The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  On 16 February, at a place called Imbonga, Greene was led by a guide on a quick hour-long walk into the forest towards a leproserie, but as soon as the guide left him he was disconcerted to find a large red monkey obstructing his path. The leproserie itself consisted of three villages, laid out in an orderly fashion, one having a ‘wide alley of palm trees’ down the middle. The mentality of the missionaries in such places was rather different from what he had encountered in Iyonda. He came across nuns so devoted to the old ways of treating the patients that they resented the sulfone cure: one even remarked, ‘It’s a terrible thing – there are no lepers left here’ – evidence of an obsessional or ‘leprophilic’ attachment to people with the disease.

  There was, in fact, an enormous amount of suffering. In one hut, he could just discern the outlines of a pot and heard sounds of movement as an old woman crawled towards the voices of her visitors on the remnants of her hands and knees. She could not lift her head, and all he could do was address her with a local greeting: ‘Ouané’. He came across an old man in good spirits who waved to him with the stumps of his arms and raised his mutilated feet. It was hard to find a more obscure place, but even here Greene was known – ‘a regional officer and a doctor suddenly appeared out of a rainstorm with a copy of The Third Man.46 During his days on the river, he would also be asked to sign copies of The Power and the Glory and Stamboul Train.47

  On 20 February, he reached Lombolomba, where he found a wide, airy leproserie. By necessity, children were separated from their mothers at birth in order to prevent infections. He saw a room with tables where the mothers could clean their babies, but also saw one tragic child in a fetal position, evidently wasting to death. The settlement was run by some nuns and one very lonely priest, a Father Octave, who was glad to have Greene’s company and that of the priests from the boat. Greene noticed that here much more attention was paid to the psychological well-being of the patients than at Iyonda, where the medical facilities were so much better. The school band put on a show for him, complete with torches. Father Octave was asked again and again who was this visitor and he replied, memorably, ‘a big fetishist’.48

  Delayed by a bent rudder, the boat, with three goats in the bow, eventually headed back down river. At night Greene watched the stars come out and listened to the vampire bats passing over the forest. Rain fell and he played the dice game 421 with the priests. He made an important note for inclusion in the novel: ‘I am alive because I feel discomfort.’ When Querry has become psychologically numbed, he is, in the logic of the novel, closest to the condition of leprosy, injuring himself and those around him. The return of first discomfort, then actual pain, marks the beginnings of health, and as the phrase echoes Descartes’s cogito, it offers a paradoxical assurance that he actually exists.

  He also decided that the doctor would not be the embittered figure he had first planned; a widower, Dr Colin was inspired as much by Lechat’s mentor Dr Hemerijckx as by Lechat himself, and the character would be objective and fair-minded, while Querry’s problems would be caused mainly by a plantation owner and his wife. Colin is more complicated still, as Greene later remarked that the evolutionary theology of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, whose best-known work The Phenomenon of Man impressed him ‘more than any other book for many, many years’,49 was essential to his conception of this character. Late one night on the river, Greene wrote some sentences that might serve as a conclusion to the novel but wondered whether he would ever reach them.50

  Arriving back at Iyonda, where he remained for another week, on 26 February Greene found from his accumulated post that the journey to the Congo had caused him to miss an invitation to Buckingham Palace; ‘thank God’, he wrote in his journal. ‘The trouble is it may occur again.’51

  Many of the observations in his journal at the time pertain to the psychological condition of those cured of leprosy, the burnt-out cases. He also noted what he called ‘the virtual enslavement of women’ owing to the lack of education.52

  In the Congo, he had seen his share of brave people, those who bore leprosy and those who cared for them. One was particularly famous: he met Andrée de Jongh on three occasions. A hero of the Belgian resistance, she had escorted many Allied airmen along what was known as the Comet Line into Spain. In 1943, she was betrayed and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. After the war she decided to lead a celibate life and work among those suffering from leprosy. Although his own relationship to the church was vexed, Greene was proud to learn that her decision to become a Catholic in 1947 had been strongly influenced by a reading of The Power and the Glory. Having received a number of honours for her wartime service, she was the subject of a popular book by Airey Neave, Little Cyclone. When Greene asked her how she came to be working in the Congo, she said, ‘Because from the age of 15 I wanted to cure the lepers. If I delayed any longer it would be too late.’53

