Greene made another visit to Central America in December 1985, just as he had reached the stage of a first partial typescript. Full of confidence, he was looking for the right setting for a new conclusion he envisaged. In Panama, he found there was something wrong with Díaz, whom he described then as ‘weak’. Also, Greene was settling into a distrust of Noriega;8 he probably believed that he was working with the CIA to undermine the Sandinistas. He was glad to move on to Managua, where he spent much of his time with Borge, whom he liked more and more.
One of the more spectacular recent events in the region had been the kidnapping of the daughter of José Napoleón Duarte, the ineffectual Christian Democratic president of El Salvador. She and a friend were held for forty-four days, then released in exchange for twenty-two rebel prisoners.9 Greene reported to Diederich that he had met in Nicaragua with the new head of the FMLN – perhaps he was referring to Salvador Sánchez Cerén, later elected president of El Salvador (see above, pp. 468–9) – who gave him thirteen photographs of Duarte’s daughter in captivity, enjoying herself with the rebels. Convinced of their authenticity Greene handed these photographs on to Le Matin, which published a selection.10
Having finished a full draft of the novel in December 1986, Greene tried immediately go to Central America, but was stymied by flight delays and had to postpone the trip until April, by which time the text of the novel was settled. He was truly disconcerted by what he found then in Panama, where he stopped on the way to and then returning from Nicaragua. After their initial conversation, he felt that Díaz was having psychiatric problems, as he spoke in mystical language about his consultations with a medium. Their second conversation was at least comprehensible; Díaz explained how the 1984 presidential election had been rigged against Arnulfo Arias to preserve the Torrijos reforms.11
A few weeks later, Noriega forced Díaz to retire, and the dispute between them became public, with Díaz making the same revelation about the election of 1984 to the press. He added the wilder claim that Noriega had been responsible for a bomb that killed Torrijos; as a relative of Torrijos, Díaz would have been specifically left out of any such conspiracy and he presented no evidence to support his claim. But whatever his mental state, some of what he said was true, particularly that Noriega had arranged the killing of the opposition leader Hugo Spadafora,12 and that he was trafficking in drugs. The charges had an immediate effect. Riots broke out in Panama, and Noriega came down hard on political dissent.
In early July, the erratic Díaz had Chuchu, his ally, handcuffed and held for a few hours at his house, accusing him of, among other things, having a sexual affair with Graham Greene. Not long afterwards, Greene telephoned Chuchu and offered to fly directly to Panama to create a stir and make sure nothing further happened to him, but Chuchu said it was unnecessary.13 At the start of a two-day general strike, Noriega sent helicopters and troops to attack Díaz’s house and detain him.14 After a week in custody, Díaz, unsurprisingly, retracted his charges, and15 a few months later Noriega threw him out of the country.
After the fall of Díaz, Chuchu kept a low profile for a few months and then allied himself with Noriega, whom he now saw as a patriot. Although Noriega signalled that Greene was welcome to return, his visits to Panama were at an end. At one point, he mused to Diederich that either Noriega or the CIA might have him killed there and blame it on the other side.16 He was emphatic in his distaste for Noriega, but he did admire his recent defiance of the Americans: ‘Better a bad man against the USA in Central America than a good man for it.’17
Unexpectedly topical, The Captain and the Enemy appeared at the beginning of September 1988. Not every reader likes Greene’s late fiction: despite a profound admiration for Greene’s work, David Cornwell believes, nonetheless, that in his last decade he was written out.18 Greene himself did not like the new novel19 and had no expectation of writing another.
