It may not have been absolutely necessary to be a Midwesterner who traveled to the East Coast to write The Great Gatsby or a World War II veteran to pen The Naked and the Dead, but few would argue that the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer was not immeasurably enriched by the authors’ firsthand encounters with their subjects.
The great British spy novelist John le Carre, too, knew his subject cold.
Le Carre, who died last week at age 89, repurposed a fleeting, seemingly unremarkable stint in the British intelligence service into the stuff of a shelfful of brilliant novels, including a series of 10 books that either revolved around or prominently featured unassuming but keen-eyed intelligence officer George Smiley. When James Bond was burning up movie screens, Smiley was the favorite fictitious spy of the cynical set and Cold War-weary. Among these books are the classics The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), and Smiley’s People (1979).
Born in Dorset in 1931, le Carre entered this world as David Cornwell, the younger of two boys born to Ronald and Olive Cornwell. Little about his early days suggested the makings of either a future secret agent or wordsmith. When he was 5 years old, le Carre wrote in his engaging 2016 memoir The Pigeon Tunnel, Olive “slipped away in the night, disappearing for sixteen years before I rediscovered her in Suffolk, the mother of two other children who had grown up unaware of their half-brothers’ existence.” As for Ronald, a crook who apparently had had connections to the notorious criminals Ronnie and Reggie Kray, le Carre had this to say in his memoir: “Conman, fantasist, occasional jailbird, and my father.” It was not a literary household. “It was my father’s boast that he had never read a book from end to end,” le Carre said in an interview with the Paris Review in 1996.
Le Carre kicked around several schools before finding his way to the University of Bern. After two years, he had his introduction to the sort of cloak-and-dagger lifestyle he would later memorialize in fiction when he abandoned his studies to sign up with the Intelligence Corps in the British army. Making his way back to England, he studied at the University of Oxford, in time earning a degree in modern languages, and accepted a position as a teacher at Eton College.
Then, more spying. “After teaching at Eton, I went into the Cold War setup properly,” le Carre told the Paris Review. “In all, I don’t suppose that I spooked around for more than seven or eight years … but that was my little university for the purposes that I needed later to write.”
Le Carre’s seeming nonchalance about a milieu typically treated with a combination of fear and reverence distinguished him from predecessors such as Graham Greene or Ian Fleming. In the core novels of the extraordinary Smiley series, le Carre populated “The Circus,” a richly imagined version of the real-life MI6, with an assortment of hacks, functionaries, questionable characters, and, of course, a dastardly mole sniffed out by the heroic but hardly superhuman Smiley. The author said that he modeled Smiley on an intelligence officer he knew, “a moleish, tubby fellow,” he said, and a don he had met while attending Oxford. Le Carre contributed a despondent realism to a genre that had become too lazily romanticized.
Le Carre has been unusually well served by moviemakers drawn not just to his labyrinthine plots, but his well-rounded, realistic characters: George Roy Hill made a first-rate movie of The Little Drummer Girl, and John Boorman found ample inspiration in The Tailor of Panama. Most memorably, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has twice been placed before cameras: An iconic 1979 BBC miniseries starred Alec Guinness as Smiley, while an equally skillful 2011 feature film starred Gary Oldman, but, for all their differences, both men embodied the character’s sublimely bland approach to counterintelligence.
Heeding the advice of Hemingway, le Carre wrote about a world with which he was familiar, and readers around the globe are the wiser and considerably the more entertained for it.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
