The books don’t stop: after John le Carré’s death in 2020 came his 26th novel, Silverview, published last year, and now further treasure arrives from the vault in the shape of A Private Spy, a 750-page selection of le Carré’s letters over the course of his long life, taking us from wartime schooldays to locked-down old age, as he deplores the “unholy mess” of a pandemic-ravaged Britain nearing hard Brexit.
Yes, the editorial introduction more or less admits that Adam Sisman has already plucked the juiciest items for his 2015 biography John le Carré. Still, this is a companionable volume all the same, rich in local interest from starry correspondents (Margaret Thatcher, Stephen Fry, Tom Stoppard – who hears that le Carré “wasn’t convinced, wasn’t moved” by Silverview, which he “dumped” in 2014), as well as enjoyable exchanges with fans: when a high-up at Avis writes in delight that one of le Carré’s characters uses his firm, le Carré jokes he’ll be sure to make his villains use Hertz in future.
He’s huffy as well as warm, haranguing Clive James’s editor over a bad review and ticking off an American cartoonist for a gag about his obsolescence after the fall of the Soviet Union. Both hit sore spots. The idea that he was a genre novelist always rankled and probably fed his notoriously adversarial post-fatwa response to Salman Rushdie (“Would the same people have leapt to the defence of a Ludlum or an Archer?”). The letters show too how he strove with increasing energy to keep his books topical once the cold war receded from the headlines. “I… am trying to set a novel around the fortunes of a young Chechen Muslim who finds himself in Hamburg,” he writes to a German human rights lawyer while at work on A Most Wanted Man (2008). “I would love the opportunity of a background briefing from you concerning the Muslim community in Bremen and in Hamburg.”
Entitlement jostles with an unexpected lack of nerve: le Carré’s letters show the bizarre extent to which, say, fixing up a meeting with a yacht broker in Miami, or getting a friend’s Spanish-speaking nephew to ferry him around Panama, came to supplant imagination in matters of plot construction. Or was it only conscientiousness? We see le Carré buy a “sensitivity read” avant la lettre from an Israeli journalist while at work on 1983’s The Little Drummer Girl, about Israel-Palestine: “I will have written things which are inaccurate/inadvertently offensive/unfair, etc. Our job, together, is to get the fictional ‘record’ as straight as possible.”
A Private Spy is edited by one of le Carré’s sons, Tim Cornwell, who died this summer having prepared the book for publication. His introduction notes an “obvious omission”: the author’s numerous lovers during his life as a twice-married father of four. In 1993 (as a letter here shows), le Carré sued a would-be biographer seeking to expose his private life and got the book cancelled; in 2010, he agreed to Sisman’s approach on the proviso that he could draw heavy red lines, all but excluding what he called “disloyalties” and “inconstancies of mind & behaviour” towards his second wife, Jane Cornwell, who died last year.
Here to fill in a few blanks – and how – is new memoir The Secret Heart, by one of those lovers, Suleika Dawson, who first met le Carré in 1982 as “a tall, blonde city girl not long out of college and generally up for anything”. She was abridging novels for a pioneering audiobook firm; when le Carré arrives to read Smiley’s People, his “do-me-gently” voice resembles “a fabulous seduction in the back of a luxuriously upholstered high-end motor”. They hook up a year later, when le Carré, recording The Little Drummer Girl, confides that he’ll never write another novel because he’s grieving his lover Janet Lee Stevens, a Middle East-based journalist whose local knowledge helped with the book. (She died in an embassy bombing in Beirut while fetching him research – per Dawson, quoting le Carré – possibly while pregnant with his child; A Private Spy prints le Carré’s letter of condolence to her parents but omits the unspoken context.)
Dawson gets le Carré’s pen running again, and the rest, as they fall into a rhythm of furtive nights at home and abroad. Rising early to write, he leaves her to bathe and “draw out [his] fluids”, the abundance of which amazes him (“It’s just so different with you, my darling”). TMI? We’ve barely started. If you ever wanted to know le Carré’s pick-up lines (“Would a girl like a quick fuck?”) or what turned him on in bed (a mirror, porn on mute, plenty of chat; the day “he switched to German… everything was off even his previous charts”), then here’s the book for you. The sex is “the most tender and truest… either of us had known” (he “drove himself into me like a ploughshare”, etc; at one point, she and le Carré make visible steam). He sends flowers to fill “all the vases I had” (“I had to run across the road to Habitat to buy more”), yet by 1985 Dawson feels like “one of those unlucky addresses that keep getting burgled… I couldn’t go on”.
“Oh, God.” Such, apparently, were le Carré’s words to Sisman when the biographer told him he’d spoken to Dawson while digging for his 2015 book and no wonder. The real revelation here isn’t what was between the sheets, or between le Carré’s legs (though we do get a passage about his Speedos), but what was between his ears: at one point, he pins Dawson by the throat, teeth bared, hissing in accusation that she purposely clacked about in heels while he phoned Jane. His theatrical need for secrecy, which ultimately caused the affair’s terminal breakdown after a relapse in 1999, isn’t easy to square with Dawson’s abundant testimony of being wined and dined about town – running into Pinter one night, Frederick Forsyth the next – or with how le Carré sold his writing flat to the author William Shawcross with her poster-size nude shot still hanging in the bedroom.
Shrewdly, Dawson puts analysis of the situation in the mouth of her boss, who tells her – between points at Wimbledon’s centre court, naturally – that she’s “a rich man’s mistress now… it’s the tension he likes – creative or otherwise – the ducking and diving between all the moving parts”. For Dawson, as well as the reader, le Carré’s MO sometimes comes to seem like an experiment in method writing that got wildly out of hand, no doubt fuelled by the psychic legacy of a fraught upbringing by his conman father, Ronnie Cornwell.
Rejuvenated by Dawson’s attentions, le Carré writes 1986’s A Perfect Spy – the “best English novel since the war” for Philip Roth, who might have been still more enthusiastic had he known the circumstances of its composition. Dawson’s tell-all never once claims victimhood, yet hints at the cost; while much of the material lends itself to sniggering, sure, it’s unmistakably sad by the end. Filling gaps in her lover’s story seems to entail silence about Dawson’s own: episodes involving late-life care for her widowed father (during which her radio silence made le Carré fret) only underline the bravado behind her dogged self-presentation as a good-time girl in Burberry and heels. There’s a bigger book here – she doesn’t need to play second fiddle in her own life too.
• A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell, is published by Viking (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• The Secret Heart: John le Carré: An Intimate Memoir by Suleika Dawson is published by Mudlark (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
