The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  In another letter he asked her forgiveness for presenting his case so persistently (‘I wouldn’t love you so much if I wouldn’t fight to the last ditch’), but he must press it if ‘the curtain is liable to fall’. He made ten points and entitled them ‘Order of Battle in the unlikely event of your choosing me’:

  1. During the ‘unhappy period’ we would consider losing ourselves on Achill and Anacapri, or we would take a long trip into strange territory … South Seas, India, Palestine, what you will.

  2. We would immediately begin steps to see whether I could get my marriage annulled on two possible grounds.fn1

  3. In the meanwhile proper arrangements would be made for you to have access to your children.

  4. While the annulment proceedings went on, it might be worthwhile considering changing your name by deed poll to mine, for two reasons

  1)I think it would make the whole business go down with your family

  2)It would enable us to economise when we travelled in only taking one room!

  5.I would hand over to you half my controlling shares in the new company which would in effect give you 1/3 of all film & theatrical earnings in perpetuity.

  6.Our finances – apart from my arrangement with Vivien & the children – would be in common & we would make a mess in common or a success in common.

  7.Whenever we settled for any length of time, we would have two rooms available, so that at any time without ceasing to live together & love each other, you could go to Communion (we would break down again & again, but that’s neither here nor there).

  8.I love your children, & you would spend any time you wanted with them.

  9.My love for you will go on till death, & I would guarantee never to break up our relationship except by your wish. No ‘tipsy frolic’ would make me walk out. It might make me sore as hell for 24 hours, but so far I don’t think I’ve managed to be sore that time!

  10.I would tell the truth to you always. Your part of our life should be yours. I trust you as I trust no other living person. I am yours entirely. I love you & will always love you. As I said in Paris you are the saint of lovers to whom I pray.31

  We do not know the results of these bountiful offerings, but the correspondence which follows is very gentle and loving.

  Greene then left for New York to work with Basil Dean on salvaging the production of The Heart of the Matter. Prior to his departure on the Queen Elizabeth he and Catherine managed to meet and he left her a simple love letter written on the reverse side of a letter from the bookseller David Low, which he had kept in his pocket during the journey to Calais:

  You are asleep & this is all I have to write on because you are holding my left hand … I love you more than I’ve ever loved you I believe. But that feeling happens again & again.

  Wouldn’t it be odd if really I had never been married before & that’s why the pseudo-marriage went wrong & one went in for tarts & love affairs. But I feel more married to you than I’ve ever felt. I want to be with you to have you to talk to & ask advice of about this and that. My dear, you are infinitely dear to me.

  … I believe in

  God.

  Christ.

  All the rest.

  In your goodness, honesty and love.

  I would live with you gladly & keep you in the church as much as I humanly could until the time when we could marry – as I believe we could. Perhaps I’m a swindler – I don’t think so. I love you far more than life.32

  When in New York, Greene visited Catherine’s sister Bonte and her husband General Gustavo Durán (a famous Spanish Republican general, praised by Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls) at their Long Island home, Apple Green, Old Westbury: ‘Catherine was unhappy with Harry, felt warm towards him but it had nothing to do with physical love,’ Bonte Durán said when I asked her to offer reasons for Greene’s visit. ‘I never knew why Catherine felt she needed my permission. Graham asked me to tell Catherine that it wouldn’t be a terrible thing to leave Harry. He simply said to me: “I want to marry her.”’33

  Greene’s work on the production of The Heart of the Matter was going badly, as we have seen: ‘I’d pay back my expenses & slip away on a plane & thumb my nose at them, but there’s Basil [Dean] & the cast & all the rest of them.’34 The pressure of ‘working & working on something dead’ and the absence of any news from Catherine had brought Greene to the verge of a breakdown. By the time Rodgers and Hammerstein closed the play on 1 March 1950, Greene had reached crisis point.

