The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)
Page 64
It appears from the correspondence that Catherine was becoming increasingly close to Thomas Gilby, the Dominican priest who often stayed with the Walstons. Harry Walston, who knew of her relationship with Gilby, had a genuine fondness for him. A letter from Newton Hall from a member of the family suggests that Catherine was besotted with Gilby and Greene was losing her.
The strain of the previous few years began to tell on Greene’s health. In July 1955 he suspected that he had harmed his liver: ‘If there was anything wrong with my liver it’s cured … I had hoped for some physical explanation of my melancholia …’24 In August of the same year he spent time with his daughter at Green Park Ranch in Calgary in Canada, which he had generously bought her. His liver was on the mend: ‘my liver is becoming like a baby’s because of the absurd liquor laws. I never have a drink till evening and then never more than two whiskies before dinner … By 9.15 one is in bed.’
In 1956 Greene had numerous X-rays. He was ill and his doctors were seeking to find out if he had cancer of the colon. In February he had barium X-rays: ‘Just been for my fourth X-ray. My fifth tomorrow.’25 A few days later his gall bladder was examined. In March, and in bed sick, he wrote to Catherine that he believed they were at a critical stage:
I feel guilty because at least twice I’ve prevented & fought against the idea of finishing, even though that may be better for you. The trouble seems to me is that we both want to simplify our lives … & yet if you simplify you can only do it by excluding me (after all I’m a kind of barnacle on your boat) & if I should simplify it would be by … living abroad … We have to think a) whether we want to simplify enough to separate – except as friends who meet occasionally and b) whether it’s possible to simplify & not lose each other … Call it a neurosis if you like, but I have the desire to be of use to someone, & in the last nine months particularly I have felt of little use & possibly of real harm to you … The simple thing that we probably both desire is to need & to be needed. I’ve fought too hard to make you stay …26
When he was staying at the Royal Albion hotel in Brighton at the end of August, Greene came back to the same point:
Of course, I want October/November but your last letter hinted that Harry might not agree, & sooner or later I have to decide whether I can go to rehearsals of Potting Shed [Greene’s latest play to be produced and have its premiere in New York] in USA …
What worried him more than not seeing enough of Catherine was that he detected certain contradictions and ambiguities ‘between the lines’:
For instance you were not to be allowed to go to Paris for the very sensible reason that with your diet etc. you should stay put, but apparently an island off Wales is less strenuous than lying in bed most of the day at the Ritz, & from your account of life at Newton it seems unlikely that our ‘wild’ Parisian life would be more tiring. But let’s leave that. You said on the telephone that if something important were happening, of course you would come. But to me still the important thing is being with you – not a film or a first night as one of the bogus ‘important’ things which in the last year I’ve found myself inventing to bring you to town.
Perhaps the most serious were two statements Catherine had made in the middle of their lovemaking:
One was that ‘in a way’ you would like our affair to come to an end – & that puts a certain responsibility on me; the other was that in the wildly unlikely hypothetical case that our respective partners died, you would not marry me. Now I’ve always felt that from the Catholic point of view there was an excuse for us in that we would marry if we could. But if that’s not the case, what is our affair – except nights on the tiles, and that’s awfully unimportant to [set] against breaking the rules. Personally I want to marry you & would marry you tomorrow if I had the chance, but an affair can’t be important on one side only.
Dearest Catherine, ever since I persuaded you over a long night & a long morning not to leave me (June last year) [the ‘Rome’ incident], I have at intervals felt guilt & uncertainty – guilt to you & uncertainty of the future.
I used to go off & give you a breathing spell – Malaya, Indo-China & what not. This time I’m only giving you a three week one, but do think a bit & tell me how you really feel. I want to have this spell myself – a partial holiday in case we don’t have our usual one & some hard thinking.
… I love you & want to be with you & there’s nothing I want more than our holiday. If the Far East is too strenuous, then I’d suggest the Canary Islands or the West Indies, but I’d be equally content with Bognor Regis if you were with me. That to me is the only ‘important’ point.27
On their last holiday together in Rome, Catherine had insisted on twin beds: ‘it seems to make a gap before one sleeps & when one wakes,’28 ‘ever since Rome & that awful long night I’ve been afraid of pressing you.’29 Greene felt that Catherine was slipping away from him, and she was. Eight years of turmoil and torment had taken their toll.
*
Back in England Greene was nostalgic for Vietnam and had brought back with him a sentimental souvenir: the last opium pipe he had smoked in a fumerie off the rue Catinat. He had got on well with the Chinese proprietor and had given him lessons in English. When the time came for him finally to leave Vietnam, the proprietor let him take the pipe with him. It lay in a dish in Greene’s flat in Albany, slightly damaged in transit, a relic of happier days.
Greene had moved from St James’s Street to Albany near Piccadilly Circus, close to the Ritz hotel (where he often stayed in later years after he had left England to live in France). His flat, number C6, was on the second floor and reached by a simple uncarpeted staircase like one you would expect in an Oxbridge college. The area was black with taxis, but the sound of London’s traffic didn’t penetrate the flat.
