Graham Greene (4 page)

For many years an influential film reviewer, he had worked as a scriptwriter for the producer Alexander Korda in the late 1930s. In the late 1940s he had his greatest success in the cinema. With Terence Rattigan, he co-wrote the script of
Brighton Rock
(1947). He then worked with Korda and the director Carol Reed – both close friends in this period – as the scriptwriter for
The Fallen Idol
(1948) and the great classic
The Third Man
(1949). Greene preferred the film of
The Third Man
to the novella published in 1950, and although he wrote scripts for
Loser Takes All
(1956),
St Joan
(1957),
Our Man in Havana
(1960) and
The Comedians
(1967), none of these achieved the same standard. Many of Greene’s stories were made into films by other scriptwriters – some of the results pleased him, but some, notably
The Man Within
(1947) and
The Quiet American
(1957), he regarded as abominations.

The 1950s saw Greene’s greatest success as a playwright, beginning with
The Living Room
in 1952, which embodied his frustration with Catholic marriage doctrine. His most admired play,
The Potting Shed
, about a family torn apart by the memory of an apparent miracle, was
presented in different versions in New York in 1957 and London in 1958.
The Complaisant Lover
was first performed in 1959. His last major play,
Carving a Statue
(1964), was a failure that Greene rather harshly blamed on the acting of Sir Ralph Richardson, who had earlier turned in one of the great performances in British cinema as the butler Baines in
The Fallen Idol
, and another very strong performance as ‘C’ in
Our Man in Havana
.

From the late 1940s, Greene kept a flat in London, first in St James’s Street, then in Albany, an elegant and quiet enclave just yards from Piccadilly, which had in the nineteenth century numbered among its residents Lord Byron, William Gladstone and ‘Monk’ Lewis. He also had a small house in Anacapri where he did much of his writing. However, he spent long periods outside Europe. At the end of 1950 he visited Malaya, where his brother Hugh was in charge of psychological warfare against the Communist insurgency. His reasons for going there were not poetic: ‘Nature doesn’t really interest me – except in so far as it may contain an ambush – that is, something human.’ (
this page
) He later commented on war reporters’ habit of subtly congratulating themselves on their own courage: ‘I think when one is dealing with horrors one should write very coldly. Otherwise it reads like hidden boasting – “just see what a brave chap I am to have voluntarily put myself in the way of such experiences.” To adapt Wordsworth, horror should be remembered in tranquillity.’ (
this page
)

He went on to Vietnam in the first of four winter sojourns that led to the writing of
The Quiet American
(1955). From the 1950s until the end of his life, Greene criticised the Americans for meddling in Vietnam, Haiti and Latin America. In particular, he enjoyed creating ‘incidents’ that would expose the silliness of the McCarran Internal Security Act (1950), which was meant to keep members of dangerous organisations out of the country. That act was opposed by many Americans, including President Harry Truman, whose veto Congress overrode. Having briefly been a member of the Communist Party at Oxford, Greene repeatedly dared American officials to refuse him visas. The anti-American habit of mind was deeply ingrained and can be detected in his writings from the 1930s, when his knowledge of the country came chiefly from books and films. Indeed, several of his literary heroes – James, Pound and Eliot – had abandoned their
supposedly uncultured homeland for Europe. The prejudice sometimes pushed him into untenable positions, as when, in his later years, he asserted moral equivalence between the superpowers and, occasionally, a preference for the Soviets (see
this page
).

In 1953 Greene reported on the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, but, like his trip to Malaya, this journey did not result in a novel. He made his first trip to Haiti in 1954, with Peter and Natasha Brook and the novelist Truman Capote, who Greene thought had ‘an odd psychic quality about him’ – he told Greene’s fortune with spectacular inaccuracy (see
this page
). They attended a voodoo ceremony, which included ‘a procession carrying fuel & food & dishes & a live hen. The man carrying the hen swung it like a censer, & then would dash to this & that member of the congregation & plaster his face & body with the live bird … More interminable prayers & then the bird’s feet were cracked off like cheese biscuits & the attendant put the live bird’s head in his mouth & bit it off’ (
this page
).

