The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  After his release, Tom Roe, stripped of his CBE, returned to a version of his old business. He made the rounds of literary agents with a scheme to help authors avoid British taxes by buying their rights and employing them through companies set up, apparently, in Liechtenstein. He visited Bruce Hunter, who would later become Graham Greene’s agent, and proposed all this as highly beneficial for authors, indeed foolproof. Sceptical, Hunter asked how people could trust him given his history, but Roe swept aside the objection.21 This was in character. He was, after all, an optimistic man.

  In a curious way, the swindler Tom Roe did literature a service. Graham Greene wanted to stop writing in 1960. By depriving him of his pension, he created a financial incentive for Greene to keep his Parker 51 in hand. Samuel Johnson said in a memorable half-truth that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’ Money mattered. It was part of Greene’s motivation to write, though his aesthetic, religious, and political concerns mattered more. By the time the various frauds were exposed, his creative energies had revived and he had begun a new novel, The Comedians, and over the next twenty years he would write six more.

  53

  THE END OF A LONG ROPE

  ‘I think it is his best book at least since “The Power and the Glory”, and perhaps the best book he has ever written’, wrote Philip Toynbee of A Burnt-Out Case.1 So went the reviews. Of course, Greene knew this book would also cause trouble, but some of it surprised him. He had had Michel Lechat vet it for technical errors concerning leprosy, but one of the leading specialists in the disease, Robert Cochrane, assailed him for using the terms ‘leprosy’ and ‘lepers’, which had been abandoned by a round-table agreement of leprologists long before. Greene responded, cogently, that if these terms were so offensive why did Cochrane persist in calling himself a ‘leprologist’?

  Cochrane’s outburst does raise the question of how Greene deals with leprosy in the novel. Certainly, the book has a documentary aspect, providing a wealth of practical detail about the disease, the patients, and the treatment. A bestseller, A Burnt-Out Case did as much as any book possibly could to shed light on the facts of a misunderstood illness. At the heart of the book is the idea that since leprosy, now curable, persists in its psychological effects, the conditions of those with the disease and someone like Querry actually converge: both come to loathe themselves. There is merit in the observation, but it requires an obvious caveat. With his background of privilege, his money, his race, and his physical health, Querry’s state is not equivalent to that of people with the disease.

  Greene built a recognition of this fact into the structure of the novel. At the end, one of the priests says, ‘What I mean is that it’s a little like one of those Palais Royal farces that one has read . . . ’2 In one of the jokes that signal his cure, Querry remarks on the absurdity of the supposed triangle involving Rycker and his wife, ‘The innocent adulterer. Not a bad title for a comedy.’3 Greene had written three successful plays, and was shaping his novel in dramatic terms. Querry, his depression, recovery, and absurd death are only part of a larger story – it is a ‘farce’ contained within the tragedy of infection and mutilation. The experiences of the white man are at best a play within a play – which, like ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ in Hamlet, touches the conscience on just a particular point. His next novel, The Comedians, would rely even more heavily on this structural device. That Querry and his problems are not all that important is seen when he is telling the doctor about his loss of vocation while a little boy awaits treatment: ‘The boy’s four toes wriggled impatiently on the cement floor, waiting for the meaningless conversation between the white men to reach a conclusion’4 – meaningless indeed. In the last paragraph of the novel, once Querry is dead, the narrative focuses again on a child – one whom the doctor, now very angry, hopes to cure without mutilations.

