The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  These limitations on comfort did not deter Greene: ‘I like boiled or scrambled eggs and can do without hot water indefinitely. I can’t drive … but Catherine can … The Swiss Family Robinson life is exactly what Catherine and I used to live when the world allowed us to … I look forward so much to this visit. Perhaps I’ll be able to work again.’14 Greene’s fear of losing Catherine had stopped him from producing his daily 500 words.

  Greene wrote to Catherine on 3 September: ‘what can one write about, when one can’t write about one’s longing? … please come to Evelyn’s as planned for Sep. 11, 12 & 13. I shall probably be going away on Sept. 27. Korda has asked me to go on his boat & work on a film story I’ve suggested to him. Olivier & Vivien Leigh will be there too. From Athens to Istanbul.’ And he added that he was frightened of the memories of previous occasions on Korda’s yacht, this time without her, but that he was surrounded by memories in London too.

  Catherine wrote to Waugh before their visit. He replied: ‘Of course I won’t tell Graham you wrote … I shall love you to come if you can bear the discomforts. It will not even be Swiss Family Robinson.’ She was clearly worried about the visit: ‘Please believe that I am far too depressed by my own odious, if unromantic, sins to have any concern for other people’s.’15 To Catherine’s suggestion that Greene might be happier if she didn’t come along, Waugh responded: ‘But when you say Graham is sometimes happier without you, that is another matter. You know & I don’t. I did detect in his letters a hint that he looked forward to a spell of solitude. Only you can decide whether that mood is likely to persist. If you think it a bad time, come later when Laura [Waugh’s wife] is home.’ Waugh then added a slyly comic postscript about the Walston wealth: ‘the Donaldsons tell me you live in great magnificence with a domestic chaplain, butlers in black coats and groaning tables of delicatessen. My conservative newspaper tells me you have got away with wads of public money & are starting to grow ground nuts in Cambridge. But, dear Catherine, I don’t listen to gossip about you.’16 Waugh is probably making fun here of the abortive ground-nuts scheme in Tanganyika initiated by socialist Minister John Strachey – and Harry Walston was a very rich socialist.

  Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford about their visit (Catherine stayed only for three days and Greene a week): ‘Greene behaved well & dressed for dinner every night. Mrs Walston had never seen him in a dinner jacket before and was enchanted and will make him wear one always.’ And then added: ‘G. Greene spent his days patrolling the built up area round Dursley noting the numbers of motor-cars. He takes omens from them.’17

  Martin Stannard, quoting this in his biography of Waugh, comments ‘the last two sentences were a humorous allusion to Bendrix’s obsession rather than Greene’s’. However, Greene confirmed that at this time he collected car numbers when bored. What was true of Bendrix in the novel was true of Greene: ‘During the last year … I’ve been so bored I’ve even collected car numbers. That teaches you about coincidences. Ten thousand possible numbers and God knows how many combinations, and yet over and over again I’ve seen two cars with the same figures side by side in a traffic block.’18 What Greene felt he had to do, and he couldn’t cheat, was first to spot the number i by itself and then work numerically upwards. Greene never explained his hobby. When I asked him what he was atoning for, he answered casually – ‘Oh, I was just bored.’19 However, in a letter to Catherine he wrote jubilantly that he’d seen a car with the number 206.

  Both Catherine and Greene enjoyed themselves at the Waughs’. In a letter to Greene, she admitted she liked being with Waugh, especially since he was able to cheer Greene up enormously. Greene made the same point to Waugh: ‘I enjoyed myself with you so much & you eased what would have been a very bad period for me.’20

  Immediately following his visit, Greene went on his voyage with Korda: ‘I told Korda I’d go with him. We had dinner all by ourselves & he was very sweet. He’s going to Rome on 27th with his party but I couldn’t bear these nights at the Grand Hotel, so I shall fly out on the 29th & join him for one night. Then Athens. If the Hanoi business comes off, I shall go straight on, so I don’t know when I’ll be back in England.’21

  Catherine had decided that they would be parted for seven months, so the future held some hope, but Greene seemed to despair even then: ‘I can’t believe that after seven months – even if some of them are dreary & sad – you’ll want to start the wear & tear of me again. It’ll be so much easier for you to stay put. But I … live only in hope of being with you again.’ The date chosen for their reunion was the end of April: ‘On April 30 the bells of Assisi will be clashing for the patron saint of husbands – & you are the only wife I’ve ever really had.’22

  Greene’s voyage on Elsewhere was scheduled to finish at Istanbul. His sister Elisabeth and her husband Rodney Dennys were at the British Embassy and Greene asked Catherine to write from 29 September until further notice c/o Rodney Dennys, British Embassy, Istanbul. Doubtful that they would ever get together again, he admitted he was working against his conscience: ‘It says do the time. You are better with Catherine, it’s right to be with her.’23 As he prepared to leave on Korda’s yacht, he had little doubt that it was over: ‘The days are awful. I hate the telephone that will never ring & I have so little hope now.’24

