Man of secrets
When John le Carré’s father died, in 1975, the novelist did not mourn. He rejoiced. After completing his masterpiece, “A Perfect Spy,” published 11 years later, he told an interviewer that he had “cried and cried.” Not because he missed Ronnie, but because the writing had provided a much-needed therapeutic flushing of this roguish, flamboyant con man — fictionalized in the novel — out of his system. Great art is sometimes born of great suffering.
Ronnie was such a nonstop liar and womanizer that his wife, Olive, fled the household early on, abandoning their sons, ages 7 and 5, to their fates. Thus the major themes of Adam Sisman’s meticulously researched “John le Carré: The Biography” are twofold: the desperate search for love and artful self-invention through spying and writing fiction.
As most readers know, John le Carré is a pseudonym for David Cornwell. Even the author, Sisman reports, can’t pinpoint its origins, though he did require a pen name because he was working for British intelligence at the time. In any event, the 84year-old has written 23 novels and will publish a memoir next fall.
Given Sisman’s unrestricted access to his subject and hundreds of letters to his friends, family, authors and publishing professionals, one wonders what else there is to tell. The intimate moments revealed are remarkable. Le Carré’s anguish about love, vexation over reviews, opinions on matters literary and political are all in plain sight.
This is an authorized biography, but one worthy of our trust. Sisman doesn’t hesitate to point out when his research shows that le Carré’s own accounts of events are inaccurate. Rich in detail — 600 pages of fairly small print — the book is nonetheless unfailingly engrossing. It is not, however, strong on assessing le Carré’s literary merits. Although obviously an admirer of the novels, Sisman gives equal time to le Carré’s champions and detractors.
For my money, the book’s most interesting sections deal with Cornwell’s troubled early years and his fraught relations with his first wife, Ann Sharp. Young David and his older brother, Tony, were packed off to traditional boarding schools. Tortured with the nickname Maggot, David had to wear a diaper because he wet the bed so often. Not until adolescence did he began to blossom, with skills at cricket and skiing, writing and foreign languages.
All the while, he felt he had to lie about his father, whose illicit schemes continually landed him in prison or bankruptcy court. The family veered between pauper and millionaire status. When Ronnie soared, he drove a Bentley and owned racehorses. When he didn’t, he couldn’t pay David’s school fees. During this time, David never saw his mother.
“We were frozen children …,” he wrote his brother decades later. “You chase after [love], act it, imitate it, and eventually, if you’re old and lucky, you believe in it.”
David initially believed he had found it with Ann Sharp, who bore their sons, but they eventually divorced, Ann faulting him, in Sisman’s phrase, as “an emotional eunuch.” (For many years since, he has been married to Jane Eustace.) Ann witnessed his years at Oxford (where he agreed to spy on communist student organizations), his service in army intelligence and then, starting in 1954, his brief career in both domestic (MI5) and foreign (MI6) intelligence agencies. It’s fascinating to learn that this future spy novelist had to learn how to fight with a knife and pick locks, and actually ran agents in communist countries.
With his third novel, “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” Cornwell was transformed into John le Carré, best-selling novelist acclaimed by no less than Graham Greene. Henceforth he would be rich, self-employed and, though famous, hiding behind a pseudonym.
He was the anti-Ian Fleming, his novels conveying subtle shades of gray on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The Britain he portrayed was graying as well, uncertain of its role in the post-imperial Cold War era, yet still trapped by its overweening sense of importance and hidebound class system.
Has le Carré been “merely” a spy novelist, or should he be ranked in literature’s higher ranks? Was he, as one reviewer wrote, somewhere in between, a thriller writer with pretensions? Skeptics like Clive Irving and John Updike have been merciless, while Philip Roth declared “A Perfect Spy” the best novel published in postwar Britain, and Ian McEwan deemed him worthy of a Booker lifetime achievement award.
Some observers dismiss his later novels as anti-American, anti-capitalist polemics that undermine his art. Yet his gifts for dialogue, scene setting and characterization have always been extraordinary. Despite the end of the Cold War, he has breathed new life into espionage fiction. And his most recent novel, “A Delicate Truth,” published while in his 80s, is breathtakingly good.
Among other events, Sisman recounts le Carré’s involvement with the numerous screen and television adaptations of his novels and his feud with Salman Rushdie over “The Satanic Verses.” (Le Carré believed Rushdie should have known that “you make light of the Koran at your peril.”)
What’s most fun, though, is the occasional glimpse of the vaunted le Carré wit. When Lord Snowden photographed him for a 1989 Vanity Fair feature, the husband of Princess Margaret asked the novelist if he would mind if they used first names. “Well, no,” le Carré replied. “You’ve got more to lose than I do.”