The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  News coverage focused on Burton and Taylor, their drinking, fighting, and love-making, but there were other things happening on the set. James Earl Jones remarked: ‘You know, if Hollywood were doing The Comedians, all the Negroes would have been type-cast. The girls would have been fair-skinned so the American male could warm to them. I think I have a very good part. The doctor’s a Communist. But Greene made him a sympathetic character and Mr Glenville is going to play me as Greene wrote it. I don’t portray the sinister Marxist. In Hollywood, they’d have turned me into a bastard.’4 Various explanations have been offered for the indifference of audiences to this film, which had had the promise of greatness about it when it was released in October 1967. Greene blamed Elizabeth Taylor, Guinness blamed Peter Glenville for a slightly ‘mechanical’ way of directing,5 others claimed it was too long, but Jones may have put his finger on the problem. American movie-goers were not all that interested in the problems of very black people in a country they could not find on a map.

  The book and the film did matter – very much – to Haitian exiles. Throughout 1966, Greene hosted a number of them in Paris. Fred Baptiste’s visit to the film set was intended to raise $80,000 to help pay for a new invasion. Greene was uncomfortable about his companion, a former Duvalierist army officer, who seemed to be a spy. Nonetheless, he made a small donation and wrote personal letters to the leading actors asking them to do likewise, but there was no response. Unfortunately, Peter Glenville had already wasted a large donation, and they probably had heard about this. He had just given $50,000 to another former Duvalierist, Father Jean-Baptiste Georges, who tried to organize a small invasion from Florida. Georges sought to enlarge his war chest by selling documentary rights for the expedition to CBS, and so his plans became known. In early 1967, customs officials seized their equipment and arrested the priest. The episode was afterwards known as ‘The Bay of Piglets’.6

  The film premiered in New York on 31 October 1967, to a certain amount of fist-waving from the Haitian regime. The ambassador to the United States called it ‘a character assassination of an entire nation’ presenting Haiti as a country of ‘Voodoo worshippers and killers’. Its intention, he claimed, was ‘disgusting and scaring the American tourist at the beginning of the season. Haiti is one of the most beautiful, peaceful, and safe countries in the Caribbean.’7 When Glenville looked to Greene for a response, he wired back: ‘Suggest following: The ruler of Haiti, responsible for murder and exile of thousands of his countrymen, is really protesting against his own image in the looking glass. Like the ugly queen in Snow White he will have to destroy all the mirrors. But perhaps someone with a sense of humour drafted the official protest with its reference to “one of the most peaceful and safe countries in the Caribbean” from which even his own family has fled. I would like to challenge Duvalier to take a fortnight’s holiday in the outside world away from the security of his Tonton. Love Graham.’8 Presumably, the love was directed towards Glenville and not Papa Doc.

  Duvalier’s diplomats conducted a panicky campaign against the film, and tried to get it banned in various countries. Their main success was a court action in France claiming that the film insulted Duvalier. In 1970 a judge ruled that some scenes should be cut before the film could be shown, with the effect that it no longer made sense, but while Papa Doc claimed ten million francs in damages she awarded him just a single franc. In October 1968, Haitian embassies around the world issued a glossy volume entitled Graham Greene Demasqué/Finally Exposed, a collection of essays in English and French by various officials in the foreign ministry.9 In it, Greene was described as an opium addict, a spy, a racist, a pervert, a swindler, and a torturer. Haiti, under Duvalier, was portrayed as a kind of paradise – a claim supported by futuristic images of Duvalierville, the concrete wasteland that figures in the novel. Greene spoke of the book as one of the greatest compliments he had ever received, telling Bernard Diederich: ‘Papa Doc honoured me.’10

  61

  MORSE CODE ON THE WATER PIPES

  While Peter Glenville was filming and the Burtons were quarrelling, Graham Greene was working on a new novel. The first notes for what in early 1967 he called ‘Sense of Security’ were scribbled inside the back cover of Victor Canning’s The Limbo Line, a thriller about the abduction and return to the Soviet Union of defectors who have taken asylum in England. The hero of Canning’s book, a retired spy recalled to service, is instructed by his superiors to allow the anticipated abduction of a ballerina to occur so that the ring and the route can be traced, but he falls in love with the woman who is being used as bait. This conflict between loyalty to a national purpose and loyalty to an individual evidently gave Greene the idea for his own story.