Many critics did like it. Jonathan Coe thought it one of ‘his most purely enjoyable’ works, ‘a small miracle of construction in which traditional narrative is used to allow rather than to compensate for density of ideas’.20 Brian Moore used similar language, speaking of ‘the miraculous shift of gears’ into the world of the political thriller in the later pages – he felt that this ‘short, skilful book’ confirmed V. S. Pritchett’s view that Greene was ‘one of the two or three living novelists who really count’.21
76
TWO FACES
‘Please, Graham, don’t ask me any questions about the past.’1 These were Kim Philby’s first words to Graham Greene when the novelist entered his flat in Moscow. For years, Greene had hoped for a meeting with Philby on neutral ground, but his efforts had been stymied by the KGB and the Writers’ Union, which took a dim view of his appeals on behalf of Daniel, Sinyavsky, Solzhenitsyn, and other dissidents, and of his protests over the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
But times were changing. Mikhail Gorbachev had been elected General Secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985 and launched glasnost and perestroika. Even the Writers’ Union changed – to a degree. In 1986, it elected the journalist and novelist Genrikh Borovik as its secretary for foreign affairs and he approached various foreign authors, among them Graham Greene. Of course, this man was also an agent of the KGB, specializing in disinformation,2 so his recollection of what happened is hardly to be taken at face value. He says he contacted Greene and found him anxious to make a journey to the Soviet Union, but, according to Borovik, Greene also made an awkward request: he wanted to see his old friend Philby. This is contradicted by Yvonne’s recollection that Philby asked for the meeting.3 Borovik may have been trying to hide the fact that the Soviets were aggressively courting Graham Greene, and using Philby, whose value was otherwise exhausted, as bait. In May 1987, David Cornwell seemed to get the same treatment, when at a Writers’ Union cocktail party in Moscow he was approached by Borovik, whom he recalls as ‘a big KGB bully boy who made no secret of his profession’; he was invited to meet ‘ “a great admirer of your work, a lover of your country, Kim Philby”. . . . I replied rather pompously that since I was about to dine with the Queen’s ambassador, I did not feel I was able to square that with dining with the Queen’s traitor. Borovik was angry, and that was that, except that when I departed from Leningrad airport, I was subjected to a full body search.’4
It is well known that the KGB never fully trusted Philby and did not give him any meaningful work until the 1970s; before that he lived like a ghost in Moscow and even attempted suicide in 1970.5 The KGB obviously permitted the late correspondence between Philby and Greene, and perhaps, as Greene thought, took advantage of it to pass notes to MI6. Even so, a personal meeting between Philby and an old colleague from British intelligence was a different matter.
Borovik was able to organize things. In June 1985 he had been granted permission (or perhaps was assigned) to conduct interviews with Philby, and he did so over a period of three years. He was even shown his KGB file in order to write a book about him, and he also produced a television documentary on Graham Greene. Borovik says that he went straight to one of the chief reformers, Alexander Yakovlev, Secretary for Ideology of the Central Committee and soon to be promoted to the Politburo, and explained the problem. ‘What idiots,’ said Yakovlev. He then picked up a hotline – presumably to Gorbachev – and obtained permission for the meeting between Graham Greene and Kim Philby.6
The arrangements were confirmed only at the last minute. Greene arrived in Russia in mid-September 1986 not knowing whether he would meet Philby at all. He and Yvonne landed first in Moscow and were taken to Leningrad and to the Black Sea and Georgia, before returning to Moscow.7 Along the way, he was delighted to meet a cosmonaut who had stayed a record three months in space; he gave Greene his annotated copy of Our Man in Havana that had been his companion in zero gravity.8
Kim Philby and his fourth wife, Rufina, lived in a side street near Pushkin Square. As it became clear, everyone involved was nervous about this meeting: there was
some doubt whether after all these years the two men could rekindle old conversations especially with watchers and listeners about. For security, Greene’s limousine did not stop in front of the building but went around the corner to where Rufina was waiting at an arranged spot. She expected Greene to be as severe as some of his photographs, and was pleasantly surprised when a tall, smiling man popped out of the car. He said, ‘I am feeling so shy.’ Then he repeated quietly, ‘I am so shy.’
