At La Pietra, his great house on Via Bolognese, Harold was engrossed by visitors from abroad—friends, and the friends of friends; acquaintances, and their circle of acquaintance. To these he gave hospitality and unjaded attention, while the procession steadily consumed his writing time. We proposed only those of our own visitors who might truly interest him. One evening, we brought with us Ivan Morris, whose Japanese scholarship was much admired by Harold. Walking in the garden before dinner, we fell behind so that they might talk alone. Ivan told us afterwards that they had spoken at length of Arthur Waley—close to both men not only as transcendent Orientalist but as Harold’s intimate friend since youth, and as Ivan’s teacher at Oxford in postwar years. Ivan had asked if Harold could shed light on Waley’s “failure” ever to visit China and Japan, the sources of his life’s work. Harold: “Ooh yes. Arthur had a recurrent stoppage.” In the first half of the twentieth century, a journey from Britain to the Far East required many weeks at sea, with uncertain access to medical care; and Waley, by Harold’s account, had been obliged to stay close to home.
When, in the mid-1980s, Harold visited Naples, friends had arranged a quiet dinner by the Naples shore—where we arrived to find our quintet enlarged by the addition of a journalist from New York, who had apparently pleaded for inclusion. (“It’s been the ambition of my life to meet Harold Acton. I’ve read every word he ever wrote.”) At table, the newcomer took charge: compliments were pelted like confetti, questions plied without pause for answer. At length, arm raking the soft night, luminous bay, and looming Vesuvius, the journalist cried out: “I can’t believe this. That I’m sitting here with the author of Under the Volcano.”
The preposterous remark did not register with our Neapolitan hosts. Francis and I looked at the sea.
Harold replied instantly, with utter simplicity: “I did not write that book, which is the work of a great novelist. I’m honoured that you should associate me with it. It’s one of the modern novels I most admire, as I admire everything that Malcolm Lowry wrote.” Harold felt for the pathos of mere silliness, and was indulgent of it. His formality did not arise from party manners, but from tact. He would not take advantage of the vulnerable.
On the following evening, we dined with Harold alone. We spoke of Naples, of friends, books, travels; and of France. Francis thanked Harold for agreeing to write, at F.’s suggestion, an introduction for the forthcoming book of a Neapolitan historian. Harold said that he had accepted with pleasure: “I am always at it with introductions these days. It’s the only way I can keep my hand in. As to reading, I shall soon be able to say, with Valéiy, ’Je ne lis que les livres dont je fais les préfaces.’ ” He mentioned that he now received, from Italian publishers, many new books on Bourbon rule at Naples: “A veritable outpouring.” Veritable was one of Harold’s words. Francis asked whether, if he were writing his history now, he would be more sympathetic to the Neapolitan revolution of 1799, in the wake of which a generation of the young Neapolitan intelligentsia was brutally destroyed.
Harold: “An enduring tragedy, and obscure to the world.” He could not share our belief that the revolution might have succeeded. “Rash,” he thought, “and in vain.” As to his own view of the event, expressed in his histories: “I was writing in the aftermath of war, and rather had the bit between my teeth against the uniform Leftism proclaimed by Italian intellectuals—a cloak in which many a former fascist sought to cover himself. It was my revulsion against the spectacle of—say, the arch-fascist Malaparte in the arms of the arch-Stalinist Togliatti. And then there was the artistic conformity, all falling into line. Most disheartening.” Later, he said, “When I started out, I was greeted as an iconoclast—inaccurately. Now I’m called an anachronism—which I don’t mind.”
As we were parting that evening, Harold suddenly asked, “Does Graham Greene still come to Capri?” It was a question, one felt, that he had been intending to raise.
We told Harold that Graham was on the island now. “If you can come over, we could lunch together.”
Harold, gravely: “I would not care to impose myself on someone who now takes so little pleasure in my society.”
We were quiet. Francis said, “What a pity this is.”
Harold nodded. “A long association. But his continual air of displeasure has become tiresome.”
It was unlike Graham, by then, to have hurt so old a friend.
Harold outlived Graham by three years. On a visit to Florence, late in 1992, we saw him for the last time. He had invited us to lunch. We had been told that he was steadily weakening; and we came up to the house in November light and with the pang of finality—that consciousness, after familiar pleasures, of a leave-taking. Harold, frail, greeted us as ever. I had brought an early, signed copy of his first book of prose, Cornelian, to ask for his inscription—“My dear, puerility,” he said, taking it up. His signature, that day, at eighty-eight, was unchanged from sixty-four years earlier.
At table, we were six: three elders, with younger companions. I was the only woman. Those three elders—Harold, Francis, and John Pope-Hennessy—have all departed now. During lunch, Harold told me, “I shall never leave Florence again. A time is coming when I may leave this house less and less. I don’t mind. I love the house, and never tire of it.” He said, “The only regret is for Naples. When I think that I’ll never see Naples again, it pains me.” A little later, he turned to the others: “We’ve been speaking of Naples, which I shan’t see again.” He then raised his head and began to sing.
The song, in dialect, was an old Neapolitan favourite—
When the moon comes up at Marechiaro,
Even the fish make love . . .
