Chuck Berry & His Lyric Gift

Chuck Berry's [1926- ] the real McCoy. A native hybrid Black African American musical genius who almost single-handedly invented Rock & Roll out of its constituent elements of R&B, Boogie, small Jazz combo, and a declamatory male solo vocal.

By 1953, Berry had formed his own combo, his echo-accoustic-enhanced voice, his amplified guitar, pianist-partner Johnnie Johnson, with drums and bass men providing the heavy back-beat. Berry's tight, catchy 3 minute singles began hitting the charts, and by the mid-Fifties the country was rockin' n' rollin to Maybellene, Roll Over Beethoven, and a string of solid hits that only stopped when Berry was sent up for trying to transport a 14 year old Indian girl across state lines. Narcotics and tax evasion troubles would trouble the singer-composer for much of his adult life. As if being a naughty black-skinned man weren't suspicious enough, Berry typically tested the limits of business practice and public morality, when during his many later years of concertizing, insisting on cash only for his live gigs and hiring local yokels--instead of seasoned veterans--for back up.

But the tunes were what made him, and he milked them for every dime over the decades. Following his release from prison in 1963 he released Nadine, and No Particular Place to Go. It was the Sixties, the Beatles and the Times They Were a-Changin', but Berry kept pumping out his sweet teen ballads for another generation of delighted fans. He had begun as a straight Blue & Rhythm crooner, but his style changed in the Fifties, his enunciation became clear (like Nat King Cole's) and the mood became distinctly up-beat. This polished image was better suited to the white audience, which increasingly was the target market. But Berry's seductive, racy demeanor (and off-stage hijinks) belied the songs' content. That's probably part of why his fans loved him. He romanticized being a teenager, innocent but eager, light-hearted but verging on delinquency. Berry himself had had a troubled growing-up in Missouri, and the success he made as an adult was a kind of fantasized glorification of the post-War childhood/'Teen-idol world of screaming bobby-soxers and greasy, wise-cracking prima donnas. Meanwhile, the mainstream found its preferred version in Elvis Presley, who sneered and gyrated and shrieked his way to super-stardom. But true Rock N Roll was already passing the torch, as the Beatles (and all their imitators) ushered in a new wave of smart sophisticated lyricism and edgy content, putting paid to the naive excelsior of the Teen craze. And the counter-culture got going too, followed closely by the Flower & Love culture. Each successive wave of pop focus distanced the originators further from our attention, so that by the late Sixties, inventors like Berry seemed like "old men" by the age of 40.

Sixties Rock now seems as far away from us as Dixieland jazz probably seemed to the children of the 1950's. It's been over 50 years since Berry took the radio waves by storm, and started everyone jitterbugging and twisting and shaking, and ducking and crawling and making waves.

One of my off-beat favorites is Havana Moon, an early moody Caribbean-flavored ballad as smooth and polished as a golden cane-head; it seems to come from an entirely different era and tradition. A girl I knew once would cry every time she heard Memphis Tennessee (played here in an old Chess record company recording) she thought it so touching a piece.

Just for old times' sake, here are versions of Johnny B. Goode, Rock and Roll Music, School Days and Carol. Growing up during these years, I recall my parents' attitudes about all the scary lawlessness this music threatened to bring into our generation. Surely just listening to such raucous liberated stuff would make a girl get spontaneously pregnant, or be cause for immediate arrest by the authorities. The Devil's Music! It was worse than masturbation, might lead to drug abuse, or gnarled toenails.

But we survived. There were worse things coming down the road. Drugs, open disobedience and relationships, resistance to authority, wearing flowers in your hair, marching, and draft dodging. If we'd gone to church, we probably stopped. If we'd been destined to become doctors and engineers, we probably ended up as teachers or lawyers. Working class kids probably understood it all better. It was about having a good time. They didn't have so many kinks to work out. It took us longer, but we finally untangled the knots. In modern or post-modern capitalist culture, each generation thinks it needs its own music, and its own heroes. But they age fast, and grow up quickly.

