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

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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. 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.

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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). John Irvin directed the celebrated BBC/Paramount adaptation, starring Alec Guinness, in 1979. In 2009-10, BBC Radio 4 broadcast adaptations of the Smiley novels starring Simon Russell Beale. The Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s austere remake, with Gary Oldman as Smiley (and in which Le Carré had a walk-on part, lustily singing the Soviet national anthem), was released in 2011.

John le Carré aka David Cornwell (1931-2020), with his son Tim Cornwell (1962-2022), editor of “The Private Spy”. Image sourced from an article by Tim Cornwell’s widow Anna Arthur at The Guardian, July 1, 2022. David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, at home with his sons Stephen, left, and Simon, 1964. Photograph: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images As time passes, the tone becomes more polished and self-aware, an explanation for which can be found in one of the author’s many illustrations (available with the audiobook in an accompanying digital file). Next to a wonderfully lugubrious self-portrait, le Carré writes of his plan to “cultivate that intense, worried look and to start writing brilliant, untidy letters for future biographies”. 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). It is very kind of you to seek my opinion on the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I must tell you honestly that I have never given the subject a moment’s thought, except perhaps to reflect that, like the Olympic Games, a great concept has been ruined by political greed.

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

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. Curiously enough, the structure follows a similar path to that in Mel Brooks' autobiography, “All About Me!”. The first chapters deal with early life, then once he starts producing books, the chapters are titled with the names of the novels he was working on at the time. With Mel, it was the movies. He spoke of the way he ended the novel in an interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1976: “I reversed the plot quite arbitrarily, and right at the end of the book turned the whole thing inside out. Quite often, you have that feeling of revelation: how ridiculous, I’ve been straining to make this character sympathetic when actually he is an identifiable beast.” Tim Cornwell, who sadly died just as the book was completed and never saw it published, has put together a portrait of his father that isn’t always flattering. Brought up by a conman who stole thousands from unsuspecting acquaintances, le Carré himself wasn’t always a flawless character, particularly with the ladies. He also doesn’t understand why his friends on the left, who weren’t happy to discover that he was spying on them for MI6 as a student, still don’t forgive him. The compartmentalism that spying requires means that the friendship and the spying are quite separate to him. The author with Gary Oldman at the premiere of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, London 2011. Photograph: WENN Rights Ltd/AlamyI have loved John le Carre's writing for some time. I have many of his books. My concern in reading books like this are the first question: Were they writing for posterity? Is there a falsity to the correspondence? In this case, I would say "no." The harsh Martin Ritt movie of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, won four Bafta awards, including best British film. Le Carré’s account of the making of the movie appears in The Pigeon Tunnel. Yet behind this facade of ease and success, he was haunted, until his death at the age of 89, by a troubled childhood, the son of a convicted high society conman who used his own son — like the schoolboy “Jumbo” in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — as a runner and watcher. In the persona of John le Carré — spy, novelist and international champion of human rights — he created a legend for a scared little boy. Review of the Penguin Viking hardcover edition (December 6, 2022) with reference to the Kindle eBook edition (same date). Thank you for your letter of June 28th. I was touched by the point you made, but I do not see the problem quite as literally as you do. I have written much about men who are not able to relate to women, because in the male oriented world from which I draw my experience – and indeed, my upbringing – the gap you deplore is, unfortunately, all too common. So I beg you to believe me when I tell you that I share your respect for the qualities and sufferings of women, whose company and talents I indeed greatly prefer to those of men.