The Letters of John le Carré
I'm currently reading a selection of the letters of John Le Carré, edited by his son, Tim Cornwell, who according to the various dedications by his siblings died as well shortly after completing said edition. Unsurprisngly, Le Carré was good with letter writing, though better so the older he got, or perhaps it's that the targets of his praise and rage align more with this particular reader's in the last few decades than early on? But I think it's also that early on it feels like he's trying, there's a bit of a mannered quality, whereas later on the letters feel much more natural. Comparing the letters to his collection of autobiographical essays, what I was missing there - material on his relationships with his siblings and his two wives - is definitely there in the letters. Editing wise, it's worth noting that Tim Cornwell inclludes some samples of where his father does not come out looking good (two words: Salman Rushdie) as well as letters that showcase insight and prescience. Several of the ones the editor tells me were German in the original make me wish there will be an original language edition, because I'm wildly curious how those sentences read there. (Literature-wise, Smiley's work on the 17th century German poets not withstanding, I note Le Carré's passion for our a literature is a very 19th century one; the only 20th century author who ges mentioned (in passing) is Thomas Mann, whereas all the adoration goes to the gents (and only male authors are listed) from the 1800s. Also he keeps spelling Joghurt the German way, with a j not a y like in English, which is somehow endearing, and Tim Cornwell provides us with this early footnote :
A letter to von Almen from Oxford is litettered with references to the writers le Carré studied in four years of German literature, Goethe prominent among them. IN 2020 he named the 'greatest film of my life': the Faustian drama Mephisto, directed by István Szabó, based on the novel by Klaus Mann and sarring Klalus Maria Brandauer as a German actor who traded integrity for fame under the Nazis. Fans have speculated on th source of le Carré's pen name - with little result, as he usually claimed to have forgotten it. The nineteenth- century French auhtor Michel Carré wrote the libretto for Gounoud's opera Fauast, raising the slim possibility of a Goethe connection.
Right then. In 2000, Le Carré almost was on the British show Desert Island Discs but withdrew before it could happen with apologies to Sue Lawley: You will be vound to ask me a series of subjects which I don't want to discuss. These are childhood, fathers, spying, Salman Rushdie, Stella Rimington's book, (...) and the other one, 'what have you got to write about now the Cold War's over?" which drives me to near dementia. So I don't really think I'm your man. :Do you?. She agreed. However, he hiad made a selection of records already, which Tim Cornwell shares with us. So, here's John Le Carré's playlist for his own life:
Crazy Gang - Underneath the Arches (Ronnie and all that)
Noel Coward - Mrs. Wentworth-Browster ('A bar on the Piccola Marina')
Alec Guinness reading 'Four Quartets' - studious period
Fischer-Dieskau - Schubert songs? The trout?
Sibelius - PINE FOREST
Alfie Brendel on the joanna - I hear it as a dialogue... conversation...Beethoven
Geoffrey Burgon's Nunc Diminitis from Tinker Tailor
Other: a burst of zither music from The Third Man - at the risk of being banal
Über allen Gipfen ist Ruh, etc. - Goethe
(In case you're wondering: Ronnie was Le Carré's con man father and "Underneath the Arches" was used in the tv version of A Perfect Spy (aka the Le Carré novel where his father has an overt alter ego). "Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh" is one of Goethe's shortest and most perfect poems, otherwise known as "Wanderer's Nachtlied", and yes, it is essentially about death. There are various musical settings, including one by Schubert, but I imagine he wanted it recited, because it's nearly untranslatable precisely because of the sound effect:
Ueber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh',
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur! Balde
Ruhest du auch.
Okay, and now here are some quotes from the letters. On the three actors who played Smiley:
"I'm the worst judge, thanks to Alec Guinness. His voice was so beguiling, on stage, radio or across the fire that it's preinted into my head as The One. WHich is silly of me; because I secretly thought Gary Oldman was the better Smiley, and Simon RB the better voice, more naturalistic and impassioned."
(By email to Simon Prince on 5 April 2020, comparing Smileys (Alec Guinnes (tv) vs Gary Oldman (film) vs Simon Russell Beale (radio))
He did have to woo Alec Guiness into playing Smiley at first, starting thusly:
Dear Sir Alec,
I write to you as an unbounded admirer of your work for many years (...) Already we are all of us agreed on one thing that if we were to cry for the moon, we would cry for Guinness as Smiley, and build everything else to fit.
And then, when Guiness objected that was too old and didn't fit the physical description given of Smiley in the novels at all:
Let me get straight to your points. 64 is the ideal age. Smiley can't be less, arithmetically, and I fear he may be more, though I have deliberately arrested the passage of time in the later books. So nobody is at all worried on that score, and you must not be either. (...)
