Les Curieux hide above the tympanum of the Last Judgement, at the Abbey of Sainte-Foye in Conques, France. They were carved in the twelfth century, a later addition to the ninth-century church. Fourteen of them peek from behind the outer rim of the tympanum arch, folding it back like paper, or pushing their faces through the blonde stone as if it were a strip of ribbon. They look like medieval ancestors of Kilroy, the cartoon character that US soldiers graffitied around battlefields during World War Two.
One interpretation holds that Les Curieux are angels watching the result of the Last Judgement, making the sky disappear “like a scroll rolled up,” as the Book of Revelation puts it. Sci-fi fans might describe them as beings from another dimension, observing us through the fabric of space and time. Artists will relate to the way they look as if they’re lurking in the back office of a gallery during a private view, stealing glimpses at an audience assessing their work on the tympanum. Perhaps they’re mascots for the age of conspiracy, representatives for those who, like children, believe in wizards hiding behind every curtain, secret grown-up controllers directing every detail of life from deep inside giant stone buildings.
Conspiracists and ideologists love a tidy work space. They apply to their beliefs Marie Kondo’s organizational philosophy: if a theory or fact does not spark joy and fit neatly into a storage drawer, then they throw it out. “When I was a young and carefree spy,” wrote novelist John Le Carré in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, “it was only natural that I should believe that the nation’s hottest secrets were housed in a chipped green Chubb safe that was tucked away at the end of a labyrinth of dingy corridors on the top floor of 54 Broadway, in the private office occupied by the chief of the Secret Service.” A short career in British intelligence during the early years of the Cold War taught him that the chipped green Chubb safe, if it even existed in the first place, was bare. “Somehow,” he says in a new film adaptation by Errol Morris of The Pigeon Tunnel, “we believe there is an inmost room where policy is being conceived. I think it’s being played completely ad hoc, from day-to-day, hour-to-hour.”
Le Carré was fascinated by “the self-imposed schizophrenia that the secret agent loves […] Being the opposite of your actual self.” David Cornwell was his real name. His upper-class accent and self-assurance were a costume he’d put on as a child and never taken off. Le Carré’s father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a prolific con-man, in and out of prison, perpetually on the run from creditors and from reality. Olive, his mother, escaped the marriage when Le Carré was a boy. She disappeared one night and severed all contact with her children, leaving them to be raised by Ronnie and a succession of step-mothers and girlfriends.
Ronnie occasionally used the teenage Le Carré as a dupe. In later life, envious of his son’s success, he tried to swindle money out of him. But a lasting lesson he taught the writer was that “life was a stage where pretense was everything […] You polish your act, learn to tell funny stories. Show off. You discover early that there is no centre to a human being.” Ronnie’s children spied on their father and he, in turn, spied on his children, monitoring their movements and correspondences. Le Carré was sent to Sherborne private school, which he loathed. “I learned the manners and attitudes of a class to which I did not belong,” he explained. “I turned myself into one of them, but I was not one of them.” He ran away to Berne to study German. There he was identified as a perfect candidate for recruitment into “the secret world”: severed from family at a young age, self-reliant, but looking for the feeling of belonging that an institution like school and university could provide.
After Oxford and a brief stint as a schoolteacher, Le Carré joined MI5 in 1958, transferred to MI6 two years later, and was posted to Germany under diplomatic cover. In his spare time he wrote two novels under his new pen-name, an espionage story and a whodunnit. He left MI6 after his third, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a runaway bestseller in 1963 (subsequently a major film in 1965 starring Richard Burton). With that novel, Le Carré created the antithesis to James Bond. No gadgets, no guns, no glamour. A drab shadowland inhabited by alcoholics, cynics, dupes, zealots and egotists gambling on “the world’s game.” An exclusive world that spoke an invented argot—the Circus, the Nursery, the Mothers, tradecraft, babysitters, lamplighters—so arcane, so plausibly the kind of slang that British private schoolboys might carry into adult establishment life, that readers took it to be authentic.
(Le Carré didn’t often address class in his books. Early novels by his contemporary Len Deighton—a graphic designer by trade—provide that counterpoint, albeit more knockabout in tone. Beginning with The IPCRESS File in 1962, Deighton’s first four books are narrated by an anonymous working-class recruit to the secret services. Three of the stories were turned into films, which named the agent Harry Palmer and cast a charming, insolent Michael Caine in the lead. In one of my favourite scenes in The IPCRESS File, Palmer discusses tinned mushrooms with his boss in a supermarket, a beautiful distillation of British attitudes to class and food in the Sixties.)
