John Le Carre:

A Brief Biography

1. John le Carré (or David John Moore Cornwell as his father knew him) lives for most of  the year in a thick-walled white building that was once a row of fishermen's cottages, at the edge of a Cornish cliff near Penzance.

2. He was born in Poole, Dorset on 19 October 1931. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was engaged in several million dollar swindles and was imprisoned for fraud. John le Carré has said his father's life was one of the reasons for his fascination with secrets.

3. Ronnie Cornwell became the model for Magnus Pym in A Perfect Spy (1986).

4. In 1937, his mother left the family. Female figures don't usually do well in le Carré's novels. Only two of his books are love stories (Naive and Sentimental Lover, (1971)--a bomb--and The Little Drummer Girl (1983) Film 1984.

               "I never knew my mother until I was 21; she was around until I was just five and then she disappeared. My father, who was in and out of prison when I was young, was a tremendously charming, dazzling con man. His dream was that my brother should be a solicitor and I should be a barrister ... and for that purpose he sent us into the gents' stream, the English private educational system, and we learned the language, we learned the manners, we learned the gestures, we learned to be charming.

               "But we went back to mayhem. We went back to we knew not what each holiday: a new lady, with or without my father, some other bit of society. This extraordinary contrast between my father's world and the world he wanted to get us into really made us frontier-crossers the whole time.

5. David and his brother were packed off to boarding schools. At 13? David went to a public [private] school called Sherborne in Dorset (1998-99 fees $7,350.00 per term)

6. In 1947, he faked a nervous breakdown so he wouldn't have to return to Sherborne.  His father agreed to let him go to Switzerland where he enrolled at the University of Berne and studied German. He was there from 1948-49. Of his decision to study in Switzerland, he says:

               "When I was about 16 I staged, I think, the nearest thing I could to a nervous breakdown ... and refused to go back to my school [Sherborne www.sherborne.org] where I'd been very  successful but I simply couldn't do any more of it. I didn't like the people, I didn't like the pupils, I loathed the staff, the buildings terrified me, and above all, I'm very thin-skinned about corporal punishment."

                "I ran away from all that and embraced a completely different culture and Identity.   I  immersed myself in German, probably because the Germans were so unpopular in those days. And I really--as Charlemagne said, to acquire another language is to acquire another soul--acquired another soul."

7. When he was 18, he discovered his father was a convicted felon and a con artist.

8. In 1949 he did his two years national service. Either here or while at Berne he may have been contacted by the British Secret Service. He was stationed in Austria, and his duties of trying to get Czechoslovakians to defect. He found the Cold War a formative experience.

9. In 1952 he went to Lincoln College, Oxford University. It's suggested he reported on left wing students. His father went bankrupt in 1954, and David left Oxford. He returned on a scholarship and graduated with a first class honors degree in modern languages.

10. He taught for two years at Eton College [www.etoncollege.com], the most famous boys school in England (tuition in 1999 $14,000.00). He found it "wholly suffocating."

11. He married for the first time in 1956. His wife's name was Anne. George Smiley's unfaithful wife is called "the Lady Anne."

12. In 1958, he was at the British Embassy in Bonn, Germany, as a member of the Foreign Office. He was possibly under cover as a member of MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service). He denies any work for the SIS--ever.

               "I was brought up to be a misfit. I was brought up to be an alien."

               "And then at a very early age I was moved into the secret world. As somebody obliged to do military service, I was in army intelligence and I found immediately in that world of occasional dissembly, of great protection, some kind of parental reference which was very important to me. I think for a while I embraced service and country and all of that with a great passion, because I had been deprived of things to love when I  was a kid.

                "So my relationship with the secret world was an emotional one and indeed, my relationship with my country and many other things has been, for the same reason, an emotional one. It's been a cycle of engagement and retreat, escape, of love, revulsion, a constant pendulum--for which the German is pendel [the name of the protagonist  of his latest book, Single and Single].

