Author’s mistresses keep coming in from the cold
John le Carre’s lovers keep emerging, according to his biographer, who says the number he has identified is the tip of the iceberg.
After le Carre’s death, Adam Sisman released a “secret annexe” to his biography which outlined the author’s serial infidelity. He said that when he was researching the book, he “kept on coming across [more] mistresses”.
After identifying a dozen women, Sisman said several others came forward to say they too had been in sexual relationships with the author, who is regarded as one of Britain's greatest postwar novelists.
Sisman also spoke of le Carre’s caddish behaviour, disclosing that on at least three occasions the author deliberately befriended men so as to later “seduce their wives”.
Sisman published his biography in 2015, but after le Carre's death in 2020, aged 89, he began work on a coda with details of his affairs during his two marriages.
Sisman said that le Carre, who co-operated with his biography, had insisted that his liaisons be excluded from the original book, to avoid “humiliating” Valerie Jane Eustace, his second wife. She died, aged 82, two months after him. They had been married for almost 50 years.
The Secret Life of John le Carre, which outlines how the author brought his spying tradecraft to assignations with his mistresses, many of whom were identified, was released last October.
“In the book, I identified 12 mistresses,” Sisman told the Oxford Literary Festival. “And I’m quite sure that is just the tip of the iceberg. I think there were at least a dozen more – and in fact, several more have come forward since the book went to press.”
He said that during his research, he “kept on coming across mistresses – and I wasn’t looking for them”.
“They just kept popping up,” he said. When he confronted le Carre, he would invariably “hold his head in his hands and say, 'Oh no’ ”.
Sisman told the festival that the affairs had given le Carre an “edge to his life which fuelled his fiction ... I came to the conclusion that it was an essential part of what made him tick as a writer”. He said le Carre's behaviour towards women might have harked back to “anger at his mother, who had abandoned him as a young boy”.
Le Carre, whose real name was David Cornwell, began writing novels while working for MI6 in the early 1960s.