Greene on Capri

by Shirley Hazzard

  Graham remarked that “the place looks idyllic, but might be hell.” Graham was inclined to suspect—in some moods, perhaps, to hope—that most idylls might be hell.

  A few years earlier, Francis and I had visited Massine on his rock. Francis spoke of that expedition, undertaken when he was writing on Jean Cocteau and wanted to talk to Massine about his collaborations with Cocteau and, in particular, about the ballet Parade, on which Cocteau, Picasso, Massine, and Erik Satie had worked and wrangled in that year 1917—year of the Western Front and the Russian Revolution, which produced, also, this seminal work of “Sur-réalisme,” as it was baptised, in a word of his invention, by Guillaume Apollinaire.

  In the late 1960s, we were arriving in Italy from New York to spend some weeks on Capri completing manuscripts. Francis had made an appointment, by letter, with Massine to visit Isola Lunga, which is most easily reached by hired motorboat from Positano. We spent the preceding days at Ravello, on the height above Amalfi and within an hour’s serpentine drive of Positano. Massine, by telephone, had confirmed day and time. Landing on the island at the appointed hour, Francis was told that Massine had gone to Naples for the day, and that an arrangement should now be made for two days later. Returning, exasperated, to Ravello, F. proposed that we take a hired boat from Positano to Capri on the redesignated day, stopping off at Isola Lunga on the way to see if Massine was really there. The waters of that coast are very deep and, near Massine’s rock, clear in levels of opaline colour. The little island, exposed alike to a blazing sun or to the gales and high seas of winter, was that morning in transparent light: one looked up to the crenellations of all the coast, and down the Gulf of Salerno as far as the Paestum shore. Our

  gozzo

  was tethered at the landing place, the boatman settled down to pass an hour or two, and we went up stony steps to the house. We had been invited for one o’clock—as we assumed, for lunch. Near the entrance to the house—in a low passage under a concrete beam and rather wet underfoot—a platoon of huge children bolted out at us, shrieking, and ran towards the sea. Recovering balance, we saw that there were two children only, and that they were very small. From an outdoor shower, a fair, statuesque young woman in bikini came, dripping, and spoke to us in German. Spamponata, as Italians say—a blown rose—and apparently the children’s mother, she was living on the island with Massine and with her own mother. Greeting us with lifeless civility, she told Francis that Massine could not see him immediately, since “we are about to sit down to lunch.” We were shown up, instead, to a sizeable room giving on to a terrace that looked towards Capri; and there we stayed, unfed and unsurprised. Francis observed: “Another of Cocteau’s jokes.”

  The blue, Homeric view of Capri and of the mighty rocks off its southern drop atoned for all. From the terrace, overlooked by the pinnacles and pastel villages of the coast, and their ledges of lemon and vine like vast green ladders in the radiant day, the island was a pebble within immensity. The sun drove us indoors; but the room itself, with glassed doors open, was infused with its setting. An airy, elderly salotto, furnished with piano, upholstered chairs, small tables, a worn sofa, it had clearly been at one time cared for and comfortable. All now suffered from neglect and damp. The decline of a seagirt house offers no phase of seedy charm. Salt destruction comes in quickly, bringing green mould and brown rust; a powdery corrosion of metal fittings, the rotting of good wood. A decaying house by the sea is without present or future. There is only a past, of whingeing doors, palsied windows, and memories damp to the touch.

  We had left our things in the boat and had nothing to read. I went down to the landing shelf to placate the boatman—who had taken a swim and eaten his merenda brought from home, and who showed no astonishment at the delay. Delay, in that part of the world, is an established context. Soon after I came upstairs, Massine appeared, dressed in spotless open white shirt, cotton trousers, soundless espadrilles. He apologised for not offering lunch, observing that, as there had been meagre fare, we had missed nothing: “Mieux vaut s’en passer.” We spoke, of course, of the romance of his island, and he told us of his plan, of many years, to construct a small theatre there, outdoors, on which a beginning had now been made. He sat down to speak of Cocteau.