He goes on:

               "So that was my secret world, and the gift that it was to me was of an element about which to write;  I was the right peg in the right hole at the right time. I had a good eye and a good ear, and I was in the secret world at a time when it was really the hub of the universe.  I knew what it was like and who those people were and how they behaved. I know the mysterious areas of English puritanism and self-restraint and decency which operated in that murky world despite everything."

13. In 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected. It became a symbol of the failure of Communism.

14. In the same year, he published A Call For the Dead. He had to assume a pen name because he was a serving officer in the government. He rejected Chunk Smith which might have been a typo for Chuck Smith. In the end, he took his second name John and "le Carré"--which is French for "the square."

15. Introduced in this novel was a mild mannered, overweight, mastermind called George Smiley.

16. Smiley reappeared in the second novel, A Murder of Quality (1962). Le Carré called both these books apprentice works.

17. In 1963 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was published. Its original title wasThe Carcass of the Lion, and it limped along until the publisher Gollancz implied it was the work of an insider. At that time, sales took off. It sold 70,000 copies in two weeks in the U.S.A.

18. The film rights were sold and Burt Lancaster hired to play Leamas!

19. Le Carré resigned from the Foreign Office to be a writer. In 1964, he wrote The Looking-Glass War.

20. In 1968, he wrote A Small Town in Germany.

19. He was divorced in 1971; he had three children. He married Jane Eustace, an editor with Hodder and Stoughton. They had one child.

20. In this year he wrote his only bomb--The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

21. In 1974, he returned to George Smiley and the first of three novels called the Search for Karla trilogy. This was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.   The Honorable Schoolboy followed in 1977 and the trilogy finished with Smiley's People (1980).  The first and third were tremendous hits on British television. Sir Alec Guinness played Smiley. He was completely unlike the Smiley in the books, and le Carré has said it would be impossible to write any more Smiley novels.

22. 1983 The Little Drummer Girl (movie 1984--Diane Keaton, Klaus Kinski)

23. 1986 A Perfect Spy

24. 1989 The Russia House (movie 1990--Sean Connery, Michele Pfeiffer)

25. 1991 The Secret Pilgrim

26. 1993 The Night Manager

27. 1995 Our Game

28. 1996 The Tailor of Panama

29. 1999 Single and Single

Note: John le Carre is based upon at least two people: Lord Clanmorris ( worked for MI5 and wrote novels) and Vivian Green, a tutor of his at Oxford University.

Some Notes on John Le Carré

1. Patriotism is important to Le Carré:   "I love my country. I mean, I think it's going to the devil at the moment, but I don't think it'll go to the devil always."

2. Like all serious writers, his work habits are regular. "We get up early in the morning ... swim for half an hour ... I have a cup of coffee and go straight to work, working through 'til lunchtime. That's the original part of the day, and a long day already for a writer ... I write with an ordinary roller-ball pen in a smart French case made for it because I have big clumsy hands and I like a heavy pen ... Jane types it out and it goes on the machine and then I rework it constantly."

3. "There is a wonderful process that occurs the moment I see the stuff in type, when I say, 'Oh my hat, I can't have written that. It really is pompous. Who the hell would want to read that?' And I start working it and cutting it and so on. It's really a different me; it's the editor who takes over the printed word. Truman Capote said, 'I'm not a writer, I'm a re-writer,' and I feel much the same."

4. When we speak about dialogue, he says: "I love language and voices and that stuff, and I'll read a dialogue scene to myself again and again and again, and try and make the voices get on the page. That's the magic of writing. It's the greatest fun on earth."

5. At 65, he is enjoying a huge resurgence of popularity with his latest book. British critics, notoriously suspicious of success, have savaged him in the past but The Tailor of Panama seems to have disarmed them to a man. Le Carré's dry comment on the rave reviews: "The older you get in this country, the kinder they speak."

6. He also worries about present-day Britain and refused the honour Thatcher wanted to bestow on him: "Who are we that we have to increase the differences between us with these titles?" 

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