The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  With Scofield playing Hamlet at night and rehearsing the whisky priest during the day, Greene was afraid that he was making the part too ‘romantic’, and both he and Brook thought the play was in trouble. A breakthrough came at the dress rehearsal, once Scofield had finished with Hamlet and cut off the long hair that went with that part; he then found himself entering the downtrodden character in a new way. Laurence Olivier seldom went to any play more than once but saw this one several times and said later that it was the best performance he could remember: ‘The evilly catalystic Peasant, digging into the Priest’s inner life, asks him if he has any children and in his fascinatingly chosen Birmingham accent Paul, in a way I have never been able to forget in twenty-five years, replied, “Ovva daw-taw.” ’6 Olivier himself would act the part on American television in 1961, but could not outdo Scofield’s stage version.

  42

  THE FILTHIEST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ

  It was never quite enough in Graham Greene’s life to have a single controversy running. As one of his three books of the year for the Sunday Times, he chose the little-known Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita,1 which had been published in Paris by Maurice Girodias, who specialized in sexually explicit books, among them works by Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. A reporter gave a copy of the book to John Gordon, editor-in-chief of the Sunday Express, who denounced it as ‘the filthiest book I have ever read’ and commenced a campaign against Graham Greene and the Sunday Times.2

  In his own right, Gordon was a fairly amusing, if illiberal, character. As a young reporter, he had taken carrier pigeons to football games to get the results to his office without delay. As an editor, he had introduced horoscopes into his newspaper, with the result that he and his astrologer were prosecuted as rogues, vagabonds, and fortune-tellers, but acquitted when it was decided that the Vagrancy Act did not quite cover this new kind of wickedness.3 Greene saw in Gordon’s outburst an opportunity to ridicule British censorship, which still involved the confiscation and burning of proscribed works. Just at the moment he needed a guide through the historical and legal niceties of the issue, he came upon the young Norman St John-Stevas’s book Obscenity and the Law, which he reviewed favourably4 and afterwards mined for comical quotations on censorship and pornography.

  With the help of the film producer John Sutro and Ian Gilmour, the owner of the Spectator, Greene set up the John Gordon Society in honour of the journalist’s efforts to protect British homes from filth. Its first meeting, at Greene’s flat in Albany, was attended by about sixty grandees, among them A. S. Frere, Freddie Ayer, Christopher Isherwood, Lady Bridget Parsons, and Lord Kinross. The Home Secretary and Director of Public Prosecutions were invited but sent their regrets. A public meeting was held at the Horseshoe Hotel in Bloomsbury on 25 July 1956, and Gordon himself was invited to speak on pornography. A tall, grey figure, he asked, ‘Am I in the right room for the John Gordon Society Dinner?’ Upon hearing that he was, he added, ‘I am John Gordon.’ Making the obligato reference to Greene’s libel against Shirley Temple, he found the large crowd, which included Lady Antonia Fraser, Lilian Gish, and Anita Loos, generally set against him; however, badgering interruptions from a shirt-sleeved Randolph Churchill, who was sweating heavily and probably drunk, won him a little sympathy. As a consequence of these shenanigans, Nabokov’s book found an American publisher and became a sensation.

  Greene and the equally manic Sutro had done this sort of thing before. In the late summer of 1953, they met two young American women at the bar of the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh and spent the next day with them. Sutro recalled, ‘I must say those Texan girls really enlivened our stay in Edinburgh and taught us quite a lot about Texas.’5 On the train back to London, Greene drank a good many black velvets and proposed, ‘Le’s found an Anglo-Texan Sh-Society’.6 The two composed a letter to The Times,7 announcing its birth and inviting those interested to contact them. Greene signed as president and Sutro as vice-president. With Greene in Kenya, Sutro received sixty letters from British Texophiles, among them the MP and architect Sir Alfred Bossom and the banker Samuel Guinness, both of whom got the joke but essentially took over the society and ran it with a straight face.

