The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Greene had come down with a bad case of flu, felt miserable and was trying to remove himself from Dorothy’s life: ‘The long term prospects seem favourable. I think things are going to be arranged,’ and knowing his own nature he added: ‘though I shall probably need a shove or two later’.25 The next day Greene reported: ‘My companion’s [Greene rarely used Dorothy’s name in letters to Catherine] caught my cough and fever. Plans for the future are solidifying quite a bit. A lot of good sense has been talked between the coughs.’26

  After Dorothy and Greene returned from Ireland, a sudden squall blew up between Greene and Catherine: ‘I have been thinking hard about our telephone conversation and the odd series of events that have taken place since Achill … Isn’t it rather odd that gossip should suddenly spring up within a few weeks of your knowing about the thing, when there was no gossip as far as one knows (it didn’t even reach you for nine years). And the gossip is apparently spread by Speaight – whom you know? And the object? If the gossip drove me to break with my mistress and smooth Vivien down, it would obviously make our love affair more easily managed.’27 It is difficult to tell from this single letter what the gossip might have been, but presumably it was peddled by Robert Speaight and given to him by Catherine (who loved gossip). It may have been gossip about Greene having a wife in Oxford, a mistress in London and now a second mistress, though it must have been much more serious than that, for Greene went on: ‘if I’m right … the affair is not worth managing smoothly. Better walk out on each other now when it can be done without ill feeling because after all, you made no promise of secrecy when I so rashly told you that evening at Rules.’ What could have been told to Catherine about his affair with Dorothy which, if it got about, would make Greene and Dorothy break up?

  Greene had taken Dorothy at the start of their affair to one of those small hotels in Paddington where you can get a room any time of day for an hour or two. It had the look of a brothel and the landlady turned out to be someone linked with the film Brighton Rock. To have this story divulged as a joke at Dorothy’s expense would have been highly distasteful to Greene. Though no longer in love with her, he was very close to her and admired her spirit.

  Catherine’s reply must have been unapologetic because Greene followed up with an accusation that her love for him was self-deception. Even if he told the truth about Dorothy to Vivien, it would still be a deception if he held back their love affair: ‘What is the good of keeping us back? Within 12 months a new line of deception would have developed.’ He also returned her letters: ‘Well, my darling, you may as well have these letters. I think they are quite sensible. I expect this is the end. If it is, you’ve given me the best morphia I’ve ever had.’28 He ended one of his letters to Catherine with the thought: ‘Thank God, anyway that there’s somebody I can’t hurt.’29

  They met again and the atmosphere cleared. Catherine flew out to Achill alone, and Greene was back in love, his letters pursuing her to Achill and reminding her of three things: that he was terribly in love with her, that he missed her voice, and that he wanted her. Still thinking that his love was unrequited, he admitted to great hopes that a trip to India (where Life considered sending him) would secure her love: ‘It might be a way of being with you for 3 months and by God, I’d get into your skin before that time was over.’30

  Catherine invaded his thoughts. When at work at Eyre & Spottiswoode, he stared at a present from her: ‘Your briefcase looks lovely. It sits on a chair and looks at me and I miss you and wish it were you.’ He felt the need to visit her in Ireland: ‘The only way I get any happiness now is either with you or with work. And work is for the time being over.’31 He’d just finished The Heart of the Matter.

  The prospect of a holiday with Catherine had a magical effect on him and as the time of their meeting drew near he could barely contain himself, sending her three telegrams in three days:

  Staying five nights would you like me to and would you meet me with sleeping bag.

  Hurray arriving Shannon Airport at 5.30.

  Longing for Thursday.

