The Secret Life of John le Carré

The Secret Life of John le Carré

ALSO BY ADAM SISMAN

A. J. P. Taylor

Boswell’s Presumptuous Task

Wordsworth and Coleridge

Hugh Trevor-Roper

John le Carré

The Professor and the Parson

THE SECRET LIFE OF JOHN LE CARRÉ

Adam Sisman

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by

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‘All his life he’s been inventing versions of himself that are untrue’

A Perfect Spy

Contents

Introduction: candour & guile

1 Spying is lying

2 ‘My great failure to find happiness’

3 Acting like a git

4 The love thief

5 An epistolary romance

6 A bit stiff

7 An inspector calls

Conclusion: truth & fiction

Acknowledgements

References

Index

Introduction: candour & guile

Why write the ‘secret life’ of John le Carré? Is it right to make public aspects of his existence that he strove so hard to keep private? In writing this book I was conscious that some might consider the subject matter prurient. And to some extent I accept this criticism; if it were no more than an exposé of adultery, then reading it would be not much better than voyeurism. In her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994), Janet Malcolm pilloried the professional biographer as a voyeur and a busybody, colluding with the reader ‘in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole’. That has not been my usual practice. Rather than peeping through the keyhole, I have tended to linger in the corridor, clearing my throat to indicate my presence. I am not one of those that believes that sex explains everything. On the contrary, it seems to me that for most people sex is merely part of ordinary life, not the creative spark.

But in the case of John le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, his pursuit of women was a key to unlock his fiction. Not only did it help to explain what he wrote, it helped to explain how, why and when he wrote. David himself was explicit on this point. ‘My infidelities,’ he wrote to me at a time when, for better or worse, the issue had come to dominate our discussions,

produced in my life a duality & a tension that became almost a necessary drug for my writing, a dangerous edge of some kind … They are not therefore a ‘dark part’ of my life, separate from the ‘high literary calling’, so to speak, but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.

Nonetheless he restricted what I was able to write about his affairs in his lifetime, as I detail in the last chapter of this book. My biography of John le Carré, published in 2015, was the truth, insofar as I was able to ascertain it, but not the whole truth. While David was alive, I was obliged to suppress some of what I knew.

Eight years on, there is no remaining reason for reticence. ‘I don’t care what you write about me after I’m dead,’ David said to me on several occasions. He died towards the end of 2020, at the age of eighty-nine, after sustaining a fall in his bathroom, and his wife Jane died only weeks later, after a long struggle with cancer. As for the rest of his family, his three surviving sons feel that, in general, any information about their father that may aid understanding of his work should be on the public record. Now that he is dead, we can know him better.

Besides, the cat is out of the bag. In October 2022 one of his lovers, using the pseudonym Suleika Dawson, published a memoir of their time together. A few weeks later, a volume of le Carré letters appeared, edited by his son Tim (who tragically died while the book was in press); this included two letters from Susan Anderson, another woman with whom David had an affair. These letters are part of a larger collection, available for scrutiny in a public archive. The story of David’s involvement with these two women is recounted in the pages of this book, together with the stories of other women with whom he was involved at one time or another. Cumulatively they provide a picture of a man always restlessly seeking love, for whom extramarital affairs were not a distraction from his writing, but an essential stimulus.

*

‘It’s hard not to feel that there is a great deal we’re not being told,’ wrote Theo Tait, in a review of my biography for the London Review of Books. He was right, of course. In his review, Tait differentiated between the first half of the book, which, he wrote, does ‘exactly what you want a biography of a novelist to do’; and the second half, which he found much less revealing. ‘At a certain point the reader is banished from Cornwell’s life.’ That point was the moment David met Jane, who became his second wife in 1972. As Tait observed, she took on the role of gatekeeper; and from then on the gate was kept tightly shut.

Tait was one of several reviewers to perceive that the book was the outcome of a struggle between author and subject: ‘a truce between candour and guile’, as Robert McCrum put it in the Observer. My book benefited from access to my subject and his archive, but this came at a cost. In theory I was free to write what I thought fit; but in practice I was constrained. There was the obvious factor that it would have been difficult to proceed had le Carré withdrawn his co-operation, as seemed possible at one stage. Given that he was so protective of his privacy, I found myself questioning why David had agreed to co-operate with me, after seeing off several suitors in the past. Inasmuch as I was able to answer the question, I came to believe that he had two, partly contradictory motives: he wanted a serious biography commensurate with his stature as a serious writer, and he wanted to be able to control what was in it. One seasoned le Carré watcher believes that he encouraged the biography because he hoped to find out about himself, only to recoil in dismay when I held up the mirror.

Undertaking a life of a living person is always a compromise. Even an unauthorised biographer is inhibited by the law of libel. As biographers of T. S. Eliot and Ted Hughes have discovered to their cost, the law of copyright is another inhibitor when writing about a writer, because (broadly speaking) the writings of the living (or recently dead) may not be quoted without permission. The position is more ambiguous when a biography is being written with the consent of the subject; or even more so when the subject co-operates with the biographer. In a previous book I explored the tension between the two. The subject is, almost by definition, the senior figure; the biographer is in a subordinate position. Each is thinking about posterity. In any agreement between them there will be an element of quid pro quo: while the subject remains alive he or she retains some measure of control, even if the restraints are rarely visible. But the biographer is likely to have the last word.

