The Secrets of Author John le Carré Revealed

Le Carré said he needed adultery to write.

He told Sisman his affairs “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.”

“Just as infidelity enlivened his real life,“ Sisman writes, “so betrayal became the underlying theme of his fiction, the one reflecting the other.”

His lovers inspired his fiction.

Sisman identifies the women who became characters in The Honourable Schoolboy, The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, The Tailor of Panama and The Constant Gardener. One of the women le Carré whisked around the world told Sisman, “I liked the whisking.”

The greatest character David Cornwell created was John le Carré.

Sisman says the author feared that “when the innermost Russian doll of his personality was opened, there would be nothing inside.” He likens him to Magnus Pym in le Carré’s autobiographical novel A Perfect Spy, of whom a friend says, “I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow.”

“People who have had very unhappy childhoods,” le Carré wrote, “are pretty good at inventing themselves.”

Errol Morris’ movie shows le Carré confronting his life on camera.

The author tells Morris that his father, who went bankrupt after stealing about $16 million in today’s dollars, was beloved even by some of the people he robbed. Le Carré paid to bail Ronnie out of prison in Zurich and Jakarta, where he was trying to run guns after a massacre that killed hundreds of thousands. He suspects Ronnie also tried to profiteer off Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War.

When Morris asks if he loved Ronnie, the author replies, “I really don’t know what love is. I must have loved him as a child. I had to master hatred in order to escape him.”

His dad took money from him repeatedly — and sued him.

After le Carré got rich, Ronnie sued him because the author didn’t say he owed all his success to Ronnie. “The reality probably is, in many ways, that I do,” le Carré tells Morris. “I’ve never felt I belonged anywhere. I’ve been very lucky in that respect. I’ve had a very rich life. I’ve seen a lot of institutions and a lot of things. I’ve led a lot of lives in an odd way. I didn’t feel that I belong to anyone.”

John le Carré, the pen name of real-life British spy David Cornwell, died in 2020 at age 89.

Des Willie/Apple TV+

The father’s con man fantasies helped inspire his son’s fictions.

“Reality did not exist in my childhood,” le Carré says in the film. “Performance did. My business has been to try to make credible fables out of the worlds that I visited, or visited me.”

In a way, he owes his greatest creation, sad spymaster George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — played by Alec Guinness, Gary Oldman and James Mason in TV and film adaptations — to Ronnie. “In writing about George Smiley,” le Carré tells Morris, “of course, I’m writing about the ideal father I never had.”

His early sense of betrayal made him the perfect spy.

His childhood made him aware of what he calls “the duality all the time of being the opposite of your outward self.” Though he was disillusioned by the amorality and betrayals of the spy trade, he never succumbed to the temptation to be a double agent, like his British spy colleague Kim Philby, who infamously sold out Britain to the Russians.

“There came a point in my life where I seemed to be offered the crossroads — I could become a really bad guy. And mercifully I found a home for my larceny.” That is, by heisting people’s real stories for his fictions. He tells Morris his books are meant “to make people feel, not a la James Bond, ‘I wish this was me,’ but more kind of, ‘Jesus! I hope this isn't me!’ ”

(Left to right) John le Carré and Errol Morris

Des Willie/Apple TV+

Morris gives him the perfect description of a le Carré story.

Morris tells him, “You've written, ‘The cat sat on the mat’ is not a story. ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is.’ And then I have my le Carré version: ‘The cat betrayed the dog by sitting on his mat.’ ”

Le Carré laughs and replies, “I think the cat was a double.”