The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  the two of us went off in tiny morain plane to Phat Diem to spend night with the warrior bishop. Fantastic number of churches. Guard of honour. The sad sincere relentless face of the bishop. Strange Cathedral, ex. Buddhist temple. Visit top hospital with the unpleasant Belgian priest. The Viet-Minh prisoner gangrening. Broken limbs splinted with bamboo. No plaster … The Belgian priest’s amateur surgery.37

  This Belgian priest, Father Willich, who was the bishop’s general factotum, appears in the novel in the extraordinary bell tower, from which you could see the mortar shells burst and watch the enemy and the French parachutists moving in single file along the canals and the great market burning fiercely: ‘Even the priest who sat in a corner of the tower never changed his position as he read his breviary.’38 Audrey Topping remembers him as ugly looking. ‘He was bald headed and had a big nose and I remember that vividly – I mean, they all shaved their heads.’39 Greene met the Belgian priest on his second visit to Phat Diem in December 1951, drank with him and found that he had a ‘rough amusing Belgian cunning’. He also added that he ‘smelt in his dirty black soutane’.

  A confidential report to the State Department from the American legation concerning a visit from Father Willich (31 March 1951) confirms what Greene reported about the Belgian priest and his hospital: ‘Phat Diem has received 150 cotton blankets of American aid, and nothing else … At present, in his 70-bed hospital, the Father, who is also chief (and sole) surgeon, in addition to his religious duties and functions as professor of mathematics and public works engineer, is obliged to perform intricate operations without proper sterilization of his instruments.’40

  The priest in the novel, whom Fowler comes to know in the bell tower at Phat Diem, shares many of Willich’s characteristics and experiences. Like Willich, the priest is European but not French – and the bishop, while hating the communist Vietminh, also hates the French. The fictional priest and Father Willich both act as the sole surgeon for the hospital:

  ‘We have the only hospital in Phat Diem [says the priest in The Quiet American], and our only nurses are these nuns.’

  ‘And your surgeon?’

  ‘I do what I can.’ I saw then that his soutane was speckled with blood.41

  The priest asks Fowler whether he came up the tower to find him. When Fowler responds that he was merely getting his bearings, the priest replies:

  I asked you because I had a man up here last night. He wanted to go to Confession. He had got a little frightened, you see, with what he had seen along the canal. One couldn’t blame him.42

  Whilst Fowler is certainly based on Greene’s life and many of his characteristics are found in the character of Fowler, Fowler’s atheism was not shared by Greene. Fowler feels, as a non-Catholic, that there is something unmanly about confession, ‘kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing myself to another man.’ What is fascinating is that the unnamed character (‘I had a man up here last night. He wanted to go to Confession’) was Greene. Trevor Wilson told me that he and Greene met Father Willich twice: ‘Graham always left me and made a confession to Willich.’43 It is revealing of how Greene worked as a novelist – transferring his own personal experience to an unnamed character.

  To Catherine, about his contact in Phat Diem with the death of civilians, he wrote: ‘especially … a poor woman and her small boy who had got in the way of war, drove me to Confession’.44

  Greene left Vietnam on this first visit believing that the Catholic area of Phat Diem could look after itself (this turned out to be monumentally incorrect). He felt that the Catholics were inspired by an idea equal in strength to the communist Vietminh, a view he put forward in Life:

  The other day at Phat Diem, in the north of Indo-China, I watched the Viet Namese Catholic bishop inspect his outposts, the unpaid militia who had helped clear the bishopric and who now held it free from the Communist enemy. I heard the young men sing their hymns; I watched the platoon leaders come up with their bouquets of flowers for their bishop. There were only 2,000 of these men here, and there were not enough uniforms yet to go round, but I would have felt more confidence fighting in their ranks than in the ranks of the 1,000,000 armed Malay police. They reminded me a little of the Home Guard in 1940. The Home Guard was never tested as these few men so often are when the guerrillas seep up across the wide flat paddies, but their strength was an idea, and that idea love of their country. Christianity too is a form of patriotism. These Vietnamese belonged to the City of God and were proud of their city that lay behind the no man’s land of rice. ‘You see,’ I wanted to say to my friends in Malaya, ‘it can be done.’ An idea was fighting an idea.45

  When Greene returned to Phat Diem eight months later in October 1951, he discovered that ‘an idea fighting an idea’ was not enough.

