1991: 67). For its first half, this chapter will examine how postimperial themes dominate The Honourable Schoolboy, embodied in the depiction of two

6

7

8

Reviews framing Vietnam as country not war: John Leonard, ‘Books of the Times’, New York Times, 22 September 1977; David Ansen, ‘Out of the Cold’, Newsweek, 26 September 1977, 84; A. J. Cox, ‘Crime’, Morning Star, 22 September 1977. Other reviews not mentioning Vietnam War: Allan Prior, Daily Mail, 8 September 1977, 7; George Thaw, ‘Success for a Spy Man’, Daily Mirror, 9 September 1977, 17; Andrew Hope, ‘I Spy a Long Trip’, Evening Standard, 13 September 1977, 21; Eddie Cain, ‘Spies’, Scotsman, 15 October 1977, Weekend, 2. Reviews mentioning Vietnam War: David Holloway, ‘Spying, le Carré’s Way’, Daily Telegraph, 8 September 1977, 14; Thomas Hinde, ‘Spy Story Plus’, Fiction, Sunday Telegraph, 18 September 1977, 14; H.R.F. Keating, ‘With Sweep and Vision’, The Times, 8 September 1977, 10. James Fenton, ‘Le Carré Goes East’, New Review 4 (1977), 31–34; Richard West, ‘Local Colour’, Spectator, 10 September 1977, 19–20; H.D.S. Greenway, ‘Travels with le Carré’, Newsweek, 10 October 1977, 49. Laurence Stern, ‘The Secret World of George Smiley’, Washington Post, 9 October 1977, 1, 6. Reviews on British decline: Lord Vaizey, ‘Futile Jerry’, Listener, 29 September 1977, 409; Peter Grosvenor, ‘The Circus Goes to Town … Just for Laughs’, Daily Express, 8 September 1977, 20.

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uneasy relationships: between the now desk-bound George Smiley and new fieldman hero Jerry Westerby; and the ‘special’ relationship between Britain and America. What, the chapter, asks, are the implications of these antagonisms for this volume’s established themes of the British state and the British nation? For its second half, the chapter teases out the novel’s textually submerged depiction of the enemy, communism. The chapter examines the novel’s Cold-War implications and inquires what the ideological relationship between The Honourable Schoolboy’s dominant imperialist and occluded anticommunist concerns might be. ***

‘Her colonial grip’: Britain, the Empire and the special relationship The British Empire and the British Eastern novel are co-dependent, with espionage often a theme of such novels. So iconic a rallying cry for imperial espionage was Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) that, with considerable irony, it inspired the nickname of Harold ‘Kim’ Philby. Empire is a conflicted, contradictory theme in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), Victory (1915) and The Rescue (1920), both problem and solution for its troubled protagonists. In Somerset Maugham’s The Outstation (1924) and Footprints in the Jungle (1927), the ‘East’ is only a blank – indeed ‘innocent’ – canvas for the Western characters to colour. The by-then declining Empire is a theme of Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) – a conflicted exercise in postimperial melancholia, combining guilt and nostalgia. The Honourable Schoolboy’s ‘Eastern novel’ resonance is self-consciously telegraphed by Jerry Westerby’s louche literary agent, Ming, at top volume, as they dine at Westerby’s gentleman’s club. ‘Nobody’s brought off the eastern novel recently, my view’ (le Carré 1999b: 113), Ming declares, running through Conrad, Malraux, Greene. No awareness is shown by Ming or Westerby that such novels are ‘Eastern’ only in the sense that they are a representation – a reflection of the West: the East is the object of these novel’s gazes, not their subject. Nor indeed does The Honourable Schoolboy itself suggest any awareness of this: while there is satire in the Ming scene, it is le Carré’s familiar, solipsistic satire of establishment manners, not of establishment ideology. Empire has lurked in the unconscious of all the le Carré novels discussed in this volume thus far. Smiley’s nostalgia for amateurism in Call for the Dead

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could be seen as nostalgia for an imperial Britain; the Department’s yearning for the Second World War in The Looking Glass War was nostalgia for the high point and the turning point of Empire; while Connie Sachs’ ‘poor loves’ lament in Tinker Tailor brought Empire into central, sepia-toned soft focus, albeit briefly. Empire absolutely suffuses The Honourable Schoolboy, however, often in convoluted ways – denied; rewritten; repressed – but unavoidable nonetheless. As Australian journalist and British spy, Craw writes of Britain: ‘The more feeble her colonial grip, the more desperate her subversion of those who sought to loosen it’ (le Carré 1999b: 35). Or rather, ‘the more feeble her colonial grip’, the more discursive, informal and focused on influence and soft power became Britain’s postimperial strategies, as we shall see regarding The Honourable Schoolboy. Where in this Eastern-centred novel is the British nation? Indeed, what is ‘British’ about the British Empire? Is the Empire to be understood as ‘stretching the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire’, as Benedict Anderson memorably puts it (2006: 86)? This makes little sense in terms of landscape or citizenry: rather, the ‘Britishness’ of the Empire was discursive; rhetorical – a means of legitimating capitalism via patriotism. Until Queen Victoria was declared ‘Empress of India’ in 1876, ‘“India” was ruled by a commercial enterprise’, the East India Company (Anderson 2006: 91). Uniting the state and capitalism under the cloak of ‘the nation’, if the British Empire was the British gentleman’s proudest creation, its imagined glory still exerted an emotional pull on the larger population even as – especially as – British Empire shrank to British Commonwealth. If, for the ordinary British citizen or British subject, that wealth was hardly common, ‘British decline’ affected the entire national corpus – not just because, materially, the costs were passed on to the ordinary citizenry but because, ideologically, postimperial nostalgia became such a potent discourse in British culture. With Britain forced to operate geopolitically under American hegemony during the Cold War, subaltern where it had once been imperial, it was primarily America that gained from Britain’s geopolitical losses. Consequently, in Cold-War British culture, America became a lightning rod for British imperial nostalgia. From The Quiet American to The Honourable Schoolboy, imperial guilt was imaginatively offloaded onto upstart America, making the United States the carrier of all Western ills (Hardt and Negri 2000: 381). Indeed, The Honourable Schoolboy’s antipathy to the Cold-War ally can sometimes seem stronger than its antipathy to the Cold-War enemy. This chapter’s reading of The Honourable Schoolboy’s themes of the ColdWar ally and what we might term ‘imperial slippage’ can both be understood

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as unconscious manifestations of ‘postimperial melancholia’ (Gilroy 2004: 117): simultaneously a denial of the British Empire’s existence and a mourning for its disappearance; an insistence on Empire as a benign enterprise and a denial of Britain’s geopolitical decline. Contradictory, paradoxical – thus all the more potent – these forces lurk within the national unconscious.

‘Saint George’s children go forth to save the empire’: British state and nation The Honourable Schoolboy’s opening description of the abrupt, mysterious abandonment of High Haven, headquarters of British imperial intelligence in Hong Kong, immediately immerses the reader in postimperial melancholia. High Haven is described as ‘built by the Royal Navy in the Twenties in all the grand innocence of that service, to receive and impart a sense of power’ (le Carré 1999b: 27). As with imperial ideologue, John Seeley’s proclamation of the British Empire’s lack of ‘violent military character’ (in Schwarz 2012: 82), no contradiction is acknowledged in the text between ‘power’ and ‘innocence’, as if imperial institutions arose organically, without bloodshed. Nostalgic, mournful, romantic, no affective trick is spared to enhance the mythic register at its most elegiac: air conditioners ripped from the walls (le Carré 1999b: 30); aerials torn from a once-grand dome (31); the miserable monsoon rain and fog; the laughter of Eastern passers-by, seeing the Western journalists gazing bemusedly – but raptly – at their boarded-up institution (29). ‘In the South East, as everywhere else’ writes journalist, Craw, later, ‘the British were having to come down from their mountain top’ (31–32). Craw adds a lugubrious list of abandoned Eastern intelligence institutions to his report: ‘Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Tokyo, Manila … Djakarta … and Seoul’ (35). This recitation functions as a synecdoche for the withdrawal of British imperial interests ‘East of Suez’ from 1971 (MacPhee 2011: 24), a phrase deriving from Kipling. Indeed, the whole scene echoes the mythic, mournful tone of Kipling’s ‘Recessional’. ‘Far-called our navies melt away / On dune and headland sinks the fire / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!’ (Kipling 1977: 130). In this crucial opening scene of The Honourable Schoolboy, the Cold War has effectively disappeared: in terms of affect, in terms of discourse, in terms of imagery, it is the imperial that dominates. All this transpires to be a trick on the part of both the novel and Smiley, as caretaker chief of the Circus. In contrast to his freelance position in Tinker Tailor, Smiley is now deep in the belly of the Leviathan: he is the liberal superego,

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chaperoned from bureaucratic conference to confab. The abandonment of all these intelligence bases has been laid on by Smiley for Karla, to lull the Cold-War enemy into a false security that his mole’s depredations have taken their toll. This then is a textual fort/da, wherein loss is rehearsed (‘fort’/gone) in order to ramp up the ‘joyful return’ (‘da’/there) and ‘master [an] overpowering experience’ (Freud 2015: 8–11). Even once Smiley’s Cold-War purpose has been revealed, the ‘joyful return’ has an enduringly imperial tone, as if British power were the unconscious of Cold-War action. In The Honourable Schoolboy Smiley, for the first time, often adopts a strikingly Churchillian rhetorical style. Assembling his troops for his strike against Karla in the East, Operation Dolphin, Smiley invokes the intelligence ‘market’, and declares that ‘unless the Circus produced, it would … have no wares to barter with the Cousins … not to produce was not to trade, and not to trade was to die’ (le Carré 1999b: 69). Smiley conflates the revival of the Circus with the revival of Britain here (le Carré, in Barber 1977, 44) and subtly invokes the tension with America. The capitalist vocabulary meanwhile – ‘market’; ‘trade’ – invokes the underlying acquisitive imperative of imperialism rather more than it conveys the Cold-War liberal ideology of democracy and freedom (MacPhee 2011: 26). There is similar imperial slippage throughout The Honourable Schoolboy. As Jerry Westerby gazes upon Hong Kong citizens as he boards a bus at the start of his mission, he quips to himself, ‘Saint George’s children go forth to save the Empire’ (le Carré 1999b: 133). Such jokey asides are revealing, evincing a postimperial Orientalism (Said 2003), an enduring framing of the dependent colonial ‘other’ as child to imperial parent. The same imagery is deployed throughout The Honourable Schoolboy in the depictions of the very few Eastern characters in this ‘eastern novel’ (le Carré 1999b: 113). Half-Chinese agent Phoebe Wayfarer is an infantile, needy fantasist who looks to Britain, according to her patrician controller, Craw, as a father (217). Chinese-French pilotmercenary Charlie Marshall is again childlike, enfeebled by the opium which he takes ‘like a baby’s feed’ (414), weeping in Westerby’s imperial, parental arms, with Westerby alternating maternal gentleness and paternal discipline in his response (422). Chiu Chow Chinese brothers, Nelson and Drake Ko, are taken in by British missionaries, the Hibberts, when their own parents are killed (264). ‘The British [insisted] their colonial subjects were “like children” and required a long process of tutelage before they could participate in the governance of their country’ (MacPhee 2011: 26; see also: Mamdani 1996: 4). This generous, selfless nurturing of the British surrogate parents elides not just their exploitative present purpose (Westerby extracting information from Wayfarer and

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Marshall; the Hibberts stocking their orphanage), but what it was that orphaned these Eastern ‘children’ in the first place: imperialism – colonial adventuring (le Carré 1999b: 217); imperial warfare (263); the clash of cultures (415). Such attitudes are the legacy of a long imperial lineage, from Kipling’s ‘Your newcaught sullen peoples / Half-devil and half-child’ (1977: 128) to ‘I am your mother and your father’, ‘the missionary rhetoric whose standard slippage in India, Africa, and the Caribbean was from God to Queen Victoria and the British government’ (Tiffin 1997: 219). Imperialism haunts the unconscious of The Honourable Schoolboy’s text. This imperial unconscious is glimpsed in Smiley’s briefing speech to Westerby. While reminiscent of Control’s speech to Leamas, Smiley’s peroration is apparently more direct in its invocation of Cold-War ideology: Our present war began in 1917, with the Bolshevik Revolution. It hasn’t changed yet. … I still feel strongly that I owe. Don’t you? I’ve always been grateful to this service, that it gave me a chance to pay. Is that how you feel? I don’t think we should be afraid of … devoting ourselves. Is that old-fashioned of me? (le Carré 1999b: 122)

Within lines, Smiley has departed his Cold-War brief, has slipped from anticommunist into imperialist idiom – as if, like the Department in The Looking Glass War, he has forgotten which war he is fighting. Smiley’s empirical attempt to invoke imperial ‘service’ in a Cold-War context creates only ambivalence – for the unreflective (123), ‘operational’ man, Westerby (‘Sport! … for Heaven’s sake’ [123]) and the reader alike. This ambivalence was present even in the term’s colonial context: who exactly was being served? The natives being violently civilized? The British people, as imperial propaganda claimed (Arendt 1994: 160–161)? Or, more realistically, the establishment elite? By 1977 service to Empire was increasingly regarded as a euphemism for exploitation and expropriation (e.g. Edward Said’s Orientalism, in 1978). With the emperor’s clothes off, Smiley’s speech inadvertently reveals British power as the naked connection between colonial and Cold-War ‘service’. The entire narrative arc of Westerby’s split from Smiley can be seen in terms of this assertion of the imperial gentlemanly ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1984: 77) and a rejection of the centrist liberal superego embodied in this novel by Smiley. Near the end of Operation Dolphin, Westerby deliberately subverts Smiley’s goal of ensnaring Karla’s Chinese mole, Nelson Ko (le Carré 1999b: 548–566) on the far-flung island of Po Toi. In so doing, Westerby is killed, like

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Leamas, in a no-man’s-land between East and West (566), again probably on his controller’s – Smiley’s – orders (566).9 Unlike Leamas, however, Westerby has not fulfilled his mission, has not given full service to his state: nor is he serving any nobler, higher purpose than Smiley – he is serving only himself. Despite Westerby being ennobled by both the novel’s title and birth – he is ‘the Honourable Gerald Westerby’ – there is little that is ‘honourable’ about his character. Westerby is heroically self-indulgent: he abandons his daughter (49), jettisons his lover (53) and is unfaithful to would-be lover Lizzie Worthington with both prostitutes and an upstairs neighbour (482–487). Westerby has seemingly no filter via the superego – conscience, guilt – or the ego – selfcontrol – and is entirely the servant of the id. So even when Westerby actively undermines the British state’s operation on Po Toi (548–566), his motivation is personal not political: his action is performed, ‘for what linked [him and Ko], and what linked him to Lizzie’ (566). The ‘link’ Westerby invokes is love – Eros – not just libidinally for Lizzie, but extended to the familial (Drake Ko reminds Westerby of his father [300]). However, Westerby’s pursuit of love – his ‘Galahad act’ (515) – is hard to distinguish from sexual harassment (does Lizzie even want saving?). In Westerby’s Oedipal rejection of the coercion of the state, in the form of Smiley, father/authority/superego, Westerby is not guided by political principle but governed by the ‘pleasure principle’, in its perpetual dialectic with the ‘reality principle’ (Freud 2010: 28–29). This means that instant gratification – winning the prize of Lizzie – has to be tempered by deferment, negotiation: thus the grotesque scene of Westerby ‘purchasing’ Lizzie from her lover/client Drake Ko (le Carré 1999b: 563). There is nothing subversive about Westerby’s actions, therefore, nothing in his pursuit of the libidinal that undermines the false verities of liberal ‘civilization’. Westerby and Smiley’s conflict is really an externalization of the conflict within liberalism, not a rejection of liberalism. Westerby and Smiley are on the same – contradictory – side. To declare that Westerby’s actions are motivated by unconscious urges is quite different to suggesting his actions are not political. Most scholars, however, see Westerby’s final actions as him planting his flag in a political no-man’sland, asserting the primacy of the private individual – as in The Spy, through 9

The shots that kill Westerby appear to come from a helicopter in which Smiley’s right-hand man, Fawn, is visible (le Carré 1999b: 566). Contrary to some scholars’ observations, this is not evidence of a creeping totalitarian corruption in Smiley (Panek 1981: 247; Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 1982; Beene 1991: 104, 1982; Cobbs 1998: 137). That ‘corruption’ has been present in Smiley throughout these novels – the ruthless streak that sits alongside his characteristic compassion – and far from being totalitarian, is inherent to his liberalism. The Leviathan is as much a part of Hobbes’ structuration of liberal thought as individualism and ultimately the Leviathan, possessing the apparatus of power, has the final word.

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love – against the crushing Leviathan of the corporate state. (See: Noland 1980: 66; Panek 1981: 254–255; Lewis 1985: 161; Wallace 1985: 12; Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 186; Wolfe 1987: 208; Edwards 1988: 53–54; Beene 1991: 104; Holtmann 1991: 67; Bennett 1998: 80). Westerby’s own perception supports this view: ‘He had no position any more, this side or that side. He didn’t know what the sides were’ (le Carré 1999b: 516). Westerby is a highly political creation, however, and, in terms of character type, he picks up where Prideaux left off in Tinker Tailor – another product of games field and gentleman’s club. Indeed ‘sport’ is Westerby’s characteristic endearment, and the only thing he deploys democratically. Westerby is described as an ‘aristocrat’ (44, 115, 141), regards himself as ‘one of the clan’ (485), a.k.a. the establishment, and thus, as Connie Sachs hymned, ‘trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves’. That old colonial hand, Westerby’s imperialism is socially determined and unconscious does not make it any more honourable. Adventuring across Southeast Asia, Westerby gets his information from imperial manuals, reading Western accounts of the colonies via Greene, Conrad and T. E. Lawrence (432), has little contact with actual Easterners, and when he does, the relationship is exploitative, while being presented as either innocent or generous. Westerby hires multiple prostitutes on the Mekong delta (482), then gamely plays with their children (487). In Cambodia Westerby pumps Charlie Marshall for information (413–422), while pumping him with opium (414), itself a generous gift from the British to the Chinese (Mandel 1980: 310; Brendon 2007: 100–104). There is nothing to suggest that Westerby is being satirized here – he is the novel’s main protagonist, its eyes and ears, its heart, and the text presents him affectionately throughout (Inglis 1992: 2004). Westerby’s personally selfish behaviour therefore needs to be understood in the political context of what Raymond Williams called the ‘larger selfishness’ of imperialism (1993: 329). What is characterized in Westerby in this understanding is what Williams called ‘residual ideology’ (1985: 122), but is tempting to call the gentlemanly id – the red-toothed, laissez-faire individualism that centrist Victorian liberalism only partly repressed through capitalist competition and imperial service (Williams 1993: 325).10 In both Hobbes and Freud, ‘civilization does not once and for all terminate a “state of nature”. What

10

Westerby’s behaviour recalls a Conradian ‘guilty lawless Romantic individualism which struggles to subject itself to communal discipline’ – specifically ‘work, duty, fidelity’ (Eagleton 1995: 134). Eagleton states that, in Conrad, the titular Lord Jim’s unruly individualism is ‘solved by “service”’ (1995: 135).

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civilization masters and represses – the claim of the pleasure principle – continues to exist in civilization itself ’ (Marcuse 1966: 15): Westerby alongside Smiley essentially (Hobbes and Freud were both very much thinkers of their capitalist times). Westerby functions as a synecdoche for his class – the class that claimed the British nation as its own, indeed once claimed the world as its own. The class whose imperial entitlement keeps slipping through the novel’s Cold-War syntax, colonialism emerging through anti-communism from the national unconscious. In this way, a residual red-toothed individualism continues to trouble the centrist liberalism that represses it, contradicting the British state’s proclaimed Cold-War virtues of liberal mildness, pluralism and democracy throughout The Honourable Schoolboy.

‘A bunch of wolves’: Britain, America and the special relationship The British protagonists in The Honourable Schoolboy often appear to mistake the Cold-War ally for the Cold-War enemy. With the post-war ‘special relationship’ announced by the novel’s choric voice as a ‘shotgun marriage’ (le Carré 1999b: 16), Smiley’s assessment of Operation Dolphin’s status speaks for all Britain’s international operations in the Cold-War era: ‘If we cut [the Americans] in they’ll swamp us. If we don’t, we’ve no resources’ (108). Again deploying Churchillian rhetoric, Smiley tells Whitehall bureaucrats that cooperation with the Americans will ‘get us back to the top table’ (204). (In 1954 Churchill told the cabinet that nuclear weapons were ‘the price we pay to sit at the top table’ [Hennessy 2010: 46]). A civil servant suggests the ‘top table’ is a ‘sacrificial altar’, on which Britain has already ‘burned the Middle East and half of Africa’ (le Carré 1999b: 204), America having taken over British oil and military outposts in those territories (Louis 2006: 485). In this exchange we can see The Honourable Schoolboy’s push and pull of imperial mourning and postimperial reassertion. When, during transatlantic negotiations, the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s Sol Eckland angrily reminds the British of Operation Dolphin’s Cold-War objective – declaring, ‘we have a sabre-toothed Soviet Communist corrupter in our sights’ (le Carré 1999b: 297) – his observation is treated by Smiley and Guillam as an ignorant breach of etiquette. In such interactions the Cold-War imperative is occluded in the postimperial scuffle between old and new world powers. When Eckland tells the British, ‘you ride our wagon, we tell you where to get off and where to stay topsides’ (298), Smiley counters with a robust assertion of imperial pre-eminence, telling the Americans: ‘Steal our

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thunder and get yourselves thrown off the Colony into the bargain’ (300). The fact that Hong Kong was the only place apart from Brunei where Britain could still claim hegemony over America is unmentioned, as is the fact that Hong Kong was regarded by America as part of its own informal Empire (Brendon 2007: 646). Rather than satirically depicting Smiley as a synecdoche for a Britain in denial (Goodman 2016: 331), the Hong Kong operation represents a facet of the novel’s not-so-subliminal assertion of British superiority over America. We see this both in characters’ commentary – Smiley and Guillam chortling at American grammar (le Carré 1999b: 282, 478); Guillam’s gentlemanly distaste at American institutions’ vulgar décor (489) – and in the omniscient narrative’s observations about the Americans’ lack of a gentleman’s ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984). So the Americans are presented as regularly mistaking the fake for the real, be that South African sherry (le Carré 1999b: 283), reproduction pictures (470), or veneered wood finishes (298, 470). American characters are presented either as vulgar rednecks like Sol Eckland, as crude in their characterization as their language (‘What [the Brits] been doing all the time? Rubbing soap into their pretty faces? So when do they get to shave, for God’s sakes?’ [296]); or as groomed, Ivy League preppies like CIA station head Martello, who is described as ‘suspiciously bluff ’ (65). Under pressure, little separates Eckland and Martello in their gracelessness: on arrival in Hong Kong – enemy territory – Martello has ‘lost much of his gloss’ (507). The genuine, solid and traditional (Britain) is thus contrasted to the ersatz, hollow and new (America). The echo of the semiotics of class in these comparisons is explained by the dominance of the gentlemanly ‘habitus’ in this imperial dynamic: Americans are not gentlemen.11 We see a similar strategy at work in Westerby’s tour of Southeast Asia on the trail of adventurers Tiny Ricardo and Charlie Marshall. This journey takes up a quarter of Honourable Schoolboy (355–488), but advances the plot only marginally. It does a lot of ideological work on the way, however. Set in 1975, Westerby’s journey is a tour of imperial fallout, lionizing and lamenting British imperialism while belittling American activities on the same terrain – for all the world as if the two nations were imperial rivals. America’s present ColdWar purpose is occluded as much as Britain’s present impotence. Throughout Westerby’s journey there is an elegiac tone, the mythic register lending grandeur

11

‘The tastes and distastes, sympathies and aversions, fantasies and phobias which, more than declared opinions, forge the unconscious unity of a class’ (Bourdieu 1984: 77).

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to depictions of decay and defeat. In Phnom Penh, ‘with the end so close’ (361), Cambodia is ‘bleeding to death’ (367) while ‘the Indians stay to pick the carcass’ (361): the casually Orientalist language suggests imminent collapse from civilization’ into chaos. ‘C’est terminé’ laments a French priest in Xuan Loc, of the ‘final act’ in another former French colony, Vietnam (430). While this refers to the anticipated endings of the Cambodian and Vietnam Wars, the elegiac vocabulary suggests the end of an era of European imperialism. In Vientiane, equally, the once-grand colonial French hotel is deserted, ‘mournful’ (432).12 Westerby’s sights throughout are on the Cold-War ally, not the Cold-War enemy. In Cambodia, with the Khmer Rouge pressing in upon Phnom Penh, Westerby accompanies an American journalist and a female American photographer to the civil war’s front line. Blonde, leggy, entitled, the photographer is ignorant of either the locality or the politics, but keeps urging the men on into danger. Westerby mentally notes ‘when the Pentagon thinks of civilisation … it thinks of you’ (374). In terms of both entitlement and the equation of ‘civilization’ with ‘white’ , Westerby is essentially accusing America of continuing what Britain had started (Schwarz 2012: passim). The Khmer enemy, meanwhile, remains invisible, a background threat, while the main drama – the ‘human interest’ – is between the Western rivals. In Phnom Penh, the British are carrying on as if nothing untoward has occurred – war, imperial decline, American hegemony. British diplomats continue their dinner party while Khmer bombs drop and guns fire nearby (le Carré 1999b: 380–386). At dinner, a diplomat expresses ‘satisfaction’ that the Americans ‘boobed’ in a military action (383), as if the old hands of Empire had never ‘boobed’ themselves. Again the Khmer enemy is invisible – if audible – while the Cambodian casualties are barely even background colour in either the Khmer bombing or the American action (375, 386). Westerby’s feeling that ‘somehow he had contributed to the disaster’ (387) potentially runs counter to the dominant ideological tendency of the novel, but this is ultimately ‘unfathomable’ to him, and he moves on, as does the text, knowledge and guilt repressed. Later the same British diplomat complains, ‘Yank[s] . . . seem to want

12

Westerby is not much given to reflection, but will eventually opine: ‘He had never seriously doubted, in his vague way, that his country was in a state of irreversible decline, nor that his own class was to blame for the mess. “We made Bill,” ran his argument, “so it’s right we should carry the brunt of his betrayal”’ (le Carré 1999b: 485). Far from blaming his own class for the ‘mess’ of imperialism, Westerby here blames an anomaly from – a traitor to – his class, Bill Haydon, for British decline. The activities of the real-life Kim Philby had almost no part in the decline of British geopolitical power, but, wrapped up in his gentlemanly solipsism, it is imperial loss of power which, for Westerby, is blameworthy, not Empire itself.

