The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  The distance between them made Catherine’s purported affair more difficult to bear:

  Perhaps when we’ve got through this, we shall be closer than ever, but it’s so difficult to get through separate. I long for night because then I can take pills & sleep. Then I wake & begin talking bitterly to myself, hurting myself, & poisoning the past. If I was with you, I might be beastly, but the boil would burst & the poison drain away, & we could be close again. There are so many weeks before I see you, & even then there’ll be the strain of twenty-four hours & more – & one’s bitterness comes back & one thinks, that’s a strain he didn’t have to put up with … How much better it is to be a labourer who beats his woman & forgets!65

  Though Italy was still ahead, Greene had almost given up hope: ‘the Strauss business seems a little futile now & motiveless, as well as depressing. I am inclined to deep analysis or nothing.’

  Catherine’s reply is clear from the almost off-hand way he began a paragraph: ‘O yes, of course we’ll get things straight.’ Then he quietly asked for answers which would help him reach a decision: ‘It would help if you let me know by letter before Italy if there’s been any more Lowell incidents since April 4 – or other incidents, including Harry.’ Catherine and Harry were on holiday and Greene felt that with the help of French wine and his knowledge of the conflicts between Catherine and Greene, Harry would do his best to save his marriage.66

  Greene promised he would still go to Italy, but he was already thinking how he could fill his time with adventure, trouble, and physical disaster to escape from his perpetual but futile passion: ‘I think it would be best for all of us if I went off to Goa for six months – perhaps in the autumn … I feel very hopeless because now there’s nothing whatever to hope for.’

  He continued seeing Strauss until he left for Italy, and the sessions left him calmer and quieter:

  One Strauss this week already, & another tomorrow. Three next week. He refuses to deep analyse me – has objections to it in all but profoundly maladjusted types, & agrees that it either leaves a person uncured but too conscious of his neuroses or produces a dull if happy simpleton; he says he notices the sense of humour is the first to go … I still find the seances depressing – the object is too patent, to shake you out of my mind. I’d rather have no mind.67

  Strauss’s treatments were beginning to have results. Greene had wanted electric shock treatment, but Strauss suggested instead that he write a long autobiographical piece: ‘I like Strauss enormously … There’s something of a saint in him … Another one this morning.’68

  Without hope he went to Italy, but the very thought of seeing Catherine again affected him powerfully: ‘I shall be seeing you in an hour & my hand trembles, & my heart beats like any adolescent in love. I went to bed this morning at 2 & woke at 5 & couldn’t sleep again for thinking of you.’69

  He was writing The End of the Affair, which he had begun in the Hotel Palma in Capri during an early visit just before he bought his ‘happy’ home in the mountains of Anacapri in 1948. He worked on the novel with tremendous vigour and happiness during May 1950 while with Catherine in Capri.

  He called the novel his ‘I’ book – maybe because it is such a close transcript of his triangular relationship with Catherine and Harry, or simply because it is written in the first person. Inevitably after the euphoria of writing at such a great pace and with great power, he became melancholic:

  Felt very depressed yesterday and pretty so-so today. There seems so little point in anything now that our holiday’s over; back to snatched moments & restless hoping for telephones so little to come back to compared with what we’ve had & so little to live for … I hardly get any melancholia with you except for specific reasons & now without you it descends again. I’ve done 5000 words since our holiday [in Italy]. Yesterday I went to Mass at 6 and did 900 words by 8.30 before breakfast. But work’s not enough … I feel very physically disturbed at you and not being available after the four weeks [the length of their holiday together] of being able to make love.70

  Alexander Korda offered him a means of escape. He cabled Greene in June 1950, inviting him for a holiday on his yacht Elsewhere: ‘I HOPE WILL BE ON ELSEWHERE FROM END OF THE MONTH WOULD YOU BOTH CARE TO JOIN ME.’

