The attention given to the Leveson Inquiry led to postponing my further watching and writing about the books, films and TV series of the works of John Le Carré but the Leveson Christmas and New Year break provided the opportunity to engage in some viewing and the 7 hour long episodes of A Perfect Spy which includes a good portrait of his real life father. The great questions are first how close are we allowed to get to the personality of Le Carré the spy? Are we also shown aspects of the personality of David John Moore Cornwall? Thirdly how much of myself do I see in this looking glass?
Spies for whichever country have characteristics in common. At the simplest of levels they are required to lead two lives and they are required to keep secrets from those closest to them. They must also be able to lie convincingly. For those who go undercover whether in the homeland monitoring organisations and individuals or overseas setting up networks and risking the lives of their agents as well as themselves there is need to be able to function in situations of extreme risk and danger.
Spies like soldiers should be able kill their enemies and accept that however much they take care there will collateral damage. A fourth grand question is: Can anyone with the Will and a level of physical and mental ability be trained to be a spy as most people can be trained to become soldiers or factory workers, or do some individuals have the personalities more suitable than others? I suspect the answer is both but that some individuals are more comfortable and find the role easier and will prove the most effective but also the most likely to become double agents. Others will need to believe that God is on their side and will not be able to function if their particular faith is lost.
Midway during the BBC adaptation Magnus Pym, the Perfect Spy faces a government selection panel for MI6 having undertaken bread and butter intelligence work during his university and national service experience for the MI5 and the military. He is asked about his father and argues that he has little contact from choice and then when asked about a Pym who is a successful conman he pretends this is his uncle, an approach he maintains even when a panel member points out that some criminality in ones background is an asset not a handicap.
Because of language ability he is to be sent to Czechoslovakia where he is asked about his willingness to undermine the regime even if his actions result in collateral damage which he justifies in shortening the life of the regime. But it is not his employers who give him the distinction of being the Perfect Spy. This we are to find out later.
I will also add, by way of introduction that knowing something of the story, although I have no recollection of seeing the series, perhaps because it did not feature George Smiley or Alec Guiness, I some apprehension. It was Christmas a time for celebration and being with family. It was not a time for a close examination of one’s failures and failings even if it should be! I have been impressed watching an episode a day over four days when returning to my Travel Lodge room and then cramming three episodes on my return home last night after a challenging drive home with several million others.
As a boy, Magnus Pym grows up in the 1930’s, a few years before me, enjoying being part of the wealthy fast cars and fast women lifestyle of his life and soul of the party confidence trickster father, played by Ray McNally, and an abused mother who tolerated that her husband also enjoyed the company of two young women of easy virtue which it later emerges he ran for profit, with associates who include Tim Healey and who in real life included the Kay twins. Early on Father and Healey are carted off to prison although the police fail to get hold of the filing cabinet in which all the records of his dodgy deals are kept. This cabinet becomes a gateway to freedom, of a kind.
The family lose everything including their home, and mother and son are required to turn to the father’s brother who is a blood and thunder preacher at the local Baptist type chapel. The brother is not just a bully who severely beats Magnus but there is the suggestion that he sexually abused his sister in the past and it is this which is used to blackmail him into given the two a home. The man’s wife is a secret drinker in the teetotal household. Their lives are a front and in fact one of the glaring issues of the series is that everyone leads at least two lives and has secrets with varying degrees of success at keeping them.
When, after his mother is sent off to a psychiatric hospital and at a Sunday school or children’s service someone has a fit, Magnus decides to use the same ploy to get himself out of the household, but the appointed nanny sees through the stunt, so he seeks revenge by peeing over the carpet in his uncle’s study, and when about be caught has another pretend passing it fit which the doctor suggests could be appendicitis and take him of to hospital where he is reunited with his father, Rick and Healey who have been released from prison during the first year or so of World War II. Phew. The context is that this was still the era when children had to been seen and not heard and males saw it their duty to beat their children as they themselves had been beaten to bring about acquiescence and self control.
In real life it is understood that Cornwell was sent to a preparatory boarding school which was bullying and abusive. In the film his father is soon back to his wealthy lifestyle this time exploiting the black market, commenting at one point that Magnus is perhaps one of 20 boys in the land who enjoyed a steak dinner that evening. After the war and shortages became less advantageous for commercial exploitation, his father becomes involved in a scheme defrauding the government by obtaining grants for renewing bomb damaged properties and then a scheme getting wealthy and lonely people to give up their capital for a superior income 10-12% is mentioned together with a return of capital to the estate. Nothing like the promised interest is paid and the capital disappears.
