Graham Greene
Page 43
TO BERNARD DIEDERICH
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 13th April 1988
Dear Bernard,
Many thanks for your letter. Chuchu has still been ringing up at intervals and claims that he is in no danger. Noriega has now become a patriot in his eyes and I must admit that if I have to choose between a drug dealer and United States imperialism I prefer the drug dealer. I never much cared for him but Omar at least would have appreciated the way he is hanging on. I was delighted by the news from Honduras. I don’t feel much like returning to Panama at this moment. It would be so easy for the CIA to bump me off and blame it on Noriega and, vice versa, though I doubt if Noriega would do it. I seem to spend a lot of my time now going to and fro to Russia. I have been four times in the last two years and we are probably going again towards the end of May. […]
TO RUFA PHILBY
Kim Philby died in Moscow on 11 May 1988.
La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur | 06600 Antibes |
May 15 ’88
Dearest Rufa,
We have been deeply distressed by the news of Kim’s death & we think of you with love and sadness. It was always the high point of our visits to Moscow when we saw you and Kim together. To me he was a good and loyal friend.
I do hope that the three of us will meet again before very long & please, please believe in our love for you.
Graham & Yvonne
[Yvonne adds a similar message in French.]
TO ANTHONY BURGESS
According to Andrew Biswell, the quarrel between Greene and Burgess was rooted in Burgess’s belief that Greene, whom he had venerated, did not take him very seriously. Burgess reviewed most of Greene’s work from 1961, and, as he said in April 1991, ‘never gave him a review less than almost fawningly laudatory’. Greene did not reciprocate, and by 1988 Burgess was conscious of the slight.23 His public outbursts were soon reported to Greene, who wrote two letters on the same day ending the friendship. It is interesting that apart from personal and literary matters, the first of Greene’s letters contains what appears to be a public declaration that his correspondence with Philby was vetted by security agencies on both sides – in fact, his correspondence with Philby was passed on to MI6 though his brother-in-law Rodney Dennys.
La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur | 06600 Antibes
|June 13 ’88
My dear Anthony Burgess,
I hear you have been attacking me rather severely on the French television programme Apostrophes because of my great age & in the French magazine Lire because of my correspondence with my friend Kim Philby.
I know how difficult it is to avoid inaccuracies when one becomes involved in journalism, but as you thought it relevant to attack me because of my age (I don’t see the point) you should have checked your facts. I happen to be 83 not 86 & I trust that you will safely reach that age too.
In Lire you seem to have been quoted as writing that I had been in almost daily correspondence with Philby before his death. In fact I received ten letters from him in the course of nearly 20 years. You must be very naïf if you believe our letters were clandestine on either side. Were you misinformed or have you caught the common disease in journalism of dramatizing at the cost of truth?
Never mind. I admired your three earliest novels & I remember with pleasure your essay on my work in your collection Urgent Copy, your article on me last May in the Sunday Telegraph & the novel (not one of your best) which you dedicated to me.
Yours,
Graham Greene
TO ANTHONY BURGESS
La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur | 06600 Antibes
[June 13, 1988]
Dear Burgess,
I have now received another cutting in which you claim I told you of an aggrieved husband shouting through my window (difficult as I live on the fourth floor.) You are either a liar or you are unbalanced and should see a doctor. I prefer to think that.
Graham Greene
TO IAN THOMSON
Ian Thomson (b. 1961), the biographer of Primo Levi and editor of Greene’s Tablet articles, writes: ‘In 1988, The Independent Magazine sent me to the Estonian capital of Tallinn to write an article about my Baltic roots — To my astonishment, Graham Greene had visited Tallinn in the mid-1930s when my mother was a child there.’ As a result of the trip and his time with the diplomat Peter Leslie, Greene conceived ‘a film sketch, “Nobody to Blame,” about a British sales representative in Tallinn for Singer Sewing Machines, who is a spy. The film was never made yet it contained the bare bones of what was originally “Our Man in Tallinn,” later Our Man in Havana. Anticipating my visit to Tallinn, I wrote to Greene asking why he had moved his Cuban “entertainment” from Estonia in the 1930 s to Cuba in the 1950 s; I was also keen to know of his 50 -year-old impressions of my mother’s native land.’24
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes |
18th August 1988
Dear Ian Thomson,
The reason why I changed from Estonia to Cuba for Our Man in Havana was that one could hardly sympathise with the main character if he was to be involved with the Hitler war. I already knew Cuba and my sympathies were with the Fidelistas in the mountains. Nothing came of the suggested meeting with Grieg.25 I tried to track the famous brothel but failed. I think the hotel was called the Ambassadors but I am not sure. I am afraid I saw very little of Estonia apart from Tallinn and have very little memories of the place except that it had a great charm for me.
Yours sincerely
Graham Greene
TO JOCELYN RICKARDS
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 29th October 1988
Dearest Jocelyn,
Thank you so much for your letter. I do commiserate with you about having Freddy so much on your hands. I read about his four [minutes]26 of death which he wrote [about,] but one thing I could not understand. How does he know that the experience he had during those four minutes was not an experience he had immediately his heart began to beat again and before he became fully conscious. I don’t see that there is any proof there of the memory existing for a while after death. Do get him to explain that.
