David Cornwell (1931-2020), better known as John le Carré, carefully protected his privacy throughout his life. He saw off two potential biographers, Graham Lord and Robert Harris, before, to his later regret, authorizing Adam Sisman’s account (reviewed in the TLS, December 18, 2015). Sisman, despite writing with le Carré looking over his shoulder, sometimes literally, and agreeing to omit some difficult material, nonetheless produced a formidable piece of exhaustively researched work, often at odds with his subject’s own myth-making (“my unintended role has been to spoil a fund of good stories”). Le Carré, passive-aggressively, produced his own memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel (TLS, November 11, 2016), within months of the publication of Sisman’s book; it was less a narrative than a succession of those well-rehearsed if constantly revised “good stories”.
Le Carré had many things to hide, some more germane to his published work than others. His life breaks neatly into two parts: the first, by far the more absorbing, if disquieting, includes a childhood marked by appalling abuse and neglect courtesy of his charming con-artist father, who lurched from the high life (hosting the visiting Australian Test team, owning racehorses, standing for parliament) to the low (several bankruptcies, the ruthless defrauding of family and friends, a number of prison sentences served in jails across the world). Le Carré and his brother Tony were abandoned by their mother when still small, and educated in the cold and brutal world of British boarding schools; he wrote to Tony in 2007, when he was seventy-five, that their parents “fucked us up rotten”.
Le Carré was picked up as a student by MI5 and later moved to MI6. In 1958 John Marriot, the head of personnel at MI5, astutely asked him, “have you got over your father yet?” (He never did.) At Oxford he had pretended to fall in with the Communists, informing on his fellow students. For MI6 he was based in Germany. In the early 1960s, when The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made him suddenly and unimaginably rich, le Carré left the service, and for the next fifty years or so was a millionaire celebrity writer of espionage fiction, and a persistent philanderer. Sisman agreed to go easy on the affairs – they are referred to en masse and en passant in a couple of paragraphs. The second half of Sisman is largely about the business of writing: agents and publishers abandoned for better deals, the odd problem with the Inland Revenue and – more interestingly – the foreign trips where le Carré researched each new story.
The ramifying damage done by his childhood, first to le Carré and then to those around him, is everywhere evident, if only between the lines: in Sisman, in the novels and in two books published this week: a collection of le Carré’s letters, A Private Spy, and Suleika Dawson’s memoir of her affair with him in the early 1980s, briefly rekindled for a few months in 1999, The Secret Heart. In his impeccable introduction to the letters, Tim Cornwell, le Carré’s third son from his first marriage, treats that damage fair-mindedly: “It’s tempting to say that genius is complex, but probably truer that trauma is simple. He cannot have failed to inflict emotional wounds in his turn, but a part of him was perpetually and ferociously on watch against the reflection of his father in his own actions”. It cannot always have been easy to have had le Carré as a father or husband. When he writes to a friend, “I don’t understand any of my children, but I have an uncomfortable feeling they understand me”, it’s a good joke with a melancholy truth inside it.
Both Tim Cornwell and Dawson acknowledge Sisman’s priority. Many of the letters in A Private Spy are familiar from the biography; Cornwell is explicit about that, and he refers to Sisman’s work admiringly as “roadmap and backstop”. Dawson recounts how Sisman tracked her down when researching the Life. It was this that convinced me that her account is, in many of its details, true; because, although nearly all of it checks out against existing sources – and the lacunae in both the Life and the letters during the years of the affair are in themselves suggestive – there were some elements that could easily, so many years on, have been diligently backfilled from good research.
Dawson, an Oxford graduate (a scholar, she makes sure to tell us), tall, blonde, desirable (ditto), met le Carré in the early 1980s, when she was abridging his novels for the audiobook market. She was in her early twenties, he was past fifty. She recounts their two-year affair in graphic sexual detail, though, at this distance in time, each fresh superlative casts a little doubt on the previous. Champagne, caviar and truffles are always to hand, and foreign holidays, expensive jewellery and other material pleasures are lovingly enumerated. At one point le Carré said he was going to leave his wife. (He didn’t.) But he did set Dawson up in a flat, and visited when it suited him. After behaviour from him that included, between the episodes of uninhibited hedonism, physical threats and what would probably now be seen as gaslighting, she eventually left him, and went into therapy. During their brief reunion in 1999 she was miffed that, rather than have his agents sort out her plane tickets and hotel bookings, as before, he simply gave her cash: “It was too close to leaving money on the dresser”. Readers will have to decide whether this was a difference of degree or kind. He cut her off the moment she objected. They never spoke again.
