The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Having completed his draft of The Heart of the Matter in June 1947, he described it to his mother as ‘a long and gloomy book. It depresses me even to write it! I don’t know whether it comes off or not.’5 He did some revision but was not ready to let it go. He told Catherine Walston that the last third was good, but that the whole book would have been if he had gone with her to Ireland two years earlier.6

  Greene turned to John Hayward, whom Eliot had relied on for criticism when writing the Four Quartets, to judge whether the novel should be published.7 An acquaintance from the 1930s, when Greene had first consulted him about the Earl of Rochester, Hayward became a much closer friend in the late 1940s. Greene had once been warned that Hayward’s appearance was ‘ugly’ – muscular dystrophy confined him to a wheelchair, and he rejected the notion entirely: ‘That powerful head ugly? that twist of the half paralysed arm, as the agile hand seized a cup or procured itself a cigarette? the wicked intelligence of the eyes? A cripple yes, but there are few men I can remember with greater vitality and with a greater appreciation of physical love.’8 Hayward had fallen in love with Catherine Walston when he met her in 1941, calling her ‘one of those tantalisingly beautiful American brunettes with a poise that would make a performing sea-lion jealous’.9 From 1948, he became an occasional visitor to the Walstons’ home in Cambridgeshire, where both Graham and Catherine helped him navigate the house and to perform personal tasks such as dressing – he described Graham as ‘an admirable valet’.10 Greene became devoted to Hayward, relishing his witty, sexy talk and his supply of gossip. In 1957, Greene took his side when Eliot abruptly left the flat the two men had shared for many years to marry Valerie Fletcher, seeing in it ‘the moral cowardice of a sensitive man . . . ’11 Of course, that was a weakness he was well acquainted with, and it is the essence of Scobie, who accepts his own corruption to avoid giving pain.

  As it turned out, John Hayward loved The Heart of the Matter,12 and publication went ahead. Determined to avoid an old trap, Greene had it read for libel by a man who had been a senior administrator in Sierra Leone and afterwards maintained that none of the characters was based on living people, apart from an illiterate Syrian trader who was unlikely to sue.13 This was not really true. We have seen how both Scobie and Father Rank were initially inspired by real people, even as Greene departed from those models as he went more deeply into the work. ‘Literary Louise’ refers to Scobie as ‘Ticki’ just as Vivien, a cat-lover, called Graham ‘Tyg’, though in this case the parallels between the person and the character are more complicated. Whether the harrowing accounts of night-time conversations between Scobie and Louise, compared to passing into and out of an emotional cyclone at the centre of which terrible truths are told, are close to any that passed between Graham and Vivien is a question that can no longer be answered. Indeed, Graham and Dorothy had some nocturnal quarrels and these may be part of the mix. Malcolm Muggeridge and Anthony Powell, who also served in intelligence during the war, felt confident that they could identify most of the minor characters in the book.14 One measure Greene took to frustrate libel actions was to avoid naming the colony in which the novel was set.15

  The Heart of the Matter was released in Britain on 27 May 1948 and in the United States two months later. A selection of the Book of the Month Club, a Book Society Choice, the Evening Standard Book of the Month, and winner of the James Tait Black Prize, it sold on a scale far beyond any of his earlier works – three hundred thousand copies within three years.16 In a heaven-sent boost to international sales, it was briefly banned in the Republic of Ireland.

  The reviews were spectacular. Typical among them was Richard Church’s claim that Greene had a ‘Dante-esque . . . genius’: ‘Think of El Greco’s long, emaciated and twisted figures, with their leper-white faces and agate eyes. They could walk into Graham Greene’s books and be at home there.’17 One review was decidedly and memorably negative. Writing for the New Yorker, George Orwell felt that Greene, who had written ‘admirably’ about Africa elsewhere, had made too little of the local people, their political concerns, colonial conflicts, and the context of war; he felt that Greene might as well have set the book in a ‘London suburb’. Moreover, he felt that there was a spiritual ‘snobbishness’ in Greene’s Catholicism: ‘Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only’, since everyone else is invincibly ignorant and so spared. He found that Scobie’s motivations are contradictory and improbable. Showing a snobbishness of his own, he complained that ordinary characters like Pinkie and Scobie were unlikely to be so focused on the possibility of their damnation: it is the result of ‘foisting theological preoccupations upon simple people anywhere’.18

