Times Out of Joint: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

I.

John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was first published in September 1963, to immediate and extraordinary acclaim. Reviewers praised a brilliant and bitter novel, morally ambiguous, chillingly authentic and terrifying in its suspense; Graham Greene endorsed it as “The best spy-story I have ever read”. Its bleak and compelling narrative absorbs the reader into a world not merely credible, but created by familiar detail. Control’s olive green electric fire, with or without its bowl of water on top, evokes government issue that could as well have furnished a local tax office or labour exchange, and with it come memories of post-war austerity, not far distant, and its pervading cold. Control’s wife, “a stupid little woman called Mandy who seemed to think her husband was in the Coal Board” (le Carré 1963: 17), probably had knitted his shabby brown cardigan – and he was the head of British Intelligence. Glamour and overt fantasy are a world away, and their very absence nurtures trust: the story asks for no suspension of disbelief, because it does nothing to implant it in the first place. English appearances, whether comfortable or squalid, were commonplaces of their time, and for Berlin and East Germany, the news media offered sufficient collateral for an author whose Foreign Office postings in West Germany were not concealed. Rumour that he was an intelligence officer was denied, but as le Carré remembered it fifty years later in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, “I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth” (2013 b: n. pag.).

The book was John le Carré’s literary breakthrough, read, and for present purposes yet more to the point, re-read, by countless intelligent and critical minds. It has been successful in proportion as the historical retrospect at the end of the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (Penguin, 2013) is restrained. ‘From the Archive’ says not a word of its awards and nominations, of its publishing history and translations, or of critics who had come to regard the work as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century; the film made in 1965 is the retrospect’s latest notice, and le Carré’s afterword attends only to the circumstances in which he remembers the story to have been written. True, the dust wrapper admits that between times he had published twenty novels more, but gives no hint that he had become an acknowledged or even a prescribed author for literature courses at schools and universities, or that his works, several explained by ‘study guides’ at various levels, are now the subject of master’s and doctoral theses, and articles in learned journals. A reader as well-informed as the Anniversary Edition perhaps modestly assumes, might well suppose there could be little to say about the mere facts within the fiction that has not already been said.

It is hence tribute to the work’s remarkable literary qualities that they have diverted attention from such simple self-contradictions as make its supposed time-span and historical anchorage variously impossible. Paradoxically, however, although the following account of them looks like an exercise in finding fault, rather it is an affirmation of the novel’s peculiar strengths, because for a reader immersed in its atmosphere – or for the present writer, re-immersed – the faults in question simply do not matter. In themselves they are hardly of interest to other than biographers or literary historians, as evidence for how the novel was created; in this, as will appear, they confirm archival indications that it was a far more complex and protracted affair than le Carré came to remember it (VIII below). Nevertheless, even an account he gave within a year of first publication indicates a text at unusual risk: it was not so much revised as rewritten. In an interview with Rex Stout for Mademoiselle magazine, he explained that “With each sentence I felt that it was immortal prose, especially the dialogue. But hardly any of the dialogue in the book is as I first wrote it. That’s because my strongest point is my critical faculty. As a critic I discarded pages and pages which I as writer had thought deathless” (Stout 1964: 61). The published version, about 70,000 words, had been reduced from about 120,000 words, and “a dozen characters in the first draft are not in the book at all” (le Carré 1964: 61). Such procedures give hostages to fortune, but as will appear, the ensuing text could never have been properly scrutinised. Later, le Carré himself acknowledged that there were defects, as in a foreword dated October 1998 (1998/1999): “My diligent publisher kindly suggested that, for this new edition of the novel, I might grab the opportunity to correct some of the more blatant inconsistencies and – dare I say it? – infelicities that occur in the original text. I declined”. Ten years later, his introduction to the Sceptre edition of 2009 records that various “minor errors” (le Carré 2009) have been corrected, but they remain unspecified, and are not of immediate concern. The passages to be considered here are unchanged between the first edition and the Penguin edition of 2016.