  Once on board he enjoyed the company of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (‘I quite like the Oliviers – he is nicer, but she has more brains.’)25 and ballerina Margot Fonteyn. On 24 October 1951, his short respite over, he caught a plane from Orly airport at three in the morning. He lunched at Bahrein, spent the night in Karachi, and arrived in Calcutta on the following day. Brief entries in his journal record his thoughts as he flew across India: ‘Over India – where are the swarming millions? The sense of empty wastes … The terrible squalor – this is all we [the British] had done in 110 years.’26 He had wired family friends from Paris, who met him at the airport. They took him to tea and later to dinner. Greene liked them both, but thought their child ‘hopelessly spoilt’. He described his visit in a letter to his mother:

  It was a ‘dry’ day (every Thursday is) in Calcutta, so we had to do all our drinking at their home before dinner & then in my bedroom … Put up by the airline at the Grand Hotel – everybody but me had to share rooms, but luckily to the French a writer is much more important than a colonel. The night’s stop was only till 1.30 in the morning, when we were given eggs & bacon & driven through streets with the pavements lined with sleeping figures & occasional sacred cow. The cows kept themselves to themselves & seldom shared a pavement with a human.27

  It had been a very slow journey by a rather seedy service, but once Greene landed in Saigon he felt ‘very happy & at home’.

  * * *

  fn1 Greene also left her the typescript of The Point of Departure, the working title of The End of the Affair, with the words: ‘for Catherine with my only love, the night we went to a medium & the day before we went back to Rome, Passetbois, Anacapri, Aniello, Norman [Douglas], everything. From Graham.’ He also gave Catherine his fat black fountain-pen as a souvenir.

  fn2 At his home in Antibes on 14 December 1983 Greene told me he had destroyed Catherine’s letters.

  26

  A Crown of Thorns

  In a narrow bed

  drop down dead.

  – S. W. BRUNT

  THE FAR EAST had an exciting yet disturbing effect on Greene. It gave rise to doubts as evidenced by an untitled (and unknown) manuscript begun on 30 December (probably 1953):

  nothing is more disquieting than the East. It calls into question all one’s beliefs, religious or political. The awful poverty of Macau, the pullulation of Hong Kong. Does one believe in quite the same way in the East in personal survival …? It’s so easy in Europe to believe that everyone in the street, the café, the cinema will survive, separate and distinct – there are only a few million of them – does one really believe any more there is the separate survival of every spider one does not deliberately kill, every ant one a
voids with the foot?1

  While questioning his belief in survival after death, Greene retained his curious desire for death, becoming a death seeker.

  Libby Getz said that Greene wanted ‘to be crucified on an anthill in a third world country’.2 He sometimes slipped in his death wish as an aside, as when, on returning to Malaya for a short visit after he’d failed to get killed in Vietnam, he wrote: ‘Tomorrow I go by rail to K[uala] L[umpur] to give the Communists another chance.’3

  On a later trip in January 1954 Greene travelled with a convoy to the fortified village of Thui-nai in Vietnam, which was approached by a narrow causeway between canals. Seconds before the convoy entered an unknown minefield, the commandant decided to send ahead a mine-detecting patrol. Greene’s jeep was stopped just before it went over a mine enclosed in a wooden box, with a piece of wood over the detonator. He and his driver had narrowly escaped being blown sky-high. He received his reprieve grudgingly:

  It was difficult to thank God with any sincerity for this gift of life. I have much to look forward to in another fortnight for a month [he was to be with Catherine] … but afterwards stretches the long period of indeterminate blight when one is depressed, bored, melancholic. The consciousness that in the long run there is nothing to live for and that the best bet is on the black.4

  On occasion his longing for death came at moments of ecstasy: when deeply in love or when moved by beauty. Only death had the power to capture happiness eternally. When he was twenty-one Greene had written to Vivien: ‘Loving you is like being drowned in a moment of ecstasy, during a clean, swift stroke, when the whole arc of blue is caught up by the eye, & death comes & leaves eternally pictured on the mind the clean blue sweep of the sky, & indelibly carved on thought, frozen in death, your head & eyes & hair …’5

  This is the extravagance of youth, but at forty-seven Greene felt the same desire. At Phat Diem, he was struck by the beauty of the area:

  The path through the water covered paddy fields with churches the only visible buildings – half a dozen at a time: two facing each other fifty yards apart … Sunset over the strange mountains, gold in the water which slowly turns to blood orange & pewter. The fisherman. The strange cranes that left the nets like huge midges. The long field of ripe rice like corn. A Sunday of childhood. The blue flowering weed. Longed for death to come here with an ambush, on this coloured evening.6

  Fowler, the cynical Englishman in The Quiet American, (‘What a shit he is!’ said Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Greene7) has, in spite of his nature, many of Greene’s qualities. He raises questions (and provides answers) which reflect Greene’s spiritual autobiography:

  Why should I want to die when Phuong slept beside me every night? But I knew the answer to that question. From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year, Phuong would leave me. If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever … Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift.8

  His problems with Catherine had left Greene with a strong sense that he had no future. On his return to Vietnam on 23 October 1951 he felt impelled to place himself in the midst of the conflict.

