"John le Carré: The Biography" | Chronicling the author who came out from the cold
Sisman in the pursuit of true le Carré that is David John Moore Cornwell, ends up delineating the two shades of the personality,
In the publisher's introductory note to the book, Bloombury says, “Over half a century since ‘The Spy Who came in from the Cold’ made John le Carré a worldwide, bestselling sensation, David Cornwell, the man behind the pseudonym, remains an enigma. He has consistently quarried his life for his writing, and his novels seem to offer tantalising glimpses of their author – but in the narrative of his life fact and fiction have become intertwined, and little is really known of one of the world's most successful writers.”
David John Moore Cornwell with penname John le Carré was in 2008 ranked by The Times as 22nd of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” In 2011, he won the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe Institute. John le Carré is known world over as the bestselling author of espionage novels. Born on October 19, 1931, during the 1950s and the 1960s, he worked for the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service.
During this period he began writing novels under his pen name and le Carré was soon to establish himself as a writer of espionage fiction. His third novel, ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ (1963), became an international best-seller, and remains one of his best-known works. ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ helped le Carré come out from the secret service and take to writing full-time. The novel was later adapted as the screenplay for the film with the same title, directed by Martin Ritt, with Richard Burton as protagonist Alec Leamas.
Having established himself as a writer, le Carréis said to have toyed with the idea of his biography since 1989, knowing full well that such a tome would help the posterity understand him better than any of his works of fiction. But the challenge was of getting an ‘honest’ biography done “for Britain’s greatest living storyteller is so addicted to mysteries and fabrications that he must always be at odds with the demands of any good Boswell,” mentions a reviewer. Finally he settled for Adam Sisman, “much celebrated for writing about the dead (AJP Taylor; Hugh Trevor-Roper).”
Thus, for Sisman, writing about le Carré must have been an extra-ordinary challenge. “I’m a liar,” le Carré had once written, “Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist.” His website declares: “Nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing.” Sisman, however, has been fortunate that he wrote the voluminous biography with exclusive access to David Cornwell himself, to his private papers and to the most important people in his life. The book features a wealth of unseen photographic material. Adam Sisman, it can be said, has been fairly successful in bringing in from the cold a man whose own life has been as complex and perplexing and filled with duplicity as any of his novels.
In le Carré's lonely childhood Adam Sisman uncovers the origins of the themes of love and abandonment which have also dominated le Carré's fiction: the departure of his mother when he was five, followed by “sixteen hugless years” in the dubious care of his father, who was a ‘conman’, who hid the Bentleys in the trees when the bailiffs came calling – a “totally incomprehensible father” who could “put a hand on your shoulder and the other in your pocket, both gestures equally sincere.”
And in Cornwell’s adult life – from recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, through marriage and family life, to his emergence as the master of the spy novel – Sisman explores the idea of espionage and its significance in human terms; the extent to which perfidy is acceptable in exchange for love; and the endless need for clemency, especially from oneself.
Sisman, in the pursuit of true le Carré that is David John Moore Cornwell, ends up delineating the two shades of the personality – the writer and the man who has projected himself as a writer of genius but feared about his childhood and his silver-tongued, small-town conman of a father. Other dualities abound. Le Carré has dined with presidents and prime ministers, but Cornwell prefers a private life at social periphery.
Le Carré could care a damn about his literary reputation but Cornwell is obsessed about his image, hawking at smallest details published about him.
