The Unquiet Englishman
Page 46
62
BEHIND THE SAND DUNE
‘I came back from a battle! I do seem to have a nose because I stumbled on the worst point of the worst incident in two months. For more than two and a half hours in the sun I had to lie with my companion & our driver on the side of a sand dune with artillery (anti-tank guns), mortars, & small arms fire. Alas. I’d only had lemonade for two days – I could have done with a whisky. As we were within a hundred yards of the Israelite artillery who didn’t know we were there & which was the Egyptian objective, I really thought I’d had my last game of roulette.’1
It was 27 September 1967 and Graham Greene was experiencing the fourth month of the Six Day War – the violence continued long after the official ceasefire. In June, Israel had routed the forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and seized control of the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. Greene was commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph to write about the aftermath of the war, and so arrived in Israel on 17 September 1967 and stayed for three weeks.2
Early in the visit he had dinner at an Arab restaurant in Jaffa with the architect of Israel’s victory, the eye-patched defence minister Moshe Dayan. Also at the meal were his wife, who spoke in praise of Arabs, their daughter the novelist and future politician Yael Dayan, and her new husband. Greene stayed in touch with the younger couple throughout his visit. Much of the time, he was in the company of Israeli documentary-makers as he travelled throughout the country and the newly occupied territories. He spent a couple of nights in a kibbutz in Galilee and looked at fortifications in the Golan Heights. It was all fascinating, but he could find no fresh angle to write about. Then came the shelling.
Following the road taken into the northern Sinai by General Israel Tal and his forces to the city of El Arish, Greene saw the burnt-out hulks of Egyptian tanks and trucks. After staying the night at Kantara on the east side of the Suez Canal, he travelled south with United Nations observers to four observation posts. At each, the officers made the ritual declaration, ‘All peaceful’. At Bitter Lakes, Greene saw the so-called ‘Yellow Fleet’, fifteen ships trapped in the closed canal. They drove as far as Port Tewfik at the southern end and headed back, only to be warned of an ‘incident’ in the vicinity of Ismailia. With the traffic stopped, they were slow to take cover behind sand dunes, but then a shell flew overhead, landing close by, followed by two more, one landing close enough that a tiny piece of shrapnel hit an observer’s face. Once they were behind a sand dune, he saw the man dabbing his cheek.
He had been told that ‘incidents’ were usually resolved within forty-five minutes, and a ceasefire arranged. Not this time. After a long delay, an Israeli artillery post almost directly behind their position returned fire, with the likelihood that the Egyptian artillery would now shorten its range and drop a shell on their hiding place. Greene took off his sunglasses so they would not break into his eyes, and thought of the Blitz, ‘but the blitz had one great advantage – the pubs remained open’.3
Greene felt something close to panic, as he had felt when charged by the police at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 and again at Phat Diem, when he momentarily wandered into the gap between French and Viet Minh fighters. He thought of the effect his death would have on Yvonne, and said ‘Hail Marys’ while trying to appear blasé and accustomed to battlefields.4 There were five men hiding behind the dune; two drivers had run for the truck and made their escape. Too slow to join them, the rest stayed put, and when the firing died down they ran for a jeep and drove off at a speed that ‘would have been reckless if it had not been prudent’.5 And prudent it was, as shelling along the canal that day was reported to have killed a total of sixty-two Israelis and Egyptians.6
Malcolm Muggeridge was in the country with a BBC film crew; though old friends, he and Greene had had some quarrels and regarded each other as fairly treacherous. At this time Muggeridge was recovering a Christian faith; largely influenced by Mother Teresa, whom he made famous in the West through a 1969 documentary, he would later become a Catholic. Greene remarked with some asperity in a letter to Yvonne that Muggeridge was ‘giving absurd interviews about himself & Christ’.7 They did, however, meet very amicably, and Muggeridge had an idea for the future: they should appear together on television when Greene turned eighty. Reminded of the plan years later Greene said no, as he nearly always refused to go on television and he hadn’t expected to live so long.8 When the day came for Muggeridge himself to be received into the Roman Catholic church, Greene wrote: ‘I don’t know whether to congratulate you or to commiserate with you on making your decision, but I can sincerely wish you good luck & I can also hope that you will make a better Catholic than I have done.’9
