John le Carré and the Inklings: Materialism versus Mysticism

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man ... Spy.

So, I like various kinds of literature. Much of what I have written on this blog has to do with that by the Inklings (Charles Williams, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis) or that coming from similar perspectives, like JK Rowling's magical world or "horror"/supernatural stuff like As Above, So Below and Paranormal Activity. For the purpose of this post, I am going to put all of that under the heading of "mystical" (I would even put other symbolist psychological stuff that involves "alternate worlds", like Inception and Interstellar with the dreamworld and the black hole, under this heading too, but it would be a long way round to describing how I would do that).

This post is on the general class of the works of John le Carré as at the other end of the spectrum from the mystical, which is the materialist (his works that I have read are: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; Smiley's People [those three together are often referred to as the "Smiley trilogy"]; and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold). But I need to clarify that, when I pit le Carré off against the Inklings as materialist versus mystical, I am not saying that he advocates materialism. What I am saying is that, whereas their works are about the mystical interaction between the natural human world and the mystical, quasi-supernatural, or fully supernatural world, le Carré's work is about the clash between the two modern forms of materialism that, together dominate our globe (more than cumulatively ... in concert) and, so, catch all of us up into their clash as collateral damage: Eastern communism and Western capitalism duking it out in the "Cold War" (hence his major genre classification being "espionage"). Le Carré is actually quite against both those forms of materialism (I think) and especially against the fallout they generate by their clash, because his whole point is a stage-pejorative stance on the utter personal, psychological, and philosophical destitution in which the Cold War has left us. But, nonetheless, his sole subject proper is materialism, and this places him on the other end of the spectrum from the Inklings, whose works are mystical in nature, even though they approve of their mystical content while he criticizes his materialist content.

Actually, my main basic point for examining this whole thing in the context of my blog in which I do so much Inklings/mystical has already pretty much been made in contrasting him, as concerned with materialism, with them as concerned with mysticism. The point was to contextualize my interest in le Carré within my larger interest in literature/philosophy/theology as I discuss it in this blog. And, actually, this post comes from experiencing again something of the origin of the interest in le Carré, which is, at least in some instances, the same as the fount of my interests in the mystical, which is my father. I grew up reading the copies of the Chronicles of Narnia he bought for us and the first copies of the Space Trilogy and The Great Divorce I read were his. But the other thing I got from him was liking the two BBC miniseries productions of the first and last of the Smiley trilogy, which had great performances by Alec Guinness around the same time he was doing Star Wars (end of the 70s/beginning of the 80s). And then, while in NYC in grad school, I actually read all of the Smiley trilogy (the most mammoth of which is actually the middle book, Honourable Schoolboy, which also has some of the most insightful scenes about the methods of Cold War intelligence activity, although the most depressing descriptions of the fallout come in the first and third books, not that the middle book does not have its share). Then just the other night, while on the elliptical machine, I watched the 1965 production The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton, which gave rise to the thoughts of this post, and it is probably the densest presentation of both the methodology and the depressing fallout (it's by far shorter than any of the three books in the Smiley Trilogy).

But I don't want to leave this post as just giving the theoretical difference between the two types of works because I realize that people may stumble across this and hope for some more commentary on actual content from le Carré. And a reader certainly deserves some concrete content as a reward for sitting through my meandering and often verbose formulation of my own pet theory idea. So I'm going also to give some headings below of what I think are the most interesting things about le Carré's work in and of itself.


Forensic Espionage versus James Bond

So, when we hear the words "espionage genre," we automatically think James Bond or Jason Bourne. Personally, I like the latter (although I was kind of ticked at them for killing Nicky Parsons in the last one, but I can understand the logic ... and it was kind of a Chloe O'Brien 24 season 7 hat-tip),  but I have no real use for the former under any of it's occupants, although Daniel Craig would probably have to be the best of them. But neither of them is espionage in the same way as le Carré's work.

In Bond and Bourne stuff, like Mission Impossible and many others, you always find out the secret identity of the villain from some secret document stolen from some highly guarded or well-hidden safe after a narrow escape in getting it involving lots of machine gun fire and a sniper or two. That's all fine and good, and I enjoy it all, but the world of George Smiley is something different ... it's forensic. It's research oriented. The hero doesn't look all fit like Daniel Craig or Matt Damon; he is a pudgy middle-aged, balding duffer in glasses ... but he is smart as hell. The wikipedia page for Honourable Schoolboy gives a list of all the cool terms like "scalphunters" (which the page notes as the closet thing in this espionage world to Bond), "lamplighters," "the Cousins" (American CIA), "janitors" (not what you think, not the "sweepers" of CIA-type films ... they're plain operations staff), "pavement artists" ... and "burrowers," which is what Smiley is: "researchers, usually academics recruited from universities."

