The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  There was plenty of gossip about Graham and Catherine. A wisecrack went around that they had made love behind all the high altars of Europe. Father Vincent Turner, SJ, who had instructed Catherine for reception into the church, remarked at the end of the summer that her personality was ‘corrupting’. When he heard of this Graham wrote to her, ‘Can’t these people get it into their heads, after all this time, that we aren’t having a flippant thoughtless fuck, that we love each other sufficiently seriously for it to be a problem that deserves their sympathy?’17

  Greene’s yearning for Walston found little relief, except in liquor and in work. While in Paris in mid-December, he went for a walk after Mass and found himself sobbing in the Tuileries Gardens.18 A month later, she conveyed to him the details of a shattering quarrel she had had with Harry, so he wrote up a detailed plan for her to leave England and join him in Capri while divorces, annulments, and child custody were settled.19 Though her feelings for Graham were very strong, Catherine was not going to risk running off with him. His pleas forced her into a firm and devastating refusal.

  Over the past two years, Greene had at least enjoyed professional triumphs to set against private frustration. But now, in the autumn and winter of 1949–50, he was involved in a failure. Basil Dean, the producer with whom he had worked on the film Twenty-One Days in 1936, collaborated with him on a dramatization of The Heart of the Matter, with Dean working mainly on structure and Greene on dialogue.20 From the earliest stage of the work, he was driving himself with Benzedrine and then looking for sleep with the barbiturate Nembutal. In early December, the two men visited Freetown to gather images for sets, and Graham wrote to Catherine about how, if he could not have her, he would like to live and work in West Africa. In February, Rodgers and Hammerstein put together a production of the play in Boston, with plans to take it to New York, but there were problems with the script and, according to Greene, Basil Dean was arguing with everyone. Although swarmed by sympathetic press who might have skewered the play, Greene had little hope for the production.21 At the beginning of March Rodgers and Hammerstein withdrew the play for revision and it was never brought back to the stage.

  In the meantime, Greene was going through a crisis, worse than the one in Paris before Christmas. On 28 February he wrote to Catherine that he was ‘desperate’, and had been crying in bed. He required pills to sleep even as little as three or four hours. He was close to taking his own life, but he could not go out a failure: ‘I’d raise the price for anybody with a gun now to 5000. I look at the Nembutal with such longing, but people would say it was because I’d written a flop.’22 At some point in his adult life, probably in the 1950s, he did attempt suicide, mixing three-quarters of a pint of whisky with a quarter-bottle of gin and ten aspirins. With his usual flippancy, he claimed to have slept it off with pleasant dreams.23

  Greene returned briefly to England before going for two weeks to Goslar in Lower Saxony, a town near the border of East and West Germany. With the help of a British intelligence officer,24 he was researching a story he had pitched to Korda in January, and was evidently accompanied for part of the time by Carol Reed.25 To be called ‘No Man’s Land’, the proposed film would follow The Third Man by setting events in zones of occupation along a dangerous frontier. The Russians were particularly watchful of the Harz Mountains in northern Germany as they were thought to contain deposits of uranium.26

  In the story, Catholic pilgrims are coming in large numbers to a grotto in the mountains to see a holy woman modelled on the German mystic and stigmatic Therese Neumann.27 An Englishman named Richard Brown slips into the Russian zone, posing as a pilgrim but actually searching for his half-brother, a vanished spy named Kramer. He falls in love with the woman who, under torture, is responsible for the capture and death of Kramer. By betraying the trust of a lenient Russian official they escape, having recovered a microfilm about the mines which Kramer had hidden in a candle in the grotto. The couple return to the West and get married, but the place of pilgrimage is deemed a threat to security and shut down.28 Greene wrote a fifteen-thousand-word version of the story that spring,29 but he and Korda agreed in September that it needed much more work before going into production30 – it was eventually abandoned.

  While in Goslar, he remained desolate, writing to Catherine, ‘I pray every night for you or death – I’d prefer the first, but the second would be a good second-best.’31 He prayed repeatedly each day to St Thérèse that his true vocation to love Catherine not be lost and also sought comfort in reading the works of the eighteenth-century Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade, who is best remembered for his teachings on resignation to providence. In these years he often read spiritual masters, among them Baron von Hügel, author of The Mystical Element of Religion (1908). Although he later changed his mind about Thomas Merton, he read the Trappist’s autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) with great admiration and wrote a cover endorsement for it. He shared such reading with Catherine, who was strongly attracted to the Catholic mystical tradition, and made the case to her that all of the great events of their relationship were part of God’s plan.32

  One friend thought Greene was missing the point about his own vocation. Father C. C. Martindale, SJ, was fifteen years older than the novelist and a calming influence. Like his friend Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, who brought the theory of evolution into theology, Martindale was, by the standards of the time, a bold thinker, and so regarded with some suspicion by church authorities.33 He had publicly tangled with theologians denouncing The Heart of the Matter in the summer of 1948. Knowing what kinds of personal trouble the novelist got himself into, Martindale nonetheless thought he discerned a calling in Graham Greene’s life: to write about what is present in the lives of most saints, ‘a black tunnel, in which he/she experiences terrific interior hate, lust, above all dis-belief – or something equivalent’. The job for Greene was ‘to show how real holiness can coexist with real imperfection (e.g. greed; cowardice; snobbishness), and perhaps to do so is your vocation’. Perceptively, he urged Greene not to be ‘seduced by money’ from the cinema.34 He urged him to put order into his existence, live more simply, and look for the real meaning of his life in his writing.

