The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  Once the script of The Third Man was completed, at the beginning of August, Greene and Carol Reed sailed to America on the Queen Elizabeth. Greene lamented having a huge twin-bed cabin all to himself. He observed that two passengers were reading The Heart of the Matter (which had recently appeared), and judged his fellow passengers as ‘a dismal collection of drabs and drears, bloopers and hounds’, with the exception of two: Kenneth McPherson, an intimate of Norman Douglas, and the actor Robert Morley.58 On board ship, he and Carol Reed went to bed at the unprecedented time of 10.30 with hardly a drink: ‘I suppose it’s the sudden stopping of work & the temporary stopping of all problems – the stretched elastic sags.’59 He knew only that he loved Catherine, that he hated the life he led, that he wanted quiet and peace ‘with you & lie on a bed, reading St. John of the Cross’.60

  He landed in New York and received an ‘offer of a December [theatrical] production of The Heart [of the Matter] which I’m holding at arm’s length. It’s odd. Everybody seems to have read the bloody book.’61 Finally, he and Reed flew out to California and met David Selznick at La Jolla. Selznick held the American rights in The Third Man and by the terms of the contract had to be consulted about the script.

  On arrival Greene sent Harry Walston a picture postcard. On it is a drawing of a man like a Chinese mandarin, looking a little like Greene, sitting in a box and looking bleakly out. Beneath is the caption PEOPLE ARE NO DAMN GOOD. And his message to Walston was: ‘All my prejudices are confirmed, except that I like Selznick enormously.’62

  They moved on to Santa Monica to a luxurious suite, once the home of Marion Davies, the film-star mistress of the newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst: ‘For a while Carol and I could do nothing but laugh. It’s very beautiful, about the size of the Palace of Luxembourg, & incredibly luxurious.’ Everything was on a large scale – a bedroom as big as a huge living room, a bathroom the size of Greene’s living room. Also there was plenty of liquor: ‘On a table we found 2 bottles of Scotch, one bottle of gin, 1 Noilly Prat & a bottle of cognac from Cary Grant. The whole place needs to be seen to be believed … It’s really balking not having a love affair in a place like this. A f—— wouldn’t do! One wants to be sentimental too & not sleep till 5 in the morning.’63

  But if Greene liked Selznick, he and Reed had much to put up with. Selznick went straight into the attack:

  ‘It won’t do, boys … It’s sheer buggery.’

  ‘Buggery?’

  ‘It’s what you learn in your English schools.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘This guy comes to Vienna looking for his friend. He finds his friend’s dead. Right? Why doesn’t he go home then? … It’s just buggery, boys.’64

  The conferences went on nightly never starting before 10.30 p.m. or finishing before 4 a.m. At their last meeting Selznick suddenly announced that he didn’t understand something about the script: ‘Why the hell does Harry Lime …?’ and he described some extraordinary action on Lime’s part. ‘But he doesn’t,’ Greene answered. Selznick looked nonplussed and then said, ‘Christ, boys. I’m thinking of a different script.’65

  The result of these conferences was forty pages of notes from Selznick that were, on the whole, ignored by Reed and Greene. Angry letters passed from Selznick to Korda, but when the film was a success all was forgiven and Selznick began to believe in it. He dropped his criticism of the title: ‘Listen, boys, who the hell is going to a film called The Third Man?’ He had suggested a title like Night in Vienna, ‘a title which will bring them in’.66

  When the film appeared in Britain in August 1949, Greene was indebted to Orson Welles for Harry Lime’s famous parting speech to his friend, Holly. Holly meets his supposedly dead friend Harry on the mighty Ferris wheel:

  When you make up your mind, send me a message – I’ll meet you any place, any time, and when we do meet, old man, it’s you I want to see, not the police … and don’t be so gloomy … After all, it’s not that awful – you know what the fellow said … In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce …? The cuckoo clock.67

  *

  After only six days in America, it was agreed that Greene would fly back to England and then on to Vienna. But it was not to be. ‘I hate more & more theatrical & film people. Not Carol Reed who is sweet. Now I look like being imprisoned here another week. Last night I had to work from 10.30 in the evening til 5.15 this morning & then the telephone woke me at 9.30.’68 In the previous eighteen months Greene had written one-third of The Heart of the Matter, three complete film scripts, and a 30,000 word novelette [The Third Man] and he was exhausted.

