European enticement

John le Carre, the quintessential "Englishman", renounced his British citizenship to become an Irishman, few months before his death.

Many consider John le Carré, aka David Cornwell, the man who redefined the espionage novel and carried it beyond the confines of genre fiction, to be the quintessential “Englishman” caught up in a lifelong quest of negotiating his Englishness. It will be news to many of them that a few months before his death, le Carré renounced his British citizenship to become an Irishman.

On April 1, his son, Nicholas Cornwell, revealed in a BBC documentary to be aired today, that he took Irish citizenship in December 2020, in order to remain European. His opposition to Brexit was uncompromising and, it appears, non-negotiable. He went to Cork, where his grandmother was from. The town archivist apparently embraced him, saying, “Welcome home.” His application for citizenship of the Republic of Ireland was successful.

Though the proximate cause for his “flight” from Britain was Brexit, which he excoriated at every opportunity, most notably in his final novel, Agent Running in the Field, le Carré’s relationship with England had always been troubled; his desire to be European unapologetic and unequivocal. The ambivalence is captured in something he told the Irish writer John Banville in 2019: “I think Brexit is totally irrational, that it’s evidence of dismal statesmanship on our part, and lousy diplomatic performances. I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years. And it’s a kind of liberation, if a sad kind.”

But le Carré’s relationship with England had been fraught not just after Brexit, but much before Europe had embarked upon its unity project. Le Carré, to put it mildly, hated that much revered institution to which he, like many upper-class children, had been sent: The public school. “At the age of 16, I decided that 11 years’ hard labour in the English boarding-school Gulag was enough for anyone, and in 1949 — only four years then after the War’s end — I bolted to Berne in Switzerland, determined to embrace the German soul,” he had said in 2010.

Philippe Sands, friend, neighbour, lawyer, writer, and the man who made the BBC documentary, said of le Carré: “This [the change of citizenship] I did not know, not when we were together, not when I entered the archives just a few weeks ago, imagining a journey around the writer and his country. In the end, there were three countries: The country of his home, the country of his soul and the country of his forebears.”

Thus, England, the country of his home; Ireland, the country of his forebears; and, Germany, the country of his soul, which, in 2011, awarded him its Goethe medal, for performing “outstanding services for the German language and international cultural dialogue”.

It is not difficult for even the casual reader to uncover le Carré’s German connection. The most memorable and deathless character he created, spymaster George Smiley, was a scholar of the minor German poets, and during his enforced absences from the Circus and the action, he would be ensconced somewhere working on his German poetry, about which he was perennially writing a monograph.

Le Carré’s least celebrated book, often dismissed as an experiment that would have been better not made, was The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), which was his only novel not dealing in espionage, apart from his second work of fiction, A Murder of Quality (1962), a crime novel set in a public school. The name of the novel, in fact, comes from the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller’s distinction between naïve poetry, which is descriptive in a straightforward way, and sentimental “poetry”, which is self-reflective and structured around the poet’s reflections on and relationship to his or her material.

This was not all, of course. Le Carré’s work, and his life and concerns all reflected a cosmopolitanism and engagement that went way beyond any parochial British-ness. His early novels are peopled, for instance, by characters of mixed, almost untraceable, stock, even when they are British: Peter Guillaume, Jim Prideaux and Toby Esterhase, all members of the secret service — the Circus.

But more than that, le Carré’s focus shifts especially in the post-Cold War era to all manner of locales and problems that concern Britain and the West insofar as they have created them in the first phase — the loot of the Congo, the depredations of the pharmaceuticals industry in Kenya, the Chechen uprising against Russian exploitation, the injustices of the “War on Terror”, double-dealings in Panama, and the intricacies of the global arms trade.

But in the end, there is far more to le Carré’s nominal British identity and his attempt to negotiate it, because his engagement with moralities and ethical behaviour are both universal and culturally rooted. It is a zone of ambivalence that cannot be politicised in a narrow sense, under the rubric of the “free world” against the rest.