Lives in Writing

by David Lodge

  During this trip Greene made the acquaintance of a French couple, Jacques and Yvonne Cloetta, and Yvonne probably contributed something to the character of Marie, the young wife of the colon Rycker in A Burnt-Out Case. Some months later she returned to the South of France with her children, leaving her husband working in Africa, and Greene commenced an affair with her which, rather amazingly, they managed to conceal from Jacques for eight years, after which he seems to have condoned it, on condition that they were discreet. In the mid-1960s Greene made his principal home in Antibes, where Yvonne lived, and they settled down into a relationship which lasted until the end of his life. During this decade Catherine’s health began to deteriorate: surgery after an accident was botched, and Sherry thinks she became an alcoholic. Greene told her about Yvonne, for whom he said (in a letter of 1967) he had ‘a real quiet love . . . “peaceful as old age”’, in contrast to their own ‘tormented love – love which made one more happy and sometimes more miserable than I’ll ever be again . . . I always remember that never for a moment have I ever been bored by you – enraptured, excited, nervous, angry, tormented, but never bored, because I lost myself in searching for you.’ But his letters became less frequent and the relationship slowly atrophied, as Catherine became chronically ill and they met at longer and longer intervals. She died of leukaemia in 1978, her beauty wasted, and refused to let Greene see her in her last illness. Harry Walston wrote a remarkably magnanimous reply to the remorseful letter of condolence Greene apparently sent him: ‘You should not have remorse. Of course you caused pain. But who can honestly say that he has gone through life without causing pain? And you gave joy too.’ From then onwards Yvonne was the only woman of consequence in Greene’s life.

  Though Greene acquired the apartment in Antibes in 1966 in order to be near Yvonne (he already had a flat in Paris), the decision to settle permanently in France at this time was taken for quite other reasons. His financial affairs were in crisis. Greene had entrusted a great deal of his money (and his royalties must have been considerable ever since The Heart of the Matter became a world bestseller in 1948, not to mention the income from his plays and films) to his accountant, one Thomas Roe CBE, a well-connected and highly respected man who undertook to protect it from the high rates of British income tax by using foreign tax havens and tax-efficient investment schemes. Greene was not his only distinguished client – Noel Coward and Robert Graves also availed themselves of his services. Roe, however, turned out to be a swindler, with criminal associates and mafia connections. One of the companies he was involved in collapsed spectacularly in 1964. In 1965 he was arrested in Switzerland and charged with abuse of confidence, fraud, and passing counterfeit dollar notes. In 1968 he was convicted and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. Greene not only lost a great deal of money by Roe’s perfidy – according to his good friend, the film director Peter Glenville, ‘Graham, through Roe, lost all, repeat all’ – he also became liable for a hefty tax bill. And according to Sherry, ‘there was a chance that the British authorities, if Greene had not become domiciled in another country, and had he not been willing to pay back what he owed, might have attempted to secure his arrest’. Sherry is irritatingly vague about this matter, as he often is when you most want hard facts from him. But it is obvious that this episode caused Greene much anxiety and despondency, which, as Sherry observes, seem to be reflected in his troubled visage in the photographic portraits made by Lord Snowdon at the time. It explains a lot, too about his subsequent lifestyle. Many visitors to his Antibes apartment, myself included, were surprised by its modest scale, but at the time he bought it he was hard pressed for cash. ‘I live on a shoestring and a Swiss overdraft,’ he wrote to Catherine on 10 June 1966. In due course his fortunes recovered, and according to Yvonne Cloetta, when towards the end of his life he asked his lawyer for a rough estimate of his wealth he was astonished at its size. For a long time he had arranged to be paid a regular income from a company set up for the purpose. Personally he was never a big spender, and according to Shirley Hazzard he was parsimonious to the point of meanness in trivial matters, taking buses rather than taxis home from Gemma’s restaurant on Capri, and being reluctant to turn up the central heating in his villa Il Rosario on chilly days. But he was often generous with gifts to causes and individuals. The value of his estate at death seems to be unknown, perhaps because he died in fiscally secretive Switzerland. In a footnote Sherry quotes the Toronto Star (a surprising source) stating that it was only about £200,000, commenting: ‘I doubt that this is the whole story, but I know he gave away vast sums to friends and family through his corporation Verdant.’

  The Thomas Roe episode is one of the most interesting revelations in Sherry’s third volume, because Greene’s tax exile had important consequences for his literary career. His visits to England were henceforth severely restricted (he writes to Catherine in 1967 that he will receive an honorary degree in Edinburgh ‘If the tax people allow!’) and he gradually lost touch with, and seemingly interest in, his native country. It is a matter for regret that the acute and eloquent observation of English culture and society in the novels up to The End of the Affair is not to be found in the later ones. When he did set a late novel mainly in England – The Human Factor (1978) – his descriptive touch was not as sure as it used to be, and his social focus narrower. Nor did he write very much about his adopted country, France. Instead, the practice established by The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and A Burnt-Out Case continued: he went hunting for material in exotic locations and trouble-spots: Haiti, Sinai, Northern Ireland, Russia, Argentina, Paraguay, Panama, Nicaragua. He acquired a reputation for anticipating where a political crisis would soon take place, and rather enjoyed it: ‘A few days ago The Times reported a plot against the President & three colonels arrested – so I seem to have picked right again,’ he writes gleefully to Yvonne from Paraguay in July 1968. Not all these trips produced novels, but they usually yielded a non-fiction book, or journalistic articles, or letters to the press.

