The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Yet how much admired Philby was comes out in correspondence between The Times and the Foreign Office in 1944. The foreign news editor wrote to Sir Frank Roberts at the Foreign Office, requesting that Philby be allowed to become a war correspondent. Roberts’s answer of 1 March indicates the favourable opinion the SIS had of Philby: ‘We should be bound to recommend most strongly against his removal from his present job … his present work is so important, and he performs it with such exceptional ability, that his departure would be a real loss to us.’44

  While Greene was at St Albans, Philby was actively burrowing for information for his Moscow masters. From 1940 to 1944 his KGB controller was Anatoli Gorsky, whose cover name was Henry. His meetings with Gorsky often took place quite casually on a park bench in Kensington Gardens, not far from the Soviet embassy.45

  Philby admitted that after moving to Ryder Street, the intimacy at St Albans shared by Section V ended:

  Instead of living at close quarters in a small country town, we were scattered all over the city. We even rose to the dignity of separate offices, which further diminished the feast of reason and the flow of soul. I cannot remember Graham ever visiting my quarters; I certainly never visited his. Our contacts were limited to the lunch hour, and to the after-hours drink at a pub before dispersing to our homes.46

  Thirty-five years later, Greene’s experiences are mirrored in the first sentence of his novel The Human Factor. ‘Castle, ever since he had joined the firm as a young recruit more than thirty years ago, had taken his lunch in a public house behind St James’s Street, not far from the office.’ Greene identified the pub where he used to drink with Kim Philby as the King’s Arms behind St James’s Street.

  Philby recalled Greene’s somewhat adolescent urge to shock people. Some of the incidents were, said Philby, ‘really funny’: ‘We were eating fish and chips in an overcrowded pub near Ryder Street and Graham roared, quite unnecessarily loudly: “This fish tastes of ammonia.” There was a startled silence followed by the clatter of cutlery on china; then a swelling susurration – “You know, it does taste of ammonia,” “Thought it smelt kinda funny meself,” etc. – with Graham on his bar-stool, grinning in triumph.’47

  Apart from meeting in ‘their pub’, Philby and Greene seldom spent time alone together. Philby regretted that he didn’t get to ‘know’ Greene and that as a Soviet penetration agent, he could not allow Greene to get to know him:

  There were usually colleagues to put a distance between us. But I felt in him a more personal factor: a deeply held sense of privacy on matters which seriously engaged him … not once did he refer to Catholicism in any context whatsoever. I had no wish to enter the forbidden zone. Any attempt … to probe his defences … would have exposed me to his probing of mine, which, for obvious, if melancholy reasons, was inadmissible.48

  The curtain of privacy was raised at least once, when Philby unexpectedly met Dorothy Glover:

  One afternoon his secretary, in great agitation, summoned me to his office: Graham was in great pain, rolling about on the floor. He told me not to worry, it was an internal haemorrhage which he had had before; could I just send him home? I got a taxi and went with him, to some address in Bloomsbury [this would be 19 Gower Mews]. On the way there, he asked me a favour. ‘If when we get to my place you notice anything irregular, please keep it to yourself.’ Of course! Well, what happened? When I rang his doorbell, a lady came out, scooped him up and took him inside. I wondered at such sensitivity from the tough man of the pub-talk. Incidentally, this is the first time that I have mentioned the incident to anyone.49

  Apart from the fact that he was living with Dorothy, what could Greene have considered so irregular? In any case, it would hardly have troubled Philby, who was living at the time with Aileen Furse, when she was seven months pregnant with their fourth child and still unmarried.

  Regardless of any friendship between Philby and Greene, everyone in Section V knew who was boss. Miss Kennard Davis, a secretary in the typing pool, remembered how cold-hearted Philby could be in his handling of staff. She recalled coming into Greene’s office one day: ‘He was gripping the chair and his eyes were glinting with anger. I asked him what was the matter and he said: “I’ve just had a caning from the headmaster”’50

  *

  By the end of 1944, by means of brilliant office manœuvring, Philby had got rid of Felix Cowgill, head of Section V, and had succeeded in taking over a new anti-communist section at a time when the Cold War was beginning to build up.fn2 The irony of the situation was not lost on him. In his memoirs he wrote: ‘[Soviet] Headquarters had informed him [his control in London] that I must do everything, but everything, to ensure that I became head of Section IX.’

