The Secret Life of John le Carre

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Luke Ford

Adam Sisman writes in this 2023 book:

* David claimed that these extramarital relationships were ‘impulsive, driven, short – lived affairs . . . often meaningless in themselves’, but while that might be true of some of them, others appear to have been much more serious and long – lasting. He needed to be loved, and at times seems to have believed himself to have been in love, at least in the moment. He told several women that he was willing to leave his wife for them. Of course he did not do so. Whether this was a tactic, or whether he meant it at the time, is an open question. Perhaps he was not really capable of love.

* Jane told herself that ‘nobody can have all of David’. He flattered her that her input was important to his work, but he said the same to other women too. Each in turn became his ‘muse’. His writing pal James Kennaway advised David that he would need a different woman for each book, advice David appears to have taken to heart. Thus Liese Deniz inspired The Honourable Schoolboy , Verity Mosley and Janet Lee Stevens The Little Drummer Girl , Sue Dawson A Perfect Spy , the Italian journalist The Russia House , Susan Anderson The Tailor of Panama and to some extent Our Game also, Yvette Pierpaoli The Constant Gardener , and so on.

* ‘People believe what they want to believe,’ wrote David to one of his lovers. ‘ALWAYS.’ He was referring to the ‘revelation’ that Graham Greene had continued working for British intelligence into his seventies. ‘No good me telling them that GG was far too drunk to remember anything, & that his residual connections with the Brit spooks were romantic fantasy.’
When he wrote that people believed what they wanted to believe about Greene, he might just as well have been writing about himself. People were willing to believe almost anything about him, even if he denied it (especially if he denied it) – for example, that he had once been earmarked as a possible future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, more popularly known as MI6). According to David, the Chief himself, Sir Dick White, had told him in a farewell interview that he was highly thought of within the Service; and that, had he remained, he might have been a candidate for the ‘top job’ in due course. This is a suggestion that one former MI6 officer, with a long and distinguished career behind him, described to me as ‘ridiculous’. The idea that anyone with less than four years’ experience in any organisation could be considered as a candidate to run it in due course is, to say the least, unlikely. Yet this is what David wanted us to believe. Perhaps he believed it himself.
The secret history of David’s career in the intelligence services is that it was uneventful. ‘The trouble with David,’ observed one MI6 contemporary who served with him, ‘is that he was never involved in a successful operation.’

* Far from being a distraction, his clandestine affairs became important, perhaps even essential to his writing. And just as infidelity enlivened his real life, so betrayal became the underlying theme of his fiction, the one reflecting the other.

* ‘They fucked us up rotten,’ David wrote to his brother Tony in 2007, when he was sixty – six and Tony two years older. ‘They’ were their parents, Ronnie and Olive, on whom he blamed all his difficulties with love. Ronnie had been ‘disgusting’: rapacious, unprincipled and abusive. He had made himself rich by preying on the vulnerable, swindling old people out of their life savings and other such scams. All his life he maintained a workforce of devoted women whom he regularly discarded and revived, indulging his sexual appetite whenever and wherever he could, even molesting his own children.

* He was still angry with his mother when he wrote to Tony in 2007, though by this time she had been dead nearly twenty years. ‘I was never able to understand – I still can’t even begin to – how you walk out on two sons in the middle of the night, then take the high moral ground.’

* His mother’s desertion left David with a lifelong mistrust of women. In his secret self, women were not to be relied upon, because they would always leave you.

* The trajectory of his affairs was always the same: he would pursue the woman urgently, and then he would lose interest.
The women in le Carré’s fiction are usually seen from a distance, which may help to explain why his novels appeal less to female readers than to male. His women tend to be thin, beautiful and unobtainable: often the possessions of a dangerous enemy, like Roper’s Jed in The Night Manager or Drake Ko’s Liese in The Honourable Schoolboy . They are little more than objects of desire. His more developed female characters are sexless or even grotesque, like Connie Sachs, queen of research at the Circus, described when first encountered as ‘a big woman’, with ‘a low belly like an old man’s’. (Later she becomes a sad old drunk.) Then of course there is Smiley’s wife, Lady Ann, whose most distinguishing characteristic is her absence. Given that David was a serial adulterer, it seems ironic that his most celebrated character should have been a cuckold. George Smiley remains devoted to his aristocratic wife, while she takes lover after lover.

