When he joined Britain’s overseas-intelligence service, M.I.6, under the guise of entering the Foreign Office, David Cornwell wrote to his adored stepmother, Jeannie: “I shall have to go to a charm school.” In truth, there were no worries on that front: the man who would write under the name John le Carré had graduated from such institutions with highest honors years before.
It’s no coincidence that he kept sending lovingly intimate letters to his stepmother even as he seldom, one senses, corresponded with her notoriously shifty husband. Le Carré was haunted all his life by the wish to maintain as much distance as possible from his con-man father—and by the fear that he might well be something of an irresistible dissembler, a spinner of fictions, himself. As his housemaster at boarding school observed of the 16-year-old who suddenly took off for Switzerland, “He strikes me as the sort who might become either Archbishop of Canterbury or a first rate criminal.”
