John Le Carré The biography

DAVID CORNWELL, KNOWN to us as John le Carré, spent five and a half years in Britain's secret services - two years in MI5 (domestic security, roughly equivalent to the F.B.I.), a "dead-end sort of place" from which he then transferred to the more glamorous MI6 (overseas intelligence). He had also done some intelligence work at Oxford and, earlier, Bern (tracking students attending left-wing meetings). Few writers have made better use of on-the-job training. The secret service has been source material for a long line of novelists, but it was le Carré who made it a permanent part of the literary landscape, giving us a fictional world so convincingly imagined that even its real-life inhabitants began to confuse the two, adopting his invented argot - "the Cousins," "scalphunters," "lamplighters," "mole," etc. - as their own. So blurred did these lines become that the Oxford English Dictionary had to conduct a lengthy usage search before deciding that "mole" had indeed been popularized in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." His 23 books have sold millions of copies, and 10 have been filmed. Anyone writing about espionage is invariably compared with him. The debate, often fueled by commercial envy and mandarin snobbery, about whether he is a genre writer who "transcends" the genre or a serious writer of distinction is by now so tired as to be pointless. He is by any standard one of the important literary figures of the postwar period. And now we have his biography - prematurely, perhaps, but no less welcome for that. Adam Sisman, biographer of Trevor-Roper and Boswell, among others, had le Carré's blessing and cooperation (but was not subject to his approval on the final cut), and the result is the biography one imagines le Carré wanted: admiring without being toadying, detailed without being overstuffed, highly readable and, above all, knowledgeable about the work. There is always the suspicion when a biographical subject is still alive (le Carré is 84 and, one hopes, still going strong) that the biographer is forced to pull his punches, leave out damaging material and paper over bad behavior. But Sisman is the kind of thorough, serious writer who inspires trust - one feels that if he has been discreet, he doesn't compromise our understanding of the life. We are told, for instance, that le Carré has had many impulsive, short-lived affairs but rarely given any names. But does it matter? Instead, we hear how le Carré felt about the affairs (guilty, stimulated by the secrecy), how his two wives felt, how the nuances of personal betrayal inform his work. And when the affair is truly significant - the Kennaway affair, a "Jules et Jim" triangle with his close friend's wife that inspired "The Naïve and Sentimental Lover" - we're given the story in full, intimate detail. Biography is a balancing act, and mostly Sisman gets the proportions right. There is one no-go area, however, that frustrates even him: le Carré's reluctance to discuss his secret service work. Pleading old loyalties and the Official Secrets Act, he keeps an enigmatic (and possibly self-serving) silence, leaving Sisman to draw on other sources to recreate those crucial years. This may not matter much either - certainly Sisman's descriptions of MI6 office life are vividly done - but we'll never know. On le Carré's time in Bonn: "David prefers to remain silent on his covert role in Germany, though he is the first to admit that it was negligible." But he would say that, wouldn't he? This reticence will disappoint readers looking for the "real" stories behind the books, as if novels are not inventions but rewritten diaries. But it's possible there are no smoking gun revelations, that in his negligible role, le Carré simply kept his eyes and ears open, alert to the moral ambiguities of the work going on around him, and created a parallel world. In later life he would brood about the ethics of his early student informing, but no such soul-searching is applied to the MI6 years - any feelings of guilt or ambivalence are confined to the books themselves. But le Carré would draw on much more than the secret world for his art, and the rest of his life we are given in full, even the emotional wounds where the scar tissue is still thin. Most biographies have to slog through an only marginally interesting youth until the real story kicks in. Not here. This is a childhood worthy of Dickens, filled with pathos and callous adult indifference, but also a swirl of topsy-turvy scenes all dominated by a larger-than-life father so colorful and outsize he might have been sketched by Phiz. Ronnie Cornwell was a born charmer and con man who could, le Carré's brother says, "put a hand on your shoulder and the other in your pocket and both gestures would be equally sincere. He could rob you and love you at the same time." A serial philanderer, natty dresser ("Son, all you really need in life is a clean shirt and a good suit") and incorrigible fantasist, he fleeced his way through a long line of more or less willing victims, swindling widows and pensioners, stealing from his in-laws and shamelessly "borrowing" from his children. His primary business was property speculation (which earned him a prison sentence for fraud), but any opportunity would do - the wartime black market, medicinal products, currency trading, gun running in Indonesia, a football-betting scheme in Singapore. In Vienna he told a rich woman he'd have her paintings cleaned and sold them instead. When things were good, there were chauffeured limousines, racehorses and parties hosting cricket teams, evenings spent in louche clubs with showgirls, bookmakers and raffish underworld figures. When they were bad, there was the humiliation of bankruptcy court. They lived, le Carré recalled, either like "millionaires or paupers." This instability proved too much for le Carré's mother, Olive, who decamped early, running off with another man and abandoning her sons (le Carré was 5). They would not see her again until they were adults. (She, however, still besotted with Ronnie, occasionally met him for trysts in London.) Instead, there were temporary stepmothers and years of bounced checks and unpaid hotel bills. The usual horrors of English boarding school (the headmaster's riding whip, the bullying) were made even worse by the embarrassment of overdue school fees and no-show visiting days. RONNIE MAY HAVE been a bad