The writing desk of David Cornwell, better known by his nom de plume John le Carré, will go under the hammer at Lyon & Turnbull’s Modern Made sale at the Mall Galleries in London on April 28th.
Considered to be one of the most important writers of the postwar era, le Carré's tales of espionage have entertained audiences since the 1960s in novels examining how people’s lives played out in the corrupt setting of the cold war era.
After a miserable enough childhood – he once said in an interview that he was beaten by his father and grew up starved of affection as his mother abandoned him when he was five – he began writing fiction in his late 20s.
He wrote in longhand during his daily journey between his then home in Buckinghamshire, and his counter-intelligence job with M15 in London. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, published in 1963, became one of the great bestsellers of the postwar period and reviews hailed it as a grown-up answer to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. After it was adapted into an award-winning film, it allowed le Carré to leave the intelligence agency – where he ran agents, conducted interrogations and tapped telephones – to focus on being a full-time author.
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He was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2011, but within 45 minutes his agent issued a statement from le Carré saying he was requesting his name to be withdrawn, as he does “not compete for literary prizes”.
A Perfect Spy is considered to be his most autobiographical novel, reflecting a boy’s relationship with his con man father – le Carré's father had been jailed for insurance fraud and was an associate of the Kray twins. He was said to have kept his children under constant surveillance, listening in on their phone calls and opening their post, as described in the Guardian: “Life with Ronnie [his father] was an apprenticeship in espionage”.
He was disillusioned with the 2016 Brexit vote to depart the European Union and applied for an Irish passport, which he was entitled to as his grandmother, Olive Wolfe, was from Rosscarbery in Co Cork.
He was awarded the Olof Palme Prize in January 2020 and donated the $100,000 to humanitarian agency Médecins Sans Frontières, and donated his archive of personal papers and manuscripts to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Now, the author’s Eos writing desk and chest of drawers, by Chi Wing Lo for Giorgetti, which he used from 2009 until his death in 2020, is for sale.
They were acquired from his friend of 50 years Gerald Moran, and le Carré penned A Delicate Truth, A Legacy of Spies (the companion to A Spy Who Came in from the Cold), Agent Running in the Field and Silverview on the desk. He also wrote his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, at this desk and stored his manuscripts in the chest of drawers – including the still-unpublished The George Smiley Years.
His words from The Honourable Schoolboy, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world”, seem pertinent to the piece and accompanying chest which are estimated at £6,000-£8,000 (€6,813-€9,082).
