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Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies.

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Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr.

Chris Carr (00:37):
On today’s podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Jessica Douthwaite, who is one of the curators of the John le Carré exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Now, for those watching on YouTube, we have some exclusive footage that I took from the exhibition. If you’re listening on audio, now might be a time to switch to YouTube.

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Chris (01:20):
Dr. Jessica Douthwaite, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing?

Dr. Jessica Douthwaite (01:25):
I’m very well, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Chris (01:27):
It’s great to have you on. And so you are one of — well, you are the main — curator of this wonderful John le Carré exhibition called Tradecraft. Before we go into it, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Jessica (01:38):
Okay. So I’m a historian by background and training, a Cold War specialist, but broadly my history focuses on Britain in the 20th century and social and cultural history. Previously, I’ve worked in partnership with some national museums on Cold War exhibitions, like National Museums of Scotland.

Chris (01:59):
Brilliant. We’re here today to talk about John le Carré: Tradecraft. I was wondering if you can give us just a quick overview of what it is, when it’s on, and how long it will run for.

Jessica (02:08):
Great. Right. So John le Carré: Tradecraft is on now, and it will run until the 6th of April, 2025. It’s at Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. The Bodleian Libraries now houses the full John le Carré archive of his literary drafts, manuscripts, correspondence, photography, and many other bits and pieces. It’s a huge archive, and the Bodleian has been in the process of acquiring it since 2010, and it’s now available to researchers. What we have in the exhibition is a first dip into that archive of material that’s never been on public display before. The premise of the exhibition is to look at him as a researcher-writer — someone who put an enormous amount of effort into researching the context, characters, and locations of his novels before he even began to write them. And my colleague, Federico Varese, who is Professor of Criminology at Nuffield College, Oxford, was a friend, but also someone who collaborated with le Carré on a couple of his novels.

(03:23):
And Federico came to the Bodleian with this idea when the archives were being catalogued. First and foremost, we wanted to position le Carré as a researcher-writer. We wanted to look at his method and the process behind writing his novels. We also wanted to look at him beyond his spy writing. Although many people will perhaps know him best for his spy fiction and Cold War espionage, half of his writing career was spent outside of the Cold War. So we wanted to look at his post–Cold War fiction in equal amounts, and also to view him as someone who wrote about the world and not just spying in Europe. We cover a geographical breadth, and that was quite a crucial theme throughout the exhibition.

Chris (04:20):
Yeah. Well, there’s so much to draw from because you’ve got 1,200 boxes spanning his entire career. So how did you approach curating such a vast collection?

Jessica (04:29):
We began with these three central premises. We had a structure already in place, but we knew that we wanted to delve first into a couple of novels. So we chose nine novels that we hope would span the breadth of the themes. We have nine novels ranging from A Perfect Spy and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, all the way through to A Most Wanted Man, which is viewed as his post-9/11 novel, and The Mission Song. So you get a bit of chronological and geographical breadth through the nine novels that we’ve chosen. Then we also pick up on the themes within those novels throughout the rest of the exhibition, focusing mainly on the networks of collaborators, influences, and experts whom he drew on in the research for those novels — people like Federico, for instance, who gave specialist knowledge and information to le Carré when he was drafting Our Kind of Traitor and Our Game. So —

Chris (05:39):
With so much material, what in the end couldn’t be included? I remember we spoke a bit about horticulture and botany when we met.

Jessica (05:45):
Yes. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, actually, because it’s such a huge archive, and we don’t even include all the novels that we would’ve liked to include. So there’s rather a lot that we could have made more of. One of them is his horticultural research. Now, I haven’t been able to view all the archives. I haven’t seen all 1,000 — I think it’s 237 — boxes, but I did find evidence of some very specialized research into the flora and fauna of Panama and the Caribbean for when he was researching The Night Manager. He was very meticulous about the details contained in his novels for location and people. He’d visited Panama and some of the locations in the novel, and he’d drafted some chapters that he then sent to a horticultural specialist for her take on what he’d included. She then wrote back with very detailed information about whether a flower would bloom at night or during the daytime — right down to that kind of detail.

