‘The Russian Bond is on his way’: exclusive extracts from the letters of John le Carré
To Ann Sharp, his first wife
Corinthia*, Midday, Monday 23 May 1951
Darling,
Today, sun and a fresh fall of snow on the Dolomites, a cold sharp wind. A smell of Spring, and ‘Vermouth Syphon’. This evening, the night train to Vienna, and with luck by tomorrow morning I should have further news of where I shall go next, for I am still ‘en route’.
I wish you were here – it is very beautiful. A small, unspoilt village, with a pub, a couple of shops and a group of houses with wooden walls and steep grey rooves. Cobbled streets, and the vigour and happiness of a real spring day. The river and the lake & the mountains. The fields look young and green, as if they were breathing in the warm sun and letting the wind run across them like spray over the side of a ship.
You would never think that this land had ever been a battlefield, that these cottages had been pill-boxes, and the rivers tank traps. This is no country for soldiers and war. Rather, for music and painting, for poetry & happiness.
O darling – this is life! I only hope I will continue to think so. I only wish that above all you were here to see it with me. To see this happen – this great transformation from the grey indifference of England to the bewitching colours and the bright rebirth of Spring in Austria. One day we will see it, both of us, together. We can wait till then.
Oh I know this is nonsense – it can’t all be true. But sometimes I feel as if I had woken up from hibernation in England, and cleared my lungs of the soot of ‘dark satanic mills’ to breathe again the beauty and the peace of the outside world. And the more I enjoy & love it, the more I miss you, my darling, who are the only person who could ever enjoy and love it with me – who could swim in this great lake of pretence. It must all be an illusion – but I claim for both of us the right to dream until we wake.
For wake we must – and I fear that more than death – and believe me, I am afraid to die too.
God bless
David
* Presumably Carinthia, the federal state in southern Austria.

To Jean Cornwell, his stepmother
Hamburg, 15 October 1963
Dearest Old Horse,
I thought you’d like to know about the progress of the book [The Spy Who Came in From The Cold]. It got very handsome notices (with the exception of some callow ape in the Lit Sup who panned it). But the Times, S. Times, Mail, Standard & co did me proud & we’ve sold around 20,000 in England already, which is quite something. Dell’s, the US paperback firm, have paid an all time record for a thriller of $25,000 advance. The net result is that we have cleaned up in a pretty big way and as long as I keep out of England until April ’66 stand a goodish chance of keeping 2⁄3 of the stuff. ....
Ann mouse has become very severe since she’s discovered she’s married wealth. Not at all sure she approves. It’s all right, I suppose, as long as you don’t enjoy it. Like sex on Sundays.
love, love to all,
D
The author at his home in London, 2008. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

An open letter to the editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta
May 1966
‘To Russia, with Greetings’
Sir,
The problem of the Cold War is that, as Auden once wrote, we haunt a ruined century.
Behind the little flags we wave, there are old faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers. Mr. Voinov [a Soviet critic who reviewed A Spy Who Came In From The Cold], I suspect, smelt in my writing the greatest heresy of all: that there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery. And so he called me its apologist (he might as well have called Freud a lecher).
James Bond, on the other hand, breaks no such Communist principles. You know him well. He is the hyena who stalks the capitalist deserts, he is an identifiable antagonist, sustained by capital and kept in good heart by the charms of a materialist society; he is a chauvinist, an unblinking patriot who makes espionage exciting. Bond on his magic carpet takes us away from moral doubt, banishes perplexity with action, morality with duty. Above all, he has the one piece of equipment without which not even his formula would work: an entirely evil enemy.
He is on your side, not mine. Now that you have honoured the qualities which created him, it is only a matter of time before you recruit him. Believe me, you have set the stage: the Russian Bond is on his way.
With greetings,
John le Carré


