The Secret Life of John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

Overview

The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive.

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden.

Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work.

In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed.

The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. “Now that he is dead,” Sisman writes, “we can know him better.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063341043
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/24/2023
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	93,367
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Adam Sisman is the author of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the biographer of John le Carré, A. J. P. Taylor, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Among his other works are two volumes of letters by Patrick Leigh Fermor. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Universy of St. Andrews.

Editorial Reviews

09/11/2023

National Book Critics Circle Award winner Sisman delivers a revealing “supplement” to his 2015 authorized biography of John le Carré (1931–2020), divulging how the espionage writer’s extramarital affairs influenced his novels. Reporting that le Carré asked that mention of his infidelity be withheld until after his death, Sisman explains he can now disclose what he learned from private correspondence and interviews with some of the many women le Carré seduced while he was married. Le Carré believed pursuing women stimulated his creativity, Sisman contends, and he describes how the writer’s furtive conduct sometimes rivaled the spycraft in his novels, with “codes, false names, dead letter boxes, and safe houses” for liaising with women. Among the paramours discussed are American journalist Janet Lee Stevens, who likely served as the inspiration for the eponymous hero of The Little Drummer Girl, and Sue Dawson, who claims that some of her conversations with le Carré made their way into A Perfect Spy, albeit between the protagonist and “his wife, not his mistress.” Sisman uncovers a previously hidden and discomfiting dimension of le Carré, and remains remarkably unflinching when addressing the implications: “Does it lower him in our estimation to know that he lied to his wife? Yes, of course it does.” Future accounts of le Carré’s life will have to wrestle with the bombshells dropped here. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Page-turning . . . . Adam Sisman completes the task of showing us who [John le Carré] was—a minor spy who became a major novelist, whose most important agents in the field were the women he needed to love and then betray. For le Carré, tradecraft was lovecraft. Much more than What Was Left Out, The Secret Life of John le Carré is not merely the conclusive homage to a compulsively fascinating character, but an insightful study into the biographical process itself. Even David Cornwell, the man who actually was John le Carré, would have saluted him." — Nicholas Shakespeare

"A more rounded and less appealing picture of Cornwell—complex, vain, emotionally manipulative—emerges from this . . . book than before. But it does not diminish the literary and moral seriousness of le Carré’s greatest novels about the secret world." — The Economist

“While there is plenty of tabloid-worthy material between its covers, the book is nonetheless complex and consequential . . . [it] is also a fascinating examination of the biographer’s art that casts le Carre’s life and writing in a fresh light.” — The Washington Post

"Revealing . . . . Future accounts of le Carré’s life will have to wrestle with the bombshells dropped here." — Publishers Weekly

"A deeply entertaining book . . . . A determined and at times forensic attempt to set the record straight, detailing the full extent of what was kept from him, going to town on le Carré’s obstructiveness and reality-softening, undermining various aspects of the le Carré legend and exposing the decades-long exercise in stage management that lay at its unexpectedly chilly heart." — The Spectator

"A one-of-a-kind revisiting of a wondrously productive life lived at the expense of two wives and many lovers." — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2023-07-11
A “supplement” to Sisman’s 2015 biography that focuses on material his subject did not want to see published during his lifetime.

David Cornwell (1931-2020), who took the pen name John le Carré for reasons that are still unknown, was conscientious, hardworking, literate, inventive, witty, and capable of great generosity, especially to the women he pursued while married to one of his two legal spouses. Aware but unapologetic about his own failings, he blamed them on a father who had misbehaved shamelessly and a mother who abandoned the family when he was a child, leaving him, as Sisman observes, “with a lifelong mistrust of women” who had even less reason to trust him. Arguing that Cornwell’s serial womanizing was not a distraction from his copious output but an active driver of it, Sisman demonstrates how betrayal was the leitmotif of both the novelist’s life and his art and that however completely he depended on his wives, he depended on a new woman to serve as his inspiration for each book. Anyone familiar with le Carré’s oeuvre will know that that’s an awful lot of women. Of the three affairs Sisman traces in the greatest detail, only one of them—Cornwell’s extended relationship with researcher Sue Dawson—persuasively bears out his first argument, as analogies between Cornwell’s paranoid behavior and le Carré’s obsession with spycraft multiply throughout its course. Sisman makes a more convincing case for his second argument, tracing the author’s professional decline to his inability to attract muses for the increasingly formulaic novels he continued to write. Sisman’s return to the “secret annexe” of material Cornwell’s son urged him to leave out of his earlier biography is given even greater interest by his unusual candor in considering the ethical implications of his tell-all coda for Cornwell, his many lovers, and biographical projects generally.

A one-of-a-kind revisiting of a wondrously productive life lived at the expense of two wives and many lovers.

Kirkus Reviews