Greene on Capri

by Shirley Hazzard

  The elation of sexual passion itself is repeatedly portrayed, by Graham, as frantic or despairing. Here is the narrator of The Comedians making love: “I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.”

  In Mario Soldati’s novel The Capri Letters, the central character observes that human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness. (Almeno is mistranslated—surprisingly, by Archibald Colquhoun—in the English language edition of that book as “almost as much”, as if shirking the issue.) Soldati assigns this thoroughly European view to his American protagonist. I would say that Graham Greene needed disquiet in many forms, not least in his pleasures.

  Graham’s hostility to the American “way of life” was exacerbated by what he considered a contemptible national quest for the Grail of happiness—the pursuit itself, as he felt, unworthily enshrined as an ideal in the nation’s founding Declaration, with the goal soon defined as materialism and indulgence. When we once spoke of Thomas Hardy’s lines explaining the poet’s refusal, on grounds of his own fateful view of existence, of an invitation to visit the United States—

  My ardours for emprize nigh lost

  Since Life has bared its bones to me,

  I shrink to seek a modern coast

  Whose riper times have yet to be;

  Where the new regions claim them free

  From that long drip of human tears

  Which peoples old in tragedy

  Have left upon the centuried years. . .

  —Graham said that he had no doubt that tears in plenty were shed in America; but that, without the shared pathos of acknowledged pain, they were shed in bafflement and felt as failure. Bringing to mind a theme of The Quiet American, he held that a policy of good cheer was often a repudiation of feeling: a licence for indifference or ruthlessness.

  I agreed. “Pollyanna is a cruel goddess.”

  Francis said, “An inartistic one, too.”

  That longing for “peace,” which Graham invoked throughout his life, in published and in private writings, seemed, on the other hand, a fantasy of transfiguration. Anyone who knew him—and he knew himself best of all—was aware that peace was the last thing he desired. It was literally the last thing, synonymous—as often in his fiction—with death. (In The Quiet American, we are told that Phuong, the narrator’s Vietnamese mistress, sometimes “seemed invisible like peace”—a peace in that instance embodied in the dolllike passivity of a discreet servant.) Graham’s recurring suicidal impulse—that flirting with fatality in adolescence and in his terrible prewar journeys, and in later expeditions to battle zones around the world—was countered or complemented by a defiant entanglement with life; and by a nearly nineteenth-century energy of intention that enabled him to come through, and to write.

  On our first afternoon at the Rosaio, pleasure held firm. Graham related the context of his quotation from Browning that had brought us together. He and Michael Richey had been to Mass in Santo Stefano, the handsome baroque church that stands as if on a platform overlooking the small central piazza of Capri, above a flight of steps, its façade averted from the cloister like quadrangle of boutiques and cafés that was once sacred ground. (One flank of the church forms a wall of the square, providing—in a Caprese mélange of sacred, pagan, profane, and commercial—premises for a pleasant café named the Bar Tiberio, whose interior has been delved out of the Santo Stefano crypt.) In the late 1960s, the revisions of the Roman Catholic liturgy were still sufficiently recent for the “new Mass” to be a subject of discussion. Graham told us that, as he and Michael left the church for the Gran Caffè, he had suggested that the innovation of the handclasp that precedes Communion, when members of the congregation greet their neighbours in the pew, might afford an agreeable sensation “if one stationed oneself next to a pretty girl.” Hence—“I will hold your hand but as long as all may”. . .

  That day, names and themes came up that would reappear in Graham’s conversation: Henry James, a lifelong and at that time unqualified enthusiasm; Conrad, of course; Francis Parkman, unforeseen but not surprising; Robert Louis Stevenson, related to Graham through maternal cousinage and, more intimately, through literary affinity; Arthur Hugh Clough, sceptical poet at odds with the Victorian age and underrated ever since. (F. and I praised Clough’s long epistolary “Italian” poem, “Amours de Voyage,” which Graham had not read.) There was Evelyn Waugh, a formidable friend with whom Graham shared chronology, an upbringing in the British professional class, a respect for the English language, a gift for fiction nurtured in the literary Britain of their time, and a Catholic conversion. Greene and Waugh were alike, also, in some dire aspects of temper, in the force of an angry blue stare, and in an intermittent compulsion to wreak social and emotional havoc.

