Where do writers get their ideas from? In the case of David Cornwell, the writer also known as John le Carré, the answer might be Enemy Combatant: The terrifying true story of a Briton in Guantánamo by Moazzam Begg. Or it might be Lords of Poverty: The power, prestige and corruption of the international aid business by Graham Hancock. The le Carré copies of these two books contain some telling annotations – and they are not alone.
Both of these titles were to be found at one time in the author’s considerable library at Tregiffian Cottage in Cornwall. They now appear – priced at £50 and £750, respectively – in an informative and insightful new catalogue published by Maggs in London.
Here, as you would expect, may be scanned the titles of many of the sources and resources for le Carré’s novels, including forty-odd books about “spies, dissidents, traitors and terrorists”. There was much to be learned from Nicholas Elliott’s With My Little Eye: Observations along the way (£500), clearly, with its mixed comments on the recruitment process for the intelligence service (“As for Guy Burgess, he did not even pass a morality test when he applied to my father in 1933 to become an assistant master at Eton”). Elliott had headed the SIS station in Bern when Cornwell worked there.
Inspiration could take more unexpected routes, too. The marks in Zelda by Nancy Mitford (£375), a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, confirm that Scott and Zelda inspired the trouble-making couple Helen and Shamus in his spook-free novel The Naive and Sentimental Lover. We would guess that a worn eighth reprint of the first edition of H. G. Fiedler’s Buch Deutscher Dichtung (£750) doesn’t sound like anything special until you see that it is annotated throughout, with “several poems including his original translation of a poem by Theodor Körner”, as well as “a small caricature of a head”. The fruits of youthful studies, sure – but then Fiedler also crops up as the name of an East German spymaster in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Yet Nicholas Shakespeare, in his introduction to this catalogue, notes that "one of David's stranger characteristics was how thin was his reading of contemporary fiction". It doesn't seem likely that he ever got around to A Heart So White by Javier Marías (£450, inscribed by the author), though Shakespeare begged him to try it. He was proud of "his complete set of Jeffery Farnol, a writer I'd never heard of", but "it was as if David's fly-paper-mind recoiled from anything that risked flecking his fictional style”.
Perhaps he wasn't missing much. Le Carré's copy of The Untouchable by John Banville (€25) comes with a bookmark inserted at page 11, on which is written a single word: "Unbelievable"
