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

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Exactly that: at each turn, fresh problems to be solved, fresh insights and flourishes of invention. Tim told me he had particularly appreciated rereading David’s letters to his first wife, Ann Sharp, Tim’s mother. Armed with sherry and pocket money, they seduced the young Cornwell into a little harmless snooping on his fellow students, and he found he liked it.

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

Later he would tell his former boarding school housemaster that he preferred the “natural” to the “unnatural” and the “free” to the “repressed. He was not really part of the literary class, with its complete set of left-wing opinions on everything from food to sex, and from foreign policy to architecture. 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.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. 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.

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The 1979 novel is the third and final instalment of the Karla trilogy, after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. You have to hand it to the Scottish government: the deletion of WhatsApp messages is good preemptive news management, whether accidental, by default or deliberate. I was witness to it as a child and then as a teenager, but by and large only they knew what passed between them and how much she reframed, adjusted, trained the novels as they grew.I suggested a short list of diversions: talk, eat, watch cricket or snooker – they both loved sport – or some of the films on her endlessly postponed watch list. Why would this brilliant methodical thinker and studier of the human condition at its worst take such a stance?

John le Carré - Penguin Books UK John le Carré - Penguin Books UK

He feels the same sense of division about himself, describing his first two novels as “unputdownable. The letters to his mentor and Smiley prototype Vivian Green are more revealing, as are his scornful asides on Kim Philby. I suspect that there was much talk of “Frogs,” “Krauts,” “Swissies,” and other words I won’t mention here, especially in the days when Cornwell toiled for Sandy and Wendy, and his days of spying on his Communist best friend.And our national decay is memorably embodied in a stammering, useless (presumably drunken) diplomat of whom it is said that “He had been on Field Marshal Montgomery’s staff at El Alamein, and this was all that was left. In my day, we were told we were little apostles for truth, pledged to speak fearlessly to power,” he said. Letters have enjoyed a resurgence of popularity recently precisely because they are a dying art and we miss them. No wonder Sisman wants to take back control with this coda, a jigsaw of offcuts and previously thwarted lines of inquiry. In the end, the editing process was every bit as painful, daunting and challenging as Tim had expected it to be.

John le Carré The Lamp Magazine | The Double Life of John le Carré

But Cornwell asserts ludicrously that he expects he told his masters that Mitchell was “a good man,” wisely adding, in case the documents ever came to light, as such things sometimes do, “I forget, and so I am sure did they. Le Carré himself was diligent in keeping letters he received from fans and oddballs – and in replying to them. His analysis is a perfect match for my recollection: “A rhythm of working together that was incredibly efficient … a kind of cadence from manuscript, to typescript, to annotated and amended typescripts … with scissors and staplers being brought to bear … getting closer and closer to the final published version. It is very kind of you to seek my opinion on the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I must tell you honestly that I have never given the subject a moment’s thought, except perhaps to reflect that, like the Olympic Games, a great concept has been ruined by political greed. Voinov [a Soviet critic who reviewed A Spy Who Came In From The Cold], I suspect, smelt in my writing the greatest heresy of all: that there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery.

In the original piece I wrote that even if nobody else in the cinema liked it, I would still be clapping. She was abridging novels for a pioneering audiobook firm; when le Carré arrives to read Smiley’s People, his “do-me-gently” voice resembles “a fabulous seduction in the back of a luxuriously upholstered high-end motor”. He made a “silly” early marriage to Ann, whom he nicknamed “A-mouse” and eventually left (“I’m a pig, I know I am”), before marrying Jane, whom he nicknamed “Cow” and who was indispensable as both his editor and gatekeeper. And to an angry communist he’d “betrayed” at Oxford, his riposte was that he’d done “what any sensible country does: we kept watch, and spread a net, and tried to protect ourselves. A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945 – 2020 by John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell, is out in paperback (Penguin).