The Love-Charm of Bombs (59 page)

The Third Man
(1948)

 

 

See notes on Chapter 20

Part VI

Mid-Century: Middle Age

21

‘We could have been happy for a lifetime'

Graham Greene

 

For Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen the approach of the middle of the century was a marker of the narrowing horizons of middle age. At first, Graham Greene sustained the intensity of the immediate post-war years by fighting for love. But it was becoming evident that it was a battle he was likely to lose. Meanwhile, the possibilities offered by war and its immediate aftermath seemed to be lost too. As the world became entrenched in the stark divisions of the Cold War, Britain continued its course of austerity, interrupted only by the 1951 Festival of Britain, which did not make much impact on Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel or Yorke. Elizabeth Bowen, like Greene, spent this period gradually coming to recognise the limits of love; Hilde Spiel was accepting the failure of her attempt at Englishness; Rose Macaulay was preparing for the death that she suspected would not be long in coming; and Henry Yorke was increasingly inclined to retreat from the daily business of living altogether by remaining indoors.

In February 1949, Graham Greene presented Catherine Walston with the poem called ‘After Two Years' where he describes a door closing on his old life and another opening onto a new world. ‘And they called
that
virtue and
this
sin', he adds in disbelief, wondering if he ever knew God before. Now his hand is set in stone and he can remain at peace:

 

For this is love, and this I love.

And even my God is here.

 

If Catherine had come to God through Graham, then Graham's God was now to be found through Catherine. Over the next two years, Graham would conduct an impassioned and ultimately doomed campaign to persuade Catherine to leave Harry and marry him instead. This was in part an attempt to convince her that for humans true virtue lay in ardent, sexual love.

Thirty years later, Graham stated in an interview that he found the idea of mortal sin difficult to accept because it must by definition be committed in defiance of God. He was sure that no man making love to a woman set out to defy God. This was the crux of the argument he propounded to Catherine. According to the teachings of their church, their adulterous relationship constituted a mortal sin. The church did not recognise divorce, and so even if legally they were to separate from their spouses and marry each other, they would be sinning in the eyes of God. But Graham was unwilling to accept that God would want them to stay with their spouses, given the absence of love and desire.

In January 1950 Graham insisted to Catherine that her marriage had failed before they met. Marriage was not a question of friendship or family life but of physical love, which was inscribed in the Catholic marriage service. ‘With this Ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship'; Catherine and Harry had long ceased to worship each other bodily. Three months later Graham complained angrily to Catherine about a priest who had instructed him to go back to Oxford and resume marital relations with Vivien. He had even had to explain to him that it was impossible for a man to have sex with a woman who did not arouse him. Instead, Graham was convinced that he and Catherine served God best by loving each other. He could only offer himself to God through her.

Even if they were in fact sinning through love, Graham had always been convinced that the sinner was closer to God than the saint. And here he had a whole tradition of theological thought to support him. In Catherine's 1949 diary, he quoted T. S. Eliot's remark that ‘most people are only a very little alive; and to awaken them to the spiritual is a very great responsibility'. Once awakened, people become capable of ‘real Good', but at the same time then and only then do they become capable of Evil. By implication, the true sinner has a greater capacity for saintliness than the ordinary man. ‘The greatest saints', Greene wrote in an essay on the writer and would-be-priest Frederick Rolfe, ‘have been men with more than a normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have sometimes narrowly evaded sanctity.'

Reviewing Greene's 1938
Brighton Rock
, a novel which explores exactly these ideas, George Orwell had complained that Greene presented hell as a kind of high-class nightclub to which only the intelligent sinner has access. Some years later, Greene became angry with Malcolm Muggeridge when Muggeridge remarked that where he himself was a sinner trying unsuccessfully to be a saint, Greene was a saint trying unsuccessfully to be a sinner. According to Muggeridge the remark annoyed Greene not so much because it credited him with being a saint, as because of Muggeridge's own pretensions to being a sinner. ‘What sort of sinner are you?' Greene asked scornfully, as though Muggeridge had claimed some undeserved achievement or beatitude.

