One has always assumed that everything Kim wrote was vetted by the K.G.B. Kim’s latest letter is therefore of great significance as he mentions, for the first time, that he is in close touch with ‘the competent authorities’.
In view of this, the fourth paragraph of his letter is uncommonly important, particularly the last sentence at the bottom of the first page and the rest of the paragraph at the top of the second page. The following paragraph is also interesting.
I have felt, for some time, that the KGB were probably doves rather than hawks and this seems to bear it out. Is it, do you think, a tentative feeler for the initiation of a dialogue between the KGB and SIS? No doubt you possess a canteen of long spoons. The fact that Kim, in one of his recent letters, asked Graham to send his regards to me may be more significant than I thought at the time. Old spies never die, and Kim must assume that I see old friends from time to time, and he probably also assumes that his letters to Graham are passed on. After all, no-one in his senses would maintain a correspondence with such a hot potato as Kim without letting it be known.
As you know, during the War I worked pretty closely with him from time to time, and got to know him about as well as most people. He had a remarkable flair for strategic deception, combining imagination with audacity. Is his latest letter a gambit in that game?35
To the extent that he established contact with Philby after his defection, Greene was helping his country’s intelligence services, and, in a larger sense, was patriotically defending its security.
If Greene was approached by the ‘old firm’ to remain ‘publicly’ a friend of Philby’s for the purpose of setting up a very English spider’s web, then the SIS made an excellent choice. Greene, of all Philby’s friends who were once close to him, was the only man Philby could trust in the West. If Philby did cheat Moscow, it must have been with Greene’s help.
Greene gained the friendship of many left-wing leaders like Fidel Castro, General Omar Torrijas, Salvador Allende and Daniel Ortega; each held a significance for the ‘old firm’. Perhaps to the end Greene played the Scarlet Pimpernel.
* * *
fn1 This is not to say that the SIS did not keep in touch with Greene. During his first visit to Saigon, Greene mentioned in his journal that he was met by Donald Lancaster and John Taylor – both men, I’ve been told, were SIS officers. The next day, 28 January 1951, he made another entry in his journal about yet another SIS man: ‘Beazley from Jakarta – obvious member of the “old firm”.’
35
White Night in Albany
The unbearable lightness of being.
– MILAN KUNDERA
JOHN CAIRNCROSS, A friend from Greene’s Intelligence days, recalled that when Greene and Catherine Walston started their affair they believed it would not last, they would grow tired of each other, but then it became ‘something much more firm and binding’. When Cairncross suggested that they make things more permanent, Greene responded: ‘We don’t want to upset things – the children are growing up as good Catholics, and she doesn’t in any case regard her existing marriage as valid because it was not a Catholic marriage.’1 The suggestion here was that everything in the relationship was fine and under control.
However, everything was not fine nor under Greene’s control. His relations with Catherine were becoming strained, the periods of separation imposed by her brought need for distraction – his work, his travels, his death wish, opium dens and brothels, and his ‘substitutes’ for her. His greatest desire still was to make her his wife, but more and more it seemed only a dream, a dream she did not share.
On occasions when the ‘embargo’ was lifted, Greene was like a nervous bridegroom. He went to the United States to see about filming The End of the Affair in February 1952 and the possibility arose that they might meet in New York since Catherine would be in Long Island visiting her sister. Greene booked into the Algonquin hotel and wrote urgently to Catherine, afraid that she might bring her sister too. They hadn’t seen each other for six months:
Please, please be alone. Come up to my sitting room at the Algonquin … First let’s look at each other like that time in Paris … In case it’s possible for you to spend the Wednesday night in New York I’ve got tickets for the new Rodgers-Hammerstein show, but I know it’s probably impossible. If only you could, I’d get another room for you [an attempt to be discreet as Greene was so much in the news because of his visa problems]. Dear dear dear I can hardly believe I’m going to see you … I’m so in love with you.2
After Catherine left he wrote of being anaesthetised ‘by life starting all over again and being with you after the beastly months. You are so dear … to me in New York and now another of the world’s capitals has become simply you’, and thanking her because she existed, he suddenly ended his letter humorously: ‘Somebody has doodled the word FUN FUN FUN all over this blotting pad in different frames. The bastard must have been out with you.’3
Whenever Greene returned to London he was profoundly aware that the embargo on his seeing Catherine, except irregularly, was back in place:
Last night, I had dinner with Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini … I start to be sorry to be home. I drink far more away from you than with you, especially where your ghost haunts … Elisabeth [Greene’s sister] and I got through 4 cocktails and 3 bottles of wine or 4 – one night. I found myself getting odd blackouts of memory … I love you and miss you and hate our new life of bits and pieces.4
It seems as if they could only see each other secretly and he was therefore always trying to persuade her to go for quick (and short) trips abroad: ‘But let’s go soon to Paris and do a dress show and a dinner at Vifors and a lunch in the Ritz grill.’5
There were times when Catherine disappointed Greene (the reference may be to The Living Room): ‘It’s all wrong that you are not at the play tonight.’ Yet in spite of the difficulties Greene was still tremendously in love with Catherine in 1953.
