John le Carré Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  A. J. P. Taylor: A Biography

  Boswell’s Presumptuous Task

  The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge

  Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography

  One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper

  (with Richard Davenport-Hines)

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2015 Adam Sisman

  Original personal archives, photographs, documents, letters and other materials © 2015 David Cornwell

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Photographs are from private sources except where credited otherwise.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sisman, Adam, author

  John le Carré : the biography / Adam Sisman.

  ISBN 978-0-307-36150-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-36152-3

  1. Le Carré, John, 1931– . 2. Novelists, English—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PR6062.E32Z87 2015   823′.914   C2015-902869-8

  Cover design by Five Seventeen and Leah Springate

  Cover images: (le Carré) © Fondation Horst Tappe / The Granger Collection; (Red Square) © Federica Gentile / Moment Open / Getty Images

  v3.1

  For PD

  Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Millionaire paupers

  2 ‘We seek higher things’

  3 God and Mammon

  4 Wandering in the fog

  5 Serving your country

  6 ‘That little college in Turl’

  7 ‘This really is the end’

  8 Poor but happy

  9 ‘Milk in first and then Indian’

  10 ‘A dead-end sort of place’

  11 A small town in Germany

  12 Becoming John le Carré

  13 Naïve and sentimental love

  14 Caught in the machine

  15 Rich but restless

  16 Keeping the bitterness at bay

  17 ‘You treated your father very badly’

  18 ‘Does anyone know what’s going on?’

  19 ‘The Love Thief’

  20 Moscow Rules

  21 ‘Whatever are you going to write now?’

  22 ‘He makes us look so good’

  23 The Secret Centre

  24 ‘Mr Angry’

  25 Beating the System

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  In working on a long book like this one a writer relies on the help of many people.

  My first debt is to my subject, David Cornwell. I express my gratitude to him in my Introduction, but it is right that I should record it here too. I also want to give special thanks to Jane Cornwell, who has made me welcome, and generously helped me in innumerable ways throughout a long and sometimes difficult process.

  I am especially grateful to those who kindly read the whole book in typescript and gave me valuable comments and suggestions: Bob Gottlieb, Bruce Hunter, Toby Manning, Roland Philipps, Nicholas Shakespeare and Henry Woudhuysen. I must state, however, that I have not taken every piece of advice which I have been given, and that responsibility for any mistakes is mine alone.

  I am also grateful to those who read portions of the text and offered me their comments and suggestions: Richard Barrett, Robin and Charlotte Cooke, Charlotte Cornwell, David Greenway, Robert Harris, Tim Hely Hutchinson, Derek Johns, Sir John and Lady Margetson, Sir Tom Stoppard, Michael Truscott, Susan Vereker (Susie Kennaway) and Michela Wrong.