  He left New York on 8 March, delighted that Catherine had decided to meet him at the airport on Thursday. But then he was delayed and sent a succession of telegrams from Newfoundland:

  THE USUAL BUGS NO HOPE ARRIVING BEFORE EARLY FRIDAY MORNING DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED.

  AS USUAL HELD UP TWO HOURS GANDER DO WAIT.

  EXPECT ARRIVE ABOUT I AM SO LEAVE MESSAGE WHERE YOU ARE.

  Greene’s plane was in fact seventeen hours late. He was stuck at Gander all night and did not reach London until 4 a.m. on Friday. Feeling ‘wildly disappointed’ that he had missed Catherine, he was delightfully surprised to find her in his flat at 5 St James’s fast asleep on his sofa. They lit a fire and poured drinks, since for Greene it was midnight. It was, as Catherine described it, ‘a superb piece of debauchery drinking whiskey at 6 am’.35

  Catherine and Greene spent a wonderful day together and he spoke about his visit with the Duráns: ‘I told her about our [his and Bonte’s] conversation & she was very very moved, pleased, encouraged. It means more to her, you know, than even Binnie’s [Belinda Straight’s] sympathy. Anyway she needed it all that weekend.’36

  And indeed Catherine did, for she and Greene had decided to confront Harry. Greene was to do what Bendrix in The End of the Affair longed to do:

  ‘What’s troubling you, Henry?’ I asked …

  ‘Sarah,’ he said.

  Would I have been frightened if he had said that, in just that way, two years ago? No. I think I should have been overjoyed – one gets so hopelessly tired of deception. I would have welcomed the open fight if only because there might have been a chance, however small, that through some error of tactics on his side I might have won. And there has never been a time in my life before or since when I have so much wanted to win. I have never had so strong a desire even to write a good book.37

  They arrived at Thriplow in time for brunch on Saturday and it was Catherine who took the offensive:

  The war guilt was Catherine’s if you take the legal definition of who crosses whose frontier first – she flew out at Harry, & they both retired to the bedroom to have it out. Nothing of course came ‘out’. Later that day I persuaded her we’d got to clear the air & have this thing in the open: she was being torn in pieces as things were. Things, things. I’m sorry, Bonte, don’t look for style or even much clarity in this letter to you. Anyway, while the three of us were together, discussing endlessly C.’s nerves without even producing the real reason, she signalled to me that I could bring it out & so I told Harry what the reason was – that she couldn’t make up her mind between non-marriage with him & marriage with me. We were all very quiet & civilised, but nobody slept more than an hour or two that night. Catherine had the worst time, with Harry lying awake crying. Next day, I would have left, but Harry obviously realised that I wouldn’t in that case be able to return & the issue would then be clear …38

  I was told that after their passionate reunion Greene had at last succeeded in persuading Catherine to leave her husband. Harry was in bed and she went up to tell him. He just looked at her and started crying, turned away and did not say a word. Harry’s tears that night kept her at Thriplow.39

  The next day Harry suggested that they take a walk together. Greene tried to make him talk about the situation but he wouldn’t, though they chattered together amiably and cheerfully. Elizabeth Walston explained that this was Harry’s way of dealing with relationships. He believed that if he did nothing about a problem it would go away or sort itself out.40 He was
, as the Reverend Thomas Gilby described him to Greene, ‘a floater. Whatever happens … he’ll float.’41

  That evening it was arranged by all three that Catherine and Greene would have time together in Paris. They spent four peaceful days there, with Catherine relaxing and drinking less than Greene had known her to drink in the previous twelve months. After Paris, Catherine returned to Thriplow and Greene went to visit his mother. It was agreed that they would go to Italy together for five weeks in May. Greene wrote to Bonte that the confrontation with Harry was right and that it had cleared the air:

  I think in a way [Catherine’s] no longer ‘scared’ of Harry, now that the t’s are crossed & the i’s dotted. She was very brave & clear-headed when once the conversation opened up – the initial hurt has been taken out of her hands & I think that’s what she feared more than anything.42

