The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Graham remained in touch with Catherine but was much more distant. Her health was poor, with surgeries on her hip, and then electro-shock therapy for depression. Towards the end of 1965, Marie Biche conveyed Catherine’s complaints about his attitude and suggested he was neglecting her; he wrote a long letter saying this was not so,6 but it was true. He had made his choice. Yvonne was confident enough about their relationship to accept that Graham and Catherine might spend some time together. In May 1965, Catherine was hospitalized with an inflamed pancreas, a dangerous condition that left her very weak, so with Yvonne’s consent he invited her to recuperate at Anacapri,7 but the days of passion were over.

  Graham Greene could never be described as a happy man, and there would be low points in future, mainly as he fretted from time to time over whether Yvonne might break with him, but the horrific, sustained depressions of the 1950s would not be repeated. One factor must have been that there was just less drama in his dealings with Yvonne than there had been with Catherine; his daughter suggests that he was generally more even-tempered and courteous after the 1950s. It is also possible that there was some change in the way his mood disorder affected him. Greene made some loose claims about entering a long manic period in the mid-1960s;8 this may be so, but it is hard to assess. In any event, he was, very simply, doing better. The leprologist Michel Lechat wrote him a sad letter in February 1966, and Greene responded: ‘I’m so sorry that you are feeling empty. Perhaps your menopause has come a little early. I went through a year or two of that in the 1950s, but I seem to have emerged and my melancholy now when it does rear its ugly head is quite bearable. I suppose that is one of the consolations of age.’9 This vastly understates Greene’s earlier depression but is accurate in claiming that his troubles were now more manageable.

  Of course, he would never again worry about money. Since the arrest of Tom Roe in the summer of 1965, his fortunes had been almost entirely and unexpectedly restored. The Comedians was set to appear on both sides of the Atlantic on 27 January 1966. It had already been made a first choice of the Literary Guild, so a great deal of money was coming from the United States. Meanwhile, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood had set a new standard for the sale of film rights, at $500,000.10 ‘A baker’s dozen’ of producers swarmed Laurence Pollinger for proofs of Greene’s new novel, the very first being Sir Carol Reed,11 but the bidding went too high for him. Monica McCall believed they could get $250,000, though Pollinger thought, at first, that she was dreaming. As it turned out, Peter Glenville, who had directed The Living Room in 1953, had the backing of MGM and made a complicated bid, with a calculation partly based on book sales, which added up to precisely a quarter of a million dollars. They offered Greene an additional $50,000 to write the script, plus expenses.12 This all came as a pleasant surprise, as the rights to A Burnt-Out Case, though optioned, had never sold at all. He asked Yvonne: ‘You’ll go on loving me if I become rich, won’t you?’13

  Immediately upon its release The Comedians was given superb reviews and became the number-one bestseller in Britain;14 by 24 March it had sold forty-four thousand copies.15 In New York, Viking released the book a few days earlier than expected, just when Peter Glenville was in Haiti, making an incognito tour in order to meet people like Jolicoeur and to get a visual sense of the hotel and the other locations described in the novel. The director saw his project as deeply political, and likely to have more immediate effect on the Duvalier government than the bullets of the partisans. It was a blessing that the Tontons Macoutes did not read book reviews, or the director might have been found dead in a ditch.16

  Greene was becoming dissatisfied with his American publisher for other reasons, particularly their delay in passing on the payment from the Literary Guild.17 Although his financial picture was very good now, he had not yet received the various large sums he was owed, and in early 1967 was briefly reduced to borrowing money from Marie Biche.18 A disaffected Greene finally left Viking in 1970 for Simon & Schuster, where Michael Korda, whom he had befriended twenty years earlier on the Elsewhere, would be his editor until the mid-1980s, when he returned to Viking..

