“Manipulative, powerful, charismatic, clever, untrustworthy,’ Mr. Le Carré once described him.
The family lurched between extremes. “When father was flush, the chauffeur-driven Bentley would be parked outside,” he said. “When things were a bit iffy, it was parked in the back garden, and when we were down and out, it disappeared altogether.” Often, debts would be called in.
“You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff,” Mr. le Carré told an interviewer.
The boys’ mother, Olive (Glassey) Cornwell, walked out of the family house and into the arms of another man when David was 5. He has little memory of it — his father intimated that she was ill, then that she had died — and he did not see her again for 16 years.
As crooked as he was, Ronnie Cornwell craved establishment respectability for his children, and David was sent to prep school and then to Sherborne, a boarding school, which he hated so much, he decamped for Switzerland at age 16 and enrolled at the University of Bern to study modern languages.
There he was recruited by a British spy working undercover at the embassy, and so his life of spying began. Except for two years when he taught at Eton, England’s premier secondary school, Mr. le Carré was a spy of some kind for 16 years, for both M.I.6. and its domestic counterpart, M.I.5.
It was not until years later that he owned up to his earlier profession — it was a relief, he said, not to have to lie about it any more — and he was always vague on the details. But while a student at Oxford, where he went after Bern, Mr. le Carré kept an eye out for possible Soviet sympathizers in left-wing groups. In 1960, he moved to Germany, posing as a British diplomat; his work included conducting interrogations, tapping phones, organizing break-ins and running agents.
Briefly, he led a triple life: diplomat, spy, novelist, writing his first book, “Call for the Dead” (1961), in longhand in red notebooks. The story of the unveiling of an East German spy operation, it was notable mostly for the introduction of Smiley and his faithless wife, Ann. (Ann was the name of Mr. le Carré’s wife at the time, though when they divorced, in 1971, it seems to have been his infidelity that was a problem, not hers).