The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  At the same time, she suffered a great many health problems, and for fifteen years endured chronic pain. In time she developed leukaemia, from which she experienced remissions. It returned, and she deteriorated during 1977–8, with her weight dropping to seven stone.4

  Graham visited her at Thriplow in November 1977, but it was uncomfortable and she was left thinking him angry about something. In one of her last letters to him, she wrote: ‘What a vast amount of pleasure you have given me playing scrabble on the roof at the Rosaio and the 7/30 Bus to Gemma and teaching me [to] swim underwater at Ian Fleming’s house, smoking opium and Angkor, ETC . . . There has never been anyone in my life like you . . . ’5 Having feared death, she came to accept it in her last weeks, though it came a little sooner than she expected. She died of a haemorrhage on 2 September 1978.6 She was just sixty-two.

  Graham was returning from Panama when Marie Biche broke the news to him. The funeral took place at St George’s Church in Thriplow on 7 September 1978. He did not attend, but Biche sent him a description of it, and a postcard of the church on which she indicated the position of the grave. Graham wrote to Harry expressing sympathy, as well as remorse for suffering he had caused over the years. In his response, Harry wrote that it was difficult to answer the letter, but that while he had indeed caused suffering, remorse was not called for since everyone causes pain: ‘But you gave Catherine something (I don’t know what) that no one else had given her. It would not be unjust [?] to say it changed her life: but it developed her into a far more deeply feeling human being than before . . . ’7

  Many years earlier, Graham and Catherine had gone through a form of marriage, secretly exchanging vows during a Mass in Tunbridge Wells,8 and for a time he had put great store by it. It is hard, then, not to think of the death of Anna-Luise in Doctor Fischer of Geneva as somehow reflecting Greene’s recent experience or the pent-up anger of many years, as if in his relationship with Catherine God had been toying with him. However, the book is not entirely despairing, as at the end Jones takes neither of the options open to him: embrace the corruption of the rich or commit suicide. Instead he returns to an ordinary life, and merely meets a client. A. S. Frere, who admired the novella, discerned its personal dimension and thought it was Greene’s most ‘self-expressing’ work.9

  Greene left Switzerland, and began writing the novella in Antibes on 30 December 1978. He worked at a tremendous pace and had a version of the story finished by the time he went to London in mid-February. Despite having other projects, including Monsignor Quixote, under way, Greene was again, as he had been in the early 1960s, afraid that he was written out. In January he wrote to the American journalist Gloria Emerson: ‘I have just begun re-reading Moby Dick in celebration of starting a new book which I thought I would never do.’10 He chose a sentence from Melville as his epigraph: ‘Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted whatever it is to be Caesar.’ The speed with which he worked was not just a matter of celebration. He was facing the real possibility of dying very soon, and he wanted to get this book written.

  On 20 February 1979 he went into the King Edward VII Hospital in London for the removal of a large portion of his colon; he later described it to Anita as the same operation ‘that scoundrel Reagan had’ – that is, a colectomy. He told Caroline, at the time, that the procedure would be ‘not serious but disagreeable’.11 In fact, it was very serious, as the surgeon told him his chances were ‘50–50’.12 Preparing for the worst, he wrote to Yvonne: ‘You have given me so much love & happiness over these 19 years which have been the best of my life.’ As it turned out, the malignant polyp was well situated;13 the operation on the 23rd was a success, and he was spared a colostomy, a possibility that had distressed him. On the 27th he called Elisabeth from hospital and described the experience as ‘horrid’, and said he did not want visitors as talking gave him hiccups.14 He spent four days on an intravenous drip and was discharged in about twelve. Left with a fifteen-inch vertical scar on his lower abdomen, he felt altogether ‘feeble’.15 Convalescing in Antibes for two months, he began to feel himself again in mid-April, and was well enough by June to travel to Oxford to receive an honorary doctorate of letters.16

