The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Greene prayed that Lowell didn’t become too good a substitute for him, and added: ‘I suppose you are out of the Church again. I wish I was the only one who put you out! And how I wish we could just have each other and no one else – anyway for a few years.’62

  Catherine was away in America until 11 October 1947. Although they were to meet on her return, he was afraid she would fall out of love with him. When Greene felt he was only the favoured lover of the moment, his letters portrayed the worldly wise, experienced lover, an innocence lost. He put up a hard front, enticing her to stay with him, but also showing her that he could find others should she drop him.

  There was, for instance, the ‘Mystery Girl’. Peadar O’Donnell had arranged for Greene to have lunch with her and prior to their meeting, Greene imagined she had either ‘a face like a horse or a body like a governess’. The ‘Mystery Girl’ proved to be a young widow with two children, a very luscious blonde, slightly wrong in teeth and accent. Greene shared with Catherine the kind of crude remark one man might make to another: ‘she might fill up a gap … it would be fun to cuckold Bill!’63

  Yet other affairs did not provide an answer: ‘I would be just as angry because she refused to be jealous of my past or my possible future.’64 It was only Catherine he worried about. Imagining that Catherine was having another affair in America, Greene had a bad night: ‘What were you up to last night? Next month I shall see you. I hope. Feel very restless and disturbed today. I want badly to disappear from the bloody literary and sexual scene – like Bierce in Mexico, Rimbaud in Abyssinia or Gauguin in the South Seas. I wish I hadn’t got a family and a sense of responsibility … I want you – badly and quite crudely. Substitutes don’t work. Let’s disappear together. I’m whistling hard. Won’t you answer my whistle?’ He ended the letter with the first profanity to appear in his letters to Catherine: ‘What a bloody, not to say fucking fool I am, Cafryn. I can’t stay out of love with you for more than 36 hours.’ Nor was he able to do so even when his letters suggest she was writing to him about her escapades in Wilton, New Hampshire.

  Greene was getting ready to take Vivien to America – her chance for a holiday – but he was dejected, partly because of the ‘grim prospect of America without a dose of [Catherine] to help it down’. His emptiness was also due to the fact that he had sent Heinemann The Heart of the Matter on 27 September 1947, and had no ideas for another book: ‘The only thing in the next month or two that could mean anything or that could bring one alive is loving someone. So I look to Ireland like an escape from Purgatory … Let’s love more than a fortnight if it’s humanly possible. Do you remember how cautious we were the first time against deciding on more than one week? I want to say to you, “Suppose we weren’t pretending but were really in love.”’65

  Greene was certainly in love, but what made him doubt Catherine was her honesty:

  she was now five minutes late. It was my bad luck that she caught me looking at my watch. I heard her voice say, ‘I’m sorry. I came by bus and the traffic was bad.’

  I said, ‘The tube’s quicker.’

  ‘I know, but I didn’t want to be quick.’

  She had often disconcerted me by the truth. In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her to say more than the truth – that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry. I wouldn’t have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue … But she never played that game of make-believe, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she would shatter my reserve with a statement of such sweetness and amplitude … I remember once when I was miserable at her calm assumption that one day our relations would be over, hearing with incredulous happiness, ‘I have never, never loved a man as I love you, and I never shall again.’66

  *

  While in America with Vivien, Greene hoped that he would meet Catherine in New York on 11 October, but that became impossible as meetings and publisher’s parties piled up: ‘My engagements in New York so far on October 10 lunch with Frank Taylor. Cocktail party at the Cosmopolitan Club in our “honour.” I wish you could be there, except that it wouldn’t be fair to Vivien her first day. October 11, 12, and 13 my agent [Mary Pritchett] wants me and Vivien to go to a house she “got in Connecticut” but I have a date with you on 11th and dinner with John Carter on the 13th. I don’t want to spoil Vivien’s holiday. We’ve got October 31 and onwards. October 11 lunch with Carol Brandt and dinner with my publisher. 15th & 16th to Boston so it fills up.’67