  Cowgill had admired Philby enormously; everyone did. In his memoirs, Philby describes Cowgill as ‘proud and impulsive, a man too big for his talents’.51 Robert Cecil later commented: ‘Philby at one stroke had got rid of a staunch anti-communist [Major Cowgill] and ensured that the whole post-war effort to counter communist espionage would become known in the Kremlin. The history of espionage records few, if any, comparable masterstrokes.’52

  Just prior to the Allied invasion of Europe on 6 June 1944, Graham Greene resigned from MI6. His departure came as a big surprise. He was not happy as an agent: ‘it was a routine thing of collecting names and filing and making notes on cards and it was very dull. It was like working in an office.’53 Still, the question needs asking as to why Greene chose to resign at this dramatic moment in the war.

  He gave his answer in two separate interviews:

  I moved out of MI6 because Philby wanted to promote me and I didn’t wish to be promoted, and I also wished to get abroad if I could. I quite unjustly thought it was a personal ambition on his part. He was moving up and I thought he was thinking of moving up his friends to guard his flanks as it were, for personal reasons. One knows now that they were not personal reasons.

  And the man who should have been put in charge of the Iberian peninsula was a younger man than me, and had much more experience of dealing with the work. I refused the promotion and resigned.54

  I transferred to PID [Political Intelligence Department] of the Foreign Office because they’d said that they would send me to France, as soon as the invasion took place, which they didn’t do. They didn’t keep their promise.55

  Greene resigned in a gentlemanly fashion. He took Tim Milne and Philby to lunch at the Café Royal, ordered them a good meal and in the middle of it offered his resignation.56 For Philby, Greene’s resignation remained a deep mystery which still troubled him thirty-four years after the event. The situation revealed another aspect of Greene’s character, though Philby was unsure just what it was:

  In 1944, I received a promotion and, in the subsequent reshuffle of posts, the Iberian sub-section of Section V required a new head. The obvious man for the job on all counts was Graham. But when I raised the subject with him, he promptly resigned from the service altogether. He explained that he had not minded chivvying Portuguese on orders from above, but had no intention of taking personal responsibility for doing so. I did not find the explanation wholly convincing. Graham doing to order something he disapproved of? It sounded unlikely.57

  It doesn’t seem a likely explanation, but neither does Greene’s.

  Unquestionably, there was an obdurate side to Greene’s nature. Job routine could easily become too much for him, and when it did, he got out. Philby offered a kinder explanation:

  I prefer to think that the human factor in his job had been on his mind for some time. Pretty well all the Portuguese [agents] who played around with the Germans were of humble status and wretchedly poor; probably courting trouble for a new pair of shoes, and who could blame them? I could not think evil of them, and I am sure that Graham, with his greater charity and understanding, could not either. I also think that the wider futility of his occupation bore hard on Graham. The war was virtually won, nothing that he could do would hasten the end, and I had given him a pretex
t for cutting loose from a dreary and distasteful routine.58

  Philby never understood why Greene refused a perfectly good promotion. If Greene’s field officers in Lisbon were involved with Otto John in the early stages of plans to assassinate Hitler, it seems incredible that he should have suddenly resigned before the second front, before Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful and tragic assassination attempt, and had himself transferred to the Political Intelligence Department (although Greene did have this itch to be near the front line and PID had promised that they would send him to France).