He sang it through to the impassioned dying fall at the end. Harold had a fine, firm singing voice and made the song his own; and I have never heard it since without mentally adding, to those old Neapolitan words, the Actonian lilt. The young men serving us came, smiling, from behind their screen to listen; and, when the song was over, added their applause to ours. Harold had again seized the sombre moment and enlivened it.
Following his death, he became for a while something of a target for the strictures of the righteous: a prey of the spectacle, recently renascent, of virtue addressing error. Harold was now a card to play. Ignoring his benefactions and his books, critics derided his affections and pleasures and sifted his ancestry. This, though it might have wounded him, would not, I think, have surprised: throughout his life, some faction or other had sat in judgment over him. If his shade revisits his beloved garden, it certainly does not waste the moonlit evenings there in rancour; but will pass them joyfully, re-experiencing the grand illusion of art in the company of those who count the hours spent with him among the best.
The crisis at Antibes subsided, throbbing. Graham and Yvonne returned to Capri. Although we had, perhaps, some of our best times, these visits could hardly be a resumption. By then, the years and the world gave context only for retrieval amid uncertainties. Graham was paler, older; and that pang of last times might have tinged our evenings together had it not been for his unsubdued argument with life. In his eighties, there was something valiant in the refusal to mellow. He remained fired, as in youth, with engagement and indignation, and by the rightful written word.
In an early essay on Ford Madox Ford, Graham had said that Ford “belonged to the heroic age of English fiction and outlived it.” In retrospect, that age seemed to extend a while; and the words can be applied, now, to Graham himself.
At the end of one warm day, we went to drinks at the Rosaio before dinner, driving up between the black ilex of the Anacapri road in one of the island’s old, open, ample taxis. Halfway up the winding ascent, there was the climatic change to cool air, and a green smell of vegetation; and, for those who dared look down, the Roman ruins fringing the shore near the port of Augustus. That was, in fact, the last time we went to the Rosaio. From Graham’s rooftop terrace, there was the immoderate sunset over Ischia, inflaming white walls, walled garden, coast,
sea, and sky: a conflagration that only Graham could have failed to remark on.
We walked to the Rondinella, and were seated at the end of a narrow terrace. The restaurant was soon full, but we were secluded, with only one tiny table nearby. Graham was in good humour, pleased; and we spoke of Henry James.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henry James had arrived on Capri. Literarily speaking, it might seem that the island lacked only that. One blue day, he came on a creaking steamer that gradually “drew closer beneath the prodigious island—beautiful, horrible, and haunted.” Beautiful, indisputably; haunted, extravagantly; horrible, James tells us, because of its antique emperor and his victims—the literal cliffhanger of the Tiberian years. Perhaps, Francis thought, horrible also in that archaic sense of the word—still valid in Italian—of inspiring awe; as a waterfall or an abyss can be, in Italian, un orrido.
Graham was interested in the word, but said, “Something odd has happened to me with Henry James.”
No two encounters with Graham were ever the same, he saw to that. But it was a familiar moment—the evening scene of Italian pleasures and trellissed vines, a young man at the nearby table reading his Corriere, the lovers passing in pairs in the street just below us; and Graham turning to Henry James.
He told us that, “after a lifetime’s enthrallment to James,” he found that he could no longer read the late and “greatest” novels—The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl.“And now I have the very criticisms I despised as philistine, that the writing is self-indulgent, convoluted, effete; that the story inches along, losing its hold. I’ve loved those books so long. And now I can’t read them.”
It might be a mood. “No, no, I can’t get back the feeling for them. The stories and the letters remain thrilling, and others of the novels. But I don’t suppose I’ll read those last books again.”
He talked wonderfully of the stories and novellas, mentioning early and obscure tales as well as the great ones. When, of “In the Cage,” I said, “It might have been better not to have them meet,” Graham asked, “You think that the story would have been greater that way? Yes, perhaps—but quite different.” When Francis said that many of James’s stories were underlain by communicated terror, Graham smiled with satisfaction: “Yes, strong in much of his work.” He spoke of dreams that James had experienced, related, and used. (This interest may have influenced Graham’s little, late book of his own dreams.)
The two men talked of “The Jolly Corner,” James’s unresolved masterpiece of dread and self-revelation. Turning to me, Graham asked, “What do you make of it, ‘The Jolly Corner’?”
I said, “Un orrido.”
It was the moment, things being so agreeable, in which Graham might have turned the tables: he still had his arsenal of spanners to throw into the works. One was aware of this; but the meal went pleasurably to its conclusion, and Graham asked for his bill.
Then, abruptly, with a voice that rang out theatrically: “There’s a spy in this restaurant.”
People turned, stared. We ourselves were not astonished.
“This young man has been listening. He hasn’t turned a page in half an hour. He’s been watching us.”
Useless to point out—Graham, knowing it was you, understanding English, why not want to hear you speak of Henry James?
The young man got up and left.
Painful.
Graham said, “He may have followed us here.” Yet he knew.
The next evening, at Gemma, Francis asked him, “Have you seen anything more of that young man?”
Graham laughed.