I added the emphasis in that last line. Smile may not have been a career academic teaching at university, but he did get a degree in modern languages/baroque German Lit and was considering post-grad work at the time of his recruitment, and he returned to Oxford for a brief stint between the Second World War and the rise of the Cold War (all of this comes from the wikipedia page, where somebody has kindly pieced together the backstory from details given across a number of novels). These aren't the people who run and jump and kick and shoot. These aren't even Brad Pitt's character in Spy Game (2001), who learns to read his immediate situation from small little things in the surroundings, but that's getting warmer. They're not even Sherlock Holmes noticing small little clues in the exciting "crime scene." Smiley did spend some years undercover in Germany recruiting for an intelligence network, but there's a reason he was so successful at his cover as a lecturer ... that's the kind of man he is.

George Smiley finds out who the mole is by sitting in a hotel room for a whole weekend or week going through expense reports and records of bank transactions, following the money and expenditures in coordination with the travel records of different persons. He's not just smart in the way of being able to do calculations ... he insightful in discovering patterns and correlations.

The only thing that has come close to this in recent times is Ben Affleck in The Accountant, which I really liked (I so wanted them to be together in the end, but I understand the logic in the character, and I do think the gift of the painting was a much more fitting close, especially with the Sean Rowe song, and I thought the director worked their relationship well ... and I thought the upside down puzzle at the beginning was pretty cool too ... and there are more random thoughts on the film by the end of this paragraph). What Affleck's Christian Wolff character does in tracking the numbers over 15 years of financial records is forensic accounting similar to the forensic "burrowing" that Smiley does to find the mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (although, The Accountant has a lot more action elements added in ... and I thought Bernthal was good too and I liked what they did with the character ... and that one line of something like "Yes, I was a good father ... a lot of other things I screwed up, but not that" was the best drama line of J. K. Simmons's career, or at least, since I can't claim to have seen all of his work, better than the whole of his Whiplash role put together; I say the role rather than his performance because I think he did a fine job for what the role was, I just disagree with the whole thing of wetting oneself over drama for drama's sake, which usually ends in wetting oneself  over roles and pieces not because they are actually even anything exceptional even as drama itself goes, but just because they have an agenda advocated by somebody to whom you're supposed to listen because they are "wise" in that way, and I'm afraid I'm not a very good or obedient boy when it comes to liking the stuff I'm supposed to like just because the sophisticati tell me I'm supposed to like it ... I like to form my own opinion).



Psychological, Personal, and Philosophical Destitution in Cold War "Intelligence" Operations

So, one might well ask the question "If there's no big action, what does it have that is special that keeps it from being less interesting than probably watching even real accountants crunch numbers for a weekend?" What makes it grabbing is the commentary on the psychological fallout of Cold War intelligence operations. For instance, the Smiley weekend/week in the hotel room mentioned above contains the introspection, during a break, that all of Smiley's philosophical systems of understanding some kind of meaning in life had dashed to pieces on the rocks of human experience. It also contains a really well done portrait of Smiley, and by extension England and the US, in his recollection of actually having interrogated Karla once without realizing who he was, the core of the scene being that he now realizes that he revealed everything to Karla about himself and gained absolutely no insight or information in return (in all ways but one, the 70s/80s BBC miniseries with Alec Guinness is worlds above the 2011 American film with Gary Oldman, but that one case is a pretty big one because it's this scene recounting the interview of Karla: the miniseries did an actual flashback using Patrick Stewart as Karla, whereas the movie stays true to the book and keeps it all in the voice of Smiley talking about the encounter, and it does a nice piece of perspective work in starting the scene with Oldman/Smiley from the side talking to the empty chair reenacting and commenting, but then the camera pans around so the viewer is in the position of the imagined Karla)

