Browsing a provincial
auction catalogue, some years ago, I noticed for sale an autograph letter
signed David Cornwell on notepaper headed John le Carré. I was reading lots of
le Carré at the time and, out of curiosity, bought the letter unseen. Forty
quid. He writes to Stacey [there was no envelope so I have no surname] who
appears to be laid up in hospital after an accident and asks for reading
suggestions. The writer obliges: start with P G Wodehouse (“the funniest man
ever”) and for fine writing head to Anna
Karenina, Vanity Fair, and Ford
Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. As if
that’s not enough to be going on with, the writer then throws in The Three Musketeers and The Prisoner of Zenda. It’s all prefaced
by advance notice for his The Mission
Song, the galleys of which he is currently correcting. His full address in
Cornwall is written in by hand and the letter dated 19:v:06. I was impressed.
Stacey appeared to be a complete stranger who had written to a famous and
almost certainly very busy author and received back a thoughtful, handwritten two-page
reply.
In his Introduction to
this very well-crafted collection of his father’s letters, the late Tim
Cornwell indicates that his father was an (unusually) good correspondent, often
replying to unsolicited mail and promptly (pages xxii-xxiii). He generally
wrote by hand and often kept no copy. As a result, the le Carré archive in the
Bodleian Library, on which this collection of over 600 pages is fairly
dependent, will contain no trace of letters like that to Stacey and the deficit
could really only be reduced by buying up such originals as appear on the
internet, as they do. Sometimes the content will be of interest - as in the
letter I have summarised - but, perhaps as importantly, those letters suggest
what one could regard either as noblesse
oblige or - and I incline to this - a rather democratic spirit. The latter
interpretation is supported by what to me is the heartening fact that David
Cornwell never accepted one of those tarnished medals handed out by our Monarch
and which Woke novelists now declare after their names to show that they are
Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. It is not as if he
was opposed to all recognition: he
accepted, for example, a Goethe Medal in 2011 and a D Litt from Oxford.
In the book under review, le Carré does give
reasons for refusing a CBE on the recommendation of Margaret Thatcher but the
letter (at pages 238-39) is written to the then Head of Britain’s Secret
Intelligence Service, Sir Dick Franks, and could be read as at least partly an
effort to deflect any accusation of disloyalty to the Establishment. Much
later, after le Carré has entertained the Russian Ambassador for a weekend at
his home in Cornwall, he follows up with a report on the weekend addressed to Alan
Judd, who has already been introduced in the editorial notes as a link-man into
MI6/SIS (pages 387-396). Le Carré expresses
himself rather differently when writing to a friend, Sir John Margetson, in
2010: “PS. Did I tell you I passed on a K[knighthood]. All right for public
servants, not good for artists, writers & the like”. (He’s right; I was disappointed
when Kazuo Ishiguro accepted a K. Some way or other, it’s going to cramp your
style).
In my own reading of le
Carré’s novels I eventually got round to A
Perfect Spy, wonderful on first read, not least because the narrative drive
never lost out to a complex structure kept in place from start to finish. I was
impressed enough to re-read and began to pick out literary devices which were
being used but not pointed to. I found myself drawn to a one-liner attributed
to a main character, “Never mind, E Weber love you always” which is repeated three
times to great effect. I wrote a few hundred words about this and was quite
pleased with the result. It occurred to me that I had John le Carré’s home
address sitting in a file: I could send him what I’d written. It would be a bit
cheeky: I would be evading the person in charge of the paper shredder in some
literary agent’s office, employed to protect authors from crank letter-writers.
But I sent it anyway.
To my astonishment,
within a few days I had a handwritten reply (10th Feb 2017) in which
I am told, rather teasingly, that I have caught something of the real person
behind the character of E.Weber, “at her charming best”.
Writers do depend on
encouragement, and I was encouraged to expand what I had written into a more
sustained reflection on A Perfect Spy
for inclusion in a book I was working on. And then I thought I’d go for broke: I
wrote again to ask permission to include his letter in the body of my essay
and, if he was in principle agreeable, to give me the necessary contact details
for his agent etc. Came the handwritten
reply (25th July 2017), “…no need to trouble my agent: please regard
this letter as consent enough”. And so the letter appears at pages 98-99 of my
completely unsuccessful book, Prose Improvements
(2017). I returned again to A Perfect Spy
in a 2018 review on this site https://www.readingthisbook.com/2018/07/john-le-carre-perfect-spy.html
and, in contrast to my failed book, it’s one of the most popular pages here with
over a thousand visitors.
The letters offered in
the volume under review are to family, friends, lovers (though sparsely),
secret and diplomatic service colleagues, fellow writers, agents, and so on.
There are a handful addressed to what one might call members of the public: to
Mrs Betty Quail who thinks that George Smiley’s problems would be solved by
conversion to Catholicism (p 230); to a ten year old boy who wants to be a spy
(p 281) and another to an eleven year old (p 359); to attentive readers in the
Netherlands and Germany who have spotted plot impossibilities and
inconsistencies (p 336, p 354) - the first one a beauty in which the Emperor is
clearly caught with no clothes; le Carré is greatly amused and sends a signed
hardback as a prize.
But these letters feel
like curiosities alongside the more weighty correspondence, some of it
providing useful grist for those who want to study plot and character and
device in the novels. This is very obviously so in letters to Alec Guinness
where le Carré is clear and detailed about how he thinks George Smiley should be played
(notably pages 211-15).
To my surprise, it was
easy to read this book rather than pick up, put down, and basically browse.. A
lot must be owing to the skills of the editor, le Carré’s son the late Tim
Cornwell, who structures the book around the major novels and provides helpful,
unassertive, notes of guidance. If there is a weakness it must (inevitably and
invisibly) rest in the fact that the compilation is a family affair, approved
by the family Estate, and appearing really very soon after le Carré’s death at
the end of 2020.
Like father like son. I
was struck by the similarities between father and son. Both display extraordinary
energy, are on the move constantly (though le Carré likes to describe himself
as a recluse in Cornwall - with a guest wing built to accommodate six …), and
are good at making friends and influencing people. The difference, of course,
is that Reggie was a career con-man criminal notching up jail sentences in
several countries (not many criminals achieve that distinction) and losing his
winnings every time, whereas le Carré amasses - and doesn’t lose, though
sometimes gives away chunks - a large
fortune built entirely on his genius as a writer and the skill of his agents in
selling film and TV rights.
There is hardly a page
in the 630 pages of this collection of letters where the author is not busy,
whether writing, travelling to dangerous places to do background research for a novel,promoting a new novel, or co-operating with scriptwriters, directors,
producers. Both energy and achievement are extraordinary.
*
I will do my duty and
make copies of the letters I mentioned at the beginning and post them to the
archivist at the Bodleian.
