The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Predictably, Our Man in Havana excited film producers, and Monica McCall, Greene’s American agent, thought she could get $125,000 for the rights. Alfred Hitchcock was the main early bidder and would go as high as £25,000 (about $70,000), but the idea of working with Hitchcock had no attraction for Greene. His old friend Carol Reed, backed by Columbia, then pushed Hitchcock aside with an offer of $100,000, which was accepted. After Mankiewicz’s betrayal of The Quiet American, Greene decided that he should write this script himself, a task for which he would receive another £6000 – the combined amounts coming fairly close to the original asking price.11 Moreover, he trusted no film-maker more than Reed, with whom he was now working for the third time. In mid-October, they flew to Cuba for two weeks to scout locations, and it was during this time that Greene garnered the new information which he passed on to Hugh Delargy. Reed was afraid that the regime would stop the filming, but Greene remarked, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll all be washed up by the time we’re ready to come back here for production.’12 He could see that Batista and his gang were into injury time.

  Returning to England, they checked into adjoining rooms at the Hotel Metropole in Brighton and fell into their old pattern of collaboration. Greene woke early and wrote; he would hand what he had done to a typist working in their shared sitting room. Once she was finished, Reed, still lying in bed, would pore over it; they would confer during lunch, go back to work in the afternoon, and carouse in the evening. Greene had a revised version of the script ready around 22 November. Reed was still worried about conditions in Cuba, so they travelled to Seville and Cadiz to look for alternatives to Havana. On 7 December, Greene finished another version, with which Reed was ‘delighted’, but Greene was too exhausted to know whether it was any good.13 He continued tinkering, especially with the last scene, but the job was done.

  48

  TAXIDERMY EVERYWHERE

  Greene had begun a new novel, to be entitled ‘Lucius’. It is hard to pin down the exact dates, but a typescript of his autobiography prepared near the beginning of 1971 has a note placing ‘Lucius’ twelve years earlier, and Greene’s bibliographers judge that it came shortly after Our Man in Havana.1 Set in a version of Berkhamsted School, the story is perhaps loosely based on a recollection of how a young master named F. ‘Dicker’ Dale, appointed in September 1915, married the matron.2

  Greene had tried before to write fiction about his school days – notably in the unpublished ‘Anthony Sant’ – and would approach the subject again in his last novel, The Captain and the Enemy. ‘Lucius’ revisits the plotline of ‘The Basement Room’ and The Man Within where a young person betrays a mentor. The schoolmaster in the story is named Stonier; he is separated from his wife but not divorced and is secretly conducting an affair with the matron. He protects a boy named Lucius Darling from bullies modelled on Wheeler and Carter, but Darling steals a sexy photograph of the matron from Stonier’s rooms and blackmails him. Stonier resigns from his post and commits suicide. Decades later, Darling, an unpleasant boy grown to unpleasant manhood, has become Foreign Secretary, and he learns of the suicide when he returns to the school for a prize-giving. Greene gave up on the project after about twenty thousand words, either because he thought the story a failure or because he could not bear thinking about his school days.

  With a great deal of work on hand – he was, at the same time, finishing the script of The Complaisant Lover – Greene had a health scare. For many months, Elisabeth Moor had been doubtful of his liver. Raymond took a different view. He thought the abdominal pains from which his brother was suffering were not related to the liver or duodenum and might be entirely psychosomatic, owing to stress, so he ordered a barium X-ray. When the results came back negative, Graham wrote to Catherine: ‘Raymond had told me frankly that it would be either nothing or cancer. I didn’t much mind about the cancer, but the ten days of waiting were a bit of a strain with nobody much to talk to.’3 Cancer would become rife in the Greene family, with the novelist himself requiring a colectomy in 1979.

  In the midst of all this, Sherman Stonor’s wife made some unwelcome moves. The hyper-Catholic Jeanne Stonor (née Stourton), the daughter of a Spanish diplomat and an Englishwoman, was an inveterate lion-chaser, with a long string of famous lovers. In late 1958, she decided to pursue Greene, who had no interest: ‘It’s so difficult to explain without rudeness that I like her but could no more go to bed with her than with her husband.’4 Years later, he was extremely annoyed to hear that she boasted of having had an affair with him.