She was the least jealous of people and if Greene were to be denied her, he would create some temporary happiness with others. Trevor Wilson (so often with Greene during his visits to Vietnam) said:
He likes women. They have to be attractive to him, and he would immediately go after the lady. In Bangkok, we were at the airfield, and he suddenly saw a lovely lady – a beautiful person and he said ‘I must go and look at her’. He went over to see her and he made a date in Singapore. She was the wife of a hunter and he’d go off, and she’d say come down to Singapore and we’ll have a nice time there – that’s where she lived you see – so he booked a plane the next day and went off to Singapore. The beautiful woman stood up and he went after her. He appears to be shy to talk but somehow or other he manages it very well. But with men it’s quite different. He only met people that I knew for certain reasons. There are two things that he’d go to the ends of the earth for: to get information: to know, and to contact a beautiful woman.6
There were some very depressing nights in November 1951 in Hanoi, as his diary testifies. He lacked hope for any future with Catherine and felt a wistful sadness over a lost opportunity with Margot Fonteyn:
November 4 Sunday [1951]
Woke feeling a bit ill. Pouring with rain. Felt a bit dismal & lonely at Mass which always makes me miss C. In how many odd churches in strange places has one prayed the same prayer. [‘Dear God, let Catherine and I stay together always and one day let us be married.’] The depression of having nothing to look forward to. Only distraction from C to think of Margot. If I had stayed on the boat that might have developed enough … I could be happy these weeks if there was a future like there always has been … Cafryn very bad.
He had met Margot Fonteyn on Alexander Korda’s yacht. They had been on the verge of an affair, but he left the yacht too soon to return to Vietnam. In interview Greene commented:
we became close and the last night I had to leave … [the Elsewhere] to go off to Vietnam. And the last night we went out together and Vivien Leigh insisted on pushing herself in but then
got hopelessly drunk and then we’d been drinking heavily and nothing happened, but we agreed to meet when I came back from Vietnam, which we did. We used to go to greyhound racing together but by that time somebody had intervened. This was before her marriage, to a man I knew called Peter Moore whom I didn’t like – he was one of Korda’s people. She was a very nice person and we had every intention – she wrote to me in Vietnam, but Peter Moore slipped in between us.7
Margot Fonteyn’s letters to Greene have a wonderfully open style, but only one of them mentions the affair that did not come off:
Now that you seem to be living in space it is very difficult to contact you by phone …
Our season finishes in two weeks on 27th of this month [June] and I fly off to Spain early the next morning … I’m not really sure of my holiday plans but if I don’t see you before I leave I will ring as soon as I am back – by which time you will probably have gone to Indo China! When I think of it, it is just as well that we never started that affair as we would have had very little chance to continue it.8
If there could be nothing but friendship between Margot Fonteyn and Greene, the same could not be said for others. John Cairncross recalled visiting Greene in his flat at the bottom of St James’s Street and finding Greene with ‘an extremely attractive Australian girl’ – Jocelyn Rickards: ‘This was a girl’, said Cairncross, ‘who had been brought to a party of mine by Freddie Ayer [A. J. Ayer, the philosopher] … and later there she was, obviously very much launched with Graham.’9
I asked Greene about Jocelyn Rickards:
I did meet her at a cocktail party, and I’d got to give dinner to a man, a German, a Catholic who wanted to write a novel, a Prince or a Count. And I’d got Rose Macaulay coming and I felt I did need somebody else and this girl had been very sweet at the cocktail party and had fought her way to the bar and got me a dry martini, and I said will you have dinner with me at a little party … So that was the beginning at a cocktail party. And we had an affair which lasted over a few weeks, you know. And we remained friends ever after.10
Greene spoke of Jocelyn as ‘an old friend of mine – we’d had a bit of an affair’.
Such affairs were inevitable since he was only allowed to see Catherine rarely. But Catherine, after almost eight years, was still his first love: ‘I don’t even want a substitute for you – anyone would be such a dreary second best.’11
In August 1954 Greene went on holiday to Haiti. While there he stayed with Peter Brook (the theatre and film director) and Truman Capote. Greene found Capote ‘rather endearing and very funny’.12 He had an ‘odd psychic quality about him’:
I like Truman Capote very much … He is telling my fortune, and it gives one the creeps because one half believes … Between September 1956 and February 1957 I marry a girl 20 years younger who is either Canadian, American, New Zealand or Australian. I am very much in love and she is 5 months gone with a daughter who proves herself a genius by the time she is 18 … My whole life changes. We have a house abroad by the sea where we are very happy and about the same time I finish (or start) my best book. When I am in the seventies (I remain sexually active till the end!) we spend the summer in the mountains and the winters in the desert. We are very happy, but before we marry I go (in about 2 years’ time) through a great crisis with myself. There it is – watch out. I’m oddly depressed by it. I want to be with you till death.13
*
In the past Greene’s happiest times had been with Catherine in Rome and Capri, but in the mid 1950s he often went there alone, so that there were others to talk about in his letters to Catherine:
Rome: 19 March [1954]
Did I tell you I’m lunching with the nice Robert Graves’ daughter and Diana today?
