The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  In Paris, Marie Biche had been indispensable to Greene: her efforts over about thirty years went far beyond those usual for a literary agent as she became essentially a personal manager for him. She was also one of his most dedicated friends. In June 1976, her husband Jean suffered a cerebral haemorrhage7 that would eventually lead to his death. Greene observed Marie’s troubles with some frustration that he could not really assist her, but in late 1977 he made a gesture. He wrote her a whimsical letter begging her to ‘be reasonable & do something – which will hurt you – to please me. I’m scared of your reaction & afraid you’ll disappoint me, but please say Yes & allow me this year for Christmas to give you instead of a classic shirt from the Faubourg unsuitable for country wear, allow me – I ask it with trembling voice – to give you a small car – Volkswagen or what you like . . . ’ She wrote back ‘no present could make me happier! It makes me sad tho’ to realize what a bitch I am that you should have to go to such verbal pains to offer me this precious gift.’ She compared her excitement to that which she felt on getting her first bicycle. With his next letter, Graham enclosed a cheque to pay for a new Citroën.8 Biche’s career was winding down and before long Greene’s account was taken over by another leading French agent, Michelle Lapautre. However, he remained close to Biche for the rest of his life.

  Greene had some important unfinished business. By the beginning of 1975 he had taken up The Human Factor again, but progress was slow, as he was then navigating his root canals. He wrote to Leroux in January 1976: ‘God knows whether the book will ever be finished. I have now done 43,000 words and it should run to more than 70,000.’9 It took another full year to complete and even then he wondered whether it was a dud. He decided finally to do what he always had done in the early years: he turned to A. S. Frere, who by then was living near by in Monte Carlo. Having read the manuscript, Frere wanted to talk about it in person, so the novelist assumed that he would be told, however kindly, that it was just not fit for publication. In fact, Frere told him it was one of the best books he had written and predicted a great success.10 Greene wrote to his American agent: ‘To my surprise Frere is enthusiastic about the novel, so published it will be.’11

  Many of the reviewers thought the same thing when it came out in March 1978, with Anthony Burgess, for example, writing: ‘Let me say at once that The Human Factor is as fine a novel as he has ever written – concise, ironic, acutely observant of contemporary life, funny, shocking, above all compassionate.’12 Two months after publication, the book was still top of the Sunday Times bestseller list.13

  Meanwhile, Greene’s imaginary defector, Maurice Castle, was of great interest to a real one. When My Silent War was published in 1968, he had received a letter of thanks from Kim Philby and nothing more for almost a decade. In the autumn of 1975 Greene was in Budapest for a few days to assist the Hungarian film-maker Lászlo Róbért with a documentary about the novelist’s time in Vietnam. Lászlo was a nasty piece of work. An officer in Hungarian intelligence, he was usually assigned to Catholic targets, including the Vatican.

  Philby had recently been quoted in a newspaper as saying that the one thing he would like in life would be to share a bottle of wine with Graham Greene. While Greene waited at the airport for his flight home, he reportedly told Lászlo that he longed to see his old friend Philby again, so Lászlo called the Soviet embassy, and in the thirty-five minutes before take-off put in a request for a meeting to be arranged between the two, but it could not be arranged on such short notice.14

  In August 1977, Hugh’s son, the publisher Graham C. Greene, went to Moscow for a book fair and sent a letter to Philby, asking him to meet for drinks. His reply was dated 30 October, and he blamed the delay on the slow postal service and his being in the Carpathians at the time ‘chivying the local trout’. Undoubtedly, Philby’s response was vetted by his superiors and this took time. The letter was very friendly, and included greetings to ‘your respected uncle’, and this odd sentence: ‘Incidentally, if you should come here again, I shall always be able to locate you wherever you are.’15 He was warning Graham C. Greene that the KGB would be watching him whenever he returned to Russia. The letter was passed on to Graham, to Elisabeth and Rodney Dennys, and then to Maurice Oldfield (‘C’).

