The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  In letters to Catherine, Greene voiced a great longing to escape both from his wife and Dorothy – and for him, both Achill and Catherine symbolised peace. In one letter he tried to define this: ‘The day was peaceful, but I don’t use the word peaceful in the same way as peace. Peaceful is negative – means no scenes and no positive unhappiness. But peace is positive, and all sorts of unpeaceful things like being in love and making love can be part of it. I think even a sikh massacre could be part of it.’74 Two days earlier he wrote: ‘My dear, before you cropped up, I used to have odd dreams of peace – that dream of the moon I gave to Scobie for instance.’75

  Louise recognises that if she leaves Scobie (in her case to go to South Africa), he will gain his peace, and she even says, as we’ve seen: ‘Poor dear, you wish I were dead … You want to be alone.’ This simple line comes from a terrible dream Greene had. In the same letter to Catherine in which he wrote of the moon image and his need for peace, he writes: ‘I also dreamed this last time that Vivien died. She was dying and I walking up and down trying to pray. I found I simply couldn’t pray for her life, so I simply prayed that she wouldn’t have any pain.’76

  * * *

  fn1 Frances McFall was the nanny for all the Crompton children. She stayed with the family all her life and is buried close to the Walston farm in Cambridgeshire: ‘We all loved her and she brought us up. She was plain but incredibly wise. She understood a variety of peculiar people – including my family.’7

  fn2 A list has survived of forty-seven women Greene slept with, mostly prostitutes and pre-war assignations. In The Quiet American, when Pyle asks Fowler (a surrogate for Greene) if he has had a lot of women, he admits that not more than four women have had any importance to him – or he to them: ‘The other forty-odd – one wonders why one does it … I wish I could have those nights back … One starts promiscuous and ends like one’s grandfather, faithful to one woman’ (pp. 102–3). Three of the four women of importance to Greene must be Vivien, Dorothy and Catherine.

  fn3 See Vol. One, ch. 25, for others.

  17

  The Third Man and Other Friends

  ‘It’s just buggery, boys.’

  – DAVID O. SELZNICK

  WRITING TO CATHERINE Walston in September 1947, Greene made a rare boast: ‘O the Greene stock is booming. [The film] This Gun for Hire revived at the Plaza, reprint of 19 Stories announced, two more of uniform edition and huge enthusiasm for script of “Basement Room”.’ Along the right-hand edge of the letter he wrote, ‘After this burst of self-advertisement. Love Graham.’

  Nothing in his letters to Catherine could have given any impression that the script he was writing in collaboration with the film director, Carol Reed, would lead to ‘huge enthusiasm’. On the contrary, Greene’s first reference to it suggests no excitement: ‘They [Alexander Korda and Carol Reed] are buying a short story of mine called “The Basement Room” and want me to work on it. Once I suppose I’d have been excited and pleased … by all this (it means 3,000 pounds), but I feel dreary.’1 And in successive letters, Greene expressed boredom, describing the work as ‘a drudgery’.2

  To some degree his comments masked his real feelings, for, in particular, Greene was beginning to feel a deep friendship for the film producer, Sir Alexander Korda. In his early days, Greene had vigorously attacked Korda, suggesting that he was great only as a publicist ‘since he had put over so many undistinguished and positively bad films as if they were a succession of masterpieces’.3 Yet here was Greene, with Carol Reed as director and Alexander Korda as banker, in the process of producing two of the greatest films of the immediate postwar era – The Fallen Idol (based on ‘The Basement Room’) and The Third Man.

