The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  If Vivien retained any illusions, remaining with Graham would bring only unhappiness and disappointment. It was possible that they could still share a life in which Oxford remained Graham’s headquarters, but there would have to be no conditions for either of them. This, he would be prepared to try. But if this arrangement would only make for more misery, he thought that an open separation would involve less strain for both of them than the disguised separation they were engaged in at present.

  On 10 June 1948 Greene arrived in Vienna for a three-week trip, which coincided with a visit to the city by Hilde Spiel. Both were shocked by the changes that had taken place since they were last there. Currency reform had been introduced and the value of money was now stable, which meant that consumer goods were to be had in plenty. As a result there were a number of bankruptcies, including several small publishing firms and intellectual periodicals such as Plan, which Spiel was previously involved in. ‘Vienna has become a little Zurich,’ Spiel noted disappointedly in her diary. Greene was accompanied this time by Carol Reed and the film crew, and he was embarrassed by how much the city had changed since he had written the film treatment. The black-market restaurants were now serving legal albeit scanty meals; many of the ruins had been cleared away. He had to keep assuring Reed that Vienna had once really been as he had described it in February.

  Only the Russian sector was still as ruined as ever, and it was there that they were going to film the climactic scene in the ruined ferris wheel at the Prater, where Harry Lime contemplates pushing Holly Martins to his death. In her account of her 1946 trip to Vienna, Spiel recollected the Prater as it had been in her youth, when pairs of lovers strolled among pink and white chestnut blossom and large comfortable families enjoyed large comfortable meals in the coffee houses. Throughout the war she had looked forward to taking her daughter to try out the ferris wheel, with its multicoloured cars, lit by lanterns. Visiting it after the war she was shocked by the wilderness that had taken the place of that cheerful landscape.

  Shellfire and a blaze that was allowed to rage unhindered through the wood and coloured lacquer of the booths have obliterated it from the earth as though it had never existed.

  The wheel was now bent and twisted and lacking its wagons, towering in poignant solitude above the desert of charred timber. No effort was made to reconstruct the Prater in the immediate post-war period. In the novel version of The Third Man Greene describes the shattered Prater with its bones jutting through the snow. Now it was spring, but according to Elizabeth Montagu the wheel looked ‘like a sort of nightmare: something out of Hieronymus Bosch’. Montagu was still accompanying Greene on many of his missions, this time following him to the vast network of sewers in which Harry Lime is finally killed in the film. Greene portrays this in the film treatment as a strange unknown world which lies under our feet: an underground city of waterfalls and rivers. Here again was wartime Greeneland, transposed onto post-war Vienna. In the film the sewers are a blacked-out underground world lit by the torches of the trench-coated police, who resemble wardens in the London blackout.

  Writing to Catherine, Graham complained about a general feeling of boredom. Apart from Carol Reed, who was getting more and more likable on closer acquaintance, the people were tedious. He was drinking too much and thinking too much and he was missing Catherine. Even the success of The Heart of the Matter meant little without her. Graham wondered if there would be more to look forward to if he was a failure instead of a success. There were plenty of other women available, but Catherine made everyone else seem unenticing. Elizabeth Montagu was nice and very friendly, but lacked sex appeal; he was taking the wife of a British Council official out to lunch while her husband was in England, but his heart was not in the game. A few days later he had dispelled a fit of blues with hard drinking and a night at Maxim’s nightclub with an attractive dancer. But he had not gone to bed with her because she lived an hour and a half away and Graham wanted an early night.

  Graham was longing to return to his flat in St James’s and to find Catherine there with a bottle. Most of all he was yearning, as always, for Achill. He had now had enough of being successful and of spending his time in smart hotels and bars. He wished that they could spend a few days in Ireland in her old Ford, motoring from the cottage to the Sound and back. In fact Graham spent the summer and autumn of 1948 not in Achill but in London, New York and Los Angeles. Catherine went to Achill in October and Graham found it painful to think of her in the quiet candlelight of Achill while he was in Harlem. He was disappointed to fly back via Prestwick and not via Shannon, which meant they could not meet in Ireland. In August he wrote to her from New York where he was finding the glamour stultifying without her. He was tired of being rich and wondered if she would still like him if he was poor and unsuccessful but happy.

  Meanwhile Hilde Spiel’s June 1948 trip to Vienna had been abruptly curtailed on 23 June by news of the start of the Berlin blockade. That spring America had finalised plans to inject financial aid into the ailing European economies in an effort to combat the spread of Soviet-style Communism. Named after the American Secretary of State George Marshall, the Marshall Plan came as a great relief for Great Britain, enabling Attlee to put aside some of his most stringent plans for austerity cuts. Initially, Marshall Aid was also offered to the Soviet Union, which predictably rejected it; as a result, the plans put in place to enable American aid to be sent to West Germany escalated incipient Cold War tensions. At the beginning of June the Western Allies announced their intention to establish a separate West German state, which would receive the Marshall Aid. On 21 June they introduced a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, into their zones in an attempt to stabilise the German economy. Two days later the Russians responded by issuing a new East German mark and by blocking the railway and road access of the Western Allies to their sectors of Berlin, aiming to force the British and Americans to give the Russians total control over food and fuel provisions to the city.

