John Le Carré, pictured in 2008 at his home in London.Last modified on Sun 27 Mar 2022 10.22 BSThen a much-loved author dies, fans and publishers cling for a while to the hope that an undiscovered manuscript lurks in a drawer, promising a final echo of that familiar voice. So last week’s news that a collected volume of John le Carré’s letters will be published in November understandably sent a frisson through the literary world.
But can a letter ever offer a truly unvarnished portrait and would we really want one? A writer with a career as eminent as Le Carré’s will have known that his correspondence would be a valuable part of his legacy and the forthcoming collection has been edited by his son Tim Cornwell, so while there may be curiosities and surprises, it seems unlikely that we will encounter anything that might demand a re-evaluation of the life.
Most of my exchanges with fellow writers now take place on Twitter and that technology will no doubt become obsolete Perhaps another reason for the excitement about Le Carré’s letters is that he belongs to one of the last generations who will leave behind such a rich trove of correspondence in this form. Even in 1940, Woolf was lamenting the decline of letter-writing in the face of new modes of communication.
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