The spy genre gave Le Carré a creative constraint within which he could interrogate his ghosts. Magnus Pym, the agent on the run in The Perfect Spy, was an avatar for the author. Pym’s father, the fraudster Rick, was a stand-in for Ronnie. Le Carré’s most famous creation, the wise and avuncular spymaster George Smiley, was the ideal parent Le Carré never had. Bill Haydon, the mole Smiley hunts down in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, was an analogue for Kim Philby, the real-life British head of counter-intelligence who defected to Russia in 1963.
Le Carré was still working in intelligence when Philby jumped to Moscow. He was the third of what later turned out to be five moles passing secrets to the Soviets. Le Carré witnessed first-hand the existential crisis that his defection triggered within the secret services. He didn’t believe that Philby had done it for ideological reasons. At first perhaps it was true that he’d been carried along the rigid tracks of youthful idealism. But his motivations curdled. Le Carré believed Philby was addicted to betrayal. It was the ecstasy of secrecy he enjoyed. “That thrill of stepping into the street and knowing what you know and they don’t,” Le Carré says. “A sensual journey of constantly challenging your luck […] To feel you’re the hub of the universe is wonderful for the vanity.”
Morris opens his film with Le Carré describing the psychology of interrogation. At the end of the movie, the author says that he opened up completely during the course of their conversations. Then Morris cuts to an admission from Le Carré that he’s been holding back, refusing to discuss the reported infidelities in his private life. “I’ll answer any question you wish me to answer as truthfully as I can,” he had said. That careful caveat, “as truthfully as I can,” excused him.
There is a ghoulish pleasure to be found in Le Carré’s work. He puts his readers in the shoes of people who have given over their entire lives to a patriotic cause, and asks what it is to vow oneself completely to a specialist world. To convince yourself that what you are doing has value. To be in a constant state of dissemblance, holding nearly everything of yourself back, even from those closest to you. Compartmentalizing, revealing only enough to make your cover story—your ‘legend’ in Le Carré-speak—seem plausible, enough to hide a great deal more. Here, betrayal and commitment mean much the same thing.
The title The Pigeon Tunnel came from a hotel in Monte Carlo. Pigeons bred on the hotel roof were funnelled down a passage which fed them out above the hotel lawns and into the gun-sights of guests shooting them for sport. The surviving birds returned to their home on the roof, only to be sent back along the tunnel the next day to face the guns again. Le Carré repeatedly used The Pigeon Tunnel as a working title. His writing career, which began as the Berlin Wall went up in the early 1960s and ended two decades after 9/11, appeared to be animated by anger and disgust at those who hold power, empathy for those whose lives are ruined in cycles of cruelty. He wrote with clarity about moral ambivalence.
As with his characters, Le Carré’s allegiances sometimes came under question. His 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl, set amid the Middle East conflict, was criticized for both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian bias. He was accused of Jewish steretyping in his early novels, and praised for writing Jewish characters who represented the complexities of postwar trauma and guilt. Le Carré once accepted an invitation to lunch with Margaret Thatcher and much to her displeasure used the opportunity to voice his support for the Palestinian struggle. He danced the conga with Yasser Arafat and asked to place his hand on Arafat’s chest, to feel “the Palestinian heart.” In a much-quoted 1998 interview with the World Jewish Review he said that he was “wholeheartedly behind the nation-state of Israel as the homeland and guardian of Jews everywhere” and that “no nation on earth was more deserving of peace—or more condemned to fight for it.” In the lead-up to the 2019 British general election he signed a public letter of refusal to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, saying it was “steeped in association with antisemitism.”