  Apart from those already mentioned, I wish to thank those who gave up their time to talk to me, and in several cases allowed me to see letters and other documents in their possession: Rupert Allason, Erica von Almen, Al and Anne Alvarez, Neal Ascherson, Michael Attenborough, Anthony Barnett, Elizabeth Bennett, Buzz and Janet Berger, Charlotte Bingham, François Bizot, Margaret Body, Tom Bower, The Reverend Tim Bravington, Susan Brigden, Siv Bublitz, Richard and Anne Bull, Lady Bullard, Susie Burgin, David Burnett, John Burgess, Sir Bryan Cartledge, Willy Cave, Alexander Chancellor, Jane Clark, Jean Cornwell, Rupert Cornwell, Simon Cornwell, Stephen and Clarissa Cornwell, Tim and Alice Cornwell (Alice Greenway), Tony and Nettie Cornwell, Prue Downing, Sarah Edmonds, Erhard Eppler, Margaret Foster-Moore, Timothy Garton Ash, the late Newton Garver, Ronnie Geary, Jonny Geller, John J. Geoghegan, Sir William Gladstone, John Goldsmith, Jo Goldsworthy, Livia Gollancz, Nan Graham, Richard Greene, Miriam Gross, Valerie Grove, Nick Harkaway (Nicholas Cornwell) and Clare Algar, Graham Hayman, Bryan Haynes, Henry Hemming, Andreas Heumann, the late Denys Hodson, Michael Horniman, Carla Hornstein, Sabine Ibach, John Irvin, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, John E. Jackson, Michael Jago, Alan Judd, Phillip Knightley, Haug von Kuenheim, Zachary Leader, Richard Leggett, Joe Lelyveld, Andrew Lownie, Mikhail Lyubimov, Robert McCrum, David Machin, the late Angela (Winkie) McPherson, Bryan Magee, Loring Mandel, Geoffrey Marsland, Roger Martin, the late Stanley Mitchell, Ferdinand Mount, Holly Nowell, Michael Overton-Fox, Gerald Peacocke, Hayden Peake, Hugh Peppiatt, Ed Perkins, Martin Pick, Jonathan Powell, Anna Rankin, Brian Rees, Roland Reinäcker, Tristram Riley-Smith, the late Christopher Robbins, John C. Q. Roberts, the late Hilary Rubinstein, Edward Russell, William Scolar, Sir Kenneth Scott, Jean Seaton, Michael Selby, John Shakespeare, William Shawcross, Xan Smiley, Godfrey Smith, Strobe Talbott, Hugh Thomas (Lord Thomas), the late Ion Trewin, Glenda Voakes, Petronilla Weschke (Petronilla Silver), Francis Wheen and Alex Williams. I apologise to anybody whose name I may have inadvertently omitted.

  I particularly want to thank Buzz and Janet Berger, Sir John and Lady Margetson (Miranda Margetson) and Stanley and Susan Vereker for their hospitality. I also wish to thank the staff at Tregiffian for their help and kindness, particularly Vicki Philipps, Brenda Bolitho and Wendy Le Grice.

  I wish to extend special thanks to Gina Thomas for her help in finding me German reviews of John le Carré’s books.

  I have been helped by various professional archivists and those in charge of archives, and I wish to thank them all: Katie Heaton, Local History Librarian at the Poole Museum; the staff of the National Archives, Kew; David Livingstone, Headmaster of St Andrew’s School; Rachel Hassall, Archivist at Sherborne School; Andrew Mussell, former Archivist at Lincoln College, Oxford, and his successor, Lindsay McCormack; Roger Parsons, Archivist at Edgarley; Michael Meredith, Archivist at Eton College; Caradoc King, for access to the A. P. Watt archives; Malcolm Edwards,
for access to the Gollancz archives; Jean Rose, for access to the Heinemann papers in the Random House archives; Sally Harrower, for access to the Kennaway papers in the National Library of Scotland; the staff of the Bodleian Library, for access to the le Carré archive, particularly Richard Ovenden and Oliver House; Jeff Cowton of the BBC Written Archives at Caversham; Jonny Davies of the British Film Institute Archive; Ian Johnston of the University of Salford Library, for access to the Arthur Hopcraft archive; the staff of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, particularly Natalie Zelt, in the University of Texas at Austin; and the staff of the British Library, especially Arnold Hunt.

  I am grateful to Stephen Fry, and to the estate of the late Sir Alec Guinness, for permission to publish extracts from letters to David Cornwell. I am also grateful to all those who supplied photographs for the book.

  I am indebted to the excellent staff at Bloomsbury, particularly my publisher Michael Fishwick and Anna Simpson, senior editor.

  Peter James has not worked on any of my books before this one. I had assumed that his very high reputation as a copy editor must be exaggerated; now I am embarrassed to find that it is not. I am very grateful to him, for correcting many slips, for pointing out infelicities, and overall for doing such a splendid job of editing. My book is much better for his attention. I am also grateful to Catherine Best for her meticulous work on the proofs and to Christopher Phipps for compiling an excellent index.

  I wish to thank my agent Andrew Wylie, for his wise counsel, and for always being there when I needed him.