The form of the novel calls for some brief preliminary notice. The framework is a third-person narrative in the past tense, the voice of an all-knowing and detached narrator, whose identity is undefined and without interest; on a rough estimate, this forms about half the text. The rest is dialogue between fictional characters. In other words, the story is told plain, and free of such ploys as enrich – or compromise and confound – the literary ambitions of a later day. Even so, in a story about spies, not all may be what it seems. A fictional character may tell lies, even to himself, or exercise economy with truth. It may not be obvious on first reading that he is doing so, and it may not be obvious even to the character himself, but a narrator is not obliged to declare such facts, or to do the reader’s thinking for him. In what follows, therefore, the source of any information within the story is clearly stated. For further clarity, single quotation marks enclose narrative in the author’s voice, double quotation marks enclose direct speech by fictional characters. Page references are to the first edition, and (preceded by an asterisk) those of the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, in the form ‘9/*5’. References by chapter, with titles in italics, are intended to ease comparison with other editions.

II.

There are contrary indications as to the year in which the story begins.

(1) The opening scene is set at a checkpoint between East and West Berlin, where Leamas sees his agent Karl Riemeck shot. The year is unstated, but the month is given as October (‘icy October wind’, ch. I Checkpoint, 7/*3; narrator as source). Since the Wall has been built (“There are still places where you can climb”, says a young German policeman, 9/*5), the October in question must be after August 1961, but must belong to that same year. October 1962, the month of the Cuba missile crisis, is too late for purely practical reasons: (i) the story ends in the year following Riemeck’s death, not earlier than June but not as late as August (see below); (ii) by November 1962 the typescript was with the publishers, and in September 1963, after three impressions before publication, the novel had been published.

(2) Against this, on his first day of interrogating Leamas, the Soviet intelligence officer Peters says “I think we will now take your Berlin service in some detail. That would be from May 1951 to March 1961. Have another drink” (ch. VIII Le Mirage, 75/*68). Leamas accepts these dates without comment. He could gain nothing from denying what the East German and Soviet intelligence services must have known, in this case knowledge later confirmed to Leamas by the East German intelligence office Fiedler: “You have told us about the dispositions of your Berlin organisation, about its personalities and its agents. That, if I may say so, is old hat” (ch. XII East, 117/*108). Likewise, Leamas confirms that he left Berlin immediately after Riemeck was shot. Peters: “Tell me this. When Karl died you flew back to London. Did you remain in London for the rest of your service?” Leamas: “What there was of it, yes.” (73/*67). On this account, Riemeck was killed in March, whereas the narrator holds fast to October, a contradiction that will be examined in due course; for the moment, allow that Leamas’s Berlin service ended in October, as the third-person narrative requires. Then, even if Peters were counting Leamas’s last few months with the Circus as part of his Berlin service, the October of Riemeck’s death and of Leamas’s recall to London would have to be in 1960, not 1961, hence before the Wall had been built. The year of the interrogation would then be 1961, and so also the year of Leamas’s attempt, with Liz Gold, to go over the Wall into West Berlin. In the novel as published, though again there are contradictions, that attempt must have been in summer, but not as late in the year as August (see VII below); it must therefore have been after the August of 1961, which is when the Wall was built.

III.

The seeming resurrection of Leamas’s deceased Berlin colleague de Jong looks to be a casual and self-contained oversight, without significance for the rest of the story.

(1) Interrogated by Peters in the late spring after Riemeck’s death, hence 1962, Leamas says that his association with Riemeck had begun in 1959 (“Then, in 1959, Karl Riemeck turned up”: ch. VIII Le Mirage, 73/*66). Riemeck’s initial contact was made through de Jong, when de Jong and family had gone for a picnic in the woods on the edge of East Berlin (Leamas to Peters, ch. VIII Le Mirage, 76/*69). Earlier in the same interrogation, Leamas says that de Jong was “killed in a traffic accident in fifty-nine. We thought he was murdered but we could never prove it” (ch. VIII Le Mirage, 73/*66).

