The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  While still in Saigon Greene received a normal visa (usually a visa is operative for a year), but it was then changed. Tom Peck, the US consular official in Saigon, said in interview:

  The visa took a long time, two months, as I remember it, but then when permission finally came, I stamped it for one year (which is the normal amount of time given to applicants). But then in rereading the Attorney-General’s note, I realised that Greene had only been given a period of three months to visit the U.S. I was frightened that if I didn’t get to Greene soon, he would be off with a year’s visa which I was instructed this could not be. So I telephoned the Continental hotel and asked if I could come and see him. I took the elevator but don’t remember the number, knocked at the door. I remember thinking how tall he was (for I’m six foot and he stood above me). The ceilings were very high and ceiling fans spinning around – no air conditioning. For some reason I recall that the windows either small or the room heavily curtained but I remember there was very little light in the room. I asked to see his passport and looked at it and then pulled out my cancellation stamp, and quickly stamped it CANCELLED and dated it across his visa. When he saw me doing this he shouted, rising from his chair, ‘What are you doing!’ I told him, that I’d made a mistake in giving him a visa for a year when the Attorney-General had given him only a three months’ visa. I immediately issued a new one there and then for three months. He was hopping mad. I never saw him again.8

  Greene was a fighter when roused and the bureaucratic rigmarole would cost the United States dear in terms of reputation. Charles Stuart Kennedy, a retired consul-general, recalled that when he entered the United States Foreign Service in July 1955, he endured a basic officer’s course which concentrated heavily on visa matters. Among other things they were told to use some common sense in applying the strict visa law and the case of Greene was used as a horrible example of what not to do:

  As we were told it, a vice consul refused Greene a visa for having been a member of the Communist Party at Oxford for a few weeks. As a prominent Catholic writer who obviously was not a mouthpiece for Moscow the vice consul should have sent a telegram to Washington explaining the matter. This would undoubtedly have resulted in his being granted a waiver of the prohibition against communists or former communists getting visas. By the bureaucratic insensitivity on the part of the vice consul Greene was ticked off and wrote The Quiet American.

  Kennedy went on to use this case for thirty years in training new vice consuls, telling them that they had to use some discretion in administering the immigration law: ‘If in doubt, or if the matter might create a public relations problem, for heaven’s sake let me know about it or refer the damned thing to the Department of State for its opinion.’9

  Greene’s visa problems would continue for many years, but at least now he could go to Hollywood, where he was to advise on the film The End of the Affair. Mrs Young, his secretary, sent a postcard to Greene’s publisher A. S. Frere at Heinemann: ‘Graham’s story to the Press has done the trick and the U.S. visa has been produced! I had a cable this morning saying he’d not now be back [in England] until about Feb. 20th and that letters should be sent to him c/o Mrs Pritchett marked “Please Forward”.’10 A letter written to his mother just prior to getting his visa reveals his ambivalence: ‘I think if I do get over there, I shall be turned out of the country after a couple of interviews.’

  Greene left Saigon rather sadly on 9 February 1952 for Hong Kong: ‘I left Saigon early yesterday – with certain regrets. I had one or two good friends there. Especially during this last stay. Perhaps I’ll write the “entertainment” I thought of and go back and film it one day. People have been nice to me.’11

  René Berval and Trevor Wilson had been good friends, but Greene had in mind the kindness shown by the Americans – the Toppings, the Getzs. There is no feeling here that he had been badly done to by the Americans in Saigon: no ugly Americans, and no anti-Americanism from Greene. In his journal he wrote of John Getz and his beautiful wife Libby. Just before his departure from Saigon, he took the Getzs out for dinner to the Jade Pavilion and to gamble at the casino. The day before he left for Hong Kong he ‘phoned Libby who insists on seeing me off’. The next day, Libby and John Getz called for him at 6.45 in the morning. ‘Kissed Phuong farewell through the grill. Libby [Getz] v. sweet & rather disturbing.’12

  He left for Hong Kong at 8 a.m. and, writing to Catherine Walston, he stressed it was ‘odd to have hot water again, to be wearing my tweed suit and one of your Dublin ties’.13 On the 11th he arrived in Tokyo at 5 a.m., was given an early morning drive round selected temples, viewed the garden of the concubines, and visited but did not stay in the ‘incredibly ugly Imperial Hotel like an air-raid shelter … The Press everywhere after that.’ He went to the zoo (sited on the top of a department store), to a Japanese theatre, and after a lunch which was too rich for him he went to the airport ‘rather knocked out’.