  The theological foisting was actually occurring across the aisle. Many Catholic readers were asking whether Scobie is saved or damned. Having committed the mortal sin of adultery, compounded by sacrilege when he receives the Eucharist, and finally the supposedly unforgivable sin of suicide, the struggles of Scobie lifted the lid on an aspect of Catholic life. Many millions of Catholics lived with profound guilt and fear, owing to the ‘sin of impurity’, which included not just extramarital intercourse, but masturbation, and even sexual thoughts. A person who died in a state of mortal sin was understood to be literally damned. This was bad enough, but to commit sacrilege was utterly terrifying, so a great many church-going Catholics remained in their pews at communion, except after their occasional visits to the confessional. Anglicans sometimes wonder what all the fuss was about, but their Eucharist has a ‘general absolution’, which offers a quick scrub for the repentant. For Catholics, it was a different story.

  In 1905, Pope Pius X, known otherwise for his suppression of ‘modernist’ theologians, issued a teaching that frequent, even daily, communion was desirable for Catholics. So there was nowhere to hide – if one did not go to the rail there was a reason for it. Late in the novel Louise wants to know what is going on in Scobie’s conscience so presses him to go with her to communion. ‘ “Aren’t you coming, dear?” Louise asked, and again the hand touched him: the kindly firm detective hand.’ Failure to do it would indicate that he was in a state of mortal sin and so confirm her suspicions of adultery. When Seán O’Faoláin suggested that the situation of the novel was ‘rigged’ against Scobie, Greene seemed surprised and insisted that he had known such situations among many of his acquaintances.19 The novel brought into the open an extraordinary desolation at work in the lives of Catholics. Many rather damaged priests and laypeople came to regard Graham Greene as someone who could help them with their personal problems; he hated this reputation and wished they would seek psychiatrists.

  Some reviewers, such as Raymond Mortimer and Edward Sackville-West, considered whether Scobie might actually be a saint. Evelyn Waugh proposed that the conclusion of the book affirms the mystery that ‘no one knows the secrets of the human heart or the nature of God’s mercy’. He suggests that Greene regards him as a saint, but insists this does not matter, as what passes between Scobie and God is necessarily hidden.20 In a letter to Waugh, Greene denied that he thought Scobie a saint, but there can be no doubt that he implicitly planted the question in the novel. The book’s epigraph, taken from Péguy, claims that the sinner is at the heart of Christianity and that only the saint knows more about Christianity. Following Péguy, Greene has narrowed the gap between sinner and saint. Curiously enough, at his death, Scobie drops a medal of ‘the saint whose name nobody could remember’. This gesture could indicate either that he has lost the protection of heaven or that he himself has become one of the blest, another of the anonymous saints. After its publication, Greene spent a good deal of time pretending that he had written an altogether different book from the one his very best readers were drawing obvious conclusions about. He was covering his tracks.

  Traditional moralists smelt sulphur. Responding to Waugh, Canon Joseph Cartmell agreed that no one knows whether a person is damned, but speaks of Scobie as ‘a very bad moral coward’. He said that the only g
ood that came of Scobie’s death ‘was a negative one, the removal of himself as a source of sin’.21 Another theologian, Father John P. Murphy, concluded that Scobie feared two women more than he feared God.22 William Brown, the Bishop of Southwark, denounced the book on the grounds that ‘adultery is adultery’ and endorsed the actions of the Irish censors.23 Greene had able defenders, among them the author and broadcaster Father C. C. Martindale, SJ, and Christopher Butler, OSB, the Abbot of Downside, who would later be a leading figure at the Second Vatican Council. Both made the case that the book was consistent with good theology, and Greene thanked them for their efforts. The exchanges rumbled on all summer in the pages of various Catholic magazines and newspapers, after which the question of whether Scobie is a saint finally migrated to scholarly journals.

