The Rev. Vivian Green, 89, Model for le Carre’s Smiley
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Vivian Green, a religious historian at Oxford University who was an inspiration for John le Carre’s fictional spymaster George Smiley, died January 18. He was 89.
Ordained in the Church of England, Green was a scholarly yet approachable figure who wrote widely. He spent most of his academic career at Lincoln College, Oxford, and served as rector from 1983 to 1987.
Writing in the college newsletter in 1995, Le Carre identified Green as one of the inspirations for Smiley, the protagonist in his trilogy, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “The Honorable Schoolboy,” and “Smiley’s People,” as well as two earlier novels.
Le Carre, who was a student at Sherborne College when Green was the school’s chaplain, said he had borrowed Green’s “strength of intellect and spirit” for Smiley.
In a 1999 interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio, Oxford-educated Le Carre described Green as “a much-loved don who became effectively my confessor and godfather, who was first of all chaplain at my public school and then turned up amazingly as chaplain at my university.”
Green joked that Smiley’s tendency to disappear into crowds “like a shrimp into sand” was true to life. “I am not a social person; I hate crowds and I don’t enjoy drawing attention to myself,” he once said.
In 1996, he published “A New History of Christianity,” a survey of 2,000 years of the Christian religion. He predicted that in the 21st century, beliefs in such concepts as heaven and hell would no longer be relevant to many people and churches would become more insular or more secular as a result.
But he also wrote that many Christians down the years had set a good example and people would continue to look to the church for answers to the major questions of life.
Born on the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England, Green was educated at Bradfield, a private school, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied history. He was ordained in 1940.
For the following decade he taught at various schools, producing his first book, “Bishop Reginald Peacock,” about a 15th century bishop of Chichester, in 1945.
Later books included “Renaissance and Reformation” (1952); “The Later Plantagenets” (1955); “The Young Mr. Wesley” (1961); “Martin Luther and the Reformation” (1964), “A History of Oxford University” (1974) and “The Madness of Kings” (1993).
