Apart from plumpness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes – when you wish it – to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worries about you. I don’t know what you call that kind of empathy but it is very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it: when either of you gets his feet wet, I can’t help shivering. So it is the double standard – to be unobtrusive, yet to command – which your physique perfectly satisfies. Smiley is an Abbey, made up of different periods, fashions and even different religions, not all of them necessarily harmonious. His authority springs from experience, ages of it, compassion, and at root an inconsolable pessimism which gives a certain fatalism to much that he does. David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, at home with his sons Stephen, left, and Simon, 1964. Photograph: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images The Spy Who Came in from the Cold announced a new voice in the rich British tradition of espionage writing. Nothing in Le Carré’s previous novels had suggested he had the skill to create such a tense and richly nuanced portrayal of an espionage operation. It remains the most perfectly plotted of his books.

‘There’s never a dull day amid my father’s words’: what John

This is probably the last major piece of work we'll see about him, unless someone does a big biography. But frankly, with “The Pigeon Tunnel” combined with this book, there may not be that much material left untold that would warrant another book. Like every relationship in Tim’s life, his relationship with his father was complicated but there was never any doubt that David’s love for Tim was unwavering or that Tim adored and admired his father. As Tim dug deep into the archive, the man he got to know from the letters was one who married young and had no idea how to cope with fame. Tim told me he had particularly appreciated rereading David’s letters to his first wife, Ann Sharp, Tim’s mother. She kept all of David’s letters over 20 years from 1950 to 1970. These letters proved to be a remarkable resource on his early life and they allowed Tim to gain a deeper understanding of his parents’ relationship and to re-evaluate it in a more positive light. Le Carre with his wife, Jane, in St Buryan, Cornwall, May 1993. Photograph: John Stoddart/Popperfoto/Getty Images Alec Guinness as George Smiley in the TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 1979. Photograph: Allstar/BBC/Sportsphoto Ltd/AllstarCalled up for national service in 1949, Le Carré spent time as an intelligence officer in Graz, interviewing defectors from the wrong side of the iron curtain. He found no heroes even among the most daring escapees from East Germany. After two years, his father persuaded Lincoln College, Oxford, to allow his son to be interviewed, although the college had already filled its quota for freshers, and he was accepted to read modern languages in 1952. When a much-loved author dies, fans and publishers cling for a while to the hope that an undiscovered manuscript lurks in a drawer, promising a final echo of that familiar voice. So last week’s news that a collected volume of John le Carré’s letters will be published in November understandably sent a frisson through the literary world. Le Carré achieved the rare double of popular and critical acclaim, but his life offered as much intrigue as any of his plots: his fraudster father; the formative years in the intelligence services; the glittering literary and film career; the vocal political engagement. There’s also his longevity: the letters span the decades from his 1940s childhood to the days before his death in December 2020, aged 89. Few people could be as well placed to offer such a comprehensive first-hand account of recent history.

A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020

Cornwell would later proclaim himself, and his greatest creation, George Smiley, as keen supporters of the European Union, and all its works. In what must be by far Cornwell’s worst book, A Legacy of Spies, he somehow resurrects George Smiley (who must by then have been at least a hundred years old) in the pleasing German town of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. There, the ancient spy declares that his whole life has in fact been dedicated to “Europe.” “I’m a European. . . . If I had a mission . . . it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe.” In the light of this piety, it is amusing to find Cornwell writing in 1969 to a fellow spy, John Margetson, about how the sales of A Small Town in Germany to the “Frogs and Krauts” are “quite satisfactory.” Cornwell’s son, Tim, who so very sadly diedjust as he had finished editing these letters, is presumably the author of a prissy footnote which explains that such expressions “were very common in Britain in the 1960s” and that his father “often used slang terms to refer to various nationalities from time to time.” Of course he did. That is what Englishmen of his class and generation were like, before we all reformed ourselves to suit the new internationalist age. Alas for the footnote, Cornwell has a go at foreigners yet again, and twenty years later, far from the 1960s. He does so in a 1989 letter to Sir Alec Guinness—describing “the Frogs” as “extremely jumpy” over the collapse of the Soviet empire. By then, time and illness were shaking the knots from a tangled life. Two weeks before the end, when he and his second wife, Jane, are both dying from cancer, he writes to a friend: “Everything is waiting. We have never been so close — yet far away too, because death, looming or simply out there — is a very private matter, & each of us does it in their own way.” Le Carré first met Stoppard when he was hired as the screenwriter for The Russia House in 1989. “I found Stoppard enchanting and extremely intelligent,” he told Alec Guinness. He is on your side, not mine. Now that you have honoured the qualities which created him, it is only a matter of time before you recruit him. Believe me, you have set the stage: the Russian Bond is on his way. Ultimately, he’s reasserting ownership of the narrative. I feel for Sisman: out to be definitive, he got cornered into granting copy approval before being scooped by someone whose story it actually was. Not the secret life of John le Carré, then, so much as the secret life of John le Carré, the 2015 biography whose blind spots – we now know – can’t be pinned on its beleaguered author.

Very few, very wise people saw through them both, of whom the most recent and the most absolute is Richard Ovenden, who examined the papers my father loaned to the Bodleian library in Oxford and observed a “deep process of collaboration”. His analysis is a perfect match for my recollection: “A rhythm of working together that was incredibly efficient … a kind of cadence from manuscript, to typescript, to annotated and amended typescripts … with scissors and staplers being brought to bear … getting closer and closer to the final published version.” John le Carré – David Cornwell as he then was – grew up among the lies of his fraudster father Ronnie. He then entered a world of secrets, reporting on leftist students when he was at Oxford before working in intelligence for MI5 and MI6. Deception was his domain and as much as he hated Ronnie he worried about coming from the same “mad genes-bank”. Instead he became a novelist; a less damaging way to tell lies.