  Carol Reed recalled how their successful collaboration began. For some time he and Korda had been looking for a story to turn into a film. In Korda’s penthouse at Claridge’s, Reed mentioned Greene’s novel England Made Me. Korda countered with ‘The Basement Room’, and retired to bed to nurse a cold. When Reed finished reading the story, he went to Korda and found him ‘lying with his head propped up against a lot of pillows. I said to him: “This is a wonderful story,” and expressed the strong desire to persuade Greene to work with [me]. Alex stretched out an arm from under the blanket and caught the telephone. “Is ‘The Basement Room’ free?” “Yes.” “Well, would you ask the author if he would lunch with Carol Reed and talk it over?”’4 Ten minutes later the telephone rang. Greene would be at the restaurant of Arlington House (Korda’s headquarters) the following day at one o’clock.5

  As soon as Greene came into the restaurant, Reed saw what sort of man he was: ‘frightfully to-the-point and practical. There was no wasting of time with him, even to asking “How are you?” and that sort of thing … I had put my question to him [and] he answered: “How do you see it?” Then we talked things over.’6

  But Greene had reservations, believing that the subject matter of the story – ‘a murder committed by the most sympathetic character and an unhappy ending’ – was not filmable.7 In the story the young boy Philip (the film version changed his name to Felipe and made him an ambassador’s son) dies an embittered old man, his psychological character ruined by his premature initiation into an adult world he never quite understood. In the collaboration which followed, Reed and Greene changed the story ‘so that the subject was no longer a small boy who unwittingly betrayed his best friend to the police, but dealt instead with a small boy who believed that his friend was a murderer and nearly procured his arrest by telling lies in his defence’. Greene thought this was a good subject, especially with Reed handling it.8

  Greene found in Reed a ‘fine film and literary intelligence’. In reviewing the film The Stars Look Down in 1940, he had praised his direction: ‘He handles his players like a master, so one remembers them only as people.’9 Reed had a strong desire to present in film terms the author’s ideas: ‘I think it is the director’s job … to convey faithfully what the author had in mind.’10 At last, Greene had met someone he could work with on an equal footing. Reed’s principles would satisfy the most fastidious of authors: ‘Unless you have worked with the author in the first place you cannot convey to the actors what he had in mind nor can you convey to the editor at the end the original idea. In making a picture you have got to go back to the first stage to see how important something may be in establishing this scene or that character.’11

  During the collaboration Reed and Greene developed a strong professional and personal admiration for each other. They took a suite of rooms in a Brighton hotel with interconnecting doors, plus a room with a secretary between them. Greene started by making changes to his original, though he used the dialogue from his story whenever it seemed to fit, and in the first version of the script a great deal of the original dialogue was kept. Then, as the writer and director kept working, the words from the original story were ‘slowly whittled down to reduce the dialogue as much as possible’. Greene knew what he was doing in turning his story first into a film treatment and then into a script, since the right rhythm in a book may seem unrealistic on the screen and need modification: ‘Dialogue in fiction must have the flavour of realism, without having to be real, while on the screen the camera emphasizes the realism of the situation.’ Curiously enough, you have to be closer in a film to real conversation ‘in order that the dialogue will match the realistic furnishings of the setting’.

  As Greene wrote the first draft, Reed suggested revisions which Greene either accepted or to which he offered alternatives. Once this draft was completed, Greene wrote ten more pages to fit the agreed new ending.12 Reed remembered (wrongly) that the script took about ten days. In fact it was completed in four months, June to September 1947.13

  The Fallen Idol was released in England in September 1948, and in America was entitled The Lost Illusion, the working title during the film’s production. This was Greene’s first real work for the cinema and his favourite among his film scripts. The film received substantial praise and deserved it.
In New York it was spoken of as having subtlety, intelligence, unforced humour and tragedy, and most of all as being free from theatrical posturing.14

  *

  The Third Man is a classic film and is perhaps the story everyone identifies with Greene. It is a memorable and triumphant thriller, winning the Grand Prix for best feature film in the 1949 International Film Festival at Cannes. The fact that it is still being shown daily in Vienna is evidence of its continued popularity. As Greene told it, The Third Man had a casual birth: ‘Sometimes one may turn them over [stories] after many years and think regretfully they would have been good once, in a time now dead. So it was that long before [emphasis added], on the flap of an envelope, I had written an opening paragraph: “I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.”’15

