With the war over, Greene soon returned to regular reviewing. The Evening Standard asked him to write a weekly book article, but he did not want the work, so demanded thirty-five guineas per week, assuming the amount would be impossible. They agreed and he was cornered into taking it on. By October, he got into a convenient row with the editors and resigned, but according to their agreement he continued to be paid for three more months.10
At about this time, he began a novel set in Sierra Leone. The Heart of the Matter took two years to write and lifted Greene into a degree of literary and religious celebrity that could never have been foreseen. He would come to hate what the book did to his life and did not want it to be seen as his masterpiece, so argued, not very convincingly, that it was technically flawed owing to the ‘rustiness of my long inaction’ as a novelist. This claim is nonsense, as he began the novel within months of completing The Tenth Man. He was not rusty at all. Nonetheless, having started the novel with Wilson looking down at Scobie from the hotel balcony, he faced a period of indecision – should this be an entertainment in which, as a twist, the criminal is known and the detective unknown, or should he try for a serious novel about Scobie. It took months to resolve: ‘ . . . when I left Wilson on the balcony and joined Scobie, I plumped for the novel’.11
He also had scriptwriting projects. Through their firm Charter Film Productions, John Boulting and his twin brother Roy had purchased the rights to Brighton Rock. The playwright Terence Rattigan produced a treatment, but this was not used, and the film play was exclusively Greene’s work.12 The censor required that Pinkie’s references to the Mass be cut as these, coming from a killer, might offend Catholics. Greene had admired nothing about the stage production of 1943, so the return of Hermione Baddeley as Ida and of the young Richard Attenborough, now under contract to Charter, as Pinkie filled him with unease. The Boultings insisted, however politely, on their casting decisions, and once Greene saw the film he assured John Boulting that the choice of Attenborough could not be improved upon.13
At much the same time Attenborough also appeared as Francis Andrews, alongside Michael Redgrave, in a film of The Man Within. Decades later, Greene recalled transferring the rights for the nominal sum of £200–300 to his friend Ralph Keene, a documentary-maker who wished to make his first feature film. Keene could not finance the production so sold the rights at a profit to a producer named Sydney Box, who made the film released in 1947.14
However, there is something wrong with this account. A contract survives, dated 7 February 1944, between Box’s firm, Theatrecraft Limited, and Graham Greene, paying him £400 for the film rights, of which he, not Keene, is identified as the beneficial owner.15 Greene must never have formalized the sale to Keene, leaving it at a handshake. Perhaps, once Keene and Box made their agreement, they realized that it was necessary to approach Greene, offering him some money to confirm the sale. While some critics have made claims for the film as an innovative historical drama,16 Greene despised the work Box then produced, especially its portrayal of torture with hot irons as part of the British justice system in the nineteenth century. He later told Quentin Falk that he was more pained by the ‘treachery’ towards his ‘first-born’ novel than by the political distortions in the 1958 production of The Quiet American – Michael Redgrave appeared in that film too. Greene made it a point to include in subsequent film contracts a clause forbidding resale of rights to Sydney Box,17 and yet Box did manage to obtain the rights to one more of his stories, ‘Across the Bridge’,18 which he sold. Greene remembered him as purely a scoundrel and a bungler.
23
MOTHER OF SIX
The story of Catherine Walston has been told by several writers, however, the most detailed and accurate information is contained in an unpublished family history by her son Oliver Walston.1 Born on 12 February 1916, she was one of four children of Lillian Crompton (née Sheridan) and David Crompton, a solemn New York shipping executive who never really recovered from the deaths of his brother and all his brother’s family aboard the Lusitania, torpedoed in 1915. Known as ‘Bobs’, Catherine was intelligent and literary, but lazy at school. Unusually beautiful, she had brown hair and blue eyes, and her height in adulthood, according to her passports, was 5′ 7″.2 Following a visit to the dentist when she was thirteen, the family’s nanny advised her parents, ‘Mr and Mrs Crompton, I must tell you that I am worried about Bobs. As she walks down the train every man looks at her. She is going to need a great deal of supervision.’3
In a biography of this sort, there is a danger of presenting a complex and intelligent person as just a combination of good looks and sexual appetites. Indeed, a similar danger exists in describing Graham Greene himself, whose life is sometimes boiled down to sex, books, and depression. In writing about Catherine Walston there is also the problem of misogyny, as a highly promiscuous man is sometimes presented as an entertaining rogue, while a woman can be rendered a carnal monster.