(2) Well and good, but a few days later when interrogated by the East German intelligence officer Fiedler, Leamas has de Jong working in Satellites Four during Leamas’s time in the Banking Section of the Circus, that is, in or after the October when Leamas was recalled from Berlin, whether October 1960 or October 1961. Fiedler: “Who was in Satellites Four at that time?” Leamas: “Oh, God. Guillam, Haverlake, de Jong, I think. De Jong was just back from Berlin” (ch. XII East, 118/*110). But by that time, as Fieldler must have known (II.2 above, “old hat”), de Jong must have been dead for at least twenty-one months, or nine if Peters’s statement of Leamas’s period of service is correct (May 1951 to March 1961, above II.2).

(3) It may be imagined that Leamas gave different accounts to different interrogators to confirm his pretended decline into drink while working in Banking Section, but even as alcoholic delusion the resurrection is implausible. There would be risk enough in false report of a fact easily verified, but arrant self-contradiction in that regard, as opposed to not being able to remember something straight away, would immediately undermine the credibility of a story that he must persuade his interrogators is true. (Cf. ch. IX The Second Day, 85/*78: ‘[Leamas to Peters] “They put me in Banking with a lot of women. I can’t remember much about that part – I began hitting the bottle a bit. Had rather a bad patch” [...] “Tell me what you do remember about Banking Section”, Peters suggested’.) Moreover, by the time Fiedler interrogated Leamas, he had already studied Peters’s report (ch. XII East, 114–115/*106).

Nothing is made of the discrepancy, and it has no effect on the later narrative, but for just those reasons it matters: Leamas’s interrogators, otherwise impressive, are allowed to overlook so obvious a defect in his story as to cast doubt on their professional competence. True, Peters ‘knew that Leamas would lie; lie perhaps only by omission, but lie all the same, for pride, from defiance or through the sheer perversity of his profession; and he, Peters, would have to nail the lies’ (ch. VIII Le Mirage, 74/*68) – but such pointless inconsistency as de Jong’s apparent resurrection seems merely an insult.

IV.

Leamas is recalled to London almost immediately after Riemeck’s death in October, whether 1960 or 1961. In dialogue with the Circus functionary Fawley, who meets his flight from Berlin at London airport, Leamas is not yet sure that Riemeck is dead; this confirms the narrator’s account at the end of the opening chapter (‘Leamas hoped to God he was dead’, 12/*7). Leamas to Fawley: “He was shot. Mundt got him.” Fawley: “Dead?” Leamas: “I should think so, by now. He’d better be” (ch. II The Circus, 15–16/*10). At the Circus later the same day, and seemingly almost as soon as he had parted company with Fawley, Leamas says to Control, “Riemeck’s dead”. It is unclear how Leamas could now be certain, but apparently Control already knew: ‘“Yes, indeed,” Control declared, as if Leamas had made a good point’ (18/*12). Leamas accepts the mission Control now offers him, which he is not to discuss with such “old friends” as he should meet “in the meantime”. Rather, he should let them think the Circus has treated him badly, “begin as one intends to continue” (22/*17, same dialogue between Leamas and Control).

(1) Hence ch. III, Decline, begins in October. ‘Leamas’ contract had a few months to run, and they put him in Banking to do his time’ (narrator, 23/*18). ‘In the full view of his colleagues he was transformed from a man honourably put aside to a resentful, drunken wreck – and all within a few months’ (narrator, 24/*19) – that is, within a few months of Riemeck’s death in October 1961.

(2) ‘And then one day he had vanished’ (narrator, 25/*19). ‘So far as could be judged, his departure occurred before the statutory termination of his contract’ (25/*20, narrator reporting what Leamas’s colleagues thought). ‘Leamas’ departure caused only a ripple on the water; with other winds and the changing of the seasons it was soon forgotten’ (narrator, 26/*21.)

(3) Narrator as source, ch. III Decline, 27–28/*21–22. Leamas works for one week at an industrial adhesives factory, for another week (perhaps not immediately following) selling encyclopaedias. At the end of that week he is thrown out of a pub, but is back there a week later. ‘A Mrs. McCaird from Sudbury Avenue cleaned for him for a week’, and then withdrew, but that week may have been concurrent with his exclusion from the pub. Hence no more than a month is accounted for, and perhaps only three weeks.

