John L. Cobbs: Understanding John le Carré. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Pr., 1998. 297 pp.
This review, like all my others, presumes you have already read the book. It concentrates on questions of particular interest to me, without attempting a summary of the whole – more notes and comments than a thoroughgoing review.
Cobbs’ study is a mixed bag, containing provocative theories based in part on poor research. One wonders if some parts were carefully crafted while others were written in haste as a deadline approached.
Call for the Dead
In discussing Call for the Dead, Cobbs draws attention to the variations le Carré makes on certain names: “Dieter Frey and Hans-Dieter Mundt (their sharing of the same given name points to their dual nature as aspects of the same nature, Frey representing the deceptively seductive mind of communism, Mundt the sinister muscle). It is not accidental that their code names are ‘Mr. Robinson’ and ‘Freitag’ (German for ‘Friday’), drawn from Robinson Crusoe’s pairing of the brilliant manipulator/visionary narrator and his primitive, muscle-bound servant.” (pg. 38) Cobbs is right to note the overlapping “Dieters” but then ignores the more significant pairing of “Frey” and “Freitag” – especially considering that their last victim, Else, is given “Freimann” as her maiden name. (See my review of A Murder of Quality elsewhere on this site.)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Cobbs draws a nice comparison between Fiedler and Mundt, saying the former is an honest, dedicated, professional Stalinist (somewhat like Markus Wolf), whereas the latter is a vicious, ugly, corrupt anti-Semite (somewhat like Erich Mielke). He also compares scenes at the beginning and end of the novel: “As Leamas stands by the Wall, unable to help the fleeing Riemeck, so Smiley stands at the end reaching out to the doomed Leamas.” (pg. 62) In this chapter, he offers more questions than answers, thus underscoring how ambiguous this apparently straightforward novel really is.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Summarizing a plot accurately is both difficult and dreary, so I understand Cobbs’ reluctance to so so in any depth. What he specializes in is thought-provoking analysis. “Smiley… senses that Haydon’s treachery derives not from mendacity or venality or even from a sense of commitment to any morality or ideology but, rather, from an egotistical love of theatrics and self-promotion.” (pg. 103) This insight aligns with le Carré’s analysis of Philby, one of the models for Haydon. It fits even better with Graham Greene’s view of Philby as expressed in The Third Man. For both le Carré and Greene, the Soviets are of course the enemy, but this does not automatically make them villains. (See my discussion of Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends elsewhere on this site.)
The Russia House
As noted, Cobbs is good on the big picture items, questions like “What does it all mean?” “In The Russia House the real enemy is ideological inertia.” (pg. 190) “But where are these Russian thugs who ran the camps? They have simply disappeared. This avoidance of dealing with the brutality of the Russian system is the greatest weakness of The Russia House, and yet it is also the key to the book.” (pg. 193) “It is most significant that le Carré did not write the sentimental ending so tempting to any reader (or writer) who believes that Barley’s deal is justified – the reunion of Barley and Katya in Lisbon at the very end of the novel (which the makers of the film based on The Russia House could not resist). There is nothing but wistful thinking to suggest that Katya will ever show up at the end of the novel….” (pg. 198) “Wistful thinking” is a nice phrase which I may borrow. He notes that the Russians Barley meets still fear the KGB even though it has now, at the collapse of the USSR, “simply disappeared.” (pg. 193)
He speculates that Andrei Sakharov may have inspired the character called Goethe; le Carré actually met the physicist on a visit to Leningrad in 1987. No mention is made of the possibility that Adolf Tolkachev could well have been a model too. (See my review of The Russia House elsewhere on this site.)
Sometimes Cobbs reaches too far. “Might it not be possible that the whole of The Russia House is a description of an elaborate Russian ‘honey trap’ in which the amateur English spy is snared by a beautiful but unscrupulous Russian agent far more skillful at using romance than her untrained and vulnerable English target is at detecting such callous deception?” (pg. 199) He then goes on to speculate that Barley himself may have been turned.
He is insightful on the central importance of the Doppelgänger motif. “Smiley and Karla … complement each other, and together they form a composite of the image of the modern spy – as Connie Sachs says, ‘twin cities … two halves of the same apple’… In that merging the dualities that have informed all of the Smiley fiction – between East and West, philosopher and activist, good and bad, institution and individual – all come together in a Götterdämmerung of fusion as le Carré draws the curtain on the long struggle that has been at the center of his canon.” (pg. 144)
Errata
Chapter 3 (“Loomings: Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality”) lists five footnotes in the text, but if one turns to the back of the book (pg. 257), one discovers only two. Readers may be mildly annoyed to read a book by an English professor that uses “whom” incorrectly. (pg. 55) And what would the professor say if a student wrote a sentence beginning, “Not only are Control’s use of…”? Five adverbs ending in -ly in the space of three lines is a bit much. (pg. 105) To my ears, it sounds decidedly odd to say that good “adulterates” evil. (pg. 148)
Mainly, though, Cobbs writes well enough, and is sometimes even eloquent; where he falls short is in getting the details right. Since it is not within the scope of the “Understanding Contemporary British Literature” series to offer original research, one should not fault the author for failing to do so. One does, however, expect competence. The author’s attention to detail is something short of impressive.
Let’s take German history. East Germany can also be called the German Democratic Republic, or GDR; in German, its official name was Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR; Cobbs is, to my knowledge, unique in referring to it in the truncated form “Deutschrepublik.” (pg. 48)
What V-J Day, the victory over Japan, has to do with the confrontation between East and West, the Potsdam Conference, and the Berlin Airlift is a mystery; probably Cobbs meant V-E Day. (pg. 63)
He notes correctly that Smiley leaves behind his copy of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus at his club early in TTSS, but he is rather far off base when he describes it as “an arcane classic of eighteenth-century German neoclassicism.” (pg. 93) To start with, it is a picaresque novel of the seventeenth century, in other words of the Baroque period; whether it should be described as “arcane” is at least debatable.
Let us turn to the rich vein of character names, which we have already noted in the discussion of Call for the Dead. “John le Carré does not name his characters casually.” (pg. 226) Indeed. But when it comes to reproducing these names, Cobbs is rather cavalier. Inspector Mendel is misspelled “Mendal” at one point, and Steed-Asprey appears as “Steed-Aspery.” (pp. 36, 98) “Jim [Prideaux] has indeed thought of himself as Caliban to Jim’s Prospero.” Probably he means, “… to Smiley’s Prospero.” (pg. 123)
As for the name “Kim” Philby, Cobbs claims that “Philby [was] named self-consciously by his romantic father St. John after Kipling’s spy-child.” (pg. 235; similar claims are repeated on pp. 104 and 112) This is complete rubbish. Harold Adrian Russell Philby acquired the nickname “Kim” at an early age, but his father did not name him after the boy in Kipling’s novel, self-consciously or otherwise. If Smiley made this kind of error, he would have been kept in retirement.
In his analysis of The Naive & Sentimental Lover, Cobbs quotes “a representative passage” from the book including the line, “You must dance but I must sleep,” which he passes over without comment. (pg. 89) First, a good analysis would have noted that the same line is used by le Carré in his screenplay for the movie version of Smiley’s People, as well as early in A Murder of Quality. (pg. 8) Second, the line is borrowed from Theodor Storm’s poem, “Hyacinths” – not from Goethe, though to be fair le Carré himself sometimes makes the same misattribution.
© Hamilton Beck
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