It is hardly original to suggest that John le Carré, real name David Cornwell, could be a character from one of his own novels, but few can have realised just how much of his life and his self is directly present in the work. The author has admitted that his 1986 novel A Perfect Spy was in essence the story of his painful yet ambiguous relationship with his father, and confessed what a cathartic experience the writing of it was for him – “I cried and cried when it was over”. But as Adam Sisman’s perceptive, entertaining if over-long biography reveals, there is a large dash of le Carré, or rather of Cornwell, in every one of his books.
Of course, fiction is always to some extent autobiographical, since the novelist is his own prime source material. However, in le Carré’s case – and it certainly is a case – the life from the start might have been consciously shaped with an eye to the main plot.
Consider the evening in the 1960s when le Carré, basking in the fabulous success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, went to the cinema with his friend the novelist James Kennaway and Kennaway’s wife Susan. As it happened, le Carré and Susan were about to embark on a love affair that would bring le Carré much torment, since he cared for his friend almost as much he did for his friend’s wife. In the cinema, Sisman tells us, “Susan sat between James and David in the darkened cinema, each clasping her nearer hand”. And what was the film they were watching? Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, in which two men strive to preserve their friendship although they are in love with the same woman. As the saying goes, you couldn’t write it and be believed.
Cornwell was born in 1931 in Poole, Dorset. His father, Ronnie, a figure straight out of Dickens, was a charming con man who blighted David’s childhood, and would continue to pop up at unexpected and highly inconvenient moments in his adult life, cajoling him, cadging from him and, at one point, even attempting to blackmail him. “How I got out from under Ronnie, if I ever did,” le Carré wrote, “is the story of my life.”
His mother, the long-suffering Olive, behaved with equal heartlessness, running off one night with a business associate of Ronnie’s, leaving David and his older brother Tony asleep upstairs. Years passed before the boys finally realised that she would not be coming back. When they were sent to boarding school, the two kept a biscuit tin of coins hidden in a hollow tree, to pay for bus fares “so that one day,” Sisman writes, “like Peter Pan’s lost boys, they could go and find their mother”.
“David”, as Sisman refers to him throughout, attended Sherborne school, which he hated. By the late 1940s he was in Bern, in Switzerland, where he studied at the university for two years, perfecting his German – all his life he would retain his love of German literature, references to which are sprinkled throughout his books – and moulding a personality inside which he could conceal, and could conceal himself from, the wounds of his childhood. In Kirchenfeld one Christmas Day he met, as Sisman has it, “a county lady in tweeds and sensible shoes” who introduced herself as “Wendy Gillbanks”, and her friend “Sandy”; both worked at the British embassy, and they invited Cornwell to come round next day “for a glass of sherry and a spot of lunch”. Thus began his career as a spy.
He was no ideologue; if he was anything, he was the kind of old-fashioned patriot you might meet in the pages of John Buchan or the Somerset Maugham of the Ashenden stories. When the affable Sandy asked him to attend leftwing meetings and report back on any British citizens he might spot there, he was happy to do so. He was also asked “to pop down to Geneva for a day, and sit on a park bench with a volume of Goethe’s poems open on his lap, until a passing stranger asked whether he had seen his lost dog …” What larks.
He returned to England in 1952 and attended Lincoln College, Oxford, where he continued to spy on his student colleagues. Many years later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cornwell met the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who was writing a book about being spied on by the East German secret police. The two men had a long conversation about the morality of spying, which Cornwell said was “a question that’s haunted me these 45 years”. He admitted that in Garton Ash’s terms he had, indeed, betrayed colleagues and friends, but insisted that such actions were justified in protecting his country and defending a free society.
At this time, too, he underwent a long interview by Nigel Williams on BBC television, in the course of which he made a subtle and, surely, a key admission. Spying, he said, “felt like betrayal, but it had a voluptuous quality: this was a necessary sacrifice of morality and that is a very important component of what makes people spy, what attracts them”. One result of the interview was a furious letter from a friend of Le Carré’s from his Oxford days, Stanley Mitchell, a teacher and Russian translator who had remained a lifelong Marxist. “Mitchell felt,” Sisman writes, “that David was seeking his absolution for what he had done.”
Like the rest of us, only more so, Le Carré is a creature of contradictions. He was an active cold war warrior and undercover defender of the west, yet his hatred for America, the greatest or at least the largest western democracy, has turned him into a caricature of the Angry Old Man and, more seriously, has marred his later fiction.
It might be asserted that, in his Buchan/Maugham mode, his real fight was for Britain, yet from the outset he has declared himself an enemy of the British establishment who refused a CBE and will not darken the doors of the Garrick Club (Graham Greene, a keen le Carré admirer, pointed out that the word “establishment” appeared 17 times in a 15 page introduction le Carré wrote to a book on Kim Philby). As a young man, writing to his future wife Ann, he declared: “I shall always end up a revolutionary.” And when his father died he said of him, with rueful admiration, that he had “beaten the system”.
The same might be said of le Carré the writer. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is, as Greene declared, the best spy novel ever written; more than that, it showed how a “genre” novel could be a work of art – and also make a great deal of money. That none of his subsequent books achieved the same level of sublimity is only an indication of how marvellous that early work was. There are some, perhaps many, in the literary world who dismiss the notion of le Carré as a “serious” writer – but where are the serious writers, now that mainstream fiction has once again triumphed? Can one imagine a latterday Wings of the Dove or Ulysses being shortlisted for the Booker? Le Carré has produced at least one masterpiece, and a remarkable string of carefully crafted, well written, intelligent novels that engage directly with the contemporary world. He has said he finds it “very difficult to read my own stuff” – what writer of any worth does not? – “but I look at it with satisfaction.” And so he should.
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