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to run the world single-handed these days’ (386), apparently oblivious that this is just what his own nation had once wanted. Again, America is being blamed for ills incubated by imperial Britain. In Vietnam, with the armies of the Viet Cong and the communist North pressing in, Westerners and their allies are attempting to leave the Americanoccupied Southern capital, Saigon. A Vietnamese agent of Westerby’s begs, ‘The British are my friends! … Get me out!’ Westerby says, ‘Try the Americans’ (431) and cuts off the call. Rather than being an admission of who holds the geopolitical power, Westerby’s remark implies that Vietnam is solely America’s problem. Yet the British controlled the state of Vietnam for the French from 1945 to 1946, supporting a pan-European principle of imperialism (Springhall 2001: 35–36), helping to lay the ground for the Vietnam War in the process (Springhall 2001: 40–41). Moreover, Britain was rather more complicit in the Vietnam War than the text’s declaration that ‘the British were not involved in the war’ allows (le Carré 1999b: 431), the British providing intelligence and military hardware to the United States (Tiley 2013). Comparison with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American draws out The Honourable Schoolboy’s postimperial melancholia. Greene’s novel contrasts the old hand of Empire, Britain, with new arrival, America. Having insisted he is ‘disengagé’ throughout The Quiet American, British journalist Fowler finally acknowledges of a fatally wounded Vietnamese guard, ‘I was responsible for that voice crying in the dark. I had prided myself on detachment, on not belonging to this war, but those wounds had been inflicted by me just as though I had used the sten’ (Greene 1974b: 113). In remarkably similar language, Westerby opines of the murder of his source, British banker, Frost: ‘I killed him … Give or take a little, it was me who gave him the shove. It’s not just the generals, it’s every man who carries a gun’ (le Carré 1999b: 353). In le Carré, however, the victim is British, and Westerby’s guilt that of the fallen human condition in a world riven by wars. In a typical trope of postimperial melancholia, Westerby effectively denies the existence of Empire and affects imperial innocence while embracing a personal, rather than a political guilt. At an US airbase in Thailand, a drunk Major Masters tells Westerby of the fall of Saigon and American defeat in Vietnam: ‘The United States of America has just applied to join the club of second class powers, of which I understand your own fine nation to be chairman, president and oldest member’ (472). The framing is striking: although he is putatively referring to Britain’s non-assistance in the Vietnam War, Masters presents the conflict as if it were a competition between Britain and America for imperial

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dominance.13 Westerby is insulated against the American’s insult, however: ‘This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm’s length. This is how they lost’ (472). There is little sense of satire in the presentation of Westerby’s views (contra Goodman 2016: 331): Westerby is the focalizer of the action, the Western eyes through which we regard the East. It is worth noting that what Westerby derides here, American deployment of the ‘bifurcated state’ (Mamdani 1996: 16) – separating the native population from the foreign force – was no different to British imperial methods. Unlike the French, who favoured direct rule of their imperial possessions, the British favoured indirect rule using local proxy figures (Arendt 1994: 130), a ‘decentralised despotism’ that was developed in Africa, and which eventually metastasized into apartheid (Mamdani 1996: 37). Malaya, meanwhile, is the implicit point of comparison in Westerby’s complacent judgement on the Vietnam War. Only victory distinguished Britain’s Malayan campaign from America’s in Vietnam, otherwise the similarities were acute: the high level of civilian casualties (11,343 in Malaya [Springhall 2001: 56]), the ‘new villages’ (peasant concentration camps [Louis 2006: 566]) and the use of chemical defoliation (Springhall 2001: 56) – ‘if anything the British were more ruthless’ than the Americans (56). Indeed, British Malayan military kingpin, Robert Thompson advised the United States during Vietnam (Thompson 1965; Louis 2006: 581). With Britain fighting bloody campaigns in Aden and Borneo in the mid-1970s (Louis 2006: 573), Britons had little to feel imperially superior about. At the end of his Eastern tour, Westerby, leaving Hong Kong, has a vision of ‘the Colony’s last day … Peking has made its proverbial telephone call, “Get out, party’s over”’ (le Carré 1999b: 528). Westerby’s vision expands: ‘For a moment it was all one vanishing world – here, Phnom Penh, Saigon, London, a world on loan, with the creditors standing at the door and Jerry himself in some unfathomable way a part of the debt that was owed’ (528). These few lines condense the thematic tensions contained by The Honourable Schoolboy:

13

Neither Masters nor Westerby perceive the Vietnam War as anything other than a geopolitical loss for America. There would shortly begin a spate of American Vietnam films where this would be the dominant narrative – Vietnam as something done to America, the war-wrecked lives of ordinary soldiers as synecdoches for their nation-state. See: Coming Home (Ashby, 1978), The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978) – where the survivors sing ‘God Bless America’ – Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) and First Blood (Kotcheff, 1982), where Rambo mumblingly vocalized this conflation of citizenry and nation-state, contra the un-American (bureaucrats, hippies): ‘they wouldn’t let us win’.

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postimperial melancholia (‘one vanishing world’; an era passing), the tension between acknowledgement of colonial guilt (‘creditors standing at the door’) and assertions of imperial innocence (the ‘unfathomable’ debt). Implicit also is a further denigration of America: Hong Kong was only regained by Britain from Japan in 1945 against Chinese pressure due to US diplomatic and military muscle (Louis 2006: 351, 375). No one could guess as much from Westerby’s elegiac imperial rumination. It is, however, American military muscle that intervenes at the narrative climax of The Honourable Schoolboy. On the island of Po Toi both Smiley’s operation and Westerby’s attempt to subvert it are aggressively foiled by the Americans, who take possession of the intelligence prize, Nelson Ko. This tactical victory for America, confirming Eckland’s estimation of who rides whose wagon, is, in the novel’s terms, a moral defeat: a culmination of the novel’s subliminal assertion of British superiority encapsulated in Guillam’s estimation of the Americans as ‘a bunch of wolves’ (le Carré 1999b: 527). Connie Sachs can always be relied upon to articulate these novels’ national ideology. ‘Who was it used to say “we’re fighting for the survival of Reasonable Man”?’ she asks Smiley. ‘It covered it all. Hitler. The new thing. That’s who we are: reasonable. … We’re not just English: we’re reasonable’ (353). Connie is discussing the unreasonableness – the savagery – of the colonial ‘other’ (Drake Ko’s thugs have just murdered the banker, Frost), but in so doing, she asserts Britain as an enduring bastion of rational, humanist – liberal  – values. Again, the nation – a proclaimed national character – is yoked to the state. Connie implicitly justifies imperialism and ruthless British state action while denigrating less ‘reasonable’ imperialists alongside colonials and communists. American hegemony could quite as easily be ‘the new thing’ as communism in Connie’s remark. In The Honourable Schoolboy, we can see that ‘America’ functions in dialectic with ‘Britain’. America serves as a scapegoat for imperial ills, a lightning rod for British frustration at declining national power. However justified many of the novel’s anti-Americanisms – that US officials outside the West feel they are on ‘enemy territory’ (508); that US operations go in with ‘too much hardware and overmanning’ (543) – the double standard, the displacement function of these observations is a faultline that indicates the knottiness of Britain’s postimperial position. A protracted decolonization process rendered Britain’s geopolitical power ambivalent, prompting compensatory rhetorical reassertions of – and nostalgic panegyrics to – that power within British culture generally and The Honourable Schoolboy

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specifically.14 This, need it be said, is a fundamentally conservative impulse, undermining the very liberal ideology by which Britain was supposed to be defined in both colonial and Cold-War guises. ***

‘A spreading plague’: Communism and Southeast Asia As the American army often found during the Vietnam War, the Eastern communist enemy is elusive in The Honourable Schoolboy – but that is not the same as it being absent. Consider all those scenes in Vietnam War films where apparently empty villages suddenly explode into life (and death): Platoon (Stone, 1986), Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987), Good Morning, Vietnam (Levinson, 1987), Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, 1994). With the Viet Cong famously tunnelling under the ground like Marx’s mole, this effectively conveys how communism operates as an unconscious element in Western thinking: beneath the surface, invisible but volatile, liable to erupt from the ground and into the light at any moment. If this chapter’s analysis thus far appears to collude with the prioritization of postimperial over Cold-War imperatives, it is time therefore to ‘reverse the controls’ (le Carré 1999b: 301), as Smiley does midway through The Honourable Schoolboy, and look more carefully at the novel’s occlusion of the Cold-War enemy. This occlusion arises from a combination of a colourful postcolonial adventure plot, the narrative dominance of the Cold-War ally and the narrative distance from which communism is viewed. Soviet kingpin, Karla is reduced to a blurry picture on Smiley’s office wall (59); Red China ‘mole’, Nelson Ko is absent until the final pages. Again, this does not mean that the Cold-War enemy is absent, however: once again communism is repressed but can be brought into the light through close reading. So, for a start, the entire plot of The Honourable Schoolboy is built around Nelson Ko

14

This theme courses through le Carré’s later work. Grant Lederer III is an American wolf in sheep’s clothing in A Perfect Spy (1986), while Orville J. Rourke’s aggressive naivety – and, again, duplicity – in Absolute Friends (2003) would prompt accusations of anti-Americanism: ‘a clumsy, hectoring, conspiracy-minded message-novel meant to drive home the argument that American imperialism poses a grave danger to the new world order’ (Kakutani 2004). A Most Wanted Man (2008) repeats Honourable Schoolboy’s climactic trick of America ruthlessly hijacking a British operation at the eleventh hour.

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– it is structured by his very elusiveness. First, Nelson is declared to be dead (183); then, in flashback, depicted never embracing the Western ‘family’ of Shanghai missionaries who take him in during the 1930s (268). He is then ‘lost’ to militant communism (268–276); then revealed to be stranded within the alien monolith of Red China (461); finally, as quarry in sight of his British hunters, Nelson is whisked away by the Americans (566–8). Elusiveness identifies and characterizes Nelson Ko, and through him figures Eastern communism as a shadow, a spectre, an absence. Like Karla, Nelson is ‘all gap’ (le Carré 1999a: 217). As with Elsa Fennan or Bill Haydon, the only time we hear Nelson ‘speak’ is through a liberal Westerner’s mediation – here, British missionary Hibbert, who, in his saintliness and paternalism is effectively a Smiley surrogate. Paradoxically, however, the effect of Nelson Ko’s secondhand, temporally distant, culturally alien words is electric and – especially as relayed in the sedate seaside, claustrophobically British setting to which Hibbert has retired – they absolutely erupt from the novel’s pages. ‘Other’ here overwhelms self: indeed, less mediator than medium, Hibbert is effectively possessed by Ko. ‘We were enemy. Europeans, capitalists, missionaries: all of us carpet-baggers who were there for their souls, or their labour, or their silver … Exploiters. That’s how he saw us. Right, in a way, too’ (le Carré 1999b: 268– 269). The words of Hibbert/Ko capture the reality of European colonization of the East beyond official Empire. ‘European imperialism is grounded on this diaspora of ordinary travellers, explorers, missionaries, fortune hunters and settlers over many centuries’ (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 113). The novel’s Tiny Ricardo and Lizzie Worthington are entirely in this carpet-bagging lineage, and 1930s free-market free-for-all Shanghai is a surrogate here for 1970s Hong Kong, a link Hibbert makes himself (le Carré 1999b: 271). The ColdWar consensus is reasserted, however, when Hibbert’s daughter, Doris, snaps: ‘Didn’t stop [Nelson] from eating your food, did it?’ (272), thereby framing – and dismissing – Nelson’s communism as a selfish child biting the selfless hand that feeds; the colonized as childlike. Despite this, so unusual in these novels are Ko’s/Hibbert’s words that their affect cannot be entirely repressed: like Marx’s grubbing mole they lurk beneath the surface of the novel thereafter. During the 1960s and 1970s, the international communist agenda was being set not by the vast, monolithic states of the Soviet Union or China but by local guerrillas in nationalist movements around the emerging postcolonial world. The repressed returning. But more to the point, the relationship between imperialism and the Cold War was a direct one, and can be detected – for those who investigate – in The Honourable Schoolboy. So it is arresting to realize that

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all the territories Westerby visits on his tour of Southeast Asia are not just about to shift control from imperialist to nationalist powers, but to shift control from imperialist to communist powers. This aspect of Eastern history is even underemphasized in some of the best cultural commentary about this era, such as Gilroy (2004), MacPhee (2011) and Lazarus (2011). Let us re-examine Westerby’s tour of Southeast Asia with this information in mind. Westerby’s first stop, Cambodia, is about to fall to the Khmer Rouge, and although the authoritarian, murderous Khmer Rouge were essentially the West’s most paranoid imaginings about Marxism come true, they are never described as communist in the novel.15 Communism is once again the ‘not said’: repressed, as invisible as the Khmer guerrillas themselves in the novel’s Cambodian scenes (le Carré 1999b: 367–376, 380–388). The besieged Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh is described as ‘a city about to be given back to the jungle’ (422). In a review of The Honourable Schoolboy, foreign correspondent James Fenton complained that ‘there was no jungle around Phnom Penh’ (1977, 34). While, contra Fenton, fiction warps and distorts reality by definition, the term ‘jungle’ does, in Orientalist terms, suggest savagery; forest-dwelling beasts; the communist barbarian at the gate. In Westerby’s next stop, Vietnam, in US-held Saigon the besieging Viet Cong is again nowhere credited as communist – repressed, tucked into tunnels. The language of Westerby’s focalization is striking: ‘the panic was everywhere, like a spreading plague’ (le Carré 1999b: 432). Communism here is a disease (‘plague’), implicitly opposed to healing European imperialism. Similarly, when Westerby hears of the end of the Vietnam War, Major Masters is described as ‘suffering the stab of defeat at the hands of unintelligible savages’ (474) – another conflation of colonial and Cold-War vocabulary that ‘others’ communism. Unmentioned, Vietnam would become the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in July 1976. In neighbouring Laos, that the Pathet Lao soldiers present in the town are communist is signalled only by their Mao caps (a cultural reference now largely lost). The plot’s chronology means the Pathet guerrillas are depicted just prior to their December 1975 takeover of the country: unmentioned in the novel, often elided in historiography, and largely unknown in Western culture. As with the ‘jungle’ slur in the Cambodia scenes, the Pathet Lao are inaccurately described

15

There is a reference to the ‘Communist enemy’ at the governor’s residence in Battambang, confused by the governor’s declaration that Cambodia would seek Soviet help to fight this enemy (le Carré 1999b: 394).

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via Westerby’s focalization as ‘not long down from the hills’ (432), as if recruited from mountain tribes, suggestive of primitivism, savagery: a common framing of anti-colonial movements in British discourse (Brendon 2007: 555). While the novel details Tiny Ricardo and Charlie Marshall’s involvement in the United States’ relentless 1964–73 bombing of Laos’s Plain of Jars (404), it is depicted as carpet-bagging, adventuring, and that campaign’s anti-communist purpose – to destroy the Pathet Lao (Logevall 2010: 295) – is never mentioned. Easily missed in the dynamism of the adventure plot is that Marshall – piloting short-haul commercial flights from Cambodia – flaunts patches on his shirt reading, ‘Kill a Commie for Christ’ and ‘Christ was a capitalist at heart’ (le Carré 1999b: 399). Here communism is posited as a threat to capitalism (a rare appearance for that term in le Carré), or more accurately, to its small-scale, carpet-bagging colonial precursor. Westerby travels regularly through Thailand, where, although never successfully colonized, the mid-1970s communist insurgency was believed likely to succeed (Westad 2007: 191). Political anxiety is perhaps indicated by the Thai scenes containing the largest cluster of invocations of the word ‘communist’ in the novel (le Carré 1999b: 435, 436, 437, 438, 440) – communism as Tourette’s, inadvertently expressing the unconscious of the text. But this is repressed again as Westerby moves ever onwards, as if something is on his tail. Finally, that vision of Westerby’s of a postimperial Hong Kong somewhat occludes Cold-War realities. ‘For a moment it was all one vanishing world … a world on loan, with the creditors standing at the door and Jerry himself in some unfathomable way a part of the debt that was owed’ (528). The peculiarity of Hong Kong was not so much that it was ‘on loan’ – in which it formalized, as Westerby’s vision hints, the larger loan of imperialism in the East – but that it was a Cold-War ‘capitalist showroom’ (Louis 2006: 349), perched on the rim of Red China. ‘The Cold War was the making of Hong Kong’ (Brendon 2007: 645): with UN trade embargoes on China following the Korean War hugely increasing Hong Kong’s industrial wealth, the citystate became an exercise in deregulated capitalism (Brendon 2007: 647). The absence of democracy in this symbolic redoubt of Western freedom was striking, however (Brendon 2007: 646). The city is described in apocalyptic terms in Westerby’s vision of its final return to China: ‘the looted shops, the empty city waiting like a carcass for the hordes’ (le Carré 1999b: 528). While the language is imperial (‘hordes’, looting, criminality), once we remember that Hong Kong will be returned to Red China, the vocabulary can be seen to merge Cold-War and colonialist concepts – communists as the new

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barbarians at the colonial gate: contemporary savagery. ‘The hordes’ reclaim the city for the atavistic ‘jungle’; private property is ‘looted’ and capitalism – civilization – is destroyed. The point of all this is that communism and postcolonialism were integrally related. Communism offered an explicit philosophical critique of imperialism as the creation of capitalism (Luxemburg 2003: 426; Fanon 2004: 38) and, in the mid-1970s, offered an active physical threat to it. Soon after the start of the Cold War, a 1949 US National Security Council report accurately predicted that ‘the colonial-nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive Communist movements’, specifically citing Southeast Asia (Logevall 2010: 286). America’s purpose in both Korea (1950–53) and Vietnam (1955–1975) therefore was to contain anti-colonial communism, in order to ‘make the world safe for capitalism’ (Westad 2007: 31). The results were an expensive and bloody stalemate (Korea), and a capitalist superpower defeated by communist peasantry (Vietnam). Concurrently, communist regimes took over in Cambodia and Laos, and threatened to do the same in Thailand (Westad 2007: 191). Given that similar processes were taking place in former colonies the world over, the explosive ‘East’ in The Honourable Schoolboy becomes a synecdoche for worldwide leftist volatility. In Latin America, although the socialist challenge had been thwarted in Chile by Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup of 1973, Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution was heading slowly to its 1979 victory, while there were communist rumblings in Grenada and El Salvador. Of Africa, after Mozambique became communist in 1975 and the communist MPLA took power in Angola from 1975, there were ‘growing fears that the continent was about to become the new battleground in the Cold War’ (Brendon 2007: 593). Communism was even a rising tide within capitalist Europe, specifically in France, Italy, Portugal, and, increasingly, Spain (Harvey 2016). With Western capitalism in internal crisis given the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the OPEC oil embargo, even the United States was experiencing industrial strife from mobilizing labour unions (Harvey 2016). By contrast, the Soviet Union and China were faring fairly well economically (Hobsbawm 1994: 474; Cooper 2011: 64) – in fact the oil crisis benefited the Soviets, as their oil reserves lent them leverage (Cooper 2010: 56). This was an uneasy period for the West, effectively representing a ‘global threat to the capitalist class’ (Harvey 2016). The significance of this threat is repressed in The Honourable Schoolboy, has been ignored in critical commentary and has been diminished in historical hindsight, following the reassertion of capitalist hegemony and the restoration of ‘civilization’.

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‘Black grail’: Britain, imperialism and communism The noted inflation of Britain’s historical role in the Cold War in le Carré’s novels (Miller 1974, 25; Inglis 1992: 204) stands in acute contrast to the common deflation of the Cold War in British historiography. Consensus historiography suggests anti-communism was primarily a US preoccupation (Northedge 1974; Frankel 1975; Logevall 2011: 282) and that Britain’s primary post-war concern was decolonization (Greenwood 2000: 174; Brendon’s [2007] index has only seven entries for ‘Cold War’ and none for ‘communism’). This is a line often followed by cultural commentators (Gilroy 2004; MacPhee 2011: 26; Piette 2016). In misrepresenting British centrality, therefore, le Carré’s novels unconsciously bespeak a larger truth about Britain’s investment in the Cold War. For Britain’s geopolitical power, its industry and in large part its establishment were founded upon a dynamic and expansionist capitalism, to which both domestic socialism and international communism represented varying degrees of threat. Cold War begins at home. There is no necessity to choose between colonial and Cold-War interpretations of mid-1970s British history – or of The Honourable Schoolboy – because the two are intrinsically intertwined. With Britain’s role in anti-communist activities under-explored in historiography, it is worth essaying a swift survey. In Vietnam from 1945 to 1946, Britain suppressed the elected communist government (Springhall 2001: 38–43). Fearful for its Eastern interests after the 1949 Chinese revolution, Britain provided troops and warships in the Korean War (Hennessey 1996: 183–185; Louis 2006: 460, 736), a fact elided in Porter (1996), Springhall (2001), Cain and Hopkins (2002) and Brendon (2007). In Malaya from 1948 to 1960, Britain went to prolonged and brutal lengths to nurture a non-communist succession sympathetic to British commercial interests (Louis 2006: 566). Finally, a large part of the reason for Britain hanging on to Hong Kong was ‘to symbolize resistance to Communist expansionism’ (Louis 2006: 374): the city-state was a Cold-War symbol quite as crucial as that of the isolated Western redoubt of West Berlin in Eastern Europe. In the text itself, in critical commentary, and even in historiography, these realities are, essentially, repressed. So let us return one last time to Westerby’s rumination as he waves goodbye to Hong Kong: ‘For a moment it was all one vanishing world – here, Phnom Penh, Saigon, London, a world on loan, with the creditors standing at the door and Jerry himself in some unfathomable way a part of the debt that was owed’ (le Carré 1999b: 528). The reason that ‘London’ appears in a list with vanishing colonial territories is now becoming clear: Westerby is invoking the barbarian at

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the gate of the imperial centre – the British working class – as kin to the barbarian at the gate of the imperial periphery – world communism. Throughout these novels we have seen how anti-communist tropes have tarred the British left. Domestically, British imperialism had once functioned as ‘a vital counterweight to class-consciousness … the labour movement was “bribed” by the economic benefits of imperialism’ (MacKenzie 1984: 7). So the struggles of colonized peoples for national liberation were, for the British establishment, frighteningly paralleled by the struggles of the British working class for equality. These latter struggles besieged the later stages of Wilson’s 1960s administration, brought down the government of Heath in 1974, and would bring down Callaghan’s right-wing Labour administration in 1979. The establishment’s domestic class enemy thus combined with the international colonial enemy as a threat to the safety of capitalism. As we see in Westerby’s language here, the gentlemanly habitus is equally hostile to both these enemies, these ‘others’, these barbarians of the foreign or the domestic variety. The fundamental link between imperialism and capitalism was put stringently by one radical during the worldwide leftist foment of 1968: ‘It was in the world of capital that [MI6] had its traditional heart, in the preservation of trade routes, in the defense of foreign investment and colonial wealth’. That radical was John le Carré (1969: 35). In fact, this is something of an exceptional moment in le Carré’s otherwise conservative essay on Kim Philby; indeed an exceptional moment in le Carré’s writing generally – a stray eruption in a canon in which ‘capitalism’ has been as much the ‘not said’ as ‘communism’: the return of the repressed. A fascinating consequence of re-reading The Honourable Schoolboy in this way – balancing its covert anti-communism with its overt postcolonial themes – is that the political implications of the plot begin to look distinctly different: more like a Western success than a British failure. Operation Dolphin’s purpose – to contain the Soviet Union by neutralizing its Chinese mole – is achieved and the outcome is of equal advantage to the United States and the United Kingdom in their united defence of Western capitalism. For, as le Carré’s own analysis suggests, it is capitalism that is the elided link between the colonial and anti-communist preoccupations in both The Honourable Schoolboy and in British culture as a whole. *** In conclusion, The Honourable Schoolboy appears to allow Britain’s postimperial concerns to occlude its Cold-War imperative. The novel frames Smiley’s strike against communism as a reassertion of British geopolitical power, while denigrating

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Britain’s Cold-War ally, America, in terms of apparently postimperial rivalry. That Britain’s competitive strategy against America is humiliatingly defeated does not altogether repress the ideological effect – or emotional affect – of the novel’s subliminal anti-Americanism. While these postimperial elements are key to understanding The Honourable Schoolboy, the Cold-War enemy, communism, however apparently occluded, is still central to the novel. At the historical moment of The Honourable Schoolboy’s creation and publication, communism represented a danger not just to colonialism but to capitalism as a world system. Emerging from this tense international situation, The Honourable Schoolboy is revealed as one of le Carré’s most unambiguously anti-communist novels.16 As it transpired, the 1970s threat to capitalism dissipated. Some communist takeovers never occurred (Thailand); one communist regime was neutralized by another (Cambodia by Vietnam), while, in the new climate of capitalist resurgence spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, many communist regimes slowly changed their policies to be more capitalist-friendly (Vietnam from 1986; Laos from 1986; Cambodia from 1991). So, as repressed and submerged as communism is in The Honourable Schoolboy, the novel remains a vital document of an era when communism represented an active threat to Western capitalism’s global dominance. *****

16

In an accompanying interview published on both sides of the Atlantic, le Carré declared: ‘When we look at the heathen, we run back and take new faith. However liberal and doubtful we may be, there is absolutely no doubt that world Communism is not something I wish my children to be subjected to’ (in Hodgson 1977, 1). This again conflates colonial and Cold-War language in its implicit veneration of the godly West and in its othering of communism.

6

‘Only People’: Humanism, Populism, the Second Cold War and Smiley’s People

The title of Smiley’s People, seemingly the most banal among le Carré’s novels, is actually a highly effective conductor of the novel’s central conceit: that ideology is an irrelevance. Underneath it all, the citizens of East and West alike are ‘only people’ (le Carré 1980: 258), autonomous human individuals – persons. Smiley’s People, like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, ends at the Berlin Wall, but this time the crossing from East to West is successful, a journey from inhuman ideology to human affirmation, meaning that even erstwhile enemy, Karla is now one of Smiley’s people. Nevertheless, behind the banner of such non-ideological humanism, Smiley’s People represents le Carré’s most uncompromising attack on communism yet and, under the guise of a humanist critique of Western actions, is a staunch assertion of the superiority of liberalism at the dawn of its turbocharged neoliberal variant.1 After sixteen years, détente’s less combative approach to the Cold War had reached its summit – in all senses – with the June 1979 SALT II nuclear arms limitations agreement. But détente was dead by December that year, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and soon both superpowers appeared to be threatening the other with nuclear war (Saikal 2010: 129). That supposedly dovish US president, Jimmy Carter had been funding anti-communist Afghan rebels for months before the Soviet invasion (Mitchell 2011: 85; Riedel 2014: 99), balances out the Western narrative of one-sided Soviet aggression (see: Judt 2010: 593–594; Gaddis 2011: 17). In the renewed chill of this Second Cold War (Worsthorne 1980, 16), public anxiety mounted, as indicated

1

Le Carré chose Smiley’s People’s PR campaign to make his most unambiguously anti-communist statements yet: ‘I do believe, reluctantly, that we must combat Communism. Very decisively’ (in Gross 1980, 33; see also: Vaughan 1979, 57).