  Although Malcolm Muggeridge had once called him ‘one of nature’s displaced persons’, Greene could not live in a hotel for ever. In May 1966 he used some of the money from The Comedians to buy a flat in Antibes, at 51 La Résidence des Fleurs in Avenue Pasteur. He liked it for its view of the town, the harbour, and the distant mountains.19 He retained the flat in Paris and the house in Anacapri, but Antibes became his permanent home. He filled it with perhaps two thousand books and some artworks, but it was otherwise unremarkable. About a decade later, V. S. Pritchett came to interview Greene there and wrote: ‘I had imagined that the novelist who had lived in Albany would be living now in one of those fine and rosy old houses on the ramparts of old Antibes looking down at the sea and the gardens where the sly old men of the town play boules all day. It was strange to find him in this huge modern block, flaunting its bombastic concrete balconies.’20 Greene generally worked in the sitting room at a table beside a tall window overlooking the harbour. His enjoyment of the place was lessened when a large marina was developed in the 1970s: the view was changed and the noise increased, but he was content to remain there. At about that time, Greene gave a lecture at the Anglo-Argentine Society, after which the journalist Julian Evans asked him why he was living in France; he said: ‘The bread is very good, and occasionally the wine is good.’21

  The new life in France generally lifted Greene’s spirits, but back in England one of his most valued friends was in trouble. The bond between Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh had certainly revived after their exchange over A Burnt-Out Case, but perhaps not completely. Their correspondence continued, and at the beginning of 1966 Waugh wrote: ‘I greatly admire The Comedians. What staying power you have. It might have been written 30 years ago and could be by no one but you.’ He still rather disapproved of what Greene was up to, as he wrote to Ann Fleming: ‘Graham Greene has fled the country with the CH and a work of communist propaganda.’22 At the same time, Greene received a gloomy letter from Father Philip Caraman, saying that according to Margaret Waugh her father was seriously ill and refusing help; Caraman suggested that Waugh’s melancholy was ‘incurable’.23 Greene wrote back, expressing regret that Eric Strauss, who could have helped Waugh, was dead. Surprisingly, he took the view that no depression was beyond treatment, especially as he had seen how John Sutro had been helped by electro-shock therapy. Since Caraman was then in Norway and unable to do it himself, Greene asked him to send some priest in England whom Waugh would trust to check on him,24 but it was probably too late for anyone to help Evelyn Waugh.

  Waugh was devastated by the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council, in particular the demise of the Latin liturgy, which made it much more difficult to claim great differences between Roman Catholic worship and that of Anglicans. Greene actually shared Waugh’s view, though for rather more practical reasons: as a traveller, he had been able to attend the same Mass, more or less, in any country of the world. Now, with vernacular liturgies, he had to accept often not knowing what was being said at the altar.25 Waugh’s concern was much deeper and more agonized: he felt that something at the heart of his own life was being erased. Apart from the question of the Latin Mass, Greene was in favour of the reforms of the Council, and his own opinions on birth control, ecumenism, social justice, and papal infallibility would soon go far beyond what the bishops espoused.

  Waugh collapsed and died on Easter Sunday 1966 in a lavatory in his home in Somerset just after hearing Caraman celebrate a Mass in Latin. Upon hearing of his death, Greene wrote to Laura Waugh: ‘I was shocked more than I can find it possible to write by the news of Evelyn’s death. As a writer I admired him more than any other living novelist, & as a man I loved him.’26

  59

  FIDEL AT NIGHT

  A nervous aide laid a copy of The Comedians on Papa Doc’s desk and assured him that it was a piece of shit. It lay there for some
time beside a Bible and a loaded pistol. Although he could not read English well, Papa Doc soon decided that the book posed a huge threat.1 Surprisingly, his first known response was an attempt at literary criticism. When asked about it at a news conference in May, he said mildly: ‘Le livre n’est pas bien écrit. Comme l’oeuvre d’un écrivain et d’un journaliste, le livre n’a aucune valeur.’2

  Papa Doc was actually obsessed with the book and the movie project as part of a plot against him. Since he wanted to rebuild the tourist industry and needed to avoid bad publicity, he chose not to send out his assassins, though an article in a Duvalierist newspaper later declared openly that Greene and his accomplices were lucky to be alive, as Papa Doc could have had them shot no matter where they hid.3 From the beginning of 1966, Greene was on the lookout for strangers hanging about his flat in Paris.4

