John le Carré suffered for your reading pleasure, but not in any material way: after more than two dozen bestsellers that spawned multiple blockbuster films—from The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to The Constant Gardener and A Most Wanted Man—le Carré(in real life, David Cornwell) had enough jack in the bank for a chalet in Switzerland, an ever-expanding compound on the windy Cornwall coast, and a home in London. But he was also a tormented soul, the walking embodiment of the first line in Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
Those agonies, and others, pulse through the letters in edited and introduced by his son Tim Cornwell. They surface despite the lifelong curation of the archive by his ex-spy father, who, before his death in 2020, was ever mindful of his reputation beyond the grave. “My father mostly covered the tracks of his untidiness”—a suitably filial reference by Cornwell to the lacuna of le Carré’s letters to his mistresses. (Tim Cornwell himself died in May 2022, at the age of 59.) Other gaps loom, too, like the letters le Carré wrote to Jack Geoghegan, his first American publisher, all of which were destroyed. In you see only what le Carré and his family want you to see. Yet such was le Carré’s life, such were the genius and range of his storytelling and the span of his acquaintances and experiences, that you don’t have to be a diehard fan to find the collection rewarding. Indeed, for writers both established and aspiring, the letters open a valuable window on the works, methods, and milieu of a novelist whose success spanned six decades.
