David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen nameJohn le Carré (/ləˈkæreɪ/lə-KARR-ay),[1] was a British author,[2] best known for hisespionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. A "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer",[3] he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).[4] Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen.
David John Moore Cornwell was born on 19 October 1931 inPoole, Dorset, England, son of[7][8] Ronald Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1905–1975),[9][10] and Olive Moore Cornwell (née Glassey, 1906–1989). His older brother,Tony (1929–2017), was an advertising executive andcounty cricketer (for Dorset), who later lived in the United States.[11][12] His younger half-sister was the actressCharlotte Cornwell (1949–2021), and his younger half-brother,Rupert Cornwell (1946–2017), was a formerWashington bureau chief forThe Independent.[13][14] Cornwell had little early memory of his mother, who had left their family home when he was five years old. His maternal uncle wasLiberal MPAlec Glassey.[15] When Cornwell was 21 years old, Glassey gave him the address in Ipswich where his mother was living; mother and son reunited at Ipswich railway station, at her written invitation, following Cornwell's initial letter of reconciliation.[16][17]
Cornwell's father – who escaped from his "orthodox but repressive upbringing"[18] as son of "a respectable nonconformist bricklayer who became a house builder and mayor of Poole"[19][20] – had been jailed forinsurance fraud and was a known associate of theKray twins. The family was continually in debt. The father–son relationship has been described as "difficult".[16]The Guardian reported that Le Carré recalled that he had been "beaten up by his father and grew up mostly starved of affection after his mother abandoned him at the age of five".[4] Rick Pym, a scheming con man and the father ofA Perfect Spy protagonist Magnus Pym, was based on Ronnie. When his father died in 1975, Cornwell paid for a memorial funeral service but did not attend, a plot point repeated inA Perfect Spy.[16]
When his father was declared bankrupt in 1954, Cornwell left Oxford to teach atMillfield Preparatory School;[15] however, a year later, he returned to Oxford, and graduated in 1956 with a First-Class degree in Modern Languages with aGerman Literature concentration. He then taught French and German atEton College for two years, before becoming an MI5 officer in 1958.[21]
He ran agents, conducted interrogations,tapped telephone lines and effected break-ins.[23] Encouraged byLord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels as "John Bingham"), and while being an active MI5 officer, Cornwell began writing his first novel,Call for the Dead (1961). Cornwell identified Lord Clanmorris as one of two models forGeorge Smiley, the spymaster of theCircus, the other beingVivian H. H. Green.[24] As a schoolboy, Cornwell first met the latter when Green was the Chaplain and Assistant Master at Sherborne School (1942–51). The friendship continued after Green's move to Lincoln College, where he tutored Cornwell.[25]
In 1960, Cornwell transferred toMI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn. He was later transferred toHamburg as a politicalconsul.[21] There, he wrote the detective storyA Murder of Quality (1962) andThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), as "John le Carré" – a pseudonym required becauseForeign Office staff were forbidden to publish under their own names.[26][27] The meaning of the pseudonym is ambiguous: he sometimes said he had seen "le Carré" on a storefront, and later said he could not remember an origin.[28] When translated, "le carré" means "the square".[28]
In 1964, le Carré's career as an intelligence officer came to an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents'covers to theKGB byKim Philby, the infamous Britishdouble agent, one of theCambridge Five.[22][29] Le Carré depicted and analysed Philby as the upper-class traitor, codenamed "Gerald" by the KGB, themole hunted by George Smiley inTinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).[30][16]
Le Carré's first two novels,Call for the Dead (1961) andA Murder of Quality (1962), aremystery fiction. Each features a retired spy,George Smiley, investigating a death; in the first book, the apparent suicide of a suspected communist, and in the second volume, a murder at a boys'public school. AlthoughCall for the Dead evolves into an espionage story, Smiley's motives are more personal than political.[31] Le Carré's third novel,The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works; following its publication, he left MI6 to become a full-time writer. Although le Carré had intendedThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold as an indictment of espionage as morally compromised, audiences widely viewed its protagonist, Alec Leamas, as atragic hero. In response, le Carré's next book,The Looking Glass War, was a satire about an increasingly deadly espionage mission which ultimately proves pointless.[32][33]