(4) ‘Finally he took the job in the library. The Labour Exchange had put him onto it each Thursday morning as he drew his unemployment benefit, and he’d always turned it down’ (ch. IV Liz, 29/*24, narrator as source.) This suggests several weeks of unemployment. The library is ‘very cold’, ‘The black oil stoves at either end made it smell of paraffin’. Hence it is winter. At the end of his first day there, ‘It was bitterly cold outside’ (32/*27). ‘About three weeks after Leamas began work at the library’, Liz asked him home for supper (34/*28): ‘It was the first of many meals that Leamas had at her flat’. On his last visit, when they became lovers, Leamas ‘left at five in the morning’ and ‘It was foggy’ (narrator, 36/*30–31).

(5) ‘Then one day about a week later, he didn’t come to the library’ (narrator, ch. V Credit, 37/*32). Two days later, Liz goes to Leamas’s flat, where he is lying ill. Winter is re-affirmed: ‘It was bitterly cold in the room and dark’ (38/*33); ‘She came every day for six days’ (41/*35). Leamas later tells Control (ch. VI Contact, 51/*45) that he was in bed for “About ten days”, which is consistent. It is still winter: when she left him for the last time, on the sixth day, ‘She was thankful for the biting cold of the street’ (41/*36). On the seventh day, Leamas assaults the grocer (41–42/*36–37). The time that has passed since Leamas met Liz is hence five weeks plus however many weeks are needed to account for the ‘many meals that Leamas had at her flat’.

(6) The next chapter opens with Leamas in jail, serving a three-month sentence for the assault (narrator as source, ch. VI Contact). On the day of his release, ‘London was beautiful that day. Spring was late and the parks were filled with daffodils and crocuses’ (45/*40). No month is stated. Mid-April is plausible, even late April, but hardly May. Leamas would have been sentenced by a Magistrates Court, and such courts, especially in London, work swiftly, hence the assault could have been in mid- or late January. That fits the weather described both then and during Leamas’s time at the library, but he must have started at the library by early December at the latest – the ‘many meals’ imply sometime in November – and that leaves barely two months for (i) his work in Banking Section, where within ‘a few months’ (not weeks) he became ‘a resentful, drunken wreck’, plus (ii) his two weeks of paid employment (glue and encyclopaedias), plus (iii) his weeks of unemployment. Unless over a year has passed between Leamas’s return to England and his assault on the grocer, which otherwise seems out of the question, there is just not enough time for this sequence of events.

V.

Moreover, regardless of the impossible compression of this sequence, among its few explicit dates there are two that cannot be reconciled with the enclosing narrative.

(1) Leamas cannot have started work in Banking Section before Riemeck’s death in October, on which he was recalled to London.

(2) Peters, interrogating Leamas in Holland (ch. VIII Le Mirage), says “I think we will now take your Berlin service in some detail. That would be from May 1951 to March 1961” (75/*68). If that is right, then the October that Riemeck was shot, which is the October that Leamas was recalled from Berlin, was in 1960. The few months that Leamas’s contract with the service had to run (23/*18) then amount to five or six, October to March, which so far is reasonable. But the Wall was not built until August 1961, and it certainly had been built when Riemeck was killed (above, III.1).

(3) For this period (the ‘few months’ which could not have been more than two or three weeks, cf. IV.1 above), Leamas worked in Banking Section. Interrogated by Peters, he says that he “got a couple of trips out of it. One to Copenhagen and one to Helsinki [...] the Royal Scandinavian Bank in Copenhagen and the National Bank of Finland in Helsinki” (ch. IX The Second Day, Leamas to Peters, 87/*80). Peters: “When did you make your journeys?” Leamas: “Copenhagen on the fifteenth of June. I flew back the same night. Helsinki at the end of September. I stayed two nights there, flew back around the twenty-eighth” (88/*81). Later in the same interrogation Leamas confirms 15 June for Copenhagen (90/*83), and for Helsinki “the end of September [...] the 24th or 25th, I can’t be sure, as I told you” (91/*83). The date for Copenhagen is later confirmed by a letter from the manager of the Royal Scandinavian Bank to Leamas’s alias Robert Lang, orchestrated by Fiedler. Fiedler tells Leamas that “The money was drawn by your co-signatory exactly one week after you paid it in” (ch. XIV Letter to a Client, 138/*130). Fiedler makes further reference to it when addressing the Tribunal, reporting no reply from Helsinki (ch. XX Tribunal, 172/*163).

