'A private spy', the correspondence of John Le Carré: 'So British'…

There is something that the British know how to do perfectly: being absolutely brilliant when they put their mind to it. This is what John Le Carré reflects in his correspondence when speaking about himself in a private spy. To the point of offering a succulent morsel to the readers of someone who dominated the literary genre of espionage for six decades. He did it with such skill and success that he extended his reign without question thanks to titles like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Girl with the Drum, The Russia House and The loyal gardener. I'm sure his devoted readers will appreciate a book like this, although I doubt it will seduce others less inclined to the literary accompaniment of 700 pages of correspondence from an author who basically wrote only about spies. It is not in vain that 309 letters are collected, introduced, annotated and glossed without fail. An effort of biographical compilation so precise and exhaustive that, not being a doctoral thesis, only a son could approach it from filial devotion. In this case, we must be grateful that it was done without incurring hagiographic apotheosis or Oedipal cruelty. Something that is the credit of the compiler, Tim Cornwell, who was the third of the children that Le Carré had with his first wife. A renowned journalist specialized in art, who makes an almost literary selection of personal letters that take so much advantage of John Le Carré's life that they make him another character in his novels. In fact, the correspondence reveals him moving freely through the rooms of his biography, although always covered in a rather modest bathrobe. Like when he goes into his infidelities, he tiptoes in length and depth, although some letters are included.

But beyond these specifically, the truth is that the Le Carré style that surrounds the entire book reflects a somewhat Victorian containment that feels good when reading. He wraps this with a somewhat old-fashioned label that nevertheless manages to enhance the sincerity of what he tells. So much so that he seems to be supported by the elegant distance of someone who suspects that he is being watched by a third party and that, therefore, he insists on telling the truth so as not to be accused of covering it up. This makes the letters speak for themselves and thread the stitches of a biographical thread that does not hide childhood frustrations and family renunciations; personal desires and hopes; writer's fears, as well as numerous political comments so much the taste of a good island meal around a port and a cigar. All issues that inspire and filter into his novels. They show the common threads that go from the author's unconscious and his own biography to the plots and characters that inhabit the spy stories that made him famous and rich. A biographical and imaginative magma from which emerged a character as exceptionally literary as George Smiley, to whom he dedicated a book before passing away in 2020 and who embodied the tragedy of the spy who knew how to understand the emotional complexity of the mole he was chasing as a possibility of himself. .

Perhaps this is the most interesting issue that nourishes the book, along with the portrait that emerges from a correspondence that almost mirrors a perfect biography. The communicating vessels that go from the life of David Cornwell to the writing of John Le Carré, his pseudonym. Through them you enter and exit his novels, as in a tangled story. The sources of inspiration are perceived and the frustration of someone who had to leave Oxford because of an embezzling father, the ideas of a tory compassionate and civilized, the geopolitical outlook of a mediocre diplomat who hid a perfect spy for MI5 and MI6 and the academic erudition of the Eton professor who was devoted to the classics and German literature. Someone who did not believe in splendid British isolation, and even less in the populist version of it that resulted in Brexit. He saw England as a substantial part of dear old Europe. So much so that he became Irish so as not to break up with her. Without a doubt, in all these stories that his letters tell is the interest of the book. In which he shows a Le Carré who loved skiing as much as the gossip of the society from which he came. That he liked the solitude of his house in the most remote corner of Cornwall, as well as dinners and dealings with glittering characters such as Graham Greene, Ian McEwan, Alec Guinness, Sydney Pollack, Pierce Brosnan and Stephen Fry, among others. many. In short, someone so British that shortly before dying in November 2020, in his last letter he dedicates a dig that only a former Eton teacher could give to a student at this school called Boris Johnson: “The fact that he studied Classics at Eton it is extraordinarily irrelevant. He is a oik (without the necessary class) from Eton.” What has been said, so British.

A private spy

John Le Carré
Translation of Núria Parés Sellarès
Editions 62, 2023
712 pages. 23.90 euros

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