  Vivien well remembers that visit to Mary Pritchett’s since it was where she spent her twentieth wedding anniversary: ‘We were at Mary’s and it was awful. I was snubbed and he was in a bad temper and somebody said: “Let’s drink to that [the anniversary].” He was sort of wry. Not what you’d call wholehearted … He was aloof and irritable when we went to Massachusetts.’68

  Since the war Greene’s relationship with Vivien had remained strained and they had continued to move further and further apart. There is an account in the Oxford Mail, 26 April 1945, which illustrates how separate their lives were becoming: ‘Mrs Graham Greene’s house is on the corner of Beaumont Street and Gloucester Street. I have been intrigued by this place ever since she first moved in and set up a notice: “This is not a Guest House or Hotel. It is not offices. It is not a Ministry!”’ The oddity of this notice attracted the journalist:

  I don’t know what it was but from the moment she [Vivien] arrived, the house had about it the stamp of a rare and distinctive personality. Perhaps it was the collection of coloured bottles she placed so gaily in her front window for all the world to see. And then at Christmas, there was a tree there and a wreath of holly on the door. In the end I could bear it no longer. ‘I can’t wait to be invited,’ I told her one day (ignoring the instruction not to ring) – ‘I want to come in – now!’

  Inside I found a positive Hinterland of culture – gilded Récamier couches, early Victorian chairs of mother-of-pearl, dessert plates of cut mirror, the residue of a courageous as well as a cultivated mind. And then on Monday night, it spilled its treasures onto the street … The Regency striped curtains of candy pink and white were pulled right back, the candles flickered the chandeliers shone, and one remembered with gratitude that life may be short but art is long.69

  Everything seemed to declare THIS IS VIVIEN GREENE’S HOUSE, not Greene’s.

  Vivien’s passion for stately homes continued unabated, and while Greene did not publicly object to visits he made with his wife, privately his letters were critical: ‘I dragged with her on Sunday to a meeting of the Georgian Group at Badminton, the Duke of Beaufort’s house – four hours hot railway travel and a picnic lunch among flies – one needs to be in love to enjoy that kind of thing. I am beginning positively to hate beautiful houses and beautiful furniture and a private house open to public inspection seems more dead than a museum.’70

  But it was an incident early in his affair with Catherine that forewarned Vivien of the altered nature of her relationship with Greene. Vivien and the children had gone to Bath for the day to visit cousins. When they returned to the house in Beaumont Street, they found Greene and Catherine together:

  he had a very strange look on his face, and I realised that somehow he thought I’d gone for some other reason. Or maybe he even thought that I’d known he was coming. It was a very curious look. She was very insouciant as usual. He said, ‘We’ve come back from Achill Island.’

  Vivien put the incident near the end of April 1947, the first magical visit for Greene to Achill with Catherine. ‘I know that because I got the children’s supper and the next day was the Feast of St Catherine of Siena, and I think that is the end of April.’71

  Greene explained to Vivien that Catherine had a bad back and that given the long return journey to London, it would be best if they stayed the night.

  And I said, for something to say, ‘I see it is your name day tomorrow. I am going to Mass anyway, it’s only just round the corner.’ She said, ‘Oh, I’ll come with you’ and
she came and she had Communion next to me. Some later time, I brought this up and I said ‘How could you have brought her to the house?’ and he said ‘Oh there was nothing between us – we didn’t even kiss each other when we were in the house.’ I said, ‘Going to Communion was very terrible,’ [receiving Communion, the body and blood of Christ, in a state of mortal sin, is itself a mortal sin] and he said, ‘Oh we both went to confession before we came here.’ But they went straight on to London to live together and that was sort of sickening.72

  What Vivien also objected to was that she had to have beds made up and the supper cooked: ‘How could I say anything with two children there. It was impossible – it was a dreadful situation.’ But it is not correct that Greene and Catherine ‘lived together’ in London: they never did. At this time he was still living with Dorothy during the week and Vivien and his family at weekends.