  Meanwhile, Carol Reed was able to assemble what was nearly a great cast for the film. Alec Guinness took the part of Jim Wormold, with Noël Coward as an inspired Hawthorne, Burl Ives as Hasselbacher, Maureen O’Hara as Beatrice, and Ralph Richardson as ‘C’. The part of Captain Segura went to the American comedian Ernie Kovacs. The choice of Jo Morrow for Milly is probably a flaw in the film, but it doesn’t amount to much – in the second half of the film she appears on screen for mere seconds at a time.

  Greene was present in Cuba for the early part of the filming in mid-April. The revolutionary government had objections to a film that found comedy in their recent history, and was dubious of the claim that it was a satire not on Cuba but on British intelligence. On set, officials demanded changes in dialogue, so that, for example, Segura could only be seen as a villain. They spoke up when burlesque dancers showed too much flesh, and required that a bootblack be given clean trousers.

  Cuba’s most famous foreigner, Ernest Hemingway, put in an appearance when filming moved to Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Havana, which Greene found a little awkward: ‘we shook hands & exchanged wry glances: I was muscling in to his territory’.5 Guinness later wrote that Greene and others attended a dinner at Hemingway’s house, but Greene did not actually go to the dinner.6 And yet, Hemingway was Greene’s favourite American novelist: he rated him even more highly than he did Faulkner.7 In the early 1960s, Gillian Sutro asked Greene’s opinion of him, and he said, ‘All writers of my generation owe a debt to Hemingway. After him, one just can’t write dialogue as before.’8 Although he dismissed the ‘hairy-chested romanticism’ of For Whom the Bell Tolls, he so admired A Farewell to Arms that he dared not go back to it in later years for fear of discovering its faults. Of course, it is perhaps as well that Greene did not have dinner at Hemingway’s that night, as the atmosphere might have brought out the worst in him. He did visit the house in August 1963, two years after Hemingway’s death: ‘Taxidermy everywhere, buffalo heads, antlers . . . such carnage.’9

  He left Reed and the actors to their work and so missed a visit to the set by Castro. Greene had to get to London for rehearsals of The Complaisant Lover, a play focused on three main characters. Victor Rhodes is a dentist who loves tedious practical jokes – as exemplars of middle-class banality, dentists are to Graham Greene what accountants are to Monty Python. Victor’s wife, Mary, is somewhat younger than he is, an intelligent, slightly nervous woman having an affair with a supercilious antiquarian bookseller named Clive Root. Ultimately, their secrets come out and the three accept an arrangement in which both marriage and affair continue. The title reverses the usual situation of a complaisant husband bearing his wife’s infidelity, and presents a lover adapting himself to the continuation of the marriage. This triangle, in which nobody is happy and nobody is rejected, is remarkably bleak, even by Greene’s standards.

  The play burnt a bridge for him, and this was unexpected. After their break-up, he had given a copy of it to Anita Björk, who then fell silent, acknowledging neither the play nor the payments on her house. Greene missed her terribly and wanted to reconcile with her, and in mid-November he asked Michael Meyer to let her know this.10 He also sent John Sutro to Stockholm as an ambassador; he brought back word that a scene in the play had caused Anita pain. When the affair is revealed, Victor goes to the garage and runs the car engine with a view to killing himself. As a method of suicide, this was once very common – and chosen by Stig Dagerman in 1954, so Anita thou
ght it ‘unfeeling’ of Greene to work such a scene into the play.11 Although she forgave him and maintained a quietly affectionate relationship with him until the end of his life, there was no way back.

