That John le had a secret life is no longer a secret. His cover was blown with the publication of The Secret Heart: John le Carre: An Intimate Memoir by Suleika Dawson (the nom de plume of Sue Dawson). That le Carre, the novelist, who depicted, like no other author, the world of espionage, had lived a life of deception and secrecy seems apposite. The problem lies elsewhere.
In le Carré’s lifetime, Adam Sisman had published, with the “cooperation” of le Carré, a massive biography of the writer (John le Carré: The Biography, published in 2015). It now transpires from Sisman’s new book that at le Carré’s insistence, Sisman was forced to exclude large chunks of le Carré’s private life from the book. With the publication of The Secret Life, the biography appears to be woefully incomplete and inadequate as a biography qua biography.
The Secret Life of John le Carré By Adam Sisman (Profile Books)
Le Carré had insisted that all his countless love affairs be left out by Sisman in the biography. Sisman now reveals that while these tortuous negotiations regarding exclusion and censorship were going on, le Carré’s eldest son, Simon, came to him and suggested that Sisman create “a secret annexe’” of the material that was being left out and publish it after the death of le Carré and his wife, Jane. This book grows out of that secret annexe. It is, therefore, an indispensable complement to Sisman’s original biography.
It is abundantly clear from this book that le Carré (David Cornwell was his real name) was a compulsive womanizer (a word he loathed). He was also a congenital liar – to his wives, to his sons, to his lovers, to his friends, and to his biographer. He was a constant and a compulsive fabricator. Cornwell may have inherited or absorbed the infamous art of duplicity from his father Ronnie, a con man and an occasional jailbird. A famous le Carré aphorism is “Spying is lying”. One could turn it around and say that for le Carré-Cornwell, living was lying.
At one level, this book is no more than an account of a great writer’s philandering. Women, as proper names, flit through the pages as objects and victims of le Carré’s lust. They appear as cardboard characters. There seems to be no discernible pattern in the kind of women le Carré preferred as his lovers/mistresses. He seems to have taken to bed any woman that fell for his charm and flattered his gigantic male ego.
However, two elements are common to his innumerable dalliances. One, he showered his lovers with expensive gifts, mostly jewellery, and took them for holidays often to exotic locations or luxurious hotels. The other is the elaborate steps he took to keep his affairs secret – false names, dead letter boxes and all the various procedures/rules he would make his spies use as tradecraft in his novels, John le Carré broke the James Bond stereotype but David Cornwell, so far as women were concerned, behaved like James Bond with a self-given licence to break hearts.
At another and a more serious level, Sisman is not engaged in an exercise in prurience or voyeurism. His attempt is to trace a link between le Carré’s frequent acts of adultery and betrayal and le Carré’s fiction. His argument is that le Carre’s libido provided the stimulus to his writing and that some of the women he was involved with became, at different points of time, his muse, albeit transient ones. The key to this argument is something that le Carré wrote to Sisman when the two of them were discussing the former’s private life. “My infidelities”, le Carré wrote, “produced in my life a duality and a tension that became almost a necessary drug for my writing, a dangerous edge of some kind…They are not therefore a ‘dark part’ of my life, separate from the ‘highly literary calling’, so to speak, but, alas, integral to it, and inseparable.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, le Carré was telling Sisman that he needed the sex and the secrecy to enable him to write. An unsympathetic reader would say that this is a most convenient alibi for an unstoppable philanderer and user of women. Note the use of the word “alas” to suggest that le Carré regretted this predicament. Was he being sincere? The question is important.
It is evident from whatever Sisman has written – in this book and in the biography – that le Carré was not averse to knowingly and deliberately speaking the untruth. He fabricated his past, and according to his convenience, he gave different versions of the same anecdote; he committed himself to undying love to the woman who at that time was sharing his bed only to break that commitment the next day or in the near future.
As a fiction writer, fiction came naturally to him. Thus, the question inevitably arises over how far we can take le Carré at his word in the passage quoted above – both in its expression of regret and the statement that sex and secrecy were the drugs he needed to write. There is no apparent reason to take le Carré at his word. But in this instance, Sisman, for reasons not explained, does.
Presumably, Sisman’s justification is that he needed to find a plausible reason for his subject’s infidelities. On the face of it, le Carré’s self-serving justification – that writing about a secret world draws inspiration from the writer’s secret life – has a faint ring of plausibility. But Sisman’s book would have been better served if he had chosen against swallowing the non sequitur le Carré offers. Promiscuity and adultery, even among great writers and artists, neither requires nor always has a perfectly or even seemingly reasonable explanation.
And an even more serious problem is that Sisman is unable to convincingly show how and when and which of le Carré’s women did genuinely serve as his muse. Sue Dawson comes nearest but that perception on her part was shattered and was shown to be a complete delusion. At best, what Sisman does is to suggest that such and such lover served as the model of a character in one of le Carré’s novels. A model is not a muse. Le Carré once wrote (again no need to believe him) that he once saw in an airport bar a weary man in a crumpled mac and this figure served as the model for Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Hardly a muse!
In any worthwhile pursuit of the theme of adultery in le Carré’s fiction and Cornwell’s life, one has to address the character of Ann Smiley, who makes cameo appearances in all the Smiley novels, beginning with the very first, Call for the Dead, but is an inescapable and constant presence in George Smiley’s life. Ann and George are apart and not apart.
Le Carré made Ann a serial adulterer taking all and sundry to her bed – from Bill Haydon, the Circus mole, a racing car driver, a ballet dancer and so on. Why did le Carré fashion Ann’s character in this manner? Was Ann Smiley a female image of le Carré-Cornwell? Such questions are not raised by Sisman. Pity.
Karla in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had told Haydon that Smiley “had this one price: Ann. The last illusion of an illusionless man.”
Perhaps le Carré was talking about himself. He had this one price: love, and he pursued the illusion of love as John le Carré and David Cornwell. The latter at his worst (Sisman’s words) “was a liar”, the former “at his best was a truth-teller’’. The distinction between the real and assumed names is important for the biographer, the literary critic, and the reader.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee is chancellor and professor of history at Ashoka University. All views expressed are personal.