To Graham Greene
Cornwall, 7 November 1974
Dear Graham Greene,
After our passage of arms over Philby a while back, it is a little difficult for me to write to you. But I should hate you to think that the dispute either soured my gratitude to you for your help and encouragement ten years ago, nor – for what it’s worth – my admiration for your work. I am moved to write by my visits to the Far East this year, & particularly to Indo China: The Quiet American, which I re-read in Saigon, seems to me still as fresh as it did 19 years ago, and it is surely still the only novel, even now, which does justice to its theme. But the sheer accuracy of its mood, and observation, is astonishing. The book seemed more real on location, even, than away from it. I was really very moved, and felt I had to tell you. It is, of course, all quite hideous now in Saigon. Phnom Penh is still beautiful, but not for much longer, and the rest of Cambodia is heart breaking.
That is all I have to say, really. Your work has been a constant inspiration to me, and whatever our differences I wanted to thank you for it, and for your example.
Yours sincerely,
David Cornwell
Still from the 1965 film adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Photograph: Album/Alamy

To Mrs Pirkko-Liisa Ståhl CHK
August 1977
Dear Mrs. Ståhl,
It is very kind of you to seek my opinion on the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I must tell you honestly that I have never given the subject a moment’s thought, except perhaps to reflect that, like the Olympic Games, a great concept has been ruined by political greed.
Yours sincerely,
John le Carré


To Sir Alec Guinness
3 March 1978
Dear Sir Alec,
How wonderful to have your letter, the contents of which I passed to Jonathan Powell at the BBC this morning. If possible, he was even happier than I was to hear that, in principle, you are enthusiastic to take on Smiley.
Let me go straight to your points. 64 is the ideal age. Smiley can’t be less, arithmetically, and I fear that he may be more, though I have deliberately arrested the passage of time in the later books! So nobody is at all worried on that score, and you must not be either.
No, you are not rotund or double chinned, though I think I have seen you in rôles where you have, almost as an act of will, acquired a sort of cherubic look! …
Apart from plumpness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes – when you wish it – to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worries about you. I don’t know what you call that kind of empathy but it is very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it: when either of you gets his feet wet, I can’t help shivering. So it is the double standard – to be unobtrusive, yet to command – which your physique perfectly satisfies. Smiley is an Abbey, made up of different periods, fashions and even different religions, not all of them necessarily harmonious. His authority springs from experience, ages of it, compassion, and at root an inconsolable pessimism which gives a certain fatalism to much that he does.
If I may say so, you communicate to me many of his pains, and the almost archeological [sic] authority of so many lives and identities. He is also a guilty man, as all men are who do, who insist on action. To this, you add another, more practical sort of authority: the authority of plain intellect.
We shall believe Guinness when he tells us things from the past, when he theorises, when he acts in accordance with unstated predictions – because, simply, the intellect is patent, and commanding, yours & Smiley’s both.
Some actors can act intelligent. Others are intelligent and come over dull, because of some mannerism which gets in the way. And a very few are intelligent and convey it: in Tinker Tailor, this gift will be pure gold, because it gives such base to the other things – the solitude, the moral concern, the humanity of Smiley – all, because of the intelligence of his perceptions, grow under our eyes and in your care.
I believe we are all meeting for lunch on March 10th.
But if you would like to meet me before then, or afterwards before I leave for Cornwall, why not let me know?
Forgive this ramble but there are good things in it, & I find I can’t think without a pen in my hand! What a wonderful prospect it all is!
Yours
David Cornwell
David Cornwell at his home near Penzance, in Cornwall. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images