  The press briefly stated ‘Graham Greene in New York Hospital’. The earliest reference was in the Catholic Times of 3 September 1948 – by which time Greene had returned to England. The headline was followed by a short note: ‘famous writer, author of “The Heart of the Matter” and many other works, is at present recuperating from an operation in a New York hospital’. A letter to his mother gives more information: ‘I should have written long before this to announce my safe return, but I was very tired & for a time not very well … I had to work like a galley slave roughing out a play [based on The Heart of the Matter] before I left again. When I got back I was wanted in Vienna but refused to go & have been resting quietly for ten days in the country.’69 Malcolm Muggeridge recorded in his diary: ‘Greene described having a haemorrhage in New York. He seemed to me in poorish shape.’70 Even his letters to Catherine were circumspect: ‘Cafryn darling, just as I’m catching the plane I’ve turned a bit sick. Nothing serious, but I have to stay over for a few days.’71

  When asked about this mysterious illness Greene described what happened just as he and Reed were getting ready to leave for England:

  I’d had rather a night on the tiles the night before with Gene Stafford, the American writer, and we’d drunk pretty well a bottle of whisky each, and Carol Reed was sitting on his bed telephoning his wife, saying that we were going to be back the next day, what time our plane was getting in. And I suddenly felt wet, and I looked down and saw … blood … soaking out from my trousers. It came from my penis. And the trouble was that I couldn’t draw Carol Reed away from his conversation with his wife. I kept on saying, ‘Carol, I’m bleeding!’ ‘Yes dear, we should be at Heathrow by such and such a time.’ ‘Carol, I’m bleeding!’ I never got through for a long time, and then he summoned the house doctor, and I was pushed into a hospital nearby where they wanted to know how much money I’d got, and what kind of a room I wanted. I said, ‘Well I haven’t got any money so you’d better put me into your cheapest room, but I think Mr David Selznick will pay.’ The doctor told me about three things which it could be, and two of them were very serious, and that he would have to examine me properly the next day under anaesthetic. When I came through the anaesthetic, he told me all was well, but I must be off the drink for a month.72

  He was taken to the Medical Arts Center Hospital and Carol Reed flew back without him.

  The following day Greene told Catherine how for twenty-four hours he had wondered whether all was up between them. On the plane back to Europe, he wrote her a cryptic note: ‘Though I miss you, it will be no good seeing you.’73

  * * *

  fn1 The sewer police worked the enormous system of sewers: there were no Allied zones in the sewers, and the Russians refused to allow the entrances, which were disguised as advertisement kiosks (and still are), to be locked. Thus agents could pass uncontrolled from one zone to another.50

  18

  Love as a Fever

  My Love is as a fever, longing still

  For that which longer nurseth the disease.

  – SHAKESPEARE

  NO ONE TOUCHED Greene as deeply as Catherine Walston, even at a religious level. Although G
reene became a convert to win Vivien, he felt a truer Catholic with Catherine: ‘I nearly slept at Mass today. How dead it was – not dead in the amusing phosphorent way of last Sunday, aware of your shoulder half an inch from mine, but just limp and meaningless and boring. I’m not even a Catholic properly away from you.’1 After going to Mass with Vivien, he wrote to Catherine: ‘It’s odd how little I get out of Mass except when you’re around. I’m a much better Catholic in mortal sin! or at least I’m more aware of it.’2 Yet Greene was troubled. Sometimes he wished that he and Catherine were pagans, ‘anyway for ten years. I might relapse after that into Catholicism or after 17 years; when I am sixty and you are nearly 50.’3

