Greene wrote of the austere Pacelli with a nuanced admiration, observing that while his encyclicals were a bore he was possibly a great pope. He was impressed by how a career as a papal diplomat had not erased the instincts of a parish priest and a manner of life that was essentially ‘Franciscan’. In 1950, Greene had made a visit to the Vatican and was shown the excavations of the putative tomb of St Peter. He had a private audience with the pope, and committed what he thought was a faux pas. In answer to a question from Pius, he said that two Masses had moved him profoundly. One was said by the pope himself on the jubilee of his ordination, which occurred on 2 April 1949; in his article Greene described the pope on that occasion passing up the nave of St Peter’s amid cheers and hats thrown in the air, his ‘fine transparent features like those on a coin’. When the other clerics withdrew and left the pope alone at the altar to go through the actions of the liturgy, Greene wondered if he was looking at a saint.
Having recounted this experience to a doubtless gratified pontiff, Greene made, as he believed, the mistake of saying that the other Mass was said by the stigmatic Padre Pio at San Giovanni Rotondo in Apulia. It seemed to Greene that the pope was a little miffed at the comparison to this peasant whom many in the Vatican believed a fraud.3 Perhaps Greene read too much into the conversation: Pius was not himself especially opposed to Padre Pio. The pope gave some thought to Greene’s visit and then read The End of the Affair, saying to Bishop John Heenan (later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster), ‘I think this man is in trouble. If he ever comes to you, you must help him.’4
In the long run, Padre Pio, a Capuchin friar canonized in 2002, mattered more to Greene than did Pope Pius XII. Just as he had been inspired by the popular piety of Mexicans, here too was a holiness on the borders of magic.5 When Graham Greene and Catherine Walston had arrived in Apulia, Pio invited them to speak with him, but Greene refused, fearing that a conversation with a saint might force him to change his life.
Early the next morning, they attended Pio’s Mass. Standing about six feet away, Greene watched him pulling down his sleeves to hide the black wounds of his stigmata. Having been warned that Pio’s Masses went on for some time, Greene became so absorbed that afterwards he was surprised to find that it had taken not the half-hour he supposed but a full two hours. For the rest of his life, through years when he struggled to remain a Catholic, Greene carried two pictures of Padre Pio in his wallet, and as he put it to John Cornwell, this encounter in 1949 ‘introduced a doubt in my disbelief’.6 This is an important phrase, echoing one he used of the Earl of Rochester so many years before (see p. 60). Greene regarded most atheists, including his friend the logical positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer, as far too assured of themselves. Had he lived a little longer Greene would almost certainly have regarded the scientism of Richard Dawkins and the new atheists as just another brittle orthodoxy.
31
‘C’
By the summer of 1951, Greene’s desire to sustain his relationship with Catherine Walston against all comers, among them a saint and a psychiatrist, was facing very long odds. With The End of the Affair soon to be released, Harry Walston had had enough. The British edition was dedicated ‘To C.’ and the American ‘TO CATHERINE with love’. Even though he himself had had mistresses, this relationship of Catherine’s was taking on a public character, and he did not like to be seen in his horns. In August, he insisted that she break off with the novelist, and threatened to divorce her. Graham proposed that he delete the American dedication but was not taken up on the offer; and he tried, unsuccessfully, to have her come and see him in Paris.1
Later in the month, while travelling in Austria with the troubled priest Thomas Gilby, he organized an invitation for himself and Catherine, then at Achill, to Piers Court. Waugh tried to wriggle out of it by saying that they were most welcome but his butler was ill, so they would have to bear up like the Swiss Family Robinson. Catherine wrote privately to Waugh, saying that Graham was often happier without her. Waugh left the invitation open, and remarked that he had read about the Walstons getting public money and planning to grow groundnuts at the farm, ‘But, dear Catherine, I don’t listen to gossip about you.’ She could see friendship in that oblique phrase and accepted the invitation. Waugh later reported to Nancy Mitford that Greene had been on his best behaviour, and had even worn a dinner jacket; having never witnessed such a thing previously, Catherine announced that she would make him always do it. During the days, Greene, in whimsical mood, discussed with Waugh such matters as the sex life of Perry Mason and went for long walks, collecting licence-plate numbers,2 a superstitious practice that he would later work into Our Man in Havana.
