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

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He was reluctant to talk on the telephone “because (1) I hate the phone and (2) something changes – I need to see you, touch you, once I have heard your voice … the phone will definitely unsettle both of us.

Tim Cornwell, the third of le Carré’s four sons, took on the mammoth task of organizing this unwieldy mass. But I never got my clothes back—so I am writing to you in a state of nature,” he joked, attaching a naughty illustration of himself. For my money, I would ask you to play Corkoran tomorrow but we are dealing with minds that function on other planes, so they will probably give it to Dicky Attenborough.

In these early letters he circled around the question of whether they should continue as strangers writing secret letters to each other, or whether they should risk meeting.

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. Smiley, back in England, tracks down her family, working-class strivers, who brag that she is in Laos working for British intelligence. As he saw it, the escapist glamour of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels only bolstered the communist image of the West as a playground of thrill-seeking hedonists trying to fill the void with empty sex and alcohol. His letters are full of admiration for people whose work meant putting themselves in harm’s way to serve others, such as Janet Lee Stevens, an American journalist who covered the lives of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon.A stranger would strike up a conversation, all small talk at first, asking me about the menu, the town, where I got my taste for brown liquor. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. A prolific correspondent and artful curator of his own life, the British novelist John le Carré left behind a trove of personal letters when he died, age 89, at the end of 2020.

After several telephone conversations in which she was nervous and he reassured her, he arrived unexpectedly early on the Friday evening, bearing champagne, foie gras, and a typescript of his novel, which he presented to her. I’ve had an amazing run,” he says when facing death, and exults in his life with Jane as two “old honeymooners on a cliff”.It was always about energy, courage, libido, fear, laughter – it was always a first book every time, there’s no such thing as a pro, not really. In 1972 he married Jane Eustace, who had worked in publishing and introduced him to Bob Gottlieb, his longtime editor at Knopf. T wo years after his death, we now have a voluminous collection of le Carré’s letters, assembled by his son Tim Cornwell and published late last year: A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré. Hence discussions on painting for instance are somewhat limited by the extent to which a boy will confess himself impressed.