Review: A Private Spy Brings John le Carré’s Personal Letters to Good Literature

In a letter to a friend in 2020, just weeks before his life ended, John Le Carré said, “Death – looming or simply being there – is a very personal matter.” I wrote. “Each of us does it in our own way.”

Literary work cannot be separated from self-analysis. No one writes a story without wrestling with anxiety, irrationality, and a myriad of broken guts that resolve into something bloody on the page, if the writer is very lucky. For a writer of Le Carré’s stature and stature, he is not only the best spy novelist of his, or perhaps of any generation, but his inventions have been staples of all manner of popular media for more than half a century. For a writer, a mountain of phantom corpses. When opened like this, it has grotesque proportions. The exploits of characters like George Smiley are almost impossible to read, bitterly bitten by their flagrant hypocrisy. Cold War-era spycraft, much of which came directly from the early days of Le Carré’s own British intelligence service, was a period of famous and embarrassing exile. Requires a tether between There’s something almost obscene about it.

private spy, a massive, sometimes frustrating, and ultimately deeply influential collection of Le Carré letters, but does not provide that tether to the satisfaction of most avid fans. For most of his life, with or without the encouragement of the law, he paid attention to the details of his darkest times. Instead, this complete and maddeningly incomplete archive of letters, emails, correspondence, and drawings is much more human. In his own words, he was given or received a public examination.

A personal letter of 750 pages is difficult to review under any circumstances. Especially when the letter is from someone for whom much has already been written, claimed, or speculated. The letters span much of Le Carré’s life, from boarding school to his deathbed, from his years as David Cornwell to his new author identity. As a purely literary point, it would be of immense value.

To be clear: some things in this collection are eye-poppingly boring. It could have been removed without offending all but the completionists (although, to be fair, the accompanying illustrations drawn by the author himself are pretty funny). There also seems to be a subtle attempt to confront and circumvent many of Le Carré’s issues, with various letters being introduced by the editor and what the relationship between writer and recipient was. No mention of possible. (The letters themselves are almost always saccharine or remorseful, as Le Carré professes his love and cowardice in very melodramatic terms, but after a while they become strangely endearing. ) The very fact that the editors were able to derive as much clarity and insight from the tangled archives and what must have been the recipient’s absolute rat kings as they did is in itself It’s miraculous.

Nothing in the literary world is more confused than a work published after the author’s death. Coalition of Duchess John Kennedy Tool and family death Two of James Agee’s two best American novels of the last 100 years were both published posthumously. (In Agee’s case, debate still rages on how closely the published novel resembles the author’s original intentions.) In many cases, authors tend to do their worst work after they die. . A recent example. As in the case of Franz Kafka’s unpublished papers before Israel’s Supreme Court, the author’s wishes sometimes collide with the will of the living in an almost cartoonish way.And then there are books like sea ​​maiden tycoonDennis Johnson’s collection of short stories released posthumously: not his best work, but outstanding nonetheless.

Le Carré’s letter fits none of these examples. They certainly serve an important literary purpose, and many of them are entertaining in their own right.For example, in a memo sent by Le Carré to his accountant, undocumented expenses during a research trip to Southeast Asia A letter to a 10-year-old fan who asked how he could become a mercenary for safe passage, or a spy (“You must judge how much you are ready for illicit means”).

But there is something else here, something more intimate, that holds the collection together and gives it a deeply literary quality to itself.

private spy Edited by Tim Cornwell, son of Le Carré. Nearly every page has a family devotion evident in the painstaking research and curation Cornwell must have done: footnotes, timelines, index pages and pages – lettered, sometimes more interesting, The whole framework almost novel. Given that more of Le Carré’s letters than the letters themselves detail his deep anger at his own father, Ronnie Cornwell, who was an abusive husband and con artist, such an undertaking is It’s hard to imagine not rooted in love (“His very existence is a complete mockery of all moral considerations”).

Summer 2022, a month after I wrote the preface. private spy, Tim Cornwell died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. What began as a tribute to his father became a tribute to him from his surviving brother.

More than details like espionage and interactions with high-profile friends and Le Carre’s outright disdain for Trumpism and Brexit, it’s the small dynamics of family and spouse that make up the most emotionally resonant part of this collection. It is a letter to a person, a brother, a son. Perhaps the rawest and most unguarded piece of writing is Le Carré’s 2007 letter to his brother Tony, spilling his thoughts on how his parents betrayed them. It’s not much different than love. ”

until the end private spy The best literary quality begins to ooze out: the feeling of living a different life for a moment. In the final section, which includes notes sent by Le Carré leading up to his final hospitalization, we see the author seeking closure, grappling with the looming death of a loved one, and thanking some of those closest to him. The giant shadow of literary giant Le Carré fades away, leaving David Cornwell disjointed but complete.