It should not be thought that all of Graham’s correspondence took place by cable, nor was it limited to complaints. Often his letters were long and full of fascinating detail, such as one in which he described in detail his horror at the “grisly sight” of seeing dictators in the flesh—Pinochet of Chile and Stroessner of Paraguay—or another in which he expressed his pleasure that the film rights to The Honorary Consul had been optioned by Orson Welles because there was no danger of his actually making the film. From time to time, he gave me advice about marriage and parenthood, warning me against ever developing a sense of guilt about either—“to look for guilt one would have to go back to Adam and Eve,” he cautioned wisely, though it was no advice he applied to himself. My father’s death in 1979—they were neighbors in Antibes—shook him almost as deeply as Alex’s had in 1956, and if anything drew us closer.
Graham’s output was constant but variable. Major novels such as The Honorary Consul and The Human Factor, which was originally called The Cold Fault (and which I mistakenly announced to the press as The Cold Vault, due to an error in cable transmission, much to Graham’s amusement), alternated with smaller books that reflected his diverse interests and his travels. Graham’s minor works produced occasional friction, for they became increasingly eccentric or hermetic, reflecting his involvement in causes and people unlikely to interest the American reader. For example, he edited the memoirs of his ninety-year-old neighbor, Dottoressa Moor, in Capri. He also wrote a pamphlet attacking the excesses of the criminal underworld, the police, and the politicians of Nice, J’accuse: The Dark Side of Nice, which took up with Zolaesque anger the case of a young Frenchwoman whose gangster husband had abused her and abducted her child. He took the failure or nonpublication of these books in the United States in stride, though I suspect it merely confirmed his already low opinion of America’s interest in the world beyond her shores. As he grew older, his restless curiosity and almost childlike fascination with eccentric and larger-than-life figures—a characteristic that he captured so perfectly in the person of Monsignor Quixote, the priest who tilts at the windmills of modern Spain and who in so many ways resembles the older Graham Greene—increased. He had always sought sainthood in secular figures and prized in others a simplicity and an innocence he had been denied, and his later works are a kind of pilgrimage in search of a different kind of faith.
In writing the flap copy for the dust jacket of his autobiography, Ways of Escape, I had referred to him as “enigmatic, secretive, and elusive,” and increasingly this rather romantic description, which he had accepted at first unwillingly, seemed true. He liked to feel he was living “on the dangerous edge of things,” and his skill at writing cloak-and-dagger novels was more than matched by his own adventures and divided loyalties. He was at once a sentimental leftist (about Africa, Cuba, Panama, and Vietnam at any rate) and a man of old-fashioned Tory attitudes when it came to England, complaining that the only things he missed when he was abroad were the sausages and dinner at Rule’s or Simpson’s, old-fashioned London restaurants where he always ordered roast beef. He was a friend of Kim Philby’s (and loyal to him to the bitter end), but continued to maintain his shadowy connections with the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), for which he had served as an agent during the war.
He traveled constantly and involved himself fearlessly—some would say recklessly—in politics, as if he was determined to add to the bulk of the FBI’s file on him. “Just think of the money I’m costing them!” he liked to say, delighted at the thought of the documents and reports on his activities piling up in Washington. In one letter, he reported that he was just back from visiting Panama, Nicaragua, and Cuba (where he spent twenty-four hours with Fidel Castro) and expressed horror that bombs were being distributed by the CIA in Nicaragua in the shape of Mickey Mouse dolls that would explode when a child picked one up—a story that sounds as if it might have been passed on to him by Fidel. Still, he never made any claim to objectivity, particularly when it came to the U.S. government, and the murky world of guilt, betrayal, and ruthlessness that formed the background of so many of his novels also influenced the way he saw the real world beyond his fiction.
Having been an agent for the SIS, Graham looked for conspiracy everywhere and found it, partly because he liked to spend his nights with the kind of shadowy figures who might actually be spies—or, like him, enjoyed pretending to be—partly because it pleased him to suppose that the tentacles of the SIS or its rivals and enemies extended everywhere, embracing people who seemed on the surface quite innocent and ordinary, like the harmless vacuum-cleaner sales representative who becomes a spy in Our Man in Havana. Graham himself was quite capable of giving even the most harmless of activities a twist to thrill a naive listener, though very often with tongue in cheek. Thus, he hinted to his biographer that he and my Uncle Alex had “surveyed” for the SIS the waters off Yugoslavia during a cruise on Alex’s yacht, although given the guest list (which included both men’s mistresses), Alex’s myopia, and the fact that there were no cameras onboard except mine, it is hard to imagine what kind of surveying they could have done, even if there was anything about the Yugoslavian coastline worth knowing or that the SIS couldn’t have gotten out of a Baedeker travel guide.
