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

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Nick is the only child of le Carré’s marriage to Jane; his three older brothers were the author’s children with his first wife, Ann.

The older he got, the more embattled he became: against pharmaceutical companies, warmongers and even spies. Rather tactlessly, perhaps, he mentioned that several married women in Panama had made approaches to him (he would mention it again in a subsequent letter); though he assured her that he had resisted them—not least from fear of what their husbands might do to him if they found out. A Private Spy spans seven decades and chronicles not only le Carré's own life but the turbulent times to which he was witness. Le Carré himself was diligent in keeping letters he received from fans and oddballs – and in replying to them. At the end of the letter to Ann, le Carré says he will be going to London for a cocktail party at the Soviet Embassy, without mentioning that his purpose was to pose as a leftist sympathizer for MI5.A month later he wrote to Susan again, to tell her that he was getting better: “I’m waking up slowly, just give me time. Le Carré had numerous infidelities during his two marriages, a habit that doubtlessly benefited from his experience in subterfuge. He continued turning down British honours, as well as an appearance on Desert Island Discs (“I have great admiration for your programme and it seems to get along fine without me”), while accepting awards in France and Germany. It was extraordinary to be in each other’s company at last, after more than a year of corresponding. It cannot have been easy for her to discuss her intimate past with a complete stranger, and I was impressed by her frankness, articulacy and insight.

It’s like – I imagine – waking up in the whorehouse with a hangover and no sexual appetite; you just want to creep away and find a new life, because the old one’s suddenly so grimey [sic] and stale.What a far better investment it is not to sell the Crown Jewels, but to line them for view on a queen’s head, for dollars, francs, pesetas, rupees, marks, obols or what you will. This last book, which turns 60 this year, recast the Cold War: The conflict was not a morality play of good versus evil, as leaders of both sides presented it; rather, it was an ambiguous addendum to World War II waged by gray men in the shadows, broken by their own betrayals and the bureaucracies—capitalist and Communist—that treated them as expendable.

He is the hyena who stalks the capitalist deserts, he is an identifiable antagonist, sustained by capital and kept in good heart by the charms of a materialist society; he is a chauvinist, an unblinking patriot who makes espionage exciting. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was an inveterate con man, in and out of money and trouble with the law. 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. By turns intimate and comic, tender and clear-sighted A Private Spy offers a rare and illuminating portrait of one of the great figures of our times. John Miller was no longer living at Sancreed, having distanced himself from David after his partner MThere were new temptations on campus at the time: “there is a curious lowering of standards among the aristocracy e. You would never think that this land had ever been a battlefield, that these cottages had been pill-boxes, and the rivers tank traps.

Sydney Pollack is supposed to be directing the movie of The Night Manager and I would be enormously tickled if you were to find a place in it. He still planned to go back to Panama, “depending on when it’s the right moment for the book, which is going so well I’m almost scared. Notably, though, it was published in Encounter, a magazine funded by the CIA—le Carré was expressing his outsider’s viewpoint in a publication that was very much a part of the inside, the same machinery that he was critiquing. It was his stepmother Jean who read to him The Wind in the Willows once when he was sick and bedridden, his earliest literary memory.

The United States of America has just applied to join the club of second-class powers of which I understand your own fine nation to be chairman, president, and oldest member. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. After Pierpaoli’s death, in 1999, her daughter burned all but one of her mother’s letters from le Carré in her kitchen sink. Dear heart, try to understand a mole too used to the dark to believe in light,” he wrote in one letter to Susan Kennaway, with whom he began an affair in 1964. 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.