Haiphong had not yet been handed over to the Viet Minh, and when he arrived on 12 March Greene had to threaten both the Viet Minh and the International Commission with bad publicity in order to get a visa to go into Hanoi.25 While waiting for it to be issued, he met old friends, among them André Moret of the Sûreté, who held a dinner party for him. He had a chance meeting with Father Willichs, whom he had supposed imprisoned.
In this port city, Greene encountered a young American who would soon become, like himself, a Catholic celebrity. Dr Tom Dooley was struggling to meet the medical needs of refugees; he told Greene that about 350 people were still arriving every day, and among them he would usually find two ‘atrocity cases’26 – these included mutilated thumbs and castrations.27 Dooley wrote several books about his work as a medical missionary in Haiphong and Laos, which sold in the millions, before he died of cancer in 1961 at the age of thirty-four. A Gallup poll in 1960 found him one of America’s ten most admired men, and the press followed each stage of his illness.28 After his death there was a groundswell for his canonization, but this faded as his ardent anti-communism and involvement with the CIA were seen by progressive Catholics to have helped bring on the American war in Indochina, while the revelation that he was gay and sexually active offended conservatives.29
Greene met Father Willichs on 15 March 1955 and had lunch with General Cogny before going by car to Hanoi. He caught sight of Ho’s portrait hanging from a bridge, and entered a city that seemed nearly deserted. The trishaws were empty and the shops and cafés shuttered. Over the next three days, Greene was idle. The apostolic delegate refused to receive him, and his visits to the shabby press office accomplished nothing. He watched a film about Dien Bien Phu and drank what he believed was the last bottle of beer in Hanoi.30 Then, on the morning of the 19th, he received the invitation he had been waiting for; after lunch and two opium pipes he headed to what had been Bao Dai’s palace for a meeting with Ho Chi Minh.
What happened at the meeting is something of a mystery. He met the Minister of Information, who pretended not to be able to speak French, and was escorted into Ho’s presence. Greene concluded that Ho, dressed in khaki with socks hanging down over his ankles, must still be more than a figurehead as the minister was afraid to say anything in the old man’s presence. Having heard him described as ‘un homme pur comme Lucifer’, Greene saw in him not a fanatic, but one who had ‘solved an equation’ – a mathematical metaphor for destructive certainty that had appeared in Loser Takes All. He reminded Greene of the schoolmaster ‘Mr Chips’, but he was too old himself to attend such a school or to imbibe his lesson.
The three drank tea, and Greene carried out his mission: he handed Ho a letter. Greene would never reveal the nature of the letter or the content of their conversation – they would probably have been covered by the Official Secrets Act. His journal records that Ho expressed ‘Curiosity about French Catholic reactions’ and added, perhaps to encourage Greene to speak freely, ‘ “We are in the family.” ’31 It is likely that the letter was a proposal for the relief of Vietnamese Catholics, but a full understanding of this episode depends on further documents coming to light. He watched Ho, socks sagging, wave as he left the room.
Greene flew back to Saigon, and following a discussion of ‘next moves’ with Fergie, left Vietnam on 22 March for Hong Kong and Singapore.32 His three articles for the Sunday Times appeared just over a month later in successive issues as ‘Last Drama of Indo China’.33 The first, ‘The Dilemma of the South’, offered a general view of the situation and concluded that Diem was running an ‘inefficient dictatorship’. The second, ‘Refugees and Victors’, described the lot of the migrants, and quoted Tom Dooley, without naming him, while the final part, ‘The Man as Pure as Lucifer’, described the meeting with Ho Chi Minh but not what was said.
40
ANITA
The Graham Greene who had come back from Vietnam was not well. Opium had quelled his appetite, so he ate less than he should and was even leaner than usual. Despite regular contact with the psychiatrist Eric Strauss, a frequent visitor to Anacapri, he remained in a melancholic and irritable state. The ‘dottoressa’, Elisabeth Moor, diagnosed a liver ailment, and suggested to his dismay that he might need to give up drinking. Blood tests came back negative, but Greene lamented that there was not a medical explanation for how he felt and acted.1
Meanwhile, some of his personal relationships showed signs of neglect. Both as a journalist and a parent, Graham Greene could fairly be described as a foreign correspondent. His children, Caroline and Francis, saw little of him but received interesting letters from far-off places, and occasionally ones which revealed how distant a father he was; for example, he wrote in the mid-1950s:
Dear Francis,
I wish I had seen more of you the other day – I was too busy with ‘affairs of no earthly importance’ & now it looks as if I shall see nothing of you this holidays. Remember to send me your blue card for next term, & let’s see also – if you feel like it – whether we can plan a small trip together somewhere queer or interesting on the Continent in the summer holidays. I mean two males together! Have you any views?