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,The Honourable Schoolboy andSmiley's People (theKarla trilogy) brought Smiley back as the central figure in a sprawling espionage saga depicting his efforts first to root out a mole in the Circus and then to entrap his Soviet rival and counterpart, code-named 'Karla'. The trilogy was originally meant to be a long-running series that would find Smiley dispatching agents after Karla all around the world.Smiley's People marked the last time Smiley featured as the central character in a le Carré story, although he brought the character back inThe Secret Pilgrim[34] andA Legacy of Spies.[35]
A Perfect Spy (1986), which chronicles the boyhood moral education of Magnus Pym and how it leads to his becoming a spy, is the author's most autobiographical espionage novel, reflecting the boy's very close relationship with hiscon man father.[36] Biographer LynnDianne Beene describes the novelist's own father, Ronnie Cornwell, as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values".[37][7] Le Carré reflected that "writingA Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised".[38] He also wrote a semi-autobiographical work,The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), as the story of a man's midlife existential crisis.[39]
Italian cover ofThe Russia House (1989)
With the fall of theIron Curtain in 1989, le Carré's writing shifted to the portrayal of the new multilateral world. His first completelypost-Cold War novel,The Night Manager (1993), deals with drug and arms smuggling in the world of Latin Americandrug lords, secretive Caribbean banking entities and corrupt Western officials.[40][41]
His final novel,Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021.
Most of le Carré's books arespy stories set during theCold War (1945–91) and portrayBritish Intelligence agents as unheroic political functionaries, aware of the moral ambiguity of their work and engaged more in psychological than physical drama.[42] While "[espionage] was the genre that earned him fame...he used it as a platform to explore larger ethical problems and the human condition". The insight he demonstrated led "many fellow authors and critics [to regard] him as one of the finest English-language novelists of the twentieth century."[43] His writing explores "human frailty—moral ambiguity, intrigue, nuance, doubt, and cowardice".[44]
The fallibility ofWestern democracy – and of its secret services – is a recurring theme, as are suggestions of a possible east–west moral equivalence.[42] Characters experience little of the violence typically encountered inaction thrillers and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of the conflict is internal, rather than external and visible.[42] The recurring character George Smiley, who plays a central role in five novels and appears as a supporting character in four more, was written as an "antidote" toJames Bond, a character le Carré called "an internationalgangster" rather than a spy and who he felt should be excluded from the canon of espionage literature.[45] In contrast, he intended Smiley, who is an overweight,bespectacled bureaucrat who uses cunning and manipulation to achieve his ends, as an accurate depiction of a spy.[46]
Le Carré's "writing entered intelligence services themselves. He popularized the term 'mole'...and other language that has become intelligence vernacular on both sides of the Atlantic – 'honeytrap', 'scalphunter', 'lamplighter' to name a few."[44] However, in his first tweet as MI6's chief,Richard Moore revealed the agency's "complicated relationship with the author: He urged would-be Smileys not to apply to the service."[44]
Le Carré records a number of incidents from his period as a diplomat in his autobiographical work,The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016), which include escorting six visiting German parliamentarians to a London brothel[47] and translating at a meeting between a senior German politician andHarold Macmillan.[48]
As a journalist, le Carré wroteThe Unbearable Peace (1991), a nonfiction account of BrigadierJean-Louis Jeanmaire (1911–1992), theSwiss Army officer, who spied for the Soviet Union from 1962 until 1975.[49]
Credited under his pen name, le Carré appears as an extra in the 2011film version ofTinker Tailor Soldier Spy, among the guests at the Christmas party in several flashback scenes. He also appears, in uncredited cameo roles, as a museum usher inOur Kind of Traitor 2016, and in theBBC TV productionThe Night Manager (2016), as a restaurant diner.