No, you are not rotund or double chinned, though I think I have seen you in roles where you have, almost as an act of will, acquired a sort of cherubic look! Let me answer this question together with your point about Arthur Lowe, because, speaking personally, they enable me to say why I at least see you as the ideal Smiley.
Apart from plumbness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes - when you wish it - to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worres about you. I don't know what you call that kind of empathy but it's very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it; when either of you gets his feet wet, I can't help shivering.
Which is a great description of some key Alec Guinness qualities as an actor, wouldn't you say?
More praise, this time to Tom Stoppard for his script for Shakespeare in Love:
Dear Tom, 4. February 1999
I loved 'Shakespeare in lLove', & loved your for writing it. It will last & last, my children & grandchildren already love it, it's one of those perfect, lighthearted, prfound works of art that actuall increase the public's awareness of its own cultural heritage. Very pompous of me, but true. And at the personal leve, it was like ak ind of doting Stoppard soliloquy on a balmy summer's afternoon, all wit & affection & musing. I identified most naturally with Webster, of course, who was surely one of youor most delicious conceits. Just wonderful. All, all wonderful -
Ever,
David.
(John Webster was the bloodthirsty little boy feeding a live mouse to a cat in the film, and a great literary in-joke on Stoppard's and now on Le Carré's part, as Webster was the most gory of Jacobean playwrights.)
On to the rants. On the Orange Menace and Brexit, to Nicholas Shakespeare, December 16th 2016:
Betweenwhiles, I can hardly believe the depths to which the US is about to sink, or has sunk already. Our supposed great ally is a rogue state run by a thin-skinned, truthless, vengeful, pitiless ego-maniac - I forgot narcissistic - & we miust never imagine he has a rational, temperate nature underneath the skin, & we must never forget how he came to power, to reminiscent of Our Dear Führer in so many ways that it dries the mouth.
Brexit? An act of economic suicide monted by charlatans, but ultimately inoperable & retrievable in fact if not in name. Or so I hope. Meanwhile, planned penury for the huge underclass.
Evidently Le Carré, being THE spy novelist, was asked whether or not he thought Trump was a Russian asset, as he wrote in reply to to William Burroughs, 23 July 2018:
Welll, I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin's position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that htey have obtained him, and they could probably blow him out of the water whenever they felt like it, but I htink they are having much more fun feeding his contradictions and contributing to the chaos. The terrifying thing is, the closer he draws to Putin, the more he lies and denies, the stronger his support among the faithful. You don't need to own Trump as an agent. You just have to let him run.
Verily. He also makes repeated mince meat of Boris Johnson ("Cowardice & bullying go hand in hand, & Johnson is a practioner of both"). As Le Carré and his wife Jane were among the people not allowed to be in the same room as he was dying of pneumonia in the winter of the first Covid year, 2020, despite her being in the same hospital for her cancer treatment, while Johson was parying at Downing Street, I hope his children got some satisfaction out of printing these disses.
All in all: very readablel, very quotable.
A letter to von Almen from Oxford is litettered with references to the writers le Carré studied in four years of German literature, Goethe prominent among them. IN 2020 he named the 'greatest film of my life': the Faustian drama Mephisto, directed by István Szabó, based on the novel by Klaus Mann and sarring Klalus Maria Brandauer as a German actor who traded integrity for fame under the Nazis. Fans have speculated on th source of le Carré's pen name - with little result, as he usually claimed to have forgotten it. The nineteenth- century French auhtor Michel Carré wrote the libretto for Gounoud's opera Fauast, raising the slim possibility of a Goethe connection.
Right then. In 2000, Le Carré almost was on the British show Desert Island Discs but withdrew before it could happen with apologies to Sue Lawley: You will be vound to ask me a series of subjects which I don't want to discuss. These are childhood, fathers, spying, Salman Rushdie, Stella Rimington's book, (...) and the other one, 'what have you got to write about now the Cold War's over?" which drives me to near dementia. So I don't really think I'm your man. :Do you?. She agreed. However, he hiad made a selection of records already, which Tim Cornwell shares with us. So, here's John Le Carré's playlist for his own life:
Crazy Gang - Underneath the Arches (Ronnie and all that)
Noel Coward - Mrs. Wentworth-Browster ('A bar on the Piccola Marina')
Alec Guinness reading 'Four Quartets' - studious period
Fischer-Dieskau - Schubert songs? The trout?