husband and a worse father, but he makes wonderful copy, an unrepentant life force who dominates this book as he dominated le Carré's life, even after his great adult success. Ronnie was given to signing copies of "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" as "the Father of the Author," and once even threatened a libel suit because a le Carré character resembled him closely (le Carré paid him $14,000 to drop the suit). After his death in 1975, Ronnie would appear again in several composite characters, most notably as Rick in "A Perfect Spy," le Carré's most autobiographical work. "How I got out from under Ronnie," le Carré said, "if I ever did, is the story of my life." It's also the story of this life. Sisman be- lieves flight from his father drove le Carré into early marriage and respectability and then into patriotic service to "expiate Ronnie's misdeeds," and le Carré's own books seem to support this. But if in his final flight, into the world of fiction, he brought a lot of Ronnie with him - a gift for story-telling and personal reinvention - the talent and enormous success were all his own. This is very much (and rightly) a writer's biography, with telling glimpses of the writing process (the discarded, often clunky titles, the last-minute revisions) and irresistible trivia (it was the publisher Victor Gollancz who came up with the title "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold"). There are the expected celebrity cameos - the Burtons behaving badly, Alec Guinness impeccably. We learn that le Carré is still sensitive about bad reviews and can be prickly and demanding with his publishers (that queue forms on the right). But most important, Sisman shows us le Carré's almost monastic devotion to his craft, a man for whom writing is life. Over so long a career there is inevitably a "then he wrote and then he wrote" quality as the years go by, but Sisman makes us look again at what he wrote, and not with ponderous analysis. Instead the book offers a knowing refresher course, and what we take away is a new appreciation of le Carré's full range. Biographers often play cat-and-mouse with their subjects, and Sisman sometimes catches le Carré in a misremembering contradiction and duly notes whenever he's embroidering an old story, a lingering trace of Ronnie perhaps. But whatever the wellspring of his gift, le Carré has managed to turn the embroidery into a remarkable body of work. A reporter and traveling companion once complained that what le Carré said at a dinner party "wasn't the way it happened." "Your job is to get things right," le Carré replied; "mine is to turn them into good stories." And so he has. LIKE LE CARRÉ, Frederick Forsyth had an early breakthrough success ("The Day of the Jackal"), went on to entertain millions of readers (through 17 books) and carried out assignments for MI6, using novel research as a cover for "enhanced tourism." But his is a blither spirit; there are no demons or dark nights of the soul here. Although not without a certain gravitas - he is still angry about Britain's role in the Nigerian civil war - his memoir, "The Outsider," is the story of a happy boy who wanted an adventurous life and got it. Not even the obligatory grim English school (he estimates 74 strokes of the cane over three years) dampened his spirits. He took off instead for bullfight training in Spain and an affair with a 35-year-old German countess who "taught me many things a lad should know as he steps out on life's bumpy road. She had the quaint habit of singing the ?Horst Wessel Song' during coitus." Forsyth passed up a chance at university to enlist, at 17, in the R.A.F. as a fighter pilot, then tried his hand at journalism. Reuters sent him to Paris at the height of the Algerian crisis (the basis later for "Jackal"), then to East Berlin, which he fled once he discovered he had been sleeping with the mistress of the East German defense minister. The BBC assigned him to Nigeria, where he witnessed the Biafran famine and became an MI6 asset. After the Nigerians put a price on his head, he was bundled out of the country back to London, now broke and without a job. "I hit on the idea of writing a novel to clear my debts." In 35 days he banged out "The Day of the Jackal." He was 31. More books, more escapades and more assignments from the Firm would follow, and "The Outsider" gives us a generous sampling of them. This is a raconteur's book. One chapter actually begins: "With hindsight, it was probably a mistake to go researching cocaine shipments through Guinea-Bissau, and I certainly never intended to land in the middle of a coup d'état." As with any raconteur's tales, some are better than others, and some may have grown taller over the years, but they are all told with such enthusiasm that a little embellishment seems part of their charm. Reading "The Outsider" is like finding yourself trapped in a pub with an insistent storyteller. You know you have better, worthier things to do, but your host is so genial and so quick to refill your glass that before you know it, you've whiled away a very pleasant evening. ? Le Carré and Forsyth both carried out missions for MI6 early in their careers. JOSEPH KANON'S most recent novel is "Leaving Berlin."

Writing the biography of anyone during their lifetime is difficult; it is especially problematic when the subject is an enigma who spent 50 years weaving a complex backstory that has only been added to by conjecture. The former spy, born David Cornwell and going by the pseudonym John le Carré, the best-selling author of more than 20 novels (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), is the subject of this intense and exhaustive biography. Sisman (Hugh Trevor-Roper) doesn't pull any punches in looking at the author's life, investigating his difficult childhood, with a con man father and a mother who abandoned their family, his career with British Intelligence (MI5 and MI6) that was cut short by a double agent, a troubled marriage, and the writing career that easily places le Carré among the top British authors of the latter half of the 20th century. Michael Page's narration is natural and will keep listeners' attention. -VERDICT This rare glimpse into a gifted, highly successful, and troubled life is recommended for le Carré's fans and anyone interested in well-executed biographies.-Scott R. DiMarco, Mansfield Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.