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

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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.

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

I wish you were here – it is very beautiful. A small, unspoilt village, with a pub, a couple of shops and a group of houses with wooden walls and steep grey rooves. Cobbled streets, and the vigour and happiness of a real spring day. The river and the lake & the mountains. The fields look young and green, as if they were breathing in the warm sun and letting the wind run across them like spray over the side of a ship. 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. My best moment was being offered a chance to meet Philby, which I declined. Genrikh Borovik, an old hood who is writing P’s ‘biography’ and has 17 hrs of tape recording with him, told me what a nice guy Kim was, and what a great patriot. I said I fully agreed. He was just like Penkovsky [Oleg Penkovsky was a Russian spy who was executed for treason after passing secrets to the West, most notably in the run up to the Cuban missile crisis], I said: fun, and straight as a dye. Just a pity poor old Oleg wasn’t in London, I said, for me to introduce him to Genrikh.Le Carre with his wife, Jane, in St Buryan, Cornwall, May 1993. Photograph: John Stoddart/Popperfoto/Getty Images 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. Is that a love letter? Does it say enough thank yous? Does it say enough that I am constantly lonely without you, even when I know I must go alone? That I want you? And wish to revive & intensify our love life too, to make more love & more journeys together? I hope it says all those things. And that I love you. And that, contrary to many bad signals in the past, I am pledged to you in love & constancy for always.

A Private Spy, edited by Tim Cornwell; The Secret Heart by

Le Carré’s CV became more interesting in the years after 1958. Officially, he qualified for a late entrants’ scheme at the Foreign Office, and in 1961 was sent to the Bonn embassy. He made frequent visits to Berlin in that summer, and accompanied Germans who attracted the attention of the Foreign Office on visits to Britain. He continued to scribble away at his novels, until the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold enabled him to resign. Prose quality is guaranteed le Carré, but what was most entertaining, was living through decades when I was not born yet, to recent times, when I have wondered how older, critically thinking people have experienced them. Published: 11 Oct 2023 The Secret Life of John le Carré by Adam Sisman review – the spy who loved meEngaging, insightful, wise, and gloriously witty correspondent John le Carre, pen name of David Cornwell, is all of these. He is the master storyteller who burst upon the world stage at the height of the Cold War with his superb and timely, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In this well-selected trove of his letters to both famous and little-known correspondents, we discover a vein of gold. We discern, through the gimlet eye of his son, Tim Cornwell, an eclectic collection of letters about life, family, world events, personalities, writing, and humane insights. Where possible, Cornwell also includes the referenced letters and articles from those to whom he wrote. 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.” His views of British and American intelligence activities were muted but not silent. He had opinions that he expressed and believed that Britain was a failed nation (not his words, but my reading). His grandmother was born in Cork and Cornwell finally applied for and received Irish citizenship based on his grandmother's Irish birthright (although there are now restrictions, Ireland permits a descendant of any person born in Ireland not more than 3 generations away from the birth to become an Irish citizen upon application) about a year or so before he died. He was very candid about it: he despised Brexit and thought Boris Johnson was an oaf. When he was notified of having received Irish citizenship, he wrote a letter to the Irish official charged with processing immigrant applications for citizenship, thanking her and her staff for the "honour" of granting him citizenship. His expression of joy was simply that: no hard feelings toward Boris or Brexit, just joy at being Irish. So this letter is to express, and thank you, for all that & more, and to renew my vows to you without qualification & to point to greater happiness in the future, & a growing love, filling & defining the spirit, a growing spirituality too, &, I believe, an intensifying harmony & mutual appreciation. In 1954 he married Ann Sharp. After his father’s spectacular bankruptcy that year, Le Carré was forced to leave Oxford, and taught briefly at Edgarley Hall, a prep school near Glastonbury, before returning to Oxford, and being awarded a first in 1956. He became a schoolmaster at Eton, where he taught German language and literature for two years, and found life laden with complexities. “I found I was involved in a kind of social war. One lived midway between the drawing room and the servants’ green baize door.” In a Paris Review interview he suggested that the worst pupils at Eton provided him with “a unique insight into the criminal mind”.