Le Carré's dirty linen by Jasper Rees

Halfway through Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography of John le Carré, something odd occurs. The book simply shuts up shop. You can all but hear the rattle of the roller shutter as if it’s half-day closing.

How did this happen?

The short answer is that David Cornwell (le Carré’s real name) got married again. Previously, at the fag end of his first marriage, he had been rambunctiously playing away with Susan Kennaway, the wife of his bosom friend James Kennaway. Both men got novels out of the ménage, and Sisman a lively chapter. Enter Jane, the second Mrs Cornwell.

In the biography, and now in The Secret Life of John le Carré, Sisman describes working on the archive at the novelist’s home near Land’s End (now up for sale), when he becomes aware of a shadow. It is David (as Sisman calls him), but it easily might have been Jane nervously proscribing all reference to her husband’s amours.

In the biography, it is as if le Carré never had any sex after 1972 outside the marital bed. It turns out some non- marital sex was also had in said bed. Other sex was in a son’s bed. Or a safe house. Or abroad.

A nanny once sensitively asked Jane if her husband’s many research trips were hard on the marriage. ‘Oh, no, no. That was all with Ann,’ she chirruped. (Ann was the first wife.) ‘He’s learned his lesson!’ Le Carré, 46, promptly took the nanny, 22, to Bruges and impregnated her.

This is a book – a vast appendix, in truth – about le Carré’s lies. A scintillating pamphlet on the vexed art of biography, it also reads as Sisman’s cold, dogged revenge for being gagged by a subject who in theory welcomed a warts-and-all life. Then, as his biographer conscientiously disinterred more and more skeletons, he disabled it by all manipulations at his disposal, including the threat of suicide.

‘Oh, God!’ le Carré groaned when Sisman told him he’d heard about Sue Dawson. The rest of us would hear about her when, semi-disguised as Suleika Dawson, she published a book about their affair.

Dawson unblushingly takes the reader between the sheets and makes all of us gawp at her Priapus’s mighty undercarriage. Sisman, who has interviewed her and five other women (two declined to talk; three others are dead), stays properly and politely outside the bedroom door.

His quest, rather than to re-enact the actual action, is to clarify how these women fetched up in the novels – and also to peer deeper into the dark labyrinthine hollows of a writer whose subject was betrayal.

A key le Carré left for unlocking the mystery was his roman-à-clef A Perfect Spy. ‘We betray to be loyal,’ reasons its (anti-)hero Marcus Pym. Le Carré’s gift for infidelity was rooted in childhood chaos: the absent mother who abandoned the young David; the crooked father who made lying look as easy as breathing. After such a start, how could any boy grow up to be faithful?

Le Carré even presented his biographer with a comprehensive list of reasons for his philandering (depression, no self-esteem, never-ending search for love, fury at convention etc).

Perhaps another motive went unspoken. Le Carré was in the habit of seducing other men’s wives, and two of those men were literary novelists who scorned spy fiction.

‘Oh yeah?’ le Carré’s unconscious seems to have said as, unbuttoning his flies, he struck a retaliatory blow on behalf of all genre writers.

He could sniff opportunity with fox-like cunning. Once a stalker groupie left her details in Cornwall while the Cornwells were away; he was soon drumming up an excuse to fly to Louisiana so he could romance her. ‘She was my ideal reader,’ he sighed.

Not all adulteries were so transactional.

Another American woman wrote that she was a fan. A sweet epistolary romance bloomed across a whole year before he engineered their one lone encounter. (Sisman learned of her only when le Carré’s letters, edited by his late son Tim Cornwell, were published in 2022.) Meanwhile, the first marriage is not neglected. There was a dalliance with a married woman in Bonn when le Carré worked for MI6. In the biography, this was blamelessly unconsummated. Here, it isn’t.

Earlier, when at MI5, he seduced his engaged secretary Liz Tollinton, who never married and carried a torch for him to her grave. ‘It is to my infinite regret,’ seethed her mother, ‘that she wore your ring until she died.’

When he specifically warned his biographer against writing about this extramarital debut, he argued that it was to spare his sons. Sisman now reveals that it was to spare his own blushes.

Eventually the libido sagged and, besides, the spy writer came to be spied on as closely as any mark. ‘I live in a high-security household,’ he testily advised one ex. ‘I have no structure for independent movement.’

The marriage was a prison he couldn’t bear to escape. His jailer was not his muse – that was the job of the mistresses, whom he often thanked for putting lead back in his pencil.

Absent from the novels, his wife fulfilled the different but vital role of office manager. ‘You need a bourgeois woman like Jane,’ le Carré told a friend. ‘She’s the only woman I can write around.’

With all the others, he was too busy.

Jasper Rees wrote Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood