Ronnie Cornwell would be the model for Rick Pym, father of the double agent at the center of his son’s 1986 novel A Perfect Spy. In a 1950 letter to his girlfriend Ann, le Carré wrote that he had been captured, stripped naked, and beaten. In the early letters, shame and a moralizing streak—qualities, again, that many of his characters inherited—bring out le Carré’s most forceful writing. Of course they had not been lovers at all: by the end of August they had been corresponding for almost a year, and still had yet to meet. He warned her that “You may have to wait a few weeks till you hear from me, but you will, my darling,” and asked her to have faith in him.

Deception was his domain and as much as he hated Ronnie he worried about coming from the same “mad genes-bank”. Here was a man working things out through his writing, trying to make sense of forces that could be soul-crushing—particularly, in this case, for people on the inside. He diagnosed his young fan with the same yearning—for adventure, for purpose—that had made Charlie susceptible to her handler’s seduction. A Private Spy is] a portrait of the famed spy novelist via a lifetime of correspondence…Meticulously edited and expansively annotated by le Carré’s son, Cornwell, this collection lands like a biography…Le Carré’s wry modesty and cleareyed insight into human nature consistently shine through…invaluable for fans. This could be an editorial choice on the part of his son, but le Carré’s characters are likewise often identified by their profession (“The Night Manager,” “The Tailor of Panama”) or in pursuit of a profession that could give them a sense of identity.Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. Rather tactlessly, perhaps, he mentioned that several married women in Panama had made approaches to him (he would mention it again in a subsequent letter); though he assured her that he had resisted them—not least from fear of what their husbands might do to him if they found out. He then entered a world of secrets, reporting on leftist students when he was at Oxford before working in intelligence for MI5 and MI6. Above all, he has the one piece of equipment without which not even his formula would work: an entirely evil enemy. Sometimes it feels like there’s no way out except to disappear into fantasy—but le Carré wrote fiction that refused to lie to us.

I have written much about men who are not able to relate to women, because in the male oriented world from which I draw my experience – and indeed, my upbringing – the gap you deplore is, unfortunately, all too common. To a 10-year-old who wrote asking how to be a spy, he said the key was to serve a cause and know “whom you would like to help, whom to frustrate”.

It cannot have been easy for her to discuss her intimate past with a complete stranger, and I was impressed by her frankness, articulacy and insight.

Though David’s first letter was typed, all his subsequent letters were handwritten, most of them early in the morning, or late at night, often with a glass of whisky at his side. It seemed to him that “once I have the whole book, I should take it on safari, read it in different lights, moods, places, sharpen it, remove all adverbs and find the right verbs instead, and make love to you. A Private Spy, a collection of correspondence spanning much of his [John le Carré’s] life, offers a fresh look at his brilliance. He spoke excellent German,” le Carré said, “and he always reminded us in German class, as everyone was demonising Germany with justice, that there was another Germany, an enduring one and a much older one and a wise and loveable Germany. But again, there’s that tension—le Carré was no romanticist for England, but he maintained a righteous rage at Philby for betraying it.Out of the secret world I once knew,” he explained in “The Pigeon Tunnel,” “I have tried to make a theater for the larger worlds we inhabit. But I never got my clothes back—so I am writing to you in a state of nature,” he joked, attaching a naughty illustration of himself. I was unaware of her existence until I came across two letters David wrote to her in the collection edited by his son Tim and published in 2022. His letters show him travelling the world, running toward danger, looking for his characters’ inner conflicts in real-world conflict zones. Ahead of one of his trips to Russia, le Carré was approached about meeting Philby to hear his side of the story.