(4) Neither the Copenhagen nor the Helsinki visit, which the story requires to be genuine, could fall within the period that Leamas was in Banking Section. Their dates, respectively in June and September, could be valid if and only if Leamas had continued in Banking Section for nearly a year after his return to London. That may have been le Carré’s original intention: there would then have been ample time for Leamas’s descent into alcoholism, his departure from the Circus, his temporary jobs, and then the weeks of unemployment, as opposed to the impossibly compressed narrative between his return to London in October and release from prison the following spring.

(5) If, however, the date accepted by Peters and Leamas for the end of Leamas’s service in Berlin is right, that is, March 1961 (above, V.2), these anomalies disappear. (i) Leamas could then visit Copenhagen and Helsinki in June and September 1961, (ii) there would be the stated ‘few months’ for him to become the disaffected drunkard who left the Circus, and (iii) there would be a plausible timespan for (a) his temporary jobs, (b) his unemployment, and (c) his work at the Library, before (d) his release from a three-month prison sentence during the late spring of the following year. His failure to remember details of his work in Banking Section, when interrogated by Peters, would likewise be more credible: it was a longer and more distant alcoholic past (above, III.3 and IV.1).

VI.

Even after Leamas’s release, the chronology is at fault, again suggesting second thoughts and incomplete revision: less than a month takes the action from London’s daffodils and crocuses to winter in East Germany.

(1) On the late spring day of Leamas’s release from prison, he is picked up in London by the Communist agent William Ashe, and the following day is introduced to Ashe’s boss, Sam Kiever (ch. VI Contact). Early next morning, Kiever and Leamas fly to Holland (ch. VIII Le Mirage). At London Airport, ‘It was cold that morning; the light mist was damp grey’, with ‘machines half hidden in the fog’ (narrator, 66/*60). The change of weather is unremarked, but not implausible. The next day, on the seafront north-west of The Hague, Leamas is trailed by “Two little men in brown suits, one twenty yards behind the other” (Leamas to Peters, ch. X The Third Day, 95/*87). Their lack of overcoats is consistent with late April or early May, with the wind pulling at a girl’s coat (narrator, ibid. 93/*85), and with Peters’s raincoat, which he is wearing on arrival at the house, and keeps on indoors pending departure (ibid. 94/*86, cf. ch. VIII Le Mirage, 69/ *62).

(2) Three days later, Leamas arrives at the hunting lodge somewhere in East Germany (ch. XII East). The time of year is unstated, but it is not autumn. Of the landscape, Fieldler says “You should see it in the Autumn [...] it’s magnificent when the beeches are on the turn” (121/*113). Three days are accounted for. On the third, “We shall have the answer in a week” (Fiedler to Leamas, ch. XIV Letter to a Client, 131/*123), and ‘They spent that week walking in the hills’ (narrator, ch. XIV Letter to a Client, 135/*127).

(3) At the end of that week, Fiedler and Leamas are arrested by Mundt’s men (ch. XVI Arrest). Leamas, chained and badly beaten, wakes up in a cell (148/*140). Interrogated that day by Mundt (ch. XVII Mundt, 154/*145), he collapses. He wakes up in a hospital bed, attended by Fieldler (154/*145, and ch. XVIII Fiedler, 155–159/*146–150), seemingly the same day, but perhaps the next. Fiedler says that the Praesidium has appointed a Tribunal to hear the case against Mundt “tomorrow” (156–157/*147–148); the Tribunal sits and determines the case within that one day (ch. XX Tribunal – ch. XXII The President). No more than three weeks have elapsed since London’s beautiful spring day.

