Biography is not an easy trade, but biographies of the living are especially deadly. A biography of a deceased person allows the author to unmask, judge, and even to dislike their subject. When it comes to the living, most life-writers must cozy up to their subjects, flatter them, woo them, and assure them their life is literally safe in their hands. So it can be enjoyable to try to guess where things have gotten sticky. I would say that Adam Sisman, author of biographies on the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and A.J.P. Taylor, and David Cornwell, the real name of the author who writes as John le Carré, started off well, with Cornwell happy to talk about an upbringing he had already well furrowed in his own fiction. But I would guess that things began to sour and Cornwell began to clam up when his adult personal life came up for discussion. It shows.
Although the book’s early chapters cover the usual ground of England in that era—prep school, minor public school, national service, Oxford—they are much enlivened by the fantastical figure of Cornwell’s father. Ronald (“Ronnie”) Cornwell was a “businessman” whose business was finding ways to swindle other people. Not above cashing checks that incriminated his wife or borrowing money from his young sons before disappearing, his crookedness is best summed-up by a member of his criminal fraternity who told his offspring at his funeral, “We was all bent, son,” before adding admiringly, “But your dad was very, very bent.” The presence of Ronnie and the absence of David’s mother, who one day simply walked out on her husband and young sons, proved fine wells on which the future novelist would draw. But for his biographer they are oases after which things get slightly arid.
Once Ronnie is dead, and there are no more calls coming from faraway places requesting help with bail, the personal details begin to disappear. David’s first marriage falls apart, and there is a strange Jules et Jim relationship with the author James Kennaway and his wife. But apart from that, the narrative of Cornwell’s life soon flattens out into the boring routine of a successful writer who has become John le Carré and who doesn’t want anything else to be pried into. After the success in 1963 of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, this biography soon becomes a recitation of the writing of books, publication details, summaries of critical reception, accounts of sales figures, and, finally, accounts of the casting, making, and reception of the films of the books. By the biography’s end, we are being informed about contractual arrangements between le Carré and various of his publishers and also about the restructuring of certain publishing houses in the London area.
None of which is what I imagine readers would come to this book for. So what would they come for? What even makes a biography of John le Carré worth publishing? That question can be answered in a single word: “spookery.” Because, of course, le Carré is a master of the higher-end of the spy genre—a genre that uniquely encourages the lowering of voices as well as a marked adrenaline-release in the male of the species. Even a drop of this stuff can have extraordinary effects on the public, and it is unarguable that not only has le Carré been one of the most commercially successful novelists of his generation, he has also given enormous pleasure to millions of readers around the world.
For years after becoming a full-time writer, le Carré pretended that he had been a humble civil servant in his 20s. In fact, he appears to have been recruited to do a little bit of spying on fellow students while still at Oxford before joining MI5 (Britain’s domestic intelligence service) and then moving to the rather more exciting MI6 (the foreign intelligence service). In this latter role he served in Germany, where he picked up much of the atmosphere and some of the characters for his Cold War masterpieces. But he was always careful to talk around direct questions about his own involvement in the business, and not—one suspects—only for security reasons.
It took until the 1980s, when he had a new novel on the Middle East to promote (The Little Drummer Girl), for le Carré to tell an interviewer that “I have nosed around the secret world.” Latterly, he has returned to evading questions on the matter, recently claiming national security reasons. But truthfully, le Carré was never at a nearly senior enough level for such concerns to still apply, and it is not as though he hasn’t gone over what experiences he had in his fiction. His evasiveness on spook issues seems more likely to have occurred for the simple reason that the exciting authenticity that any connection to the secret world brings would pall if the low-level nature of le Carré’s involvement were ever that clear. In any case, slight though his connection to that world might have been, it has been very good both for his fiction and for his bank balance.
The more pertinent question that now hangs over him is: Is the stuff any good? To my mind, the novels which are said to “cement” his reputation as a great writer as opposed to a great genre writer (A Perfect Spy, to name one) are overwritten, overlong, and underwhelming. If I am going to read a book on spooks, I am content with a real page-turning shocker of derring-do; If I wish to read a more serious novel, then I will read a more serious novel. But this is a matter of taste, and le Carré has notable defenders to whom one should listen (Ian McEwan, for instance) who have insisted—particularly in recent years as the object of their admiration has entered his 80s—that we should regard le Carré as one of our great writers and not merely as a purveyor of highly successful genre fiction.
Undoubtedly, le Carré captured something. After the certainties—not to say absurdities—of Ian Fleming’s fictional world, John le Carré brought uncertainty, complexity, and an undoubted insight and depth to the spy novel. Few writers in any genre caught a central portion of the Cold War so successfully. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and despite his own protestations, le Carré unarguably lost his subject. As this biography makes clear, he always wanted to write novels that weren’t about “the circus” (as he referred to the British end of the spying business), but when he did they were generally less well received and he went back to doing what his public wanted.
His last 25 years have not been entirely praiseworthy. Despite others’ claims for his prescience, when Islamic terrorism hit the West, le Carré was writing about the horrors of pharmaceutical companies. By the mid-2000s, an undoubted crankiness crept in. His loathing of George W. Bush and Tony Blair led to him allying with the worst Socialist Workers party elements against Bush and telling an interviewer in 2005 that, because of Blair, Britain was sliding towards becoming a “fascist state.” Truthfully, this strand was always there: Bill Haydon’s admission of guilt in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy gave an early version of the point of view that le Carré himself ended up drifting towards: In the end, there was not so much moral difference between the Soviet Union and American capitalism.
There may be excuses for coming to this conclusion—too close a proximity to the coal-face of espionage, a youth spent in a declining power that had recently ceded its leadership role to the United States—but it constitutes an unarguable intellectual and moral failing. There is a good anecdote here of what happened when Margaret Thatcher invited le Carré to a dinner in Downing Street. The author had recently been in the Middle East researching The Little Drummer Girl and meeting with (among others) Yasser Arafat. Ever one to get to the point, Thatcher asked her dinner companion whether there was anything in particular he wanted to say to her. Yes, he replied: He thought that the Palestinians deserved greater sympathy from the British government. “The Prime Minister’s face darkened. ‘They were the people who trained the people [the IRA] who killed my friend Airey Neave,’ ” she scolded him.
Perhaps the crankiness is a peril of living in this literary terrain. David Cornwell saw some personal darkness and some professional conundrums. As John le Carré, he transmuted both into publishing gold. In a notorious 2008 Sunday Times interview—over which it is my understanding (though this is not mentioned in this book) that le Carré threatened to sue—he appeared to suggest that he had thought of “going over” during the Cold War. Of course, this was le Carré speaking late into the evening. Who knows if it is true or not? As this biography makes clear, memory and false memory, fact and fiction, were always undelineated things in his world, as they were for his father. However, unlike his father, he made something of it, and has left his biographer to do what he can—against some evident odds—with that fact.
Douglas Murray is the author of Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas and Neoconservatism: Why We Need It.
