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

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An older woman with an eerily friendly voice started going over what the training for a job in clandestine affairs would entail. Voinov [a Soviet critic who reviewed A Spy Who Came In From The Cold], I suspect, smelt in my writing the greatest heresy of all: that there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery. I’ve had an amazing run,” he says when facing death, and exults in his life with Jane as two “old honeymooners on a cliff”. In the original piece I wrote that even if nobody else in the cinema liked it, I would still be clapping.

From The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which changed our understanding of the secret agent from guns and Martinis to shadows and moral ambiguity, to Agent Running in the Field, in which modern Britain is mired in political corruption, he catalogued our sins and recounted the journey of the Anglosphere into the twenty-first century. Subsequently he made a half-hearted offer to do so, but only under the pretense that she had sent it to him as a stranger. He asked her to forgive “the awful silence”; and assured her that “I’m not that person anymore and won’t be again. I also have no time to get into a pissing-match about the perfectly ludicrous article in the New York Times Magazine about [Kim] Philby, which was faxed to me from elsewhere.P.s was dashed by what he described as “an infuriating tradition of not being enthusiastic about anything, or surprised. In a 1950 letter to his girlfriend Ann, le Carré wrote that he had been captured, stripped naked, and beaten.

By the time his third novel, “ The Spy Who Came In from the Cold,” was written, his publisher was offering a huge, life-altering advance.He kept his cold war career under wraps for more than 20 years, until Newsweek blew his gaff in 1983. By treating me as you would like to, you will not remove the root causes of your anger, which I suspect are insecurity and borrowed shame.

The eyeballs are straighter, the perfect vowels are prerecorded, each sentence makes a deadly point and jokes are out of place unless they are hers. There was, he knew, something more enduring about his work, even though it depended on the knowledge he’d acquired inside the secret tent: It was literature. Yet it wasn’t all bad, or not as bad as the time le Carré had spent at school: “There is astonishing liberalism in many ways—not the least of these being the number of boys who are so terribly bad at games that Sherborne would have had a fit, and whose lives remain unimpaired by this handicap.

Usually they were dreary, evasive letters loosening vows at the same time they renewed them, qualified, haunted, the reverse of reassuring. When he learned Sydney Pollack was thinking of taking a break from directing to act, le Carré assured him it was the right move: “You really don’t have to be Zeus all the time. David sent her a message saying that he wanted to talk to her, but she declined, a decision she now regrets. Susan, concerning my insecurities: these letters that you kiss, and which as time goes by contain my closest secrets, or may … I care terribly that they should never see the light of day.

Le Carré’s own spies are bureaucrats, weary men in suits just trying to get a case in the win column. Pulling a thread that leads him through war-ravaged Laos to Thailand, Westerby ends up at an American military base just as Saigon falls. His authority springs from experience, ages of it, compassion, and at root an inconsolable pessimism which gives a certain fatalism to much that he does. But the day after he had sent this, he received a reassuring letter from her, explaining why she had not written: in the remote Blue Ridge Mountains she had been unable to get to a post office. It helped enormously that a new book was germinating, The Tailor of Panama, which he would eventually rate as one of his best.

There’s no naming names here, either, but the letters to Susan Anderson (a museum curator) and Yvette Pierpaoli (an aid worker) read like those of a lover, and to Susan Kennaway, his affair with whom is well known, he describes himself as “a mole too used to the dark to believe in light”. The article was otherwise so crowded with inaccuracies that I for one would not know how to address it without cutting it to pieces. I identified most naturally with Webster, of course, who was surely one of your most delicious conceits. In any case, David Cornwell’s career as a spy ended the year after his breakthrough novel was published: Philby, it is widely believed, blew his cover. The wonder pills I have been taking for the same complaint have run their course, and the next stage is to nuke me with an experimental radioactive infusion every six weeks.