Just a Guy Named Joe Ceravolo

In a previous post on the work of Max Douglas [1949-1970], I said the following about the premature death of poets: The sense of loss we feel in the work of one so young, on the threshold of discovery and achievement, is like a stillborn birth. If we could undo the past and open a door into possibility, we would never "know" what mightn't have happened. We can't not know what we think actually did happen. And so the dead young poets of the world spin endlessly in a sort of limbo of possibility, half in the world of make-believe, half in the world of reality. [They] remind us of the duty we bear as survivors; we carry the burden of their promise as talismans of inspiration into the future.

Joe Ceravolo [1934-1988] died at age 53 of cancer. By that point, he had already become famous, as perhaps the most original lyric voice of the Second Generation of New York School poets. Like most people who didn't live in New York and weren't familiar with the St. Marks scene during the 1960's, I first discovered his work when Columbia University Press selected his Spring in This World of Poor Mutts as the first Frank O'Hara poetry prize volume in 1968. His work got a lot of publicity for this, and the book's oddness and originality were immediately recognized by the larger literary community. I had read his poem "Ho Ho Ho Caribou" in the Paris Review #44, just before the Mutts book came out, though I wasn't sure what to make of it. It looked and sounded like major work, but having nothing else by which to compare it (for context), I was baffled and intrigued. Its author was a New Jersey guy with a wife and family, and worked as an engineer. Which made sense: the poems seemed at moments to be almost like empirical experiments in neurological apprehension, using ordinary language to explore unusual sensations and feelings about being in the natural (or man-made) world. The thing about the work was that everyone who read it immediately "got it"--that is, it wasn't difficult writing, it was very approachable and seductive, simple even. But like all things miraculous and easy-seeming, it concealed a clever and inquisitive mind behind it.

The "home-made" tradition in American verse has been traditionally identified with the work of William Carlos Williams--and behind it that of Walt Whitman. This isn't the place to go into the aspects that make Williams a down-to-earth-American-original-household-brand-name, suffice it to say that his influence has been primarily in two areas: prosodic innovation, and native American subject-matter. Williams was a small-town physician who lived in New Jersey, just as Ceravolo did. Williams was among the first writers to take on red wheelbarrows and green broken glass and chickens in the rain, instead of nymphs and gods and wraith-like apparitions, and probably the first to do it successfully.

There are a great many things one can say about Ceravolo's writing, but the most obvious observation is that he's interested in the phenomenal, how forces and mass are expressed and perceived, felt. In his poems, different contexts and conditions rub up against each other, slide, slip and slither. He's interested in the natural world, almost the way a scientist is. This produces a poetry that is superficially jagged, fractured or "cubistic" in structure, broken up into adjacent planes, non-syntactic atonalities or fragments. At its best, it's fascinating exploration into the relationship between 1 thought, 2 feeling and 3 language; where language must bear the burden of whatever incompatibilities may occur between the other two. This is certainly process, but not process in the sense of manipulation. More as a listening and intuitive interplay between mind and impulse: What do things really feel like?

Heart Feels Like Water

The fish are staying here

and eating. The plant is

thin and has very long leaves

like insects' legs, the way

they bend down.

Through the water

the plant breaks from the water:

the line of the water and the air.

Told!

The poem feels like an investigation into the experience of watching fish in a pond, edged with grass. But the line-breaks set up a naive credulity, against which the startling metaphorical descriptions achieve an artless delight: "Through the water/the plant breaks from the water" startles you with its description of how light is bent through clear liquid, in the same way that leaves may seem resemble insects (Praying Mantises???--or those South American bugs which are camouflaged by looking exactly like leaves?).

The planar membrane between liquid and gas ("the line") is realized with a single exclamation "Told!" like touching the surface with a majic wand. The poem, it seems, very much asks us to take it as a kind of magical occasion, in which intensity of apprehension and vivid empirical data are presented as directly as possible, without any margins or insulation. Insulation from direct apprehension of the object is exactly what Ceravolo's not trying to do!

from Ho Ho Ho Caribou

1

Leaped at the caribou.

My son looked at the caribou.

The kangaroo leaped on the

fruit tree. I am a white

man and my children

are hungry

which is like paradise.

The doll is sleeping.

It lay down to creep into

the plate.

It was clean and flying.

10

Like a flower, little light, you open

and we make believe

we die. We did all around

you like a snake in a

well and we come up out

of the warm well and

are born again out of dry

mammas, nourishing mammas, always

holding you as I

love you and am

revived inside you, but

die in you and am

never born again in

the same place, never

stop!

