The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  While in Capri in March 1948, Greene and Korda had discussions with the travel writer Norman Douglas about making a film of his novel South Wind, a hedonistic satire set in a fictionalized version of the island. When it came out in 1917, it had been a scandalous bestseller, admired by Greene and many of his generation.25 A friend of Joseph Conrad and many other writers, Douglas had a history of paedophilia which forced him to stay away from Britain for fear of the law. The film project went no further than a first treatment,26 but Greene, with characteristic sympathy for the disgraced, grew fond, even protective, of the eighty-year-old Douglas, as well as of the novelist Kenneth Macpherson and the photographer Islay de Courcy Lyons who lived with him. Suffering from a painful skin disease, Douglas hastened his own death in 1952 with an overdose. As final attempts were made to keep him alive, he reportedly muttered, ‘Get those fucking nuns away from me.’27

  Greene was not usually able to sit down and simply write a script. His own writing process required him first to create the story as a short novel – just as The Tenth Man was supposed to be the basis of a script. Many years later he wrote: ‘My film story, The Third Man, was never written to be read but only to be seen.’28 This is just wrong. In early January 1948, he told Mary Pritchett, his American agent, that he planned an entertainment of the sort he had written in the past, perhaps thirty or forty thousand words, and asked what would be an ideal length for serial publication. He told her he would write it as ‘straight fiction’, to be turned into a script only ‘if approved’ by the film-makers.29 It was always intended to be a book, which he finished on 2 June 1948. It then went through four revisions as a script by the autumn.30 Published in 1950, the novella of The Third Man represented an early version of the story. Greene had control of the story throughout, and felt that the contribution of Carol Reed was wholly positive so that the story was better finally on the screen than it was on the page.31

  After his difficult holiday in Morocco with Dorothy, and a short visit to New York to sort out contracts, Greene returned to Vienna around 20 June 1948, this time with Carol Reed and other members of Korda’s organization to scout locations. The city had been tidied up since February. Restaurants were beginning to offer more than gruel, and a pile of rubble in front of the Café Mozart (‘Old Vienna’ in the film) had been carted away. He said to Reed: ‘But I assure you Vienna was really like that – three months ago.’32 It was as if Greeneland were being erased by the Marshall Plan.

  Back in London, Greene and Reed continued their script conferences, which involved Greene walking endlessly about the room and the two men, from time to time, acting out scenes. Not even Korda was allowed to take part in the work. They did, however, have to face David O. Selznick, best known as the producer of Gone with the Wind. Korda’s business had fallen apart during the war, and his co-production and American distribution agreements with Selznick kept his firm afloat. To meet his obligations to Selznick, he sent Greene and Reed to California in mid-August for script conferences.33 Greene first told Catherine that he liked him ‘enormously’34 – that would change. Some of his suggestions made sense, such as making both Holly Martins and Harry Lime American. Indeed, he was anxious that the film should appeal to American taste and not provoke the censor. But his efforts to modify, and in fact seize control of, the film were relentless. He disliked the title, and in a memorable exchange he attacked the probability of the story, asking why did Martins stay in Vienna after learning of Lime’s (first) death? Greene pointed out that he had fallen in love with a woman and been punched by a policeman, but Selznick dismissed this, judging instead that the film’s narrative was based on one man’s affection for another: ‘It won’t do, boys, it won’t do. It’s sheer buggery.’35

  Graham Greene had a Homeric tolerance for liquor. He could, and regularly did, drink vast quantities without evident effect. However, drinking, some drug use, exhaustion, and extreme stress caught up with him on 21 August 1948, on the way back from California. An hour before he was to board his flight from New York to London, he suffered a haemorrhage in his urinary tract. Admitted to the Medical Arts Center, he remained very ill for twenty-four hours and wondered whether he would become impotent. After various tests, the doctors merely forbade him to drink for ten days and gave him a barbiturate for the flight home. The actor Ralph Bellamy, who wanted to do a stage production of The Heart of the Matter, brought him a copy of Aldous Huxley’s latest novel, Ape and Essence, to read on his flight. Greene despised the book, after which the sedative must have come as a blessing.36

