‘A Private Spy’: thriller writer John le Carré’s collected letters — and emails — reveal his unguarded opinions: political, literary and personal

On May 22, 2000, David Cornwell, better known to the world as John le Carré, sent an email to Canadian haematologist Dr. Nancy Olivieri.

Olivieri had been consulting with the late novelist — he died on Dec. 13, 2020 — on a work in progress, eventually published as “The Constant Gardener,” which dealt with corruption among big pharma companies. Olivieri was well known globally for challenging the Canadian drug company Apotex about the safety of a drug called deferiprone.

One line in le Carré’s email message stands out: “What sticks in my mind above everything else — what I find shameful and unforgivable — is the extent to which your own academic and professional colleagues have connived in the suppression of debate.”

During his career as a novelist, which spanned more than half a century, betrayal was le Carré’s great subject. And little surprise: following stints at the University of Oxford (as a student) and Eton (as a teacher), Cornwell worked for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, which not only provided him plentiful background material for his most famous creations — the cynical spy George Smiley and his agency, colloquially referred to in the novels as “the Circus” — but instilled in him a rabid hatred for professional betrayal and moral turpitude.

Of course, espionage is all about moral turpitude and, as a writer, le Carré was admirable for his willingness to traffic in the grey areas of human behaviour. There are not heroes and villains in his books — “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold”; “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”; “A Delicate Truth”; and the like — so much as embittered and disillusioned men (they are almost all men) toiling within a corrupt and uncaring system.

Which is not to suggest that, in life and letters, the man who created le Carré was not imbued with the fire of moral righteousness about everything from the perceived evils of communism to George W. Bush’s botched invasion of Iraq to the irredeemable nature of British double agent Kim Philby (a subject on which he and one of his literary heroes, Graham Greene, parted company).

What this new, generous selection of Cornwell/le Carré’s correspondence offers is a more unguarded glimpse at the spy-turned-novelist’s concerns — political, literary and personal — than what appeared in his 2016 memoir “The Pigeon Tunnel” or Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography. The latter of which le Carré had an ambivalent relationship toward: in an editor’s note Tim Cornwell, David’s third son, remarks that while his father approved of Sisman’s diligent research, he found the material about his personal life “intrusive.”

For those with a prurient or voyeuristic bent, what the current volume lacks is much in the way of correspondence with the notoriously libertine le Carré’s various inamorata; the exception being a series of overly sentimental letters to Susan Kennaway, with whom the author conducted an affair while still married to his first wife, Ann. The closest le Carré himself comes to addressing his muddled personal life in these pages is in a late letter to his brother Tony, in which he professes his enduring love for his second wife, Jane, and admits that his “love-life has always been a disaster area.”

Other arenas are less open to hedging, including his aggrieved responses to critics he found ill-informed or simply not too bright and, significantly, his reaction to the fatwa against fellow writer Salman Rushdie, whom he claims in a letter to a Guardian columnist in 1990, is “a victim, but … no hero.” Le Carré died before Rushdie was stabbed onstage earlier this year by a man apparently motivated to carry out the fatwa still in force against “The Satanic Verses” author; one wonders whether this might have changed his mind. (In 2012, the two writers publicly reconciled.)

The other inescapable figure in these pages is le Carré’s father, Ronnie, a con artist and swindler who frequently found himself behind bars in various countries. Fictionalized in the character of Rick Pym, father of the protagonist in the 1986 novel “A Perfect Spy” — broadly considered le Carré’s masterpiece — Ronnie is a colourful and roguish figure who, these letters imply, frustrated and inspired his son in roughly equal measure. Le Carré’s fraught relationship with his estranged father may account as much for his storytelling ability as his acerbic tongue and sometimes exaggerated self-righteousness. As an origin story pieced together from the fragments of correspondence that comprise “A Private Spy,” one could do worse.

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