It could be a set-up straight from a spy thriller.
David Cornwell. Image: Stephen Cornwell
“I was a PhD student at Oxford in the 90s, working on the Russian mafia, doing field work in the middle of nowhere in Siberia,” professor Federico Varese recalls.
“One day I got an email from somebody claiming to be John le Carré. I thought this is a very good joke from my friends – or the beginning of something important.”
Le Carré – real name David Cornwell – the masterful thriller writer relied on rigorous research, which grounded his books in a palpable reality.
His knowledge of espionage was gathered while working for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 60s. Later, he’d always consult with experts in whatever field he was writing about.
Through professors at the university, Varese was fingered as an expert in organised crime and his input helped shape his 1995 novel Our Game. It also started an ongoing working relationship and friendship that would last until the writer’s death in 2020.
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Jane Cornwell typing a Le Carré manuscript
Varese is one of the curators of Tradecraft, a new exhibition at the Bodleian in Oxford which holds le Carré’s archive and reveals his method for the first time.
“Something he told me once was, ‘I’m not a spy who writes novels. I’m a writer who briefly who worked as a spy,’” Varese adds.
“So we’re trying to reclaim his reputation in the realm of literature.”
Varsese’s fellow curator, Dr Jessica Douthwaite, talks us through the creative process seen in three pages from his most celebrated books.
The Little Drummer Girl
Image: Bodleian Library collection
This will have come at the early planning stage. John le Carré bequeathed his archive of papers to the Bodleian in 2010. It’s over 1,200 boxes of drafts, all the research for his novels, personal correspondence, all his dealings with agents and editors – everything – and that is now finally fully catalogued and accessible online. The research that went into his novels is unlike anything I’ve seen before. Even though he was a fiction writer, he researched like a journalist or like a social scientist – definitely on par with anything an academic would do. The human themes around betrayal, deception, traitors, loyalty, they still definitely hold up.
George Smiley is one of his most iconic characters. He has a very subdued, unglamorous personality and unathletic demeanour. This description that you have there is from when he’s introduced on the first page of the second chapter of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He’s put in details about his rotund figure, his gait, his walking style. There’s a strong anti-Bond theme here. Le Carré was positioning his spy fiction directly against Ian Fleming’s James Bond. This is where you see that George Smiley character coming to life. Pretty much everyone he wrote about – the personalities and the physical descriptions – came from a real-life figure.
The Constant Gardener
Image: Bodleian Library collection
He never used a typewriter or a word processor. Everything was handwritten and typed up by his wife Jane. He had quite a unique writing method. First, he would have these notes, jumbled ideas, characterisations, bits of dialogue. Eventually those, in conjunction with the research, would become handwritten drafts. Jane would type them up, then he would cut them out and staple them onto new bits of writing. Essentially, he was moving things around like a jigsaw. Slowly, over time, Jane would retype and retype. The reason the archive is so big is because, for instance, we have every single iteration of chapter one of The Constant Gardener. It could go through six versions before he was happy.
