Editorial: Literature and Security

Abstract

Literature is a lie which seeks to tell a truth. Espionage is a trade dependent on deceit. Where the two professions meet, the dissembling knows no limit (Gearon, “A Landscape of Lies in the Land of Letters”). John le Carré, the nom-de-plume of the late David Cornwell (1931–2020), reflected more than any novelist of our time on the interface of literature and security. In his case, that was a life lived in service, to the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the Security Services, MI5, and a life lived, too, in the service of literature. The author stated: “I’m a liar, born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist” (Sisman 1). In The Pigeon Tunnel, le Carré aptly characterizes his autobiography as “stories from my life,” the subtitle of his work. It is a narrative in which the dual worlds of security and secret intelligence are inseparable from his love of and dedication to writing; there is little or no separation from his life and his art. Born in 1931 and educated in the English public-school system he was a patriotic schoolboy during the Second World War. Skilled at languages and loving literature, he left England, as he himself admits, to escape a difficult relationship with his father, and to study modern languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland. It was there, as his autobiography details, that a dedicated patriot developed an intense love of all literatures, especially German. David Cornwell’s national service as part of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps was put to good use in the interrogation of those who crossed from the other side of what was now called the Iron Curtain to where he was stationed in Allied-occupied Austria. Vienna, in the early period of the Cold War, was the crossroads of intelligence. Look simply to the novels of the time by Graham Greene above all to see the spies on those streets. Completing his National Service, David Cornwell returned to England, and Oxford, in 1952, at an age when today he would be called a mature student, at Lincoln College. His unofficial and covert duties Text Matters, Number 11, 2021 https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.02