After his conversation with Muggeridge in Jerusalem, Greene was left to wonder what he himself made of being in the Holy Land. In his hotel room he wrote: ‘Out of the window the lights of Bethany. One feels closer here, & in the Holy Sepulchre, to the man Jesus, the builder from Nazareth, but no closer to the God. The particulars, this landscape, the exposed rocky fragment of Golgotha belong to the man like the house where Tolstoy lived. But God seems no more connected with this place than with one of the innumerable stars.’10
Greene did feel connected to Israel. He felt that it had been entirely justified in the pre-emptive attacks that began the war, as the soldiers of Egypt were preparing to overrun the tiny state. He admired Dayan and a number of other leaders, especially the tolerant and pragmatic mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. He remained a supporter of Israel for many years, and was proud to receive the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1981, but the people he admired generally belonged to the Labour Party. The Likud Party, under Menachem Begin, was elected in 1977, and after agreeing to the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the subsequent treaty with Egypt, it held to hardline policies on permanent settlements in occupied areas and resisted significant concessions to its neighbours, so Greene’s views changed. He remarked in 1988, when the party now led by Yitzhak Shamir was sharing power with Labour under Shimon Peres, that, proud as he was of the award, if it had been granted to him at that time he would have had to refuse it.11 Also in 1988, he lent his name to protests on behalf of Mordechai Vanunu, the nuclear technician who provided the Sunday Times with firm evidence of Israel’s nuclear arms programme; following a ‘honey-pot’ abduction scheme, this whistle-blower was brought back to Israel to stand trial and sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment. In a telegram to the anti-nuclear campaigner Monsignor Bruce Kent, Greene described this as ‘a disgrace to the government of Israel’.12 Indeed, Amnesty International remains concerned about Vanunu’s case; after he served his whole sentence, eleven years of it in solitary confinement, he was subject to bizarre restrictions on where he might live and whom he might talk to.13 As late as 2017, he was convicted, for the third time, of an obscure violation of his terms of release.14
Graham Greene’s visit to Israel put his life at risk, and over the years his travels to the dangerous places of the world caused enormous worry to his family and friends. In 1967, what went around came around, and Greene was himself the worrier. Working now as a freelance reporter, photographer and documentary-maker, thirty-one-year-old Francis Greene had been in Israel for the Six Day War itself. Immediately before the fighting began, he went to a sad feast in Tel Aviv attended by young people, some in uniform – they expected their country to be invaded and believed that in a few days most of those present would be dead. Francis went with the army in its storming of the Golan Heights and witnessed Israeli units moving quickly through minefields, without regard for their horrific casualties. One of the first reporters to reach the top of the Heights, he could hear Russian being spoken and worked out that some prisoners were Russian artillery instructors; they were soon permitted to leave via a secret rendezvous with a submarine. This was a major story, but as a freelancer he did not have the means to get it out in time. He then followed retreating Arab forces through Gaza, and went on foot into the Negev, where he b
riefly became lost.15
Francis also reported on the Vietnam War in 1967–8, and this led him into even greater peril. From October 1967, Graham was in frequent contact with Trevor Wilson, then posted in the Laotian city of Vientiane, seeking news of his son. Moving in remote parts of Laos, Francis was first arrested in November by CIA operatives in a helicopter, who confiscated his film.16 Back in Vientiane, he was found to be suffering from ‘malignant malaria’ – an often fatal disease. Trevor Wilson reported to Graham that his fever reached 105°.17 Writing to his father, Francis described himself ‘as weak as a smoke ring’,18 but soon returned to his work. He was photographing in the old Imperial capital of Hué at the end of January, and was, again, lucky to escape with his life. He was on one of the last flights out before the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive. During the three-week occupation of Hué, they executed any Westerners they could find, and any local person suspected of collaboration.
