The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Cogny arranged for Greene to go to Dien Bien Phu12 on 5 January 1954, and he was disturbed by what he saw. The French had indeed assembled a great many men, guns, and aeroplanes, and could point to locations where the approaching Viet Minh would be subject to enfilade or flanking fire. The camp was set in the middle of a plain where human-wave tactics could only end in slaughter. It was ringed by hills that the French had fortified and given names as if they were girlfriends or mistresses: Anne-Marie, Beatrice, Claudine, Dominique, Eliane, Gabrielle, Huguette, and Isabelle.

  Further off, other hills were held by the Viet Minh, who could see every movement within the compound but were themselves hidden from view. General Giap had studied the abandoned camp at Na San and changed his tactics. Motivated by a popular land reform recently begun in the countryside that promised to give freedom from traditional landlords, two hundred thousand civilian porters dragged artillery and anti-aircraft guns over great distances to the heights above the French camp. They also brought a huge amount of rice to sustain the army of fifty thousand Giap had assembled.13 The French had sent out scouts and knew that the Viet Minh were massing for attack. Shells fell intermittently on Dien Bien Phu as the Viet Minh worked out the exact range. The French, however, could not locate the enemy guns, which were dug in and camouflaged by trees and vegetation.

  Greene witnessed a curious display of nerves among the French when the commander, Colonel Christian de Castries, lost his temper in the officers’ mess. The chief of artillery mentioned the withdrawal from Na San and de Castries angrily declared that that was a defensive position and that this was intended for counter-attack. He ordered that no one mention the withdrawal again in the mess. When Greene later asked what the colonel had meant, an officer waved at the hills and said that to take the offensive they would need not a squadron of tanks but a thousand mules.14

  Greene toured the hilltop outposts and slept in a dugout beside an intelligence officer, then returned to Hanoi the next day for a further meeting with General Cogny.15 Greene had no training in field tactics, but common sense, and perhaps the remarks of Cogny, made him afraid of what would happen at Dien Bien Phu.

  He could see that the great dilemma was that without independence the Vietnamese had no incentive to fight the communists, and yet if the French left the communists would likely seize a quick and permanent victory. What was possible? To pursue this point he went to Bui Chu, the Catholic enclave adjoining Phat Diem, where the French had experimented by allowing the Vietnamese to conduct their own defence. At first, it was a disaster, as two battalions deserted to the Viet Minh, taking their new American weapons with them, and the French had to rush back, but given time and training the local forces were certainly up to the job.

  Greene was taken to see Thui-nhai, and it was on the road to this village that the landmine was found and disarmed. He referred to Thui-nhai as ‘the most impressive thing’ he had seen during the war. Everyone who could walk served in the militia, with girls as young as twelve armed with knives and grenades, other villagers with Sten guns or merely old rifles. Mud ramparts had been built, extending even inside the church, as that was an apt place for a final stand. This village had survived nine attacks and received the surrenders of Viet Minh who had had enough of the war – one officer brought with him plans for the capture of Bui Chu. Taken for a flyover in a small plane, Greene saw a French flag on just one artillery position and felt that he was looking at ‘a bird’s eye view of independence’.16

  This was a village with one culture – nearly everyone, apart from the Buddhist commandant, was Catholic – so the model might not apply easily everywhere, but for Greene this was the best possible way forward: the Vietnamese, given the means, could look after themselves. Moreover, he seems to have been proud that Catholics could lead the way. On his earlier visits, he had been fascinated by the Bishop of Phat Diem, mistakenly referring to him as a Trappist – he was actually a member of a similar and equally austere branch of the Cistercian Order.17 As Greene saw it, he had only one ambition: to build new churches, even though he did not have enough priests to operate them. He was left with an image of the gaunt bishop riding stiffly in a jeep with his fingers raised in benediction. The Bishop of Bui Chu, Pham Ngoc Chi, was a very different sort of person. He could see that while his people needed churches, they also needed schools and hospitals, and they needed a functioning economy. Greene thought of him as a much-needed modernizer; however, he regarded both men as compromised by their military activities.18

