A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020

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Of course, only fans of John le Carré will want to read this book. But for those of us who are, and who have read all his books, this one is catnip.

A Private Spy - Penguin Books UK

It’s not hard to see why. In Smiley’s People — the third act of the trilogy of masterly Cold War novels that began with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — le Carré's ruthless Russian spymaster, Karla, schemes to protect his only weak point, the small, broken thing at the heart of his being, his schizophrenic, secret child. To smuggle her to safety from his enemies in Russia, Karla sends an agent to the west to find a discreet mental hospital and a convincing false identity, “a legend for a girl”. At the Berlin film festival with his wife Valerie Jane Cornwell. Photograph: Franziska Krug/Getty Images No one is a peeping tom for reading (or writing) about this, Sisman says. “The more we can understand this complex, driven, unhappy man, the more we can appreciate his work.” Was le Carré’s hectic adultery “an ersatz form of spycraft”? Method writing for his bestselling tales of double-cross? Fallout from being abandoned by his mother and molested by his conman father? All of the above, Sisman speculates, adding that “the literature of early German romanticism… took a grip on him at an early age”. No doubt, but as he also points out, with almost risible solemnity, his lovers were mostly younger women, “some of them much younger. One was the au pair looking after his youngest son.” We can probably keep Goethe out of it. The erudition of many of these letters is what is so impressive. Just writing to a friend, he could not write a badly composed letter.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

John le Carré obituary | John le Carré | The Guardian John le Carré obituary | John le Carré | The Guardian

Thanks so much for your very touching letter. Your feelings about Brexit spoke into my heart. Just now I wd rather be Dutch, German, French, or for that matter Polish, than a Brit subjected to this truly shaming process in which we are engaged. ....When a much-loved author dies, fans and publishers cling for a while to the hope that an undiscovered manuscript lurks in a drawer, promising a final echo of that familiar voice. So last week’s news that a collected volume of John le Carré’s letters will be published in November understandably sent a frisson through the literary world. Le Carré achieved the rare double of popular and critical acclaim, but his life offered as much intrigue as any of his plots: his fraudster father; the formative years in the intelligence services; the glittering literary and film career; the vocal political engagement. There’s also his longevity: the letters span the decades from his 1940s childhood to the days before his death in December 2020, aged 89. Few people could be as well placed to offer such a comprehensive first-hand account of recent history. But that imagination brought real attention to such topics as arms dealing, pharmaceutical company abuse of large populations (LONG before the opioid crisis), and institutional abuses to individuals during the so-called War on Terrorism.

John le Carré’s letters may be boring — but his mistress’s John le Carré’s letters may be boring — but his mistress’s

Ann mouse has become very severe since she’s discovered she’s married wealth. Not at all sure she approves. It’s all right, I suppose, as long as you don’t enjoy it. Like sex on Sundays. Ex-spy and eminent British novelist John le Carré, pictured here in July 1993. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Let me go straight to your points. 64 is the ideal age. Smiley can’t be less, arithmetically, and I fear that he may be more, though I have deliberately arrested the passage of time in the later books! So nobody is at all worried on that score, and you must not be either. One of his sons worked hard to compile letters he wrote to others, since he didn't keep a file copy of his own handwritten letters. Once he started faxing them, a copy would often be saved. Still, there's a lot here, and it is a window into a person's mindset over time (he died in 2020 at age 89). No, you are not rotund or double chinned, though I think I have seen you in rôles where you have, almost as an act of will, acquired a sort of cherubic look! … This is probably the last major piece of work we'll see about him, unless someone does a big biography. But frankly, with “The Pigeon Tunnel” combined with this book, there may not be that much material left untold that would warrant another book. As time passes, the tone becomes more polished and self-aware, an explanation for which can be found in one of the author’s many illustrations (available with the audiobook in an accompanying digital file). Next to a wonderfully lugubrious self-portrait, le Carré writes of his plan to “cultivate that intense, worried look and to start writing brilliant, untidy letters for future biographies”.

John le Carré A complex, driven, unhappy man: the truth about John le Carré

James Bond, on the other hand, breaks no such Communist principles. You know him well. He is the hyena who stalks the capitalist deserts, he is an identifiable antagonist, sustained by capital and kept in good heart by the charms of a materialist society; he is a chauvinist, an unblinking patriot who makes espionage exciting. Bond on his magic carpet takes us away from moral doubt, banishes perplexity with action, morality with duty. Above all, he has the one piece of equipment without which not even his formula would work: an entirely evil enemy. Le Carré's letters reveal a man who could at times be ingenuous, even dishonest, with those closest to him He never knew when he went home for school holidays which of his father’s mistresses would be waiting to greet him, and deception and lying were the ways adult life seemed to work. He and his older brother, Tony, developed skills in observation and reading between the lines, targeted at their father. They read Ronnie’s letters, and rifled through his filing cabinets in the hope of uncovering their father’s complex web of lies. Passionate in devotion to his children, Ronnie in turn kept his boys under constant surveillance, listening to their phone calls, searching their rooms, opening their mail. Life with Ronnie was an apprenticeship in espionage.David Cornwell's letters offer the reader a view of his opinions on subjects from his love for his wife and mistresses to his total disdain of Tony Blair, Donald Trump, Brexit, and Putin (He really understood what moved each of them and distrusted Putin from the beginning in which sense he was prescient). I have loved John le Carre's writing for some time. I have many of his books. My concern in reading books like this are the first question: Were they writing for posterity? Is there a falsity to the correspondence? In this case, I would say "no." John le Carré and his wife, Jane, at the Berlin film festival, 2001. Photograph: Franziska Krug/Getty Images