The Secret Life of John le Carre
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive.
Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden.
Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work.
In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed.
The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. “Now that he is dead,” Sisman writes, “we can know him better.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Book Critics Circle Award winner Sisman delivers a revealing "supplement" to his 2015 authorized biography of John le Carré (1931–2020), divulging how the espionage writer's extramarital affairs influenced his novels. Reporting that le Carré asked that mention of his infidelity be withheld until after his death, Sisman explains he can now disclose what he learned from private correspondence and interviews with some of the many women le Carré seduced while he was married. Le Carré believed pursuing women stimulated his creativity, Sisman contends, and he describes how the writer's furtive conduct sometimes rivaled the spycraft in his novels, with "codes, false names, dead letter boxes, and safe houses" for liaising with women. Among the paramours discussed are American journalist Janet Lee Stevens, who likely served as the inspiration for the eponymous hero of The Little Drummer Girl, and Sue Dawson, who claims that some of her conversations with le Carré made their way into A Perfect Spy, albeit between the protagonist and "his wife, not his mistress." Sisman uncovers a previously hidden and discomfiting dimension of le Carré, and remains remarkably unflinching when addressing the implications: "Does it lower him in our estimation to know that he lied to his wife? Yes, of course it does." Future accounts of le Carré's life will have to wrestle with the bombshells dropped here.