  Through the rest of the film project, Korda deflected Selznick’s many suggestions and then protests. Selznick did agree to the casting of Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli, but objected to Reed’s choice of Orson Welles, suggesting, instead, Noël Coward. Korda politely insisted on Welles, who was annoyed with Korda for cancelling other projects so had his own fun by dodging from one Italian city to another with Korda’s brother Vincent on his heels with instructions to get him back to London. At some risk to his own business, Alexander Korda allowed Greene and Reed to make the film largely as they wanted to.37

  The film brought together some extraordinary artists, among them the Australian cinematographer Robert Krasker, who was responsible for the tilted camera angles and shadowy effects. Reed discovered the zither player Anton Karas, whose Harry Lime theme became an international hit and popularized an instrument most people had never heard of. The cast included a group of distinguished Austrian actors, including Hedwig Bleibreu as the landlady. Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, and Trevor Howard all turned in superb performances.

  But there was something miraculous about Welles. From the moment a cat toys with his shoelace and the light from an open window catches his face, he dominates the film. Martin Scorsese thinks this scene ‘might be the best revelation – or the best reveal, as they say – in all of cinema’.38 Some words Orson Welles contributed were among the most memorable in a script where everything is memorable: ‘After all it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow says – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly!’ This extraordinary speech caused Welles some awkwardness, as he explained to Peter Bogdanovich: ‘ . . . the Swiss very nicely pointed out that they’ve never made any cuckoo clocks!’ It was the Germans who invented them.39

  Greene finished his script by the end of September, and location filming in Vienna ran from late October until December, followed by studio shooting in England, which finished in March.40 The film opened in London on 2 September 1949, and almost immediately after took the Grand Prix du Festival at Cannes. An American version re-edited by Selznick was released in February 1950. With its predilection for honouring the second best, the Academy could only scrape up three Oscar nominations for the film: Reed for best director, Oswald Hafenrichter for editing, and Krasker, the sole winner, for black-and-white cinematography. In May, The Third Man won the British Film Academy Award for Best British Film. It remains one of the finest films ever made.

  26

  A PIECE OF GRIT

  Three years was about as long as Graham Greene could bear a desk job, and he no longer needed the one he had at Eyre & Spottiswoode. Douglas Jerrold had reneged on the arrangement for him to retire and leave full control of the firm to Greene. The pot called the kettle black when Greene complained to his mother in June 1947 of Jerrold being unstable. At the end of that year, Greene told Catherine Walston that he would like to leave in six months.1 He stayed longer and the departure was messy.

  In early 1946, Greene had bid high for Anthony Powell’s John Aubrey and His Friends, a biography, in order to get a further deal for three novels. At a lunch at the Authors’ Club in mid-September 1948, Powell complained that the biography was still not published, and the two got into a row.
Greene dismissed the book as boring, and immediately accepted Powell’s request to cancel the fiction contract. Malcolm Muggeridge was present at the lunch and remarked in his journal on Greene’s appetite for conflict. Indeed, Greene had once told Muggeridge that rows were nearly a ‘physical necessity’ for him.2 Jerrold rejected the notion that Greene could simply cancel the contract, as it was one of the firm’s assets, so Greene resigned. He casually invited Powell for drinks shortly after, but Powell, not so easily assuaged, did not speak to him again for twelve years.3