  Evelyn Waugh sensed something ‘melodramatic’ in the ending but missed its significance – he dismissed it as merely absurd.5 Waugh thought that in this novel, as in the short story ‘A Visit to Morin’, which Greene distributed in a special edition to friends at Christmas 1960, the author was publicly abandoning the faith. Moreover, he felt himself criticized in the character of Rycker, since he had given lectures in the United States on Greene as a Catholic writer. The Daily Mail asked him to review the book and he refused. Instead, he sent Greene a letter praising some aspects of the book, then apologizing for his decision not to review and for any behaviour of his that resembled Rycker’s.6

  Greene was pained by this letter and wrote a lengthy response, entirely rejecting the idea that Waugh had ever behaved like Rycker. Whether Querry was a self-portrait was a more complicated question: ‘With a writer of your genius and insight I certainly would not attempt to hide behind the time old gag that an author can never be identified with his characters. Of course in some of Querry’s reactions there are reactions of mine, just as in some of Fowler’s reactions in The Quiet American there were reactions of mine. I suppose the points where an author is in agreement with his character lend what force or warmth there is to the expression. At the same time I think one can say that the parallel must not be drawn all down the line and not necessarily to the conclusion of the line. Fowler, I hope, was a more jealous man than I am, and Querry, I fear, was a better man than I am. I wanted to give expression to various states or moods of belief and unbelief. The doctor, whom I like best as a realized character, represents a settled and easy atheism; the Father Superior a settled and easy belief (I use “easy” as a term of praise and not as a term of reproach); Father Thomas an unsettled form of belief and Querry an unsettled form of disbelief. One could probably dig a little of the author also out of the doctor and Father Thomas!’7

  Waugh was having none of this, and in his next letter dismissed the notion of ‘a settled and easy atheism’ as an impossibility. He took the view that an atheist rejects the real purpose of his life – union with God – and so can never be settled. Waugh’s position was out of touch with Catholic theology of the time, which made much of what the Jesuit Karl Rahner called the ‘anonymous Christian’, one who might live a graced life without believing church doctrine. In any event, Waugh lamented Greene’s departure from faith and spoke of him as a ‘lost leader’.8 Greene responded: ‘I suggest that if you read the book again you will find in the dialogue between the doctor and Querry at the end the suggestion that Querry’s lack of faith was a very superficial one – far more superficial than the doctor’s atheism. If people are so impetuous as to regard this book as a recantation of faith, I cannot help it. Perhaps they will be surprised to see me at Mass.’9

  Greene seems to have been troubled by this correspondence, and he wrote soon after to Catherine Walston about the novel and the state of his beliefs: ‘I’ll probably never succeed in getting any further from the Church. It’s like, when one was younger, taking a long walk in the country & at a certain tree or a certain gate or the top of one more hill one stopped & thought “Now I must start returning home.” One probably went on another mile to another hill or another tree, but all the same . . . ’10

  About a year later, Greene was very pleased with a letter from a Benedictine monk, Ralph Wright, who detected hope in the last pages of the novel. Greene wrote to him: ‘You have disinterred my intention – you notice that Querry even makes a joke at the last moment which is also a sign of returning health. However the first hundred and seventy four pages were not intended in any way as a debunking. One must remember that technically the book is written through the eyes of Querry and it is Querry’s irritation with the facile Father Thomas and the bogus Rycker. These two are intended as a contrast to the really selfless and practical work of the fathers in the mission. I think you would find that if these two characters had been left out the book would suddenly have become extraordinarily sentimental. On the one side Querry rediscovering a bit of life, on the other a group of noble priests. To make even their nobility plausible one has to put in the shadows. After all even the everyday
life of a Catholic is haunted by the corruptio optimi.’ Originally a monk of Ampleforth Abbey in North Yorkshire, and now at St Louis Abbey in Missouri, Father Ralph Wright is a gifted but little-known poet. Greene was nearly incapable of praising books he did not admire, and he praised the poetry of Ralph Wright.11

  After the publication of A Burnt-Out Case, Greene decided to put together a volume called In Search of a Character: Two African Journals, combining the notes he kept while sailing in convoy to Freetown at the end of 1941 with the longer record of his stay in the leproseries. Before publication he again sent proofs to Michel Lechat to check for technical errors. Lechat was dismayed by what he read. Greene was about to publish his unfiltered impressions of the archbishop, various priests, aspiring authors, local officials, and others who would be crushed by his comments and who would hold it against him that he had brought this man into their midst. Lechat wrote at length to Greene, pointing out all the harmful passages, and let him know that if the book was published as it stood their friendship was over. At once, Greene wrote to him with apologies and assurances that changes would be made – he made more besides. In the end, the short book that was published in October 1961 contains a vastly more genial account of his time in the Congo than is recorded in the original journal.