  Comparing his old job with his new, however, it looks like a very curious decision. When Greene moved from MI6 to PID, he moved to an editorial job. At PID, he edited an anthology to be dropped over occupied France. Now Greene was an odd and brilliant man, but even odd, brilliant men accept promotion. In Ryder Street excitement must have been high – invasion pending and the possible assassination of Hitler – yet Greene got out. It is hard to believe that Greene would resign on the eve of D-Day, the emotional and strategic climax of a long war, without having a very important reason.

  Perhaps Greene, always intuitive, resigned because he suspected that Philby was a Russian penetration agent. Greene once told me that if he had known that Philby was a Soviet counterspy, he ‘might have allowed Philby 24 hours to flee as a friend, then reported him’. If Greene did suspect Philby, it would be just the kind of thing that would catapult him out of the service rather than share his suspicions with the authorities. And he would have had to contend with his own credo, established during his painful school years of divided loyalties. As a schoolboy, Greene had betrayed to his father the identity of his tormentor – Carter. He was not going to do that again.59

  * * *

  fn1 Ustinov, a brilliant agent, was tiny and round. A great impersonator (much like his son, actor Peter Ustinov), one of his party pieces was to imitate Queen Victoria with a white handkerchief over his head. He looked, I was told, like a bed bug imitating Queen Victoria. At the end of the war, he interrogated Paul Fidrmuc, whose activities inspired Greene’s Our Man in Havana.

  fn2 Cowgill, nevertheless, remained on good terms with Philby’s second wife, Aileen Furse, whom he deserted in England in the 1950s, to be with another man’s wife in Beirut.

  14

  From Spy to Publisher

  Times have changed since a certain author was executed for murdering his publisher.

  – J. M. BARRIE

  AS WITH MYSTICS and soothsayers, Greene at times had dreams which foreshadowed future events. He later described a dream so vivid that, almost forty years on, the image remained in his mind:

  I woke up in bed and across the window went a small plane, with fire coming out of its tail, which then did a nose dive. Although I was working for M16 and one heard stories that there was a secret weapon which was going to be unleashed by Hitler, I had, in my position, no knowledge of what kind of thing it was and so I was immensely surprised when the first night of the VIS came and one saw exactly the image that I’d seen in the dream.1

  Almost a week after D-Day, on 12 June, the first V1 pilotless plane crossed the English coast and fell on London. During the following months 8,000 were launched against the city, 2,400 of which fell on Kent.

  The V1s had red tails and looked as if they were enemy fighters in flames. The British cabinet christened them flying bombs, the man in the street ‘doodle bugs’ for they seemed to doodle. When they ran out of fuel they fell to earth and, being filled with high explosive, burst with a roar and a blinding flash. The V1 was an unguided missile, and it was, as Evelyn Waugh brilliantly described: ‘as impersonal as a plague, as though the city were infested with enormous, venomous insects’.2

  They came night and day; there was no warning, no time to seek a safe shelter; abandoning dignity, all one could do was to throw oneself on to the floor, under tables, into doorways. As many as 20,000 houses a day were damaged, and casualties were severe – 10,000 during the first week’s bombing.

  Greene’s mother wrote of the missiles coming down near her home in Crowborough:

  Everybody in the village in a great state of excitement. People have been watching rockets all night. At any rate we lay in bed and rested our limbs if not our heads. The nights are awful. I don’t mind the beasts [V1s] in the day time as you see our planes chasing them to open ground before firing [on them]. Then one hears a crash or not as the case may be. But at night we are surrounded by guns firing at them and I suppose planes. I just lie and shake. One’s head feels awful. We go to bed very early to get some sleep. Last night we had slept till 2 before it started.3

  June and July 1944 were months of heavy clouds, driving rain, leaden skies, and pilotless bombs. Greene was still living with Dorothy Glover, but no longer at 19 Gower Mews. They had moved to Gordon Square, an area regularly and heavily bombed. Surprisingly they rented the flat most vulnerable to attack: ‘We got it very cheap during the flying bomb business,’ Greene told me. ‘It was a tiny rent and on the top floor. A bomb hits more easily if you’re on the top floor and you are more likely to be killed than if you are on the ground floor,’ hence the cheapness of the flat. The flat cost Greene ‘something like three pounds a week, furnished’.4

