LE CARRE'S TOUGHEST CASE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403780002-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 12, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: March 16, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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ARTICLE'-i'r'e L? NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
ON PAGE 16 March 1986
LE cARRE'S
TOUGHEST CASE
By Joseph Lelyveld
T IS ALMOST TOO OBVIOUS TO POINT OUT, BUT THE
man behind the novels of John le Carre has a lot in com-
mon with his characters. This is so not only because of his
presumed emergence from the shadowy world of Her
Majesty's secret service and his multiple personae. It is
so also when you meet him, for David Cornwell - the
creator of the le Carre mask and oeuvre - customarily
discloses himself the way his books disclose their plots:
disarmingly, in artfully controlled stages, never entirely.
Yet in his 11th novel - "A Perfect Spy," just out in
Britain and to be published in the United States in May -
Cornwell steps out from behind le Carre, setting down
pointers to his own past as never before. Significantly,
the new novel is the first of his thrillers not to have been
submitted to his former employers in the British Govern-
ment for clearance. Cornwell observes the proprieties:
He is careful not to identify the departments that would
normally have had to give their permission and careful,
as well, not to declare the reason for his omission this
time. But in the hours of conversation I had with him at
homes in London's Hampstead and on the rocky Cornish
about which he has been told little, except that it is patriotic, offi-
cial and British. Cornwell clammed up when, trying to get down
to crude facts, I asked whether he had actually done in his Ox-
ford days what he makes Pym do in his novel. A thoroughly en-
gaging conversationalist with a rare gift for mimicry, for get-
ting the accent and intonation of voices right, he now looked
away into a middle distance, kneading his tufted, rust-colored
eyebrows with his forefingers.
Getting nowhere, I asked why he was reluctant to answer my
question. "I don't think it would have been a respectable thing to
have done," he replied on a note of such exquisite, not to say hi-
larious, ambiguity that the truth of the matter, I thought, stood
out clearly.
Still, anyone trying to read "A Perfect Spy" as a veiled mem-
oir of the author's experience as an intelligence officer will soon
feel frustrated. Cornwell's trail into the secret world becomes
hard to trace once Magnus Pym leaves Oxford and it is not, fi-
nally, in the narrative of Pym's career as an agent that a light is
cast into the darker recesses of David Cornwell's past and mind.
It is not the character of Magnus Pym that makes this Corn-
well's most personally revealing book. It is, instead, the some-
times devastating portrait of Rick Pym, Magnus's father, a man
of immense social charm and no inner values. Rick is the suc-
cessful public man David Cornwell fears he might have become
had he not reincarnated himself as John le Carre and veered off
into literature.
And even then, the point is not merely confessional. The sharp-
ness of the David Cornwell self-portrait found in Magnus Pym
enables the author to tackle a subject that has tantalized and
eluded him since he first started to write 25 years ago: his ex-
traordinary boyhood as the son of an overwhelming and consum-
ing, charming but mendacious confidence man. Rick Pym is the
fictional projection of Cornwell's own father.
coast - the only interviews he would have, he said, on the new
novel and its genesis - he deftly guided me to an informed
guess. "A Perfect Spy" was not offered for clearance because it
is, of all his books, the first to make direct use of his own experi-
ences in what he calls "the secret world" and thus the one most
likely to incur censorship from what remains the government, of
all Western governments, most obsessed with its secrets.
David Cornwell would never put it this way - although John le
Carrb might, if he were projecting it as fiction - but it followed
from my guess that one of Britain's best-established authors was
daring the authorities to make themselves absurd by prosecut-
ing him under the Official Secrets Act. For what exactly? Only
the authorities and Cornwell could say for sure. But to the extent that his
own early biography overlaps with that of Magnus Pym - the fictional dou-
ble agent who comes close to being his alter ego in the new book - the author
can be said to have lifted the curtain that still conceals the way the declining
imperial power set about in the post-World War II years to recruit bright
young Englishmen to spy on other bright young Englishmen.
"A Perfect Spy" shows Pym going through his rites of initiation into the
secret world In Bern, Vienna and Oxford where, as an undergraduate, he in-
filtrates left-wing student groups and sends reports to an agency in London
Joseph Lelyveld is chief of the London bureau of The New York Times.
tntinued
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Ronald Cornwell, this obsessive high roller who simwLa-
neously espoused and flouted the traditional middle-class vir-
tues of hard work and probity, made his second son a minor
character in the obscure drama of his life. (David's mother, the
first of his father's three wives, vanished from the scene when he
was only 3.) The process of discovering, as an adolescent, what
his father was all about, he now says, provided him with his first
experience of a secret world and the craft of espionage. In other
words, what he knew about his father, he learned by spying.
