In memory of John le Carré, 1931-2020

 

Ten minutes to midnight: a pious Friday in May and a fine river mist lying in the market square. Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret, drawn over with tramwire. Bonn was a dark house where someone had died, a house draped in Catholic black and guarded by policemen. Their leather coats glistened in the lamplight, the black flags hung over them like birds. It was as if all but they had heard the alarm and fled. (John le Carré, A Small Town in Germany)

Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret... Bonn was a dark house where someone had died...

John le Carré died on 12 December at the age of 89. The shock felt more considerable than it probably should have considering his advanced age. I considered him my favourite living author, and as with Ursula Le Guin (who died in 2018), longevity was a factor. I was reading both of them by my early teens, if not before, and for many of us very little that follows will have quite the same impact. Others have written more eloquently about his significance as a spy writer, and simply as a great writer. For me his work is deeply personal, and I know that I'm not alone.

I recall le Carré as a sort of mysterious concept before I recall him as an author. My father was often reading his books when I was a child, and I would also see them in the library. In the slightly over-dramatic cover art of the 1980s, 'Le Carré' in huge letters would take up 90% of the space on the cover, and it was years until I learned this was a pseudonym (his real name was David Cornwell). There was something both intimidating and alluring about this monolithic concept.

At some point in junior high, when I would have been 12 or 13, I read The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. My memory of that first reading, or at least a part of it, is extraordinarily vivid. I was sitting outside at lunchtime, on a sunny and quiet staircase round the back of the school, and riveted to the book. What I remember is reading this passage:

"As he stood there peering into the room, surprised to find it empty, the door behind him closed. Perhaps by itself, but Leamas made no attempt to open it. It was pitch dark. No sound accompanied the closing of the door, no click nor footstep. To Leamas, his instinct suddenly alert, it was as if the sound-track had stopped."

My reaction to this was absolutely visceral. I remember feeling frozen to the spot - somewhat like Leamas himself. At the moment when the door closed I am pretty sure that the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. In my memory, this is when I knew that I would go on reading this author. 

There is a way in which memory flows in all directions, in time or in our lives (and I am not sure that time is linear, although we perceive it as such). What I don't know is whether I remember such moments so clearly because they pointed the way forward, or whether they have later taken on a greater significance. I'm not sure it matters. 

There are many, many le Carré moments in my life. I remember reading Absolute Friends on a Mallorca beach holiday 15 years ago with my parents, when my father had finished reading it. I remember reading Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy exactly ten years ago while visiting my friends in Japan, and being utterly confused but knowing that it was going to be important. And although I never met him, I was fortunate to see le Carré four times. The first was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's Southbank, in 2008, when he gave a talk for the release of A Most Wanted Man. I cannot forget the thrill of seeing him walk onto the stage. In 2011 (I think) he read from The Spy Who Came In from the Cold on Trafalgar Square, for World Book Night, saying "I want you to imagine that this is the Brandenburg Gate". Later that year I saw him at the premiere of the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy film, and I was as delighted to see him as I was to see the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth (or very close!). And in 2017 I was in the second row at the Royal Festival Hall, a night attended by a cross-section of the literary and artistic world, when he gave a spectacular speech about his life (and George Smiley's) for the release of A Legacy of Spies. The advantage of living in London is that your life can be full of such highlights; le Carré's appearances were especially bright ones, for me. 

In the past ten years, I engaged with le Carré's work more intensely than I had previously done. I have joked that moving to south London and, for a while, having a view of MI6 from my window had an effect, but it's actually possible; geographic locations have quite an powerful effect on me. Although I had been writing poetry for about as long as I'd been a le Carré fan, I also started writing poetry more intensely in the past ten years, and publishing. Here and there, I also found his influence creeping into my work, whether in the occasional poem actually about spies, or in some acerbic tone or wry observation. Le Carré loved poetry, too. In The Russia House, he quotes Stevie Smith and Theodore Roethke in the space of one page. Our Game references Osip Mandelstam. The Honourable Schoolboy opens with Auden's famous lines: "I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." Perhaps most tellingly, George Smiley loved "the lesser German poets". 

I have realised that we create a kind of internal genealogy for ourselves. We find the things that matter and they become linked together into a system or a map, and that is who we are, at least in part. The lamplight falls especially brightly, or at least with a particular light, on certain people, places, beliefs, concepts and artistic works on our map. John le Carré's works reside in one of those pools of light, for me. It is very hard to now say goodbye. 

Image: John le Carré at the 'Zeit Forum Kultur' in Hamburg, 2008. Photo by Krimidoedel. Used under Creative Commons license

Poetry in Our Kind of Traitor: Unreal Cities

I recently saw Our Kind of Traitor, the new film based on the 2010 novel by John le Carré. A story about the Russian mafia and corruption in the highest levels of British society, it may not sound like anything particularly out of the ordinary - but although this was not my favourite le Carré book nor film, it was still very good (in both forms) and it does have the vivid, ironic writing and the complex ambiguity of his other works. The film is visually beautiful and has some excellent performances, especially the tour de force by Stellan Skarsgård, who plays the Russian money launderer Dima.

In the novel, the protagonist Perry Makepiece is a teacher of English literature, and there are references to poetry, but it isn't necessarily his main area of expertise. In the film, he has become specifically a teacher of  'poetics', which he also describes as "so boring" (to a Russian, who predictably tells him that poetry isn't boring. He then adds that it's only boring "when it's put under a microscope.") I had to wonder if Perry became a poetry instructor for the film, rather than just an English literature expert, because to many people poetry would suggest a particularly high level of detachment from reality. Alternately, he could be a poetry instructor because of poetry's peculiar insights into the nature of reality. In one scene, Perry is giving a lecture on TS Eliot's The Waste Land, quoting some of my favourite lines:


  Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.


