THE
UNQUIET
ENGLISHMAN
A Life of Graham Greene
RICHARD GREENE
In Memory of Bernard Diederich
1926–2020
CONTENTS
Introduction
1.The Dog in the Pram
2.Flight
3.Backwards Day
4.The Revolver
5.Casual Corpses
6.Marriage
7.Rats in the Thatch
8.The Devil Looks After His Own
9.Minty Stepped on Board
10.In Zigi’s Town
11.Raven
12.My Worst Film
13.Shirley Temple
14.Real Brighton
15.The Lawless Roads
16.Doll
17.Bombs and Books
18.The House in the Swamp
19.The Ministry of Fear
20.Canaries and Defectors
21.Mrs Montgomery
22.Hot Irons
23.Mother of Six
24.Banned in the Republic of Ireland
25.Lime
26.A Piece of Grit
27.Points of Departure
28.Malaya
29.Shoulder Flash
30.The Cards in his Wallet
31.‘C’
32.The Bell Tower
33.Visas
34.The Splinter
35.Mau Mau
36.Dien Bien Phu
37.No One Expects the Inquisition
38.A Reformed Character
39.Accidents Can Always Happen
40.Anita
41.Our Man on the Potomac
42.The Filthiest Book I Have Ever Read
43.6½ Raves
44.A Mixture of Petrol and Vodka
45.Handshakes and Contracts
46.Bombs and Daiquiris
47.The Whole Trouble
48.Taxidermy Everywhere
49.The Separating Sickness
50.Alone in a Lift
51.Changes
52.Death and Taxes
53.The End of a Long Rope
54.Plastiques
55.Masks
56.The Real End of the World
57.Statues and Pigeons
58.The New Life
59.Fidel at Night
60.Papa Doc Honoured Me
61.Morse Code on the Water Pipes
62.Behind the Sand Dune
63.A House Surrounded by Orange Trees
64.No One’s Poodle
65.Light Bulbs
66.About my Best
67.Long Spoons
68.Effervescence and Vibration
69.The Diplomatic Passport
70.Storming the Palace
71.The Bomb Party
72.Three Hostages
73.J’Accuse
74.I Am the Message
75.Better a Bad Man
76.Two Faces
77.The Late Rounds
78.A Sense of Movement
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
INTRODUCTION
It was mid-December 1951, and French colonial forces were fighting the nationalist Viet Minh for control of Vietnam. In the years that followed the French withdrew and American forces would come in ever greater numbers to pursue their own futile war. Phat Diem was a strategic enclave on the Gulf of Tonkin about 75 miles south of Hanoi, and it was now surrounded by Viet Minh guerrillas firing from a range of 600 yards. Wading ashore from a landing craft that also transported a French commando unit, the forty-seven-year-old Graham Greene, a tall man and perhaps an easy target, could see buildings that had been blasted by bazookas and a market in flames.
It reminded him of the Blitz, but with many more corpses, some sticking up out of a canal.1 In a sight he would never forget, he came upon a mother and her tiny son dead in a ditch. They had wandered into the field of fire between the French and the Viet Minh and been brought down by just two shots, apparently French. Greene remembered especially the ‘neatness of their bullet wounds’.2 These were his people – Catholics. Greene wondered what panic they must have felt, and then knew it for himself when he became separated from his companions and stumbled, very briefly, between the lines of the Foreign Legion and the Viet Minh.3
Catholics and Buddhists from the town sheltered in and around the cathedral, bringing with them whatever they treasured – photographs, pots, pans, pieces of furniture. A friend of Greene’s from an earlier visit, a Belgian priest named Willichs, had perched in the bell tower and was reading his breviary. With mortars firing and planes dropping bombs and supplies, a distressed Greene, thinking that this day he might die, asked to have his confession heard. Around 1980, he spoke of this as the last time he had received the sacrament, but soon after renewed the practice. On this memorable occasion in Phat Diem, he was given as a penance one ‘Our Father’ and one ‘Hail Mary’, and the priest handed him a Tintin book so that he would have something to read.4
Greene learned that the attack had begun with an advance party slipping into a procession in honour of Our Lady of Fatima. There was then a surprise attack on the officers’ quarters, although it turned out that only one of the dead was an officer – twenty-five enlisted men were killed.5
No other journalist had got near this shambles, and the French were anxious to keep it a secret. Greene got the impression that they regarded the Belgian priest as a spy – he belonged to the Société des Auxiliaires des Missions, which existed specifically to aid the transition from colonial to national churches in Asia, an objective that hardly endeared them to the French in Vietnam.6 In any event, Greene and the priest were both independent witnesses to what had happened, so having spent just one night there – he slept in his clothes with a revolver on his pillow7 – he accepted an offer to get away and spend twenty-four hours with the navy. But the officer who escorted him upriver to the city of Nam Dinh left him there and hurried back to Phat Diem. Returning to Hanoi, he could see that it was all a cover story and that he had been got rid of.8
Getting rid of Graham Greene was never going to be an easy proposition. Vietnam is perhaps the best known of his political and literary involvements. He made four winter visits to Vietnam, and in 1955 the fight for Phat Diem provided a pivotal scene in his novel The Quiet American, which provoked outrage in the United States by revealing how deeply the country was involved in the bloodshed, in the belief that a distant colonial conflict was a front line in the Cold War. This brave and prescient novel foresaw the American war in Vietnam, the horrors of which continued until 1975.
