John le Carré was born in Poole, England, on October 19, 1931. He had a gloomy childhood, thanks to the disruptive motions of his father, an erratic businessman who kept the family moving from place to place. After attending a series of private English schools, le Carré was called upon for national service and spent several years in Vienna with the Army Intelligence Corps. When the term expired, he returned to England and enrolled at Lincoln College, Oxford. Graduation was followed by a procession of odd jobs, including one year in which he taught at Eton.

In 1960, le Carré, whose real name is David John Moore Cornwell, resumed his intelligence career with the Foreign Service. During this time he began writing novels, the first entitled Call for the Dead. His second book, A Murder of Quality, appeared in 1962 while le Carré was stationed at the British Embassy in Bonn. Two years later he resigned from the Foreign Service to devote himself entirely to writing. He achieved international fame as the author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. His later books include A Small Town in Germany, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley’s People, The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, and Our Game, almost all of which have been adapted for movies and television.

The interview took place in the auditorium of New York’s YMHA on a late autumn day in 1996. Le Carré had arrived from London earlier that day to promote the publication of his sixteenth novel, The Tailor of Panama. The auditorium was packed. After the interview he cheerfully submitted to questioning by the crowd, then moved to an adjoining space where autograph-seekers, some carrying more than a dozen books, had formed a long queue that curled around the room. Le Carré, who likes to turn in early, looked fatigued. He stayed on until almost midnight, ministering to each request in a broad, legible hand.

INTERVIEWER

Can you say something about your early reading?

JOHN LE CARRÉ

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father’s boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don’t remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital. My earliest reading included Maugham, the heroic English storytellers—Henty, Sapper, Peter Cheyney, and thank heaven, the great and wonderful Conan Doyle. I graduated joyously to Dickens and erratically to Bernard Shaw and Galsworthy. And cautiously to the heavy contemporaries—Koestler, Gide, and Camus. But the big explosion in my reading occurred in my late teens when I was seduced by the German muse. I devoured the whole of German literature alive, as it seems to me now. I have probably read more German literature than I have English. Today my pleasure is with nineteenth-century storytellers: Balzac, Dickens, and the rest.

INTERVIEWER

And among contemporary writers?

LE CARRÉ

Everything by Marquez, and sudden batches of new writers. Most recently, practically everything by Beryl Bainbridge, just for the pleasure of her ear. I read most between books, and very little fiction while I am writing.

INTERVIEWER

You taught at Eton for a while. What did you teach, and was your stay there of any value to your writing?

LE CARRÉ

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dalí or how bumblebees manage to fly. Eton is a place of extremes, and these were good for me as a writer. The English upper classes can be seen at their best and worst. The good pupils are often brilliant, and they keep you on your toes and take you to the limits of your knowledge. The worst pupils provide a unique insight into the criminal mind. On all these counts my time at Eton provided me with riches. I even set one early novel in a school that was quite like Eton—A Murder of Quality.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you change your name?

LE CARRÉ

When I began writing. I was what was politely called “a foreign servant.” I went to my employers and said that I’d written my first novel. They read it and said they had no objections, but even if it were about butterflies, they said, I would have to choose a pseudonym. So then I went to my publisher, Victor Gollancz, who was Polish by origin, and he said, My advice to you, old fellow, is choose a good Anglo-Saxon couple of syllables. Monosyllables. He suggested something like Chunk-Smith. So as is my courteous way, I promised to be Chunk-Smith. After that, memory eludes me and the lie takes over. I was asked so many times why I chose this ridiculous name, then the writer’s imagination came to my help. I saw myself riding over Battersea Bridge, on top of a bus, looking down at a tailor’s shop. Funnily enough, it was a tailor’s shop, because I had a terrible obsession about buying clothes in order to become a diplomat in Bonn. And it was called something of this sort—le Carré. That satisfied everybody for years. But lies don’t last with age. I find a frightful compulsion towards truth these days. And the truth is, I don’t know.

INTERVIEWER

Which intelligence service were you in?

LE CARRÉ

Even now, some residual sense of loyalty prevents me from talking much about it. I entered the secret world when I was young. I kind of lurched into it. There never seemed an alternative. I was first picked up when I was a young student in Bern, having run away from my first school. I retained what is politely called “a reporting responsibility.” Then, for my military service, I went to Austria. That was a very formative time, because one of my jobs was trolling through the displaced-persons camps, looking for people who were fake refugees, or for people whose circumstances were so attractive to us from an intelligence point of view that we might consider returning them, with their consent, to the countries they came from. For a person of, as I was then, barely twenty-one, it was an immense responsibility at an extraordinary moment in history, which, horrible as it was, I was very pleased to have shared. Afterwards, after teaching at Eton, I went into the cold-war setup properly. In all I don’t suppose that I spooked around for more than seven or eight years, and that’s forty years ago, but that was my little university for the purposes that I needed later to write. I think that if I’d gone to sea at that time I would have written about the sea. If I’d gone into advertising or stockbroking, that would have been my stuff. It was from there that I began abstracting and peopling my other world, my alternative, private world, which became my patch, and it became a Tolkien-like operation, except that none of my characters have hair between their toes.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a moment during all of this when you really felt that you were going to write about it?

LE CARRÉ

There was. I had the curious and very rewarding example when I was in the first of the two services that I joined of working with a man called John Bingham, whose real name was Lord Clanmorris. He was a thriller writer, and also an extremely good intelligence officer, a moleish, tubby fellow. He gave me not only the urge to write, but also a kind of outline of George Smiley, which I later filled in from other sources, notably my own. He and a don at Oxford who I knew very well became parts of this composite character called Smiley.

INTERVIEWER

Did you find it easy? Did you have great confidence in yourself as a writer?

LE CARRÉ

I have a great debt of gratitude to the press for this. In those days English newspapers were much too big to read on the train, so instead of fighting with my colleagues for the Times, I would write in little notebooks. I lived a long way out of London. The line has since been electrified, which is a great loss to literature. In those days it was an hour and a half each way. To give the best of the day to your work is most important. So if I could write for an hour and a half on the train, I was already completely jaded by the time I got to the office to start work. And then there was a resurgence of talent during the lunch hour. In the evening something again came back to me. I was always very careful to give my country second-best.