March 13, 1983

A Talk With John le Carré

By MELVYN BRAGG

ohn le Carré owns a mile of cliff in Cornwall near Land's End. Three working men's cottages, gleaming with cream paint, crest the rock wall that holds back the Atlantic. Inside that sturdy, anonymous, everyman stonework is a richly furbished gentleman's residence - gilded mirrors, Oriental rugs, old wood. The garden is fronded and glitter-green, an oasis in that rolling cliff-land, a harbor of protected cultivation. Down below, under the welcoming Atlantic, black Cornish rocks ride in the sea, lurking for yet more victims - nine lives lost there last year alone.

Mr. le Carré's chosen hideaway in the England of his birth is mined with ambiguities. So is he. He likes to hunt alone and yet he has always been compulsively attracted to the most incestuous institutions. ''From early on, I was extremely secretive,'' he says, ''and began to think that I was, so to speak, born into occupied territory.'' He has been mapping it out ever since - in English public schools, the British Army, at Oxford where he read Modern Languages and belonged to the poshest clubs, at Eton where he taught the not entirely trustworthy flower of the land, in the Foreign Office where he was in intelligence and in novels where he makes fictions out of the forked and coiling tongues of institutionalized life. Fictions with a watcher at the center, like the boy Roach in ''Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,'' based on the boy le Carré.

The private scandals of his father's business crimes and imprisonment, the abandonment by his mother when he was 5, the rigorously imposed respectability of his grandparents ''instilled in me a condition of subterfuge. The catastrophes in our family were so great and the disproportion between the domestic situation and the orthodoxy of my educated program was so great that I seemed to go about in disguise.''

His name, as everyone now knows, is not John le Carré (it is David John Moore Cornwell). Nor is the barren cliff-top his only lair. He likes to prowl around. Parts of all his novels have been written abroad; many of the early spy stories were set in Germany where he worked as a spy in the early '60s. He used to deny having been a spy, but now it's out. He gives in gracefully - caught but too late for it to matter. His new line is a line in charming resignation, an admission of nothing very much. ''It would be terribly boring if people knew how boring my life had been in intelligence.'' ''Boring'' is the English upper-class, all-purpose killer word, dropping a dead bat on the ball. Mr. le Carré knows all about that.

One of the attractions of his novels is the smell of insider lore they give off, like a good wax polish. ''I had to find out what the orthodox world was like,'' he says - and the final redoubt of orthodoxy is intelligence. Then he secreted it into a fiction. The names coined by the circus-men who fill the ring in the Smiley novels go back through the cloisters of English life to nicknames at school, the code languages of adventurous boys, the lovingly localized learning of a group that aspires to be a separate and superior clique. Smiley's great attraction is his memory, and its specialty is its grasp of trade secrets.

Mr. le Carré hove off to the Middle East to uncover some more of those for his new novel, ''The Little Drummer Girl.'' Originally he had intended it to be another Smiley book. ''I still had it in mind to take Smiley around the world and have him fighting it out with Karla, his Russian opposite number, in different theaters. But I simply could not find a plot in the Middle East which was not too gothic, too manipulative, too silly really to accommodate that conflict.

''So I went in and out of Israel and the Lebanon. Then I went down to the Palestinian camps and was astonished at my own simple perception: We have neglected entirely the Palestinian case. Golda Meir, as you know, said the Palestinians did not exist. There was a slogan, 'A land without people for a people without land.' Now these things were not true, not fair and not just. I wanted to say so and in terms of popular fiction, simply by putting a human face upon the Palestinians. It's enough.''

Mr. le Carré has written well of Israel. Again and again he acknowledges his devotion to individuals there and his belief in its right to exist. But his exposure to the Palestinian camps ''radicalized'' him.

In ''The Little Drummer Girl,'' Israeli intelligence, worried at the success of a particular Palestinian guerrilla, chooses, programs and plants a double agent who in the end takes the Israelis to their prey and their prize. Many of the techniques of briefing and debriefing will be familiar to those who know the Smiley novels. The subject matter of ''Drummer Girl,'' though, is far harder edged - with Beirut and Sharon sill smoldering. And the central character is a woman. Smiley not only did not fit, his immensely successful television screen realization by Alec Guinness ''took the character away from me. Writing Smiley after Smiley-through-Guinness had entered the public domain was very difficult. In a sense his screen success blew it for me.''