  We found associations in common: with Harold Acton (“Harold and I were cat and dog at Oxford. Even then I had a regard for him—he was generous and fearless. But it was later that we became friends”); with Rupert HartDavis, who had come to Graham’s aid in their early days as writers; with Peter Quennell, whom Graham had known since schooldays but with whom his relations were, at that moment, “a bit shaky”; with Elizabeth Bowen: “A very old friend. I like her books, too, except for that one about the spy.” (The Heat of the Day remains a favourite of mine.) Graham discovered that Francis and I had met through Muriel Spark: “I don’t know her but I admire her writing.” He did not say that—as I knew from Muriel—he had regularly and privately sent money to help her survive her lean first years of writing fiction, the cheques arriving each month with, in Muriel’s words, “a few bottles of red wine to take the edge off cold charity.” Greene did similar good by stealth, over many years, for other needy writers—among them the Indian novelist R. K. Narayan, to whom he gave inestimable material and professional help. One gradually learned, through chance testimony, of financial and practical aid to friends down on their luck, and to charitable concerns where he felt interest and saw authenticity.

  Frugality, by contrast, was another note that would recur. When we admired the Rosaio, Graham told us that he had bought the house in 1948 for, as I recall, about four thousand pounds: “Completely equipped, too—dishes, pots, sheets, blankets, all included.” Even in those years, it was an outstanding bargain for a modest property that today, with the crazed appreciation of Capri real estate, might fetch a million dollars. Thereafter, Graham was to relate this coup to us, together with its pots and pans, whenever the charm of his house was mentioned. In the island’s older houses such as his, humidity is invincible; and in winter, ceramic floors, high ceilings, and thick walls intensify the chill. On that December afternoon, the fireplace was faintly supplemented by central heating, the host’s complaints about the cost of heating fuel—“I don’t mind cold, for myself”—being borne with equanimity by his houseguest, whose history of solitary transatlantic crossings under sail did not, in fact, point to molly coddling. In later years we became accustomed to those ritual invocations of economy—to Graham’s consulting his watch as we lingered over dinner at Gemma: “Mustn’t miss the last bus. It would mean taking a taxi.”

  Most obviously, it was a means of countering assumptions about his wealth. But one came to understand that the mannerisms of a labyrinthine man were almost always consciously deployed—and not merely to disconcert, although that motive was seldom absent. To have asked, Why should you care?—about the price of heating oil, the fare of the taxi, the ticket for the hydrofoil—would have been rude. It would also have involved falling into a trap prepared by Graham’s insistence on a need for thrift: he would have provoked an impertinence that could be resented. (Graham regularly invited you to step on a rug, which he would then pull out from under.) As it was, a strain of illogic underlay such assertions—acceded to, for the sake of calm; but unresolved.

  Born in 1904 into a well to do family, Graham had, long before our meeting on Capri, become rich through his prolific writings of novels, stories, memoirs, articles, essays, plays, and screenplays. In his twent
ies and thirties, however, he had suffered, with millions of his contemporaries, indelible humiliations of the Great Depression, which, following on the carnage of the Great War, would mark British character, society, and politics for the rest of the century. The anxiety of men, women, and children living close to the bone and the abyss is a climate of the early fiction, which frequently takes place in wet, cold, sunless settings; in which even the astute can expect little advancement and no quarter, and the rich exist in privileged unconcern. Greene’s own bleak experiences in Depression years are noted in his two volumes of autobiography, and his biographer Norman Sherry records the keen relief of Graham and his young wife over a gift of ten shillings from an aunt who was herself in pinched circumstances. Vivien Greene told Sherry that, in those years at the brink, “we were very frightfully poor . . . much poorer than anyone of our own social quality.” With his knowledge of that wretchedness and reduction, Graham, like others, long sought to keep faith.

