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

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

After leaving the Foreign Office, he took his family to live in Crete, where he wrote A Small Town in Germany. It was a novel steeped in the hesitant British engagement in the European Economic Community, and the rise of demagogic rightwing populist movements in Germany. The world of British diplomacy has rarely seemed more threadbare, and in the aggressive, lower-class Alan Turner, Le Carré created a perfect foil for the self-deluded upper-class diplomats who proved easy prey for a mole.After Mitchell’s death in 2011, Cornwell wrote a condolence letter to his family, in which he was still blaming his target for being outraged, asking querulously: “Was he really imagining that a bourgeois society would not spy on a revolutionary movement?” Well, perhaps not. Maybe he just objected to the identity of the person who had been watching him for the Secret Police. For, as has been said in other contexts “it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.” No doubt Cornwell was familiar with that passage of Scripture, for his education was strongly Christian and there is quite a lot of evidence that he found religion a persistent problem and an occasional temptation. I sat bolt upright when I first read (I think it was in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) the words “Smiley hated faith.” How interesting, I thought. Why would this brilliant methodical thinker and studier of the human condition at its worst take such a stance? I never found out. The remark wasn’t explained. As a schoolboy, Cornwell had undergone a “complete revulsion” from Christianity soon after a stay with a group of Anglican monks. Later he would tell his former boarding school housemaster that he preferred the “natural” to the “unnatural” and the “free” to the “repressed.” Later still he would tell his Oxford chaplain, an unusual clergyman who famously wore leather trousers when off duty, that “I’ve always wanted to become a Christian and try and live like one.” About the same time, he wrote to his first wife, during another monastic retreat, “I just feel, perhaps for the first time, that I am near to finding a way of life and a real faith.” But he added urgently: “I’m not suddenly getting religion nor will I turn monk.” Later still, he told a psychiatrist that he had been trying during his first marriage “as I have tried off and on throughout my life, to embrace religion.” The attempt ultimately failed. His instructions for his funeral included a stern ban on any “mumbo-jumbo.” But the full passage is not quite so dismissive. It is in a 2001 letter to his sons and his wife and says: “I had an amazing life, against the odds. I turned from a bad man to a much better one. I detest the mumbo-jumbo of organised religion, love the glory of creation and believe in some kind of triumph of that glory.” Fry first wrote in 1991. ‘The English dam can withstand the pressure of 15 years of admiration and affection no longer,’ he said. ‘The only writer I’ve ever written to apart from yourself was PG Wodehouse.’ After reading The Night Manager, he wrote again. The book is well-edited, and we do not learn everything about the writer. But, we learn plenty about the man, who wrote with love, and courtesy (even when he was upset or distressed), saying just enough in his letters to know who he was as a person who wished well for the world and its people, and who was not hesitant about citing events and people who he believed were misdirected or evil. In one letter, which I think really offers insight into Cornwell, he writes that he has a bad habit of wanting to isolate himself from the world with his family when he's not working and really wants to act differently in that regard, but in about half of the letters, he is making excuses why he cannot meet or attend conferences or visit friends. Much like George Smiley, he will act decisively when called upon, but for all of it is quite happy left alone with his manuscripts and daydreams. When trying to fit a label onto himself he mulled and rejected 'Social Democrat' and 'liberal', and considered 'humanist' to be fairly accurate except for it sounded like a job title (“like 'I do humans'”). But that may be the closest term we have to what he was about. He was modest about his importance, though – when he followed Daniel Ellsberg as the next recipient of the Olof Palme award, he wrote to Ellsberg that “I am a totally unworthy successor...your contribution to the world is diamond-real, and mine is merely imaginative”. Rejuvenated 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.

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Very few, very wise people saw through them both, of whom the most recent and the most absolute is Richard Ovenden, who examined the papers my father loaned to the Bodleian library in Oxford and observed a “deep process of collaboration”. His analysis is a perfect match for my recollection: “A rhythm of working together that was incredibly efficient … a kind of cadence from manuscript, to typescript, to annotated and amended typescripts … with scissors and staplers being brought to bear … getting closer and closer to the final published version.” Review of the Penguin Viking hardcover edition (December 6, 2022) with reference to the Kindle eBook edition (same date). He never knew when he went home for school holidays which of his father’s mistresses would be waiting to greet him, and deception and lying were the ways adult life seemed to work. He and his older brother, Tony, developed skills in observation and reading between the lines, targeted at their father. They read Ronnie’s letters, and rifled through his filing cabinets in the hope of uncovering their father’s complex web of lies. Passionate in devotion to his children, Ronnie in turn kept his boys under constant surveillance, listening to their phone calls, searching their rooms, opening their mail. Life with Ronnie was an apprenticeship in espionage. He found rich ambiguities in the world of private banking in Single & Single and of post-9/11 espionage in A Most Wanted Man (2008). The fate of the disaffected Muslim immigrant Issa Karpov, torn to shreds by competing intelligence agencies, British, American and German, did not fit into the emerging western discourses of terrorism. Alan Furst in the New York Times said A Most Wanted Man was Le Carré’s “strongest, most powerful novel” with “near perfect narrative pace”. The diatribes against Tony Blair and the British role in the invasion of Iraq in Absolute Friends (2003) were more enthusiastically received in Britain than in the US.

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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. 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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. No, you are not rotund or double chinned, though I think I have seen you in rôles where you have, almost as an act of will, acquired a sort of cherubic look! … I'm not unbiased here, I've been a John le Carré (penname of David Cornwell) reader and fan my entire life. I'm going through a further binge now after recently reading the memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016) and seeing its movie adaptation at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Some of the same anecdotes are covered in the letters here with the actual correspondents. Many of these are with fellow writers, book editors, politicians, spymasters, researchers and family. The letters to regular fans though are the especial delight, such as the above example.

John le Carré obituary | John le Carré | The Guardian John le Carré obituary | John le Carré | The Guardian

When a much-loved author dies, fans and publishers cling for a while to the hope that an undiscovered manuscript lurks in a drawer, promising a final echo of that familiar voice. So last week’s news that a collected volume of John le Carré’s letters will be published in November understandably sent a frisson through the literary world. Le Carré achieved the rare double of popular and critical acclaim, but his life offered as much intrigue as any of his plots: his fraudster father; the formative years in the intelligence services; the glittering literary and film career; the vocal political engagement. There’s also his longevity: the letters span the decades from his 1940s childhood to the days before his death in December 2020, aged 89. Few people could be as well placed to offer such a comprehensive first-hand account of recent history. 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.] 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. Thanks for yours, and please forgive this typed response: I am in the late throes of the novel. The family bad news has brightened..... I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin’s position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that they have obtained him, and they could probably blow him out of the water whenever they felt like it, but I think they are having much more fun feeding his contradictions and contributing to the chaos. The terrifying thing is, the closer he draws to Putin, the more he lies and denies, the stronger his support among the faithful. You don’t need to own Trump as an agent. You just have to let him run. We are moving to London for an unknown period while I change the atmosphere around the book. I hope to have completed some kind of first draft by the Fall. 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.

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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.