November 10, 2021
A comprehensive biography focused on the writer in his youth, and his work in maturity.
David Cornwell aka John Le Carré was a child of privilege (Eton, Oxford, British Foreign Service, et al) who had a rather leaky family structure. Father Ronnie, and David’s nemesis, was a confidence trickster on the grand scale (football pools, airlines, real estate, international trading, even trading on his son’s reputation – Daddy had done it all, and gone to jail many times for his transgressions); his mother deserted the family when David was a child. David learned early in life to mistrust love, which made him a good spy. He was a recluse and bloomed late – and when he did, he went full bore.
He was recruited by MI5 and MI6 as an agent while still in school, and later worked for both agencies despite their different missions and work cultures (MI5 was for old war vets and MI6 was for idealistic university grads from posh families). He was a budding poet and cartoonist, but took to writing because he was bored. Given his family connections, he had no problem getting into the publishing world and bypassing the starving writer route. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, launched him to worldwide fame and allowed him to retire from the Foreign Office (much to the FO’s relief, although he always portrayed Britain on the winning side, warts and all).
He was lucky to come of age as a writer when the Cold War was at its height and spying was fashionable. Yet he craved the recognition of a literary writer—like Somerset Maugham, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Stephen King also did—despite making millions in his pigeon-holed genre. That recognition never came, and he reacted badly to critical reviews. In fact, once, he departed from the beaten path to write the novel The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, modeled on a love triangle between him and his closest friends, the Kennaways, only to be so badly beaten up in the press that he ran back to his cold but comfortable world of spies.
The book gives considerable air-play to each of his novels, to their genesis, reception in the marketplace, reviews, and spin-offs such as films and television series, and to Le Carré’s rigorous drafting regimen and on-site research that often took him into dangerous terrain. Despite his introverted nature, he was ruthless with agents and publishers, negotiating tough deals and ditching his promoters, even long-standing ones, at the slightest hint of non-performance.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Le Carré had to regroup and cast abroad for other conflict zones to serve as backdrops for his fiction. Gradually his writing took on a polemical tone of fighting for the marginalized: prisoners in Guantanamo, Africans bilked by multi-nationals, and refugees, among others. He was anti-political correctness, and he could afford to be, given his giant media profile, yet he got into a feud with Salman Rushdie over the publication of The Satanic Verses (Le Carré was one of the few writers who opposed the book’s publication) They remained lifelong antagonists – perhaps it was good for book sales, for both of them!.
Le Carré was happiest while writing and would remove himself from his family to travel the world or hide away in a nook where he could write undisturbed. Writing was his therapy from the shocks of love denied in childhood. His writing tips are interesting:
1) Begin the story as late as you can
2) Write out key sentences and put them on the wall
3) Rewrite
4) Don’t be afraid to throw away 18 months of work.
This is a good book for writers, if you are not going to lapse into despondency under the shadow of this man, who couldn’t seem to write a bad book and who became a one-man book industry, a man of privilege who took the side of the underdog in his writing and profited hugely from it.