Grand Hotel, Roma
I’ve grown to like Claudia – spent yesterday at sea with her and the children. Tonight I dine with Barbara [Rothschild] and a couple of German Monsignori. If I hadn’t this story to finish I’d take a plane to Guatemala. I wish you’d write and invite me to Paris or Brighton or a movie or to C.6 [Albany] so that I had some motive to return. I can’t go to Capri now as I’ve lent the villa to a rather wet pretty South African with a small girl who has run away from her rich lover. The stupid things one does when in drink.14
The nightmare worsened when he had nothing at the moment to write about, leaving him open to depression and boredom: ‘Nothing to distract me in Rome. Everybody’s away. I’ve finished all my books and even the paper stalls are shut.’ He spoke of taking a car the next day and scrambling down paths but that there’d be no fun in that:
I long for the 19th [when he and Catherine were to meet] – I’m heavy with longing for it, but it will be over so quickly. How I hope we can have a few weeks to live for. I dread long periods without you – everything, even the things one enjoys, is flat without you … one longs for you like a medicine that takes away the pain.15
Greene continued working in 1954 on The Quiet American, but Catherine was rarely with him. On 27 June he wrote: ‘sickness, two elections and Binnie. We’ve seen less of each other this year than any other year.’ Harry Walston had had nothing but bad luck in trying to become a Labour member of parliament. He had contested the 1945 election as a Liberal candidate and failed; he stood again as a Labour candidate for Cambridge in 1951 and 1955, then in 1957 and 1959 and failed again.
Catherine, who helped Harry during elections, had to keep scandal to a minimum, which was probably a further reason why she and Greene met more and more abroad and not in the vicinity of the Walstons’ home. ‘I’ll be seeing Harry this evening,’ Greene wrote, ‘and I’ll see if he’s really concerned, or just thinks it would be a little nicer.’16 Although it appears that Harry allowed Catherine to go off on these jaunts with Greene, they had to be spaced out and not disrupt family matters.
During the period 1954 to 1956 Greene’s love for Catherine was undiminished, but she was making it increasingly difficult for it to flourish. Catherine often suffered a deep religious guilt:
I know that you are worried [Greene wrote] and unhappy at the conflict which you feel between your relation with me and Catholicism. That means that I know – and it’s always a grim thought – that in that way you’d be happier if I left you. And that for a lover is a horrid thought. One wants to give happiness to somebody one loves … and not take it away.
My case, you see, is different. I would still stay in the fringes of the church if you left me – perhaps not even in the fringes, for almost all my Catholic writing has been done since I knew you and I have certainly been to the sacraments far more often in our five years than in the previous eight. So with me – as far as you are concerned – there’s no real conflict, and sometimes I hate the conflict I cause in you.17
In June 1955 Greene was still working on The Quiet American at Anacapri. He loved to have Catherine by his side when working on a novel. In a letter to her he had quoted William Faulkner’s praise of The End of the Affair, then added: ‘So don’t let Philip [Caraman] or anyone make you think you are bad for my writing. You’ve produced perhaps the best book.’18 This time it was possible for Catherine to join him in Anacapri for a short visit. By 24 June she had returned to Newton Hall and he was missing her: ‘Work goes on, but without much fun as you and Scrabble [then a new and popular game] aren’t waiting.’
By Monday, his last promised week to finish The Quiet American, he admitted he’d reached 60,000 words, but what was troubling him was their failure to see each other often enough. If she had been there he would have finished his book earlier: ‘much easier with you around … So much of the trouble between us and the lack of contact has been a) physical with mental effects – lives like the irascible old colonels from India have b) absences – we’ve seen less of each other this year.’19
Greene was becoming very uneasy about any possible future with Catherine. He had been happy with her at Anacapri, but the holiday was marred by the memory of a crisis: ‘It was a lovely working holiday but I wish “Rome
” hadn’t happened. It made me feel I live on a precipice.’20
He returned to England and went down to Sussex to see his mother and sister Elisabeth and her husband Rodney, but he was melancholy: ‘It’s a beastly day … the rain pressing on the window, and there isn’t a film to be seen, and no one to talk to … I think sometimes I ought to get out of England and stay away. [He moved to France in 1966.]’ His love for Vivien now seemed ‘very tiny and far distant, more distant than childhood. One looks back across a huge chasm … I wish you weren’t this side of the chasm and everything else so separated.’21 On 7 July 1955, he wrote: ‘Just [received] a parcel of the uniform edition of The End of the Affair … that book of ill omen.’22
Greene’s anxiety that the great love of his life was slipping away is obvious. As always, periods of silence on Catherine’s part worried him:
Catherine, Catherine, I wish you had the imagination to know what mental torture you can cause … I am sending this into the blue and telegrams because nobody knows where you are or when you are returning. It’s a pain speaking and there are other things we have to talk to you about … This is the worst period and the worst strain since April 1950 – or was it 49. I don’t know whether it’s not the end. My dear, my dear. I wish you knew what you do to people. And I thought it was only my craziness.23
The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 63