  *

  In spite of the excitement of Vietnam, Catherine Walston remained of profound concern to Greene. Before leaving Malaya for his visit to Indo-China, he admitted that he was ‘getting tired of peaceful atmosphere with no hope of a bullet’. This was true especially when he felt that he had no hope of persuading Catherine to leave her husband and family. It was at this time that he had a depressing dream in which Catherine said to him: ‘I’ve got something rather sad to break to you.’ She told Greene that she was forbidden ever to come to Italy with him again.

  However, six days later he received a telegram from Catherine announcing she’d meet him in Paris.46 Just prior to catching a plane on the first leg of his journey, he noted: ‘Depressed & worried. Will C. be tired of it all?’ On the plane he wrote her some verses entitled ‘After Four Years’:

  I went as far as China to forget you,

  But in the razed village on the plain,

  In a footprint, on the laterite, I met you,

  So it’s not worth going there again.

  He could not lose Catherine in the marshes south of Saigon, there was no forgetting, she was everywhere.

  When Greene’s plane arrived in Paris at 10.35 p.m. it was over two hours late. Expressing his longing to wake up in the night and feel her against him, Greene had cabled Catherine to bring his briefcase, her red shoes and four shirts. She met him with warm clothing. They spent a week together at the Pont-Royal hotel in rue Montalembert, before leaving for London. Afterwards he wrote: ‘No one has ever been more loved than you except the saints. Remember you’re the central object & purpose of a life.’47

  He told his mother that he loved his first visit to Indo-China – ‘a very strange medieval place’; that the High Commissioner General de Lattre was very kind to him, providing him with everything from cars to tiny aeroplanes for his journeys; that he was shot at once, but discovered it only afterwards – and that he wanted to return to Vietnam.48 But first Korda’s charm and blandishments (and a desire to escape his eternal boredom) found him again aboard the Elsewhere.

  * * *

  fn1 In Greene’s undated ‘Saigon journal’, in thinking about his experience with women he. becomes philosophically sexual:

  I woke in the plane from Saigon, and some sexual dream compelled by the beat of the plane engine made me wonder why the cry of a woman’s orgasm is always sad: the sound that seems to be torn from her unwillingly, in pain, rather than pleasure? Do they know the sound they make and the words they use, with each woman so invariable?

  25

  Interlude on Elsewhere

  We’ve added about ten feet to give it a rounded stern so it will be about one hundred feet long and we’ll put bulwarks up … so it will look more elegant.

  – ALEXANDER KORDA

  IN JUNE 1951 Greene was sailing in the Aegean on Korda’s yacht, the Elsewhere. He knew that he needed to go back to Indo-China; the war was heating up in the Catholic Phat Diem area and Paris Match wanted him to write on Indo-China as France’s ‘Crown of Thorns’. Yet his thoughts always returned to Catherine. He could not but be aware how rarely they now met:

  I live from holiday to holiday with you. Hope deferred is a strain … Paris Match is pressin
g for a date for Indo-China, & sometimes there seems so little left. Each year there’s a downward graph – I wish I hadn’t kept a diary: one might not notice how steeply it was …1

  When the Elsewhere arrived at Hydra, the island was decked out for a festival: bells clanged, fireworks were set off, a play was performed in the street and, on the quayside, Greene saw a chauffeur he and Catherine had used on their last visit. At Nauplia was yet another chauffeur they always used, which brought memories flooding back of inland trips he had made with Catherine. Greene persuaded Korda to take them to Mycenae – ‘wonderful heavy ruins of the Homeric age which were legendary ruins already when the Parthenon was building’. Another old chauffeur had candles in his pouch to light up Agamemnon’s extraordinary beehive tomb. Their next stop was Epidaurus, where the Vienna Symphony Orchestra was playing in the Greek amphitheatre:

  It was awful getting there, but once there it was very lovely – the sun sinking, stars & moonlight & cigarettes going on & off like lighthouses: about 12,000 people & the King & Queen sitting on pillows. First Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony (which I liked perhaps because a faint idea for an Indo-China novel stirred).