(Aside on the 2011 movie: They totally screwed other things, particularly Jim Prideaux's character, not only in going out of the way to use him to make sure there is a gay character, but, and I suspect as a result of such subjugation of art to politics, also in turning him into the kind of basketcase who yells at the kid Billy; the Prideaux of the novel never would have done that because it would be to lose the last thing he has, which is his stoic professionalism; these guys have pretty much lost their souls; they're not the kind of guys who get married and lead a normal life in the suburbs or nicer; but they have one thing left, and that is doing the job that's in front of you, and if that job is teaching kids, then that involves a certain disposition, a certain not placating them but, especially in England, doing that with a certain wry humor that accommodates kid who are bright but outlsiders in wry inside jokes ["what kind of man is our bird down there, Billy? is he a a poor man? is he a beggar man? Our Billy's a good watcher, eh? He's always watching."] ... what it DOESN't involve is yelling at one of the kids as you break down in anguish over unrequited love, whether heterosexual or homosexual [but, as I say, I suspect that the subjugation of art to not just that particular politics but any politics is the root of such disregard in handling characters]).

Possibly one of the most depressing expressions of the destitution is the description given of it by Liz in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: "to find the humanity in people ... to turn it like a weapon ... and use it to hurt and kill."

The movie version of Spy Who Came in also did a nice piece of having Lemar lose perspective on "us versus them" and say that it doesn't matter, East and West are the same bastards (which reminds me a bit of Herr Trump recently implying that there is not much difference between Putin's violence and skeletons in the American closet; I think Trump is a disease ... the Lemar of the movie has the humanity to be depressed by it; Trump celebrates it as a method to getting what he wants). The poignant absurdity of that idea can perhaps best be seen in the words of the ultimate "soldier" in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Roy Bland: [paraphrase because I'm too lazy and rushed to dig the book out, but a solid paraphrase] "An artist is a bloke who can look at things from two diametrically opposed viewpoints and still function; now, obviously, I'm still functioning: as a socialists, I'm going where the money is, and as a capitalist, I'm sticking with the revolution." Smiley replies, "Roy, if your father could hear you, he would turn in his grave" ... and Bland replies, "let him rotate."

There are some good observations of these themes and tensions in The Honourable Schoolboy in Jonaki Singh's review at allreaders.com. "Like a lot of John le Carre novels, especially the Karla trilogy, this novel explored the notions of the individual, loyalty, and humanity. The juxtaposition of George Smiley, representing the old, fast-fading notion of national loyalty, and Jerry Westerby, representing an individual's search for humanity in an increasingly cynical and violent world, was very interesting."

Singh also captures some of this core aspect of the books when listing a "favorite scene": "The scene when Westerby visits Tiny Ricardo in Thailand is my favorite because not only is one of the main mysteries of the novel solved, but the reader can see Westerby's own doubts about the value and importance of the intelligence work he is performing at the cost of others' and his own humanity. These doubts then go on to motivate Westerby's actions and decisions in the last section of the novel." A bit more positive but still demonstrating pessimism and depression from the Cold War as the core tension in the books, Singh's "reaction to the main character [Jerry Westerby]" is "I liked that no matter how many sorrows and disappointments Westerby has experienced, he is not completely pessimistic about human relationships or incapable of feeling empathy for others" (things are a bit different with the naive Liz in Spy Who Came in, who says at one point in the final conversation that she feels as if she was put out to stud ... see the "legend making" section below other details from that particular cinversation).


Manipulation and Ambiguity:

What was said above by Liz about using people's humanity as a weapon is a huge theme in le Carré, using it as a weapon by using it as a tool in gaining intelligence on the enemy, in the form of manipulation.

The most depressing instance as far as seeing how it wrecks people as humans is the culmination of the Karla trilogy in Smiley's People. In that novel, Smiley has to blackmail Karla into taking the only course that actually does him any good, which is to accept asylum in the West because, as soon as the Kremlin realizes what has gone on with Karla (his daughter), they will retire him, as in kill him. Crossing over to England is the only way to save himself and his daughter ... but he's been so steeped in the world of manipulation that he can't process anything other than blackmail, so Smiley has to blackmail him into accepting what is for his best. Of course, Karla also represents a goldmine of intelligence on the Kremlin's own intelligence operations, so there is some ambiguity as to the motivation for bringing Karla in, which is part of what makes Smiley so vacant when others are celebrating so much at bringing Karla in ... he's simply burnt out by wishing, to borrow from a very different source from a completely other area of life, as Nick Cave's song "Mercy Seat" puts it, "to be done with all this twistin' of the truth ... And anyway, I told the truth, but I'm afraid I told a lie."