In Vietnam without the French there was no control of the roads, the watch-towers were left to crumble and anarchy was returning. Greene felt he would never again see the ‘strange sunsets falling on the Baie d’Along or the lamp glowing on the cook’s face as he prepared an opium pipe’.30 The country was about to retire behind the plastic curtain, the last performance begun. The days of the rue Catinat were over, he would miss the pavement cafés, the good restaurants, the elegant women in the ao dai, their beautiful national dress.
On his last visit to Vietnam, Greene had smoked more than usual: normally he smoked no more than three perhaps four pipes, but on this occasion alone in Saigon and waiting for another visa, ironically a communist visa, he smoked himself inert. In his previous sessions, often with French officials, he had smoked no more than twice a week; now on three occasions he smoked ten pipes a night. Even then this amount was not enough to make him an addict. An addict, whittled down to extreme emaciation, cheeks sunken like twin wells, would need to smoke over a hundred pipes a day.
Greene hoped to recapture happier times and smoke his pipe once more. He recalled in an unpublished manuscript entitled ‘Opium in Albany’ what Sir Tan Cheng Lock had once said: ‘I cannot see how anyone after the age of fifty can carry on his work properly without the aid of opium.’ A friend had brought Greene back from Persia a slab of opium looking like a bar of chocolate and the possibility of smoking in the quiet of Albany became a reality.
He invited Catherine to share a last pipe with him. They had no lamp, so they tried a candle. First they tied up the loose parts of the pipe with scotch tape. It was an almost impossible task and they had only one pipe of scorched opium apiece out of the whole bar. Greene then remembered that Dottoressa Moor of Capri had given him a tin of opium already twenty years old. Greene found the tin, opened it and was astonished to find the opium in perfect condition: ‘Like a great wine opium guards its quality over the decades.’ It was a tremendous struggle because the candle flame turned and twisted, but they attained three pipes each: ‘but what pleasure it was to recapture the smell and the quiet and the serenity, however crudely, just off Piccadilly. The quiet of Albany was very similar to the quiet of a fumerie where no one inter
rupts the repose of another.’31
*
Greene’s escape into the ‘white night of opium’ was only a palliative, lessening the pain of his melancholia. There never seemed to be peace in his life, and sometimes when it came he turned away from it. Since his house at 14 North Side had been destroyed in the blitz, he had not had a permanent home. In the years of travel (and no man travelled more, as his diaries show) in the Far East, Greene had lost his sense of home.32
Reflecting on the 1950s, Greene said: ‘It was a period of great happiness and great torment. Manic depression reached its height in that decade.’33 He needed friends he could trust, like his sister Elisabeth and his brother Hugh. But others he had come to rely on would soon leave him.
His friend Alexander Korda once saved him from suicide by taking him out of himself: ‘My dear boy, this is so foolish what you plan. Come with me to Antibes. You are bored. All right. We will go on the Elsewhere.’34 Korda, whom Laurence Olivier had praised for his ‘Godlike yet unobtrusive generosity’,35 died suddenly from a massive heart attack in 1956. In early 1961 Eric Strauss (head of the psychiatric department of St Bartholomew’s hospital) died. Evelyn Waugh, writing to Lady Diana Cooper, said: ‘[Greene’s] alienist Dr Strauss kicked the bucket last week. No one to keep an eye on him now.’36
Catherine had been central to his existence since the first days in Achill in 1947 and had helped to bring into being some of his greatest novels – The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. Now she was gradually detaching herself and their relationship was fading. Ahead were Anita Bjorg, the Swedish classical actress, and Yvonne Cloetta, who saw Greene into a distinguished old age.
But at C6 in Albany he was now with Catherine. Under the influence of opium they lay back with shoes off in spartan simplicity. The smell of the opium cleared the nostrils, the mind was racing, the body numb. They were soon to sleep the ‘white night of opium’. In the future Greene would go to Haiti, the nightmare republic where the dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier flourished, destroying enemies and friends, using for the purpose the hated Tontons Macoutes (bogeymen in Haitian patois); he would go to Cuba, where Batista was taking too little notice of the young communist leader, Fidel Castro, fighting in the hills; he would go to the leper colony in the Congo, fulfilling his desire to be among lepers like Father Damien, whose life he had once hoped to write. He would continue to seek out the dangerous or the lost and forgotten places of the world. He was to have thirty-six more years wheeling obsessively round the world, compelled it would seem to wander the earth until death. Unending traveller, unending writer, he laboured like Sisyphus.
Even walking the streets he seemed homeless. Once in Antibes I became aware of his acute solitariness. Turgenev said that the heart of another is a dark forest, and as the twilight ebbed fast I watched him silently walk away, becoming a dark speck, until finally I lost him.