  In later life Greene frequently used his status and celebrity to intervene in international politics. Sometimes this was entirely to his credit, as when he gave support to the Soviet dissident writers Sinyavsky and Daniel in 1967 by publicly requesting that his blocked Russian royalties should be paid to their wives, because he had no desire to revisit the country as long as they languished in prison; but he went on to say that this should not be taken as a criticism of the Soviet Union, where he would choose to live in preference to America. Commentators were quick to point out that in such a case it would not be long before he shared the fate of Sinyavsky and Daniel. Greene’s political gestures were seldom free from paradox, inconsistency or internal contradiction. The often-quoted statement in his 1969 Shakespeare Prize acceptance speech, ‘The writer should always be ready to change sides at the drop of a hat. He speaks up for the victims, and the victims change’, is not the all-accommodating loophole he claimed it to be. At about the same time as the Sinyavsky–Daniel affair, he gave considerable offence in Britain by writing an admiring introduction to the autobiography of his old Secret Service colleague, the traitor Kim Philby. Greene wrote: ‘He betrayed his country – yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?’ This is pure sophistry, because ‘country’ in this context was not an abstraction but a human community, including many British agents whom Philby sent to certain death. Sherry recalls that when he pressed Greene to condemn those deeds of Philby, he uncharacteristically became red with anger, and refused to do so.

  Greene kept his word and did not return to Russia until 1987, when he participated in a peace conference convened under the regime of Gorbachev, whom he admired and wished to support. He made a speech improbably celebrating an alliance between Catholics and Communists. ‘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.
There is no division in our thoughts between Roman Catholics and Communists.’ This rhetoric blatantly ignored a division within the clergy and laity of the Roman Catholic Church, between conservatives who often supported oppressive right-wing regimes, and those on the political left influenced by liberation theology. Greene’s tendency to support any Latin American political movement that was ideologically leftist and hostile to the USA often led him into an uncritical alliance with politicians who were as ruthless in their methods as those they opposed. Sherry has done his homework in this area, and even if he tells you more than you really want to know about the political history of Cuba, Haiti, Panama and the rest, he does enable an informed assessment of Greene’s treatment of these matters in his novels and reportage.

  Describing the novelist’s surprisingly warm friendship with the populist leader of Panama, General Omar Torrijos, in the five years preceding his death in a suspicious air crash in 1981, Sherry observes that ‘as Greene got older he seemed to take more risks, made up his mind in favour of those leading dangerous lives’. One might also cite his fascination with guerrillas and revolutionaries in books like The Comedians and The Honorary Consul (probably the best of the late novels). But one must bear in mind that all this time he was regularly reporting on his travels to the British Secret Service. Sherry adds little to what he revealed in the second volume about this topic, but Yvonne Cloetta is unequivocal in conversation with Marie-Françoise Allain: ‘What I can tell you is that, to the very end, he worked with the British Services.’

  This puts Greene’s provocative public support for revolutionary struggle in a rather different perspective. It also raises a question which Sherry largely ignores: Greene’s attitude to British politics. In his second volume Sherry reported in a footnote that Greene voted Conservative in the general election of 1945 – ‘the socialists are such bores,’ he told his mother in explanation – a rather extraordinary fact when one considers that almost everybody in the country of even mildly progressive views voted Labour on that occasion. In the third volume we learn that Greene confessed to Catherine, whose husband was a Labour parliamentary candidate, that he celebrated the defeat of that party under Hugh Gaitskell in 1959 with a slug of whisky while in a plane over Canada. Yvonne Cloetta recalls that he was delighted by Mrs Thatcher’s victory in 1979, explaining, when she expressed surprise, ‘It doesn’t make a great difference with us, Labour or Conservative, in day-to-day life, or even in politics, but I’m pleased mainly because, for once, it’s a woman.’ It’s difficult to reconcile these laid-back attitudes to British politics with those Greene struck on the international stage. I have not changed the opinion I expressed in an earlier essay about Greene, that his interventions in politics, both public and secret, were not driven by any coherent ideological conviction, but were essentially personal, emotional, and opportunistic in motivation.

