THE SCRIBE WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

A rare interview with John le Carré, a man as private as the heroes of his work.

BY JENNY HOBBS

John le Carré (or David Cornwell as his father knew him) lives for most of the year in a thick-walled white building that was once a row of fishermen's cottages, at the edge of a Cornish cliff near Penzance.

He granted me a rare interview for two reasons: because I made my request through an old family friend, which meant he could trust me, and because - having shunned us in the bad old days - he is curious about the new South Africa.

From the stern photographs on the dust covers of his books (all of which repose, well thumbed, on my bookshelves), I expected a forbidding intellect and a brief chat with this very private author who is said not to take kindly to journalists.

Though the intellect is indeed formidable, le Carré the man is a delight: courteous, warm and witty, gifted with the unique sense of humour that must be England's best export.

He's a big man with the manner of a benign bear, born to hardship and scarred by experiences that have made him wary of all but an inner circle of family and friends, yet with the assurance of one who has achieved a state of grace through his own talent and effort.

Besides the Cornish eyrie, there's a house in Hampstead; he and his wife Jane live comfortably, without ostentation, and don't socialise. Their pride and joy is a magnificent wind-protected garden with walls and hedges that form quiet squares where fuschias and roses nod around favourite sculptures. Their most recent indulgence is a heated swimming pool in a long wooden building that also contains her office. He works upstairs in the house, in a monastic white room with a desk and modern leather chairs and a tall window overlooking the sea.

"We live, as you see, in remote circumstances. This is where I like to live," he explains. "There's not a lot of distraction apart from the nature itself ..."

The interview goes on for well over an hour, ending in champagne and lasagne around a table that rocks with laughter at his brilliant mimicry. He takes off, in turn, a Russian ambassador, Margaret Thatcher, the Queen, Yasser Arafat, the President of Panama and a tailor who has risen in the world: "He's got this very slightly discoloured, slightly Cockney voice with the Cockney washed out of it, but the cadence still there."

Le Carré's ear for phrasing and accent is faultless, and explains his ease with dialogue and fluency in German, learned at Berne University in the late forties and polished at Oxford, where he gained a first in modern languages.

Of his decision to study in Switzerland, he says: "When I was about 16 I staged, I think, the nearest thing I could to a nervous breakdown ... and refused to go back to my school [Sherborne] where I'd been very successful but I simply couldn't do any more of it. I didn't like the people, I didn't like the pupils, I loathed the staff, the buildings terrified me, and above all, I'm very thin-skinned about corporal punishment."

When I ask about a frequent comment he makes, that he had a spy's background, he says, "I was brought up to be a misfit. I was brought up to be an alien.

"I never knew my mother until I was 21; she was around until I was just five and then she disappeared. My father, who was in and out of prison when I was young, was a tremendously charming, dazzling con man. His dream was that my brother should be a solicitor and I should be a barrister ... and for that purpose he sent us into the gents' stream, the English private educational system, and we learned the language, we learned the manners, we learned the gestures, we learned to be charming.

"But we went back to mayhem. We went back to we knew not what each holiday: a new lady, with or without my father, some other bit of society. This extraordinary contrast between my father's world and the world he wanted to get us into really made us frontier-crossers the whole time.
"I ran away from all that and embraced a completely different culture and identity. I immersed myself in German, probably because the Germans were so unpopular in those days. And I really - as Charlemagne said, to acquire another language is to acquire another soul - acquired another soul.
"And then at a very early age I was moved into the secret world. As somebody obliged to do military service, I was in army intelligence and I found immediately in that world of occasional dissembly, of great protection, some kind of parental reference which was very important to me. I think for a while I embraced service and country and all of that with a great passion, because I had been deprived of things to love when I was a kid.

"So my relationship with the secret world was an emotional one and indeed, my relationship with my country and many other things has been, for the same reason, an emotional one. It's been a cycle of engagement and retreat, escape, of love, revulsion, a constant pendulum - for which the German is pendel." (Which explains a great deal: the harassed hero of Le Carré's latest bestseller, The Tailor of Panama, is the tailor himself &shyp; Harry Pendel).