  *

  On his arrival in the United States Harold Guinzburg sent Greene a cable: ‘RELIEVED THAT YOU’RE IN AND THE NATION STILL STANDS.’14 Greene went to Hollywood to see about the filming of The End of the Affair and, as he put it to Catherine: ‘I had a quiet time here fixing up the files of your novel – except for Mass with Claire Booth Luce in a church so clean and so rich that I longed to be with you in the little grubby Anacapri church where nobody’s rich.’15 He also mentioned that he went for a drink with Charlie Chaplin.

  In Hollywood he learnt how seriously McCarthyism was entering its soul. When he arrived in Los Angeles he felt he had entered a city under ‘a reign of terror’. He found that Hollywood’s film studios ‘took extra measures toward anyone under the threat of McCarthyism’ and against anyone of ‘liberal tendencies’ or who was linked with a left-wing movement. ‘People seem to be completely at the mercy of the man [Senator Joseph McCarthy],’ he remarked, ‘and if a man answers yes, he had been a member of the Communist party, he is expected to give the names of friends in the party.’16

  Greene returned to New York to consult with the editors of Life, and to receive the 1952 Award for Fiction from the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors for The End of the Affair. He was interviewed, among other newspapers, by the New York Herald Tribune. The headline was strong: ‘Graham Greene Says U.S. Lives in Red-Obsessed “State of Fear”’.

  Mr. Greene arrived in New York about 2 p.m. yesterday and a few hours later when he granted an interview in his room at the Hotel Algonquin, immediately expressed concern over what he said is happening to American freedom because of the country’s growing fear of Communism.

  He considered his own case rather comical, he remarked, because he had been a Roman Catholic since 1926, and is certainly no friend of the Communists. But he doesn’t consider the anti-Communists’ policy in America with its pattern of ‘smearing and besmirching’ very funny.

  ‘I’m speaking this way because I like America and Americans … This land of freedom. People came here not to win television sets or refrigerators but to gain freedom from the house spies, the informers, the military regimes.’ He added sadly, ‘But there are a lot of informers going around here now.’17

  Greene was at pains to stress not his own case but what Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin was doing, and he spoke out directly, as a Catholic, to Catholics: ‘As part of their religious beliefs all Catholics should be opposed to this.’ It was almost the duty of Catholics to oppose such laws as the McCarran police-state law and the general nature of McCarthyism. He quoted President Roosevelt’s statement in his first inaugural: ‘The only thing to fear is fear itself,’ and then Thomas Paine, who had done so much for the American revolution: ‘We should guard even our enemies against injustice.’ He felt bewildered by the nature of America’s fear complex and felt that this obsession was being noticed in other parts of the world: ‘America’s allies are beginning to wonder if their concept of democracy is the same as yours. The fear of one man – Stalin – is not found in England or Europe.’

  An
editorial in the New York Times agreed with Greene and spoke of the puerility to which ‘our immigration laws have been allowed to sink’. ‘We never were really worried about Mr. Greene, whose transgression apparently was that he belonged to the Communist party for about a month some twenty years ago, prior to his conversion to the Catholic faith.’ People like Senator McCarran attempted to create a ‘kind of intellectual cordon sanitaire about the United States – an attempt which has seriously damaged our reputation as a liberal democracy abroad and has encouraged the forces of reaction, parochialism and xenophobia at home’. It pointed out that rigid barriers set up by its immigration laws played into the hands of its enemies: ‘What hope have we … to hold out to defectors from the Communist regimes, what inducement are we able to offer the former Communists who are among the most effective enemies of communism, when we automatically slam our doors in their very faces?’18

  *

  According to his biographer, David Robinson, Charlie Chaplin embarked for England on the Queen Elizabeth on 17 September 1952. He had been at sea for two days when the radio announced that the US Attorney-General (who had only recently and reluctantly granted Greene a limited visa) had ordered that Chaplin be detained by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service upon his return to the United States. Chaplin had lived in America for forty years but had kept his British passport. It would now have to be decided whether he could re-enter the country under US laws. It was a deliberate insult to America’s most famous living comic. Immediately, in a great rage, Greene wrote an open letter to Charlie Chaplin, which appeared in the New Statesman on 27 September 1952. The letter first spoke of ‘the great pyramid of friendly letters that must be awaiting’ Chaplin in London, for of course he was the world’s but certainly England’s favourite son:

  Your films have always been compassionate towards the weak and the underprivileged; they have always punctured the bully. To our pain and astonishment you paid the United States the highest compliment in your power by settling within her borders, and now we feel pain … at the response … from those authorities who seem to take their orders from such men as McCarthy.

