The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  On 12 February Greene wrote to Catherine: ‘I have your photograph stuck up in a letter rack under the light, as though I was an undergraduate in love for the first time. Have I ever felt like this before?’ As the time for their meeting in Rome drew nearer he longed for the isolation of lovers: ‘Let’s be really anti-social & lone wolves. I’m tired to death of company.’28

  He thought of leaving Vienna by train because it would have been easier to reach Italy that way, but for the sake of adventure, he decided to fly: ‘I suppose I could stop here & go down by train to Italy but that looks like missing an exciting story in Prague [it was thought that a revolution was breaking out there] & one’s Catholic hosts then might think one was turning tail.’29 Before leaving for Prague, Greene again expressed his longing: ‘I … desire [you] very badly & I can’t believe I saw you only a week ago today … If it wasn’t for your photo I feel I should almost forget what you looked like – such aeons & centuries of days.’30

  He arrived in Prague in the middle of a snow storm. There was no food on the plane, no food in the hotel, and no rooms to be had. He spent the night on a sofa. Eventually, scrambling for food, he found his way to the basement, where he discovered a ball for the staff in progress and suddenly there was food aplenty. He watched the Venezuelan ambassador dancing with the fat cook (wise man) and felt, if this was a revolution, it was a happy one. Early the next morning he was out in the streets seeking the blasts of riot and revolution to discover no more than a crackpot inventor who spoke of a parachute which could be guided for fifty kilometres after the drop, and, more extravagantly, a machine which could build a foot of wall every second.

  Greene was in Prague for a week, still hoping to find himself in the middle of a revolution – but little was happening in the streets apart from marches and shouting crowds waving red flags. He remembered the novelist Egon Hostovsky sitting on his sofa bed, and telling him that Jan Masaryk, the Czech Foreign Minister (whose father, Thomas Masaryk, had earlier been president), had said goodbye to his staff and a few days later was dead, an apparent suicide which might well have been murder.

  On 27 February 1948 a paragraph appeared in the News Chronicle about Greene the eternal traveller, under the heading of ‘Czech-mate’: ‘A guest in Prague’s most ambitious hotel, the Alcron, when it passed yesterday from private into public ownership, was novelist Graham Greene, who is in Prague at the moment to lecture for the British Council. He looked for his Communist waiter. He had been appointed national administrator.’ To which Greene replied when the note came to his attention: ‘the Alcron did not pass from private into public ownership, I am certainly unaware of ever having been served by a Communist waiter who had been appointed national administrator, and I was not lecturing for the British Council.’31

  *

  He met Catherine in Rome in late February and began writing the treatment for The Third Man. They visited Ravello together and, upon completing the story, he read it aloud to her in bed. Perhaps more important for Greene’s future was finding a small villa in Anacapri, Rosaio, where most of his later books were to be written at least in part.32 It was a magical place: ‘There I can do more in three weeks than I could in three months at [home].’33

  The villa had originally belonged to Count Cerio. It had been a refuge for Maxim Gorky, Norman Douglas and Jan Masaryk when they first arrived on the island. Immediately after the First World War Francis Brett Young lived there and then it was sold to Compton Mackenzie. According to John Cairncross, a friend from Greene’s days with the SIS, Greene picked it up for a song ‘because a South African, who had got it for his mistress, had to leave’.34 Shirley Hazzard recalled that Greene bought the villa and its contents for only £3,000, a bargain he often referred to with satisfaction.

  Visiting Rosaio one might expect to find photographs of wife or children or mistress, some pointers to Greene’s private life. Not so. While the ground floor was not bare, it was not sumptuous either. His study upstairs was reached by a very short staircase to a door into the loft. The study was extremely small with only a skylight and contained a wooden trestle table of rough unplaned wood and a rough wooden bed at right angles to it. Nothing else. The walls were whitewashed and, apart from a small cross, without ornament – a monastic cell. This was his ‘happy home’ high in the mountains.35