In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future ofliberal democracy, saying: "I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise offascism and it's contagious, it's infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about".[50] He later wrote that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the "notion ofindividual freedom, of inclusiveness, of tolerance – all of that we calledanti-communism" prevailing during that time.[51]
Le Carré opposed both U.S. PresidentDonald Trump and Russian PresidentVladimir Putin, arguing that their desire to seek or maintain their countries' superpower status caused an impulse "foroligarchy, the dismissal of the truth, the contempt, actually, for the electorate and for thedemocratic system".[52] Le Carré compared Trump's tendency to dismiss the media as "fake news" to theNazi book burnings, and wrote that the United States is "heading straight down the road toinstitutional racism andneo-fascism".[53][54]
In le Carré's 2019 novelAgent Running in the Field, one of the novel's characters refers to Trump as "Putin's shithouse cleaner" who "does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can't do for himself". The novel's narrator describesBoris Johnson as "a pig-ignorant foreign secretary". He says Russia is moving "backwards into her dark, delusional past", with Britain following a short way behind.[55] Le Carré later said that he believed the novel's plotline, involving the U.S. and British intelligence servicescolluding to subvert theEuropean Union, to be "horribly possible".[54]
Le Carré was an outspoken advocate ofEuropean integration and sharply criticisedBrexit.[56] He criticised Brexit advocates such asBoris Johnson (whom he referred to as a "mob orator"),Dominic Cummings andNigel Farage in interviews, claiming that their "task is to fire up the people with nostalgia [and] with anger". Le Carré further opined that: "What really scares me about nostalgia is that it's become a political weapon. Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed, and selling it, really, as something we could return to", adding that with "the demise of the working class we saw also the demise of an established social order, based on the stability of ancient class structures".[54][57] On the other hand, he claimed that the UKLabour Party has "thisLeninist element and they have this huge appetite to level society."[58]
Le Carré once compared Brexit to the 1956Suez Crisis, stating that it was "without doubt the greatest catastrophe and the greatest idiocy that Britain has perpetrated since the invasion ofSuez... The idea, to me, that at the moment we should imagine we can substitute access to the biggest trade union in the world with access to the American market is terrifying", he said.[59][60][61] Speaking toThe Guardian in 2019, he commented: "I've always believed, though ironically it's not the way I've voted, that it'scompassionate conservatism that in the end could, for example, integrate the private schooling system. If you do it from the left you will seem to be acting out of resentment; do it from the right and it looks like good social organisation." Le Carré also said: "I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years. And it's a kind of liberation, if a sad kind."[54]
In January 2003, two months prior to the invasion,The Times published le Carré's essay "The United States Has Gone Mad" criticising the buildup to theIraq War and PresidentGeorge W. Bush's response to the11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, calling it "worse thanMcCarthyism, worse than theBay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than theVietnam War" and "beyond anythingOsama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams".[62][63] Le Carré participated in the Londonprotests against the Iraq War. He said the war resulted from the "politicisation of intelligence to fit the political intentions" of governments and "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden toSaddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history".[64][65]
He was critical ofTony Blair's role in taking Britain into the Iraq War, saying: "I can't understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretences has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed."[64]
Le Carré was critical of Western governments' policies towards Iran. He said that Iran's actions are a response to being "encircled by nuclear powers" and by the way in which "we oustedMosaddeq throughthe CIA and the Secret Service here across the way and installed theShah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, theSAVAK".[64]
Le Carré feuded withSalman Rushdie overThe Satanic Verses, stating: "Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity".[66]
While researchingThe Little Drummer Girl, le Carré travelled through the region – including Lebanon – where he metYasser Arafat. He recounts:
“I have come … to put my hand on the Palestinian heart.” Arafat then seized le Carré’s hand, placing it on his chest. This experience enabled him to see the Palestinians as victims with legitimate claims, and not as merely terrorists.[67]