  When it was quite dark the orchestra played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – ‘incredibly romantic’.2 He looked forward to London because when he got home he could speak again to Catherine: ‘but the agonising part of being in love starts again’.

  By the middle of August, it seemed that Harry Walston was forbidding Catherine to see Greene. Greene suspected that the imminent publication of The End of the Affair was behind Walston’s ultimatum – it was published in September, but he received copies in August, which he gave to special friends. On 15 August, after he had returned to London, he wrote to Catherine that her sister Belinda (Binnie) had given him strong advice:

  Binnie’s just gone. She couldn’t tell me much. I’m so sorry for all those miserable days for you. I gave her a copy of the book [The End of the Affair]. How sad & ominous the title now seems to be. Binnie obviously felt that I should take things into my own hands & clear out of the picture. I would if you asked me to, but it would be like death. I would like to hear from you calmly in writing … if you would like me to disappear. I’d sublet the flat & go abroad or something.

  It seemed that Harry Walston was threatening divorce. Greene answered that four and a half years of condonation put the possibility out of the question: ‘Harry can’t threaten anything. Morally he had every right 4 1/2 years ago; now he hasn’t even the legal right … For him to bring down a curtain now, after you’ve got used to me & our life together is cruel & unwarranted.’3

  Harry Walston had forbidden his wife to see Greene, not only at Newton Hall, but elsewhere also: ‘If for even a couple of weeks by doing nothing you accept Harry’s right to forbid you to see me aren’t you making it impossible without a major trouble ever to be with me again? Harry can dictate about Newton, not about your life outside.’4

  Greene left it to Catherine: ‘if you decide against me & the “affair” (if that’s what one calls these four years between the first Achill & the last Italy) must be over, then I clear out without question’, but he added a caveat: ‘Sooner or later the old promiscuity for both of us probably. There’s something terribly wrong in that alternative.’5 Telling her he was grateful for the years she had given him, he added that he wanted to carry on with her until death.

  In March 1950 Greene had sent the manuscript of The End of the Affair to Catherine because he wanted to give her a sentimental present. In the letter with the manuscript he wrote: ‘Because I’m going to Germany tomorrow: because I hate myself today, because all the best part was written with you (I remember coming out of my workroom while you were washing up & reading one sentence & saying “isn’t that good” – “virtue tempted him in the dark like a sin”) and because I love you & bastard as I am, I’m married to you by this ms. Graham. Put up with me for another year or two.’6 He gave her also a typescript of The Heart of the Matter and wrote on the flyleaf: ‘For Catherine with love, a book which would never have been finished without “the graveyard, rock & sea”.’fn1

  The dedication in the English edition of The End of the Affair read: ‘To C.’ – few readers would know to whom this referred. But in the American edition, it was to read: ‘To Catherine with love.’ When Walston brought pressure to bear on Catherine to limit her visits to Greene, Greene wrote to her to ask: ‘Would you like me to cable America to try to stop the dedication?’ It was not changed, however.

  With publication came Harry Walston’s latest refusal to allow Catherine and Greene to meet. The whole of literary London would believe not only that Greene was Mrs Walston’s lover – literary London knew that already – but that Greene had written a close account of their affair.

  Catherine’s sister, Belinda Straight, wrote a firm letter to Catherine objecting to the fact that the novel revealed the Walston family too easily and too obviously and was, in a sense, a betrayal of Harry Walston. However, when she complained, Catherine responded that it wouldn’t be right to expect a creative writer to change his text. (Belinda had asked for the name of Crompton to be replaced – after all she was a Crompton herself. Greene had called one of his characters Father Crompton.) Belinda was astonished when Walston wrote to her to say that she had hurt her sister by her remarks – a remarkable man. Belinda then advised Harry Walston to sue Greene for the undeniable resemblance between himself and Henry Miles, the cuckolded husband. He never did, but his relationship with Greene was spoilt even further by the appearance of the novel.