Lots of love
Graham
In 1988, Freddie Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon and his heart stopped. He reported that in the four minutes before he was revived, he saw a red light responsible for the government of the universe but it was not doing its job well, ‘with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw, was slightly out of joint’. Ayer died again without being revived on 27 June 1989.
Greene was actually very interested in near-death experiences, and in his late years seemed to debate with himself the possibility of an afterlife, finding it marginally easier to believe in the existence of a God than in the survival of the soul. In Cloetta’s view, he decided the matter a few days before his death, remarking: ‘If we human beings come on this earth only in order to spend about eighty years here, that makes no sense. What is eighty years compared to eternity? So there must be something else.’ Earlier, he had written, ‘… perhaps in Paradise we are given the power to help the living. I picture Paradise as a place of activity. Sometimes I pray not for the dead friends but to dead friends, asking their help.’27
TO ROBERT CECIL
Robert Cecil (b.1913) was a historian and the biographer of the defector Donald Maclean.
14th February 1989
Dear Robert Cecil,
Thank you so much for getting your publisher to send me your book which I found fascinating reading. It was a change to have a well-written book on the subject and not the usual journalistic type. I never knew Maclean and I only met Burgess twice, once over coffee with David Footman28 during the war and once when he forced himself on me on my visit to Moscow as a guest of British Airways in 1961. I don’t know why he particularly wished to see me as I didn’t like him. I was leaving early the next morning and I had begun a serious attack of pneumonia.
However curiosity won and I asked him in for a drink. He drove away my very nice translator saying that he wished to be alone with me but the only thing that he asked of me was to thank Harold Nicolson for a letter and on my return to give Baroness Budberg a bottle of gin!
One thing strikes me as odd. On page 138 you speak of his telephone call to Stephen Spender to ask for Auden’s address in Ischia which ‘falls into the same pattern of deception.’ I wonder why he was playing the same deception all those years later in 1961 when he told me in the course of our meeting that he had intended to split from Maclean in Paris and go on to stay with Auden in Ischia. I remember he said that he was caught up in the arrangements which had been made for them and had to go on to Prague with Maclean. Perhaps he thought I would write an article about our meeting, but why persist with the Ischia story after so many years?
Again thank you so much for this excellent book.
Yours ever
Graham Greene
P.S. I see that you have answered my question about Burgess in your final pages!
Before his escape to the Soviet Union, Burgess tried to create a cover-story by calling Stephen Spender and asking for Auden’s address in Ischia. Cecil notes that the KGB sought to surround the British defectors in as much disinformation as possible to avoid giving credibility to the revelations in 1955 of the Soviet defector Vladimir Petrov. Burgess himself entertained hopes of returning to England.29
TO MICHAEL MEYER
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 24th May 1989
Dear Michael,
Poor Anita is suffering from a bombardment of letters from Norman Sherry. I have told her to put them all in the wastepaper-basket. He will probably get onto you and I do hope you will refuse to give him any information about Anita. She has a right to her private life.
Love,
Graham
TO SHABBIR AKHTAR
Born in Pakistan but having lived many years in Bradford, Akhtar led protests against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. He opposed violence, but helped organise a ritual burning of the book. His own book entitled Be Careful with Muhammad: The Salman Rushdie Affair was published in 1989. In the midst of the controversy he wrote to Greene, asking for advice.
3 July 1989
Dear Dr. Akhtar,
I sympathise with you over this silly Rushdie affair. I doubt whether I can be of much help however. I haven’t read Rushdie’s book and have no desire to. I can sympathise with anyone who loses his faith altogether, but then there is no need to preach disbelief. One should allow others to believe what one has ceased to believe oneself. On the other hand I disapprove equally of death sentences.30
As a very doubting Catholic (that is to say I very much doubt the infallibility of the Pope) I would be on Rushdie’s side perhaps if he hadn’t apparently made a mock of all believers. I have occasionally mocked the Pope but that is quite different from mocking those who believe in the existence of Christ. I respect their belief and sometimes share it. I think your articles are excellent and I think you should persist in what you are doing.
Yours sincerely,
Graham Greene
PS Without having read his book and judging by reports I would say that Rushdie was guilty of shocking bad taste but that hardly justifies violence and death.
Greene never admired Islamic culture. His first direct encounter with it was in Liberia in 1935, where, as he remarked in old age, one offensive Mandingo porter aroused in him ‘a few prejudices reinforced today by that horrible old man Khomeini’. Throughout his life Greene took the side of the Israelis against the Arabs. A particular admirer of Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Six Day War, he feared nonetheless that Menachem Begin and the Likud Party might fail to take the steps necessary for peace. See Allain, 107–16.
TO REV. RALPH WRIGHT, O.S.B.