  On 4 July 1947 Greene was light-hearted: ‘I feel excited and cheerful and quite undespairing! I’m awfully nice to everybody. Will I really see you there? Where shall we spend the nights? In sleeping bags on a turf field – or in Galway City. I don’t care a damn but do be there. Five nights anyway.’ In a postscript the inevitable lie rears: ‘Officially I’m in Holland on Guild Publishing.’ Two days later he was in a fever of anticipation: ‘Is it true that I’m going to see you in less than five days,’ and then he burst out into verse: ‘Long roads and stony ditches / And here’s to nice girls / And to hell with riches.’32

  The fear grew that something might prevent Greene from seeing Catherine: ‘Don’t let anything stop you. I can’t settle to any book when I’m not going to see you. I can’t read poetry. Now I’m to see you again, I take poetry down again, and it throws its stones at me to make me ache for you: “One careless look on me she flung / As bright as parting day, / And like a hawk from covert spring / It pounced my peace away.”’ And he answered the quote: ‘Your looks weren’t careless, and I had no peace but it makes me want you just the same.’ And immediately he quoted another poem: ‘You’ve stuffed my pillow, stretched the sheet / And filled the pan to wash your feet.’ He ended his letter with the triumphant assertion, ‘You are going to be so involved soon, you won’t want another soul. You are in love and I’m in love and we are going to meet Thursday.’33

  After five days with Catherine, he was able to face two weeks with Vivien and the children in Switzerland in August, but his thoughts strayed to Catherine and their sexual congress: ‘Last Sunday, about an hour ago, we got out of the car and went to bush.’34 This memory and its effect on Greene is more fully described in The End of the Affair. ‘I lay there unable to sleep, one memory after another pricking me … a day in the country when we had lain down in a ditch out of view of the road and I could see the sparkle of frost between the fronds of hair on the hard ground and a tractor came pushing by at the moment of crisis and the man never turned his head.’35

  Greene had no letters from Catherine while in Switzerland and he feared the silence: ‘Catherine dear, I hope you meet me [at the airport] … I wish we could get away somewhere for two nights – I mean nights not afternoons … I long to hear something from you, but your handwriting would probably mean that you weren’t meeting me. I’d hate that … I love you … I wonder whether you do.’ To still his doubts, Greene answered his own question: ‘Yes, I think you do.’ He still felt cut off from her, and waking up with Vivien at his side he kept on having the curious notion that it was Catherine, but added: ‘it was all wasted because we didn’t like each other. Do you think we only like each other in Achill?’36

  He couldn’t stand Switzerland, though ironically he was to die there forty-five years later: ‘This place is very pretty, very clean, very kind. I think it must be rather like Limbo. Music, fireworks, good plain food, contentment and good taste evenly spread. I prefer Achill and the choice of Heaven or Hell.’ His confidence oozed away: ‘Darling, let me know if you are not meeting me. I’d want to make other arrangements.’ And he had written, then crossed out: ‘I don’t mean sexual.’37

  But it was a working holiday for Greene; he was still correcting The Heart of the Matter. ‘Nearly finished Karamazov but very disappointed on second reading. Maybe I can write as good as D. Cut larger chunks of the new novel and after all it may be good.’38 He had been reading André Gide’s latest novel and felt encouraged: ‘It makes me feel that perhaps after all my book [The Heart of the Matter] is not so bad. It’s a damned sight better than his.’39

  When he returned from Switzerland, Catherine met him at the airport but then went to the United States for three months until October. Back at work as a publisher in Bedford Street, he daydreamed between reading the scripts of ‘two dull authors’ and thought of his time with Catherine by Galway harbour: ‘How one can go on falling in love with the same person
… sometimes several times a day. My God how I miss you. It seems too good to be true that we’ll be sleeping in that charming Galway hotel and driving up through Westport, picking up steaks on the way and with time, time to squander.’ Still in the early exciting stage of love ‘which just seems to go on and on’.40

  There was another reason for his excitement. John Hayward, who was sitting in judgment on The Heart of the Matter, had expressed his admiration and Greene admitted to being ‘nearly cheered because John likes the book very much – I’m just off to see him now’. Expressing his desire to marry Catherine, he ran on excitedly, ‘I’ve told the New Statesman that I’ll do their dramatic criticism but now I’m begging to repent.’41

