(8 of 10)
After completing another spy novel, A Small Town in Germany—also underrated by critics—the author attempted a "serious" work, The Naive and Sentimental Lover. The knowledgeable thought it a roman à clef, a riposte to Some Gorgeous Accident, written by Cornwell's close friend, the late novelist James Kellavar. Both books concerned misadventures of two men in love with the same woman. Lover had not a belted trench-coat in sight—and the book proved the sole bomb of the Le Carré career. It also coincided with the end of the Cornwell marriage. "Like all divorces, it was awful," he concludes tersely. "We both very quickly remarried, and we both have second families." Ann married a British diplomat; a year after his divorce, David wed Jane Eustace, editor at Cornwell's English publishers, Hodder & Stoughton. After Son Nicholas was born in 1972 the new family centered on the cliff house in Cornwall. To go farther west from London and still dwell in England, the citizen would have to be a lighthouse keeper. In a way, Le Carré is precisely that.
During his periodic bouts of isolation, the writer can be seen walking over Cornwall's shaven hills, "populating them with the creatures of my imagination." Those creatures light up corners of the dark world that everyone knows about but few have seen—the world of the spy.
How real is the Le Carré construction? Do his plots correspond with true moral quandaries? Says one American CIA official: "We know that our work plays havoc with our personal lives. We know that an awful lot of what we have to do is slogging through file cards and computer printouts. Poor George Smiley. That's us."
As to the surroundings and situations, Le Carré's worlds may not be precise, but they carry the air of verisimilitude—and that is enough. The author is, after all, not a master spy but a master spy novelist. His success at simulation comes as much from research as from instinct. For The Honourable Schoolboy, for example, Cornwell made five trips to Southeast Asia. Pinned down by automatic weapons fire in Cambodia, he dived under a car and coolly noted his impressions on file cards.
For the next Smiley novel, Le Carré is on a Middle East shuttle. Though his plot is still incubating, the author has already uncovered a significant anecdote: "A member of Israeli intelligence told me that he once climbed a telephone pole, snipped the lines on one side with a wirecutter, turned to the other side, severed those—then went down with the telephone pole. A central metaphor for the area."
David, Jane and Nicholas now divide their time between the Cornwall residence, a rambling house in Hampstead and a ski chalet in the Swiss Alps. His sons by the previous marriage, Simon, 20, Stephen, 17, and Timothy, 14, are frequent visitors, irrevocably tied to the man who confesses himself "a soppy father." The close relationships are an open repudiation of his own deprived childhood—and of the father who died in 1975 without a reconciliation.