  Greene was sorely tempted, but Catherine was unable to cruise on the Elsewhere. Korda loved Greene’s company and sent another cable: ‘LEAVING TOMORROW MORNING FOR ZURICH SATURDAY FOR ROME STOP HOPE BE MONDAY ON BOAT BUT ONLY FOR FEW DAYS STOP REAL HOLIDAY WILL START FOURTH JULY SOMEWHERE IN NORTH MEDITERRANEAN STOP TEMPTATIONS SHOULD ALWAYS BE YIELDED TO LOVE = ALEX.’ Greene sent the cable to Catherine and added in his minute hand: ‘How I wish you could come!’71 But he could not persuade her and ended one letter: ‘I could weep with longing to hear your voice.’72

  By the first week of July, he was on the Elsewhere and asking Catherine if she’d meet him at one of the yacht’s many ports of call: ‘we’d pledge each other for life … I’d fix everything, I’d see to everything. You’d never have too many things to think about only enough to keep you busy! Nicely busy. I’d write lots of books and see only the people we wanted to see for meals.’73 The front of the postcard advertised a restaurant in Capri which they had both frequented, OSTERIA DEGLI AMICI – CAPRI. The card bore the motif of two hands clasped in love, and Greene repeated his heart’s desire: ‘They’ve left out the ring. Dear love, one word telephone wherever I am & I’d come to fetch you or to meet you’, followed by the initials ‘I W T M Y’ [I want to marry you].74

  And Catherine did join him on the yacht for a short period, for on 9 August he wrote of their visit to the Prince of Monaco’s boat with Korda and their last kiss over the hedge at Nice airport. Greene also described life in the seaport in Antibes – he could not then have imagined that he’d spend the last thirty years of his life there – ‘the scarlet woman with the thin legs … left her third husband last night … The Guinness yacht is back alongside with lots of children and wives … There are so many traces of you on board. Even the silences are full of you.’

  By the middle of August, the yacht had reached San Remo and he told Catherine that his younger brother Hugh had gone off to Malaya: ‘last night I dreamed he was dead and woke in tears!’ Greene was still working hard on the first draft of The End of the Affair. ‘I’ve written 61,000 words and should finish in 2 more days … I wish you were here to drink to the last word.’75 He wrote his last thousand words, and the manuscript, then called The Point of Departure, ends:

  I found the only prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: ‘O God. You’ve done enough, my mind is broken like steps [?] I can’t jump. I can’t get beyond human love. O God I hate myself. Don’t bother me any more. Leave me alone forever.

  [no. of words] 63,162

  Aug. 19 N Y Elsewhere 7.55 a.m.

  This differs slightly from the final version found in the first edition:

  O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.76

  On finishing the novel, Greene left the yacht and flew back to London.

  And so the troublesome relationship continued. He was obsessed but, unable to visit her at Thriplow, was seeing her for an evening only once a month. At times his frustration ran deep: ‘Pray for me in the Achill church. My mind has been very twisted lately, but it will untwist when we are really together. You are absolutely necessary to me … there’ll be no trouble this time in France. I am completely & solely in love with you.’77

  In September, while visiting Vivien and the children, Greene realised that although he had considered returning to his wife should Catherine never marry him, there was no going back. While Vivien was ‘perfectly nice’, that door had been closed and even Greene’s psychiatrist ‘could never work that miracle’. Knowing he could not ‘go home again’, he wrote:

  Do you remember what David [Crompton] said about ‘home’ requiring an illusion of being indispensable to somebody. I feel particularly
useless and so homeless. Paris, Goa, Malaya, London – there’s no point beyond myself in being anywhere. I have ceased being of use to anybody.78

  On reading about the Kon-Tiki expedition, Greene wished that he could write a cheerful travel book instead of his pessimistic kind: ‘I wish I could write an optimistic one, but that, like verse, needs hope, & I haven’t got hope. If I went to Malaya, after Hugh, or to Goa, I feel this monotonous rather stupid gloom would fall over the book. If only you could come with me – to Korea, or Goa, or Malaya. Then one might write a cheerful travel book.’79

