The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Graham Greene turned fifty-five on 2 October 1959 and was feeling his age. The affair that had begun with Yvonne Cloetta was a slow burn: although sexually driven at other times, he now needed coaxing and encouragement, a grim experience that led somewhat later to the writing of ‘Cheap in August’, a short story about an older man’s sexual failures. In a book of interviews with Cloetta, Marie-Françoise Allain asked how it was that in 1959 Graham began a satisfying new relationship but was also in perhaps the deepest depression of his life. Cloetta accepted the paradox but did not herself understand it.

  When she met him, Greene had almost finished believing in either religion or love, and he was living with his burnt-out case, the architect Querry, whose emotional emptiness and despair were based on his own feelings but were then concentrated and magnified. Long afterwards he remarked, ‘When you live for two years with a character one is apt to catch his depression.’15 He and his character passed the illness back and forth like a virus in a boarding school. Cloetta recalled that one evening he stayed up working on the novel and found it so distressing that he vomited.16 And perhaps the time he spent with Querry felt like two years, but, driving himself with Dexedrine, he had a draft of the novel finished by 24 March 1960, a little over a year after his visit to the leproseries.17

  If his mood disorder predisposed him to extremes and the amphetamine was encouraging anxiety and restlessness, there was still the longstanding issue of Catherine Walston to trigger his depressions. From time to time Graham and Catherine still took holidays together – they went to the Caribbean in the autumn of 1959 and again in 1960, but by 1961 she was complaining in her letters that he found her boring, was uncommunicative, and wanted to ‘dislodge’ her from his heart.18

  Although Yvonne remained married to Jacques, she urged Graham to make a firm break with Catherine. He did so very slowly, and there were painful moments, such as when Yvonne discovered a picture of Catherine beside his bed in Albany. Yvonne’s tastes and sensibilities were different from Catherine’s, and Graham tended to discover this the hard way. In the late summer of 1959, he took her and a friend to a brothel in Paris’s louche Rue de Douai and arranged the sort of erotic entertainment that Catherine had shared with him. Yvonne got up and left.19 In the contest with his older mistress, however, time was on Yvonne’s side. Catherine was now lamed by arthritis, and in the coming years endured two not very successful operations to repair a broken hip. She took heavy medication for pain, and tended to drink too much. The sheer vitality that had once characterized her was draining away.

  Immediately after his mother’s death, Greene travelled to New York for business, and Irene Selznick threw a small, but doubtless distracting, party for his birthday, attended by Claudette Colbert, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Margaret Leighton, and Janet Gaynor. He went then to Alberta to see Caroline, and along the way was tempted to lay aside the leprosy novel in favour of a sadly comic play to be called ‘May We Borrow Your Husband?’, which he later wrote as a short story.

  He spent November in Jamaica with Catherine, and after a brief return to London in December headed to the Pacific with Michael Meyer, experiencing Christmas Eves on either side of the International Date Line, one in Fiji and the other in Samoa. They stayed for a month in Tahiti, where he grew increasingly irritable over things as trivial as games of Scrabble. At the same time, he was working at the hated novel, writing twenty thousand words in twenty-five days, bringing the total manuscript close to fifty thousand words by the time they left.

  On the way back, he discovered a part of the United States that he loved – San Francisco – and went to a party where ‘the beatnik poet who is half negro, half Jew & half Catholic & very very drunk paid me his highest compliment by saying that I was the only true beat in English literature!’20 This must have been Bob Kaufman, who came from New Orleans and whose father was a German Jew and mother a black Catholic. He would now be called a performance poet, reciting his compositions wherever he was welcomed. When John F. Kennedy was shot, he took a vow of silence which he observed until the end of the Vietnam War.21