Startling statements are enjambed with unusual (primitivist) imagery. The disjunctions are refreshing and dramatic ("am/never born again in/the same place" or "my children/are hungry/which is like paradise"). With just a handful of simple effects, he's able to summon up a kind of ritualistic game of archetypes and/or fetish-objects. There's a light sense of play which liberates the otherwise somber assertions from their moorings. It's not unlike the sense of surprise you sometimes get in a Williams poem, the way the poem unfolds jerkily, or ricochets off successive hits like a pin-ball zig-zagging down a maze of bongs and crooked lanes.

from The Green Lake is Awake

I saw three girls

passing, going to work,

yet the whole street is

moving away.

*

A dog walks over to the

little boy. He walks over

sideways and bashful.

*

If you can imagine

a park, then you can

see this crushed lollipop.

*

Paul is watching me. His

eyes get sleepy with intensity.

He looks like he's

going to sneeze.

*

The duck is bobbing up and down.

It stays almost

in the same spot

as the water under it

moves away like a river.

*

Orange soda.

Distant voices.

_____________________

May

I am lost.

I had swum before.

There is no deformation fatigue

Residual under salt water

Morning oh May flower! oh

May exist. Built.

When will water stop

cooling? Built, falling. Reeds. I am surprised.

Weakness. Torsion.

The wind, white.

Sapphire, oxidation. Million. . . . . .

Fire of Myself

What I miss most is

that live

that subtle transformation

from inert to

trans-atomic structures

that leaves my welded

and supple body

that carries the imprint

of that body

into the land

of pure migration

* * * * *

Meandering through my own consciousness, I can see how Ceravolo's work influenced my own, like these random examples culled from my own collected early poems:

The blunder

forward

rocks

the boat--

under

water

under

water

*

Water giggles, happy with itself?

Though it needs some seriousness

About itself to make the

Contradiction into

A rubberband.

*

a siren

is a glass of milk

in the morning--

pulsing

*

Ceravolo can't be forgotten. In this age of instant reputations and instant disintegration, it seems like the culture's memory is never more than a click or two away. Poems sit stubbornly on the page, and the world's exploding archive of data buries us all under an insupportable burden. Allan Kornblum published The Green Lake is Awake: Selected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo in 1994 [Coffee House Press: Minneapolis, 131 pages]. Introduction by Kenneth Koch, who had been Ceravolo's poetry teacher way back when. The wonderful thing about him is that his work--though contemporary with an entire generation of writers in and around the New York area, who shared an active interest in experimental writing--is nothing like theirs. He wasn't a poetry groupie slavishly following the well-rutted career path of would-be hangers-on/academics, he had "a life" separate and distinct and integral to the "real world" which fed directly into his imagination. He was pure. And in that sense his writing gives one hope--amongst all the clawing, grasping, greedy ambition and envy which seems to infect the world of art and literature, his work was a made thing, clean and necessary--as refreshing as a soda on a hot summer afternoon.

Air Stream Trailers - Vestige of the American Moderne Design Craze

The couple in this picture acquired their original Air Stream "Torpedo" trailer as a kit from the manufacturer in 1935. Holman, a Florida physician, was handy, and saw the kit (which cost $5.00) advertised in Popular Mechanics magazine. It took him two and a half years to complete the trailer, and everything had to be done by hand: plumbing, wiring, gas fixtures, mattresses, curtains, etc. Not like today when you can drive a finished motorhome right off the sales lot. It was the 1930's and cash was scarce. Holman was still a medical student when he built his. He and his wife continued to use the trailer for the next five decades, traveling all around the lower 48, with only minor augmentations to the original shell. In his 90's (circa 2008), Mr. Holman was still attending Air Stream Trailer Rallies, something he had been doing since the late 1940's. His trailer is the earliest known example of the Air Stream product line.

