"The Watcher" by Jackie Hedeman
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I always assumed that I would meet John Le Carré, and now I never will. I told this to my friend Molly when Le Carré died this winter. “Yeah,” she said, her sympathy immediate, if Skype-blunted. “I felt the same about Bowie.”
In the days that followed Le Carré’s death, I found myself struggling to sum up an adequate explanation for his place in my literary pantheon. I still struggle because my reasons are self-evident and shared by so many others. Neatly articulated homages have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian, all expressing some version of the facts of his life and work. Le Carré was a gifted writer. He was uncompromising on the subject of the resounding violence of colonialism and dangerous imperial self-regard. He could have been a little better at writing women, though he improved. In George Smiley, he created one of the greatest fictional characters of all time.
This is what I love most in his writing: his ability to create characters who set his fictional world spinning with desperate, human action. In Le Carré’s work, the chess game of fiction writing is all but invisible; if his plots are unpredictable, it is because his characters are, at all times, frustratingly themselves.
Unlike its filmic adaptations, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy opens not with a botched mission to uncover the identity of a Soviet mole but with an if-then statement. “The truth is,” the novel begins, “if old Major Dover hadn't dropped dead at Taunton races, Jim would never have come to Thursgood's at all.” Thus the tone is set for an essential spy novel, one that has as much to say about love, grief, and loneliness as it does about secrets, betrayal, and the Cold War. “Jim” is Jim Prideaux, a former spy shunted out of the service after an assignment goes wrong and leaves him badly injured, his spy networks dead, and the Circus—Le Carré’s stand-in for MI6—in chaos. Prideaux washes up on the shores of Thursgood’s, a boys’ boarding school, and parks his camper in a muddy dip. He has been hired to teach French. His wounds are still draining. He buries his gun.
The first to see Prideaux arrive is Bill Roach, a little boy with a round face and glasses. His parents have left him because they’re leaving each other; he’s deposited at Thursgood’s and promptly forgotten. At boarding school, he doesn’t fit in. He spends most of his time invisible, observing but unobserved. He is primed to go on like this indefinitely—until graduation or some other end—only his life is disrupted, reshaped, and possibly saved, by the arrival of this stranger.
At first Roach watches Prideaux from afar, imagining backstories, trying to make sense of what he sees. Then he comes a little closer. He makes himself known. With deeply perceptive empathy, Prideaux dubs Roach “best watcher in the unit,” giving Roach a noble purpose. “Best watcher in the unit” does not single-handedly turn Roach’s life around; he still does not fit in with his classmates. Nevertheless, “watcher” is an essential understanding of who he already is—a label like a lens bringing into focus what was always there.
In an interview with The Paris Review, John Le Carré explains the origins of Tinker, Tailor’s school-time plot:
In fact, that child was written into my life because I was a duty master one night at this school for disadvantaged kids, and somebody came to me and said, “Please, Jameson is trying to kill himself.” They took me to this stairwell in a big Victorian house, and there was a little kid standing on the banister at the top, with a marble floor forty feet below. Everyone was petrified. And I just went and scooped him up. He didn’t jump. And when we were alone I said, “Why did you do that?” He said, “I just can’t do the routine. I can’t make my bed. I can never make it to class promptly. Everybody teases me.” It was that little child in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy whom Jim Prideaux espoused; they make a common bond. I love people who can spot a victim, and Jim could because he was one himself.
Prideaux’s victimhood extends beyond his disastrous mission. The Soviet mole in the Circus, the one who sent information to Moscow with more or less open eyes, knowing that Prideaux would likely be injured, killed, or captured, is Bill Haydon, Jim’s colleague, friend, and—as evidenced by subtext so heady it may as well be text—lover. Haydon and Prideaux met at Oxford in the 1930s and went on to work closely together in intelligence for years.
Le Carré’s influences run deep and essential. If anyone was a watcher, he was. Before he was the author John Le Carré, he was David Cornwell, an intelligence agent working for MI6. That career came to an end when it was revealed that Kim Philby, a member of the Cambridge Spy Ring who had also worked for MI6, had shared the names of British agents with the KGB. Philby fled to Moscow, leaving behind him ruined trust and the knowledge—impossible to ignore though many had tried—that privilege was not a guarantee of loyalty.
