The Unquiet Englishman
Page 48
He was thinking of a new novel10 to be set, possibly, in a river port on the Paraná, about a botched abduction. The rebel group would be seeking to capture the American ambassador, but instead end up with the tiniest of diplomatic fish, a British honorary consul. Greene had already named the consul Charlie Fortnum, after the Piccadilly grocer, and his friend the physician Eduardo Plarr, and put together an outline of chapters.11
Colombia was ‘the classic country of guerrillas’, where Camilo Torres had been killed and where the new theology was springing up, so he gave some thought to setting the book there. He was particularly interested in an organization of about fifty left-wing priests there called the Golconda Group: politicians denounced it as subversive, and conservative prelates tried to stamp it out.12 He wanted to observe the Colombian elections to be held in April, the results of which he understood to be fixed in advance in favour of the country’s traditional rulers,13 but it turned out that Argentina and Paraguay could offer him more than enough material for his story.
‘Overtaken by events’, he wrote in his journal on 26 March 1970.14 He had flown to Buenos Aires a week before, and then spent a few rainy days with Victoria Ocampo at Mar del Plato, before flying on to Corrientes, a border city on the Argentine side of the Paraná, which he had observed briefly on his earlier voyage upriver to Asunción, and stayed there for eight days. As he put it to Catherine: ‘Nobody could understand why I was going there. It’s very hot and humid, they said (and that was true) and nothing ever happens there. (That wasn’t). I flew up in the same plane as the governor who passed a decree making me the guest of the province so I paid for nothing . . . hotel, drinks all free.’15 He encountered a community of British expatriates, and visited a brothel and a camp outside the city – all of these featured in the novel.
But then came news that a Paraguayan consul named Waldemar Sánchez had been kidnapped by the Argentine Liberation Front. He had been in Buenos Aires, trying to sell his just-imported Mercedes-Benz to prospective buyers who turned out to be rebels – this detail prompted Greene to have Fortnum importing and selling a Cadillac from time to time as a matter of diplomatic privilege. In their communiqués, the captors described Sánchez as a CIA operative and said he would be shot if two men held by the Argentine government were not released. The government took a hard line and refused these terms, and, without interrupting his fishing holiday in Argentina, General Stroessner announced that he could accept the death of the consul. After eighty hours in captivity and an extension of the deadline, the blindfolded Sánchez was released near a train station in Corrientes. Greene heard that the rebels had probably abducted the wrong man: ‘More & more like my own story.’16
Greene cut out a long article on the abduction from a Corrientes newspaper and had it translated for further study.17 Meanwhile, he and his guide, an airport manager, came upon the scene of a murder. The police were going about their work and Greene, seeing the corpse covered by a long sheet of paper with only its toes showing, asked if he might photograph it; he was taken aback when they actually peeled away the sheet to reveal the body with its knife wounds, and yet, to Greene’s mind, the man looked ‘peaceful’. The killing was not political, but just something between friends – a matter of smuggling, or merely of machismo.18 Indeed, some male characters in The Honorary Consul, notably the novelist Saavedra, are obsessed with this sense of sexual honour, which Greene himself found unfathomable. Also, during Greene’s visit, a man locked the doors of his car and drove with his family into the river, killing them all.19
In this city where nothing was supposed to happen, there was yet more trouble. Greene met with and liked Father Raúl Oscar Marturet, a member of the ‘Third World Movement’ of priests, which had the support of perhaps 10 per cent of Argentine clergy, including a few bishops. Their views were progressive but diverse,20 and in many cases no more radical than those of Pope Paul himself, whose 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio, espoused many points of social justice. Even so, Monsignor Francisco Vicentín, the old-school Archbishop of Corrientes, had encouraged the police to harass Marturet, who finally went to court and had Vicentín arrested. Vicentín then excommunicated Marturet, a measure that was rescinded by Rome in 2016, by which time the priest was long dead.21 Vicentín tried to replace him with a more pliant priest, who showed up with some supporters to take over the church, only to be fought off by the parishioners who were stalwarts of Marturet. In a series of such confrontations Vicentín closed four churches with the backing not only of the police but of an infantry brigade. Just before returning to Europe, Greene made a statement to the press supporting Marturet, saying that the Third World organization was doing ‘great work’.22
He got down to writing the novel in Anacapri at the beginning of June 1970. It made good progress, though he recalled the writing as difficult; he had about forty thousand words written by September, and reported to Marie Biche in July 1971 that he had completed seventy thousand, but it took until June 1972 for him to complete his typescript, at 91,500 words.23 He revised it extensively and the result was a novel he particularly favoured. He conceived Travels with My Aunt as loosely structured and so wrote on ordinary-sized paper, but The Honorary Consul was to be tightly plotted so he used foolscap.24 It was an odd discipline, but it may have reminded him of how each word he wrote must fit a larger design.
