January 1, 1990
My dear Soizic,
[—] Your question about Cambridge is difficult to answer. All the five concerned were at Cambridge long after I was at Oxford. Generations at university go in three years. I belong to the 1922 generation and Kim and the others belonged to a much later one – at the beginning of the thirties. It was then apparent that Germany was the main threat and the hunger marchers were busy. It was more natural in the early thirties to side with our possible ally Russia. Years later after I had left the Service I received a letter from an authority asking the same question as you. What about Oxford? They named one man whom I had known but who I am convinced had not the making of a double agent. An obvious candidate would have been my friend Claud Cockburn, but he was so openly a communist that he would not have made a very good double.
Your second question about Kim. I had grown to like Kim immensely during the period when I worked with him in 1942–3 and later after he had left for Moscow he wrote to me supporting my action in asking for my books no longer to be published in Russia because of the imprisonment of two people whose names I temporarily forget.37 He said this was an honorable action and he hoped it would have an effect. He also wrote to me on the subject of the Afghan war saying that he was against it and he knew nobody there who was for it – in other words he indicated that the KGB had been against the war. In the last years of his life I saw a lot of him on my four or five visits to Russia. As you may have read [in] my speech at Hamburg published under the title The Virtue of Disloyalty I never believed in the prime importance of loyalty to one’s country. Loyalty to individuals seems to me to be far more important.
I hope the time won’t be long off when we can meet again and discuss things more closely perhaps also with Bernard Violet.38
Much love,
Graham
PS It may amuse you to hear that when I published Our Man in Havana MI5 rang up the head of MI6 to say that I should be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. The head of MI6 laughed.
TO BERNARD DIEDERICH
La Résidence des Fleurs, |Avenue Pasteur,| 06600 Antibes | May 14, 1990
Dear Bernard,
Many thanks for your letter. My sickness is not a painful one only boring because one sees no end to it.39 I do hope you will get back to Haiti for the Pope’s visit. I was astonished to read that Fidel had sent him an invitation!
Yvonne and I send our love to you and Ginette and Jean-Bernard and I look forward to his photographs.
Affectionately,
Graham
TO KENNETH L. WOODWARD
Simon & Schuster asked Greene to provide a blurb for Kenneth L. Woodward’s book Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t and Why. Greene complied, but wrote a separate letter to Woodward about his own encounters with two saints, the stigmatic Padre Pio, whose picture Greene as an old man still carried in his wallet,40 and Pope Pius XII. Woodward, a religious affairs specialist with Newsweek, responded to musing by David Lodge on whether Greene was actually a believer at the end of his life by offering the letter not as conclusive proof but as evidence that Catholicism was still of interest to Greene in his last months.41
September 11, 1990
Dear Mr. Woodward,
I’ve been reading your book Making Saints with great interest. I thought you might be interested in your turn by my own experience at a Mass of Padre Pio in a village in Southern Italy. He was a friend of a great friend of mine, the Marquess Patrizi,42 and I went to the village with a woman friend43 of mine. I was invited to see him that night in the monastery, but I made excuses not to go as neither of us wanted our lives changed! We were both Catholics. However the next morning we went to his Mass. He was not allowed to say Mass at the high altar but only at a small side altar and he had to say his Mass at 5.30 in the morning. There were only a few women outside the monastery gates waiting for them to open, and during the Mass we were only about six feet away from him. The women had all immediately gone to the confessional box as directly his Mass was over he went into the confessional until lunch time.
Throughout the Mass he tried to hide the stigmata by pulling his sleeves halfway down his hands, but of course they kept on slipping. He was presumably not allowed to wear gloves. I had been warned that his Mass was a very long one so I was surprised to find it of average length, except that it was spoken clearly and without, as some Italians do, gabbling. I was even more surprised when we left the church to find that it was seven o’clock and I had no idea where this long period of time had been lost.44
In Rome I was told by a Monsignor of the Vatican that Padre Pio was a ‘pious old fraud’, a view which I did not share. I also felt that I had said the wrong thing when I met Pius XIII – or was it the XII (this was in the early fifties) when I told the Pope that the two Masses which had most impressed me in my life were his own double Mass on the anniversary of his becoming a priest at Saint Peter’s45 and the Mass Padre Pio had said in his village. My interview with the Pope became rather a stiff one.
Yours sincerely,
Graham Greene
P.S. You might tell your publisher that I have never in my long life seen such bad page proofs circulated. Whole pages and lines missing sometimes in the most interesting places.46
TO VÁCLAV HAVEL
An old friend of Greene’s, the playwright Václav Havel (b. 1936) was gaoled three times for political activities under the Communists. He became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989.
October 5, 1990
Dear President Havel (It gives me great pleasure to address you thus formally!)
I hope you got my note thanking you for your kind enquiry after my health. Alas it’s such that much as I want to come to Prague I can’t make the journey. I live between blood transfusions! If you see her do give Mrs. Temple also my regrets.47
I often remember the evening we spent together in 1969 with a suspicious character in the old town the night that you had discovered a listening apparatus in your ceiling!
