Tinker Tailor Telephone Tea Cosy Grumpy Spy

Posted Thursday night, February 4, 2021.

Gary Oldman as George Smiley at work in the 2011 film adaptation of John le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. Focus films

Le Carre could be funny: mordant, witty, sardonic, satirical, even parodistical, all in his own manner and voice. He had influences, naturally, some you’d expect, like Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, and Evelyn Waugh. But in certain sentences and phrases and Smiley’s relationship with telephones I hear whispers of P.G. Wodehouse, particularly in Smiley’s tea cosy and those nearly anthropomorphized “anonymous” grey boxes humming “without warning”:

Smiley had always loathed the telephone, and he would take no calls whatever, unless in Guillam’s view they concerned matters of great urgency, and none did. The only instrument Smiley could not switch off controlled the direct line from Guillam’s desk, but when he was in one of his moods he went so far as to put a tea-cosy over it in an effort to quell the ring…

...It was during this...period that a new and wonderful gadget appeared on the fifth floor. It was brought in suitcases by two crew-cut technicians and installed over three days: a green telephone, destined, despite his prejudices, for Smiley’s desk and connecting him directly with the Annexe. It was routed by way of Guillam’s room, and linked to all manner of anonymous grey boxes, which hummed without warning….

---from “The Honorable Schoolboy” by John le Carre.

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Declassified related post: "John le Carre, Comic novelist?"

Comments

[Paula]

So many good writers have been influenced by P.G. Wodehouse!

I recently discovered Rex Stout & he and P.G. admired one-another. I've seen passages in their works where you wonder who was echoing who - was Bertie Wooster channeling Archie Goodwin or Archie channeling Bertie, or both?

I was really delighted by the Nero Wolfe books/stories, notwithstanding some aspects that wouldn't pass today. (You can laugh at Archie's constant evaluations of women being a matter of age and beauty, or be offended. Since Archie's overall heart is always in the right place, I choose to laugh. Etc.)

But there are other greater luminaries who pay homage to Wodehouse as well.