  Greene was preparing to leave for Malaya to observe the communist insurgency there. Because he was leaving, Catherine met him for a day: ‘You’ve just gone, but I can smell the Sous le Vent all through the room, so that it’s at least soaked with your scent, though you know the scent I prefer. You left that behind, dear heart. I loved you very very much today. Malaya is an unhappy excitement to work out. I wish, you were my wife, so that when one went away, one came home – to the place you shared and the bed you shared.’80

  Greene asked for a last meeting before he left for Malaya, suggesting 21, 22 and 23 November, but then requested in his typical way that she add one more day: ‘We shan’t have any others to squeeze for a very long time.’ He suggested that she ask the Duff Coopers (who were mutual friends) to invite them both to dinner, and thus gain an extra evening. He ended his letter: ‘I kiss your mouth, your eyes, your “secret hair”.’81 In The End of the Affair, Bendrix, seeing a photograph of Henry in the Tatler with his wife on his arm feels the same desire for that secret place: ‘She had lowered her head to escape the flash, but I would have recognised that close knotty hair which trapped or resisted the fingers. Suddenly I wanted to put out my hand and touch her, the hair of her head and her secret hair.’82

  *

  Again and again Greene fought with Catherine because she would not marry him, but afterwards he was always contrite and deeply troubled: ‘I’m sorry that I’ve failed you again … I do such bad things to you. For God’s sake – please ring me up & tell me how you are. You are all I have in the world & I make such a mess of things. Pray for me.’83 But he never spoke better about his love affair with Catherine than in The End of the Affair.

  When I began to realise how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work: I would reconstruct what we had said to each other: I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy – I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck …

  We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but now there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out now … the pointed word that set her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips … My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.84

  Yet the end of their love affair did not come so swiftly, though Catherine was often upset at the seemingly endless battles. Greene was going out to Malaya, and later Indo-China, and then Kenya, where the terrible revolt of the Mau Mau was taking place. He had nothing to live for he felt, and he was fearlessly waltzing forward into the active zone, in the direction of the battlefield.

  * * *

  fn1 It’s difficult to say What grounds for annulment Greene had in mind here. Perhaps he thought to seek an annulment on the grounds that Vivien had no wish for further children and that they had not slept with each other for a number of years.

  PART 5

  The Death Seeker

  General de Lattre de Tassigny

  23

  War of the Running Dogs

  The jungle is neutral.

  – F. SPENCER CHAPMAN

  IN THE 1950S Greene wrote: ‘I had travelled too much that year / and the roads were rough; / I came to this village as the dark dropped, / I had come far enough …’ In the years 1950 and 1951, he travelled far, though distance never allowed him to forget Catherine.

  Apart from Greene’s desire to escape Catherine’s decision to remain with Harry Walston, a delicate situation involving his Danish publisher may have heightened his interest in a trip to Malaya. On 22 October 1950 Greene visited Copenhagen. After a few days there he travelled to Stockholm prior to the selection for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He thought he had a fair chance of being chosen and in a letter to Hugh Greene quoted a newspaper joke about his visit to Stockholm: ‘two months too early is the newspaper crack’. Greene identified the three leaders for the Nobel: ‘Pier Langerquist (the favourite), Faulkner & self. Odds on the Swede or Faulkner – but perhaps next year …’ He mentioned that a member of the Swedish Academy was coming to dinner: ‘so I shall have to behave better than in Copenhagen, even though Westerman [Greene’s Danish publisher] is putting in an appearance without his daughter or a shooting party’.1 Greene had had a letter from Hugh inviting him to visit Malaya, where he was serving as the head of Emergency Information Services. In response to his brother’s letter, Greene wrote that he was ‘feeling exhausted as I had my Danish publisher on my back last night’.

  It seems that Paul Westerman felt he was an aggrieved father, for his daughter Yvonne had broken off her engagement and given up her law studies as a result of a flirtation with Greene. ‘One should never flirt with 20 year olds, but she was very sweet & pretty.’fn1 Greene soothed Westerman by admitting that he wished his publisher ‘could be an injured father-in-law’; Westerman invited Greene to go shooting with him in Africa and they ‘drank & drank & got friendlier & friendlier’.

