Le Carré, the spy who betrayed his best friend... by having an affair with his wife
HE IS known as the master of dark secrets and intrigue. Now a sensational new biography reveals how celebrated spy novelist John le Carre conducted a series of ‘assignations’ in real life – including one with the wife of his best friend.
While it had long been rumoured that le Carre, whose real name is David Cornwell, had a number of affairs, this is the first time the suspicions – and the name of a lover – have been confirmed.
The biography, by Adam Sisman, names his romantic partner as Susan Kennaway, wife of the late author James Kennaway, who was Cornwell’s best friend.
The book is being serialised by The Mail on Sunday and today’s first part reveals a series of never-before-published letters in which Cornwell speaks of his obsessive love for her.
The affair seems to have been later echoed in Cornwell’s 1974 masterpiece, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which his central character George Smiley is humiliated by his wife’s string of infidelities.
Cornwell and James Kennaway – whose bestknown work is Tunes Of Glory, which was later made into an Academy-nominated film starring Sir Alec Guinness and Sir John Mills – were close friends in the early 1960s.
Cornwell had been married to wife Ann since 1954, but was besotted with Susan.
Kennaway cheated constantly on Susan and when Cornwell spent a weekend at the couple’s Highgate home in 1964, Cornwell decided to become Susan’s lover after she told him she wanted to have an affair to take ‘revenge’ on her husband. The pair fell deeply in love and discussed running off together.
In letters, Cornwell told his mistress: ‘This place is full of you. Oh Susie, love, dearest heart, I love you. I seem to miss you more with each day that passes.’
But he was not prepared to leave his wife for her.
Explaining his unwillingness to commit to Susan, he wrote: ‘I’ll tell you what I am: a painkiller… a great big fat fraud. Poor love; I’ve been more brave with you than with anyone, and still I’ve been a coward. I can’t hurt – it’s as simple as that. I can’t bear discord.... I love you but I’m a hollow oak.’
When, in 1965, Kennaway discovered a love letter his wife had written to Cornwell, the two friends fell out. Cornwell wrote to him: ‘Dearest James. I have failed you most terribly. I describe you in conversation as my best friend. If you can, say the same.’
But Kennaway was distraught and never saw Cornwell again. He died in a car crash in 1968 when he was 40. Susan remarried when she was 50 and now lives in France.
Intriguingly, in one of her own books, published in America in 1981, Susan hinted at her affair with Cornwell, referring to him only as her husband’s ‘dearest friend, novelist David.’
In the book, The Kennaway Papers – a compilation of her late husband’s diaries, with a narrative by herself – she confessed: ‘Neither David nor I had imagined the wildness of James’s passion or the sort of fight he was prepared to make in order that I should stay with him.’
In one angry letter that James sent to his wife, he wrote: ‘You want to destroy me. You won’t. Not until I have taken you by the throat, have opened your mouth and have killed you stone dead, you inadequate love-refusing Brief Encounter absurdity. Die, die, die.’
Both Cornwell and Kennaway drew on the affair for future novels. In 1967 Kennaway wrote Some Gorgeous Accident which tells of a triangular relationship set in the Swinging Sixties.
Four years later Cornwell wrote The Naive And Sentimental Love. It was Cornwell’s only departure from espionage novels and, to his disappointment, it received scathing reviews.
Cornwell’s marriage to Ann ended in divorce in 1971. In 1972 he met Jane Eustace.
She recognised early in their life together that she would have to share him with other women and admitted: ‘Nobody can have all of David.’