  On 15 November Greene went on a bombing raid – perhaps death would come that way. He recorded the experience in his journal:

  Left for Haiphong. Arrived Cat-B: 10.30. Colonel said no chance of bombing mission that day … Drinking afterwards with Capt. Pinquet of Gascogne dive-bombing mission turned up. He had been told to send me only on horizontal bombing but under influence of drink all went well. Started at 3. Over target, Phong-To, a recently captured post & village [by the Vietminh] at 4.15. Spent 3/4 of an hour bombing & gunning. 14 dives – one from 9,000 to 3000 (highest range for Vietminh heavy m.g.s). On way home shot up sampan on the Red River from 200 feet. Shower of vertical sparks. Extraordinary rose light on mountains & gold on paddy. Dinner party at Jardines. Very tired and stoned & little overturned.9

  He gave a radio talk about the raid on the BBC, the text of which was printed in the Listener on 15 September 1955, three months before The Quiet American was published. The changes in the two accounts are negligible.10 Here is the passage in the novel built up from the notes in his journal:

  At Haiphong I had friends in the Squadron Gascogne, and I would spend hours in the bar up at the airport … orders had gone out from Hanoi that I was to be allowed only on horizontal raids – raids in this war as safe as a journey by bus, for we flew above the range of the heavy machine-gun; we were safe from anything but a pilot’s error or a fault in the engine …

  One morning in the mess … as I drank brandies and sodas with a young officer … orders for a mission came in. ‘Like to come?’ I said yes … Driving out to the airport he remarked, ‘This is a vertical raid.’

  ‘I thought I was forbidden …’

  ‘So long as you write nothing about it. It will show you a piece of country up near the Chinese border you will not have seen before. Near Lai Chau.’

  ‘I thought all was quiet there – and in French hands?’

  ‘It was. They captured this place two days ago. Our parachutists are only a few hours away. We want to keep the Viets head down in their holes until we have recaptured the post. It means low diving and machine-gunning … Ever dive-bombed before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is a little uncomfortable when you are not used to it.’

  … I was crammed on to a little metal pad the size of a bicycle seat with my knees against the aviator’s back.11

  Captain Pinquet (called Trouin in the novel) took Greene over the Red River (and the Red River at this hour was really red). To Fowler it seemed that he had gone far back in time and was seeing it with the first geographer’s eyes. They then turned away at 9,000 feet towards the Black River. Soon they were over the village to be attacked.

  We circled twice above the tower and the green-encircled village, then corkscrewed up into the dazzling air. The pilot … turned to me and winked. On his wheel were the studs that controlled the gun and bomb-chamber. I had that loosening of the bowels, as we came into position for the dive, that accompanies any new experience – the first dance, the first dinner-party, the first love … On the dial I had just time to read 3,000 metres when we drove down. All was feeling now, nothing was sight. I was forced up against the navigator’s back: it was as though something of enormous weight were pressing on my chest. I wasn’t aware of the moment when the bombs were released; then the gun chattered and the cockpit was full of the smell of cordite, and the weight was off my chest as we rose, and it was the stomach that fell away, spiralling down like a suicide to the ground we had left … As we climbed in a great arc I could see the smoke through the side window pointing at me.12

  Before the second dive Fowler felt fear, the fear that he would humiliate himself by vomiting over the navigator’s back, or that his ‘ageing lungs’ would not be able to stand the pressure. After the tenth dive, he was aware only of irritation, the bombing run was going on too long.

  And again we shot steeply up out of machine-gun range and swerved away and the smoke pointed. The village was surrounded on all sides by mountains. Every time we had to make the same approach, through the same gap. There was no way to vary our attack. As we dived for the fourteenth time I thought, now that I was free from the fear of humiliation, ‘They have only to fix one machine-gun into position.’ We lifted our nose again into the safe air – perhaps they didn’t even have a gun. The forty minutes of the patrol had seemed interminable, but it had been free from the discomfort of personal thought. The sun was sinking as we turned for home: the geographer’s moment had passed: the Black River was no longer black, and the Red River was only gold.13

  They turned homeward but as they came towards the river the plane aimed its canno
n at a small sampan, shattering it in a shower of sparks. The bomber didn’t wait to witness whether any victims survived, it just climbed and returned home. Fowler found it disturbing: ‘There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey – we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.’14

  *

  During Greene’s two-month stay, he again visited Phat Diem because fighting there had intensified. A New York Times article of 10 May 1951 reported: ‘commercial traffic flourishes between Phat Diem and insurgent territory, most of it done by coastal junks’. The Vietminh’s objective was often rice: a minimum of 90,000 tons per year was needed to feed 300,000 men (150,000 combatants and as many coolies).

  The New York Times also spoke of the peculiar nature of the area and of bishops who had medieval powers of life and death. The headline read: ‘TWO BISHOPS RULE AREA IN TONGKING: Catholics Administer Districts Independently of the French, Bao Dai or [Communist] Insurgents’ and the article described the influence of the bishops who were leaders of the Church, the army and the state in the war against communism; they operated virtually as autonomous powers, each bishop with his own army. The area’s Catholicismfn1 had made people strongly anti-communist and for more than a year it had successfully resisted communist penetration: ‘and today … reputedly the most peaceful regions in all Vietnam’.