  Despite being the story of an MI6 officer who is working for the KGB, The Human Factor is decidedly not the story of Kim Philby. The defector, Maurice Castle, is a conservative character and opposed to Marxism. He leads a rather grey life in Berkhamsted, with a mortgage, a dog, and a bicycle. Formerly stationed in South Africa, he fell in love with a black woman named Sarah and so was blackmailed by the security services there. He returned to London, protected by a diplomatic passport, but she had to escape with the aid of communist rebels. Out of love for her and gratitude to her protectors, Castle begins leaking material to the KGB, culminating in the revelation of an appalling plan to back the apartheid regime with American nuclear weapons. Once that document is leaked, he must take refuge in Moscow and so is separated from Sarah. Although a version of the book was almost finished in late 1967, Greene spoke of it then to V. S. Naipaul as one he might write in the future: ‘I am hoping, when the present spy vogue is over, to write a book in which the villain is M.I.5, not the Russians or the Chinese. It will be set in England right until the end. A sympathetic study of treachery.’1

  This ‘spy vogue’ included a book by Philby’s third wife, Eleanor, Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved, which appeared in January 1968. That book recounted, just as Greene’s did, the ruin of a defector’s marriage. He had been consulted about the book, and later relied on it for a description of Castle’s flat in Moscow.2 After it came out he laid his own manuscript aside for about seven years. The Human Factor was finally published in early 1978, more than eleven years after he had written those notes inside the cover of The Limbo Line.

  He appears to have had almost no contact with Philby himself for a good many years, and it was not until 1977 that an occasional correspondence started up between them. Nonetheless, he was known to be a defender of Kim Philby. He published a ferocious, almost incoherent, review of two new books on Philby in February 1968,3 claiming that the real purpose of intelligence work was not to gather scientific or military information but to sow distrust on the other side, and to this end MI5’s revelation of Philby as a traitor was a mistake as it created distrust between Britain and America. He speculated on how interesting it would have been if Philby had become ‘C’ and had access only to the ‘vacuous’ minutes of high-level meetings; his eventual flight to Russia would have caused widespread laughter. Indeed, he dismissed the whole phenomenon of defection: ‘No harm done by Philby, Burgess, and Maclean can outweigh the entertainment they have all given us.’ In the article he argued very dubiously for the moral equivalence of crimes committed by East and West. Even allowing for the outrages of American foreign policy, it is hard to equate them with those of Stalin and his successors.

  The same review contained a comment that the ‘distinguished’ John le Carré (David Cornwell) must not really be the author of a ‘vulgar and untrue’ account of Philby contained in one of the books. Five years earlier, Greene endorsed The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as ‘The best spy story I have ever read’ – a phrase which still appears on reprints – and the two writers struck up a pleasant connection. After 1968, Greene always found fault with le Carré’s novels, saying they were too long, and on one occasion compared his style to ‘bad Kipling’.4 He probably had a special dislike for the character of Bill Haydon, the treacherous penetration ag
ent modelled on Philby. Although the two authors did subsequently exchange letters with expressions of good will, Greene was not very interested in renewing the connection, and this was a source of pain to Cornwell as he admired Greene and felt indebted to him.5 For his part, Greene may have been influenced by the younger writer in the mid-1960s; in The Human Factor, the bureaucratic world of MI6, with its melancholic functionaries and its obsession with files and pieces of paper rather resembles the one inhabited by George Smiley. Indeed, the broadcaster and journalist Robin Lustig maintains that in this novel Greene ‘does le Carré better than le Carré does’6 – high praise indeed.