  On 6 March 1954, in honour of the anniversary of Texan independence from Mexico, the society held a barbecue at Denham Film Studios, where more than fifteen hundred guests, many of them American airmen, consumed 2800 pounds of beef and dozens of barrels of cider; there were three country bands; and London buses hired to shuttle guests had as their destination signs ‘TEXAS From Piccadilly Circus’. Unfortunately, Greene missed the event as he was in Vietnam dealing with somewhat quieter Americans.

  The society later hosted many political, cultural, and commercial delegations. In 1959 the Governor of Texas revived, without launching any ships, the Texas Navy, which had been disbanded for well over a century, just so that he could name honorary admirals. Twenty-five Britons, including Prince Philip, were commissioned Texas admirals, and the society became responsible for entertaining them. Greene resigned as president on April Fool’s Day 1955, pleading the demands of travel. Sutro stayed a member until 1972, when he and his wife Gillian moved to Monaco. In its last days, one member remarked that ‘the society was a little top-hatted instead of ten-galloned’, and despite efforts to rescue it, the Anglo-Texan Society rode into the sunset in 1979.8

  The madcap Sutros were among Greene’s closest friends in London, especially after they moved in 1953 to 26 Belgrave Square, where he was a frequent guest for dinner. The invariable dish was shepherd’s pie, which he prized; Greene contributed bottles of Château Cheval Blanc. At Oxford, John, a big man and an accomplished mimic, had been close to Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton, and was known for taking his friends motoring in a hired Daimler followed by a more humble vehicle carrying champagne, caviar, and foie gras, which might not be available in country shops.9

  Somewhat younger than her lumbering and very amiable husband, Gillian, who had grown up in France, was a small, dark-haired woman often mistaken for Vivien Leigh.10 At different times she aspired to be an artist, an actor, and a writer, being moderately talented in each of these areas. One evening, the Sutros held a cocktail party to which Greene came very early, saying he was in a nervous state and could not bear meeting the guests, and so would have to leave again shortly. Gillian, dressed in tangerine silk Gucci trousers, was upset, and Greene pondered what to do. He said that he would stay if she let him spank her, so she turned around and said, ‘Spank!’ The novelist gave her two slaps and pronounced himself fit to attend the party.11 While there was undoubtedly an attraction between them – Greene said he envied John nothing but Gillian – she denied there was ever an affair and no evidence to the contrary has come to light. The Sutros, of course, had an unconventional marriage, with both taking numerous lovers. Gillian’s included Mario Soldati, Arthur Koestler, Carol Reed, and the Hungarian artist Marcel Vertès. John was involved with the writer Barbara Skelton and various actresses.

  Like Greene, John Sutro suffered from manic depression; Gillian was extremely grateful for the novelist’s assistance when, heavily indebted, John suffered a breakdown in late 1965, tried to kill himself, and had to be hospitalized. While recovering, he sent Greene a very sad letter and was told, ‘stop flagellating yourself. We all make mistakes, we all make people we love suffer in one way or another – c’est la vie, & luckily people don’t love us for our virtues or we’d be in a bad way . . . So do forgive yourself because then we can all be at ease again & laugh again over a shepherd’s pie.’12

  Greene was involved in John’s production business and served as a director on at least two of his companies, and Sutro performed a similar role for Greene. Their friendship nearly disintegrated over a long and fruitless effort to make a film of The Living Room, and they quarrelled about Kim Philby. John died in 1985, and Gillian wondered whether Greene retained any affection or respect for him. Gillian herself will take on a large and somewhat ambiguous role in the rest of this book. Much of her life stor
y has been told by Nicholas Shakespeare in the greatly admired Priscilla, a book about his aunt, Priscilla Mais, Gillian’s closest friend, who was caught in Paris during the war and, apart from a period of internment, managed to survive as the mistress of Germans and black marketeers. After many years of nursing a grudge against the deceased Priscilla over one of her lovers, Gillian unearthed the facts about her life in Paris and wanted to write a book exposing her. Of herself, Gillian once wrote, ‘I possess the capacity to hide rancour behind a mask of indifference.’13 Any effort to think well of Gillian ends up as all benefit and no doubt.