  Lastly I must thank Penelope Dening, who has helped me in more ways than I can adequately describe. I am hugely grateful, and this book is for her.

  Introduction

  ‘People who have had very unhappy childhoods’, John le Carré once wrote, ‘are pretty good at inventing themselves.’ He is exceptionally good at this himself. As a boy he learned to invent, making up stories to entertain, to fantasise, escaping from reality, and to dissemble, adopting one persona to conceal another. As a man he put these skills to professional use, first as a spy, and then as a writer. ‘I’m a liar,’ he explains. ‘Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist.’

  Who is John le Carré? Readers are always curious about the lives of writers whom they admire, but this is particularly so of le Carré’s readers. For more than half a century he has been a bestselling novelist. From the start of his success, there has been speculation about the extent to which he has drawn on his own experiences in his books. And le Carré has encouraged this speculation, by drip-feeding stories about his past over the years.

  Of course, ‘John le Carré’ does not exist. The name is a mask, for somebody called David Cornwell. To use an espionage expression, it is a cover name. And even though his cover was blown long ago, it has helped him to keep the public at a distance. It is one of several means he has used to conceal his tracks and confuse those on his trail. His decision to adopt a pseudonym, given that he was doing secret work when he began writing, was understandable; but his choice of the name John le Carré remains mysterious. Over the years he has provided several explanations for it, but has subsequently admitted that none of them is true.

  So what sort of person is David Cornwell? It is clear that he is a man of manifold talents, who could have made a good career as an artist or an actor had he not become one of the world’s most successful authors. His editor at Knopf, Bob Gottlieb (who in a long and distinguished career in book and magazine publishing has known a few clever people), describes him as the cleverest person he has ever met. In private Cornwell is courteous, sophisticated and amusing. It can be surmised that beneath the surface lie strong and perhaps passionate feelings. But the real man has yet to be investigated. While his books may appear revealing, they are fiction.

  Though famous, le Carré remains unknown. He has perfected the art of hiding in full view – or, as Americans say, in plain sight. As his career has progressed, details of his history have accumulated, though these are not always consistent. For years he denied to interviewers that he had ever been a spy, albeit for understandable reasons. In the narrative of his life fact and fiction have become intertwined. One suspects that le Carré enjoys teasing his readers, like a fan dancer, offering tantalising glimpses, but never a clear view of the figure beneath.

  To write the life of a writer who is still alive and writing is a sensitive task. Readers have a right to know what they are reading, and readers of a biography of a living person are bound to be curious about the conditions under which it has been written. It seems appropriate therefore to provide a brief history of this book. After finishing my biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper in 2010, I had lunch with Robert Harris, who had been commissioned almost twenty years before to write le Carré’s life. He told me that he no longer intended to write a full biography, and encouraged me to undertake the book myself. I wrote to David Cornwell with this suggestion. ‘There are huge hindrances,’ he replied: ‘my own messy private life, the demise of so many people I worked with or otherwise knew, and my habitual reluctance to discuss my very limited & unspectacular career in intelligence.’ We subsequently met at his house in Hampstead. By this time he had read my Trevor-Roper and had decided that I was an appropriate person to write his biography. He made it clear that he wished me to write ‘without restraints’, which indeed was the only basis on which I was willing to proceed. This seemed to me a wise decision, though of course this was easier for me to abide by than it was for him. I estimated that it would take me four years to write, as has proved to be the case. We came to an agreement, by which David (as he quickly became to me) granted me access to his archives, a list of introductions to people he has known (friends and enemies) and long interviews. I was to have a free hand to write what I wanted, provided that I showed ‘due respect to the sensitivities of living third parties’. I also agreed that he should have the opportunity to read the typescript before anyone else saw it. This seemed to me the best possible arrangement to produce a biography in the lifetime of the subject.