Greene with the Finnish edition of Brighton Rock
London in the blitz
14 North Side, before it was hit by a landmine and shored up afterwards
14 North Side, before it was hit by a landmine and shored up afterwards
Greene in London, 1945
Catherine Walston’s christening: standing, John Rothenstein, Vivien Greene; seated, Catherine Walston, the Reverend Vincent Turner
Dorothy Glover (right), with Harry Walston behind her
Greene at the City hotel in Freetown, Sierra Leone
Freetown
Agent Graham Greene
Agent Kim Philby
Agent Malcolm Muggeridge
Film director Carol Reed (The Fallen Idol and The Third Man) discussing a script with Greene
The giant Ferris wheel in Vienna; a kiosk entrance to the sewers in Vienna – both used in filming The Third Man
Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles in The Third Man
Greene with François Mauriac
Correcting The Heart of the Matter at Thriplow
Catherine Walston
Catherine Walston, Greene’s ‘Bacall profile’
Greene on Capri
Greene and Catherine at Anacapri
Greene with John Hayward at Thriplow
Norman Douglas with Graham Greene
Greene at Achill, County Mayo
Greene and Catherine on Capri
The Elsewhere, Alexander Korda’s yacht
Alexander Korda with Graham Greene on the Elsewhere
With Catherine aboard the Elsewhere at Antibes
Catherine as barber
In Malaya with Major McGregor Cheers and two gurkhas
The Continental Palace hotel in Saigon
In an opium fumerie
On patrol with French troops at Phat Diem
On patrol with French troops at Phat Diem
René Berval’s apartment on rue Catinat, used by Greene for Fowler and Phuong in The Quiet American
Phuong and René Berval with their black dog
Larry Allen, the original for Granger in The Quiet American
Greene with Colonel Leroy and Leo Hochstetter (‘Q.A.’) at Bentre
The bell tower at Phat Diem
Phat Diem: ‘The canal was full of bodies’
A ceremony at the Cao Dai temple
Dedan Kimathi, leader of the Mau Mau, after his arrest in 1956
Greene at a wild animal farm in Kenya
Death in rue Catinat: the massive bomb explosion outside the Continental Palace hotel in Saigon, 1952
Death in rue Catinat: the massive bomb explosion outside the Continental Palace hotel in Saigon, 1952
Death in rue Catinat: the massive bomb explosion outside the Continental Palace hotel in Saigon, 1952
Greene with the elder Mathieu sister. Her younger sister, the original for Phuong in The Quiet American, is seated extreme right
The bishop of Phat Diem with Trevor Wilson
Charlie Chaplin, Catherine Walston, Oona Chaplin and Graham Greene at Vevey
Our man in Havana
Notes
Wherever possible in the following notes I have referred to the Penguin editions of the works of Graham Greene because these are the most accessible and widely distributed. Although the pagination of some Penguin editions has remained unchanged for decades, others have been reset in recent years. Neither of these, however, contain the introductions in the Heinemann and Bodley Head uniform and collected editions. A full Bibliography of Greene’s works and the sources used in this book will appear in Volume Three.
1 Rumours at Nightfall
1 Letter to Ben Huebsch, 25 April 1938.
2 The Lawless Roads, Heinemann uniform edition, 1955, p. 289.
3 Ibid., pp. 287–8.
4 Letter to Ben Huebsch, 10 June 1938.
5 Diary, 14 September 1938.
6 Ibid., 24 September 1938.
7 Ibid., 25 September 1938.
8 Ibid., 26 September 1938.
9 Letter to his mother, 23 September 1938.
10 Ibid., 4 October 1938.
11 Ibid., 26 December 1938.
12 Unpublished notebook.
13 Undated letter to Ben Huebsch.
14 Letter to Ben Huebsch, 9 April 1938.
15 Ibid., 29 April 1939.
16 Ibid.
17 Letter from Ben Huebsch, 10 May 1939.
18 Letter from Vivien Greene, 23 November 1939.
19 The End of the Affair, Penguin edition, 1975, pp. 25–6.
20 Letter to Ben Huebsch, 12 June 1939.
21 Letter from Hugh Greene to his mother, December 1933 or January 1934.
22 Letter to Ben Huebsch, 13 July 1939.
23 In-house memo, 25 September 1939.
24 Spectator, 18 August 1939.
25 Undated letter to his mother.
26 Telephone conversation with Vivien Greene, 23 August 1990.
27 Ways of Escape, Penguin edition, 1987, p. 68.
28 Interview with Walter Allen, August 1976.
29 Interview with Vivien Greene, 23 June 1977.
30 Ways of Escape, pp. 68–9.
31 Letter to Ben Huebsch, 31 May 1939.
32 Letter from David Higham, 22 May 1939.
33 Spectator, 22 September 1939.
34 Ways of Escape, p. 69.
35 Ibid.
36 Spectator, 22 September 1939.
37 Letter to John Hayward, 20 October 1950.
38 Ways of Escape, p. 69.
39 Ibid.
40 Interview with Vivien Greene, 26 July 1979.