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

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Tim Cornwell, the third of le Carré’s four sons, took on the mammoth task of organizing this unwieldy mass. A Private Spy, a collection of correspondence spanning much of his [John le Carré’s] life, offers a fresh look at his brilliance. Later, though, he takes in his surroundings with the eyes of a spy and the insight of a novelist: “This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm’s length. Le Carré himself was diligent in keeping letters he received from fans and oddballs – and in replying to them.

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. View image in fullscreen Ex-spy and eminent British novelist John le Carré, pictured here in July 1993. 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). 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.You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. 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.

I don’t want to ask you whether you’re married, though I sense that you are,” he continued: “actually I don’t want to ask you anything ordinary at all, whether you are sixty or thirty or long or short or white or black … I want to ask you for a photograph, but that would be too like casting. After his year of military service, le Carré went to Oxford, where he continued his studies in German as well as his intelligence work, hanging around leftist circles to report back to MI5.Westerby, who has traded dreams of empire for the pursuit of love, responds cavalierly: “Proud to have you aboard. But again, there’s that tension—le Carré was no romanticist for England, but he maintained a righteous rage at Philby for betraying it. Both Philby and Blake effectively crippled SIS liaison and field operations at the middle levels for years and years.

But the inside has been such a ferment of buried anger and lovelessness from childhood that it was sometimes almost uncontainable.

Westerby meets his contact, an American major drinking brandy while absorbing the news of his nation’s defeat. But sometimes I feel as if I had woken up from hibernation in England, and cleared my lungs of the soot of ‘dark satanic mills’ to breathe again the beauty and the peace of the outside world. This collection is a treasure trove, revealing the late author’s humour, generosity, and wit–a side of him many readers have not previously seen. I have written much about men who are not able to relate to women, because in the male oriented world from which I draw my experience – and indeed, my upbringing – the gap you deplore is, unfortunately, all too common. You kiss my letters; I kiss yours,” he wrote happily: “by whatever strange route, I love you, and am joined to you, and that’s the mystery of it.

He told an audience in 1997: “I was brought up in a bookless household, and I have a natural sympathy for people who grow up without the example of reading, or come late to it, or never come at all. The joy to me is how much of you is there …” For all his enthusing, it was clear to Susan that he felt awkward about recommending her to his publisher.Not by our country, which voted for a lot of things it didn’t want or understand, but by a handful of jingoistic adventurers and imperialist fantasists, backed by a lot of dark money and manipulation: populism led from above, when was it ever otherwise? Susan was horrified: though she understood children’s participation in the intifada, she felt strongly that to train them as combatants was wrong. Many of his characters are quiet, ordinary people longing for honorable work and finding, as we do, all paths riddled with complicity and compromise. 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. To a 10-year-old who wrote asking how to be a spy, he said the key was to serve a cause and know “whom you would like to help, whom to frustrate”.