Lamplighters, pavement artists, babysitters – they have taken on whole new meanings thanks to John le Carré. As his fans will know, they are part of tradecraft practised by the spies he wrote about so evocatively. Now, almost five years after his death, an exhibition, with the title Tradecraft, reveals the techniques and motivations of the characters’ real creator, David Cornwell.
As you enter the exhibition in Oxford University’s Bodleian library you are greeted with a large portrait of Cornwell, wearing a black bucket cap, looking straight ahead with piercing eyes, his chin resting on his gently clasped hands. Accompanying the photo are two of his quotes. “I am not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked in the secret world,” one says. The second, after questioning whom, if anyone, we can trust, continues: “What is loyalty – to ourselves, to whom, to what? Whom, if anyone, can we love? And what is the caring individual’s relationship to the institutions he services?”
They are questions that had confronted him since childhood, with a mother who abandoned and lied to him and a father, Ronnie, a conman and fantasist who spent time in prison. Among the books that feature in the exhibition is A Perfect Spy, which he called the most autobiographical of his novels, whose central character, Magnus Pym, is obsessed with his father, Rick, a seductive fraudster.
Betrayal and spying are, of course, the dominant themes of his cold war novels featuring his hero George Smiley – themes which Cornwell experienced first in fact, then in fiction. After spending national service in the army’s intelligence corps, he was offered a place at Lincoln College, Oxford. The exhibition includes caricatures he sketched for the college publication, the Lincoln Imp. There are articles written for the journal Oxford Left. His fellow contributors were among those on whom Cornwell passed information to MI5, one of his first tasks for the agency, one he said later he regretted.
A handwritten note shows how uncomfortable he was amid early speculation about his own spying. “Why do people want me to have views about spying? If I wrote about love, or cowboys, even sex, people would take it that this was my interest and therefore I made up stories about it,” he wrote.
His college fellow and rector was Vivian Green with whom Cornwell developed a close relationship (he sketched Green for the Imp). Green had been Cornwell’s tutor at Sherborne school and presided over Cornwell’s marriage to his first wife, Ann Sharp. A reference from Green reveals that he described his former pupil as “congenial, pleasant and loyal”. A Lincoln tutor later recorded: “Mr Cornwell has done his medieval texts very intelligently,” adding: “He must make more of his facts.” It was advice Cornwell, unknowingly at the time, was to seize with astonishing results.
Although Smiley, portrayed by Alec Guinness in the BBC television series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, was a composite character, correspondence between the actor and the novelist featured in the exhibition shows how much Cornwell was inspired by Green. Cornwell, as le Carré, once wrote: “George Smiley must have all the qualities I lacked: Vivian’s patience, his sagacity, his discretion, his memory. And that peculiar loneliness that comes from knowing and seeing a lot that you can’t do much about.”
Fact and fiction seemed to merge when a younger Smiley is described at Oxford as “donnish” but “much slimmer”. In a letter to Cornwell, Guinness questioned whether he was suitable for the role of Smiley. “Although thick-set I am not really rotund or double-chinned,” he wrote.
The exhibition includes what he called an “observation”. “From the very first book,” Cornwell wrote, “my central characters have been forced to ask themselves what they owe to Caesar, and what they owe to their consciences.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war Cornwell turned his attention to contemporary issues that struck his conscience.
The exhibition shows the extent to which Cornwell, much like a journalist, relied on sources – they included his former colleagues in MI6 – and how he travelled extensively to research his plots. He consulted widely on the arms trade for The Night Manager, and the pharmaceutical industry for The Constant Gardener. He accused the industry – the subject of much controversy now – of “obsessive secrecy at all levels”. He noted: “Pharma Speak … Be grateful for our brilliant successes and pay whatever we tell you and shut up.”
Drafting The Mission Song, about a western coup plot in eastern Congo, Cornwell described “corporate responsibility” as “the other Heart of Darkness”. The main character of A Most Wanted Man was based on the real story of Murat Kurnaz, a Turk brought up in Germany and rendered to Guantánamo Bay. Cornwell checked with the manager of the Hotel Bellevue Palace in Berne, Switzerland, to ask whether he could name the establishment in the money-laundering and mafia plot Our Kind of Traitor. He met the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat while writing The Little Drummer Girl, in a plot with striking contemporary resonances.
Some former ministers and spy chiefs have expressed regret, and some concern, about what they criticised as a cynical tone and negative message in Cornwell’s novels. Others have welcomed the debates he has provoked. Cornwell mentioned some years ago how he had been invited by MI5 to give a talk to their officers. He was welcomed but told them he was unlikely to be accepted if he applied to join the agency again.
Tradecraft at the Weston library, the Bodleian, Oxford, runs until 6 April.