They took the lift to the Philbys’ flat, a place filled with books. Having not seen Greene in so many years, Kim was himself diffident. He embraced his visitor, and made his point about no questions, but even so, Greene, curious about how English Kim still was, did ask one: had he learned Russian?9 And, of course, he had, but on this evening he struck Borovik as more English in his manner than ever before.10 Borovik left them to their conversation, which had to move in very narrow channels since the flat was undoubtedly bugged. As usual, Greene ignored the food that was laid out, and drank up the Stolichnaya, remarking, ‘Funny how vodka never makes you drunk.’ Philby, who had spent most of the past two decades drunk on vodka, disagreed.11
The next night, the four visited Borovik’s home, where they were joined by a number of writers, among them one of Russia’s leading poets, Andrei Voznesensky, for a cheerful party at which Greene sat beside Philby and the two exchanged reminiscences.12 For her part, Yvonne found Philby ‘seductive’.13 Once Graham and Yvonne flew back to France, Philby wrote on 24 September 1986: ‘Rufa said, without any prompting from me, that the three days we spent on and off together were among the happiest in her life . . . I find myself suffering from an acute attack of the esprit d’escalier: so many questions I wanted to ask, but didn’t, so many things I wanted to say but didn’t. Well, you can’t bridge a gap of thirty-five years in a few hours. Zut alors!’14 Perhaps this was a way of saying, yes, we were listened to.
Greene was no sooner home than he was planning another trip to the Soviet Union. However, there were problems in England. His brother Raymond had battled throat cancer in 1975 and survived, only to die on 6 December 1982 following a heart attack and kidney failure.15 Graham liked and admired Raymond, and they had often worked together in helping relatives with financial problems, but they were not close. Hugh, however, was his closest male friend, and he was now suffering from lung, bone, and prostate cancer, complicated by severe anaemia.16 When Graham flew to Moscow in February 1987 to participate in the grand Forum for a Nuclear Free World and the Survival of Mankind, it was understood that Hugh was likely to recover owing to a new course of treatment.17
He was travelling without Yvonne this time, having suggested that the Forum might be tedious for her. Early in the trip, which seems to have lasted just six days, someone put a fur hat on his head and he was pressed to wear it whenever he went into the cold; he remarked later to Gillian Sutro, ‘I suppose they did not want me to go back with pneumonia like I did once on one of my visits.’18 He had not seen a great deal of snow in his life and so forgot to bring boots to Moscow in February. He had to step in Rufa’s footprints and hold her hand as he slipped about in the snow – a dangerous matter for an eighty-two-year-old. At the Philbys’ flat, he remarked to Kim: ‘You and I are suffering from the same incurable disease – old age.’ He complained how difficult it was even to have a shower.19 Though eight years younger than Greene, Philby was facing greater difficulties: he had emphysema and a failing heart. At this point, Greene was merely fragile.
Borovik took Greene and Philby to a dacha owned by Oleg Vukulov, one of Russia’s leading artists, and after a while the party moved to the house of Serge Mikoyan, a historian and peace campaigner. There Kim Philby spoke at length about the books that had moved him in his youth, and about The Quiet American, particularly praising a description of Pyle: ‘He is absolutely convinced of his righteousness and absolutely indifferent.’ Greene listened to all this while tossing pine cones onto the fire.20
The Forum brought about six hundred foreign and Soviet participants together to promote the cause of arms reduction, but it was also a large-scale PR operation. The Soviets were anxious to assemble foreign intellectuals, including Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, and Fay Weldon, for ‘round table’ discussions; as it turned out, Greene most admired the contributions of Gore Vidal.21 However, in the week before the event protests for the release of a detained teacher of Hebrew were brutally put down by the KGB. The British reporter Martin Walker was beaten up and kicked in the kidneys by men who had obviously been trained in hand-to-hand combat. There was speculation that hardliners in the KGB were trying to embarrass Gorbachev and undermine his reforms.22
Greene became involved in his own way. He threatened to withdraw from the Forum over the case of a Russian Orthodox prisoner who had been refused a Bible and access to a priest, but Greene was promised on the telephone, presumably by Borovik, that he could have a meeting with the head of the judiciary about the case as soon he reached Moscow. When he got there, he was told that the man had already been released. It was the sort of thing Greene often did when welcomed to a repressive country; for example, he followed up his visit to Cuba in 1983 by sending Fidel a plea for two imprisoned writers whose names were provided by PEN.23 Of his involvement with the case of the Orthodox prisoner, Greene commented to the Czech novelist Josef Škvorecký: ‘Perhaps I did do a tiny bit to help.’24 Although devoted to Greene as a writer and as a person, Škvorecký did not approve of Greene’s late visits to the Soviet Union.25
Greene met Gorbachev briefly. Participants at the round tables, which Greene found life-threateningly dull, were taken into a smaller room in the Kremlin before the general meeting. When Greene approached in a group of eight participants, Gorbachev shook his hand and said, rather mysteriously, in English, ‘I have known you for some years, Mr Greene.’26 It is not clear whether Gorbachev was a reader of Graham Greene – there were millions of them in the Soviet Union – or had noticed his name in intelligence reports concerning Latin America. During the Forum, Greene received a good deal of attention from a Siberian he understood to be second to Gorbachev in the Politburo; this was almost certainly his ally and later rival Yegor Ligachyov. He invited Greene to return in the summer and visit Siberia. Gorbachev, Ligachyov, and Yakovlev were the three most powerful men in the Soviet Union – why did they care whether a British novelist came to the country?
