Title: A Private Spy - The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020
Author: Edited by Tim Cornwell *
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 713 including chronology, acknowledgements, sources and index
Price: £30.00
Format: Hardback
Published: October 13 2022
ISBN: 9780241550090
Anyone who has known John le Carré, either directly or indirectly, under his pen name or as David Cornwell, even David John Moore Cornwell, will find much of interest in this collection of his letters, faxes and emails, from the age of 14 to just before his death, aged 89, on December 12 2020.
Some will relish the letters to star names in show business and literature, of whom Alec Guinness, written to in connection with his decision to accept the challenge to play George Smiley in the BBC serialisation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, surely needs no introduction. Other household or near-household names include Graham Greene, Sir Tom Stoppard, Ben Macintyre, Victor Gollancz, Jonny Geller, Sydney Pollack, Pierce Brosnan, John Boorman, Gary Oldman, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.
Others will relish letters voicing what some will today describe as 'unwoke' opinions relating to European political stability in the wake of the metaphorical collapse of the Berlin Wall. The writer makes specific and sometimes uncomplimentary references to French people, Germans, Poles, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Czechs and Magyars.
Members of the Downhill Only ski club, though, of which I am one, will surely rush to the index, looking for mentions of the club and Wengen, the beautiful village in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland where the club was born on February 7 1925 and remains a prominent sporting and social landmark today.
The DHO and Wengen first appear on page 19, in a section preceded by the statement from an email of December 20 2007 stating: I took part in the Lauberhorn Race when I was an English bloody fool and nearly killed myself. And a letter to Alec Guinness and his wife berating much of continental Europe (as alluded to above) is addressed from Chalet Chamois, 3823 Wengen, Switzerland (pp 297-298). This is immediately preceded by a thought-provoking letter on Salman Rushdie. “Absolute free speech is not a God-given right in any country. It is curtailed by prejudice, by perceptions of morality and by perceptions of decency. Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity.”
Cue howls of outrage from followers of French author and philosopher Voltaire, a passionate believer in untrammelled free of speech, and nods of approval from followers of John Stuart Mill, one of whose famous quotes is: If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
On more mundane issues, there is a chuckle-inducing letter on page 199 explaining how le Carré/Cornwell had incurred unaccounted-for expenses of around £2,500, which included a contribution of $1,000 to the illegal Shan state army in Chiang Mai.
The references to opium caravans and heroin trading are echoed, the editor notes, in The Honourable Schoolboy, the second of the so-called Karla Trilogy. This book never made it on to the BBC screens not because of any literary failings, but because of the cost of filming in its exotic locations.
I sometimes joke that my wife and I had dinner with John le Carré and his wife at the Hotel Bären in Wengen; if we meet in the DHO Clubroom in Wengen, do ask and I will tell my tale. But I honestly feel from the merest skimming of A Private Spy that I know something more of him and hereby pledge that Iwill resume working my way through the novels of his that sit on my bookshelf unread.
In the meantime, the book's coda is almost heartbreaking, telling briefly of his passing in the Royal Cornwall Hospital, of pneumonia. His wife, Jane, was in a separate ward in the same hospital but under Covid rules they were not allowed to meet. The last email from his iPad, we learn, was sent to his agent Jonny Geller. A true writer, he was wordsmithing to the very end.
* Tim Cornwell, David Cornwell's third son by his first wife, Ann Sharp, and a former foreign editor and arts correspondent for The Scotsman, died in May 2022.