  Reflected in the early writings, an innermost sense of helplessness under fate and unfairness contributed to an imprudent belief, among readers, in Graham’s unconditional solidarity with the underdog and the working class. Graham’s sympathies—innately mercurial and unbiddable, and ever more dispassionate with age—lay far less with categories than with the peculiarities and torments of all manner of unquiet spirits in their disillusion, equivocation, culpability, selfdoubt, and self-disgust. Singularity engaged him. He was disinclined to solidarity or to any sustained “position.” In his books, there is culmination in the narrative, but he does not seek to “resolve.”

  In public matters, the maverick was, intentionally and necessarily, more exposed. Julian Symons, a literary critic who wrote, over years, appreciatively and perceptively of Greene and his work, gave his opinion, in reviewing in 1989 a volume of Graham’s letters to the press, that

  these are the letters of a man concerned with the minor inequities and major iniquities of Western society, and ready to use his prestige as a writer to ask awkward questions and publicize uncomfortable facts. A congenital distrust of merits has prevented Graham Greene from adopting the explicitly political stance of a Günter Grass, but nobody reading these letters could doubt where his social sympathies lie.

  I think that is manifestly if inconsistently true—even if the attribution of “social sympathies” might have prompted Graham to throw a spanner in the works. Again, it was rather that he “felt the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness—the sense that that is where we really belong.”

  Graham had known well, or intimately, or casually, a great diversity of women and men, among them oddities celebrated or obscure. In general, he required stimulus from his companions, but his familiars included an occasional adulator or sycophant; and these, though few, did not displease him. Women should show, ideally, a domestic calm and a compliant attention, or risk being found shrewish. In regard to his work, he could be canny about deploying connections; but there were compartments to his life, and some of his preoccupations had no reason to intersect. His political interventions were of a lone and intractable character; while the crowded milieu of the theatre, of which he had close experience, never lost its appeal for him. A suggestion made since his death, that he sought to know rich and powerful people, is fantastical: he did not seek people out, least of all for cachet. Prominent persons were eager to know him, not the other way round. According to mood, he was curious to meet some fresh personality, from any quarter, who might enliven an hour or an evening; and in such chance acquaintances he took an unaffected interest—that could, however, easily wane.

  Graham cared nothing for fashionable life. In the drear stringency of war’send England, the ease and charm of Catherine Walston’s married setting no doubt contributed to the initial glamour of that love affair and to the confident power of a Circe from Rye, New York: a beautiful girl who had married Henry Walston, a wealthy Englishman of homely appearance and progressive politics, borne five children, and, still young, secured Graham as her trophy lover, holding him in thrall between rapture and the rack for fifteen years. Catherine was vibrant, generous, original. In her ambience, Graham met personalities of the day, not merely prominent but interesting; and aspects of his daily existence were simplified. The contrast between his own austere requirements and her social spirit is nevertheless made plain in the fine novel The End of the Affair, where the writer works in a lone room “across the Common” from the comfortable, busy house of his beloved and her polite, political husband.

  In these matters, Graham’s life and work speak for themselves. As to the insinuation that he cultivated people for their position or possessions, anyone who knew him will find it laughable.

  Graham Greene’s first literary successes were short circuited by misfortunes, some of them self inflicted. And when, with a wife and two children to support, he did reach a degree of financial security—supplementing his fiction with a crushing burden of salaried journalistic tasks—the Second World War convulsed the globe; calling populations to arms, and sweeping Greene, in his midthirties, into its maw. As Graham observed, he was over forty before he could afford to write on his own terms. By then, he had established himself through the development and gruelling application of his talent and intellect. He had served his apprenticeship.