  50

  ALONE IN A LIFT

  One can hardly plan for a volcano. Mount Cameroon was erupting for the fourth time in fifty years. A formation with two peaks, it rose 13,000 feet above sea level and had a base of 600 square miles. On its eastern slopes there were four craters and three flows of lava. The main stream was a mile wide and 50 feet high, pouring from two vents in what had been a wooded area; it consumed banana and cocoyam farms, then stopped just short of an oil-palm plantation and the only road to the interior of the South Cameroons.1 Bouncing through updraughts and clouds of ash in a three-seater plane, Greene sat beside Hô Boucarut, an old friend from Vietnam, and watched the outpouring.2

  The volcano was not the only thing that Greene did not plan for – his personal landscape was also about to change beyond recognition. He had left Iyonda on 5 March 1959, travelling via Léopoldville, Brazzaville, and Libreville for the port city of Douala in Cameroon, where he stayed from 8 to 13 March. There he visited an old-fashioned leproserie at Dibamba. When interviewed by a priest about what he saw, he apparently said that he preferred it to Iyonda, with its scientific advantages, as its approach was more compassionate. When those remarks, consistent with what he wrote in his journal about Lombolomba, appeared in a newspaper, an embarrassed Greene told Lechat that he had been misquoted.3

  Part of the attraction of Douala was old friends. He planned to meet André Moret, formerly commandant of the Sûreté in Tonkin, now serving in Cameroon; however, immediately before Greene’s arrival he was injured in a road accident and had had to be transported back to France, so another old friend from the Sûreté, Paul Boucarut, met him at the airport and that night took him to a dance hall where he watched sailors buy drinks for the prostitutes. Paul’s Tonkinese wife Hô, a tiny woman of great beauty who usually wore garments of peacock-coloured silk, wanted to introduce him to a few of her friends, especially a thirty-six-year-old French woman named Yvonne Cloetta.

  Born in Pontrieux in Brittany on 17 January 1923, Yvonne (née Guével) grew up in a devout family and was educated at the lycée in Quimper. Her father worked for the French national rail firm SNCF and was involved in the construction of the Niger–Benin railway – indeed, from the year of her birth he spent most of his time in Africa. During the German occupation, Yvonne lived with her aunt and uncle at Carhaix-Plouguer. Her uncle wept at the arrival of the Germans and expected them to rape the young women as he recalled the French doing when they occupied Germany in 1918. The town was spared such horrors, though other places were less fortunate. Yvonne observed the ‘putes’ receiving German soldiers and sensed a sadness among the young women of the town when Germans were transferred to the Eastern Front, where they would likely be killed. Gillian Sutro gathered from one conversation that Yvonne, or someone close to her, had witnessed the shooting of two suspected maquisards as they had a drink, along with the café owner who served them.4

  At the end of the Second World War, Yvonne and her mother, a station master, joined her father in Dakar, where Yvonne took a secretarial job with the United African Company, a large subsidiary of Unilever, dealing especially
in peanut oil and palm oil. She soon married her boss, the Swiss Jacques Cloetta, and they lived in some luxury in Dahomey (now Benin), Mali, Togo, and French Cameroon.5 By the time she met Graham Greene, the marriage to Jacques had dried up, though they remained together for the sake of their two young daughters.

  Cloetta knew exactly who Graham Greene was – she had seen The Third Man and had read some of his books. She regretted not being able to take up Hô’s invitation to dinner with the author of The Power and Glory, which she thought a masterpiece. However, Hô then invited them both to her house for a drink, where the awkwardness of new acquaintance was relieved by Hô’s recounting of the flight over the volcano.