  Loving Catherine was a sin, and yet he felt keenly alive because of it. He took T. S. Eliot’s phrase to heart: ‘Most people are only a very little alive; it is only when they are so awakened that they are capable of real Good, but that at the same time they become first capable of Evil.’4 Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Greene took risks with his immortal soul. It was in his nature to go beyond permitted limits: he wanted to know, to experience, but most of all he wanted a great love. Both he and Catherine were religious and genuine Catholics, and yet they succumbed to sexual temptation. In later life, Greene scotched the notion of sexual sin altogether: ‘I find the idea [of mortal sin] difficult to accept because it must by definition be committed in defiance of God. I doubt whether a man making love to a woman ever does so with the intention of defying God.’5

  Greene was bewitched: ‘I am in love with a Bacall profile, a wood in Cambridgeshire, Chesterfield cigarettes, bathrooms, and Rolls Royces, Austins and Fords, Irish Whisky.’6 It was the attraction of opposites: Greene, in spite of his extraordinary fame, was still tremendously shy, while Catherine was an extrovert. She loved to say shocking things, ‘not out of any sort of perverseness’, but simply because it was her way.7

  David Crompton described his sister as being attracted to famous people.8 The guests at Thriplow Farm and Newton Hall were said to include George VI, Elizabeth II, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bob Hope, Eddie Cantor and James Cagney. As Greene’s lover, Catherine increased her friendships in literary and film circles. When she was curious to meet Evelyn Waugh, Greene arranged for him to come to London for lunch:

  Graham’s flat is next to hers at 5 St. James’s Street. The paralysed John Hayward [the writer and critic] was there, tenderly and candidly petted by Mrs W. Luncheon plainly had been brought from her flat for there was no salt. She sat on the floor and buttered my bread for me and made simple offers of friendship … Finally, I was asked to go with her to the country [Thriplow]. I couldn’t that afternoon as I had to dine with the editor of the Daily Express. Very well they would pick me up after dinner. I couldn’t do that as I was lunching with Father Caraman next day. Very well she would send a car for me at 2.30.9

  At Thriplow Waugh met a side of life he had never seen before: ‘very rich, Cambridge, Jewish, socialist, high brow, scientific, farming. There were Picassos on sliding panels & when you pushed them back plate glass & a stable with a stallion looking at one … The house a series of wood bungalows, more bathrooms than bedrooms. The hostess at six saying, “I say shall we have dinner tonight as Evelyn’s here. Usually we only have Shredded Wheat. I’ll see what there is.” Goes to tiny kitchenette & comes back. “Well there’s grouse, partridges, ham, a leg of mutton and half a cold goose” (literally). “What does anyone want?” There’s a children’s nannie dining with us called “Twinkle” … everyone talking to her about lesbianism & masturbation. House telephone so that generally people don’t bother to meet but just telephone from room to room.’10 One side of the dining room at Thriplow looked out on to the paddock and it was not unusual for Catherine to draw the attention of her dinner guests to the sight of the horses breeding. Whether this was done to amuse her guests or to shock them, it was an uncommon household.11

  When Greene was staying at Thriplow, he would sometimes entertain the Walston children. Susan Walston recalls him reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Speckled Band’ to them, and Bill Walston that he read them G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. The Walston children liked him because he was soft-spoken and gentle. They felt that their mother was very protective towards him, she would warn them not to disturb him in the mornings so that he could write.

  Waugh noted that Catherine was ‘barefooted and mostly squatting on the floor. Fine big eyes and mouth, unaffected to the verge of insanity, unvain, no ostentation – simple friendliness and generosity and childish curiosity.’12

  She enjoyed being admired. Despite his overwhelming passion, Greene was very watchful of her character and he had her in mind in the following extract from Sarah’s diary in The End of the Affair: ‘I can’t be alone for the rest of my life with Henry, nobody admiring me, nobody excited by me, listening to Henry talking to other people, fossilising under the drip of conversation like that bowler hat in the Cheddar Caves.’13

  The Walston house was ‘nearly always … full of men and all admirers of Catherine – whether they were priests or whether they were friends of Harry’s they’d always gravitate around her and she liked that’. On the whole Catherine was not comfortable with other women, as Lady Melchett remembers: ‘She didn’t really like women … She knew I admired her so I was tolerated …’14 But it was also true that her guests were drawn to her compulsively. Her daughter Susan recalls that when Catherine left a room it died and guests would soon leave for their own rooms.