* David believed that his miserable childhood explained his restless search for love.

* …his entire writing career can be seen as an attempt to come to terms with the trauma of his early years.
‘People who have had very unhappy childhoods,’ he once wrote, ‘are pretty good at inventing themselves.’ As a boy he learned to invent, making up stories to entertain, to fantasise, escaping from reality, and to dissemble, adopting one persona to conceal another. As an adult he put these skills to professional use, first as a spy, and then as a novelist. He was a self – made man – not in the usual meaning of that phrase, though he was that too, but in the sense that he put on a show to keep the unhappiness at bay. And when David Cornwell became John le Carré, that was yet another mask to hide behind.
David worried that he had no real feelings, that he was incapable of love, that he was forever pretending.

* His success as a writer of spy fiction enabled him to leave the Service and to live as he pleased; in Ann’s eyes it turned his head. He began one love affair, then another; then embarked on a period of hectic promiscuity that lasted several years. As he would describe it much later, ‘ I was a caged animal, and with the success of my writing the door was opening.’

* He listed the ‘Reasons’ for his philandering:

1 Ever since childhood, a search for elemental creature warmth & love
2 A recognition – at 30 – that I had given my youth away to a marriage that only made me sad
3 An ignorance & suspicion of all women, a never – ending search for love; carnality, self – destruction, reckless despair, hope
4 Depression
5 No self – esteem
6 Fury at the chains of convention
7 Utter loneliness
8 Fury at my own conformity with convention
9 A root fear of women, again

* Whether or not there was anything in Ann’s theory, there was something problematic about David’s relations with other men. If women were a challenge, men were rivals. Several of the women with whom he had affairs were married to friends of his; this might happen by accident once, or even twice; but with David it happened again and again. One might think that friendship with the husband would preclude a sexual interest in the wife, unless it was, perhaps, a way of seducing the friend.

* It was a feature of David’s life that he seemed isolated, with few real friends.

* One of David’s least attractive characteristics was a tendency to disparage the people around him: not just the people he worked with, like his editors, his publishers and his agents; but also other writers, friends, lovers, and even his wife and sons.
As David became older, he nurtured protégés, especially younger men with literary ambitions.

* Jane’s worship made him an idol, and the effect on David of such adulation was not necessarily beneficial. All writers are egotists, but some are more egotistical than others. He became demanding, self – important, and unwilling to accept criticism. He told Nicholas Shakespeare that he could not write in London because of the denigration in the air. Isolated from his peers, he lacked the capacity to see himself as others did. He declined to allow his novels to be submitted for the Booker Prize, as if it was beneath him; and fantasised about winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

* But as long as he kept writing, she could never retire; she felt obliged to continue working until almost the end of her life.
In tolerating her husband’s repeated infidelities, Jane was fulfilling the cliché that when a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy. She had become David’s mistress after she had been discarded by her former boss, George Greenfield. In an act of barely believable selflessness – or masochism – she introduced him to David, and arranged matters so that her ex – lover would become David’s literary agent.

* he was sensitive about his anomalous status: hugely successful commercially, but not awarded the status of a ‘literary’ writer.

* By now in his seventies, he may have lost some of his enthusiasm for the chase. He continued writing up until the end, but it is perhaps not a coincidence that the novels became less interesting and more formulaic. Without a new muse for each book, his inspiration dried up.