The best depiction of the actual operation in motion, though, comes in Honourable Schoolboy. A lot of operatives stay in their areas of action by not just posing as foreign press, but actually being press, sometimes writing fluff social commentary etc to keep in the press pool where they can spot leads. Sam Collins is one such operative who had gained a status of sort of resident veteran guru in the press pool in Hong Kong (I think). You don't really find out exactly high up he is as a guru not only in the press but in the English intelligence operations until you get a scene in which he is giving a sort of lecture, really a "wise veteran from the field" talk, to a bunch of younger guys in a library/den/sideroom, one of many dark paneled and arm-chaired "Brit" looking rooms in their headquarters, filled with gin and grey sunlight filtered through smoke, recounting his method for running an asset in Hong Kong.

The asset was a Chinese woman in her 30s who was also in the press but mainly did society/gossip/fashion. She was not an asset who actually worked in an intelligence agency of the enemy, but she was valuable even as a small-time journalist, maybe even moreso because more below the radar of the opposition. The description of the scene of the method is pulled off well. She knows she is providing intel to the English; there's no problem at that level. The issue is not letting her know what she has provided that is or even might be of use. And here again is the ambiguity: if she doesn't know what she gave that is of use, she might be let off safely as inconsequential if interrogated, but it also, in the case of such an interrogation, keeps the opposition form knowing what information was passed on to England's agency that England considered of value. Some might look at this and say "best of both worlds," but others, like me, might ask "maybe so, but doesn't it bleed back the other way and make you ask about anything that seems altruistic whether it might have ulterior motives that is does 'in addition,' and whether maybe the altruism is just an excuse for the ulterior motive?"

So, here is how the wise veteran Sam Collins reveals to do the thing. He would go meet the woman in her apartment and sit and listen for an hour or more as she gave her "report," dutifully writing it in his notebook as if any of what she has gathered that she thinks is of value actually IS of value (which it isn't). Then afterward, he takes her out to dinner at a place she likes. And she enjoys it; and she thinks she knows that she can't be of as much use as a source as more power players; but she tries to do her bit and thinks it is sweet that Sam takes her out to dinner, even though it's probably down in the book that he has to in order to take care of an asset even if they're not huge, but she feels like he probably is sweet and has some sympathy for her and she appreciates the night out from the perspective of her little world of trying to provide what help she can. But the truth of the matter is that it is during this dinner out, which she perceives as mainly a sweet and sympathetic gesture, that he gets his real information.

What SHE perceives as him being nice by asking questions about her normal journalism subject (society) to make her feel good and give her a chance to talk about stuff she finds interesting is REALLY him asking leading questions and finding out that at such and such big event, a man matching a possible description of one their person's of interest was seen with a blonde girlfriend that fits the description of a blond asset in London who works for some midlevel person from whom she has access to the type of information they think has been being passed to the person of interest. The Chinese journalist never realizes she has given him this particular valuable information. She thinks she was just gossiping freely to a man who was sweet enough to give her a night out to be social and talk with company. Was he also being sweet in addition to getting his information? Who knows? Was he using this method just to keep the opposition from ever knowing what London took as valuable, or was he also doing it in hopes of keeping her safer if she were to be interrogated? Who knows? But those questions and ambiguities do play into whether or not we feel like we are losing our humanity, caring simply about intelligence operations and not about people's humanity.


"Legend Building" in le Carré's Spy World:

Possibly the most insightful thing in le Carré's spy world, and most insightful because it is not only for the intelligence gathering game but also for human psychology, is "legend building." Smiley's People starts off with a retired sort of head of a local network of low-level watchers living in Paris excitedly sending word to Smiley that "Karla is building a legend!" So, what is a "legend?" A legend is a believable cover story for covert operations, and the key thing is that it needs to have a few external fact that can be verified as independent. So, in the case of Karla here, he wants to bring (they think) a female agent in her 20s (she actually winds up being something other than an agent) into the West through Paris. So, they find a a Russian expat woman living in Paris named Ostrakava, a complete expat nobody working in a sewing shop/small factory, but who happens to have had a daughter who went into state care after Ostrakava was arrested on minor matters (as happens a lot) and eventually left as an expat. So, a mysterious man shows up outside her work one day and takes her to a cafe and tells her that Mother Russia has been feeling some sympathy for expats and wants to help them reunite with family, and so they would like to send her daughter, now in her 20s, to live with her in Paris, but Ostrakava herself has to go fill out the French paperwork and such. So she does ... and never sees her daughter because the Kremlin picks up on their end and uses the paperwork to cover an agent coming into Paris. The thing is that there is no suspicion because Ostrakava filed the papers and she has no demonstrable ties to the Kremlin. Unless somebody had happened to witness the encounter with the strange man, she looks like just another rundown expat living out an estranged existence working in a factory/shop in Paris with some illusory hope of seeing a daughter again. The fact that she filled out the paperwork, and not the Kremlin trying to slip it in through secret channels, can be verified externally.

