THE SPOOK who could have been a villain – or an Archbishop
John le Carré liked quoting his friend and rival novelist Graham Greene about childhood being the bank balance of a writer. Having been abandoned by his mother Olive at the age of four, and left in the clutches of his father Ronnie, a bankrupt and conman, he built up considerable capital for his own literary career.
We first meet him through R.S. Thompson, his housemaster at Sherborne who, in trying to prevent Ronnie removing him from the school early to study in Switzerland, described him as ‘extremely sensitive… the sort who might become either Archbishop of Canterbury or a first-rate criminal’.
The resourceful young le Carré survived this rupture, leading to a magnificently rich life which, following his death in 2020, has been posthumously embellished through the publication of his private letters.
At Bern University he was first approached by the secret services, and later worked for not one but two British intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, at the height of the Cold War, providing the experiences he banked to help him write his acclaimed spy novels.
He gave up clandestine activity in his early 30s when The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, his third novel, was hugely successful, earning him half a million pounds (roughly £11million today).
Unsurprisingly, he was a brilliant correspondent. Revelations tumble out, even if they don’t change the broad picture. For example, in 1954 MI5 introduced him to Kemsley Newspapers, publishers of The Sunday Times, where the Foreign Manager, Ian Fleming, had just embarked on his James Bond novels and liked to hire spooks as reporters.
Bond’s technicolour existence famously stands in stark contrast to the grey bureaucracy of le Carré’s George Smiley – something le Carré elaborated on to a Soviet correspondent, suggesting the Cold War was a no-win contest of murky morality, while Bond, like the Communists, divided humanity into goodies and baddies. He maintained contact with the secret world through friends such as Dick Franks, a former MI6 head. But he kept his distance, rejecting a CBE and knighthood, telling Franks he preferred to ‘stay out of the citadel’.
Instead he railed in later novels, which many think should have won at least a Booker Prize, against the privilege, subterfuge and sleaze he observed in Britain and the wider world. He was particularly vehement about the deceptions involved in the Iraq War.
He clearly enjoyed his links with the film business. His letter urging Alec Guinness to play Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a gem. ‘Smiley is an Abbey, made up of different periods, fashions and even different religions, not all of them necessarily harmonious,’ he wrote with typical felicity.
Don’t expect lists of le Carré’s mistresses. One or two get a mention, but on the romantic front he is more usually declaring his often wayward love for his wives, Ann and Jane – perhaps inevitably since these engaging letters are edited with great fairness and sensitivity by a family member, his son Tim Cornwell, who himself died earlier this year before publication.