  He loved Capri. It was here that he made friends with the navigator Michael Richey (now over seventy and still sailing his boat Jester alone across the Atlantic); the brilliant writer Shirley Hazzard and her husband, the biographer Francis Steegmuller; and with Dottoressa Moor, of whom he wrote: ‘in her moments of bawdry she resembled the Wife of Bath and in rambling sexual memories Mrs Bloom’s monologue’. She had ‘startling blue eyes, tough electric hair as alive as a bundle of fighting snakes, a small square body with big teeth’ and she had a capacity for passionate living Greene had known in no other woman. She was the trusted doctor for the poor in Capri – she’d take the pulse of a peasant in the street, the blood pressure of a fisherman in her house – and she was paid in kind, a fish, a lettuce from a stall in Caprile, or fruit, sometimes a bottle of wine.36 Greene was particularly friendly with the artist Countess Cerio (the leading Caprian on the island, whose grandfather was a friend of Joseph Conrad) and, unexpectedly, with Norman Douglas.

  He met Douglas, hedonist and sybarite, in 1948 soon after he had bought Rosaio with the proceeds of The Third Man. Douglas was no longer writing; his masterpiece South Wind had appeared as early as 1917. His novels had never attained wide circulation and he was perennially short of funds. Greene was fascinated by him, especially by his philosophy, which he tried to adopt while on the island: ‘find everything useful and nothing indispensable, and everything wonderful and nothing miraculous’.37 Douglas was tolerant, pagan in outlook, and railed against hypocrisy, puritanism and smugness. All these qualities, but for Douglas’s denial of the miraculous, suited Greene. Douglas had been a close friend of Joseph Conrad (whom Greene admired), had children, but was now living in Capri at the home of a friend. Greene’s other friend Sir Harold Acton (himself a homosexual) was a little jealous of his friendship with Douglas: ‘he did not think it right … Norman having this friendship and warmth for a heterosexual’.38 There must have been something special about Douglas, for he was a strange man for Greene to like, because he was a homosexual.

  Mario Soldati described Greene as ‘a free man and without prejudice, but he had a kind of bitterness against homosexuals. He was full of contradictions … but at the same time he loved Norman Douglas immensely.’39 Soldati recalled Greene’s hostility to the playwright Terence Rattigan, who wrote the first treatment for the film Brighton Rock. Soldati pointed out that Greene’s difference in attitude was not because he objected to Rattigan the homosexual but to Rattigan the hypocrite, the crypto-homosexual who retained the Victorian varnish of respectability.40 If Greene had been a homosexual he would have been open about it like Douglas.

  As soon as he arrived on Capri, Greene would write notes to his friends, especially those living on, not merely visiting, the island – to Dottoressa Moor, to Countess Cerio, even to Gracie Fields and Norman Douglas. A note to Norman Douglas has survived:

  Albergo Terrazzo, Capri, 1 April 1948

  Dear Norman Douglas,

  I’m back here again till Sunday. Would it be possible for you to have lunch with me tomorrow? I’d call for you any time you like, or meet you where you like. Would you ring up & leave a message?

  Douglas returned Greene’s letter writing the following note upon it: ‘Dear Gr Gr, Come here at once, if you can, 9.10, to the Ristorante Savoia near the Piazza, where you will find friends galore. Else come to Caffè Vittorio on the terrace Tomonso at about 12.30 and then lunch with us. Norman.’

  Douglas’s response failed to reach Greene and found its way back to Douglas, so he wrote yet another note on the letter:

  Dear Graham Greene,

  This [note] went all over town to try and find you but
you still can make the Vittorio at 12.30.

  During the years 1947–55 Greene often took Catherine with him to Capri. There he could be alone with her; they could be ‘lone wolves’ but not anti-social. A note to Catherine has survived: ‘Seven o’clock on Friday night. Dear, I’m so happy to be loved by you. G.’ At the bottom of the sheet he’d written at an angle: ‘You are sitting on the roof … just over my head.’ On another occasion, he left her a short note on Foreign Office notepaper: ‘Strolling out towards the Church. Have done 600 [words] anyway, darling.’ And thinking perhaps of a religious film he writes a tantalising short note: ‘A camera shot of the Crucifixion: / From a new angle the strange tree. / The camera records without pity / The authentic Agony.’41