All my best wishes for you and for your country.
Yours very sincerely,
Graham Greene
TO GLORIA EMERSON
With the Gulf War imminent, Gloria Emerson was considering a visit to Baghdad.
Résidence le Chêne, | Chemin du Châno 26, | 1802 Corseaux, | Switzerland | November 20, 1990
Dear Gloria,
You are a courageous woman. Do take care of yourself. You would certainly be in grave danger if war does break out. My only feeling is that Bush is afraid to take that step. What I don’t understand is that America could elect a former head of the CIA to the White House. After all he has been brought up in an atmosphere where lies are not only permitted but necessary as well as all the other tricks of the trade. One expects a President to have a rather more moral training.
I am glad you like The Honorary Consul. At one time I also thought it my best book.
Affectionately,
Graham
TO BERNARD DIEDERICH
Résidence le Chêne, | Chemin du Châno 26, | 1802 Corseaux, | Switzerland | November 20, 1990
Dear Bernard
Many thanks for your letter. The Daily Express, as you could assume, have got things entirely wrong. Yvonne and I have taken this flat to escape from the noise and dirt that has developed in Antibes. I haven’t given up Antibes and I am not living with my daughter. I expect to spend most of the year here except perhaps a month or two in the winter when we will go back to Antibes. I sold my house in Capri to pay for the flat which is a very nice one with a beautiful view.
[—]
TO JOHN CAIRNCROSS
Widely believed to be the fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring, Cairncross, a translator and literary scholar, passed on to the Soviets important information from intercepts at Bletchley Park that helped them to defeat German tank divisions at the battle of Kursk. He denied that he had passed on information that allowed Stalin to develop an atomic bomb. Greene h
ad known Cairncross, a Scot, from his days with the SIS, when he dubbed him ‘Claymore’. In the 1980 s Greene advised Cairncross on many matters, including his efforts to secure a carte de séjour in France. When various researchers, including the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew, identified him as the fifth man, Greene was unconvinced and advised him on the writing of The Enigma Spy: An Autobiography, published posthumously in 1997. Another friend of Greene’s, Colonel Ronald Challoner, an intelligence officer who had been British consul in Nice, also assisted Cairncross over many years; he eventually edited his manuscript and provided an introduction summarising the evidence in his favour.
January 22, 1991
Dear Claymore,
I have dictated this letter because I am really too ill to write. However my secretary is a complete safety box. And also incidentally my niece!48 She will send your letter back to me. Or rather I am not sending your letter to her as I keep all your other letters.
I would gladly write to my own publisher, Max Reinhardt, about your book and if necessary show him the testament, but I wouldn’t do either of these things without your consent. He is not now a very large publisher but all the same he might be very interested. The trouble is that your book should come after the new Andrew book if it contains material which you wish to attack, and a controversy of the two books might well sell each other. The other point is secrecy. I can’t absolutely guarantee anybody’s secrecy except my own. My own feeling is that you should remain in the dark for a period as Challoner suggested, unless certain circumstances broke. This would make your reappearance on the scene in your own book all the more important. Do get on with that and let me know when it is finished.
I’m glad Gayle is doing well.
Yours ever,
Graham
TO ALBERTO HUERTA, S.J.
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | January 22, 1991
Dear Fr. Alberto,
Your two little presents arrived very happily to raise my morale a bit as this Christmas has been exactly like the last one – a history of hospitals and transfusions. I thought your sermon on the dead Jesuits was absolutely first-class. I wish somebody could insert it into the reading matter of Bush. Anyway I shall treasure it always.
Really the only link I feel I have with the Catholic Church now is with the Jesuit Order. I can’t bear the present Pope!
With much affection.
Yours ever,
Graham
One gift was a photograph of several religious in Roman collars kneeling and saying the rosary in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco as a protest against military involvement in Central America. In front of them is a line of helmeted and baton-bearing police officers. The other gift was the text of a rousing sermon Huerta had delivered on 15 November 1990, the first anniversary of the murders of six Jesuit priests and two laywomen at the University of Central America in El Salvador.
TO GLORIA EMERSON
Résidence le Chêne, | Chemin du Châno 26, | 1802 Corseaux, | Switzerland | February 25, 1991
Dear Gloria,
Many thanks for the magazine and your letter. I’m sorry about the trip to Baghdad in one way and glad in another as I wouldn’t like to think of you being bombed. The whole affair seems a flurry of nonsense due to Mr. Bush.
I was interested in the dream articles but I have never been a Freudian or a Jungian. Two things never seemed pointed out by these scientific giants. One is, as I can prove from my diaries, that Dunne’s experiment with time is reliable and that dreams take incidents from the future as well as from the past.49 The other interesting point is that it’s the dreams which refresh and not the sleep. This has been pretty well proved. However here we’re in the realm of facts and not theories.
I’m in the same state of bad health which is likely to continue to the bitter end.