(07:04):
And for a while, we toyed with the idea of including some of these botanical examples to illustrate how committed he was to accuracy, because Federico has an anecdote about le Carré being very conscious of the types of trees that were growing around a cemetery in Moscow when he was writing Our Kind of Traitor. I also know that in The Constant Gardener, flowers and plants are a really key motif throughout that novel. So for a while we toyed with that idea, and I think visually it would’ve been very beautiful, but it would’ve meant doing a lot more research looking for those botanical details, and we didn’t have time in the end. That would be genuinely something I’d love to do.

Chris (07:58):
And was Justin Quayle then le Carré’s expression of this inner horticulturalist that he was?

Jessica (08:05):
Well, I think Justin Quayle’s character really suited that methodical, very introverted gardener — someone who reverts to his plants as a source of comfort. I get the sense from Justin Quayle’s character that he’d prefer to spend more time with his plants and less time with the people around him. So I think for le Carré, that was the perfect coupling. And with the colonial context of Kenya in the novel, the way that Justin’s English flowers intermingle with the plants of his garden in Kenya is quite an interesting way of dealing with the English abroad. So I think that was a device.

Chris (08:56):
Yeah. Such a good book, that one. And I think I mentioned to you, I was very lucky to meet John le Carré once at a protest against George Bush in 2004. I saw him and was like, oh my goodness, it’s John. I very quickly said something: I absolutely love — I said to him, I love The Constant Gardener. It was my favorite book of yours. And he said, “God bless you.” So whether he was miffed by me pointing out that book in particular or not, I don’t know.

Jessica (09:24):
I’m sure he was just very pleased to meet a fan.

Chris (09:26):
Yes, yes.

Jessica (09:27):
Yeah, amazing that you met him on a protest. Obviously, I never met him. Federico knew him very well, but I think that’s a place I would’ve really liked to meet him — on a march. Speaking of things that we didn’t include, I’m sure there’s quite a lot of fan mail in the archive. Because the exhibition is about his research methods, we didn’t use much fan mail at all, but we have a letter from George Bush Sr. In the letter, he’s just read The Night Manager, and he’s congratulating le Carré on The Night Manager, saying how much he enjoyed reading it, and I think he finishes it “from an ex-CIA, ex-prez,” or something like that. But my favorite thing about it is that, obviously, John le Carré was a pseudonym, but George Bush Senior clearly didn’t know that, and he addresses it “Dear John,” which hardly anyone wrote to him, saying “Dear John.” We didn’t include it in the end.

Chris (10:39):
No, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. So what books and manuscripts were selected for display, and what was the reasoning behind this selection?

Jessica (10:48):
Yeah, so A Perfect Spy — we had to have that in because it’s his most autobiographical novel. We have a really generous and large loan of personal ephemera from the family. And of course, although this is more about John le Carré the writer, we needed to talk about his private life to an extent, and his childhood, which was very influential on his later career in the spy service and his later career as a writer. So A Perfect Spy is semi-autobiographical. It brings into the novel the character of his father, Ronnie Cornwell, who in real life was a kind of artist-criminal, potentially a bit of a gangster who dabbled in all sorts of crime. So we have A Perfect Spy. We have Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, because we could not leave that out.

Chris (11:47):
No, it’s the classic. Yeah.

Jessica (11:50):
It’s the classic. We are very aware that some visitors to this exhibition will be superfans, but some visitors may not know le Carré outside of adaptations. So we wanted to make sure that it was accessible to anyone. Then we have The Honourable Schoolboy, and I chose that because it’s still very much a Cold War novel, but it’s set in South Asia. It’s an amazing example of John le Carré’s first foray into travel and almost ethnography on the ground. The way he researched that novel was to get deep into the Vietnam War with his friend, the journalist David Greenway. Then we have The Little Drummer Girl, which we chose for similar reasons, because it includes another conflict outside of the Cold War but still within that timeframe — 1983 — and Israeli and Palestinian terrorism in Europe. Then we have The Night Manager, which is his first novel published after the Cold War. Then we have The Constant Gardener, Our Kind of Traitor, The Mission Song, and A Most Wanted Man.