(4) Liz Gold, brought to East Germany on false pretences and then coopted as a witness before the Tribunal, is taken immediately after the hearing to a cell deep in the political prison where the Tribunal was held (ch. XXIV The Commissar, 205–206/*193). She is released that same day ‘into the cold air of a winter’s evening’ (207/*194) and ‘twilight [...] the gathering darkness’ (207, 208/*195). The time must be about 19.00 hours: Leamas to Liz, “We’re five hours from Berlin [...] We’ve got to make Köpenick by quarter to one. We should do it easily” (208/*195). The season is confirmed by the frost, which ‘hovered in long shrouds across the fields’ (208/*195). In Leipzig the day before, Liz had waited for Frau Ebert to put on her coat, ‘for it was cold that evening’, and then Holten appeared at the outside door; he was wearing a raincoat, which confirms cold but not intense cold, consistent with the weather at Görlitz (narrator, ch. XIX Branch Meeting, 162/*ref).

(5) But this cannot be more than three weeks after Leamas’s departure from England, which at its earliest could have been in late April and at its latest towards the end of May. Hence the Tribunal could have sat as early as mid-May or as late as towards the end of June, but certainly no later than that. True, it took place somewhere near Görlitz, at the southern end of East Germany’s border with Poland (ch. XIX Branch Meeting, 163/*154), and true also that winter there is more severe and lasts longer than in England, but it does not last to mid-May or June, and in those months darkness is not gathering until long after 19.00 hours. The longer that London’s daffodils and crocuses were delayed, the further from the preceding winter must the Tribunal have been held, and those flowers could not possibly have been delayed until such time as the next winter, whether in London or Görlitz, was only a month ahead.

(6) Regardless of London’s late spring, from the East German hunting lodge to the winter evening near Görlitz there is a further strain on the seasons. At the hunting lodge, it is explicitly not autumn: consistent with the days elapsed since leaving London, and with incidental notices of the weather and hours of daylight, it is late spring (VI.2). Yet near Görlitz and three weeks later at the most, winter has begun.

Other allusion to the weather that night neither resolves nor confounds the issue. In Berlin on the night following the tribunal at Görlitz, it is raining not snowing, which allows summer but does not preclude winter: ch. XXV The Wall, ‘She was staring stiffly forward, down the street at the falling rain’ (215/*202), and ‘They sat in total silence save for the rain pattering on the roof’ (216/*203); ch. XXVI In from the Cold, ‘The thin rain hung in the air’ (220/*206). The narrator is the source throughout.

VII.

The external event that bears immediately on the novel is the building of the Berlin Wall, in August 1961. Le Carré saw it for himself, and on his own telling it was the inspiration for the story: “I watched the Wall’s progress from barbed wire to breeze block; I watched the ramparts of the cold war going up on the still-warm ashes of the hot one” (2013b: n. pag.); ‘It was the Berlin Wall that got me going, of course’ (introduction to the Sceptre edition of 2009). Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that the building of the Wall interfered with a story that was already partly written. Though it begins and ends at the Wall, the Wall is neither woven into it nor essential. Once built, of course, it was far too dramatic a symbol to be ignored, and without disrupting the plot, it could make the narrative more intense. It does so when Leamas and Peters cross into East Berlin after their arrival at Tempelhof: Leamas, now supposed to be on the wanted list as a defector, ‘was dimly aware of the new fortifications on the Eastern side of the wall – dragons’ teeth, observation towers and double aprons of barbed wire. Things had tightened up’ (ch. XII East, 107/*99, narrator as source; cf. ch. X The Third Day, 95/*87, Peters to Leamas: ‘“The fact is”, he added with something like impatience, “that by now every country in Western Europe will be looking for you.”’). The Wall is threatening, and more so than when Leamas last saw it, but this is the only sight of it between the opening and the last two chapters, background to an episode that is short and self-contained. The novel’s ending is another matter: without the Wall, even le Carré would have been hard pressed to contrive so powerful an effect. Even so, the story that leads up to it in no way demands the Wall as its final scene, and though in the published version the Wall frames the narrative structure, its presence in the first chapter need not be original. Rather, the beginning looks to have been adapted to changed circumstances. A first scene set in the bleak cold of March shifts easily into a gathering October gloom, but for such a shift, if shift there were, only the narrator’s voice is responsible. After the first scene, October is no more. The later chapters, in dialogue but only in dialogue, affirm that the month was March. March gives due time for Leamas’s alcoholic decline, and March is confirmed by his visits from Banking Section to Copenhagen and Helsinki, but it is explicitly the March of 1961.

