This month sees the publication of not one but two books about the life of John le Carré. A Private Spy, the first collection of the late novelist’s letters, traces his path from boarding school boy to literary giant whose work has shaped our perception of the Cold War and beyond. A Secret Heart, meanwhile, by the pseudonymous Suleika Dawson, is a soon-to-be-published memoir of an adulterous affair with le Carré, which began when the book’s author was in her early twenties and single, while the married spy writer had just turned 50.
The memoir features lurid tales of marathon sex sessions – she describes the first time they went to bed as the “sex that only the hero and heroine can have; sex for the cameras, sex for the gods” – and talks about the way in which le Carré “ran” her as if she was his undercover agent.
Yet “Dawson”, an audiobook abridger at the time of the original two-year affair (there was a later six-month reprise), was just one of le Carré’s many infidelities, even though she claims to be “the love of his life”. The film producer Simon Cornwell, 65, le Carré’s eldest son from his 1954 marriage to Ann Sharp, tells me, “Two of my mum’s closest friends over the years were people with whom my dad had had quite intense relationships. And who came to my mum because she was the only person who would understand what they were going through. Was my mum angry, upset? Of course she was, and ultimately, they decided they couldn’t live together. That was his decision, not hers. But ultimately, was she forgiving of him? Absolutely.”
We’re talking via video call, with Simon in a hotel room in Budapest, and his youngest brother, the novelist Nick Harkaway (his pen name) – from le Carré’s second marriage, to book editor Jane Eustace, in 1972 – on a separate screen. “I was grumpy when I started getting a sense of the full scale of it,” 50-year-old Nick admits, of his father’s adultery, noting that his parents had neglected to tell him until it was too late. “I was like, well, actually, you could have told me that because I’ve made an ass of myself on a couple of occasions saying, no, no, none of this has ever happened.”
Later, I ask Simon, whether he worries about the emotional wreckage his father may have left in the lives of the women he had affairs with, especially Dawson, who was so much younger than the successful author, and who says she was left with “borderline clinical depression” after the relationship. He doesn’t want to comment on that, he tells me, nor, he adds, on the idea that it might now be viewed as sexual harassment – even if Dawson takes full responsibility for her part in the affair. “If Dad is to be regarded as a significant writer, and I think he was that, having a picture of every aspect of the man, and the processes he went through, the things he thought and felt, I think is really interesting,” he says. “So while it’s difficult reading for the family, I think this book has value.”
“I’ve known about my father’s affairs for quite a while,” adds Nick. “Suleika Dawson’s book makes it clear that she feels this was a relationship of mutual affection. So, you know, I miss my parents a lot and this doesn’t change my understanding of them.”
Indeed, Dawson’s story could already have been in the public domain. She was interviewed by le Carré’s biographer, Adam Sisman, but her account was not included in his 672-page rendering of le Carré’s life published in 2015. It has long been thought that le Carré himself – also, of course, a pseudonym, for the writer born David Cornwell – must have stepped in to block the more sensitive of Sisman’s discoveries. Yet, when I talk to Simon and Nick – a different picture emerges.
‘It’s not conventional but it is at least understandable’
We’re discussing A Private Spy, an erudite, witty and wide-ranging work compiled and edited by the third of le Carré’s four sons, the journalist Tim Cornwell, who died earlier this year. In one letter that John le Carré wrote to his elder brother Tony in 2012, he describes Sisman “going around ringing doorbells from one’s past”, and worries that “my love-life has always been a disaster area”, but concludes that what comes out will be “a gift of truth, of a sort, to my children, and one I could never hope to deliver myself”.
I wonder if he had second thoughts about this “gift”? “I would think my mother intervened, if intervention took place,” Nick says. “People misunderstood because she was extremely self-effacing… even people who knew them did not understand the degree to which she was a formidable presence in her own right. It was a marriage of equals. And if she felt that what Sisman was writing about needed to be reined in, she would have reined it in, and whatever Dad thought, you know, that would have been part of the conversation.”
“I know Adam does have lots and lots of material that wasn’t published and wasn’t included in the biography,” Simon notes. In fact, Sisman was able to identify 10 women with whom le Carré had affairs during his marriage – from the au pair who looked after his son, to the former model, to whom he proposed she move in to form a menage a trois, to the last affair he uncovered, with a German lawyer almost 50 years younger than him. And more than once he took a woman to his home when his wife was away, even sharing the marital bed. Yet, incorporating the more risqué elements of le Carré’s private life into the letters presented a problem. The writer of classics such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, who died of pneumonia after a fall in 2020, kept copies of most of his correspondence. “But what became apparent was that things that might be a bit too ‘hot’ mostly didn’t make it into the archive,” says Nick.
