Adam Sisman, can you first tell us about the genesis of the book, The Secret Life of John le Carré? This shorter work serves as a coda to your full-length biography (although it can be read without being familiar with that work). When did you initially have the idea of writing a follow-up?

While I was writing the biography that was published in 2015, my relations with David Cornwell (John le Carré’s real name) became tense, as I discovered more and more about him that he didn’t want to see published in his lifetime. We had agreed at the start that the book should be written “at arms’ length” and that I shouldn’t flinch from telling the truth about him, however unpalatable that might be, providing that it did not cause distress to living third parties. I wasn’t searching for scandal – far from it — but I seemed to come across mistresses wherever I went (two more have emerged since the book went to press).

David Cornwell/John le Carré

As I say, David became agitated about what might be in the book, and at a particularly fraught stage in our relations his eldest son Simon acted as a mediator.  Simon came to visit me at my home in Bristol and suggested keeping a “secret annexe” of material to be published later, after David’s death. This secret annexe is the core of the new book. David himself said that he didn’t mind what I wrote about him after his death; though, as so often with him, I’m not sure that this was completely true.

At first I thought in terms of a revised edition of the biography, but for various reasons I abandoned this idea in favour a standalone book.

 Le Carré once mentioned in an interview that “First you invent yourself, and then you get to believe your invention.” In the book you state that you began to distinguish between David Cornwell and John le Carré. In what ways do you consider them as being different and divorced from one another?

He also wrote of one of his characters that “All his life he’s been inventing versions of himself that are untrue”, a sentence that I use as an epigraph to my book. Of course the distinction between David Cornwell and John le Carré is no more than a literary construct. Nevertheless I think there is a sense that while Cornwell was a liar, le Carré was a truth-teller. John le Carré aspired to be a serious novelist, and a serious novelist must confront the truth, it seems to me.

 The book is, to say the least, revelatory. You were probably unsurprised to find that your subject was egotistical (he was an author after all) but when did you begin to suspect that there was much more to the story than the image that Cornwell tried to project and curate?

I think that there is always more to the story than the image we try to project to the outside world.

When I first met David, I was struck by his charm, as everyone who met him was. He seemed a man at ease with himself. But I realised quite quickly that this was a mask, and underneath the mask was someone quite different, an unhappy man churning with unresolved emotion – most of all, perhaps, resentment of his mother, who left the family home and abandoned David and his brother Tony while they were still little boys. I don’t think it is too much to say that this was a defining moment in his life. Women could not be trusted, because they would always leave you. His strategy was to seduce them and then drop them before they could abandon him.

Do you think the ‘secret life’ Cornwell led was in some way a substitute for the secret life he left in the security services?

Yes, in at least two ways. First, it provided some excitement in the otherwise rather dull life of a writer. I think that he used the drama and the jeopardy that extramarital adventures provided fuel for his writing. He admitted as much to me. “My infidelities,” he wrote to me at a time when, for better or worse, the issue had come to dominate our discussions,

produced in my life a duality & a tension that became almost a necessary drug for my writing, a dangerous edge of some kind… They are not therefore a “dark part” of my life, separate from the “high literary calling”, so to speak, but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.”

One aspect of the secret life that he relished was knowing things that other people didn’t know. In this sense adultery was like espionage. He employed many of the techniques he had learned in his intelligence career to conduct his clandestine affairs: codes, dead letter boxes, cut outs, safe houses, and so on. In this sense he was playing at being a spy, even though he had left that life behind. His tradecraft became lovecraft.

What shines through, in both the biography and The Secret Life of John le Carré, is just how accomplished a novelist le Carré was – and how he devoted himself to his craft. Indeed, he may have been too devoted and obsessed. Do you remember when you first encountered le Carré as a reader? If you had to recommend two or three novels by the author, which would they be and why? Did Cornwell ever profess to have a favourite himself?

I first encountered le Carré’s early novels as a teenager, on my parents’ bookshelves. (Their copies of the first two are now in my possession, Penguin Crime editions with green bindings.)  I think that the first le Carré that I actually read was The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It made an enormous impact on me: it seemed so bleak, so unflinchingly truthful.

I still think it one of his very best. If I were to recommend only two of his books, this would be one of them—and the other, very different in style, would be Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

David thought that A Perfect Spy was his best book, and this is the third one I would particularly recommend. Philp Roth called it “the best English novel since the war”.

Do you think that le Carré’s books will last?

Yes, I think that his best work will last. As is true of all writers, his weaker novels will be forgotten, but the best ones will continue to be read. He has established himself, so it seems to me, as the definitive novelist of the Cold War. In the future, when people try to understand the Cold War, they will read le Carré. In parallel to that is his role as what Blake Morrison has called “the laureate of Britain’s post-Imperial sleepwalk”. Better than any other writer I can think of he has explored how Britons struggled to come to terms with Britain’s much diminished role after the Second World War. One could also make a case for The Honourable Schoolboy as one of the best books about Vietnam, and the apparent collapse of Western influence in South-East Asia.

In a sense he has already shown his staying power. It is now sixty years since the publication of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and it is hard to think of another novelist who continued to have this kind of success over such a long period. That said, I think that his later novels are pretty feeble. 

 Graham Greene has a couple of cameo appearances in the life of le Carré. Greene may have been the novelist who le Carré most aspired to be like. Did you ever discuss Greene with le Carré? Similarly, were there other writers which you felt he particularly admired?

Yes, we discussed Greene, and I wrote something about this in my biography. He certainly admired Greene and aspired to be like him. In general he didn’t read many other contemporary writers. He sometimes mentioned Balzac as an inspiration.

The amount of research you carried out for both books was exhaustive and enlightening. It seems that the only person you didn’t interview was the chap who was employed to clip the claws of Elizabeth Taylor’s parrot during the filming of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Taking Ronnie Cornwell, his father, as a given, is there anyone you regret not being able to interview for the books?

Yes, quite a few people come to mind. One of them is Rainer Heumann, his Swiss agent and the model for the character of Axel in A Perfect Spy, who I think must have known a lot of his secrets. Another is the woman with whom he fell in love while serving with MI6 in Bonn. This was his first extramarital affair, and his consequent unhappiness and guilt fed into the writing of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, his breakthrough book. I was able to identify her, but she resisted my approaches, and I didn’t want to distress an old lady by pressing it further.

 Can you tell us about what your next project will be? 

I have plans for at least two books, maybe more. I think I’m done with le Carré!

Adam Sisman is a biographer of and the author of The Secret Life of John le Carré. Richard Foreman is a bestselling novelist and the author of Spies of Rome.