Sibelius - PINE FOREST
Alfie Brendel on the joanna - I hear it as a dialogue... conversation...Beethoven
Geoffrey Burgon's Nunc Diminitis from Tinker Tailor
Other: a burst of zither music from The Third Man - at the risk of being banal
Über allen Gipfen ist Ruh, etc. - Goethe
(In case you're wondering: Ronnie was Le Carré's con man father and "Underneath the Arches" was used in the tv version of A Perfect Spy (aka the Le Carré novel where his father has an overt alter ego). "Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh" is one of Goethe's shortest and most perfect poems, otherwise known as "Wanderer's Nachtlied", and yes, it is essentially about death. There are various musical settings, including one by Schubert, but I imagine he wanted it recited, because it's nearly untranslatable precisely because of the sound effect:
Ueber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh',
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur! Balde
Ruhest du auch.
Okay, and now here are some quotes from the letters. On the three actors who played Smiley:
"I'm the worst judge, thanks to Alec Guinness. His voice was so beguiling, on stage, radio or across the fire that it's preinted into my head as The One. WHich is silly of me; because I secretly thought Gary Oldman was the better Smiley, and Simon RB the better voice, more naturalistic and impassioned."
(By email to Simon Prince on 5 April 2020, comparing Smileys (Alec Guinnes (tv) vs Gary Oldman (film) vs Simon Russell Beale (radio))
He did have to woo Alec Guiness into playing Smiley at first, starting thusly:
Dear Sir Alec,
I write to you as an unbounded admirer of your work for many years (...) Already we are all of us agreed on one thing that if we were to cry for the moon, we would cry for Guinness as Smiley, and build everything else to fit.
And then, when Guiness objected that was too old and didn't fit the physical description given of Smiley in the novels at all:
Let me get straight to your points. 64 is the ideal age. Smiley can't be less, arithmetically, and I fear he may be more, though I have deliberately arrested the passage of time in the later books. So nobody is at all worried on that score, and you must not be either. (...)
No, you are not rotund or double chinned, though I think I have seen you in roles where you have, almost as an act of will, acquired a sort of cherubic look! Let me answer this question together with your point about Arthur Lowe, because, speaking personally, they enable me to say why I at least see you as the ideal Smiley.
Apart from plumbness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes - when you wish it - to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worres about you. I don't know what you call that kind of empathy but it's very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it; when either of you gets his feet wet, I can't help shivering.
Which is a great description of some key Alec Guinness qualities as an actor, wouldn't you say?
More praise, this time to Tom Stoppard for his script for Shakespeare in Love:
Dear Tom, 4. February 1999
I loved 'Shakespeare in lLove', & loved your for writing it. It will last & last, my children & grandchildren already love it, it's one of those perfect, lighthearted, prfound works of art that actuall increase the public's awareness of its own cultural heritage. Very pompous of me, but true. And at the personal leve, it was like ak ind of doting Stoppard soliloquy on a balmy summer's afternoon, all wit & affection & musing. I identified most naturally with Webster, of course, who was surely one of youor most delicious conceits. Just wonderful. All, all wonderful -
Ever,
David.
(John Webster was the bloodthirsty little boy feeding a live mouse to a cat in the film, and a great literary in-joke on Stoppard's and now on Le Carré's part, as Webster was the most gory of Jacobean playwrights.)
On to the rants. On the Orange Menace and Brexit, to Nicholas Shakespeare, December 16th 2016:
Betweenwhiles, I can hardly believe the depths to which the US is about to sink, or has sunk already. Our supposed great ally is a rogue state run by a thin-skinned, truthless, vengeful, pitiless ego-maniac - I forgot narcissistic - & we miust never imagine he has a rational, temperate nature underneath the skin, & we must never forget how he came to power, to reminiscent of Our Dear Führer in so many ways that it dries the mouth.
Brexit? An act of economic suicide monted by charlatans, but ultimately inoperable & retrievable in fact if not in name. Or so I hope. Meanwhile, planned penury for the huge underclass.
Evidently Le Carré, being THE spy novelist, was asked whether or not he thought Trump was a Russian asset, as he wrote in reply to to William Burroughs, 23 July 2018:
Welll, I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin's position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that htey have obtained him, and they could probably blow him out of the water whenever they felt like it, but I htink they are having much more fun feeding his contradictions and contributing to the chaos. The terrifying thing is, the closer he draws to Putin, the more he lies and denies, the stronger his support among the faithful. You don't need to own Trump as an agent. You just have to let him run.
Verily. He also makes repeated mince meat of Boris Johnson ("Cowardice & bullying go hand in hand, & Johnson is a practioner of both"). As Le Carré and his wife Jane were among the people not allowed to be in the same room as he was dying of pneumonia in the winter of the first Covid year, 2020, despite her being in the same hospital for her cancer treatment, while Johson was parying at Downing Street, I hope his children got some satisfaction out of printing these disses.
All in all: very readablel, very quotable.