  Hilde Spiel immediately returned to Berlin from Vienna, wearing a parachute on the aeroplane in case of interference by Soviet fighter planes, and found herself in a city with rationing and limited electricity. The Western government in Berlin blocked Soviet efforts to extend their new currency to West Berlin and on 26 June they began an airlift, thwarting the Soviet attempts to force them into submission by cutting off supplies. A month later there were over 1,500 Western flights a day landing in West Berlin. There was now great anxiety throughout Europe that the crisis would lead to full-scale conflict, which seemed frighteningly possible to a generation still reeling from one of the most violent wars in history. Nonetheless, the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin insisted that the British should stay in Berlin rather than abandoning it for fear of war.

  Hilde wrote to her mother:

  Our relationship with the Russians is over, on our part rather than theirs, for with their hypocrisy they would probably go on making conversation indefinitely. I am dreadfully sorry that they are behaving so badly, I really liked them as individuals. We held different views, but our contact with them was enormously interesting. We really live in idiotic times, and the twentieth century constantly jangles one’s nerves.

  The aeroplanes overhead reminded them uneasily of the war and Hilde began to have palpitations at night. Mimi was anxious about Hilde’s safety and Hilde was irritated that she had to spend so much time reassuring Mimi when she was troubled enough herself. If it should come to war, Hilde insisted, there was no way of knowing where and on what scale it would take place.

  I can only repeat that His Majesty’s Government would take the necessary precautions if we had to be evacuated . . . if the entire population of Berlin is not losing control, I don’t see why I should panic . . . As long as I keep my head, everything will be all right. I am doing so, but it would be a help, Mimi, if you could be a little bit grown-up now.

  The tension was reflected in Hilde and Peter’s marriage. Over the course of their time in Berlin they had strengthened as a
couple. Now that she no longer felt downtrodden, Hilde had become gregarious and desirable; Peter, meanwhile, was energetically powerful and ambitious. They could recognise in each other the person they had initially married. Although they remained close to the children, they were both putting their careers and social lives before their roles as parents and this had given them a new space in which to get to know each other. Now, though, Hilde was anxious about the safety of her children. She was not naturally heroic and was fearful in the face of danger. As always the presence of her children made it difficult for her to lay aside her fear, and Peter began to find her needy and demanding. She later looked back on this as a time when they came close to breaking up. ‘You are the cause of all my misery,’ Peter said at one point, ‘because you can’t think straight.’

  But these months were not solely frightening. As in the war, this period was enlivened by intense friendships, with Hilde and Peter becoming close to the English novelist Rex Warner and his wife Frances. Rex Warner was in Berlin working for the educational branch of the Allied Control Commission, based at the Technical University, which was in the British zone. For Hilde, this was a triumphant moment because it was her first proper friendship with a London intellectual. The two couples were soon meeting almost every day. Rex Warner was part of a set in literary London that included Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay and Henry Yorke. He had been at Oxford with W. H. Auden and with Cecil Day-Lewis, with whom Rosamond Lehmann was currently having an affair. At the end of the Second World War, Rosamond had reported to a friend that she had got to know Rex and become very fond of him. ‘He is a wonderfully nice man, full of goodness and intellectual vigour, pouring down pints and pints of beer all day.’ According to Rosamond ‘no one ever suffered less from angst, and it’s so refreshing’.

  In fact, by the time that he arrived in Berlin, Rex was indeed suffering from angst. At Graham Greene’s party for François Mauriac the previous spring he had met Catherine Walston’s close friend Barbara Rothschild, who had recently divorced Baron Victor Rothschild and was as glamorous, rich and sexually liberated as Catherine Walston herself. Surveying the crowd at the party, Catherine dismissively informed Barbara that there was not a single man worth speaking to in the room. Barbara replied that there was actually one, pointing out Rex Warner, and suggested that the two women had a bet to see who could talk to him first. Rex was as quickly smitten as Barbara was, and they began an intense affair. During his stay in Berlin, Rex was writing to Barbara every day. Frances knew about the affair and knew too that he was planning to leave her when he returned to London. He was convinced that he ought to have the integrity to act on his feelings rather than living a lie, and that he was incapable of having a mere fling with a woman he loved this much. After visiting Barbara in April he wrote to his friend Pam Morris that he had ‘at last found everything I want’.

  Hilde and Peter were not yet aware of the tension within the Warners’ marriage, although they noticed a sadness on Frances’s part. They also did not know how much Rex disliked his life in Germany, although he was pleased to have made a few close friends. At the end of June he told Pam Morris that he was planning to leave Berlin as soon as possible, ‘never having enjoyed a city less’. The tensions in his marriage were exacerbated by the political situation. ‘Perhaps things aren’t rather serious, but there is always the chance of the Americans doing something foolish.’ The Warner family left Berlin on 14 July and Rex went straight from the airport to Barbara Rothschild’s house in the village of Tackley, near Oxford, where he and Barbara would invite Graham Greene and Catherine Walston for weekend visits that summer. At the end of August Graham pleaded with Catherine to arrange another long Tackley weekend.

  Given the political situation, Hilde and Peter had also decided that the safest course was for Hilde and the children to return to London, which she planned to do at the end of July. However, she was delayed by Christine contracting appendicitis and could not leave until the end of August. First she took the children for a much-needed holiday to Bellagio on Lake Como in Italy. The peace and the beautiful scenery were a relief after the dangerous summer in Berlin, but Peter had forgotten to send Hilde any money, and she was lonely with just the children for company. However she had told Hansi she was there, and her friend passed on her whereabouts. Luciano, Hilde’s Italian count, telephoned from Milan and then arrived in person, hiring a motorboat to take Hilde to an open-air dance across the lake at Lermo. Hilde was charmed by his naive cheerfulness and love of pleasure. He stayed for two days, entertaining the children by the lake during the day, and then departed. Hilde was left with a memory of ‘a moment, perhaps the only one in my life, of Baudelairean perfection’. She never saw him again.

  At the end of September Hilde returned to Wimbledon, that ‘green grave’ she had left two years earlier, hoping never to return. ‘In Wimbledon’, she wrote in her autobiography,

  where I was to spend the next fifteen years, one grows old before one’s time. Time passes so slowly in this green, restful, peaceful place that one pays no attention to it as in the days of youth, while secretly, mercilessly, it takes its course, so that in old age one is amazed to find oneself cheated of a long span of life.

  She was enchanted by the green melancholy beauty of her garden, but it was a grave nonetheless.

  Hans Flesch-Brunningen, c. 1948

  Hilde’s English social life felt extremely narrow after the excitement in Germany. Peter remained in Berlin, reporting that the city was dying and that everybody had given up hope that it could still come right. ‘Deep gloom has descended upon everything . . . the city is so overwrought that before long it will be ripe for the Russians and they will just squash it.’ Hilde was relieved to be away from the danger, but she was increasingly lonely and there were few people to see except for Hans Flesch-Brunningen, who regularly took her to Soho or to the theatre. The previous August, Flesch’s wife Tetta had died. Hilde and Flesch had corresponded throughout her time in Berlin and now that she had returned they settled into a companionship that was becoming increasingly necessary to both of them. Hilde later wrote that at this point Flesch became at once ‘a male friend, a female friend, a brother; he was a substitute father, only nine years younger than my real father would have been; he was Vienna to me.’ Spending time with him, she was transported into an Austria which no longer existed, but which she still desperately needed. She loved and respected Peter for his German intellect and humour, but she could still succumb to the lure of a more gallant and florid old-world charm.

  Flesch’s appeal also lay in his need for a kind of intimacy that Peter seems not particularly to have desired. Peter wanted to know that Hilde was there; ideally in the same house as he was, or if not, then at least accessible by letter. But he found it relatively easy to go for long periods apart, as long as he knew that ultimately they were a unit, taking on the world together. There were times when Hilde appreciated the freedom offered to her by this kind of marriage. She could go to Vienna and recover the single life of her youth; she could engage in brief love affairs with a British press officer or an Italian count. But in day-to-day life she wanted a more sustained and intimate companionship than Peter was prepared to offer. She needed to be with someone who would enter into her concerns and share them because they were hers. When she wrote to Peter in Berlin worrying about the debts they were accruing in London, she was informed that she should stop fretting because debts were unimportant in the general scheme of things. This was frustrating because it suggested an unwillingness to experience the world on her terms. The fact was that she was worried, and she needed Peter to sympathise with her anxieties. Flesch did, and this came to matter more and more.

  However, Hilde and Peter’s marriage had not yet run its course. In November they met for a holiday and parted on passionate and congenial terms. Although Peter was not able to return for Christmas he begged Hilde to come out to Berlin, and in February 1949 he was pleading with her to have another child after he fina
lly returned.

  I must write something that has gone through my mind all these days during the trip, and it is now becoming an obsession with me: I do so want another daughter. I know you will scream and spit at me and all the rest, but there it is. Please, please, Mummili, think it over, or rather feel it over, if you can. The reason is simply that I’m so missing the child we lost. Anthony is a golden treasure fallen straight from heaven but he is another, a different child, not that one. It may all sound very stupid and illogical and sentimental and it may also be because I’m away from you all and miss you so – there are moments when I feel I simply cannot bear being separated from the children a day longer – but somehow deep down it worries away at me, and I just want to have that child.

  He was aware that he had no right to suggest such a thing, given that he had been absent for so long. But he was doing all he could.