Now, finally, after a succession of failed attempts, he has man-
aged to deal with that experience in a novel and recapture his fa-
ther as a character. In drawing his portrait of Rick Pym, he
makes his most bruising revelations.
"It was only when I took leave of Smiley in my own mind that I
was able to address myself to my real father," David Cornwell
said. He was referring, of course, to George Smiley, his best-
known character who appeared on the first page of the first le
Carre novel, "Call for the Dead," published under the le Carrel
nom de plume because David Cornwell was still working in the
government for surrogate fathers like Smiley. Smiley's physical
appearance was suggested, the author told me, by someone
Cornwell knew in the Defense Ministry and his long-suffering
manner was drawn from an old tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford.
The character, who appeared in five later novels and then, with
Alec Guinness in the role, in two celebrated television series,
shared with his creator an interest in 17th-century German lit-
erature. They also came to share a vision of the secret world, of
the meaning of loyalty and betrayal. But David Cornwell's direct
references to his own life were strictly controlled, more elusive
than allusive, in the Smiley books.
HE REAL FATHER, RONNIE, DIED 10
years ago. By then, father and son were mutu-
ally estranged and embittered. John le Carre's
triumphs - more specifically, the millions his
books had earned - were for Ronnie both a
source of pride- and grievance. The grievance
was that here was capital in his own name,
there for the taking, practically owed to him -
or so he could easily convince himself - and yet
out of reach. Knowing how his father had
preyed on wives, parents, in-laws, close friends
and innocent or not-so-innocent bystanders,
knowing how he left one and nearly all with a
shimmering vision of a huge payoff in an al-
ways pending real estate deal and a vaporous
promise to "see you right," the son usually
managed to withstand the paternal blandish-
ments and appeals for money.
"I would pass him the odd couple of grand,"
the author said, thinking back to encounters in
which the father-son relationship was painfully reversed, "but
nothing of the dimensions which he felt he was owed. He had a
marvelous brain for instant arithmetic. Once, in Vienna, he
worked out with me what my education
had cost. He overlooked the fact that
some parts of it were never paid - and
other parts were paid with dried fruit -
and figured out what it would all have
been worth to him if he had simply in-
vested it. Then he suggested a sensible
settlement figure."
David Cornwell's voice trailed off,
and now Ronnie was speaking through
his son's mouth. "Son," he was saying,
"to sit here and feel that you are not
able to put your hand in your pocket for
your old man. It's not the money. It's
the gesture ...."
With the catharsis of the novel behind
him, he can laugh at his imitation. In-
deed, recovering his sense of humor
where his father was concerned was an
essential step to writing the book. "It
wasn't until three or four years ago,"
he said at our first meeting, "that it
dawned on me that the only way I could
tell this story and get the humor out of it
that I wanted - and through the
humor, the compassion - was to make the son, by extension, in
many ways worse than the father. So there could be no question
of self-pity."
The balance between compassion and indignation achieved in
the novel is harder to maintain in conversation, and it was only
at our subsequent meetings that Cornwell ventured beyond "A
Perfect Spy" to deal directly with recollections of Ronnie. The
father who introduced himself at a Berlin film studio as his son's
agent, explaining that he was doing advance work for Para-
mount for the filming of "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold"
and then leaving behind, as was his custom, a mound of unpaid
bills. The father who twice threatened to sue the son (once over a
half-realized but still recognizable portrait in "A Naive and Sen-
timental Lover," the other time over a television interview in
which he felt himself to have been slighted). The father who ap-
pears to have represented himself to a woman he fancied in
Brussels as Ron le Carrel, the famous author, and who may not
have been above thoughts of blackmail on hearing a tale about
his son and a woman in another European city. The father who
had to be bailed out of jail in Zurich and Jakarta, whose unpaid
bills were likely to be waiting for his son whenever he checked
himself in at a luxury hotel. The smooth-talking father who
could, over a few drinks, persuade a normally dutiful Swiss rail-
road engineer to deliver him in an unscheduled, private train to
Wengen, where his son has a ski lodge. The father who, at a time
when he was not just penniless but deeply in debt, could be em-
braced by the headwaiter upon entering the Savoy Grill.
