John le Carre, who probed murky world of spies, dies at 89
Le Carre’s literary agency, Curtis Brown, said he died in Cornwall, southwest England on Saturday, December 12, after a short illness. The agency said his death was not related to COVID-19. His family said he died of pneumonia.
In classics such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, Le Carre combined terse but lyrical prose with the kind of complexity expected in literary fiction. His books grappled with betrayal, moral compromise and the psychological toll of a secret life. In the quiet, watchful spymaster George Smiley, he created one of 20th-century fiction’s iconic characters — a decent man at the heart of a web of deceit.
“John le Carre has passed at the age of 89. This terrible year has claimed a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit,” tweeted novelist Stephen King. Margaret Atwood said: “Very sorry to hear this. His Smiley novels are key to understanding the mid-20th century.”
For le Carre, the world of espionage was a “metaphor for the human condition.”
“I’m not part of the literary bureaucracy if you like that categorises everybody: Romantic, Thriller, Serious,” le Carre told
The Associated Press in 2008. “I just go with what I want to write about and the characters. I don’t announce this to myself as a thriller or an entertainment.
“I think all that is pretty silly stuff. It’s easier for booksellers and critics, but I don’t buy that categorisation. I mean, what’s
Tale of Two Cities? — a thriller?”
His other works included Smiley’s People, The Russia House, and, in 2017, the Smiley farewell, A Legacy of Spies. Many novels were adapted for film and television, notably the 1965 productions of Smiley’s People and Tinker Tailor featuring Alec Guinness as Smiley.
Le Carre was drawn to espionage by an upbringing that was superficially conventional but secretly tumultuous.
Born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, southwest England on Oct 19, 1931, he appeared to have a standard upper-middleclass education: the private Sherborne School, a year studying German literature at the University of Bern, compulsory military service in Austria — where he interrogated Eastern Bloc defectors — and a degree in modern languages at Oxford University. But his ostensibly ordinary upbringing was an illusion. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a con man who was an associate of gangsters and spent time in jail for insurance fraud. His mother left the family when David was five; he didn’t meet her again until he was 21.
It was a childhood of uncertainty and extremes: one minute limousines and champagne, the next eviction from the family’s latest accommodation. It bred insecurity, an acute awareness of the gap between surface and reality — and a familiarity with secrecy that would serve him well in his future profession.
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Jackson was just 48 when she died, in 1965, and left behind an extensive backlog of unreleased material. Her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, made little effort to organise her papers beyond giving them to the Library of Congress, so Hyman and his sister, Sarah Hyman Dewitt, took on the job. They have made several trips to Washington, sorting through boxes and sometimes finding sections of a given work in different piles, a process especially time consuming because Shirley Jackson rarely dated her manuscripts.
Hyman, who manages his mother’s estate, has co-edited two posthumous collections of her stories and other writings and otherwise seen her reputation soar well beyond being the author of The Lottery. Two volumes of her fiction have been issued by the country’s unofficial canon maker, the Library of America, and Jackson was the subject of an award-winning biography by Ruth Franklin. Hyman says at least 10 film or television adaptations are in the works, along with stage productions, a multimedia project by composer Ryan Scott Oliver and a collection of her letters that is scheduled for 2021.
“There is still material we haven’t gotten to,” Hyman said.
Meanwhile, an early story never published before, Adventure On a Bad Night, appears this week in the new issue of Strand Magazine. Adventure On a Bad Night was likely written during World War II or shortly after, Hyman says. It’s a brief sketch about a housewife named Vivien who takes a needed break to go out and buy cigarettes. She meets a heavily pregnant woman who seems to have an Italian accent and is being shunned by the store clerk as she attempts to send a telegram. Vivien helps out and the woman responds by paying for her cigarettes.
Strand managing editor
Andrew Gulli says the story has “the Jackson trademark touch of imparting something touching and significant out of the mundane.
“Also it shows her knack for showing how those marginalised by society struggle to survive,” said Gulli, who has published obscure works by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner among others.
Franklin, whose Shirley
Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life won a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2017, says the story echoes other Jackson narratives from the time, about “a woman in search of ‘adventure’ of some kind and/or an encounter with racism or xenophobia.” She cites After You, My Dear Alphonse, in which Jackson pokes fun at a white woman’s presumption that her son’s Black friend is poor, and in need of food and clothing.
Jackson resisted calling herself a feminist, but Adventure On a Bad Night captures the ongoing tension of a woman coping in a male world. At home, Vivien is preoccupied with chores while her husband remains seated, reading the paper. On her way back from the store, she sees three sailors and wonders if they’ll whistle at her, walking faster before noticing over her shoulder the “sailors were eyeing a girl going the other way.”
Laurence Hyman says that, judging by letters she wrote at the time, Jackson was happy in her marriage while writing