  The play was a great success, but how it happened surprised everyone. John Gielgud, the director, had other commitments and was a week late for rehearsals, so the play went on stage after a mere two weeks of work. It had a brief provincial tour beginning in Manchester, and then opened at the Globe in London on 18 June 1959, with Phyllis Calvert appearing as Mary, Paul Scofield as Clive, and Ralph Richardson as Victor – for a number of days Richardson was acting both as ‘C’ in studio filming for Our Man in Havana and as Victor on stage. Greene and Richardson had an argument, and the actor nearly quit, over the question of how long it had been since Victor and Mary had sex.12 This problem was sorted out, but it set the table for a more terrible row over Richardson’s performance in the lead of Carving the Statue (1964). Oddly enough, Gielgud and his cast understood The Complaisant Lover as a tragedy, and yet the audiences responded to it, with its trick cushions and other practical jokes, as a grim comedy.13 It was extremely popular and ran for almost a year.14

  The play was in one respect a victim of its own success. The New York producer Irene Mayer Selznick had optioned the work, expecting to bring the whole production over from London, but it was doing too well to close. The daughter of Louis B. Mayer, Selznick had once been married to David O. Selznick, and she terrified most directors and actors. She admitted to being intimidated by Graham Greene. In the summer of 1959 she proposed to Greene that the spelling of ‘complaisant’ should be changed to ‘complacent’. Greene sent her an explanation of how the two words differed, and his letter was leaked to the press.15

  Nonetheless, they developed a pleasant relationship, with her remembering him as ‘cozy’ and ‘delightful’ to work with, even as problems piled up. A planned production for the autumn of 1960 was one of forty-three postponed owing to a labour dispute between the producers and Actors’ Equity.16 Moreover, they had a difficult time coming up with a suitable cast. At a certain point, Greene despaired and suggested they give up on his ‘ragbag’ of a play.17 In 1961, Selznick did finally launch a production at the Barrymore Theatre, directed by Gielgud’s friend and collaborator Glen Byam Shaw. Cast as Victor Rhodes, Michael Redgrave, not an obvious choice for the role, finally appeared in a faithful production of a work by Graham Greene. It started badly, with him drinking and unable to learn his lines, but in due course he was able to give his part tragic depth. Googie Withers appeared as Mary and was required for a time to wear a rubber body suit so as to look her age. Richard Johnson as Clive was sacked and then rehired. A young Gene Wilder was aptly cast as the hotel valet.18 Opening on 1 November 1961, the play did well, if not as well as in London, and with many productions queued up from the preceding year and awaiting theatre space, it closed after a three-month run.19 It was the last theatrical success Greene would enjoy for many years.

  49

  THE SEPARATING SICKNESS

  Hansi Lambert had once astonished Graham Greene by splashing Guerlain perfume on a roaring fire.1 Born Johanna von Reininghaus, she was an Austrian Catholic and the widow of Baron Henri Lambert, a member of the Belgian branch of the Rothschild family and founder of the Banque Lambert. Following her husband’s death, she ran the bank for some years. She also established a literary and artistic salon, where she numbered among her friends the poet Stephen Spender, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, and the composer Nicolas Nabokov. Graham Greene had met her by January 1948, probably in connection with a large Catholic congress held annually in Brussels. They remained in touch, and when he came to Brussels, he usually stayed at her grand house at 24 Avenue Marnix. Lambert was used to helping authors and artists with strange requests, and so she helped Graham Greene find his way to some leproseries in the Congo.

  Why did he want to go to such places? The answer is complicated and perhaps melodramatic. Since biblical times, leprosy has been seen as a curse, and those suffering from it treated as outcasts. In Greene’s fiction, he often depicted his protagonists spreading sorrow like a contagious disease – ‘D’ in The Confidential Agent, the whisky priest, and Scobie are all described as carriers of illness. Moreover, Greene often employed specific images of leprosy: Richard Smyth in The End of the Affair is healed of a skin ailment, and Father Rank in The Heart of the Matter indiscreetly remarks on having seen Scobie visit Yusef and is suddenly embarrassed: ‘ . . . he swung his great empty-sounding bell to and fro, Ho, ho, ho, like a leper proclaiming his misery’.2

  It will come as no surprise that Graham Greene often expressed self-loathing: ‘I wish I could stop being a bastard,’ he once wrote to Catherine.3 He was fully convinced that anyone he touched would suffer. He could not easily sustain normal relationships so thought of himself as effectively unclean and separate. A reader of Greene’s next novel, A Burnt-Out Case (1961), will immediately see it as a work responding to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness because of its setting and long journey by river, but the book’s initial conception owed more to that other early influence on Greene’s writings, his distant cousin Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote about the Belgian missionary Father Damien (or St Damien of Molokai as he is known since his canonization in 2009).