Chris (13:09):
Yeah. Really good selection of books, I think. And I’m glad The Constant Gardener was in there because it’s obviously my favorite. Out of interest, I know The Honourable Schoolboy is the Smiley story that has never been adapted. I don’t know if you saw any correspondence about whether there were plans to adapt it to the screen. Do you know?

Jessica (13:29):
I haven’t seen any yet. It wouldn’t surprise me if there had been a conversation. There probably was, because le Carré was very keen on adaptations, actually. And what you do find in the archives are enormous boxes full of unfinished plays and unfinished adaptations. For instance, both Our Game and The Mission Song went a very long way into screenplay production before they were finally canned and didn’t ever become movies. He was keen on the adaptation process, and he liked writing for screen. In fact, sometimes the way he wrote his novels was almost like he was writing for the screen. He did scene-by-scene novel writing. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it was there, but I haven’t come across it myself.

Chris (14:27):
No, fair enough. So le Carré was known for meticulous research. How did he gather information and work with experts — from journalists to whistleblowers — to bring authenticity to his novels?

Jessica (14:38):
In the beginning, when he was scoping the topics of his novels, he would read anything and everything that was written on the subject already — generally, almost always the nonfiction. So he would be reading academic works, journalists, any published journalism on the topic. Through that, he would then become familiar with the names associated with research on those topics, and then you would get a contact from him. He would track you down. Federico has a great story, which I won’t tell, about the way he was tracked down as a young PhD student at the time. He also employed research assistants. So it wasn’t just an ad hoc process, particularly when his novels were set abroad, like The Constant Gardener. He might hire assistants on the ground. Even though he did travel to those places, he might also have someone there, almost like a fixer.

(15:50):
And for one novel, he might have several people doing different bits of research. For The Night Manager, he had a journalist — a young journalist at the time who subsequently became a very well-established author — but she was a security specialist working at The Washington Post, and she did some very in-depth research on the illegal arms trade for him. At the same time, he was meeting trade regulators in Miami who were giving him under-the-table info about how corrupt officials were managing to smuggle drugs and guns across borders. At that time, he said to someone in Miami, “If I wanted to buy illegal firearms, where would I go?” And they said, “You’d go straight to Panama.” So he went straight to Panama. He followed the trail — followed the scent, to an extent — and I’m sure that for his research, some of his training in the intelligence services was quite handy.

Chris (17:04):
Yeah, totally. Did you get any insight on how he went about picking topics to write books about?

Jessica (17:08):
I think that was very personal to him.

(17:14):
I don’t think there was a one-size-fits-all, but what he did do was keep news snippets and articles he’d read, and he kept all of his notebooks. All of his notes are kept in the archive, and he would go back to things. I’ve read him say in interviews that he would go back to a notebook he’d written 20 years before because he’d met a man on the street in Berlin or somewhere and written a description of them, and then they return in a novel that he writes later on.

(17:52):
So he was almost like a magpie picking up all these observations, and they would return one way or another in later fiction. For instance, when I was doing the research for The Constant Gardener — I don’t know this explicitly — but the way he was researching that was, first and foremost, with an idea that he wanted to write about corporate corruption. He did not begin that novel knowing that he wanted to write about pharmaceutical corruption and ethics. He actually began researching that novel looking at all sorts of different unethical practices in various developing countries and low-income communities — looking at mining disasters in India, for example, and various industrial disputes in developing countries and the Global South. Then he hit upon the pharmaceutical industry within that. He pursued that and did a huge amount of research on it. He interviewed a couple of whistleblowers who shared their stories with him and went from there.

Chris (19:07):
And he had this famous saying, “A desk is a dangerous place to view the world.” So how did le Carré develop this? He had this habit of visiting locations that shaped his writing. What methodology did he use to really get to know a place?

