The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Greene went on to describe the splintered alliances and complex motivations on both sides of the fight. While he spoke respectfully of the sacrifice of the French, and portrayed Ho Chi Minh as being pulled along by communist hardliners, the best that could be hoped for, in his view, was an armistice comparable to the arrangement in Korea. The French would then get on with their withdrawal. The communists would probably persecute Catholics in Tonkin, but even so he did not believe there could be a general victory against communism in this war.11

  In early March, Greene submitted a version of the article to his editor at Life, Emmet Hughes, who did not like it. Over the next two months, he submitted a series of updates as new information came to him, and in early May obtained permission to publish a French version in Paris Match. However, the English version languished on Hughes’s desk, and by June he knew it was being spiked.12 Long afterwards, he incorporated portions of it into the memoir Ways of Escape, and it appears in full in a late collection of his prose entitled Reflections.

  Greene spent most of that spring in Anacapri, in the company, first, of his sister Elisabeth and then of Catherine. He wrote to Catherine that he wished they could go together to Ravello in July to witness the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St Pantaleon13 – about as Catholic a tryst as can be imagined.

  In the meantime, he was becoming more at home on the island of Capri. He usually dined at a restaurant run by a woman named Gemma near the cathedral and a couple, Aniello and Carmelina maintained his house. That summer an old German, Baron von Schack, an impoverished pederast who repaid hospitality with wild flowers, died in Anacapri. Over the objections of the carabinieri who wanted to seal up his little flat until his estranged wife arrived, the novelist made sure that his pickelhaube, his spiked helmet from the First World War, was placed on his coffin,14 just as Wormold does for Dr Hasselbacher in Our Man in Havana.

  Greene became friends with the uninhibited Elisabeth Moor, an Austrian doctor whose practice was mainly among the poor of the island, and twenty years later he ghosted her lusty memoir An Impossible Woman, which contains amusing, and evidently authoritative, anecdotes about Greene himself. For example, her boxer dog, likely the inspiration for ‘Buller’ in The Human Factor, frequently shook to death cats that came into her garden; rather than have this known and the dog put down, she stealthily got rid of the corpses, once with Greene’s help – they each took one handle of a bag containing an enormous dead cat – and he complained about the weight all the way to her secret burial ground.15 He admired the sheer intensity with which she lived and her refusal to regret a carnal past – she eventually provided the inspiration for Aunt Augusta in Travels with My Aunt.

  34

  THE SPLINTER

  Long ago, Greene’s family had staged skits, and as a schoolboy he had written historical plays. As a mature writer, he had written film scripts and radio plays, but The Living Room was his first full stage play. He had begun it five years earlier on Achill,1 the first notes written inside the back cover of the anthology Devotional Poets of the XVII Century, which he often carried when travelling.2 He had worked on the play from time to time, and now learned that the producer Donald Albery wanted to stage it at Wyndham’s Theatre in the spring of 1953. The director would be the young Peter Glenville,3 later best known as director of the films Becket (1964) and Graham Greene’s The Comedians (1967).

  The story of an affair between a married psychologist and a young Catholic woman who commits suicide, The Living Room reflects Greene’s sense that Catholic marriage doctrine, regardless of its ultimate validity, left couples and families in misery. The house in which the play is set becomes a metaphor for repression: as each room in which a person dies is closed off there is less and less room for the living. Important parts of the play are conducted as a dialectic between the psychologist and the girl’s uncle, a priest in a wheelchair. Among the many changes to the script was one necessitated by the Lord Chamberlain’s objection to the sounds of a lavatory.4 By September 1952 Greene provided Albery and Glenville with at least three revised versions of the play.5

  As the British production was gearing up, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm put on a production, which was immediately acclaimed by Swedish critics.6 Greene went to Stockholm, and while there met with Pär Lagerkvist, who had taken the Nobel Prize in 1951 – doubtless, he hoped that a good word from him would sway the committee for a future award. He also met, in passing, Stig Dagerman, the most highly regarded Swedish writer of the younger generation, and his wife the actor Anita Björk, then appearing in Shaw’s Pygmalion.7