In response to the growing network of roads (and highways, or "interstates") in the nation, and the opening of numerous national parks, there grew up a "gypsy" culture of road life in the 1920's and '30's, which continues to this day. Travel by car (and trailer) became a national pastime. Growing up in the 1950's and 1960's, American middle-class families began to take for granted a Summer trip by car. Motoring became for many, almost a way of life, nomadic and foot-loose. Even the avant garde got involved: Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the great Beat classic text, is based on cross country travel, by road or train. This expression of America's prosperity--where ordinary people could expect a "vacation" break from employment--was the excursion; and intra- and inter-state tourism became big business.

Air Stream trailers came in many sizes and variations. There were four-wheeled versions, and not all of them had the characteristic shiny external skin. But they all had the Streamlined Moderne Design look, and it was this aspect of their appearance which has made them a classic ikon of our culture, and entitles them to a place of honor in the history of engineering and product design. Streamlined Moderne began in the 1930's. With the Stock Market Crash of 1929, austerity and efficiency came into fashion. Sleek finishes, aerodynamic forms, synthetic materials and an infatuation with speed and futuristic elements predominated. Consisting of elements of Art Deco, Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, and Bauhaus elements, it was expressed in architecture, ships, interior design, furnishings, appliances, as well as in automobiles (and trailers). Little attempt was made to distinguish between functional and non-functional streamlining. Sleek "aerodynamic" styling, based on the idealization of the machine, came to dominate commercial and factory-made design for 30 years, well into the early 1960's (and the era of fins and sweeping chrome trim). The Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933-34 (the year before Holman bought his trailer kit), drew 38 million visitors--providing a welcome oasis of excitement and optimism during a period of extreme economic privation. Science and technology had become the new gods.

Our family never owned a trailer. By the 1950's trailers had become rather expensive, especially if you weren't going to use them very much--and then there was always the additional consideration of where you were going to store them when not in use. We did have a large "barn" in back of our house, but that didn't seem to be the primary excuse for not having one. Instead, we became "campers" with tents and utensils and paraphernalia carried in the trunk of the big family car. This was what Father called "roughing it" which undoubtedly reflected his nostalgia for his scouting days in pre-WWI Wisconsin. We camped in designated state or national park "grounds" where there were fire-pits and picnic tables, and crude common bathroom units. This was all supposed to be great fun, though the inconveniences probably outnumbered the novelties three to one.

Despite our never having used or owned one of these, today I still get nostalgic for the 1950's whenever I see one of these old shiny beauties. They're a touching reminder of the delight people once felt for the American Dream of Summer vacations and recreation. People still travel in America, but a lot of the romance has gone out of it. Campgrounds nowadays are often nothing less than glorified trailer parks, and trailer parks have distinctly negative connotations for those of us Baby Boomers who grew up at a time when living in a trailer meant you couldn't afford to buy or rent a decent house, even a small one. Some people actually preferred living in a trailer--some people do today. I visited a man in Santa Clara a few years ago, in a trailer development where the trailers were so large and elaborate that they looked almost like tract homes. But that's not what vacation trailers were about.

How about a vacuum cleaner that looked like a rocket ship?

Or the hand iron that looked like Captain Nemo's submarine?

Or the weird teardrop-shaped automobile designed by Norman Bel Geddes, which looks like something Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock might have found crawling from under a rock out at the edge of the galaxy?

From the Gallery of Heroes - David Lean's Three Great Screen Epics

David Lean's [1908-1991] career can be artificially divided into four distinct periods: the first encompasses his debut and early efforts to bring three of Noel Coward's stage dramas to the screen--The Happy Breed (1940), Blithe Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945). The second includes two brilliant adaptations of Dickens's novels, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The third period included sophisticated social comedies (Hobson's Choice in 1954, and Summertime in 1955). The fourth period, a crowning fulfillment to an impressive portfolio, includes The Bridge on the River Kwai ([1957], Lawrence of Arabia [1962], Doctor Zhivago [1965], and A Passage to India [1984].

Successful epic film concepts require a broad cinematic vision. During the post-War period, the movie industry, under pressure from television, felt compelled to expand its medium both technically and aesthetically, to encompass wider (literally, as with Cinerama@) and more ambitious panoramic productions, in order to compete successfully with the cathode ray tube. Lean was preeminent among film producers and directors who led the charge to make cinema the heroic medium it could be. Beginning as a film editor--working his way all the way up from the ranks as a messenger and newsreel cutter--Lean was ideally equipped to organize a large, complex production crew around a coordinated effort, marshaling resources and setting schedules to consolidate remote location work and sequencing of the scene and cutting processes.

