The Writer's Good Fortune

I've been meaning to watch it since it came out late last year, but I finally caught up with The Pigeon Tunnel over the weekend. It's another excellent Errol Morris documentary in which he conducts what was the final interview ever given by John le Carre. The author died soon after these interviews were done, in 2020, at age 89, but any indication that he was fading or ailing in any way is nowhere in evidence. For the 94 minutes the film lasts, le Carre and Morris engage in a scintillating conversation about le Carre's life and career and preoccupations. Memory, history, espionage, childhood--these are just some of the things that the two discuss, and le Carre is, as you might expect, full of fascinating insights and sharp, even twisted, wit.

In talking about his career in the British spy service, he talks about how during this time (the early 1960s), he was posted to Berlin. He then says, "It was one of the great good fortunes of my life because I was there for the erection of the Berlin Wall." 

The drama that went on in Berlin before the completion of the wall was, le Carre says, very intense. This was a time when East Germans knew they'd be unable to leave Communist East Germany once the wall was finished. As le Carre says (and we see in old newsreel footage), their desperation led to scenes of West German firemen holding trampolines under apartment building windows as East German people, not all young people, jumped the many stories into the trampolines so they could get to West Berlin. Facing us, le Carre talks at some length about this remarkable and dire time and how through it all he felt a mixture of anger, disgust, and empathy. "It was for me a milestone," he says, and he then declares, with a firm crispness, "It was the impetus that produced The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

But back to his comment about his good fortune to be in Berlln when the wall was being built. He's talking about a historical event that was a terrible thing, tragic for millions, but what gold the situation provided, obviously, for a writer. Of course, his being at the central place at the pivotal time of an era that lasted decades gave him material to draw and expand upon for years. That's one thing that has to be a writer's purpose, I would think, to witness and then reflect on, with a certain detachment (even with the anger and the disgust), what might very well be a world or a group of people in the midst of catastrophe.

In his remark about his great fortune, le Carre speaks with a sober tone. He also has a matter of factness about him, since he knows that we know that without those formative Cold War experiences he might not have become the definitive Cold War author he became. But the essence of the response, that he was lucky (to get access to material that had much suffering at its root) reminds me of Joan Didion in the documentary her nephew, Griffin Dunne, did about her several years ago. In Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, the scene occurs when Dunne and Joan are dicussing the famous piece, "Slouching Towards Bethelem", that she wrote in the late sixties in the Haight-Ashbury. It's the part where she talks to the guy in the room and she sees a child on the living-room floor licking her lips in concentration. The girl is wearing white lipstick. The guy says the girl is five years old and "On acid." In describing what it was like to be a journalist in that room and see the little kid on acid, Joan's face lights up for a fraction of a section and she says that "...it was gold." That, "You live for moments like that if you're doing a piece."

The basic amorality of the writer when it comes to finding and using material. Another's ill fortune, the writer's good fortune. But the best writers will then be able to illuminate something from what they found. This is all obvious and has been forever. But I like how le Carre, and Didion, both point this out in their documentaries in their different ways.