Part of the challenge of this book was to weave in ideas he had about the compassion of God. For many years he had had an offbeat interest in Manichaeism; an ancient religion that once rivalled Christianity, it imagined God to have a dual nature, good and evil in perpetual struggle. In 1947, Greene had read The Medieval Manichee by Steven Runciman, and wrote to Catherine Walston: ‘I’ve almost come to the conclusion that I’m a good Gnostic instead of a bad Catholic. It’s much more convenient. Even The Power & the Glory is a Gnostic phrase & not a Catholic one.’25
The problem for Greene was that he could not take the idea of a devil very seriously, and if there was evil in the world God must be in some sense answerable for it; neither free will nor Original Sin offered a serious explanation for the way an omnipotent God had placed human beings in unbearable circumstances.
Seeing poverty and repression all around him, in the novel Father Rivas agonizes over this question and offers a tentative solution: ‘He has to be a God made in our image with a night-side as well as a day-side. When you speak of the horror, Eduardo, you are speaking to the night-side of God. I believe the time will come when the night-side will wither away . . . It is a long struggle and a long suffering, evolution, and I believe God is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain.’26 In addition to Manichaeism, Rivas is espousing what is called ‘process theology’. Sometimes Teilhard de Chardin is claimed as a process theologian, but the names most commonly associated with this wide-ranging school of thought are Alfred Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, and not all theologians of this school are Christian. They regard God not as a psychological construct, but as really existing. Their essential claim is that God is Himself subject to the sorrows and flux of time, and is evolving. According to process theology, God cannot force final outcomes in the material order, though he may create possibilities for free beings to accept or reject.27
There was no reason to rush into print with The Honorary Consul, as A Sort of Life came out in September 1971 and the volumes of his Collected Edition were being released at intervals. His introductions to the individual novels, drafted in the early 1960s for a German edition,28 appeared in the Daily Telegraph Magazine from 1970 to 1974, and Greene thought that together they could form a second volume of autobiography. In the late 1970s, his niece, the publisher Louise Dennys, did the necessary editorial work, stitching together the introductions and some other articles Greene had written over the years. It was published as Ways of Escape in 1980.
The delay with The Honorary Consul also allowed Greene to find out more about South America – and he did owe the Observer an article, having accepted payme
nt some time before to write a piece about Finland, which never materialized. He wanted to meet Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile, who took power in November 1970. Allende saw foreign exploitation of Chilean resources as a major cause of poverty, so he nationalized copper mines owned by the huge American firm Anaconda, later offering minimal compensation from which the company’s ‘excess profits’ were deducted. He took similar steps against other companies, causing outrage among foreign investors.29 As is well known, the Nixon administration saw him as a communist enemy of the United States, and worked first to prevent his election and then to bring about his downfall. Allende died during a CIA-assisted coup on 11 September 1973 which brought to power the junta dominated by General Augusto Pinochet.
