by Lara Feigel
so widespread as it appears immediately after a bombardment, and neither the destruction of the town by one side in that savage and pernicious dispute, nor of its churches by the other . . . is now very apparent, though valuable things perished in both.
Buildings clearly could and did survive. Witnessing the recovery of these Spanish towns seems to have restored Rose Macaulay’s faith in her own equally indefatigable powers of revival.
Recovery also came through the warmth and light of southern Europe. Spain, like Portugal, was a land of colour. Rose Macaulay described the mountains above the Puerto de Selva as evoking the shifting colours on a dove’s breast. The houses were painted white; their doors and shutters were vibrant blue and green. There were brightly coloured plants growing all around. It did not matter that parts of the village had been destroyed by both sides during the Civil War; the colours at least remained. Relaxing into the scenery, Rose started to enjoy a sense of irresponsible freedom. She was happy driving carelessly along the coast in her trusted Morris, expressing only mild alarm when the bumper, the exhaust and even the steering axle (‘rather startling!’) fell off along the way. In Fabled Shore she reported that over the course of the 4,000 miles of road she covered in Spain and then Portugal, she learnt that cars were not as firmly held together as she had hoped. Parts of them were liable to fall off. ‘If these objects, which I detested, but which were, it seemed, essential to my car’s structure, action, and well being, could be fastened on again with straps, I fastened them on with straps, until I reached the next garage’; otherwise she walked off in search of help.
Feisty and self-sufficient, Rose was settling into the persona of the redoubtable English eccentric that friends would remember her as in old age. Twice when inns listed in her out-of-date guide books turned out no longer to exist she inflated her wartime air mattress and bedded down under the open sky. She informed her cousin that she had passed a lovely night in the woods beneath a moon in the Porta Coeli Cartuja, despite getting badly bitten by mosquitoes.
Sleeping outside, diving off rocks into empty bays whenever possible, Rose was also recovering the sensual pleasure that she had lost with the death of Gerald O’Donovan. As always, she swam obsessively. She told a hitchhiker that she would happily drive to any destination but that her passenger would have to wait patiently while Rose stopped off to bathe along the way. One of the most joyful moments of the trip came in the village of Torremolinos near Malaga where Rose swam in the evening, underneath the moon, and then again the next morning, dropping into the green water amid cactuses, golden cucumbers, pumpkins and palms, and swimming out alongside a boat filled with fishermen who were hacking mussels off the rocks and singing. For Rose the beauty of the place and of the hour – the smooth opal morning sea, the spread of the bay, the colourful garden – was like ‘the returning memory of a dream long forgotten’. She was learning to experience alone the joy she had found on holidays with her lover.
Nonetheless, Rose remained lonely, especially after her return to London. It would be some time before she could find a more permanent mental equilibrium. She was as distressed by the political situation in Britain as Bowen and Yorke were, complaining to her sister about the Labour mismanagement of the economic crisis following the nationalisation of the coal industry and assuming that a Conservative government would have avoided making so many mistakes. During the winter of 1947 she wrote the account of Spain and Portugal that would be published in 1949 as Fabled Shore. This book is for the most part a joyful and eccentric montage of Spanish colour, but it ends with a scene whose bleakness betrays Rose’s own.
The final pages take place in the Cape St Vincent in Portugal, which Rose Macaulay describes as ‘a desolation of ruins’. There are chapel-shaped, roofless buildings spread about the cliff; the silence and solitude are eerie. This is Rose’s second night of bedding down on the ground and it is less peaceful and pleasant than her first. By this point she is fed up with inns that fail to materialise; distressed to find herself ‘stranded, supperless and roofless, at the world’s end’. She makes her bed in the roofless apse of what was once a chapel and the night is spent among dark and ghost-trodden ruins. All night the wind moans coldly around her; ‘the long beams of the lighthouse . . . speared and shafted the desolate wastes of the sea which bounds the known world’.
See notes on Chapter 19
20
‘The place I really did lose my heart to was Vienna’
Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen and Hilde Spiel in Vienna, 1948–9
In February 1948 Graham Greene arrived in Vienna to research the story for The Third Man, a new film to be directed by Carol Reed. It was freezing cold. As they landed the plane glided across roofs covered with thick snow and then skidded on the sleet-clad tarmac. Greene was met at the airport by a press photographer, waiting to catch him unshaved, and transported to the famous Sacher Hotel, which had been commandeered as the British headquarters. The hotel itself would feature in The Third Man as a symbol of the lost world of old Vienna. Here the hero Holly Martins is caught in shadow against the white opulence of the gleaming marble pillars; enormous ornate vases loom into view as he climbs the stairs. Installed amid broken chandeliers and crumbling stucco flourishes, Greene felt desolate and alone; he was missing Catherine more than he had ever done before. Just after he arrived at the hotel he wrote a letter begging her to marry him, in a registry office if necessary. He had her photograph stuck in a letter rack and felt as though he were an undergraduate in love for the first time.
Graham was able to propose to Catherine with confidence because he was finally in the process of separating from Vivien. The previous November, Vivien had learnt about the full extent of Graham and Catherine’s relationship after a series of gradual revelations. In June 1947 he had told Vivien formally about Dorothy. He wrote to her afterwards assuring her that he felt closer to her as a result of his confession and that he still loved her. He was now convinced that the marriage could survive and that their estrangement was the result of his own foolishness. That October after an afternoon in Oxford he left a note for Vivien promising her that he was not going back to anyone in London, as Dorothy had been dispatched to West Africa and would not be returning for some time.
But at the same time as Graham was comforting Vivien he was writing to Catherine, longing to push the rusty gate and see it swing, desperate for peace. At breakfast in Oxford on 20 November, Vivien opened a letter addressed to Catherine in New York which had been sent back to Graham marked ‘return to sender’. It was the day of the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth, and Vivien had been looking forward to the celebrations for weeks. The engagement to Prince Philip of Greece had been announced in July, and although much of Britain was ambivalent about this union with a foreigner, people were generally grateful for a moment of glamour amid the continuing austerity. Londoners brought out their Blitz mattresses and spent the night on the pavements waiting for the procession the next day. In Oxford there were street parties and gatherings as people listened to the wedding on the radio. Vivien’s son Francis watched while she opened the letter and asked her if anything was the matter. She took the letter to Campion Hall, where a year earlier she had celebrated Catherine’s christening, and showed it to her friend Father Tom Corbishley, who was listening to the coverage of the wedding. The priest went against Catholic doctrine and told Vivien to divorce her husband. She returned home and telephoned Graham at Eyre and Spottiswoode. As always, he tried to defuse the situation, insisting that it was only a love letter. ‘I know what real feeling is and this is real,’ Vivien informed him. Graham acquiesced. ‘I am going to leave you,’ he replied. ‘We’ll be going away together.’
The letter was particularly hurtful because it began with a description of a visit to Oxford, where Graham had been comforting Vivien. Her scenes were less violent than Dorothy’s, but he felt tired afterwards, and wished he could escape somewhere, somehow. Vivien read Graham’s declarations of love for Catherine in his famili
ar knotty handwriting. He wanted the first drink of the day with her; he was longing to wake beside her at 3am; and he was in love with her and wanted no one else.
Graham arrived in Oxford a few hours later and informed Vivien again that he was planning to leave her. She cried, prostrated on the floor, her head on Graham’s knee. Graham assured her, in a moment of cruelty that Vivien would never forget, that he would still send her the proofs of his novels to read. After Graham had gone, Vivien went to mass at Blackfriars and donated her engagement ring to the collection.
There is no account of this day by Graham Greene himself, but it is clear from his subsequent letters to Catherine that he continued to feel guilty about Vivien. What was it, then, that prompted him to behave so callously when it came to the actual moment of separation? Since the first trip to Achill seven months earlier, Graham had become gradually more exhausted from the strain of being responsible for the happiness of three women, all of whom, in different ways, he loved. The letters where he assured Vivien of his continued affection do seem to have been ingenuous. He loved her as a partner and a family member; twenty years of shared history could not be easily forgotten. He would rather have her there, as a comforting presence in his life, than not there at all. He was used to her reading the drafts and proofs of his novels, and he liked to retreat occasionally from his volatile affairs and busy public life into the ordinary domesticity of life in Oxford. If Vivien could only feel the same way about him then he would rather stay married than separate. He was still enough of a Catholic to wish to avoid divorce if possible; it was apparent that it would be better for the children if their parents remained at least nominally together; and besides, he was not confident about his chances of persuading Catherine to leave Harry.
However, in his more honest moments Graham was also aware that Vivien did not share his feelings and that she wanted more love and more loyalty than he was prepared to give her. He was conscious, too, that she had a right to expect this. He had married her knowing that she was hesitant about sex; he had only gained her initially tentative love by overwhelming her with protestations of the intensity and constancy of his own. In assuring her of his continued affections he was attempting to fulfil his duty to her by convincing himself as well as her of his love. But the strain told, again and again, because there was no day or hour when he was not obsessively thinking about, desiring and needing Catherine.
Vivien’s phone call on the day of the Royal Wedding came as a surprise, and Graham’s first reaction was to attempt to pacify her and to tell her what she wished to hear. When she stopped him from doing this, Vivien offered him a way out which, in the relief of the moment, he accepted. By naming Graham’s feelings for Catherine as love, Vivien suggested that she herself had the strength at least to acknowledge the failure of their own marriage. Graham accepted and therefore exacted this strength when he declared that the marriage was over. Because the decision to separate had been precipitated by Vivien’s phone call, Graham did not have time to think about how to end the marriage lovingly. And if Vivien’s account is accurate, he did not even attempt to be loving. Perhaps he felt that by behaving cruelly he was offering her clarity; that there was more cruelty in his continual, half-hearted attempts to retain her affection while offering her only the dilapidated remnants of a marriage.
By ignoring Vivien’s protests, and by failing to clamber down onto the floor and comfort her, Graham perhaps believed that he was behaving honestly at last by no longer offering a love in which he could only periodically believe. By nonetheless promising her that she would still be given his proofs to read, Graham was offering her instead the continued partnership that he wanted and hoped that in time she would come to want too. Of course, it did not seem that way to Vivien. And with more time to think and to accrue guilt, Graham came to acknowledge his own callousness and to feel remorseful about the selfishness of his behaviour. However, although he could regret his own selfishness he could not regret his love for Catherine, which he saw as an unquestionable and unchosen given and as a force for good; for a unique happiness and peace which he felt had to be given a chance to exist.
Released from his immediate obligations to Vivien, Graham spent Christmas with the Walstons in Thriplow, fairly happily accepting his place within Catherine’s extended family. On Boxing Day he left a note for Catherine thanking her for a joyful Christmas. He was surprised how little he had thought about his children. The following week he told her that he was feeling happy for ten reasons. The first, he proclaimed insistently, was their mutual love: he was in love with her, and she was in love with him, or would be when they were united again. The second, more contentiously, was his religion. Throughout their affair, both Graham and Catherine were trying to remain ‘in the church’ where possible, which meant confessing to their adultery when they were apart. He now announced that he had decided to avoid leaving the church for anything or anybody less important to him than she was, even though this would deprive him of stories to tell her (from the start, Graham and Catherine had been unfaithful to each other partly for the sake of exciting and annoying each other through their subsequent accounts). Fourth in the list came Dorothy, whom he believed had become more independent. And last of all came an unexpected sense of indifference about Vivien.
