Writing about a spy writer
• John le Carré biographer Adam Sisman on unravelling novelist’s secret life
Dead or alive? For Adam Sisman, who has written two biographies on spy novelist David Cornwell (John le Carré), the dead have the edge. They can’t second guess you, but then you can’t check stuff with them once they’ve gone. Sisman had the privilege of both, if it could be called a privilege.
“It’s a gift to have the author available to answer questions,” says Sisman. “And that’s very helpful.”
Not always. “I have to confess that I was quite disappointed with what I got from him,” says Sisman of Cornwell alive. “I did feel he was telling the same old stories very often.” Tick one for a dead subject.
After the novelist died in December 2020 aged 89, the agreement between biographer and subject changed. For the first book, John le Carré The Biography, the pair had settled on some circumscription. “He didn’t proscribe a lot of it, to be fair,” says Sisman. “The two areas that were difficult were his period in intelligence [Cornwell called it “limited”]. He didn’t try to censor what I wrote, he just refused to talk about it. And then there was his personal life.”
“My own messy private life”, as Cornwell wrote to Sisman, would not be out of bounds. Or so Sisman understood. “We agreed at the start that the biography would be at arm’s length, that it should be a credible biography not a hagiography.”
Even after Cornwell had agreed to a “warts and all” biography, he would later complain that it was “too much warts and no all”.
Sisman had always wanted to be a writer, but imagined that meant being a novelist. “[But] my earlier attempts at writing a novel were embarrassingly bad.” He went into publishing and became an editor for about 15 years, then lost his job in a management clear-out. “I was looking around for things to do, and I thought someone should write a biography of the historian AJP Taylor. And why not me. That was my first book. At an early stage, I thought Le Carré was a good subject, but there was an obstacle.”
Sisman’s wife, the editor and novelist Robyn, who died in 2016 aged 66, had signed Robert Harris to write Cornwell’s life story when she was head at the publishing house Hutchinson. “I complained to her, ‘I want to write that book’, and she said, ‘tough’,” says Sisman.
Harris, however, needed to complete his first novel, under Robyn’s editorship. Fatherland, about how World War 2 ends with a Nazi victory, became a best seller, and it changed his plans. “Years passed and from time to time I would see Robert and would say ‘how are you getting on with David Cornwell? And he would say ... um... I’m busy with the next novel.” The Sismans met Harris for lunch one day and the Cornwell idea was revived. “He [Harris] said, I’m not going to write that book [Cornwell biography] and I said, would you mind if I had a go? He said, it’s not in my gift, but I won’t stand in your way.”
Soon afterwards the project took off, but it wasn’t only Harris stepping aside. Cornwell had been impressed with Sisman’s biography of Hugh TrevorRoper, a famous historian who had fallen from grace. So, with Cornwell’s permission, he plunged ahead into what turned out to be a difficult biography, probably his “most difficult”, says Sisman, who had five previous ones under his belt.
In the beginning Sisman had Cornwell looking over his shoulder, often literally. Soon after Cornwell had been introduced to his subject and allowed into the novelist’s archive,
Sisman was working there, his back to the door. “At one point a shadow over my shoulder caused me to look up, and there was David in the doorway. ‘It’s very strange to have you here, poking about in my mind,’ he said with a grin,” Sisman writes in the introduction to John le Carré The Biography, the first biography.
Sisman had been given access to Cornwell’s family, friends, even enemies, and, above all, to the “invaluable” archive at the family home where he lived with his wife Jane, 82, who died two months after her husband. “Invaluable,” Sisman says, “because old men forget.”
What Sisman learnt working with Cornwell “became less a way of working with him and more a question of working around him. But with access to his archive, and to his family and to his friends — and enemies.” What emerged was Cornwell’s “messy private life”, as he had written to Sisman.
“I was not especially interested in David’s private life per se though I could scarcely ignore the fact that betrayal was a recurrent theme in his work,” Sisman writes in the second biography, The Secret Life of John le Carré, which appeared late last year. The unexpurgated version, you might say.
Sisman says he understood why Cornwell did not want to talk about the “messy” side. “It was quite discreditable, really, and also embarrassing for his wife and his family.”
As for the second biography and the extramarital affairs, what is a book about spies (or spy novelists) without the sex? But Sisman insists it should not be read for its prurience, but how it helped Cornwell unlock his fiction.
“It wasn’t that I wanted to write all about the scandalous, scurrilous details,” he says. “It seemed to me an important part of his life. He was leading a double life. In some sense, I think he was sort play-acting at being a spy. I think the real appeal was not the sex but the danger and the jeopardy of the assignment. He was lying all the time, and he maintained the deceit. The strain must have been enormous,” he says. “He also needed that sense of not being a middle-aged man sitting in a room, scribbling on paper.”
While researching the first biography, Sisman began picking up stories of Cornwell’s secret life from speaking to acquaintances, from gossip, and needed to confront his subject with the information. It was an element that led to a strain in their relationship, which Sisman writes about in the final chapter of The Secret Life. “I thought at one stage that it might fall apart altogether.” That was when Cornwell’s eldest son stepped in. “Simon Cornwell acted as a kind of intermediary, and proposed this idea of a secret annex of material to be published after David was dead.” It was an elegant solution at the time, brought some peace between biographer and subject, and now it’s all out there. And more.
In the paperback edition of The Secret Life, which is due out soon, there is an afterword in which three more mistresses are revealed since the hardcover went to print. “And since the paperback went to press, two more have surfaced,” says Sisman. “I’m surprised he could remember what they were called. The last count I had I could identify 15. I guess there must have been 15 more.” It has all left Sisman in some“awe of Cornwell as Le Carré. He was meticulous about his work and he would rehearse dialogue again and again in his head. He’d go for walks, and I’ve heard this from locals who lived nearby and knew that they were not supposed to speak to him because he’d be acting out scenes from, say, the Honourable Schoolboy, often using a German accent or a Russian accent, or Hungarian [he was a famous mimic].
“And he would carry little scraps of paper and when he’d said something to his satisfaction, he would stop and scribble it down.
“He created a world that is so convincing that his terms have gone into general usage [“moles”, being the most famous]. In terms of what he was good at, dialogue in particular, he’s superb. Character, place — he’s just fantastic.
“I think it’s not an issue that he’s a spy writer or a literary writer, he’s just a very good writer. And that’s all there is to it.”
In 2010, two of Cornwell’s sons, Stephen and Simon, founded The Ink Factory to carry on their father’s work in films. They have scheduled two new episodes of The Night Manager, which was a successful TV series, and planning a remake of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
“They have optioned my two books as a Le Carré biopic,” says Sisman. “I felt I’d sort of sold him back to himself as it were.”
HE WAS LYING ALL THE TIME, AND HE MAINTAINED THE DECEIT. THE STRAIN MUST HAVE BEEN ENORMOUS