Just before her nineteenth birthday, Catherine met an Englishman named Harry Walston, a Cambridge graduate studying bacteriology at Harvard. He came from a well-to-do Jewish family, known as Waldstein until the First World War, whose original fortune was derived from the manufacture of optical instruments. A restless character, Catherine decided that marriage would get her away from home. Five months after meeting, they were married. Later, Catherine claimed to have crossed her fingers during the vows, and she maintained that the marriage was not valid as she had never believed the words she was saying. Perhaps it was her intention to dump Harry once she had got the freedom she yearned for, but as it turned out, they had a curiously durable connection, while both pursued numerous extramarital affairs. Sometimes, Harry is understood as an extreme cuckold and the victim of Catherine’s infidelities – in fact, he lived in a similar manner but apparently with fewer partners. The term ‘open marriage’ did not yet exist, but that is what they had.
Returning to his family’s estate in Cambridgeshire, Harry gave up his academic work and turned to farming. Always an adventurer, Catherine took flying lessons and earned her private pilot’s licence in 1936 – this at a time when Amelia Earhart was a heroine of the newsreels. The Walstons raised six children, though the parentage of two is doubtful. According to Oliver Walston, his brother David, born in 1940, may have been fathered by a man who was Catherine’s lover for some years before and after the marriage, although the reason for that belief is not clear. A more bizarre set of facts surrounds James Walston (born 1949), who was, apparently, not the child of either Catherine or Harry. The family believes that he was the son of Harry’s girlfriend at the time, by another man. Too embarrassed to reveal the pregnancy to her parents, she needed to have the child adopted. For some reason this appealed to Catherine, so she travelled to Dublin, where the child was to be born, went about with a pillow under her clothes until the delivery, and was then certified as the mother.
A letter from John Hayward, who became her close friend, offers a modicum of proof for this tale by addressing her as ‘Mother of Six’, then joking about how Harry has informed him of an error in arithmetic and how she showed no sign of pregnancy two months before.4 Greene worked an episode like this into Travels with My Aunt, and it is sometimes claimed that this must have been based on the child of Catherine and Graham Greene, but the family is doubtful of this and no documents have come to light supporting the suggestion. Graham Greene’s non-involvement in this peculiar episode is worth recording, even as doing so brings to mind an inscrutable headline from a British newspaper in 1986: ‘Body Found, Boy George Not Involved.’
During the war, Catherine became a friend of John Rothenstein, the director of the Tate Gallery, and his American wife Elizabeth, author of a noted study of the painter Stanley Spencer. The Rothensteins were both Catholics. Having considered becoming an Anglican, Catherine was particularly influenced by her conversations with Elizabeth and concluded that the Catholic attitude towards truth, that it cannot change between one age and another, was a decisive d
ifference between the churches. Indeed, Elizabeth was a very fervent woman and could see that Catherine was struggling to find meaning in her life. She introduced her to the Jesuit intellectual Father Martin D’Arcy, whose rigorous manner of thinking she found impressive. Elizabeth also introduced her to the writings of C. S. Lewis and to the novels of Graham Greene.