  Greene had to wait for six weeks before he could meet Catherine again, for his confrontation with Harry had made him an unwelcome guest. Until then Greene could only wait for the future, living off the crumbs which from time to time Catherine offered – a day in a week, a night in London, a concocted visit to the home of mutual friends (the Huntingdons) – and always this passion to marry: ‘Marry me, Catherine, in the church when we can, outside it any time. How many times one writes the same words till they must be stale as dry bread to you, that never has one conceived the possibility of loving so completely before. Lust has lost its meaning – it exists now only for you … “All longings, folly, grief, despair, / Day dreams & mysteries.” The poems one liked in youth suddenly come alive in one’s head.’43

  Before their trip to Italy on 15 May, Greene had to travel to Germany. So close to winning Catherine, he feared that his ‘stupid jealousies’ might have ruined his chances: ‘Why, O why was I beastly to you on the only two nights I had a chance of being peaceful & at home? I feel such fear of losing you through my own stupidity.’44

  Greene realised that there would be times when they would be apart even if they were married: ‘There would be trips you wouldn’t want to come, but there’d always be the feeling “when I’m back we’ll be together for days & days, or weeks & weeks.” And always I’d want you to come.’45 Although he tried to distract himself with drink and danger, he could not ease his longing for Catherine:

  I’ve drunk a schnapps & eaten a Wiener Schnitzel & drunk two huge glasses of wine & it doesn’t stop the longing. I stopped it for a while last night, standing on top of a wardrobe & taking a flying leap onto a bed, & agreeing to walk, over into the Russian zone with the Russian wife – but her husband wouldn’t let her. Fear would be better than drink in driving you into the back part of my mind … I pray every night for you or death – I’d prefer the first, but the second would be a good second-best.46

  He also travelled along the edge of the Russian zone until he was stopped by a tree trunk: ‘& the East German police invited one to step over, & one half longed to; one wants you or disappearance … I literally can’t contemplate life without you.’47 This seems a dubious preparation for their Italian holiday in May, but it appears as if Catherine’s latest letters tentatively suggested that she wasn’t going to leave her husband: ‘but I’ll take any kind of life if sometimes for a period of weeks or days I can be with you’.48

  When asked by a Russian girl, ‘What do you want most?’ Greene replied, ‘To be married to someone.’49 In another letter comprised almost entirely of initials,50 he repeats his greatest hope:

  D d d,

  I l y c,

  I w y t s i m b.

  I w t f y,

  I w t b y,

  I w t m l t y

  I w t k y

  and above everything else in the world,

  I w y t m m.

  W a m l,

  G.

  His letters are extreme: like a young lover he dreamed of serving with her in some medical mission, of finding a way to serve God with her, and of dying with her: ‘All this means Catherine is that I love you more than my work, more than any person that’s ever lived, & the only way I can learn to love God more than you is with you.’51

  Catholic though he was, Greene no longer viewed their affair as adulterous:

  St. Theresa stands by my bed & every time I turn to her … I pray for us. But I’m afraid my prayer is always that God’s will shall be in favour of our love. Don’t be too sure that it may not be & who knows whether the peace we have so often got together has not been with him, instead of against him? I feel no wrong in this love for you, I feel so often as though I’m married to you, only desperately sad sometimes at being separated from my wife (you, I mean).52

  His petitions to St Theresa were always the same: ‘Dear Saint, some of us have a vocation to love God. Some of us only have a vocation to love a human being. Please let my vocation not be wasted. I’ve proved it badly in the past, but this time I’ve entered my Order for life.’53

  Greene threw everything into his battle for Catherine and explored the possibility that God was not against their love. He quoted a passage from Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Self-abandonment to Divine Providence, his reading matter when depressed: ‘“Nothing happens in this world, in our souls or outside them, without the design or permission of God; now we ought to submit ourselves no less to what God permits [Greene’s italics] than to what He directly wills.” I just can’t believe that the plane trip [from] Cambridge to Oxford was not designed, any more than I believe that there’s anything wrong in loving you with my body as well as my mind: “With my body I thee worship.”’54

  He turned to his older brother Raymond for help. Raymond Greene, who was still a doctor in Oxford but soon to move to Harley Street, arranged to meet Catherine and look, with an orderly, unromantic eye, at the nature of their love. Greene delivered Raymond’s judgment:

  I spent an evening with Raymond who has the hygienic strictly honest view of a doctor … I assume that apart from shades of misunderstanding he told the truth.