In the following year, Greene travelled to Alberta with his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Lucy Caroline. With his backing, she bought a ranch, which he visited often, writing portions of
Our Man in Havana
there: ‘It’s a strange feeling looking round at the country, hill & valley & stream, & knowing that Lucy is the owner. It makes one feel there’s some point in writing books after all.’ (
this page
) She married in Canada and had two sons, Andrew and Jonathan Bourget.

By the mid-fifties, there was little reason for Greene to hope for marriage from Catherine Walston. He began a relationship with the recently widowed Swedish actress Anita Björk. He found himself very much in love but Stockholm was dull, and his sense of humour shocked the Swedes. Short of asking Anita to abandon her career and live elsewhere, there was no hope of marriage or any other satisfying arrangement between them. By the end of the decade, Greene was in a profound depression and went so far as to seek electric-shock therapy from Dr Eric Strauss, who suggested instead that he write about his childhood. So, on doctor’s orders, he began his volume of autobiography,
A Sort of Life
, which did not actually appear until 1971.
²⁸

Around 1958, Greene also started a novel about school life, but
found the subject so grim that he abandoned it in favour of leprosy.
²⁹
He visited the Congo in early 1959, spending most of his time at a leproserie in Yonda in the company of Dr Michel Lechat and a group of Belgian missionaries. The novel that came from this experience,
A Burnt-Out Case
, was published at the beginning of 1961. Evelyn Waugh wrote: ‘It is the first time Graham has come out as specifically faithless – pray God it is a mood, but it strikes deeper and colder.’
³⁰
However, other Catholics thought well of it, among them Edith Sitwell, who described it as a ‘holy book’.
³¹

Greene met Yvonne Cloetta in Cameroon in March 1959. Although for the sake of their children she did not divorce her husband, she became Greene’s de facto spouse for the next thirty-two years. An elegant and thoughtful woman, her temperament was more cheerful and moderate than those of Greene’s earlier loves. Her influence seems to have coincided with a quieting of the cycles of manic depression and the beginning of a happier phase in the novelist’s life. Nonetheless, Greene defended his right to be melancholy: ‘Does anybody really want to change a little? A complete change, I suppose, one could accept, but not a small change – otherwise one would be losing one’s thing.’ (
this page
)

Greene was always cagey about money, but in the early 1960s he was swindled by a financial adviser named Thomas Roe. After a long dispute, Greene squared things with the Inland Revenue at the beginning of 1966 by moving to Antibes, in the south of France. At just the moment one branch of the government was forcing him abroad, Downing Street was approving him as a Companion of Honour. Greene was actually glad to be nearer to Cloetta. Much of the rest of his life was spent in Paris, Antibes and Anacapri. He returned occasionally to England to see his family, to do business and, somewhat reluctantly, to collect medals and doctorates.

In 1963 and 1965 Greene returned to Haiti to observe the homicidal regime of President François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, whose gang of national police thugs, the Tonton Macoutes, had kept him in power by
torturing and killing his supposed opponents. Once Greene’s Haitian novel
The Comedians
was published in 1966, ‘Papa Doc’ developed a very personal hatred for its author, threatening him with death – much to Greene’s pleasure, since it was the only novel that he deliberately wrote to effect political change – by drawing the world’s attention to the plight of the Haitians. Greene’s main guide in Haiti was another man despised by the regime, the journalist Bernard Diederich, a New Zealander who also organised many of Greene’s journeys to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Nicaragua.

By now in his mid-sixties, Greene opened new territory in his fiction with
Travels with My Aunt
(1969), a subtle work about old age and death. He felt the novel was much underrated by publishers and critics, many of whom thought it merely funny – which it is, too. Part of that novel was set in South America, and from 1968 he made a series of visits to Paraguay, Argentina and Chile that would also provide the background for
The Honorary Consul
(1973), a work that returned to the problems of faith and tyranny that had preoccupied him since
The Power and the Glory
. In the summer of 1973 he visited the farm in the Transvaal of the novelist Etienne Leroux, a journey that brought into focus the questions of apartheid addressed in
The Human Factor
(1978). That novel draws a portrait of a defector, whose actions, if not his motives, resemble Philby’s.