  Doubtless as a consequence of the Observer review, Philby’s London publisher asked Greene to write a short introduction to the defector’s autobiography, My Silent War.7 In it, Greene asked the rhetorical question, ‘Who among us has not betrayed something or someone more important than his country?’ It was an article of faith for Greene that relationships with individuals were more important than those with countries or societies or groups. This was the same stance E. M. Forster took: ‘ . . . if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country’.8 It is an attractive thought, as nations have a lot to answer for, especially after two world wars. And yet as a moral principle it falls apart: it hints at tribalism and tends to justify indifference to strangers, things Greene abhorred. In a rather different sense, it suggests a failure of imagination; one cannot put a value on the pains of people one has never met, and that is precisely what novelists claim to do in their art. Of course, in reality, Greene was acutely sensitive to suffering and was constantly helping out strangers. Characteristically, he interpreted Philby’s career as a problem of belief, and compared him to Catholic zealots in the days of Elizabeth I awaiting the triumph of Philip of Spain. At the end of the introduction, he remarked of Philby’s defection: ‘After thirty years in the underground surely he had earned his right to a rest.’9

  Greene’s own relationship with the Soviet Union could hardly be characterized as ‘rest’. He condemned both sides in the Cold War, and his attitude towards the Soviet Union, especially after the accession of Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, was highly critical. He took a particular interest in the cases of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuliy Daniel, a pair of satirists whose works were smuggled abroad and published. In 1965, they were arrested for anti-Soviet activities. They were tried in the following year and sentenced to hard labour. In September 1967, Greene wrote to the Secretary of the Union of Writers and asked that any royalties owed to him and any money being held for him be paid to the wives of the two imprisoned writers.10

  Greene wrote a letter to The Times about Daniel and Sinyavsky, remarking that if he had sent it to Pravda or Izvestia, it would not have been published.11 He outlined his decision concerning the royalties and stated that he could no longer visit the Soviet Union, of which he had such happy memories, while these men were in jail. Greene specifically wanted to make a protest over human rights, nothing more, so he added this wildly provocative declaration: ‘There are many agencies, such as Radio Free Europe, which specialize in propaganda against the Soviet Union. I would say to these agencies that this letter must in no way be regarded as an attack upon the Union. If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States of America, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union, just as I would choose life in Cuba to life in those southern American republics, like Bolivia, dominated by their northern neighbour, or life in North Vietnam to life in South Vietnam. But the greater the affection one feels for any country the more one is driven to protest against any failure of justice there.’12 This statement was made while in his fiction he was working out what he took to be the wholly moral grounds for Maurice Castle’s defection. Even so, it is unreasonable. If Graham Greene had been a Russian writer, he would long since have been declared an unperson. He could not live and work in Russia without the protections of international celebrity, money, and a foreign passport, and he knew this. His remarks had a more straightforward rhetorical purpose. He wanted to make sure that his protest on behalf of Daniel and Sinyavsky was useless for American propaganda. He was poisoning the well.

  Greene was as good as his word and refused to visit the Soviet Union until the Gorbachev years owing to the treatment of dissidents. In July 1969, the novelist Anatoly Kuznetsov, author of Babi Yar, left the Soviet Union and sought asylum in England. Greene wrote to The Times on 6 August 1969 asking his fellow novelists to join him in refusing permission for their works to be published in the Soviet Union ‘so long as work by Solzhenitsyn is suppressed and Daniel and Sinyavsky remain in their prison camps’. The secret police soon claimed to have found letters from foreign authors including Greene in Kuznetsov’s apartment; Greene denied this and took it as a sign that the authorities no longer trusted him.13

  He made many such protests. In late 1956, the Russians had crushed the revolution in Hungary and killed or imprisoned many dissidents. Greene made a plea to the new Interior Minister for the release of Tibor Déry, an anti-Stalinist writer who had been spokesman for the now deposed government.14 In 1958 Greene had privately urged the Soviet Union of Writers to allow Boris Pasternak to accept the Nobel Prize: at first he did accept it, but was pressured to decline, and was then persecuted until his death two years later.15 Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the prize in 1970 but was unable to travel to Stockholm, for fear of not being allowed to return home; however, his undelivered lecture was eventually published in a pamphlet by Max Reinhardt and then printed in the Listener; Greene issued a statement through the BBC World Service about his ‘excitement and admiration’ upon reading it.16 Reinhardt was actually Solzhenitsyn’s British publisher, and Greene certainly approved of this.17 As late as 1981, Greene turned down an invitation to Russia and Georgia because of the continued imprisonment of the mathematician Anatoly (Natan) Scharansky; Greene did not care to offer the Soviet government even a minor propaganda victory.18

