Greene on Capri

by Shirley Hazzard

  In Paris there was hunger, heatlessness, courage, factionalism, the black market, the rancours of anticlimax. Old people and invalids succumbed to malnutrition and cold. Younger citizens pleaded in the streets with Allied soldiers for food, cough medicine, aspirin, ointment. Parisians continued to astonish. Calling one day at the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay (now incorporated in the Musée d’Orsay), where Francis and his first wife had stayed at length throughout the 1930s, F. was moved to find the same concierge and his assistant, in their well worn formal clothes, coming from behind the desk to greet him—with, however, the unsought assurance that “Monsieur Steegmuller, your furniture is intact.” Chests and chairs with which, in prewar years, the Steegmullers had gradually fitted out their accustomed rooms had been concealed from “the new occupants” since the fall of France in 1940; and Francis was welcome to visit these pieces in the lumber room whenever he chose.

  Graham asked if Francis had considered writing a book on France under the Occupation, a subject on which, at that time, little had been published. F. said that the theme had often been suggested to him and always drew his interest, but that such a book, which would be a work of years and could never be comprehensive, should draw on a multiplicity of events attested by those who had lived through them: French men and women who had yet to tell their difficult story.

  He said, “Yvonne, it’s you who should speak of this, not I.”

  Yvonne told us that, when France fell, in June 1940, she had been a schoolgirl in a village in Brittany. On an overcast day of that fine spring, German troops were convoyed in a stream of lorries into the little town before the eyes of a local populace fearful of looting, rape, drunken violence, and vengeance festering from Germany’s defeat in the First World War. At her uncle’s insistence, Yvonne and her sister were concealed in the attic of their house. It was immediately clear, however, that the occupying soldiers were under strict orders to behave well—unless “provoked”—and that there would be no molestation of the local population.

  The unexpected restraint of the young troops occupying the village encouraged families to accept them, and eventually to allow their daughters to go out with them. Relief on the part of the townsfolk was agreeable also to the lonely soldiers, glad of a vicarious share in family life. Seeing this measure of fraternization, Yvonne and her sister asked their uncle why he had been anxious to hide them in the attic; to which the uncle replied, “I suppose I was thinking of what we did in Germany in 1919.”

  In the summer of 1941, with the onslaught of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, special trains carrying German troops to the east hurtled through northern France. Yvonne’s mother, who was chef de gare at the local station, was on duty day and night, raising the boom for passage of the incessant trains, signalling and shunting to give them precedence. The cheerful soldiers waved to her and shouted cordial, if indecent, greetings in German; while the villagers lamented that such fine boys, many of them still adolescent, should be sacrificed in the barbaric regions to which they were travelling. It was as if forgotten that Hitler was actually invading Russia, as he had invaded France; and that Germany must now suffer the ferocious consequences.

  In the late 1960s, when we first knew Graham on Capri, opposition to the Vietnam War increasingly coloured intellectual life in the United States. At the ceremonial meeting, in May 1965, of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters—an annual event of inductions and awards attended by members in all the arts and by a large invited public—the Academy’s president, Lewis Mumford, had appealed against America’s continued prosecution of the war. Speaking “on my own initiative . . . and as a private citizen,” and invoking the humane traditions of the United States, Mumford called on the nation’s President, Lyndon Johnson, to “halt the escalation of error and terror” of American policies in Vietnam. The doomed conflict in Asia was not, as yet, the symbol of folly and wanton violence that it would become to millions of Americans over the next few years. Although the audience was a relatively reflective one, opinions were emotional and divided. Those who found Mumford’s address timely and honourable were at least matched, in numbers, by those expressing outrage, which frequently turned on Mumford’s having used his position as president of the Academy to raise “political” matters. Mumford, who had lost his only son in the Second World War, had no doubt foreseen that classic response; discounting unseemliness in order to make his appeal for the populations of Southeast Asia and for “the lives and prospects of our own younger generation.”