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by CND membership rising to early 1960s levels ( Judt 2010: 591). After her arrival in power in May 1979, Margaret Thatcher terminated the ColdWar consensus (Hall 1979: 16), taking as uncompromising a line against the left – unions, peace campaigners, the Labour Party – as towards what she considered their source: Soviet communism (Thatcher 1980).2 Thatcher also notably presented her administration as a champion of people (Thatcher 1979c) – but despite apparently humanist rhetoric, and her quotations from Saint Francis of Assisi, Thatcher was in reality a right-wing populist with a hard-line, Hobbesian take on human society, notably lacking in humanist compassion (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite 2012: 570). Thatcher was against the ‘nanny’ anti welfare state, while appealing to ‘popular prejudices’ (Williams 1983: 238) via a deceptive anti-elitism. Smiley’s People was published on 12 November 1979 (United States) and 4 February 1980 (United Kingdom), during the hugely successful BBC dramatization of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (September–October 1979; repeated February–March 1980). Estimated to have reached 11 million viewers, the series had become a talking point on daytime radio, in the tabloids, and in offices and classrooms across Britain: a whole new level of public dissemination for le Carré’s Cold-War vision. Much of Britain, that winter, appeared to be Smiley’s people. Le Carré’s reputation as an insider to the secret state was enhanced when, following the publication of Andrew Boyle’s Climate of Treason in November 1979, Thatcher exposed Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, as the Cambridge spy ring’s ‘fourth man’ and thus the collaborator of Tinker Tailor’s central inspiration, Kim Philby (Oldham 2013: 739). If anything, le Carré’s popularity worked against his critical acceptance, and the press reception of Smiley’s People was extremely mixed – by now the standard pattern with le Carré. In this supposedly populist moment, the literary class system was still in force. In a welter of publicity for the novel then, Smiley’s People’s timely anti-statist theme was widely recognized.3 While many reviews saw the novel as a Manichean struggle of liberal

2

3

Before the next election, le Carré suggested he ‘might even vote for Mrs Thatcher … even her leadership is better than no leadership at all’ (in Wapshott 1982, 7). Reviews noting anti-bureaucratic theme: Allan Prior, ‘Spymaster with the Modern Touch’, Daily Mail, 4 February 1980, 7; Andrew Boyle, ‘A Man for All Treasons’, Evening News, 4 February 1980, 7; Michael Ratcliffe, ‘George’s Black Grail’, The Times, 7 February 1980, 12. Richard Barkley, ‘Smiley’s Final Showdown’, Sunday Express, 3 February 1980, 6; Joseph McLellan, ‘George Smiley’s Revenge’, Washington Post, 23 December 1979, 1, 4.

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good versus communist evil,4 with Smiley an unequivocal force for good.5 Only a handful of reviewers noted the ‘corruption’ in Smiley that le Carré later flagged (in Rogers 1982). Robert Lekachman wrote, ‘[using] tactics imperceptibly less nasty than the KGB’s … Smiley is able, but barely, to reassure himself that he cheats and deceives on behalf of the better society’.6 Many found Karla’s humanization unconvincing; indeed some complained that it whitewashed communism.7 Complaints of anti-communism in the novel came only from David Caute (‘the only good Russians are those uncontaminated by Communism’) and Julian Moynahan: ‘since [Karla] is Red his motivation must be fanatical and “absolutist”, his methods merciless; whereas Smiley’s motive and method are always described as “reasonable” and “decent”’.8 As ever, a large number of reviews regarded the novel as ‘beyond politics’. Al Alvarez claimed, ‘the great battle of Secret Service titans … hinges finally on paternal guilt’ making the novel ‘about character and … human weakness’. Walter Clemons found that ‘Karla’s secret is personal, familial’ not ‘political’. Tom Paulin suggested Karla’s humanization was itself a critique designed ‘to assert the superiority of Western to Eastern values’,9 while American reviewers were quick to call out the political fantasy in Smiley effecting Karla’s defection.10 More connections from the novel to Blunt were made than had been from Tinker Tailor to Philby, with Ian Hamilton noting,

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Reviews taking anti-communist line: Peter Grosvenor, ‘I Spy Another Side to Smiley’, Daily Express, 7 February 1980, 10; V.S. Pritchett, ‘A Spy Romance’, New York Review of Books, 7 February 1980, 22–24. Reviews positing Smiley as force for good: Tom Paulin, ‘National Myths’, Encounter, June 1980, 58–63; John Coleman, ‘A Crafty le Carré: Smiley Springs the Trap’, Sunday Times, 3 February 1980, 42; Harry Reid, ‘Self-Effacing Superspy’, The Scotsman, 2 February 1980, 3; Kirkus, 1 January 1980; J. Roger Lee, ‘The Spy Who…’ Reason, August 1980, 49–50; Pritchett. Reviews noting Smiley’s corruption: Ian Hamilton, ‘Smileyfication’, London Review of Books, March 1980, 15–16; A. Alvarez, ‘Half Angels versus Half Devils’, The Observer 3 February 1980, 39; Moynahan; Michael Wood, ‘Spy Fiction, Spy Fact’, New York Times, 6 January 1980, 16; Robert Lekachman, ‘Good Boys, Bad Boys, Old Boys’, The Nation, 26 April 1980, 504–506. Reviews questioning credibility of Karla’s humanization: Matthew Coady, ‘Spy Story’, The Guardian, 7 February 1980, 9; Patrick Cosgrave, ‘Smiley’s Final Bow’, Daily Telegraph, 7 February 1980, 14; William F. Rickenbacker, ‘Missing in Action’, National Review, 8 August 1980, 974–975; Stefan Kanfer, ‘New Act for the Circus Master’ Time, 31 December 1979, 70; Hamilton. David Caute, ‘It Was a Man’, New Statesman, 8 February 1980, 209; Julian Moynahan, ‘Smiley’s People’, New Republic, 19 January 1980, 31–32; Wood. Reviews regarding Smiley’s People as non-political: S. S. Prawer, ‘The Circus and Its Conscience’, Times Literary Supplement, 8 February 1980, 131; William H. Pritchard, ‘Fictional Fixes’, Hudson Review 33(2) (Summer 1980), 261–262; C. P. Snow, ‘Estonian Connection’, Financial Times, 2 February 1980, 10; Christopher Booker, ‘Spymasters and Spy-Monsters’, The Spectator 9 February 1980, 16; Walter Clemons, ‘The Old Dependables’, Newsweek, 24 December 1979, 71. Reviews noting British fantasy: Kanfer, Moynahan, Clemons and Britons, Coleman; George Thaw, ‘Smiley Spins His Deadly Web Once More’, Daily Mirror, 4 February 1980, 23.

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‘le Carré’s appeal is supported by actual recent history’. Even so, fully half the reviews still made no mention of Blunt.11 Smiley’s People’s status is higher in subsequent scholarship, but still tends to be claimed as an apolitical novel. ‘The importance of international relations is reduced to almost nil … Smiley’s assignment is … a purely personal crusade’ (Sauerberg 1984: 186; a view echoed by Monaghan 1985: 139; Barley 1986: 127; Dobler 1989: 14; Beene 1991: 110; Bennett 1998: 85; Hoffman 2001: 149; Martin 2011: 48). Cobbs links this assessment to the novel’s humanism and anti-statism: ‘Smiley’s people are all those who choose humanity over ideology and individuals over institutions’ (Cobbs 1998: 139–140). This anti-statist theme is widely attested: ‘the ultimate evil is the system’ (Dobel 1988: 203; see also: Paulson 2007: 325). While many scholars see Smiley as corrupted by his quest for Karla, this does not condemn him to moral equivalence with the enemy: Karla remains the measure of evil – ‘Karla is a kind of anti-Christ’ (Dobler 1989: 348; see also: Broyard 1982: 23; Aronoff 1999: 96). Indeed some scholars, like reviewers, feel that communism is let off the hook by Karla’s humanization in the novel (Rothberg 1987: 61; Wolfe 1987: 240; Beene 1991: 107; Martin 2011: 46–48). This chapter will, first, examine Smiley’s People’s presentation of the British nation, asking why Smiley’s attempt to define and gather up his people prompts hostile reactions from the citizenry. The chapter will then explore the function of Smiley’s disavowal of the British inhuman, unfeeling bureaucracy and ask how this squares with his not simply serving the state but glorifying it by engineering Karla’s defection. Next, the chapter asks how Karla’s humanization impacts upon the novel’s presentation of communism. Finally, the chapter asks whether Smiley’s use of inhuman methods to achieve his victory cancels out the humanist values so central to Smiley’s People, and whether it adds ambiguity to that humanist-sounding title. ***

‘Deniable blessing’: Smiley and the British state Anti-statism in the late 1970s had become – ironically – centralized through Thatcher’s ‘anti-establishment’ rhetoric, her government’s deregulating monetarism 11

Reviews on Blunt: Melvyn Bragg, ‘Pawns in Smiley’s Game’, Evening Standard, 5 February 1980, 19. No mention of Blunt in remaining reviews: Robert Kee, ‘Dangerous Mudlands’, Listener, 7 February 1980, 191; Jack Sullivan, Saturday Review, 1 March 1980, 44; Henri C. Veit, Library Journal, 1 December 1979; Karl O’Lessker, ‘Le Carré’s People’, American Spectator, March 1980, 17–18.

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(Hall 1979: 17) and its attacks on the civil service (Leys 1989: 273). The civil service, encompassing the intelligence services, epitomized the ‘elitist’ redoubts against which Thatcher positioned her populist project. This was a spurious stance for Thatcher to take, given her administration’s authoritarian, centralizing tendencies (Leys 1989: 101). Smiley’s own anti-statism is similarly spurious. In timely contrast to The Honourable Schoolboy, where Smiley was head of the Circus, Smiley is placed in his more familiar position outside the state in Smiley’s People. Now in retirement, Smiley is commissioned by Oliver Lacon to officiate over the Circus’s murdered former agent, General Vladimir’s estate. Yet the text has to work hard to create distance between Smiley and the state. First, Smiley only enters the plot of the book named after him at the Leviathan’s behest – for all his complaints, he comes when the state calls (le Carré 1980: 44). Second, Lacon and the Circus’s Lauder Strickland only want Smiley to tidy up (61–62), to protect the state from scandal. With official cover-up being a standard anti-statist motif, Smiley’s departure from Lacon’s brief shadowplays a ‘defeat’ of the bureaucrats, subverting authority and undermining the corrupt state. But that Smiley’s self-appointed quest for Karla, to combat and contain communism, actually serves the state is made clear by his operation’s ultimate endorsement by Circus chief, Saul Enderby. Indeed, third, by the end of the novel, Smiley is not only serving the state, he is glorifying it by handing the British state a major Cold-War victory. While anti-statism is a populist position, seemingly championing the commons against the elite, ultimately in Smiley’s People the best hope for humanism – for persons – is, via Smiley, located in the state. In the end even the bureaucrats are Smiley’s people.

‘Malevolent bureaucracy’: Smiley in the belly of the Leviathan Smiley’s People begins not with Smiley, the British bureaucrats, or the murder of General Vladimir but with another Soviet émigré, Ostrakova, a middle-aged woman who, having fled to Paris, is now being harassed by the Soviet secret police (7–24). The KGB intimidation of Ostrakova is bureaucratic in its methodical bullying (9), its long lists of her ‘crimes’ (11– 17) — accounting books of ‘immorality’. Ostrakova, in turn, characterizes the Soviet regime as a ‘malevolent bureaucracy’ (11), occupied by a ‘soulless, numberless universe of brutalized functionaries’ (121) and she describes her imprisoned lover, Glikman, as rebelling against ‘the Soviet bureaucracy’ (21). Given the moral authority lent to dissidents throughout Smiley’s People, this negative, communist characterization of bureaucracy

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hangs over the book: human imagination shrunken by abstraction, human emotions reduced to statistics, human actions reduced to functions. Bureaucracy is depicted as fundamentally antithetical to humanism, to the welfare of persons. Unlike Ostrakova’s experience, the bureaucratic myopia of le Carré’s recurring civil servants, Oliver Lacon, Lauder Strickland and Saul Enderby has little to do with Arendt’s description of ‘totalitarian bureaucracy’ (1994: 245). However, the bureaucratic preoccupation with procedure and hierarchy depicted in these novels is seen to succour a solipsism and inertia that allows communism to penetrate the British state in the cases of Maston in Call for the Dead and Alleline in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The two versions of bureaucracy meet in Smiley’s People, when British bureaucratic inertia allows Soviet communism to enact its bureaucratic inhumanity in England, home of humanism, with communist ideology manifesting itself, as ever in le Carré, as murder, the ultimate anti-human action. It is worth remembering that a distinctly debased ‘humanism’ was the state ideology of the USSR up until the mid-1960s (Alderson and Spencer 2017: 212). In the Hampstead safe house where Vladimir was supposed to meet his controller, Smiley and the bureaucrats repeatedly disavow one another. This deliberate distancing is necessary for the bureaucrats to emphasize their (secret, publicly unaccountable) power and protect their positions. The Circus’s Lauder Strickland insists on parameters, barriers: that certain procedures are ‘a confidential matter’ and that Smiley is ‘no longer family’ (le Carré 1980: 57). Oliver Lacon emphasizes that Smiley’s role in the case is as ‘a private citizen, Vladimir’s Executor, not ours’ (64): an example of the ‘sophistry’ at which Lacon is said to excel (62). The bureaucrats are thus rejecting the idea that they are in any sense Smiley’s people. Disavowal is necessary for Smiley, in turn, to maintain his customary distance from the state. Smiley is distinctly tetchy throughout the scene, challenging the bureaucrats’ interpretations of events; mentally berating bureaucratic ‘stupidity’ (63) and repeatedly demanding to know why he has been called in out of retirement (44, 46, 48). To Lacon’s assertion, ‘You have a duty, as we all do. A loyalty’, Smiley mentally responds with the question he asked himself in Call for the Dead: ‘Duty to what? … Loyalty to whom?’ (63). While never really answering this question, the insistent, familiar assertion of the distance between Smiley and the bureaucratic state in Smiley’s People is implicitly predicated on Smiley as embodiment of the nation. Smiley’s ‘duty’ is to a broad humanity, not to the anti-humanistic redoubt of bureaucracy – to the commons, not to the elite.

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A second, geopolitical, reason for the antagonism between the state and Smiley is that, for the bureaucrats, Smiley represents a different political era – ‘of the past, not the present’ (64), by which Lacon means the Cold War. Lacon and Strickland talk throughout the scene as if that conflict has already been concluded. Lacon calls Vladimir ‘a total hangover from the worst days of the cold war’ (62) and links him – and thus Smiley – with the list of ‘anti-détente, inflammatory’ (52) methods that the (Labour [49]) government has proscribed.12 Strickland delivers a lugubrious list: ‘No honey-traps. No doubles. No stimulated defections. No émigrés. No bugger-all’ (50). Strickland’s tone is negative, but with due bureaucratic procedure and protocol, he and Lacon insist on the observance of these strictures. The difference between Smiley and the current administration, however, is not temporal – a matter of eras – but political – a question of policy. Smiley offers an uncharacteristically direct rejection of the state’s new bureaucratic procedures: ‘What utter nonsense’ he exclaims (52) – further evidence of Smiley’s new tetchiness. Ostensibly dismissing the oversight committee set up as a ‘brake’ upon the intelligence services, Smiley is also effectively declaring détente to be ‘nonsense’. Smiley pointedly and repeatedly emphasizes the human reality of Vladimir’s murder (52–55), to which the bureaucrats appear procedurally oblivious, concerned only to tamp down scandal and appease their political masters. Bureaucracy ‘must by its very nature disregard the essential humanity of its human objects and instead approach them as “a set of quantitative measures”’ (Zygmunt Bauman, in du Gay 2000: 40). The British bureaucrats are thus subliminally associated with Soviet bureaucracy: not ‘the enemy of humanity’ exactly, but by no means its friend. During Smiley’s absence, the text and Smiley’s demeanour suggest, with politicians hypnotized by détente and the intelligence services dominated by deskmen, Britain has allowed communism to gain advantage in the Cold War. This is given body by the bureaucrats’ refusal to accept Smiley’s insistence that Vladimir’s murder was the Soviets’ doing (le Carré 1980: 63). At the end of this safe house scene, Smiley discovers that Strickland had deleted Vladimir’s reference to ‘the Sandman’ – Karla – from the Circus’s tapes (65). Strickland’s purpose is presumably a non-inflammatory, prodétente measure, but in erasing the connection between Vladimir’s murder and the Soviet state the bureaucrats, in the novel’s terms, elide the murderous reality

12

This is another speech redeployed in Homeland, in S03 E05, wherein another results-orientated bureaucrat, Andrew Lockhart, attempts to hobble the intelligence services. Like Lacon, he is outmanoeuvred. The tape-wiping scene, meanwhile, is redeployed in Homeland S06 E06.

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of communism, and administrative pedantry blurs into political appeasement. If the Hampstead safe house is a synecdoche of the state, it is an ironic one: the house is unsafe — neglected, dilapidated (42), leaky, exposed to the cold, to the Cold-War enemy. There is also a domestic political resonance here. In Smiley’s People both bureaucratization and détente are attested as initiatives of a Labour government (49–52). At the time of the novel’s publication, Thatcher was berating the previous Labour government’s bureaucratization – ‘The slow but certain route to national suffocation under a blanket of bureaucracy and State control’ (1979b) – while deriding Labour’s détente policy as ‘appeasement’ (1979a). Thatcher thus linked anti-statism with anti-communism. With derided bureaucrat, Lacon and his Labour masters labelling association with Soviet dissidents ‘anti-détente’ (52), the text clearly echoes Thatcher’s equation of Labour with bureaucratic inertia and Cold-War appeasement: British socialism again blurring with Soviet communism. Smiley’s new anger can even be seen to channel Thatcher’s indignation (le Carré 1980: 138). So too can that of Connie Sachs. At her Oxfordshire ‘dacha’, Connie will remind Smiley that Circus chief, Enderby – another deskman – quashed Connie, Smiley and Vladimir’s previous anti-Karla operation (le Carré 1980: 164, 169), before all three were sacked: the implication is that these events were connected. Thus the overly centralized state not only mirrors the monolithic Soviet state, it also appeases it. Seizing this opportunity to revive the Cold War, Smiley responds by removing the bureaucratic ‘brake’ (49) and launching an aggressive operation against Karla and thus the Soviet Union. This echoes both Thatcher’s hawkish anti-communism and her own removal of bureaucratic ‘brakes’ on the state (du Gay 2000: 121–122). In the case of both Smiley and Thatcher, this is Barthes’ Operation Margarine – offering up the small change of state control (bureaucracy) to strengthen the state’s real currency (power). ‘Who could seriously be Lacon’s man?’ Smiley asks himself (le Carré 1980: 138), but it is the wrong question. Smiley’s anti-statist rhetoric makes no distinction between loyalty to bureaucrats – entitled functionaries like Lacon and Strickland – and loyalty to the liberal state as a deep system of interests. To this last, Smiley is – and has always been – a loyal servant. The difference between Smiley and Thatcher, however, is that Smiley’s ultimate concern, the text proposes, is people – persons – as opposed to Thatcher’s deceptive populism. Because for Smiley, as for liberalism, beneath the anti-state rhetoric, the state is regarded as the ultimate guarantor of individual freedom. Even so, the textual parallels between Thatcher and Smiley foreshadow that this state-fostered humanism will be problematic.

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The mutual disavowals between Smiley and the bureaucrats will be repeated often and at wearying length throughout the novel,13 but are, this chapter suggests, purely window dressing at a populist anti-statist moment. Although Enderby recognizes that Smiley’s planned operation to ensnare Karla will be of vast political advantage to the British state (245), he can only endorse the operation equivocally; bureaucratically. Enderby insures the state against the operation’s failure by warning he will deny Smiley if it fails (247) and insists that Smiley’s redeployment of the state’s monopoly of violence – the unemployed, ‘anti-détente’ Lamplighters and Scalphunters (245) – be unofficial. Of course, they never were entirely ‘official’ in the first place. Via Enderby, the state finally gives Smiley’s anti-communist operation its ‘totally deniable blessing’ (248), but it is a blessing for all that: a recognition of the unity of interests that, amidst this tiresome anti-courtship ritual, has actually been present all along. After his meeting with Enderby, Smiley has dinner with Lacon before setting off to entrap Karla in Switzerland. Unaware of Smiley’s intentions, assuming the Vladimir affair is concluded, Lacon drunkenly and complacently asserts détente attitudes: ‘The anti-Communist phobia was overdone … They weren’t red-toothed monsters, not any more’ (258) This underlines that in Smiley’s denial and defeat of the bureaucrats, the purpose has been a denial and defeat of détente. This is effectively a coup, in which Smiley has returned the British state’s Cold-War strategy to containment of communism. Yet Smiley’s operation is couched in non-political terms: as a conflict between humanism and its antithesis, meaning that what is effectively  the British state’s operation against Karla/communism is ostensibly – contradictorily – conducted in defence of persons not ideology: in defence of Smiley’s people. ***

13

Connie Sachs sarcastically goads Smiley that he is a ‘baron’ of the Circus’ ‘fifth floor’ (top brass) but this is effectively the truth (le Carré 1980: 179). Toby Esterhase’s question, ‘Who is speaking here actually? Is it George Smiley? Is it Oliver Lacon?’ (148) highlights that the distinction is spurious. To Claus Kretzschmar in Hamburg, Smiley claims to ‘represent a large company’. This paltry subterfuge disappears when Kretzschmar responds, ‘your parent company – okay, London’ (195), ‘London’ having been shorthand for the British state throughout these novels. To Ostrakova in Paris, Smiley says he has ‘come from London to help you’ (227). Roping in Peter Guillam in Paris to his investigation, Smiley employs ‘all the authority of his old chief ’ (231). When Enderby asks whether Smiley’s attack on Karla is ‘business or for pleasure’, Smiley replies ‘I was never conscious of pleasure. … Or rather the distinction’ (248). Again, this is because the distinction is spurious. That scholars can continue to insist that Smiley’s quest is merely ‘personal’ is thus mystifying.

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‘British to the core’: Smiley’s tour of the nation If not the birthplace, Britain is certainly the bastion of humanism: often spoken of as if it is bred in the bone and grown in the soil. J. S. Mill called Britain ‘the cradle and home of liberty’ in 1867; Stanley Baldwin acclaimed ‘the broad humanity that [is] so characteristic of English people’ in 1924 (in Schwarz 2012: 101)14. Consequently, the murder of anti-communist Estonian émigré, General Vladimir on Hampstead Heath (le Carré 1980: 34–41) haunts the novel – twice revisited (81–89); a revenant. This murder occurs in an iconically British landscape, a landscape that is both literally a common — playing a key role in the Peasants’ Revolt – and in a typical liberal contradiction, privately owned by the City of London corporation, the heart of British financial capital. In its brutal inhumanity – Vladimir’s face shot off at point-blank range (63) – this murder is the novel’s central (though by no means only) inhuman, anti-humanist act. It is a reminder of the political threat of communism that the British state, via the bureaucrats, is sleeping through. The British people, meanwhile are also oblivious to their danger, as the parade of innocent passers-by suggests – Buddhist monks; female typists (89) – bemused, amused by the elderly gentleman digging about in the dirt. It is amidst the foliage of the heath that Smiley locates proof of the murder’s political motivation. Smiley’s investigation involves him traversing the British landscape: a classic fictional mechanism for mapping what Anderson calls the national ‘imagined community’: ‘The movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside’ (2006: 30). Ostensibly investigating the circumstances of Vladimir’s murder, Smiley is actually nation-building: not only in the representational sense of mapping, defining, delimiting but nation-building in the more physical sense of recruiting, marshalling, awakening. The Britain imagined in Smiley’s People is ostensibly more democratized than in previous le Carré novels. Locales include workingclass London areas such as Paddington and Charlton, while the novel even touches upon the immigrant experience that had so transformed Britain during the Cold War – although in le Carré, all the immigrants are white. All are dissidents from Eastern Europe, thus supporting an anti-communist rather than anti-imperialist agenda. Neither Commonwealth then nor ‘common wealth’,

14

We can appreciate the tensions within humanism when we consider that Baldwin was justifying imperialism, via its ‘civilizing mission’, as a humanist project.

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these working-class areas are run down like the dingy parts of London we saw in Looking Glass. Vladimir’s flat in Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington, is, like Leiser’s, described in terms of death (le Carré 1980: 72), darkness, decay (72) and neglect (73), with the comparison of a pile of rotting mattresses to a ‘frontierpost’ (72) suggesting contiguity with the centrally controlled dilapidation of Eastern Europe. Again as in Looking Glass, these are images of Britain in decline, contrasting acutely with the radiant landscapes of Tinker Tailor. In Charlton, the children at a bus stop are ‘glum’ (92), the docks a ‘dismembered hinterland’ (92). There is no industry in this bleak landscape, with its ‘lazy chimneys’ (92) and ‘crumbling warehouses’ (93) where, in a housing estate compared to a ‘graveyard’ (93), Estonian immigrant Villem Craven’s work van is parked outside his house in the middle of the afternoon (93). ‘Labour isn’t working’ was the Conservative election campaign poster that year, depicting a winding queue of people outside an unemployment office, representing the Labour Party as inept and the labour movement as irresponsible (Sked and Cook 1990: 321–322). Given the concurrent Winter of Discontent, a clear subliminal meaning of ‘not working’ was ‘on strike’. These landscapes stand as an indictment of Labour – Britain’s reflection of East European grimness; socialism and communism as mirror images – and of labour – the unions – running the country (down). Later a sympathetic West German will tell Smiley, ‘You English are poor these days. Too many trade unions’ (le Carré 1980: 202). Here again the novel taps the contemporary anti-union mood captured by Thatcher: British decline is not the result of imperial collapse or establishment incompetence but of the demands of the working class for fairness. The novel’s apparent democratization of the nation then is, like Thatcher’s, less humanism than an elite-driven, illusory populism. In Smiley’s People even the establishment landscape is now in decline: our one view of the Circus is from outside, from the democratically drab rear courtyard – ‘a dismal place, all white tiles and black drainpipes and a stink of cat’. The scene is pervaded by a sense of loss, of empires crumbling: ‘the light … burning weakly in [Smiley’s] former room’ (253). Lacon’s Berkshire Camelot has gone in the divorce settlement with his departing wife (46). Notably, Lacon’s aristocratic habitus has become modernized, democratized: his wife has run off with a lowly riding instructor (46). In affluent Hampstead,15 the only house we enter is a safe house, a non-place, unhomely, rundown, marked by absence – Vladimir’s, literally (this was his meeting point); the bureaucrats’ metaphorically (42). When Smiley returns to Oxfordshire, Connie Sachs has come down in the world, exiled with her partner, Hilary, in the countryside, in 15

David Cornwell had purchased a home in Hampstead in 1977, very near the heath (Sisman 2016: 349).