In any case a lot of love,
G.
Now eighteen, Francis had finished at Ampleforth College and gone up to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read physics and learned to speak Russian. Francis himself wrote amusing letters, including one in which he described how someone had poured Tide detergent into the Mercury fountain in Tom Quad, with predictable consequences. Something of a wit, he won national magazine competitions for light verse. In early 1955, he was reading through his father’s works and enjoying them, and announced, whimsically, that he would become a collector, so Graham had Doris Young send him a full set.2
Caroline had recently turned twenty-one, and a party her father held for her at Albany was a bit discouraging as many of those invited were his friends rather than hers.3 Having worked as a model and found it unpleasant, indeed predatory, she conceived a surprising ambition to become a rancher in western Canada. After consultations with Vivien, in August Graham travelled with his daughter to Alberta to look at properties, and remarked, ‘The women are all sympathetic to Lucy’s ambition: the men pour cold water.’4 He strongly approved of his daughter’s unconventional plan and provided the capital for a ranch near Calgary, to be operated in partnership with a couple named Parker who provided the livestock and equipment. It was not the kind of life the novelist could enjoy, but he knew it was right for his daughter.5
As a journalist, Graham Greene’s special subject was faith under conditions of oppression. He spent the second half of November in Poland, and then wrote two articles for the Sunday Times.6 On 17 November, he went to Auschwitz and afterwards maintained that no one should go to the country without seeing this site of annihilation – he drew special attention to a display of tons of women’s hair and another of tiny shoes. He felt that an awareness of the horror forced one to be cautious in making judgements about contemporary Poland. A few days later, after he had seen both Warsaw and Kraków, he remarked, ‘My goodness, how I love these people. Their kindness has been beyond belief.’7
Initially, he was impressed by how far the country had come since 1945. He believed that the Russians had done the Poles less harm than the Nazis had, but then considered how in the late summer of 1944 the Russians halted their advance so that the Germans could wipe out the partisans of the Warsaw Uprising and leave the country ripe for occupation. The church, which had stood up to tsars and Nazis, was now at the heart of resistance to the puppet government installed by the Soviets. Despite the incarceration of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński in 1953, the church continued to function, perhaps aided by the Virgin of Cźestochowa, whom Greene referred to in Hilaire Belloc’s phrase as ‘help of the half-defeated’.
Greene rejected another kind of Catholic response to the occupation of Poland, perhaps as wholly defeated. He had been invited to the country by the PAX Association, which had relaunched
an old Catholic newspaper on pro-Soviet lines and was permitted to publish foreign literature, and he reported on this group to MI6.8 He was met at the airport by one of its principal members, the novelist Jan Dobraczyński, and had meetings with its leader Bolesław Piasecki, who had been a right-wing nationalist and Jew-baiter before the war, then a brave figure in the Uprising; he was taken to Moscow for execution, spared, and returned to Warsaw to start the PAX Association, which was intended to sever the Polish church from Rome.9 Opposed by most Catholics, it supported death sentences handed down against priests as well as the cardinal’s imprisonment and then house arrest. Greene attended at least one large meeting of the group and several small gatherings, and fell out with them by enquiring at what point PAX would actually stand up to Moscow as the incarceration of Cardinal Wyszyński was not enough of an offence for them to do so. At one dinner, a publisher became so annoyed with him that she had to be escorted from the table.10 Greene presented Piasecki with an open letter to the cardinal, requesting an audience and offering to keep such a meeting out of the news, but heard nothing more about it.