La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur | 06600 Antibes | 28th July 1989
Dear Ralph,
It was very nice seeing you the other day and I hope you are safely home now. I have read your book with great pleasure. I have a habit of marking with a little tick poems I particularly like and I find I have marked thirteen – a good score. The three I particularly liked were O Hidden God, Jericho and Distance.
Yvonne and I send our love,
Graham
Even when the author was someone as close to him as Ralph Wright, Graham Greene was incapable of praising thirteen poems he did not like. This ‘good score’ is a remarkable endorsement of Wright’s little-known collection, Seamless (1988).
TO ALBERTO HUERTA, S.J.
Huerta said he was ‘plowing’ through the recently published first volume of Sherry’s biography. He had also heard rumours that Graham had left the Church.
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 1st August 1989
Dear Fr. Huerta,
Leopoldo31 has just spent a few days here but I have too much work, too much age.
Reviewers have been rather kind to Sherry’s first volume, but I found it far too long and full of unnecessary details. Anyway I hate being written about and there is another man Mockler32 coming on the scene shortly. At least Sherry writes well but Mockler doesn’t.
Your rumour is not quite correct. I usually go to Mass on a Sunday but sometimes I have too many people to see or too much work to do. I disagree with a good deal that the Pope has said and done but that doesn’t mean that I have left the Church. I would call myself at the worst a Catholic agnostic!
All good wishes,
Yours ever,
Graham Greene
TO HANS KÜNG
The Swiss theologian Hans Küng (b. 1928) served with his friend and colleague Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) as a theological consultant to the Second Vatican Council. Whereas Ratzinger turned to the right after 1968, Küng became a dissident within the Church. Largely in response to his Infallible? An Inquiry (1971), Pope John Paul II stripped him of his licence to teach theology.
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | Oct. 24 89
Dear Hans Küng,
I was delighted to get your essay33 with its generous & undeserved dédicace. The admiration is all on my side & the gratitude, for helping me to keep one foot in the Catholic church. It’s a delight to add this essay to the five books of yours I have on my shelves.
Yours with gratitude, admiration and friendship.
Graham Greene
TO TOM BURNS
It is no small task to interview an ironist. Typically, Greene was both defensive and provocative when he spoke with journalists. In an interview with John Cornwell that was published as ‘Why I am still a Catholic’ in The Tablet (23 September 1989), he debunked eucharistic doctrine and natural law, compared Gorbachev to John XXIII and the curia to the politburo, and he talked about the taste of Trappists for gossip. He also hinted that he only received the sacraments to make Father Durán happy.
25 October 1989
Dear Tom,
I rather rashly gave permission to The Tablet to syndicate the interview because I thought that Cornwell’s book on the death of John Paul I was excellent. I regretted it later when it all appeared again in The Times, Telegraph, Observer and Independent. Because of the silly personal paragraph Vogue have now asked for it from America but Wilkins34 I am glad to say is cutting out that paragraph. How could I possibly refer to somebody I have known for thirty years as a girlfriend? I think I must have thought the interview was over and we were talking vaguely but not as vaguely as that. There were other minor errors. I have two armchairs and not one and I have never drunk a vodka cocktail in my life. It would have been pure virgin vodka!
I am so glad that Wilkins is keeping The Tablet on the liberal lines which you instituted after your very conservative predecessor.35 It remains a monument to your work. I can’t help wondering whether Newman was not welcoming a compromise rather than welcoming the idea of infallibility at all. I don’t see why the church – a very vague term
which includes you and I – can be any more infallible than the Pope. I disbelieve in infallibility anywhere in this world.
Love
Graham
At the First Vatican Council in 1870, John Henry Newman opposed the Ultramontane party which argued for a very strongly worded definition of papal infallibility, but he did accept the more moderate definition that was passed; still, he would have preferred to wait.36
TO THE EDITOR, BALLIOL COLLEGE MAGAZINE
Anthony Powell reviewed Sherry’s first volume in the Balliol College Record (1989). He complained about the amount of paraphrase of published works and described the whole as ‘interminable’. He disputed Sherry’s description of Greene’s personality as private, since some of the information he had supplied, especially about sex, ‘borders on the exhibitionist’.
[Note in Greene’s hand: Don’t send the letter to Balliol!]
7 November 1989
Dear Sir,
I am no defender of Norman Sherry’s biography, perhaps I can defend myself a little. I accepted him as biographer because I had a great admiration for his two books on Conrad. I would certainly have cut massively his biography of me if I had had an opportunity. However I received no galley-proofs of the book, only the final proofs. I would have reduced it if I had had galley-proofs by at least 60 or so pages and I have insisted that for the second volume I must receive the necessary galley-proofs. To have cut as I wished the first volume would have meant reprinting the whole book which I could not expect the publisher to do.
Yours truly,
Graham Greene
TO MARIE-FRANCOISE ALLAIN (‘SOIZIC’)
The daughter of Greene’s murdered friend Yves Allain, Marie-Françoise Allain was a literary journalist who compiled volumes of interviews with both Greene and Cloetta.