  During his convalescence, Greene was waiting to learn the fate of two short plays he had written. One, Yes and No, is a brief parody of acting and directing styles: a director gives incoherent instructions to a young actor whose only lines are ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. The second, longer one, For Whom the Bell Chimes, he described to his dramatic agent Jan Van Loewen as ‘a disreputable farce which I don’t suppose anyone will want’.17 He was more or less correct. The story is pure entertainment, with criminals impersonating collectors for a polio charity and a murdered woman’s body concealed in a folding bed. Even using the first play as a curtain-raiser for the second, they were too short for a mainstream production in London or New York. In the end, a disappointed Greene had to settle for a production at the Haymarket Studio Theatre in Leicester, which opened on 20 March 1980.18

  More importantly, he got back to work on Doctor Fischer of Geneva.19 As happened rarely, he liked this book, and thought it auspicious that Josephine Reid, who still took on some jobs for him, wept over the manuscript as she typed.20 He expanded and revised the story, and had what he thought a ‘publishable’ version of thirty-four thousand words ready by 15 June. As was his usual method, he read the manuscript into his Dictaphone and sent the belts to Reid for typing.21 He was able to place the final typescript in Max Reinhardt’s hands at the beginning of August.22

  It reached the bookshops in late March 1980, and even though it was not a major work for Greene it was well received. Margaret Drabble wrote: ‘This is a cold and glittering fable, decked with deadly trinkets – crystal glasses, gold watches, dry martinis, Muscat grapes, emeralds. These are the little presents with which Greene serves up the cold porridge of his knowledge. We swallow it, of course.’23 In the United States, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt thought the theologizing ‘glib’ but praised it as a ‘wickedly inventive piece of black humour’.24

  72

  THREE HOSTAGES

  ‘Graham, I thought you were not there.’

  ‘I was fast asleep, Chuchu. Where are you?’

  ‘In Panama, of course. I have a message for you from the General.’1

  The telephone had rung in Antibes at 1 a.m. on 30 April 1979. Much as Greene missed his friends in Panama, he had no reason to believe that he would ever go back. Just two months earlier, he had had his colectomy and was still incapable of making the long flight; at the same time, he was beginning to believe that a criminal gang posed a terrible threat to Yvonne’s family and that he must remain on post in France.

  No matter, Central America was coming to him. The Canal Treaty was settled, and the Sandinistas had driven Somoza out of Nicaragua, but a frightening new civil war was about to break out in El Salvador, the violence of which is now hard to comprehend. The causes of the war can be traced chiefly to land ownership. Almost all the agricultural land was owned by a few families, whose wealth derived from coffee.2 A brief war with neighbouring Honduras in 1969 caused the border to be closed, ruining the Salvadoran economy and plunging many landless people into destitution. In 1972, José Napoleón Duarte, a Christian Democrat, won election as president but was expelled from the country. The military took over and engaged in repression of the left, both the radical and merely reformist strands, particularly in the countryside, where an outfit named ORDEN (Organización Democrática Nacionalista) held sway through a network of spies and occasional collaborators numbering sixty to one hundred thousand. A persecution set in with union leaders, teachers, and left-leaning church workers being assassinated.3

  In the mid-1970s the government attempted to quell tensions by embarking on modest land reform, but it was thwarted by the traditional oligarchs and so it seemed that change by political means was an impossibility. By 1977 there was a marked increase in political repression by the military and by paramilitaries. The best known of t
hose killed at this time was Father Rutilio Grande, SJ, a pastor and theologian who supported the formation of comunidades eclesiales de base – essentially church-based cooperatives – which made it possible for peasants to press for their rights. He and two other men were ambushed on a country road in March 1977.4 His friend, the now canonized Archbishop Óscar Romero, was so shocked by the killing that he abandoned his own political conservatism and began to protest economic injustice and the operation of the death squads.