That the Wall was not made part of the story until much of it was already drafted explains at a stroke the pervading discrepancies, but there remain others, even chronological. Le Carré said that he composed and revised chapter by concentrated chapter, which is no safeguard for overall consistency, and doubtless explains de Jong’s resurrection four chapters after his death (II above), as a mere name confined to two adjacent sentences. The publisher’s editor, however, if such there were, was oblivious not only to the calendar. Consider, for example, the contrary descriptions of Liz Gold’s dwelling. In chapter IV, she has a flat which is just ‘a bed-sitting room and a kitchen’. The sitting room has ‘two armchairs, a divan bed, and a bookcase’. The divan is apparently the only bed there. ‘After supper she would talk to him, and he would lie on the divan, smoking [...] She would kneel by the bed, holding his hand’ (ch. IV Liz, narrator as source, 34/*29). In chapter XI, the same place is described as follows: ‘Liz Gold’s room was at the northern end of Bayswater. It had two single beds in it, and a gas fire [...] He would lie on the bed, hers, the one furthest from the door’ (ch. IX Friends of Alec, narrator as source, 98/*90). Less trivial are inconsistencies between the narrator’s account of what happened after Leamas was picked up by Ashe, and Karden’s account of it in his cross-examination of Leamas at the Tribunal. In the narrative, Leamas and Ashe part company at four o’clock in the afternoon (ch. VI Contact, 50/*44). Leamas spends most of the next five hours either on foot or on public transport, shaking off his supposed followers. At nine o’clock he awakens the driver of a van parked at Charing Cross station, who drives him to a meeting with Control at Smiley’s house. Against this, Karden (ch. XXI The Witness, 182/*171) accuses him of zigzagging “by bus, tube and private car [...] Your car turned into Bywater Street and our agent reported that you were dropped at number nine. That happens to be Smiley’s house”. Leamas denies it (“I should think I went to the Eight Bells; it’s a favourite pub of mine”), and to Karden’s counter (“By private car?”) retorts “That’s nonsense too. I went by taxi, I expect”. True, Leamas could not insist that he went by van, and the alleged arrival by car might have assured him that Karden was bluffing, but outright denial would surely have been safer than admitting he was in the neighbourhood at all. Yet there is other indication that Leamas at the Tribunal remembers those events differently from the Leamas befriended by William Ashe. The exchange with Karden does not invoke the time of his alleged arrival in Bywater Street, but later in the Tribunal’s proceedings, the hour seems to have shifted from the late evening to much earlier in the day: now, according to the narrator, Leamas ‘was sure, he was absolutely sure, that he hadn’t been followed to Smiley’s house that afternoon’ (ch. XXII The President, 194/*183). It is hard to read this as other than his arrival in the afternoon, but even if it applies only to his efforts to lose his followers, the narrative of chapter VI leaves precious little afternoon for them: he was taken up with Ashe until four o’clock, then had a cup of coffee at the Black and White, then looked at bookshops, and then read the evening papers on display in newspaper offices. He could hardly have begun his zigzagging until what in ordinary usage counts as early evening, and he could certainly not have completed it by then.

VIII.

In his foreword of 1989 to the 1990 edition, le Carré said that he wrote the book “in a great rush over a period of about five weeks [...] a disgusting gesture of history coincided with some desperate mechanism inside myself, and in six weeks gave me the book that altered my life” (1990). He does not say whether the five or six weeks included the reduction of the original 120,000 words to the published 70,000, or even that he started with a blank slate, but the events of twenty-eight years ago are not the same as the memory of those events. For le Carré especially, imagined events were liable to be remembered as if they were real, an abiding theme in the biography by Adam Sisman (John le Carré: The Biography: London, Bloomsbury 2015). The sources quoted by Sisman establish a very different process of creation, which goes far to explaining how the text’s chronology came to be at odds with itself.

