“We all write too few letters these days,” wrote David Cornwell, late in life. Well, you’d hardly know it from the 700+ pages of this latest (and presumably last?) volume. But his lifelong hatred of “the telephone”, and love of the handwritten letter, fax and latterly email, have, thankfully, preserved a vast collection of his interactions, making him perhaps “the last great letter writer of the 21st century”.

Le Carré was not exactly David Cornwell, of course (his own son, editing, uses the pseudonym throughout); but one of my own earliest interactions with his oeuvre involved realising, in a horrible flash, how much was surely born of his direct experience.

Raised by the cartoonish crook and gross manipulator Ronnie Cornwell – whose cruellest claim was doubtless that he taught his son “the art of writing” (le Carré said he learned instead from producing what he called “Foreign Office” summaries when at MI5 and MI6) – the child and proto-JLC lived a frenetic existence, one moment entertaining the Australian cricket team, the next more or less on the run. The vicarious guilt of all that “evil-doing” pursued him for the rest of his life.

The camp humour, Wodehouse jokes, and half the names in his novels suggest he never left the public school too far behind; but from the unhumble beginnings of Sherborne and Swiss holidays, a highly-developed “social conscience” rapidly sprang up. “I don’t think I’ve ever met so much arrogance,” he wrote soon after starting work as a teacher at Eton.
Already equipped with a deep well of betrayals and insecurities to draw from, the unmasking of George Blake and Kim Philby, early in his “Foreign Office” career, were timely gifts in the creation of the writer John le Carré. “Instead of [reading] those great big broadsheets on a train going up and down to London, I just began writing in a little notebook.”

He settled almost instantly into the life of the consummate professional novelist: “I must have the desk in my sights all the time.” He made himself produce a first-draft narrative before embarking on the “fun” of the research trips – but even so, I puzzled at the tale of his flying to the Far East via Copenhagen purely so he could touch down in Tashkent and “whiff the fumes of Russian petrol on the hot tarmac.” (Back then, I twigged, he’d never been to Russia.)

The contemporaneous reflections on his novels – “not perfect”, “quite a reasonable one” – are valuable correctives to his later overwhelming fame, and he was prone to all the usual writerly uncertainties. He referred to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as “just a thriller, to mark time”, and suspected the LWT television adaptation would be “very lousy”.

At the height of his “spy-novelist” phase, le Carré talked about reducing his overheads, so he could write the “riskier” books. His next publication was, in both senses, “the daddy book” – A Perfect Spy, described by Philip Roth as “the best English novel since the war”. Only in his early 60s, when writing The Night Manager, did he feel “completely in charge of my craft”.

Through all this clattered his notoriously turbulent personal life. One of his earliest affairs spawned books by three out of the four people concerned (his being The Naïve and Sentimental Lover) – and yet le Carré’s Bodleian archive is, we’re told, resoundingly silent on this substantial theme, largely because several parties, including le Carré himself, destroyed or otherwise withheld their letters. He calls several of his female correspondents, rather clammily, his “secret sharers” – and perhaps he too could hear the voice of Ronnie doing much the same.

According to Tim Cornwell, though, le Carré’s generosity of spirit left “an enormous reservoir of love, admiration and good will”. He could be remarkably nice to gushing fans, pedantic schoolchildren, and little old Catholic ladies. He was also extremely generous – to dissident Czech film-stars, to wannabe writers, and to his half-sister Charlotte, the activist actress on whom he modelled The Little Drummer Girl. There are far more glimpses – however unsatisfyingly brief – of his great friendships with Al Alvarez, Tom Stoppard and Philippe Sands, than there are of beefs with Graham Greene, Clive James and Salman Rushdie.

Several timely publications over the years – The Constant Gardener vs Big Pharma, eg – made le Carré look like something of a seer, and relaunched him in a long “late style”. But his work continued to feed into and out of spy-land (he evidently had access to the CIA’s in-house newsletter), both appreciated by those in the know in Russia, and publicly condemned, as though fact, at Chatham House.

His views on the relative merits of the West were far from consistent. Notably, he gave short shrift to an old Oxford Communist “mate” about having spied on him back in their youth – and he began to take a dim view, once the Cold War was won, of Western under-reaction to attacks on the “dignity… of minorities and small nations in the face of totalitarian regimes”. He then adopted quite the opposite attitude to Iraq, of course.

He called his last novel, Agent Running in the Field, “an indictment of Brexit Britain – a pathetic cocktail of delusions and false hopes.” But for all his disillusionment, he could never bring himself to leave. “You’ve got to live in the swamp”, he wrote to Stephen Fry – and his eleventh-hour exploration of his Irish roots feels like a last, instinctive flipping of the bird to the political Establishment.

His obviously-wounded disregard for the literary establishment (he disliked “modern” novels, he said) made him no less irritated by anything other than enthusiastic reviews. Frustrated at being (merely) “the greatest spy novelist of the Cold War era”, he complained of his reception in the broadsheets: “I’ve been ‘le Carré’ for too long.” A hard man to please, he never thought he wrote his “ur-book”. Pushing 90, with millions in the bank and international recognition to burn, he remained obsessed with getting on with “something new”.

It is a testament to just how many novels le Carré produced – almost all of them bestsellers – that in A Private Spy the books often seem to have just… happened. But given his work ethic, and semi-reclusiveness, perhaps that’s accurate. Certain major pivot points are signposted – like his dramatic improvement in fortunes after The Spy Who Came In From the Cold – but it would be difficult to get much out of this volume without a fairly thorough knowledge of le Carré and his works already.

There are also considerable lacunae beyond his romantic life (the “heartbreaking” divorce from his first wife, Ann, is only really spoken of some decades later). Next to no letters between le Carré and the huge presence of his father; or indeed from a whole range of other model characters, or from whole chunks of the globe.

There is no shortage of intriguing footnotes about the self-fulfilling myths around his work; projects that never came to pass (a Cohen Brothers’ movie of the Tailor of Panama, starring Robin Williams…?!?!); entertaining views on the people of his time, both political (he had no doubt Donald Trump was a Russian asset) and literary (that “arch cunt” Martin Amis); and occasional fun bits on JLC himself (the former intelligencer, it is said, was bad with names, and was once quite bemused as to why “Barry Goldman” had been cast to lead in Tinker, Tailor). The fact that the disgraced Philby allegedly read le Carré books each night, in bed, is – for my money – topped only by the extraordinary nugget that Alec Guinness, perhaps just playing hard to get, suggested casting Arthur Lowe as Smiley!

It is a testament to just how many novels le Carré produced – almost all of them bestsellers – that in A Private Spy the books often seem to have just… happened

For all these gems, the letters are (of course, and of necessity) heavily “selected”, and ultimately – as its title might well indicate – A Private Spy contains few explosive revelations for the JLC completist. Le Carré continues to have “lots and lots of secrets”, from the perennial question of where his pen name came from to even a single mention of his long relationship with editor Suleika Dawson (352 pages’ worth in her memoir, The Secret Heart, published within a week of this volume).

As a man, le Carré was nothing if not fully human – all the “fuck-ups” and “inadequacies” and “compassion” of real life – and it is interesting to see him investigate his moral failings in his own words, however carefully one has to treat them. He might still be accused of being somewhat “self-forgiving” (a term he’d have been stung to realise he had used of Tony Blair). But at the last, he seems to have managed to die happy. “I had an amazing life, against the odds. I turned from a bad man to a much better one.”

ASH Smyth is a writer and radio presenter, living in Stanley. He is a member of the Falkland Islands Defence Force, and previously served in the Honourable Artillery Company, in Helmand and Kabul