The new John le Carré exhibition at the Bodleian’s Weston Library in Oxford gets underway with a large photo of the author in his later years staring pensively ahead and, next to it, two of his quotations. One says, ‘I am not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked in the secret world.’ This declaration was le Carré’s appeal to us to see him as he saw himself. The curators of John le Carré: Tradecraft might well have employed it to outline to visitors the focal point of the show. For the many exhibits offer insight not into the exploits of a former intelligence operative but rather the working methods of a long-practising writer – one who helped transform the modern spy novel.

Le Carré’s big game-changing book was his third offering, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963). Instead of exotic locations, his backdrop was a battle-scarred Cold War Berlin divided by ‘a dirty, ugly thing of breeze blocks and strands of barbed wire, lit with cheap yellow light, like the backdrop for a concentration camp’. His characters were agents who were distinctly unglamorous. ‘What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs?’ asks the protagonist Leamas, more a victim than a hero. ‘They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.’ The novel paved the way for more murky, gritty dramas that unfolded in twists and turns and were rich in intrigue, suspense and moral ambiguity.

The second quote that greets us on entry to the exhibition comprises questions which le Carré grappled with throughout his life, and which he explored in his 26 novels over the course of a career spanning six decades: ‘Whom if anyone, can we trust? What is loyalty – to ourselves, to whom, to what? Whom, if anyone, can we love? And what is the caring individual’s relationship to the institutions he services?’

Trust (or better, distrust) and treachery run through le Carré’s work like a watermark. But then, as he wrote in his 1986 novel, A Perfect Spy, ‘Betrayal is a repetitious trade.’ His characters betray their country, their partners and their friends. Sophie in The Night Manager (1993) proves her unfaithfulness to Richard Roper, ‘the worst man in the world’, first by sleeping with the eponymous hero, Jonathan Pine, and then informing him of Roper’s shady arms dealing. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Bill Haydon demonstrates his duplicitousness by cuckolding his colleague in British intelligence, George Smiley, while at the same time, like the notorious double agent Kim Philby he is partially modelled on, leaking secrets to the Soviets. Some betrayers have warped perceptions of betrayal: Dima in Our Kind of Traitor (2010), who belongs to an ‘outlaw band of Russians’, categorically insists he is no quisling because the information he is selling to the British is for preservation not profit. Other characters like Adrian Haldane in The Looking Glass War (1965) know exactly what betrayal involves. ‘Do you know what love is?’ he says at one point. ‘I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.’

The opening section of the exhibition reveals that le Carré first experienced the bitter taste of betrayal not as an adult spy but as a child. Le Carré – whose real name was David Cornwell – was five when his mother, Olive, left home and abandoned him and his brother Tony forever. He was brought up by Ronnie, a man he memorably described in his 2016 memoir The Pigeon Tunnel as ‘conman, fantasist, occasional jailbird, and my father’. On the surface a loveable rogue, Ronnie was in actual fact a destructive force who had no scruples about scamming strangers, friends or relatives. Among the family photos on display is one of an elegantly attired Ronnie disembarking a plane. He exudes respectability. But, as le Carré later showed in his fiction, appearances can be deceptive.

Other exhibits from le Carré’s early years stem from his time as a student at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he read Modern Languages. While studying he was working for MI5, spying on left-wing undergraduates who were considered potentially subversive (he later expressed deep remorse for betraying friends and fellow students). A handwritten University of Oxford careers service record card lists his interests, which include his Olympic-level skiing ambitions. On the reverse, his father’s bankruptcy is noted (‘£1,250,000!’). A handwritten report from a Lincoln tutor states: ‘Mr Cornwell has done his Michaelmas tests very intelligently. He must make more of his facts’ (something he did later with aplomb as an established writer).

There are articles and illustrations that le Carré contributed to the Oxford Left journal and his college publication, the Lincoln Imp. One pen-and-ink sketch entitled ‘Oxford Faces’ from around 1953 features a don and a man in a bowler hat in a hugger-mugger exchange. This is more than just a sharp little drawing; it also highlights the relationship between Oxbridge and the spy world during a time of anti-communist government policies.

Most of the sections of the exhibition are devoted to particular le Carré books. We find draft manuscript pages made up of typed text by le Carré’s second wife, Jane, and the author’s handwritten amendments. His tightly scrawled notes and series of signs, arrows and cross-hatchings both fill and deface the page. They show his fastidious attention to detail and the extent to which he repeatedly revised his work in progress. We also view plot outlines, character profiles and sketches for key scenes, along with numerous photos le Carré took and notebooks he filled while conducting fact-finding field trips.

The section on le Carré’s most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy, is especially illuminating. The book – for many le Carré’s masterpiece – chronicles the life and times of Magnus Pym, from his chaotic childhood with his fraudster father, Rick, to his years as a spy with divided loyalties. A lengthy handwritten plot chart for an early draft of the book reveals that the original title was ‘The Maharajah’s Elephant’. Under this title, le Carré has written in red an alternative: ‘The Killing of Rickie Pym’. Among the fascinating photos taken on location in south-east Asia for The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) is an annotated sketch map of Khmer Rouge fighting in Cambodia, which matches le Carré’s memories of visiting the warfront and being caught in the crossfire. Next to plot flowcharts and drafts of scenes from The Little Drummer Girl (1983) is a list of Israeli contacts that a journalist gave to le Carré when he was conducting research in the country, together with a typed description of his meeting with Yasser Arafat.

