Spy Stories: The Life and Fiction of John le Carré Author(s): Tom Maddox Source: The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), Vol. 10, No. 4 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 158-170 Published by: Wilson Quarterly Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40257078 Accessed: 09-12-2018 10:47 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Wilson Quarterly is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Sun, 09 Dec 2018 10:47:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PERSPECTIVES Spy Stories: The Life and Fiction Of John le Carré During the years following World War H, a certain popular-thriller glamor attached to the image of Western secret agents. Cold War heroes, they countered the Red menace in Greece, Berlin, Guatemala, and elsewhere. That espionage could be a dubious, often amoral game seldom occurred to the readers of Ian Fleming's James Bond stories. But in 1964, well before accounts of treason and double agents became common media fare, John le Carre's chilling Spy Who Came in from the Cold suddenly shattered many illusions. Le Carre's complex moral vision has given his "spy stories" something extra. Here, critic Tom Maddox suggests that le Carré has created significant literature about our times, most recently in his best- selling tale, A Perfect Spy. by Tom Maddox This is the century of spies. Yet, though Carre's talents cry out to be employed in they are said to be almost everywhere, the creation of a real novel." Burgess we seldom see them, except on televi- went on to lament "the myth that the sion, giving press conferences, or being only literature the British can produce led, in manacles, from car to courtroom. on a world scale is sub-art about spies." Knowing that most of the successful One can hear in these remarks more ones work in shadows, we wonder who than the waspishness of a novelist re- they are and what they do. viewing a colleague who has had better So we take pleasure in stories about sales and received higher critical praise. them, even if our pleasure is often con- Here is the voice of High Culture, taminated by the sentiment that spy sto- schooled in the rigors of modernism, un- ries are inherently unworthy of serious willing to believe that the spy novel attention. Reviewing A Perfect Spy, John could ever be literature. le Carre's latest novel, Anthony Burgess Many years ago, Argentine writer offered a standard put-down of the Jorge Luis Borges made an astute ob- genre, if not of the author himself: "Le servation about the detective story: WQ AUTUMN 1986 158 This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Sun, 09 Dec 2018 10:47:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LE CARRÉ David Cornwell, otherwise known as John le Carré "The literature of our time is exhausted personal obsessions. Like Dickens, he by interjections and opinions, incoher- has transformed a popular form into high encies and confidences; the detective art. Such transformations are mysterious story represents order and the obligation and difficult to explain, but they are to invest." In our day, nearly 45 years marked by certain outward and visible later, Western literature is even more signs. In le Carre's case, they are the filled with interjections and incoherencies, literary tradition he inherited, the per- to say nothing of its other ills. sonal history he brought to it, and the The result is that a vast public - edu- 26-year arc of his fiction. cated, sophisticated - waits eagerly for a Any brief survey of le Carre's relation writer who can order and invent and still to his predecessors is bound to be unsat- provide the excellences of literature. isfying. The field is enormous, and liter- Le Carré is just such a writer. And ary history, which is in bad enough con- reading his novels has become one of the dition with regard to the certified works characteristic literary pleasures of the of great literature, is in absolutely awful late 20th century, just as reading the fic- shape with regard to popular genres. tion of Charles Dickens was one of the Nevertheless, to refuse to place le characteristic pleasures of the 19th. Like Carré in a tradition is worse yet, for then Dickens, le Carré has invested a popular one ignores the fact that his work de- literary form with the full strength of his pends vitally on the existence of the pop- WQ AUTUMN 1986 159 This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Sun, 09 Dec 2018 10:47:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LE CARRÉ ular genre. As le Carré has said, "When ble in the simplicity of his idea calling mad- I brought back, but did not invent, the ness and despair to the regeneration of the realistic spy story, it was misinterpreted world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on as a great new wave." Admitting neces- unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men. sary limitations, then, let us quickly ex- amine a small sample of the massive out- With striking prescience, Conrad por- pouring of modern spy novels. trayed the "pest" we have come unwill- Rummaging through the 20th centu- ingly to know more fully as the political ry's spy stories, one can understand terrorist. Burgess's contempt for "sub-art about Waiting for Cornwell spies." Inane popular fantasies are the norm, spun by writers as various as However, for serious writers any ex- E. Phillips Oppenheim (The Spymaster, cursion into spy fiction during the dawn The Secret) and John Buchan (Mr. of this century could only be a vacation Standfast, The Thirty-Nine Steps) in jaunt - a walk on the literary wild side. the early part of this century, and, more Spy stories remained peopled by clean- recently, by Ian Fleming (Dr. No, limbed young lads of enormous pluck and Goldfinger). Moreover, during the daring and their antagonists, brutal Ger- greater part of the spy novel's existence, mans with shaved heads and dueling a literary Gresham's Law has appeared scars or Orientals of inhuman subtlety to operate: The bad has usually driven and cunning, with no respect at all for out the good. President John F. Kennedy human life. For spy fiction to begin to singled out Ian Fleming for his golden come of age, it had to wait for two distin- touch, not the more serious practitioner guished British writers, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. of the genre, Graham Greene. In both men's narratives we enter Depicting the Pest more realistic worlds where despair is as This has not completely discouraged common as heroism, and confusion, wea- riness, cowardice, and deceit abound. serious writers. As early as 1907, Joseph Conrad wrote The Secret Agent, a novel But even though Ambler brought a de- that stands out among the clutter like a gree of psychological realism to spy fic- Palladian villa among suburban tract tion in such novels as A Coffin for homes. In that acute psychological story, Dimitrious (1937) and Journey into Conrad depicted the secret agent as Fear (1940), he began (and remains) too agent provocateur, his nature as unideo- close to purely popular fantasy to be- logical, opportunistic, amoral. The force come a novelist of le Carre's importance. behind this essentially passive creature His novels are usually well-crafted, but was provided by the nihilistic madness of they are essentially thriller-picaresque people such as "the incorruptible Profes- tales of innocents abroad in a conspiracy- filled world. sor," who is set loose at the novel's end: Greene certainly deserves examina- He had no future. He disdained it. He was tion on his own terms, whether we read a force. His thoughts caressed the images his early "entertainments" such as The of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, in- Confidential Agent (1939) or his later significant, shabby, miserable - and terri- novels such as the The Quiet American Tom Maddox, 40, is a professor of English at Virginia State University. Born in Beckley, West Virginia, he received a B.A. at Evergreen State College (1975) and a Ph.D. at American University (1978). A blues musician and composer as well as a published science fiction author, he writes often about popular literature. Copyright © 1986 by Tom Maddox. WQ AUTUMN 1986 160 This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Sun, 09 Dec 2018 10:47:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LE CARRÉ (1955). But I cannot give such an assess- he said in an interview in 1977. "We ment here. So I will just express my be- were ruled by the rod and by the ath- lief that, for a number of reasons, the letes; we lived a cultureless existence in simplest being his lack of total commit- beautiful buildings and we were heirs to ment to the form, Greene never became preposterous prejudices." At age 17 he the quintessential spy novelist. Yet, after fled Sherbourne School and spent a year Greene (and, to a lesser degree, Am- at the University of Berne in Switzer- bler), the ground had been prepared.