In fact, with Graham it was always difficult to tell where the spy novelist left off and the spy himself began. From time to time they came together, as when Graham turned up unexpectedly in the White House in the guise of a Panamanian diplomat (complete with diplomatic passport) as part of the entourage of General Omar Torrijos, the leftist ruler of Panama from 1968 to 1981, during an official visit. He was photographed standing behind Torrijos and President Carter, without anybody in the White House or the press recognizing him—ironic in view of the fact that he was still unable to obtain a visa to visit the United States except by making a special application as “a former communist,” which he was unwilling to do as a matter of principle.
Over the years, Graham’s FBI file began to obsess him more and more. Ostensibly, his brief flirtation with communism, which he claimed was a student prank, was the cause of the U.S. government’s refusal to grant him a visa. Behind that simple explanation, however, was a layer of misunderstandings about Graham among Americans who had never met him (particularly those who either made or supported American foreign policy), most of whom bitterly resented his portrait of Alden Pyle, the naive but deadly central figure of The Quiet American, whose love for Phuong does not prevent him from helping to plant a bomb that kills dozens of innocent Vietnamese.
Each brush with America made Graham more determined to track down this famous file, as if it were the Holy Grail. He saw it as the source of all his problems with America, possibly even as the source of his problems with the Nobel Prize for Literature committee; he assumed that he was being watched, his correspondence opened, his telephone calls recorded, while someone, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., gathered this information and misinformation and used it against him at every opportunity.
Early in 1981, when we met for a drink at the Ritz Bar in London, one of his favorite haunts, he asked me if I would be willing to do him a great favor. Anything, I said. He nodded darkly, his long, slim fingers touching as if in prayer. He glanced to either side and drew himself closer to me. He had read about the Freedom of Information Act, he said, and wondered if I could find a way of getting him access to his FBI file. I had no idea how the Freedom of Information Act worked and said so, but I promised to do my best. He confirmed it by letter, adding that given his views on America’s involvement in Vietnam, it was likely to be a bulky dossier, possibly even sufficient material for a short book. He thought it would be particularly interesting to know who had informed on him in various places all over the world over the years. The only thing he really wanted at this point in his life was a look at his FBI file—and, of course, the Nobel Prize, which was still being withheld from him by one vote, from a man who seemed determined to outlive him.
When I got back to New York, I looked into the matter, which turned out to be amazingly simple—though I did not tell Graham this, since he would have been hugely disappointed. All I had to do was get a lawyer in Washington to make an application to the FBI, then wait. Time, it appeared, was the major factor, perhaps because the government hoped that some applicants would simply lose patience. In this case, time dragged on for months, while Graham inquired impatiently whether there was any news and wondered if the FBI was using the time to destroy or alter their records on him.
Finally, there arrived in my office a slim envelope containing the FBI’s famous Graham Greene dossier. Though many of the names and some of the information had been carefully blacked out, my heart sank instantly at the sight of it—this was not at all the bulky package Graham had been expecting for all these years. One typical item was a clipping from Walter Winchell’s column in the New York Daily Mirror, dated December 19, 1956, in which Winchell wrote: “Hollywood newspaper people are not happy about America’s most-decorated soldier (Audie Murphy) taking the lead role in the film version of ‘The Quiet American,’ which libels Americans. The author of the book admits to being an ex-Commie.” The clipping had been pasted carefully to a sheet of paper, at the top of which Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant, housemate, and reputed lover, had written his initials to indicate that Hoover had read it.
Another item, also bearing Tolson’s initials, was a reply to a request for information from Marvin Watson in LBJ’s White House, where apparently they wondered who Graham Greene was and why several antiwar groups were quoting him on the subject of Vietnam. The FBI memo explained helpfully that he was “a well-known Catholic British writer.”
The only other document of note was a lengthy report on an International Congress of Intellectuals, held in Warsaw in 1948, in which Graham Greene was listed as a delegate, along with Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Louis Aragon, Le Corbusier, Bertolt Brecht, Lord Calder, Ted Hughes, Randall Jarrell, and Ruth Benedict. A note at the bottom of the document warns that John Rogge, a former assistant attorney general from the New Deal, “is bringing to the Congress an address from Henry Wallace.” Apparently the worst the FBI could produce about Graham was that he might have listened to an address from the former vice president.
This was about the extent of the FBI’s knowledge of Graham Greene. There were no glamorous spies, no records of telephone conversations, no record of his visit to Fidel Castro or his travels in Vietnam, no dark accusations of opium smoking or visiting prostitutes, no mention even of his having been a member of the SIS or a close friend of Kim Philby. Far from being a thorn in J. Edgar Hoover’s side or the target of constant FBI surveillance, Graham had apparently hardly ever attracted Hoover’s attention.
Graham brooded darkly on the possibility that the FBI file was a fake, that somewhere they had concealed the real file, with all the dirt, and from time to time he urged me on to further effort, but nothing came of further inquiries. The bomb had turned out to be a damp squib, and no book was to come of it.
Perhaps because of that, our relationship temporarily lost some of its warmth, and eventually, with a typically cutting comment, he went back to Viking, ostensibly because he was dissatisfied by the number of copies we had remaindered of Getting to Know the General, a book about the late Omar Torrijos that had been difficult, if not impossible, to sell.