  The main accusation against Chaplin seemed to be that he had spoken when Russia was invaded by Hitler’s troops in her defence at a public meeting in San Francisco. His speech had been made at the request of President Roosevelt, but, as Greene recorded, the authorities’ accusation was based mainly on the fact that Chaplin had addressed his audience as ‘comrades’ – a dangerous term signifying communist sympathies. Greene referred to conditions in England when Catholics were persecuted. He compared McCarthy and the Un-American Committee with Titus Oates, who in 1678 fabricated evidence to prove a popish plot to assassinate Charles II, which resulted in the frenzied persecution of Catholics throughout the land and in the hanging of three innocent people.

  He ended his open letter to Chaplin:

  They will say it is no business of ours. But the disgrace of an ally is our disgrace, and in attacking you the witch-hunters have emphasized that this is no national matter. Intolerance in any country wounds freedom throughout the world.

  His letter was reprinted in America by New Republic on 13 October 1952 with an excellent introduction, presumably by the editor:

  At 63, THE MAN who made buffoons of dictators is threatened with the dictatorial McCarran Act. When Charlie Chaplin tries to pass the Statue of Liberty, he will be held at Ellis Island until he convinces the Attorney-General that he is pure. His is the burden of proof. Accused of non-conformism and contempt ‘for the high state of womanhood’, Chaplin is lumped with Costello as an ‘unsavory character’ … Chaplin’s re-entry permit implies absence of cause to deport him. Threatening him once he has left is dishonorable and the world knows it.

  Greene received a tremendous response to his letter, much of which supported him, though Evelyn Waugh wrote to him rather defensively: ‘It is no good pretending I wasn’t shown your letter about Chaplin in the New Statesman.’19

  Not everyone responded favourably. One letter in particular Greene saved in his archives and also sent to the New Statesman. It is a letter which conveys ‘more vividly than press reports the atmosphere of smear, suspicion and unreason that McCarthy, like Titus Oates before him, has managed to impose on a section of his countrymen’ Greene wrote in his cover note. The letter came to Greene because, in applying for a second visa to return to America churlishly he was offered one for only eight weeks. That did not allow him to work on his play The Living Room, then being produced on Broadway, and he refused it. Greene thought the letter was a bizarre and macabre joke:

  Dear Mr Greene,

  You have earned the gratitude of the American people by refusing a visa to the United States. You will please us still further in the future by not even applying for one. There are enough of the home grown variety of ex-Communists and fellow travellers here already. No need for any ‘furriners’. May I suggest instead that you turn your talents to securing a visa to Russia where you will be welcomed with open arms. I anticipate much less trouble for you there. We beseech you please do not on any account honor us with your presence in this country. It is enough to have to live in the same world with you.

  Unfortunately, my womanly intuition tells me that if you have not already landed here you will all too soon come to these shores – your half-baked statements to the contrary. No truer words were ever writ than ‘A man is known by the company he keeps’ to which may be added also by the periodicals he contributes to.

  Sincerely L. Ettinger.

  P.S. If this is a publicity gag then I feel sorry for you to have to sink so low. Won’t you make 150,000,000 Americans happy and stay on your side of the ocean?