  Although the children’s presence made it impossible for Vivien to confront Greene, they later corresponded about the matter. In response to Vivien’s complaint that the two were leagued against her in her own home, Greene wrote that he and Catherine had definitely given up their affair:

  We had already been to confession before that night … & had no intention of starting again. It was over & we didn’t exchange a word of love or affection that night – she wouldn’t have stayed over then if she had not been on the point of collapse.

  From the moment it did start again, Catherine kept away from the house in Beaumont Street. ‘I am not defending us in saying this,’ Greene stated, ‘only explaining something that may make the pain a little less. The affair to us seemed dead & buried in the Farm Street confessional.’73

  But was it a true confession? Isn’t this Scobie’s dilemma in The Heart of the Matter. to love a mistress so much that a true confession cannot be made? Scobie enters the confessional box:

  He could hear Father Rank close the door of his box and nausea twisted him again on his knees. ‘O God,’ he said, ‘if instead I should abandon you, punish me but let the others get some happiness.’ He went into the box. He thought, a miracle may still happen. Even Father Rank may for once find the word, the right word … Kneeling in the space of an upturned coffin he said, ‘Since my last confession I have committed adultery.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘I don’t know, Father, many times.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’ …

  ‘Is it one woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must avoid seeing her. Is that possible?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘If you must see her, you must never be alone with her. Do you promise to do that, promise God not me?’ He thought: how foolish it was of me to expect the magic word. This is the formula used so many times on so many people. Presumably people promised and went away and came back and confessed again. Did they really believe they were going to try? … I am not going to try to cheat myself or God. He replied, ‘It would be no good my promising that, Father.’ …

  Father Rank said, ‘I don’t need to tell you surely that there’s nothing automatic in the confessional or in absolution. It depends on your state of mind whether you are forgiven. It’s no good coming and kneeling here unprepared. Before you come here you must know the wrong you’ve done.’

  ‘I do know that.’

  ‘And you must have a real purpose of amendment. We are told to forgive our brother seventy times seven and we needn’t fear God will be any less forgiving than we are, but nobody can begin to forgive the uncontrite. It’s better to sin seventy times and repent each time than sin once and never repent.’ …

  He’s right, of course, he’s right. I was a fool to imagine that somehow in this airless box I would find a conviction … He said, ‘I think I was wrong to come, Father.’74

  If Greene was not contrite, then Scobie represents his romantic courageous self. Did Greene lack the moral courage to promise to avoid Catherine in the Farm Street confessional?

  It is difficult not to feel that Greene’s defence of his actions to his wife was specious, but his sense of guilt after he had written the letter must have been intense. Greene was unable to mend his ways; it was his private hell and he shared his anguish with no one.

  When in Italy in late 1949 Greene attended Mass with Padre Pio, the stigmatic. He recalled the occasion to me:

  I can recall the stigmata, the dried blood sticking out. It would dry and then it would bleed again and then dry again. He also had to have his feet padded because they also bled … I was as near to him as I am now to you and those hands looked terrible, sort of circular pieces of dried blood.

  Pio invited Greene to meet him privately, but although he longed to do so, he refused: ‘I didn’t want to change my life by meeting a saint. I felt that there was a good chance that he was one. He had a great peace about him.’ Greene was afraid of losing his lover; the vow of chastity was one he could not keep. But there was also the difficulty of what would happen to faith if doubt were removed.

  After Catherine’s visit to Beaumont Street, Vivien was sure that the end of her marriage was near: ‘I felt as if there was a thunderstorm coming up and you ask when is it coming, when is it going to come and I longed for something to happen, not for it just to go on and on. When he brought Catherine to my house to spend the night after they’d returned from Achill where she took her men, why, from that moment, I felt really there was no return.’75

  * * *

  fn1 The exact quotation is: ‘For exactly an hour and a half the mark of his mouth had been the last on hers. He felt … dreariness of a man who tries to write an important letter on a damp sheet and finds the characters blur.’61

  19

  Private Wars

  A pity beyond all telling

  Is hid in the heart of love.