  In the late 1980s, she wanted to complete a memoir John had begun, but her focus soon shifted to Greene. As a memoirist, she took no prisoners: ‘I made great efforts to like Catherine although I thought she was a destructive character, a lion hunter & fundamentally tough as an army boot.’14 Assuming that she would write mainly about John, Greene submitted to many interviews with her. Meanwhile, she surreptitiously taped conversations and transcribed telephone calls with him and with his last mistress, Yvonne Cloetta, who was shocked to discover, after Greene’s death, that Gillian was planning to write a book. Among her papers is a letter from Kim Philby to Graham Greene, which she must have snatched from the copy of My Silent War in which Greene kept Philby’s letters. Her book was never completed, but her large archive of letters, documents, cassette tapes, and transcriptions has made its way to the Bodleian Library, where scholars may study it. It is a disturbing example of intimate espionage.

  43

  6½ RAVES

  In the autumn of 1956, Greene took a holiday in Portugal with Anita Björk, during which he finished off his work on a film script of George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan – the script turned out well, but the production itself was a fiasco, owing to a miscast lead. That visit to Portugal also entailed research for a story, the proposed setting of which shifted three times. Just after the war, the director Alberto Cavalcanti had asked him to come up with a script, so Greene sketched out one to be set in 1938 in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia and a hive for spies of all the great powers, which he had visited in 1934 (see above, pp. 78–9). The story was to have had a representative of Singer sewing machines peddling false intelligence to London in order to maintain an extravagant wife.1 Cavalcanti checked with the censors and was told that no film could make fun of the Secret Service, so it was shelved, but Greene wondered whether the director simply did not like the idea.

  In 1956 Greene was encouraged by the producer John Stafford to go ahead and write such a script. Stafford was then working on a very competent, if minor, film of Greene’s short story ‘Across the Bridge’, in which a fugitive swindler, played by Rod Steiger, is killed trying to rescue his dog. At the time, Greene believed that he should write the new script about a husband who invents sub-agents and his wife who invents lovers and that it should be set in Portugal, then under the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. After all, for a couple of years Greene had known all there was to know about espionage in Portugal and Spain, and it was in these countries that the agent Garbo, inventor of two-dozen imaginary agents, had actually operated (see above, pp. 151–2). Greene had not yet considered placing his man in Havana.

  That idea may have grown on him during a Caribbean holiday in November and early December, with an itinerary that included Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba. His companion for most of the time was Catherine Walston, and in Port-au-Prince Greene’s fleeting acquaintance with Bernard Diederich developed into a close friendship.2 Diederich recalls coming upon Graham and Catherine playing Scrabble, and the novelist being forced to consult a dictionary as he struggled to work out spellings that came naturally to her. Diederich took Greene’s picture and agreed not to run a story about their visit in his newspaper until after they had left. Greene wanted to go to a ‘house of flowers’, so Diederich took the couple to brothels where they watched erotic dance acts. Even though she enjoyed such shows and often went to them with Greene in Paris, Walston remarked teasingly that all writers are interested in brothels: ‘It allows them to see and sometimes feel humanity in the raw.’ And when a surprised Greene looked at her, she added, ‘You know it’s the male oppressor’s workplace!’3

  During their visit, they attended vernissages with Diederich, and got to know the primitive and modernist schools of Haitian art. Greene acquired two paintings, one by Rigaud Benoit of a priest and parishioners on their knees as a flash flood sweeps away everything in its path. He later acquired other Haitian artworks; they remained precious to him and were hanging on the wall in his flat in Switzerland at the time of his death.

  Unlike most tourists, Greene and Walston travelled aboard taptaps, the vividly decorated pick-up trucks that carried ordinary Haitians about for a tiny fare. At Diederich’s suggestion, they switched from the El Rancho Hotel to the Oloffson, owned by Roger and Laura Coster. Once a maternity hospital for the wives of American Marines, this hotel allowed Greene more privacy, and it also employed Haiti’s best bartender, a smiling man named Cesar who specialized in rum punches. Some years later, Greene would make an almost undisguised version of the Oloffson, a gingerbread structure with prominent balconies, the setting for The Comedians.