  Raymond Greene spoke with Catherine in early April, and concluded that she would never leave Harry for Graham, even though she felt a ‘responsibility’ towards him. Graham was causing trouble for her with Harry and she found that his physical demands were overwhelming. Graham asked her if all this was accurate, and she told him plainly that she could not begin a new life with him by abandoning her children.35 At this point, they declared a ‘sabbatical’ in their relationship.36 Although things were strained, they came together again in Paris before the month was out.

  Greene knew that he suffered from a mental illness – he had said so to Vivien after the break-up of their marriage (see p. 171, above). Most of those who knew him well thought so too. When asked to predict what Greene might be writing in twenty years’ time, his old friend the novelist Edward Sackville-West (later 5th Baron Sackville) replied: ‘Oh, Graham will have committed suicide by then.’37 With Catherine herself embarking on a course of psychoanalysis,38 Greene agreed to meet with a psychiatrist named Eric Strauss. This was an inspired choice, and Strauss was essential to keeping Greene alive through the next hellish decade.

  A Jew of Austrian descent who converted to Catholicism, Strauss was one of Britain’s leading psychiatrists and a therapist of unfailing practicality. Having attained the rank of captain in the Middlesex Regiment in the First World War, he read modern languages at New College, Oxford, with a view to becoming a diplomat, but then switched to medicine. He was particularly influenced by time spent in Marburg studying under the psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, some of whose work he translated into English. A man of broad culture, Strauss composed music and was an amateur actor. Most of his medical career was spent at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, where he became a pioneer in the use of electro-shock therapy.39 His frequent collaborator, t
he wonderfully named neurologist Russell Brain (eventually created Baron Brain), wrote of Strauss: ‘He stressed “the principle of multiple causality”, by which he meant that no explanation of a psychological disorder is adequate which does not take into account the part played in its causation by the mind, the body, the inherited constitution, and the social environment of the sufferer; and he criticized the Freudians for laying undue stress on the psychological compared with other causal factors. He found support for his holistic approach in the Thomistic teaching on the nature of man, and he applied it in his practice . . .’40 Strauss hated easy answers. Although a fervent Catholic, he believed that spirituality had a good deal to learn from psychiatry; at the end of his life, according to Philip Caraman, SJ, he was working on a study of the fifteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe as an authentic saint afflicted with mental illness, and hoped also to write a psychiatric interpretation of St Paul.41

  Greene was initially reluctant to see Strauss, suggesting that what he really needed was ‘deep analysis’, but he was also desperate, praying, at a friend’s suggestion, to St Jude, the patron of lost causes.42 Greene met Strauss twice in the first week of May and three times in the second. It was not what he expected. Straightaway, Greene asked for shock therapy. Despite being its main advocate in Britain, Strauss refused: ‘Bear with your depression another fortnight. Meanwhile start writing down what you remember of your childhood.’ Greene did so and his depression lightened. After twenty years in his drawer, this long ‘screed’ provided him with the opening pages of A Sort of Life.43 Although lithium was used to relieve bipolar illness from the 1950s,44 there is no evidence that Greene received that treatment. In fact, nothing ever worked better for Greene than laying pen to paper, as he put it in 1980: ‘Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.’45

  Greene soon came to think of Strauss as a kind of a ‘saint’, even though he found the sessions with him difficult.46 Strauss evidently diagnosed manic depression, a term that Greene then used to describe himself.47 By the end of June, Strauss told him that his love for Catherine was unreasonably intense, and would thereafter hold to the view that the relationship should end.48 Greene was annoyed by this, and sometimes put Strauss’s opposition to the affair down to his being homosexual,49 but he continued to consult the psychiatrist for another decade, their therapeutic relationship and close friendship ending only with Strauss’s death in 1961.

  Greene and Walston spent about four weeks together in France in the early summer of 1950. It seems that she also came later to visit Greene in Anacapri, leaving in early July.50 In August, Greene sailed with Alex Korda on the Elsewhere in the Adriatic, then to Athens, and finally up the Rhône. Among those on board, again, was Michael Korda, for whom Greene now had a great affection. Michael Korda recalls how Greene worked: sitting on deck, he would write a precisely counted five hundred words, and stop wherever he was, even in the middle of a sentence, until the next day. Korda supposed that this discipline gave Greene something he could govern amidst the chaos of life.51 A bad typist, Greene wrote his stories in longhand, usually in a notebook with a Parker 51 fountain pen. By the early 1950s, he used a Dictaphone for all but his most personal correspondence; when abroad, he would post the Dictabelts to his secretary, Doris Young, in the St James’s flats where she worked for both Greene and Harry Walston. Young (and her successors) would type the contents of the belts onto already-signed sheets of letterhead. This practice led to the creation of carbon copies of the tens of thousands of letters Greene wrote over four decades, now preserved in an archive at Boston College. At some point, Greene took to reading the longhand versions of his novels into the Dictaphone as well.