  Despite the danger, there was little difficulty assembling a cast for the film. Having been approached by both Glenville and Greene, Richard Burton wrote to the novelist at the end of March, saying that he ‘loved’ the book and was anxious to see the script.5 He was perfectly suited to play the gamecock Brown, who constantly challenges the Tontons Macoutes but stands for nothing and has no way of backing up what he says. He had recently played just such a hollow man, also under Peter Glenville’s direction; in the title role of Becket, his character is nothing until forced to become archbishop and make a stand, almost against his will, for ‘the honour of God’. Although there are different versions of the story, Greene understood that the price of getting Richard Burton as Brown was that they had to give the part of Martha to Elizabeth Taylor, and this caused Greene a pang as he had hoped to see it played by Anita Björk.6 Alec Guinness, who took the part of Jones, wrote to Greene in July that it was the best script he had ever read. James Earl Jones was cast as Magiot, Peter Ustinov as Ambassador Pineda, Roscoe Lee Brown as Petit Pierre, Lillian Gish as Mrs Smith, Paul Ford as Mr Smith, and Raymond St Jacques as Concasseur.

  With the production taking shape, Greene visited Cuba from 28 August to 19 September for the Daily Telegraph. While there, he spent much of his time in the company of the novelist and poet Pablo Armando Fernández, who had once worked at the Cuban embassy in London and was acquainted with Francis Greene. Later regarded as one of the island’s most important writers, Fernández largely organized Greene’s visits in 1963 and 1966, and a genuine respect and friendship sprang up between the two writers. Some years later Graham Greene asked Max Reinhardt to publish a novel by Fernández, but nothing came of the idea.7

  Greene was a guest of the government and they wanted to put him up in a grand house usually reserved for visiting heads of state with a butler, a guard, servants, and a swimming pool.8 He felt that this was a bit much for an independent journalist, so he checked in to a hotel, but he did make use of an ancient Packard and a French-speaking driver, for excursions about the country in the company of Pablo Fernández, the writer Lisandro Otero, and the photographer Ernesto Fernández. He met with many political and cultural figures, among them Haydée Santamaria, a survivor of the 1953 Moncada Barracks attack, whom he had first encountered at the safe house in Santiago in 1957; she was now in charge of Latin American relations and the publishing house Casa de las Americas. He visited René Portocarrera and Raúl Milian, a gay couple who were among Cuba’s leading artists, and he enjoyed their company very much.

  Greene remained enthusiastic about the Cuban experiment, finding it infinitely preferable to the ‘Stalinist capitalism’ of the United States,9 but he had also learned a good deal about the mistreatment of dissidents. Raúl Castro arranged a military flight for him to the Isle of Pines, the site of an enormous panopticon prison where the Castro brothers had themselves been incarcerated following the attack on Moncada Barracks. After the revolution it remained the harshest Cuban prison, with several thousand inmates, many of them opponents of the new regime. In 1963, the Organization of American States’ Interamerican Commission on Human Rights issued a report on Cuba, drawing particular attention to abuses occurring at this facility; Fidel initially disregarded the report, but the prison was becoming an international embarrassment and in 1967 he shut it down.10

  Greene had first met Armando Hart, Santamaria’s husband, at the same Santiago safe house in 1957, and watched him having his hair dyed. A very cultured man, he was now a cabinet minister, and Greene challenged him about the persecution of homosexuals, finding his answers ‘less than satisfactory’.11 The novelist wanted to know about the UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción) camps run by the army. Theoretically, they provided an alternative form of service for conscientious objectors, but were in fact hard labour camps, where homosexuals, supposed layabouts, and members of certain Protestant groups were sent for years at a time, with almost no contact from their families. Given that there were three priests currently in such camps, Greene judged that the position of the Catholic church had deteriorated since his last visit.