In a 1998 interview with Douglas Davis, Le Carré described Israel as "the most extraordinary carnival of human variety that I have ever set eyes on, a nation in the process of re-assembling itself from the shards of its past, now Oriental, now Western, now secular, now religious, but always anxiously moralizing about itself, criticizing itself with Maoist ferocity, a nation crackling with debate, rediscovering its past while it fought for its future." He declared: "No nation on earth was more deserving of peace—or more condemned to fight for it."[68]In 2003, Le Carré criticized howneo-conservative influences and theIsrael lobby shaped U.S. Middle East policy, implying that such manipulation fed continuous conflict. He said the novel was intended to show:
"… neo-conservative group which is commanding the political high ground, calling the shots and appointing the State of Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global policy." This frames Israel – not necessarily the nation, but its political positioning – as central to escalatory foreign policy trends fuelling instability.[67]
Le Carré emphasized both empathy and support:
“I stood – and stand – wholeheartedly behind the nation-state of Israel … And wholeheartedly behind the peace process as the guarantor not only of Israel’s survival, but of thePalestinian survival also.”[69]
In 1954, Cornwell married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp. They had three sons.[8] they divorced in 1971.[70] In 1972, Cornwell marriedValerie Jane Eustace, a book editor withHodder & Stoughton[71] who collaborated with him behind the scenes.[72] They had a son, Nicholas, who writes asNick Harkaway.[73] Le Carré lived inSt Buryan, Cornwall, for more than 40 years; he owned a mile of cliff nearLand's End.[74] The house, Tregiffian Cottage, was put up for sale in 2023 for £3 million.[75] Le Carré also owned a house inGainsborough Gardens in Hampstead in north London.[76][77]
Le Carré was so disillusioned by the 2016Brexit vote to leave theEuropean Union that he secured Irish citizenship. In aBBC documentary broadcast in 2021, le Carré's son Nicholas revealed that his father's disillusionment with modern Britain, and Brexit in particular, had driven him to embrace his Irish heritage and become an Irish citizen. At the time of his death, le Carré's friend, the novelistJohn Banville, confirmed that the writer had researched his family roots in Inchinattin, nearRosscarbery, County Cork, and that he had applied for an Irish passport, to which he was entitled having completed the process of becoming an Irish citizen and having Irish ancestry through his maternal grandmother, Olive Wolfe.[59][60][61] His neighbour and friendPhilippe Sands recalled:
He became an Irishman through his maternal grandmother. And it was very, very moving, I have to say, to arrive at the place of the memorial to find an Irish flag and only an Irish flag. He had really in the last years, grown very disillusioned with what had happened to Britain and the United Kingdom.[78]
Le Carré died atRoyal Cornwall Hospital,Truro, on 12 December 2020, aged 89.[79][80] An inquest completed in June 2021 concluded that le Carré died after sustaining a fall at his home.[81] His wife Valerie died on 27 February 2021, two months after her husband, at age 82.[82]
In 2023, biographerAdam Sisman inThe Secret Life of John le Carré identified 11 women with whom le Carré had affairs during his second marriage.[83]
Le Carré's son Timothy died on 31 May 2022 at the age of 59, shortly after he finished editingA Private Spy, a collection of his father's letters.[84]
In 2010, le Carré donated his literary archive to theBodleian Library, Oxford. The initial 85 boxes of material deposited included handwritten drafts ofTinker Tailor Soldier Spy andThe Constant Gardener. The library hosted a public display of these and other items to markWorld Book Day in March 2011.[87][88]
^"Say How: I–L".Library of Congress. National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. November 2019.Archived from the original on 19 September 2018. Retrieved28 May 2018.
^Lawless, Jill (13 December 2020)."Master spy writer John le Carre dies at 89".Boston Globe. Associated Press. Retrieved27 January 2023.His first three novels were written while he was a spy, and his employers required him to publish under a pseudonym.
^Cornwell N (13 March 2021)."My father was famous as John le Carré. My mother was his crucial, covert collaborator".The Guardian.Archived from the original on 13 March 2021....Richard Ovenden, who examined the papers [le Carré] loaned to the Bodleian Library in Oxford... observed a "deep process of collaboration". His analysis is a perfect match for my recollection: "A rhythm of working together that was incredibly efficient … a kind of cadence from manuscript, to typescript, to annotated and amended typescripts … with scissors and staplers being brought to bear … getting closer and closer to the final published version."
^Herbert, Ian (6 June 2007). "Written in his stars: son of Le Carré gets £300,000 for first novel".The Independent.ProQuest311318983.
^"日本冒険小説協会大賞リスト" [Japan Adventure Fiction Association Grand Prize List].jade.dti.ne.jp (in Japanese).Archived from the original on 28 May 2017. Retrieved14 December 2020.
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