Jessica (19:20):
Well, he went there, I suppose, as one of the most important things. He would study the place first. He would, like I said, get all the books. He would get the maps, he would speak to people, and then he would go there, and while he was there, he would walk the streets. Lots of people who did these travels with him would talk about how he would just go off into his own head with his little pocketbook, noting things when you don’t think there’s anything to note — but he’d be noting it down. What I find really fascinating is that his notes are almost like a stream of consciousness: the sights, the smells, the sounds, the feeling — the heat or the cold. So I suppose immersion was his method.

Chris (20:20):
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Were there any discoveries in the archive that changed or deepened your understanding of his process?

Jessica (20:27):
For me, his writing process in particular was astounding. It’s quite well known that he wrote a lot of drafts of his novels, and Federico talks about being sent six finished versions of Our Game. Well, yes. But what I find most interesting is that before he’d even finished a novel, his chapters would go through six versions before he’d even got to the point where he was sending it to someone like Federico. You’ll find five or six different versions of the same chapters. Within that, he was working incredibly closely with his wife, Jane, and they had this dialogue of annotations. He didn’t type anything. She typed it, and his handwritten process was the way in which he really got his thoughts and story on the page. Then he would do that in the morning, and she would type it up.

(21:26):
He would have a break, he would come back to the typed pages, and he might cut them up with scissors. He might use Sellotape and staples to move them around. Then he would annotate it, change it, cut it, put little notes on for her, and then she would type it up again. So in the archive, there is this incredible jigsawing process between the two of them. It really brings to life both the way that he, as a creative person, had to work — it was the way he had to do it — but also the fact that he relied so heavily on his wife within that. She wasn’t just a typist; she was instrumental to the way that he developed his stories. I found that quite astounding.

Chris (22:21):
And it’s great that the exhibition has highlighted her role in the process.

Jessica (22:26):
Yeah, we have some fantastic loans of photography, and she had her own career in publishing, so she didn’t just assist in the writing process. She was very important when it came to liaising with agents and publishers and the final push to have the novel printed. So yeah, we hope that we’ve covered her influence as much as possible.

Chris (22:56):
The exhibition’s title Tradecraft plays both on espionage skills and his craft as a writer. How do you see that dual meaning reflected in his work?

Jessica (23:05):
I’m sure he said this himself before, but he used some of those tricks of the trade — the intelligence skills — the kind of interrogation; following the scent, following the trail; hiding in plain sight to do his research; playing different parts. He was famously excellent at impersonation, but I think he shapeshifted a lot when he was doing his research. I think that his own personal tradecraft actually seeped into the way that he researched his novels. And then obviously, on one hand we have the tradecraft he used to do the research, but on the other hand, he completely changed the course of espionage fiction in the English language. What we pick up on in the exhibition is the fact that he created this entire George Smiley universe and a tradecraft vocabulary that has come to influence so many other writers and so many other creatives in fictionalizing that intelligence world.

Chris (24:22):
And the real world too.

Jessica (24:24):
Yes. So we wanted to have that double entendre to really pick up on that.

Chris (24:31):
Yeah. Let’s take a break and be right back. So le Carré described himself as a writer who once worked as a spy rather than a spy who became a writer. How do you think that distinction influenced his creative voice?

Jessica (25:01):
It’s quite funny, actually. I think he got quite fed up with being positioned as a spy who became a spy writer — someone who just drew on their own experiences. I think it annoyed him because he first and foremost felt himself to be a creative and an artist. And so it was frustrating for him that the idea he had been a spy and then a writer kind of diminished and undermined his actual creativity. We have an item in the exhibition — a handwritten note — where he’s really peeved that he’s still being called a spy writer. He says no one would say this. No one would call me a cowboy who writes about cowboys or such and such.

Chris (25:52):
Because spy fiction was sort of looked down upon as well, traditionally, in some ways.

Jessica (25:56):
Yeah. Although, with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he absolutely smashed that out of the water. So although he struggled after the success of that novel to pick up his career again, he knew he was doing something different. And we make this very clear in the exhibition as well: he was an artist before he was a writer.

Chris (26:19):
Yeah.