Some of Ronnie's capers seem funny in retrospect, others not.
But, for a moment at least, I thought I heard more nostalgia than
resentment in Cornwell's voice when he said, "He pulled some
wonderful cons in my name."
ALL HIS LIFE, RONALD CORNWELL MANAGED A BET-
ter-than-plausible imitation of an entrepreneur with flair. His el-
dest son, Anthony, two years older than David and now the crea-
tive director of a New York advertising firm, passes on a story of
how Ronnie managed to talk his way out of an enormous bill at
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the grand luxe Kulm Hotel in
St. Moritz. He simply bought
the hotel - that is, he per-
suaded the manager that his
parties and profligate spend-
ing had all been part of a test
of the hotel's services on be-
half of a syndicate that was
about to purchase the estab-
lishment. The manager was
so relieved to hear that
Ronnie had been satisfied
that he forgot the tab. Some-
compamed by flashy women they wanted for as long as i of his bankruptcy: "Un-
in feathered hats. The fathers they wanted and go away full less supply of lovelies and
of the other boys were in the sent them all around at 6 o'- crowned King of Chalfont St.
-hutunnaid." ,,,;.U ,,e Peter Owes a Million and a
times Ronnie dreamed up big
deals and nearly pulled them
off, only to overplay his hand
by turning down a fat profit in
hopes of an even fatter one.
"He did everybody down,"
David Cornwell's first wife,
Ann, says of her former fa-
ther-in-law. "If he had a
choice between being honest
and dishonest, he'd be dishon-
est. It made him feel clever."
David Cornwell remembers
that his father's laugh had a
frightening ring to it when it
went on too long, that his hugs
suggested violence as well as
love. He remembers, too,
times when his father - who
also accumulated heavy
debts to bookies - seemed to
be hiding out in physical fear.
The first glimmering that
Ronnie might be something
other than an ordinary busi-
nessman registered in
David's preadolescent imagi-
nation during the war. In a
I "Many, many years ago," "There may have been the The eerie sense of isolation 3
his Ronnie voice was saying,
"when I was making my way
in life, as you will be too,
make no mistake about it, I
was in the position of the of-
fice boy who borrowed a few
stamps from the till ......
What he calls "the sheer en-
chantment of Ronnie" still
worked for him then, but he
already knew how appear-
ance and reality could di-
verge. The father's plush of-
fices, luxurious suburban
residence, big property deals
and splashy parties could not
conceal from his son the fact
that every trip to the butcher
or local garage in the gleam-
ing Bentley was a high-risk
adventure, for it could always
end with the embarrassment
of being told that there would
be no more meat or gas on
credit.
"Listen," the Ronnie voice
was telling the creditors, "I
had to make my way in the
world once. I understand
your problems, but you must
understand mine. I've got a
temporary problem of liquidi-
ty. There's money out there
working for both of us and
you'll be seen right. Come to
dinner meanwhile."
In his own voice, David
Cornwell continued: "So
they'd come to dinner and eat
a piece of meat on credit and
period of austerity, his father drink themselves into the
would arrive at St. Andrew's ground, because you can al-
in Pangbourne, the boarding ways get drink on credit pro-
school Tony and David at- vided you order in dozens.
tended, in flashy cars, ac- They would drink whatever
i ficking on the DiacK marxet in ity, but less as an end in itself oats. ne wiu um wJ.
medicines and fruit. "I real- the suburb where Ronnie had
than as a means. The right sent them a nice present and himself as a daz-
ized," David Cornwell said, contact, the right friends, the they'd find it waiting at the established
"that by the standards of the right name dropped in the bar. There were these tern- zling light of the country club
world into which he projected set. For the scale of his crash
right place, just the right bly pretty girls with the reciated, one may
me, he was himself just not present for the local bank cricket bats." to be convert ap1pre pounds into 198y
quite what he should be." manager's wife or child This was not the kind of
He was 18 before he discov- The debts he
might be nurtured into credit. anecdote his father would tell dollars. would be the equiva-
ered that his father was a Some debts were occasionally him directly, but one he amassed
convicted he
felon, jailed as an paid off, but what came in would overhear when Ronnie lent, according to the Bank of
embezzler when David was a mostly went toward incurring was regaling his raffish circle England, of $30 million today. small boy. Ronnie was stand- new obligations on new deals of underlings and retainers. Ronnie's second wife and
ing in Great Yarmouth as a that would miraculously see "It was," he said with hind-I their two children - Char-
Liberal candidate for Parlia- everyone right. The weight of sight, "like listening to some-1 lotte Cornwell, an actress
ment when the secret came his indebtedness never made body on the dirty tricks side who was the model for his
out. Cornwell is convinced him desperate. It was, in fact, of the intelligence service protagonist in "The Little
that his father arranged to be what he lived on. But the boasting how he'd done a bur- Drummer Girl," and Rupert
confronted with his own hid- larger it got, the grander his glary." When they were Cornwell, now the corre-
den past at a public meeting, style of living had to become alone, father and son seldom spondent in Bonn for Lon-
in order to drown out a Tory to keep the bubble from talked. "Practically all our don's Financial Times -
whispering campaign. The bursting. conversations," Cornwell washed up in an aunt's house
son was almost taken in by said, "the ones that really with two pounds, 12 shillings,
t.