To Jane Cornwell, his second wife
Needham, Boston, 13 March 1987
My darling you,
It must be a hundred years since I wrote you a love letter. Usually they were dreary, evasive letters loosening vows at the same time they renewed them, qualified, haunted, the reverse of reassuring. But in the last year or so I have felt things for you that I don’t think I have ever felt before: a reliance on your love and goodness and humbling unselfishness, an immense gratitude for your secret understanding of me, and for your endless forgiveness of my inconstancies of mind & behaviour as I tried to get to the centre of myself, often at some cost to us both; and – you as Nicholas’ mother – I have loved very particularly, because, as you know, sometimes your love for us both is like a single love, and it embraces the child in me just as it embraces him, and it is the source of our collective strength. And I love you too because you have managed, without intruding, to become the familiar to my writing self, the provoker and supplier of good things, the rounder & extender of ideas, now practical, now abstract, in short my indispensable literary partner & editor-of-first-instance, totally unsung to anyone outside our smallest circle; but essential to me in this as in so many ways. It was thus, dearest love, that you achieved my revival, & survival, & finally my present celebration, as a novelist; & I know that without you it would not have happened.
So this letter is to express, and thank you, for all that & more, and to renew my vows to you without qualification & to point to greater happiness in the future, & a growing love, filling & defining the spirit, a growing spirituality too, &, I believe, an intensifying harmony & mutual appreciation.
Is that a love letter? Does it say enough thank yous? Does it say enough that I am constantly lonely without you, even when I know I must go alone? That I want you? And wish to revive & intensify our love life too, to make more love & more journeys together? I hope it says all those things. And that I love you. And that, contrary to many bad signals in the past, I am pledged to you in love & constancy for always.
David
The 1979 novel is the third and final instalment of the Karla trilogy, after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. Photograph: sjbooks/Alamy

To Sir John Margetson, an old friend from MI6
London, 24 September 1987
My dear John,
Back at last from the Algarve (Gerrards Cross-sur-mer) Moscow (2nd trip to top up the book) Leningrad (to see [Andrei] Sakharov & [Yelena] Bonner who were weekending there) Capri (to collect an Italian lit prize & schmooze in the smog) and Zurich, for reasons I barely remember – & now Jane reminds me of your warm, kind invitation to us to visit you before your tour ends, and you take up an honest profession at last. And we would love to say ‘yes’ but, honestly John, I don’t think we can or should, because it is time for me to pull down the shutters & write my long delayed oeuvre, and we have cancelled everything, even Christmas in Wengen, till I have a complete first draft behind me.
Will you forgive us? I find that the Russian stuff simply evaporates once I am away from the place, unless I really hide myself away & stare at blank walls: particularly the extraordinary, sad compassion that I find sloshing around in me as I survey those misled, misgoverned, jolly people and their huge brick forests.
My best moment was being offered a chance to meet Philby, which I declined. Genrikh Borovik, an old hood who is writing P’s ‘biography’ and has 17 hrs of tape recording with him, told me what a nice guy Kim was, and what a great patriot. I said I fully agreed. He was just like Penkovsky [Oleg Penkovsky was a Russian spy who was executed for treason after passing secrets to the West, most notably in the run up to the Cuban missile crisis], I said: fun, and straight as a dye. Just a pity poor old Oleg wasn’t in London, I said, for me to introduce him to Genrikh.
Genrikh nearly popped his garters & said the cases were quite different. I said they both wanted to screw their superiors & Genrikh said prissily that we cd continue the discussion at the Brit Ambassador’s reception tomorrow night. I agreed, but warned him that we’d have to be very careful of the microphones.
For a lovely moment, he gave a sage nod, & the complicity was absolute. Then to his credit he let out a wild whoop of laughter, remembering too late that they were his mikes…
Love to you both/all, & do please forgive us,
David

To Don Chapman, WHO wrote from Australia to ask for a tie TO auction.
London, 20 August 1992
Dear Don Chapman,
This tie was given to me by my wife when I went to lunch with Mrs. Thatcher. Its colours were aptly chosen: the deep blue of Mrs. Thatcher’s convictions, shot with the intermittent red of my own frail socialism, and an insipid yellowish colour which I am afraid says much about my moral courage.
In the end, I selected a quite different tie, an equally awful confection of blue upon blue. Mrs. Thatcher is one of those politicians who are even more unreal than their waxworks. The eyeballs are straighter, the perfect vowels are prerecorded, each sentence makes a deadly point and jokes are out of place unless they are hers.
Yours sincerely,
John le Carré