Jessica (26:19):
He illustrated for a long time before he even began writing novels. He was an excellent caricaturist and cartoonist, and he’d already been illustrating published books and journals. So I think at heart he felt himself to be someone with this creative impetus — someone who wanted to create art. So I think it did frustrate him. And I think, on the other hand, he obviously had been a spy. He did work in both intelligence services. He’s not really allowed to speak about it — or at least until recently he wasn’t — so I think he was annoyed that people kept asking him.

Chris (27:09):
Yes, fair enough. One thing I didn’t know until the exhibition — I don’t know if it was me being silly — but I didn’t realize he was an illustrator in his spare time. How did his sketches and watercolors kind of feed into the written work and character building?

Jessica (27:23):
Definitely in the early stages of creating his characters, he did a lot of doodles. There’s a lot of doodling in the archive. It’s not always clear which characters they relate to, but I think he had a very visual mind. This also goes with the fact that he traveled a lot. I think he needed to see things before he wrote them down and before he translated them into words. So I think his doodling really helped him visualize the people and sometimes the places within his novels. It’s fantastic to see these early handwritten descriptions built up around a doodle. It really brings to life how he imagined these worlds he was creating.

Chris (28:17):
Yeah, fantastic. And there are some great examples in the exhibition, which are brilliant.

Jessica (28:22):
Yeah.

Chris (28:23):
His later novels obviously became more outspoken and political. How do you see his political evolution reflected in the manuscripts and correspondence?

Jessica (28:31):
Yes, I’m still divided about why he became more outspoken towards the end of his life. I suppose the obvious answer would be that there was more to be outspoken about. The watershed really was the Iraq War. That seems to have been the line in the sand. That’s when he used his platform and his privilege as a very well-known author who, until that point, hadn’t really dabbled in public life in that sense. With the Iraq War, he went on several anti–Iraq War marches. He wrote a very, very angry think piece in The Times against it. From that moment on, he became more vocal. Around the time that The Constant Gardener was published, he was very vocal about the dangers of pharmaceutical companies having too much power and the international law surrounding pharmaceutical patents. So he gradually introduced some of those politics into his novels.

(29:41):
And A Most Wanted Man is another example, because that deals with the era of rendition and illegal detention and Guantánamo Bay — torture of men who hadn’t been tried legally; the catastrophic reduction of their human rights. So I think he slowly embedded some of those political ideas into his novels. In his public life, he was becoming more and more vocal. With Brexit, it happened again — he was on the anti-Brexit marches. With Trump’s first election, same thing in 2016. He continued to talk about his horror at the erosion of social democracy and legal elections and the concerns around disinformation. He was criticized for some of his later novels for the way his politics seeped into his storytelling. I don’t think it was conscious; I think it was an organic extension of the way he was feeling about the world.

Chris (31:08):
But at the same time, a lot of people level these criticisms at anything even slightly political. When we look at a lot of writing from the past — I mean, people claim Star Trek’s suddenly gone woke, just taking it away from le Carré for a moment. But Star Trek’s always been technically woke because it’s the show that had the first interracial kiss on television. I noticed in le Carré’s early books he had a suspicion of American power — so in A Perfect Spy, there are elements of that, certainly in other novels too. And I think with the Iraq War, I can totally understand why that was a big line in the sand for him. It’s a big abuse of power, basically.

Jessica (31:46):
Yes, a hundred percent. And it’s really interesting the way he talked about the Cold War. Another thing that’s been on my mind recently is the way le Carré spoke about patriotism versus nationalism. He was often criticized for criticizing England — we actually have an example of that in the exhibition — but he always talked about himself as a patriot, and he always talked about loving his country as well as loving Europe. The way he talked about his own actions in MI5 and MI6 in the early Cold War, to him, remained justified in the context of the dangers of communism in that early period. He was able to interrogate that, and he was able to see that actually those dangers perhaps weren’t as awful as feared. But in the context of being a young man at that time, he still was able to justify his role within it. Above that, he was also able to stand back and look at the macro history of these periods. This is why his Cold War work is so fascinating and brilliant: it was ambiguous. By the end of the Cold War, there wasn’t really an enemy. There wasn’t really a winner. There were no victors. Until the very end, he had an interesting take on fighting for your country versus standing back and being able to take criticism — and being able to be wrong.