  In The End of the Affair, Greene describes the Vis first coming over and Bendrix (based on Greene) and Sarah (based on Catherine Walston) making love, but in this instance Greene used his experiences of making love to Dorothy under the threat of death from the V1 pilotless planes:

  the blitz had petered out with the great final raids of 1941. When the sirens went and the first robots came over, we assumed that a few planes had broken through our night defence … and at that moment, lying in the dark on my bed, we saw our first robot. It passed low across the Common and we took it for a plane on fire and its odd deep bumble for the sound of an engine out of control. A second came and then a third. We changed our minds about our defences. ‘They are shooting them like pigeons,’ I said, ‘they must be crazy to go on.’ But go on they did, hour after hour, even after the dawn had begun to break, until even we realised that this was something new.

  We had only just lain down on the bed when the raid started. It made no difference. Death never mattered at those times – in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent forever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the watching her torch trail across to the opposite side of the Common …5

  Greene wondered whether eternity might not after all exist as the endless prolongation of the moment of death, and that is the time he would have chosen, ‘the moment of absolute trust and absolute pleasure, the moment when it was impossible to quarrel because it was impossible to think … the Vis didn’t affect us until the act of love was over. I had spent everything I had, and was lying back with my head on her stomach and her taste … in my mouth when one of the robots crashed down on the common.’6 That suspended moment of risk – ‘the sudden waiting silence when the engine cut out’ – was felt by all who experienced V1 bombing.

  Since Greene was living in the midst of danger with Dorothy, one would expect that he’d be concerned about her future, but anxiety about Vivien and his family was uppermost. As Greene felt that the war made all expectations of life uncertain, he sent Laurence Pollinger some suggestions in the event of his death:

  One would like to feel that a few pounds for one’s impoverished family could still be wrung out of one’s books, and I’d therefore be most grateful if you would help Vivien under those circumstances to produce:

  a book of short stories enlarging the Cresset volume.

  if Douglas [Jerrold] would consider such, a volume of essays of which I think there is ample material in store in a box of cuttings …

  Keeping The Power and the Glory in print and perhaps arranging Penguins or other rights for The Man Within, Stamboul Train, A Gun for Sale.

  To go on to more cheerful matters … I suggest that I should write a preface to The Lawless Roads linking it up
to The Power and the Glory. Presumably Douglas [Jerrold] would pay some kind of an advance in addition to the purchase price, but – except of course again in the event of death – I don’t want him pressed hard about this.7

  In July, Greene was still working for the Political Intelligence Department and his address was Editorial Unit, 43 Grosvenor Street, London. He ran a section with the novelist Antonia White,fn1 producing a kind of Reader’s Digest called ‘Choix’, to be dropped over France: ‘It was supposed to have been a sort of secret, hidden propaganda of a cultural kind. I mean not obvious political propaganda but making the French aware of what had been going on in literature whilst their country had been occupied by the Germans. I was criticised severely by the chief of the department. The poem was called “Liberté”. It was thought flippant to open with a French poem and take up the whole first page with a poem. It was not propaganda, you see, but I stuck to my guns.’ Greene could not remember how many copies were produced, but he believed that none had survived: ‘The aeroplane crews’, he remarked mildly, ‘probably threw them away rather than waste time dropping them.’8

  On 14 July 1944 Greene wrote in high glee to his mother: ‘My half-time release from Government service came through: starting on Monday as a publisher.’

  *

  Greene had known of the possibility of joining Eyre & Spottiswoode early in the war, for on 2 July 1940 he wrote to his mother: ‘You’ll be amused to hear that I’ve become a company director of a publisher – Eyre & Spottiswoode, who are also the King’s Printers, so are soundly based. This will give me anyway £100 a year director’s fees, if I’m called up. So long as I’m in London I shall be getting £100 free of tax entertainment allowance, whether in the Army or not.’