The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  On 25 August 1987, Graham, accompanied by Yvonne, made his return to Russia for a twelve-day visit. Taking up Ligachyov’s invitation, they went to Siberia and saw Novosibirsk and Irkutsk, as well as Tomsk, which was ordinarily closed to foreigners because of its nuclear facilities. Yvonne was impressed when a group of five senior KGB officers came to pay their respects.37 In Moscow, they had a dinner with the Philbys at the well-known Aragvi restaurant, which figured in The Human Factor. Their conversation turned to Peter Wright’s then controversial book Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, which claimed that the one-time head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, was a mole, and that he was responsible for tipping off Kim Philby prior to his defection. The Thatcher government was trying to ban publication, but in so doing transformed the book into a worldwide bestseller. Once home, Greene asked his American publisher, Michael Korda, to send him some copies, one of which he sent to Philby in Moscow.

  Meanwhile, Philby’s old friend Nicholas Elliott was distressed about Spycatcher, which reflected badly on him as the British intelligence officer who confronted Philby in Beirut just before his defection. While Graham was in Moscow, Elliott wrote to Elisabeth Dennys dismissing the book as ‘balls’ and Wright as a ‘traitor’. He enclosed a newspaper clipping suggesting that Graham was in Moscow to consult with Philby about a second volume of the defector’s memoirs. Such a book would, of course, describe those meetings in Beirut, and Elliott wanted to know what was going on.38 After Graham returned, Elisabeth, who had been friends with Elliott for many years, wrote back to him that she had spoken to Graham about his recent meeting with Philby, and he said there was no truth to the story about the memoirs. She also said that Graham had read Spycatcher and thought it ‘not only inaccurate but very boring’.39 Philby had a good deal of blood on his hands. Given Greene’s earlier pattern, it is extremely likely that he consulted with senior officers at MI6 about his meetings in Moscow, but, even so, many of his old colleagues were, like Elliott, baffled by his involvement.

  In February 1988, he returned to the Soviet Union for the airing of Borovik’s laudatory documentary. This also marked the only occasion that Kim Philby appeared on television during his years in Russia. Sitting in a pinstripe suit beside Rufa, in front of a row of P. D. James novels in his study, he said that Greene ‘rather dropped out of my life during my troubles’ but made contact again ‘when I came over here’.40 He spoke for ten minutes in praise of Greene and of the ‘perfection’ of his portrayal of the CIA in The Quiet American. He was happy to gloss over any disagreements they had ever had: ‘I wouldn’t say that our views coincided but he belonged to those few, who at least sympathized with me’.41

  Greene attended a dinner in honour of Philby at the House of Writers, where he met the poet Andrei Dementyev and Svyatoslav Fyodorov, a pioneering eye surgeon and wealthy entrepreneur. Greene asked Fyodorov pointedly, ‘How can you obtain independence from state control when no one else can?’ Fyodorov answered smilingly, ‘Because I’m pushy. If I can’t get in the door, I’ll climb through the window.’42 In 1991, Boris Yeltsin offered him the premiership of Russia, but he refused, and in 1996 was one of many candidates in the presidential election eventually won by Yeltsin.43

  After this visit, Greene would not see Philby again. Philby’s heart was giving out and he was admitted to hospital. In an odd expression of Englishness, he announced one day that he wanted to make tea, so Rufa brought an electric kettle to the intensive care ward, thinking he was on the mend – he wasn’t. He died before dawn on 11 May 1988.44

  The Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow wanted to celebrate Greene’s eighty-fifth birthday, but since he could not guarantee that he would live that long he returned to the Soviet Union, for the last time, in October 1988, when he was turning eighty-four. Travelling in good weather, he and Yvonne went from Moscow to Kiev and then back again. The University of Moscow gave him an honorary doctorate; also receiving one was the Canadian John Kenneth Galbraith, the only economist whose books Greene found readable.45 A still-grieving Rufa joined Graham and Yvonne at the birthday reception held by the Writers’ Union at the Sovyetskaya Hotel. Greene interrupted a toast to him as guest of honour to propose one of his own: ‘I want to drink to the wife of my close friend who died not long ago and to whom I was bound by warm memories.’46 He then blew out the eighty-four candles on his cake.