Chris (33:28):
Yeah, there are so many contemporary issues I’d love to have his perspective on, because we’ve just had this flag campaign over the summer. We’ve got the Israel–Palestine conflict — that’s been really terrible since October the seventh. We’ve had the rise of Trump again. There are so many things that I’m sure he would’ve given us a lot of perspective on.

Jessica (33:48):
Me too. That was something I couldn’t stop thinking about while I was researching and curating this exhibition. We include audio in the exhibition. We have a listening station, and we’ve used interviews from across the course of his career to pick up on some of the things that were most important to him. They included things like social democracy and too much power in the hands of corporate demigods.

(34:25):
Having his voice in the exhibition talking about those things brings to light how contemporary his themes are — particularly the flags recently. I would genuinely have loved to know what he would’ve said about that, because he often commented on the difference between patriotism and nationalism, and I think he would’ve been a revered figure to speak out on that. He was very worried about the extension of the intelligence state in the post–Cold War period and surveillance. He had a lot to say about the misuse of intelligence in this day and age and its connection with disinformation. That would’ve been really interesting as well — to hear his thoughts on that.

Chris (35:20):
And even the war in Ukraine as well. My goodness, I missed out on my list of things — social media and disinformation. Oh my goodness, the list never ends. It just makes you realize what we’ve lost with his passing.

Jessica (35:34):
Yeah.

Chris (35:36):
Let’s take a break and be right back with more.

(35:38):
Are there any books of his that you have a personal connection with, either as a reader or a collaborator?

Jessica (36:01):
So my favorite novel, I suppose — put it that way — is A Perfect Spy. Because I spent so much time in the archives thinking about him as a writer and how his life influenced his writing, I find the tension between reality and fiction in that novel really intriguing. I still can’t pinpoint — there are some obvious things in there that he definitely drew on from real life to depict — but there are still some things where I’m like, oh, was that from real life or is that made up? It was also a novel he was incredibly proud of. He was pleased to have finally written something in which he could include the character of his father without sounding self-indulgent or self-pitying. And it was also beautifully written and very accomplished. So that would definitely be my standout novel.

Chris (36:59):
Yeah, excellent choice. For someone new to le Carré, which novel would you recommend as an entry point, especially in light of the exhibition?

Jessica (37:08):
I suppose I have to say Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. But we do talk about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in the exhibition, although it isn’t one of our novels. I think I would probably start with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold because, particularly as a Cold War historian, I’m still fixated on how the Berlin Wall was constructed and how it emerged from this standoff between the West and the East — and then, overnight, pretty much, it was constructed. That novel is an incredible encapsulation of a moment in time when it really wasn’t clear what would happen — where this was going. So I think for anyone entering le Carré from the beginning, it would have to be that one.

Chris (37:59):
Yeah, fantastic. Another good choice there. What do you hope visitors will take away from Tradecraft about le Carré — not just the writer, but as a thinker and observer of the modern world?

Jessica (38:09):
Some of the conversations we’ve just been having — about the themes that transcend his entire career as a writer — I hope people are left wondering: gosh, what does this mean for now? If le Carré were to write about our present day and our society and the world, how would he be feeling about it? What kinds of themes would he be picking up on? I also hope people come away wanting to reread his books or read his books — go and find other novels that aren’t in the exhibition, because there are lots, obviously — and really explore his writing again. And I hope lots of people visit this exhibition who don’t know le Carré at all and who might have their interest piqued and want to find out more. So, yeah.

Chris (39:03):
Was there a particular standout item for you in the exhibition that you particularly loved?

Jessica (39:08):
Yeah, I’ll give you two examples because they’re quite different. Within our loans from the family, one of the things we loaned is the suitcase of his mother. His mother left le Carré and his older brother when they were five and seven years old. She couldn’t bear to live with their father anymore — Ronnie Cornwell, who was abusive and a very unpleasant man — and she left. That abandonment was hugely influential in le Carré’s life. He’s talked about it a lot since, especially in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. In The Pigeon Tunnel, he talks about finding her and reconnecting with her, which I think was a very strange experience for him. She only had two objects left from that time in her life. One of them was a photograph, and one of them was this suitcase, and it has her married initials on it.