Contrary to some accounts of Catherine simply parachuting into Greene’s life with a request that he be her godfather in late 1946, she was, in fact, already acquainted with him and, indeed, with Vivien. For a time, John Rothenstein, whose home was near Oxford, lodged on weekdays with the Walstons in their flat at 6 St James’s Street in London; in the autumn of 1945 he held a small party there at which Catherine met Graham Greene and spoke also with his friend the artist and politician John Hastings (16th Earl of Huntingdon, and father of the author Selina Hastings). On Good Friday 1946 Walston travelled from Cambridge to Oxford with the Rothensteins and the young Vincent Turner, SJ, who was giving her religious instruction, to spend the afternoon with the Greene family. On the way, she made her firm decision to become a Catholic.
In September 1946, Elizabeth Rothenstein wrote to Greene asking him to be Catherine’s godfather. He was slow to respond, perhaps because he had gone to Paris for a romantic liaison with a French literary critic named Claudette Monde – Greene later told Walston about this affair, but no French critic of that name seems to have existed; either he was boasting to Walston or the woman was using a false name, as many did in the days of reprisals against collabos.5 According to Catherine, the situation caused him to feel guilty so he delayed a response to Rothenstein’s letter. It seems, also, that he regarded Catherine as a bit of Catholic business that Vivien could take care of. Greene did not attend her baptism and first communion, sending Vivien to represent him. He sent a delayed note of congratulations to Catherine on Eyre & Spottiswoode headed paper.6
With Elizabeth Rothenstein and the IRA man Ernie O’Malley, who was one of her lovers, Catherine visited the Greenes again in November: ‘V was nervous and giggled . . . G hardly spoke. Francis stood completely silent behind his head. V and I talked of Poland. G looked haunted and very sad. Left after 30 minutes. V asked if I knew a house near Cambridge. I promised to look.’7 That Christmas, she sent the Greenes a turkey,8 and in February called Vivien to tell her about a Queen Anne house in the village of Linton. The next day, with snow falling, Graham went with Catherine to look at it. He made the purchase soon after, but sold the house again without occupying it. Vivien resented the suddenness of his decision to buy this house without her seeing it too.9 More important was what passed between Graham and Catherine. Having seen the house he faced a long journey back to Oxford, so she proposed an alternative, ‘Why not fly? I’ll come over with you & fly back.’ It was just a forty-five-minute flight to Kidlington aerodrome, but something happened: ‘A lock of hair touches one’s eyes in a plane with East Anglia under snow, & one is in love . . . ’10
Greene’s life was now knotted in the most extraordinary way. He was married to Vivien, living with Dorothy, purportedly involved with a possibly non-existent Claudette Monde, and in love with Catherine Walston. At the beginning of March he went to Amsterdam to buy paper for Eyre & Spottiswoode, and sent a cryptic postcard to Catherine: ‘I love onion sandwiches. G.’ The image would re-emerge in The End of the Affair: ‘Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn’t, of course, simply the onions – it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable. I put my hand under the cloth and laid it on her knee, and her hand came down and held mine in place.’ In April, Greene went to Walston’s cottage on Achill Island in County Mayo. He cut turf and worked on his novel, storing up idyllic memories of her whistling as she worked in the kitchen and of her tending the fire at night.11 Their relationship would rarely be more happy.
