A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020

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Cornwell would later proclaim himself, and his greatest creation, George Smiley, as keen supporters of the European Union, and all its works. In what must be by far Cornwell’s worst book, A Legacy of Spies, he somehow resurrects George Smiley (who must by then have been at least a hundred years old) in the pleasing German town of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. There, the ancient spy declares that his whole life has in fact been dedicated to “Europe.” “I’m a European. . . . If I had a mission . . . it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe.” In the light of this piety, it is amusing to find Cornwell writing in 1969 to a fellow spy, John Margetson, about how the sales of A Small Town in Germany to the “Frogs and Krauts” are “quite satisfactory.” Cornwell’s son, Tim, who so very sadly died just as he had finished editing these letters, is presumably the author of a prissy footnote which explains that such expressions “were very common in Britain in the 1960s” and that his father “often used slang terms to refer to various nationalities from time to time.” Of course he did. That is what Englishmen of his class and generation were like, before we all reformed ourselves to suit the new internationalist age. Alas for the footnote, Cornwell has a go at foreigners yet again, and twenty years later, far from the 1960s. He does so in a 1989 letter to Sir Alec Guinness—describing “the Frogs” as “extremely jumpy” over the collapse of the Soviet empire. This collection of letters is a glimpse into one of literature’s great minds. He is warm and angry and loving and lustful and brilliant and appreciative but always, always, erudite and compelling.

John le Carré. My mother was his My father was famous as John le Carré. My mother was his

O darling – this is life! I only hope I will continue to think so. I only wish that above all you were here to see it with me. To see this happen – this great transformation from the grey indifference of England to the bewitching colours and the bright rebirth of Spring in Austria. One day we will see it, both of us, together. We can wait till then. A Private Spy was a lovely Christmas gift which I have been making my way slowly through over the last few months. John le Carre (David Cornwell) has been a favourite author of mine over the years. Exactly that: at each turn, fresh problems to be solved, fresh insights and flourishes of invention. And all along, at every step, was Jane, recalling the first moment of inspiration to refresh a tired passage, or asking whether a given phrase really reflected the intent she knew was behind it. She was never dramatic; she was ubiquitous and persisting throughout the body of work. For a lovely moment, he gave a sage nod, & the complicity was absolute. Then to his credit he let out a wild whoop of laughter, remembering too late that they were his mikes… I knew Greene a bit, & was in awe of him,” he writes, towards the end of his life, “but I never really believed in his Catholic convictions. As a literary tool, they work to a point, but God is really best denied in fiction — Camus & Co — and morality left to struggle without him.”Called up for national service in 1949, Le Carré spent time as an intelligence officer in Graz, interviewing defectors from the wrong side of the iron curtain. He found no heroes even among the most daring escapees from East Germany. After two years, his father persuaded Lincoln College, Oxford, to allow his son to be interviewed, although the college had already filled its quota for freshers, and he was accepted to read modern languages in 1952. He came to see a moderation in Arafat which confounded western propaganda. Arafat and other Palestinian leaders were unexpectedly forthcoming. The experience of visiting the Palestinian camps in Lebanon enabled Le Carré to see the Palestinians as victims, and not as terrorists. He was accused in Israel of being antisemitic, a claim heartily rejected by Le Carré, and by independent commentators. A review of The Tailor of Panama in the New York Times in 1996, implying that Le Carré was an antisemite, led to an ill-tempered exchange of letters with Salman Rushdie in the Guardian in 1997. Mikhail Lyubimov, the “most brilliant and level-headed” of the large KGB contingent at the London residency from 1960 to 1964, and who served as chief of the British department of the KGB in the 1970s, claimed that it was Philby who betrayed Le Carré’s identity as a spy to the KGB. His departure from MI6 followed Philby’s flight to Moscow. Le Carré believed this to be the case, and repeatedly expressed his “unqualified contempt” for Philby. While in Moscow on a writerly visit in 1983, he flatly refused to meet him. He donated his archive of personal papers, letters and manuscripts (“filling the space of a Cornish barn”) to the Bodleian library in Oxford.