  A year after The Fallen Idol, Greene was asked by Korda over dinner to write another film script for Carol Reed. Greene came up with the note he had written on the flap of an envelope about the last farewell to Harry – this paragraph only, because he had taken the story no further and had not an inkling of what would come next. This was an intriguing titbit to drop on the table beside Korda at dinner, but the story was in fact incorrect.16

  As Greene told it, he took his ‘note on an envelope’ to Vienna because Alexander Korda wished to make a film about the city’s four-power occupation. Vienna, in 1947, was divided into American, Russian, French and British zones, the inner city being administered by each power in turn. The battle-scarred, bombed-out ruins of the city fascinated Korda and he wanted to put them on film: ‘He was prepared’, Greene told me, ‘to let me pursue the tracks of Harry.’17

  On 28 September 1947 Greene wrote to Catherine of his feelings after completing a novel: ‘I sent The Heart of the Matter to Heinemann yesterday, and I have no ideas for another book and feel I never shall … I feel very empty and played out … This is always the way when a book is finally cleared. It affects one badly, so that even one’s religion doesn’t mean a thing.’

  But two days later the situation changed dramatically – the creative impulse for Greene was always somewhat miraculous. That night at 11 p.m. he wrote to Catherine, then in America:

  I believe I’ve got a book coming. I feel so excited that I spell out your name in full carefully sticking my tongue between my teeth to pronounce it right. The act of creation is awfully odd and inexplicable like falling in love … Tonight I had a solitary good dinner where I usually go with My Girl and afterwards felt vaguely restless (not sexually, just restless) so I walked to the Café Royal and sat and read The Aran Islands, and drank beer till about 10 and then I still felt restless, so I walked all up Piccadilly and back and went into a Gent’s in Brick Street, and suddenly in the Gent’s, I saw the three chunks, the beginning, the middle and the end, and in some ways all the ideas I had – the first sentence of the thriller about the dead Harry who wasn’t dead, the Risen-from-the-dead story, and then the other day in the train all seemed to come together. I hope to God it lasts – they don’t always. I want to begin the next book with you in Ireland – if possible at Achill, but on Aran or Inishboffin or the Galway Hotel or anywhere.

  Now I shall go to bed with lots of aspirin, but I shan’t sleep.18

  In a postscript he added: ‘Today I read an article which said “Unlike such writers as James Joyce and Graham Greene …” – damn it. I’m not played out yet.’

  Greene went to Korda’s for dinner soon after he had had this extraordinary inspiration about a man risen from the dead. When he went to Vienna the following February, he had the beginning, middle and end of the story, not just the first sentence. The sentence scribbled on the back of an old envelope was not written long before he went to Korda’s, and his knowledge of the development of the story was already substantial.

  However, Greene had originally intended to set his story in London, not Vienna. To tie it into the complications of that occupied, ruined city clearly would cause difficulties – and it did.

  Greene left for Vienna in February 1948 seeking first-hand impressions, but went reluctantly, for the tremendous desire to see more of Catherine grew upon him: ‘I’m getting dissatisfied with small snippets of you.’19 On the plane, he felt ‘lonely, screw-eyed & miserable’.20 He was looking forward to finishing his preliminary survey of Vienna so that he could rendezvous later with Catherine.

  He was met at the airport by Elizabeth Montagu, daughter of Lord Montagu, who worked for Korda and had the job of looking after Greene, and making sure that he saw all he needed to. She introduced Greene to a friend of hers, the London Times correspondent, Peter Smollett (anglicised from H. P. Smolka), who was extremely knowledgeable about conditions and confusions involved in the four-power occupation. She took him to the opera (they were performing Fidelio); the theatre was one of the few not destroyed by bombing. There was rubble everywhere and Greene watched pedestrians picking their way through the mounds of it caused by the terrible Allied bombing. There was very little entertainment except clubs where nude dancing took place.