  In 1873, Father Damien went to serve eight hundred people on the Hawaiian island of Molokai who suffered from leprosy, known there as the ‘separating sickness’.4 A difficult man in some ways, he nonetheless made many practical reforms in the treatment of those he lived among, and decided it was necessary to touch them in the normal course of things. By the late nineteenth century, it was known that leprosy does not spread easily and that the centuries-old notion of almost instant transmission was entirely wrong, though its epidemiology remains a difficult question even today. However, in time, Father Damien did contract the disease, and he continued to live and work on the island. His story became widely known and many regarded him as a saint.

  A month after the priest’s death in early 1889, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Pacific travels, came to Molokai and saw the settlement. He had no fear of the people and wanted to be of use, but there was nothing for him to do apart from teach some young women how to play croquet. Some months later he read a published letter by the Presbyterian missionary Dr Charles McEwen Hyde, making several claims about Damien, among them that he had a history of immorality – he assumed this because some scientists believed, erroneously, that leprosy was a stage of syphilis. Stevenson came down on Hyde as with a scimitar: he wrote an open letter defending Damien, which was republished many times throughout the world and helped to cement the priest’s reputation as a saint.5 As the foiled biographer of Stevenson, Greene knew all about this episode and had a fascination with Father Damien.

  Greene’s initial sense of leprosy was probably mythic or metaphoric, even though he had seen an actual case during his trek through Liberia – a person with the disease asked him for medicine, and he gave him what he had even though it was not going to do any good (see above, p. 89). He probably saw other cases in his travels. Still, he needed to learn what the disease actually is.

  It is certainly not the skin ailment that Moses legislated for, and we do not know what Jesus was healing. Leprosy is thought to have come to Europe with Alexander the Great’s soldiers returning from Asia.6 In a paradox that appealed to Greene, the disease does its harm by removing pain. Peripheral nerves are damaged, and the patients injure themselves without knowing it. Subsequent infections can lead to the loss of fingers, toes, hands, and feet, all for the lack of warnings that pain gives. Some patients lose the ability to blink and so go blind. The only animal apart from humans to harbour the leprosy bacillus is the nine-banded armadillo, whose low body temperature makes it a suitable host; this is important for research as scientists have had scant success reproducing the bacillus in vitro.7

  For many centuries, there was no treatment for leprosy except segregation. In about 1940, the antibacterial sulfone drugs
, particularly Dapsone, known as DDS, made it possible to cure the disease, and nowadays a superior multi-drug treatment is available.8 The disease often eludes early diagnosis and mutilations continue to occur. The World Health Organization reports that by the end of 2016, there were still about two hundred thousand new cases each year.9

  In September 1958, Greene told Hansi Lambert that he was looking for a ‘hospital of the Schweitzer kind’ but run by a Catholic religious order, preferably in West or Central Africa. In Vietnam, Greene had come to know and respect Belgian missionaries, so he was especially interested in going to the Congo. Lambert knew just the person for him to contact, and, in fact, he had already met him. In 1950, the young medical student Michel Lechat had attended a dinner she gave in Greene’s honour, though he and the novelist exchanged just a few words. Lechat came from a literary family and in his youth aspired to be a poet, so was in awe of the company at Lambert’s gatherings. Something of an adventurer, he travelled in Turkey and managed to get himself jailed there for three days without having committed a crime. In 1951, he joined a group of health workers bicycling through the jungle distributing sulfones to people with the disease. When asked about this remarkable work, he confirmed that it occurred, but downplayed it: ‘Quite poetic. Yes and no. Probably more funny! The creation of a myth.’10