  T. S. Eliot once used, in praise of Massine, the word “inhuman.” He had a creature quality, informed by astuteness but ultimately inaccessible. His body was itself paradoxical—small, compact, but charged with enlarging life; insinuating, câlin, yet forceful and utterly self-possessed. Symmetry was perfected in the fine head and compatible features—broad brow, short nose, full lips of a

  controlled mobility, slightly prominent ears; and the famously dark and deep-set eyes. I remembered a small gouache, by Picasso, that I had seen in a house near Avignon: Massine as Pulcinella, in 1920, parting crimson curtains to acknowledge applause: a figure, unmistakeable, suited to its dispassionate Cubist forms.

  When we saw him on Isola Lunga, Massine, in his early seventies, seemed little marked by age. Memory was prompt and prolific; talk expressive, intelligent; manner, cordial, formal, courteous. One felt that he consulted his own preference in all things—as with the making and breaking of appointments—and that, with him, that had ever been the case. There was a moment, indelible. Francis had asked about the origins of innovations that, at the first performances of Parade, had provoked indignation—the audacious “one-step,” and the angular “Cubist” movements, shocking to an audience nurtured on classical ballet. To illustrate his own responses, Massine was suddenly on his feet, by the open windows, in a series of steps, attitudes, gestures that culminated in a pose of abrupt, humorous intensity. His blue backdrop was sea and sky, and the monoliths of Capri.

  When we got up to go, Massine invited us to see the work in progress on his outdoor theatre, where masons could be heard resuming their afternoon shift. Leaving the house, we passed small lower rooms where children wailed to an accompaniment of minor crashes and there was an emanation of weary disorder. In a legendary setting, Massine had managed to surround himself with the least exotic trappings of suburbia. From the kitchen, the fair girl gave us a dishevelled nod, a tired smile.

  By four o’clock we were lunching, at a trattoria of indulgent timetable, on the waterfront of Capri.

  Something of this was related by Francis to Graham and Yvonne. I think that Massine’s “case,” on his Italian island, was the opposite of Graham’s on Capri. Greene came to Capri to be away; Massine to Isola Lunga because he loved the place. Graham demanded freedom from irrelevant tasks and interruptions; Massine’s choice involved him in constant struggles with the elements, with the claims of a confined domesticity, and with clamorous incursions for maintenance and construction. Massine had chosen beauty, with its inexorable servitude; Greene, autonomy.

  At Villa Jovis, we walked with Yvonne and Graham through the ruins, on a path that leads, with little diversion, to the headlong drop facing Naples. At our side, as we went, the rim of the island curved on vacancy. Graham agreed that the little church long since built on the culminating peak of the emperor’s palace was “a snub that might have been avoided.” (A few years later, the statue of the Madonna on its pedestal near the church was blown to smithereens by a bolt of Tiberian lightning; and replaced by a heftier bronze version with pertly modern features, provided with the apotropaia of a lightning conductor.) Graham asked Francis about his Catholic upbringing in Connecticut. To Francis’s own question, as to whether he was still an observing Catholic, Graham responded, “I haven’t been to Confession in over twenty years.” He repeated a favourite evasion: “I consider myself a Catholic agnostic.” He said that he continued to be criticised, in Catholic intellectual publications, for “unsound” interpretations of Church practice in his fiction. In a private audience, Pope Paul VI had reassured him: “He told me, ‘Your books will always antagonise certain Catholics. That should not trouble you unduly.’ ” Graham did not, in fact, seem troubled on that score. We spoke, in the Domain of Jove, of the enig
ma of religion in the newly sceptical, and newly superstitious, world.

  Graham was curious, among the Tiberian ruins, about the

  ambulatio, where the emperor had walked alone; and about the remains of a presumed observatory for watching the heavens and plotting the imperial horoscope. Tiberius’ withdrawal to Capri, and his erratic governing of the Roman Empire from what was then remote isolation, inevitably engaged us all. “It was fear,” said Graham. “He made himself impregnable.”

  Francis pointed out that, even so, there was the threat from within. For private conversation, Tiberius went up—as related by Tacitus—to the highest ground of his villa, the place where we were standing, in order not to be overheard or surprised. When the emperor’s favourite, Sejanus, overreached his power, Tiberius despatched him to Rome, ostensibly as his honoured emissary, and sent sealed orders that he be put to death. We talked of Ben Jonson’s play on that theme, Sejanus: His Fall, and of the scene in which the Roman Senate unseals “the huge long-worded letter from Capreae,” which is read aloud in the presence of the horrified Sejanus.