  That night they went to the Chantaco, the one night club open to Europeans, and stayed till four. It was probably on this night that Greene met Jacques Cloetta – they did not meet again for about six years. Greene did not enjoy dancing, so Yvonne and Hô kept him company by turns, but after his weeks in the leproseries, he could not unwind. Of course, the Boucaruts were match-making. Yvonne said goodbye at the night club, but the next afternoon Paul asked her to come to Greene’s hotel, as the novelist wanted to say goodbye again. She made Paul swear not to leave her alone with him. They went to his room, where he was packing his suitcase, and, to Paul’s great disappointment, the two fell into a serious discussion of love and mortality. It was an odd flirtation, but Greene’s interest in this petite, blue-eyed woman was piqued. Since Yvonne and Hô would be in the South of France in the summer, he suggested that they meet for drinks in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where he would be visiting the Reinhardts.

  That proposed meeting was a long way off. In the meantime, Cameroon was in the midst of a rebellion in the run-up to independence at the beginning of 1960, so Yvonne and Jacques agreed that she should return with their daughters to France, while he remained working in Africa, an arrangement that implied liberty to pursue other relationships.6 She then went through something of an ordeal. She was having an affair with a young diplomat and was devoted to him. However, his father disapproved of this involvement and so arranged a suitable marriage for him. After a night in a hotel with Yvonne, the young man got up early, settled the bill, and vanished, leaving Yvonne humiliated.

  When Greene saw her again on 29 July,7 he could see something was wrong. While they were having drinks with Hô, he quietly asked Yvonne to have dinner with him the next evening at Le Réserve in Beaulieu. She found it easy to confide in him, since he was like a priest, so she told him all that had happened.8 They then sat in her car looking at the boats in the harbour and talked till dawn. He was leaving for London the next day, so they had lunch at the airport, and when it was time for him to check in they stepped into a lift. He embraced her and asked, ‘Est-ce que tu m’aimes?’ Startled, she said it was too early to know. After ten days he came back and pretended that he had confused his verbs in the lift, having meant to ask whether she liked him, and yet over the next thirty-two years he would always embrace her when they were alone in a lift.9

  51

  CHANGES

  The arrival of Yvonne Cloetta was the most important change in Greene’s life in 1959, but other things were changing too, and it is helpful at this point to survey them.

  Marion Greene had a sometimes frosty manner, and while it is said that she would leave the room whenever her son Herbert came into it,1 she was consistently kind and encouraging to her other children, especially Graham, whose achievements and adventures she followed closely.2 Having been incapacitated by a fall, she lost interest in life. After a period of decline, she spent about two weeks in a coma and died peacefully on 22 September 1959 at the age of eighty-seven.3

  In her last years, Graham and Raymond provided her with a pension, while she, for her part, helped out her younger sister Nora, or Nono, who also lived in Crowborough. Learning of his mother’s death, Graham immediately wrote to Nono from Paris: ‘Perhaps as a Catholic I am more “cold-blooded” because I believe there is a future & that she is probably happier at this moment than any of us . . . What I want to say now is hard to phrase. I want to be of any help I can & I want you to feel that anything I was able to do for Mumma at the end, I would like to transfer to you. Please between us of the School House days, between the favourite aunt & the most difficult nephew, don’t let’s have any shyness . . . I know how much she depended on you & worried about you, so you must let me help.’4 Marion had consistently loved and encouraged Graham as he went about his utterly unconventional life. She did reproach him for leaving Vivien, but there had been no lasting rift even then between mother and son. Grief for her was likely a factor in his mental state in the following months.

  There were yet more changes in his family life. Caroline would soon marry a man named Jean Bourget and leave the ranch for Montreal and there start a family. Francis, having completed his degree in physics at Christ Church, Oxford, began National Service in October 1957 and was given a position in the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. He visited Russia whenever he could, including a journey there with his father in 1957 and other longer stays to strengthen his grasp on the language. He became a producer on the BBC television series Tomorrow’s World, where he put together programmes on contemporary science, among them one in which he thoughtfully debunked a purported sighting of a UFO.