  Money was no longer an issue. He was able to establish Vivien and the children in the spacious Grove House at Iffley Turn in Oxford, a Regency villa which, though it needed initial repairs, served as Vivien’s home for the rest of her life. Graham himself moved into a flat at 5 St James’s Street, directly adjoining one occupied by Catherine and Harry Walston, and this was his London residence until 1953. Although this sounds like they were all together in a lovers’ commune, in fact Greene and the Walstons were seldom in residence at the same time. In 1948 he purchased – or perhaps it was again payment in kind from Korda – the Nausikaa, a 32-foot double-ended cutter which he docked at Lymington in Hampshire, in the mistaken hope that he and Catherine might use it often. He took Francis and Caroline sailing, and on a few occasions friends such as the Dominican priest Thomas Gilby, then sold it in late 1949.4

  His ties to England were gradually being loosened. Frequently visiting Paris, he basked in a new kind of glory. He wrote to Catherine in late January 1949: ‘It’s all too fantastic. My books in every shop – a whole display in the Rue de Rivoli. Three different people writing books on me for three different publishers. The Professor of English at the Sorbonne has asked me to lecture & says that he can fill the hall twice over.’ Priests were fussing over him. Magazines were looking for interviews. Graduate students were parsing his world view: ‘I’d really be rather enjoying it if I believed it, but I don’t, quite . . . commonsense tells me it’s all a joke that will soon pass. But I wish you could see the joke too. I’d love to preen my feathers in front of you.’5

  With the death of Denyse Clairouin at Mauthausen in 1945, Greene’s business in France had been taken over by her younger colleague, Marie Schebeko (later Biche), a Russian with command of many languages. She became an important, if hitherto little-known, figure in Greene’s life. Her manner was formidable, even disconcerting, possibly owing to a blue-eyed gaze that was off-centre.

  She was warm-hearted, discreet, and extremely devoted to those closest to her. Although a private person, she became one of Greene’s closest friends, and, surprisingly, an intimate of Harry Walston. She remained Greene’s French agent until about 1977, managing most of his business on the Continent.

  Greene’s most important admirer in France was François Mauriac, who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952. While at Eyre & Spottiswoode, Greene had arranged for Muggeridge to negotiate with Mauriac so that they became his English publishers.6 Greene’s own standing in France owed a great deal to a tribute Mauriac paid to his work in Le Figaro in October 1948. After they had both appeared at a conference the following May, Greene wrote to him: ‘Please believe that though I am no longer your English publisher, I am your admirer, your disciple & your friend.’7 Both novelists had found their best subject in the agonized Catholic conscience,8 but they saw things differently. Privately, Greene thought himself the better novelist – he was probably right. Moreover, Mauriac dreaded that his work might glamorize sin; he thought that the writer’s dilemma was to show the evil in human nature without causing the reader to be tempted. Greene could not care less about this.

  In a friendly debate about the writing of novels with Elizabeth Bowen and V. S. Pritchett, broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1948 and then published as a pamphlet, Greene specifically distanced himself from Mauriac’s position, saying that although he did feel pressure from the church to be edifying, he was saved from this by his ‘disloyalty’.9 His views were obviously shaped by the battering he was taking from priests and theologians over the morality of The Heart of the Matter. In 1969, he would return to this topic in a famous lecture entitled ‘The Virtue of Disloyalty’, delivered upon receiving the Shakespeare Prize from the University of Hamburg. In it, he argues that writers must often be disloyal to their countries or to the prevailing systems of belief in order to ‘enlarge the bounds of sympathy in our readers’. It suited Greene intellectually and temperamentally to be a ‘piece of grit’ in the machine.10

  27

  POINTS OF DEPARTURE

  ‘Mass at 12 at Farm Street where I met the shambling, unshaven and as it happened quite penniless figure of Graham Greene. Took him to the Ritz for a cocktail and gave him 6d for his hat. He had suddenly been moved by love of Africa and emptied his pockets into the box for African missions.’1 Evelyn Waugh had known Greene since Oxford, though they had moved in different circles there. They had contact from time to time in the thirties, and Waugh had been a contributor to Night and Day. The friendship grew much closer after the war, when both Waugh, with Brideshead Revisited, and Greene, with The Heart of the Matter, found themselves lofted into literary and religious celebrity. Greene’s attitude towards Waugh was strikingly humble: he always spoke of him as the best writer of their generation. He commented to James Salter in 1975: ‘In the Mediterranean you can see a pebble fifteen feet down. His style was like that.’2