Unfortunately, Catherine's Catholicism was more orthodox than Graham's. She, like Graham, did come to God through sex. In her 1950 diary she recorded matter-of-factly that she had dreamt about having an orgasm in the presence of St Thérèse of Lisieux, whose letters she and Graham were both reading. She seems to have had no qualms about having affairs with several of the priests who were also acting as her spiritual advisors. But her religious commitment was nonetheless serious; more so, perhaps, than Graham's. In March 1950 she was delighted to receive a letter from her daughter Anne announcing that she would like to be received as a Catholic. Catherine prayed to St Thérèse before asking Harry for his blessing and was enormously relieved that he agreed to it. ‘And to the other 4 as well. To have been given a flower!' Her faith, like Graham's, was elastic enough to allow for adultery. But the adultery was to be followed, always, by confession; it would have been extremely hard for her to make a permanent step towards living in sin with a lover. Offering to come to Thriplow in April 1949, Graham assured Catherine that he had no wish to spoil Easter for her in any way. He understood how she felt and might have gone to confession himself by then as well.

However, throughout 1949 and 1950 Graham seems to have remained optimistic about his chances of persuading Catherine to marry him. In December 1949 Graham went on a two-week holiday to Freetown, for the first time since the war. He travelled with Basil Dean, who was directing a theatrical version of
The Heart of the Matter
which Graham had just finished adapting himself. Graham was very happy to be back in West Africa, and he began to associate his surroundings with Catherine, inscribing her body onto the landscape he loved:

 

You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

 

He went on to outline his plans for the spring, sad that they were not planning their lives together. He even suggested that she could act as his agent, taking time off to write her own books (Catherine had been attempting to write her own novels since 1947). After spending Christmas with the Walstons in 1947 Graham had described Harry to Catherine as exceptionally likeable, but now that he was in direct competition with Harry he began to resent his presence in Catherine's life. He hated going to sleep night after night without her and was jealous of her husband in the bed next to hers. The fact that she and Harry had no sex was not enough to assuage his jealousy; he was envious of Harry for hearing her first words on waking each day. Travelling home, through Paris, he minded being alone in a place where he had been happy with Catherine. He was longing, once again, for death, wishing that his plane would crash.

During the spring of 1950 Graham made explicit attempts to persuade Catherine to leave Harry. At the end of January he wrote the letter maintaining that her marriage had failed before they met, because she and Harry were no longer in a sexual relationship. Graham, unlike Harry, loved her completely, with brain, heart and body. Any time she asked, he would lay out a plan of action for living together; he was certain that he could make her happy without necessarily excluding the church. She would only be unhappy for a time, and could share the children with Harry as Graham shared his with Vivien. Later in the day, longing to put his arms around her, with her face turned to his, and to hear her sleeping, Graham presented Catherine with an ‘Order of Battle' setting out the practicalities of their life together. They would base themselves initially on Achill and Anacapri; he would attempt to have his marriage annulled; she would have access to her children; he would give her half of his controlling shares in his company, handing over a third of all his film and theatrical earnings in perpetuity. To solve the religious dilemma, once they were settled they would always have two rooms available, so that at any time without their ceasing to live together and love each other, Catherine could go to Communion. As far as Graham was concerned, Catherine was ‘the saint of lovers to whom I pray'. It is clear that Graham was prepared to leave the church altogether if necessary, and that Catholicism had become a doctrine he engaged with largely for Catherine's benefit. He was now far less of a committed Catholic than he had been in the early years with Vivien or while writing
Brighton Rock
,
The Power and the Glory
or even
The Heart of the Matter
. Catholicism had become chiefly a shared interest with Catherine; it had brought them together and continued to unite them as a common pursuit (not least because it was an area of Catherine's life that was not shared with Harry), but Graham would now have liked to relegate it to a subject for intellectual inquiry rather than a binding moral code.