  – W. B. YEATS

  THE DEATH OF her marriage is etched for ever in Vivien Greene’s memory: ‘Graham left me on this Queen’s wedding day – 20 November 1947.’ What brought things to a crisis was a letter Greene had written to Catherine from Beaumont Street. The letter was addressed to her in New York, but by the time it arrived, she had left and it was returned to the sender:

  We were having breakfast … it had been going on and on and I felt I must know one way or the other. In any case, I had an intuition and I took this letter and I thought, now I won’t open this letter – it’ll postpone whatever is going to happen. If I do open it something awful is going to happen. I had the letter and looked at it for a bit and I said to myself: ‘I’ll get it over – I know this is going to alter everything.’ And when I read it, Francis had seen my face change … he got up and said, ‘What’s the matter?’

  Vivien sent Francis off to school and continued to examine the letter. Somebody had opened it and seeing 15 Beaumont Street, Oxford, on the writing paper, had re-addressed it.fn1

  I opened it and of course it was a passionate love letter. I rang him up and said that we must talk, and I suppose I was shedding tears, and asked him to come down and he did. I said I’ve got a letter and I think you ought to know about it, or something like that. And he sounded as if he knew. I don’t know how, but as if he knew that the thing had blown, as they say. He came down that afternoon from London. First of all he said, ‘Oh that doesn’t mean anything. You know how one writes.’ And I said, ‘No – I know what is real feeling and that is real.’ And he said, ‘Well, yes it is.’ And he said, ‘I am going to leave you. We’ll be going away together – leaving here.’

  Greene told Vivien that he would be sending someone to pack his books and clothes: ‘It was very difficult with the children coming back soon from school. We went upstairs into the drawing room and then he left. And I thought, well, I’ll probably never see him again and looked out of the window that was facing the street, and he looked back for a minute, didn’t wave, but looked back.’1

  This dramatic moment appeared eight years later in his novel The Quiet American as the hero Fowler, visiting the Cao
daist festival in Tay Ninh, turns his memories over at random, memories which were Greene’s – ‘a fox … seen by the light of an enemy flare … the body of a bayoneted Malay … my wife’s face at a window when I came home to say good-bye for the last time’.2

  After he left, Vivien was stunned. She remembered the last Christmas and New Year in Beaumont Street – making up stockings for the children in front of the gas fire, listening to the trains at the station blowing their whistles at midnight to welcome in the New Year and sobbing. She found the whistles terribly melancholy and wondered what would become of her.

  Upset by her husband’s departure, Vivien wrote to Greene’s mother, who replied in distress: ‘I am ashamed of my son. It absolutely makes my heart bleed. I could never have believed it of Graham. What about his religion – surely one cannot get absolution if he confesses such sin. Like you, I am appalled at K. [Catherine] – too terrible. I could kill her, nasty minx. With everything in the world & 5 children … I hope he will keep away from K now. I think you are a saint. I feel like a murderer.’3

  In another letter Marion Greene darted in anguish from one subject to another: ‘Your letter distressed me beyond words – poor dear thing.’ After speaking of ‘that horrid woman’, she stressed the parallels between Greene and his hero Scobie – the suicidal qualities of both: ‘Of course Graham is too soft-hearted. I feel there is much of him in Scobie. I think the only way he can save himself is to cut clear of D[orothy] & the other woman & return to you & the children. Perhaps not in Oxford, quite a fresh start & let that woman commit suicide. I don’t expect she would … Graham was a very sensitive child. You know the stories. He hated to be taken notice of or favoured in any way … Nobody could have been more in love than he was with you. I am sure his only salvation is to return. How does he go to confession – I cannot understand that part. As to K. she is his God-daughter. I thought you could not, in your church, marry God-children. You may commit adultery apparently. I don’t know how that woman can – what does her husband know – all those little children too. It is just beastly.’4 Later Marion questioned whether Walston could divorce his wife if he condoned the adultery. She ended the last letter in deep sadness: ‘I simply cannot understand such a tender-hearted person as he is being so cruel to you.’ Vivien must earlier have given some explanation as to why he could be cruel, for Marion Greene’s letter ends: ‘I am sorry about drugs [benzedrine] & drinking. Oh dear, I am glad Da has not lived to know all this. I dread G. coming.’5