For much of the next month, Francis was out of contact in the Mekong Delta – Graham ‘could hardly sleep at night’19 and had to content himself with scraps of news from diplomats as he and Wilson fired off telegrams to anyone they could think of who might have seen him. Then, in early March, Francis and another journalist were detained by the Royal Laotian Army at the much-bombed Boloven Plateau at the southern end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where they had witnessed covert American military activity. Supposedly a ‘protective arrest’,20 it was anything but: they were held naked in a cage and were likely to have been shot, except that Trevor Wilson was tipped off by a midnight telephone call from an anonymous American radio operator and then agitated for their release. As it was, Francis’s exposure to the elements brought back symptoms of the illness he had suffered in December.21 These troubles he accepted as part of his profession and so regarded Graham’s search for him as somewhat tiresome, especially when he had to reimburse people for all the return telegrams. He wrote to his father and asked him to ‘call off the hounds’.22
While Graham Greene could no longer undertake such arduous journeys himself, he followed developments in Vietnam and had even hoped to make a trip there in 1965, but was frustrated by visa difficulties. In the meantime, he was an inspiration to the new generation of reporters who wrote about the war, even if he did not always admire their work. When, some years later, a publisher sent him a copy of Michael Herr’s memoir Dispatches, composed in driving rhythms like rock music, he wrote: ‘I read Dispatches naturally with great interest. I was rather put off by the opening part which seemed to me too excitable, but Herr calmed down a bit later. I think when one is dealing with horrors one should write very coldly. Otherwise it reads like hidden boasting – “just see what a brave chap I am to have voluntarily put myself in the way of such experiences.” To adapt Wordsworth, horror should be remembered in tranquility.’23
He frequently wrote letters to the newspapers about the conflict and thought that American policy was fundamentally unrealistic, since they failed to accept that much of the rural south was already in the hands of the communists. In his view, the only sensible course was for the Americans to negotiate with them – something that began fitfully in 1968. Apart from an extensive correspondence with opponents of the war, Greene made various public gestures. Most memorably, he tried in 1970 to organize a mass resignation of foreign members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since it had not come out against the war. He could not persuade anyone to join him, so made his own stand: ‘I have tried to put myself in the position of a foreign honorary member of a German Academy of Arts and Letters at the time when Hitler was democratically elected Chancellor. Could I have continued to consider as an honour a membership conferred in happier days?’24 Of course, it changed nothing, and yet he did it. He was, after all, a reader of Cervantes.
63
A HOUSE SURROUNDED BY ORANGE TREES
When The Human Factor went into a drawer towards the end of 1968, Greene began thinking of a banker named Henry Pulling who goes down a rabbit hole into the world inhabited by his Aunt Augusta. Travels with My Aunt was partly inspired by Greene’s long friendship with the dottoressa Elisabeth Moor, the Austrian woman whose stories of a rackety life had captivated him whenever he went to Capri. The Australian-American writer Shirley Hazzard, a regular visitor to the island, recalled her: ‘A squat, categorical figure, formless in winter bundling, the Dottoressa had the rugged, russet complexion of northerners long weathered in the hot south, prominent paleolithic teeth, and memorably pale blue eyes.’1 In the mid-1970s, the photographer Islay de Courcy Lyons had attempted to write up Moor’s tape-recorded memoirs; then Greene took over the job, added passages of his own in her style, and saw it into print as An Impossible Woman in 1975, figuring she would earn a much-needed £5000 from the book.2 He described the dottoressa to Michael Korda as ‘a combination of Chaucer’s Good Wife of Bath and Mrs Bloom’.3 This would also be an apt description of Aunt Augusta.