  It turned out that the General wanted Greene to help resolve a hostage situation in El Salvador. A messenger from Panama appeared in Antibes and explained that rebels had abducted two bankers. The rebels were willing to drop their original demands for the release of political prisoners and the broadcast of a communiqué, and would settle for a ransom of five million dollars. Greene was to pass this information on to their employer, the little-known Bank of London and Montreal based in Nassau. With the help of Hugh’s son, the publisher Graham C. Greene, he made contact with the right official in the firm, who initially treated his approach with scepticism; he may have thought Greene a criminal or fantasist. Greene gave him a number to call in Mexico City and left. The novelist met the General’s emissary again shortly after; the man placed a call to Mexico and learned that the bank had already made contact, and soon the men were free. Greene rather resented the bank’s lack of gratitude. He thought he had earned at least a case of Scotch, but he supposed that the bank believed he would get a cut of the ransom money. The contact in Mexico City was, in fact, Gabriel García Márquez, who had founded an organization called Habeas, a Central American equivalent of Amnesty International.5

  Meanwhile the situation in El Salvador was growing dire. As students, workers, peasants, and church leaders were coming together in mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, General Carlos Humberto Romero, the right-winger running the government, initiated a ruthless campaign against anyone assumed to be an opponent of the regime: bodies were frequently found at the sides of roads. In October, the Carter administration organized a bloodless coup to get rid of this man and install a junta with civilian representation from the centre and left. The junta promised nationalization of foreign trade in coffee and sugar, an investigation of political violence, and land reform. None of it happened, and the civilians withdrew at the end of 1979; a series of juntas would be formed and overthrown in the coming year. A popular front against the government came together in January 1980, and about two hundred thousand people marched through San Salvador in support. Towards the end of 1980, several guerrilla groups would unite as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN),6 and Greene would have dealings with them.

  Archbishop Óscar Romero happened to be an old friend of Bernard Diederich, and told him on several occasions that he expected to be killed.7 In the early months of 1980, he spoke against the juntas as a ‘cover for repression’ and rounded on the United States for providing military aid. On 23 March 1980, Romero spoke of the supposed agrarian reforms as ‘bathed in blood’, and urged soldiers to disobey their orders. The next morning, as he was saying Mass, a gunman shot him through the heart. At his funeral, a bomb went off outside the cathedral, and the panicking crowd of fifty thousand was machine-gunned, leaving up to forty people dead and another two hundred wounded.8

  The cruelties were relentless. On 14 May 1980, at least three hundred peasants were killed by the National Guard, ORDEN, and Honduran forces at the Sumpul River in a counter-insurgency sweep. They were shot, bayoneted, or drowned as they fled towards the river, which marked the border with Honduras.9 In October the army began a campaign in the department of Morazán, killing three thousand people and turning twenty-four thousand into refugees.10 Church workers were often targets: in December 1980, three American nuns of the Maryknoll Order and a laywoman were raped, machine-gunned, and buried in a shallow grave as supposed communists. Graham Greene later wrote a cover endorsement for Ana Carrigan’s Salvador Witness, focusing on the life of the murdered laywoman, Jean Donovan.11

  Socorro Juridico, a group of lawyers sponsored by the archdiocese of San Salvador, documented 8062 political assassinations carried out by the army, national guard, police, and paramilitaries in 1980 alone. This count did not include the disappeared, or those killed in military clashes.12 With the new Reagan administration seeking to push back what it took to be a communist tide in the region, such numbers would be repeated year after year until a negotiated peace in 1992. In a country of 4.7 million, something like seventy-five thousand people were killed, and eight thousand more disappeared.13

  At the beginning of 1980, Greene was again asked to help resolve a kidnapping in El Salvador. He received a late-night call from the South African chargé d’affaires in Paris, Jeremy Shearer, who asked for his help in securing the release of Archibald Gardner Dunn, the country’s ambassador to El Salvador, who had been abducted on 28 November 1979. The ransom demands were extreme and they did not know who was holding Dunn.

  The South Africans would have had to swallow some pride to seek help from the author of The Human Factor, but Shearer seems to have liked and admired Greene. The novelist put him in contact with the bank that had been involved in the earlier kidnapping to see if they still had the telephone number in Mexico City.

  In the midst of this, Greene got hold of Gabriel García Márquez and explained the details of the case. Gabo foresaw real difficulty. The first task was to determine which of five guerrilla groups were holding the ambassador. More importantly, South Africa had no friends on the left and someone like Dunn would be seen as a fascist, wholly deserving of his fate. Gabo found it hard to involve himself in such a case but did take a hand in it. He advised Greene that it would be far better for the family to make contact than for the South African government to do so.14 When Greene relayed this information back to Shearer in Paris, he learned that Dunn’s wife was suffering from cancer and her children were not up to the job of negotiating. So he suggested a bit of deception: the South African diplomatic service should ‘provide a notional brother-in-law’.15 Nothing worked, and Dunn remained in captivity.

