“I hate the telephone, I don't know how to type and I ply my trade by hand,” wrote John le Carré (1931-2020) in a letter to his editors in 1996. The writer gave few interviews, he let his novels speak for him. Those who maintained frequent dialogue with Le Carré did so through letters. According to his son Tim Cornwell (1962-2022), John le Carré always knew that the letters would be the subject of attention. That is why he decided to collect seven decades of his father's correspondence in A private spy (Planeta/ Edicions 62), the book on which he worked until his death last year and which reveals his father's most intimate voice, one of the best postwar novelists. His archive of correspondence sheds light on his complex childhood, his profession as a spy, and his development as a literary author. Additionally, he discovers the lesser-known side of Le Carré as a talented illustrator.
The hundreds of recipients of John le Carré's letters include important figures in politics, literature, the publishing world, and, of course, his former profession as a spy. From Margaret Thatcher, whom he described after meeting her personally as “one of those politicians who are even more unreal than her wax figures.” Even the writer and screenwriter Graham Greene, to whom he confessed: “there are few writers, living or dead, whose support I would value more than his.” After he publicly said that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was “the best spy story” he had ever read.
A man “capricious in his relationships” but “desperate to preserve the sovereignty of his heart.” According to his son Tim Cornwell, the lovers in le Carré's life were not scarce, although in the book there are only a handful of letters to them. “I would marry you, I would take you away, but I never will and you must know it now,” he wrote to Susan Kennaway, wife of the Scottish writer and friend of Le Carré, John Kennaway. The romance between them did not prosper, but his story with Susan was the one that later inspired his novel The Naive and Sentimental Lover.
“Ever since I started writing about Smiley, I dreamed of you playing him one day,” le Carré wrote to Sir Alec Guinness on February 7, 1978. Those were the words that began a long and significant professional relationship between the two. . The British actor played the role of George Smiley in the television adaptations of le Carré's books. “You are neither chubby nor do you have a double chin,” the novelist told Guinness in his attempt to convince him to accept the role. His interpretation of Smiley is considered one of the most iconic and remembered in spy cinema, “a marvel,” in the words of Le Carré.
The book also collects many of the author's responses to his readers. “You're too young to be dishonest,” he responded to a ten-year-old boy who asked him what he should do to become a spy. “You have a good example of me in my most primitive state,” he wrote to Martina Wieggandt, a reader who pointed out some inconsistencies in the plot of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. “The book is riddled with inaccuracies,” Le Carré explained. Although he had the opportunity to correct them in later editions, he chose to preserve his original writing. “It would have been unfair to the reader and, in a way, to me as well.”
He often signed his letters as David Cornwell (his real name), in others he hid under John le Carré. On two occasions he even signed himself as Napoleon, a character for whom he apparently expressed a certain fascination. His interest in politics and his complex relationship with England will endure until his last writings. In his letters, he calls Prime Minister Tony Blair an "arch-sophist" and Boris Johnson an "Eton Oik" (a classless man). In A Decent Man, the last novel he wrote, he mentions the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union. Brexit was “an act of economic suicide mounted by charlatans,” a “truly embarrassing” process, he wrote in 2016 to his friend and novelist Nicholas Shakespeare. “I hate Brexit, I hate Trump, I fear a rise of white fascism everywhere and I take the threat very seriously.”
“Writing is nothing if it is not obsessive,” said John le Carré. In the publishing industry, the author of 25 novels demanded a high level of professionalism. A letter addressed to the international publisher Penguin in 2009 sets out some of the conditions that the writer demanded from his collaborators. “I write all my books by hand. Jane (his second wife), and no one else, endlessly rewrites everything I write.” He strongly requested that they not offer him Christmas gifts or commemorative editions to surprise him on his birthday, and he also made it clear that he read very few books a year. “I haven't read thrillers for decades and I know almost nothing about contemporary writers. “I dislike the literary environment.”
“If a writer is useful for anything, it is to express out loud what others perhaps feel and cannot express.” From The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to A Decent Man, le Carré's works defined the Cold War era and continued to speak truth to power in the decades since. “I have not experienced a single day of boredom among my father's words,” confesses Tim Cornwell, his son and the editor of A Private Spy.