  During the 1950 cruise, Greene was trying to finish his new manuscript. Before the publication of The Heart of the Matter, Greene decided he wanted to write what he called ‘the great sex novel’.52 Until fairly late in the day it bore the title ‘The Point of Departure’, before being published as The End of the Affair in 1951. He started on it in earnest at the end of 1948 while on Capri,53 and by mid-August 1950, with just a few days’ work left to do, he had completed sixty-one thousand words.54 Greene re-read Great Expectations just before beginning his novel and was struck by how Dickens, despite operating under the constraint of first-person narration, managed always to vary his tone. Apart from The Third Man, Greene had made little use of first-person narrators and worried that Bendrix’s opening declaration might be a trap: ‘ . . . this is a record far more of hate than of love . . . ’. The rest of the novel might take on a tone of unrelieved rancour. At times, he was tempted to rewrite everything from his accustomed third-person perspective, but part of what makes the novel work is that Bendrix’s claims about what he thinks and feels are always suspect – the reader learns quickly to question what he says and how he says it, just as the sections of Sarah’s journal provide a contrasting voice to set against that of Bendrix. Moreover, by choosing first-person narration Greene puts the whole notion of ‘I’ on trial.

  There is no doubt that the book’s basic situation was drawn from Greene’s affair with Catherine and his dealings with her husband. Bendrix is a novelist in love with the wife of a senior civil servant, to whom he gives the name Henry. However, it is almost as important to emphasize the ways in which this novel is not a transcript of Greene’s affair with Catherine. Beginning in 1939, the book describes a love affair in the Blitz, something Greene experienced with Dorothy Glover. The setting is Clapham Common, a place Greene shared with Vivien. His personal letters and journals rarely sound in any way like the snarling Bendrix. Catherine was a far edgier and more playful figure than Sarah, and by no means was Harry as downtrodden as Henry. So while the novel is correctly called a roman à clef, the elements drawn from life merely mark out the broad territory in which the act of imagination occurs.

  In another sense, treating it as a who’s who of Greene’s sex life is a precise denial of what the book is about. The epigraph is taken from Léon Bloy: ‘Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.’ The characters that are so easily equated with Graham, Catherine, and Harry actually have no being at all, even in the fictional world Greene has created, except as they approach Golgotha. Greene felt that a disaster had set in for the English novel after the death of Henry James; whereas traditional novelists had always conceived of their characters as being somehow under the eye of God, where their actions had an eternal consequence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions. This is a problem philosophers have worried about since the days of John Locke, whether identity is a matter of ‘substance’ or ‘consciousness’.55 Although he does not use the term, Greene believed in identity of substance, in there being an essential self. Greene saw Mrs Dalloway, for example, not as a novel with realized characters but as a mere ‘prose poem’.56 In his view, this was not only an intellectual difference between Woolf’s beliefs and his, but a failure of craft – her characters are defective because ontologically adrift. Of course, in pursuing such a point, Greene undermined his claim to be a novelist who happened to be a Catholic: his Catholicism was here shaping his sense of the novel. As a side note, it is worth observing that Greene did not simply dismiss Woolf – he thought highly of To the Lighthouse.57

  Once finished, Greene was slow to deliver his manuscript, causing some anxiety to A. S. Frere at Heinemann, who wanted to get it into print. Greene sent it first to Edward Sackville-West, a recent convert to Catholicism, who said he did not especially like it but believed Greene should go ahead and publish.58 That autumn he worked with Sackville-West to simplify the chronology of the journal section, and began to feel that it was indeed a good novel.

  At forty-six, he was young for the honour, but Greene discovered that he had a realis
tic chance of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He heard that Hemingway, whom he admired, had put himself out of the running with a bad book, Across the River and into the Trees, and that his real competition was William Faulkner and the Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist, author of Barabbas, which would be made into film starring Anthony Quinn in 1961.

  Greene headed to Stockholm, where he had dinner with the permanent secretary of the committee and one of its members on 19 October.59 No prize was awarded in 1949, so two were available in 1950. They went to Faulkner and Bertrand Russell. Enjoying home advantage, Lagerkvist won it in 1951, and then in 1952 it went to Greene’s friend Mauriac. It was the one honour Greene longed for and there was every reason to believe he would one day receive it. This was merely the first page of a saga of frustration and disappointment – the prize was never granted. In old age, Greene said, melodramatically, that he now longed for a prize bigger than the Nobel – ‘Death.’60

  28

  MALAYA

  ‘Malaya was the first of my escapes.’1 Distressed over Catherine, Graham decided to follow his brother to Malaya, then in the midst of the Emergency – essentially a war, though overshadowed by the one in Korea. Some of Greene’s most memorable journeys in the next decade would be to countries breaking from the colonial control of Britain, France, and Belgium. His way to Malaya was paid for by Life magazine, for whom he had written an article on the recently proclaimed dogma of the Assumption.