  Elizabeth Montagu managed to get Greene a room in the famous Sacher hotel – difficult to do because it was the senior officers’ transit club for British troops in Austria. When he arrived there was snow on the roofs and ‘sleet driving along the tarmac’. At the terminal he had evidence of his increasing fame: ‘a press photographer waiting to catch me unshaved, & the editor of the English paper’.21 In that strange way which is typical of Greene he noted: ‘How humiliating it is to be one of the victors because all the jokes are turned against the victors, never against the defeated!’22

  In the script, Greene has a short, apt description of the city – it was the ‘smashed dreary city of Vienna’.23 That February Greene was struck by the dreadful circumstances of the Viennese, many of whom were collapsing in the streets from starvation. The narrator in the story, Colonel Calloway, in charge of the British Military Police in Vienna, echoes Greene’s own experience: ‘I never knew Vienna between the wars, and I am too young to remember the old Vienna with its Strauss music and its bogus easy charm; to me it is simply a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice.’24

  Elizabeth Montagu took Greene to the central cemetery, which he insisted they visit as a setting for Harry Lime’s pretended burial: ‘Vienna looks indescribably miserable. I spotted a good cemetery for my opening – with a tramline running beside it & opposite a half mile line of monumental stonemasons … Today it’s been snowing for 24 hours & everything looks lovely under the snow … the main feature of my morning ride was the fantastic central cemetery with the monuments looking grotesque under snow – white moustaches when there shouldn’t have been & white bonnets slipping over eyes of stone women who should have been stark naked.’25 The Third Man closely follows his letter to Catherine:

  The trams ran along the high wall of the Central Cemetery, and for a mile on the other side of the rails stretched the monumental masons and the market gardeners – an apparently endless chain of gravestones waiting for owners and wreaths waiting for mourners … the avenues of graves, each avenue numbered and lettered, stretched out like the spokes of an enormous wheel … The snow gave the great pompous family headstones an air of grotesque comedy: a toupee of snow slipped sideway over an angelic face, a saint wore a heavy white moustache, and a shako of snow tipped at a drunken angle over the bust of a superior civil servant …26

  By 17 February 1948 he wrote: ‘the story is crystallising & I’m longing to get away’ – to Rome, where he had arranged to meet Catherine as soon as he felt the story was ready for writing. He missed Catherine dreadfully: ‘One feels terribly lonely in a crowd of people being hospitable. I want to be on my own with you. This is the sort of life that stretches ahead:

  Today: [Tuesday]

  4.30 Austrian Catholic publisher.r />
  6. American police chief.

  7.15 – 1 or 2 [in the morning] The Times correspondent [Smollett].

  Wed 12.30 A large jovial American Information Service woman.

  4. A gigolo at the Casanova Bar.

  7. British Council man.

  Thursday. Lunch The 20-year-old actress [Alida Valli].

  6. A hideous hawk-like American woman who won’t take No for an answer.

  Friday. Lunch. A playboy Austrian count.

  Dinner. English couple.

  Saturday. Elizabeth Bowen cocktail party.

  Sunday. Lunching with an Austrian industrialist.

  Monday. 6.30 a.m. off Thank God.’27

  In Ways of Escape, Greene described dining with his friend Elizabeth Bowen, who had come to Vienna to lecture at the British Institute as a guest of the British Council. After dinner, Greene took her to the Oriental, a rather seedy night club:

  ‘They will be raiding this place at midnight [Greene told Elizabeth].’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I have my contacts.’

  Exactly at the stroke of twelve, as I had asked my friend [Charles Beauclerk, chief information officer] to arrange, a British sergeant came clattering down the stairs, followed by a Russian, a French and an American military policeman. The place was in half-darkness, but without hesitation (I had described her with care) he strode across the cellar and demanded to see Elizabeth’s passport. She looked at me with respect – the British Council had not given her so dramatic an evening.