  Mumford was denounced, as reported in the press, as “an emotionally disturbed fanatic,” by certain members of the Academy. Within two or three years, when antiwar sentiment regarding Vietnam had become a majority opinion in the United States and around the world, some of those same figures would be in the ranks of protest. Most people reading that controversial speech today might, I imagine, wonder at the fury it aroused, and at the possibility of disagreeing with it.

  From that day in 1965, America’s war in Vietnam would continue for another ten years.

  Graham, who had been elected to foreign honorary membership in the American Academy in 1961, had learnt of Mumford’s speech and its aftermath; and had kept a mistrustful eye on the Academy’s attitude to the war. In May 1970, he sent the following letter of resignation to George F. Kennan, who was then president of the institution:

  Sir,

  With regret I ask you to accept my resignation as an honorary foreign member of the American Academy–Institute of Arts and Letters. My reason—that the Academy has failed to take any position at all in relation to the undeclared war in Vietnam.

  I have been in contact with all your foreign members in the hope of organising a mass resignation. A few have given me immediate support; two supported American action in Vietnam; a number considered that the war was not an affair with which a cultural body need concern itself; some were prepared to resign if a majority of honorary members were of the same opinion. I have small respect for those who wished to protect themselves by a majority opinion, and I disagree profoundly with the idea that the Academy is not concerned. I have tried to put myself in the position of a foreign honorary member of a German Academy of Arts and Letters at the time when Hitler was democratically elected Chancellor. Could I have continued to consider as an honour a membership conferred in happier days?

  Elizabeth Bowen, one of Graham’s oldest friends and a fellow honorary member of the American Academy, told us that she had received Graham’s call for resignation but had not answered it. Visiting New York at that time, she remarked, “Almost every American writer I know speaks out against the war. Why open fire on one’s friends?”

  Not long afterwards, we saw Graham on Capri, and he—with the air of pleased excitement peculiar to his exercises in bedevilment—proposed to Francis that, as an American who opposed the Vietnam War, he should resign his own membership in the institution. Francis said, “I don’t believe that’s necessary, as yet.” When Graham, spoiling for contest, harangued him on the theme, Francis told him, “Graham, stop needling me. If it reached that point, I wouldn’t need your prompting.”

  We told Graham that Elizabeth had spoken of his letter. He laughed. “She never answered me.”

  Graham contended that the antiwar movement among America’s young, having compelled Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal, had lost impetus when Nixon, “with his unerring instinct for human weakness, had taken the heat off the draft,” thus enabling the war to grind on for years. He was impatient with religious exemptions sought by non-believers; scarcely less so with young Americans seeking haven abroad. If the United States government were confronted with tens of thousands of young men prepared to go to prison rather than fight in Asia, the war would soon be brought to an end. He found the self-engrossed lassitude of hippies and yippies, and the mass cult of the young, ominous and abject: “I would like to take a machine gun to the young.”

  In Rome that spring, Alberto Moravia had also maintained to us that unmanageably large num
bers of potential conscripts willing to face prosecution and imprisonment would force Washington to conclude the war. Moravia said that the egotism of politicians could be countered only by numbers: “Such numbers would be an index of failure, and that’s what politicians care about. If American casualties were currently in thousands, the war would soon be terminated.” When Francis responded, “One can’t wish for casualties,” Moravia replied, “Let’s say, if American casualties equalled those of the Vietnamese.”

  The irruption of Watergate stimulated Graham. Prominent support for Richard Nixon in much of the British press had him in ferment. On the last day of May 1974, he wrote to us from Antibes enclosing an article against “Nixonhaters” by a London columnist:

  Certainly you have seen this piece absurd even for barrow-boy Bernard. It doesn’t merit a reply in words, but haven’t you some friend in Washington who would collaborate in a telegram?

  The President has much appreciated the stand you have taken in the London Times of May 31 and he would like to invite you to be the guest of the government in Washington on June 15-22. During that week the President will be making an important statement off the record. A room has been booked for you at——Hotel. Only if you are unable to be present please reply to——, White House.