  Money brought freedom. By nature ascetic and in some respects parsimonious, Graham had little taste for luxury and none whatever for pretension. We merely saw that he lived where, and as sparely, as he chose; stayed, without apology, in a good hotel when it suited him; bestowed money as he saw fit and without display. By the time we met, he had already made his headquarters at Antibes, in a small modern flat near his companion of later years, Yvonne Cloetta, who, with her husband and daughters, lived close by. In addition to the Anacapri house, he had a Paris flat—which, finding that we were then much in France, he offered for our use during his absences. (Within a few years, Graham had lent that Paris flat, for her lifetime, to his French literary agent, Marie Biche Schebeko, who was in rather frail health. She lived there, with her husband, until her death.) From time to time, in divesting mood, Graham would speak of selling the Rosaio—perhaps to remind himself that he could, if he chose, do so. Possessions, long regarded with suspicion, had by now been repudiated as an encumbrance. The only “purchases” ever mentioned to us were books acquired during visits to Britain when, driven by his younger brother Hugh, Graham would make descents on secondhand bookshops in the Wye Valley.

  (In 1975, as Graham’s “rediscovered” biography of Lord Rochester—a manuscript from 1931—was published, a double portrait by Sir Peter Lely came up for auction in New York, advertised, with photograph, as “The Countess of Rochester and another lady [said to be Nell Gwynn].” We mailed the notice to Graham at Antibes, and he replied: “Sotheby’s attribution does seem a very odd one. I wish I had the money to buy the picture! I wonder what it fetched.” The portrait sold for $4,000.)

  Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of Graham: “Whatever his circumstances, he has this facility for seeming always to be in lodgings, and living from hand to mouth. Spiritually, and even physically, he is one of nature’s displaced persons.” He was not attached, through habit or memory, or aesthetically, to the rooms and houses and neighbourhoods of his life, and could throw them over at will. Familiarity bred restlessness or rejection. Even in a chosen setting, such as the Rosaio, he retained the quality of wanderer.

  Indignation that would not be roused by a degree of industrial wealth no novelist could ever envisage will regularly be directed at the prosperity—rare enough—of a gifted writer. And Graham Greene, since his death, has been rebuked by commentators eager to demonstrate that, in his having caused millions of readers to buy his books throughout half a century, and having profited from that seemingly harmless transaction, he had relinquished his immortal soul. Creative writing, which, alone among the arts, seems delusively accessible to every articulate person, has immemorially attracted that confusion of esteem and envy, centred on the indepen
dence in which it is conceived and composed: a mystery of originality that never loses fascination for the onlooker. In W. H. Auden’s view,

  this fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artist works; he, and in our age almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue not of some special talent, but of their humanity, could do if they tried.

  I think that independence and absolute freedom in the conduct of his life were imperative to Graham Greene; and that any restriction, unless self imposed, was not only galling to him, as to many high strung natures, but intolerable. The most difficult elements of his personality usually turned on that issue. Resentment of a real or fancied imposition, or the inability to prevail in his view or desire, could ignite a sense of infringement that seemed like madness. In certain enkindled moods, the inconsequential supposition of a shared opinion might be angrily repelled as importunate; while the failure—particularly by a woman—to fall in with his judgment could be a betrayal. In discussion, most people depend on at least a few common assumptions, if only to ensure that conversation does not founder in mindless wrangling. But reliance of that kind was just what Graham could not stand. Agape was his idea of hell.

  All that was yet to be observed and experienced.

  On that afternoon in Anacapri so many years ago, we talked about the Vietnam War—then in full spate, as it would be for years there after. All of us deplored the war as excruciating folly, and Graham questioned Francis and me about measures taken by people like ourselves, living in the United States, to contest it. Mass protests against the war by persons of all ages and professions were, at that time, only beginning in America. In following years, as the conflict was bitterly protracted, Vietnam became an inevitable theme of our talk and our correspondence.