  *

  Greene returned to Vienna in June 1948, this time with Carol Reed and the film crew. Reed looked at Greene’s treatment and compared it with the current reality: ‘When Carol Reed returned with me to Vienna to see the scenes I had described I was embarrassed to find that between winter and spring Vienna had completely changed. The black-market restaurants, where in February one was lucky to find a few bones described as oxtail, were now serving legal if frugal meals. The ruins had been cleared away from in front of the Café Mozart [which Greene calls “Old Vienna” in the story]. Over and over again I found myself saying to Carol Reed, “But I assure you Vienna was really like that – three months ago.”’42

  What did Greene do in Vienna? His dedication in The Third Man suggests that he drank too much: ‘TO CAROL REED in admiration and affection and in memory of so many early morning Vienna hours at Maxim’s, the Casanova, the Oriental.’ To Catherine he wrote: ‘This trip has moments of fun, but I drink too much & work too much & miss you too much & think too much. I am getting terribly bored with the story & everybody except Carol who gets nicer & nicer on acquaintance … Vienna has begun to rot my guts already … Carol hates going to bed before 4.’43

  But at whatever time he was drinking with Reed, or finishing up late at the Oriental, Maxim’s and the Casanova, Greene continued to work: ‘I have agreed to finish the first treatment before I leave Vienna and the story seems to get longer and longer. I do it straight on the typewriter, usually about two and half hours in the morning, then the first drink … then lunch: then a couple more hours and perhaps an hour on a bed with Hardy’s poems: then the drinking starts again.’

  On 23 June 1948 Reed and Greene went to the Russian zone. ‘Feeling much more cheerful after a drunken evening with Carol annoying the Rs. [Russians],’ he wrote to Catherine. His postcard shows the Prater prior to the Russian bombing, the funfair with its Arabesque steeples, and in the centre of the postcard the giant Ferris wheel. Although conditions had improved, the Russian sector was still terrible: ‘the Prater lay smashed and desolate and full of weeds, only the Great Wheel revolving slowly over the foundations of merry-go-rounds like abandoned millstones, the rusting iron of smashed tanks which nobody had cleared away …’44 The trees were splintered and there were shell holes everywhere. ‘It looked like a sort of nightmare: something out of Hieronymus Bosch,’ recalled Elizabeth Montagu. ‘It was very dramatic. The wheel was still there, that was the amazing thing. It stood there. It was a very fragile thing but it hadn’t got a direct hit.’45

  Greene also spent time in the sewers of Vienna where Harry Lime, brilliantly played by Orson Welles, finally loses his life: ‘We dressed in heavy boots and macintoshes and took a walk below the city. The main sewer was like a great tidal river, wide as the Thames, rushing by under a huge arch, fed by tributary streams.’46 Greene mentioned in his story how these streams have fallen in waterfalls from higher levels and have been purified, so that only in the side channels is the air foul: ‘The main stream smells sweet and fresh with a faint tang of ozone, and everywhere in the darkness is the sound of falling and rushing water.’47 He described reaching the curving iron staircase, and the accumulation of debris in the shallows, a scum of orange peel, old cigarette cartons,48 but he never spoke of the rats.

  Elizabeth Montagu accompanied Greene into the sewers and mentioned to the sewer police who went with them that she had seen no rats. The sewer policefn1 wore lint-white uniforms, like ski instructors, with trousers tucked into high boots to stop the rats taking a chunk out of a leg. They told Elizabeth to turn around slowly and not panic. As she turned, a policeman shone his huge torch behind towards the top of the sewer and there was a great army of rats, eyes glittering. The rats, which were very fierce and frightening, were the size of small dogs and had originally been raised on farms for their fur: ‘They were a peculiar phenomenon because when the Russians came into Vienna they let all the rats out of their farms. They are the rats that make wonderful fur linings for winter coats.’49

  Greene spent twenty days (10 to 30 June) in Vienna on this second visit – late nights, hard drinking, hard writing. In Ways of Escape, Greene described how, on his penultimate day, he met the future Duke of St Albans, Charles Beauclerk, then a young intelligence officer, who told him about the scandalous profiteering in watered-down penicillin which caused the deaths of children who in effect received little or no aid from the medication. ‘[The hospital] had bought some of this penicillin for use against meningitis. A number of children simply died, and a number went off their heads. You can see them now in a mental ward.’51