In each of his three great screen epics--River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Zhivago--he combined a persuasive and compelling story line with stunning visual effects to create a new augmented screen language, as impressive in its way, as many of the greatest literary epics (such as War and Peace, Gone With the Wind, or The Grapes of Wrath--each, of course, also made into a movie version as well).

In cinema, each scene must say a thousand words of description, each line of dialogue must carry the weight and function of pages of verbal exchange. The sifting of content and plot down to its effective essence is crucial to efficient and convincing progress in a movie. A movie employs the skills and experience and talents of dozens of key individuals, but without a defining and unified vision it can end up as a mess on the cutting-room floor. Lean's great skill in adapting powerful stories in exotic settings, sweeping through space and time and human lives with style, is unmatched by any of his contemporaries. Gone With the Wind [1939], or Cleopatra [1963] might bear comparison, but it wasn't until the 70's that the movie industry seriously took up his challenge and continued the tradition that Lean had largely created through his own signal efforts.

In each of these three movie masterpieces the action is centered around an impressive male heavy: Alec Guinness, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif. Important secondary roles are also crucial for the interaction and dialectic of conflict. In River Kwai, William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa, and James Donald each represent distinct positions in the film's ironic tension; in Lawrence, a host of stars and character actors (Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Hawkins, Sharif, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains and Arthur Kennedy) swirl around each other like planets in a vast constellation of interests; in Zhivago, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger, Tom Courtenay, Ralph Richardson and Geraldine Chaplin are each sharply drawn against the vast tapestry of revolutionary Russia. In each film, the historical complexities aren't really addressed with any degree of completeness or verisimilitude; rather, the potential for dramatic character development is exploited, and historical events are seen at the human level, rather than like lines and colors on a metaphorical map. It would be difficult to imagine Tom Jones [1963], or Patton [1970], or Barry Lyndon [1975], or The Godfather epic [1972-1990], or Searching for Private Ryan [1998], or Brideshead Revisited [1981], without the example of Lean's approach to picaresque subject-matter.

Central to each of Lean's successes is a concentration on the relation between the literal visual landscape and the human struggles which grow out of, or are played out in an actual physical context. In Kwai, the Japanese efforts to expand their empire by forging a railroad through the remote jungle interior of Burma serves as the backdrop of prison-camp life during the construction of a wooden bridge over the River Kwai. In Lawrence, the parching sands and wastes of the Arabian Peninsula provide a gigantic canvas for the dramatization of British, Arab and Turkish interests as they contend for Suez. And in Zhivago, the good doctor's travails cover the whole Russian diorama, from Moscow to Siberia, from the top echelons of pre-Revolutionary Czarist decadence, to the dregs of WWI disintegration and chaos. How such events and expanses are experienced, immediately and pungently, by the central character, forms the crucially important substance of each narrative.

The stories of how each film was made constitute tangled yarns of their own. Years in the making, each required a complicated coordination of key elements (stars, locations and back studio work), and the results were never certain. The risks inherent in such stretched projects are are always first financial: Backers for ambitious projects like this must front vast sums, sometimes years in advance, before any possible return can be expected. Guaranteeing participants--especially well-known actors--an income during the production process, years in advance of release, presents huge barriers. Producers must con everyone, and past accomplishments are no proof of future profits; a track-record is decisive, and this is what Lean brought to the table. With each successful production, his reputation provided a firmer foundation for future opportunities. No one who didn't dream big could ever embark on such outlandish adventures.

Central to any epic movie is a stirring, skillful score, and each of these productions is noteworthy in that respect. Malcolm Arnold did the score for Kwai, and Maurice Jarre (about whom I have written particularly before) won Oscars for both the other two scores. In each, a romantic lyrical set-piece, identified with the central character (the whistled marching tune in Kwai, the desert fantasy of Lawrence, and "Lara's Theme" in Zhivago, unifies and lulls the audience with an exotic undercurrent of emotion, roughly the equivalent to a stylistic "tone" in a novel. Scores as good as this are like visual "symphonies" with separate movements, grandly scaled. But intelligent dialogue and narrative flow must be carefully coordinated to achieve a dramatic action. Which is where the editing process comes in. The cinematographer for both Lawrence and Zhivago was Freddie Young.