  Greene’s religious views are just as difficult to determine. He ‘was ever in a confused state about the condition of his faith’, Sherry remarks, but this was perhaps more forgivable than his political inconsistencies. Few of us, whether we define ourselves as religious believers, ex-believers, or non-believers, are completely consistent in our answers to the ultimate questions about life and death. Even convinced atheists have been known to light a candle in a church on occasion. (Tony Harrison has a fine poem on the subject.) It was Greene’s fate, however, to have to act out his uncertainty on the stage of his celebrity. A Burnt-Out Case was an oblique announcement that he no longer believed in the letter of Catholic dogma; in due course he was more explicit in interviews, notably one with John Cornwell in the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, in September 1989, where he described himself as a ‘Catholic agnostic’. In another interview he described himself more oxymoronically as a ‘Catholic atheist’. He drew a distinction between ‘belief’ which he had lost, and ‘faith’ which he retained, though the latter always seemed to me more like a wistful kind of hope that the whole Christian myth might improbably turn out to be true.

  Sherry, who describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, suggests that in his later years Greene was edging back towards the fold. ‘Greene was concerned about his promiscuity, wanted forgiveness to escape punishment in hell and be received in the arms of God.’ The main evidence for this bold assertion is Greene’s curious relationship with the Spanish priest Fr Leopoldo Duran, which inspired the whimsical fable Monsignor Quixote (1982) and which Duran himself described in his memoir, Graham Greene: Friend and Brother (1994). For many years Greene would spend a week or two with him in the summer, being driven about the Spanish countryside, always ending up at the monastery of Osera. On Sundays during these trips, or when staying in the flat in Antibes, Duran would say mass for the two of them, Greene told Cornwell – adding ambiguously: ‘And to please Fr Duran I make a confession now.’ In his memoir, Duran describes how he was summoned by Greene to his deathbed and administered the last sacraments, and asserts that Greene died a fully reconciled member of the Church. Yvonne Cloetta, however, gives a rather different spin to the episode: ‘I had indeed suggested summoning his friend, the Spanish priest, Leopoldo Duran. He raised his hand casually and said, “Oh, if you want to . . .” That implied he was indifferent.’ Sherry himself did not arrive on the scene until after Greene’s death, and the details of the writer’s last days and hours are incomplete. In this respect as in so many others, this enigmatic man carried his secrets to the grave.

  Graham Greene’s career as an author mostly predated our modern publicity-driven literary world of book tours, literary festivals and gladiatorial prize competitions, and in later years, apart from giving an increasing number of press interviews, he generally kept clear of it. Towards the end of his life, however, he did get involved in one very typical manifestation of this new literary culture. In 1989 the Guinness Peat Aviation Company founded a prize worth a record 50,000 Irish punts for the best book written by an Irishman or established resident in Ireland in the last three years, and invited Greene to choose the winner from a shortlist to be drawn up by a panel of distinguished judges, who laboured for many months sifting the works submitted. Greene, however, sought to overrule the judges and award the prize to a book not on the shortlist, The Broken Commandment by Vincent McDonnell, which he himself had helped to get published after it had been sent to him in manuscript by McDonnell’s wife. This caused huge consternation, anger and embarrassment, and the crisis was only resolved by giving a special prize (in fact funded out of Greene’s pocket) of 20,000 punts to McDonnell, while John Banville received the main prize for The Book of Evidence, but the controversy and recriminations continued for some time. It was a tragi-comic episode which took its toll on Greene and may have hastened his death (which like Catherine’s was caused by leukaemia). ‘Dublin killed me,’ he said to Sherry later. Sherry argues plausibly that Greene adopted McDonnell as a kind of literary son and channelled into his cause some of the emotion generated by his own failure to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was denied this accolade year after year, partly because of the implacable hostility of one Swedish Academician, Arthur Lundkvist, but also because other members of the academy thought he was more of an ‘entertainer’ than a ‘serious’ writer. That was a grave misjudgement. It is true that Greene used throughout his career the structures of the adventure stories he read in his childhood and youth, which accounted in part for his wide readership. But he combined his page-turning narrative technique with a unique and unsettling vision of the world which subverted and transformed the stereotypes of popular fiction. He was also a master of English prose (something which Scandinavian readers are perhaps not able fully to appreciate).

  The same, alas, cannot be said for his biographer. Sherry’s third volume is self-indulgently and often eccentrically written. The discourse is frequently broken up into short sections consisting of a paragraph or two, separated by asterisks, which disrupt the cohesion of the narrative and afford the biographer too much freedom for digression and superfluous comment. Mixed meta
phors run amok (e.g., ‘When Greene writes a letter to the press, it’s a lightning rod for shoals of letters to be poured out in answer, swords drawn.’). Similes often baffle (e.g., ‘Had he failed this couple [the McDonnells], he’d have been as ashamed as a nudist caught with his clothes on.’). Sometimes, like Nabokov’s Kinbote in Pale Fire, Sherry addresses the startled reader directly: ‘Don’t you feel that at times, writing a novel was for him a disease?’ Towards the end of the book there are lurid disquisitions on the horror of death which seem to tell us more about the biographer than his subject. Either Sherry was poorly served by his editors or he ignored their advice. This is a great pity, because his dedication to his task is manifest, and the research that has gone into the book is awe-inspiring. With all its faults the completed biography is an indispensable companion to the work of a major modern writer, and a fascinating account of an extraordinary life.