  In late 1977, Lászlo Róbért visited Greene in Antibes and brought word from a ‘friend’ enrolled in a Soviet school of espionage that Philby, still amiable though drinking heavily, was now an instructor there. This too was passed on to Oldfield, who thought he recognized Lászlo Róbért’s name – that is to say, MI6 had already taken note of him.16 Thirty years later, Lászlo appeared at the Graham Greene International Festival and was asked whether he still believed in communism. He replied, ‘Until tomorrow.’

  In early 1978, a very occasional correspondence began between Greene and Philby. Greene sent a copy of The Human Factor to Moscow; Philby read the novel twice and planned to read it a third time. He admired it and confessed to wry amusement. He thought the treatment of Castle at the end somewhat ‘shabby and most un-Russian’, as he himself had been provided with all he might need, even a shoehorn.17 Greene’s description of the flat was based on Eleanor Philby’s book, but even so, he changed a few details for future printings in light of what Philby told him.18

  They both wanted to meet, but the problem was that Philby could not come to a Western capital, and Greene refused to go to Russia while dissidents were being ill treated; this left as possibilities such places as Budapest, Havana, or Hanoi.19 There is no solid evidence that Greene and Philby met in person before Greene’s visit to Moscow in 1986, once glasnost and perestroika were under way.

  During those years, however, they continued to write occasional letters. However, a question hangs over their closely vetted correspondence: who is talking to whom? It is perfectly possible to see some of what was said, especially by Philby, as rather impersonal, as if one intelligence agency was addressing another by a back channel. Apart from distant reminiscences and talk of books, their letters chiefly discuss international relations. The most startling comments in their correspondence came at the end of 1979: Greene suggested that having signed the SALT II agreement, the Russians and Americans would do well to act jointly against Iran, with defined spheres of influence, and stand face to face across a frontier rather than engage in brinksmanship in neutral territory. In his response on 2 January 1980, Philby mused about the Ayatollah’s irrationality and then said he had passed the suggestion on ‘to the competent authorities’.

  But then, in the same letter, Philby introduced the topic of ‘this infernal Afghan business’ – the Soviets had invaded the country a week before and overthrown the government: ‘I need hardly tell you that I am very unhappy about it; what may surprise you is that I have met no one here who is happy about it.’20 Philby was talking about the mood of the KGB, a most indiscreet thing to do except with the approval of his superiors. When Rodney Dennys forwarded the letter to Sir Dick Franks, Oldfield’s successor as head of MI6, he drew attention to this statement and remarked: ‘I have felt, for some time, that the K.G.B. were probably doves rather than hawks and this seems to bear it out. Is it, do you think, a tentative feeler for the initiation of a dialogue between the K.G.B. and S.I.S.? No doubt you possess a canteen of long spoons.’ Remarking on Philby’s ‘flair for strategic deception’, he nonetheless believed he was telling the truth.21 So did Greene.22 Sadly, this tantalizing story stops there – what may have happened next is unknown. For the rest, if there is anything more, we must await the release of secret files.

  As Greene would explain soon after to his great friend in Panama, Omar Torrijos, he had a ‘favourite theory’ that in time the KGB would take control of the Soviet Union: ‘it would prove more easy to deal with pragmatists than ideologists. The KGB recruited the brightest students from the universities, they learnt foreign languages, they saw the outer world, Marx meant little to them. They could be instruments of a measure of reform at home.’23

  This was one of
Greene’s odd predictions that came true, but hardly as he had hoped. It was well known that Yuri Andropov, after fifteen years in charge of the KGB, was positioning himself to succeed a declining Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Communist Party, and he was cultivating his image abroad. He took over in November 1982, and enacted some internal reforms but continued the war in Afghanistan and engaged in a diplomatic stand-off with the Reagan administration.24 He was dead by February 1984, and after thirteen months of retrenchment under Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev, a serious reformer and not KGB, came to power. In the long term, however, Greene was sadly right to foresee the KGB ruling Russia – this happened with the accession in 2000 of Vladimir Putin, once a lieutenant-colonel in Soviet intelligence. Greene’s faith in the pragmatism of the KGB as inclining towards reform was misplaced. What the novelist did not foresee was the territorial ambition, the repression, and the greed.