He goes on: "So that was my secret world, and the gift that it was to me was of an element about which to write; I was the right peg in the right hole at the right time. I had a good eye and a good ear and I was in the secret world at a time when it was really the hub of the universe. I knew what it was like and who those people were and how they behaved. I know the mysterious areas of English puritanism and self-restraint and decency which operated in that murky world despite everything.
"It's very hard to write about that in the kind of stuff I do, but at times I wish I could pay it some respect. It was incorporated in Smiley, in a way."

Patriotism is important to Le Carré. Later he says, "I love my country. I mean, I think it's going to the devil at the moment but I don't think it'll go to the devil always. And I want reforms that are more radical and to me more obvious as I grow older."

During his national service and subsequent years in British intelligence under the cloak of the diplomatic corps, he translated for five British prime ministers. He speaks quietly with the precision of a man whose strong, often controversial views are deeply felt and well thought out. He listens with the watchful attention of a collector.

Like all serious writers, his work habits are regular. "We get up early in the morning ... swim for half an hour ... I have a cup of coffee and go straight to work, working through 'til lunchtime. That's the original part of the day, and a long day already for a writer ... I write with an ordinary roller-ball pen in a smart French case made for it because I have big clumsy hands and I like a heavy pen ... Jane types it out and it goes on the machine and then I rework it constantly.

"At lunchtime we always have a glass of wine and then I take a walk. Jane drops me two hours away over the cliffs on one side or the other, and I walk back to the house. Then I'll read a bit and if I still have some puff in me, look at the typed stuff. It's quite nice to do that when you've sort of worked off the high that you've got into from writing, to look at it calmly, almost between reading the newspaper; you come upon your own stuff in a much more critical way.

"There is a wonderful process that occurs the moment I see the stuff in type, when I say, 'Oh my hat, I can't have written that. It really is pompous. Who the hell would want to read that?' And I start working it and cutting it and so on. It's really a different me; it's the editor who takes over the printed word. Truman Capote said, 'I'm not a writer, I'm a re-writer,' and I feel much the same.

"How the stories actually happen is, thank God, a mystery I can't answer. You cannot get to the secret centre of yourself as an artist. I think you simply decide; as Graham Greene said, he regarded his talent as a separate creature that had to be fed and watered and nursed and looked after, and in ordinary social discourse he liked to leave it outside the door, give it a rest. I feel much the same. In my own circle I never talk about my work, either what I'm doing or what I've done."

When we speak about dialogue, he says: "I love language and voices and that stuff, and I'll read a dialogue scene to myself again and again and again, and try and make the voices get on the page. That's the magic of writing. It's the greatest fun on earth."

At 65, he is enjoying a huge resurgence of popularity with his latest book. British critics, notoriously suspicious of success, have savaged him in the past but The Tailor of Panama seems to have disarmed them to a man. Le Carré's dry comment on the rave reviews: "The older you get in this country, the kinder they speak."

He doesn't enjoy the literary scene; the intrusive watchers who sit on the cliff path ogling him through binoculars, "ambitious young chaps with no principles", and fools.

He also worries about present-day Britain and refused the honour Thatcher wanted to bestow on him: "I couldn"t see myself as a Commander of the Thingummy of St George. Who are we that we have to increase the differences between us with these titles?"

He says of Thatcher: "She had, I thought, one of the best small minds I've ever met ... I didn't find any sense of humour in her at all. No flirtation. There was wit, but it was of the triumphalist sort; it was the wit that was there to destroy you in an argument ... But she had the most phenomenal presence and of course, in English terms, something quite extraordinary - she had the power of a super-nanny over collectively rather inhibited, tongue-tied men who were not used to being ordered around by a woman."

Le Carré has visited Kenya and Zambia, but never South Africa. I hope I'm not letting the cat out of the bag by revealing that he and Jane plan to pay us a visit sometime this year. "We'll stay long enough to fit into the woodwork for a while," he says at the conclusion of our interview. "I'll keep my big mouth shut and my tourist eyes open and try not to be a dreamy idiot."

This conjures up a fascinating prospect. With the 2004 Olympics in our sights, undercover shenanigans are bound to increase on the tip of Africa. Could we hope for an Honourable Ballboy or a Sailor of Cape Town or an Imperfect Security Spy in due course from the prophetic Le Carré pen? Watch this space.

Author Jenny Hobbs lives in Johannesburg. Le Carré's The Tailor of Panama was released in paperback in June.