  The British production was a great success. The cast was led by the young Dorothy Tutin, whom Greene regarded as ‘the making of the play’,8 and Eric Portman in the role of the priest. It had its first performance in Glasgow before opening in London on 16 April 1953, for a run of 310 performances at Wyndham’s, earning Greene about £5000.9 The play opened at Henry Miller’s Theatre in New York on 17 November 1954, with Barbara Bel Geddes playing the part of the young woman.10 One of Greene’s most durable plays, The Living Room has been successfully staged on various occasions, including a revival at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London in 2013.

  Meanwhile, Korda had put The Heart of the Matter into production, with much of the filming in Freetown. Having invested a great deal of time in Basil Dean’s failed stage version, Greene did not want to write this script. The director George More O’Ferrall and the scriptwriter Ian Dalrymple came up with a version that evaded Scobie’s actual suicide by having him on the verge of shooting himself, but then being called away on police business, in the course of which he is killed. Their version also made little of the priest’s comments on the mercy of God. While Greene accepted that there would be trouble from the censors, he proposed slight changes, which would clarify Scobie’s intent to commit suicide, and give the priest the last word again, something he regarded, as few other people might, ‘a happy ending’.11 The director tried to accommodate his wishes with some reshooting, but the film’s structure was not altered. Released in November 1953, it disappointed Greene, though he could not fail to admire Trevor Howard’s performance as Scobie.12

  As usual, he went sailing that summer with Alex Korda aboard the Elsewhere. Leaving Venice around 2 August, they sailed to the Croatian island of Rab, and then to Split, before leaving the yacht in Brindisi around 11 August. This particular voyage had a touch of derring-do as British intelligence had given them a large currency allowance to photograph the coastline of Yugoslavia13 – if challenged by Tito’s men, no one would have a better excuse for taking pictures than a film producer.

  And yet, this was not the deepest secret among those making the cruise. That actually belonged to Thomas Gilby, a Dominican priest two years older than Greene. A former naval chaplain who lived at Blackfriars priory in Cambridge, and a regular visitor at Thriplow, he had written books on literature, Thomas Aquinas, and, somewhat ironically, the morals of married life. Another who confessed to a reluctant Graham Greene, he disclosed that he was having an affair. After leaving the Elsewhere, the two went briefly to Anacapri before taking a further holiday in Salzburg. Greene shared some of his sleeping pills with the disconsolate priest, and poured him many glasses of liquor. Greene wrote to Catherine that it would probably be best for Gilby to leave the priesthood.14

  Though disturbed by Gilby’s revelations, he could understand his feelings, and sometimes wrote about how falling in love was like being ambushed – his mind was still full of the Viet Minh. Embarrassment over Babbling April had not quite killed off the poet in Graham Greene, and from time to time he still wrote poems, many of them highly accomplished. In November 1952 he produced what may be the most memorable of them all, ‘On the Road from Strasbourg to Paris’, later retitled ‘I Do Not Believe’:

  I believe only in love that strikes suddenly,

  out of a clear sky:

  I do not believe in the slow germination of friendship

  or one that asks ‘why
?’

  Because your love came savagely, suddenly,

  like an act of war,

  I cannot conceive a love that rises gently

  or subsides without a scar.15

  The scar was on its way. Philip Caraman, a Jesuit priest, soon told Greene that Thomas Gilby’s affair was with Catherine Walston. However, Greene had suspected it already and wrote to her: ‘I hadn’t realised that other people were wondering too what I wonder – I thought I was crazy & manic-depressive.’16 Whatever relationship there was between Gilby and Walston ended by January, but the breach between Greene and Walston never quite healed. The officious Caraman had made it a project to separate Greene and Walston, and on another occasion told Walston that Graham had women in Paris.17 Editor of The Month and the author of middlebrow histories and biographies, Caraman was much loved by Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, and Alec Guinness, but after this episode, Graham Greene grew to resent him, and near the end of his life judged his priesthood ‘very suspect’.18