To Stephen Fry,
Fry first wrote in 1991. ‘The English dam can withstand the pressure of 15 years of admiration and affection no longer,’ he said. ‘The only writer I’ve ever written to apart from yourself was PG Wodehouse.’ After reading The Night Manager, he wrote again.
Cornwall, 13 September 1993
Dear Stephen,
Just got back from bloody Russia to your wonderful letter, for which I thank you very much. Russia is a kind of Czarist Wild West, but tortured by guilt, religion, laziness, and its own unbelievable waste of talent. I never went anywhere that gave me such an appalling sense of anarchy got up as change. If we ever doubted that the world had altered after the Cold War, a couple of days in Moscow would put us out of our misery. Sydney Pollack is supposed to be directing the movie of The Night Manager and I would be enormously tickled if you were to find a place in it. For my money, I would ask you to play Corkoran tomorrow but we are dealing with minds that function on other planes, so they will probably give it to Dicky Attenborough.
We all root for you here, and love your work. Thanks again for writing.
As ever,
David
Ex-spy and eminent British novelist John le Carré, pictured here in July 1993. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

To Marianne Schindler, Switzerland
Cornwall, 11 July 1994
Dear Ms. Schindler,
Thank you for your letter of June 28th. I was touched by the point you made, but I do not see the problem quite as literally as you do. 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. So I beg you to believe me when I tell you that I share your respect for the qualities and sufferings of women, whose company and talents I indeed greatly prefer to those of men.
Yours sincerely,
John le Carré

To Edward Behr, a former foreign correspondent
Cornwall, 1 August 1994
Dear Ed,
Thanks for your fax. It would be madness for me to let you anywhere near me at the moment. I am in the last throes of a very long and intricate novel. I also have no time to get into a pissing-match about the perfectly ludicrous article in the New York Times Magazine about [Kim] Philby, which was faxed to me from elsewhere. Unattributably, it is simply not possible that any intelligence service, let alone the British one during that shaming period of its existence, could take upon itself the persistent public humiliation of a high profile triple-agent operation which, at the public relations level alone, practically destroyed it. The article was otherwise so crowded with inaccuracies that I for one would not know how to address it without cutting it to pieces.
Both Philby and Blake effectively crippled SIS liaison and field operations at the middle levels for years and years. No secret service is strong enough to break its own rice bowl like this, and maintain its clout in the corridors of power. What we saw was what we got: a nasty little establishment traitor with a revolting father, a fake stammer and an anguished sexuality who spent his life getting his own back on the England that made him.

To Sir Tom Stoppard
Le Carré first met Stoppard when he was hired as the screenwriter for The Russia House in 1989. “I found Stoppard enchanting and extremely intelligent,” he told Alec Guinness.
London, 4 February 1999
Dear Tom,
I loved ‘Shakespeare in Love’, & loved you for writing it. It will last & last, my children & grandchildren already love it, it’s one of those perfect, lighthearted, profound works of art that actually increase the public’s awareness of its own cultural heritage. Very pompous of me, but true. And at the personal level, it was like a kind of doting Stoppard soliloquy on a balmy summer’s afternoon, all wit & affection & musing. I identified most naturally with Webster, of course, who was surely one of your most delicious conceits. Just wonderful. All, all wonderful –
Ever,
David