Greene could not decide whether this was to be a novel or an entertainment: ‘I found more and more that the distinction was a bad one and that the two types of book came closer and closer to each other. I abandoned the distinction altogether in the case of Travels with My Aunt, which I thought was on one side quite a funny book and could be described as an entertainment but on the other hand it was a book that described old age and death.’4
Old age and death were on his mind, but so too were youth and memory. At the same time, he was working on his autobiography, something he had pursued in fits and starts for nearly twenty years. He had written an autobiographical ‘screed’ for Eric Strauss, and tried later to shape his life’s story in terms of the many airports he had landed at, and on turning sixty in 1964 had produced a rather gloomy meditation, ‘The Last Decade’, on what his life had been and what he might yet expect, but as it turned out he had the better part of three decades still ahead of him. His uncertainty about autobiography as a form, and about the nature of his own experiences, came together in the title he finally decided on: A Sort of Life.
Relying on his often-mistaken memory, he confirmed few of the details, at times treated fact and personal myth in much the same manner, and exaggerated dramatic elements – a common flaw in the memoirs of novelists, whose craft is always to improve a story. Nonetheless, the outcome was an elegant and haunting account of sheltered early years, Judas-time in the dormitory, self-harm and attempts at suicide, and then growth into a novelist. By December 1967, the manuscript was forty-five thousand words long and he had reached the age of twenty-two in his account,5 but he held this book back, perhaps to coordinate the launch with the first volumes of his new collected edition. Released in 1971, A Sort of Life was received, as Walter Clemons described it, as ‘one of Graham Greene’s best books’.6
With the past so much on his mind in late 1967, he went with Mario Soldati back to one of the great scenes of his earlier life – Sierra Leone – and wrote an article called ‘The Soupsweet Land’, which was an open-hearted love letter to West Africa.7 Thinking of himself as a ghost, he was surprised to be recognized right away on the street and drawn into the company of old ‘coasters’. The day after their arrival, he went to the little house in the flats he had occupied in 1942–3. It was still there, rats and all, but the swamp had been cleaned up and new buildings had improved the neighbourhood. He went to the Catholic church in Brookfield with the statue of St Anthony above the altar: ‘What had I lost for him to find? The whole past.’8
It was not all nostalgia: Greene had picked, as he often did, a delicate moment for his journey, perhaps acting on a prompt from MI6. His journal shows that during the two-week visit he did some research on diamond mining. For many years this industry was dominated by De Beers’ Sierra Leone Selection Trust, but at times the firm was in conflict with many thousands of unlicensed indigenous miners whose stones were smuggled out of the country, mainly through Liberia, leading to tensions across the border. In 1967, there was an election in Sierra Leone, but the winner, Siaka Stevens, was immediat
ely thrown into jail and the country experienced months of political crisis. Stevens took power again in early 1968 and turned diamonds into a political issue, encouraging the illicit miners. He nationalized the industry in 1971,9 and he and his associates subsequently grew fat on the sale of diamonds. Stevens’s legacy is complicated, as for some he is a pioneer of democracy and for others a killer and a thief.10 ‘Blood diamonds’ or ‘conflict diamonds’ were a key factor in the hideous war that broke out in Sierra Leone in 1991, with different factions using them to pay for the fighting.11 During his visit, Greene observed the De Beers mining sites and noted their elaborate security arrangements, and he also watched the work of some unlicensed miners. What he made of it all is not certain, as he did not turn his scattered observations into the proposed article on ‘Post Colonialism’.12
Going back to Sierra Leone caused Greene to burrow even more deeply into distant memories. Among other things, it brought back to mind two brothers named Wordsworth he had met on his trek through Liberia. One was the district commissioner of Tappa Tee, a man of ferocious aspect, accused by local chiefs of oppression, though Barbara Greene discovered that he was actually ‘shy and timid’ and she could not believe the accusations. The younger Wordsworth asked for brandy and affected a swagger but yearned for affection. Speaking in the local dialect of English, he told the Greenes they were his best friends and begged them to write letters: ‘He stood, a pathetic little figure, by the gateway of the compound, and watched us till we disappeared into the forest.’13 Thirty-two years later, Greene created a character from Sierra Leone named Wordsworth, who is Aunt Augusta’s lover. He begs cigarettes and is a drug smuggler, but by the end of the story lives up to his name as a pure romantic; although much of what he does is amusing, his death takes on dignity as he refuses a pay-off (or ‘dash’) to leave Aunt Augusta and return to Europe.