  Certainly, the church in Bui Chu had endured a great deal. Seven months earlier, the Viet Minh had abducted four priests; among them were two Belgians whom Greene had met in 1952 and with whom he had discussed English literature. The Viet Minh had fired into a chapel, killing four nuns, one of whom fell dead beneath a statue of Mary. And yet Greene, in the midst of his own depression, found the liturgies in Bui Chu cheerful, utterly unlike those of ‘bourgeois’ Europe: ‘The Bishop was robed to the music of violins, gay tinkly music like an eighteenth-century gavotte. The altar boys carried the vestments with a ballet grace: even the candles on the altar seemed to dance . . . This was a Mass to be enjoyed, and why not? The sacrament is too serious for us to compete in seriousness. Under the enormous shadow of the cross it is better to be gay.’19

  Greene returned to Hanoi, where he heard that the Viet Minh had initiated pincer movements in Laos, and through the evening of 11 January 1954 listened to helicopters bringing in the wounded.20 The next morning he flew to Vientiane, where he attended an audience with the crown prince and tried to find out what was going on. In the latter days of his visit to Indochina, he had meetings with a series of leaders, among them the regent of Laos, General Fernand Gambiez, and King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, but no records of the conversations have come to light.21 Greene did record a very illuminating discussion he had on a flight to Luang Prabang, when an unnamed French colonel, one of nine who were travelling together, complained that they needed 250 more planes in this part of Indochina, but had nowhere to put them, as all the landing strips were full. He also spoke uneasily about Dien Bien Phu, confirming for Greene that the Viet Minh were moving artillery there, though he spoke with scorn of the prospects of a massed assault.22

  The colonel was right to worry about those guns. On 13 March 1954, the Viet Minh began a massive bombardment that knocked out unprotected French artillery pieces and destroyed the airstrip. The camp was besieged, relying on the Americans to airdrop supplies. Having dismissed the capabilities of the Viet Minh, the artillery commander at Dien Bien Phu, the man whom Greene had heard rebuked in the mess for speaking of Na San, went to his bunker, held a grenade to his chest, and blew himself up.23

  Under heavy rainfall that created misery for the thousands of wounded on both sides, the Viet Minh expanded a system of trenches allowing them to mount ground attacks against the hills controlled by the French. As the situation unfolded, it became clear that only American airpower could relieve the camp. In the end, President Eisenhower, having been refused British support, decided there would be no bombing, as it might provoke China. On 7 May 1954 the camp fell. About ten thousand Viet Minh and two thousand French had been killed.24 Nearly eleven thousand French soldiers were marched off to a grim captivity, from which only a third ever returned.25

  This battle still lay a few weeks in the future, but the atmosphere was gloomy, and Greene spent a great deal of time among soldiers, who always made him nervous.26 In Hong Kong, just after Christmas, he had dabbled in heroin and did not like it.27 In Vietnam he smoked opium almost every day, sometimes as many as eight pipes. Between the mood disorder and the countless objective reasons to be depressed in Vietnam in 1954, he was particularly troubled.

  Over the next month or so he engaged in some erratic behaviour. Going to Bangkok to meet Catherine on 22 January, he was at the same time conducting a liaison with Mercia Ryhiner, a strikingly beautiful young woman of Eurasian descent. She had been briefly married to a man who trapped exotic anima
ls by the thousands for European zoos, and became herself an expert trapper who would, without the protection of a gun, take on apes, leopards, tigers, elephants, and king cobras. She became something of a celebrity when the couple came ashore in Genoa with a shipment of rhinoceroses for the zoo in Basel and the press pursued a ‘beauty and the beasts’ storyline.28

  Unhappy with Catherine and feeling strongly about Mercia, Greene found ways to spend time with both women in Bangkok at the end of January. He went to Saigon with Catherine from 6 to 17 February,29 and made arrangements to see Mercia in Singapore at the end of the month, spending a total of three weeks with her. They quarrelled, something Greene blamed on himself. As there was now no likelihood of a marriage to Catherine, Greene wished that something more might come of his connection with Mercia, but she felt uneasy about his not being divorced,30 so released him back into the wild. The two remained friends, and in later years she struck up a friendship with Greene’s daughter. In 1978, she married the actor Rex Harrison.31

