If there is one expression that should now be banished from the writings of British critics and academics, it is “definitive biography”. Publishing news across the Channel regularly brings new illustrations; but this time, it’s the final blow. It has just been attacked by Adam Sisman, the almost official biographer of the writer John le Carré – one of the greatest contemporary authors in the English language and not just a good specialist in the novel of espionage, a genre to which we have tried to assign it for too long. In the very comprehensive book that he dedicated to it in 2015, he did not say everything. Not quite, not really. By his own admission, the biographer still had something under his belt. Nothing is painful like writing a book while constantly feeling the breath of its main character behind your shoulder. So he’s doing it again these days with The Secret Life of John le Carré.
Married for half a century, he had many mistresses
We suspect a little of the content, the title announcing the program. He had promised not to divulge anything during the lifetime of his hero who died in 2020 at the age of 89. Consenting, le Carré had cooperated “without constraints but on condition of respecting the sensitivities of living third parties”; the beneficiaries, his children (their mother died shortly after him), gave their agreement. Married for half a century after a failed first union, he multiplied the number of mistresses by using in his amorous clandestinity the techniques learned when he was an MI5 agent in Cold War Germany: blankets, shadowing, dead letter boxes , etc. An experience of betrayal which irrigated his novels.
His affair with Susan Kennaway, the wife of his friend, the novelist James Kennaway, was well documented: their menage a trois was described by the husband in his novel Some Gorgeous Accidentby the woman in The Kennaway Papers (1981), collection of his correspondence and notebooks, and by the lover le Carré in A naive lover and sentimental (Robert Laffont, 1972)! But others have remained secret and are only of interest because of what is reflected in his work.
Le Carré conducted his affairs of the heart like espionage operations
There was an American photographer, an Italian journalist, a German lawyer… Adam Sisman identified around ten thanks to the exploration of his archives, his correspondence and following meetings. Some, younger (thirty years younger) and sometimes much younger than him (fifty younger, such as the au pair who took care of his son) are recognizable in his novels. One of them, Suleika Dawson, with whom he went on vacation to the island of Lesbos in the 1980s, published her memoirs last year under the title The Secret Heart (“The Secret Heart”). Janet Lee Stevens, a Middle East correspondent, was killed in a Shiite militia bombing of the American embassy while conducting research for him in Beirut; she was nicknamed “the little girl with the drum”, which inspired le Carré the title and content of one of her books.
This permanent tension had become essential to him because he knew it to be fruitful for his creative imagination. Le Carré conducted his affairs of the heart like espionage operations. Of all the fictions he had created, his life was the most successful. A mixture of mysteries and fabrications, true lies and false memories of formidable complexity, woven not in reality but in the fabric of dreams. His father, a real crook, a crook and a mythomaniac, had put him in a good school at a young age; his mother too, who had abandoned her children (he was 5 years old) by deserting the marital home. He then had to invent himself, mythologizing his person and then his work in the depths of a universe where Russian dolls fit together in a game of mirrors. It is perfectly transparent in A pure spy (Robert Laffont, 1986), his masterpiece and the key to his neuroses.
John le Carré was the pen name of David Cornwell. Adam Sisman’s biography is in some way devoted to the first, and its appendix to the second. A third book is said to be in preparation: it is said to recount the troubled relationships between a biographer and his hero, to lay bare their relationship and to reveal its influence on their respective works. The investigation promises to be explosive. And full of revelations. Naturally, any resemblance to people, etc. The author would be a certain George Smiley.