  Seeing that the revolution was very much a project of the young who would one day become set in their ways, Greene remarked, ‘I do not wish to live long enough to see this revolution middle-aged.’12 Some of those he met in Cuba were already wavering, among them the poet Carlos Franqui, a journalist and spokesman for the government, who went into exile in 1968 when Fidel endorsed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

  During his three weeks in Cuba, Greene was kept waiting for a meeting with Fidel, who travelled about the country according to no very fixed schedule, a practice that wrongfooted would-be assassins. Raúl was far less elusive, and Greene was even able to watch him and other cabinet ministers play a 2 a.m. game of basketball: Cuban revolutionaries tended to be night owls. One day, Greene, who was shown several agricultural projects during his visit, arrived late at the Isla Turiguano, a state farm specializing in cattle, horses, and pigs, and found that Fidel had already been there and left. They reached Morón, to find that he had spent the night there and moved on. Fidel showed up in Camaguey – after Greene had left. So it continued, until the last evening of Greene’s visit, when he was having dinner with the British ambassador, only to be called away by Carlos Franqui for his long-delayed meeting with the leader. The ambassador was envious of Greene as he had never had such a meeting with Fidel.

  Franqui took him to a house outside Havana, watched over by many guards. Inside he found Fidel, his top aide and physician René Vallejo, who acted as interpreter, and the minister of education José Llanusa. The meeting lasted from about 11 p.m. until 2 a.m. For the first forty-five minutes or so, Fidel held forth on farming and country life, telling Greene a practised anecdote of how he had gone into a pueblo at night and found two men playing dominoes, so he joined them. As word of his presence spread, a crowd gathered and demanded a speech. Instead he had asked them about the minute details of their lives, and decided to try an experiment in the town, a bolder kind of communism where everything would be provided and the results could be judged by economists and sociologists.

  Greene drew Fidel into a discussion of how Catholicism and communism have much in common, making the case not just for coexistence but for cooperation. Castro then praised the papal nuncio to Cuba. They agreed that right-wing American clerics like Cardinal Spellman and the television preacher Bishop Fulton Sheen posed a threat to Cuba. Greene gathered that since Castro hoped to export his style of revolution to South America he could not appear to the peasants in other countries as a persecutor of the church. When it was over, Greene noted ‘He plays Communism by ear & not by books.’13 As a parting gift, Fidel gave him a painting of flowers by Portacarrero, and signed the back of it. Franqui gave him one by Milian. The artists themselves had already each given Greene a picture, so he returned to France with four Cuban artworks.

  Apart from political discussions, Greene and Fidel struck up a friendship. Indeed, it was common for visitors, among them the Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his wife Margaret, to find the Cuban leader affable and in many ways admirable – the T
rudeaus and their sons regarded Fidel as nearly a family member. By a fluke, the British ambassador encountered Fidel on the beach the day after Greene had met him and reported back to Whitehall that the Cuban leader had ‘waxed eloquent in Graham Greene’s praise. Of course it must be gratifying to him that an eminent author from the capitalist world – and a Roman Catholic to boot – should take this benevolent interest in the Cuban revolution, but Graham Greene evidently struck a personal note.’ He also judged Greene’s view of the revolution as ‘sympathetic but not wholly uncritical’.14

  60

  PAPA DOC HONOURED ME

  At their late-night meeting, Fidel Castro offered Graham Greene all facilities free of charge for the filming of The Comedians.1 It was, perhaps, not a serious offer as MGM was hardly going to ignore the embargo. However, the problem of where to shoot the film was real. In the end, Glenville decided to re-create scenes from Port-au-Prince in the coastal city of Cotonou in Dahomey, among them a replica of the Oloffson Hotel. When he reached the country in early February 1967, Greene saw the sign ‘Welcome to Haiti’ and had an irrational moment of fear, thinking he was back there. The guerrilla leader Fred Baptiste came to Cotonou during the filming and liked what he saw: ‘But this is Haiti.’2

  About two months later, an American journalist asked Greene, then making another visit to the set, what he wanted the film to accomplish. Mixing a Scotch and soda, he commented, ‘I’d like it to help isolate Duvalier. And I would hope it might have some influence on your State Department. Duvalier has brought the country to the verge of economic disaster, and the only thing that props him up is outside aid and the dwindling tourist trade. Any aid to Haiti only ends in keeping the tontons happy. It never reaches the poor.’ He added, ‘These are, of course, ideal objectives for the film’s impact. I’m afraid it’s a little like David flinging the pebble . . . ’3