The ideal spy, he thought, was “someboy who is a bit bad, but also loyal.” I wonder if this could describe the ideal critic: faithful to the cause of art, but never to be fully trusted by artists and their professional associates, never fully trusting them in return. There’s an essay about Louise Bourgeois, written by the art critic Stuart Morgan, which The Pigeon Tunnel put me in mind of. In a way, a piece about belief and loyalty. Stuart was a teacher of mine, and he used to tell stories about his friendship with Bourgeois in New York during the 1980s, championing her work when few others cared. In the essay he describes asking her one day about a sculpture he had seen sitting around her house, and which had disappeared. She denied its existence, and part of the essay hinges around his getting her to admit that she’d made it. In their Guardian obituary for Stuart, published in 2002, the critics Ian Hunt and Adrian Searle recounted how he “cajoled Bourgeois about her self-mythologising, what he called her lies, without offending her.” Stuart fell ill with Lewy body disease in the late 1990s. The obituary described how a carer visiting his home had been impressed by his large book collection and remarked that he must be a deep person. Stuart disagreed, and replied that he was “interested in the problem of describing the surface of things, the difficulty of which he thought had been underestimated.” Paying attention to the surface of things is a skill that both critics and spies share. There are people and things which are what they seem, but there are many more that aren’t. “I don’t think we can penetrate people very much,” said Le Carré, “but we can form imaginings about them, and then relate to them.”
When I was an editor of an art magazine I used to come across the snobbism that too many exhibition reviews were “merely descriptive.” “Merely” was always the attending adjective. It suggested a lack of effort, a failure to meet a threshold that the person complaining would not disclose. Description didn’t carry intellectual valour. It was amateur, vulgar. I could never understand this attitude. It’s hard to know something until you begin to describe it. Description is done for the historical record—reviews are primary sources—and for people who can’t see the show in person. To describe what something looks like involves including and excluding details. Is the artwork bigger than my body? Is the sculpture on a plinth or the floor? What’s it made from? Was it fabricated by machine or by hand? Does it smell? Description demands specifics. Is that painting red or is it crimson? Or carmine? Each word smuggles with it hidden persuaders. By not paying attention to describing the surface of things—because you’re hot for your own prose, busy flashing that PhD around like a backstage VIP pass, writing from the press release not the gallery walls—you might find yourself tempted to redecorate dank dungeons in eggshell white and cover the blood on the floor with a nice knotted-pile rug.
“Draw what you see, not what you know” was a maxim I was taught in life drawing classes. The tilt of a foot or a head might look wrong as you first get it down on paper, but don’t distort your work with the angle you want to see. Instead trust that your observations will make sense as the drawing develops. But describing what you see can cause trouble. You might say something in public or at work about a picture—of the bombing of a hospital, say—and find yourself chastised for failing to genuflect correctly before speaking, neglecting protocols you didn’t know existed. Your inbox and DMs begin to fill with pettifogging advice and exhortations to do the right thing, issued by names—not people who’ve ever looked you in the eye—names who hold power, which is not the same thing as authority. Professional constituencies tow you so far out to sea that your sense of self—what you thought you stood for—becomes a tiny harbour light rapidly extinguishing itself on a dark horizon. Sanctimony is handed round like a cheap and sugary snack. Your sincerity is belittled. Describing the surface of something turns out to be more difficult than you estimated and it gets you fired from your job. You’re told to shut up because the picture is neither crimson nor carmine, it’s “complicated.”
What is complicated is enduring the vertiginous shifts in scale that careen back-and-forth between the tiny dramas of domestic life and the catastrophic idiocies of politics and war. The zoom control that keeps crashing in for a close-up then helicoptering up to high altitude. Where do you put yourself when there is laundry to be done, and your phone is screaming news of hostages, of ethnic cleansing and children trying to mind their own business while adults—so brave, so well-equipped—rain fire on their heads? News of Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine?
Today I read news reports that the Palestinian poet, essayist and New Yorker contributor Mosab Abu Toha was taken by Israeli forces in Gaza. So perhaps, as ever, it’s the poets that worry power with their superior precision and ways of describing the surface of things. In his book-length Autumn Journal, written between August and December 1938, the poet Louis MacNeice describes daily life under the queasy creep of war. (MacNeice, incidently, was also friends with the art historian Anthony Blunt. It was revealed in 1979 that Blunt was the fourth member of the Cambrige Five spy ring.) Looming in the background to the poem is the sorry end of the Spanish Civil War, and the Munich Agreement which allowed Hitler’s Germany to annex swathes of Czechoslovakia. Autumn Journal was written as these events unfolded and MacNeice captures the quality of feeling that lies between trying to process the news, wanting to vent about it, yet needing to carry on; between anxious rumination about the future and “a smell of French bread in Charlotte Street, a rustle / Of leaves in Regent’s Park.”