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Kamala Harris, LBJ & The Passage Of Power

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Luke Ford

Philosopher Iskra Filever writes Aug. 24, 2024:

…when circumstances change, so does our behavior. The very most humorous comedian is likely to appear subdued if put on trial, and a person who scores high on social anxiety may be relaxed and confident in the company of intimate friends. Biden’s decision to step down and endorse Harris changed the circumstances, and the new situation is eliciting different behavior from Harris. The old Harris was Vice President. A Vice President’s job is to play second fiddle, do no harm, and make sure not to draw attention away from the president. The Harris In a New Key is a presidential nominee. A top-of-the-ticket nominee, unlike a VP, is allowed and indeed encouraged to remain in the limelight and go full throttle on the political highway.

In addition, and relatedly, people like winners. (Perhaps, we have evolved to.) Years ago, when Barack Obama was competing for the Democratic nomination with Hillary Clinton, a Clinton supporter said to me after the first primary, “Guess who won!” “I don’t know,” I answered. “Was it Clinton?” “Barack Obama,” he replied, and went on, “And this victory makes him interesting.” While Obama was the same person he had been the day before, I knew what my interlocutor meant: Something had changed. It was as though new victory light was shining on him while the light illuminating Clinton was getting dimmer. People wanted to see more of him and less of her. He had become more interesting.

I would conjecture that Biden’s endorsement of Harris had an effect parallel to that of Obama’s first primary victory: Harris became more attractive and better able to command attention. There is a halo around a person likely to be coronated.

…Young people created their own version of candidate Harris, a version tailor-made to suit their needs.

It is notoriously difficult for politicians to relate to younger voters or young people in general, though (often awkward) attempts continue…

Fortunately for Harris, however, she didn’t have to find a way to appeal to the younger crowd, because they rebranded her. They didn’t simply meet her half-way but walked the entire distance. Popstar Charlie XCX declared on social media that Harris is “brat.” “Brat,” kind young people explained later, meant that her vibes are summery, chartreuse-colored; that she is not too prim and proper; is perhaps a tad “messy” and “volatile” but in what psychologists call ego-syntonic way – she is comfortable and mildly amused by her own messiness and maybe, of that of life.

The “Kamala is brat” meme was precisely what the internet had been craving. It was a boon to the Harris campaign. All that the campaign needed to do at that point was run with it, and they did.

What made this re-branding possible?

I will mention two things. One is that Harris, as a person of mixed race, has what in a white-majority country may be seen as a “coolness” factor. She looks different and therefore, non-boring. Boringness may seem like a virtue to those who prioritize stability but not to those who look for excitement, which is most young people. (Whether Harris is actually different in non-superficial ways from any average candidate is a separate question.)

The second point is that Harris has been a low-profile Vice President and had, for this reason, up until quite recently, remained mostly unknown. Before the Biden endorsement, many knew what her laughter sounds like but not much else. She was a blank canvas. This made it possible for re-branders to project onto her whatever qualities they wished to see. Like many a lover who becomes enamored with an object for the first time, they chose to project something of themselves.

Robert Caro wrote in his 2012 book, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, about when JFK was assassinated, LBJ’s behavior dramatically changed:

…very little conversation, “no lost motion; it wasn’t necessary for us to talk.” To Marie Fehmer, her boss was “a changed man, transformed.” At first she couldn’t understand why he looked so different from the Lyndon Johnson for whom she had been working, but she came to realize, she says, that the very movements of his body were different; that instead of the awkward, almost lunging, strides and “flailing” movements of his arms that had previously often characterized Johnson under tension, now his stride was shorter, measured, and his arms were staying by his sides, hardly moving at all; that “there was no flailing,” that “only his head moved. It wasn’t just that there was no flailing emotionally. There was no flailing physically either. It was as if he was actively controlling his body.” Not only his movements but his voice was transformed, she says. It had none of the impatience in it that was often — usually — present, none of the anger and rage into which impatience so often morphed, none of any of the emotions with which it was generally filled. “His voice was not low so much as it was level — it didn’t fluctuate in tone. He was keeping it under control, calm.”

It was an iron control, a discipline that, during those three days, never slipped. “I’ve never seen him as controlled, as self – disciplined, as careful and as moderate as he’s been this week,” Bill Moyers told Time ’s Loye Miller. “He’s remained calmer … he’s been more careful to sort out and reason his feelings and his thoughts, and he’s been good to work with. You know very well how he used to thrash around and blow his top so often. It seemed like he had a clock inside him with an alarm that told him at least once an hour that it was time to go chew somebody out. But he hasn’t lost his temper once since two PM last Friday.”

