Perfect Spies and Imperfect Dads
My essay on John le Carré's collected letters, his daddy issues, his novels, and Freud
I said I would use this platform to share my work — and now I will do so. I wrote this essay on A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré (just published by Viking Press) for the Baffler, which is a great magazine you should all read. If you’re not interested in espionage thrillers (which is what JLC wrote), then think of this piece as an extended reflection on Freudian family romance and the Death Drive… with some spy stuff mixed in; if you’re not interested in Freud, think of this as an essay about espionage with a light sprinkling of psychoanalysis, just for kicks. If you’re not interested in Freud or espionage… well, I think that’s just strange.
Here’s an excerpt from the middle (and then I’ll tell you a little bit about how this piece came about, if you’re interested):
To assume those who embrace a life of strategic deception do so out of comfort with deceit is a mistake; rather, le Carré suggests, the perfect spy is someone assailed by his own fraudulence, by the feeling that he cannot be coherent to himself or others. Long before he joins the clandestine world, our recruit feels he is living undercover, an imposter in his own life. His career, his marriage, his friendships are pervaded by emptiness and pretense. He is an avid compartmentalizer. He has affairs, if he has the courage, but they only exacerbate his affliction. Small lies accumulate, like debts, in teetering piles. He is alone and apart, playing a role, waiting to be found out. The secret life is a refuge in precisely this sense: it transforms the otherwise intolerable burden of doubleness into a duty. The perfect spy is someone who turns his imposter syndrome into an art form—an asset.
Secrecy, le Carré wrote in 1986, is “a place of escape, attracting not the strong in search of danger, but us timid fellows, who couldn’t cope with reality for one calendar day without the structures of conspiracy to get us by.” … During his Charlie Rose interview, le Carré said that “secrecy is some kind of embracing, and secure-making, environment.” (As he spoke, he wrapped his arms around himself and smiled.) Becoming a spy was, for le Carré, a relief. “It was that feeling that I could put my inherited larceny at the feet of my country and serve,” he has said. In A Perfect Spy, Pym’s CIA counterpart, Grant Lederer, expresses this sentiment in nearly the same words: “You know what our racket is? It’s to place our larcenous natures at the service of the state.”
The figure of the con man, the spy, and the artist are mixed up in le Carré’s mind. Each relies on their capacity to entertain, mislead, and beguile; to seduce, make others complicit in their personal fantasies, no matter the cost. They set themselves watchfully apart from the world, grant themselves licenses, and depend, for material and emotional sustenance, upon those they deceive. “Is there really a big difference,” le Carré writes in The Pigeon Tunnel, “between the man who sits at his desk and dreams up scams on the blank page (me), and the man who puts on a clean shirt every morning and, with nothing in his pocket but imagination, sallies forth to con his victim (Ronnie)?” And later: “Spying and novel writing are made for each other. Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal.”
It goes on…. Please read it! That’s the main thing.
If Freud and John le Carré seem an odd pairing, I hope that they won’t seem so after you’ve read the essay. But also there’s a simple explanation: in the spring of 2020, I had a lot of time on my hands. Usually, in such circumstances, I read. But perhaps like some of you, I found myself basically incapable of focusing on a book for more than a few pages. This was alarming — not only because reading is usually a source of solace in moments of turmoil and angst (see: spring 2020), but also because I needed to read books to do my job.
I don’t know how, exactly, but I came up with a solution: I would relearn to read by reading novels that are designed to maintain one’s rapt attention, i.e. spy thrillers. I had read and enjoyed a handful of JLC’s books (much preferring their drab pessimism to Fleming’s Bond or Tom Clancy), but that spring and summer, I read almost all of them. Pretty much back-to-back. By the time I’d finished, I found I could sit and read less minute-to-minute thrilling stuff again too. Which was fortunate, because by then, I had enrolled in a series of (zoom) courses on psychoanalysis taught by my brilliant friend Pat Blanchfield at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR). So my reading list went from 100% JLC to 100% Freud. These two writers and their approaches became irreparably mixed up in my mind — held together by the ambient sense of trauma that pervaded everyday life during the pandemic and lockdown.
That’s all to say, this piece was percolating for a long time. When I saw the letters were being published, I immediately pitched Jess Bergman at The Baffler, whom I knew to be a fellow JLC fan, and a great editor. She said yes, on the strength of a pitch that went something like: “I’ve had an essay about JLC, fathers and sons, (ahem) Freud, and The Perfect Spy kicking around my head for a while…” (Thanks, Jess.) And the rest was history. Well, the rest was a bunch of self-torture and rending garments and rereading and writing badly and hating it all the whole time. But I’m reasonably happy with how the piece turned out. So please give it a shot!
Hello Sam,
Another brilliant piece. It was very moving and very deep. Thank you so much. I am glad that Freud and le Carré landed in your lap at the same time. Two very large bundles to undo.