At the University of Lublin, among mainstream Catholics, Greene was impressed by a production of Murder in the Cathedral11 which spoke to the yearning of Polish believers for the return of their own archbishop. When the professor who organized the production came to England in 1956, Greene arranged for T. S. Eliot to meet him.12
Cardinal Wyszyński’s place in history is not a simple matter. A mentor of the future Pope John Paul II, he is well on his way to canonization, but his legacy of courage in the face of oppression is tainted. In 1945–6, after the Germans had gone and when Poland was in a state approaching civil war, Catholics carried out pogroms in Kraków and Kielce, killing about fifteen hundred Jews. When a delegation of Jews approached Wyszyński, asking him to denounce the ancient ‘blood libel’ that Jews murdered Christian children and used their blood to make matzo, a notion that had animated the attackers especially in Kielce, the newly installed Bishop of Lublin commented on how many Poles were being killed and said that all murder was wrong, but as for the matter of blood, it was ‘not definitively settled’. One historian notes that as long ago as 1247 there had been a papal bull dismissing the blood story as a fraud. Seven centuries later, Wyszyński thought it deserved further consideration.13
Greene’s visit to Poland had begun with a four-day visit to Stockholm that would transform his personal life. On the first evening, his Swedish publisher, Ragnar Svanström, held a dinner for him attended by the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Anders Österling – the man who usually announced the winners of the Nobel Prize. Also present were Harald Grieg (the brother of Greene’s old friend Nordahl Grieg), the literary Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, and the translator Michael Meyer.14 After many drinks, Greene asked Meyer to join the Svanströms and himself for another dinner the next night, but Meyer said he had a date. Greene told him, ‘Bring the girl.’ He added, ‘Perhaps you could find one for me’, then backtracked: ‘No, I was joking.’
Jocelyn Rickards, Mercia Ryhiner, and Allegra Sander were all remarkable women. Greene’s interest in them may have been partly owing to the waywardness of his mood disorder, which he recalled as being at its worst in the 1950s, but he also knew by now that nothing would ever come of his relationship with Catherine Walston and was searching for an alternative. He was about to find one.
Graham Greene had met Anita Björk in passing almost exactly two years earlier, when The Living Room was produced in Stockholm. He had actually had a clearer impression of her husband, the playwright and novelist Stig Dagerman, widely believed to be one of the most promising figures in European literature – Greene certainly admired his works. Following Anita’s success in the film adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which shared the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1951, she went to Hollywood, where Alfred Hitchcock wanted her for the lead in I Confess (1953).15 Since at the time she was living with Stig without being married to him and had a child from an earlier relationship, a studio boss, whose own adulteries would have led to remarks in Gomorrah, told her that she was falling short of the moral standards of Hollywood and the couple went home. They did marry the following year, and she gave Hollywood another try – in June 1952 she was the subject of a long article in the New York Times, comparing her skills and appearance to those of Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman.16 She appeared with Gregory Peck in the unremarkable Cold War thriller Night People (1954), but gave up on the American film industry as she preferred to live and work in Sweden. She had a long and accomplished career in European theatre and film.
‘Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable’ is the title of one of Stig Dagerman’s best-known works. Suffering from bipolar illness and burdened by debt from his efforts to support the children of his first marriage, he took his own life on 4 November 1954.17 By the time she met Graham Greene again, Anita Björk had been a widow for almost exactly a year.
Hoping to cheer her up, both Meyer and Svanström invited her to the dinner. When Meyer told Greene what they had arranged, the novelist felt very awkward and said, ‘I didn’t mean it seriously. I hate blind dates, they’re always a disappointment.’ The party met in an old restaurant in Djurgården, the island in central Stockholm dedicated to gardens, amusements, and museums, including, nowadays, one devoted to ABBA. After dinner, Meyer invited Greene and Björk back to his apartment, where it was obvious that there was an attraction between the two.18 Just before Greene left Stockholm, Björk had lunch with him between rehearsals, and afterwards sent him a single rose.19
At Christmas Anita was able to come to London for a day, and the relationship began. Graham went to Stockholm on New Year’s Day 1956 and stayed for about two weeks, and in early March they took a holiday together in Portugal. On his return, Greene composed a bibulous letter to Catherine, in which, without referring to Anita, he suggested, yet again, that they consider ending their affair. In fact, he did not tell Catherine about Anita until December, although she had picked up rumours well before.
