From the Author
I love le Carre. The "great" books? 1. "Tinker, Tailor," 2, "A Perfect Spy," 3. "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," 4, "Smiley's People," 5. "The Little Drummer Girl" (I must confess my possible bias on "A Perfect Spy," because besides being a brilliant novel it is such a wonderful key to le Carre's life. "Spy. . . Cold" may be a better, more tightly-written book. 3. What interests him for me as a reader? How he manages to keep his integrity as a student of human character in a field that has been repeatedly corrupted by sensationalists. Actually, I'm afraid that even JLC is subject to temptation, as my discussion of "The Night Manager" indicates. The urge to simply lop off a hunk of cops-and-robbers thrill-a-minute action with the old John Grisham bologna slicer must be very great, and I am always fascinated at how he manages to sketch his situation in depth with fleshed-out characters and a real literary artist's sense of ambience.
I never thought about how he affects me as a writer. I suppose I can identify with his struggle as a young man to draw a line between his writing and the compromise of quotidian life. Having worked in advertising and done a good deal of writing for Reader's Digest General Books as well as cheese-and-cracker commercial, I know what it is to try and keep that kind of facile glibness out of writing that you are trying to make something better. The miracle to me of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" is that it seems to have sprung Medusa-like from JLC's head with little evidence of the process of learning to write that must have gone into it (Yes, yes. Of course I'm aware of "A Murder of Quality" and "Call for the Dead.") Still, this writer came to the attention of the world pretty much fully formed. Another thing that fascinates me as a writer is "The Naive & Sentimental Lover," a book which I am convinced owes more to James Joyce than M1.
4. I think I've discussed this in the answers above. I'll mention another thing. Le Carre, like most of the great masters of British fiction, is acutely aware of class and its importance in forming human character and behavior. Most American writers don't understand class and are embarrassed by it, and so either don't deal with it, or deal with it in simplistic good-buy/bad guy terms--usually with the upper class characters being the bad guys. Le Carre, like Trollope, Dickens, and Jane Austen, has an enormously sensitive feel for the depth of class distinction and its power to form character and behavior. Smiley is a gentleman; Jerry Westerby is not. That doesn't mean that either of them is good or bad, but it is extremely important.
6. I published a critical biography on Owen Wister more than a decade ago (Wister was the Philadelphia lawyer who wrote "The Virginian" in 1904 and virtually created the genre of the Western in American literature, and ultimately film). In terms of academic work, I've published a fair number of articles in "reputable" academic journals of topics ranging from "'Alien' as an Abortion Parable" to a discussion of William Styron's obsession with pain (a theory that Styron personally told me was "absurd" shortly before he had his first bout of massive clinical depression which led to "Darkness Visible."
At the moment I'm working on a book on "American Alcoholic Writers." My basic thesis is that most (again, I wish I could underline in email) major American writers in the first half of the twentieth century were or became industrial-strength alcoholics. I remember asking a man at Chapel Hill who was working on a "definitive" biography of Faulkner if he had read anything about alcoholism to write his book, and he said, "I don't need to study alcoholism to appreciate Faulkner's art." Maybe not, but it helps. As a recovering alcoholic, I think I have a leg up on the topic, and I am astonished at the number of supposed "experts" in modern American literature who have made no effort to learn anything about the subject. I cannot, for example, imagine writing about the fiction of Raymond Carver without at least going to a couple of AA meetings to find out what they're like. I am especially interested in two questions: a) why is there such a dramatic shift in the 1890's in terms of the prevalence of alcoholism among writers; through most of the 19th century there is relatively little of it, even among writers who you might expect psychologically to be alcoholics, like Melville or Thoreau? From Henry James to Jack London is a pretty dramatic shift. b) what kind of literature is the alcoholic psychology likely to produce? I have some ideas about both these questions, and I've already compiled a mass of relevant material, but I would be delighted to correspond with anyone interested in the topic, and I am looking for new sources of information. My working title is "No Second Acts," from Scott Fitzgerald's famous line, "There are no second acts in American literature." 7. Who am I thinking of? Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Crane, London, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, John O'Hara, John Cheever, Eugene O'Neill, Hart Crane, ad infinitum. Why? Because they were drunks. I welcome additions.