  Beauclerk may well have provided Greene with information about the ‘penicillin racket’, but he may have already heard the story from another source. Five days before he left Vienna in February he spent a long evening with The Times’s correspondent, Peter Smollett. Smollett was better informed than the young intelligence officer about the dirty rackets then operating in Vienna. He and Greene spent several nights together and once visited the Russian sector so that Greene could call on an old, retired servant who had worked for his mother. The Russian guards were quite fierce and any informality out of place could lead to arrest. Having a British car with a uniformed driver and the Union Jack prominently displayed was a necessity.

  The deliberate watering down of penicillin must have been part of the news of the day, but what makes it likely that Smollett was Greene’s initial source is a statement by Elizabeth Montagu. She recalled that Smollett wanted Greene to look over some unpublished stories, one of which contained an account of the watered-down penicillin.

  Although working on the film treatment, Greene continued to miss Catherine. He got rid of his depression with companionship and drink: ‘A fit of the blues last night was dispelled by hard drinking and a night at Maxim’s with an attractive half-Russian, half-German dancer who had yet read books. We talked about Spain and Venice and Lesbians and Oscar Wilde and Dr [Axel] Munthe and Capri … I didn’t go to bed with her because she lived half an hour away and couldn’t leave till 2 and I wanted an early night.’52

  Greene’s references to other women when writing to the woman he loved tormentedly seem to have been made to show her that he had the opportunity even if not the inclination for other affairs: ‘Today at lunch a far prettier young actress of the Josephstadt than Greta – we go to her first night tomorrow, and tonight the beautiful Biddulph, and I feel abysmally uninterested. I think I have always been really, but now I feel more than ever out of the game and ready to pimp in an avuncular way for Carol …’53

  Greene lunched with women who were looked upon as possible subjects for seduction: ‘I am giving lunch to the beautiful wife of the unfaithful man on Wednesday (he’s in England), but my heart is not in the game: so far avoided the twenty-year old actress [Alida Valli].’54 Not only did Greene miss the opportunity of having an affair with her, but Orson Welles did also. Welles was deeply involved with an Italian actress at the time, and did not realise that Alida was ‘the sexiest thing you ever saw in your life … I see her now and she excites me beyond words … The Third Man … [is] the only movie of mine I ever watch on television because I like it so much – and I look at Alida Valli, and I say, “What was in your mind when you were ten days in Vienna and yo
u didn’t make a move?” She drives me mad with lust when I see her in it!’55

  Despite what he wrote to Catherine, Greene didn’t stay away from all women. Elizabeth Montagu had the wearisome task of escorting him to midnight dives where the most haggard prostitutes would hang out. ‘Hideous they were … where did such hags come from? … It was always late and I longed to prop my eyes open with a matchstick – such hags.’ When she asked how Greene could go to such dives and remain a Catholic, he looked at her and said: ‘I have my ways.’56

  In a letter to Catherine written just before his departure from Vienna, he entertained her with a fictional sexual encounter in the style of Henry James rewriting Fanny Hill:

  Lying there his head cushioned, how cushioned only his great forebears, Tristram, Paolo, Anthony, Ronio & the incomparable Jules could have adequately conceived, cushioned against a softness, a furriness, an obscure yielding carpet of brown moss that the poets had sometimes compared to a forest, others to a lily pond, & the Eastern writer who had conceived the thousand and one nights to a rabbit, he felt an urgent wish to fasten his lips, nay to thrust his tongue between these outjutting coral cliffs, to speak in these hidden caverns – not the essential juices that now urgently, relentlessly demanded satisfaction in the same crevice, but the essential, the gourmet extracts edible also to the touch of crab & aguja, the feel of fungi and so raising his head he pushed, he propelled, he satisfied the first craving against her cunt, quickly, savagely, his tongue rasping like a cat, before he turned his attention to the imperative demands of his job.57