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

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Which came first, the author or the spy? In 1961 David Cornwell, a junior agent in MI6, was sent on his first overseas posting. By then his writer alter ego, John le Carré, had already published his first spy novel, Call for the Dying, to great acclaim. From his diplomatic cover at Bonn in West Germany, he writes to a civilian friend: “I have decided to cultivate that intense, worried look and to start writing brilliant, untidy letters for future biographers. This is one.” 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 diedjust 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. Le Carre with his wife, Jane, in St Buryan, Cornwall, May 1993. Photograph: John Stoddart/Popperfoto/Getty Images

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

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. Forgive this ramble but there are good things in it, & I find I can’t think without a pen in my hand! What a wonderful prospect it all is! My best moment was being offered a chance to meet Philby, which I declined. Genrikh Borovik, an old hood who is writing P’s ‘biography’ and has 17 hrs of tape recording with him, told me what a nice guy Kim was, and what a great patriot. I said I fully agreed. He was just like Penkovsky [Oleg Penkovsky was a Russian spy who was executed for treason after passing secrets to the West, most notably in the run up to the Cuban missile crisis], I said: fun, and straight as a dye. Just a pity poor old Oleg wasn’t in London, I said, for me to introduce him to Genrikh. Le Carré first met Stoppard when he was hired as the screenwriter for The Russia House in 1989. “I found Stoppard enchanting and extremely intelligent,” he told Alec Guinness. Ultimately, he’s reasserting ownership of the narrative. I feel for Sisman: out to be definitive, he got cornered into granting copy approval before being scooped by someone whose story it actually was. Not the secret life of John le Carré, then, so much as the secret life of John le Carré, the 2015 biography whose blind spots – we now know – can’t be pinned on its beleaguered author.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. John le Carré – David Cornwell as he then was – grew up among the lies of his fraudster father Ronnie. He then entered a world of secrets, reporting on leftist students when he was at Oxford before working in intelligence for MI5 and MI6. Deception was his domain and as much as he hated Ronnie he worried about coming from the same “mad genes-bank”. Instead he became a novelist; a less damaging way to tell lies. The Naive and Sentimental Lover was poorly received. (“The book is a disastrous failure” – TLS.) Reviewers and readers knew what kind of book they wanted from Le Carré, and he was henceforth ruefully prepared to accept the reading public’s judgment. He toyed with the idea of writing an autobiography long before the publication of The Pigeon Tunnel, more an engaging collection of reminiscences than an exploration of his inner life – what was left out of his memoirs was striking. Yet the chapter titled Son of the Author’s Father, first published as In Ronnie’s Court in the New Yorker in 2002, is a troubled, brilliant and unforgettable portrait of his parents. His father’s judgment of other people, he wrote, “depended entirely on how much they respected him”. Apart from plumpness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes – when you wish it – to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worries about you. I don’t know what you call that kind of empathy but it is very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it: when either of you gets his feet wet, I can’t help shivering. So it is the double standard – to be unobtrusive, yet to command – which your physique perfectly satisfies. Smiley is an Abbey, made up of different periods, fashions and even different religions, not all of them necessarily harmonious. His authority springs from experience, ages of it, compassion, and at root an inconsolable pessimism which gives a certain fatalism to much that he does.