  You can draft this much better than I can. My experience in life assures me that the big lie always comes off and the barrow boy will turn up in Washington.

  Our love to you both from rainy Antibes.

  We had to point out the unlikelihood of Western Union’s accepting such a hoax. It was still the era of telegrams as well as of anger, and telegraphers in Washington were presumably alert to presidential messages of the kind. Expressing solidarity to Graham, we enclosed a copy of a recent letter of our own sent to the same newspaper on the same subject and never published. Graham’s stratagem was not our style.

  When we first knew Graham, I was surprised by references in the press to his delight in practical jokes—since a person less disposed to clowning, or to taking his turn as “the fall guy” (one of GG’s favoured expressions), could hardly be imagined. But Graham’s pleasure in such jokes derived exclusively from spoofs practised by himself on others. A turning of tables, which is the nature of the practical joke, involves an unwitting victim, a wilful humiliater, and a betrayal of trust. In his memoirs, Graham gives examples of his taste for humour of the kind, in baffling episodes that make one wonder how he could waste his time and ingenuity, or take satisfaction, in them. He had a ready sense of self-absurdity, but would tolerate no hint of bullying directed against himself.

  America was the one theme on which Graham would regularly badger Francis. If argument was in the air with Graham, I—as a woman, and more perturbable—might be singled out for provocation on a fine range of topics. But F. was accountable for the state of the Union and, at times, for America’s very existence. Most of this was fairly playful—or perhaps F. kept it so, in the face of Graham’s determination to rile.

  Norman Douglas at the restaurant Le Grottelle, c. 1949 (ISLAY LYONS. COURTESY OF THE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DIVISION, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY)

  Visiting Norman Douglas: Catherine Walston, Graham Greene, and Kenneth Macpherson at Villa Tuoro, c. 1951 (ISLAY LYONS. COURTESY OF THE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DIVISION, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY)

  II Rosaio (GIOVANNA LALATTA)

  Harold Acton at Positano, 1981 (CARLO KNIGHT)

  Francis Steegmuller, Shirley Hazzard, Graham Greene, and Yvonne Cloetta at II Rosaio, 1979 (LAETITIA CERIO)

  Villa Jovis (PUBBLI AER FOTO)

  Casa Malaparte (VI.MAR. DI SCALOGNA)

  Léonide Massine’s Isola Lunga (ANDREA DE LUCA EDIZIONI)

  Francis Steegmuller and Shirley Hazzard at Villa Fersen, 1977 (EVAN CORNOG)

  Graham Greene at Gemma, 1987 (PIETRO QUIRICO)

  The third of July, in the United States’ bicentennial year, 1976, was the eve of Graham and Yvonne’s departure for France, and we dined together to say goodbye. On previous evenings, Graham, chipping away at the American anniversary, had made much of the fact that, in 1754, George Washington, then a young British officer in North America, had surrendered unconditionally to the French at Fort Necessity, on the historic date of the Fourth of July. Graham told us that he had sent a letter to The (London) Times on this point, quoting Francis Parkman on the horrors attending Washington’s defeat. When we sat down to dine on the third, Graham, wearing the bedevilment grin, at once lifted his glass.

  GG: I want to propose a toast: Down with George Washington.

  SH: I have a better toast. It’s Francis’s seventieth birthday.

  FS (later): How can Graham be so SILLY?

  Graham had brought with him The Times of 2 July, in which his letter had been published. (Francis sent a rejoinder; but the letter never appeared.) In this, as in other matters, Graham’s humour had a keen edge: the snowball that conceals the stone.

  He was suspicious of the word “fun” and there were forms of pernicious folly presented as entertainment that angered him. On a day when mayhem at a football stadium was in the headlines, he denounced it as “the new violence.” It was one of the first horrific episodes of the kind—taking place, I think, in Mexico. Graham said, “At school, games were forced on us as a healthy alternative to belligerence. Most games now are belligerence.” He added, “I’m not against violence. What I can’t stand is brutality posing as fun.”