  By the summer of 1980, Greene was in much better health, embarking on a longer than usual excursion with Father Durán in July. He also accepted, at short notice, an invitation from the General, who had it in mind to send him back to Nicaragua. He had dinner in Antibes with Jeremy Shearer and asked if there was anything he could do for Ambassador Dunn while he was in the region. The chargé told him that the matter was being handled by the embassy in Washington, and that it would be best not ‘to cross lines’.16 For most of his life, Greene had been crossing lines, and would do so again in trying to help Dunn.

  Arriving in Panama on 19 August 1980 for a two-week visit, he spent his first few days with Chuchu and Diederich. He was surprised by changes in Panama City: everywhere were new bank buildings of twenty storeys or higher, a strange sight in a country supposedly dedicated to social democracy.17 He received word from Gabo that the ambassador’s release was now arranged but Salvador Cayetano Carpio, codenamed Comandante Marcial, wanted first to speak with Graham Greene. Marcial was head of the FPN, the largest rebel faction and the group holding the ambassador.

  It took a while for Chuchu to track down the General, but on the evening of the 21st they had dinner together at the house of Rory Gonzalez. The leader’s young girlfriend was there and he showed off their new baby. He rebuked Greene for addressing him as ‘General’ rather than by his first name, ‘Omar’, when other people were present as this placed a distance between them; Greene found this poignant rather than offensive, and wrote of him in his journal as ‘A lonely man genuinely affectionate & grasping for friendship.’18 In what turned into an evening of hard drinking, Torrijos asked that Greene delay his departure for Nicaragua to make sure of meeting Cayetano, as he wanted this negotiation to succeed.

  Before meeting the rebel leader, Greene read an interview with Ambassador Dunn in Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban government. He
could see that the man was very ill and had been badly treated; the journalist who conducted the interview was also badgering him. Disgusted, Greene threw down the newspaper and swore never to read it again.19

  Diederich noticed that Greene was still angry when Cayetano appeared at his hotel escorted by a G-2 officer.20 A small, elderly man in spectacles – this was what a lesser evil looked like. When roused, Greene was formidable, and for this kind of conversation he needed to be, even though Cayetano behaved courteously. The left in El Salvador was very divided: Cayetano, who is often compared to Ho Chi Minh, was the chief advocate for a protracted popular war rather than for socialism achieved through the ballot box; among his followers he encouraged immediate sacrifice for the cause.21 Once a seminarian, he had been imprisoned and tortured, and grew into a hardline ideologue, essentially indifferent to bloodshed. When Greene came to write about this encounter, he did not wish his words to be construed as endorsing the Salvadoran regime, so offered explanations for how Cayetano had become so harsh. Nonetheless, as Greene told Diederich, he thought the man’s eyes hard and would not care to be his prisoner. Writing to his son Francis, he referred to Cayetano as ‘creepy’.22

  It is usually assumed that Greene was swept along by enthusiasm for rebel movements. He wasn’t. Certainly, he and Diederich treated Chuchu’s passion for the armed struggle in El Salvador with caution, as did the General himself. Greene had good information on what was happening there, and knew that the guerrillas were themselves guilty of atrocities. Of course, no one really knows the full extent of what happened in El Salvador. The UN Truth Commission of 1993 found that of the twenty-two thousand complaints it received of executions, disappearances, and torture over an eleven-year period, representing only ‘a significant sample’ of all that occurred, 85 per cent were specifically attributed by witnesses to agents of the government and paramilitaries or death squads allied to it. However, the commission also received eight hundred complaints against the rebels, half concerning executions, and the rest disappearances and forced recruitment.23 Admittedly, this number was a small fraction of the total, but even so it represented a great deal of butchery. Greene had been somewhat critical of the guerrillas in Nicaragua, but judged that they were much better than those in El Salvador.24