After this visit, Greene wrote to Catherine proposing that they have a child and devote their lives to Catholic Action, promising her that he would go to communion weekly if they were together.3 They saw each other in September, but she refused to come to him in Paris in October, at which point their affair was understood to be over. But, as will be seen in the following chapters, they would reconcile and break up again and again through the next decade, a pattern that created sorrow for both of them.
Apart from gloom about Catherine, Greene was anxious about the novel – that it was aesthetically flawed and religiously wrongheaded. He took comfort from a letter written by the Dominican friar Father Gervase Mathew, who had served as Francis’s godfather, just as his brother David, an archbishop, had served as Caroline’s. He wrote: ‘How much I disagree with your judgement of the End of the Affair. Now that I have finished it I think that you have never dived to a more real level and I think that the conception of God that underlies that reality is the truest of those in all your books – and you said so much that I have seen so often in life but never before in print. Love Gervase.’4
Greene’s spirits usually improved in the company of Alex Korda. At the end of September 1951, they set sail from Athens for Istanbul, where Elisabeth was then living, her husband Rodney, a senior SIS officer, having been posted there. The weather was against them, so they sheltered on the island of Skiathos for three days spent mostly in a pub drinking retsina. Their shipmates were Margot Fonteyn, Laurence Olivier, and Vivien Leigh, who had been mobbed by paparazzi in Athens. In the course of many games of canasta, large meals, and much drink, Greene decided that Leigh was more intelligent than Olivier. He flirted with Fonteyn and they decided that he should write a ballet for her.5 He considered the project during his sojourn in Indochina and in March pitched it to Alex, who thought that Peter Brook might be a suitable director. However, the idea faded away.6
Greene arrived in Paris around 21 October 1951, and saw Father Martindale. He had hoped Catherine would meet him in Paris; she telephoned and confirmed that while she wanted the relationship, she could not be separated from her children. On his way to Indochina Greene took some comfort in that statement but said that if the break were absolute he would remain in Indochina and die there.
The End of the Affair had come out in Britain in early September and drew a wide range of opinions from reviewers, some of whom were taken aback by his decision to carry the story beyond Sarah’s death into a period when she seems to bring about miracles of healing through saintly intercession. While this was consistent with his taste for a religion that openly embraced something close to magic, the gesture took him outside the traditions of the realist novel and alienated readers who did not share his faith, so he revised later editions of the novel to make the healings more ambiguous.7
But there was great praise too. Time magazine ran a picture of him on its cover with the caption: ‘NOVELIST GRAHAM GREENE Adultery can lead to sainthood’,8 and devoted six pages to a biographical and critical piece that judged him as accomplished a craftsman as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, or Evelyn Waugh. The praise Greene most valued, however, came not in a review: Faulkner himself wrote in a letter to his British publisher, the contents of which were soon passed on, ‘I have also read Mr Greene’s THE END OF THE AFFAIR; not one of yours, but for me
one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody’s language.’9
32
THE BELL TOWER
On 30 October 1951, Graham Greene found himself at a dinner in Hanoi where General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was giving a speech aimed at one of his guests, the Bishop of Bui Chu, Pham Ngoc Chi, whose commitment to the French cause was no sure thing.1 Indeed, the general spent as much time managing allies as he did fighting the enemy. He had just returned to Vietnam after three months of travel. Having been in Washington to get military aid speeded up, he had appeared on Meet the Press and other television programmes, selling the war to the American people not as the last gasp of colonialism but as a heroic stand against communism.2 The general’s charisma attracted the interest of American politicians, among them the young congressman John F. Kennedy, who briefly toured Vietnam.3
De Lattre also visited London to secure cooperation with British forces in Malaya. Having won a series of battles through the past year, he convinced much of the world’s press that the war was rounding a corner. For example, an article appeared in The Times on 5 October, based on sources no closer to Tonkin than Paris, declaring that in Vietnamese public opinion the cause of the Viet Minh was ‘virtually lost’. That was the kind of coverage the general was looking for, but it was nonsense.