  Driving a Chevy half-ton about 1300 miles from Alberta, Caroline picked up her father and Michael Meyer in San Francisco at the beginning of February, with a plan to go back to the ranch on a route through Nevada and Utah. They ground their way through snow to Reno, where Graham won enough money at the slot machines to pay for their night’s lodging,22 but that was not their best stroke of luck. They got under way again, and the truck’s driveshaft broke within sight of the only garage for fifty miles in the Great Salt Lake Desert – it had then to be towed to another service station further down the road to be fixed.23 Waiting in a hotel in ‘claustrophobic’ Salt Lake City, Greene could find nothing better to listen to on the radio there in the Mormon heartlands than a lecture on the health benefits of chewing gum. He had left all his luggage in the truck, but clung ‘like grim death’ to a briefcase containing his manuscript.24

  52

  DEATH AND TAXES

  Guy Burgess was knocking at his door. Greene was in Moscow: he had flown there for a short visit on 1 April 1960 as the guest of British European Airways on the inaugural flight of its new Comet service. The ambassador to the Soviet Union, Sir Patrick Reilly, once chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was on that plane along with a contingent of the Scots Guards who piped the passengers on and off and later went skirling in Red Square.1

  This junket gave Greene the chance to see a Russian play of The Quiet American – ‘very bad’, he reported to his daughter. He politely endured the speeches made from the stage and gave one himself when called upon. This play and his books were earning him some roubles he could not take home, so he opened a bank account, which struck him as a very capitalist thing to do. He took long walks with Tanya Lanina, who worked for the Writers’ Union and was the main translator of his books. He went to the Bolshoi Ballet and to the circus, and had dinner with a Russian family which left him feeling ‘quite accepted’, but after an embassy party on his last evening in Moscow he began to feel very ill.2

  Guy Burgess worked, in his desultory way, for the state-run Foreign Languages Publishing House, so caught wind of his visit to Moscow. He called Greene and asked to see him. Despite having an early flight, the novelist was curious, so said yes, but, hoping to keep the meeting short, told him that he had been up for sixty-five of the last seventy-two hours.

  It may be that Greene was actually meeting Burgess at the behest of MI6, if only to keep tabs on the defector and perhaps profit by an indiscretion. However, there is no hint of such an assignment in his descriptions of the meeting, although he would certainly have reported even an unexpected contact with Burgess to the service. He had met him just once before, during the war, with David Footman, a novelist and an MI6 officer specializing in Eastern Europe.3 Greene did not like him – certainly not as he liked Kim Philby. At the time of their defection in May 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had been working in Washington, and Philby tipped them off that they were about to be questioned, so they had fled.

  In Moscow, Burgess’s material needs were taken care of, but his lifestyle was cramped and isolating, since Communist Party discipline was surprisingly prim and Burgess’s homosexuality was disapproved of. He was also desperate for conversation, so stayed late with Greene, whose sickness was taking hold so that he really did feel like ‘grim death’. Burgess rehearsed his old cover story that in 1951 it had been his intention to accompany Maclean only as far as Paris, and then to go to Ischia to stay with W. H. Auden, but became caught up in the arrangements that had been made for them so went on to Prague and finally to Moscow. He was portraying himself as an accidental defector. He asked Greene to thank Harold Nicolson for a letter he had sent, to carry a message to his mother, and to give Moura Budberg, the woman who had once advised Greene on what to see in Tallinn and who was now under scrutiny by MI5, a consolatory bottle of gin. Burgess was drinking himself to death in Moscow – and succeeded in doing so two yea
rs later. If he had a serious purpose in talking to Greene, it was likely to send a signal to MI6 that he wanted to come home.4

  Greene flew back to London on the morning of 5 April 1960, and was promptly laid on a stretcher and taken to hospital in an ambulance. He had pneumonia. In his usual way of concealing illnesses, it was two weeks before he informed his daughter in Canada, but not Francis or Vivien in Britain, saying that the matter was ‘TOP SECRET’. His cough persisted and his doctors became concerned that he was actually suffering from lung cancer. He did not get the all-clear until July. He afterwards incorporated his experience of bronchoscopy into ‘Under the Garden’, a long, dream-like short story which he particularly favoured. The worry of lung cancer hung over him, especially in the following year when his psychiatrist and friend Eric Strauss underwent surgery for the disease and died.