The girl chosen by le Carré -Charlie - is based on his own sister Charlotte. A few years ago he saw her with a Royal Shakespeare touring company, playing in ''As You Like It'' in a West Country gymnasium, shouting to be heard above the rain drumming on the roof and thought - ''Something here.''

Actors back to the cliff-top house: warm fire, warm wine, talk of actors' ways already found fascinating in his association with Guinness and the cast of the Smiley adaptations. Lore about a leftwing English actress whose fierce social concern and reckless temper took her to weekend schools for Trotskyism and bourgeois terrorism that were set up in seedy country houses not far from London. Lore about makeup and dressing rooms and agents. Lore about the sexual pack habits of worldly young theater people. In the end, Charlie was set up for Israeli intelligence, ripe for the picking.

The case for Israel is well put by the Israelis in the book. It is the passionate, urgent case we have listened to respectfully and guiltily since 1945. To top it off, Mr. le Carré went to Israel a lot. ''They invited me. They allowed me to see anybody I wanted to see. In many ways it's an extraordinarily open society. If you want to see General so and so, somebody calls him up and you go along. I talked to a lot of people who'd been in secret outfits. They even let me talk to their Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinians were a much more difficult nut to crack because they have no p.r. worth talking of. They speak very poorly for themselves, in my opinion.''

But in Beirut he met Yasir Arafat. Mr. le Carré was already enchanted with the P.L.O. leader - his gaiety, his ''moderation.'' ''If we are about to see his downfall it will be because of his moderation.'' In Mr. le Carré's conversation Mr. Arafat comes through as a witty tragic hero. While the novelist's fairness to Israel is not in doubt, his real shot in ''Drummer Girl'' is for the recognition that the Palestinians too exist, that they are now a lost tribe of Israel, that they have graces and rights, honor, loyalties and the tenderness of friends.

For the future, he says, ''I'd like to stay as close as I can to contemporary reality. By the end of the Smiley books I'd gone too far into a private world.'' His idea now is to ''get near to what Camus did for North Africa. So many situations are badly spoken for. I don't believe, for example, that 99 percent of the Russians want to kill us or vice versa, but there is such a gap between what we are told and what is the truth on the ground.''

I found him winding himself up for the publication of ''The Little Drummer Girl.'' Television interviews, rarely given in the past, are now acceded to, and journalists and critics home in on the Cornish cliff tip for the well-shaped, finely mimicked stories about Yasir Arafat. A film of the book is already under way, early review signals are being expertly decoded. ''The reviewing industry,'' as he calls it, is not unfamiliar with the le Carré jugular - ''The Naive and Sentimental Lover,'' his non-espionage novel about a love affair, was panned. ''I was due for it. The reviewing industry is an envy market to some extent.'' As with most writers, his private opinions of most reviewers are expletives deleted.

He moves, as the mood takes him, from Cornwall to his house near Hampstead Heath in London, to Switzerland, to ''goofing around abroad.'' His domestic life is stiffened by four sons, the eldest in his mid-'20s, the youngest, 7; his wife, Jane, who used to work in publishing; two dogs; good friends, and books, the carefully eclectic list of a well-aimed mind.

As John le Carré treats the theme of betrayal, the public or institutional default is always more excusable than the personal betrayal of faith. Sometimes the sheer pyrotechnics of the plot seem to race us past rather than through the problems raised. But he wants it to be complicated in order that we will trust him to make it simple. After he stuck his neck out with ''The Naive and Sentimental Lover,'' he recalls, ''I thought, they were right. And if you can do one thing well, stick with it.'' So he went back to Smiley. Three books later, he leaves the cover again, this time for what his Israeli intelligence officer calls ''the theater of the real.''

Mr. le Carré sees his life dramatically and observes contemporary history most keenly. In 1948, when he was 18, he did his National Service in Army intelligence in Vienna. ''I spent a great deal of time with extraordinary victims of half a dozen wars: Estonians, for example, who had been imprisoned by Germans and then by Russians and then by Americans! R.A.F. officers who had bombed Berlin in 1945 and returned for the airlift in 1948-9. It was like reading the right book at the right time. I saw the right things at the right time.''

This, to judge by the new book and what he himself says, is where his watching will take him now: searching for the right story, watching for the right time.

Melvyn Bragg, a novelist and film writer, conducts interviews for British television.

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