  68

  EFFERVESCENCE AND VIBRATION

  The old firm was a good place to get a briefing. In late June 1975, Graham Greene emerged from a ‘most interesting’ private lunch with Maurice Oldfield ready to pack his bags for Portugal.1 Thirty years before, Greene had run the Portugal desk in Section V of MI6. In 1956, he had thought of setting in Lisbon the story eventually written as Our Man in Havana. Recent events, however, had transformed the country.

  The dictator António de Oliveira Salazar had died in 1970, having been enfeebled by a stroke and replaced by Marcelo Caetano two years earlier. For almost forty years Salazar had ruled the one-party Estado Novo (New State), maintaining control through a security apparatus, which spied relentlessly on the citizens and made short work of opposition. Caetano adopted cautiously liberalizing policies, but did not address the roots of disaffection with the regime. Over the years, what protests there were had come mainly from university students – protests officially referred to by the security forces as ‘student effervescence’. After 1968, students became decidedly more effervescent, some advocating Eastern Bloc forms of communism, Maoism, or terrorism.2

  At the same time, almost every family in the country of ten million had sent a son to fight in pointless wars in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, and other colonies that were demanding independence. University students were conscripted, so the lower officer ranks included many leftist opponents of the regime. Disputes over seniority, pay, and training magnified the discontent, and on 25 April 1974 the army conducted a nearly bloodless coup, afterwards referred to as the ‘Carnation Revolution’ since many citizens placed carnations in the barrels of the soldiers’ rifles.3

  There followed a messy period of attempted counter-coups, and then elections for an assembly in the spring of 1975. At the time of Greene’s meeting with Oldfield, it was not certain whether Portugal would become a Western satellite of the Soviet Union or lurch back towards fascism. As it turned out, Portugal followed a third path, largely under the leadership of Mário Soares, a democratic socialist who brought the country into the European Economic Community.

  Greene wanted to make a discreet visit to Portugal, and considered going to see his old friend Maria Newall,4 ‘Pistol Mary’, whom he had known in Kenya (see p. 239) and who was now living in Sintra. With General Franco looking corpse-like, Greene also wanted to see Spain that summer. ETA had struck hard in their campaign to establish an independent Basque state in southern France and northern Spain. In December 1973, they killed Franco’s likely successor, Luis Carrero Blanco, in Madrid: a bomb tossed his car 35 metres into the air and over a building into the courtyard beyond.5 In April 1975 they carried out less spectacular killings of two policemen, and the government placed much of the Basque territory under a state of emergency.6 Monsignor Quixote captures this atmosphere of menace with the protagonists being dogged by the Guardia Civil, who suspect that they are dealing with a disguised terrorist, not a monsignor authentic down to his purple socks.

  That priest, of course, was loosely modelled on a real one. Before his meeting with Oldfield, Greene had already contacted Father Leopoldo Durán, a literary scholar in Madrid, proposing to make a visit there.7 A perfectly orthodox priest who spoke of Franco with veneration and had no great devotion to democracy, Leopoldo Durán offered an ideal travelling companion for an author known all over the world as a leftish troublemaker. Greene could look at what he wanted in Spain and Portugal, and it would always be assumed that they had a pious, or at least respectable, purpose for what turned out to be fifteen journeys of about a fortnight each through Spain and Portugal between 1976 and 1989.8

  And for the most part they did have respectable purposes. Greene doubtless kept his eyes open for things that would interest Oldfield or his successors, but over the years his travels through the Iberian peninsula seem to have been mainly personal and pleasant – especially as the countries grew more stable. They stayed in small hotels or in religious houses, and the always restless Greene wanted to linger no more than a day or two in any place. For each journey, Durán found a ‘third man’ to do the driving, so he and Greene could stop for picnics and drink Manchegan wine. At a certain hour of the day they turned to something stronger, so Greene dubbed his friend ‘the whisky priest’.9 All this gave him the idea for his gently comic novel published in 1982.