Le Carré’s writing existed in the wake of that betrayal. In Le Carré’s work, spying is not fun or glamorous. Instead, it is revealed to be a thankless and bloody occupation, where the ethically-minded few are nonetheless embodiments of empire. He called it as he saw it. Le Carré stopped short of condemning the whole enterprise—he was still invested—but he was a zealous, if pessimistic, reformer who hated Kim Philby to the end. On the flyleaf of Philby’s memoir, My Silent War, Le Carré is quoted:
Behind the inbred upper-class arrogance, the taste for adventure, lies the self-hate of a vain misfit for whom nothing will ever be worthy of his loyalty. In the last instance, Philby is driven by the incurable drug of deceit itself.
It is odd for me to reflect on this hatred, given that Bill Haydon was my introduction to Kim Philby and the history of the Cambridge Spy Ring, and that introduction held sufficient charm to power decades of fascination. Philby and Haydon share a magnitude of betrayal, though their biographies do not significantly overlap. Haydon folds when cornered, gets nosebleed after nosebleed in his cell, waiting to be swapped for captive British spies in Russia. He attempts to defend his decision to send Prideaux into danger, even as he half-acknowledges what they meant to each other. Le Carré walks a long way to make Haydon unlikeable and pathetic and ultimately succeeds, though not soon enough to prevent me from rooting for him, at least a little. Haydon’s charm is superficial, but he maintains a level of suavity that is difficult to reject out of hand. How could I not root for a character who peppers longwinded staff meetings with delightfully cutting asides?
The line between writer and spy is fine, even in fiction. Where do we, as writers, draw our inspiration? There is a significant element of spying in my own writing practice and, in my nonfiction writing, perhaps even a soupçon of betrayal. When I take people I know and characterize them on the page, sometimes I have their permission and sometimes I haven't sought it. Rendering a character, speculating on their feelings and motivations, am I reaching conclusions based on observable facts, or am I making assumptions? I like to think that I come as close to the truth as possible, given the impenetrability of another’s experience, but it is also possible that, like Kim Philby and Bill Haydon, I lack the self-awareness necessary to play out the consequences of my watching.
In the end, Prideaux is not surprised by Haydon’s treachery, though he is hurt, so hurt that he steals into the place where Haydon is behind held pending extradition and snaps his neck. Back at Thursgood’s, Prideaux retreats into himself. He has explained away his absence with a sick and dying mother, which provides a cover for his grief. Little Bill Roach, best watcher in the unit, sees this. As a school play approaches, with Prideaux and Roach on the crew, and they work out a language of gestures. “Thus at rehearsals Jim had to give him a special signal—to Bill and no one else. He was to raise his arm and drop it to his side when he wanted to footlights to fade.”
The delight of being seen and understood is present in this small scene. So too is the knowledge that it is possible to get through life on your own terms. In Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy no such moment exists. When Prideaux (Mark Strong), returns to Thursgood’s after Haydon is dead, Roach (William Haddock), bounds up to his camper to welcome him back. Prideaux rounds on him. “I don’t want you hanging around here. Keep away from me from now on. Go and join the others. Just bloody join in. Go and play, damn you!” Roach runs, his special status revoked. It’s the last we see of either of them.
I questioned many of the film’s adaptive choices, but none more so than this, because it represented a fundamental misunderstanding of Le Carré’s work. The work of spying happens on a grand scale. It is heartless and ruinously assimilationist. When betrayals occur, they are both intimate and far-reaching. On the other hand, the work of living happens on a small scale. It is not showy. And watching is not necessarily spying—violent or invasive—or even writing. Sometimes watching is just taking care.
Le Carré situates spying within the wider, mundane world. This, I believe, is why so many insist that he is a genre outlier, rather than an example of what can be accomplished within “genre writing” when the material is honored. In Le Carré’s writing, the epic lives in the quotidian, whether the quotidian is hunting for doctored files in a back office or raising an arm and dropping it. To find the epic, all we have to do is watch out for it.
Jackie Hedeman (she/her) received her MFA from The Ohio State University and her BA from Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in Autostraddle, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, Electric Literature, Fugue, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat Fellow and a Charlotte Street Foundation 2019-2021 Studio Resident. With Molly Olguín, she is the co-creator of The Pasithea Powder, a scripted audio drama.