Half a century later, the novel still causes awkward moments along the Potomac. In 2007, former president George W. Bush, a man sometimes thought a prisoner of his own innocence, gave a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which included an odd remark, indicating that the novel’s criticism of American foreign policy retained its sting in the time of the Iraq War: ‘In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called “The Quiet American.” It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism – and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” ’9 When a later president, Donald Trump, arrived in Hanoi, where crowds and cameramen were kept at a distance, he tweeted of ‘Tremendous crowds, and so much love!’, and checked into the Hotel Metropole where Greene had once stayed. He was immediately dubbed ‘the unquiet American’.10
Graham Greene continues to speak to an unquiet world. This biography will unravel the public and private lives of this most admired novelist. Shirley Hazzard spoke of him as ‘one o
f the writers of the century’, and John le Carré believes that in his time Graham Greene ‘carried the torch of English literature, almost alone’.11
This book takes a very high view of Graham Greene’s accomplishments, and so endorses the common opinion of three generations of writers and critics that he is one of the most important figures in modern literature. In course of time, our sense of even a great author’s work will contract to a few defining books. That is how canons are formed. And yet, the process is wasteful. It is easy enough to boil Graham Greene’s accomplishment down to, say, five essential books of his middle years: Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), and The Quiet American (1955). Once we do this, however, other first-rate novels, especially those written after 1960, not to mention his plays, short stories, journalism, essays, letters, memoirs, film scripts, and travel books, are shunted off into lists of ‘Further Reading’. In fact, Graham Greene is one of the very few modern writers in English who can be valued for a whole body of work. As a craftsman, he was a perfectionist rarely content with something he had written, and so we can sometimes be misled by his criticisms of his own books. Like any writer, he could occasionally be uneven; still he maintained an extraordinarily high technical standard in his writing, and many of his insights into human character and motivation, politics, war, human rights, sexual relationships, and religious belief and doubt remain compelling and provocative. It is hard to think of a recent writer in English who comes as close to greatness as he does.
A NEW BIOGRAPHY
There is already a three-volume authorized biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry (1989–2004) and a more prosecutorial work by Michael Shelden (1994), as well as several fragmentary or partial works. Both completed biographies occasioned controversy when published, not least because they focused to a remarkable degree on the minutiae of his sexual life, provoking some reviewers to regard parts of the works as prurient and trivial. Broadly speaking, the complaint against these works was that in the midst of all the lurid details they had lost sight of what mattered in the life of Graham Greene.
And yet the strengths and flaws of existing biographies may be almost moot, as the body of evidence has grown enormously since those works appeared; the landscape of his life has a different outline. In recent years, many thousands of pages of new letters and documents have become available, among them letters to his family, friends, publishers, agents, and close associates. In one instance, lost letters to his immediate family were discovered in a hollow book. His daughter, Caroline Bourget, has made available her collection of private letters from her father and participated in extended interviews, allowing a rich new perspective on his family life. The many letters Greene wrote to Father Leopoldo Durán, his confessor and companion on journeys through Spain and Portugal that gave rise to his entertaining and meditative novel Monsignor Quixote, have now been deposited in an archive, as have his letters, amounting to over a thousand pages, to his French agent Marie Biche, and a comparable collection of letters to the publisher Max Reinhardt – developments that allow for a much deeper knowledge of two of his most valued friendships, but also of the very complicated way he earned his living. A memoir by his wartime colleague at MI6 Tim Milne forces a careful reconsideration of the novelist’s relationship with the double agent and defector Kim Philby.
A political memoir by Bernard Diederich, Greene’s guide through Haiti and Central America, has, by itself, transformed our sense of the second half of his career, when his eye turned to politics and human rights in the southern hemisphere.
Oliver Walston has written a detailed and revealing memoir of his mother Catherine, Greene’s lover in the 1950s and the inspiration for Sarah in The End of the Affair – he has made that unpublished work and many private papers available as sources for this biography. Catherine has been written about by several authors, but often speculatively; her son’s memoir corrects and widens the record on many particular points and allows for a more serious reflection on her relationship with Graham Greene. Yvonne Cloetta, Greene’s last lover, published a memoir that revealed her private life with the novelist over thirty-two years, a period earlier researchers had to approach often through second-hand reports. A large collection of the papers of the novelist’s friend Gillian Sutro contains, extraordinarily, many transcriptions of private conversations with Greene and Cloetta, and even surreptitious tape recordings, as Sutro secretly hoped to write a book about them – these include some of Greene’s private recollections of the women in his life, including the stage designer and children’s author Dorothy Glover.
