Charm in the secret world is placed very high on the list of desirable qualities. It’s called, in recruitment terms, ‘entertainment value.’ And at its baldest, it means that your wretched little agent, stuck somewhere, is going to look forward to seeing you. He or she is run-down, exhausted, lying to her employers, and she wants to be turned into a goddess for the evening, and she wants to be listened to—she wants a confessor. In other words, the very attributes which in my father I tended to perceive as larcenous were the ones which my employers found attractive in me. So I’ve got it in for charm. Charm’s on my hit list.
—John le Carré
“Paper’s back,” David Cornwell told Steve Kroft in a 2017 segment on 60 Minutes. Paper was never not back for Cornwell, better known by his pen name, John le Carré. Once le Carré completed his celebrated, if brief, service with British intelligence, paper became an essential part of his arsenal. And he deployed it with precision for several decades, taking notes and writing longhand, eventually becoming one of the greatest and most popular writers of the 20th century.
Le Carré was literature’s most astute observer of the emotional and moral costs of spy life; no one better understood the required elements of espionage during and after the Cold War, the complex architecture of a life built with lies. He saw, as T. S. Eliot said of John Webster, “the skull beneath the skin.” He understood that while thrilling missions, physical risk, and seductive assassins make for fine plots, the one thing that makes a story last is character. Unlike his contemporary Ian Fleming, le Carré never wasted time on the description of a martini, or allowed himself to be seduced by his characters. Charm, he knew, is a chimera. Or worse.
“I look at you as an exquisite poet of self-hatred,” Errol Morris tells le Carré in his new documentary about the writer, The Pigeon Tunnel. Morris elicited tears from former U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara. What will he coax from le Carré? Will he convince him to tell the truth about his work with M.I.6, work le Carré once denied, later deflected, and, at times, allegedly slyly inflated? That would make sense—the great spy novelist coming clean about his life as a spy and about the experiences which launched him into a life as a best-selling author—as that has always been the accepted line about le Carré. Like Fleming, Graham Greene, and, later, Frederick Forsyth, and Jason Matthews, he was the spy who wrote what he knew.
Or perhaps Morris will illuminate the truth about the mistresses le Carré allegedly kept throughout his life, many of whose stories are recounted in Adam Sisman’s The Secret Life of John le Carré, which comes out later this month. This slim, enchanting, and exotically—in our era of lies—candid book is a kind of dividend to Sisman’s 2015 biography of the author. It contains the one aspect of the story that Sisman was forbidden from including in that book but which le Carré’s son Simon Cornwell allowed him to disclose following his father’s death, in 2020.
The Secret Life of John le Carré is oddly unsalacious, though. Its contents are, for le Carré–lovers, less compelling as potential cause for condemnation than for the literary question they raise: How many of the romances were research? Was le Carré inclined to illicit affairs less for love than for divining, accurately, a certain quality of character? We know there was a real woman who inspired Tessa Quayle in The Constant Gardener. Le Carré dedicated that novel to her: “Yvette Pierpaoli, who lived and died giving a damn.” Was there also a real woman who inspired the headstrong actress Charlie Ross in The Little Drummer Girl or the sly, icy Jed Marshall in The Night Manager? Sisman does not say.
Le Carré never wasted time on the description of a martini, or allowed himself to be seduced by his characters. Charm, he knew, is a chimera.
Morris is not interested in mistresses. Or marriages. His interviews with le Carré are intercut throughout the film with a rotating set of images that suggest something far more elusive: Russian nesting dolls; thousands of cracked eggshells overflowing an empty ballroom; and pigeons, a reference to the title of the documentary and of le Carré’s 2016 memoir, flying into and away from the screen, down formidably narrow corridors, and across the empty sky in Southern France where, we learn, a very young le Carré first encountered them. He was there, as a child, to observe a carefully orchestrated shoot, where the birds were released into the air off a grassy hotel terrace, having been trapped in their “tunnel,” bred, and then freed only to slaughter: the perfect metaphor for the life of a spy.