  In Search of a Character was the first of Greene’s books published by Max Reinhardt at the Bodley Head. He decided to leave William Heinemann in June 1961.12 The background to this is very complicated and can only be summarized here.13 After thirty-two years with the firm, Greene had seen a new generation of directors and editors take the place of those he had once worked with. Short of capital, Heinemann was taken over in April 1961 by the conglomerate Thomas Tilling Ltd, headed by Lionel Fraser, formerly chairman of Heinemann. There followed in May a tentative agreement for a merger with the Bodley Head, which would see Greene and Reinhardt on the board of the new entity. But then it all fell apart. The directors of Heinemann disliked the deal when they saw it, and they disliked the idea of Graham Greene being a member of the board. Under the new arrangements, Greene’s close friend A. S. Frere would serve in the symbolic position of president, without real contact with authors, and so he left altogether. A little later, Frere joined the Bodley Head as an adviser. The bestselling authors Georgette Heyer and Eric Ambler also moved to the Bodley Head. Heinemann retained the rights to Greene’s earlier books, and only after a protracted, sometimes contentious, negotiation did the two firms collaborate on a collection edition, of which the first volume, Brighton Rock, finally appeared in 1970. One of the benefits to Greene of moving to the Bodley Head was that Reinhardt was willing to ease his tax burden by spreading out payments to him over time so that he received something like a salary, and generally relieved him of the detailed management of his financial affairs.14

  In the early 1960s, Greene probably believed that he had more of a future as a publisher than as a novelist. A Burnt-Out Case had shaken his confidence, and he did not think he could produce another work on that scale. In late 1961, he turned his hand to short stories, even though some of them hardly qualified as ‘short’, such as ‘Under the Garden’, which drew on childhood visits to Harston and on his recent brush with cancer. Completed by the beginning of January 1962, it stretched to about twenty-two thousand words, which can be compared to thirty-one thousand for Loser Takes All, published as a novel or novella.15

  He followed it with ‘May We Borrow Your Husband?’, a skilful work which has not aged well. Readers often feel its portrayal of two gay men as predators is harsh, although this effect is softened towards the end when the older of the two, Stephen, is revealed as a tragic figure. The plot turns on the men borrowing a honeymooning husband from his new wife; she takes comfort and counsel of a sort from an older man who is writing a book, as Greene himself once did, on the Earl of Rochester and who falls in love with her. Initially, Greene conceived of it as a play, then dwelt on the plot for some time before deciding it should be ‘a very short novel’.16 Once he started it in January 1962, he found that it became ‘sadder and sadder’;17 it seems that he was finding sexual misunderstanding and deception not nearly as amusing as he had supposed.

  ‘May We Borrow Your Husband?’ belongs to a key moment in his life. He was in a hotel in Antibes, suffering from flu and reading John Henry Newman’s letters – almost certainly the just-published volume which covers the buoyant years right after the future cardinal’s conversion in 1845.18 Greene was moved by what he read and wrote to Catherine that he was ‘at the end of the long rope which has been allowed me. There seems to be little left except a blind leap back into faith or what I haven’t the courage to do.’ Reading Newman put the question into relief: faith or suicide. He pondered a break with Yvonne in order to complete his return to an orderly Catholic life,19 but he never went that far. Still, he would later be able to say that it was only faith that kept him from committing suicide.20 It is another paradox, so characteristic of Graham Greene, that at the very moment he was writing perhaps his most cynical story he was deciding that his life probably had a meaning.

