... my readers will see for themselves to what extent an old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination. We all reinvent our pasts, I said, but writers are in a class of their own. Even when they know the truth, it’s never enough for them. [loc. 3938]
Subtitled 'Stories from My Life', this is a collection of essays that Le Carré describes as 'true stories told from memory', with the roles of nuance and creativity acknowledged. Here we find Margaret Thatcher arguing with Le Carré about the Palestinians; Yasser Arafat with a soft and silky beard; Rupert Murdoch, who has 'that hasty waddle and little buck of the pelvis with which great men of affairs advance on one another'; Alec Guinness, who became friends with Le Carré after starring as Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Nicholas Elliott, whose friendship with Kim Philby was the focus of Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends; Graham Greene, who was delighted to find that there was a code sequence for 'eunuch' ... and newsreader Reginald Bosanquet, whose inexplicable largesse kept Le Carré (or rather David Cornwell) at Oxford when he'd run out of funds. There are poignant passages about his difficult relationship with his father (con artist and gambler) and his emotionally unavailable mother. There is surprisingly little about his time as a spy ("I feebly protested that I was a writer who had once happened to be a spy rather than a spy who had turned to writing") or about his personal life.
But what engaged me here was the same phenomenon that engages me when I read his novels: the precise observation of minutae, like that description above of Rupert Murdoch's waddle-and-buck, and the ear for voices which is evident in his accounts of meeting warlords, journalists, businessmen, politicians. Some of these, he tells us, were foundations for some of his characters. He is interested in them as people: he is profoundly interested in people.
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