“It is remarkable, really,” Miller reported to Time ’s editors in New York. “Some of us who have seen Lyndon at his most cantankerous cantankerous in times of lesser stress were wondering what sort of tantrums he must be having behind the office doors as the immense pressures of his new job and necessity for seizing it quickly bore down on him. But … my every inquiry brings the reply” that there were no tantrums — none of the cursing, none of the glass – throwing, none of the vicious rages. And the replies Miller received were accurate. There was never a crack in the calmness, the aura of command, the sense of purpose. The few reporters who were allowed to spend time in 274 during those days saw it for themselves, and those of them who had known Johnson for years were startled by what they saw now. Hurrying from 274 to Time ’s offices to describe Johnson in a wire to New York, John Steele used adjectives like “direct, calm, deliberate,” and nouns like “composure and sense of being collected.” Hugh Sidey felt he was showing more of such qualities than he had ever demonstrated before. “There were questions, decisions to be made, just flooding in on him one after the other,” he says. “He just handled them, one after the other,” without a pause. Business in 274 “seems to be progressing matter – of – factly,” another reporter wrote, “and actually quite well compared to the tumultuous office atmosphere which has often surrounded Johnson in the past.”

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Hate Comments About Gus Walz

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Luke Ford

Gus Walz is the 17-year-old son of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. At the convention this week, Gus had an intense teary public reaction to his father.

Ideally, you don’t react publicly to Gus by saying “What a retard!” Ideally, you don’t post, “What a spaz!”

It takes restraint for people who post every stray thought to social media to not publicly comment on Gus’s emotional display. I believe in the moral ideal to not pick on children and the disabled (at least publicly). Gus is 17, he’s not a child. Ideally, we don’t pick on candidate’s kids. That’s an awesome ideal. That’s the civil thing to do. But when we do that civil thing, we’re also diminishing truth. The natural human reaction is to have a response to Gus’s extreme reaction. The casual thing is to say somethinga bout Gus’s display, but the disciplined reflexive thing is to speak with care about members of a protected class such as children.

Similarly, when Joe Biden seems senile and Kamala sounds drunk, the natural thing is to describe what you sense, while the civil thing is to stay silent until you learn the socially appropriate response.

I love civility and I love truth and they are often in conflict and sometimes truth is more important than civility and sometimes civility is more important than truth. Stand-up comics often share forbidden truths. I like a wide Overton window. If politicians display their spouse and kids, then those people become more likely to catch flak. There are advantages and disadvantages from being displayed as the family of somebody famous. I’m the son of a famous preacher, and I’ve milked those advantages in often shameful ways (I showed up uninvited to my dad’s work place, Good News Unlimited, to get regular paid work during high school until I was fired).

Criticizing Gus’s outburst is not hate. It is a normal natural human reaction to mock Gus. It is also a normal natural human reaction to love Gus and to want to protect him.

When I put “Gus Walz hate” into Google News (without quotation marks), it receives dozens of results of the MSM condemning right-wing reactions to Gus as hateful. I think that’s a bogus critique. Ideally, people wouldn’t criticize the kid, but the amount of restraint that would take for many people would reduce their humanity. There are many ugly things about criticizing Gus, but there are ugly things I see in the loss of spontaneity and humanity that results restricting oneself to only socially acceptable comments about Gus.

We would have been better off as a nation if we had practiced less civility with Joe Biden’s long stretches of senility and used more truth to talk about the ugly things that were happening. Transmitting raw reactions of what you see and feel will come with upsides and downsides. In public discussion, we’re ratcheted too much towards civility and away from truth.

July 6, I blogged: “Liberals Were Blinded To Biden’s Senility By Their Own Speech Codes”

One way of reconciling the competing values of civility and truth is to describe what we see without adding ridicule. You can simply describe Biden’s seeming senility, Kamala’s seeming drunkeness, and Gus’s outburst and skip the vitriol but this will come at a loss of spontaneity and humanity.