  Born in Galicia and for a time a member of the Vincentian Order, Durán had first contacted Greene in 1964; he was then writing a thesis at the University of Madrid on the theological background of Greene’s novels.10 From 1968 to 1972 he was a doctoral student at King’s College London, where he wrote another thesis focused on priests in Greene’s fiction;11 he later turned this into a book. Greene did not get to Spain or Portugal right away – that took another year to arrange – but he did meet Leopoldo Durán in the flesh in London on 20 August 1975. Durán’s anecdotes are sometimes unreliable, and he got this date wrong by two years in his memoir of Greene.12 As Durán recalled, the novelist put on a jacket and tie and met him for a meal at the Ritz, where they talked about fiction, films, theology, and the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei, which Greene hated for its political activities. At a certain point Greene asked Durán, as a person who had studied his works, whether he thought he had ‘true faith’. Durán responded that the fiction ‘hinged’ on the existence of God and that he believed Greene’s faith greater than his own, and it appears that this answer got Greene’s attention even as most pious responses to his work merely bored him: ‘Thank you very much indeed. Your answer is very comforting.’ When Greene asked Durán about his own belief, he received an extraordinary – and very Catholic – answer: ‘I do not believe in God, I touch him.’13 In his search for a plausible travelling companion, Greene had stumbled onto something resembling sanctity.

  That autumn, Franco fell into a coma and eventually died on 20 November 1975, so Greene tried right away to organize a visit to Durán at Christmas, but work on The Return of A. J. Raffles and the television series Shades of Greene got in the way.14 He did finally get to Spain on 16 July 1976, having requested to see Toledo, Salamanca, and the Basque territory.15 He stayed for about two weeks.

  In his first night at a Madrid hotel, he had a piece of luck. There was a box beside the bed, which Durán could not figure out, so the novelist explained that if you inserted a 25-peseta coin the bed would vibrate, giving its occupant a massage to induce sleep. The next morning, a very rested Graham Greene reported that the machine was broken and a single coin had purchased a whole night of vibration: ‘Strange things happen to me in hotel rooms.’16

  On their way to Salamanca, they passed the Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen, where thirty-three thousand Civil War dead are buried. It features a 500-foot-high cross, and an enormous basilica, where Franco was buried. Out of respect for his victims, Spain enacted a law of historical memory in 2007, removing fascist statues throughout the country and forbidding political ceremonies at this shrine. After a long controversy, the socialist government moved Franco’s remains to another site in 2019. Greene thought the Valle d
e los Caídos disgusting – something the pharaohs might have gone in for. Durán would later write, somewhat wistfully, ‘Graham never understood Franco’s political and spiritual ideology.’17

  Greene soon saw something he did like. In the university city of Salamanca they visited, at his request, the grave of Miguel de Unamuno, a writer best known for his essay ‘The Tragic Sense of Life’ and for his retelling of the story of Don Quixote. His writings presented doubt and belief as almost inseparable, and Greene admired him greatly. At the cemetery, they asked where the grave was and were told that it was marked ‘340’ – that was all. They stood in silence by the grave for about fifteen minutes, and it was then, Durán believed, that the novel began stirring. In the story, Sancho, the communist mayor, is a former student of Unamuno, and it was by his example that Sancho was able to retain for some years a degree of belief in Catholicism; just as Monsignor Quixote’s belief is challenged by the events of the novel, so too is Sancho’s disbelief.

  They travelled north-west into the Galician province of Ourense, and made their first visit to the large Trappist monastery of Oseira in a river valley among the Martiñá mountains. Founded in 1137, it was abandoned and looted in the time of Napoleon, then re-established in 1929.18 When Greene first saw the monastery in 1976, it was undergoing a slow restoration, but even so, he was impressed by its austerity, and wrote in the guest book: ‘Thank you very much for these moments of peace and silence. Please pray for me. Graham Greene.’19 Each year, the novelist and priest returned to this monastery, and it is where, in the novel, Monsignor Quixote meets his end.

  By comparison with these silent monks in their silent home, Santiago de Compostela was hard to bear. They arrived on the eve of the feast of St James and found the cathedral overrun with pilgrims and tourists. In the afternoon the liturgical hours would be marked by the firing of cannons. Greene declared himself willing to forgo the Indulgences – Purgatory was preferable to all that noise – so they got back on the road. In Coruña they visited the tomb of Greene’s distant relative Sir John Moore, who died there in battle against Napoleon’s forces in 1809; Greene had first visited the site with his Aunt Eva and cousin Ave in 1921. He recited for Father Leopoldo a little of Charles Wolfe’s famous poem on Moore: