by Lara Feigel
Graham Greene spent the spring of 1947 longing to return to Ireland and specifically to the peace it had brought him. He was infuriated with both Vivien and Dorothy. The exhaustion that can come of lying to two women who are no longer loved finds its way into The Heart of the Matter, which he finished on 11 June, convinced that only the final third, which he had written since the first trip to Achill, was good. Here he observes that it is better to avoid lying to two people if possible, but that it is tempting to lie out of pity. Scobie faces the pain that inevitably shadows any human relationship and is saddened as he sees himself coming to feel the same kind of intense pity for his mistress as he feels for his wife, knowing from experience how pity always remains after love and passion have died.
Scobie, like Greene, has spent his life dreaming of peace. Peace seems to him the most beautiful word there is. ‘My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you.’ But with his wife and mistress, Scobie fails to find any sort of lasting peace. In the end he commits suicide, submitting himself to an eternity of restlessness in order to provide the women at least with the peace he lacks. Graham, unlike Scobie, had been given another chance. He had found with Catherine the peace that he had failed to find with Vivien or Dorothy. In August he told her that before she appeared he used to have strangely abstract dreams of peace (like Scobie’s dream about the moon) but that now he dreamt about her instead. Two days later, he defined the difference between peacefulness (which he experienced with Dorothy) and peace (which he experienced with Catherine). The previous day with Dorothy had been peaceful, but this was simply a negative state, free from scenes and active unhappiness. Peace, by contrast, was positive, and experiences like being in love and making love which were not in themselves peaceful could still bring peace.
On 27 June, Catherine returned to Achill, and Graham wrote her a plangent letter while she was on her way there. ‘You are in the air, Caffrin, and I’m – very much – on the earth.’ He reminded her that he loved her, missed her (‘your voice saying “good morning, Graham” at tea time’) and wanted her, returning lovingly to his memories of shared domesticity in Achill by way of involving her in their love. He wanted to be in her cottage, filling the turf bucket, listening to the clank of her washing up as he worked, or helping her to make lunch. He was thirsty for orange juice at 3 in the morning and longed to see her nursing the fire in her pyjama top.
Two days later, after a weekend of being dragged around country houses by Vivien, he wrote despairingly to Catherine that he was missing her obsessively and was learning to hate beautiful houses and beautiful furniture. He was desperate for a few days of happiness and therefore was going to set about pursuing her to Ireland, where he could finish the film script that would become The Fallen Idol. He wanted to kiss her, touch her and make love to her; he was longing just to sit next to her in the car. Even mass felt dead and boring without the awareness of her shoulder half an inch from his. He was not a proper Catholic away from her.
The next day he was already making desperate attempts to find transport to Ireland but was finding it difficult. He had received a letter from Catherine, and was pleased that she was missing him and that Achill was filled with memories of him for her as well. Luckily, he was writing The Fallen Idol for Alexander Korda, the film mogul who would go on to produce The Third Man. Thanks to Korda’s influence Graham managed to procure a seat in an American Overseas Airlines plane to Shannon Airport, arriving on 10 July. He wrote to announce the news to Catherine, bubbling with extravagant enthusiasm. Would he really see her there? And where would they spend the night? He would be happy in sleeping bags on a turf field. Graham spent the following week counting down the days and found that he was too excited to read anything except poetry. He wished that they could escape to Romania and live alone together for months or years until they were tired of each other.
Once more, Achill was the setting for intense and straightforward love. Although Graham and Catherine would spend much longer periods of time in other places – most notably in Italy – Graham would always think of Achill as the place where love could flourish most easily. In August he wrote wistfully that he longed to have her beside him lazily reading on the Achill sofa, interrupting her every ten minutes with words and every twelve minutes with kisses. When Catherine returned to Achill without him in the autumn of 1949, he wished that he could be with her, watching her make up the fire and wondering whether to wait to make love again until the next morning or to start trying to interest her as soon as she had finished the turf. ‘Dear dear dear’, he wrote, and the words were enough to conjure an image of a red dressing gown and of Catherine pushing a comb through her hair during their first morning on Achill. The red dressing gown, the turf fire and the mattress on the floor joined her hair against his face in the plane as indexes of shared passion. In 1951 he told her that after four and a half years he still loved her as he had loved her on Achill, brushing her hair in her scarlet dressing gown. Even now, he could feel her hair on his skin and he never boarded a plane without looking for her in the seat next to him.
Greene on Achill Island, 1947
Graham inscribed not just the interior of Catherine’s cottage but the whole of Irish history and literature into the mythology of their love. Between them, they got to know several Irish writers. Some years earlier, Graham had helped Flann O’Brien to find a publisher for At Swim-Two-Birds, which he always regarded as a masterpiece. In 1976, Sean O’Faolain thanked Graham for sending him to Italy and in the process converting him from his ‘Irish faith to ROMAN Catholicism’. For Graham, these friendships with Irish writers now came to be part of his love affair with Catherine.
After arguing with Catherine at the beginning of September 1947, Graham went into a bookshop and was excited to find a list of titles published by the Cuala Press. At once he was in love again and he celebrated by sending her the list to choose any volumes she would like to own. He himself had bought Arable Holdings by F. R. Higgins because he had opened it at ‘Elopement’ and felt his out-of-love mood vanish:
O, maybe we’ll live a while in Killala,
Whom few things change with tide and tree,
Where love had been weaned and the streets in mildew
Just hobble to the lean sea!
There even my jealousy would believe you –
Were you ever so dreamy after the men
Of a town that yawned as the French marched through it
And never awoke since then!
Collecting Cuala Press editions together was a way for Graham and Catherine to grant a seriousness to a mutual love of Ireland that had begun with a turf fire and a mattress on the floor. And it was earnest for Catherine as well as Graham. In 1951 their friend the priest Father Caraman proposed an Irish number of his Catholic magazine The Month and Catherine wrote back enthusiastically, listing writers to approach, including Sean O’Faolain. ‘Graham has just come in,’ she reported, ‘and we have been talking about the Irish Month and he had some good suggestions – at least we think so.’
Graham always associated Irish literature with his love for Catherine. From 1948 onwards, he was making Catherine diaries each year, which he adorned with a quotation for each day. These tended to be grouped around the often related themes of love, death and religion. Large numbers of the quotations describing love and sex were from Irish writers. Early in the first diary (for 1949), Graham included Frank O’Connor’s translation of The Midnight Court, which evoked Achill with its description of
The stack of turf, the lamp to light,
The sodded wall of a winter’s night.
Most frequently quoted in the diaries is Yeats, whether he is describing the painful delights of obsessive love in
When I clamber to the heights of sleep
Or when I grow excited with wine
Suddenly I meet your face.
or
Lying alone on a bed
Remembering a woman’s beauty,
Alone with a crazy head
; or the more transitory delights of sex itself in
All creation shivers
With that sweet cry
or
I offer to love’s play
My dark declivities.
For Graham, sex had become quintessentially Irish because Ireland was the setting for his defining sexual experiences with Catherine; for those moments when sex and love came together most inseparably.
After the second trip to Achill, Graham missed Catherine more intensely than ever. That summer, they did not meet as often as he would have liked and they bickered frequently when they did. At the beginning of August, Graham asked Catherine despairingly if she thought they only liked each other in Achill. But the tempestuousness was part of the passion. Vivien later said that her mistake with Graham had been to be always quiet or gentle. She thought that he would have preferred her to scream and fight. Later in August, Graham complained to Catherine that his cigarette burn had completely gone and was in need of renewal. Dorothy, too, endowed her lover with cigarette burns during the more passionate phases of their relationship.
Graham’s irritation with Catherine never lasted long, and he spent the second half of August longing for her, body and mind. Sitting in his office, he was delighted to have a dull day lightened by a postcard from Catherine with a picture of the Galway harbour on the front. He fell in love, reading five lines and looking at the Galway swans. And he found it cheering but odd that he could keep falling in love with the same person, often several times a day.
Graham informed Catherine half-jokingly that he was willing to renounce Catholicism for her sake, and wished that she was a pagan. He could become a pagan overnight, though he might relapse back into Catholicism after 17 years when he was 60 and she was nearly 50. But two weeks later he complained that casual sex with ‘substitutes’ was having little effect on his restlessness and he wished that Catherine would stay in the church except when she was with him. He now wanted them both to relinquish other lovers, at least for a few years.
One potential substitute had also brought Graham happily in contact with Ireland. At the end of August, he told Catherine that after dreaming all night of catching a plane to Shannon, he began to cut the leaves of a Cuala Press book by Frank O’Connor that she had given him. At that moment his phone rang and his secretary announced that there was a call from Peadar O’Donnell, the writer and former IRA commander who had taken over the editorship of The Bell from Sean O’Faolain in 1946. Ireland seemed to be breaking in on him uncontrollably; he half expected the window to be smashed by someone throwing a bit of turf. In fact it was not O’Donnell himself, but a girl he had passed Graham’s way, wanting to have lunch and talk about The Bell. Out of curiosity, Graham met her at the beginning of September and found that she was a friend not just of Peadar but of Ernie O’Malley.
O’Malley was a former IRA Assistant Chief of Staff, now a writer living on Achill Island. He was a lover of Catherine’s, and it was thanks to O’Malley that she had found herself on Achill in the first place. In 1935 O’Malley had become engaged to a wealthy American called Helen Hooker and Catherine’s grandmother, Sarah Sheridan, was sent to Ireland to give her verdict on the O’Malley family. As a result, Catherine and Harry were introduced to Ernie and Helen in America, and became friends in England and Ireland. By 1946, Ernie was a frequent visitor to Catherine’s Achill cottage and his influence, as well as John Rothenstein’s and Graham Greene’s, was crucial in her conversion to Catholicism. On first meeting Ernie, Graham was impressed. He later wrote that as a boy he had romantically admired the Old IRA; Michael Collins had been a hero of his youth. In 1981 Graham Greene would recall Ernie O’Malley as an enchanting figure, remembering a day in Achill when he had asked Ernie what time high tide was. Ernie hesitated for a while and then began to look cautious, with the attitude of an Old IRA man resolved not to give information away to a potential enemy. ‘Well Graham, that depends,’ he eventually replied. But even if Graham respected Ernie, he was always a jealous lover. As a result he was particularly pleased to be introduced to Peadar O’Donnell’s girl because it might be fun to cuckold Ernie, though it would be even better if Ernie could be supplied with his own bedfellow and stop bothering Graham’s own.
Peadar’s girl did not in fact manage to distract Graham from his longing for Catherine. Although she was lustrous and blonde she had a babyish manner and a tiresome accent, and she wrote poetry, which she inflicted on Graham. He spent the rest of September missing Catherine and looking forward to a third trip to Achill, which they had planned for the end of October. They were in need of time to stretch in, time to quarrel in, time to love in and time to sleep. At the end of September Graham and Vivien went to New York and he felt deadened by the lack of love; he was looking forward to Ireland as a flight from Purgatory. What if they were not pretending but were really in love, he suggested to Catherine. But then at the start of October the proposed trip to Ireland began to look less certain. Graham pleaded with Catherine to go ahead with it, homesick for the feel of the Atlantic blowing in through the top of the door and for the fresh dampness of the salt on his skin. It was not to be. The Walstons’ other plans intervened. Although he would spend the rest of his life longing for the rusty gate, the turf fire and the mattress on the floor, and most of all for the peace that they brought, Graham Greene would never visit Achill again.
See notes on Chapter 18
19
‘The returning memory of a dream long forgotten’
Hilde Spiel in Berlin and Rose Macaulay in Spain, 1947
For both Hilde Spiel and Rose Macaulay, 1947 was a year of rejuvenation. In Berlin, Hilde Spiel found renewed excitement among some of the worst ruins of Europe. Meanwhile Rose Macaulay escaped these recent bomb sites to bask in the colours of the Spanish and Portuguese Mediterranean and contemplate the more picturesque ruins of an earlier age.
Hilde Spiel moved to Berlin in November 1946 and was immediately exhilarated by her new life. This was a pleasant surprise given that the decision to leave England had been so difficult. Even in the weeks just before Hilde and the children’s departure, she and Peter were still equivocating about whether they should make the move at all. That summer Peter had tried to assuage Hilde’s doubts by assuring her that it was only a temporary move. While they were there they could use Berlin as a kind of headquarters from which to see the continent as a whole. But in October 1946 he wrote to her with less conviction from Hamburg, where he was worn out from working on Die Welt:
This life cannot go on. I’m so exhausted, cold, and ill, I really don’t know what to do with myself. The food in Hamburg is very bad, there is no heating yet, it rains, is wet and damp, and I’m just a bundle of misery and unhappiness.
He was longing for the sun, for rest, and for enough money to enjoy himself again, and was worried that he would never fulfil his literary ambitions. In this state, even Wimbledon seemed desirable.
I sometimes see myself back in my little study in Wimbledon, in a warm room, with a good lamp, surrounded by my books, and quiet, and I see Christine come in and talk to me – and an overwhelming longing comes over me to be back, only back, and sit with you and my children.
He asked Hilde to decide what to do for him. If she were to announce that she did not in fact want to come out after all, then in his present mood he would be grateful for the excuse to quit Germany altogether.
Hilde wrote back sympathetically, suggesting that they could indeed return to England, as long as they left Wimbledon. They could even rent a house like Elizabeth Bowen’s in Regent’s Park. There is a sense of relief in Hilde’s letter; it is clear that at this stage she would rather stay in London if it could be partly Peter’s own idea. But by the time he received his wife’s message Peter was again confident about the need to move to Berlin and happy to decide on her behalf. ‘My decision is: we are going ahead. I’m in no fear at all of losing England.’ He assured Hilde that there were ‘more and more nice people’ coming out from England and that i
t was possible to see very little of the Germans. ‘I do feel we must not miss the next 12 months in Berlin. They are going to be the most decisive in history. To be able to say, later: we were there, we knew all these people – that will be worth a lot.’ And so in November 1946, Hilde, Christine and Anthony joined a ship full of women and children and WAAFs all making their way to Germany. And she quickly came to feel that she was moving with the current of her time once again, looking back on this as ‘the richest, most diverse, most exciting and closest to reality’ period in her life.