At the end of chapter 10, “A Dead-End Sort of Place”, Sisman (2015: 208–209, 610 n. 47) cites a letter of 7 August 1963 from le Carré to his accountant Horace Hale Cross. In this, le Carré says that he had envisaged at an early stage writing at least two novels, in which the minor characters of the first [Call for the Dead] would became more prominent in the second. He had begun, he says, “as early as February 1960” to draft “substantial scenes and situations which belonged to the second novel”, anticipatory composition which is “of course the inevitable practice if the two books together are to provide a single entity”. The “second novel” was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but he laid it aside, and A Murder of Quality ousted it from second into third place. Sisman, concluding in paraphrase as opposed to direct quotation, affirms that “Mundt’s re-appearance and the role that he played in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold were devised and written in the summer of 1960” (2015: 209). At the end of the next chapter, “A Small Town in Germany”, Sisman (2015: 238) reports that in spite of le Carré’s repeated claim to have written The Spy Who Came in from the Cold within about five weeks, there is evidence that it took him considerably longer than that.

(i) In a letter which le Carré wrote to his wife in March 1962, a good eighteen months after the summer of 1960, he says that he has found “a very good plot” for a new book in which (Sisman’s paraphrase) the Wall would play a symbolic part (Sisman 2015: 238, 611 n. 39). This “new” book can only be The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and its typescript was not even in the hands of le Carré’s agent until the following November.

(ii) In his letter to Cross of 7 August 1963 (cited above), le Carré recalls that in August 1961, inspired by the building of the Berlin Wall, he had “decided to begin the task of giving final shape” to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, while A Murder of Quality was still in progress (Sisman 2015: 238, 611 n. 40). “Giving final shape to” presupposes that the book was already well advanced by then, which is consistent with le Carré’s reference in the same letter to having written “substantial drafts” of the intended sequel to Call for the Dead.

Sisman here assumes that le Carré’s account in (ii) is “an exaggeration” (Sisman 2015: 238, 611 n. 40), but it is unclear what he thinks has been exaggerated. At the end of his previous chapter (“A Dead-End Sort of Place”), Sisman had accepted without question that “Mundt’s re-appearance and the role that he played in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold were devised and written in the summer of 1960”, “while he was writing Call for the Dead” (2015: 209, 238); the words are Sisman’s own, and his authority for them is the same letter to Cross. There is hence no reason for Sisman to doubt that le Carré was giving thought to his intended second book while finishing the book that had pushed it into third place; ‘decided to give final shape to’ is not at all the same as ‘wrote it’, even if in le Carré’s later memory it became so. Sisman recognizes that it did, but for the wrong reason, reaffirmed in his text (2015: 238): he thinks that le Carré’s elaborated account of having written the first draft in five weeks “seems to be another example of false memory” because “when the Wall went up in August, David was still working on A Murder of Quality, which would not be delivered to the publisher until January”. (Sisman’s source for the five weeks is a BBC interview of 2000, “John le Carré: The Secret Centre”, but the foreword to the Hodder & Stoughton edition of 1990 shows that by then the false memory was at least ten years old.) The real evidence against composition within five weeks, however, and for present purposes the essential points, are (i) that a letter written by le Carré before The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was published confirms that it incorporates material written in the summer of 1960, and (ii) that another such letter implies that in March 1962 the plot was a recent idea. The eight months between then and delivery of the typescript in November must therefore have included not only new writing and revision, but tailoring to include old text. The gathering winter darkness in Mundt’s Görlitz (VI above) was already imagined some eighteen months before Riemeck is supposed to have been shot, and perhaps as much as two years before the account of his death, the beginning of the novel, was written. Diverse parts were brought together, but never properly amalgamated. In an irony that Karden, Mundt’s counsel at the tribunal, would have relished, the result is a story about spies that would not have withstood even the first interrogation of a competent intelligence officer.