“The Secret Life of John Le Carré”

Yesterday we discussed a book, The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars, which was written in an interesting style reminiscent of that of the historian A. J. P. Taylor.

Coincidentally, I also recently came across “The Secret Life of John Le Carré,” a short book by Le Carré’s biographer, Adam Sisman, with a bunch of stories about the subject’s love life that had been left out of the biography when it had been published a few years ago but which Sisman was now free to share, following the death of the Le Carré and his wife and the approval of Le Carré’s children. The stories were almost all about Le Carré’s love affairs, which might sound pretty boring—some English dude and his many infidelities—but actually it was fascinating, not the affairs themselves but the biographer’s perspective on all of it, and also the connections to the novels.

I’m not gonna recommend this one to all or even most of you—you’ll have to be a Le Carré fan. I’m not a Le Carré superfan—I’ve read some of his books but not all, and I haven’t actually read the Sisman biography—but, yes, a big appeal of this new Secret Life book is the insight it gives into his writing.

If this all sounds like it might interest you, I highly recommend “The Shadow in the Garden,” a book by James Atlas that’s a mix of memoir about his experiences as a biographer of poet Delmore Schwartz and novelist Saul Bellow, and various reflections and anecdotes about biography-writing more generally. I’m not much into Bellow and I know essentially nothing about Schwartz, but I looooooved the Atlas book, for reasons discussed in excruciating detail in this post.

P.S. Here are some past posts that discuss Le Carré, one way or another:

Emile Bravo and agency

John Le Carre is good at integrating thought and action

What’s the best novel ever written by an 85-year-old?

Contingency and alternative history

There is only one reality (and we cannot demand consistency from any other)