On 19 January 2019, David Cornwell, AKA John le Carré, wrote to his son, Tim, or Timo as he always called him: “My love for you is undivided and strangely, or not so strangely, I feel close to you and the pains you have endured. I love your courage, & your moral decency, & your questing brain & your uncompromising soul, and your lovely wit. I feel – arrogantly – like a companion in your solitude.”
This very personal, and much longer, handwritten letter from a father to his son lay by Tim’s bedside for the rest of his life – a life that ended abruptly on 31 May 2022, when Tim suffered a pulmonary embolism. He was 59. His death was sudden and unexpected. One minute we were lying side by side on a hotel bed in Northumberland and were talking about the book we’d been listening to on our journey back to London from a family visit to Scotland. Tim hadn’t been able to concentrate. His daughter, his son-in-law and his one-year-old grandson had all tested positive for Covid, so it was a natural assumption that he too had fallen ill. It explained the tightness in his chest, his need for my asthma inhaler. And then, to paraphrase Joan Didion, you get up to go to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Like David, I too feel – also arrogantly – that I became a companion in Tim’s solitude, perhaps never more so than when we were living in his father’s house on a Cornish cliff, a house we were hoping to buy and make our own. Tim had taken on the daunting and at times very painful task of editing a book of his father’s letters. Reluctant at first, he’d been persuaded by his brothers Simon, Stephen and Nick, all aware, perhaps better than Tim himself, of his ability to rise to the challenge. Tim says in the introduction to A Private Spy: “My elder brother Simon, as literary executor, kindly set me on what became a journey in my father’s company, and I thank him and the reader for allowing me to treasure that, whatever the result. It is a privilege to take it on, and a challenge, as my own modest career has been as a journalist, and not as an academic or biographer. But I came to know him much better, particularly as a young man; and regret that I did not spend more time asking him simpler questions about his life.”
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.
In June 2001 David wrote to his sons and Jane, his second wife: “You are all my favourite sons. I regret more than I can ever say the failure of my first marriage and the pain it inflicted on you all. But I knew nothing of life in those days, I had no learning in parental love, no trust in women, no identity beyond a terrible need to escape my vile childhood and be acknowledged in some way. Sometimes I can forgive myself, often not. Perhaps by now you can. Please try, for it will add to your happiness.”
Tim had always been open about his struggles with mental health, and the reality of bipolar life was something we had learned to manage together. Since he’d been officially diagnosed as bipolar, he was a reluctant patient, refusing to let the diagnosis define him. He regarded the daily doses of lithium and olanzapine as a chemical life sentence leaving his creative mind deadened, muffled and dopey. As he started his journey with the letters, Tim told me he felt he hadn’t been able to properly mourn his parents’ deaths, that he was distanced from true grief.
But Tim knew from experience that fighting the drugs was a high-wire act. Despite their dulling effect he worked assiduously, spending many hours poring over his father’s words, trying to make sense of the man he had known as a father but also as a world-renowned author. Then there was the detective work, or as Tim called it, “harvesting”; the painstaking effort to fill in the gaps left by missing letters, destroyed correspondence, and the evidence of numerous lovers. He was particularly interested in the 1950s and 60s, the period that le Carré seldom talked about, his career in intelligence. The MI6 training course held a special fascination for Tim; he was struck by how much his father admired his fellow trainees, particularly those who had shown great courage under torture.
In the end, the editing process was every bit as painful, daunting and challenging as Tim had expected it to be. At home on the Cornish coast his moods swung wildly from elation to despair, fuelled by a growing conviction that the book was doomed to fail. On the most difficult days, he could scarcely summon the energy to get out of bed. Yet on other days, he simply enjoyed himself, forgetting that he was supposed to be editing, and going exploring instead. As Tim said: “There has never been a dull day amid my father’s words.”
One of the books Tim cherished, given to him by his father, was Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44. One reviewer said of it: “One goes on reading page after page as if eating cherries.” That simile stayed with Tim. He said he hoped every letter in A Private Spy could be eaten separately: fresh, crisp, colourful, tart; or soft, juicy, rich, a little rotten. A Private Spy is Tim’s legacy as well as his father’s.
• A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945 – 2020 by John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell, is out in paperback (Penguin). To buy a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