  Greene understood from his doctors that England’s climate was bad for his lungs. He wanted to be near Yvonne, and now his health provided him with a second reason to spend much of his time in France. That spring he acquired a small flat at 130 Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris’s seventeenth arrondissement, a neighbourhood noted for its embassies, museums, and academic institutions, and for its association with writers, musicians, and artists, such as Gabriel Fauré and Marcel Proust.5 The flat’s best feature was a room with two fireplaces and a window looking out onto large chestnut trees. Marie Biche arranged for renovations, and Greene began using it late in 1960. He kept it secret for a time as he did not want to lend it to friends or family as he did the house in Anacapri.6 There was a business problem about the transaction, as he could not use the holding company that owned Caroline’s ranch for this purpose, but he told Catherine he would work around the difficulty: ‘Luckily I have got a lot of bankers & crooks among my friends.’7

  These words were more true than he realised, and what followed over the next few years would provide him with a third reason to become a permanent resident in France – as a tax exile.8 It all began straightforwardly. Harbottle & Lewis were, and remain, a reputable law firm in London, specializing in entertainment and media. In good faith, this firm strongly recommended the services of the solicitor and financial adviser Thomas Roe to John Sutro, who in turn recommended him to Graham Greene.9 Roe would also add Noël Coward, Charlie Chaplin, Robert Mitchum, and William Holden to his list of clients. He had various points in his favour: an upbeat manner, an air of competence, an excellent war record, and a CBE. He worked mainly in Lausanne, where his company Co-Productions Roturman helped British individuals and firms – most wanting to avoid British taxes – to establish themselves. Roe solved Greene’s problem about the purchase of the Paris flat by setting up a new holding company in Switzerland, to be called Verdant, on which he had signing powers. By the summer of 1960, Roe had more or less taken over Greene’s finances and was making investments.

  His years as a publisher had made Greene a far better businessman than many other writers, but by 1960 he was acting out of despair – a sometimes costly state of mind. He believed that A Burnt-Out Case might be his last novel, and he had to find a new way to make a living. Although he had made a great deal of money over the years, he had saved relatively little, and his main asset was his copyrights. He saw some prospects in his arrangement with Max Reinhardt, but they were not sufficient to take care of himself, his family, and the various people who depended on him – his kindness being a matter for the debit column. A plan to have the Bodley Head publish a collected edition of his novels required the cooperation of Heinemann, which was highly resistant to the idea of losing its most famous author.

  Roe moved quickly to have Greene’s royalties, other than those from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, paid into Verdant. A more important plan was to grant paperback rights in ten of Greene’s novels to Penguin for an advance of £33,750, to be paid to Roe’s firm in Lausanne, which would agree to pay Greene an annuity of between £1500 and £2000 – a solid pension at a time when the average annual salary in Britain was about £600 – no matter what happened, he would have enough to live on.10 Roe would then transfer these rights and obligations to Verdant, putting Greene back in control. As the situation unfolded, Verdant took over the copyrights of all Greene’s books, apart from The Quiet American, which he had given to Francis.11 His London company, Graham Greene Productions, now about a decade old, was mainly concerned with film and stage rights, and any profits went not to him but chiefly to Vivien and Francis. Another company, called Pasture, was set up in Liechtenstein, and Greene signed service agreements with both Verdant and Pasture – he was essentially employed as a writer by these two companies, the more important being Verdant.

  The goal was to minimize taxes, and avoid the surtax on dividends altogether. It is difficult now to credit how high British income tax was in the 1960s. The Beatles found out when they began to make money; George Harrison wrote in ‘Taxman’, ‘Let me tell you how it will be, there’s one for you nineteen for me.’12 He was describing a situation where between income tax and surtax, he was paying 95 per cent on investment income. In the 1967–8 tax year, there was actually a special charge on investment income over £8000 of 45 per cent plus income tax at 41.25 per cent and surtax at 50 per cent – for a total of 136.25 per cent.13 Successive governments, still dealing with the financial consequences of the war, were trying to support the NHS and the welfare state, so needed a great deal of revenue. Meanwhile, those who paid the top rates felt they were being pillaged, and many decided to live abroad. In Greene’s case, the simple course of investing the Penguin advance, say, on the London stock exchange and receiving dividends was highly unattractive owing to the surtax.