2
the well-prepared mea culpa
his father delivered then,
which now rolled off his own
.... tie .. -atorl it for my
odd piece of land," said his and emotional neediness that
son. "There may have been came from such a father
the odd successful deal. But I drove Ronnie's sons to seek
think that for as long as he what David now calls "neu-
could hold the system togeth- tral ground." They could feel
er, he was never at any one at home neither in his circle
time solvent. I doubt whether nor the very proper schools
there was a time in his life of they attended. Tony's even-
~___ w tual solution was to emigrate
check to America. David, at 16, fled
he to Switzerland, to Bern, to im-
for could ould have
for 1,000 pounds signed with a chconfi- eck dence." merse himself further in the
understood that if he German language, which had
He the seemed to offer him at school
stood for Parliament
first time it was to get out of an "internal refuge."
active duty in the army in Ronnie's bank drafts never
wartime - he enhanced his came on schedule, often
plausibility. Sending his sons never came at all, so David
to the right schools achieved survived, as Magnus Pym
the same end - paying the does in the novel, on odd jobs,
tuition regularly did not - including one washing ele-
and so did the lavish parties. phants with a long brush. The
11 11
David Cornwell remembers
the actor Trevor Howard at
the house and, another time,
tents on the lawn when the en-
tire Australian national
cricket team arrived. Hoping
to capitalize on the visit,
Ronnie had bought 100 or so
cricket bats for the Austral-
plot of A Perfect Spy dic-
tates that Pyrn go from Bern
to Oxford, then wind up in the
intelligence corps in Austria.
In David Cornwell's young
life, intelligence service in
Austria preceded Oxford. By
then, he had met Ann, who
would become his wife.
ians to autograph; in a typi- Ann, now married to a Brit-
cally grand gesture, he ish diplomat stationed in Zim-
meant to distribute them to babwe, was one of the first
the sons of existing or poten- people David had known who
tial creditors. But setting up could not be charmed by his
an assembly line for the sign- father. Ronnie and she recog-
ing proved impossible at the nized each other, from the
party. start, as rivals for his affec-
Ronnie was only briefly tions. Then, just before the
fazed. "The team was staying young couple was to wed,
at the Strand Palace Hotel," Ronnie went bust in spectacu-
David recalled, "and he got lar fashion. David Cornwell
about 10 of the prettiest girls recalls the headline in The
he could find from his limit- Daily Express over the report
. or
counted, were conducted in sixpence, or about $1
front of other people. All years thereafter, Ronnie's
through our lives." , appearances in the lives of all
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his children tended to be fur-
tive and brief. Sometimes,
Rupert recalls, he would be
summoned to an obscure rail-
way hotel where his father
would be registered under an
alias. Bankruptcy did not
keep Ronnie from showing up
at David's wedding and, hav-
ing signed a tab with his usual
flourish, ordering cham-
pagne for all the guests. Nor,
at a later date, when his son
was struggling along on ?13 a
week as a teacher at Eton, did
it prevent Ronnie from send-
ing him a new Ford, supplied
without a down payment by a
gullible car dealer in Wales.
David Cornwell knew that
he had charm, but charm,
Ronnie's charm, was a char-
acteristic he viewed as deeply
corrupt, more to be resisted,
even exorcised, than used. "I
was appalled by the effect
that charm could have be-
cause he had nothing else but
charm," he said.