  To add more constraints to their love, it appears that Catherine had suggested that though they should continue to see each other, they should no longer have sex. She opted for ‘intellectual companionship’. There is a strong possibility that the Dominican priest Thomas Gilby, a close friend of both Walstons and the author of Morals and Marriage: The Catholic Background to Sex, was behind Catherine’s remarks:

  You say the last 4 1/2 years have been a fairy tale. Thomas has probably said that, but he hasn’t lived them. It was at least a fairy tale which might have lasted another five before one side of the relation died slowly & naturally out. The fairy tale you are substituting is one in which one will be afraid to come into the same bedroom, afraid to kiss, afraid to touch you, when we shall be so self-conscious that the body will be always in one’s mind because never at peace.7

  Greene could not be persuaded that their sexual relationship was wrong, given the depth of their love. He quoted Browning: ‘Better sin the whole sin sure that God observes.’ Again and again he put forward the view that the only way they could continue to stay together for life ‘is to go back & back to Confession & Communion after every time or period, but I don’t believe – even Thomas doesn’t believe in the possibility … of suddenly switching a relation into the unphysical level.’8 He then became sophistical, speaking of eventual and immediate intention. If Catherine’s intentions were immediate then Greene thought it better to end their affair promptly. But he warned her and he warned himself what that would lead to: ‘I hope & pray you don’t [end it] because life would be a real desert without you, & God knows what shabby substitutes one would desperately try to find. But try & answer clearly.’9

  Catherine continued to hold out some hope only to dash it later. Unable to stand the situation, Greene came out with his own ultimatum, a statement of three alternatives:

  I can’t stand this situation – I simply haven’t got the strength. There are only three things possible to choose.

  1) I know you won’t, but that’s to come away with me to Italy, start annulments – you’d have your children half their holidays, we’d marry as soon as we could, & if possible have one of our own …

  2) Be as we were minus Newton [because he was no longer allowed by Walston to visit Newton Hall]. Sometimes going away for a little, getting back to confession or communion all the time. But in between be lovers.

  3) I disappear completely as from tomorrow. My dear,
last night shows that I can’t be with you & not your lover. I’m too in love for that. I’d just ask one thing & that’s for you to take my bureau key & take away your letters in the top right hand drawer. I tried the other day to destroy them, but it meant seeing them & I couldn’t.fn2 If it’s 3 try not to be corrupted & lie around. I’ll try not.

  You said it was not the love relationship that Harry minded – it was that you ‘worked to sew on fly buttons’, but no one, not even the church, has a right to demand that you shan’t love in that way. Our love’s been a good love … I have been your husband …

  Please put 1, 2, or 3 on a piece of paper. It won’t be 1, but if it’s 3 I think I must go away tomorrow … Your lover – probably for the last time of writing it.10

  It seemed the end, but it was an end he sought to prolong.

  Korda was pressing Greene to join him again on his yacht, Elsewhere. Flamboyant yet friendly, Korda had a great fondness for Greene. Greene wrote a sketch of the man under the name of Dreuther in his 1955 entertainment Loser Takes All:

  He had just ordered himself a Pernod and he was talking with easy familiarity to the barman, speaking perfect French. Whatever the man’s language he would have spoken it perfectly. Yet he wasn’t the Dreuther of the eighth floor now – he had put an old yachting cap on the bar, he had several days’ growth of white beard and he wore an old and baggy pair of blue trousers and a sweat shirt.11

  The cruise on the Elsewhere was to begin on 27 September. Greene had promised Evelyn Waugh that he would spend ten days with him beforehand. Waugh, unaware of the troubles between Catherine and Greene, had invited them both to stay. His wife had taken the children away for a month and he was on his own: ‘Is there any hope of having you for a visit (if with Catherine, better still) to cheer me up … Do come if you can bear the thought.’12 He warned Greene that his cook was also on holiday: that only a village woman would take her place so they might have to live on scrambled eggs; that his butler had gone sick and ‘all my comforts & yours depend on him’. He went on to tell Greene, who hated any formality of dress, that he wore a dinner jacket in the evenings – ‘but there’s not the smallest reason why you should do so’. He couldn’t even promise constant hot water as the boiler was one of the things his sick butler attended to: ‘Plenty of coke if you know about fuelling. It will be Swiss Family Robinson Life.’13