That year, after leaving Capri, Yvonne wrote to us enclosing an article promised during the evening at the Rondinella. Referring to their busy return to Antibes, where “le calme et la tranquillité de Capri, eux aussi semblent bien loin,” she looked to a reunion in the following year. But, in 1989, Graham wrote: “We were sorry to miss you. The journey from here becomes more and more tiring and we are thinking of selling.” He had owned the Rosaio for more than forty years. The house had given him shelter longer than any other.
We stayed in touch by letter and, occasionally, by telephone. Graham’s voice grew remote, exhausted, his energies ebbing at last. He was moving, with Yvonne, to an apartment near Geneva, for medical care. In a letter of August 1990, he told us:
It’s very sad to have to sell the Rosaio but the journey was really becoming too much and I have been very ill with anaemia and pneumonia on top of it. I have to have blood transfusions every two weeks and vitamin injections every three days, but I hope in the end I shall get out of this tiresome position. Yvonne and I send our love.
Possibly to temper his sober meaning, he added in a postscript: “Perhaps I’ll be able to meet you and Francis one day at some nearer point than Capri.”
In New York, on the fourth of April 1991, as we prepared our breakfast, I turned on the radio for the news. The first announcement reported Graham’s death on the previous evening. We had expected it. But Francis said, “What a shock it is.”
In the previous September, at the death of Alberto Moravia, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica had carried across its front page the headline: SENZA MORAVIA—” Without Moravia.” As with Moravia in Italy, there was scarcely a literate person in the English-reading world who had grown up without some consciousness of Graham Greene—of his unquiet, unappeasable spirit and his ability to put clear words to the world’s malaise. Almost to the end, he had kept pace with his convulsed century, detached but not dispassionate; aiming for the heart.
Yvonne had shared his later life with unresisting love. Now she wrote to us: “C’est ce ‘plus jamais’ que je n’arrive pas á accepter.” Recounting Graham’s last hours, she told us of his urgent wish to be allowed to die, that he should not be revived, and did not regret departure—“au point que ses derniéres paroles ont été ‘But I want to go,’ ” as he lapsed into a coma. A few hours earlier, with Yvonne and her daughter at his bedside, he had spoken with acceptance and simplicity of his own death; and Martine had reminded him of the work that would endure. Graham replied that he believed he had written “some good books” and that “I may be remembered, perhaps, from time to time—in the way that one recalls Flaubert.” Yvonne wondered if we could shed light on that incongruous remark. It remains an enigma.
In 1994, at Francis’s death, Yvonne wrote to recall, with loving-kindness, our evenings à quatre—the foursome from which two had departed. “Maybe, now, they have found each other and go on discoursing on Flaubert.”
In 1992, following Graham’s death, a letter came to me from Michael Richey, with whom, over years, we had lost touch:
I wonder if you remember a Christmas at Capri, so many years ago now, when I was staying with Graham Greene and we first met? As I remember things Graham and I had been to Mass in the Cathedral and were having a coffee in a bar nearby, talking I think about the revised liturgy and the new practice of greeting your neighbour at a particular juncture. Graham thought it a useful way of introducing yourself and quoted a poem but got stuck and you out of the blue . . . picked it up. After that we met several times, at Laetitia Cerio’s I think and I am not sure we did not spend new year’s eve together. Graham had gone off somewhere . . . It’s a pretty story and I’d like to get it right. What was the poem and what the passage?
That was the genesis of this memoir.
In his early decades—in “the years of power”—Graham was close to many writers, none of whom wrote of him at length or intimately, and most of whom are now dead. Through all his adult life, there is scant testimony, other than his own, to suggest what it was to be habitually in his company, to walk with him in a street, to exchange opinions, literature, laughter, and something of one’s self; to observe his moods and responses, suffer his temper, and witness his attachments; to see him grow old. It seemed time, too, that a woman should write of Graham Greene.
When friends die, one’s own credentials change: one becomes a survivor.
Grah
am has now had several biographers, one of whom, in creating, over twenty years, the quarry for posterity, has served him mightily. I hope, even so, that there is room for the remembrance of somebody who knew him—not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well—on an island that was “not his kind of place,” but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story. These recollections are bound up with glimpses of that place, and with memories of its men and women; above all, with images of two tall men sitting at ease in the café, as years pass, talking of the great writers: living impressions that may stay vivid into the Millennium—or so very little longer.
A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s
In thanking friends and acquaintances for practical help and kind encouragement during my work on this memoir, I should like, in particular, to recall the generosity of the following persons:
Nicholas Scheetz, Norman Sherry, Yvonne Cloetta, Michael Richey, and Alison and William Parente.
My gratitude also goes to
Lily Aprile Gravino, Anna Maria Boniello, Alice Weber Cerasaro, Annetta Cinefra, Everett Fahy, Pietro Quirico, Giuseppina and Riccardo Rocchi, Raffaele and Maria Vacca, Oliver Walston, and Ausilia Veneruso and Riccardo Esposito of the Libreria La Conchiglia, Capri—
and to
Lynn Nesbit, my agent and friend
Jonathan Galassi and his colleagues at Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Mike Dibb and his team at the BBC
Greene on Capri Page 13