(40:11):
So there’s nothing else with her name from her Cornwell era. We have that suitcase in the exhibition, which I think is an incredibly poignant reminder of his childhood and some of the personal influences he carried with him throughout his life. The other one would probably be — so I talked about the way he wrote page after page of these chapters — we have a very early description of George Smiley from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. George Smiley enters Tinker Tailor in chapter two. We have an early draft of the first page of chapter two, and George Smiley is walking through these damp, rainy London streets, and le Carré is working on this description of his girth and his very unathletic gait. It’s just a great example of his writing process.

Chris (41:24):
I particularly liked seeing the painted stone with “Fix it” written on it.

Jessica (41:28):
Yes. Yeah.

Chris (41:30):
That did make me chuckle when I saw that.

Jessica (41:32):
Yeah. And he’d use that stone. He put that on top of drafts that weren’t ready. He needed to fix them. I mean, there’s loads of gold in the exhibition.

Chris (41:44):
Excellent. For the benefit of my co-host, Matt, do you know what brand of pen John le Carré used? I filmed the pen — it’s his black pen — but I couldn’t work out who made it.

Jessica (41:54):
I do. I think it’s a Sheaffer.

Chris (41:57):
A Sheaffer. Okay.

Jessica (42:00):
I believe he used a different pen to write his drafts, and he used a Parker fountain pen for his signature. So his signatures were in a fountain pen, but it was a Sheaffer ballpoint pen. And yes, we have one on display, still with the Sellotape he’s used to fix it. It’s wrapped in Sellotape to fix the nib.

Chris (42:25):
Yeah, fantastic. It makes a lot of sense using the fountain pen for the signature; they always look better with fountain pen signatures. Yeah, definitely. Lastly, there’s this fantastic book, Tradecraft: Writers on John le Carré — it’s a companion to the exhibition. How does it complement and expand on the exhibition experience?

Jessica (42:46):
Yes. Federico drew together a range of writers who aren’t literary experts but who, one way or another, had a creative connection with le Carré. They’re also not le Carré experts; they’ve never written about him before. But in this book they draw on the themes of the exhibition: John le Carré as a writer, researcher, someone who was very much a globalist and positioned his work in the context of geopolitics and international relations, and someone who was very keen on adaptations. We have the director of one of his adaptations in the book, and all of them write from the perspective of people looking at his process differently and the impact of his work differently from alternative perspectives. One of the chapters is written, for example, by the journalist Michela Wrong — who’s also in the exhibition — who took le Carré to Rwanda and eastern Congo when he was researching The Mission Song. Some of the things I’ve talked about here — the way he observed the details of the places he visited — she illustrates and evokes brilliantly in her chapter in the book. Federico also talks about their relationship as collaborators and friends. So it’s a real insight into the way he worked.

Chris (44:20):
Yeah. Jessica, thank you so much for joining me. Jessica, where can listeners find out more about you, and where can they also find out more about the exhibition?

Jessica (44:28):
Okay, so if you go to the Bodleian Libraries’ social media or webpage, you can find out all about the exhibition. We’re running a lecture series, so there will be one lecture every month for the time that the exhibition is on, with various experts. To find out more about me, I am not on social media at the moment — for reasons that are probably quite obvious. I can’t bear it. So I’m on LinkedIn.

Chris (44:59):
Yep. Cool. That’s a good place to be, actually.

Jessica (45:01):
And you can Google me for all of my publications and anything I’ve done previously.

Chris (45:08):
Cool. So if people want to connect, LinkedIn’s the best place.

Jessica (45:10):
Yes.

Chris (45:11):
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining me there. Really appreciate it, and it’s been nice to catch up again.

Jessica (45:16):
Yeah, it’s been great to speak.

Chris (45:18):
Thank you.

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