“There are one or two letters in the book to lovers or people who may have been,” says Simon. “But we had to go find them.”
They include one letter to the French humanitarian activist Yvette Pierpaoli (to whom le Carré dedicated The Constant Gardener), which does not suggest a passionate affair, although in his editor’s notes, Tim makes clear that it seems “quite likely” she was one of his lovers. Pierpaoli’s daughter burnt her mother’s letters from le Carré after her death in a car accident in Kosovo in 1999.
“It’s saying in a very French way, you know, what was between them shall be forever sacred, which I love,” says Nick. “But I wish I knew what that relationship really was. Because my mother really liked her. And that is unique, in this context. There’s a picture of Yvette hanging in what was my mother’s study in Tregiffian, the family home in Cornwall.” (The Cornwells lived close to Land’s End in west Cornwall; Jane, who died of cancer, survived le Carré by only two months.)
Then there is a letter to Susan Anderson, a museum curator in Los Angeles; their relationship appears to have been epistolary, but le Carré invites Anderson to write to him privately through intermediaries, gushing, “I kiss your eyelids, and your erudition, and I send you the rush of the Atlantic storm on the windows of my work room, and I relish you as the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“She’s just stupendous,” says Nick. “I can absolutely see how you fall in love with Susan Anderson.
“I feel like what [the letters] say about those relationships is the tangible reality and depth of them, however emotionally incontinent he was, to which I think the answer is totally… if you’re going to fall in love, repeatedly, sequentially, serially with magnificent people – it’s not conventional but it is at least understandable.”
One of the things Nick feels strongly about is that “there will be a moment where someone tries to say, of my mother, this poor woman was the victim of her husband’s infidelities. And she would have pushed back very hard on that. She would have said, I chose this again and again, and I won again and again. And, in their final years, specifically in the last 18 months, their contentment was remarkable… this was not a series of defeats, but a series of victories.”
Did they have to forgive their father for his infidelity to their mothers? “I suppose yes,” says Simon (le Carré left Simon, Stephen and Tim’s mother Ann in the late 1960s, after his affair with Susan Kennaway, wife of his friend the author James Kennaway – the collection includes the full text of his letter to Susan calling off the affair.) “But I was probably guided in that by my mum and, and also by Jane actually, with whom I was very close… I think Jane almost made the decision in advance to forgive David.”
“She was p----d off a lot of the time, but she stayed and she decided that was what she wanted,” Nick agrees. “I don’t get to diminish her decision by saying thunderously, you know, this is condemnable.”
‘Mild profanity with great fondness’
Over the course of its 700 pages, A Private Spy roves far and wide. There are ring-side seats for the writer’s spats with Graham Greene and Salman Rushdie – the former, over le Carré describing the Soviet double agent Kim Philby, whom Greene liked, as “vain, spiteful, and murderous”; the latter, over the publication of The Satanic Verses, with le Carré suggesting Rushdie should have withdrawn the book because of the danger it presented to the “innocent young men and women” in the “mail-rooms and stock-rooms” of his publishers. “Absolute free speech is not a God-given right in any country,” he rails. But, says Nick, “the moment something terrible happens to Rushdie, his [my father’s] compassion would kick in and override any other conversation”.
There’s an account, too, of le Carré’s refusal to meet Philby in Moscow, of which he later says, “I must have been a fool”, but Nick, who was with him at the time, remembers he was “pissed off” that someone would think it “cute and clever to put them in the same room… It felt like a slur on his good name.” Simon adds that his father “wouldn’t have been blown [as an MI6 spy] by Philby because he was already blown by George Blake [the MI6 officer]. But did he harbour a deep anger about Philby? Yes, I think so.”
What about the story that le Carré had considered defecting to the Soviet Union himself that once made front-page news in The Sunday Times, which the novelist suggested was a distortion of an unrecorded conversation and too much Calvados? “I think that was nonsense,” says Simon. “I mean, as a thought experiment, who wouldn’t? If he was doing his job as an agent…”
“I think his direct knowledge of the Russian state during his time as a spy was sufficient to persuade him that Stalinism was a really dreadful thing,” adds Nick.