Perhaps, the Kremlin hoped – very unrealistically – that this Englishman would defect and become a trophy for the reformed Soviet Union, or at least become a wholehearted advocate for it in the West. It is also conceivable that they hoped he would be useful to them in Latin America. Father Durán tells us that at some point in his Russian travels Greene was offered the Order of Lenin for his literary achievements, but he turned it down because he did not want people to think he was a secret communist.27
The Russians, who tended to hold authors in greater esteem than in the West, probably overrated his value. Moreover, they missed a nuance in Greene’s thinking. He had written to Bernard Diederich in 1985: ‘Russia and the USA seem to be the same face looking at each other in the same glass and there are times when I certainly prefer the Russian face to the American face similar though they both are.’28 However, Greene fundamentally did not want to align with either side, and would have been content to smash the mirror.
Greene came away from the Forum with a good feeling about Gorbachev, as he put it to Škvorecký: ‘Yes, I was very impressed by Gorbachev both in the few moments of meeting him when he struck me as an honest man with a certain inner strength and a sense of humour. I was also very impressed by his speech at the Forum. I see him too as very close to Dubcek, but I think he has a certain political genius which may enable him to survive and to make his changes however gradually. I am an optimist.’29 It was not often that Greene claimed to be an optimist.
Unexpectedly, Greene was asked to give a short speech before a thousand people in the Kremlin Grand Palace on 16 February 1987. Without notes, he address
ed Gorbachev, who listened with a broad smile.30 He made the case that Catholics and communists were not essentially enemies, and that they were struggling side by side in many just causes: ‘We are fighting together against the Death Squads in El Salvador. We are fighting together against the Contras in Nicaragua. We are fighting together against General Pinochet in Chile.’ This was greeted with applause. He concluded: ‘And I even have a dream, Mr General Secretary, that perhaps one day before I die, I shall know that there is an Ambassador of the Soviet Union giving good advice at the Vatican.’31 At the time, Greene’s suggestion struck many as odd, but he was on to something. Having broken diplomatic ties in 1923, the Vatican and the Soviet Union would exchange ambassadors three years later32 – and Greene did live to see it.
Then came bad news from England, and he was obliged to cut short his stay in Moscow. Hugh had taken a sudden turn for the worse. He was near the end and had asked to see Graham, who took the first available flight to London. By the time he arrived at the King Edward VII Hospital, Hugh had lost consciousness. Graham stood beside his bed saying repeatedly, ‘Poor boy, poor boy.’33 He later described the experience of listening to Hugh’s rattling breath as ‘terrible’, and his thoughts went to their shared experiences in Malaya and to their childhood, when he had read pirate stories to him – the same sort of tales he was revisiting in The Captain and the Enemy. He suggested to Hugh’s wife, Sarah, that they should hasten his death, but she rejected the idea.34
Graham was at Bentley’s restaurant, near Piccadilly, when he heard from his nephew James that Hugh was gone, and felt relieved that he would no longer be struggling. He later asked James’s forgiveness for not attending the funeral: ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of all the strangers.’ Three weeks after the death, he could not get the breathing out of his mind.35 In the period after Hugh’s death, Graham did what he could to help Sarah, who came to regard him as ‘a darling man’.36
The Unquiet Englishman Page 57