Greene expected the same welcome he had received on his earlier visit, but the atmosphere had changed.4 Trevor Wilson had continued his search for a Catholic third force without much discretion. Having been decorated for his work in Paris at the end of the European war, he was now told to get out of French Indochina. Allowed back in mid-November and given about four weeks’ reprieve to sort out his affairs, he was persona non grata. This was not simply a local matter, involving one consul who happened to be a loose cannon. On his visit to London de Lattre had urged the British to work with his forces in Indochina, for example in the matter of naval patrols, but he would hardly want them to meddle in military or political affairs, even as he was opening the door to this. Expelling Wilson sent a message to the British government about the limits of cooperation. In the meantime, Greene’s choice of company was unfortunate – when he first landed in Saigon, he was met at the airport by, among others, Donald Lancaster, a British diplomat and MI6 representative.5 He wrote to his mother that he met in Saigon with two members of ‘the old firm’.6
French patience was wearing thin. Over the summer the Catholic militias had collapsed: they were encircled by the Viet Minh and had had to be rescued by French paratroopers. At the end of May, the general’s son, Lieutenant Bernard de Lattre, had been trapped in an outpost not far from Phat Diem. Having signalled for reinforcements, he was hit by an artillery shell.7 Greene maintained that the general blamed Catholics for his loss and was embittered against them, and perhaps he was.
At the level of policy, the general was frustrated by the bishops’ failure to accept the French as their true allies, but he did not really grasp what he was dealing with. Even today, it is commonly assumed that Catholicism in Indochina was a foreign imposition and that Catholics were stooges of the French. In fact, the faith had been present in the region for about four hundred years; by 1945, Catholics represented something like a tenth of the population. There were six times as many indigenous priests as there were missionaries, as well as four bishops of Vietnamese descent, whose ordination the Vatican had insisted upon. Many of the Vietnamese clergy were involved in Catholic Action and so had a qualified sympathy with progressive causes. Unlike the French missionaries, the indigenous clergy strongly supported independence, so much so that in 1909 three priests had been jailed for nationalist activities. Nor were the foreign missionaries all of one mind: some from Belgium actually supported independence.
Although the Vatican dreaded communism, it had long foreseen the end of European empires and was encouraging the transition to indigenous church leadership in soon-to-be-independent territories. Pope Benedict XV and Pope Pius XI had both written encyclicals on the subject.8 As the war progressed, the leading Catholic intellectual in Vietnam, Nguyen Manh Ha, was trying to find a path to peace that avoided both communism and colonialism, so de Lattre had him exiled too.9 The Bishop of Phat Diem, Le Huu Tu, loathed the French and in 1945 accepted a role as adviser to Ho Chi Minh but withdrew as the Viet Minh became more openly committed to communism. He wanted to keep his diocese out of the fighting, but Phat Diem was in a strategically important area in the lower Gulf of Tonkin, so the war came to him. The French rescue in the summer of 1951 humiliated the bishop.