Dawson’s account is rarely more than an extended tabloid kiss-and-tell, though its uncertainties of register and address betray some cross-currents of insecurity beneath a brassy surface. The author’s belief that she was the most significant of le Carré’s many lovers leads her to an unedifying and startlingly spiteful competition with her main rivals, all of whom are dead. Nonetheless, there are items here that might have the power, one imagines, to hurt some survivors, in le Carré’s family and others. His brief affair with Yvette Pierpaoli, who inspired The Constant Gardener and remained a lifelong family friend, was suppressed by Sisman but is effectively conceded by Cornwell (“if she was also, as seems likely, one of his lovers, it was in a different mode. Her picture still hangs on the wall in [le Carré’s second wife] Jane Cornwell’s study”). By contrast, Dawson’s confirmation is graceless, to say the least. More novel is her assertion that le Carré had been having an affair with Janet Lee Stevens, his guide in Sabra and Shatila in 1982, before she died the following year in the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut. Dawson expands on an anomalous reference to Stevens in Kai Bird’s biography of the US spy Robert Ames (The Good Spy, 2014); in A Private Spy Bird is tantalizingly among the people thanked for offering letters that were not selected. (Sisman, carefully, did not even mention Stevens; a revised edition of his book would be interesting on this subject, among many others.) Dawson wonders, fruitlessly, if Stevens had been pregnant with le Carré’s child.
Some of the letters in A Private Spy suggest (as Sisman apparently suspects) that Dawson has over-rated her own significance; notable, inter alia, are excerpts from a remarkable long-running erotic correspondence with an American historian and several love letters to his wife throughout the years, frank about his various betrayals and shortcomings, but reaffirming a constant love and gratitude. Le Carré knew from an early age that his correspondence could and probably would be read more widely, but in (for example) the letter to his children about his funeral arrangements there is no sense of performance or dissembling.
The other secrets le Carré kept, and more successfully, relate to his time as a spy. Even now it is impossible to adjudicate between the competing assessments variously on offer – was his espionage work of no significance, or was he a potential high-flyer whose career had always been compromised by moles? Did he really tell Dawson that, as a young desk officer, he had personally received the cable revealing that Kim Philby had defected – a snippet oddly never revealed anywhere else by a notorious retailer of spicy and unreliable anecdotes? By definition, the only people who know the truth are never going to tell us. All that matters, therefore, in literary terms, is that the account le Carré gave of the secret world is plausible. He leveraged his brief time as a spook into some of the best Cold War novels ever written. Thereafter, in a fascinating feedback, he became a desired guest of spies and politicians for decades after, enabling him to better research his later espionage fiction. Sisman and the letters both offer useful accounts of these later relationships; the latter inevitably offer more colour and texture.
Indeed, A Private Spy testifies to le Carré’s universally acknowledged gifts as a raconteur, mimic and caricaturist; the book contains many of his marginal doodles and cartoons. These are gifts he brought to his literary work – the ability to pin a character with brief, deft strokes: accent, dress, idiom, background, temperament – and which perhaps enlivened his MI5 reports back in the day.
It is the betrayals during his years as a spy, far more than the constant inconstancy of his love life, that are of interest to the reader of the novels. That he had informed on his friends evidently bothered him throughout his life. The letters to his contemporary Stanley Mitchell offer a vehement self-defence, notable for le Carré’s segue from first person singular to first person plural (“We did what any sensible country does: we kept watch, and spread a net, and tried to protect ourselves”). The author’s faintly incredible anecdote about attending the funeral of an agent he had run inside the British Communist Party decades earlier, told in The Pigeon Tunnel, whether true or not, occasions this reflection:
“Today, when we read of undercover policemen worming their way into peace and animal-rights organizations, taking lovers and fathering children under false identities, we are repelled because we know at once that the targets never justified the deception or the human cost. Harry, thank God, did not operate that way, and he believed absolutely that his work was morally justified. He saw international communism as his country’s enemy, and its British manifestation as the enemy inside the home camp. No British communist I ever met would have subscribed to that view. The British establishment emphatically did, and that was good enough for Harry.”
The clarity of the line drawn there comes from anxiety rather than certainty. Le Carré’s own activity, he suggested to Mitchell, was forgivable partly because it was worthless (“What did I know to betray? What did you know that was betrayable?”). Of the long, murky continuum of British state surveillance of its own dissenting citizens, le Carré had little to say bar the occasional reference to the activities of Peter Wright (of Spycatcher fame) and the self-absolving reference above.
Le Carré’s own politics were increasingly on the left, internationally – in his final years, his vocal opposition to the invasion of Iraq, to the war on terror, to Donald Trump, to Brexit, is a matter of public record, and it comes with even less uninhibited language in the letters. He seems to have been far less interested in domestic leftism, in his life and in his work, possibly because his privileged background and wealth enabled an enduring affection for some of the institutions he affected to despise. (Despite his grim experience of boarding school, he nonetheless sent his sons to board.) His championing of any number of dispossessed or disadvantaged figures across the globe, matched with hugely generous donations of money and time, emerges strongly in Sisman and in A Private Spy, and is a useful reminder of why, amid his mood swings and abrupt severance of ties (with friends, agents, publishers, lovers), le Carré could also be a charming, big-hearted, encouraging and lovable man. Typical, for instance, are the letters to Stephen Fry, one offering to assist with his clandestine departure from Britain after Fry, suffering from depression, had skipped out on (of all things) his role in a play about the Soviet spy George Blake.