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

In 1954 he married Ann Sharp. After his father’s spectacular bankruptcy that year, Le Carré was forced to leave Oxford, and taught briefly at Edgarley Hall, a prep school near Glastonbury, before returning to Oxford, and being awarded a first in 1956. He became a schoolmaster at Eton, where he taught German language and literature for two years, and found life laden with complexities. “I found I was involved in a kind of social war. One lived midway between the drawing room and the servants’ green baize door.” In a Paris Review interview he suggested that the worst pupils at Eton provided him with “a unique insight into the criminal mind”. 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. It’s Dawson’s book that hangs over proceedings here. Sisman’s title is over-juiced; as he says himself, “the cat is out of the bag” since The Secret Heart. He and Dawson first met in 2013 when he was tipped off by an agent unable to sell her book because of legal threat. Both puppets of le Carré in their way, they “became, as she put it, chums”. But when Sisman says The Secret Heart “makes it possible to provide a detailed narrative of their affair”, surely Dawson’s own book is the “detailed narrative of their affair”? We don’t need his summary, not least because Dawson – in laying on so graphically what she and le Carré got up to – gives a more vivid sense of the emotional stakes involved, slightly lost in Sisman’s comparatively zestless account (not an ice cube or stupendous ejaculation in sight).First, there is the subject matter. You would expect a celebrated novelist to have lived at the centre of things and to have been greatly engaged in the disputes of his time. Not at all. Almost all of the letters are about trivial things such as “I had a mild argument with X”, or are literally admin, like “thank you so much for your kind gift, it would be good to see you soon”. I was amazed that Le Carre never seems to have commented on current affairs; remarkably, the great Cold War novelist doesn’t remark on the fall of the Berlin Wall! The only comments on major events are on Iraq and Brexit, where he adopts the annoying de-haut-en-bas tone of a parody liberal writer; there is no reasoned, intellectual engagement with the issues, but simply milquetoast whining about “isn’t this beastly and aren’t people stupid for believing politicians”. It’s not hard to see why. In Smiley’s People — the third act of the trilogy of masterly Cold War novels that began with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — le Carré's ruthless Russian spymaster, Karla, schemes to protect his only weak point, the small, broken thing at the heart of his being, his schizophrenic, secret child. To smuggle her to safety from his enemies in Russia, Karla sends an agent to the west to find a discreet mental hospital and a convincing false identity, “a legend for a girl”. Le Carre discusses a vast array of themes from his full life. He disliked publicity appearances; believed his skills most fine-tuned in later life; felt strongly about German culture, and noted how it informed much of his early writing. He was honest about calling out duplicity, falsehood, shame and integrity in real life. In his correspondence he freely discussed examples. Masterpieces emerged regularly, with offerings such as Tinker,Tailor,Soldier,Spy and The Perfect Spy, (a near autobiography), among his best. He wrote to many about the responses to each of his books, and commented upon what each story revealed.

John le Carré: the lover and the letters - Financial Times

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. An archive of letters written by the late John le Carré, giving listeners access to the intimate thoughts of one of the greatest writers of our time. The never-before-seen correspondence of John le Carré, one of the most important novelists of our generation, is collected in this beautiful volume. During his lifetime, le Carré wrote numerous letters to writers, spies, politicians, artists, actors and public figures. This collection is a treasure trove, revealing the late author's humor, generosity, and wit—a side of him many listeners have not previously seen. 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. 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. A new terrain was opened up by the worldwide typhoon of deregulation that followed the end of the cold war. Le Carré wrote with indignation about the international arms trade and drugs dealers ( The Night Manager, 1993, adapted for BBC television in 2016 by David Farr and directed by Susanne Bier), the exploitation of Africa by the pharmaceutical industries ( The Constant Gardener, 2001), and the sinister competition by capitalists worldwide to exploit the valuable natural resources of Africa ( The Mission Song, 2006).One of his sons worked hard to compile letters he wrote to others, since he didn't keep a file copy of his own handwritten letters. Once he started faxing them, a copy would often be saved. Still, there's a lot here, and it is a window into a person's mindset over time (he died in 2020 at age 89). Soon after the deaths of John le Carré, AKA David Cornwell, and his wife, Jane, weeks apart in 2020 and 2021, a long silence came to an end. In The Secret Heart, a memoir published last autumn, le Carré’s sometime research assistant, Sue “Suleika” Dawson, outed herself as one of more than a dozen women to have had an affair with the former intelligence agent after the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) encouraged him to give up the day job and, seemingly, monogamy. Perhaps it’s not too late to revive the humane art of letter-writing. If I start now, given the state of Royal Mail, some of them might even arrive in time to be published posthumously. How wonderful to have your letter, the contents of which I passed to Jonathan Powell at the BBC this morning. If possible, he was even happier than I was to hear that, in principle, you are enthusiastic to take on Smiley.