If somebody around you dresses, speaks or acts provocatively, you usually have to reduce your humanity by inhibiting your natural reactions by staying silent.

Alvin W. Gouldner wrote in his 1979 book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era:

The culture of the New Class exacts still other costs: since its discourse emphasizes the importance of carefully edited speech, this has the vices of its virtues: in its virtuous aspect, self-editing implies a commendable circumspection, carefulness, self-discipline and “seriousness.” In its negative modality, however, self-editing also disposes toward an unhealthy self-consciousness, toward stilted convoluted speech, an inhibition of play, imagination and passion, and continual pressure for expressive discipline. The new rationality thus becomes the source of a new alienation.

Calling for watchfulness and self-discipline, CCD [culture of critical discourse] is productive of intellectual reflexivity and the loss of warmth and spontaneity. Moreover, that very reflexivity stresses the importance of adjusting action to some pattern of propriety. There is, therefore, a structured inflexibility when facing changing situations; there is a certain disregard of the differences in situations, and an insistence on hewing to the required rule.

As a blogger without an editor, I often publish raw thoughts that normal people find socially unacceptable. Sometimes, when I look back on things I’ve published, I wince.

Publishing raw thoughts is sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful. Raw reactions aren’t inherently superior or inferior to considered reactions. Casual reactions aren’t inherently better or worse than reflexive reactions. There’s a price to pay with either type of reaction.

I grew up among Protestants who self-censor far more than Jews, the group I joined at age 27. I love the easy way Jews talk about the natural passions for sex, honor, money and the like but I recognize non-Jews often find this shocking. On the other hand, Jews often find Protestants fake, stilted and weirdly self-controlled.

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Does Kamala Have A Drinking Problem? (8-21-24)

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 Kamala loves to drink, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=157117
04:00 *DRUNK KAMALA* Clips will be huge problem for Dems, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoKCEFdHSB0
08:00 Kamala’s high spirits, https://www.takimag.com/article/high-spirits/
11:00 Is Kamala a drunk? https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/08/19/is-kamala-a-drunk-n3793332
13:00 Kamala’s taste in wine, https://www.sfchronicle.com/wine/article/Kamala-Harris-has-good-taste-in-wine-15478759.php
32:00 Tim Walz’s DUI conviction
43:00 Michael Malice breaks down Kamala’s “3 phases of wine mom”
48:00 Donald Trump doesn’t drink or smoke
1:00:00 Daily Mail covers the Kamala seems drunk story, https://t.co/H6taSpm1nA
1:02:00 Here Come the Democrats, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnFtB86D8SY
1:08:45 Dems say Tim Walz is just excited
1:09:50 My ex-GF’s relationship with her uncle was never the same after he asked for a blowjob
1:13:45 VP Kamala Harris’ Bizarre Word Salad on “Duality” and More: Drunk, Stoned, or Dumb? With Ruthless
1:19:30 Kip joins
1:46:00 How drunk is Kamala Harris?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBSi-lu_DF4

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Kamala Loves To Drink

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

Kamala Harris is restoring American political tradition by finding joy in the bottle.

An oenophile, the California candidate is an ardent personal supporter of her home state’s famous wine industry, while also displaying habituated knowledge of European vintages. The owner of Washington’s Cork Wine Bar enthused in 2020:

“She can talk about different varietals. She can talk about differences between California oak and French oak…. She knows what she likes and doesn’t like, and knows why she doesn’t like it…. She does like her California wines, but she does have a great appreciation for Old World wines as well, because we don’t do domestic wines at Cork.”

