Spy Vs. Spy, but in This Case It’s All John le Carré

‘The Secret Life of John le Carré’By Adam SismanHarper, 208 pagesIn 2015, Adam Sisman published a biography of John Le Carré with the fitful cooperation of the espionage novelist and certain stipulations were made: Mr. Sisman could acknowledge le Carré’s infidelities but not recount them with any specificity. Both expected that after le Carré’s death, Mr. Sisman would publish a more candid account, and that has now appeared. The book’s title alludes to le Carré’s obsession with the clandestine—not merely to spare his wife Jane the public exposure of his rampant affairs, but also to deflect and mislead his amours, to whom he professed a love that he was never certain he had ever really experienced.Mr. Sisman’s book recounts the vicissitudes of dealing with le Carré, who expressed admiration for Mr. Sisman’s biography of a historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, but also dismay with a draft of Mr. Sisman’s biography of him, saying it would not do because of inaccuracies and biases.Mr. Sisman had a hard time with his subject, who specialized in lies and wrote about liars in spy stories. The biographer shows that his subject’s dishonesty is of a piece with the themes of betrayal that pervade the novelist’s books.It is surprising that Mr. Sisman was not more suspicious of le Carré going into their collaboration. It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Sisman that le Carré was running his biographer as spymasters run their agents in his fiction.Mr. Sisman is not naive, but he seems to have succumbed too often to the duplicitous dynamic le Carré set in motion — such as when le Carré announced his intention of doing his own memoir. Mr. Sisman feared that his subject was trying to get his story out before the biographer pounced — a word I use advisedly, as le Carré often acted as though the biographer was, as in Westerns, trying to get the drop on him. It is pretty funny, really, to watch the duel between the earnest Mr. Sisman and the dodgy le Carré. Mr. Sisman never seems to twig that the announcement of a memoir is a way to keep the biographer in line, as who knows what le Carré could divulge in a memoir that would make the biographer’s diligence seem wanting.How could le Carré think of the biographer as other than one of the novelist’s tools? Mr. Sisman is like those hand-picked biographers of Gore Vidal and Philip Roth, undertaking their books on the terms their subjects dictated. The biographers nonetheless thought of themselves as independent. Blake Bailey joked to me that Roth joked to him that he was now working for the biographer. What better piece of flattery, even if it is a joke, could a writer devise to get the biographer to think in terms of the subject’s designs?Then, too, a biographer who collaborates with a living subject is, by definition, susceptible to working on a vanity project. In le Carré’s case, a biography was meant to signal that he was ripe for a Nobel, which he believed would propel him out of the ranks of genre writers and into the pantheon of literary greats.“Undertaking a life of a living person is always a compromise,” Mr. Sisman supposes: “Even an unauthorized biographer is inhibited by the law of libel.” Not that much, really, judging by my experience as an unauthorized biographer in the U.K. and here. To prove libel is a steep climb in court, which is why literary estates often threaten cases of copyright infringement to forestall biographies, since publishers are easily intimidated by threats against biographers charged with quoting too much from their subjects’ writings.Mr. Sisman, an astute historian of biography, including “Boswell’s Presumptuous Task,” still seems not to have fully considered the resources available to an independent biographer of a living figure. Start first with why a biography is necessary, why you should write it, rather than what cooperation or archive may be available. So I would have said if Mr. Sisman had come calling.Mr. Rollyson writes about his unauthorized biographies of living figures (Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and Michael Foot) as well as with le Carré’s novel, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” in “Confessions of a Serial Biographer.”

Spy Vs. Spy, but in This Case It’s All John le Carré

Spy Vs. Spy, but in This Case It’s All John le Carré

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