  It was a love affair of dangerous proportions. Despite Greene’s doubts about whether Catherine reciprocated his overwhelming love, family and friends agree that Catherine did love Greene, that he was her greatest passion. Yet she was in control, if one can be in control of such turbulence: it was Catherine who would bring Greene to breaking point with Vivien and Dorothy, and Catherine who allotted the time they would spend together. In The End of the Affair Bendrix is desperate to see Sarah, who is taking care of a sick Henry, and Sarah coolly takes charge:

  ‘Isn’t there any way to see you?’

  ‘But of course.’

  There was silence for a moment on the phone and I thought we had been cut off. I said, ‘Hullo. Hullo.’

  But she had been thinking, that was all, carefully, collectedly, quickly, so that she could give me straightaway the correct answer. ‘I’m giving Henry a tray in bed at one. We could have sandwiches ourselves in the living-room. I’ll tell him you want to talk over the film – or that story of yours,’ and immediately she rang off the sense of trust was disconnected and I thought, how many times before has she planned in just this way?15

  Everyone was aware of their liaison. Even with Harry in the house, Catherine would say things like, ‘You know, Graham and I were in bed all day and all night – that’s why I’m feeling a bit jaded.’16

  When Greene spent Christmas 1947 with the Walstons at Thriplow, he and Catherine managed to make love while her husband was in the house. The incident, in a different form, found its way into The End of the Affair.

  There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom – we were together in desire. Henry had his tray, sitting up against two pillows … and in his room below, on the hard-wood floor, with a single cushion for support and the door ajar, we made love. When the moment came, I had to put my hand gently over her mouth to deaden that strange sad angry cry of abandonment, for fear Henry should hear it overhead.17

  In the novel, Henry comes downstairs and greets Bendrix and goes back to his sick bed. Bendrix asks Sarah a curious question and the answer seems to fit Catherine:

  ‘Do you mind?’ I asked her, and she shook her head. I didn’t really know what I meant – I think I had an idea that the sight of Henry might have roused remorse, but she had a wonderful way of eliminating remorse. Unlike the rest of us she was unhaunted by guilt. In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act. She would have thought it unreasonable for Henry, if he had caught us, to be angry for more than a momen
t. Catholics are always said to be freed in the confessional from the mortmain of the past – certainly in that respect you could have called her a born Catholic.18

  Greene’s obsession with Catherine gave her the power to change his moods, taking him from despair to euphoria. He felt as Bendrix did about Sarah: ‘I have never known a woman before or since so able to alter a whole mood by simply speaking on the telephone, and when she came into a room or put her hand on my side she created at once the absolute trust I lost with every separation.’19

  *

  Greene’s love for Catherine was complicated by his continued relationships with Dorothy and Vivien. Visiting Ireland with Dorothy in 1947, he wrote: ‘I hate seeing Dublin with someone else, but when I promised that holiday I had no hope of you at all. And only three quarters of a thought.’20 On this holiday Dorothy wanted to revitalise their love, but it was, unbeknown to her, a futile hope. In a postscript to a letter to Catherine, Greene wrote: ‘My God, how bored I am.’21 Dorothy could not duplicate the intense feelings experienced in Ireland with Catherine: ‘A complete absence of onion sandwiches, turf fires, home made bread, candlelight.’22

  Greene conveyed a hidden message in this letter. Like many lovers, he and Catherine shared a code. His letter from Ireland indicates an ‘absence of onion sandwiches’ and a postcard from Amsterdam bears the simple message: ‘I love onion sandwiches.’ ‘There was one code word I did remember – “onions”. That word had been allowed in our correspondence to represent discreetly our passion. Love became “onions”, even the act itself “onions”.’23 While in Ireland with Dorothy, Greene intended to remain true to Catherine.

  As a further twist to the story, it seems that onions were themselves a code, a joke between Greene and Catherine. Harry Walston hated the smell of garlic, so at Thriplow Greene and Catherine would eat it ostentatiously so Harry wouldn’t break in suddenly in the middle of the night. Greene thought this so amusing that he used it in The End of the Affair, only changing garlic to onions so Harry Walston wouldn’t realise what they had done.24