  Greene felt that his own retelling of the incident was in the worst of taste: ‘but I felt so relieved when the meeting went off so well, & this is the steam from the relief. Alas, I wish I could marry & live quiet with a pretty Dane. I pointed out the difference in age, but he scouted that – said it was a minor matter. It was a curious evening. The daughter had written to warn me that he was coming to see me & I half expected him to have a big game gun or a sjambok.’3

  Somehow the story got around. When I interviewed Vivien Greene, she recalled her shock when the Daily Express telephoned her with the news that her husband was to marry a Dane. It would have been news to Greene if approached, but by this time he was in Malaya.

  Romantic entanglements aside, Greene’s spur was the prospect of adventure. To Hugh he wrote:

  I was fascinated by [your letter] & it sounds just my meat. Life on the frontier again – why, after all, should I try to write different books? Could you … let me have some facts for financial calculations? There’d be no point in coming for less than 6–8 weeks. How much, do you calculate, life would cost me per week, or month, having as much drink & moving about as I wanted? Would it be hotel life or what? Add in a bit extra for my Chinese girl on occasion. Where would I fly to? Kuala Lumpur? … I suppose one would have to use a car a good deal. Could that be laid on officially on any excuse? The Express owes me rather more than a thousand, but a great deal of that would go on the return ticket – perhaps it’s extravagant to take a return ticket.

  Greene ended his letter suggesting that he’d not come out until Christmas: ‘All seasons are the same, aren’t they?’4

  Once he’d decided to go, Greene couldn’t wait until Christmas and on 31 October told Hugh he’d be leaving for Malaya on 25 November, arriving in Singapore on the 27th, and then on to Kuala Lumpur. Although Greene knew West Africa, he was a very new boy travelling in Malaya. He wrot
e to Hugh, concerned about the clothes he would need: ‘What do you wear in the evening at parties, an ordinary dinner jacket or what? Do I need mosquito boots?’ Telling Hugh that he’d already had his cholera injections and vaccination, he wanted to know whether he should bring quinine to deal with malaria.5

  Hugh’s letters have not survived, but it is clear he was doing his best for Greene: ‘I would love to do the trip round Pahang in the armoured car with you, so I hope you won’t do it before I come.’ He also assured Hugh that when he was acclimatised he’d like to do a tough patrol: ‘The trouble, I am warned, is that the Army is apt to put on show patrols for Generals and visiting politicians and I would like to avoid one of these.’6

  Moreover, he wanted to avoid anyone who smacked of authority: ‘I particularly don’t want to stay with Sir Henry Gurney [the High Commissioner at the time of his visit] or Ross if it can be avoided without offence.’7 Greene believed that ‘it prevents one seeing life at anything other than an official level’.8 Also, he felt he’d find ‘the burden of hospitality appallingly tiring’ – he had had more than he could take in Europe, he told his brother. He ended his letter: ‘If you cannot meet me at the Airport will you send a message as to where I am to go.’9

  On 13 November Hugh booked Greene into the Majestic hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Greene had worked out the general terms of what he was going to do in Malaya; he agreed that he needed to spend time ‘with the planters who are in the danger area’, and also ‘a patrol with the Gurkhas would be a very good thing’. As always when preparing for a journey, he sought letters of introduction. His friend Bishop David Matthew wrote to the bishop of Malacca and also to the Superior of Catholic Missions in Malaya and the Far East. Greene told Hugh that Life magazine had offered him a minimum of $2,500 for anything he wrote about Malaya – ‘This may help matters with the authorities,’ he added.10 Also he carried on his journey a letter from his friend Norman Douglas which contained a semi-humorous warning: ‘Look out for syphilis – a friend of mine came back from Malaya in a deplorable condition – I am in a pretty groggy way myself.’11