  Ben Jonson, whose reading of Tacitus inspired the play, had been obliged to imagine Tiberian Capri. One wonders how he pictured it. One wondered, that day as ever, what Graham saw—or what pleased him, rather, in all the extraordinary prospect. (Once, when we had been together to swim at the foot of the Faraglioni, and were returning after lunch by small boat to the Marina Grande, we looked up at that suspended avalanche of dolomitic ramparts, cloven grottoes, spires of teetering rock; and Graham had laughed and said, “You feel that it ought to have significance.

  Something should be going on up there, some event in keeping with the scenery”—sentiments of many a Romantic who had, on Capri, infused emotion into stones.)

  In the autumn of 1939, after the outbreak of war in Europe, Robert Penn Warren, standing at the parapet of Villa Jovis, had looked out helplessly at history—

  There once, on that goat island, I, As dark fell, stood and stared where Europe stank

  —

  and threw a small stone, his protest, down to the sea:

  I could do that much, after all.

  Returning to the town, Yvonne and Francis went down ahead with Sandy. Graham and I, following, spoke of the fascination of retribution, for which, he thought, Nemesis had now developed, in “detective fiction,” a current literature of her own. I said that there had always been, in life and literature, the thrill of flight and pursuit, the exhilaration of getting away with something; Graham, that there was the excitement of sin itself; excitement in guilt and fear, even in being unmasked; and that these elements were active in most good writing. We talked about French nineteenth-century poets, modern masters of those themes. Graham returned to the irruption of detectives into the novel and, from Wilkie Collins, tracked retribution through Victorian and Edwardian literature. I said that almost all Dickens’s fiction was marvellously retributive, much of Conrad’s also. But I was hopelessly outclassed, Graham being encyclopaedic on the fiction of crime and concealment. He enjoyed the early policemen in their omniscience—Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, wise, percipient, and relentless as God—but preferred the freelance sleuthing of Sherlock Holmes and his progeny; delighting in Arsène Lupin, “gentleman cambrioleur,” creation of Maurice Le Blanc, and fateful figure of Graham’s early reading.

  The theme suited our Tiberian day. The implacable emperor marked the island forever with his gigantic presence, Capri seeming, ever after, to gather sacred monsters and formidable personalities—Norman Douglas, for instance, or Graham himself—who are ultimately drawn into its fabled strangeness, making part of the myth. “Grande personaggio,” an Anacaprese remarked to me the other day, on the path near Graham’s gate.

  Through the 1970s, Graham’s self-imposed minimum of three hundred and fifty words a day (“I try to break off where it will be easier to resume”) still produced, with revisions, a finished book every two years or so: a novel, a collection of stories; more rarely, a play or brief digression into non-fiction. Work, his life and lifeline, remained his most necessary and exacting pleasure. There were, also, with fair regularity, the films to which his fiction continued to give rise even in late years.

  With exceptions—The Third Man, which was made directly from his screenplay, and The Fallen Idol, which was based on his story “The Basement Room”—films drawn from Graham’s writing were generally unsatisfactory to him; and that was often due to flaws in the casting.

  “Yes, Trevor Howard was very good [in The Heart of the Matter]. He was a friend, too, we drank together. But the girl was miscast, and it threw the whole thing out. The same with Our Man in Havana—I had fun with it, Noël Coward and I flew together to Jamaica, Alec Guinness was excellent. But, again, the miscasting of the girl.”

  Landing in Jamaica, Greene and Coward had been met by the powers making the film, who had with them a candidate for the female lead: “Somebody’s friend. One’s heart sank. The girl was not young enough, not girlish enough, had the wrong voice. She was worldly, hard. There was lunch at the hotel, where the girl was not present. When the casting came up, I said the girl didn’t seem right. They realised that she’d made a poor impression at the airport: ‘She was overwhelmed at meeting you both. She was shy.’ At which Noel snorted, ’That tart SHY!’ After that, things rather went to pieces.”