Over the last 30 years, I've heard it said over and over in film discussions, that it's no longer possible to make epic films like those from the heydays of the studio system, or those like Lean's great epics. But somehow, they keep getting made. Unfortunately, the costs of technical innovations--which might in some ways make complicated set-up shots, location headaches, or stunt scenes easier or less time-consuming--often end up being greater. I've thought that sci-fi or action movies, particularly, should benefit from these technical advancements; but so far the results have been largely unconvincing. Poor story lines and bad scripting or casting can't be saved by visual fireworks. If you want to make a big historical block-buster, it's still a huge undertaking, with or without the software programming to assist you.

In any case, these movies give us the most vivid examples of the recreation of specific stories, taken or adapted from great books. They're fictions, of course, even when based loosely on real events or actual biographies. T.E. Lawrence wrote his own story, and Pasternak had "lived" much of the outward events described in his novel (which won him the Nobel Prize), and Boulle's wartime jungle romance was true in many respects to the circumstances of the Japanese-British conflict in Burma. In the end, they're more about exciting visual narrative than fact. But the lessons they teach, the motives they lay bear, the forces they engage, are as real as those in the best literature. They're lyrical, visual poetry at its best.

Movies as a popular art form follow a recent trend in the cultural traditions of the West. In the 19th Century, popular picaresque adventure novels, such as the work of Alexandre Dumas, or Walter Scott, furnished formulaic escapist fodder for the masses, who could fantasize vicariously the intrepid exploits and improbable intrigues of heroic characters in exotic locals. There was a strong continuation of this trend throughout the 20th Century, both in fictional and non-fictional genres. Movies provided an even more efficient route to mass markets, hence the hybridization of the adventure narrative, which flowered after World War II. Given its financial demands, the form was largely confined to American, or joint British-American productions (as with Lean's). Unlike the imaginary heroes and heroines of the 19th Century, though, movies permit the glorification of the celluloid actor, creating a whole other dimension of public interest. Making movies is a technical art, but the popular interest in "stars" and publicity and "glitz" is a phenomenon created by the modern media, chiefly movie-making. It's one thing to provide cheap thrills like The Count of Monte Cristo, to feed the public imagination. But imagine how 19th Century audiences might have reacted, had Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin originated as a cinematic muckraker, complete with vivid scenes of slave-quarters and beatings and hangings!

The power of cinema as an art form, or as a vehicle to influence public opinion, is well-documented, as is the history of film as pure entertainment. Lean's ambitious epics stop well short of trying to communicate anything profound about the subjects they engage, though they are filled with opportunistic wit and shrewd observations. We don't learn anything new in his movies about Japanese or Turkish imperialism, or the development of Communism in post-Czarist Russia. What we do get is a personalized version of life in historical contexts, a sense of how the individual is caught in the web of the large movements of history, and there is no better medium to do that. Pure human drama can be effectively staged in static legitimate theater, but the sweep and bustle of the visual permits a canvas as large as the world itself. As time speeds up, and the world gets smaller, movie epics like those of David Lean become de-facto interpretations of popular history, for popular consumption. They give us the illusion that we can at least imagine what history means, even when, or if, it is far too complex to permit this in reality.

From the Gallery of Heroes - John Le Carré [Part Two]

The Nobel Prize for Literature has usually been regarded as an honorific offered to authors who take on a symbolic polish for their respective nationalities. Slavic naturalists and rebellious Hispanic poets, renegade political activists and misbegotten émigrés. These all find welcome. But writers of mysteries and fantasy and other sub-genres of literature are uniformly shunned, since it seems that their efforts, as ingenious and biting as they may be, aren't somehow as "serious" and committed as they must be to be considered important art.

But the Committee could do worse than award it to le Carré, a writer who, though originally devoted to the stock mystery story genre, expanded the espionage novel to major dimensions, in effect erasing the artificial distinctions intended to limit its importance and range. How could the contentions of the great superpowers, through their respective Intelligence apparati, be somehow a less respectable or relevant subject than the vicissitudes of a Hungarian farmer, a Chilean miner, a Chicago salesman, or a Russian physician? There are few other writers with as just a claim to international fame, recognition and accomplishment as he.