  On 31 October 1961, Greene lamented to Catherine that the paperback plan could not work as tax would be deducted at source.14 A long struggle then began with the Inland Revenue, as Greene hoped to be granted a particular form of exemption, allowing his advance to be paid to Roturman and then to Verdant without tax. Laurence Pollinger, who was sceptical of the plan, reserved just over £11,000 in escrow in case the exemption was not granted.15 Discussions went on literally for years. At first Roe wanted all the money sent to Switzerland, without worrying a great deal about the exemption – Pollinger refused. Later Greene himself would make periodic enquiries about the sum in escrow. No exemption was granted, and Greene’s London accountants decided that it belonged to the Inland Revenue even if they were slow to collect it. He had to be resigned to that. He was able to obtain exemptions only for royalties earned after 1 January 196616 – that is, once he had become a resident of France.

  Behind this rather dry narrative of tax rates and holding companies lies a story about pigs, sausages, and counterfeit banknotes.17 When Greene met him, Roe had just built a villa overlooking Lake Geneva at a cost of £130,000. To make ends meet, he took £27,000 belonging to his clients, among them Graham Greene, and made himself a temporary loan. In time his debts would amount to £480,000. A boundlessly optimistic man, Roe saw a path to salvation in his dealings with a sinister figure named Denis Loraine, who in 1959 had established the Royal Victoria Sausage Company – so named on the basis of a fictitious claim that King Edward VII had once enjoyed its products. In fact, Loraine had gone into the sausage business as a way of settling the very large bill his wife had run up with a butcher in Hove, East Sussex – rather than pay it, he became the man’s partner.

  Roe and Loraine soon founded another company, Cadco Developments, to build a huge piggery in Glenrothes, one of the ‘new towns’ in Fife, and were promising to create about two thousand jobs. They received substantial funding from the Royal Bank of Scotland and from various government agencies, of which £83,000 simply disappeared from the country, much of it in the form of travellers’ cheques. More money was squandered on a Jaguar and an Aston Martin, trips abroad, and perks for board members. One of the directors resigned and reported irregularities to the Board of Trade. George Sanders, a once-famous actor who won an Oscar for his part in All About Eve, was a client of Tom Roe; he se
rved as a director of Cadco, perhaps without knowledge of the frauds, but was nonetheless disgraced. The piggery project collapsed in November 1964, with total liabilities of £828,000 and assets of £195,000. The MP for West Fife, Willie Hamilton, demanded an investigation in the House of Commons: ‘At the best, this has been a story of unexampled negligence and incompetence; at the worst, a tale of fraud and corruption on a gigantic scale.’18

  Roe had put most of Greene’s Penguin advance, apart from the sum in escrow, into Cadco – he may have invested other money belonging to Greene in the same project – and it was gone. Greene estimated that he had lost half his savings. Roe had also invested funds from his other clients, who were, likewise, fleeced. He became desperate and tried to raise money by selling bogus stocks obtained from the mafia; he later admitted with some understatement that these stocks were ‘doubtful’.

  Roe met with mobsters in Los Angeles and agreed to buy counterfeit $100 bills for $25 each. Roe was warned that if he did not keep up his end of the bargain he would be killed. A courier delivered the bills with a total face value of $375,000 to Switzerland in July 1965, and Roe passed some of them at a bank, only to be detected. Police found the rest of the notes in his car and at his office. Meanwhile, Loraine and others were arrested in the United States. A Swiss court convicted Roe of fraud, misappropriation of £183,000 belonging to his clients, and possessing counterfeit notes, sentencing him to six years in prison and other penalties.

  At Charlie Chaplin’s recommendation, Greene retained as his Swiss lawyer the scrupulous and learned Jean-Felix Paschoud, who walked into the offices of Roturman and seized all the files pertaining to Graham Greene and Verdant. He also terminated Greene’s original 1960 agreement with Roturman.19 However, Greene made nothing in the 1960s from the Penguin deal in which he had placed so much hope – as late as 1971 the paperbacks had still not sold out the advance, so there were not even any royalties.20