  77

  THE LATE ROUNDS

  ‘I have now received another cutting in which you claim I told you of an aggrieved husband shouting through my window (difficult as I live on the fourth floor.) You are either a liar or you are unbalanced and should see a doctor. I prefer to think that.’ It was 13 June 1988, and this was the second time that day that Greene had written to Anthony Burgess. After years of pleasant, though not close, association with Greene, Burgess had spoken scathingly on a French television programme of Greene’s age, and in a magazine of his supposedly constant correspondence with Kim Philby. Greene’s first letter pointed out he was three years younger than Burgess had claimed and expressed the hope that he too would reach that age. He then confirmed that his contact with Philby was no secret from the intelligence agencies: ‘I received ten letters from him in the course of nearly 20 years. You must be very naïf if you believe our letters were clandestine on either side.’ He concluded tartly: ‘Never mind. I admired your three earliest novels & I remember with pleasure your essay on my work in your collection Urgent Copy, your article on me last May in the Sunday Telegraph & the novel (not one of your best) which you dedicated to me.’1 Then he wrote the second letter.

  What was this about? One of Burgess’s biographers believes that after years of writing adulatory reviews of Greene’s work, Burgess noticed that the praise was seldom returned, and grew angry.2 This is a very plausible explanation. It is also possible that some remark made by Greene had been passed on to Burgess; he wrote, for example, to Bill Igoe in 1984: ‘I liked his early books, but I thought Earthly Powers was terrible. He writes far too much. Apparently he was wildly indignant that he hadn’t got the Nobel Prize instead of [William] Golding and believed himself to be at the top of the list.’3 A comment like this could have made its way round until someone told Burgess. Pierre Joannon tried to broker a peace, but Greene and Burgess had nothing more to do with each other.4

  Despite being widely reported, this was at best a tiff between two authors who had never been on intimate terms. There were other conflicts of much greater importance in Greene’s last years. Just as he had left Heinemann in the early 1960s in part because of how the publisher had treated A. S. Frere, he now left the Bodley Head because of how Max Reinhardt was treated.5 Since 1973, the firm had belonged to a consortium with Chatto & Windus and Jonathan Cape, and somewhat later with Virago Press. By 1982, it was clear that the consortium was unwieldy and inefficient. Approaching seventy, Reinhardt wanted a smooth succession so sold many of his shares to two of the other principal figures in the group, Tom Maschler and Graham C. Greene.

  Maschler and Graham C. Greene entertained a takeover bid by the American giant Random House, something Reinhardt objected to as he felt it would erase the character of the existing imprints. The disagreements became intense in late 1986 and early 1987, with Graham Greene (the novelist) taking Reinhardt’s side entirely. Graham C. Greene unwisely claimed in the press that rumours of changes at the publishing group were ‘pure fantasy’;6 the novelist then wrote a letter to the editor suggesting that his nephew was ‘living himself in a fantasy world’. That letter reiterated a threat made privately that he would leave the Bodley Head if the appropriate changes in management were not made.7 Hugh had died a few weeks earlier, so presumably it was easier for one Graham Greene to enter into a dispute with the other.

  The Random House deal went through, and Max Reinhardt was sacked within a year.8 Greene followed through on his threat and gave The Captain and the Enemy to Reinhardt Books, an imprint separate from the old consortium, and followed it with four other
titles: Yours Etc: Letters to the Press 1945–89, edited by Christopher Hawtree; Reflections, a collection of prose pieces edited by Judith Adamson; The Last Word and Other Stories; and the posthumously published A World of My Own: A Dream Diary. Since the relationship with Graham C. Greene was never close, there was, in reality, no bad blood. Graham C. Greene did well by the transaction with Random House, and his uncle went his own way.

  This was a dispute about how to make money. One of the peculiarities of the literary world is that merely giving money away can lead to rows. The last really public event of Graham Greene’s life was to judge a new prize in Irish literature in 1989. The Guinness Peat Aviation (GPA) Prize was set up by Tony Ryan, the co-founder of Ryanair, who had given a good deal of money for the support of the arts in Ireland. This prize was spectacular: IR £50,000 for any Irish book published in the preceding three years. To make a splash for the inaugural award, they wanted the final decision to be made by the outstanding writer in English. An official of the firm, Seán Donlon, met with Greene at a dinner hosted by Pierre Joannon. The novelist agreed to an arrangement whereby he would be given a shortlist of five determined by a committee of eminent critics, and he would choose the winner. It was also agreed, explicitly, that Greene, who would receive IR £25,000 for his efforts, could if he wished ignore the shortlist and simply give the prize to whoever he thought worthy.