  Of course, there can be many grounds on which to fault a book other than moral theology. In September, Heinemann forwarded to Greene a letter from the makers of Elastoplast, complaining that the novel referred to their product with a lower-case e, which was bad for business. Also, since the book presents Elastoplast as somehow inferior to an ordinary bandage, they volunteered a member of their medical department to explain to the author the superior merits of their product.24 Greene ignored this golden opportunity to stretch his mind.

  25

  LIME

  One evening in late September 1947, Greene went out for a solitary dinner and drink, and then restlessly walked along Piccadilly and into a public lavatory in Brick Street, where he suddenly had the idea for what would become The Third Man.1 He wrote a single sentence on the flap of an envelope: ‘I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.’2

  At a dinner soon after, Korda asked him to write a new film for Carol Reed to direct, so he suggested a story begun along these lines. Korda was actually thinking of a comedy-thriller, but was content for the two men to work on Greene’s idea. However, he wanted the film set not in London but Vienna, which was then divided into four zones occupied by the British, French, American, and Russian armies.3 He had money in Austria which he could not get out owing to currency regulations but which could be used to pay for a production there.4

  Korda paid Greene £1000, and would later pay him £3000 more for his work on this project.5 He sent him to Vienna in mid-February, arranging a room for him at the Sacher Hotel, which was then exclusively reserved for officers of the occupation – the excellent kitchen was largely supplied with meat and vegetables by young women working the black market.6 On his first day, he saw the enormous central cemetery and knew that it should be used in the opening of the film. The city itself was in a desperate state, with piles of rubble everywhere and people struggling to find the basics of life. It was a setting perfectly suited to Greene’s imagination.

  Unable to organize his plot beyond the phoney funeral, he explored night clubs, strip joints, the Josefstadt theatre, the Prater amusement park with its great Ferris wheel, and many other spots that might be suitable for filming, but more than anything he needed to decide exactly what Harry Lime’s racket was and how he was pursuing it. He says that he found the solution after a lunchtime conversation with Colonel Charles Beauclerk, the future Duke of St Albans, a contact from SIS and now an official in the British zone, who told the novelist an amusing story about the ‘underground police’: when he learned of their existence he assumed they were secret police and ordered them to be shut down. Finding later that they were still operating, he was annoyed that his orders had been disobeyed. It was explained to him that these men really did work underground, patrolling the large system of sewers through which spies and criminals could move between the zones. Beauclerk also told Greene that there was an illicit trade in penicillin, often diluted or adulterated, and potentially causing great harm to those who received it. Greene says that Beauclerk took him on a tour of the sewers, and it was then that he worked out the final shape of his story.7

  However, there was another source for Greene’s information on sewers and penicillin. One of Korda’s employees, Elizabeth Montagu, who had worked in American intelligence, arranged for Greene to speak with The Times correspondent Peter Smollett. Born Hans Smolka in Austria, he changed his name in England, and became a highly regarded journalist, once considered by David Astor as a possible editor of the Observer.8 During the war he served in the Russian department of the Ministry of Information, where he may have crossed paths with Graham Greene. He was, however, a Russian spy and a close associate of Philby and Burgess.9 Greene read some pieces Smollett had written about the sewers, police patrols, and the penicillin trade. When she read Greene’s early draft, Montagu was concerned that there might be a claim of plagiarism so she pressed to have Smollett signed to a contract. Although not credited, he was paid about £200 and was satisfied.10

  Elizabeth Bowen came to Vienna to deliver a lecture on the English novel, so Greene invited her out to dinner at the very seedy Oriental night club, and once there predicted that there would be a police raid at midnight, something he had learned through his ‘contacts’. Loving practical jokes, he had, in fact, made an arrangement with Beauclerk for just such a raid to occur. At exactly midnight, a British sergeant, accompanied by representatives of each of the other three powers, came into the night club; the sergeant went straight to Bowen demanding to see her passport. Greene later wrote: ‘She looked at me with respect . . . ’11

  Greene was supposed to begin writing immediately, but that month there was a new European crisis, this time in Czechoslovakia, and, perhaps prompted by MI6, he wanted to see it.12 Surprisingly, his brief foray there became in 2017 the subject of an engaging, though fanciful, graphic novel.13 Despite a snow storm, he flew on 23 February 1948 to Prague, where the Communist Party under Prime Minister Klement Gottwald was carrying out a coup in order to avoid scheduled elections. The police force had been purged of non-communists and was arresting opponents of the party. Demonstrations and a strike put pressure on the president, Edvard Beneš, so he accepted the resignations of a group of non-communist cabinet ministers, giving full control of the government to Gottwald and his party on 25 May, a landmark event in the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.

