Early life and career[edit]
On 19 October 1931, David John Moore Cornwell was born to Ronald Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1906–75) and Olive (Glassy) Cornwell, in Poole, Dorset, England. He was the second son to the marriage, the first being Tony, two years his elder, now a retired advertising executive. His younger half-sister is the actress Charlotte Cornwell. Rupert Cornwell, a former The Independent newspaper Washington bureau-chief, is a younger half-brother.[2][3] Le Carré said he did not know his mother, who abandoned him when he was five years old, until their re-acquaintance when he was 21 years old.[4] His relationship with his father was difficult – given that the man had been jailed for insurance fraud, was an associate of the Kray twins[4] (among the foremost criminals in London) and was continually in debt. A biographer reports,
"His father, Ronnie, made and lost his fortune a number of times due to elaborate confidence tricks and schemes which landed him in prison on at least one occasion. This was one of the factors that led to le Carré's fascination with secrets."[5]
The character "Rick Pym", the scheming con-man father of protagonist 'Magnus Pym' in his later novel A Perfect Spy (1986), was based on Ronnie. When his father died in 1975, le Carré paid for a memorial funeral service, but did not attend.[4]
Cornwell's formal schooling began at St Andrew's Preparatory School, near Pangbourne, Berkshire, then continued at Sherborne School; he proved unhappy with the typically harsh English public school régime of the time, and disliked his disciplinarian housemaster, Thomas, and so withdrew. From 1948 to 1949, he studied foreign languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 1950 he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Austria, working as a German language interrogator of people who crossed the Iron Curtain to the West. In 1952, he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he worked covertly for the British Security Service, MI5, spying on far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents.[6]
When, in 1954, his father declared bankruptcy, Cornwell quit Oxford to teach at a boys' preparatory school; however, a year later he returned to Oxford, and graduated in 1956 with a (First Class Honours) Bachelor of Arts degree. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, becoming an MI5 officer in 1958. He ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines and effected break-ins.[7] Encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels as "John Bingham"), and whilst being an active MI5 officer, Cornwell began writing his first novel Call for the Dead (1961). Cornwell has identified Lord Clanmorris as one of two models for George Smiley, the spymaster of the Circus, the other being Vivian H. H. Green.[8] As a schoolboy, Cornwell had first met Green when he was the Chaplain and Assistant Master at Sherborne School (1942–51). The friendship continued after Green's move to Lincoln College, where he tutored Cornwell.[9]
In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under 'Second Secretary' cover in the British Embassy at Bonn; he later was transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There, he wrote the detective story A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), as "John le Carré" (le Carré is French for "the Square"[7]) – a pseudonym required because Foreign Office officers were forbidden to publish in their own names. Cornwell left the service in 1964 to work full-time as a novelist, his intelligence-officer career at an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent (one of the Cambridge Five).[6][10] Le Carré depicts and analyses Philby as the upper-class traitor, code-named "Gerald" by the KGB, the mole George Smiley hunts in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).[11][12] Credited by his pen name, Cornwell appears as an extra in the 2011 film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, among the guests at the Christmas party seen in several flashback scenes.
In 1964, le Carré won the Somerset Maugham Award (established to enable British writers younger than 35 to enrich their writing by spending time abroad).
Personal life[edit]
In 1954, Cornwell married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp; they had three sons—Simon, Stephen and Timothy—and divorced in 1971.[13] In 1972, Cornwell married Valérie Jane Eustace, a book editor with Hodder & Stoughton;[14] they have one son, Nicholas, who writes as Nick Harkaway.[15]
For more than 40 years, he resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, UK, where he owned a mile of cliff close to Land's End.[16]
In 1998, he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Letters) from the University of Bath.[17] In 2012, he was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, by the University of Oxford.[18]
Writing style[edit]
Le Carré's first two novels – C