In July 1976, Greene took the first of a series of journeys through Spain and Portugal with his friend the literary scholar and priest Leopoldo Durán, who wrote a memoir of him. Out of their travels came
Monsignor Quixote
(1982), a work that considers age, death and illusion with the lightness of touch and the gentleness Greene had first demonstrated in
Travels with My Aunt
. He may have learned that particular set of narrative skills from many years of reading R. K. Narayan.

Greene made his first visit to Panama in December 1976 as the guest of the charismatic, anti-American head of government, General Omar Torrijos. He became particularly close to ‘Chuchu’, a member of the General’s bodyguard who happened to hold a doctorate from the Sorbonne. Torrijos took Greene (to his great delight) along with him as a member of the Panamanian delegation to Washington for the 7 September 1977 signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, an event attended by several South American despots who, in their own
countries, would gladly have made the novelist disappear. After Torrijos’s death in an airplane crash in 1981, Greene wrote
Getting to Know the General
(1984), a memoir of Torrijos, Chuchu, and a country that became dangerous for him under the rule of Manuel Noriega.

A difficult and unproductive time for Graham Greene began in 1979, when he was treated for intestinal cancer. Although he was cured, more troubles were pressing on him. Yvonne’s daughter Martine was caught in a child-custody dispute with a former husband whose underworld connections seemed to shield him from the law. Martine, her parents and Greene were all threatened with violence. Described in a pamphlet he wrote called
J’Accuse
(1982), the conflict took five years to resolve and, by the end of it, Greene had finally become an old man. In his last decade he produced just one novel,
The Captain and the Enemy
(1988) – an enigmatic and technically perfect book whose first paragraph, about a boy being won in a game of backgammon, is unforgettable. In this book, Greene finally brought school life into his fiction and introduced, very obliquely, memories of the psychoanalyst Kenneth Richmond and his wife Zoë.
³²

Greene took three trips to the Soviet Union in 1986 and 1987, where he visited again with Kim Philby. The novelist’s fame in Russia was considerable. At one point Greene met a cosmonaut, B. I. Gretchko, who had spent three months in orbit: ‘He presented me with his marked copy of a Penguin of
Our Man in Havana
which he had taken with him into space!’ (
this page
)

Greene maintained through these years a wide range of political contacts in Latin America and a heavy correspondence throughout the world. In December 1989 he was hospitalised with an illness eventually diagnosed as leukaemia. The following summer he bought a flat in Vevey, Switzerland, the country where his daughter, Lucy Caroline, and Martine Cloetta were both living. As his illness advanced, his wits remained sharp, though he suffered some loss of memory. His daughter recalls that he looked on his own death with great curiosity as to what, if anything, lay ahead. It was, for him, another journey without maps. He died on 3 April 1991.

The material available for this selection is vast – one collection alone fills seventeen linear feet of files, and there are others nearly as large. An edition of the complete letters would take several decades to complete and would be valuable for scholars but otherwise forbidding and essentially unreadable. In this volume, I have chosen a substantial group of letters that are engaging to read and that reveal Greene’s personal, literary, religious and political concerns over a period of seventy years. The book is arranged on chronological lines, with chapters divided mainly according to his major works.

With so much material at hand, it has not been necessary to include in this volume Greene’s many letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines – these are already available in an excellent edition by Christopher Hawtree,
Yours etc
. (1989). Likewise, I have omitted Greene’s letters to the bookseller David Lowe available in
Dear David, Dear Graham: A Bibliophilic Correspondence
(1989). I have, however, included Greene’s contributions to the important book
Why Do I Write?
(1948), which had little circulation and now is largely forgotten.

The Graham Greene literary estate has given me complete freedom in preparing this book. As is well known, the Greene archives at Georgetown University were subject to various restrictions. All but one of those have now been lifted. The letters Greene wrote to Yvonne Cloetta, who died in 2001, remain, by her instruction, under an embargo during the lifetime of Jacques Cloetta. Some have found their way into print, but this is a violation of the arrangement made when they were sold. The full publication of those letters will have to wait. Her experiences with Graham Greene are admirably described in her interviews with Marie-François Allain,
In Search of a Beginning
(2004).