  Several of Graham’s friends from early years had gone through troubled relations with him—Graham not disliking his disruptive role. In most of his long associations, there were, I imagine, periods when his friends felt themselves heartily disliked. But complete rupture was rare, and exasperated affection common. Friendships that had lasted from his first years of literary struggle were, with their bloom of shared experience, important to him; and departures from those thinning ranks were noted losses.

  There was an evening when, Graham and Yvonne having just returned to the island, we exchanged some news of the past winter. With slight ironic smile, Graham said that friends had died: “Old friends, but all younger than I.” He would soon turn eighty. “One wonders more than ever when one’s own number will come up. Like Wordsworth—

  “Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber

  Were earlier raised, remain to hear

  A timid voice, that asks in whispers,

  ‘Who next will drop and disappear?’ ”

  He asked what I could remember of that poem, in which Wordsworth mourns the deaths, in close succession during the early 1830s, of a number of intimate friends, all poets. Between us, we managed, with some slips, to say the whole. When we reached the lines

  Nor has the rolling year twice measured,

  From sign to sign, its steadfast course,

  Since every mortal power of Coleridge

  Was frozen at its marvellous source;

  The rapt One, of the godlike forehead,

  The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth;

  And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,

  Has vanished from his lonely hearth—

  —Francis asked that we repeat them, thinking of the attachment between Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the estrangement that followed. We went on, then—

  Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,

  Or waves that own no curbing hand,

  How fast has brother followed brother,

  From sunshine to the sunless land.

  Graham wondered why Wordsworth had chosen “sunshine” rather than “sunlight,” which “would have run better.” The poet had preferred the less expected word. He remarked that “fast” was a welcome word, and that Wordsworth himself, having turned eighty, had died immediately: “Whereas now they keep you on the rack.” He added, “It’s not so much the eighties that I fear. It’s the nineties.”

  He asked whether I could remember a poem at sight. I told him that I had rarely “memorised” a poem, even at school, and had no “system”; that I remembered particular l
ines at once, being moved by them, and then might read the poem over, bear it in mind, say it aloud when I was alone. Then I might remember it always. That had been the case since childhood. In adolescence and in my early twenties, when I had much solitude whether circumstantial or inward, I was able to recall poems from a reading or two if they were not very long. There was nothing diligent in it. Recollection was spontaneous, easier than breathing. One remembered all manner of lines that captured ear and imagination. Where there was greatness, the words seemed inevitable, as if memory had been awaiting them.

  For Graham, something of the same: memory, rather than memorising. He found that he added less and less with age, and rarely recalled lines of new poets, even if he liked their work: “I don’t think one is so accessible to poems that come after one’s own era.” Sensations aroused by poetry were in any case private, intuitive, unaccountable. In the past, poetry had been a presence that cut across the generations and the classes. One never knew where it would turn up. Like mercy.

  Graham was to feel again, poignantly, the sense of anachronistic loss when his brother Hugh, younger than he and the closest of his male contemporaries, died in the 1980s. At that time, he told Yvonne, “It should have been me.”

  In the mid-1970s, Graham was at work for the first time on a Capri subject, his commemoration of the Dottoressa Moor—who, in 1975, while the book was in progress, died in Switzerland at the age of ninety. Presented as Elisabeth Moor’s autobiography, An Impossible Woman is partly transcribed from interviews taped years earlier. Graham had inherited the idea, and much of the task, from Kenneth Macpherson, who conducted the interviews with the Dottoressa and arranged for their transcription. In her medical capacity, Elisabeth Moor had attended Norman Douglas in those last months when he lived under Macpherson’s wing on the Tuoro hill. The links with postwar Capri—with Douglas, Macpherson, and now the Dottoressa—were being inexorably severed.