The section on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – a novel about the search for a Soviet mole that has burrowed deep inside British intelligence – incorporates background information in the form of news articles from the 1960s on the Cambridge Five spy scandal. It also provides portraits of two real-life figures le Carré drew on for his most famous creation, Smiley – his MI5 colleague and mentor John Bingham, and his friend and former teacher, Vivian H. H. Green. There is a draft of the book in which le Carré describes Smiley as ‘small, podgy and at best middle-aged’; in a scribbled insertion he adds: ‘His legs were short, his gait anything but agile.’ In a letter to le Carré from Alec Guinness, the actor queries whether he fits the bill for the role of Smiley in the BBC TV adaptation of the novel. ‘Although thick-set I am not really rotund or double-chinned,’ he writes. Concluding this section are le Carré’s notes on Smiley’s devious KGB counterpart, Karla. His ‘technique’ comprises agents’ meeting places, the rules used to disguise undercover work and the tactics deployed to infiltrate British intelligence. Le Carré also refers to the microdot and microscope devices that his spies use hidden in objects such as cigarette holders and fountain pens.

Sections covering books from later in le Carré’s career remind us how he defied those critics who thought that he would be forced to hang up his pen when the Berlin Wall came down. Instead, he found new subject matter in different conflicts and wider concerns, tackling the likes of the illegal arms trade (The Night Manager), unethical practice in the pharmaceutical industry (The Constant Gardener, 2001), and extreme rendition (A Most Wanted Man, 2008). We come across faxed images of gun models, typed notes from an interview with a lawyer and stories from the global campaigner Yvette Pierpaoli. In le Carré’s handwritten pocket notes for The Mission Song (2006), a book partially set in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he invokes Joseph Conrad with his description of ‘corporate responsibility’ as ‘the other Heart of Darkness’. Among his research for Our Kind of Traitor are photos of the tattoos on members of the Russian mafia brotherhood vory-v-zakone (‘Thieves-in-Law’).

A query relating to that novel crops up in one of the many letters on display. Le Carré asks the manager of the Hotel Bellevue Palace in Bern if he may name the establishment and depict it in detail. The scenes in which the hotel features, he writes, ‘include a large gathering of bankers at a private reception, and an unseemly scuffle between two Russians and an Englishman’. In another formal letter sent to Switzerland, this one addressed to two employees of the pharmaceutical firm Novartis, he shows he is not a man who suffers fools. ‘I am what used to be called in German a free writer. Nobody buys my opinions. In your world, that is unusual and perhaps unsettling.’ He goes on to mention those ‘who have suffered the long reach of your industry’s terrible power’ – an industry accused of ‘amassing excessive wealth at the expense of the wretched of the earth’.

Elsewhere we find examples of le Carré’s personal correspondence, which he always wrote by hand. In one tetchy letter, penned before he disclosed his involvement in intelligence, he airs his frustration with public rumours. ‘Why do people want me to have views about spying?’ he gripes. ‘If I wrote about love, or cowboys, even sex, people would take it that this was my interest and therefore I made up stories about it.’ We glimpse a softer side to him in a letter to a fan, Doris, written from his home in Cornwall in March 2020, just nine months before his death. ‘I too am very old (88),’ he writes. ‘I feel something of the survivor’s guilt when I hear of the confinement and subsequent privations of my family and friends in locked down cities. This afternoon, after a morning’s work that my wife is now wrestling with (I write by hand, and she, poor woman, types it all out) I went for a lovely walk over the fields in perfect sunshine, and felt that I had seldom been more content.’

There is something rather poignant about this late letter and items such as le Carré’s pen, the cushion he rested his arm on when at work, and a small hand-painted pebble marked ‘to fix’ which sat atop piles of writing that needed refined. Since the publication of Silverview in 2021 and a collection of le Carré’s letters a year later, aficionados know that the vaults are now empty and that there will be no more posthumous offerings.

Yet this superb exhibition also lifts our spirits for we are surrounded by reminders of just how vital and colourful le Carré’s work is. On one wall, there is a glossary of the jargon he invented for people, places and ‘tradecraft’, or the techniques of espionage. This is a writer who created his own world, one filled with lamplighters and scalphunters, babysitters and pavement artists, not to mention the Circus, the Laundry and the Nursery. The various exhibits demonstrate le Carré’s dedicated commitment to authenticity, both through his own research and the expertise he sought from a number of sources – friends, lovers, journalists, academics, authors, activists, lawyers, politicians and, as he once put it, ‘various shades of spy’.

The exhibition isn’t as comprehensive as it could have been: the curators have delved deep into le Carré’s vast archive at the Bodleian Libraries, yet given short shrift to his novels from the 1960s. But what we do get brilliantly illuminates a much-missed author’s creative process.

John le Carré: Tradecraft is at the Weston Library, the Bodleian, Oxford until 6 April.