The Prague Spring had taught Greene that democratic socialists would always be playing a weak hand, and he was discouraged by recent events. In March 1971, Fidel Castro unveiled a new forced labour scheme for ‘vagrants’ and ‘parasites’30 – all too reminiscent of the UMAP camps that Greene had objected to on his last visit. Greene wrote to Victoria Ocampo: ‘ . . . the situation in Cuba seems to be turning sour so that I am beginning to despair of a human face to communism!’31
In May 1971, Ocampo arranged for Greene to meet the poet Pablo Neruda, now Allende’s ambassador to France. It was, perhaps, just chance that the two writers had not met before. In 1952, Neruda, then exiled, spent a year on Capri in a house owned by Greene’s friend, the engineer and sometime mayor of Capri, Edwin Cerio – this time in Neruda’s life would later inspire the film Il Postino. Greene wrote to Ocampo: ‘ . . . I went and had lunch with Neruda and to my astonishment found myself rather liking him. Perhaps he was showing his best side. Within half an hour we were Graham and Pablo to each other. He has sent a telegram to Doctor Allende asking him to receive me . . . ’32 Neruda lived only two more years. Supposedly suffering from prostate cancer, he died in a Santiago hospital two weeks after the coup, and evidence has since emerged suggesting that the Nobel laureate was poisoned.33
Arriving in Buenos Aires on the heels of a tornado on 11 September 1971, Greene again stayed with Ocampo, who set up a meeting for him with the short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges. Perennial contenders, both writers failed to win the Nobel Prize. In 1967, they were under consideration until the very end of the process. That year, Greene had the support of the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Anders Österling, but three other members disagreed and the prize went to Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias.34 Of course, since Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, and James Joyce were also denied the prize, it is possible that by being snubbed Greene and Borges were in better company than if they had won.35
Meeting Borges proved a delight for Greene. It was explained to him that as an enemy of the former president Juan Perón, who was exiled in 1955 but would return to power in 1973, Borges was in some danger from his followers. He lived with his ancient and unflappable mother, who picked up the telephone one day only to be told they would both be killed. She answered: ‘As my son is blind you will find that easy – as for me you had better do it soon since I am over 90.’36 Greene was impressed.
Sent to fetch Borges from the National Library, he immediately liked the man, and was dazzled by his ability to quote poetry, even in Old English, which he had memorized as his sight failed: ‘I wasn’t going to trumpet my self-pity. My mother wanted me to learn Greek, but so many people know Greek.’ They spoke of G. K. Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson: Greene could only remember a few words from Stevenson’s poem ‘Say not of me that weakly I declined’, and as they were about to cross a street Borges paused on the pavement and quoted it perfectly.
At lunch Greene observed his ‘angelic’ expression while gazing into the corner of the room. Of course, Greene thought his politics ‘very conservative’. When Greene said that he had found Paraguay ‘beautiful’ but disliked its leaders, Borges remarked, ‘It’s better than here. A Dictator should know his own mind, not like the one we have here.’37 Presumably, he was referring to the Argentine General Alejandro Lanusse’s cautious movement towards elections and a compromise with the Peronistas. Greene did not share his views about Lanusse, and believed that an unsuccessful plot to overthrow him about a month later, while he was meeting Allende at the Chilean port of Antofagasta, was a very dangerous matter.38
Greene flew to Santiago on 17 September 1971 and had his first meeting with Salvador Allende that afternoon; they briefly discussed aspects of his political programme. He struck Greene as a technocrat, and this was a ‘refreshing change from charisma. At my age charisma begins to lose appeal. One prefers a doctor for one’s sickness.’39 Throughout his life Greene had been intrigued by charismatic leaders, but this remark may specifically indicate his disappointment with Fidel Castro. He heard that one of the right-wing newspapers had published a report that this was not the real Graham Greene in Chile, but an impostor40 – he had been confused again for the ‘other’.