Probably the best succinct description of the general method is given by Lemas (Spy Who Came in) to Liz, who fell in love with him and had an affair with him, when he is telling her how that fact was used as a legend for a certain goal (discrediting Lemar himself in his attempt to bring down Mundt, who is actually London's agent without Lemar knowing about it): "They only had to put you and me in contact, even for a day, it didn't matter; then afterwards they could call on you, send you the money, make it look like an affair, even if it wasn't, don't you see? Make it look like an infatuation, perhaps. The only material point was that after bringing us together they should send you money as if it came at my request. As it was, we just made it very easy for them [by actually having an affair]."

The set up is that Lemar has been posing as having gone to seed and disgruntled because of having been shunted sideways and down the ladder after losing his agents in East Germany, even punches a grocer to get thrown in jail for assault so that the East Germans operating in London and thinking that he, as alienated from his old bosses, might be a good asset can have a convenient shot at picking him up. He thinks he was building a legend for getting into East German intelligence and getting his hands on Mundt, who killed everybody in his network in Berlin, but in reality, London and Mundt were building a different legend to be used against Fiedler, the man on the East German side who suspected Mundt of being a double agent and had picked up Lemas for some information from Lemas's old work that might prove Mundt was in the pay of London. The linchpin is providing evidence that, at the time Lemar was supposed to be alienated from the Circus (center of English secret intelligence, headquartered by the Cambridge Circus traffic intersection, but not MI6, which is often referred to as "the competition"), he was actually still in their good graces and employ, as evidenced by the fact that they were financially aiding his girlfriend (or crush girl or whatever) for him. As Lemar said, they only needed them to be in the same place (in this case it was working in a library, which they set up for Lemar to get by paying off the guy at the employment agency)  for a day to make it believable that they got involved as an explanation for why the Circus would give the girl money.

The picture is actually a lot darker than all that. From what I can tell, they planned for the girl to die from the start. They knew she was a member of the communist part in London and, so, would be easy to lure to East Germany on pretense of some experience-gaining/learning exchange month, when in reality she was to be the witness that clinched Mundt's defense, and in the escape at the wall, it's actually the "good guys" (Mundt and Smiley) who have arranged for her not to make it ... she knew too much for a civilian to be let go ... but they are the ones who planned from the beginning to bring about the situation in which she knew too much (so, she was not only put out to stud, but also scheduled for the glue factory before the whole thing ever started rolling).


Pscyhology

The relation that all this has to psychology, as the situation seems to me, is that "legend building" is basically what we all do in our natural run of things. To quote Cobb in Inception (see my post on the film here), we are continually both receiving and constructing our reality. We never have all the facts, even though we do have some facts ... and we have to fill in the story as best we can. It's not that we choose to build legends; it's that we have to build them in order to have any coherent picture at all. After that comes the task of investigating more whether that picture is accurate to reality. I think the true mark of humility is the willingness to examine new facts that might challenge our legend and cause us to modify it.

And, just as there were different goals for two different legends in Lemar's case (the "Lemar as aliented" legend was supposedly to get Lemar in GDR intel base and close enough to get his hands around Mundt's throat, but the "Lemar is actually still working for London" was to do that and THEN to discredit Fiedler, who was trying to use Lemar to show Mundt was a double agent), we all have different motivations for our different legends we build. That is just called being human, but I think called being humble involves admitting it and working at sifting through our own legends and admitting the motivations for them and trying to do the best at picking the ones that seem to best make sense of our experience of reality and best enable us act charitably, or at least as charitably as we can alongside our unavoidable self-motivations.