  In the intervening years I have conducted several long interviews with David, amounting to perhaps fifty hours in total – far more time, so he tells me, than he has given to anyone previously. Most of these sessions have lasted all day. The usual pattern has been for me to arrive at his house in Hampstead around 11.00 in the morning, to talk for a couple of hours, and then head off for lunch, usually in his local pub. Afterwards we have gone back to his house, and continued into the early evening, with a fortifying drink in the late afternoon. I have enjoyed his company, and it may be that my account of his life has been influenced by feelings of liking, gratitude and respect – for his wife Jane and other members of his family, as well as for David. Though I acknowledge these warm feelings, I have endeavoured to preserve the splinter of ice in my heart that every writer needs, according to Graham Greene. Readers will have to judge whether the splinter has remained frozen.

  While I am aware that it has been a privilege to interview my subject in such depth, I am conscious too of the need to be wary of relying on his testimony. I remember in particular a conversation over lunch, in which David described to me how he came to teach at Eton; I rather baldly informed him that his account did not correspond with the documents I had seen in the archives. I am quite sure that David had not told me this knowing it to be untrue; he was obviously disconcerted that his recall had played him false. All memory is fallible, and should be treated with caution by the biographer.

  In the spring of 2011 I made my first visit to Tregiffian, David’s house in Cornwall. Jane showed me where David’s papers were kept, in a converted garage at right angles to the main house. The weather was gloriously mild, and I kept the door open to enjoy the warm sunshine. At one point a shadow over my shoulder caused me to look up, and there was David in the doorway. ‘It’s very strange to have you here, poking about in my mind,’ he said with a grin.

  It would be d
isingenuous to suggest that there have not been difficulties between us while I have been writing the book over the past four years. ‘I think our continuing relationship is an achievement in itself,’ David wrote to me in 2014. I can only imagine how hard it has been for him to have a comparative stranger explore every room of his life, from attic to basement, to expose his mistakes and quarrels, and to probe his sore spots. I wish to pay tribute to him for his generosity, his tolerance and his continuing sense of humour. There have been some tense moments during the last four years, but there have also been a lot of laughs. ‘I know it’s supposed to be warts and all,’ he said to me at one point; ‘but so far as I can gather it’s going to be all warts and no all.’

  It was obvious to me from the outset that David has thought deeply about biography. One of my difficulties has been to keep up with him; all too often he has anticipated my question and formulated his reply before it has even occurred to me. I have sometimes felt like a whaler in my skiff, being towed by a leviathan.

  On the other hand, David has been reluctant to talk to me in detail about his time serving in the intelligence services. On this subject he has largely maintained the silence which he adopted when it was first revealed that he had done secret work. David refers to the promises he made to his old German contacts, as well as to the Official Secrets Act. ‘I am bound, legally and morally, not to reveal the nature of my work in SIS,’ he wrote to me recently. My account of this period of his life is therefore derived principally from other sources. Readers may share my frustration that he has not been more open in this regard, when the enemy against which the Cold War was fought has ceased to exist. Even if one respects his loyalty to his former services, one does not have to be excessively cynical to see that it has served his purpose to keep this aspect of his life hidden.

  David is known to be an excellent raconteur, and, as is normal, his anecdotes have improved as they have been retold over the years. I have sometimes reflected that my unintended role has been to spoil a fund of good stories. He has of course explored his past in the innumerable interviews he has given since his first success. Reading these, one cannot help noticing how often the answers he gives do not tally. One can see why it has sometimes been necessary for him to obfuscate, but at other times this seems to arise from no more than a cultivated air of mystery. Everything he says, therefore, needs to be examined sceptically. For example, he has talked repeatedly about his refusal to meet ‘Kim’ Philby when the opportunity arose on a visit to Moscow in 1987. By 2010, when he gave an interview to Olga Craig of the Telegraph, this decision had become elevated to one of the highest principle. ‘I couldn’t possibly have shook his hand,’ he told Ms Craig. ‘It was drenched in blood. It would have been repulsive.’ But the diary of his travelling companion records David as saying at the time that one day he would ‘dearly love’ to meet Philby – ‘purely for zoological purposes, of course!’1