Vivien was worried. She told Greene he had changed during his time in Ireland, but he thought she did not realize he was having an affair with Catherine Walston. He told Evelyn Waugh that he would like to find a house in Ireland, but that Vivien had a ‘phobia’ about the Irish12 – perhaps she was just wary of Graham living anywhere near Achill Island. He made a trip to Dublin in May, apparently accompanied by Vivien, to consider houses, and again in July when he stayed with Catherine at Achill. At about this time, he described himself as ‘a cornered rat’ and was talking about whether life insurance policies covered suicide.13
Greene’s relationship with Dorothy was crumbling. She wanted to be the only woman in his life, and he would not agree to that. In August, their quarrels sometimes went late into the night, and Greene hoped she would just leave him. In September he arranged for her to take a three-month voyage along the West African coast where, in one of the ports, was a sea captain who carried a torch for her. However, the situation was not resolved until the following May when Graham and Dorothy took a short, hellish trip to Morocco, during which peace was obtained only from pipes of kif and watching naked dancers, and they finally agreed that he should no longer live at Gordon Square.14
Graham and Vivien took a comparably gloomy trip to New York in September, where he was negotiating, unsuccessfully, with Life magazine for a commission that would send to him to recently partitioned India – he hoped to be joined there by Catherine. In November, an amorous letter he had written to Catherine was returned to Beaumont Street. Vivien opened it and had final proof of the affair. She confronted Graham, and revealed all to his mother who took her side unreservedly.15 Some months later Graham wrote to Vivien: ‘ . . . the fact that has to be faced, dear, is that by my nature, my selfishness, even in some degree by my profession, I should always, & with anyone, have been a bad husband. I think, you see, my restlessness, moods, melancholia, even my outside relationships, are symptoms of a disease & not the disease itself, & the disease, which has been going on ever since my childhood & was only temporarily alleviated by psycho-analysis, lies in a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also one’s material. Cure the disease & I doubt whether a writer would remain. I daresay that would be all to the good.’16
While formal terms of separation were being agreed, Vivien offered a divorce which Graham refused on the grounds that he would lose contact with the children.17 Afterwards, she refused his requests for a divorce and an ecclesiastical annulment. In later years, the Jesuit literary scholar Father Alberto Huerta reportedly asked why she had done so and elicited the response, ‘to punish him’.18 Until her death in 2003, at the age of ninety-nine, Vivien continued to style herself ‘Mrs Graham Greene’.
24
BANNED IN THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
With his private life in chaos, Greene was about to experience a string of professional triumphs. In July 1947, Heinemann published Nineteen Stories, including ‘The Basement Room’, which had first appeared in 1935. Korda paid £1000 for the rights to that story, conditional upon Greene working on the script, employment that would bring him another £2100 – his earnings on the film were double his annual salary as a publisher.1 Eventually entitled The Fallen Idol, this was his first collaboration with Carol Reed,2 one of the few directors whose work he had raved about when he was a film critic. Reed’s most recent film was Odd Man Out, an atmospheric production about the last twenty-four hours in the life of a wounded IRA man. The penny-pinching executives at the Rank Organisation caused Reed so many problems that at the beginning of 1947 he bolted for Korda’s London Film Productions, where he enjoyed large budgets and an unusual degree of artistic freedom. For his part, Reed treated Greene as a collaborator with perfect respect, doing everything he could to bring the author’s intentions to the screen.3
At Korda’s suggestion, Reed and Greene had met for lunch in May to discuss the possibility of making a film from the story. Initially, Greene thought it unlikely for film development because it was so b
leak: a little boy admires a butler named Baines, who has a horrible marriage and becomes involved with a young woman; the butler eventually kills his wife and is caught because of a comment the boy makes to the police; in later life, the boy accomplishes nothing and eventually dies still haunted by the arrest of Baines. This was a characteristic plot for Graham Greene, since it involves the betrayal of a mentor or dominant friend. In their subsequent discussions they reworked the plot so that the death of Mrs Baines really is an accident, and the boy’s remark to the police leads them rather to falsely suspect the butler, who is eventually cleared.
Around the end of July, the two men took connecting rooms at a hotel in Brighton, brought in a typist, and put the script together. Although Greene was on the payroll for six weeks, the most important work was done in about ten days. Not everything was to Greene’s taste, of course: the overblown title was chosen by the distributor. He had to work hard to convince Reed to work into the script the boy’s pet snake MacGregor, whom Mrs Baines destroys in a symbolic castration. With a handsome budget of £400,000 and a cast led by Ralph Richardson, Michèle Morgan, and the boy actor Bobby Henrey, Reed took advantage of the freedom given to him by Korda to create a quiet but enduring masterpiece of British cinema. The film won the British Academy Film Award for Best Picture,4 and for his effort Graham Greene won the prize for best screenplay at the 1948 Venice Film Festival.
The Unquiet Englishman Page 21