T HE PERCEPTION
of these symmetries
had much to do with
David Cornwell's departure
from government service and
the view of the secret world
that shaped his voice as a
writer. it also has kept him
The Ford came with the li- luorking ~n~ha shadow cast by
cense plate RC 4, suggesting
it was just one in Ronald stp absolutely public stage.
by
Cornwell's fleet, but the son, am appalled
he
in what amounted to a decla- my public ol performances," ration of independence, sent said. "I
hope never to ap-
about back. "He was very angry vision there and n again. "
about my returning it," pear r in "A Perfect
David said, "because for him Finally,
than symmetries be-
that meant I didn't have the Spy,"
faith faith that he would keep up come
provide the background.
book's
the payments. He thought my They ty P
ors were economic, structure, subject and theme.
as
Looking at the secret world, which
is so much less secret than it was
when he started writing, Cornwell is
inclined to go a step further and argue
that public morality now shapes pri-
vate morality, including the morality
of spies. That is why, he argues, there
has been such an apparent epidemic
of treason and defection. "If you can
rewrite international la* to suit your
own purposes," he said, "you can
hardly then expect the people you em-
ploy not to rewrite the morality of
their own position."
The argument struck me as inter-
esting but too neat. Was the morality
of the secret world really worse now, I
asked, than it was 30 years ago?
Maybe not worse, Cornwell replied,
but just more public. The real differ-
ence, he thought, between now and
then was in the flagrant failures of
Western agencies, notably the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency, to "handle"
people. No agent in the old days would
lose a defector in a Georgetown res-
taurant the way the C.I.A. lost Vitaly
Yurchenko, the K.G.B. defector, last
November. The official con man's
basic skills as a "handler" have
waned as a result, he theorized, of an
obsession with high-tech espionage.
re
whereas they were emotion- "You know what I feel?" a
al, but if there is any logic to breathless C.I.A. man, bent A had HIS SPECTACULAR
money at all, you really can- on exposing Magnus Pym as bankruptcy in London, Ronnie
not accept a brand new car a double agent, asks in its had to travel farther afield -
from a chap who's a bank- pages. "I think if Magnus's ' to Asia and the United States - to find
rupt ? writing ever worked for him, investors for his schemes. One year
For the next 20 years, the he'd have been okay." There he would turn up in Singapore, trying
son mostly dodged the father is a personal reference here to sell the authorities on a plan for
and the bitter emotions he but it needs to be worked out betting pools; the next, in New York
evoked. "I was just so busy carefully. Obviously, this is with an idea for a convention center in
defending myself," he said, not John le Carve saying that the Bahamas. Like the cricket bats
"that I wouldn't allow him in, David Cornwell could have the Australians autographed, John le
and that was what really en- become a traitor. It is not be- Cam's books became an asset on
raged him, how I ceased to trayal, in any case, that Corn- which Ronnie could trade. He ordered
weep when he wept. Because well sees in the character who copies by the hundreds, signing them
it was almost family law that more or less serves as his al- with a flourish, "From the author's
at a meeting or a departure, ter ego. It is obedience: Pym father." His son doubts he ever really
you wept." is obedient to too many mas- read one, that he ever really read any
And yet, as sons do, he ters. book.
could feel his father inside As might be expected in a le Remarkably, his old debts still un-
himself. Ronnie had his se- Carve novel, the perfect spy paid, Ronnie managed to re-establish
cret world, and the son, mak- turns out to be a pathetic fig- himself in London in a new marriage
ing his excursions into an- ure and a hypocrite. Mag- and a new office in Jermyn Street.
other kind of secret world nus's hypocrisy can be seen The office had a letterhead proclaim-
under the tutelage of surro- as less forgivable than that of ing it to be the international head-
gate fathers - those fathers his father, Rick, but less forgivable quarters of a dozen companies. He
whose lives and personalities than the hypocrisy of either father or was sitting there one day when his
would later be refracted into son is that of the secret institutions daughter Charlotte burst in to ask
characters like George Magnus serves. Top officials meeting why she had to wait until the age of 25
Smiley - came to realize he in Whitehall are more concerned in to discover from a family lawyer that
had inherited some of "A Perfect Spy" with saving face he had been to jail. "It's an absolute
Ronnie's traits and that they with the Americans than they are lie," Ronnie said.