  Just as Greene grew uncomfortable with The Heart of the Matter, Waugh told Greene in 1950 that although he liked the plot of Brideshead Revisited, the book, in its original form, was the product of ‘spam, Nissen huts, black-out’ and not suitable for peacetime.3 After initial admiration, Greene wavered in his view of this novel, but many years later decided firmly that it was an outstanding work, and indeed Waugh’s finest.4 For his part, Waugh looked to Greene as the one person who might produce a decent screenplay of the novel. In the summer of 1950, Greene tentatively agreed with David O. Selznick, whom he now regarded as a fool, to take on the job.5 However, Waugh lost heart about the whole business.

  Along with respect for each other’s craft, the two converts had a damaged Catholicism in common. Apart from his own complicated sexual history, Waugh had needed an ecclesiastical annulment of his marriage to Evelyn Gardner (‘she-Evelyn’ to his ‘he-Evelyn’) before he could marry Laura Herbert in 1937. He seems to have believed that more dangerous than sexual sins were his own lapses of charity, and some of these achieved Olympic standards, as when he wrote to Laura in 1945 about their first son: ‘I have regretfully come to the conclusion that the boy Auberon is not yet a suitable companion for me.’6 Although a very conservative Catholic, he refused to sit in judgement on Greene and Walston, inviting them to stay at his home, Piers Court.7

  Harry Walston did not like Waugh, but Catherine invited him to their home at Thriplow in Cambridgeshire, where he was astonished by the profusion of the place and recalled seeing Picassos on the wall, though, in fact, the Walstons did not possess any. He also marvelled at the freewheeling conversation, in which, for example, the children’s nanny Beatrice Ball, known as ‘Twinkle’,8 might discuss masturbation and incest with her employers and their guests at the dinner table.9 Waugh found the unaffected Catherine entertaining, but he was not accustomed to hostesses going barefoot and it may have been on account of this that he questioned her sanity.10

  Waugh thought there was something that set Graham Greene apart – that he had an ‘apostolic mission’ that many Catholics might fail to understand because of the sexual content of his books.11 He did not mean that in some vague secular sense Greene had a writer’s vocation, but that he had been literally sent out in the manner of the apostles. Despite leading a ‘disordered’ life, Greene had a surprising effect on Catholics. Hovering on the edges of the church, his old friend Edith Sitwell, who converted some years later, wrote to him in 1945: ‘I said before, but I repeat it, what a great priest you would have made. But you are better as you are.’12 She felt that he understood si
n and redemption in a way the clergy did not. In May 1948, she read The Heart of the Matter and wrote to a Catholic friend: ‘Have you read Graham Greene’s new book? It may prevent me from committing suicide!!’13

  Greene continued to go to confession occasionally and entertained an agonized hope that one day he might live a faithful and orderly life married to Catherine – indeed, the two privately exchanged marriage vows during a Mass at Tunbridge Wells.14 He took advice from canon lawyers and concluded that he had grounds for an annulment from Vivien, but was stymied as she was now even more opposed to an annulment than to a divorce.15 In the early days of Graham’s affair with Catherine, there had been a wild hopefulness mixed in with all the guilt, but by mid-1949 Catherine showed no real signs of leaving Harry. In her correspondence with Graham she wanted him to speak of ‘liking’ rather than ‘loving’ her. Despite having got along well with him for two years, Harry was beginning to find the novelist a pest and a threat to his household. There was a crisis in July, when Harry told Graham he must not speak to Catherine any more. At the same time, Greene received a letter from the outspoken Twinkle, advising him that he was too demanding of Catherine’s time.16 The row was smoothed over, but he was very unhappy.