We live in an era in which Americans seem more interested in the drinking habits of dead presidents like Ulysses S. Grant than of live contenders.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 2020:

While everyone has been obsessing over Kamala Harris’ political record, there’s one very important aspect of the Democratic ticket’s vice presidential candidate that I’m simply astonished no one has been talking about: her taste in wine. Actually, it’s notable that the senator drinks alcohol at all. Her running mate, Joe Biden, is famously a teetotaler — remember when he brought non-alcoholic beer to that “beer summit” with Skip Gates? — as are President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

….the question burned: What kind of wine does Harris like to drink?? That question has now been answered, at least in part. Harris is a wine club member at Rock Wall Wine Co. in Alameda, the winery confirms. “I had a true fan girl moment,” says Rock Wall owner-winemaker Shauna Rosenblum. That moment came earlier this spring, while Rosenblum was working the drive-through pick-up line at her tasting room, which remains closed under Alameda County’s coronavirus shutdown plan. A woman drove up in her car to pick up her wine shipment. Rosenblum asked whether she’d like her wine placed in the backseat or the trunk, and she opted for the backseat. “Enjoy the vino!” she called out to the customer. “Thank you Shauna!” the customer replied. “I closed the door and the car drove off and I said, ‘That woman sure looked a lot like Kamala Harris,’” Rosenblum recalls. Her colleague confirmed that it was Harris; she uses a pseudonym for her wine club membership.

According to the colleague, Harris is a regular at Rock Wall’s tasting room and loves Rosenblum’s wines. There are a few things I like about this anecdote. First, Harris supports local, independent wineries. Second, she goes to pick up her own wine in her own car, which is something I always assume important people have assistants do for them. Third, she knows good wine when she sees it. I endorse her choice of Rock Wall. The urban winery, located inside an airplane hangar inside the former Naval Air Station Alameda, puts out an eclectic mix of bottles. A few of my favorites are the floral, honeyed Fiano (a Campanian white grape variety that I adore; $20), the delightfully herbal Rigg Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, from a backyard vineyard in Castro Valley ($50) and the juicy, spicy Alegria Vineyard Zinfandel ($55). Of course, it shouldn’t come as a shock that Harris has good taste in food and wine — she’s from Oakland and Berkeley, after all.

Maya Rudolph’s Saturday Night Live impersonations of Harris have already featured martini glasses and frozen cocktails. And let’s not forget the time she bet against Senator Ted Cruz on the outcome of the 2017 World Series with two bottles of wine.

David Strom posts to Hot Air:

Is Kamala drunk most of the time? If you watch her talk with that possibility in mind, so much makes sense all of a sudden. All those word salads, the occasional slurring, the inappropriate laughs… These are all tells that her brain is fogged by something, and it may not be stupidity. 

Don’t get me wrong; she is not the sharpest tool in the shed, not playing with a full deck or knocking it out of the park when she takes an IQ test. But is she as stupid as she seems, or is she drunk?

I vote drunk. 

Obviously, I don’t know; it could be a Xanax addiction, and if that is the case, that would be potentially worse. Addiction to benzodiazepines would be easier to hide but harder to actually kick during a campaign. The withdrawal symptoms are famously harsh, and the period of time it takes to get better is famously long. It is a remarkably unpleasant and debilitation process and there is no way to do it while traveling the country and speaking regularly to large crowds. 

But seriously, doesn’t she look inebriated? She doesn’t always slur her words, but when she does it is remarkably hard to unsee. What the campaign is trying to sell as “joy” looks to me like inebriation. Not falling down drunk, obviously, but not sober either. 

I totally missed this until it was pointed out to me, but I think that was confirmation bias on my part. I have been seeing her up on the national stage for five years, and you assume that nobody could rise to her position without being at the very least sober when in public. 

But then again, she didn’t exactly rise to where she is by being especially good at politics. She was carried there by others who were pushing her up the mountain, not hiking up it by herself. Since it didn’t take skill to get there, maybe even sobriety wasn’t required. 

Of course, the same could hold true with my new hypothesis. I could be seeing inebriation instead of stupidity because I am primed to see it. Somebody threw the hypothesis out there because it fits what we observe, and once I saw it perhaps I see every idiotic moment in that light. After all, I have no access to her blood alcohol level and no way to get proof that she has been drinking. 

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