In March of this year (2010), John le Carré let his hair down just a bit to give a lecture at Oxford University. Here is the second half of the text of that speech. I don't know if the man is much given to talking shop; this is mostly composed of anecdotes. But it's pieces and incidents like this from which interesting fictions may be inspired and derived.

________________________________________________________________

I took my family to Greece for a year, then to Vienna for another. I pined for my vanished colleagues and the chatter of the corridors and the daily buzz.

Stuck in the trough of self-doubt that follows a big success, I came up with a spy story that told of catastrophic failure and cover up. Alan Dulles, former head of the CIA, pronounced it the real McCoy. My readers were less sure.

I returned to England, wrote a novel set in the British Embassy in Bonn that dwelt on Germany's unvanquished Nazi past.

I wrote a love story and it bombed.

* * *

It was during this same troubled period of my life that I experienced a surreal end-piece to my career in the secret world.

I was languishing in Somerset, trying to live the life of a settle writer and a country gentleman, and fearing I was neither. My front doorbell rang.

Before me stood Sir Roger Hollis, former Director-General of MI5, whom I had got to know a bit in the line of duty. He was soliciting donations for Wells Cathedral where his father had served as Bishop.

Of course, I said. Come in. I'll sign you a cheque.

So he came in. And stayed in.

Sitting in my studio in its one armchair.

Reading his Times newspaper.

* * *

And I crouched at my desk and pretended to write, while I beat my brains out trying to fathom what on earth he wanted of me.

He must have come four or five times over a period of a few weeks, to sit in my studio and read his newspaper while I pretended to work.

It was only years later that I read that during this time Hollis was being subjected to hostile interrogation by Government lawyers in London who were determined to prove that all the cock-ups on his watch were the result of a conspiracy, and that Hollis was the Russian spy responsible for all of them.

Which he wasn't. H never had been, as the world now knows. Those cock-ups on his watch were just cock-ups.

And it is my sad conviction that the poor man was using my studio as a safe house where he could rest his weary head between their assaults on him.

* * *

I was in low water.

Or thought I was.

I seemed to have run dry, the writer's nightmare.

I wanted to write a story about how a secret service could be turned inside out to the point where it was operating against itself.

But how to tell it? The complications seemed insoluble.

Above all, how to tell it without George Smiley, because by then, he and I had had a serious falling out. My readers might still fancy him, but I was sick of him.

When you're a forty-year-old writer, as I was, and having a Force 12 mid-life crisis, there's not a lot of incentive to re-enter the over-familiar soul of a man too old even to be your father, who has a tart for a wife, and wipes his spectacles on the fat end of his tie.

Or so I reasoned.

For six months I flogged away, and every time Smiley knocked at my door, I refused to let him in. Until one day I took the entire manuscript--boxes of it--up to the headland of the Cornish cliff where I was living and put a match to it.

My wife told me later she had a copy in the office, but that just spoils a good story.

So obviously, all I could do after burning the manuscript was swallow my pride and open the door to Smiley after all. No context. He had won.

And no sooner had he won than he was stolen from under my nose by Alex Guinness, leaving me with nothing to do but complete the Karla trilogy, and enjoy the master-class.

* * *

"May I speak to David Cornwell, please?"

"Hullo, Alec."

"How did you know it was me?"

* * *

Alec wanted to meet a real spy. I introduced him to Sir Maurice Oldfield, a former Chief of MI6.

For years the press had insisted that Oldfield was the model for Smiley which, despite a physical similarity, simply wasn't true.

But after a long lunch in Chelsea, if my Smiley wasn't based on Sir Maurice Oldfield, from now on, Alec's was.

And when Oldfield, after a brandy or two, got up from the table, and strode off down the King's Road swinging his umbrella, Alec was out on the pavement in a flash, studying his movements with the same intensity with which, we are told, he studied orang-utans in London Zoo.

Then he hurried back to the table, sat down, grabbed a water glass and started running his finger round the rim.

"I've seen people do this before," he said.

Then he gave the glass a meditative flick with his forefinger:

"And I've seen people do this."