  Graham and Catherine then made a short visit to Cuba in late November, about which little is known – their presence there is recorded mainly by passport stamps.4 It was a fraught moment for the island, then ruled by the corrupt Fulgencio Batista, who led a successful Sergeants’ Revolt in 1933, served as elected president from 1940 to 1944, sought election again in 1952, then seized power in a coup when he saw that he was not going to win. Allowing mobsters such as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano to run an enormous business in drugs, prostitution, and gambling, Batista clung to power by arbitrary detention, torture, and murder of his opponents. His best-known henchman was Colonel Esteban Ventura, commander of the police in Havana’s fifth precinct; this torturer and killer was often seen in a linen suit, and served as the model for Captain Segura in Our Man in Havana.5

  At the time of Greene’s visit, localized revolts were taking place, notably in Santiago de Cuba, so Batista immediately rounded up five hundred people, and suspended constitutional guarantees in four of the island’s six provinces.6 This coincided with the return of Fidel Castro. Having led a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks on 26 July 1953, he had been briefly imprisoned before going into exile in Mexico. On 2 December 1956, he and eighty-two men landed from the yacht Granma in Oriente Province; battling Batista’s men, many were killed and others scattered. Although revolutionary myth put the number at a biblical twelve, perhaps as many as eighteen of the force, among them Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos, reached sanctuary in the Sierra Maestra mountains, from which they conducted a guerrilla war.7 There is no certainty that Greene was investigating the troubles in Cuba in late 1956, but if not, he picked an extraordinary time merely to change planes in Havana.

  Leaving the Caribbean, Greene went to New York to put what he thought were the final touches on The Potting Shed before going to Canada in late December. He stopped in Montreal to set up a holding company related to the ranch, and met his friend in that city, Karl Stern, a German-born psychiatrist and author who had recovered a belief in God through psychoanalysis and eventually converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism; he is now best remembered for his autobiography The Pillar of Fire.

  Greene took a restful two-day journey by train through a wintry landscape to Alberta. Caroline, clad in blue jeans, met his train and took him to the ranch, where he saw her beloved new horse, Silence, who would serve as the model for Seraphina in Our Man in Havana. He was alarmed by his daughter handling two Percherons, one unbroken, but she knew what she was doing.8 The beauty of the place astonished him. He could look over a valley to the foothills and at the end of the vista see the Rocky Mountains. Caroline had transformed a 23-foot cabin into a comfortable home, complete with bookshelves of her own construction and furniture acquired from shops in Calgary. At night, coyotes howled nea
r by and the horses leaned against the cabin for warmth. He wrote to his mother: ‘It’s a strange feeling looking round at the country, hill & valley & stream, & knowing that Lucy is the owner. It makes one feel there’s some point in writing books after all.’9

  It was not all easy for him that Christmas, as Caroline had a candid conversation with him about how his conduct had injured the family. Greene was stung by her words, but there was no lasting breach, and he was amused to receive her Christmas gift: a Geiger counter – something that he soon worked into his fiction.

  Greene was never likely to write a novel about Canada – not an obvious trouble-spot, at least not for the settler population – but he did set a story in Calgary. In ‘Dear Dr Falkenheim’ (1963), a man writes to his young son’s psychiatrist about a traumatic experience the boy has had. He and the boy’s mother planned to get rid of, indeed ‘liquidate’, the notion of Father Christmas in their household but to continue with seasonal gifts to their son, including the Geiger counter he has asked for. Things go further than expected, and at an outdoor celebration Father Christmas arrives by helicopter, only to be decapitated by the rear blade. The son, ‘a bit like an early Christian’, continues to believe Father Christmas is real because he has seen him die. The father writes, ‘Please do what you can, Doctor.’10 The question of who is most sane is left unanswered.