  ‘I can’t get you out of my heart, you’ve splintered inside it & surgeons are useless. They say one day I may die of the splinter, but it can’t be removed.’19 Greene’s letters to Walston in early 1953 varied in tone between bitterness and studied resignation, but the splinter was not coming out. The problem was not that she had been involved with someone else – they both had other lovers – but the choice of Gilby, whom he regarded as a close friend, seemed a complicated betrayal of love, friendship, and the shared faith that was the backdrop for their relationship. Things improved enough for him to join her for a chaste holiday in Jamaica in March, where they were entertained by the Bond creator Ian Fleming, whose wife Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh about Greene: ‘Is he living in sin? Is he tortured? He remained remote from all, totally polite and holding the cocktail shaker as a kind of defensive weapon.’20

  The perfect moment for Graham and Catherine to untangle themselves came in February, when their landlord gave them four months’ notice to vacate their adjacent flats in St James’s Street. Instead, they maintained their arrangements by taking two sets of chambers at Albany, an historic and exclusive enclave off Piccadilly which had numbered among its residents Lord Byron, Lord Palmerston, Aldous Huxley, and J. B. Priestley.21 According to an unpublished essay of his, Greene once enlivened this rather sober place by smoking opium there, though it was so old it had dried up and crumbled away.22 He and the Walstons were seldom in London at the same time, and for him his flat was as much a business address as a home. Doris Young, the secretary he shared with Harry, did her typing there. What time Graham had with Catherine was now usually spent abroad, as, for example, in May of that year when they had a happy time together at Anacapri. Indeed, Anacapri was also where he was able to write most productively.

  In the summer of 1953 Greene was often in the company of the Australian Jocelyn Rickards, a small woman with black hair and astonishing green eyes who went on to become a leading costume designer in British cinema. She said that she met Greene at an exhibition in 1951, and experienced an instant chemistry – she says they fell in love. They did not begin an affair for about two years, as Catherine Walston was always in the way. Rickards had already begun a much longer-term open relationship with A. J. Ayer, whose sexual wanderings were prodigious. She recalled: ‘Progressively, I became part of a trio, a quartet, a quintet and sextet.’ Still, her relationship with Ayer endured, as did another with the playwright John Osborne. As for Greene, she recalled, ‘His skin was always faintly sunburned and the texture of fine dry silk.’23 Their relationship was reckless and exuberant, involving on one occasion intercourse in the first-class carriage of a train from Southend, observable to those on each platform where the train stopped. She said that Greene was full of guilt and spoke of himself as a manic depressive, and yet the man she knew was ‘full of gaiety, wit, immense charm and perfect manners. According to some of his so-called friends, you’d think he was never off his knees.’24 When Rickards came to write a memoir many years later, she had his approval: ‘I’m no more ashamed of our affair than you are.’25

  Greene was seldom a happy man, if often an amusing one. His practical jokes included from time to time ringing up a retired solicitor in Golders Green who happened also to be named Graham Greene and berating him, in various accents, for writing ‘these filthy novels’. To get down off this particular cross, the solicitor changed to an ex-directory telephone number. Greene (the novelist, not the solicitor) would carry with him other people’s business cards, and when he spotted a friend in a restaurant he would write lewd or inscrutable proposals on the back of a card, send it across, and watch the friend’s reaction.26

  From time to time, Greene entered competitions in which, under pseudonyms, he imitated his own writing style.27 The first time he did it led to the making of a new film in 1953. Four years earlier, the New Statesman had offered a six-guinea prize for the best opening or conclusion to a novel in the manner of a contemporary author named Greene or Green. Graham Greene submitted three entries; one of them, ‘The Stranger’s Hand’ by M. Wilkerson, managed to pick up a guinea, as the prize was divided six ways. Other entrants, including Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, had to settle for honorable mentions.28 In a letter to the editor, Greene identified M. Wilkerson as ‘yours truly’, and lamented the failure of D. R. Cook and N. Wilkinson (his other pseudonyms) to win prizes, as the money would be, in a phrase reminiscent of Harry Lime, ‘free of Income Tax’.29

