Obituary: John Le Carré, the great master of spy novels, dies
Opinion: John Le Carré dies and neither the Nobel Academy nor Hollywood come out to apologize
Opinion.John Le Carré, the man who invented the Cold War
John Le Carré's father was a real gulf, one of those who are well liked in movies or novels but we would not want him at home.
"Ronnie [as the writer calls him] spent his entire life walking on the thinnest and slickest layer of ice that one can imagine," writes the son in his appetizing memoir,
Flying in Circles
(Planet).
John Le Carré was a spy because he lied from the time he was conscious.
A personality was forged by pretending to have a stable family, "with real ponies and parents."
But it was not like that:
his father used to "appear on the list of most wanted for fraud and appear at the same time at the Ascot races
, on the owners' compound, wearing a gray top hat."
His father had to
convince Scotland Yard inspectors to postpone his arrest on the day of his second wedding
at Claridge's.
He even invited the representatives of the law to join the party while both: of course they accepted.
It seems to be, always according to Le Carré, that he did not know shame, he was a brilliant speaker and with a salt shaker, one of those who put the public in your pocket.
"Seductive and persuasive".
But it also "destroyed the lives of many people."
Among others, that of his mother, whom Le Carré met when he was already 21 years old.
In a tape that she recorded for Tony, the brother of the future writer, this woman tells that her husband beat her and that was the reason why he left home.
"I still can't bear to listen to it, so I've only been able to hear some fragments," says Le Carré, who at the time of writing his memories is 84 years old.
"Ronnie's violence was nothing new to me, because he
also had a habit of hitting his second wife ... He hit me too, of course
.
"
Although there were days of roses.
When father and son went to the Monte Carlo casino.
The son was 17 years old.
Hours later, before dawn, they ended up at a jewelry store open 24 hours a day to
pawn "the platinum cigarette case, the gold pen and the Bucherer watch. Or was it Bucheron?"
Without a doubt
The Son of the Author's Father
is the best chapter in
Flying in Circles
, but from the book we will know that John le Carré was passionate about German literature, especially Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann.
His knowledge of that language was decisive for him to be recruited by the British secret service in 1956, when he was 25 years old, first in MI5 (offices on British soil) and four years later he applied to MI6 (abroad).
The boundaries between being a spy and a writer are made very clear: "I was not a spy who had become a writer, but a writer who happened to be a spy."
Okay, but did he reveal something he shouldn't?
"I did not want my stories to be read as the disguised revelations of a literary defector, but as works of fiction
that owed little to the reality that had inspired them."
Believe him, but they also sent him this message from his old House: "He who has been a spy once remains a spy all his life."
And Le Carré insists that his "former Service regretted having approved the publication of my books (...) although God knows that I had very little secret material to reveal."
They were?
A little more.
And the
case of Kim Philby
, the agent who betrayed His Majesty and preferred Moscow?
"I
have always criticized Philby harshly and that has led me to publicly clash with Graham Greene
, which I regret."
Le Carré adds that "the magnitude of Philby's betrayal is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not worked in the industry. In Eastern Europe alone, dozens or perhaps hundreds of British agents were imprisoned, tortured and executed."
To make matters worse, John le Carré acknowledges having met two KGB directors and addresses the extent to which ideological convictions are maintained (the writer officially ceased being a spy in 1964, at the age of 33).
You cannot close the chapter on the relationship between espionage and literature without mentioning that
his work at MI5 was his best school of letters
.
The heads of headquarters (in Curzon Street, Mayfair district), who had been brought up in the classics, "pounced on my reports with gleeful pedantry and monumental disdain" for their unfinished phrases and "useless" adverbs.
They let him know by scrawling words like "redundant," "remove it," "justify it," "inelegant," or "is this really what you mean?"
His three-year stay in Bonn allowed Le Carré to approach the New Globke Law, according to which the priorities of the officials of the Hitler regime (salaries, arrears, pensions) were restored to them in 1951, as if Germany had won the war.
He evokes that in the absence of his mother or sisters "I learned late to get to know women -if I have ever learned-", Nureyev's desertion, the interview with Bernard Pivot, how Joseph Brodsky
fits
the news that He is a Nobel Prize winner (yes, Le Carré was present), his two stays in Russia (1987 and 1993, this time he sees his brother Rupert, then a correspondent for
The Independent
), his odyssey until he met Arafat (they danced together), the
case Profumo
, Graham Greene's cat and mouse game as a spy and his relationship with the FBI "
The human factor
portrayed [some MI6 members] not only as idiots but as murderers") ...
And two appendices.
"What I like most about writing is intimacy (...) First you invent yourself and then you create your invention."
And a recommendation from, of course, his father: "
The only thing that can save you from ruin is your animal wit and a
double-breasted pinstripe
suit
, made by Berman of Savile Row, that you wear every night."
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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