The film also ends on a rather beautiful visual reference to these lines. In the lecture room, however, when Perry goes on to 'Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,' the camera lingers on the bored faces of the students. In his lecture, Perry speaks of the "corrupt listless societies" described by both Dante and Eliot, populated by "lost souls". His wife Gail points out to him that the Russian vory recruit "people who are disillusioned with their lives and have lost their way." 

The irony is that Perry's life shifts from the unreality of the poetry lecture room to a cascading hierarchy of power games and violence (often referenced with games such as tennis, chess, and even children's hide-and-seek), the secret world of the spies, and the unreal cities of London's chrome and glass to Switzerland's beautiful sterile music-box towns, which hide uglier realities (or unrealities.) Nothing in le Carré's works is entirely free of corruption or ambiguity. Criminals and traitors on both sides show deep, sincere love for their families. Loyalty comes in unexpected forms. Everything slides away and resists definition. The MI6 agent Hector makes reference at one point to the Polish philosopher Kolakowski and his stern definitions of good and evil, but the film suggests that things are not always so black and white.

This isn't the first novel or film from le Carré to feature poetry quite prominently: The Russia House quotes poets including Boris Pasternak, Stevie Smith and Theodore Roethke, and Our Game alludes to Osip Mandelstam. Smiley, his most famous character, is fascinated by the German poets. I think John le Carré understands how poetry hangs in the balance between realities and unrealities, and how - as in the best poetry, or simply the best writing - people and situations can be both intensely metaphorical, and intensely real-world.

'My Father Carries Me Across a Field' by George Szirtes: Journey of Memory

The Darkening Sky of the First Night - Gustave Doré, for Dante's Divine Comedy


I have come to think that all poetry, and I suppose all art, is about memory. I don't see how it can be otherwise.

The Hungarian-British poet George Szirtes wrote the poem 'My father carries me across a field' as part of a sequence called 'My Fathers' in the collection Reel, which won the 2005 TS Eliot Prize. Much of Reel, the title of which deals with the film-reel of memory, is bound up with recollections of childhood. 'My Fathers', the title of the sequence, signals the brokenness, multiplicity and (in some respects) inconsistency of memory.

You can read 'My father carries me across a field' on the link below, from the Poetry International website. I also recommend that you watch the accompanying video, where Szirtes discusses the experiences which gave rise to the poem and then reads it.


MY FATHER CARRIES ME ACROSS A FIELD (George Szirtes)


In its most literal sense, this poem is about Szirtes's family leaving Hungary at the time of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, when he was a child. Written in terza rima, one of the poet's favourite forms, the poem seems to me to evoke Dante not only in form but in content ("Spirits everywhere are drifting over blasted/Terrain"). It is many years since I read the Divine Comedy, but the whole poem and this image in particular reminded me of Dante; I am not sure if this is a general impression, or a specific reference (conscious or unconscious).

Besides Dante, in my opinion, the real poetic presence in this poem is Theodore Roethke. "We go where we have to go", says the narrator looking back on his child-self, and this seems a direct reference to 'The Waking': "I learn by going where I have to go." I also felt that there was something of Roethke's 'In a Dark Time', although this is less clear to me.

Certainly, 'My father carries me across a field' feels like an account of a psychological journey as well as a physical one, and this is very Roethke-esque. "My instinct about memory is that it is half imagination," says Szirtes in the video interview, and this is a poem where an adult narrator with an enormous knowledge of literature and a whole life's experience looks back on a very intense, disorienting moment in childhood. The poem is a snapshot which also becomes a palimpsest - adult knowledge and emotion placed over childhood knowledge (for example, the books of A A Milne, the only English literature which he had read up until that time) and emotion. It feels true, and it is true, but it is not necessarily an entirely accurate (in the strictest sense) account of what happened.

While the poem is a revisiting of what must have been a fairly traumatic childhood experience, it is clearly also a way of accommodating and dealing with the experience. Art is a space in which we can deal with trauma. I found the final lines particularly telling in this regard:


[...] We have no function

In this place but keep moving, without sound,
Lost figures who leave only a blank page
Behind them, and the dark and frozen ground

They pass across as they might cross a stage.


This is the moment when the camera pans away, and quite sharply. The moment is both dramatised intensely, and depersonalised, in a sense. The narrator suddenly moves from "we" to "them" and "they", both placing the figures of the poem on a dramatic world stage, and moving away towards the person he has become.

This is a poem which I find both unsettling and beautiful and which seems to evoke so much of the turmoil of Europe - and the world - in decades past, and now.

Theodore Roethke: "In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See..."

 

Gustave Doré, 1857, from Dante's Inferno

 

 

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,   

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

 

-Theodore Roethke, from 'In a Dark Time'


Roethke's 'In a Dark Time' walks the reader through some of the most fundamental images of the subconscious/unconscious; it's at one and the same time highly immersive (I feel like Dante heading into the dark wood, in those opening lines), and extremely self-aware, even self-observing.

I appreciate this poem, and Roethke's poems generally, for their keen psychological insights. Above all, this poem tells me that we can make use of the dark times. It reminds me of Rumi's famous words: "Don't turn your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That is where the light enters you." The dark time is when the eye begins to see.


IN A DARK TIME (Theodore Roethke)