In literature, posterity is the name of the game. John le Carré (aka David Cornwell), who knows this only too well, has been flirting with the idea of his biography since 1989, with many second and third thoughts. Quite a few Le Carré watchers believed that his complicated alter ego would never surrender to the biographer’s torments. Surely, it was said, Britain’s greatest living storyteller is so addicted to mysteries and fabrications that he must always be at odds with the demands of any good Boswell. In the end, the writer’s approaching rendezvous with oblivion tipped the balance, and he struck a deal with Adam Sisman.
The upshot is a fascinating truce between candour and guile. Sisman, justly acclaimed for writing about the dead (AJP Taylor; Hugh Trevor- Roper), must have known what he was risking, but possibly underestimated the fathomless complexity of his subject. Besides, who could capture Le Carré? An addictive mixture of Hamlet and King Lear, with a dash of Mercutio, he has become his own best fiction.
Le Carré is a romantic “lost boy” whose appetite for telling his own story can only be satisfied by enthralling reinvention. His own website even boasts a Prospero-like indifference to the truth: “Nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing.”
From the outset, Sisman has had to negotiate with a subject whose first instinct is to seduce those who come close to him within a wilderness of mirrors, in which vanity reflects insecurity reflects pride. On this analysis, Le Carré is like the Russian doll that introduced the TV version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: an enchanting hybrid of sphinx and tease.
Sisman’s Cornwell is a man who has projected himself as a writer of genius while fearing that he’s his silver-tongued, small-town conman of a father’s son. Other dualities abound. Le Carré has dined with presidents and prime ministers, but Cornwell prefers a private life at the edge of society. Le Carré shuns the literary world (during an interview in 2000 he told me: “I feel completely out of step with the English literary scene”), while Cornwell obsesses about his reputation, policing the smallest detail of his life and work.
In this pre-emptive strike against posterity, pride has finally trumped mystification. Somehow, after a last-minute delay for some inevitable second thoughts, what its publisher calls “the biography” has finally emerged, bearing the scorch marks of Cornwell’s fiery self-protectiveness. Long before Sisman proposed himself for mission impossible, at least one would-be biographer (a Sunday Express journalist) had been chased off with writs, while a second, the writer Robert Harris, was first encouraged, then disdained, then monstered.
Cornwell obviously retains a deep ambivalence towards this latest version of himself. Last week, he announced that he had just sold a “memoir”, The Pigeon Tunnel, to Penguin Random House, which is hardly the action of a man joyously saluting the imminent publication of a massive, long-awaited life story.
On his side, Sisman has also acquired some reservations about Cornwell, whom he awkwardly identifies as “David”. In a rather queasy introduction, he makes it clear that he’s had a testing time, and more or less concedes that he has occasionally been leaned on by his subject. Defiantly, he insists on hoping “to publish a revised and updated version”, presumably when Cornwell can no longer interfere.
With these caveats, however, this book fulfils almost every expectation. Sisman has immersed himself in an extraordinary life story and reported it with exemplary dedication, following Le Carré’s footsteps and, like a literary Jeeves, quietly correcting his master’s narrative with here a discreet cough, there a raised eyebrow, anon a sharp intake of breath. I counted about 10 discreet formulas for Le Carré’s lies, from “false memory” to “fictional recreation” to “entertaining mensonge”.
“David”, I suspect, will not relish what Sisman has done to “Le Carré”, which is to strip away a lot of the magic. At the same time, the biographer’s truths, painstakingly quarried from an airy mountain of fabrication, have their own engrossing authenticity. Beyond the sensational headlines of newspaper serialisation – notably a 60s menage a trois with the novelist James Kennaway and his wife Susan – Sisman has also re-examined crucial aspects of Cornwell’s life with cold precision.
Le Carré has already fictionalised Ronnie Cornwell in A Perfect Spy, but the MI5 man who asked: “Forgiven your father yet?” was on the money. Not until Ronnie’s death is the son released from his old man’s intolerable interventions. Described by Cornwell, referencing PG Wodehouse, one of his favourite writers, as a “Ukridge” character, Cornwell senior made and lost several fortunes and was twice imprisoned for fraud.
To this faded family portrait, Sisman adds some splashes of colour, but also darkens it. Ronnie emerges as more sinister: a wife beater, a sexual tyrant and, according to one crooked associate, “very, very bent”. About Cornwell’s mother, Olive, who fled the family home when her son was five years old, leaving a lifelong antagonism towards the opposite sex, Sisman has less to say, which is disappointing. Perhaps the biggest question in Cornwell’s life – was he more wounded by his father’s deceitfulness or his mother’s desertion? – remains unresolved. Nevertheless, being untruthful became a habit of being. For this, Le Carré’s own explanation is as good as any. “People who have had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves.”
His best invention was The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, a zeitgeist book whose inspiration Cornwell attributes to the breakdown of his marriage. At this point in 1962, Sisman establishes that Cornwell’s “spying” consisted of informing on his Oxford contemporaries to MI5, plus a couple of years at a desk in Mayfair, and a tour of duty with MI6 in Bonn. Once the Berlin Wall went up, and Europe became divided, this was more than enough for Le Carré to do what he has called “a sort of Tolkien job” on his experience.
Sisman gives chapter and verse for a diminished portrait of Le Carré, the cold war spook, but Cornwell was always more interested in his predicament as an Englishman in the aftermath of empire. This was the subject of the great sequence of fiction by which he will be judged in the long term: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People and A Perfect Spy, described by Philip Roth as “the best English novel since the war”.
Here, the old argument about Le Carré’s achievement breaks out afresh. To Roth, Ian McEwan and many others, he is one of the greats. To Anthony Burgess, and Clive James, among the naysayers, he is a self-inflated thriller writer. Tactful but not ecstatic, Sisman seems to side with Le Carre’s distinguished fans, but his biography reports one inescapable verdict: that Le Carré has spent his career mythologising himself and his work. Rarely has there been a more passionate marriage between life and art.
John le Carré: The Biography is published by Bloomsbury (£25). Click here to buy it for £17.50
