Perhaps a real spy would burn all his correspondence in his last days without a pulse, so that all the possible explanatory letters accumulated after a long, productive and secret life would turn into a fireplace; But although David Cornwell was a spy, he was undoubtedly more of a writer, and not just anyone, but the master of espionage literature, the writer who lifted a minor genre to the heights of the best literature of his time. It was David Cornwell, John le Carré (Poole, United Kingdom, 1931-Truro, United Kingdom, 2020) and A Private Spy, John le Carré’s letters are the last gift he left to his readers.
Following the death in 2020 of the creator of George Smiley and many other melancholic and human spies, his son Tim Cornwell began editing and organizing the extensive correspondence of his father, a prolific letter writer and attentive reporter and writer with friends and family. He had a keen interest in communicating with all the people he had met and appreciated in a long public life. Such difficult work required his efforts for more than two years; he did not live to see the end of it, as he died shortly before its first publication in the UK last year.
The letters of John le Carré, a private spy, brings together 309 letters written by the novelist between 1945 and 2020 and sent to more than 140 different recipients. Tim Cornwell divided these into 24 thematic chapters and included a chronology about his father at the end of the volume. All the letters are contextualized by his son, who is perhaps the best possible guide to the world of his father, a public but discreet man, and his notes are not devoid of many and very interesting details, in addition to many intimate descriptions: “My father wrote” in many of his letters, which he usually signed: ‘As always, David’.
This volume, which has the air of a complementary work, a final wink to the most devoted readers, contains a large number of personal photographs, the majority of which are unpublished and taken from the family album, as well as an intriguing photograph. A series of drawings by Le Carré himself. Undoubtedly, the feeling that A Private Spy leaves the reader approaching these pages is that they have been invited to get to know better this author they have read so much about but know so little about. But we must remember that to gain first-hand knowledge of Le Carré’s life, it is best to first approach his open-ended memoirs, Flying in Circles (2016); And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to read his book about his father, In Ronnie’s Court (2008), which he published in The New Yorker, and what we have here is a short but revealing and hard-hitting book.
Although Tim Cornwell admits to ignoring his father’s correspondence with his numerous lovers – the author of The Naïve and Sentimental Lover knew what he was writing about, and in fact the book was based on his best-known lover, the gossip-involved reader. and for celebrities too, a Private Spy won’t disappoint. More than 140 recipients featured in this volume include Graham Greene, Ian McEwan, William Burroughs, John Banville, Philip Roth, Sydney Pollack, John Boorman, Alec Guinness, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Pierce Brosnan and Margaret Thatcher, among others. He tells a friend about Margaret Thatcher, admitting that after meeting her he found her a bit “admirable” and was surprised himself.
Of all that can be found here, it may be of greater interest to Le Carré’s most devoted reader to discover his failure to write a final, unfinished novel about George Smiley, or to project a play about his father. It is also extremely interesting to check out his document collection efforts; The correspondence here to obtain useful information for his novels is numerous, and we can attest to the great effort and dedication he required from his collaborators and editors (there are several farewell letters for him). the latter whom he abandoned in search of more and better help).
And yes, A Private Spy also includes a series of letters written to other spies; Note that Le Carré was a member of British MI5 and MI6. Thus, Kim Philby’s relationship with Nicolas Elliott, the last person he met from the secret service before fleeing to Moscow, and the famous KGB general Oleg Kalugin, attracts attention.
«Collecting my father’s letters was an easy task; He left behind a huge reserve of love, admiration and goodwill. One of the qualities that is omnipresent in his letters is his generosity of spirit, whether to a beginning writer or a 5-year-old boy asking him how to become a spy,” explains Tim Cornwell about his father.
That is the purpose of this anthology, to show us the warm and approachable side of a writer, and perhaps for this reason and because, A private spy’s closing letter is a short and polite farewell email to an editor. Written from an iPad at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro (UK). Yes, Le Carré was a tireless reporter until the end.