Adam Sisman writes in this 2023 book:
* David claimed that these extramarital relationships were ‘impulsive, driven, short – lived affairs . . . often meaningless in themselves’, but while that might be true of some of them, others appear to have been much more serious and long – lasting. He needed to be loved, and at times seems to have believed himself to have been in love, at least in the moment. He told several women that he was willing to leave his wife for them. Of course he did not do so. Whether this was a tactic, or whether he meant it at the time, is an open question. Perhaps he was not really capable of love.
* Jane told herself that ‘nobody can have all of David’. He flattered her that her input was important to his work, but he said the same to other women too. Each in turn became his ‘muse’. His writing pal James Kennaway advised David that he would need a different woman for each book, advice David appears to have taken to heart. Thus Liese Deniz inspired The Honourable Schoolboy , Verity Mosley and Janet Lee Stevens The Little Drummer Girl , Sue Dawson A Perfect Spy , the Italian journalist The Russia House , Susan Anderson The Tailor of Panama and to some extent Our Game also, Yvette Pierpaoli The Constant Gardener , and so on.
* ‘People believe what they want to believe,’ wrote David to one of his lovers. ‘ALWAYS.’ He was referring to the ‘revelation’ that Graham Greene had continued working for British intelligence into his seventies. ‘No good me telling them that GG was far too drunk to remember anything, & that his residual connections with the Brit spooks were romantic fantasy.’
When he wrote that people believed what they wanted to believe about Greene, he might just as well have been writing about himself. People were willing to believe almost anything about him, even if he denied it (especially if he denied it) – for example, that he had once been earmarked as a possible future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, more popularly known as MI6). According to David, the Chief himself, Sir Dick White, had told him in a farewell interview that he was highly thought of within the Service; and that, had he remained, he might have been a candidate for the ‘top job’ in due course. This is a suggestion that one former MI6 officer, with a long and distinguished career behind him, described to me as ‘ridiculous’. The idea that anyone with less than four years’ experience in any organisation could be considered as a candidate to run it in due course is, to say the least, unlikely. Yet this is what David wanted us to believe. Perhaps he believed it himself.
The secret history of David’s career in the intelligence services is that it was uneventful. ‘The trouble with David,’ observed one MI6 contemporary who served with him, ‘is that he was never involved in a successful operation.’* Far from being a distraction, his clandestine affairs became important, perhaps even essential to his writing. And just as infidelity enlivened his real life, so betrayal became the underlying theme of his fiction, the one reflecting the other.
* ‘They fucked us up rotten,’ David wrote to his brother Tony in 2007, when he was sixty – six and Tony two years older. ‘They’ were their parents, Ronnie and Olive, on whom he blamed all his difficulties with love. Ronnie had been ‘disgusting’: rapacious, unprincipled and abusive. He had made himself rich by preying on the vulnerable, swindling old people out of their life savings and other such scams. All his life he maintained a workforce of devoted women whom he regularly discarded and revived, indulging his sexual appetite whenever and wherever he could, even molesting his own children.
* He was still angry with his mother when he wrote to Tony in 2007, though by this time she had been dead nearly twenty years. ‘I was never able to understand – I still can’t even begin to – how you walk out on two sons in the middle of the night, then take the high moral ground.’
* His mother’s desertion left David with a lifelong mistrust of women. In his secret self, women were not to be relied upon, because they would always leave you.
* The trajectory of his affairs was always the same: he would pursue the woman urgently, and then he would lose interest.
The women in le Carré’s fiction are usually seen from a distance, which may help to explain why his novels appeal less to female readers than to male. His women tend to be thin, beautiful and unobtainable: often the possessions of a dangerous enemy, like Roper’s Jed in The Night Manager or Drake Ko’s Liese in The Honourable Schoolboy . They are little more than objects of desire. His more developed female characters are sexless or even grotesque, like Connie Sachs, queen of research at the Circus, described when first encountered as ‘a big woman’, with ‘a low belly like an old man’s’. (Later she becomes a sad old drunk.) Then of course there is Smiley’s wife, Lady Ann, whose most distinguishing characteristic is her absence. Given that David was a serial adulterer, it seems ironic that his most celebrated character should have been a cuckold. George Smiley remains devoted to his aristocratic wife, while she takes lover after lover.* David believed that his miserable childhood explained his restless search for love.
* …his entire writing career can be seen as an attempt to come to terms with the trauma of his early years.
‘People who have had very unhappy childhoods,’ he once wrote, ‘are pretty good at inventing themselves.’ As a boy he learned to invent, making up stories to entertain, to fantasise, escaping from reality, and to dissemble, adopting one persona to conceal another. As an adult he put these skills to professional use, first as a spy, and then as a novelist. He was a self – made man – not in the usual meaning of that phrase, though he was that too, but in the sense that he put on a show to keep the unhappiness at bay. And when David Cornwell became John le Carré, that was yet another mask to hide behind.
David worried that he had no real feelings, that he was incapable of love, that he was forever pretending.* His success as a writer of spy fiction enabled him to leave the Service and to live as he pleased; in Ann’s eyes it turned his head. He began one love affair, then another; then embarked on a period of hectic promiscuity that lasted several years. As he would describe it much later, ‘ I was a caged animal, and with the success of my writing the door was opening.’
* He listed the ‘Reasons’ for his philandering:
1 Ever since childhood, a search for elemental creature warmth & love
2 A recognition – at 30 – that I had given my youth away to a marriage that only made me sad
3 An ignorance & suspicion of all women, a never – ending search for love; carnality, self – destruction, reckless despair, hope
4 Depression
5 No self – esteem
6 Fury at the chains of convention
7 Utter loneliness
8 Fury at my own conformity with convention
9 A root fear of women, again* Whether or not there was anything in Ann’s theory, there was something problematic about David’s relations with other men. If women were a challenge, men were rivals. Several of the women with whom he had affairs were married to friends of his; this might happen by accident once, or even twice; but with David it happened again and again. One might think that friendship with the husband would preclude a sexual interest in the wife, unless it was, perhaps, a way of seducing the friend.
* It was a feature of David’s life that he seemed isolated, with few real friends.
* One of David’s least attractive characteristics was a tendency to disparage the people around him: not just the people he worked with, like his editors, his publishers and his agents; but also other writers, friends, lovers, and even his wife and sons.
As David became older, he nurtured protégés, especially younger men with literary ambitions.* Jane’s worship made him an idol, and the effect on David of such adulation was not necessarily beneficial. All writers are egotists, but some are more egotistical than others. He became demanding, self – important, and unwilling to accept criticism. He told Nicholas Shakespeare that he could not write in London because of the denigration in the air. Isolated from his peers, he lacked the capacity to see himself as others did. He declined to allow his novels to be submitted for the Booker Prize, as if it was beneath him; and fantasised about winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
* But as long as he kept writing, she could never retire; she felt obliged to continue working until almost the end of her life.
In tolerating her husband’s repeated infidelities, Jane was fulfilling the cliché that when a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy. She had become David’s mistress after she had been discarded by her former boss, George Greenfield. In an act of barely believable selflessness – or masochism – she introduced him to David, and arranged matters so that her ex – lover would become David’s literary agent.* he was sensitive about his anomalous status: hugely successful commercially, but not awarded the status of a ‘literary’ writer.
* By now in his seventies, he may have lost some of his enthusiasm for the chase. He continued writing up until the end, but it is perhaps not a coincidence that the novels became less interesting and more formulaic. Without a new muse for each book, his inspiration dried up.