  Public figures receive hostile letters, but Greene’s public statements aroused vindictive responses:

  In our sympathy for the underdog it’s easy to forget he sometimes is indeed a dog. A mad dog who calculatingly clothes his treachery with the loose fitting robe of liberalism … forfeits the respect due an honest straightforward enemy …

  Despite his conviction on the charge of fathering the child of a young actress never included among his numerous wives, Chaplin’s present troubles are political … the moral reptile of today is free to slink about pretty much as he pleases, to chain-marry wives … to write, direct and act in his own movies and even compose his own music … The American is proud of his citizenship … He … holds … the right of a nation to deny its hospitality to the criminal, the diseased, the anarchist, the world revolutionist …

  Nothing but the certainty of a refusal has prevented his applying long ago for American citizenship: the threat of deportation has been like a vulture, patient but always alert, at his shoulder for many years … I’ll agree Charlie Chaplin is an artist of great merit … I do not concede to a man possessing his Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist theories the right to remain out of prison or to stay alive; my love for the music of Prokofieff and Khachaturian will not unsteady these hands on the bombsight when the time comes.20

  Victor Lasky, who had looked on Greene as a favourite author, wrote to him saying he was totally bewildered by the fact that Greene was now so anti-American.21 Greene thought that Lasky confused his criticism of certain American personalities and certain American acts with being anti-American and concluded that he did not consider himself ‘anti-American any more than I consider myself anti-Romanian or anti-Italian, but I do think we are at liberty to criticise what we consider injustices or dangerous tendencies in other countries, especially when those countries are tied as closely to us as America … In England we have not noticed any particular slowness on the part of America to criticise our policies in, say, India or Palestine, but it would be absurd necessarily to label such critics as anti-British.’22

  *

  Greene’s visa troubles continued throughout the 1950s, but he remained as determined as ever to attack the McCarran Act. In September 1954 it seemed that he was in further trouble with the US Customs and Immigration Service, for an FBI ra
diogram carried the following information to the Director of the FBI in Washington:

  GRAHAM GREENE, SMC. INS ADVISED GREENE ARRIVED SAN JUAN, PR LAST NIGHT AT 8.55 PM VIA DELTA … AIRLINES FROM HAITI. INS ADVISED SUBJ INADMISSIBLE TO U.S. BECAUSE OF MEMBERSHIP IN COMMUNIST PARTY OF ENGLAND. WAS PLACED UNDER GUARD BY INS AND RETURNED TO HAITI ON DELTA … AIRLINES DEPARTING SAN JUAN 7.30 AM AT THIS DATE SUBJ ADVISED INS THAT HE WAS A NOVELIST AND WAS GOING TO NYC TO CONTACT AN AGENT FOR HIS BOOKS. HE SENT TWO CABLEGRAMS WHILE IN SAN JUAN, ONE TO QUOTE … MARY [PRITCHETT] UNQUOTE IN NEW YORK STATING QUOTE TURNED BACK. CAN’T LUNCH. LOVE GRAHAM UNQUOTE AND THE OTHER TO QUOTE [PETER] BROOKS MYRTLE BANK HOTEL, KINGSTON, JAMAICA. CAN’T LUNCH WITH L. PHOEDE TURNED BACK. GRAHAM. UNQUOTE SUBJ STATED WHILE IN CUSTODY OF INS THAT HE HAD BEEN A MEMBER OF THE CP OF ENGLAND YEARS AGO WHEN HE WAS 19 YEARS OLD; THAT HE WAS GOING TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCE IN SAN JUAN AND THAT HE WOULD MAKE A LOT OF PUBLICITY OVER HIS BEING DETAINED. SUBJ DESCRIBED AS FOLLOWS: BORN FEBRUARY 10, 1904 [sic], ENGLAND; HEIGHT 6 FEET [sic]; WEIGHT 180 POUNDS; SANDY, THIN HAIR; OCCUPATION, BRITISH NOVELIST; NO ADDRESS AVAILABLE. SUBJECT INDICATED HE WOULD RETURN TO ENGLAND FROM HAITI VIA DUTCH AIRLINES.

  Time picked up the story: ‘British Novelist Graham (The Third Man) Greene, who is something of an internationalist … out to smash the … McCarran Act, stepped off a plane at San Juan airport, Puerto Rico and snapped a sharp yes when immigration officials asked the routine: “Have-you-ever-been-a-Communist?” question. Greene, who was en route to London from a vacation in Haiti, was politely detained overnight, next morning took off for Havana for a few days’ nightclubbing and the chance to bemuse reporters with his story.’ Greene told the now old story of how he became a communist for a joke, and added of the Immigration Service: ‘“They couldn’t have picked on a person who is less a Communist,” he said of his Puerto Rico detention. “It’s all very silly.”’23