  Greene told Donlon and Joannon that he wanted to give the prize to the extremely talented Vincent McDonnell for his debut novel, The Broken Commandment, published by Reinhardt upon his own recommendation. Greene had already promoted this book, unsuccessfully, for the lucrative Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.9 Donlon had no objection to Greene making that choice. However, when presented with a shortlist that included Roy Foster, Seamus Heaney, and John Banville, Greene saw that he had made a mistake and that the main prize should go to Banville for his novel The Book of Evidence. He asked for a separate prize to go to McDonnell, whom he still regarded as outstanding. Donlon quickly came up with a ‘first fiction’ prize of IR £25,000.

  Five years later, when Greene was under ground, a playwright and lecturer named Gerry Dukes called Greene a ‘wool merchant’ for his dismissal of the shortlist, which Dukes had helped devise, and remarked that ‘integrity . . . was in short supply in Greene’s world’. He even worked the word ‘villain’ into his account. Dukes had indeed delivered the shortlist to Greene.10 However, Joannon soon responded that Dukes had nothing to do with the original arrangement or with the creation of the additional prize.11 Joannon’s account was later confirmed by Donlon, who also wrote that Greene had matched the generosity of the GPA by forgoing his own fee, and so effectively paid for the additional prize himself.12

  Graham and Yvonne went to Ireland, staying first with Tony Ryan at his home in Tipperary. Ryan had them helicoptered to Dublin for the prize-giving on 28 November 1989. Greene’s health had been slipping. As late as May 1989, he made a show of hardiness after falling and breaking four ribs: he took some painkillers and went on to a large meeting at the Central Hall in Westminster, where he gave an address introducing Daniel Ortega.13 However, from about June, he declined rapidly.14 At the prize-giving, he was in obvious pain and barely got through the ceremony, which was held at the Old Parliament House, now the Bank of Ireland, on College Green. He was troubled by the size of the crowd and needed to be taken outside for a breather before giving a gracious speech in honour of the authors. At the end there was a standing ovation, and he was moved to tears. He remarked later to Joannon, ‘It was far better than the Nobel Prize.’15

  78

  A SENSE OF MOVEMENT

  In April 1968, Graham Greene had retraced the route of Stamboul Train from Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express. With him was the documentary-maker Christopher Burstall, who filmed the novelist, though not his face, and recorded his conversation (see pp. 369–70). They eventually spoke of what might lie beyond death:

  GREENE:

  I’m a great believer in Purgatory. Purgatory to me makes sense while Hell doesn’t.

  BURSTALL:

  You think you have to serve your time in Purgatory, do you?

  GREENE:

  Serve your time, and I think it would be a very interesting experience, and one would have a sense of movement. I can’t believe in a Heaven which is just passive bliss. If there’s such a thing as a Heaven, it will contain movement and change.

  BURSTALL:

  And do you think it will contain pen and ink?

  GREENE:

  No, I don’t believe that. No, I don’t follow Kipling there. I think what one might find is that what one is crudely trying with pen and ink, the search one was making for understanding, would be pursued intellectually forever. But in a far more subtle and interesting and painless manner.1

  Greene was speaking hypothetically. Given that life had often seemed too long, he was not always sure that he wanted more of it, let alone an eternity. And in any event, the proofs of an afterlife were elusive. In the 1980s and 90s there was widespread curiosity about ‘near-death experiences’. Even Freddie Ayer, a long-time atheist and an old friend of Graham Greene, seemed to have one. In 1988, he choked on a piece of smoked salmon and was more or less dead. In the four minutes before he was revived, he saw a red light which was responsible for the ordering of the universe, but it was not doing its job well, ‘with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw, was slightly out of joint’. Greene read his article, ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’,2 and asked Jocelyn Rickards, who had had affairs with both Greene and Ayer, to pass a question on to Freddie: ‘How does he know that the experience he had during those four minutes was not an experience he had immediately his heart began to beat again and before he became fully conscious. I don’t see that there is any proof there of the memory existing for a while after death. Do get him to explain that.’ Here we have Britain’s outstanding Catholic novelist disputing a spiritual experience claimed by its most renowned atheist. Ayer died in a more permanent way in June 1989.3