made him effective in gov- with saving the lives of agents who Charlotte, on whom he doted, would
ernment service. "The bar- may be compromised. With Magnus suddenly in those years, when she
gaining, the seduction in the and Rick - as with Ronnie - appear- was struggling as an actress, spot his
foreign service life, the busi- ances matter most. Public morality bald head from the stage. "If your
ness of making people say and private reality reflect each other. parents are proud of you, I think you
more than they want, of be- The novel seems to suggest that the forgive anything," she says. Occa-
friending where you would best con men can be found holding sionally it happened that a first-class
not befriend unless they had power in governments. The differ- air ticket would arrive in the mail
information or access or in- ence is that where Rick left his with a summons to Paris. After a
fluence that you wanted, I tradesmen with unpaid bills, the insti- splendid lunch, father and daughter
found all of those things horn- tutions leave their agents dead. would go to the races and root from
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nvw"c aalu uc uwncu. nlS 50I1 KU-
pert, Who was working in those days
as a correspondent in Paris, recalls
that when he was invited to meet his
father there, it was usually at the Ritz
bar.
When he died while watching a tele-
vised cricket match in 1975,
Ronnie had at least two cars,
the Jermyn Street office, an
apartment at a good Chelsea
address, a country house near
Maidenhead, two race horses
- all held in the name of his
bogus companies - and no
assets.
"Nobody could find enough
money in his wallet or any-
where to pay a single mem-
ber of his staff for that
week," David said. "There
was no money, period. All the
helpers, assistants and em-
ployees at his office were
going through the papers like
crazy looking for one little bit
of money. It was like the end
of 'Zorba the Greek,' all those
dreadful widow women in
black coming in, but they
never found a thing."
David Cornwell paid for the
cremation and memorial
service but boycotted the
service. Charlotte, who imag-
ines that her father might
have had to face prison again
if he hadn't died then, was so
offended by her half-broth-
er's absence that she didn't
talk to him for nearly two
years. Now she says she re-
spects him for his honesty.
"Dad would have been de-
lighted to have a book," she
says of "A Perfect Spy."
Switching into her own
Ronnie Cornwell voice, she
then gave vent to the mock
protests her father might
have made. "I don't know
where he got the idea for
this," she huffed. "It's abso-
lutely not true." Switching
back to her own voice: "Deep
down, he would have been
thrilled. "
David Cornwell's three
sons from his marriage to
Ann remain close to him. He
has a fourth son by his second
wife, the former book editor
Jane Eustace. And, as he
grows older, Charlotte and
Rupert both say their half-
brother, though taller and
slimmer than Ronnie, in-
creasingly resembles his fa-
ther. That symmetry, carried
to its logical extreme in the
novel where Pym portrays
himself as "a failing con man
tottering on the last legs of his
credibility," fortunately
blurs in real life. But all
Ronnie's offspring still feel
his presence, and the mystery
still unfolds. Rupert Corn-
well, with the same initials as
his father, braces himself for
trouble whenever an immi-
gration officer hesitates over
his passport. The question,
"Are you any relation to Ron-
ald Cornwell," can still some-
times be the prologue to a
hitherto unknown saga of
debts and unpaid bills.
David Cornwell heard it
last in November when he
handed his credit card to a
clerk at the Imperial Hotel in
Vienna. "Cornwell, Cornwell.
Is that a common name in
England?" the man asked.
"Spelled that way, no, not
very," he replied.
"But John le Carre's father
was called Cornwell."
"Yes, I believe he was," the
author conceded, intending to
leave it at that. Then, soften-
ing, he owned up to being
himself.
,,You treated your father
very badly," the man com-
mented. "Ja, such a nice gen-
tleman, you could have given
him money."
As always, Cornwell gets
the accents just right as he
relates his story. As always,
his father had left behind au-
tographed copies of his books.
Altogether out of the ordinary
was the fact that Ronnie owed
no money to the clerk, an old
drinking companion. "So how
is he?" the man now asked.
"Well, I'm sorry to tell you
he's dead," the son replied.
Finishing his narration, he
says, "I left him in a state of
mourning."
In his own personal history,
the new novel serves as a ca-
tharsis for David Cornwell
rather than a final judgment
on the father. "I still don't
know him," the son acknowl-
edged. "He remains a foreign
country." Yet he hopes that
many sons and many fathers
will recognize their own histo-
ries in that of Magnus and
Rick Pym.
"There's a feeling I have
very much," he said, "I think
many fathers have it, that
somehow we are there not to
pass on the things we inher-
ited from our own fathers." ^
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000403780002-1