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what she calls a ‘dacha’ – another Eastern European reference (160). Connie greets Smiley with ‘Welcome to Siberia’ (162). The dacha operates as a commercial kennels in which the human habitation is barely so: a ‘ramshackle’ wooden shack (160), one room for two people, surrounded by detritus (163), and in Connie’s case, a presentiment of impending death (163). So is the establishment fallen under Labour, the novel suggests: democratized via decline – gone, literally, to the dogs. Smiley completes his tour of Britain with a journey to Cornwall. Cornwall has been a regular point of return in these novels (le Carré 1964a: 10–11; le Carré 1999a: 381), a location for the evocation of the natural world at its wildest (le Carré 1980: 256). A landscape which, it is now revealed, is substantially owned by Ann’s aristocratic family. So again the establishment that owns and once defined Britain has declined, manifested by its landscape’s private physical decay. Ann’s family home is ‘very big and crumbling’; there are ‘acres of smashed greenhouse’, a ‘collapsed stables’ and an ‘untended kitchen garden’; the drive is full of pits; and fallen trees lie ‘like yellow tombstones’ (254). The establishment itself is personified by Ann’s relative, ‘mad Harry’, who blames the working class for British decline: ‘the bloody strikers should be put up against a wall and shot’ he barks at Smiley, ‘where’s their sense of service, for Christ’s sake?’ (255). Despite the superficial satire of establishment manners, the Winter of Discontent chills the text here, again tapping the contemporary – and in historiography, enduring – belief that union militancy in the 1970s had got out of hand (see: Judt 2010: 538–539; Sked and Cook 1990: 321–322), that indeed striking is unpatriotic (Hall 1979: 1). Mad Harry’s feudal outrage is thus not so far from Smiley’s anger in the novel: on behalf of the gentlemanly, liberal England of service and patriotism, now neglected and disparaged. With the British landscape thus undermined by communism, by leftism, Smiley’s tour of Britain becomes a quest to galvanize the British citizenry in the country’s defence. Women, unusually for le Carré, feature strongly in the novel’s iconography. Women are symbolically connected to the nation in this novel, just as women are often imagistically connected with landscape in culture – birthing, nurturing, gathering from nature’s common wealth. As Smiley gathers his people, women – neighbours, wives, lovers, receptionists – act as emotional gatekeepers to their Cold-Warrior partners in love or in business. Capturing an ambiguity in the novel’s title – is the condition of being ‘Smiley’s people’ chosen or bestowed? – these women are not convinced they are Smiley’s people. A suspicious elderly neighbour of Vladimir’s asks Smiley whether he is a burglar (75); Vladimir’s lover, Elvira, expresses silent ‘contempt’ for Smiley, blaming him for the Circus’s failure to protect the General (119); the receptionist at Esterhase’s

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new art gallery tries to prevent Smiley from gaining access to her boss (142); Connie’s partner Hilary, damaged veteran of the Circus, faces off her old chief with fear (161); Stella Craven regards Smiley with ‘hate’ (4). Smiley is twice asked to leave: by Stella in Charlton (99) and by Hilary in Oxfordshire (183). We are not accustomed to Smiley being responded to in this way – this avatar of decency, of humanism, of all that is best in the British nation, being repudiated. The novel’s women regard Smiley not so much with personal as political dislike – Stella Craven sends Smiley off with ‘Stay away all of you’ (107): note the collective address. These women regard Smiley not as the investment of humanism or the embodiment of the nation, but as the state encroaching upon the individual, pushing its way into their homes, re-awakening the fight in their retired Cold-Warrior partners. Stella insists that Villem is now ‘William Craven’, that, having extracted himself from the anti-communist exile groups, he is now ‘British to the core’ (94). But the women’s nation, like that of Sarah Castle in The Human Factor, Greene’s Philby-inspired novel from the year previously, is the family. ‘We have our own country. You and I and Sam’ (Greene 1978: 187). In Smiley’s People, family bonds of some kind are everywhere: Stella holding her young child, Madonna-like (le Carré 1980: 94); Vladimir being ‘like a brother to [Mikhel’s wife, Elvira]’ (109); Connie, deep in connubial bliss with Hilary, telling Smiley to return to his wife: ‘Go home George … Be like this old fool here. Get yourself a bit of love and wait for Armageddon’ (186). Connie is advocating what has been implicit throughout these scenes: the priority of love, of the personal over the political, of people – persons – over ideologies. Yet when Smiley does return to his estranged wife, Ann, in Cornwall, it is not to ‘gather her up’ as Connie recommends (164) but to reject her. Ann makes an emotional appeal that they should reunite – ‘we’re landed with each other’ (257) – and Smiley rejects it: ‘he despised her dependence on him and wanted only to be free of her’ (257). The images deployed in the women’s affirmations of love are hardly transcendent: Connie’s remarks suggest an escapist denial of the defeats of the Cold War; Ann suggests only a bureaucratic emotional stasis. So while this scene with Ann represents the one reversal of the rejections during Smiley’s quest, it traces the same dialectic: the political against the personal. Where in previous novels we would have expected Smiley to respond compassionately to these hostile women, now, in line with his new anger, he is brusque, patrician. He instructs Stella Craven to make tea (95); tells her to ‘be quiet and listen’ (106); tells Hilary to make tea and dispatches her from the Oxfordshire shack (178); while, infuriated by what he perceives as the injustice of Connie comparing him to Karla, Smiley comes close to striking

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her (186). Smiley’s brusqueness is not merely an expression of sexism, or the gender division of labour (though it is these things too) – it is the expression of that deeper patriarchy, the English gentlemanly ideal. Smiley is rejecting the feminine, familial concept of the nation and asserting a more masculine nation, catalysed by political emergency. Smiley’s rudeness is intended to shake the women from their inward-looking lives: to remind them of the reality of the Cold War – a war that threatens the very personal realm they hold dear. Smiley is asserting a broader humanism than the familial, a larger personal than the individual; he is asserting the greater good, the greater family of the nation, of the international liberal West against the inhuman enemy: communism. Smiley in these scenes is a recruiting sergeant for the Second Cold War, waking slumbering citizens and bureaucratic state alike in the ultimate conflict to ‘save’ Britain: but in reality to preserve a very particular, patrician England. Smiley certainly has an effect upon his people. Villem initially hides from Smiley but then it transpires he has lied to Stella about his continuing anticommunist activities and is still blooded for the fight (99, 100–105). Having initially denigrated Smiley’s Cold-War preoccupations, Toby Esterhase ends their interview by volunteering his services in Smiley’s fight against Karla, thus communism (159). Connie Sachs briefly forgets she is dying, gets caught up in the thrill of the chase and excitedly asks to accompany Smiley on his quest: ‘That’s your banner, George. I can see you marching. Take me with you, George, for God’s sake. I’ll leave Hils, I’ll leave anything’ (185). Smiley’s tour will continue into Europe, where he will extend his web of connections to encompass anti-communist ColdWarriors, Claus Kretzschmar in Hamburg and Ostrakova in Paris. Smiley’s purpose here parallels historical reality: Margaret Thatcher was being hailed by the Conservative press as ‘an interventionist lion abroad, willing to roar furiously in defence of her cubs against the Russian bear’ (Worsthorne 1980, 16), the press cheerleading ‘a new Cold War’. Worsthorne’s article’s title, meanwhile, ‘A Cold War Begins at Home’, indicated the right’s expectation that Thatcher would, in tandem, intervene to defend capitalism against the unions (Sked and Cook 1990: 343). Smiley’s anti-communism is overt; his anti-leftism more covert, but both unite in this echo of contemporary Thatcherism and in the characterization of the nation in the novel. From Smiley’s tone towards the novel’s women to the fact that caught up in his web will be Karla’s human connection – his daughter, Tatiana – humanism begins to transmute into a near feudal ruthlessness in the course of Smiley’s People. Nothing will be too personal to be drawn into this political conflict. Although it is through this process that Britain will be saved from communism – liberalism reasserted

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against inhuman totalitarianism – this harshness in defence of humanism will create a central contradiction in Smiley and in Smiley’s People. ***

‘The danger is absolute’: Karla and communism For two-thirds of its length, Smiley’s People features the most Manichaean portrayal of the Soviet Union in le Carré’s fiction. General Vladimir has his face shot off by a Moscow Centre bullet on Hampstead Heath (le Carré 1980: 63); Soviet thugs make an attempt on Ostrakova’s life in Paris, then hold her under siege (70–72); another anti-communist dissident, Otto Leipzig, is tortured and brutally murdered on a boat in a desolate area of Schleswig-Holstein (210–221). There is no political end or principle to communism here, just inhuman means. The Soviet Union in Smiley’s People is represented unequivocally as ‘the enemy of humanity’ (Medovoi 2012: 164): dangerous to its citizens and its enemies alike. ‘The danger is absolute’, Otto Leipzig warns Ostrakova (le Carré 1980: 67). ‘Absolute’ echoes ‘absolutism’, Soviet totalitarianism, in Arendt’s understanding: power for power’s sake. After being attacked by Soviet heavies, Ostrakova observes: ‘They had been murdering the entire Russian people for centuries, whether in the name of the Czar, or God, or Lenin’ (70). With the authority that dissidents possess in the novel, ‘they’ here connotes the Soviet state as the enduring instrument of an oppressive ruling class, from the Czar’s monarchical absolutism to Soviet totalitarianism. Again this frames the Soviet Union as intrinsically antipathetic to humanism – the state versus the people. Ostrakova remembers the imprisonment of her lover, Glikman, as a ‘slow, doctrinal prison death’ (71). She calls the ‘system’ ‘immoral’ (11) and recalls typical anti-Soviet crimes as being: to ‘question … the absolute right of the authorities’; to be religious; to paint abstract pictures; to publish love poems (16). These crimes have historical basis, but are also selective, being personal, located where, in liberal terms, the political has no business. Totalitarian power ‘intruded upon the private individual and his inner life with … brutality’ (Arendt 1994: 245). Again, whatever ideological rationale lies behind this authoritarianism is repressed in the text: in Smiley’s People, communism is a repression of a more material, hateful kind. Karla’s delusional daughter, Tatiana offers a case study of Soviet communism’s presented inhumanity. Of fragile mental health, Tatiana falls afoul of the

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system, which can perceive her illness only in political terms – as ‘anti-social tendencies’ – and incarcerates her (le Carré 1980: 185). Smiley’s People thus provides a familiar picture of the Eastern Bloc as a prison, a police state, where politics are prized over people and ideology valorized over humanity. While the framing of the Russian people as victims of communism was common in Western Cold-War culture (Medovoi 2012: 174), le Carré adds a more humanist understanding: that the Russian people are fundamentally dissident – the human host rejects the alien parasite; the people reject the inhuman system. The human factor will be a crucial consideration in all that follows, but the key point, in the context of the Second Cold War, is Smiley’s People’s emphasis upon the ruthless murderousness of the Soviet regime.

‘Two Karlas’: Contradictions in the Cold-War enemy In two previous volumes of the Karla trilogy, and for nearly two-thirds of Smiley’s People, Karla has been synonymous with the Soviet regime, carefully and consistently represented as a fanatical, murderous communist ideologue. So Ostrakova’s harassment by Soviet officials and the murder of General Vladimir are unavoidably read as Karla’s work: indeed, Smiley attributes Vladimir’s murder to ‘Moscow Centre’ (le Carré 1980: 63), long contiguous with Karla in le Carré’s fiction.16 Consequently, when Vladimir’s last message to Smiley transpires to contain information about ‘the Sandman’, it is not much of a mystery who this sinister figure is: in the trilogy, those who get too close to Karla have a tendency to fall asleep, for ever (65). Karla is not actually named until later in the book, in the trilogy’s third revisit of his and Smiley’s encounter in a Delhi prison. This emphasizes Karla’s political motivation: ‘The more Smiley implored him [to defect], the more dogmatic his silence became’ (140). Dogma is connected to violence throughout these novels, and later Smiley ponders Karla’s ‘absolutism’ and ‘Karla for whom killing had never been more than the necessary adjunct of a grand design’ (220). As ever, while the ideological ‘grand design’ remains opaque, the killing is all too clear. Here again we have Arendt’s ‘monstrous immorality of ideological politics’ (1994: 249), the Cold-War consensus reasserted as the acute East-West polarities of the Second Cold War.

16

‘Moscow Centre’ has been interchangeable with ‘Karla’ throughout the Karla trilogy. ‘By Karla you mean Moscow Centre?’ Lacon primly corrects Smiley in The Honourable Schoolboy (le Carré 1999b: 67).

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Smiley’s interview with Connie Sachs in her Oxfordshire dacha announces a shift in Karla’s characterization. Connie reveals that Karla once had a lover, but that when she ‘[got] ideas above her station … Wanting the State to wither away … He had her shoved in the slammer. In the end the old despot’s love turned to hatred and he had his ideal carted off and spavined’ (le Carré 1980: 184). If this is still the familiar inhuman ideologue, the revelation that this union produced a daughter adds an entirely new human vulnerability to Karla’s characterization. Now the murderous ideologue becomes ‘this other Karla, Karla of the human heart after all, of the one great love, the Karla flawed by humanity’ (221). This recalls Conrad’s declaration in Under Western Eyes, that ‘he who forms a tie is lost, the germ of corruption has entered his soul’ (1963: 169) – the epigraph of Greene’s aforementioned Human Factor. In humanist terms, Karla has, through this emotional interconnection, become a person. Throughout the trilogy, until these very last pages, Karla, rarely seen, never speaking, without personal details, without even a real name, never really was a person – or rather he never really was a proper fictional character. Instead Karla was too obviously ‘a fantasy arrangement of elements . . . taken to typify’ (Sinfield 1992: 56), in this instance, Soviet communism. At this point, after Connie provides the information about Karla’s daughter (le Carré 1980: 184–185), the novel’s narrative is retrospectively reframed, and so the harassment, the torture, the murders are all revealed to be personal and not political acts. This, we are now to understand, is a human story: that of the love of a father for his daughter; the inability of an ideological society to understand that daughter’s human frailty (185) and the father’s struggle to protect her. Karla’s solution is to smuggle Tatiana out of the Soviet Union, to a Catholic Swiss sanatorium (266–270) – a neutral space beyond politics. To do all this, Karla has abused the political system he serves for personal motives. In order to protect Tatiana, Karla has exploited the human frailties of others – the greed of Kirov, ‘the Ginger Pig’ (167); the lustfulness of Berne-based Soviet diplomat, Grigoriev (263). Smiley reverses the process, and works through the network of individuals manipulated by Karla’s scheme to get to Karla’s human weakness. While Smiley cannot find the Ginger Pig before Karla kills him (333), Smiley makes full use of the human frailties of Grigoriev (288–314) and of Tatiana (319–324), and in so doing touches the human frailty of Karla himself. Once the ‘secret’ of Karla’s repressed humanity is exposed, Karla abandons communism – the system he has fought for, plotted for, murdered for – and his position at the head of the Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre, and defects to the West at the Glienicke Bridge a mere nine pages later (326). The political here is eclipsed

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by the personal, Cold War ideologies by a generalized humanism: in the world of Smiley’s People, there are, apparently, ‘only people’ (258). The narrative urgency of the plot – the elaborate sting operation in Berne; the ‘will he/won’t he’ tension surrounding Karla’s defection – serves to repress a whole series of contradictions created by the recalibration of Karla’s character. These contradictions lurk in the unconscious of the text. Consider, for example, Smiley’s summary of the situation: That adversary had acquired a human face of disconcerting clarity. It was no brute whom Smiley was pursuing with such mastery, no unqualified fanatic after all, no automaton. It was a man; and one whose downfall … would be caused by nothing more sinister than excessive love. (315)

This markedly selective account reveals how the humanization of Karla occludes humanist concerns: if Karla is ‘no brute’, then murders for personal rather than political motives are implicitly redeemed in the novel’s moral universe. Moreover, the text continues to hold the ‘two Karlas’ (221) – the loving father and the murderous fanatic – in tension, in entirely contradictory coexistence. So although by Smiley’s discovery of Otto Leipzig’s murder, in Schleswig- Holstein, Karla is known to have a daughter, Smiley recalls Vladimir saying ‘With Karla the killing comes first, the questioning second’ (211). Brutishness as usual. The faultline here is further suggested by this statement contradicting the chronology of the narrative: Leipzig was interrogated under torture before he was killed. Concurrently, Ostrakova makes no distinction between Karla’s thugs and the Soviet officials of her distant past: ‘The men who had come to kill her were the same men … who had killed Ostrakov and Glikman’ (225; emphasis added). Even as Karla defects to the West across the Berlin Wall, the armed guards on the Soviet side are still viewed by Smiley as ‘Karla’s people’, while it is ‘the curse of Karla’s fanaticism’ that Smiley feels has fallen on him, via his own lapse from humanist principles (332, emphases added). As a result, Karla is rendered incoherent as a character. Contrary to Smiley’s statement, this new ‘human face’ of Karla’s does not possess ‘disconcerting clarity’ (315): Karla becomes an inchoate amalgam of Soviet symbol and flimsily characterized family man. Karla is still not heard directly: he speaks only through his Berne-based henchman, Grigoriev’s memory and mediation. Moreover, most of what Karla tells Grigoriev is deceptive: he never admits that Tatiana, whom he commissions Grigoriev to befriend, is his daughter. Thus, even after his proclaimed humanization, Karla possesses none of the ‘interiority’ modern readers expect of a fictional character (Sinfield 1992: 65): he remains distant, exterior, ‘other’.

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‘Character is a strategy – one that will be abandoned when it interferes with other desiderata’ (Sinfield 1992: 78). Clearly the faultlines in Karla’s characterization occur because of diverging ideological ‘desiderata’. On the one hand, Soviet communism’s inhumanity is presented as succumbing, through Karla, to the very humanity exemplified by liberalism. One man walks across a bridge: from Eastern functionary to Western personhood; from inhumanity to humanity. On the other hand, in 1979, Western victory in the Cold War was by no means a foregone conclusion and so the communist threat in Smiley’s People needs, simultaneously, to be reasserted – meaning Karla’s representative function as Soviet communism’s brutal synecdoche cannot be entirely abandoned. The snow swirling around Smiley at the Berlin Wall (le Carré 1980: 333) is manifestation of the renewed, communist-created chill of the Second Cold War. These contradictions in the characterization of Karla, and consequently in the presentation of communism, are indicative of contradictions within liberal ideology. That Karla’s dedication to the communist cause transcended his own self-interest was incomprehensible to Smiley in Delhi in Tinker Tailor (le Carré 1999a: 140). In Smiley’s People, however, Karla’s self-interest is now revealed, his defection at least as much about saving his own skin as protecting his daughter. The details of how the West will protect Tatiana are sketchy, unconvincing (326), while Smiley’s main leverage is a threat to expose Karla’s abuse of the system to the Soviet authorities (325). Love for a family member is, however, only an extension of self-interest, as Thatcher would shortly suggest.17 Lacon’s earlier exposition of the underlying selfinterest of humanity is thus entirely congruent with Thatcherism: ‘Communists were only people, after all. Communists wanted what everyone wanted; prosperity and a bit of peace and quiet’ (le Carré 1980: 258). In this, however, liberalism’s contradictions reveal themselves, because Karla’s love has prompted him to steal, blackmail, torture and murder for its sake. This is not humanism but Hobbesian competitive individualism at its most red-toothed and ruthless. This is the perennial contradiction within liberalism, exposed here within the very essence of its attack upon communism. We are back, therefore, to where we began in this chapter, with Thatcher – whereby an avowed British humanism is in contradiction with populist competitive individualism. The national ego is split, the liberal self divided. Once again, as we shall see, this division is embodied by Smiley. However, such a critique of liberalism is, once again, immanent, submerged, and takes some teasing out. The power of first impressions – especially in a novel 17

‘And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour’ (Thatcher 1987).

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built on proairetic narrative urgency – means that the novel’s murders can never be properly reframed as personal, and so retain their original affective meaning: as political murders by the inhumane regime of the Soviet Union. Particularly given the characterization of communism in these novels, these murders remain communist murders. On a similarly immediate level, the novel reveals the selfinterest of supposedly selfless communism ideologues to a liberal Western readership, suggesting that communism is an alien infection that will ultimately be rejected by the human host, the corpus of mankind. By people. Most of all, the novel presents a symbolic political defeat of East by West, at the site of the ultimate symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall. Communism, thus, for all the complexities of Smiley’s People, is morally condemned, intellectually overwhelmed and politically defeated at this tense moment of the Second Cold War. ***

‘Half-angels’ and ‘half-devils’: Smiley, Karla and the Cold War ‘It’s not a shooting war any more, George. … That’s the trouble. It’s grey. Halfangels fighting half-devils. No one knows where the lines are’ (182). Connie Sachs’s speech is usually taken as an articulation of moral equivalence between the communist East and the liberal West (Lewis 1985: 178; Wolfe 1987: 23; Dobel 1988: 192; Beene 1991: 107; Hindersmann 2005: 27). There is, however, a faultline within Connie’s ‘half-devils’ speech that reveals a contradiction within the whole critical concept of moral equivalence in le Carré. ‘Half-angels’ and ‘half-devils’ are not the same: even if a neutral moral line can be said to exist, halfangels are half way to beatitude while half-devils are half way to damnation – there remains a vast gulf between them. Up until this statement in the novel, communism, via Karla, has been depicted as nothing but devilish, while its polar opposite, liberalism, via Smiley, has been depicted as nothing but angelic. Indeed the novel has made much play with such religious imagery – an irony not entirely at odds with its secular humanism, invested in compassion, empathy and human betterment. Smiley is first introduced through mist and spectral early morning light on Hampstead Heath via a police Superintendent’s awed perception: ‘An abbey … That’s what [Smiley] was … made up of all sorts of conflicting ages and styles and convictions … man as God’s architecture’ (le Carré 1980: 40). This is the mythic register misfiring and becoming purple prose: an indication of a faultline. In

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chapter twelve, Circus courier, Ferguson tells Smiley that although officially laid off, he is ‘still on the side of the angels’ (135) – a stock Manichean phrase but here meaning on the side of the British state. In the following chapter thirteen, Smiley calls himself ‘Mr Angel’ when visiting Toby Esterhase’s art gallery; Esterhase’s receptionist then quips ‘got an Angel for you’ (143). A potent equation is being made here then between Smiley, liberalism and moral purity. Saint George of England reborn. Connie’s ‘half-angels’ speech, in the ensuing chapter fourteen, functions therefore as a narrative pivot. Coming at the novel’s precise midpoint, it forms a prelude to the information she unearths about Karla’s daughter, and thus to Karla’s humanization. Connie also introduces, in the same scene, the idea that Smiley and Karla are not polar opposites but magnetic poles: ‘twin cities’, ‘two halves of the same apple’ (186). While Smiley internally denies this –‘neither Karla’s methods nor Karla’s absolutism were his own’– his aggressive reaction to Connie appears to confirm it (186). From here on in, Smiley is regularly likened to Karla. In Berne, Smiley asks himself, ‘What would the absolutist do which we are not doing ourselves?’ (271) – looking for guidance now to Karla, but thus, ideologically, to communism and the inhumane methods Smiley once despised: blackmailing Grigoriev and Karla via their human frailties. Next, Smiley begins to confuse himself with Karla, declaring ‘I wrote it’ of the elaborate Grigoriev sting, before correcting himself, ‘No … Karla wrote it’ (273). After the Grigoriev sting has succeeded, Smiley castigates himself for ‘resort[ing] to Karla’s techniques’ (315). Above all, Smiley’s moral ‘corruption’ is exemplified by his exploitation of Karla’s disturbed daughter, Tatiana, in order to manipulate his political adversary.18 The use of people – persons – as a means to an end is the ultimate transgression of humanist values, to have, as Liz abhors in The Spy, their very humanity turned against them. This potentially undermines the entire concept of Smiley’s people, and makes a mockery of the moral distinctions made repeatedly across these novels between inhumane East and humanist West. However, at exactly this same point, the novel steps up the mythic register in its narration of Smiley. Seen in Paris, through the besieged Ostrakova’s eyes, Smiley is characterized by ‘his very air of humanity’ (227): ‘She sensed in him a passionate caring for herself that had nothing to do with death, but with survival;

18

Le Carré later flagged up this interpretation, calling the novel ‘a moral Reichenbach Falls’ which would ‘destroy them both; like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty: Smiley, by an act of professional absolutism, Karla, by a lapse into humanity’ (in Rogers 1982, 92). This references Conan Doyle’s ‘The Final Problem’ (1893) where Holmes dies with his nemesis, Moriarty, in the Swiss falls.

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she sensed that she was looking at a face that was concerned, rather than one that had banished sympathy for ever’ (227). Smiley’s humanity is here again explicitly contrasted to the inhumanity of the Soviets who have harassed and harried this dissident. Even as Smiley departs for Berne to blackmail in the name of Britain, after the Circus summit, Saul Enderby and Sam Collins ‘privily agreed … how in some way they failed to understand, they had removed themselves to a higher order of conduct for which they were unfit’ (244). In Berne, Smiley’s interrogation of Grigoriev is regularly telescoped into a fabled past of ‘Circus mythology’ (283), the events of the sting now retold as secret service legend, used as training – there is even a scale model of the operation at Sarratt (286). Toby Esterhase is heard to say, retrospectively of Smiley: ‘you see a lot, your eyes get very painful’ (250) – Smiley as suffering saint again, a tragic hero, his fatal flaw a loyalty to undeserving institutions. Esterhase says that in Berne, ‘George held the whole scene like a thrush’s egg in his hand’ (301). Esterhase’s words are not just a tribute to Smiley’s technique but to Smiley’s delicacy – ironic given the fact that Smiley is blackmailing a dogsbody and using a disturbed young woman as a political bargaining chip. The mythic register reaches its most sonorous and dramatic pitch in Smiley’s People’s climactic scene, bringing these contradictions in Smiley into central focus. Through Grigoriev, Smiley has now achieved a conduit to Karla: blackmailing Karla with the information about his misuse of Soviet funds and personnel to protect Tatiana, the price Smiley has demanded is Karla’s defection. With everything thus set up, Smiley’s team, including Esterhase and Guillam, now wait at the Glienicke Bridge on the Berlin Wall, to discover whether Karla will accede to Smiley’s pressure. When Karla materializes on the Eastern side of the Wall, Smiley’s quest has come to an end, the prize is in sight. Smiley watches Karla slowly crossing the bridge. [A]n unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and possess him and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this noman’s-land. (332)

This passage represents the finest writing of le Carré’s career: capturing the mood of a historical era, its mechanics – bridges, barriers, border guards – while also capturing its contradictions. The passage is ambiguous yet revealing, resonant yet deadened, open but closed. The most commonly accepted interpretation of this passage is that Smiley has negated his own humanity

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by using inhumane methods: ‘man’ being defined in humanist terms as moral and compassionate (see: Panek 1981: 246; Atkins 1984: 181; Sauerberg 1984: 202–206; Homberger 1986: 88; Cawelti & Rosenberg 1987: 179; Rothberg 1987: 62; Wolfe 1987: 234; Dobler 1989: 45; Beene 1991: 110; Buzard 1991: 186; Everett 1991: 512; Bennett 1998: 94; Cobbs 1998: 146; Aronoff 1999: 28; Oldham 2013: 729). There is, however, a scholarly minority report that maintains that Smiley’s exemplary humanity is untainted (Hughes 1981: 278; Monaghan 1985: 141; Wolfe has it both ways, 1987: 255; Dobel 1988: 210). The Smiley cult endures. Neither of these scholarly interpretations of Smiley’s characterization – inhuman monster or suffering saint – displays a political dimension, but this does not negate the validity of either interpretation, or the contradiction between them. Both judgements of Smiley are present in Smiley’s People: Smiley is both half-angel and half-devil.19 With Smiley the avatar of the British nation and synecdoche of the British state, his characterization has been used across these novels to work through fundamental contradictions within liberalism. Consequently, Smiley’s characterization is contradictory because liberalism is contradictory. Saint and sinner, half-angel and half-devil, man and noman – this equates to mild but harsh, humanist but Hobbesian, individualist but authoritarian: the antinomies of liberalism. From Call for the Dead to Smiley’s People this has been the contradiction that has riven, complicated and arguably energized these Cold-War novels. Smiley’s People simply foregrounds this contradiction for longer and in greater detail than previously: makes more of an issue of it; a narrative, a drama out of this liberal crisis. As ever, this crisis is resolved by Smiley – however functionally – because, illiberal as his methods may be, they still win a major victory for liberalism in the existential conflict of the Cold War. Smiley may have edged into utilitarianism instead of humanism, but this still holds the liberal line: Smiley is still on the side of the angels. As such, the novel’s critique of Smiley is a distinctly relative one compared to the absolute – absolutist – critique which the novel levels against the anathema of the communist East.

