BOOKS
Writers and Spies Y,LADIMIR VOLKOFF, a French writer, of Russian descent, is the author of The 'blowil-sround (to be published on 9 April by The Bodley Head); a story about spies which was ,th, a Popular and a literary success when it first appeared in France last year. The '4)111:ming is extracted from a recent interview with Mr Volkoff.
Interviewer: Have you ever worked in French Intelligence? Volkoff: People who have been spies have to say they have not been spies; people who have not been spies like to imply that they have been spies. So if I answer yes, you will understand no, if I answer no, you will understand yes. So what am I going to answer? The detailed description of the everyday life of the Intelligence officer seems very far from the James Bond world. They work in very ordinary offices and when they have to follow someone or have them killed there's a tremendous air of nervousness. Is that your impression of the reality? How should I know? Do you have admiration for the people who work in the Service? Yes, because I think it's a necessary evil and I think that this whole concept of necessary evil is probably one of the main Pivots of what I like to write about. Are there connections between the world of espionage and the world of literature? Everyone in Volsky's department seems to be an author of some kind. If Cervantes had not hidden a mike in Rosinante's mane, or the donkey's mane, Whatever its name was, he could certainly never have known what Don Quixote was telling Sancho Panza or what Sancho Panza was telling Don Quixote. I think that a writer is by essence a spy, and of course he's a spy who can intoxicate himself by getting Just a little bit of information and then transforming it into something else. And , maybe this is where a good writer and a good spy differ. A good spy is the one who does not intoxicate himself and keeps a little bit of information in its place, whereas the writer is the one who lets the little bit of information grow, and transforms it entirely. But in essence, originally, the two attitudes are really very close to each other. Maybe a good writer would make a bad spy? Volsky does seem to get intoxicated by the story that he's invented which then envelopes him.
This is what Graham Greene and Philby seem to say in this book that Philby Published and Graham Greene wrote a Preface to [My Secret Wad. Philby says Graham Greene was not too gifted for real professional spy work, and Graham Greene doesn't seem to hold it against him and still writes a preface. The few spies I may have known in my life, professional ones I mean, were really extremely concerned with the idea of not becoming intoxicated, of not becoming writers, of still keeping things exactly at arm's length and keeping them in their own proportions, their own perspective.
Can you trace the well-written spy or crime story back through French literature, or is it much more evident in Anglo-American literature?
In England there is a tradition of great authors having been spies before becoming authors, beginning with Daniel Defoe and going down the line. As far as I know in France, the only former spy who is really a very well-known author is Beaumarchais. Voltaire did some amateur spying, but the only professional one was Beaumarchais. I am a great reader of English spy stories, and some American ones also, and I've won' dered for quite a long time why the English and Americans were so gifted at telling spy stories and the French so poor at it. And finally I've come up with an answer — good or bad. It is that the genre of spy story belongs to the fantastic — and the English are very well known for their genius for the fantastic — ghost stories and so on. Maybe it's not by coincidence that in America they call some kind of spies 'spooks', and spooks and ghosts and spies keep company together and I'm not surprised that the English are very gifted at that kind of story and the French not.
I was really extremely pleased with the success The Turn-around had in France, it was on the best-sellers' list and so on. I think the French were somehow surprised to find a good spy story in French. On the other hand I don't think this is a spy story. It is about spies but it is not a spy story. To me a spy story, even well-written, even a spy story like Le Cant, is really a genre in itself. It has its own rules like the three unities in French tragedy and we have to conform, and I don't think that my book really conforms to those rules. It is not a spy story, it is a novel in which the heroes happen to be spies. My deep feeling about literature, and this is why I sometimes get annoyed with contemporary literature, is that really what literature should do is — let's go back to very ancient times — sing about heroes. That's what Homer did and that's really what think literature is all about — to tell people stories about heroes. And Who are our contemporary heroes? Our life is so hum drum and so flat and so boring that we are left really with very few individual heroes, and by a hero I mean somebody who leads a dangerous life or who lives by real life and death or the choice of life and death and so on. And the world of Intelligence is still a world where a few people, individuals, take a lot of individual risks. It's a world where a man pits himself against a system, against the police, against whatever. And I think the fact of the extraordinary success of James Bond shows one very simple thing: that people want to read about heroes, they don't want to read about anti-heroes and people who live in the suburbs and have sexual problems and can't pay their taxes.