  By the slightest of margins, Greene thought an afterlife was more likely than not – this got him into the country of Morin as he could not formulate a solid argument in favour of an afterlife, but his instincts affirmed it. Valentina Ivasheva was a literary scholar in Moscow and a friend of the novelist. In 1980 she wrote him a tragic letter about how her husband had thrown himself from the balcony of their seventh-storey apartment and been killed. Greene offered what consolation he could: ‘I don’t believe myself that death is the end of everything, or rather my faith tells me that death is not the end of everything and when my belief wavers I tell myself that I am wrong. One can’t believe 365 days a year, but my faith tells me that my reasoning is wrong. There is a mystery which we won’t be able to solve as long as we are alive. Personally even when I doubt I go on praying at night my own kind of prayers. Why not try at night talking to your husband and telling him all you think. Who knows whether he mightn’t be able to hear you and now with a mind unclouded?’4

  At about the time he wrote this letter, Greene had returned to the sacraments, doubtless owing to the kind-hearted chivvying of Father Durán, and he continued to receive them for the rest of his life.5 He also placed great store in having people pray for him and Masses said for his intentions. This does not mean that he resolved his doubts. Father Alberto Huerto, SJ, was an authority on Greene’s fiction and a friend. He wrote to him in the summer of 1989 to ask whether there was any truth to the rumour that he had abandoned the church. Greene replied that although he disagreed with much of what Pope John Paul II did, he still went to church fairly frequently: ‘I would call myself at the worst a Catholic agnostic.’6

  The ‘agnostic’ part of that formulation had to do with the reasoning side of Christianity. In his late years, Greene followed closely the writings of the theologian Father Hans Küng, best known for Infallible? An Inquiry, which offered a tough critique of the fundamental claims of the papacy, after which the Vatican withdrew his crede
ntials as a Catholic theologian. Graham Greene was strongly influenced by ideas, and they exchanged letters in 1989, with the novelist expressing gratitude to Küng ‘for helping me to keep one foot in the Catholic church’.7

  Dismissing the papacy, Greene could see that his own beliefs were not that far from the Anglicanism in which he had been raised, and he studied the publications of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, intended to work out common ground between the churches. He could see that if he were a young person again the differences between the beliefs of the two churches would have been insufficient for him to become a Roman Catholic.8 However, he was still attracted to the ‘magical’ element in Catholicism, so there was a powerful tug. The Catholic church was where almost a billion of the world’s poorest people brought their deepest yearnings, and Graham Greene was unlikely to walk away from that.

  In certain respects, Greene’s theological views were surprisingly conservative. He did not admire the Dominican theologian Father Edward Schillebeeckx because his account of the Resurrection was overly figurative: he spoke of Easter occurring in the experience of the disciples. For Greene, the Resurrection, if it occurred at all, had to involve an empty tomb, and he pointed to the account in John’s Gospel as having the veracity of good journalism, as the sprinting John comes to the tomb first and stops, while Peter rushes in. This was a human touch that fable or myth would be unlikely to generate.9

  Sadly, Graham Greene was himself sprinting towards the tomb. He came back from Dublin in very poor shape. In late 1989 he visited a doctor in Antibes, who told him that his blood tests were ‘déplorable’; moreover, his blood pressure was up and his heart weak. This doctor said that it was a ‘miracle’ that he could even stand up.10 In this condition, Greene travelled to Switzerland with Yvonne, and on 27 December 1989 fell seriously ill. Gruelling tests at the Hôpital de la Providence in Vevey, involving a needle to the spine and tubes down his nose, confirmed anaemia, with a haemoglobin count about half what was normal. He was given four blood transfusions to relieve the symptoms. After two days, he was released from hospital and then came down with what seemed to be flu. He collapsed in Caroline’s bathroom and was returned to hospital on 4 January 1990 for a stay of almost two weeks. He got back to Antibes on the 26th and found a huge pile of letters waiting for reply – uncharacteristically, he tossed most of them into the waste-paper basket.