19

Le Carré’s own commentary is similarly contradictory. During Smiley’s People’s promotional interviews, le Carré declared, ‘I am myself absolutely satisfied that, by and large the West has a better record. I think it’s quite wrong to say … that both sides in fact use the same methods’ (in Vaughan 1979, 340). Clearly this contradicts le Carré’s later Reichenbach Falls comment. In an interview on the Smiley’s People DVD, le Carré not only affirms Smiley as moral exemplar, he explicitly presents Smiley as a synecdoche of the intelligence services: ‘[Smiley] is above all … some kind of arbiter of morality and human behaviour. Some things are simply beyond the pale. I think that’s also, of course, as a generality, true … of the secret services. That although all kinds of wicked things are attributed to them, there were certain things you never fooled with’ (le Carré 2004).

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In fact, there is a different potential reading of this passage – that the ‘noman’s land’ image is not a negation of humanity but the reverse: an assertion of essential humanity. In this understanding, no-man’s-land is a neutral space between ideologies, between East and West in this case. So Karla and Smiley are not so much morally hollow men as simply beyond politics, meeting on the common ground of common humanity. Think of the now-iconic incident when German and British soldiers played football at Christmas in no-man’s-land in the First World War. Amidst the horrific human toll of the Great War, this has become an enduring image of humanist values. Here, similarly then, Smiley and Karla can be seen as part of a humanity greater than any ideology: ‘only people’ (258) – Smiley’s People. This is a woolly, relativist humanism that was essentially killed off in the concentration camps and torture chambers of the mid-twentieth century (Anderson 2017: 68–69). Moreover, as that possessive makes clear – Smiley’s people, not Karla’s people – this electrically resonant, mythically symbolic event does not truly occupy a space between Eastern and Western politics: it occurs on Western ideological terrain. Smiley is a Western agent, acting on behalf of Britain; Karla is an Eastern agent, renouncing his political allegiance. It is a movement from East to West, a rejection of communism and an affirmation of liberalism. As such, Karla has simply become one of Smiley’s people. Far from a stripping away of the distortions of ideologies to the naked human essence, this is an assertion of liberal ideology as neutrality; of liberalism being beyond ideology; of liberalism representing and embodying the fundamental truth of the human condition. *** In a diner scene in the final episode of Homeland’s fourth season, the CIA’s resident hawk, Dar Adal, addresses the scruples of the drama’s dove, the Smiley-esque Saul Berenson. ‘Let’s face it’, says Adal, ‘not every choice we make is blessed with moral clarity. Especially in our business. What’s that line? “We are the no-men of noman’s land”’. Soon after, Berenson swallows his scruples and toes the hawkish line. This is postmodern intertextuality at its most self-conscious, in which a fictional contemporary ‘reality’ treats le Carré’s historical Cold-War fiction as a moral manual for the ongoing War on Terror. It provides a benevolent liberal veneer for aggressive geopolitical action against an implacable enemy that is entirely ‘other’. Rather than this being a travesty of le Carré, Homeland is entirely in sympathy with the strategy of Smiley’s People, whereby, asserting a humanism invoked by the novel’s very title, Smiley palliates – renders as liberal, humanist – an aggressive anti-communism. Smiley’s People goes to some lengths to separate Smiley

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from the state, but beyond this cover, Smiley once again works for, defends, secures and glorifies the British state. Smiley’s People rehearses considerable anxiety about the use of expedient methods, but ultimately Britain’s actions are posited as a necessary counterbalance to the implacable political threat of Soviet communism presents to the traditional ‘way of life’ of the British nation. Since the communist enemy has been consistently defined as inhumane, even inhuman in le Carré’s novels, the humanizing of the Soviet state’s prime representative, Karla should create a breach in the Manichaeism of the novel, and in Cold-War ideology generally. But Smiley’s People upholds the idea of the Soviet Union as a potent threat at the onset of the Second Cold War, while also depicting Karla’s defection to the West as a vindication of liberal values and a rejection of the inhuman ideology of communism. As per the clue in the title, Smiley’s People asserts that what is important is people, not ideologies. But rather than being a compassionate claim for a common humanity beyond politics, this is actually a political claim for the superiority of liberalism over communism. As such, Smiley’s People reveals that contrary to the rupture conventionally attributed to Thatcher, the anti-communism of the Cold-War consensus was merely calcified by Thatcherism. In the period before ‘glasnost’ , as the Second Cold War bit and the neoliberalism forged in the Cold-War took root, this appeared to be a political permafrost. *****

Conclusion: ‘Man, Not the Mass’

This study of John le Carré’s Cold-War fiction will end where it began, at Sarratt, the Circus’s country house, its public school for spies, and with its gentleman spy, George Smiley. Sarratt, in rural Hertfordshire, is as emblematic of Englishness and the establishment as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead – it is where the communist mole, gentlemanly traitor, Bill Haydon was ‘trained to rule the waves’, where he was interrogated by Smiley, and where he ultimately met his end. Sarratt, it turns out in The Secret Pilgrim (published in 1991), has not been sold off, as Connie Sachs feared (le Carré 1999a: 122). This cornerstone of espionage and establishment heritage has been retained and Sarratt is still training spies even after the end of the Cold War (le Carré 1999c: 1–15). As for George Smiley, Haydon’s double and nemesis: in all six of the novels already discussed in this volume, Smiley has been present. Whether central or ancillary, Smiley has always embodied, contained and resolved these novels’ ideological dilemmas: he is the perennial lodestone of liberalism. At the end of Smiley’s People, Smiley was described as a ‘no-man’, a humanist who had been hollowed out by the venalities required by Cold Warfare against an implacable, inhumane enemy. This study’s previous chapter suggested that there is considerably greater ambiguity in the ending of Smiley’s People than has been recognized by previous scholars. Such an analysis is given further credence by Smiley’s role as exemplar in The Secret Pilgrim. Nominally, this book is a seventh Smiley novel, though it is barely anything so grand – more a collection of ColdWar  short stories deploying Smiley as a framing device, giving a talk to new espionage recruits at Sarratt. Even so, it is a delight to encounter him again. Far from being a hollowed-out no-man, Smiley appears to be in the best of moral and physical health. Ushered into the text reverently, Smiley is unambiguously, for the younger Ned, master of Sarratt, one of the ‘silent heroes of the Cold War, who, having made their contribution, modestly went to earth in the society they had protected’ (le Carré 1999c: 7). This is not quite accurate:

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le Carré is forever depicting the elite and extraordinary as the everyman and ordinary. The ‘liberated’ – capitalist – Russians now regard Smiley as a hero (10), and he is sought to solve problems worldwide (10). So much then for the moral corruption that had supposedly entered Smiley’s soul at the end of Smiley’s People. Moreover, the Sarratt students plainly didn’t attend the ‘moral equivalence’ module: they are ‘in love’ with Smiley (13), pressing him for more after his speech, seating him in the ‘throne of honour before the fire’ in the library (13). The Secret Pilgrim aims for the mythic register throughout – pitching at nostalgia, melancholia, the sense of an era’s end; a muted triumphalism – but cannot always achieve it, seeming hurried, flat, and sometimes simply complacent. ‘ “Oh I don’t think I’m a legend at all,” Smiley protested as he clambered to his feet. “I think I’m just a rather fat old man wedged between the pudding and the port” ’ (11). In the gentlemanly environs of Sarratt – however decayed, however brusquely described – Smiley shows himself to be the very stanchion of this world of library, fire, port, cricket pitch, tradition. Indeed Smiley even addresses the students as if they all belong to the category of ‘the privately educated Englishman – and Englishwoman’ that he hymns (35). Their knowing laughter suggests his complacent assumption is correct. Soon enough, Smiley confronts those dangling, unresolved moral issues of Smiley’s People directly. ‘Please don’t ever imagine you’ll be unscathed by the methods you use,’ Smiley tells the students. ‘The end may justify the means — if it wasn’t supposed to, I dare say you wouldn’t be here. But there’s a price to pay, and the price does tend to be oneself ’ (14). By this stage in his career, such statements are beginning to sound like false modesty: there is little evidence in The Secret Pilgrim of any damage to Smiley’s ‘self ’. Indeed, the ever-unresolved liberal contradiction, the split in the national ego that he has embodied throughout the preceding novels appears to have been resolved by communism’s collapse. The end, after all, does justify the means. Among its Cold-War reflections, The Secret Pilgrim revisits familiar – arguably leftover – le Carré preoccupations. For example, lowly Foreign Office functionary, Frewin is a repressed homosexual who sells state secrets out of loneliness (269–329), harking back to that perennial le Carré motif of the ideologically motiveless betrayal (not to mention a recurring unsavoury strand of homophobia (see: Maston, Leclerc, Haldane, de Lisle, Martindale et al.). This reassertion of the emotional over the ideological, the personal over the political, renders the Cold War meaningless, a looking-glass war. If no one really cared about communism or liberalism, what on earth was all the fussing and fighting, the snooping, prying and tailing about?

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In fact, The Secret Pilgrim has already contradicted itself on this issue of ideology. Under the guise of critiquing some of the issues left unaddressed in le Carré’s Cold-War fiction – ‘we made … friends of the most disgusting potentates’; ‘we exploited [countries] almost to death, for our own ends’ (123) – Smiley offers a eulogy to liberalism. Smiley hymns, ‘our respect for the individual, our love of variety and argument, our belief that you can only govern fairly with the consent of the governed, our capacity to see the other fellows’ view’ (123). Near the end of The Secret Pilgrim, this tone of Western self-congratulation is specifically linked to the humanist impulse analysed in Chapter 6, on Smiley’s People. Smiley declares: I only ever cared about the man … I never gave a fig for the ideologies … Man, not the mass, is what our calling is about. It was man who ended the Cold War, in case you didn’t notice. … not even Western man either … but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: ‘we’ve had enough’ … and the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners. (le Carré 1999c: 332)

This is the speech of a victor, of the vindicated. Far from suggesting that Smiley or the West has been compromised in this conflict – and become no-men – the familiar bouts of conscience are starting to seem like mere flags of convenience, palliatives for an aggressive liberalism. Again, communism is posited as unnatural, inhuman, an alien parasite inevitably rejected by the human host. Furthermore, it is simply not true that Western ideology trailed behind events: former Eastern European regimes embraced capitalism and turned sharply towards marketization, fervently encouraged by the Western powers. Liberal ideology was triumphant. Moreover, that disparaging ‘mass’ evokes a larger defeat than just that of communism. In an era in which the British working-class movement had been heavily defeated by Thatcherism, this is a tellingly gentlemanly choice of words, which undermines Smiley’s proclaimed humanism. Who gets to be a part of the ‘mass’ and who gets to be a ‘man’? Who is common and who has the wealth? Amidst all this liberal self-congratulation, The Secret Pilgrim does sound one resonant off-note. In the final chapter, Ned visits another English country house seated in another vast sweep of grounds. The lord of this manor, Joyston Bradshaw, is an amoral arms dealer, ugly legatee of the Cold War: reaping the rewards of capitalism’s free-for-all in the post-Soviet free market. In the face of Bradshaw’s lack of conscience – another gentleman lacking a superego – Ned responds with the following revealing statement: ‘All my life I had battled against an institutionalised evil. It had a name, and most often a country as

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well. I remembered Smiley’s aphorism about the right people losing the cold war, and the wrong people winning it. […] I thought of telling [Bradshaw] that now we had defeated communism, we were going to have to set about defeating capitalism’ (346–347). Ned’s use of the word ‘capitalism’ is one of very few occasions the term has been deployed throughout the novels studied in this volume. But this uncharacteristic eruption from the national unconscious exposes a characteristic problem in le Carré’s Cold-War work. Once again an apparently balanced Cold-War binary proves to be anything but, for Ned quickly concludes of Bradshaw: ‘the evil was not in the system, but in the man’ (347). In these statements the communist system is blanketly condemned as ‘evil’ – without so much as a lost good intention, or a misguided soul caught up within it – and declared equivalent with a capitalist excess that is maverick – individual; aberrant – rather than characteristic or systemic. Capitalism’s centrality to liberalism is elided in both British political culture and British cultural production – not least in le Carré’s Cold-War fiction. If liberalism is a tangible presence – however rarely named, however reframed as ideological neutrality – capitalism is a tangible absence, a ‘not said’ of these novels, repressed quite as much as is the ideological content of communism. Thus, the defining ideological conflict that produced these novels — the conflict between capitalism and communism — is elided, submerged, repressed. This eruption is one of the few occasions when the ground that these novels proclaim to stand upon has shifted underfoot. It tremors briefly, before – very quickly – the foundations are firmed up again, the terrain smoothed and the faultlines, the cracks, the breaches disappear into the liberal fictional landscape again.1 Capitalism is both a prime mover and a manifestation of residual, red-toothed individualist, repressively authoritarian, militarily aggressive tendencies within liberalism — forever in contradiction with social liberalism’s milder, humanist aspects. These conflicts in what this volume has termed the ‘national ego’ have been incarnated in these novels in the person and character of Smiley. In respect of Smiley – and for that matter, Bradshaw – le Carré’s political position is somewhat akin to that of Dickens, as analysed by Orwell. Evil is not within the structure itself, the society or the system: it is in human nature, with individual humans either more, or less, evil (Orwell 1970a: 457).2 This is a kind of optimistic Hobbesianism, where the Leviathan is, while not quite kept as a pet, essentially tamed, and where both the state and civil society become a play of purely personal moralities. 1

2

Even with the benefit of another 26 years of hindsight, Smiley will dismiss ‘capitalism’ as British motivation in the Cold-War in A Legacy of Spies (le Carré 2017: 262). Ironically, Williams accused Orwell of the same ideological myopia (1974: 25).

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‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent. Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of authority and who do behave decently’ (Orwell 1970a: 458). Such a character is George Smiley. Smiley represents the compassionate state (whose individualism is compatible with the collective greater good), the rational nationalist (whose ‘deep love of England’ is free of xenophobia or chauvinism) and the moderate anti-communist (who sees that liberalism may not have quite all the answers and that communists can, occasionally, be human beings). These virtuous traits, when examined carefully, reveal themselves to be faultlines – man versus mass – as we have seen. But this is Smiley’s job, his function in these novels, as the bearer of liberalism – to solve problems, to crack cases, to resolve contradictions, or, more realistically, to embody them. It is this impossible mediating function that makes Smiley so engaging, that, in part, gives le Carré’s work the depth his espionage novelist competitors lack, and imbues his novels with a tension that energizes them. Let us now sum up this study’s three thematic faultlines, the Cold-War enemy, the state and the nation and offer an overview of what this volume has explored. ***

The enemy Almost every le Carré Cold-War novel depicts not just a defeat of the Eastern Bloc by the British nation-state, a victory of West over East, but a moral victory of liberalism over communism. The Cold-War enemy of communism is always presented as more reprehensible than liberalism at its worst. This anticommunism is a central, defining feature of le Carré’s Cold-War work, operating in tandem with the antipathy we have witnessed to the home-grown ‘mass’, with which it is in constant dialectic: the one cannot be properly understood without considering the other. In Western liberal minds, the Cold War between West and East formed a mirror image of the struggle between the British ruling and working class. Consequently, the perceived threat of the Eastern Bloc often functioned as a synecdoche, or – to use ‘mirror image’ more correctly – distorted representation of the perceived threat from the domestic working class. The representation of international communism in British fiction therefore has at least as much relevance to the realities of domestic class relations as it does to that of Eastern communist regimes. So to what extent communist regimes really were repressive, expansionist and the rest was, in a sense, by the by: it was what these communist regimes represented that was important in British ideology, in government propaganda and in Cold-War fiction – the empowered mass.

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Communism in le Carré’s Cold-War novels is presented in Manichean terms as murderous: aggressively expansionist abroad and repressively authoritarian at home. Call for the Dead features a communist penetration of both the British state and the British nation, in which conspiracy and murder are represented as communism’s defining tactics, indeed largely its identity. Ideology, ideals, intention are all unheard, invisible, repressed. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, while apparently comparing the Cold Warfare ‘means’ of communism and liberalism, ultimately condemns communism again, denying it valid ends, and suggesting it is dedicated to power for its own sake. At the same time, the novel venerates liberalism as ‘benevolent’. While communist rockets at Rostock may well be paranoid Western imaginings in The Looking Glass War, and the novel consequently questions whether communist expansionist hostility is real, the novel’s depictions of the East are themselves actively hostile, their reflection upon the domestic class enemy latently so. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy there is another, deeper, enemy penetration of the British state apparatus. In this novel, communism is silenced as much as travestied – a different form of negative depiction, while Karla is as Manichean a creation as one might find in far less ‘realist’ spy fiction like Fleming’s From Russia with Love. Communist ideology is a loud silence in a novel about communist spies. In The Honourable Schoolboy, the presentation of Eastern communism fuses with Western colonial attitudes: initially as invisible as natives to the Western gaze, communism here gradually becomes ‘other’, ‘savage’, alien. Finally, in Smiley’s People, communism is depicted as repressive at home and murderous abroad, a presentation that the supposed ‘humanization’ of once archideologue, Karla complicates but does not overturn. With its ideals and intentions carefully elided, organized communism is defined as essentially anti-human in Smiley’s People: a trenchantly anti-communist conclusion to these Cold-War novels.

The state Contrary to Control’s claim in The Spy, the British anti-communism depicted in le Carré is by no means purely ‘defensive’. The plots of The Spy, Looking Glass, Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People all feature aggressive anti-communist operations by Britain. Fiction here reflects historical Cold-War reality – British anticommunist actions in Malaya (1948–60), Kenya (1952–60), Borneo (1963) and Aden (1963–67); combined British/US anti-communist actions in Korea (1950– 53) and the Congo (1960–61). Covert British support of right-wing dictatorships to counter leftists and communists in Greece and Indonesia also undermined the idea of Britain as purely reactive in its Cold-War strategies. Defensiveness is thus a rhetorical not a practical position, a proclamation of Western innocence, which,

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suggesting an anxiety in le Carré’s novels about aggressive British state action, begins to take on the secondary meaning of ‘defensive’ as ‘self-justifying’. A particular microcosm of the British state is the subject of intense focus in le Carré’s Cold-War fiction – and yet, like an iceberg, like the unconscious, the greater portion of the state is largely obscured. Of the various institutions of the state, we see only the bureaucracy that administers le Carré’s particular branch of the state, the intelligence services: the men of the files and dossiers, cabals and careerism. Unseen, largely, is the military industrial complex that underlies all this, precondition of both the intelligence services and the Cold War itself. Bureaucracy is only the small change of a system of which the capital is power, profit, property. However, the intelligence bureaucracy in le Carré functions as a synecdoche of the state. It is the medium through which the novels channel cultural anxieties about the state as a whole, primarily by rhetorical anti-statist, anti-bureaucracy strategies, before ultimately reaffirming the status quo. There are in fact three different anti-bureaucracy tropes in le Carré’s fiction, which tend to blur together, both within the novels themselves and in critical commentary upon them. There is, first, the entitled, self-serving, myopic, inefficient administration of the civil service (personified by Maston, Alleline and Lacon). There is, second, an instrumental, accounting-logic approach to human life (exemplified by Frey, Fiedler and Karla, but also Haldane and Control). Then there is, third, a soulless, joyless ‘planned’ society (communist states in The Spy, Looking Glass and Smiley’s People, and hints in the depictions of planned, social-democratic Britain in Looking Glass). Le Carré’s anti-bureaucracy trope, this study has argued, serves as a homeopathic inoculation of the body politic with ‘a contingent evil’ (Barthes 1991: 41). This means that the broadsides against bureaucracy distract the reader from how these novels actually uphold the deeper state’s structures, ideology and activities. Smiley is a professional in amateur’s clothing; a bureaucrat disguised as an individual and an authoritarian passing as a humanitarian. For all his regular retirements, resignations, sackings, anti-statist and anti-bureaucratic rhetoric, Smiley is also the state’s reliable executor, its saviour, its champion. No one ever asks why Smiley is forever polishing his spectacles on the fat end of his tie. As with so much in commonsensical liberalism, it just is. On a literal level, short-sighted Smiley is defogging his glasses to enable him to see better. Like his tubbiness, his bad clothes and even his cuckold status, such a gesture is eloquently expressive of Smiley’s ordinary, flawed, vulnerable humanity. On a metaphorical level, Smiley is seeking clarity amidst the opacity and occlusions of the deceptive, treacherous secret world where surfaces are never what they seem. While the idea of Smiley’s misted spectacles evokes both the Biblical ‘we see through a glass, darkly’ and Marx’s analogy of ideology as a

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camera obscura distorting our perceptions (1977: 154), Smiley is not attempting to see through or beyond liberal ideology. He is, myopically, seeking clarity only in order to resolve liberal contradictions in the name of the political superego. In Call for the Dead, Smiley secures his despised superior, Maston’s state power, despite Maston’s bureaucratic complacency having permitted communism to penetrate the state unhindered. All Smiley can champion in the place of this bureaucratized apparatus is a status quo even more ante: the pre-democratic amateur state. In The Spy, Control and Leamas deploy the bogeyman, bureaucracy – the field agent’s desk-job nemesis in Banking Section (1964b: 24; le Carré 1999b: 484) – to ensnare the enemy, and re-secure the larger British state apparatus. In The Looking Glass War, the bureaucratic instrumentalism hinted of Control in The Spy is manifested in the character of Haldane and in the Department’s treatment of Leiser. While Smiley, for the Circus, shuts the Department’s operation down, this represents one section of the establishment-dominated state balancing out another. It is a correction, not a rethink, compassion balancing authority, and once again it secures both the state and the status quo. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley sweeps out a cabal of compromised bureaucrats, but, again, only in order to resecure the state and re-establish the establishment. At which point, after all his anti-statist rhetoric, Smiley will ascend to the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy himself. Indeed, from those giddy heights, as ringmaster of the Circus in The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley excels at the bureaucratic juggling act (see: ‘The Barons Confer’, le Carré 1999b: 185–210) and confidently walks the ‘special relationship’ tightrope. In comparison to other novels in which he appears, there is, in The Honourable Schoolboy, no denying that the state’s interests are also Smiley’s interests. Indeed it is likely that fieldman, Jerry Westerby is sacrificed by Smiley for just such raison d’état – nor is it clear that the novel condemns Smiley for doing so. This equivocation will come centre stage in Smiley’s People, as Smiley now plays fieldman to Saul Enderby’s deskman, and through the use of ever more illiberal methods secures both Enderby’s power and liberalism’s. Despite being depicted as an outsider to the state, Smiley not only reinforces but glorifies the British state, by achieving for it a major Cold-War victory. It is true that some considerable anxiety is expressed in every novel about the more ruthless actions of the British state. Resolution of such anxieties is impossible because liberalism’s avowed mildness, its professed humanism, will always be at odds with the violence inherent in the administration of law and the defence of the realm. More than this, liberalism’s ontological political purpose – to protect property, profit and power – will always be at odds with the social ideology of ‘rights’ which developed in later liberalism. It is this contradiction we see played out time and again in le Carré’s ColdWar novels, with a repetitiveness that clearly reveals anxiety, indeed a returning-to-

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the-scene-of-the-crime neurosis. In each case, Smiley becomes the crucible of liberal contradictions, attempting to resolve the irresolvable. Smiley is the divided national ego in these novels, channelling the ideological superego of liberalism, suffering under this harsh master, but never rising up against or rejecting it.