They want to read about heroes. And I think that people are right. It's not a question of selling many books, it's a question of being Homer to the people who need Homer.
It's a tremendous surprise to find such a detailed discussion of the Church, of Christian faith, in a story like this, Does that come from your own beliefs? Are you a practising member of the Russian Orthodox Church?
Yes. This is completely essential. I think that if! should cease being a — practising is a big word, trying to practise — Christian, I would probably cease writing. God is the source of everything, and anyway I'm, well, frankly, personally, I'm not interested in anything that is not eternal. And if it's something that just has to last for a few hours, a few years, I could very easily get bored with it. What interests me are things that we say or do in eternal terms, and art in itself, literature, creation is somehow — pale, of course, humble, of course — the imitation of the act of God who is the creator. And if we are simply playing games, I'd just as rather play chess as write books. But if by writing books I feel that I'm somehow following a greater aim, helping a greater purpose, then I feel I'm doing something.
Do you feel that that's been understood, for instapce, by the French critics?
I think that most critics, or at least most readers understood that the story was really a spiritual story and! think that one of the reasons for its success was not so much the merit of the story itself as the fact that it came at a time when the French readers were really . . . thirsty. They wanted . . .how can I put it?. . .There is a tendency in the contemporary world to place things spiritual on one side and from time to time you open that door and you go and see what is happening there, in that particular room. But you hunger for a door to be opened from one room to the other, for some connection to be made. And, in a very humble way of course, I think this novel served that purpose. People felt that even the world of spies, which to them was J ames Bond, or whatever, and the world of spirituality which for them, maybe, was spending one or two hours in church and being bored there, that somehow the two worlds related and I think they were grateful for this opening.
The book is dedicated to Graham Greene Why?
The book was dedicated to Graham Greene for several reasons. One reason was that when I was about 15 I was studying English and I read some Graham Greene and I thought this was great. It is not exactly what I wanted to do because at that time already I wanted to be Volkoff and not Graham Greene, but I felt that at least Graham Greene was doing a very important thing. He was writing exciting stories, heroic stories, well-written, that were still literature. He was really doing as, well, people, in the 19th and 18th century used to do. I mean, after all, what can be more exciting than Macbeth? That's a thriller, you know, and Greene was writing good thrillers — but really good. Then I realised that he really was the pioneer in one particular field which appeals to me very much; understanding that there's a deep connection between the spy and the Christian.
With regard to the links between Christianity and the world of the spy, is there something about the Russian church that makes those connections particularly vivid? No, I don't think it's typical of the Russians, with maybe this one exception, that the Orthodox Church was never as triumphant and militant as the Roman Catholic Church was and is. Of course it was the official church of the old Russia and it is the official church in Greece and a few other countries. But the way we experience it now, really it's a minority church, it witnesses but it doesn't impose itself. It's there for you if you want it and it's not there for you if you don't want it. Nowadays, maybe thanks to the Russian Revolution, there are really no conventions attached to it. It's a matter of choice and, well, you don't wear any special badges. I know lots of people, some Americans and there are quite a few Englishmen I think, and there are some French people — to say nothing of Russians, Greeks and so on — who are Orthodox. It doesn't show on their faces but still they belong to this organisation which to them is truth on earth.
Of course they don't collect information and they don't indulge in sabotage or anything of this kind, but at a higher, spiritual level they're working for a cause and this cause, literally, is not of this world. And this is really what happens to an Intelligence agent who is in a foreign country. He lives in this country as if he belongs to it, just as a Christian lives in the world as if he belonged to the world. And if he's not being obnoxious about fasting and praying and such annoying things, and just conforms to what people do — St Paul says that very clearly, very neatly 'Eat what people eat, behave as people behave' and so on — he really plays, up to a point, two roles. You belong to this world and you belong to another world. And this to me is rather fascinating. It is really as if the world, as it is, is infiltrated by God's spies.
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