  While in Singapore and then Penang, Greene worked on his articles, which he feared might close a door for him in Indochina. He wrote to Catherine: ‘I don’t know how the papers will take them because they are very anti-American & anti-Emperor. I’m afraid so much they won’t let me back again which means the end of opium.’32 He was wrong about the newspapers. He arrived back in Europe just as Dien Bien Phu was taking over the headlines, and his first-hand knowledge was exactly what the editors needed. The Sunday Times published two pieces (21 and 28 March 1954), as did the New Republic (5 and 12 April 1954), with single articles appearing in the Spectator (16 April 1954) and The Tablet (17 April 1954)33 Greene wrote politely to General Cogny to thank him for his help and to express the hope that his articles did not give offence. Cogny seems to have taken it all graciously and the two remained in touch.34

  37

  NO ONE EXPECTS THE INQUISITION

  In Vietnam, Greene had been working in a soldiers’ world of orders, duty, and obedience; on his return to England he found himself unexpectedly caught up in another chain of command. On 9 April 1954, Greene was summoned to meet Bernard Griffin, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, who read to him a letter from Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, the arch-conservative head of the Holy Office, once known as the Inquisition. Addressing Griffin, Pizzardo wrote that The Power and the Glory had been denounced to the Holy Office, and while he made a show of gentleness in referring to Graham Greene as a convert, he maintained that in the book the human condition seems insuperably wretched and that the work caused harm to the priesthood: ‘[it] portrays a state of affairs so paradoxical, so extraordinary and so erroneous as to disconcert unenlightened persons, who form the majority of the readers’. Greene was instructed to stop publication and translation of the book until its errors were corrected.1

  Greene almost always treated priests and prelates with respect – the notable exception coming late in his life with Pope John Paul II, whom he thought a vastly over-rated bully – and he was not sure how to proceed. Evelyn Waugh, who had also had brushes with censorship, volunteered to join any public demonstration that Greene wished to make but assumed he would not wish to do so.2 This was a generous offer: a key difference between the two novelists was that whereas Greene was a rebel and a Catholic, the great rebellion of Waugh’s life was, in fact, just being a Catholic. He hated confrontations with the church; in particular, he disapproved of Greene’s public letter of protest, shortly after, concerning the church’s refusal to provide a funeral or even prayers at the graveside of the French author Colette, who was divorced.3

  Greene believed that his problem with the Holy Office had actually originated with Griffin, who in his Pastoral Letter for Advent 1953 had implicitly condemned The Power and the Glory and other works by Catholic writers for their treatment of adultery.4 In fact, the complaint had come from a priest in Switzerland, and Griffin was merely articulating the views of Cardinal Pizzardo.5

  There was, however, a hidden dynamic. If Pope Pius XII had read The End of the Affair and only expressed concern for its author, and The Heart of the Matter had outraged conservative clerics throughout the world, why did the Holy Office turn its guns on the The Power and the Glory? Years later, Greene remarked to Anthony Burgess that it was an odd choice.6 As a matter of theology, it reads as a thought experiment conducted within a very orthodox understanding of the priesthood. Moreover, the Holy Office sent the novel to three theological consultants, none of whom recommended it be condemned. The most negative said the book was terribly sad and ought not to have been written, and that Greene’s bishop should admonish him to write differently.7 So why did the Holy Office ignore this advice?

  The answer probably lay in the 1930s. Pizzardo had been the architect of Vatican policy towards Mexico and the Cristeros, advocating Catholic Action rather than armed struggle, and he was anxious about the reputation of the church in that country.8 Insofar as Greene portrayed the moral inadequacy of a certain kind of priest, he inadvertently gave support to anticlericalism. In portraying simony as a cornerstone of parish life, he was confirming part of the claim that the Mexican church exploited the poor. It is very likely that Pizzardo’s difficulty with the book had little to do with sex and that he was really attempting to control the historical narrative.