Then he put his forefinger inside the glass, and whirled it round the inside of the rim.

"But I've never seen anyone do this before. Do you think he's looking for the dregs of poison?"

* * *

But Smiley and I hadn't buried the hatchet. The Cold War was on its last legs. I longed for it to end. Did Smiley? I wasn't sure.

But how to plan my escape?

Smiley was above all a European. All right, from now on I would write about non-European places: Asia, the Middle East, Central America, Africa, the Caucasus.

Here are a few snapshots from the album of my writing life after Smiley.

* * *

In Phnom Penh and Saigon, cosseted by seasoned foreign correspondents, I had my first glimpse of warfare, and human courage and cowardice in the raw.

The cowardice was mostly mine.

* * *

In an opium den in Vientiane, I reclined beside a French colon who, when the pain of missing France became too much for him, would place a telephone call to the Café Flore in St Germain, personal for Mademoiselle Génévieve du Clos.

Then he would listen to her name being called out above the babble of customers--Mademoiselle du Clos, Mademoiselle du Clos--until the cafe hung up.

* * *

At the Commodore Hotel in Beirut, a waiter whispered to me over dinner: Mr David, Our Chairman will see you now!

For an hour boys with Kalashnkovs drove me without lights round Beirut in a sand-coloured Volvo. In a block of flats peppered with shell holes, the lift was miraculously working.

ON the twelfth floor, in a hermetically sealed apartment filled with Palestinian flags and cigarette smoke, Arafat's High Command sat waiting.

I sat with them. Finally he entered. Black and white keffiyeh. Silver pistol at his side. Khaki uniform with razor-sharp creases.

Mr David! Why have you come to see me?

Mr Chairman, I have come to put my hand on the Palestinian heart!

Arafat seizes my hand and presses it to his breast!

Mr David, it is here!

We embrace. His beard is as soft as a girl's hair, and he smells of Johnson's baby powder.

* * *

An Israeli Intelligence colonel in his twenties drove me into the Negev desert to mee a young German woman terrorist from the Baader Meinhoff years who was being held in a secret prison. Her name was Brigitte.

The prison Governor, a much older woman, summoned her and introduced us to one another in English, which was evidently their common language, and sat with us, patiently, while I interviewed Brigitte in German.

Soon she got bored with me and asked the Governor, in English, to be taken back to her cell.

A guard was called and Brigitte was taken away. The Governor and I sat alone.

"I never have to let her know that I was speak German," she confessed to me--in German. "You see, I was in Dachau. I know voices like hers a little bit too well."

* * *

In the first free-enterprise restaurant in what was still Leningrad, in the year of perestroika in 1987, I sipped tea with Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who, having provided the Soviet Union with its hydrogen bomb, had become its leading persecuted champion of human rights.

He and his wife Elena Bonner had just been released from Gorki after eight years of incarceration. Sakharov described the moment when Mikhail Gorbachev urged him to return to Moscow and take his place in the new Russia.

* * *

In the Russian Embassy in London, I dined with Yevgeny Primakov, then Russian Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister, and a former head of the KGB.

So who do you identify with in my work, Yevgeny?

Smiley, of course!

* * *

In Panama City, the fifty-something President Endara summons me to the Palace of Herons and introduces me to his very young student bride as she crouches on the floor in jeans, doing Lego with Endara's children.

Darling. Meet the great writer, John le Carré.

The name means nothing to her, as her expression makes embarrassingly clear.

But darling, he is a genius!

The old diplomat stirs in me.

Madam President, there is no reason why you should have heard of me. But you will be familiar with Michele Pfeiffer and Sean Connery who both starred in a recent film of my work.

The new First Lady's gaze softens.

You know Mr Connery?

Well, met him a few times, you know.

You are very welcome in Panama.

* * *

And of course the President was right: I am a genius--but only alas because I comply with Scott Fitzgerald's definition of the man who can hold two opposing views on any one subject and still function.

My garden in Cornwall is presently being desecrated by badgers. I wire up their holes. I barricade my plants.

But secretly, I want the badgers to win.

* * *

I will leave you with the words of Joseph Brodsky. We were having lunch together in Hampstead when the news was brought to him that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

We walked out into the sunshine and embraced.

"And now," he said, "for a year of being glib."