De Lattre wanted help from the Vatican. During his visit to the United States, he met with Cardinal Spellman of New York, an ecclesiastical power-broker convinced of the threat of communism. De Lattre went on to Rome for a private audience with Pius XII in mid-October10 and discussed the status of the Catholic church in Indochina. What he wanted was for the pope to pressure the Vietnamese-born bishops into a full alliance. The pope, a career diplomat, expressed concern, but then did a peculiar thing. In an evident concession to the general, he immediately appointed a new apostolic delegate to Vietnam, but chose an Irishman, Archbishop John Dooley, to take the post which had for a generation been held only by Frenchmen – what the pope gave to the French with one hand he took away with the other.11 Having made very limited progress on his Catholic problem, the general returned to Vietnam at about the same time as Greene in late October 1951.12
Tainted by association with Trevor Wilson, Greene’s movements were now scrutinized by the Sûreté Fédérale – the police and security service. He would afterwards satirize his minders in the character of a hapless Monsieur Dupont, whom he and Wilson, during the time of his reprieve, teased mercilessly, crushing him in games of chance and sending him home drunk to a sceptical wife. They brought him to fumeries and a bathhouse, where an erotic massage caused him to pass out and need reviving with whisky. Greene put it about that he was writing a roman policier to be called Voilà, Monsieur Dupont.13 In the end, he did something rather like that, as the frame of The Quiet American is the investigation conducted by Inspector Vigot into the death of Alden Pyle. Of course, Vigot is no buffoon; he is portrayed as something of a priest, reading Pascal and listening to men’s confessions.
Greene could not stand having his movements supervised. But being penned in with journalists in Hanoi and Saigon had a benefit which he would recognize later. The Quiet American is dedicated to a couple named René and Phuong, and Greene insisted that he had only borrowed the woman’s name and the location of their flat in Saigon for the story. René de Berval, a journalist and cultural writer living in Saigon, edited the journal France-Asie and wrote books on Buddhism and the kingdom of Laos; he was extremely fond of Greene. Not a great deal is known about Phuong, except that, like her namesake in the novel, she had a sister who was anxious to see her married.14 He had met the couple on his first visit, and looked to de Berval for advice on when to come back.15 During his sojourns in Vietnam, Greene spent many evenings with this couple and they were probably his closest friends there once Wilson left the scene. He was also attracted to Phuong, as on one occasion he kissed her through the grille, ‘like Pyramus and Thisbe’, at the airport.16
Inter-racial couples were common in French Indochina, so the situation in the novel is most likely an amalgam of several relationships Greene observed, and, of course, the result of a good deal of invention. The married Trevor Wilson had a Vietnamese girlfriend named Tuan.17 Greene had other friends, such as the police officer Paul Boucarut18 and his wife Hô, who come back into the story a little later.19 A memoir by Danielle Flood describes how she was the child of a French-Vietnamese woman and an Englishman but her paternity was ascribed to an American – this series of events may have been known to Graham Greene.20 There had even been a novel by the little-known Harry Hervey entitled Congaï: Mistress of Indochine (1925), in which the half-Annamite protagonist chooses among relationships with European men.21 Greene may have come across that book, but the idea of a triangle involving
two foreigners and a local woman in a war zone was not new for him. It was precisely what he had portrayed in Rumour at Nightfall, where the journalists Crane and Chase compete for the love of Eulelia Monti, and the matter is decided by a betrayal. The Quiet American is partly constructed out of the rubble of that book.
Greene spent some time with the Reuters correspondent, an Australian named Graham Jenkins, and with the somewhat traumatized Associated Press representative Larry Allen, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for war reporting. Allen had been aboard at least three ships (eight by some accounts) that were sunk, including a destroyer off Tobruk, then imprisoned for many months in Poland and elsewhere, escaping and being recaptured several times. After the war, he reported from Moscow, Tel Aviv, and Singapore. He moved on to Indochina, where the French liked his reports and awarded him the Croix de Guerre in 1952.22 Bernard Diederich, a journalist from New Zealand who will become a central figure later in this book, knew Allen: ‘He told me about covering a riot in Singapore, and the UPI fellow traveling with him was killed while he was saved in a ditch by a couple to whom he gave 2000 dollars he said he always carried with him.’ Diederich believes that all these brushes with death left Allen somewhat ‘gun shy’ in later life, and the quality of his reporting fell off.23 Greene disliked Allen; he told Diederich that he based the character of the journalist Granger on him and that a press conference in which Granger badgers the briefing officers into divulging casualty figures was based on an actual event;24 of course, one might observe, that in playing rough with the officers Allen was just doing his job.
The Unquiet Englishman Page 26