  *

  Greene’s ‘absurd grotesque [love] life’ had its difficulties. Vivien always knew more than she admitted and kept quiet about it, but Dorothy was of cruder clay. From his Bedford Street office, Greene wrote:

  Feeling battered. Big scene which went on last night till about 2. One of the worst yet. I miss peace and you more than ever … We’ve been having rats lately and this morning [Dorothy] came face to face with it in the clothes cupboard and killed it with a shoe. This on top of last night’s scene had left one a bit flat. The trouble is that with you away one will stay flat. It is like the court after Hannibal left for England … The scene last night did not end traditionally.42

  Unable to break free, Greene placed Dorothy in the way of an affair and had high hopes of it: ‘The girlfriend is really ripe for a love affair and I wish she’d take the plunge. Henri is in town and they are going to a party together tonight. I really pray for something to happen.’43

  There is always the contrast between on the one hand, the loveless affair with Dorothy, the dead marriage to Vivien, and on the other the promise of periodic love from Catherine. From Vivien’s house in Beaumont Street, Greene wrote: ‘The dark night for me is dryness in extra boredom: with you I don’t feel that – or despair either.’44 That dryness of spirit, which afflicted Querry in The Burnt Out Case, the sense of total emptiness, is what Greene suffered after the completion of a novel. Having finished The Heart of the Matter, he experienced a withering of the creative spirit, and Catherine served as a narcotic, if not a cure.

  Living in Beaumont Street for just a weekend was unbearable: ‘O God, What a house. This is Sunday with both dullness and Vivien around. Nobody goes and tells somebody to do something. They shout from the basement.’45 The house in Beaumont Street had a basement kitchen. Greene’s nerves were on edge, but he denied this: ‘Forgive this outburst, but at weekends I wonder which wears one down most: Oxford or London. I sometimes think that far from being nervy, I have the strongest nerves in Christendom. I want your peace and excitement again … I long to have you lazily stretched on an Achill sofa with a book and a pencil and interrupt you every ten minutes with something I want to talk about and every twelve minutes I’m in love.’46 Greene, renowned for the prodigious sense of smell and decay reflected in his novels, then added: ‘How it makes me hate the smell of other people.’ His letter ends on a mysterious note: ‘My dear, the important cigarette burn has completely gone. It must be renewed.’

  It looks as if Greene enjoyed punishment. When interviewed, Vivien lamented the fact that Catherine changed Greene, but she felt ‘After the war things would settle down and it would all be part of the past … But of course far from it – things just got worse.’47

  But if Vivien practised a quiet forbearance, how did Dorothy react to Greene’s infidelities? ‘Dorothy was very jealous,’ Vivien recalled, ‘and when he had an affair with Catherine, she sent him postcards with grave stones on them. Metaphorically she simply threw plates at him and shouted and yelled and he did show great pride in the mark where she’d burned a cigarette on his hand, and I think that rough stuff rather appealed. He wasn’t being bored and he could get bored to screaming point.’48 Greene’s secret malady was boredom unto madness. The despair he often felt when alone placed him in a region where ‘laughter was like the unknown syllables of an enemy tongue’.49

  Still he didn’t know how to give up Dorothy. She wouldn’t leave him and, after loving Catherine for a whole year, he was still living with Dorothy in Gordon Square. In order to be able to see Catherine more often, Greene persuaded Dorothy to travel to Africa: ‘I am fixing up for my girl to go on a cargo ship toward Africa and back.’50 Three days later, on 5 September 1947, he had completed the arrangements: ‘Today I wangled her a passage on an Elder Dempster cargo ship down the West African coast and back, mid-September to mid-December – so she’ll be happy.’ He felt nostalgia for his past journeys: ‘I must say when I saw the list of stops my heart missed a beat.’ Las Palmas, Dakar, Bathurst – all places he had visited in 1934 during his travels, which appear in Journey Without Maps – Lagos, where he had been trained as a secret agent, and Freetown where he’d been stationed.