In February, Graham travelled to Boston, where he was needed at rehearsals of the play. Boarding the ship, he could still see Catherine's hand against the window of the car. He had never felt the pain of parting with her more acutely. He was convinced that they would love each other forever and that she should marry him – they were neither of them married. During the voyage, reading, socialising with the other guests and writing (revising the novel that would become
The End of the Affair
), Graham oscillated between missing Catherine unbearably and feeling happy simply because she was alive. He was desperate to go to Achill in the spring, and wished they did not have to take other people into consideration. In a few years her children would leave home and she would just be left with Harry. Graham wanted to grow old with her; to be with her when even desire was dead.

Graham arrived in Boston to find that his play, seen in rehearsal, was a failure. He worked hard revising it but the first night at the end of February was disastrous. Rodgers and Hammerstein, who were producing the play, decided to end its run in Boston. There was talk of reviving it later in the year but Graham was convinced that it was far worse than the original and that it had to be abandoned. Basil Dean was bitterly disappointed, but if Graham felt suicidal it was primarily because he had not heard from Catherine. He informed her that he was looking yearningly at the nembutal, wondering about overdosing on sedatives. He was resentful that if he committed suicide people would say it was because his play was a failure. In fact, he did not care about the play; the problem was the working away on a dead piece of writing and hearing so little from Catherine.

Graham and Catherine were reunited in London on 10 March. He arrived home at 4 a.m. to find her asleep on his sofa. For Graham, still on American time, it was not yet midnight, so they lit a fire and poured drinks. Catherine reported to her sister Bonte that it was ‘a superb piece of debauchery drinking whiskey at 6am'. The next day, Catherine and Graham went to Thriplow to confront Harry about the situation and suggest a six-month trial separation for Catherine and Harry. This seems to have been the moment when Catherine came closest to leaving Harry, but the results were disastrous as far as Graham was concerned. Graham had met Bonte in New York and had been reassured to find that she was very much in favour of his relationship with Catherine. He now wrote to her describing the events at Thriplow. The three of them had begun the weekend discussing Catherine's fraught nerves, without any of them explicitly referring to the cause. Eventually Catherine signalled to Graham that he could tell Harry the truth and Graham informed Harry that Catherine was being torn apart by her failure to decide between non-marriage with Harry and marriage with Graham. No one made a scene and they all went to bed, where Harry kept Catherine awake by crying all night. The three of them spent a tortured weekend walking, talking and drinking. On the Tuesday, Catherine and Graham went to Paris, where Graham bought Catherine a ring at Cartier, and they also bought caviar for a forthcoming party at the Walstons' St James's Street house – a delicacy that was so expensive that they considered insuring it. The conversations of the previous weekend had evidently failed to clarify the situation. Alone with Graham, Catherine could accept his ring and play the part of his wife. At the same time, she was spending Harry's money, busy preparing for events she would host with him.

Reading Graham's report to Bonte and his letters to Catherine, it seems as though only Catherine's excessive sense of responsibility for Harry was stopping her leaving him for Graham. However, reading Catherine's diaries alongside Graham's letters, a more ambivalent picture of the relationship emerges, which makes Graham's optimistic descriptions of the life they could share seem deluded. She is loyal and concerned, often reporting on Graham's moods and activities, and the number of words he has written that day. But their times together seem less idyllic than they might appear to Graham in retrospect. A picture emerges of continual arguments and depression that would make the prospect of a life together terribly risky, even without the spiritual dangers of eternal damnation. ‘Spent the morning with Graham – very nervous and depressed and self pitying,' she recorded in January 1950. On 21 March, at the end of the extravagant dinner party in which they ate the Parisian caviar, she notes a ‘violent quarrel with Graham at midnight', followed the next day by another bad quarrel, apparently the result of his jealousy of Catherine's friend and possible lover Evelyn Shuckbaugh.