In a 2018 letter to a close friend, le Carré makes the startling comment: “I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin’s position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that they have obtained him.” I wonder if he ever shared with his sons why he had “no doubt”. “I think it’s a statement of conviction – and from knowledge of who the sources were – more than of possession of data,” Simon says.
Le Carré did sometimes have access to secrets, though, he adds, at least up until the 1990s, when “he played a modest part in brokering a new relationship between Russia and the United States. There were informal dinners [at home] in Hampstead… between Russians and Americans at very high levels, who were ‘definitely not meeting’ and there they were together having a chat with the security sitting discreetly outside.”
There’s also a fascinating sketch about a luncheon with Dennis and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Dennis “drinks more than the rumours say, brays golf-club aphorisms at you… keeps referring to Mrs T as the future widow Thatcher. Reads. Likes Archer, likes me,” le Carré writes. Later, he compares Thatcher’s years in power to the Soviet Union, when “Brezhnev sold his country’s silver, plundered its resources, and the pigs-in-clover boys had a really good time”.
What would their father have made of Liz Truss’s avowed return to Thatcherism? “He would have laughed,” says Nick, “in a furious way. The situation we’re in right now, he would regard as the high, dark comedy of a really stupid government.”
Before his death, Simon notes, le Carré “had begun to play with a Boris Johnson story”. Did it explore a Russian connection? “No, I think actually it was a return to his Etonian roots.” Prior to joining the intelligence service in the late 1950s, the novelist taught French and German at Eton, long before the future prime minister boarded there, but in the final letter of A Private Spy, he refers to Johnson as “an Etonian oik”. (Le Carré once described the exclusive school’s former pupils as “a curse on the earth”.)
There are surprising details everywhere you look: “Kubrick wants to film Smiley’s People (1979), but I’ve turned him down for the Beeb,” le Carré writes in 1980. A missed opportunity, Simon concedes. Le Carré’s sons now “curate” his back catalogue, and a Gary Oldman-starring Smiley’s People sequel to Tomas Alfredson’s admired Tinker Tailor… is also off the cards.
There’s some fun at the expense of James Bond, too, in the letters, with le Carré describing him, tongue-in-cheek, as the “hyena who stalks the capitalist deserts”, and writing: “He has the one piece of equipment without which not even his formula would work: an entirely evil enemy.”
There was tension there, Nick admits, but, he laughs, “he also loved a really good Bond movie. We went to see GoldenEye and we all loved it.”
Le Carré talks in the letters about the “love of family” being his one “abiding, triumphant discovery”, describing himself as a “late-developed father and grandfather”. Did he struggle with fatherhood? Simon thinks he struggled less than perhaps he imagined he did. Nick notes that he was the first child not to be sent away to boarding school and tells of the father who, when he had had a nightmare, “suddenly, I’m sitting in my parents’ bed at six in the morning with Dad drawing all the figures from my nightmare as cartoons. And the terrifying dog that chased me through the hills became this kind of gloriously friendly, goofy animal.”
They’re not expecting anyone to be offended by the contents of the letters, not even Ian McEwan (le Carré describes one of his novels as “piss awful” in the letters). “Mild profanity with great fondness was very much part of the frame,” Nick says. “My phone would ring on a Wednesday evening and I’d pick it up and my dad’s voice would say, ‘Hello a---hole, how you doing?”
One unavoidable image is of le Carré wrestling with the events of his childhood throughout his life. There are breezy letters in the 1980s to his mother Olive, who walked out on the family when he was five, leaving no forwarding address. Much later, long after her death, he writes: “I’m starting to resent it very deeply.” Did he ever get over the hurt of being abandoned? “No,” Simon says, “whether the hurt became greater as he got older, or whether he simply found himself able to express it in a way that he hadn’t before,” he can’t say.
In the introduction, Tim explains how Olive had told him she left because his father Ronnie gave her venereal disease and beat her up. Ronnie, the flash conman who was twice sent to jail, weaves his way through the letters, as he does le Carré’s literary output, most notably in the portrait of him in A Perfect Spy. “He is the bastard who will con someone a third time, and then take their last tenner, not because he wants it or needs it, but because it’s there to do,” says Nick. Le Carré’s life is “a journey from wolf child to national treasure”, he decides.
Do they see his father’s son in their father? “I think he’s there all the time, one way or another,” Simon says.
A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell (Viking, £30), is out Oct 13
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