  The projected journey softened Dorothy: ‘I think this will be very good for her – getting away from me and new places and being made much more of – as any white woman is there. Elder Dempster too are treating her as a V.I.P.! She’s been very sweet this last week and much more ready to accept the fact that one can love two people!’51

  Greene hoped that during the two months she was away, Dorothy might fall out of love. ‘As you once said,’ he wrote to Catherine, ‘absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder.’ Given Catherine’s partiality to others, he feared he might be left without anyone: ‘All the same you mustn’t walk out on me before she returns or I shall be left high & dry & desperately having to look for a love affair.’52

  *

  Greene was possessive of his love for Catherine. One night the Greenes were entertaining John Rothenstein, the director of the Tate Gallery, and his wife Elizabeth, both of whom knew of Catherine’s affair with Greene. Later that evening Greene wrote to Catherine: ‘Talking to John about God knows what. I hear the two women [Elizabeth and Vivien] slightly bitching you out of the corners of my ears and the blood all seemed to go to my head and I grinned and grinned at John and didn’t hear a word of what he was saying.’ The following day, he awakened with the firm knowledge: ‘I don’t like people who don’t like you. If anybody is going to dislike you it’s got to be me.’53

  Though he longed to be Catherine’s only love, Greene was not successful. Vivien once asked him: ‘Don’t you mind [Catherine’s] other lovers, her being married and all that?’ He responded rather primly, ‘I wish you hadn’t said that, it was very nasty’ – and added defiantly, ‘Why should I mind? I’ve had lots of other women.’54

  But Greene did mind. His relationship with Catherine was strained by his jealousies, which compelled him to make the most terrible accusations against her. He portrayed this and her response to it in The End of the Affair.

  ‘A frigid woman is never jealous, you simply haven’t caught up yet on ordinary human emotions.’

  It angered me that she didn’t make any claim. ‘You may be right. I’m only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don’t mind anything you do that makes you happy.’

  ‘You just want an excuse. If I sleep with somebody else, you feel you can do the same – any time.’

  ‘… I want you to be happy, that’s all.’

  Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel … Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust … I would catch her out in small lies, evasions that meant nothing except her fear of me. For every lie I would magnify into a betrayal, and even in the most open statement I would read hidden meanings … I saw intimacy in the most casual movement of the hand … ‘I’d rather be dead or see you dead,’ I said, ‘than with another man. I’m not eccentric. That’s ordinary human love. Ask anybody. They’d all say the same if they loved at all.’ I jibed at her, ‘Anyone who loves is jealous.’55

  Greene refused to believe that love could take any form other than his own: ‘I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
’56

  Greene did not trust Catherine to remain true to him, an aspect of their relationship mirrored in The End of the Affair: ‘I went home that first evening with no exhilaration but only a sense of sadness and resignation, so again and again I returned home on other days with the certainty that I was only one of many men – the favourite lover for the moment.’57

  What maddened Greene was his fear that he was merely ‘a favourite’, for Catherine was having other simultaneous affairs. Sarah, in The End of the Affair, clearly expresses Catherine’s attitude to these liaisons: ‘He thinks I still sleep with other men, and if I did, would it matter so much? If sometimes he has a woman, do I complain? I wouldn’t rob him of some small companionship in the desert if we can’t have each other there.’58 And what Sarah says of Bendrix was also true of Greene: ‘Sometimes I think that if the time came he would refuse me even a glass of water.’59

  Catherine’s letters from America seemed to indicate that she was having an affair with an old friend, Lowell Weicker, an American general who had been stationed in England during the war and had often visited Catherine at Thriplow. Greene was desperately unhappy and a great deal more jealous than Harry Walston: ‘I didn’t sleep on Sunday night. I suppose you were with Lowell. I feel the dreariness of my own character, Wilson [The MI5 spy in The Heart of the Matter], when he felt that embracing Louise was like writing on a damp pad. The letters blur too soon … I’ve a great deal of blurry myself.’fn1, 60 Walston loved his wife without needing to possess her.