We continued to correspond, and I continued to see him whenever I went to Europe—in some ways it was easier to think of him as a friend when I was no longer his editor, though I am not sure the reverse was true. I had thought of Graham as old when I was fifteen, but now he really was old, his eyes an icy blue, so pale that he seemed almost blind, his face puffy where he had once been gaunt, yet he continued to travel, to write, to involve himself in countless lost causes. In his last letter to me, he said he was well, “except for the incurable disease of age.”
He never did win the Nobel Prize.
CHAPTER 23
By 1972, I had written hundreds of thousands of words for magazines and newspapers without the idea of writing a book ever having crossed my mind. Despite having edited God knows how many hundreds of books—many of which, truth to tell, might better have gone unpublished—the book still seemed to me something of a sacred object, not to be undertaken in a light spirit. When I thought of writing a book, I thought of Graham Greene rather than many of “my” authors, who seemed to have stumbled into writing books more or less by accident and learned how to do it, to the extent they had learned at all, by trial and error. It might seem odd that after so much exposure to authors, I still held naive illusions about authorhood, but such is the fact.
After the New York Herald Tribune closed its doors in 1966, Clay Felker, then the editor of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, reconstituted New York as an independent enterprise and eventually made it a home for the practitioners of what was then called “the new journalism,” including Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Gail Sheehy, Nick Pileggi, and “Adam Smith.” “The new journalism” was hard to define, but in practice it meant writing nonfiction as narrative, with a clear-cut story line, strong characters, and as much pizzazz as possible. In the “old” journalism, typified by the news pages of The New York Times, the writer was ideally invisible—he or she reported the facts as objectively as possible. In the “new” journalism, the writer bullied his way into the story, sometimes overwhelming the people he was writing about, and inevitably blurred what had once been the fairly rigid distinction between nonfiction and fiction—a distinction that had in any event been eroding under the influence of books such as Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (which presented fact as fiction) and the nonfiction of Norman Mailer (in which fact and fiction were indistinguishable). In keeping with the zeitgeist, the new journalism was almost by definition overheated, full of sound effects, and occasionally shrill. The people who were good at it, such as Wolfe and Breslin, were journalistic exhibitionists, media stars whose specialty was making even the humdrum and the insignificant seem important and, above all, exciting. Even the restaurant reviews had to be written like narrative stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which probably explains why the celebrity chef appeared as a culture figure then, since a writer could hang a story on him, as opposed to simply reporting whether the food was edible and the service good or bad.
The staff writers at New York constituted a small, clubby set; very much on the defensive, they were not exactly welcoming to outsiders or newcomers, and it was not then a place for which I thought of writing. When my agent Lynn Nesbit urged it on me, I was torn between reluctance—I feared being out of my depth—and enthusiasm, for I was getting tired of writing for women’s magazines, with their restricting format and narrow range of interests.
Almost from the first, the pieces I did for New York were splashy successes, in the sense that they were controversial, lent themselves to being cover pieces, and stirred up a lot of talk. I attribute this far more to Felker’s shrewdness—no magazine editor ever had a better sense of what would sell copies and start a buzz than Felker in his heyday—than to any skill or insight of mine. Indeed, the first piece I wrote for Felker came about only because none of the women’s magazines (nor the Times) wanted it. Some months previously, my wife and I had been dining out at a restaurant where two rather drunken men seated near us began to make remarks about her fairly low-cut dress. I kept my temper for as long as I could, but when they continued, despite a complaint to the owner, I lost my temper completely, grabbed a heavy cut-glass ashtray, and flung it with a good deal of force at the larger of the two men, hitting him neatly on the forehead. Once the ensuing fracas was over, I was astonished to find that Casey was furious with me. I had been under the impression that I was defending her honor, and that she would be grateful for it. She, on the other hand, felt that she had been handling a potentially embarrassing situation gracefully and without a scene and that I had acted on her behalf without even asking for her opinion—that, in fact, it was
not her honor that I was defending at all but my own, as if she were chattel or a possession of mine.
As I thought about it later, I decided that she had a point. I had assaulted the man because he was making lewd remarks about my wife—it was my own amour propre that was at stake, not Casey’s. I was not sorry to have thrown the ashtray at a rude and noisy oaf, but on the other hand I could understand that Casey felt the situation had been taken out of her hands.
Lynn Nesbit passed my account of the ashtray incident on to Felker, who instantly saw that it spoke to many of the questions that were beginning to trouble women about their relationships with men. Himself an unapologetic male chauvinist at the time, Felker nevertheless had an eagle eye for the kind of popular psychology that appealed to women readers, and he knew just what to do with the goods when he had them. My story appeared with a striking cover and was soon at the center of a fierce debate. For some time I had been writing, in Glamour, about the ways in which women were badly treated—or perceived themselves to be—in the workplace, using for examples the everyday evidence before my own eyes at S&S. S&S was not worse than anyplace else, but there was no shortage of horror stories about male chauvinism. Some men, then, felt that in the war between the sexes I had betrayed my gender.
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