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But that imagination brought real attention to such topics as arms dealing, pharmaceutical company abuse of large populations (LONG before the opioid crisis), and institutional abuses to individuals during the so-called War on Terrorism. At Oxford he resumed work as an intelligence agent. He contributed drawings to Oxford Left magazine and compiled dossiers for MI5 on fellow students suspected of leftwing activity. Le Carré recalled these years with lighthearted irony in A Perfect Spy, but he accepted that communist subversion was a real danger to Britain.

I bought this more in hope of retaining a link with the work of a treasured author than in any expectation of finding the usual le Carré gems. And what a pleasant surprise. As the reader follows David Cornwell from callow youth through to a dying, but flawed giant, you get a real sense of the man's humanity, his foibles, the inner fire that drove him, and -not least - some uncensored (it seems) le Carré rants about the state of the world, various politicians, other writers. No one is a peeping tom for reading (or writing) about this, Sisman says. “The more we can understand this complex, driven, unhappy man, the more we can appreciate his work.” Was le Carré’s hectic adultery “an ersatz form of spycraft”? Method writing for his bestselling tales of double-cross? Fallout from being abandoned by his mother and molested by his conman father? All of the above, Sisman speculates, adding that “the literature of early German romanticism… took a grip on him at an early age”. No doubt, but as he also points out, with almost risible solemnity, his lovers were mostly younger women, “some of them much younger. One was the au pair looking after his youngest son.” We can probably keep Goethe out of it. An archive of letters written by the late John le Carré, giving readers access to the intimate thoughts of one of the greatest writers of our time

John le Carré’s letters – but I’m thrilled we’ll get to read John le Carré’s letters – but

John le Carré's home in Cornwall, England which was recently put up for sale. Image sourced from RightMove Co. UK. [Note: Links were working as of October 3, 2023. Image and link may no longer be available once the house is sold.] In the end, I selected a quite different tie, an equally awful confection of blue upon blue. Mrs. Thatcher is one of those politicians who are even more unreal than their waxworks. The eyeballs are straighter, the perfect vowels are prerecorded, each sentence makes a deadly point and jokes are out of place unless they are hers. Let me go straight to your points. 64 is the ideal age. Smiley can’t be less, arithmetically, and I fear that he may be more, though I have deliberately arrested the passage of time in the later books! So nobody is at all worried on that score, and you must not be either. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The symbiosis of author and editor, father and son, has resulted in a brilliant book, le Carré's final masterpiece' 5*, Jake Kerridge , Sunday TelegraphRejuvenated by Dawson’s attentions, le Carré writes 1986’s A Perfect Spy – the “best English novel since the war” for Philip Roth, who might have been still more enthusiastic had he known the circumstances of its composition. Dawson’s tell-all never once claims victimhood, yet hints at the cost; while much of the material lends itself to sniggering, sure, it’s unmistakably sad by the end. Filling gaps in her lover’s story seems to entail silence about Dawson’s own: episodes involving late-life care for her widowed father (during which her radio silence made le Carré fret) only underline the bravado behind her dogged self-presentation as a good-time girl in Burberry and heels. There’s a bigger book here – she doesn’t need to play second fiddle in her own life too. So this letter is to express, and thank you, for all that & more, and to renew my vows to you without qualification & to point to greater happiness in the future, & a growing love, filling & defining the spirit, a growing spirituality too, &, I believe, an intensifying harmony & mutual appreciation. My love life has always been a disaster area,” he told his brother Tony, and worried, needlessly, how much the Sisman biography would expose. There’s no naming names here, either, but the letters to Susan Anderson (a museum curator) and Yvette Pierpaoli (an aid worker) read like those of a lover, and to Susan Kennaway, his affair with whom is well known, he describes himself as “a mole too used to the dark to believe in light”. More might have come of his romancing had not so many of his letters been destroyed. Tim Cornwell lists a few of the losses and there may have been diplomatic omissions. Le Carré himself was diligent in keeping letters he received from fans and oddballs – and in replying to them.