Of course it is helpful to the biographer to meet and to become familiar with his or her subject (though not so helpful as one might imagine), but the more you come to know someone, the less inclined you are to upset them. Familiarity with your subject can be both an advantage and a handicap.

The recent history of biography offers contrasting precedents. James Atlas’s memoir The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (2017) recounts in excruciating detail the succession of mishaps and mistakes he made in writing his life of Saul Bellow, like mine published while his subject was still alive, in 2000. On the other hand, Patrick French was able to publish The World Is What It Is (2008), his authorised biography of V. S. Naipaul, during his subject’s lifetime, despite the fact that his book revealed damaging details about Naipaul’s private behaviour. ‘A great writer requires a great biography,’ George Packer wrote in his New York Times review of French’s book, ‘and a great biography must tell the truth.’

I had been aware from the outset that dealing with David wasn’t going to be easy. Robert Harris, who had been commissioned to write a life of le Carré almost twenty years earlier, warned me that I would never be able to publish in his lifetime. As it turned out he was wrong, but only partially so.

At the start David was welcoming, and we were immediately on first-name terms, so friendly that I often had to remind myself that we weren’t really friends at all, and that the cordiality could be withdrawn at any time – as I found had happened to others who thought of themselves as his friends.

Perhaps it helped that I was, and remain, an admirer of his work. In my opinion he is a writer of high class, worthy of comparison with the best. Assuming that people are still reading novels in a hundred years’ time, I think there is a good chance that they will be reading le Carré. For me, he is the definitive writer of the Cold War era: more than that, he is (as Blake Morrison has put it) ‘a laureate’ of Britain’s ‘post-imperial sleepwalk’ – a sleep from which, arguably, we have yet to wake. Like most readers, I think more highly of some of his books than others, and like many I think less well of the later novels than the ones written in what I consider to be his prime, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Naturally David wanted one to admire all his work, his most recent most of all.

In the introduction to my biography I described an episode that occurred early on. I had driven down to Cornwall for my first visit to Tregiffian, his isolated house on the cliffs above the shoreline near Land’s End, where his papers were kept. To reach it you had to turn off the road and drive several hundred yards along a grassy track towards the sea. I had not yet seen David when Jane set me to work, in an outhouse that served as his archive. It was a beautiful spring morning, so sunny and warm that I left the door ajar. After I had been there an hour or so I became aware of a shadow, and looked up from my desk to see David standing over my shoulder. It’s an image that stays in the reader’s mind, according to Tait:

The book depicts Cornwell as a man you wouldn’t want to cross: very clever and very touchy; helpful and generous towards those he trusts, but unforgiving and vindictive towards those he sees as a threat or a disappointment.

The crisis in my relations with David came after I began to uncover evidence of his extramarital affairs. In doing so I cannot claim any special skills as a detective; on the contrary, I learned about his lovers almost at random. I was told about one by some fellow guests at lunch with friends one Sunday; I heard about another late at night at a party, from someone I had just met. David’s half-sister Charlotte told me about another lover, an American photographer. When I contacted her, she responded openly, offering to talk; but after she had been in touch with David, her attitude changed completely. ‘I want no part in your book,’ she wrote to me. I heard about yet another woman, an Italian journalist, from a writer who knew David well. To him, she had spoken freely about her affair with David; but to me, she pretended that it had been a misunderstanding. As soon as one of David’s ex-lovers opened her mouth, it seemed, David shut her up.

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 of his work. It did occur to me too that a man who lives a double life is a man under constant pressure. Did this pressure energise the work? The life of a writer, even a bestselling writer, is not in itself very exciting: in essence it involves sitting alone in a room, with pen or keyboard. Tait was not the only reviewer to comment that the most interesting part of the biography was the story of my subject’s early years, before David Cornwell became John le Carré, and a few years afterwards. Perhaps the drama of the later years was hidden. Were sexual adventures a relief from the tedium of the writing life? Was the excitement of adultery, with the risk of exposure, a stimulus to creativity? Was it a substitute for spying?

*

John le Carré was an enigma, which made him a tempting subject for a biographer. From the beginning of his career as a writer in the early 1960s there had been speculation about him: in particular, about the extent to which his novels drew on his own experience. Almost inevitably his readers become intrigued by the writer. Even his pseudonym was a mystery. He provided several different explanations of why he chose the name John le Carré, and afterwards admitted that none of these was true.

Few were convinced by his early denials that he had been a spy. Later he admitted to having served in British intelligence; but the more he protested that this had been merely in a humble capacity, the more suspicion spread that he had really been a spymaster. Such ambiguity served his purpose. One feature of his intelligence background is that it allowed his often-cryptic utterances to go unchallenged, because they seemed based on secret knowledge. One can see why it was sometimes necessary for him to obfuscate, but at other times this seemed to arise from no more than a cultivated air of mystery. He encouraged the sense that he was concealing more than he revealed. And his long-lasting success meant that he was interviewed time after time, decade after decade. Each interviewer would mug up beforehand