The Many Faces of George Smiley

George Smiley appeared in either a major or a minor role in John Le Carré's first four novels, Call for the Dead (1961), A Murder of Quality (1962), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), and The Looking Glass War (1965). In the second novel, A Murder of Quality, Smiley had even been a much older man, retired, and called in as a consultant in the investigation of a murder at a private boys' school. When Le Carré began his "Karla Trilogy," his 7th, 8th, and 9th novels, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People, Le Carré reinvented Smiley, made him younger, and reworked the timeline of his career at "The Circus." A number of actors have played George Smiley in various screen and television adaptation of John Le Carré's novels.

1965, "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," Rupert Davies.

1966, "The Deadly Affair," James Mason (based on Call for the Dead and with the Smiley character's name changed to Charles Dobbs).

 












1979, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," and 1982, "Smiley's People," Alec Guiness.

 

 1991, "A Murder of Quality," Denholm Elliott.

2011, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," Gary Oldman.

How Reality Seeps into Fiction

Before I get started on real-life influences on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I want to repeat the link from my August 4th post to the Wikipedia about the insider spy jargon from the book. That way, you don't have to scroll down.

Early Life and Fascination with Secrets

From the official website of John Le Carré (né David Cornwell): “I never knew my mother till I was 21. I act like a gent but I am wonderfully badly born. My father was a confidence trickster and a gaol bird." One of his early influences that allowed him to "act like a gent" was his education at Sherborne School in Dorset, which by all accounts, he hated, but as you can see from the novel, the closed, secretive world of the British boys' boarding school, with its hierarchies, competitions, nicknames, and insider lingo,  finds an echo at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service.

The conflict between acting like a gent and keeping the secrets of a conman father, are at the heart of his most biographical novel, A Perfect Spy, which I looked for at the library, but it was apparently checked out (I will be renting the miniseries version from Netflix shortly). I also see some echoes of the father, real life Ronnie Cornwell, with Ricki Tarr, the fictitious conman, hustler, and intelligence operative, who reignites the hunt for "Gerald," the mole. Ricki was traveling on a passport under the name of "Poole," which also happens to be the name of the town in which David Cornwell was born.

According to (undoubtedly unimpeachable) internet sources, David Cornwell's father, Ronnie, was an associate of the Krays, the subject of another movie.


Also the subject of a BBC documentary.


As a matter of fact, in other John Le Carré novels I have read, the theme of gangsters' (or spies') kids attending exclusive private schools often crops up.

The Philby Scandal

The rough template for Tinker, Tailor was provided by the Philby Scandal which unrolled over the course of more than 10 years from 1949 to 1961, when Harold Adrian Russell Philby (AKA "Kim" Philby) finally defected from the UK to the Soviet Union. Like the fictitious "Gerald the Mole," Philby had been recruited at a leading university before the war to spy for the Soviets and had risen to the highest ranks at the SIS, and like Gerald, it was some time before the service was able to prove that Philby was a double agent. The rough outlines of the story are provided by a link to a PBS "Nova" documentary "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies." Here also is a link to Kim Philby's Wiki page (subject, of course, to the usual caveats about anything you read on Wikipedia).

Below is a documentary on "The Cambridge Spies," split up into three parts for YouTube.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

John Le Carré

John Le Carré is the pen  name of David Cornwell (it means John The Square in French). The rough biographical facts of his life are on his official website:

[He] was born in 1931 in Poole, Dorset, and was educated at Sherborne School, at the University of Berne (where he studied German literature for a year) and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in modern languages.

He taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg. He started writing novels in 1961, and since then has published twenty-one titles.

 Along with some quotes about himself by himself, my favorite being:

A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.

And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

Le Carré had his 22nd novel, published in 2010, Our Kind of Traitor, about the Russian mob in modern day Great Britain. He considers A Perfect Spy (1986) his most autobiographical novel, and in fact, to readers who want to know more about David Cornwell the man, Le Carré refers them to this novel. His most broadly acclaimed novel is his third, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  This novel was written in 1963 at the height of the "Cold War," at the height of the popularity of the James Bond franchise, and was widely considered to have taken the wind out of the whole James Bond image of foreign espionage. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was also made into a pretty darn movie starting the long-late but often great Richard Burton. In the grand tradition of YouTube, it was chopped up into 12 segments and posted to YouTube, but only segments 3-5 remain (probably due to copyright reasons). Below is segment 4. Enjoy it while you can.

Saturday, August 4, 2012, 2 p.m.

Be prepared to question your assumptions (and mine too).

"Do you remember when we thought a raccoon was getting into our garbage?"

Mary kept sewing.

"Turned out it was dogs."

Here's a link to a brief interview with Percival Everett in which he talks about Assumption and other things, including the crow that is sitting on his shoulder in the picture on the back cover of the book.

For something completely different:  A link to a Wikipedia entry which explains the jargon from  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.