Some secrets, some lies
John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman
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EVER SINCE Dickens it has been said that to become a successful writer you need a ‘blacking factory’ in your past. For David Cornwell, alias John le Carré, the blacking factory was his incorrigible father, Ronnie, a con-man so bent that if he swallowed a nail he’d shit a corkscrew. Like Rick, the protagonist’s father in A Perfect Spy (1986), Ronnie combined geniality with menace. ‘His hugs,’ says Adam Sisman, ‘were a demonstration of ownership as well as affection.’ Caught red-handed, as he sometimes was, he would insist to le Carré and his elder brother that he’d simply been trying to ‘see them right’. No wonder le Carré would conclude that getting out from under Ronnie ‘is the story of my life’.
Tormented by Ronnie’s philandering, le Carré’s mother Olive bolted in 1936, when John was five. For some reason he blamed her for this, later admitting that it handicapped him as a writer as well as a man: ‘Whenever I start to write a female character, Olive always seems to get in the way.’ His misery was compounded by boarding school, the fees for which Ronnie paid just often enough to appease the bursar. Although the war blurred social identities, le Carré felt he didn’t really belong, ‘and would liken his boyhood to living in occupied territory’. Why then did he send his four sons to board at Westminster? If Sisman asked this question, he has failed to provide us with an answer.
Le Carré became a household name in 1963 when The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was published. But the turning point in his life occurred much earlier, in 1948, when, aged sixteen, he stood up to Ronnie and insisted on leaving Sherborne School and enrolling at the University of Bern. There, despite a hand-tomouth existence, he gained a working knowledge of German that would lead, after National Service, Oxford and a brief spell teaching at Eton, to his recruitment by the intelligence services.
Much to Sisman’s frustration, le Carré refused to be drawn on his spying activities, invoking the Official Secrets Act and ‘promises made to old German contacts’. So the news that he is spilling the beans in a memoir to be published next year suggests that he can be just as duplicitous as Ronnie. Sisman also admits that his ‘unintended role has been to spoil a fund of good stories’. I lost count of the number of times he gives le Carré’s version of an event and then adds that the record suggests otherwise. Le Carré says it goes with the territory: ‘We all reinvent our pasts, but writers are in a class of their own. Even when they know the truth, it’s never enough for them.’
To his credit le Carré has been frank about something else he shares with Ronnie, infidelity. Sexually timid as a young man – he and his first wife had known each other for three years before they slept together – he made up for lost time once he became a celebrity. This hastened the end of his first marriage, following which he was lucky enough to meet someone who accepted that ‘Nobody can have all of David’.
Sisman says le Carré takes ‘enormous care with his prose’, which may run into several drafts. When, more than thirty years ago, I interviewed le Carré, he said that if his writing had any merit, some of the credit should go to his superiors at the Foreign Office, who discouraged adverbs and other embellishments. He is also, as Sisman acknowledges, a superb mimic, equally at home with the speech of a Jewish refugee girl, a Russian mafia boss or the suave, heartless, knife-edged banter of Whitehall warriors.
Le Carré rejoiced when the Berlin Wall came down, but within a few years he had become disillusioned by the West’s failure ‘to rise to the moment’. He came to identify more and more with the Left, particularly over issues like the Iraq war, against which he marched, and ‘the new American realism, which is nothing other than gross corporate power cloaked in demagogy’. He turned down a knighthood, saying he had no wish to be embraced by the Establishment: ‘I prefer to stay outside the tent.’ By now, he could well be a Corbynista.
This long and engrossing book contains some provocative asides. Sisman alleges that having acted for the Crown against Ronnie Cornwell, Sir Norman Birkett KC (as he then wasn’t) subsequently accepted his hospitality, which included ‘introductions to obliging young ladies’. There is also a dark hint that Alan Clark, who sometimes borrowed le Carré’s London flat, may have taken under-age girls there. On the other hand it seems odd that we hear so little of le Carré’s sons.
Anthony Powell once said that if you sought a justification for novel-writing, you could do worse than consider an epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne: ‘Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths.’ Given what we now know about le Carré – and what we still don’t know – I think this Delphic observation sums him up pretty well.