The Secret Heart, review: John le Carre’s former mistress spills the beans in this lurid memoir

John le Carré's former mistress, who goes by the name of Suleika Dawson, on a beach in Lesbos in 1983
John le Carré's former mistress, who goes by the name of Suleika Dawson, on a beach in Lesbos in 1983

Although John le Carré admitted to a complicated love life – there is a reference in his memoir to “marital mayhem entirely of my own making” – he never went into details.

Now, however, one of his mistresses has written a memoir that shines a light on le Carré – real name David Cornwell – in the role of lover. If you felt that Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography was all very well but could have done with a few loving descriptions of what its subject looked like in Speedos, then this is the book for you. (“David’s build leaned more towards yeoman farmer than athlete and the stream-lined trunks had some stretching to do, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination”).

The mistress in question has not disclosed her real identity, but has been knocking around under the pseudonym Suleika Dawson for a good while: she published a novel called The Forsytes, a sequel to John Galsworthy’s Saga, under that name in 1994. She was in her mid-20s, “a tall, blonde city girl not long out of college and generally up for anything” when she met the 51-year-old le Carré in 1982. (He was then married to his second wife Jane, and would remain so until his death in 2019; she survived him for only a few weeks.)

Given that this book has been marketed as being full of red-hot action, I was a bit alarmed by what they might be up to in the first sentence: “I’ve never let anyone this far in, David told me once, quite early in our relationship.” In fact, they’re just having what turns out to be the first in an innumerable line of heart-to-hearts from which le Carré draws a level of emotional stimulation apparently absent from his marriage.

Dawson then spools back to the “meet cute”: she was working for an audiobook company when le Carré came in to read Smiley’s People. His voice “had a sort of do-me-gently quality to it and the delivery was like a fabulous seduction in the back of a luxuriously upholstered high-end motor” and by the end of the recording session she was smitten.

Author David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, in Cornwall (1965) - Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images
Author David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, in Cornwall (1965) - Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images

She resisted him for a few months, but they eventually did the deed in his absent son’s bedroom – “David turned [the Anglepoise lamp] to face the wall, as if even the lightbulb shouldn’t know we were there” – and embarked on a two-year affair. There is much emphasis on his insatiability, but mercifully not too much detail on the ins and outs.

Dawson attempts to convey his charm (“David was just so hugely attractive it was as if he had an industrial magnet inside him, drawing me close”) but it doesn’t really come across, and so, although I’m sure in reality he was extremely sexy, we are just left with the sense of a naive young girl falling for ludicrously cheesy patter (“Your legs … They simply don’t stop. They go all the way up to heaven”).

She is far beadier on his failings, including his dress sense (“although [he] doubtlessly spent the Earth on bespoke tailoring, he nevertheless managed to look as if he had just stepped out of a Marks & Spencer menswear department”), his pomposity and intellectual snobbery, and his self-pity. He continually assured Dawson he would leave Jane – embodying the sort of clichéd character he would never have allowed into his work – but, of course, never did; on one occasion, he physically attacked Dawson for walking away while he was on the phone to his wife, as she picked up on the sound of the high heels. Dawson left him for the good of her sanity, although the affair resumed for a few months in 1999 when she renewed contact.

Some of Dawson’s writing is hilariously overblown, but she can be very sharp and funny. Can we trust her spookily precise recall of conversations and events, however? Early in their relationship he tells her: “They offered me a K this year. I turned them down.” “No Sir David Cornwell, then,” Dawson muses. But it was a mere CBE le Carré was offered that year – the spurned knighthood wasn’t proffered until well into the 21st century – so he can’t have said that and she can’t have thought that.

Perhaps it will comfort the son whom Dawson reports le Carré describing as “a mystery to me” to know that her recall may be a bit shaky. Cornwell’s family already have enough to upset them here, what with the unflattering portrait of le Carré’s wife as controlling and thick, and the presentation of his sister, the actress Charlotte Cornwell, as incestuously in love with her brother.

If that thought doesn’t bother you and you like books that mercilessly detail the appalling behaviour of great artists, go fill Ms Dawson’s coffers.


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