  Taking the advice of his old friend, the papal diplomat Archbishop David Mathew, and a copyright lawyer, Greene composed a ‘casuistical’ letter to Pizzardo that began by apologizing for a delay in answering the Holy Office as he had been in Indochina, trying to mobilize world opinion on behalf of persecuted Catholics. He then pointed out that the licences for publication and translation of The Power and the Glory had long since passed to various publishers and he no longer had the power to suppress the book. At Mathew’s suggestion, a copy of this letter was sent to the very cultured Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, Pro-Secretary of State at the Vatican, in the hope that he would get involved.9

  In fact, Montini had already intervened, advising Pizzardo that he had read the book long ago as one of ‘singular literary value’. He went on to accept that it was sad but insisted that it showed the priest’s spiritual fidelity to his mission.10 It was at his suggestion that the book was sent to the third consultant, who thought the investigation was pure nonsense. Pizzardo could see he was playing a weak hand and allowed the complaint against The Power and the Glory just to fade away.

  After his election as Pope Paul VI, Giovanni Battista Montini met in July 1965 with Greene and told him, to his delight, that he had read The Power and the Glory, Brighton Rock, Stamboul Train, and The Heart of the Matter.11 Greene brought up Pizzardo’s attempt to suppress his Mexican novel; the pope seemed not to remember the case, but said to Greene, ‘Parts of all your books will always offend some Catholics and you shouldn’t pay any attention to that.’12 Canonized in 2018, Paul VI is the first saint known to have been a fan of Graham Greene.

  Pizzardo used up the last of Greene’s patience with Catholic interference with his work. Not long after, Greene read Ralph Ellison’s ‘wonderful’ novel Invisible Man: ‘One’s own books seem tight & narrow by comparison.’ Meanwhile complaints about his work continued to emanate from Rome. He felt that, like Ellison, he should be bolder in just saying what he thought: ‘What fun is there in writing if one doesn’t go too far? What makes me a “small” writer is that I never do. There’s a damned cautiousness in what I write, & therefore one has a “damned” success.’13 From the mid-1950s, Greene became more willing to write about doubt as the counterpart of belief – something he had certainly experienced but had rather shied away from in his fiction.

  He was making little progress on The Quiet American. As usual, in the middle of a major work, Greene felt confused and uncertain, telling his mother at one point: ‘I still don’t know what the book’s about.’14 In May 1954, he was seized by the idea for a novella, Loser Takes All, which he wrote in a matter of weeks while staying at a hotel in Monte Carlo and conducting his research at the gaming
tables.15 He later recalled, in error, that the book was written in 1955.16 It was serialized in August and September 1954, then published as a book in January 1955.17

  It is the story of an accountant named Bertram whose employer, Mr Dreuther, offers him and his fiancée, Cary, a honeymoon cruise in his yacht, beginning at Monte Carlo. The employer then forgets all about it. The couple have to live by their wits in the casinos, quarrelling, and reconciling. Mr Dreuther eventually appears and remembers the arrangement. In writing the ‘sentimental’ Loser Takes All, Greene wanted to break out of old habits: ‘A reputation is like a death mask. I wanted to smash the mask.’18 This novella anticipates the comic fiction he would write over the next decade, and, in particular, it introduces numbers as a leitmotif, which reappears especially in Our Man in Havana. In Loser Takes All, Bertram becomes enslaved by a mathematical gambling ‘system’ and recovers his humanity only when he gets rid of it – it stands for any system of thought that is too sure of itself.

  The situation was drawn from an occasion in June 1951 when Greene and Walston were left waiting in Athens for the Elsewhere.19 Mr Dreuther is closely modelled on Korda and given many of his catchphrases. Korda was not at all offended by the portrait, but he and Greene had a rare quarrel over the casting of the part when it was made into a film. Greene wanted Alec Guinness, but Korda refused, and it went to the lugubrious Robert Morley.20 There was more to this than Greene was willing to make public. Korda’s distribution company, British Lion, went into receivership in the late spring of 1955;21 Greene heard that the film of Loser Takes All, for which he wrote the script, would be cancelled. He was livid and thought the friendship finished – but they sorted out their differences.22 The project went ahead with John Stafford as producer, Ken Annakin as director, and Rossano Brazzi and Glynis Johns playing the leads. Released in Britain in September 1956, the film was a pleasant but decidedly minor production.