Those pigeons are also a nod to what Morris is after: the author’s childhood, and the two roguish and brilliant men who defined his life, Ronald Thomas Archibald Cornwell, his father, and Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, former head of counter-intelligence for M.I.6 and the most celebrated traitor of the Cold War. The final, tiny nesting dolls.
Morris links “Ronnie” and Kim by drawing out le Carré’s memories of them, gradually revealing the similarities. To le Carré, Philby exemplifies what he calls “the addiction to betrayal,” careful to point out that this addiction arose from instinct rather than reason. Le Carré describes the condition from which certain spies suffer as “the joy of self-imposed schizophrenia,” as apt a description of spy life as there ever has been. It is a certain kind of person who finds joy in being several people at the same time, lining up noms de guerre, false histories, and cover stories, without going mad. “I had some inner relationship with Philby,” le Carré concedes to Morris.
“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. But the cat sat on the dog’s mat—that is a story.” This is le Carré’s variation on E. M. Forster, who wrote in Aspects of the Novel, “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” Forster’s essential differentiating element, between story and plot, is the introduction of emotion, and causality. Le Carré is only interested in plot, which for him, must involve a crime. And betrayal is the ultimate crime, whether of a loved one or a country or the dog who does not want you on his mat. Betrayal makes a plot move, a heart break. But where did le Carré’s obsession with betrayal, the daily bread of spy life, actually start?
“Smiley was the father I never had,” le Carré tells Morris. And there, with that simple, somehow obvious line, Morris cracks the riddle. Because the truth is that David Cornwell never needed M.I.6 to become John le Carré. He never needed government service, or a gun, or a map, or a sophisticated listening device. He never needed an asset, or a mistress. All David Cornwell needed to become John le Carré he had long before he ever set foot inside what he would christen “the Circus,” before he was stationed in West Berlin at the height of the drama, and before he came up with the idea of writing a spy novel. The only thing David Cornwell needed to become the greatest author of espionage, of the art of betrayal and its relationship to love, was his childhood. He was writing what he knew, after all.
That childhood made the man: a mother who ruthlessly abandoned her sons when they were barely more than toddlers; a father who sent a teenage boy to collect cash at the races, where he would eventually greet the bookies by name; and, above all, the pressure to hide in the guise of a fine English gentleman, a posh Eton schoolmaster, an Oxford scholar.
He created a character from an entirely different class and with an entirely different attitude, which was the writer’s first, finest “cover,” one he never dropped. Le Carré was becoming a spy before he could skip a stone. His nom de plume, in the end, was his nom de guerre. He used it for the duration of his personal war, one fought with plot, character, and the ruthless pressing for answers to the hard questions: Why are certain people prone, even addicted, to lies? Why would someone betray the one they love? Will the answers be kept in that locked box in the innermost room at the Circus? Will the answers bring the real peace, peace of mind? What if the locked box is empty?
In the film, le Carré tells us that when British intelligence opened a safe belonging to Nazi official Rudolf Hess, it contained only a pair of pants. Morris described the Hess story in The New York Times as “a historical investigation [which became] a grim joke about the nature of history, maybe about the unknowability of history, about the chaos of history.” The same could as easily be said of le Carre’s entire oeuvre.
Le Carré cared and was angry about history in equal measure. He wrote stories about the arms trade, Big Pharma, the specter of Russia and, later, of “terror,” so that we, his readers, could learn from his characters’ losses and be entertained along the way. So that we would not have to fight those fights, or answer those questions, alone. He wrote about the secret world, and knew secrecy is the flip side of knowledge. Secrecy is power. It is the power of secrets that solders the stories of Ronnie and Kim and David, of George Smiley and Jim Prideaux and Bill Haydon. Of David Cornwell and John le Carré.
“Childhood is the credit balance of the writer,” le Carré tells Morris, quoting Greene. It surely occurred to le Carré that a child is also the perfect intelligence asset. Impressionable, vulnerable, keen to please and, as he put it, “to be listened to.” A child is not yet cynical, as spies invariably are. A child is always dreaming, a little like a novelist, of what comes next.
Lea Carpenter is the author of Eleven Days and Red, White, Blue. Her third novel, Ilium, will be published by Knopf in January