  The BBC was, of course, Hugh Greene’s territory. Having been appointed Director of News and Current Affairs, he was being groomed by Sir Ian Jacob to succeed him as Director-General. Perhaps resenting his youngest brother’s success, Herbert Greene bombarded Jacob with letters and telegrams protesting at Hugh’s programming decisions. Trying to put a stop to this nonsense, Graham threatened to cut off the allowance he was paying him,5 but Herbert was not to be bullied. He went on to lead a public protest against the cancellation of the Nine O’Clock News, which featured the chiming of Big Ben,6 claiming that his dispute was not with Hugh but with the corporation. Strange as all this is, Herbert had very pleasant qualities, which were discovered by Caroline when she went to visit this uncle about whom she knew nothing, and the two got on surprisingly well.7 Afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, Herbert died in 1969, and Graham remarked that he had had little luck in life except to have found a loving wife.8

  Herbert’s shenanigans caused no real harm to Hugh, who was indeed appointed Director-General of the BBC in the summer of 1959. He remained Graham’s closest male friend, and they sometimes went on long rambles, looking for pubs and bookshops in the countryside.9 Avid book collectors, they assembled an anthology of vintage tales of espionage, The Spy’s Bedside Book, with numerous pieces by John Buchan and William Le Queux, and even an odd effusion from Herbert on his involvement with the Japanese intelligence services in the 1930s. Neither Graham nor Hugh was particularly demonstrative, but Hugh’s fourth wife, Sarah Greene, suggests that they were both shy, and so understood each other.10

  Having returned from postings in Turkey and Paris, Elisabeth and Rodney Dennys became increasingly important to Graham from about 1957, and he grew fond of their children Amanda, Louise, and Nick. Indeed, Nick recalled him as an affectionate and playful uncle.11 In 1961, Graham set up a financial covenant to assist with their education.

  Apart from the family bond, he could speak freely with Elisabeth and Rodney about intelligence. Having been a senior figure in SIS, Rodney retired from the service in 1958, and began to look for a new career. Graham tried to set him up as a literary agent, but that did not work out. Ultimately, he took on a surprising and very colourful line of work. A learned man with a sense of protocol, he joined the College of Arms, where he was involved in the organisation of Winston Churchill’s state funeral and the Investiture of the Prince of Wales. He was appointed Rouge Croix Pursuivant, then Somerset Herald, and when he retired he became Arundel Herald Extraordinary and wrote two engaging books about heraldry. The separate strands of Rodney’s working life came together in 1968 when he advised the makers of the film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in which James Bond po
ses as a herald.12

  One figure who disappeared early from the story was Graham’s eldest sister Molly, who had once tracked him down on Berkhamsted Common. With the ranks of young men so thinned by the Great War, she had decided to marry Lionel Walker, a sedentary man more than twenty years her senior, and Charles Greene had settled some money on her. Seldom travelling, the couple lived in semi-retirement in a rural cottage without electricity. When their son John, of whom Graham was particularly fond, built himself a house many years later he refused to have a chimney or a hearth in it as he never again wanted to see solid fuel. At 6′ 1″, Molly had something of her mother’s impressive bearing. At her funeral in 1963 her eleven-year-old grandson, Peter Walker, could not spot his father John, who was a mere six feet tall, among his towering aunts and uncles.13

  An important change was coming to Graham’s business affairs. He had been a client of the literary agency Pearn Pollinger and Higham since it was formed in 1935. Indeed, he had been a client of David Higham since 1928. When Higham went into service during the war, Laurence Pollinger, who specialized in film rights, took over Greene’s business. The partnership split up in 1958 and Greene followed Pollinger rather than Higham, who was rather taken aback as he saw Greene as a friend – the two had even gone birdwatching together. Higham gathered that Greene chose Pollinger because he was the underdog in the split; Greene told him that he would return as a client once Pollinger retired or died.14

  In 1959, Greene hired a new secretary, Josephine Reid, who would handle his correspondence and type most of his manuscripts until 1975, continuing such work on an occasional basis until 1991. In addition to her secretarial skills, she had a Foreign Office background and understood how to work on a confidential basis. She did not pry into his business and she revealed nothing. Long after Greene’s death, she continued to refuse requests for interviews and rebuffed all enquiries.