The nation The nation is not an immediately obvious – or commonly discussed – facet of either the Cold War or of spy fiction. Yet the British nation stands centrally in these novels as both the ideological battleground and the ideological vocabulary of the Cold War – the home, the land and the national character. Unlike the state, which has tended to be viewed negatively in liberal culture, the nation was seen in Cold-War British culture as innocent, organic, even wholesome: a shared landscape, a united citizenry, a collective national character, a common way of life. Anthony Giddens writes of the ‘attachment to a homeland [being] associated with the creation and perpetuation of certain distinctive ideals and values, traceable to certain historically given features of “national” experience’ (1985: 214). Yet there is nothing in the geographical, ‘racial’ or territorial assemblage of a nation that embodies any particular ideal or value, whatever imperial ideologies claimed about the English as an elect nation or Britain being invested with a civilizing mission. As the British Empire revealed, to lionize an ‘us’ is to demonize or dehumanize a ‘them’. ‘No human identity is purely inwardly formed. The “other” always plays some role. But it can be just as a foil, a contrast, a way of defining what we’re not’ (Taylor 1998: 208). Indeed, the idea of nationhood shed its normative positivity after the collapse of communism unleashed vicious national tensions across former Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The idea of a nation is not just a field of contestation internationally but domestically, its dialectic of ‘us and them’ active inside as well as outside national borders. Class was the terrain on which these nationalistic, Cold-War home-front battles were fought in Britain: the class system created socio-political borders within its national borders. Class was and is the guilty secret at the heart of the British nation, in the national unconscious. While the class war long predates the Cold War, it gained new currency, new potency when the decreed national enemy was international communism, an ideology and movement dedicated to levelling class distinctions and which presented itself as the arm of the international proletariat – the mass. In Call for the Dead, the working classes are depicted as untrustworthy, suburbanites as suspect and the new breed of socially dubious bureaucrats complacent about the communist threat. This leaves only the gentleman – in the

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dignifiedly shambling shape of Smiley – as the nation’s true essence and saviour. The gentlemanly claim on ‘England’ is part of the national unconscious explored in this volume, a feudal atavism that runs deep in British culture. Because the unconscious is a site where contradictions can coexist, in Call for the Dead, a counter-narrative erupts from the same source – the national unconscious. In this counter-narrative, the very term ‘gentleman’ becomes a lightning rod, a conductor for an entirely different nation, where land and wealth are commonly owned. This is a rare glimpse of such a thing in le Carré, however, and this British ‘common wealth’ disappears as quickly as it appeared. Class moves centre stage in The Spy, by way of the novel’s democratization of the national everyman personified by the contemporary, ‘classless’, nongentlemanly protagonist, Leamas. Yet the class war here is hardly democratically depicted: the text and Leamas are both in thrall to the gentlemanly Control (with Smiley lurking in the shadows). ‘Men’ not the mass. Leamas and Liz are set up as cannon fodder to secure the establishment; Control and Smiley live to fight another day. Or rather, to send others to fight another day. This imbalance is underlined by the fact that the true classlessness of communism – the abolition of class – gets no hearing. Communist ideologue, Fiedler never even mentions the word ‘class’ – no communists ever will in these novels. Le Carré’s Britons tend to mean something rather different by ‘class’. Leiser, for instance, in The Looking Glass War, is dismissed as ‘common’ by Haldane (le Carré 2011: 131); later Alleline will be declared by Haydon to have ‘no shadow of class’ (le Carré 1999a: 169). This is class as manners, aesthetics, taste – what Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’ (1984: 49) – not the structural divisions between the ruling class and the ruled. The larger class war suffuses Looking Glass, the domestic battleground of the class struggle offering a reflection of the Cold-War conflict between East and West. The war on the home front is distinctly one-sided, again: the ruling class does the ordering, the lower classes do the dying. Some critique of the class system occurs more potently in this novel than elsewhere. But this is repressed by the text’s overweening sympathy for establishment characters and affinity for establishment locations, in contrast to its negative depiction of their lower-class equivalents. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy reveals a breach in the establishment, allowing a levelling, classless, redistributive ideal to burrow into the heart of the ruling class in the person of the communist mole, Bill Haydon. But just as the novel reveals this breach, it again quickly repairs it – barely a word of communist ideology is permitted to be transmitted to the reader. The breach is also filled by the fact that although the gentlemanly class has produced a Haydon to corrupt the nation with communism, it has also produced a Smiley to purify and make England whole again. Indeed, never previously in le Carré has England seemed

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so green and pleasant: in recession-hit, strike-struck Britain, the environments of the working class – and the working class themselves – are nigh on invisible. With Empire the proclaimed pinnacle of gentlemanly achievement, but a subject hitherto submerged in le Carré’s fiction, imperialism belatedly becomes a central presence in The Honourable Schoolboy, via its Eastern setting. The novel’s hero is an imperial gentleman, Jerry Westerby, hewn in the public school, imperial, Newbolt Man mould, and with all the entitled self-interest that entails. Britain – as a landscape; as a citizenry – is very much in the background here, so the ‘nation’ is now a more abstract affair, as the Empire defiantly stretches the fraying mantle of Britishness around everdiminishing territory, as the threatening foreign and domestic ‘other’ merge. In Smiley’s People we see a more democratized British landscape and citizenry, as Smiley musters his people for a final confrontation between Britain’s liberal and humanist values and communism’s absolutism. But Smiley here deploys humanism as a Trojan horse for a harsher, authoritarian anti-communism, or, as he might see it, for an illiberal defence of liberalism. Hampstead Heath becomes the national canvas here, both private and public, a playground for liberal freedoms which is desecrated by murderous, Machiavellian communism, a national way of life attacked by an alien ideology. But, despite the novel’s populist title, it is ultimately the national elite which is, as ever, secured and upheld in Smiley’s People: ‘man’ not mass. Nation does not need to be a conservative ideology. A realization of the concept of a ‘common wealth’ which actually made the nation’s wealth common would be radical: a nation which was commonly owned, in which the ‘commons’, the multitude, the mass eclipsed and encompassed the entitled, the elite, the establishment. The nation is thus a contested terrain, with Gerard Winstanley on one side and Thomas Hobbes on the other. In the work of socialist, Raymond Williams, the concept of a ‘way of life’ is used in an inclusive manner; in that of conservatives like T. S. Eliot, it is exclusive and elitist. A left-wing nationalism lay behind the post-war Attlee government designating socialized, state-run industries and services ‘nationalized’ – owned by the people as a whole (Ward 2004: 107) – from the National Coal Board to the National Health Service. That many nationalized industries would begin to be privatized at the end of this volume’s time frame, under Thatcher, suggests how both impulses – the radical and the conservative – compete in Britain’s national unconscious. So although ‘nation’ can be a potentially democratizing notion, in le Carré’s novels it is almost never deployed in this way: it is utilized to depict and endorse an establishment-dominated, hierarchical, class-stratified country. Indeed, amidst the novels’ keywords we can discern two genealogies of meaning. One is valorized: gentleman, establishment, traditional, conservative, English,

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Empire, countryside, individual, private, liberal, ‘self ’. The other is denigrated: working-class, common, modern, socialist, British, local, city, collective, public, communist, ‘other’. Anxieties tug at the texts throughout, however: even as they assert establishment verities – the familiar, the ‘self ’ – their surfaces are troubled by the radical, the unfamiliar, the ‘other’. *** Finally, let us return to those opening words of Bill Haydon’s: ‘Secret services [a]re the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious’ (le Carré 1999a: 379). This volume’s analysis of the British national Cold-War unconscious has revealed – in and through the faultlines in le Carré’s work – a profound anti-communism. This anti-communism emanates from a gentlemanly establishment dominating the British state, meaning that imperialist impulses and conservative biases lurk inside post-war liberal democracy. But despite its centrist proclamations, liberalism is not really a no-man’s-land within the British Cold War, the class war – a neutral common ground between aristocracy and commoners. Liberalism serves the interests of the establishment, as we see from the role of Smiley throughout these novels. The establishment also stakes a claim to being the essence of the British nation – of ancient, traceable lineage, its roots deep in the national soil. But the British national consciousness is divided like that of the individual, like Berlin, like Europe, like the Cold-War world. So the other secret at the heart of the national unconscious is the conservative gentleman’s antithesis: the British nation’s leftist impulses – socialists communists, unions, the working class, the mass. Impulses that are sometimes found even within the hearts of those self-same gentlemen, as in the case of the communist mole, Bill Haydon. This is Marx’s mole, grubbing away beneath the surface, undermining the entire edifice of the establishment, the very ground on which it stands. The class struggle is the contradiction that lurks in the national unconscious, beneath the liberal common-sense centrism of Cold-War Britain. Yet it is a contradiction that – usually through the gentlemanly, liberal Smiley – is repressed. The breach is filled in, the undermined structures repaired, steadied, the ideological ground re-compacted and rolled as level as the playing field in an English public school, or the landscaped lawn of an English country house. That levelness is, of course, illusory, cosmetic: ideological. The mole continues to do its work beneath the surface, meaning the Cold-War consensus of post-war Britain, the ideological structure that underpins these novels, stands on shaky ground. ********

Appendix: Plot Synopses

Call for the Dead plot synopsis Circa 1960, security agent George Smiley informally interviews Foreign Office official, Samuel Fennan about his communist past. Smiley tells Fennan he has nothing to fear, so is shocked when Fennan commits suicide afterwards. At odds with his bureaucratic superior, Maston, Smiley’s suspicions rest on an early morning call Fennan requested the night before his ‘suicide’. Resigning in frustration and pursuing the investigation independently, Smiley discovers Fennan was murdered because he was about to expose his wife, Mrs Fennan’s espionage. The plot was masterminded by Smiley’s former student and resistance colleague in Nazi Germany, Dieter Frey, now a GDR agent. In London, Frey kills Mrs Fennan at a theatre, but when Smiley pursues Frey to banks of the Thames, Frey is killed by Smiley in a scuffle.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold plot synopsis Rough-hewn, long-standing secret agent Leamas’ German networks have been decimated by GDR espionage chief, former Nazi, Hans Mundt. Back in London, Leamas’ decline into alcoholism and his subsequent imprisonment are eventually revealed to the reader as elaborate cover, designed by British spymaster, Control. Leamas’ lover, Liz, a communist, is unaware of his true work. Posing as a defector, Leamas is taken to the GDR by communist agents, where it transpires his Stasi interrogator, Jens Fiedler, suspects that his own superior, Mundt, is a British agent. When Fiedler brings the case to a Tribunal, Mundt brings in Liz as a witness to discredit Leamas’ ‘defection’ as a Western plot, and Fiedler is arrested. When Mundt releases Liz and Leamas from prison, Leamas realizes Fiedler was correct, that Mundt is a Western agent, and Leamas’ function was to discredit

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Fiedler and secure Mundt’s position. As Liz and Leamas are escaping over the Berlin Wall, Liz is shot and Leamas chooses to die rather than return to the West.

The Looking Glass War plot synopsis Leclerc, head of a now moribund wartime Intelligence Department, now moribund, gains intelligence that suggests the GDR is installing missiles near the Western border. Department member, Taylor is mysteriously killed while in Finland attempting to obtain a pilot’s aerial photographs of the rockets. Leclerc’s aide, Avery fails to retrieve the film on a second trip to Finland. Fred Leiser, a middle-aged Pole who worked for the Department in the war, is hastily trained, in Oxford, saddled with outdated equipment by the rival Circus and sent to the GDR to investigate. As the Department listens via radio nearby, Leiser kills a border guard, and finding out nothing about the missiles, is soon captured by the GDR authorities. Control sends Smiley to shut the Department’s operation down.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy plot synopsis Civil servant, Oliver Lacon brings Smiley out of retirement to investigate which of a Circus cabal of four – Percy Alleline (codename: Tinker), Toby Esterhase (Tailor), Roy Bland (Soldier) and Bill Haydon (Sailor) – is a long-standing Soviet ‘mole’ or penetration agent. The key information about the mole comes from Irina, a Soviet agent, via Ricki Tarr, a Scalphunter. Due to the state’s internal penetration, Smiley has to operate secretly, outside the Circus, scrutinizing files and conducting interviews at a London hotel. Smiley finally ensnares the mole, Haydon, who is arrested and interrogated at Sarratt, the Circus’s training school. In a parallel plot, Haydon’s friend and colleague Jim Prideaux has become a prep school teacher, after being badly wounded when the mole compromised his Czech mission. The plots now intersect. Prideaux tails Smiley and, discovering that the mole is Haydon, kills him in the Sarratt grounds.

The Honourable Schoolboy plot synopsis Smiley is now head of the Circus, masterminding Operation Dolphin from London, while agent Jerry Westerby does the legwork from Hong Kong, across

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Southeast Asia. Smiley’s plan is to strike back at Karla via ensnaring Karla’s longtime Red China mole, Nelson Ko. Inspired by love for Nelson’s brother, Hong Kong gangster Drake Ko’s mistress, Lizzie Worthington, Westerby turns rogue near the operation’s completion and tries to help the Ko brothers escape from the island of Po Toi. Westerby is shot and the American allies snatch Nelson away from the British. In a Circus coup, Smiley is sidelined and Saul Enderby is appointed Circus chief.

Smiley’s People plot synopsis Smiley is called out of retirement by Oliver Lacon when émigré Soviet dissident, General Vladimir, is murdered on Hampstead Heath. Discovering this was Karla’s work, Smiley embarks on a plot to ensnare his Soviet nemesis, travelling across Europe, following a trail of Karla’s murders. With the help of Connie Sachs, Smiley discovers that Karla has a disturbed daughter, Tatiana, in a Swiss sanatorium, to whom Karla is illicitly channelling Soviet funds: the murders were attempts to hide these facts from the Soviet authorities. Through an elaborate ‘sting’ in Berne, Switzerland, deploying former Circus personnel, including Toby Esterhase, Smiley applies pressure upon Karla, via his factotum, Grigoriev. This culminates in Karla defecting to the West at the Berlin Wall.

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Index Note: Page references with letter ‘n’ followed by locators denote note numbers. Absolute Friends (John le Carré) 4, 13 n.11, 149 n.14 absolutism. See totalitarianism Abteilung. See Stasi Adenauer, Konrad 70, 73 Africa 140, 143, 147, 153 Agamben, Giorgio 48 n.19, 116, 120 amateurism. See also aristocracy; gentleman administrative culture 19, 37–9, 96, 112, 118, 136, 190 Leclerc as 86–7, 90, 96 political antipathy to 39, 85 and public school code 110, 112 Smiley as 24, 38–9, 49, 62, 118, 189 Ambler, Eric 12, 13, 13 n.11, 26, 77 America anti-Americanism in le Carré 4 n.4, 20, 127, 137, 148, 149 n.14, 156 anti-communism 7–8, 9, 10, 33, 68 Bay of Pigs invasion 77, 77 n.7, 81 Cambodia campaign 144–5 capitalism and 68, 155–6 and China 122 and Cuban missile crisis 51, 79, 80 domestic containment 7, 42 and Europe 8, 68, 78–80 hegemony in Cold War 19, 33, 136, 137, 139, 145, 148 and Hong Kong 144, 148 imperialism 5, 5 n.5, 31 n.5, 68, 144, 145, 149 n.14, 180 industrial relations, 153 Korean War 153 Laos/Plain of Jars campaign, 152 ‘special relationship’ with UK 33, 68, 93, 133, 137, 139, 143–9, 190 spy fiction 19 and Vietnam War 20, 133, 135 n.6, 145, 146–7, 147 n.13, 149, 151, 153 Anderson, Benedict 15, 40, 137, 166

Anderson, Perry 32, 37–8, 44, 66, 85–6, 93, 104, 108, 114, 119 Andrew, Christopher 8, 116 n.18 Angleton, James Jesus 79, 116 ‘angry young men’ 37, 66, 98. See also antiestablishment anti-colonial movements 104, 112, 113, 150–3, 166 anti-communism actions in le Carré’s fiction 66, 70, 71, 81, 139, 188–9 American 10, 24, 81, 152, 154–5, 157 British government and 9–11, 16–17, 24–5, 30, 32, 154–5, 164, 181, 188–9, 194 Cold-War liberalism and 24, 26, 29, 87 Control’s 67–9 in criticism 17, 24, 123, 159, 159 n.4, 160 dissidents/exiles/émigrés 166, 169, 170, 171 Fennan, Elsa and 27–8 Leamas and 66–7, 69–70 in le Carré’s work (see under le Carré) 1984 and 18, 52 Poles and 81 Smiley as 29–33, 49, 124–5, 126–8, 163–5, 170, 172, 184–5 in West Germany 73 anti-establishment Call for the Dead as 37 cultural current of 62–4, 66, 85, 87, 98, 158, 160, 164 le Carré’s work seen as 11–12, 14 Leamas as 62, 64–6 Looking Glass War as 77 n.6, 78, 85, 87, 102 Smiley’s People as 160–1 The Spy as 53, 54, 64, 65, 66 Thatcher as 160 Tinker Tailor as 117

Index anti-statism 13. See also bureaucracy Call for the Dead 24, 34, 37 Looking Glass War 91 Smiley’s People 158, 160, 161, 164, 165 Tinker Tailor 116, 118, 190 Arendt, Hannah 26, 35, 46, 54, 58, 67, 162, 171, 172 aristocracy. See also gentleman; establishment amateurism and 38–9, 44 Ann Smiley and 44, 168 British society and 1, 12 n.9, 92, 109, 112, 194 establishment and 1, 77, 86, 92, 100, 109, 127, 129, 167, 193–4 Haydon and 1, 127 Lacon and 167 Oxford and 100 as styling 46, 86 Westerby and 142 Armageddon. See nuclear war atomic bomb. See nuclear weapons Attlee, Clement 7, 30, 30 n.3, 193 Avery, John (le Carré character, Looking Glass) 85–6, 88–9, 91, 92 n.19, 93, 94–6, 97, 100, 101 Bakhtin, Mikhail 47, 119 Barley, Tony 24, 49, 123, 135 Barthes, Roland 5, 37, 47, 59, 101, 119, 164, 189 Bay of Pigs invasion 77, 77 n.7, 81 Beene, LynnDianne 17 Benjamin, Walter 46, 97 Benn, Tony 104, 131 Berlin 5, 8, 17, 21, 51, 52, 55, 64, 133, 154 Berlin crisis 17, 51, 51 n.1, 73, 79 Berlin Wall Cold-War icon 3, 51, 54, 61, 71, 73, 89, 175, 176 Smiley’s People and 71, 157, 174–5, 176, 178 The Spy and 19–20, 51–2, 53, 53 n.8, 54–7, 61, 62, 70–1, 72–3 thrillers and 52 Western ideology and 17, 41 n.14, 54 Bevin, Ernest 7, 17, 25, 30 n.3 Blake, George 23, 28, 33, 48 Blunt, Anthony, Sir 1, 3, 115 n.16, 158, 159, 160, 160 n.11

221

Bond, James 16, 52, 52 n.5, 63, 110, 120 Bourdieu, Pierre 140, 144, 144 n.11, 192 Boyle, Andrew 127, 158, 158 n.3 Brandt, Willy 73, 122 Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh) 98, 99 n.21, 112, 131, 183 Britain Cold-War role 9, 10, 21, 24–5, 41 n.14, 87, 99, 122, 140, 154–5 decline of American reviews’ recognition of 77, 106, 106 n.11, 135, 135 n.8 aristocracy/amateur class and 39, 77, 85, 87, 145 n.12, 167–8 blamed on ‘mole’ in le Carré 104, 127, 145 n.12 British reviews’ avoidance of 77, 77 n.7, 135 decolonization and 9–10, 63, 79–80, 94, 137–8, 148 Honourable Schoolboy and 20, 137–8, 145, 145 n.12, 148 le Carré seen as chronicler of 5, 14, 77–8, 137–8 Looking Glass War and 20, 79–80, 93–6, 96 n.20, 98, 102 Smiley’s People and 14, 167 Tinker Tailor and 106, 108, 113, 126–7 working class and 14, 20, 41, 90, 93–6, 96 n.20, 98, 102, 113, 167–8 industrial relations in 10–11, 15, 26, 41 n.15, 41, 96 n.20, 104, 167–8, 191, 193 invasion of Soviet Union 7 landscape of in le Carré’s fiction 3, 9, 15–16, 191, 193, 194 Call for the Dead 40–1, 45 Looking Glass War 93–8 Smiley’s People 166–8 The Spy 64 Tinker Tailor 108–9, 113–14, 125, 131 leftism in 8, 10–11, 16, 18, 19, 193–4 Call for the Dead 25–7, 32–3, 37 Honourable Schoolboy 154–5 Looking Glass 78, 87 Smiley’s People 158, 168, 170 The Spy 58–9

222

Index

Tinker Tailor 104, 111, 113, 115, 127–9, 128 n.25, 131–2 as non ideological/neutral 13, 18, 31, 42, 69–70, 123–4, 194 British Empire. See also imperialism America and 93, 143–4, 144–7 as benign, 15, 46, 46 n.16, 138, 139–40, 145 n.12, 146, 148, 166 n.14, 191 British attitudes to 10 n.8, 15, 30 n.3, 46, 46 n.16, 113, 137, 138–9, 155 brutality of 10, 46, 47, 121 n.21, 140, 145 and capitalism/exploitation 97, 140, 142–3, 150, 155–6 Cold War and 10, 140, 150–4, 156 n.16 end of 10, 14, 20, 63, 79–80, 111, 112–13, 133, 145 n.12, 193 gentlemanly class and 46, 97, 109–11, 112–14, 126, 137, 140, 142–3, 193 Hong Kong and 133, 144 imperial service 97, 112–15, 126, 138, 140, 142, 142 n.10, 168 le Carré’s fiction and 14–15, 112, 136–7 ‘othering’ and 8, 101, 191 ‘postimperial melancholia’ 113, 136–7, 138, 146, 148 spy fiction and 100–11, 136 British national identity Call for the Dead and 40–8 class struggle and 16, 64–8, 78, 92–3, 113, 192, 194 decency and 44, 45, 46, 49, 58, 59, 93, 107, 131 democracy/freedom and 16, 40, 47–8, 65, 93, 98, 99–100, 113, 124, 139, 143 establishment and 16, 193–4 Call for the Dead 40, 44, 47–8, 49 Honourable Schoolboy 143 Looking Glass 78, 93, 96–8, 99–101 Smiley’s People 167–8 The Spy 65–6 Tinker Tailor 107–15 Honourable Schoolboy and 137 le Carré’s work and 11, 14–16, 193–4 left-wing nationalism 40, 47, 193 Looking Glass War and 92–102 Prideaux as British everyman 109–11, 115 Smiley as British everyman/avatar 14, 16, 44–6, 49, 62, 106, 107–8, 115, 169, 179

Smiley’s People and 166–171 The Spy and 62–6, 67 suburbia and 42–3 Tinker Tailor and 107–15 working class and 40–2, 62–6, 94–6, 99–101, 192 World War II and 44, 98–101 Buchan, John 15, 46 n.16, 91 n.18, 111 bureaucracy Call for the Dead 23–4, 34–7, 37–9, 49, 189, 190 Honourable Schoolboy 139, 143, 190 intelligence agencies as 11, 13, 14, 20, 23, 33, 77, 106, 116, 189 linked to communism 35, 38, 55, 57, 90 n.15, 106, 116–18, 161–4, 189 linked to fascism 35–7, 57, 72, 77, 88–9, 91, 102, 189, 190 Looking Glass War 77, 84, 88–9, 90 n.15, 91, 102, 190 post-war state and 19–20, 24, 34–5, 37–9, 89, 116, 164, 189, 190 Smiley’s People 20, 158 n.3, 160, 161–5, 166, 190 The Spy 77, 77 n.6, 190 as state synecdoche 11, 13, 14, 20, 34–9, 49, 77, 161–5, 189 Tinker Tailor 20, 106, 116–19, 118, 131, 190 Burgess, Guy 23, 33, 34, 48 Call for the Dead (John le Carré) anti-communism of 9, 11, 19, 23, 24–33 bureaucracy and 23, 24, 33, 34–9 establishment and 37–9, 40, 44–5, 49 ‘gentleman’ and 38, 39, 44–5, 46–8 historical spy cases and 23, 28, 33, 48 landscape in 40–4, 45 ‘nation’ and 40–5 press reception 23–4 scholarship and 24, 29, 31 the state in 33–9 Cambodia 142, 145, 151, 151 n.15, 152, 153, 156 Cambridge spies/Cambridge spy ring 1, 4 n.4, 20, 103, 103 n.2, 104, 105, 115, 115 n.16, 127, 158 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 32, 158

Index capitalism British decline and 85, 87, 92, 93, 96, 104, 167 British state and 34, 39, 186 communism opposed to 7, 8, 25, 42, 51, 68, 124, 133, 152–3, 155–6 domesticity and 42–3, 64, 83, 124 empire and 133, 137, 139, 150, 152–3, 154–6 greed/acquisitiveness 82–3, 119, 124, 133, 137, 139, 150, 154, 185–6 harnessing human nature 13 n.11, 142, 143 in le Carré’s work 13, 13 n.11, 25, 155, 186, 186 n.1 liberalism and 13, 51, 67, 153, 186 ‘mass’ culture and 3 n.3, 44, 82 Russian 184–5 Carter, Jimmy 157 Childers, Erskine 15 China 122, 133, 140, 149, 150, 152, 153 Churchill, William 27, 33, 54, 100 n.22, 139, 143 CIA 18, 53, 79, 81, 87, 116, 180 Circus, the (le Carré institution, passim) British state institution/synecdoche 13, 20, 78, 102, 118, 135, 139, 161–2, 167, 169, 178, 183 bureaucratization of 37–9, 116–19, 161–5 establishment 64, 90–1, 102, 108, 112, 183 as intelligence service 1, 11 rivalry with Department 84, 90–1, 90 n.17, 99, 102, 190 Smiley as head of 114, 119, 138, 139, 161, 190 civil service 25, 33, 38, 86, 87, 92, 99, 112, 161, 189 Clancy, Tom 19 class hierarchy questioned in le Carré 47–8, 100, 102, 119, 129, 192, 194 hierarchy upheld in le Carré 12, 14, 16, 17, 21, 191–4 Call for the Dead 19, 30, 39, 40, 44–5, 49, 192 Honourable Schoolboy 20, 142–3, 144, 145 n.12 Looking Glass 20, 90–2, 92–3, 94–102, 192

223

Smiley’s People 14, 168–70, 193 The Spy 20, 64–6, 192 Tinker Tailor 20, 109–15, 121, 192–3 importance of in le Carré 7, 12, 12 n.10, 16, 18, 192 struggle Call for the Dead 44–5, 49, 191–2 and Cold War 1–2, 7–8, 16, 18, 21, 94, 113, 129, 185, 187, 191–4 Honourable Schoolboy 154–5 Looking Glass 20, 78, 93, 99–101, 192 Smiley’s People 166–8, 193 The Spy 20, 63 n.16, 65–6, 192 Tinker Tailor 113, 129, 131, 192–3 understandings of 12, 144 n.11, 192 ‘classlessness’ communism and 7, 58, 63 discourse in 1960s 19, 54, 62–4 Leamas and 53, 62, 64–6, 192 Leiser and 97, 98, 101, 101 n.23, 192 Cold War, the Britain’s key role in 10, 25, 49, 80, 154–6 Cold-War consensus challenged 8, 10, 55, 58, 70, 78, 194 contradictions in 6, 21, 39, 194 historiographic 8, 80, 154 in le Carré 2, 3, 19, 21, 58, 67, 69, 82–3, 102, 132, 150 Orwell and 18 and post-war consensus 16 scholarship and criticism’s reflection of 17, 57 Thatcher and 158 Cold-War liberalism 24, 26, 29, 44, 49, 57, 87 end of 183 heritage 4–5 as ideological war 2, 6, 29, 45–6, 169, 174, 180, 181, 185 ideology of 3, 10, 14, 17, 78–81, 83, 125, 140, 181 Manichean Western discourse of communism as evil/‘other’ 5, 7–9, 15, 17, 21, 186, 194 Call for the Dead 26, 29, 31–2, 35–6, 44–5 Honourable Schoolboy 154–5 Looking Glass 78, 80, 82–3

