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’s not why we’re so fascinated by the prospect of a writer’s private correspondence. In her 1940 essay The Humane Art, Virginia Woolf observes that “the letter writer is no surreptitious historian… he speaks not to the public at large but to the individual in private”. What we want from a collection of letters is a glimpse behind the curtain, a sense of who that person was among friends and family. Le Carré had already produced a memoir, but the letters promise a different kind of intimacy: a more dynamic sense of his personal relationships and the exchange of ideas.
But can a letter ever offer a truly unvarnished portrait and would we really want one? A writer with a career as eminent as Le Carré’s will have known that his correspondence would be a valuable part of his legacy and the forthcoming collection has been edited by his son Tim Cornwell, so while there may be curiosities and surprises, it seems unlikely that we will encounter anything that might demand a re-evaluation of the life. Private letters might give the illusion of eavesdropping on a conversation, but a written correspondence, even to close friends, can be as much of a performance as anything intended for publication, particularly for a writer who must have “sometimes looked over his page at the distant horizon”, as Woolf puts it.
Recently, at a friend’s funeral, the celebrant quoted that famous line of Philip Larkin’s: “What will survive of us is love.” It’s a comforting sentiment, taken at face value, but Larkin’s sardonic poem Posterity offers a more brutally honest view of what we leave behind; he imagines his future biographer, bored in a US archive: “I’m stuck with this old fart at least a year.”
Certainly, Larkin’s own copious letters have ensured that what survives of him is a picture of a resentful, emotionally constipated misanthrope with unpalatable opinions – and that’s after 30 volumes of his private papers were shredded at his instruction, so we can only imagine what was in those. And, of course, we do. There’s always a sense of outrage at the idea of a writer’s words being destroyed to keep them from the public, even (especially) when it’s the author’s own decision, as if we, the readers, had a God-given right to scrutinise their every utterance.
Perhaps another reason for the excitement about Le Carré’s letters is that he belongs to one of the last generations who will leave behind such a rich trove of correspondence in this form. Even in 1940, Woolf was lamenting the decline of letter-writing in the face of new modes of communication. “The wireless and the telephone have intervened,” she complains, predicting that “instead of letters posterity will have confessions, diaries, notebooks… in which the writer talks in the dark to himself about himself…” She might have been anticipating social media.
Letters have enjoyed a resurgence of popularity recently precisely because they are a dying art and we miss them. Shaun Usher’s wonderful Letters of Note website, and its subsequent books and live shows, tapped into a nostalgia for a more thoughtful way of communicating. It’s possible, I suppose, that decades after the leading writers of my generation are dead, actors will read out their collected WhatsApp exchanges on stage, but it’s unlikely to have the same impact. My generation is also the last that can hope to find forgotten caches of letters in the attic after our parents are gone, like those that inspired Simon Garfield’s 2015 book My Dear Bessie, a wartime love story pieced together from surviving correspondence.
It makes me wonder what I’ll leave behind for my son to edit if I live another 40 years. There are specialist services now that advise on leaving digital assets to your beneficiaries, although bequeathing him my phone passcode so he can access a handful of regrettable sexts from years ago isn’t quite the same as stumbling across an old shoebox of yellowing love letters tied up in ribbon. Most of my exchanges with fellow writers now take place on Twitter and that technology will no doubt become obsolete in time. And yet it is a shame, when I consider some of the brilliant writers I know, to think that there will be nothing left to discover in their archives because we’ve all grown so used to blurting our every thought in public on a platform that won’t endure.
Perhaps it’s not too late to revive the humane art of letter-writing. If I start now, given the state of Royal Mail, some of them might even arrive in time to be published posthumously.
• Stephanie Merritt’s latest novel is While You Sleep