Intrepid bibliographers have tracked down hundreds of Greene’s fugitive publications. A group of expert researchers delving in archives has added greatly to what we know about particular aspects of his career, especially his sojourns in war-torn places.12 New secondary works have changed our sense of what was going on in the countries Greene visited – a notable example being the new historiography of Mexico in the 1930s. Accordingly, it is not only possible but imperative to bring these sources together and to retell the story of Graham Greene’s life and times.
That well-worn phrase, ‘life and times’, is actually the essence of this book. There is no understanding Graham Greene except in the political and cultural contexts of dozens of countries. And in an odd sense the reverse is also true: we fail to understand something about modern times if we ignore Graham Greene. Here is a single life on which much of the history of a century is written.
In his later books, Greene used the term ‘involvement’ to describe a kind of loyalty, passion, and commitment that can overtake a person who observes suffering and injustice – as a character remarks in The Quiet American, ‘Sooner or later, one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.’13 Greene travelled to many of the most afflicted places in the world and drew close to the sorrow and oppression he observed. His characters and plots emerged from his observing eye, his curiosity, and his sense of involvement. This process becomes the central narrative of Graham Greene’s life – how politics, faith, betrayal, love, and exile become great fiction.
Broadly speaking, even as this biography narrates, with much new detail, the key events and patterns in his private life, it swings the balance away from obscure details of his sexual life, which have captivated earlier biographers, to an account of his engagement with the political, literary, intellectual, and religious currents of his time.
And so, what follows is a story of ‘involvements’ – Graham Greene risked his life in such places as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mexico, Malaya, Vietnam, Kenya, Cuba, the Congo, Haiti, Paraguay, Panama, and Nicaragua. He needed constant stimulation to keep boredom, a debilitating feature of ‘manic depression’ (now known as bipolar illness), at bay. But that only explains so much. He had strong political principles, not least that American foreign policy was a threat to the whole world. He refused to accept the reasoning of the Cold War – he was not going to choose between East and West, but looked south to some of the world’s poorest countries, where the urgency of each day made human nature that much more discernible. As Scobie in The Heart of the Matter speaks of Sierra Leone: ‘Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst.’14 He was vigorous in defence of dissidents everywhere, from behind the Iron Curtain to the United States, and of writers imperilled by their beliefs.
In a sense, this is not one narrative but several braided together. It looks at the psychological history of a man who was traumatized as an adolescent over questions of loyalty and betrayal, and then suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions. It is the story of a traveller, whose restlessness caused him to seek out troubled places, where his concerns were politics, poverty, and human rights. It is the story of a man who struggled to believe in God and yet found himself described, against his will, as a great Catholic writer. It is the story of a private life in which loves and passions ended in one ruin
after another, until his sixth decade when he found constancy and peace in an unconventional relationship. It is a story of politicians, battlefields, and spies. More than anything, it is the story of a novelist mastering his craft, and exercising it in ways that changed the lives of millions.
1
THE DOG IN THE PRAM
‘The first thing I remember is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet.’ So wrote Graham Greene in the memoir, A Sort of Life, that he published in his sixties. The dog was his sister’s pug, killed on the road, and the nurse could think of no better way to get its corpse home than to load it in with the baby. When he was five years old, he saw a man run into one of the town’s almshouses intent on slitting his throat – his elder brother Raymond recalled that Graham did witness the man slashing himself but Graham had no recollection of it.1 For many writers, an Edwardian childhood was a lighted thing, the last lovely time before fathers and brothers marched off to the Great War.
Raymond, who became a leading physician, once remarked drily of their childhood: ‘I saw nothing horrible in the woodshed, perhaps because we had no woodshed.’2 Graham wrote more lyrically of the years before his troubled adolescence: ‘The clouds of unknowing were still luminous with happiness. There was no loneliness to be experienced, however occupied the parents might be, in a family of six children, a nanny, a nursemaid, a gardener, a fat and cheerful cook, a beloved head-housemaid, a platoon of assistant maids, a whole battalion of aunts and uncles, all of them called Greene, which seemed to bring them closer . . . The six birthdays arrived, the Christmas play, the easter and summer seaside, all arrived like planets in their due season, unaffected by war.’3
Looking back, Graham suggested that he never knew a world without pointless death, but his early years passed in an atmosphere of affection, ease, and security. His Edwardian parents were distant, in the fashion of the times, but the siblings remembered them always as loving and beloved. Of course, he did observe the troubles of people who lived in the town of Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, but his own world was protected.
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