From this point, Graham committed himself fully to Catherine, and found her absences harder to endure. Missing her viscerally and desolately, Graham now saw Vienna itself as bleakly miserable. Like Colonel Calloway, the narrator of the novel version of The Third Man, Graham Greene had never been to Vienna and so could not remember the Strauss music and charm of the city that was once the home of Hilde Spiel. For Calloway, Vienna is merely a city of icy ruins, presided over by the broken Prater and littered with smashed tanks that have not yet been cleared. He does not have enough imagination to visualise it as it once was, any more than he can picture the Sacher Hotel as anything other than a transit hotel for English officers, or see Kärtnerstrasse as a fashionable shopping arcade instead of a street which existed only at eye level, repaired up to the first storey. Now, this former boulevard of Old Vienna is inhabited by a Russian soldier in a fur cap with a rifle over his shoulder, a few prostitutes, clustered around the American Information Office, and men in overcoats, sipping ersatz coffee by the windows.
Greene was depressed by the rubble and did not like the complacency of being on the winning side. He complained to Catherine that he found it humiliating to be one of the victors because all the jokes were turned against the winner, never against the defeated. But the next day it started to snow and he found that everything looked suddenly lovely. He was driven to the enormous central cemetery which would provide the setting of the opening scene of The Third Man, and discovered that the monuments looked grotesque under the snow: white bonnets protruded over the eyes of naked stone women.
Greene found in the Vienna that he would immortalise in The Third Man a new manifestation of Greeneland. Here were the seedy, downtrodden faces, the smoke-filled rooms, the pasty naked dancers and the shabby gangsters of his 1930s novels. In this respect post-war Vienna provided a continuation of wartime London. Indeed, recaptured in the stark black and white of The Third Man’s film noir cinematography, Vienna acquires many of the visual characteristics of London in the Blitz with its surreal juxtapositions, picturesque ruins and dark, torchlit streets where the surviving façades of grand buildings tower above messy piles of rubble.
Night-time in Vienna in The Third Man (1948)
Shown round by a young film assistant called Elizabeth Montagu, Greene was swept into the Viennese social life that had enveloped Hilde Spiel two years earlier. He attended a run of social gatherings organised by the British and was introduced to Peter Smollett, who took him on a tour of the Russian zone across the canal. It was from Smollett that he learnt about the penicillin racketeering that he would use in the plot of The Third Man. At this point penicillin was only given to military hospitals, and hospital orderlies were stealing the medicine and
selling it on the private and civilian market. The illegal penicillin was often diluted, which meant that children injected with it frequently died (both because it was too weak to have any effect and because they were infected by the polluted water).
Greene dragged Elizabeth Montagu to strip clubs where they were entertained by prostitutes who seemed as ruined as their city. ‘Hideous they were,’ she reported later, wondering ‘where did such hags come from?’ In the novel of The Third Man Greene described the Oriental as a sordid smoke-filled night club where visitors found the same risqué photographs on the stairs and the same half drunk Americans at the bar as they would find in any squalid bar in a shabby European city. This did not mean that he was not happy to frequent just these haunts himself. And the Casanova Revue bar provided the setting for several set-piece scenes in the film. Holly Martins talks to the shady Baron Kurtz while serenaded by a scruffy violinist; officials in military uniform seem out of place amid the faded decadence of the draped fabrics and dancing girls, and the small tables are watched over by the silhouetted figures of naked women on the wall.
While in Vienna, Greene spent an evening with Elizabeth Bowen, who was there on a British Council lecture tour. During the day, she was busy addressing the kinds of audiences that Greene would satirise in The Third Man. Here Martins is hijacked by a taxi which drives off abruptly and hurtles malevolently through the city. In any other thriller it would lead him to a macabre death but in Greene’s hands it lands him in a lecture room. Martins (the author of racy thrillers) finds himself called upon to assume the role of an experimental novelist and address a collection of earnest readers on the subject of the contemporary novel. ‘Do you believe, Mr Martins, in the stream of consciousness?’ he is asked.