Feature: Oxford Literary Festival on April 8
Published: 7 April, 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN
Tinker, tailor, biographer
EYES always alert, never missing a detail, for more than 30 years he has been a familiar figure on Hampstead Heath, tall, intent and fast-walking, usually alone, often accompanied by one lurcher, sometimes two dogs.
He strides too the cliff-top paths and beaches in Cornwall, where he has a hideaway house on a mile of cliff he owns, approachable but distant with strangers, able to speak in fluent French and German, and mimic perfectly any Russian leader or even Maggie Thatcher.
“He is the cleverest man I ever met,” says one publisher I know. And also a man of contradictions, the son of a jailed, womanising confidence trickster and a mother he never met until he was 21, now rich and generous, once sending me a crate of the best champagne.
In Who’s Who he is listed as David John Moore Cornwell, almost a deception in itself since he is known to the world as John le Carré, smash hit author of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, and a succession of novels – 21 so far, some of which have become films and TV adaptations.
Now snowy-haired and 80 in October, he has invited the admirable Adam Sisman, one-time a resident of Woodsome Road, Kentish Town, now a citizen of Bath, to delve into his secret past, and write the definitive, independent and unmolested biography.
He has proposed calling it “A Life Unmasked”.
“David suggested another title – ‘Cover Story’,” Adam recalls amusingly of one of his Hampstead assignations with le Carré, initially at his home in Gainsborough Gardens.
And he ruefully adds: “I am aware that a biography of le Carré presents particular problems because so much of his life has been spent concealing himself, both as a spy and a ‘fabulator’. But I am nonetheless confident of uncovering the man behind the disguises.”
He is well experienced in the long haul – Bloomsbury plan to publish in 2014, on the 50th anniversary of The Spy Who Come in from the Cold – having produced a highly praised biography last summer of the controversial historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Adam is also the author of works on AJP Taylor, Boswell and the friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge.
But he had rivals in the field when it came to le Carré. Some 20 years ago the political journalist and novelist Robert Harris signed a contract for an unauthorised biography of le Carré, who asked for it to appear after his death.
Harris’s researches led him to interview le Carré’s now late first wife, as well as previously unseen correspondence, and he wrote some 30,000 words in note form.
Then another writer, Graham Lord, proposed his own exposé version on the former British intelligence officer – he served as a member of the diplomatic corps in our embassies in Bonn and Hamburg – whose inside knowledge of espionage has given his novels such vivid authenticity.
Lord, now living in the Caribbean, backed down when le Carré challenged him. Meanwhile, Harris took off on another tack, developing his own very successful career as the author of Fatherland, Pompeii and The Ghost Writer, declaring that his le Carré was more or less on permanent hold.
It was Harris who suggested Sisman should try to lift the lid on the Berlin Wall spy and creator of Smiley’s People and The Perfect Spy.
“Robert and I are friends, not rivals,” Adam, 57, reveals. “I am a huge admirer of his work, and he has written very kind reviews of two of my books. We often talk to each other about what we’re doing. I had been contemplating a life of le Carré for years and we have discussed it together several times. About a year ago, after I finished my biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, I had lunch with Robert, and it was he who encouraged me to approach David Cornwell. So I wrote to him.”
It was a pivotal moment for Adam, who joined the horde of le Carré fans after reading The Spy Who Came in from the Cold when only 12 or 13, and reading his novels, often more than once – Tinker, Tailor at least a dozen times.
“One of his secrets is a superbly accurate ear for the way people speak – as good as that of any other English writer in my opinion,” he insists, describing Tinker Tailor as “a superbly constructed novel, rich and satisfying, peopled by wonderfully vivid characters.”
For his part, le Carré admired his Trevor-Roper biography. “And he decided – and importantly his wife Jane too – that I would be an appropriate person to write his life,” says Adam with evident satisfaction.
“He has given me exclusive access to his archive, to himself, and to the important people in his life – ‘the keys to the kingdom’, as his agent put it. Nevertheless, we agreed that we both wanted to have an arm’s length arrangement, so that I will have a free hand and David will not have control over what I write.”
That means trips to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where le Carré has deposited his manuscripts – he handwrites every word, corrects it and Jane types it up – and also to Cornwall, where le Carré’s extensive personal papers are stored.
He plans to visit Sherborne, the public school in Dorset from which le Carré ran away during an unhappy childhood. He will also go to Eton, where le Carré taught for two years after coming down from Oxford with a first-class degree with honours in modern languages.
There is a growing list too of interviewees. “I shall have to go round the world, to America, to Russia, to Germany and Switzerland,” he says, almost with glee at the prospect of spying on the once master spywriter whose fiction has enthralled millions, all the settings in actual places he has visited.
There are also le Carré’s four sons, three from his first marriage, to meet. “When David told them that I was writing this biography,” says Adam, “his son said: ‘Oh good! – we shall all be able to find out from it what you’re really like’.”
Such is the task he has set himself.
l The internet has been buzzing with stories over le Carré’s request for his name to be removed from the shortlist of nominations for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize, worth £60,000, as he has for other major literary awards. Sisman will no doubt be quizzed about this when he is interviewed at the Oxford Literary Festival at 4pm tomorrow (Friday) when he appears with Ion Trewin, who edited his Trevor-Roper biographer and is administrator of the Booker Prize.