To Tony Cornwell, his brother
London, 15 May 2007
Dearest To,
Well, thanks a million for your lovely long letter and all the kind & wise things you say about us, the universe, & the whole catastrophe, as Zorba wd have it. Yes, we have indissoluble and incomparable bonds. Sometimes, with age, one’s childhood is the only bit one imagines one sees clearly. But probably what really happens is, we peck everything we know on to its back, & it becomes the lodebearer for all of it.
We were frozen children, & will always remain so. The chip of ice that G. Greene said every writer shd have in his heart was spread over our entire bodies from an early age. …The only poetry we remember is the stuff we learned as kids, & it’s not much different with love. You chase after it, act it, imitate it, and eventually, if you’re old & lucky, you believe in it, but it comes hard, it’s flawed, & we fake it a lot, like religion, in the hope that one day we’ll have it for real.
So we loved each other, because actually that’s all we had, & we reacted off each other, towards & against each other, & we lived in each other’s skins, & revolted against the captivity, & the emptiness of the rest of our lives, and we learned sex too late like everything else, and we went our different ways, but probably they were ultimately very similar ways, which is another serious annoyance. Our father was a mad genes-bank, a truly wild card, and in my memory disgusting – still. I never mourned him, never missed him, I rejoiced at his death. Is that so awful? I don’t think so.
Writing about him, I tried to make him sweeter, but it didn’t work. When I was faithless, I blamed him, when I promised love all over town, it was his fault, when I met our mother I thought her spooky & unreal, & 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. But she was just a poor woman at her wits’ end, I expect. We’ll never know. Perhaps they were both much more ordinary than we give them credit for – just not for us. Either way, they fucked us up rotten.
Take care.
David

To Gary Oldman
Oldman had emailed to thank le Carré for ‘generous and flattering words’ about the 2011 film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
By email, 31 August 2011
Dear Gary,
It was from the heart. In the original piece I wrote that even if nobody else in the cinema liked it, I would still be clapping. … I love the movie, love your Smiley, and that’s a constant. Came back from Germany last night after collecting a gong [. . .] the place was hopping with excitement about the movie. … I’ve got a hundred quid at 10–1 on winning at Venice. If I win, I’ll buy you lunch. It’s a beautiful, beautiful performance.
Best to you and yours,
David
The author with Gary Oldman at the premiere of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, London 2011. Photograph: WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy

To Keith FitzPatrick, a fan for 40 years
Cornwall, 29 July 2017
Dear Keith FitzPatrick,
Thanks so much for your very touching letter. Your feelings about Brexit spoke into my heart. Just now I wd rather be Dutch, German, French, or for that matter Polish, than a Brit subjected to this truly shaming process in which we are engaged. ....
I’m very glad that my books have given you pleasure. I trust the new one, out in September, will not disappoint. I didn’t expect Smiley to pop up again but, when he did, he was irresistible. Yes, we are betrayed. Not by our country, which voted for a lot of things it didn’t want or understand, but by a handful of jingoistic adventurers and imperialist fantasists, backed by a lot of dark money and manipulation: populism led from above, when was it ever otherwise?
Best wishes, & thanks again for writing –
David Cornwell
(John le Carré)


To William Burroughs, a US fan living in France, who wrote to him over 15 years
Cornwall, 23 July 2018
Dear Bill,
Thanks for yours, and please forgive this typed response: I am in the late throes of the novel. The family bad news has brightened..... I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin’s position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that they have obtained him, and they could probably blow him out of the water whenever they felt like it, but I think they are having much more fun feeding his contradictions and contributing to the chaos. The terrifying thing is, the closer he draws to Putin, the more he lies and denies, the stronger his support among the faithful. You don’t need to own Trump as an agent. You just have to let him run. We are moving to London for an unknown period while I change the atmosphere around the book. I hope to have completed some kind of first draft by the Fall.
All very best to you, and stay in touch.
David
At the Berlin film festival with his wife Valerie Jane Cornwell. Photograph: Franziska Krug/Getty Images

To Mikhail Lyubimov, Russian writer and ex-colonel in the KGB
Cornwall, 19 October 2020
Dear Michael,
Good to hear from you. ...
Our home news is not too bright. Jane has developed an inoperable cancer and is undergoing a severe course of chemotherapy. The wonder pills I have been taking for the same complaint have run their course, and the next stage is to nuke me with an experimental radioactive infusion every six weeks. But we prevail, the kids are being wonderful, I am entering my 90th year, Jane is 8 years behind, we have been married for half a century and never been closer. And I continue to write most days.
Our love to you and yours,
As ever,
David
These are edited extracts from A Private Spy, The Letters of John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell, published by Viking on 13 October £30.
This article was amended on 27 October 2022 to add the original footnote from the book explaining that the reference to “Corinthia” was presumably intended to be to Carinthia.