  Greene witnessed some of the demonstrations, visited his publishers and agents, and on one occasion found the office of his Catholic publisher under armed guard. Egon Hostovský, one of whose novels he had published in translation at Eyre & Spottiswoode,14 worked in the Foreign Ministry, and spoke of how the minister, Jan Masaryk, the last non-communist in the cabinet, had said farewell to his staff. Two weeks later, on 10 March, Masaryk was thrown to his death from a high window in the ministry.15 Czechoslovakia would remain close to Greene’s heart, and he eventually numbered among his friends the novelist Josef Škvorecký and the playwright and future president Václav Havel.

  Making his way to Antibes, Greene boarded Korda’s yacht, the Elsewhere, for a journey down the coast of Italy. This craft was a converted Royal Fairmile torpedo boat, lengthened to about 120 feet and given a rounded stern16 – Greene would sail on it often in the years to come. Among the passengers for this excursion were Carol Reed, Randolph and Pamela Churchill, and Vivien Leigh.

  Vincent Korda’s fifteen-year-old son, Michael, was overwhelmed by the company until a tall, sandy-haired man handed him a pre-lunch cocktail. ‘ “Go on,’ he said. “It’s a martini. It can do you no possible harm. I’m Graham Greene, by the way.” ’17 There grew up an alliance between the two, as if in opposition to the world of adults, which at that moment was manifesting itself especially in the noisy, drunken talk of Randolph Churchill. Greene fixed his eyes on Churchill as on a zoo animal, and said, ‘The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. Everything is useful to a writer, you see, every scrap . . . ’18 Young Korda was in awe and shortly after decided that he too must become a writer, and so he did – a
novelist, memoirist, biographer, historian, and publisher. Greene offered him advice on sex, and took him to a brothel in Nice and to a bar in Genoa where sailors wore drag and one sang in creditable imitation of the American comedian Sophie Tucker.19

  Michael Korda witnessed the early work on the script, with his uncle Alex, Reed, and Greene holding laborious conferences on deck – and getting nowhere. There was that first sentence and not much else. They reached Capri, once the resort of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius and now an enclave of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Sipping his drink and watching the sun set over the island, Greene remarked within Alex’s hearing, ‘I should give anything to own a villa there’. The next morning at breakfast, the novelist unfolded his napkin and a large rusty skeleton key fell out. Greene asked what it was, and Alex replied, ‘It’s the key to a villa in Anacapri. Quite a nice one. I had myself taken ashore late last night in the motor launch. I bought a villa. It’s in your name, dear boy. Now the rest of my story, please!’ Not surprisingly, things came together very quickly after that.20

  Korda had problems with currency regulations and Greene hated income tax, so some of their transactions, such as this one, were in kind. The compact Villa Rosaio on Via Ceselle in Anacapri, a commune in the upper part of the island, had been occupied at different times by the novelists Francis Brett Young and Compton Mackenzie.21 It was, in fact, two tiny peasant houses renovated and turned into one by the town’s enterprising former mayor Edwin Cerio, an engineer and author who became a friend of Greene’s, as did his daughter, the artist Laetitia Cerio. With its vaulted construction, it is a notable example of the vernacular architecture of the island.22 Each of the little houses had a double and a single bedroom, and a bathroom; one had a kitchen, dining room, and living room.23 The villa also had a small rooftop patio, where the novelist often sat. It offered him a quiet place to write, as well as privacy in which to entertain Catherine. Under the imprint ‘Rosaio Press’, he soon printed, in only twenty-five copies, a collection of love poems for her, After Two Years.24 For each of the next forty years he would spend a month or two on Capri, and was named an honorary citizen of Anacapri.