In real life I believe his father went to the USA at one point while Le Carré was sent to Sherborne Public school so he would become an English gentleman and a lawyer to become chief justice. In the series Magnus is bullied at the school because of his tendency to fabricate tales about his father’s exploits in the war. He carves the initials of one bully in the chapel, a flogging offence and this is an act which is to haunt him later. I am not sure the extent to which most parents forget the their acute awareness as children because of the need to move on from their own sinful behaviour and acts of wickedness or if there are those of us, like Magnus who remain haunted be all their experiences, traumas and short comings from the ideal of behaviour that has been implanted in them.
It is however fact that before going up to Oxford Le Carré spent at least a year 1948 1949 in Berne at the University where he made friends with a British Diplomat and his wife through the local English Church. According to a documentary about the life of Cornwall he commenced to undertake courier jobs for British Embassy and to provide intelligence on local extremists at the University.
In real life he also spied on left wingers and trade unionists when at Oxford and was then recruited to home intelligence service by someone who had moved from Sherborne School to the Principal of an Oxford College and on whom the character of George Smiley is based. In this production of the written work I am yet to read it is the contact at the British Embassy in Berne who is to become his mentor and sponsor for his life as a spy. In real life Le Carré was then recruited by MI5 before MI6 which he had to leave after the success of his book “The Spy who came in from the Cold published in 1965 and by which time he had over 25 years of involvement at different levels. He is now in his early 80’s.
In the TV series Magnus goes to Berne with an alleged Baroness Weber who has convinced his father that she is the rightful owner of a treasure box of art and manuscripts worth a fortune. They stay at the best hotel and she runs up huge bills at local stores buying fashionable clothing and jewels. His father has given Magnus a sum of money which is only to be handed over to the contact once Magnus has inspected the contents of the box. The Baroness persuades Magnus to hand over the funds after seducing him and then disappears. Magnus has to do a midnight flit and then undertake a series of manual work jobs as well as relying on charity to survive as his father has also disappeared again.
He then gains a scholarship at the University which brings him into contact with the British Embassy contact and spying on locals but there is no reference to the role as a courier.
He befriends a refugee in the same lodging house who claims to be a poet and they spend hours together discussing life. The man, Axel, is deported after Magnus reports to the British about his life. The suggestion is that he is either a Russian communist agent or a left wing extremist. It is an event which is to govern the rest of the story although it is not signalled at the time. In fact the reality is that he was then a struggling poet, seeking truth and grateful for the friendship of Magnus who he calls Sir Magnus and a refugee without paper but a limp.
In the third and fourth episodes Magnus, now played by Peter Egan for the rest of the series, has returned to England and is up at Oxford, a period when in reality he continued to provide intelligence on extremist clubs, societies and individuals at the university. The series does not cover this period in his life.
The reason for his appearance in the series is the selection of his father as a Liberal Democrat Candidate in the General Election. His father is still surrounded by his former cronies and one suspects that his choice of party was dictated only by his ability to con his way into the confidence of local hierarchy at a time when politics was very local and dependent on the war record or trade union support for the two main parties, before the era of TV campaigning and where local meetings would be well attended and covered by the local newsprint media. Rick is still up to his tricks finding ways to be able to book the Town Hall eve of Poll public meeting which traditionally would go to the sitting candidate or political Party which had won the previous Election.
Before the meeting Magnus discovers as young woman attempting to break into the filing cabinet which years before Magnus has held the key to prevent the police gaining access to the records of his father’s criminal deals. By this time Magnus has learned the art of surveillance and getting into locked places to view records and he does so in order to find the papers about the women’s father. The story goes back to the days of the insurance/income providing scam in which the subject handed over their capital for an income and protection when in old age as well as securing the capital as inheritance for the family. In this instance not only did her father see little of the promised income but on his death bed he had been persuaded to sign over the estate, which included a farm, so that the family was left penniless.
The young woman was spending the rest of her days attempting to bring Rick to justice.
