2021年经济学人 小说家约翰·勒卡尔(2)（在线收听）

On the avenue his own pace slowed. Instinctively he began to practise tradecraft, or writing craft. He became observant, guarded, watchful, keeping to the edge of the path where the undergrowth slightly obscured him. Writers and spies shared the same "corrosive eye", as Graham Greene put it: that wish to penetrate the surface to the centre and truth of things. In fact he had not been in "the circus" for long; just a few years, running low-grade agents into eastern Europe and then working out of the British embassy in Bonn, before Kim Philby, a celebrated double agent, exposed him. He was a writer who, very briefly, had been a spy.

在大街上，他自己的脚步放慢了。他本能地开始练习间谍情报技术，或写作技巧。他变得敏锐、谨慎、警惕，一直守在灌木丛稍稍遮住他的小路边上。作家和间谍都有一个“腐蚀性的眼睛”，就像格雷厄姆·格林所说的那样：他们希望从表面渗透到事物的中心和真相。事实上，他在“马戏团”里待的时间不长，只有几年，从低级特工到东欧，然后在英国驻波恩大使馆工作，在著名的双重间谍金·菲尔比揭发他之前。他是一位作家，曾短暂地做过间谍。

Yet he felt he had been recruited to the secret world from childhood, as Conrad was to the sea. He had acquired the comforting habit of cover-stories to try to account for a father who was in jail one moment and at Ascot the next: an epic conman from whom his mother bolted when he was five. He had joined the secret service for all kinds of romantic reasons, to do some good for society, and to discover how the world was really run; but also because he felt corporate attachment offered him a family's protection.

然而，他觉得自己从小就被征召到这个秘密世界，就像康拉德被征召到大海一样。他养成了用封面故事安慰人的习惯，试图解释一个父亲，他曾在监狱里呆过一段时间，后来又在阿斯科特：一个史诗般的骗子，他五岁时母亲就离开了他。他因为各种浪漫的原因加入了特勤局，为社会做点好事，发现世界是如何运转的；但也因为他觉得组织的依恋为他提供了一个家庭的保护。

To some extent it did. But he soon found with Alec Leamas, the pretend defector whom Smiley in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" sent into East Germany and ultimately to his death, that spies were not priests or saints, but "a squalid procession of vain fools, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives". In the cold war Western agents, aping Soviet ones, walked on the thinnest moral ice. It often broke.

在某种程度上确实如此。但他很快发现亚历克·莱马斯，在《从寒冷中走来的间谍》中，那个假装叛逃的人被派往东德，最后被处死，间谍不是牧师或圣徒，而是“一群虚荣的傻瓜、虐待狂和醉汉组成的肮脏队伍，扮演牛仔和印第安人来照亮他们腐朽生活的人”。在冷战中，西方特工，仿效苏联特工，走在道德冰层最薄的地方，冰经常裂掉。