He writes:
“But posters flapping on the railings tell the fluttered
World that Hitler speaks, that Hitler speaks
And we cannot take it in and we go to our daily
Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption ‘War’”
Then, a few lines later, he describes how
“we laugh it off and go round town in the evening
And this, we say, is on me;
Something out of the usual, a Pimm’s Number One, a Picon —
But did you see
The latest?”
Lately I’ve kept returning to a passage in the poem’s final canto. Here MacNeice dreams of a “possible land”
“[… ] Not of sleep-walkers, not of angry puppets.
But where both heart and brain can understand
The movements of our fellows;
Where life is a choice of instruments and none
Is debarred his natural music,
Where the waters of life are free of the ice-blockade of hunger
And thought is free as the sun,
Where the altars of sheers power and mere profit
Have fallen to disuse,
Where nobody sees the use
Of buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money,
Where the individual, no longer squandered
In self-assertion, works with the rest, endowed
With the split vision of a juggler and the quick lock of a taxi,
Where the people are more than a crowd.”
“Buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money.” Individuals “squandered in self-assertion.” Understanding people as “more than a crowd.” It could have been written yesterday. In a sense it was. It was also written the day before yesterday, and every year stretching back to the month MacNeice put it to paper. It’ll be recomposed again tomorrow too because there is no chipped green Chubb safe containing the world’s blueprints, but that’s OK, that might be a cause for hope.
RECOMMENDATIONS
—Baltimore’s finest electricians, Matmos—Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt—have released a new album with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Given the run of the Smithsonian’s audio archives, the duo’s new work, Return to Archive, is cribbed and cooked entirely from non-musical recordings of animals, insects, telephones, radios, and science experiments. Featuring collaborations with Evicshen and Aaron Dilloway, it’s typically unsettling and funny, and the above track, ‘Why?,’ is a weirdo banger. I interviewed Drew last year for this newsletter. You can read it here.
—I love this stop-start performance by Dory Previn from The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977.
—Artist David Levine’s latest work, Dissolution—currently showing at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York—is a 3D holographic video narrated by a disembodied soul trapped inside a machine, which itself is trapped inside a museum collection. The imprisoned soul’s monologue is self-aware and funny, sharp about the art industry’s conflicted desires to serve both politics and aesthetics. It’s a sculpture that’s also a video, and looks unlike anything I’ve seen outside of a science-fiction movie, yet it rattles and whirrs like an old film projector. (The device uses a sheet of glass that rapidly shuttles up-and-down multiple times per second: it’ll take your fingers off if you get too close.) Dissolution glows like a jewel box. It looks like a message that has been sent simultaneously from the past and from the future.
—Yang Haisong and Sun Xia are the cult Beijing band Dear Eloise. For those who go fuzzy around the edges for lo-fi shoegaze, try this.
—Have you seen Anatomy of a Fall yet? A courtroom drama about writers and alleged murder. Dreamy.
—A new essay by Paige K. Bradley on the musician Judee Sill grapples with the “proximity of romantic love and a religiously tinged fervor” in Sill’s songwriting. Here’s she is performing in 1973, another Old Grey Whistle Test clip, complete with ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris introduction.
—Having earlier advocated for paying attention to descriptive language, I will now be contrary and say that a problem I have with a lot of language around men’s clothing is its monotonous fixation on technical detail and dubious appeals to heritage virtues. Goodyear welted soles and delinquent nubuck uppers hand-buffed with Irish pumice. Bar-tacked triple-stitched belt tabs spanner-tightened with forge-grunted copper donut buttons. Based on a British World War One-era fly swat. Built on lasts originally used on child chimney sweeps in Victorian London. It’s as if men are not interested in how something feels on their body or makes them look, only how often you need to change the oil and check the tyre pressure. Designer Luke Walker’s label L.E.J. makes beautiful clothes beyond my pocket but I recommend their line in descriptions. Examples: “By goodness gracious, this is the way to wear fabric. Tuck it for dramatic drape, or wear it open for a louche couture vibe. I don’t have words!” “It's the kind of hardwearing elegant stuff which might need elbow patches in about 70 years.” “There's a hidden internal drawstring in the waistband, for when you're feeling particularly trim.“ “If you were considering a set of new gold buttons for your birthday, this fella would take them handsomely.”