224

Index

Smiley’s People 159–60, 174, 176, 180, 188 The Spy 52, 54, 55, 58–9, 60–1, 67, 69, 73 Tinker Tailor 122–5 communism as expansionist 3, 7, 8, 10, 26, 30, 50, 58, 154, 187, 188 imperial attitudes in 8–9, 151, 152–3, 154–5, 156 n.16, 188 impossibility of East-West dialogue 51, 102, 113, 172 perceived as US preoccupation 9, 10, 154 reflection of British class struggle in le Carré 1–2, 15–16, 21, 76, 94, 102, 113, 129, 187, 188, 191–2, 194 in politics 7, 10–11, 15–16, 21, 104, 185, 191 Second Cold War 157, 170, 172, 175, 176, 181 Soviets presented as Cold-War aggressors in British politics 7, 8–9, 10, 19, 30, 50, 52, 54–5, 68, 154, 157, 187 in le Carré 3, 5, 7, 9, 19–20, 30, 54–5, 61, 68, 80–1, 188 and War on Terror 4–5, 5 n.5, 180 colonialism. See imperialism communism as ‘absolutist’ 29, 30, 159, 171, 172, 177, 177 n.18, 179, 193 British left and 8, 11, 13 n.12, 18, 19, 63, 104, 127, 158, 194 Call for the Dead 25–7, 32–3, 37 Honourable Schoolboy, 154–5 Smiley’s People 164, 166–8, 17 The Spy 56, 58–9 Tinker Tailor 111, 113, 115, 128–9, 131–2 as expansionist in British politics 7, 8–9, 10, 19, 30, 50, 52, 54–5, 68, 154, 157, 187 in le Carré 3, 5, 7, 9, 19–20, 30, 54–5, 61, 68, 80–1, 188 human nature and 13 n.11, 26, 27, 29, 42, 56, 124, 162, 172, 185, 186, 193 ideological enemy of West/liberalism 2–3, 6–8, 10–11, 13, 15, 18, 19, 122, 185, 187, 191 Call for the Dead 23–4, 28, 30–1

Honourable Schoolboy 140 Looking Glass War 76, 79–81 Smiley’s People 157, 160, 162, 165, 171–2, 180–1 The Spy 52, 54–7, 58–61, 66–7, 69, 69 n.22 Tinker Tailor 122–5, 127 ideology repressed in le Carré 13, 184–5, 186, 188, 192, 194 Call for the Dead 25–8, 30–1, 33, 48, 49, 50, 188 Honourable Schoolboy 149–53, 154–6 Looking Glass 72, 81, 188 Smiley’s People 171–2, 188 The Spy 56, 58, 59, 63, 188 Tinker Tailor 20, 107, 111, 115, 122–5, 125–9, 132, 133, 188 as inhumane in British politics 7, 11, 13, 26, 29, 124, 159 in le Carré 7, 13, 183, 185, 188, 193 Call for the Dead 27, 29, 30, 42 Honourable Schoolboy 148 Looking Glass 89 Smiley’s People 157, 159–60, 159 n.7, 162–3, 165, 166, 170–2, 173, 175–8, 181 The Spy 55, 57, 59, 61, 72 n.25 Tinker Tailor 123, 124–5 as murderous Call for the Dead 9, 26, 27–9, 31–3, 35, 36, 42–3, 48, 49 Honourable Schoolboy 148, 151 in le Carré’s fiction 5, 7, 9, 188, 193 Smiley’s People 20, 161–3, 166, 171–3, 174–6 Tinker Tailor 115 n.16, 125 in Western Cold-War consensus 7, 31, 151 ‘other’/alien to West/liberalism 5, 8, 15, 21, 31, 75–6, 80, 122, 194 Call for the Dead 29, 31, 45 Honourable Schoolboy 148, 151–3, 156 n.16, 188 Looking Glass 75–6, 80, 83 Smiley’s People 174, 180 The Spy 58, 59 Tinker Tailor 111, 125 peace movement and 25, 32–3, 48, 59, 60, 158

Index socialism/leftism linked to 11, 13 n.12, 18, 188, 194 Call for the Dead 19, 25–7, 31–2, 35 Honourable Schoolboy 153–5 Looking Glass 90, 94, 96, 98 Smiley’s People 164, 166–8, 170 The Spy 56, 58–9, 63 Tinker Tailor 104, 111, 113, 115, 128–9, 131–2 threat to West in British politics 2, 7–8, 14, 15, 23, 50, 51, 78–81, 122, 152–6, 187 in le Carré 2, 8–9, 19, 20 Call for the Dead 23, 31, 33, 35, 40, 49, 191 Honourable Schoolboy 145, 152–6 Looking Glass 78, 83, 102 Smiley’s People 175, 181 The Spy 72 Tinker Tailor 120, 125 as totalitarianism 5, 26, 29, 30 n.4, 35, 36, 46, 54, 57, 70, 90, 159, 171 ‘containment’ as British concept 10 domestic 7, 17, 42–3, 67 in le Carré 19, 71, 122, 123, 125, 153, 155, 161, 165 literary 2 Truman and 7, 8 Congress for Cultural Freedom 18 Conquest, Robert 26 Conrad, Joseph 136, 142, 142 n.10, 173 Conservative Party 3, 25, 63, 63 n.15, 92, 104, 167, 170 Constant Gardener, The (John le Carré) 4, 13 n.11 Control (le Carré character, The Spy, Tinker Tailor) anti-bureaucracy views of 117, 190 British ideology and 9, 15, 52, 55, 58, 67–9, 140, 188 cynical plots/expedient morality of 53, 61 n.13, 70, 71, 91, 121, 189, 190 as establishment 65, 66, 67–9, 90, 101, 192 Cook, Peter, 12, 37 Cornwall 9, 40, 168, 169 Cornwell, David. See also le Carré, John class position 12 n.10, 86 n.13, 101 n.23 diplomatic career 63 n.15

225

education 12 n.10 father 12 n.10 Hampstead house 167 n.15 social connections with spy world, 115 n.17 spy career 3, 11, 34, 47, 47 n.17, 63 n.15 teacher at Eton 12 n.10, 109 n.14 vetting interviews 34 Crosland, Anthony 39, 85 Cuban missile crisis 8, 51, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80 Cuban Revolution 43 Cumming, Charles 4, 4 n.4, 103 n.2 Czechoslovakia 125, 130 Deighton, Len 3, 4, 12, 14, 33, 52, 62, 64 detective fiction 3 n.3, 5, 21, 62, 98, 119, 126 détente 5 n.5, 10, 19, 20, 75, 122, 123, 157, 163, 164, 165 Diggers, the 47 domestic, the 19, 23, 42–4, 49, 68, 168–70 Doyle, Arthur Conan 21 n.13, 39, 45, 84 n.10, 177 East Germany. See GDR Eastern Bloc 7, 8, 31, 50, 54, 57, 69, 120, 172, 187 Eichmann, Adolf 35, 35 n.9 Eisenhower, Dwight 7, 8 Eliot, T. S. 40, 79, 193 England. See Britain establishment, the amateurism and 37–9, 49, 62, 85–7, 90, 96, 110, 112, 118, 136, 190 ‘angry young men’ versus 37, 64–5 British decline and 87, 145 n.12 British nation and 1–2, 12, 16, 19, 192, 193–4 Call for the Dead 40–1, 44–5, 45–8 Honourable Schoolboy 136, 142–3 Looking Glass War 92–6, 96–8, 98–102 Murder of Quality 115 n.16 Smiley’s People 167–8 The Spy 53–4, 62–6, 73 Tinker Tailor 107, 108–11, 111–15 British state and 1–2, 11–14, 12 n.9, 15–16, 19–21, 193–4 Call for the Dead 19, 37–9, 48–9 Honourable Schoolboy 140–1, 154–5

226

Index

Looking Glass 20, 77, 77 n.6, 78, 85–9, 90–2 Smiley’s People The Spy 54, 62, 63, 64–6, 73 Tinker Tailor 20, 102, 104, 107, 114, 118–19, 131–2, 190 contemporary criticism of 37–8, 41–2, 44, 63, 85–7, 167 Control as 65 Cook, Peter’s night club 39 Cornwell, David and 12 n.10, 109 n.14 definition of 12, 37 n.11, 44 Empire and 140, 154, 155 fear of working class in 40–2, 63, 94–6, 104, 155, 168 Guillam as 113, 114, 117 Haydon and 1, 102, 111–14, 127, 131, 145 n.12, 183, 192, 194 Home’s administration as 63 homosociality of 44, 89, 112, 113 iconography/locations 40, 45, 108, 115, 167–8 ideology 2, 136 Leamas and 65–6, 66, 73 literary establishment 3, 76 Oxford and 1, 12, 20, 96–8, 101–2 Philby and 103, 112 public schools and 1, 12, 37–9, 44, 97, 109–14, 110 n.15, 115 n.16, 142, 183 questioned in le Carré 1–2, 11–13, 19, 20, 21, 193–4 Call for the Dead 45–8, 49–50, 53 Looking Glass 77–8, 77 n.6, 85–8, 88–90, 90–2, 94–6, 98–100 Smiley’s People 176–80 The Spy 62, 65, 68 Tinker Tailor 111, 115, 118–9, 128–9, 131–2 Sarratt as symbol of 1, 112, 114, 129–30, 183, 194 Smiley as 16, 115 n.16, 183–5 Call for the Dead 37–9, 44–5, 46–8, 191–2 Honourable Schoolboy 140, 143 Looking Glass 90–2, 101–2 Smiley’s People 164, 167–8, 170 The Spy 62, 65, 192 Tinker Tailor 104, 107, 109, 111–15, 118, 192

Thatcher and 160 upheld in le Carré 1–2, 12–14, 15–16, 19, 21, 193–4 Call for the Dead 19, 38, 39, 44, 45, 49–50, 190, 192 Honourable Schoolboy 136, 142–3, 154–6, 190, 193 Looking Glass 20, 88, 90–2, 94–6, 96–8, 101–2, 190, 192 Smiley’s People 167–8, 176–81, 190, 193 The Spy 65–6, 69, 73, 190, 192 Tinker Tailor 20, 113–15, 118, 119, 122, 131–2, 190, 192 Westerby and 136, 140, 142, 145 n.12, 155, 193 Fanon, Frantz 8, 153 fascism 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35–6, 41 n.14, 49, 54, 72. See also Nazism feminism. See Women Fennan, Elsa, (le Carré character, Call for the Dead) on bureaucracy 35–6, 37 childlessness 43 as communist spy 9, 27, 28, 36, 43, 49 critique of communism 27 Jewishness 23, 27, 28, 29 murder of 31 ‘non ideological’ communist 28, 49 Fennan, Samuel (le Carré character, Call for the Dead) 25–7, 31, 34, 36, 38, 42–3, 49 feudalism 45, 46, 47, 49, 100, 120, 121, 168, 170, 192 Fiedler, Jens (le Carré character, The Spy) 9, 54, 56–8, 59, 63, 67 n.17, 69, 189, 192 First World War (1914–18) 15, 180 Fisher, Mark 13, 49, 124 Fleming, Ian action-orientated superficiality of 6, 14, 23, 33, 76, 84, 188 Berlin and 52 Dr. No 30 n.4 From Russia with Love 56, 188 jingoism of novels 12, 96 n.20 Living Daylights 52 Manichaeism 7, 30 n.4, 56, 188 modernity 64

Index Moonraker 6, 30.n.4 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 52 public school ethos in 110 sales compared to le Carré 3, 52 You Only Live Twice 96 n.20 Freud, Sigmund 6, 27, 46, 49, 139, 141, 142, 143 Frey, Dieter (le Carré character, Call for the Dead) communist spy 28, 41 communist symbol 30, 31, 46, 47, 48 death of 42, 45–7 extremism 29–30, 31, 44, 49 Jewishness 28, 29 murderousness 9, 31, 34, 35, 49 Romanticism 29 Frye, Northrop 31 Fuchs, Klaus 23, 33, 48 Gaitskell, Hugh 25, 32, 32 n.6, 39 GDR (German Democratic Republic) 9 British communism and 59, 71 in Call for the Dead 36, 41, 47 in Looking Glass 20, 75, 78, 80–1, 82–3, 89, 94, 96, 102 as prison 3, 54, 56, 122 in The Spy 17, 19, 54–6, 58, 60, 61, 61 n.12, 68, 69, 70 n.23, 72 gentleman/gentlemen. See also establishment Control as 65, 69, 90–2, 192 country houses and 94 decline/death of 96, 110, 112–14, 168 definition 44–5, 46–8 delegation of violence 100, 121, 192 domination of nation 46–7, 62–6, 113, 131, 136–7, 142–3, 168–70, 192, 194 domination of state 16, 92, 194 Call for the Dead 38, 45, 48–9 Honourable Schoolboy 136–7 Looking Glass 85, 86–9, 90–2, 99, 101 Smiley’s People 14, 168–70 The Spy 64–6, 69 Tinker Tailor 102, 109, 112–13, 114–15, 121, 131, 184 Empire and 46, 96, 110, 112–13, 137, 140–3, 193 as faultline 45–8, 192

227

gentleman’s club 44, 48, 90, 101, 108, 112, 136, 142 Haydon as 1, 111–14, 126, 127, 192 homosociality 44, 89, 113 Leclerc as 86–8, 90–2, 94, 95–6, 99, 101 Oxford and 97–8, 109, 111–14 Philby as 103, 112 public schools and 37–8, 44, 77, 97, 109–11, 112, 113–14, 142 questioned 47–8 Smiley as 14, 16, 183–5 Call for the Dead 37–9, 44–5, 46–8, 191–2 Honourable Schoolboy 140 Looking Glass 90–2, 101–2 Smiley’s People 167–8, 169, 170 The Spy 62, 192 Tinker Tailor 107, 109, 111–15, 121, 192 snobbery of 39, 44, 90, 144 valorized 19, 21, 38, 39, 44–5, 49, 66, 73, 193 Westerby as 136, 140, 142, 145 n.12, 155, 193 Gilroy, Paul 46, 113, 138, 151, 154 God that Failed, The 26 Gold, Liz (le Carré character, The Spy) as collateral damage 61, 72 as communist 54, 55, 58–60, 65, 66 death of 53, 57, 61–2, 61 n.12, 61 n.13, 68, 69, 70, 71, 89 feminism and 59–60 as liberal 9, 60–1 relationship with Leamas 56, 62, 64, 67, 89 struggle between liberalism and communism within 58–61 underestimated 59 witness of GDR 55–6 as working-class/classless 16, 64 Goodman, Samuel 11, 48 n.19, 97, 100, 144, 147 Gramsci, Antonio, 17, 18 Great Britain. See Britain Greece 70, 104, 188 Greene, Graham Empire and 135, 142, 146 le Carré’s work and 5 n.5, 38, 85 n.12, 134, 134 n.4, 146 leftist politics 12, 13 n.11, 136

228

Index

and Philby 103 n.2, 128 n.24, 169, 173 as realist spy fiction 12–13, 26 relegation of politics in 17, 85 n.12 Guillam, Peter (le Carré character, Call for the Dead, Tinker Tailor, Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People) gentlemanly 113, 114, 144 role in Circus 117, 120 Smiley’s right-hand man 27, 48, 118, 121, 123, 130, 143, 148, 165 n.13, 178 Guinness, Alec 107 Haldane, Adrian (le Carré character, Looking Glass) 79, 88–91, 99, 100–1, 126 n.23, 184, 189, 190, 192 Hall, Adam 33, 52 Hall, Stuart 3 n.3, 18, 160–1, 168 Haydon, Bill (le Carré character, Tinker Tailor) and British decline 104, 113, 145 n.12 and bureaucracy 117, 131 death of 114, 120, 121, 128, 129–30, 183 establishment product 1, 102, 111–14, 126, 127, 131, 145 n.12, 183, 192, 194 exposure as mole 118, 119, 121, 125, 127 friendship with Prideaux 106, 111, 114, 127, 130 interrogation 125–8, 129, 183 mole/traitor 1, 5 n.5, 6, 20, 107, 122, 125, 183, 194 motivation 126–9 as non-ideological 9, 20, 106, 126–9 parallels to Kim Philby Honourable Schoolboy 136, 145 n.12 Smiley’s People 158, 159 Tinker Tailor 1, 103, 104–5, 106, 111–16, 122, 126, 128, 128 n.24, 130–1 Heath, Edward 92, 104, 155 heritage 4–5, 40, 98, 112, 183 Hobbes, Thomas ‘Common Wealth’ 15, 63, 64, 166, 168, 192–3 empiricism 66 on human nature 13 n.11, 27, 29, 46, 72, 110, 142–3, 158, 175, 179

Leviathan 11, 13 n.11, 72, 91, 122, 138, 141 n.9, 142, 161, 186 Hollis, Roger 115, 115 n.17, 131 Holmes, Sherlock 21, 39, 45, 84 n.10, 177 n.18 Home, Alec Douglas, Lord 63, 92 Homeland (US drama) 5, 5 n.5, 163 n.12, 180 homosexuality/homoeroticism 33 n.7, 60, 60 n.10, 88–9, 115 n.16, 117, 184 Hong Kong 133, 138, 139, 140, 144, 147, 148, 150, 152, 154 Honourable Schoolboy, The (le Carré) British class struggle and 155–6 British role in global Cold War 154–5 centrality of Empire in 10, 20, 136–7 communism in 149–54 as Eastern novel 136–7 imperial slippage in 137, 139–43 ‘postimperial melancholia’ of 138–9, 146, 148 press reception and scholarly reputation 133–5 public school ethos and 110, 142 and Quiet American 134, 136, 137, 146 reviews 134–5 scholarship 135–6, 141, 141 n.9 ‘special relationship’ in 143–9 the state in 137, 139–42, 143–4, 148 humanism Britain and 49, 148, 162, 166, 169–70, 193 British Empire and 166 n.14 communism as 7, 162 communism/Soviets antithetical to 166, 170–2, 175, 177, 193 contra bureaucracy 91, 160, 162, 163 contra populism 167, 175 First World War and 180 individualism 60 n.11, 72 n.25 liberal humanism 2, 6, 60 n.11, 88–9 and liberalism 157, 165, 177, 179, 180, 185, 186, 190, 193 love and 60, 88, 89, 91 as non-ideological 157, 165, 174 relativist humanism 180 the state and 161, 164, 177 Thatcher and 158 welfare state as 49 Hungary 10, 28, 83

Index Ideal Home Exhibition 42 ideology. See British Empire; communism; Cold War; liberalism imperialism American 143–9, 149 n.14, 156 attitudes to Easterners 139–40, 142, 145, 151 brutality of 10, 46–7, 121 n.21, 138, 147 as civilizing mission 15, 46, 46 n.16, 166 n.14, 191 Cold War and 150–3 communism as contra 7, 10, 153, 155 decline 133, 137, 138, 144–6, 145 n.12, 167, 191 Fanon on 8 gentleman and 46, 97, 108, 110, 112–13, 126, 142–3, 144, 145 n.12, 193 ideology 46 n.16, 112–13, 138, 140, 142, 191 ignored in Honourable Schoolboy reviews 135 indirect rule 147 Kipling and 121, 138, 140 in Malaya 10 nostalgia for 113, 137, 139, 143 proclaimed innocence of 146, 148 public schools and 109, 111, 142, 193 service and 97, 138, 140, 142 slippage in British discourse 137–40 spy fiction and 110–11, 136 totalitarianism and 46 Westerby and 138, 140–3 working class and 137, 140, 155 India 118 n.19, 123, 133, 137, 140, 172, 175 Information Research Department (IRD) 10, 11, 16, 18, 32, 35, 41, 66 intelligence services. See MI5; MI6 Jameson, Fredric 18, 31, 93 Jenks, John 32, 41 Jews 23, 27, 28, 29, 35 n.9, 56, 58, 113 Judt, Tony 11, 157, 168 Karla contrasted to Smiley 124–5, 148, 172, 176 defection to West 20, 159, 160, 161, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 181

229

‘fanatic’/ideologue 13, 20, 122, 123, 124, 125, 159, 172, 173, 174, 188 humanization of 21, 157, 159, 159 n.7, 160, 170, 173–5, 177, 181, 188, 189 incoherence of characterization 174–5 Manichean characterization 7, 20, 123–5, 171, 181, 188 mole plot and 122, 126, 129, 140 as murderous/evil 20, 123, 124, 160, 163, 172, 173–4, 176, 188, 189 paralleled with Smiley 169, 177–9, 177 n.18, 180 representative of Soviet communism 13, 20–1, 188 in Honourable Schoolboy 139, 150 in Smiley’s People 159–60, 161, 163–5, 170, 171–2, 172 n.16, 173–6, 180–1 in Tinker Tailor 13, 20, 106, 122–5, 132 silence of 9, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 132, 149, 174 Kennan, George 8, 24, 29, 123 Kennedy, John F. 51, 51 n.1, 55, 63, 73, 79 Keynesianism 16, 19 KGB 9, 159, 161 Khmer Rouge 145, 151 Khrushchev, Nikita 8, 32, 43, 51 n.1, 59, 73, 136 Kipling, Rudyard 77, 121, 133, 138, 140 Koestler, Arthur 2, 18, 63, 85, 87, 123 Korean War (1950–3) 10, 49, 152, 153, 154, 188 Kynaston, David 11, 41 n.15, 95 Labour Party anti-communism in 25 Callaghan government 131, 155, 164, 167 economy and 27, 96 fictional government in Smiley’s People 20, 163, 164 first Labour government 25, 127 Gaitskell, Hugh and 32, 32 n.6 IRD and 32 le Carré and 86 n.13 left wing of 11, 32, 104, 131 MI5 fear of 104, 116 modernization under first Wilson government 62, 63, 85, 96, 102

230

Index

post-war/Attlee government 25, 27, 30 n.3, 34, 35, 38, 62, 99, 193 second Wilson government 104, 116, 119 Lacon, Oliver (le Carré character, Tinker Tailor, Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People) 5 n.5, 108, 112, 114, 118–19, 120, 129–30, 161–5, 167, 172 n.16, 175, 189 Laos 151, 152, 153, 156 Larkin, Philip 60, 96 n.20, 98 Leamas, Alec (le Carré character, The Spy) anti-communism of 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 70 character of 56, 59, 62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 101, 121 death of 57, 61–2, 69, 70, 71, 73, 84 n.11, 141, 192 establishment and 53–4, 64–6, 67–8, 100, 117 love and/Liz 56, 59, 60, 61, 64, 67, 70–1, 89 Western ideology and, 55, 58, 66–7, 69–70, 69 n.22, 70, 71 working class status/‘classlessness’ 16, 20, 53, 62–5, 69, 84 n.11, 100, 121, 192 Leavis, F. R. 17, 44, 68 n.19 le Carré, John. See also Cornwell, David; individual works: Call for the Dead; The Honourable Schoolboy; A Legacy of Spies; The Looking Glass War; The Naïve and Sentimental Lover; Smiley’s People; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; individual fictional characters anti-American attitudes in, 4 n.4, 20, 127, 137, 143–9, 149 n.14, 156 anti-communism of 6–7, 9, 11, 25–33, 157 n.1, 187–8, 193–4 Call for the Dead 49–50 Honourable Schoolboy 20, 136, 143, 154–5, 156 Looking Glass 67, 81–3 Smiley’s People 159, 162–3, 170, 171–6, 180, 188 The Spy 52, 54–62 Tinker Tailor 122–5

chronicler of British decline 14, 93, 133, 135–40, 143–9 Cold War history and 1, 10, 19, 28, 51, 80, 130, 134, 152, 154, 160, 188 as Cold-War literature 1–6, 16–21, 187–94 Cold-War politics underestimated 17 Honourable Schoolboy 135, 141–2, 159–60, 165 n.13 Looking Glass 75, 77, 84–5, 85 n.12 Tinker Tailor 105–6, 106 n.9, 130 critical consensus on 2, 5–6, 17, 153, 154, 189 Deighton and 3, 4, 12, 14, 33, 52, 62, 64 Fleming and comparative sales 3, 52 contrast to 6, 12, 14, 23, 33, 64, 76, 84 n.11 similarity to 7, 52, 56, 110, 188 genre and 2, 3 n.3, 31, 39, 76, 76 n.4, 105, 119, 120, 126, 134, 135 individualism in novels of contra bureaucracy 37–9, 118, 162, 171 contra communism 30, 38–9, 55, 57, 59, 69 n.20, 72 n.25, 160, 171, 185, 194 laissez faire liberalism and 49, 124, 141 n.9, 142–3, 142 n.10, 175, 186 Smiley and 24, 30, 107, 179, 185, 189 the state and as anti-individualism 11, 34, 37, 38, 39, 60, 72 n.25, 88–9, 90 n.15, 118, 141–3, 160 as guaranteeing individualism 72, 164, 169 liberal ideology in novels of presented as ‘common sense’/ neutrality 13, 17, 180–1, 185–6, 189, 194 Call for the Dead 31 Smiley’s People 157, 160, 165, 169, 174, 180–1 The Spy 61, 66–70, 72 Tinker Tailor 123–5 questioned 49, 75–6, 78–81, 120 upheld 3, 13, 17, 18–19, 21, 26, 185–6, 189–91, 194

Index Call for the Dead 30, 33, 39, 45, 48–9 Honourable Schoolboy 138, 141, 148 Looking Glass 82–3, 98 Smiley’s People 157, 164, 179–81 The Spy 9, 57, 60–1, 65, 66–71 Tinker Tailor 119, 121–2, 128, 130–2 moral equivalence in novels of Call for the Dead 45–9 claimed by scholars 5, 9, 24, 53, 56–8, 69, 122, 123, 176, 178–9 Looking Glass 70–2 Secret Pilgrim 183–4 Smiley’s People 160, 176–80 The Spy 9, 53, 56–8, 68–9, 70–2 Tinker Tailor 122, 123–5 personal valorized over political 17, 70–1, 83, 88–9, 141, 146, 170, 171, 173–4, 184, 186–7 radical reputation of 2, 5–6, 53, 73, 102, 155 scholarship on 5–6, 10–11, 17–18, 19, 183 Call for the Dead 23–4, 29, 31 Honourable Schoolboy 133, 135, 141, 141 n.9 Looking Glass 77–8, 80, 84, 88, 91, 93, 99 Smiley’s People 160, 165 n.13, 179 The Spy 53–4, 56, 57, 58, 59, 67, 69, 72 Tinker Tailor 106–7, 113, 114, 122, 125, 126, 128, 130 Leclerc (le Carré character, Looking Glass) amateur 87–8, 90, 91 attitude to working class 94–6, 97, 99–100, 101 establishment 85, 86–7, 90, 92, 95–6, 99, 101–2 homosexual? 89, 184 narcissism 75, 80 violence and 121 Second World War and 99–100 Legacy of Spies, A (John le Carré) 4–5, 71, 72, 186 n.1 Leiser, Fred (le Carré character, Looking Glass) anti-communism and 81