  He was especially involved with dissidents in Czechoslovakia. The emergence of Alexander Dubcˇek as leader in January 1968 initiated the Prague Spring, a brief, lighted time in which it seemed possible for an Eastern Bloc country to reform its government and embrace human rights and free speech. However, the Kremlin was having none of it, and on 20–21 August 1968 sent in half a million troops.

  Greene had visited Czechoslovakia before, notably at the time of the revolution in 1948, and had friends there. Since early 1966 he had been in contact with Josef Škvorecký, a novelist who was helping to translate some of his works. Škvorecký feared that he or his wife would soon be arrested, so the couple fled just before the invasion. He wrote to Greene asking for advice about political asylum and opportunities for work, but then he and his wife decided to risk a return to Czechoslovakia. They established a code phrase: if Škvorecký was arrested, his wife would send a message asking for permission to translate The Man Within and Greene would know it was time to go to the newspapers and begin agitating for his release.19

  Škvorecký organized an invitation from the Union of Writers for Greene to visit Prague, but then finally decided the country was not safe and left for Canada. Greene arrived for his ‘visit of protest’ at the beginning of February and did all the things he normally refused to do in the West – met reporters, gave interviews, spoke on the radio. He met a good many of Škvorecký’s friends, including the playwright Václav Havel, who would later become president of the Czech Republic. On the evening they met, Havel had just discovered a listening device in his ceiling and was suffering from the company of someone Greene believed to be a spy. Havel was afraid that Greene was not meeting ‘representative’ people so introduced him to some of his friends.20

  Just before Greene’s arrival, a young philosophy student had set himself on fire in the centre of Prague to protest the Soviet occupation. In an interview with the television journalist Karel Kyncl, Greene called this act ‘courageous’ and so gave offence to the governmen
t. His works soon ceased to be available in Czechoslovakia.21 In 1972, Kyncl was sentenced to twenty months in prison for speaking out at the Union of Writers in defence of a dissident chess grandmaster and writer named Ludeˇk Pachman. Kyncl fell seriously ill in prison, so Pachman approached Greene, who sent a letter to The Times in February 1973, urging the authorities to release the journalist.22 Nothing happened, but word of Greene’s appeal made its way to Kyncl and he immediately spread the news to fifty other political prisoners by tapping the novelist’s name in Morse code on the water pipes. He later wrote to Greene: ‘only a person who has spent at least a few weeks in prison can really perceive how we felt about the fact that the great author, whom we all highly respect and whose books we love, spoke out in our name’.23

  With the help of Rodney Dennys, Greene was able to assist Kyncl’s son, a photographer, to come to Britain in 1980 and start a new life.24 However, Karel Kyncl himself remained in Czechoslovakia, eking out a living by selling ice cream and other such employments; he was eventually arrested again, for his work with the Charter 77 human rights group. Greene was a leading figure in protests that eventually secured his release in 1983, after which Kyncl took asylum in Britain.25

  Although exiled, Josef Škvorecký remained Greene’s main source of information about Czechoslovakia, writing him long letters full of news he picked up from his contacts over a period of twenty years, some of which Greene passed on to MI6. However, there was more to Škvorecký than a source of political intelligence. In the autumn of 1968, Greene read his novel The Legend of Emöke and was astounded, calling it a ‘master work’ and comparing it to Chekov.26 When Škvorecký applied for a teaching position at the University of Toronto, Greene provided a reference that made similar claims. When Greene’s niece Louise Dennys became a publisher in Toronto, he suggested that they work together. One of his novels, The Engineer of Human Souls, published by her firm Lester & Orpen Dennys, won Canada’s highest literary prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, in 1984, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize. He received many honours, of which the greatest may have come when a Czech astronomer discovered a very large piece of rock orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, and it was officially named Asteroid (26314) Škvorecký.27