Affectionately,
Graham
TO NORMAN SHERRY
Philby had described the results of Greene’s intelligence work in Sierra Leone during the war as meagre. Sherry planned to dispute this claim.
February 27, 1991
Dear Norman,
I begin to regret my decision that you should not come here because tired as I am I think it is going to be more tiring answering your letter than meeting face to face. My daughter I am sure would have put you up for a couple of nights but unfortunately she is going to be away the whole of April. Please believe that I liked your book except for what I thought was an excess of sentimental love letters at the beginning when one would have been sufficient.50 A face to face interview would perhaps have been less tiring than a long letter.
Philby’s assessment of my work in Freetown is not a bit bleak to my mind. It’s absolutely correct and he is defending me rather than criticising. I didn’t at that time know that he was my boss in London. All I knew was that I was under control of a man in Lagos whom I disliked very much and who disliked me. We quarrelled incessantly and finally London withdrew me from his care and I worked direct with London though little knew that it was Kim. I was overworked though I have no memory of the day to day stuff which filled my time. I was sufficiently overworked for them to send me a secretary, a young woman who unfortunately was very bad at coding which only added to our work. Too many telegrams were sent back asking for a repeat.
One of the things which I disliked in my job was that it seemed to be taking over the duties of MI5. All Portuguese boats had to be searched for commercial diamonds and information. In the papers on one boat I learnt that my friend and literary agent Denyse Clairouin had been arrested by the Germans as a member of the Resistance. One interrogation that I had to make of a prisoner disgusted me so much that I never made another. It was a great relief to join Kim and his outfit when I returned.
My two plans which were turned down. An African intellectual, a friend of Victor Gollancz, had been put in prison under the iniquitous 18B regulation which also imprisoned my cousin Ben.51 My idea was that he should be rescued from his prison by two purported communists and in return for getting him out he would have to agree to send some harmless economic information from French Guinea. When we had sufficient of this we would blackmail him and threaten to show it to the French if he did not provide more interesting material. The Commissioner of Police was ready to work with me on this, but London wasn’t. Their objection was that a question would be asked in Parliament.
My other rather wild plan was to open a brothel on a Portuguese island (Bissau?) just off the coast from Dakar where the Richelieu was stationed. The French were apt to take holidays on the Portuguese island. I had found an admirable Madame, French by origin but very patriotic, who was ready, given the money, to open the brothel. I felt that valuable information could be obtained from many of her visitors. The reply to that was that all brothels were very strictly under French intelligence control which seemed to me dubious in the case of a Portuguese brothel. Anyway I was fed up.
My visits inland [in] Sierra Leone were I suppose in search of some form of information but I can’t in the least remember what. These are very inadequate replies to your questions but perhaps after all we can meet one day.
Yours ever,
Graham
TO NORMAN SHERRY
March 20, 1991
Dear Norman,
I have been thinking over again your letter of queries. I think you should pay more attention to the background of the war at that point. The importance of Freetown was this. The Mediterranean was completely closed and all convoys military or otherwise had to go to Egypt and North Africa via the Atlantic and the West Coast, and Freetown was the main port of call. After de Gaulle had attacked Dakar unsuccessfully we were militarily at war with Vichy France and Freetown was more than half bordered by French Guinea in Vichy hands. We had to be prepared at any time for a military assault. I had to have agents near the border on the look out for any possible movements by the French. I imagine this was why I was travelling a number of times in the interior
to find agents and to check with them.
My final quarrel with the man in Lagos was when he refused permission for me to go up to the border of French Guinea where I had made an appointment with the English Commissioner because a Portuguese boat was arriving at the same time in Freetown. The search was perfectly competently done by the police and didn’t need me, but I had to cancel my appointment with the Commissioner which angered him and caused trouble. The quarrel reached a point where Lagos cut me off my pay which used to come by diplomatic bag. I had to borrow money from the Commissioner of Police who luckily became a great friend, although it must have been embarrassing for him.52 NS 2: 117 and Shelden, 294, identify this man as Captain Brodie. Because of my cover all my telegrams came in to the police station in a code unknown to the police and I had to send all my telegrams out from the police station in a code unknown to them. Anyway this was the end of my relations with Lagos and I was allowed in future to deal direct with London.
[—]
‘All I do is go from one room to another,’ said Graham Greene on 12 February 1991. His health continued to decline and, exhausted, he entered Providence Hospital in Vevey, where Yvonne Cloetta and Caroline Bourget were in constant attendance. On 2 April he received the last sacraments from Father Durán, who was following an arrangement for his death made years earlier. On 3 April at 11.40 a.m. he died. He was buried in the village cemetery at Corseaux. Of his life’s work, he remarked to Martine Cloetta on 1 April, ‘A few, yes, are good books. Perhaps people will think of me from time to time as they think of Flaubert.’
1 Mikhail Gorbachev had taken over as Secretary General of the Communist Party on 11 March 1985. His first summit with Ronald Reagan was set for November.
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