John le Carre: The Doubleness of Class

WILLIAM WALLING
 

When Adam delved, and Eve span.

Who was then a gentleman?

—John Ball, 1381
 

Pseudonyms invariably suggest some kind of doubleness. It
may be a doubleness as uncomplicated as the one evoked
by a simple change in name such as the transformation of
William Sydney Porter into O. Henry. Or, it may be one as uncan¬
nily resonant as a "Mark Twain," with its very denotation declaim¬
ing the doubleness that so often seemed to obsess Samuel Clemens
as a writer. In any case, pseudonyms, even at their most innocuous,
remind us ofthe inevitable disjunction between public and private
realms.

Exactly how far from innocuous is the pen name chosen by
David Cornwell almost thirty years ago remains a matter of
speculation. What is beyond speculation is the fact that his
choice—John le Carre—ranks easily today as the most widely
recognized pseudonym among all contemporary English novelists.
There is also nothing especially mysterious about his decision to
publish under a pseudonym, for at the time of his first novel. Call
for the Dead in 1961, David Cornwell was working for the British
Foreign Office, and regulations there prohibited publication of a
book under his own name.

His recourse to a pseudonym, then, seems uncomplicated
enough. The specific one chosen, however, is rather another mat¬
ter. In a 1974 interview, Cornwell himself claimed he had taken
"John le Carre" from the sign on a London shop; but it was a claim
soon subverted both by the inability of anyone to verify such a
shop's existence and by Cornwell's subsequent revisions in the
original story. Moreover, the irony of le Carre as a pseudonym for
 

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