231

as establishment pawn 88, 89, 99, 101–2, 121, 190 homoeroticism and 89 London neighbourhood 94, 167 operation as Cold-War provocation 81–2, 88 Polish immigrant 81, 88, 95, 97, 101 representative of love/liberalism 88–9 training of 84 witness of East German austerity 82–3 working class 16, 77, 97, 100–2, 192 Le Queux, William 15 Levellers 47, 47 n.18 liberalism ambiguity and 57, 71–2, 88, 121, 178–9 anti-communism and 8, 9, 24, 26, 29, 30, 49, 127 anti-statism and 190 Call for the Dead 24, 30, 34–5, 37 Looking Glass 87, 89–90, 91 Smiley’s People 158, 160–1, 164–5 Tinker Tailor 116, 118 aristocratic elements within 30, 37–40, 44–5, 50, 85–8, 107–15, 131, 168, 170 authoritarian tendencies (see under contradictions in) classical liberalism (see under laissez faire liberalism) as ‘common sense’/neutral/nonideological in British ideology 7, 13, 17, 42, 66–7, 69, 194 Call for the Dead 31 in le Carré criticism 17–18 in le Carré’s work 9, 13, 185–6, 189, 194 Smiley’s People 157, 160, 165, 169, 174, 180–1 The Spy 61, 66–70, 72 Tinker Tailor 123–5 contradictions in 6, 19 authoritarian tendencies 8, 185, 186–7, 189 Call for the Dead 34, 36, 39, 48–9, 50 Honourable Schoolboy 140–2, 141 n.9, 144–8 Looking Glass 87–90, 91, 102, 190

232

Index

Smiley’s People 175, 177–81, 190, 193 The Spy 70–2 Tinker Tailor 120–2, 130–1 class inequalities 21, 40–5, 62–6, 93–102, 108, 113, 131, 154–5, 166–8, 185, 194 self-interest/selfishness 13 n.11, 139, 142, 175–8, 186, 193 statism 13, 34, 36–7, 71–2, 91, 116, 118–19, 122, 138–9, 160–1, 162, 164, 179 trespass on privacy 36, 67, 166, 173, 193 violence 36, 48–9, 70–2, 120–2, 141–2, 144–8, 175, 180, 190 ‘decency’/’benevolence’/mildness of 1, 3, 11, 16, 21, 185, 187, 188, 190 Call for the Dead 44, 45–6, 48, 49, 58 Honourable Schoolboy 141 n.9, 143, 148 Looking Glass 93 Smiley’s People 175–7, 180 The Spy 60, 68–9, 72 Tinker Tailor 107, 120, 124–5 ‘greater good’ and 36, 57, 58, 69–72, 100, 170, 187 historiographical consensus and 9, 127 human nature and 13 n.11, 29, 46, 110, 158, 179, 186 individualism and 30, 37, 48, 59, 72 n.25, 88, 107, 124, 141–3, 175, 179, 186, 187 laissez faire liberalism 13 n.11, 29, 30, 34–5, 48, 60, 110, 120, 142–3, 175, 186 literary criticism and 6, 17–18, 24, 56–7, 81, 160 love as liberal emblem 60–1, 60 n.11, 67, 67 n.18, 88–9, 91, 124–5, 141–2, 171, 173, 175 Marx on 18, 75 n.1 moral equivalence to communism (see under le Carré) property and 43, 44, 98, 153, 189, 190 questioned in le Carré 2, 5–6, 13, 19, 47–8, 71, 78–81, 119, 181, 189, 190 red-toothed (see laissez faire liberalism)

Smiley as embodiment of 13, 21, 183–7, 189–90, 190–1, 194 Call for the Dead 26, 34, 36–7, 44–5, 48–9 Honourable Schoolboy 140–1, 141 n.9, 143 Looking Glass 91–2 Smiley’s People 171–2, 175–6, 176–80, 179 n.19 The Spy 62, 71–2 Tinker Tailor 107, 116, 119, 120–2, 123–5 social liberalism/’rights’ and freedoms/ nanny state 186, 190 Call for the Dead 36, 45, 48 Honourable Schoolboy 143 Looking Glass 91, 92 n.19, 93, 98 The Spy 65, 71, 72 Tinker Tailor 118, 119, 120 Trotsky on 82 upheld in le Carré 3, 13, 17, 18–19, 21, 26, 183–6, 189–91, 194 Call for the Dead 30, 33, 39, 45, 48–9 Honourable Schoolboy 138, 141, 148 Looking Glass 82–3, 98 Smiley’s People 157, 164, 179–81 The Spy 9, 57, 60–1, 65, 66–71 Tinker Tailor 119, 121–2, 128, 130–2 violence of (see under contradictions in) London Honourable Schoolboy 147, 154 Looking Glass 20, 93–6, 97–8, 102 national symbol in le Carré 3, 9, 11, 16, 93–6, 98, 108 shorthand for ‘British state’ 165 n.13 Smiley’s People 166–8 The Spy 59, 64 Tinker Tailor 108 Looking Glass War, The (John le Carré) anti-communism in 82–3 Bay of Pigs invasion and 81 bureaucratic instrumentalism 88–90 class in 76, 78, 84 n.11, 86–7, 90–1, 90 n.17, 92–8, 98–102, 101 n.23 and Cold-War revisionism 78–81 Cuban missile crisis and 75, 77–80 elision of anti-communism 81

Index enemy as mirror 75–6, 102 establishment and state in 84–8 GDR in 82–3 interpretations of title 78 Labour government and 82, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 102 relegation of Cold War 75, 77–8, 102 reviews 76–7 rivalry between Department and Circus 90–2 scholarship 77–8, 80, 84, 88, 91, 93, 99 the state in 84–92, 98–101 Looking Glass War, The (1969 film adaptation) 76, 89, 92, 92 n.19 Lukács, György 18 Luxemburg, Rosa 153 Macherey, Pierre 6, 31, 33, 58, 81, 125, 129 McCarthyism 24 McEwan, Ian 4 Maclean, Donald 4 n.4, 23, 33, 34, 48, 103, 103 n.2, 115 n.16 Macmillan, Harold 3, 12, 42, 51 n.1, 63 n.15, 103 McNamara, Robert 7 MacPhee, Graham 139, 151, 154 Malaya 10, 49, 133, 147, 154, 188 Malayan Emergency 10, 49, 121 n.21, 147, 154, 188 Manichaeism 7, 8, 20, 56, 158, 171, 177, 181, 188 Marshall Plan 8, 68, 93 Martindale, Roddy (le Carré character, Tinker Tailor, Honourable Schoolboy) 89, 107–8, 116–17, 184 Marx, Karl ideology 6, 18–19, 75 n.1, 127, 189–90 image of mole 1–2, 2 n.1, 6, 115, 117, 149, 194 literary criticism and 82, 113 the state 34, 34 n.8, 116, 117 Marxism, 69, 82, 113, 126, 128, 128 n.25, 151 Maugham, Somerset 110, 110 n.15, 136 MI5 (Security Service) and Burgess and Maclean 23, 25, 33 Circus as 11 existence of 2 and ‘fourth man’ 103–4, 115, 115 n.17

233

le Carré and 3, 11, 12 n.10, 25, 33–4, 63 n.15 leftist subversion and 104 Philby 103, 131 vetting 25, 33–4, 35, 36, 37, 49 Wilson plot 63 n.16, 116 n.18 MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service, SIS) and Blake, George 23 Circus as 11, 23 existence of 2 le Carré and 3, 53 le Carré on 85, 155 Philby and 103, 113, 115, 131 Milgram Experiment 35 Moscow Centre (le Carré institution, passim) 118, 118 n.20, 122, 171, 172, 172 n.16, 173 Muggeridge, Malcolm 18, 63, 85 Mundt, Hans Dieter (le Carré character, Call for the Dead, The Spy) 35, 41, 43, 56, 57, 61 n.12, 61 n.13, 69, 70, 72 Murder of Quality, A (John le Carré) 115 n.16 Nadel, Alan 7, 17, 42 The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (John le Carré) 104 Nazism. See also fascism bureaucracy and 35 Call for the Dead and 25 communism and 27, 30, 46, 61 concentration camps 27, 28, 35, 41 n.14, 54, 147 Labour accused of 27 post-war Germany 41, 61, 70, 70 n.23 Romanticism and 29 Smiley and 29, 44 Soviet pact 28 Newbolt, Henry 110, 193 New Left 32 Night Manager, The (John le Carré) 4, 13 n.11 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) (George Orwell) anti-communist text 18, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60 bureaucracy and 35, 89 as Cold-War fiction 2, 18, 52

234

Index

empiricism and 66, 67, 67 n.17, 67 n.18 IRD and 18 socialism and 35 Nixon, Richard 43 nuclear war 4, 23, 51, 70, 75, 78, 120, 157, 169 nuclear weapons 23, 32, 36, 80, 80 n.8, 143, 157 Nunn May, Alan 23, 48 oil crisis (1973), ‘oil shock’ 104, 153 Orientalism 139, 140, 145, 151 Orwell, George 2, 18, 26, 35, 35 n.9, 52, 55, 59, 64, 186–7. See also Nineteen Eighty-Four Ostrakova (le Carré character, Smiley’s People) 161, 162, 165 n.13, 170, 171–2, 174, 177 Oxford University 11, 12, 12 n.10, 16, 26, 37, 38, 40, 44, 47 n.17, 64, 90, 97–8, 102, 111–14 Pathet Lao 151, 152 peace movement 25, 32, 33, 48, 59. See also CND Peasants’ Revolt 47 Penkovsky, Oleg 56 Perfect Spy, A (John le Carré) 4, 9 n.7, 149 n.14 Philby, Kim. See also Cambridge spies analogue of Bill Haydon 1, 105–6, 111–14, 126, 128, 130–1 British decline and 103, 145 n.12 connection ignored in Tinker Tailor reviews/scholarship 105, 105 n.7, 106 n.12, 159 defection of 3, 63, 103, 136 destructive effects of investigations into 115–16, 121 n.22 differences from Haydon 130–1 and establishment 3, 103, 111–14, 115, 126 le Carré’s comments on 128, 128 n.24, 155 popular culture and 4 n.4, 52 n.3, 103, 103 n.1, 103 n.2, 158, 169 Poland 81, 83 Popular Front 25, 26, 28, 127 Portland spy ring 23, 28, 48

postcolonial/postcolonialism. See anticolonial movements Powers, Francis Gary 81, 81 n.9 Prideaux, Jim, (le Carré character, Tinker Tailor) 109–11, 109 n.14, 112, 114–15, 120, 125, 127, 130, 142, 196 Profumo, John 63, 63 n.15 public school Cornwell and 12 n.10 establishment and 12, 37, 38, 39, 44, 77, 97, 109–11, 112, 113–14 imperialism and 109 as location in Tinker Tailor 109–11, 115 n.16 Sarratt as 1, 112, 129, 183, 194 Smiley and 37, 38, 44, 113 spy fiction and 110, 110 n.15 Westerby and 142–3, 193 Quiet American, The (Graham Greene) 134, 136, 137, 146 Reagan, Ronald 156 Russia (post Soviet) 184–5 Russian Revolution 7, 140 Sachs, Connie (le Carré character, Tinker Tailor, Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People) anti-bureaucracy 118, 164, 165 n.13 British liberal ideology of 112–13, 126, 137, 142, 148, 170, 179 compares Smiley to Karla 169–70, 177 East/West moral equivalence and 176–7 establishment and 109, 111–14, 167–9, 183 love and 169 post-imperial melancholia 113, 126, 137, 142, 148 revelations about Karla 173 Said, Edward 31, 80, 96, 139, 140. See also Orientalism Sarratt (le Carré location, passim) 1, 112, 114, 126, 129, 130, 178, 183, 184 Schaub, Thomas Hill 2 n.2, 24, 26, 29, 44, 57 Second World War (1939–45, World War II, ‘the war’) British economy and 9, 94

Index British national identity and 40, 44, 81, 98–102 class divisions and 65, 100, 102, 137, 192 dividing line in British history 37, 43, 78, 94, 98–102, 137 Empire and 137 Holocaust/concentration camps 27–8, 29, 180 ‘People’s War’ 98, 99–100 Sherlock Holmes and 45 Smiley and 25, 44 Secret Pilgrim, The (John le Carré) 183–5 Sinfield, Alan 6, 18, 25, 91, 125, 126, 128, 173, 174, 175 Singapore 133, 138 Small Town in Germany, A (John le Carré) 84 n.11, 87 n.14, 104, 104 n.3, 108 Smiley, Ann (le Carré character, Call for the Dead, Tinker Tailor, Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People) 43, 44, 91, 108, 123, 124, 130 n.26, 168, 169 Smiley, George (le Carré character, passim) as ‘amateur’ 19, 24, 37–9, 49, 62, 112, 118, 136, 189, 190 anti-statism/anti-bureaucracy of 24, 34, 36–9, 117–19, 158, 160–5, 189, 190 British national everyman/avatar 14, 16, 187, 192–3, 194 Call for the Dead 40, 44–6, 48–9, 48 n.19 Honourable Schoolboy 135, 139, 140–1, 144, 148 Smiley’s People 159, 162, 169, 179, 180–1, 184 The Spy 59, 62 Tinker Tailor 104, 106, 107–8, 107 n.13, 115 compassion of 16, 71, 72, 91, 101, 107 n.13, 125, 141 n.9, 169, 178, 187, 190 decency of 1, 16, 44, 45–6, 48–9, 59, 107, 114, 131, 159, 169, 187 as establishment/gentleman 14, 16, 115 n.16, 183, 183–5 Call For the Dead 37–9, 44–5, 46–8, 49, 191–2 Honourable Schoolboy 140, 143

235

Looking Glass 90–2, 101–2, 190 Smiley’s People 164, 167–8, 170, 193 The Spy 62, 65, 192 Tinker Tailor 104, 107, 109, 111–15, 118, 121, 190, 192 Frey, Dieter, relationship with 28–31 Homeland and 5, 5 n.5, 180 humanism of 91, 148, 161, 162, 164, 165, 169, 170, 176–81, 183, 185, 193 as individualist 24, 30, 38, 107, 179, 185, 189 as investigator 1, 5, 6, 13, 27, 39, 41, 109, 111, 116, 184 Karla, relationship with 20, 122–5, 139, 157, 163–5, 165 n.13, 170, 172–5, 177–8, 177 n.18, 180 liberalism, embodying contradictions in 13, 21, 183–7, 189–90, 190–1, 194 Call for the Dead 26, 34, 36–7, 44–5, 48–9 Honourable Schoolboy 140–1, 141 n.9, 143 Looking Glass 91–2 Smiley’s People 171–2, 175–6, 176–80, 179 n.19 The Spy 71–2 Tinker Tailor 116, 119, 120–2, 123–5 Smiley, Ann, relationship with 43, 44, 91, 108, 123, 124, 168, 169 state, relationship to 13–14, 19–20, 184, 187, 189–91 Call for the Dead 24, 34–40, 44, 48, 48 n.19 Honourable Schoolboy 135, 136, 138–41, 141 n.9, 143–4, 148 Looking Glass War 84, 90–1, 90 n.16, 90 n.17 Smiley’s People 160–5, 165 n.13, 169, 177, 179 The Spy 62, 71–2, 71 n.24 Tinker Tailor 104, 116–22, 122–4, 127, 130–1 tragic hero/saint/mythologized 14, 31, 44, 72, 107–9, 113, 139, 150, 176–9, 183–4 Westerby, Jerry, relationship with 20, 140–3 Smiley’s People (John le Carré)

236

Index

bureaucracy in 20, 158 n.3, 160, 161–5, 166, 190 communism in 171–2 contradictions in Karla’s characterization 174–6 détente and 5 n.5, 157, 163–5 humanism in Britain and 162, 163, 166 bureaucracy antithetical to 160, 162 contra inhumane methods 160, 167, 170, 174, 175, 176–9, 183, 193 Empire and 166 n.14 liberal state and 161, 164, 169 as non-ideological 157, 165, 174, 180, 185 Smiley and 163, 164, 169–70, 174, 176–9, 183, 185, 193 Thatcher and 158, 164, 167, 175 USSR antithetical to 162, 170–1, 172, 176, 177, 181, 183 Karla’s humanization 21, 159–60, 159 n.7, 173–5, 177, 181, 188 liberalism and 157, 158–9, 164, 166, 168, 170, 175–6, 177, 179, 180–1 Manichaeism 158, 171, 177, 181 populism and 158, 161, 164, 165, 167, 175, 193 reviews 159–60 scholarship 160, 165 n.13, 179 Second Cold War and 157, 170, 172, 175, 176, 181 Smiley corrupted? 177–80, 183–4 the state in 160–5 Thatcher and 158, 160, 161, 164, 167, 170, 175, 181 socialism (leftism) bureaucratization and 30, 35, 90, 118 n.19, 164 links to communism 63 in le Carré 11, 27, 30, 35, 56, 94, 96, 98, 111, 113, 128 n.25, 129, 167, 194 leftward turn in 1930s 25–6, 126–7 leftward turn in 1970s 11, 104, 131, 153–4, 194 used against left in politics 18, 19, 27, 30, 35, 56, 90, 164

planning and 27, 63, 90–1, 94, 96, 113, 189 Popular Front and 25 restrictions upon capitalism 16, 63, 111, 154, 167, 189 utopian 193–4 Soviet Union (USSR) Afghanistan and 157 arms reductions and 122 Berlin crisis and 8, 51, 51 n.1, 53, 55, 79 British imperialism and 10 British left and 8, 11, 18, 32–3, 58, 59, 104, 111, 113, 127, 158, 164 as bureaucracy 35, 90 n.15, 106, 161–4 citizenry 171–2 Cuban missile crisis 8, 51, 78–9, 80 dissidents/émigrés and (fictional)161–2, 163, 164, 166 economy 41, 63, 86, 122, 153 espionage (Soviet) fictional 1, 20, 23, 33, 109, 111–16, 117, 126, 125–9, 130–1, 188 historical 1, 3, 23, 33–4, 33 n.7, 48, 63, 79, 103, 105–7, 111–16, 115, 125–9, 130–1 espionage (in Soviet Union by West) 56, 81, 81 n.9, 121 n.22 expansionist in Western ideology 7, 8, 10, 30, 68, 187 framed as enemy of the West in politics 6–8, 9–11, 16–17, 29–30, 78–81, 104, 122, 131, 153, 157–8 in le Carré 8–9, 10–11, 17, 29–30, 78–81, 109, 113, 155, 162–5, 170, 171–5, 181 humanism as state ideology of 162 Hungary and 10, 28, 83 India and 123 invaded by US and UK 7–8 KGB 9, 161 Philby and 130, 131 planning and 41, 63, 86 and Poland 81, 83 presented as murderous in le Carré’s fiction 5, 9, 188, 193 Smiley’s People 20, 161–3, 166, 171–3, 174–6 Tinker Tailor 115 n.16, 125

Index in Western Cold-War consensus 7, 31, 151 revolution 7, 140 in Smiley’s People 20–1, 159, 161–4, 171–6, 178, 181 Soviet-Nazi alliance 28 and Suez 10 in Tinker Tailor 117, 122, 123–5 as totalitarian 30, 35, 171 Western consensus on questioned 8 and Wilson, Harold 63 n.16, 104 Spanish Civil War 27, 127 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (John le Carré) anti-communism of 9, 19, 52, 54–6, 56–8, 61–2, 65 Berlin Wall and, 19, 51, 54–5, 56, 57, 61–2, 72 class/classlessness in 20, 53, 62–6 empiricism in 66–70 endorsement of state? 68–72 GDR in 55–6 influence of 5, 52 le Carré’s career and 3, 51–2 Liz’s struggle between liberalism and communism 58–62 1984 and anti-communist texts 52 austerity in 55 empiricism of 67 n.17 fear of officialdom in 56 and film adaptation 52 n.2 interrogation scenes 57, 67 personal/political and 57, 67 n.18 power and 58 radical reputation 51–2 reviews 52–3 scholarship 53–4, 56, 57, 58, 59, 67, 69, 72 the state in 64–5, 66–72 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (1965 film adaptation) 3, 63, 68, 76 Stalin, Ivan 8, 9, 26, 28, 57, 59, 52, 71 Stalinism communism and 8, 9, 18, 27, 31, 32, 59, 66, 126 Eastern Europe and 8, 9, 18, 27, 32, 57, 70 n.23 Elsa Fennan and 31 Fiedler and 9, 56–8

237

leftism and 11, 13 n.12, 18, 25, 27, 32, 66 Liz Gold and 59 Popular Front and 28 Stasi 9, 83 state, the 11–14, 34 n.8, 188–91 Call for the Dead 33–9 Honourable Schoolboy 137, 139–42, 143–4, 148 Looking Glass 84–92, 98–101 Smiley’s People 160–5 The Spy 64–5, 66–72 Tinker Tailor 115–22 suburbia 16, 23, 24, 25, 42–4, 45, 49, 93, 191 Suez Crisis 10, 126 Swinging Britain/London 62, 85 Swinging Sixties 85, 90, 92 n.19, 93 Thailand 146, 152, 153, 156 Thatcher, Margaret anti-establishment populism 158, 160–1, 164 capitalism and 156, 170 Cold-War consensus and 19, 158 Cold War hawk 158, 164, 170 hostility to left 158, 164, 167, 185, 193 views on society 158, 175, 175 n.17 Third World War. See nuclear war Thompson, E.P. 32 Thompson, Robert 147 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John le Carré) British left in mid-70s 11, 104, 131 British landscape in 109–10 bureaucracy in 20, 106, 116–19, 131, 190 communism in 9, 11, 20, 104, 106, 122–9 cult of Smiley and 107–8 Empire in 10, 96, 109, 112, 114, 126 the establishment and 107–15, 117, 118–22 the nation in 107–15 Philby, Kim and 1, 20, 103, 105–6, 111–12, 113–14, 115–16, 122, 126, 128, 128 n.24, 130–1 reviews 105–6 scholarship 106–7, 113, 114, 122, 125, 126, 128, 130 the state in 115–22

238

Index

success of 3, 104 violence in 110, 116, 120–2, 129–30 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979 television adaptation) 6, 107, 112, 130 n.26, 133 n.1, 158 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011 film adaptation) 4, 107, 133 n.1 totalitarianism ‘absolutism’ as 29–30, 171 British 34, 35, 44, 46, 88–90, 102, 115, 141 n.9 communism as 5, 26, 30, 30 n.4, 35, 36, 54, 57, 70, 90, 162, 170, 171 Smiley as anti-totalitarian 29, 36, 44, 45–6 totalitarianism theory 26, 54, 171 Trevor Roper, Hugh 26 n.2, 98 Trilling, Lionel 24 Trotsky, Leon 26, 82 Truman Doctrine 8 Turkey 8, 68, 80 U2 spy plane incident. See Powers, Francis Gary Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). See Soviet Union United Kingdom. See Great Britain United States (US). See America United States of America. See America Vassal, John 33, 33 n.7, 60 n.10 Vetting 25, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 49 Vietnam 146, 151, 154, 156 Vietnam War (1955–75) 20, 133–4, 135 n.6, 145, 146, 147, 147 n.13, 149, 151, 153 Vladimir, General (le Carré character, Smiley’s People) 161, 162–4, 165, 166–7, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174 Warsaw Pact 8 ‘way of life’ of aristocracy 112 British 8, 14, 15, 92, 191 Call for the Dead 24, 40, 41, 42, 45, 49 as ideological 42, 67–8, 109, 193 Looking Glass 100 The Spy 58, 67–8, 69 Tinker Tailor 109 Western 5

Weber, Max 13, 38, 45, 120 welfare state 16, 34, 49, 62, 85 n.12, 94, 96 n.20, 99, 118, 158 West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany) 41, 61 n.12, 70, 78, 80, 87, 104 n.3, 122 Westerby, Jerry (le Carré character, Honourable Schoolboy) anti-Americanism 144–8 character of 141 communism and 140, 151–3 fieldman 136, 140 gentleman/establishment 114, 136, 140, 142–3, 145 n.12, 154–5 as imperialist 136, 139, 140, 142–3, 142 n.10, 144–8, 145 n.12, 147 n.13 relationship with Smiley 20, 140–1, 141 n.9, 143 Tinker Tailor and 114, 115, 118 White, Dick 131 Williams, Raymond anti-Stalinist 32 on class 12, 30, 65, 101 n.23 cultural materialism 18 ‘emergent ideology’ 60 on imperialism 142 on populism 158 ‘residual ideology’ 39, 113, 142 ‘service’ 38 ‘way of life’ 40, 193 Wilson, Harold anti-establishment 63, 85, 92 classlessness and 62–3, 64 industrial strife and 155 MI5 plot against 116, 116 n.18 MI5 suspicion of 63, 63 n.16, 104 modernizing programme for Britain 63–4, 82, 85, 86, 87, 92, 94, 96, 98, 102 planning 86, 89, 91, 94, 113 shift to right 104, 131 white heat speech 63 Winstanley, Gerard 15, 47, 47 n.18, 193 women domestic containment and 42–4, 67, 67 n.18, 168–70 feminism 59–60 Fennan, Elsa 9, 27–9, 31, 32, 35–6, 43–4, 49, 150 GDR and 55, 56, 61, 83

Index Gold, Liz 9, 16, 53, 55–6, 57, 58–61, 69, 70, 89 nanny state and 36, 49 onlookers 112 Ostrakova 161–2, 171–2, 174, 177 personal versus political and 56, 67 n.18, 91, 91 n.18, 141, 168–70 Sachs, Connie Honourable Schoolboy 148 Smiley’s People 164, 165, 167–8, 169, 170, 173, 176–7 Tinker Tailor 109, 111–13, 118 Tatiana (Karla’s daughter) 170–1, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178 threat of/fifth columnists 43–4, 59 treated as property 141, 142 as victims 57, 61, 68, 70–1, 178 Worthington, Lizzie 141, 150, 197 working class British decline and 20, 41, 93–4, 96, 96 n.20, 98, 102, 168 cannon fodder 65, 84 n.11, 100–2, 192 characters in le Carré 16 Call for the Dead 40–1, 42 Looking Glass 77, 88–9, 94–7, 99–102

239

Smiley’s People 165, 169–70 The Spy 64–6, 73 Tinker Tailor 120–1, 141 industrial strife and 11, 15–16, 41–2, 96 n.20, 104, 119, 153, 155, 167, 168, 185 neighbourhoods 15–16, 20, 40–1, 45, 64, 94–6, 101, 117, 166–7, 193 ‘othered’ in le Carré 40–1, 64, 89, 94–6, 101–2, 120–1, 166–7 social mobility / classlessness and 42, 62–5, 94, 99, 101, 118, 192 threat to establishment/Britain 11, 15–16, 30, 187, 194 Call for the Dead 40–2, 44–5, 49, 191 Honourable Schoolboy 121 Looking Glass War 95–6, 99–100 Smiley’s People 155, 167, 168 The Spy 64 Tinker Tailor 104, 108, 121 World War II. See Second World War World War III. See nuclear war Worthington, Lizzie (le Carré character, Honourable Schoolboy) 141, 150, 197 Wright, Peter 104, 116