As ever, Greene’s private life was a mess; much as he loved Anita, he could not get Catherine out of his system, and their affair revived from time to time into the 1960s, when he finally distanced himself from her. It is perhaps in the character of Greene’s relationship with Anita Björk that less is known of it. She was a discreet person, and deposited none of her correspondence with Greene from the 1950s in an archive. Her work was centred on the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and she wanted to raise her children there, so Greene became a frequent visitor. Near the end of his life Greene wrote to her: ‘Some of the happiest days of my life were spent with you in Stockholm.’20
41
OUR MAN ON THE POTOMAC
The most interesting bad review that Greene received in his career was doled out to him by A. J. Liebling, a distinguished war reporter who shared with E. B. White the role of main essayist at the New Yorker. He is the author of at least one quiet masterpiece, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1963), and his essays on boxing are unsurpassed. Though almost forgotten nowadays, Liebling was one of the best American prose stylists of the mid-twentieth century, and in a title-shot against Graham Greene he was by no means over-matched. His article was as much a parody as a review, in which he describes the experience of reading The Quiet American between naps while flying across the Atlantic.
He claimed that the book was the product of one dominant culture succeeding another, as might have happened with the Greeks and the Romans or the French and the English. The gist of his position is that the senior culture treats the junior as a whippersnapper. He proposed first of all that ‘Fowler-Bogart’ was actually a poor imitation of a Hemingway hero and that Greene himself was a ‘minor American author’. He then considered whether some (slight) errors in idiom and cultural references to the United States showed that Pyle was really an Englishman. He called the book an ‘Eastern Western’ and made fun of Greene’s startling metaphors, before referring to the novel as ‘Mr Greene�
�s nasty little plastic bomb’. He concluded: ‘There is a difference, after all, between calling your over-successful off-shoot a silly ass and accusing him of murder.’1 Liebling’s essay is funny, but it is hardly fair, as its closing indignation implies that American foreign policy would never engage in what we now know as black ops. Even as Liebling was writing, Edward Lansdale and his ilk were at work in Indochina.
Others were at work in Hollywood. Claiming that the British edition of The Quiet American had sold a breath-taking two hundred thousand copies within a month, gossip columnist Louella Parsons revealed that the four-time Oscar winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz had ‘scooped’ the rights and planned to write, produce, and direct the film himself.2 Greene was giving Caroline the rights so that she could sell them and pay for the ranch, and it took several months to do all the paperwork, but Mankiewicz closed the deal for about $50,000.3 By the beginning of 1957, it became evident that he was doing something disgraceful. Even though the book was effectively banned in South Vietnam, Mankiewicz, in search of ‘local colour’ – though not perhaps red – was permitted to film there, something Diem himself would have decided. A journalist in Saigon learned that the film would be a ‘travesty’, heralding ‘the triumphant emergence of the democratic forces in the young and independent state of Viet Nam backed by the United States’.4 With Michael Redgrave and war hero Audie Murphy playing the leads, the film, released in February 1958, showed the innocence of Pyle and the gullibility of Fowler. Greene regarded the whole business as a betrayal, but his immediate reaction was rather mild: ‘I am vain enough to believe that the book will survive a few years longer than Mr. Mankiewicz’s incoherent picture.’5
With the rockets’ red glare of patriotism and outrage contributing to his American book sales in the spring of 1956, Graham Greene was busy with auditions and then rehearsals for a new play. The Power and the Glory ran for a week in Brighton, then from 4 April to 2 June at the Phoenix Theatre in London. Directed by Peter Brook, with whom Greene had travelled to Haiti, the play worked from a script that Denis Cannan and Pierre Bost had rewritten several times since 1951, with revisions from Greene. The whisky priest was played by Paul Scofield, who would also appear in Greene’s The Complaisant Husband (1959); in When Greek Meets Greek (1975), the first episode of Thames Television’s Shades of Greene series; and in a Yorkshire Television production of The Potting Shed (1981). The Lieutenant was played by Harry H. Corbett, a capable actor who became popular in the comedy series Steptoe and Son.
The Unquiet Englishman Page 32