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

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This article was amended on 13 January 2021. An earlier version said The Night Manager was adapted for TV by Susanne Bier. It was David Farr who should have been credited in that regard. Bier was the director. It was part of how it worked: he produced, they edited; he burned, she fanned’ ... David Cornwell at his desk at home in 1974. Photograph: Ben Martin/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images John le Carré – David Cornwell as he then was – grew up among the lies of his fraudster father Ronnie. He then entered a world of secrets, reporting on leftist students when he was at Oxford before working in intelligence for MI5 and MI6. Deception was his domain and as much as he hated Ronnie he worried about coming from the same “mad genes-bank”. Instead he became a novelist; a less damaging way to tell lies.

John le Carré: the lover and the letters - Financial Times

The Naive and Sentimental Lover was poorly received. (“The book is a disastrous failure” – TLS.) Reviewers and readers knew what kind of book they wanted from Le Carré, and he was henceforth ruefully prepared to accept the reading public’s judgment.

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Perhaps another reason for the excitement about Le Carré’s letters is that he belongs to one of the last generations who will leave behind such a rich trove of correspondence in this form. Even in 1940, Woolf was lamenting the decline of letter-writing in the face of new modes of communication. “The wireless and the telephone have intervened,” she complains, predicting that “instead of letters posterity will have confessions, diaries, notebooks… in which the writer talks in the dark to himself about himself…” She might have been anticipating social media. Some actors can act intelligent. Others are intelligent and come over dull, because of some mannerism which gets in the way. And a very few are intelligent and convey it: in Tinker Tailor, this gift will be pure gold, because it gives such base to the other things – the solitude, the moral concern, the humanity of Smiley – all, because of the intelligence of his perceptions, grow under our eyes and in your care. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? He found rich ambiguities in the world of private banking in Single & Single and of post-9/11 espionage in A Most Wanted Man (2008). The fate of the disaffected Muslim immigrant Issa Karpov, torn to shreds by competing intelligence agencies, British, American and German, did not fit into the emerging western discourses of terrorism. Alan Furst in the New York Times said A Most Wanted Man was Le Carré’s “strongest, most powerful novel” with “near perfect narrative pace”. The diatribes against Tony Blair and the British role in the invasion of Iraq in Absolute Friends (2003) were more enthusiastically received in Britain than in the US. John le Carré and his wife, Jane, at the Berlin film festival, 2001. Photograph: Franziska Krug/Getty Images

letters of John le Carré A Private Spy audiobook review – the letters of John le Carré

I'm not unbiased here, I've been a John le Carré (penname of David Cornwell) reader and fan my entire life. I'm going through a further binge now after recently reading the memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016) and seeing its movie adaptation at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Some of the same anecdotes are covered in the letters here with the actual correspondents. Many of these are with fellow writers, book editors, politicians, spymasters, researchers and family. The letters to regular fans though are the especial delight, such as the above example. Moreover, Le Carre’s own style of writing in the letters is really bad considering his skills as a novelist. They are written without a drop of wit, humour or charm. Indeed he comes across as both pompous and whiny. I had always thought he was a great novelist but after reading this I find him deeply dislikable. We shall believe Guinness when he tells us things from the past, when he theorises, when he acts in accordance with unstated predictions – because, simply, the intellect is patent, and commanding, yours & Smiley’s both. Mikhail Lyubimov, the “most brilliant and level-headed” of the large KGB contingent at the London residency from 1960 to 1964, and who served as chief of the British department of the KGB in the 1970s, claimed that it was Philby who betrayed Le Carré’s identity as a spy to the KGB. His departure from MI6 followed Philby’s flight to Moscow. Le Carré believed this to be the case, and repeatedly expressed his “unqualified contempt” for Philby. While in Moscow on a writerly visit in 1983, he flatly refused to meet him. Le Carre' was keenly aware of the money he was making and how it was being made. He did not stand aside when it came to making money, and a lot of his earthly endeavors involved activities that were very lucrative, namely revenues from movies and TV serialization of his written product.Le Carré first met Stoppard when he was hired as the screenwriter for The Russia House in 1989. “I found Stoppard enchanting and extremely intelligent,” he told Alec Guinness. It was a wonderful thing, but the more painful, when he died rather abruptly in December, to see her deprived of the other half of her way of thinking across five decades. She was casting around for who might be holding the part of herself that she had vested in him, looking for the rest of the process that was trying to continue in her – hence the search for the missing material, the determination to keep going, because to stop working was to die again.