  That guinea was the first of thousands that the story earned for its author. One of his best friends in Italy was the novelist and film-maker Mario Soldati, a flamboyant, womanizing, high-living genius, whom he had met in the late 1940s. Soldati had had an affair with Gillian Sutro, whose husband John was a film producer and a contemporary of Greene’s at Oxford. In Italy, Greene and Soldati kept glamorous company, dining with the likes of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. When Soldati learned of the ‘The Stranger’s Hand’ caper, he loved it.30

  At his prompting, Greene expanded the two paragraphs into a story before handing off the writing of the script itself to Guy Elwes and Giorgio Bassani. Working for Korda’s firm British Lion, Soldati served as the director, with John Stafford and Peter Moore the producers. Looking to retain some control of the script, Greene took on a new role as associate producer, and this may have also appealed to him as a way of continuing to have a career if he ever reached an end as a writer. However, he found the financial side of producing films dreary and soon gave up on it.31

  Filming began in Venice in April 1953, and he hurried there as soon as The Living Room had opened in London. The new film rather grafted The Fallen Idol onto The Third Man – with some success. Strange as it now seems, Venice was, as the opening narration puts it, ‘a border city’. As Churchill defined it in 1946, nearby Trieste marked one end of the Iron Curtain. Yugoslavia, on which Greene and Korda had done some spying the previous summer, was a communist country, and the story turns on a pair of kidnappings by Yugoslav agents in Venice.

  The production brought back Trevor Howard as Major Court, an MI5 officer, and Alida Valli, who had played Anna in The Third Man, as a refugee and hotel receptionist. Major Court witnesses the kidnapping of a Yugoslavian and gives chase only to be abducted himself and held captive by the very complicated Doctor Vivaldi, played by Eduardo Ciannelli, who injects the two men with various drugs to aid interrogation – they are to be taken across the Adriatic in a cargo ship. Court’s young son Roger sounds the alarm and a search begins. Like Philippe in The Fallen Idol, Roger wanders the streets; by chance, he encounters Doctor Vivaldi, a surprisingly sentimental torturer, who befriends him and buys him a gelato. The doctor later remarks to Major Court, ‘Aren’t we all fond of children?’

  Valli’s character, Roberta, wants to help the boy and persuades her American boyfriend, played by Richard Basehart, to rescue Major Court from the ship, which the authorities may not search without causing an international incident. He does so by setting the ship alight, so that a wat
erborne fire brigade must board the ship in what becomes a Trafalgar of firehoses. Meanwhile, one of the Yugoslav agents shoots at Major Court, only to have Vivaldi block the bullet with his own body out of loyalty to Roger. Towards the end of the movie, Greene makes a cameo – his hand is seen untying the knot of one of the fireboats.32

  If not quite as good as The Third Man, it was an excellent thriller, despite being outflanked by political changes. At the end of the Second World War, the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito was an ally of Stalin and unquestionably a threat to his neighbours. By the time the film was released in 1954, he had fallen out with the Russians and was regarded, despite the repressiveness of his regime, as the sort of communist the West could live with. It was no longer plausible to think of his agents as truly dangerous or of Venice as threatened, and the film lacked the air of menace that hung over Harry Lime’s Vienna. Though fairly well received, it fell short of the hopes of Korda, Soldati, and Greene.33

  35

  MAU MAU

  For half a century, Kenya had seemed the most secure of British possessions in Africa – white settlers could obtain large, fertile farms in the highlands, with an orderly and submissive workforce of local people. Although her own farm failed, Karen Blixen’s memoir Out of Africa presents an eloquent and nostalgic account of the settler project. In the ‘Happy Valley’ of the Wanjohi, aristocratic expatriates contrived a privileged, gin-soaked, and sexually freewheeling way of life, which, again, was founded on the availability of land and labour and the illusion of racial harmony.