  In 1984, in New York, a wartime film based on one of Graham’s short stories was shown in a revival series of 1940s films. To

  Francis’s note commenting on our enjoyment of that obscure but gripping movie, Graham replied:

  I am afraid I never saw Went the Day Well. It was made by my friend Cavalcanti from a short story which was called “The Lieutenant Died Last.” As far as I can make out it didn’t have a great deal in common with the short story which was published during the war. The quotation in the title escapes me. I don’t know why, but I always assumed that it was something out of Shakespeare!

  I do hope we shall see you and Shirley during the spring in Capri, but God knows! We both send our love to both of you.

  In that film, as in the short story, war brings Greene-ish horror to an idyllic English village. A crucial scene involves pepper flung into a German officer’s eyes.

  Among the great actors, Ralph Richardson and Paul Scofield were particularly admired; Laurence Olivier particularly condemned. Graham’s dislike—emphatic and undiscussable—of Olivier’s acting probably owed something to his inborn resistance to prevalent opinion. Fascination with theatre and film did not, in Graham’s case, spill over into stage talent. His walk-on part in François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night) is almost endearingly unconvincing. (GG: “I had a row with the actress.”) In a companion scene of the same film, a cat does far better.

  Graham’s aversion to being photographed was not only a resentment of journalistic exploitation but a distaste, reasonable enough, for being depicted inadvertently and without permission. We ourselves disliked intrusive snapshots that made it impossible to be natural. When, at Gemma, the flash of a summer camera exploded close to us, Graham shaded his face with a hand that trembled. Once only, at the Rosaio on his seventy-fifth birthday, we asked if we could take the last four pictures in an ancient little camera. Graham agreed, but grew restive after the first two. At Settanni, an old, good Capri restaurant, miraculously unchanged, a montage of photographs of postwar Capri personalities would draw his attention: “Then, even film stars had faces. Nowadays, everyone is a pro.”

  Like many of his generation, Graham was punctilious in promptly answering correspondence—which must have been, throughout his writing life, enormous. The bulk of his replies were dictated, and sent on disc or tape to England, where his sister Elisabeth arranged for transcription and posting. His letters to us, handwritten or typed, were seldom more than a single page. They had his voice, and his liking for a clear sentence. The tone was never guarded. Despite a repudiation—in A Burnt-Out Case—of “the exaggeration mark,” he used exclamation
marks frequently. However, letters rarely gave rein to the emotion and sense of inward ferment palpable in his conversation and his presence. Particularly in later years, Graham may have felt, with Dr. Johnson: “It is now become so much the fashion to publish letters, that in order to avoid it, I put as little into mine as I can.” As little, at any rate, of the deeply personal.

  As years went on, Graham’s handwriting required ever more concentration from his correspondents:

  Forgive a typewritten and dictated letter, but I have found that even one of my oldest friends Mario Soldati cant read my handwriting and spends weeks pondering on what he cant read.

  In editing and adapting Elisabeth Moor’s memoirs, Graham strayed into that Capri with which he had never concerned himself. (One cannot quite speak of “the real Capri,” Capri having unrealities scarcely accessible to outsiders.) One would not usually associate Graham Greene with inadvertence. In writing fiction or criticism, his impressions, intuitions, and literary intelligence had sufficed to produce trains of inimitable imagination; and he was used to relying on them. The concept of scholarship, or of research, was temperamentally remote from him. He did not amass facts: a single small event might provide a measure of revelation, to be affirmed in words. Once formed, his views were resistant to change. He was antagonistic to contrary evidence.

  The Dottoressa Moor and her high-handed oddity had contributed to the Aunt Augusta of Graham’s Travels with My Aunt. She had also, I think, played Scheherazade to Graham’s sultan, plying him with stories of Capri suited to his sense, and hers, of drama and absurdity—to his taste for the picaresque, and for the adventure of the single spirit challenging a hostile world. Like other women in Graham’s life, she had sought to please; to relieve his boredom and sustain his affection. Hence, in Anacapri, the Thousand Nights and One. Her vitality and egotism come through, engagingly enough, in Graham’s Impossible Woman: the early life in Vienna, the rattling off of travels and sexual encounters, and lightning love affairs; and the more credible of the medical experiences. The Dottoressa’s account of the death, in agony, of her young son is excruciating. Her own survival of that tragedy was valiant. She retrieved some of her ebullience, only to be broken at last by the accidental death of her grandson.