Magnus who has already been placed in the position of endorsing his father’s campaign and which he does with a two edged choice of words, provides the young woman which ammunition to cause his father a major problem at his final public meeting by revealing that Rick has been to prison. Rick however is seasoned at being able to turn most verbal attacks or criticisms to his advantage. He pretends that as a young man he had used postage stamps from the petty cash box as a junior clerk which he had intended to return, an offence which even in the days before the World War II was unlikely to have led immediately to prison as a first conviction. He then uses a parable of the son given a second chance in order to win the crowd on the night over to his side, although he later admits that the headlines in the local paper was the reason why he did not succeed with the electorate in general.
Magnus had become engaged to a young woman of good standing and family background and has provided a cover story about his father being abroad. Somehow Magnus has got to learn of the wedding which he gatecrashes with his cronies, provides crates of Champagne and an expensive limousine as a wedding gift although while he showing the bride his generosity police vehicles are seen arriving in the background. There is then the scene as Magnus attempts to explain why the vehicle was immediately taken away.
While serving in army intelligence during national service Magnus is contacted by his former friend in Berne Axel who despite knowing that it was Magnus who turned him in says that out of friendship he can provide him with great intelligence which will further his career having become a spy for the Communists in Prague. He therefore knows all about the role of Magnus. He reintroduces Magnus to the former secretary of the extremist club at the University in Berne and with whom Magnus has what is suggested as his first sexual affair. She is called Sabina. He had attempted to use her to gain information about the club members although she had resisted his efforts to gain access to the membership list so he had been forced to break into the filing cabinet where the information was held and this had led to identifying Axel as an extremist as well as stateless refugee. She is to be his link and means of gaining the information which is to put him in the good books of his employers and further his career.
We know that in reality that Le Carré worked for MI5 before moving to MI6 and overseas postings but in this series he has moved from the army to MI6 and the relationship with his wife become quickly strained because of absences and the secrecy He is posted to Europe first to Prague and then to Berlin. There is a tense situation before a potential defector is met and who turns out to be none other than Axel with a record of their dealings to date including that Magnus complied with a request to provide low level intelligence for the high level stuff which Axel provided. Now he is to be blackmailed in a one way situation when he is provide the highest level of information in relation while he will appear to have established an excellent network of fictitious and false agents who will appear to provide quality information which will be either false or of little long term value. The only consolation is that his contact will be again Sabine.
When in Berlin he is contacted by the police in the middle of the night and fearing his role has been discovered he attempts to hastily destroy film and other giveaways of his trade. He then discovers it is his father in jail for yet another scam and a police chief who knows and respects Magnus and fixes for his father to be released.
His wife cannot cope with his absences and secrecy and faced with his departure to Berlin, seeks and gains a divorce. Magnus is one of those men who need a wife and family to provide a background cover of stability and commonplace when in reality he craves, like his father for the excitement of trying to beat the odds. In fact it is evident that Magnus has turned into his father. Gregarious, able to make friends quickly wherever he goes, and enjoying the illicit, Magnus like his father enjoys sex whenever the opportunity arises. The immediate employer is always Jack from the Berne Embassy and he takes a fancy to Jack’s woman friend Mary, who Magnus then marries and has a son, Thomas.
We then catch up with Magnus his wife and child in Washington but according to a suspicious associate and new CIA family friend” Grant Laderer he is always on the move all over the USDA talking to officials and getting secret information which he hopes is only being passed on to the UK. On a family picnic the issue of the Criminality of Artists versus the Artistry of Criminality is raised. And the extent to which one has to be a barking psychopath to enjoy their work, which they do.
It is 20 years since his recruitment by Axel who is also in the USA and an Embassy official and believes it is time for them to retire and he later offers Magnus a Dacha in the Black Sea with a chestful of medals. Magnus explains that for him he has become the game. A committee of USA officials led by one Harry Wexler think they know the particular game he is playing having noticed some curiosities in the computer analysis of Magnus and his Czechoslovakian networks.
Celebrating Christmas with his family, Magnus is called out to a bar where he meets his yet again destitute father and Magnus provides him with a steak meal but refuses to invite him home for the festivities making available fresh funds as he has in relation to various American cities where enterprises failed. The Americans insist on coming to London to put their suspicions to senior British intelligence officers but Jack dismisses it all as a Czechoslovakian attempt to frame Magnus. Recalled to London and haunted by his past, Magnus, under a false name, takes secret lodgings with a Miss Dubber (Peggy Ashcroft) at his childhood now desolate seaside holiday centre one of a row of near empty guess houses. He has survived the interrogation about his contacts, including the curiosities thrown up by the computer analysis but the Americans remain suspicious.
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