  54

  PLASTIQUES

  Writing short stories may have restored some of Greene’s confidence, but there was nothing like a couple of bombs to get him thinking of a novel. The French fought a very ugly war against the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) from 1954 until the signing of the Evian Accords on 19 March 1962. In the course of that war twenty-five thousand French were killed and three hundred thousand Muslims.1 The war caused the collapse of the Fourth Republic in 1958, bringing Charles de Gaulle out of retirement to serve briefly as prime minister, then as president of the Fifth Republic. His willingness to compromise with the FLN outraged the French in Algeria, the so-called pieds-noirs, and led to the formation of the paramilitary Organisation armée secrète (OAS) intent on keeping Algeria French, and then to a failed putsch in April 1961, led by four generals, among them Raoul Salan, whom Greene had known and liked in Indochina. France’s most decorated soldier, Salan was sentenced to face a firing squad but was eventually pardoned.

  Like everyone in France, Greene followed the events in Algeria. In 1957, he made tentative plans to visit Colonel Jean Leroy, who was serving there, but had to cancel as the dates conflicted with his visit to China.2 In the summer of 1960, he addressed a long open letter in Le Monde to André Malraux, then Minister of Cultural Affairs, to protest against the torture and secret trial of the Algerian journalist Henri Alleg, whose book about his experiences was banned. Alleg had become a cause célèbre among writers and intellectuals. Greene had had some brief contact with Malraux when they had both served as judges for a translation prize set up in honour of Denyse Clairouin. When younger, Greene had admired Malraux’s writing, especially La condition humaine, but when he re-read it with a view to writing a film script he was disappointed, and he later complained of Malraux’s rhetoric and ‘mythomania’ – that is, his habit of exaggerating aspects of his life and career.3 Greene was perfectly content to make trouble for him.

  Meanwhile, Evelyn Waugh had an offbeat response to Greene’s protest on behalf of Alleg, which Greene thought utterly revealing of how his friend’s mind worked. In an interview with Gaia Servado, Greene remarked: ‘He was a rebel. Politically, he couldn’t stand anybody, the Tories included. It is a mistake to label him a right-wing writer. He did not reason in political terms. To give you an example, one evening we went to see Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros with Laurence Olivier. On the following day a letter of mine appeared in The Times in which I denounced tortures in Algeria. And then I got a little note from Evelyn: “I see that you send letters to The Times about tortures in Africa. Why don’t you mention the torture inflicted upon us by Laurence Olivier last night?” ’4

  In early February 1962, Greene rushed to Paris, since news reports described the city as torn apart. He did not want to miss the eruption of a civil war, and, in the event, he did not even have to leave his flat to witness the violence. Following large demonstrations in oppos
ition to the OAS, plastique bombs (plastic explosives) were planted in districts sympathetic to the political left. One went off in a street thirty yards from Greene’s flat on Boulevard Malesherbes and blew out one of his windows. He ran to another window to look out and saw a flash and heard a great bang – a second bomb had gone off two doors away. Both were aimed at left-wing publishers. The experience left Greene feeling ‘close to history’.5 He was sorely tempted to write an entertainment, to be called ‘The Last Time I Saw the General’, but it was not really possible. He would have to spend a week in Algiers doing research6 and that would be playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded.

  55

  MASKS

  Graham Greene may have hated his life, but others thought it a good thing to be him and so borrowed his identity. Beginning in the 1950s, he tracked the activities of what he called ‘the other’ – actually several men who impersonated him on different occasions, among them an escaped prisoner named John Skinner, and one whose name, Meredith de Varg, might have suited a minor villain in The Maltese Falcon. A third impersonator got himself jailed in Assam, so Greene proposed to interview him for Picture Post, but this fellow skipped bail, and while he was at large the real Graham Greene could not easily go to India for fear of arrest. There was word of an attempt in Paris to blackmail Greene over sexy photographs – at a time when Greene was not in Paris.1 As late as the mid-1980s, a man posing as Graham Greene turned up at a reading by Joseph Heller in Newcastle upon Tyne, conducted himself with Greene-like diffidence, and then fielded questions, including one about the difficulty of creating female characters.2