Allende thought this Greene was real enough, and lavished attention on him. At a lunch on 21 September he assembled the most important members of his government to meet the visiting novelist, among them Chief Economic Minister Pedro Vukovic, David Baytelman, who was in charge of land reform, and the Finance Minister Américo Zorillo. Conversation ranged over the possibility of rationing, a blockade, and the military threat from Bolivia and Brazil as proxies of the United States. Rather bluntly, Greene questioned Baytelman about whether land reform in Chile might fail as collectivisation had failed in Cuba.41 During his visit, there was constant unease about a possible coup, and he took it as ominous when Radomiro Tomic, the leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, was uncertain whether the next presidential election would take place at all: he wondered if they might instead have a government of ‘colonels’.42
Greene spoke little Spanish, so Luis Poirot, known as ‘Lucho’, a photographer and theatrical director whom Allende trusted, translated their conversations into French; he also served as Greene’s main guide, driving him about in in his mother-in-law’s red Austin Mini. When he first met him at Santiago’s Hotel Carrera, he saw that he had already unpacked a teddy bear, his companion on many journeys, and placed him in the middle of the bed. He had also placed a bottle of Cutty Sark on the nightstand. Discovering that Greene disliked being photographed, he took no pictures, but listened carefully to his conversation and learned that the novelist distrusted the Christian Democrats, especially one of their leaders Patricio Aylwin,43 who went on to support the coup but eventually became an opponent of Pinochet and succeeded him as the country’s leader in 1989.
He visited copper and nitrate mines and a large textile mill, trying to find out how the workers were treated, and he spent time at Valparaiso, where he met with university students. He witnessed a good deal of misery: those who did best were copper miners who took good wages in exchange for the risk of silicosis, of which many were dying. He also met some priests who had allied themselves with Allende, and for whom the glory of God was in the barrios, and he approved of them.
Leaving the country on 11 October, he set to work on ‘Chile: The Dangerous Edge’, describing the regime, the economy, the church, and the threat of a coup, and sent it to the Observer. Over the years, Greene had had several spats with the editor, David Astor, and for a time would not write for the newspaper at all. When another of the editors, Richard Hall, showed Astor the list of forthcoming articles on a clipboard, Astor said: ‘I should not like that. Greene is mischievous. He is anti-American. He is a fellow-traveller.’ Hall was himself deeply moved by the article and waited until Astor was on holiday to slip the feature into print on 2 January 1972. When Astor returned, he made no comment, but soon ran another article as what Hall called a ‘counter-blast’, but its purpose failed since the author took much the same line as Greene. Hall spoke of Greene’s article as ‘terribly prescient’: ‘Of all the many pieces of writing I have steered into print over the years, that is the one of which I am most proud . . . ’ 44
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LIGHT BULBS
Dorothy Glover once claimed that her diet consistently solely of avocado pears.1 In the 1960s, she was not especially well, ate poorly, and seems to have drunk a good deal. She had ceased to publish new children’s works and had little to do that was satisfying. While she could rouse herself and be pleasant at parties, she was inclined to melancholia, which she poured out to Graham – so much so that he once dreamt of reproaching her for this and was told in the dream that it was just her nature.2 As he had bought a house for Anita Björk, so he provided Dorothy with a pension and contributed to her purchase of a cottage, where she lived with her mother, in Crowborough, the same town where Charles and Marion Greene, Elisabeth and Rodney Dennys, and indeed the Philbys, had all lived at various times.
Around the end of November 1971, Graham noticed that she had not drawn her pension from the bank and thought something must be wrong. He soon found out that on 23 November the seventy-year-old Dorothy had died suddenly while sitting at the dining-room table. In a macabre touch, her infirm mother, still very much alive, was sitting beside her. Yvonne Cloetta said that she only saw him cry twice in their relationship, and one of them was upon hearing of Dorothy’s death, when he shed ‘bitter tears’.3 He made a depressing journey from Antibes to organize her funeral. She had made him her executor, so there were many details to take care of with regard to her books and papers and, of course, her mother.4 One aspect of her small legacy as a writer and illustrator vanished in 1973–4, when the Bodley Head republished Graham’s four children’s books with new illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.5