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

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Tim had always been open about his struggles with mental health, and the reality of bipolar life was something we had learned to manage together. Since he’d been officially diagnosed as bipolar, he was a reluctant patient, refusing to let the diagnosis define him. He regarded the daily doses of lithium and olanzapine as a chemical life sentence leaving his creative mind deadened, muffled and dopey. As he started his journey with the letters, Tim told me he felt he hadn’t been able to properly mourn his parents’ deaths, that he was distanced from true grief. For a lovely moment, he gave a sage nod, & the complicity was absolute. Then to his credit he let out a wild whoop of laughter, remembering too late that they were his mikes… O darling – this is life! I only hope I will continue to think so. I only wish that above all you were here to see it with me. To see this happen – this great transformation from the grey indifference of England to the bewitching colours and the bright rebirth of Spring in Austria. One day we will see it, both of us, together. We can wait till then.

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James Bond, on the other hand, breaks no such Communist principles. You know him well. 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. Bond on his magic carpet takes us away from moral doubt, banishes perplexity with action, morality with duty. Above all, he has the one piece of equipment without which not even his formula would work: an entirely evil enemy. By then, time and illness were shaking the knots from a tangled life. Two weeks before the end, when he and his second wife, Jane, are both dying from cancer, he writes to a friend: “Everything is waiting. We have never been so close — yet far away too, because death, looming or simply out there — is a very private matter, & each of us does it in their own way.” But that imagination brought real attention to such topics as arms dealing, pharmaceutical company abuse of large populations (LONG before the opioid crisis), and institutional abuses to individuals during the so-called War on Terrorism.

An archive of letters written by the late John le Carré, giving listeners access to the intimate thoughts of one of the greatest writers of our time. The never-before-seen correspondence of John le Carré, one of the most important novelists of our generation, is collected in this beautiful volume. During his lifetime, le Carré wrote numerous letters to writers, spies, politicians, artists, actors and public figures. This collection is a treasure trove, revealing the late author's humor, generosity, and wit—a side of him many listeners have not previously seen.

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

John le Carré's home in Cornwall, England which was recently put up for sale. Image sourced from RightMove Co. UK. [Note: Links were working as of October 3, 2023. Image and link may no longer be available once the house is sold.] 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”. John le Carré and his wife, Jane, at the Berlin film festival, 2001. Photograph: Franziska Krug/Getty Images

It’s not hard to see why. In Smiley’s People — the third act of the trilogy of masterly Cold War novels that began with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — le Carré's ruthless Russian spymaster, Karla, schemes to protect his only weak point, the small, broken thing at the heart of his being, his schizophrenic, secret child. To smuggle her to safety from his enemies in Russia, Karla sends an agent to the west to find a discreet mental hospital and a convincing false identity, “a legend for a girl”. 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.

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

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. Our home news is not too bright. Jane has developed an inoperable cancer and is undergoing a severe course of chemotherapy. The wonder pills I have been taking for the same complaint have run their course, and the next stage is to nuke me with an experimental radioactive infusion every six weeks. But we prevail, the kids are being wonderful, I am entering my 90th year, Jane is 8 years behind, we have been married for half a century and never been closer. And I continue to write most days. I have loved John le Carre's writing for some time. I have many of his books. My concern in reading books like this are the first question: Were they writing for posterity? Is there a falsity to the correspondence? In this case, I would say "no." 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

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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. 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. The book is well-edited, and we do not learn everything about the writer. But, we learn plenty about the man, who wrote with love, and courtesy (even when he was upset or distressed), saying just enough in his letters to know who he was as a person who wished well for the world and its people, and who was not hesitant about citing events and people who he believed were misdirected or evil. In one letter, which I think really offers insight into Cornwell, he writes that he has a bad habit of wanting to isolate himself from the world with his family when he's not working and really wants to act differently in that regard, but in about half of the letters, he is making excuses why he cannot meet or attend conferences or visit friends. Much like George Smiley, he will act decisively when called upon, but for all of it is quite happy left alone with his manuscripts and daydreams. First, there is the subject matter. You would expect a celebrated novelist to have lived at the centre of things and to have been greatly engaged in the disputes of his time. Not at all. Almost all of the letters are about trivial things such as “I had a mild argument with X”, or are literally admin, like “thank you so much for your kind gift, it would be good to see you soon”. I was amazed that Le Carre never seems to have commented on current affairs; remarkably, the great Cold War novelist doesn’t remark on the fall of the Berlin Wall! The only comments on major events are on Iraq and Brexit, where he adopts the annoying de-haut-en-bas tone of a parody liberal writer; there is no reasoned, intellectual engagement with the issues, but simply milquetoast whining about “isn’t this beastly and aren’t people stupid for believing politicians”.