John Le Carré and the Many Shadings of Privacy
How solitude and privacy played out in the life of spy novelist John Le Carré (1931-2020).
As someone who loves spy novels, I couldn’t resist putting The Secret Life of John Le Carré by Adam Sisman on my to-read list. This slim 2023 book revealed how the popular author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and many other acclaimed novels on the world of espionage himself actually led a double life. He carried on many, many undercover love affairs with the subterfuge of codes, fake names, dead letter boxes, safe houses and so on.
What interested me most when I finally read the book recently was not the details of his clandestine adulteries so much as the nuances of privacy in the life of this world-famous British writer.
David Cornwell – Le Carré’s real-life name – was an introvert who had the ability to be exceptionally charming in company. This combination of traits made him very well suited for the unspecified work he did for British Intelligence prior to his breakout success as an author. After all, the spy business runs on being able to convincingly play various deceptive roles while keeping certain things to oneself.
Like many writers, Cornwell cherished being left alone and working alone. In a 2017 “60 Minutes” TV segment on him, he told his interviewer that he loved living by the sea in Cornwall, about as far west from London as possible, because his neighbors “don’t give a damn for celebrity, if they even know what I do,” he said. “Not a head turns in the street when I walk by, and that’s enormously soothing.” In the barnlike studio on his property, he would spend mornings alone with his characters and his words. He walked in the afternoons and edited his work in the evening. And when traveling to soak in foreign atmosphere for his books, he deliberately did so alone, maximizing his opportunities to observe.
Yet when he hung out with friends, he became a “social dazzler,” in the words of a writer who profiled him for Vanity Fair in 1989. A gifted mimic, he would spin stories that kept a roomful of dinner companions rapt. That ability to keep others enthralled probably went back to his unusual childhood, as the son of a roguish con man whose escapades had the family living like royalty one week and like paupers the next. As a boy, David Cornwell learned to cover for his father with fluent lies, plausible excuses and clever compartmentalization.
His exuberant social persona coexisted with barriers protective of his inner self. As reported in Sisman’s book, here is how that worked for Nicholas Shakespeare, a friend who was a generation younger than Cornwell:
“Though the two men became very close, and remained friendly until the end, David was not someone whom he felt able to ring up and have a chat with. While very open with him when they were together, David was at the same time immensely private, and guarded his privacy to a ruthless degree, frequently changing his telephone numbers to exclude unwanted callers.”
What had me scratching my head after finishing Sisman’s exposé, published after Cornwell’s death, was the earlier tug-of-war collusion between Cornwell and Sisman, which proceeded as follows. Cornwell agreed in writing to cooperate with Sisman on a biography that the latter researched and then published in 2015. In the course of his research, Sisman inadvertently learned about several of the affairs that Cornwell had conducted in secret. When Sisman pursued the clues that had turned up, the women involved initially talked, then later clammed up, apparently on orders from Cornwell. He thus left such stories out of his Le Carré biography. After the deaths of both Cornwell and his loyal wife Jane, Sisman corrected the record by chronicling a number of Cornwell’s infatuations, ruses and betrayals in a second book.
What puzzles me is, first, why Cornwell agreed to cooperate with the biography at all, knowing that it would probably be published during his lifetime. Perhaps Cornwell believed he was so skilled at deception and concealment that he was confident he could control his biographer’s narrative. And second, why did Sisman agree to publish the original biography with such significant omissions that he felt duty-bound to supplement it with The Secret Life of John Le Carré later? I did not find Sisman’s justifications in the corrective volume convincing.
Aside from those psychological and ethical issues, I came away from this topic appreciating another variation on the theme of how introverts manage to be in the public eye while remaining fundamentally private. David Cornwell rationed his participation in interviews, but he performed amiably and persuasively when they took place. Wary about being perceived as part of the Establishment or as a participant in literary rankings, he turned down a knightship and refused to let his books be submitted for the prestigious Booker Prize. He broadcast the image of a cozy and faithful marriage while his loyal, hoodwinked wife not only typed up every line he wrote but also shielded him from interruptions while he connived to meet mistress after mistress. David Cornwell made partial peace with being a public figure, but secretly and privately he lived his life his own way.