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

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Thanks for yours, and please forgive this typed response: I am in the late throes of the novel. The family bad news has brightened..... I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin’s position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that they have obtained him, and they could probably blow him out of the water whenever they felt like it, but I think they are having much more fun feeding his contradictions and contributing to the chaos. The terrifying thing is, the closer he draws to Putin, the more he lies and denies, the stronger his support among the faithful. You don’t need to own Trump as an agent. You just have to let him run. We are moving to London for an unknown period while I change the atmosphere around the book. I hope to have completed some kind of first draft by the Fall. An account in The Pigeon Tunnel places Le Carré in Beirut, being driven blindfolded to an anonymous building, and then taken into a room to wait. Yasser Arafat enters. “Mr David, why have you come to see me?” I have come, Le Carré said, to put my hand on the Palestinian heart. At which, Arafat seized Le Carré’s hand, placing it on his chest. “It is here, it is here.”

But if you would like to meet me before then, or afterwards before I leave for Cornwall, why not let me know?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. As le Carré’s own life filled with glitz, he was making his name by ridding the spy thriller of that very same quality. “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold” was a rebuke of jingoistic, Bond-like spy fictions. Men and women of conviction, on both sides, are swallowed up by a game of one-upmanship run by suits in London and Moscow. In a now famous line, a British agent named Alec Leamas preaches to an idealistic young socialist: “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” 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. Through his correspondence, we learn a lot about le Carré’s habits as a writer. There are literary feuds, frustrations with critics, and glimpses into how some of his books became successful film and television productions (and how some didn’t). Despite his success, you get the sense that le Carré never let go of his insecurities about being taken seriously as a novelist; we see him seeking—and reveling in—the approval of writers such as Graham Greene, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard. Clearly, he wanted to be known as more than a spy or a spy novelist. 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. Thanks so much for your very touching letter. Your feelings about Brexit spoke into my heart. Just now I wd rather be Dutch, German, French, or for that matter Polish, than a Brit subjected to this truly shaming process in which we are engaged. ....

Both Harkaway and le Carré will be credited on the cover of the new work. “When we first talked about it, I was – let’s call it ‘hesitant’, which is as good a word as any for ‘terrified’,” said Harkaway. “But look at the world! Vladimir Putin was born in 1952; he grew up into the peak of the Cold War. We live in the ghost of the 20th century, the absolute core of the Smiley books. This is a story about how our world happens. And it opens the door to stories which explore more of our present through that lens. It’s an amazing thing to be part of.” When trying to fit a label onto himself he mulled and rejected 'Social Democrat' and 'liberal', and considered 'humanist' to be fairly accurate except for it sounded like a job title (“like 'I do humans'”). But that may be the closest term we have to what he was about. He was modest about his importance, though – when he followed Daniel Ellsberg as the next recipient of the Olof Palme award, he wrote to Ellsberg that “I am a totally unworthy successor...your contribution to the world is diamond-real, and mine is merely imaginative”. The letter can be read as a mission statement for le Carré’s politics at the time. 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. This irony recurs in his letters: Le Carré repeatedly offers withering indictments of the powers he served, but he never seems to cast them aside. Later in life, he wrote nostalgically to Alan Judd, a fellow novelist who once served as a soldier and diplomat, of his time at MI5 and MI6: “I miss the Office … In a sense, they are the only places, apart from writing.” In the worlds le Carré created, truths are rarely self-evident. So it was in his own life, as we learn in a recently published book of his letters. On the surface, he progressed naturally from his youth to the inner sanctum: His adolescence was spent in English public schools immediately after World War II, where the boys did military training in uniform, jingoism was the norm, and—at least for one final generation—empire was an inheritance. He studied foreign languages. He served in the British army’s Intelligence Corps. He attended Oxford. He taught German at Eton. By the time he joined MI5 in 1958, his biography read, well, like a lot of other recruits’. After Mitchell’s death in 2011, Cornwell wrote a condolence letter to his family, in which he was still blaming his target for being outraged, asking querulously: “Was he really imagining that a bourgeois society would not spy on a revolutionary movement?” Well, perhaps not. Maybe he just objected to the identity of the person who had been watching him for the Secret Police. For, as has been said in other contexts “it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.” No doubt Cornwell was familiar with that passage of Scripture, for his education was strongly Christian and there is quite a lot of evidence that he found religion a persistent problem and an occasional temptation. I sat bolt upright when I first read (I think it was in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) the words “Smiley hated faith.” How interesting, I thought. Why would this brilliant methodical thinker and studier of the human condition at its worst take such a stance? I never found out. The remark wasn’t explained. As a schoolboy, Cornwell had undergone a “complete revulsion” from Christianity soon after a stay with a group of Anglican monks. Later he would tell his former boarding school housemaster that he preferred the “natural” to the “unnatural” and the “free” to the “repressed.” 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.” About the same time, he wrote to his first wife, during another monastic retreat, “I just feel, perhaps for the first time, that I am near to finding a way of life and a real faith.” But he added urgently: “I’m not suddenly getting religion nor will I turn monk.” Later still, he told a psychiatrist that he had been trying during his first marriage “as I have tried off and on throughout my life, to embrace religion.” The attempt ultimately failed. His instructions for his funeral included a stern ban on any “mumbo-jumbo.” But the full passage is not quite so dismissive. It is in a 2001 letter to his sons and his wife and says: “I had an amazing life, against the odds. I turned from a bad man to a much better one. I detest the mumbo-jumbo of organised religion, love the glory of creation and believe in some kind of triumph of that glory.”So we loved each other, because actually that’s all we had, & we reacted off each other, towards & against each other, & we lived in each other’s skins, & revolted against the captivity, & the emptiness of the rest of our lives, and we learned sex too late like everything else, and we went our different ways, but probably they were ultimately very similar ways, which is another serious annoyance. Our father was a mad genes-bank, a truly wild card, and in my memory disgusting – still. I never mourned him, never missed him, I rejoiced at his death. Is that so awful? I don’t think so. We shall believe Guinness when he tells us things from the past, when he theorises, when he acts in accordance with unstated predictions – because, simply, the intellect is patent, and commanding, yours & Smiley’s both.

But antisemitism is central to a wider debate about the kind of country we want to be. To ignore it because Brexit looms larger is to declare that anti-Jewish prejudice is a price worth paying for a Labour government. Which other community’s concerns are disposable in this way? Who would be next? That is all I have to say, really. Your work has been a constant inspiration to me, and whatever our differences I wanted to thank you for it, and for your example. 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”. His views of British and American intelligence activities were muted but not silent. He had opinions that he expressed and believed that Britain was a failed nation (not his words, but my reading). His grandmother was born in Cork and Cornwell finally applied for and received Irish citizenship based on his grandmother's Irish birthright (although there are now restrictions, Ireland permits a descendant of any person born in Ireland not more than 3 generations away from the birth to become an Irish citizen upon application) about a year or so before he died. He was very candid about it: he despised Brexit and thought Boris Johnson was an oaf. When he was notified of having received Irish citizenship, he wrote a letter to the Irish official charged with processing immigrant applications for citizenship, thanking her and her staff for the "honour" of granting him citizenship. His expression of joy was simply that: no hard feelings toward Boris or Brexit, just joy at being Irish.

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.

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