  1)He said that you had quite decided in your mind never to leave Harry.

  2)That on certain prompting from him you said you realized you would have a much more peaceful & happy life if you washed me out, but you didn’t feel able to do that because you felt ‘responsible’ for me.

  3)That though you loved having me at Thriplow my presence there always caused nerves & gloom.

  4)That when I was not at Thriplow there was a perfectly peaceful atmosphere (this seems to conflict with the ‘scenes with Harry’).

  5)That you were worried by my ‘sexual energy.’55 Raymond said you gave the impression that this was ‘rather a nuisance’ to you.

  I ought to add that he got the impression that probably unconsciously you were putting on an act & not telling the truth about a great many things.56

  Greene wanted the facts at once and in detail: ‘Now, my dear, for goodness sake tell me the truth. Then we can face anything. 3) is obviously true since Christmas. Were you telling the truth about 1) 2) 4) & 5)? You need not have responsibility for me, & my sexual energy can be put off altogether if it’s a nuisance. If 4) is true, why invite me down & why prepare a room where we can work? … Anybody can stand & face facts, but what wears the nerves is half-truths, half lies, deceptions of any kind or another.’57

  But none the less he admitted that even if all the points were true, he would still go to Italy. Moreover, if Catherine had decided never to leave Harry, Greene felt that it would be a relief in a way: ‘One never wants to cherish a completely false hope.’ Now that he had laid his cards on the table, Greene advised Catherine to ‘play them straight & with courage. I love you, I want you, as a mistress, & much more as a wife … I want to trust you to tell me the truth even when it’s unpleasant. There’s no future in half-truths.’58

  Catherine’s reply is missing, but clearly she raised a point that must have held some irony for the man who had left both wife and mistress for her: ‘You wrote quite rightly about how does one found a life on complete abandonment of one’s family et
c. I tried it & failed.’59 Although she was deeply in love with Greene, Catherine felt that there was no one as patient, loving and generous as Harry.60 But she could not bring herself to be as completely honest with Greene as she was with others. In a letter written to Bonte three years later, she confessed that, ‘Through cowardice, fear, love, stupidity and selfishness, I have allowed a situation and relationship to grow out of hand, and have never made my position clear enough … do I remain because I am selfish or unselfish, for good or bad motives? Maybe some of both …’61 The future, which had looked so promising when Greene wrote to Bonte after confronting Harry, had suddenly become bleak.

  *

  Each day until their holiday in Italy was interminable and the strain was so great that Greene felt the need to see his psychiatrist: ‘I’ll see Strauss of course if I can get back from the second trip …’62 The separation Greene had to endure bred the jealousy which often troubled their relationship. ‘Now that you know that this L. affair isn’t dead,’ Greene wrote, ‘would you try not to have times alone with him? [this is the same advice Greene received from his confessor] or have you found that after all he’s very important, more than we are?’ Greene pleaded with her not to let their affair ‘crash’: ‘If we crash there’s only tarting & self-disgust & three women a week’.63

  Greene was told that Catherine was having an affair with a ‘Swiss friend’: ‘I can’t keep my imagination quiet yet. It’s morbid & I hate it … There’s so much to understand too: that story of not meeting your Swiss friend … Please make me understand. I feel hopeless. Suppose he [Harry] had become Ambassador, this would have happened all the time. Please try to make me see what happened, how. Would you ever have told me yourself? I’m lost. I don’t know what to believe any more. Please pray for me as you’ve never done before.’64