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.”
Don’t say he didn’t warn us. Misdirection, evasions and plants. Nested identities. Russian dolls. If we learn one thing from A Private Spy, his selected letters, it is that Cornwell/le Carré was always, to some degree or other, playing by Moscow Rules.
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”.
David Cornwell attended the elite Sherborne public school in his native Dorset, the University of Bern in Switzerland, and Lincoln College, Oxford. He did his national service in Austria, in British army intelligence, then later worked for MI5, the domestic security service, before moving to M16, foreign intelligence. At the age of 32 he was made for life, financially and critically, by his brilliant third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
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Le Carré's letters reveal a man who could at times be ingenuous, even dishonest, with those closest to him
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.
Sometimes, it seems, he fooled even himself: “I was a nasty, vengeful little orphan with a psychopathic liar for a father and a boy-scout self-image as an antidote,” he writes to a former friend from his Oxford years, a Communist student on whom Cornwell had spied on behalf of MI5. Yet he is hurt, and then self-righteous, when his old target refuses to forgive him.
Le Carré's letters reveal a man who could at times be ingenuous, even dishonest, with those closest to him — married twice, he had numerous furtive affairs, which are only occasionally revealed here — and at other times brutally honest with himself and others.
“I am in an extremely equivocal position,” he writes to his publisher in 1968. “A thriller-writer with pretensions? A novelist who hasn’t the guts to drop the thriller form?… I write in my own way about my own things.”
Amid a rich selection of literary and political correspondences (including feuds: he publicly charged that Salman Rushdie was wrong to publish The Satanic Verses) we see his early admiration for Graham Greene, a clear and acknowledged major influence, cool into mutual rancour.
“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.”
Here is a man who champions human rights causes, yet can write a letter to the New Yorker denouncing “the easy anti-Murdoch hysteria” of sections of the British press. Although he is a self-proclaimed literary hermit, who declines to have his books entered for competitive prizes in the UK, he is happy to pick up numerous foreign awards, and is chuffed to be receiving a non-competitive honour from Murdoch’s Sunday Times, conferred at a dinner in his honour at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.
This book was never written. No forgiveness for old spies
Yet, as with many of his flawed fictional characters, he seems to have retained, at base, a core of real principles. Le Carré never wavers in his suspicion of absolutes, with unfettered capitalism prominent among them. He abhors the faked intelligence and media lies that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq (“Look at Blair! How did we spawn the mendacious little show-off? This child, playing grown-up games, & f***ing up the world in his Noddy car”), and responded to Brexit’s dog-whistle nationalism by taking Irish citizenship, courtesy of a grandmother from Cork. He had already been offered, and long since refused, British royal honours.
By then, time and illness were shaking the knots from a tangled life. Two weeks before the end, when he and his second wife, Jane, are both dying from cancer, he writes to a friend: “Everything is waiting. We have never been so close — yet far away too, because death, looming or simply out there — is a very private matter, & each of us does it in their own way.”
Le Carré's son by his first marriage, the journalist Tim Cornwell, collected and selected these letters. He himself died just before publication, unexpectedly, aged 59.
The Tinker Tailor trilogy ends with an act of profound self-betrayal. George Smiley, le Carré's humanist superspy, breaks his own code of decency by using Karla’s love for his child to blackmail him into defecting. Six months before his death, which was in December 2020, le Carré writes to his old friend, Tom Stoppard, that he is planning his final story. In it, Smiley will go to visit Karla, now living safely and secretly with his daughter in some charming English village, to settle their accounts. This book was never written. No forgiveness for old spies.
