It may be that this apparently cruel story represents one pole of Greene’s religious thinking at the time: that the only possible basis for faith is trauma, or at least an intimacy with suffering. For him, the most authentic believers had always been in the trouble spots, the ones who had no comfort to deceive them.
In 1956, Greene had written a short story exploring the other side of the question, what he saw as the weakness of intellectual Catholicism. In ‘A Visit to Morin’ a wine merchant curious about the church encounters a novelist named Morin whose works had once been very popular among Catholics and finds that the man’s views have shifted – he seems to be poised between doubt and affirmation. Even though he does not receive the sacraments, Morin reacts angrily to the suggestion that he has lost his faith: ‘I told you I had lost my belief. That’s quite a different thing.’11 This distinction between belief – intellectual conviction – and faith – an intuitive or experiential assent – would remain with Greene for the rest of his life. In 1975, he reassured a concerned stranger who believed Greene had lost his faith and so prayed for him every day, ‘I once wrote a short story A Visit to Morin in which I distinguished between the loss of belief and the loss of faith. I think I still have faith, even though the belief is a bit ragged.’12 He found the Thomistic arguments for the existence of God tiresome and unconvincing, yet, like Morin, he continued to go to Mass and at night he said his prayers.13
After Christmas, Greene was suddenly called back to New York to revise The Potting Shed, which was set to open at the Bijou Theatre on 28 January 1957. The director was the young Carmen Capalbo, then best known for a 1954 production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Robert Flemyng was cast as James Callifer, the main character who as a boy hanged himself and was mysteriously revived – Greene referred to this as his first attempt to create a ‘hollow man’, a forerunner of Querry in A Burnt-Out Case, whom he thought the more successful character.14
It is often observed that Greene had difficulty creating interesting female characters; one of his most subtle is the ageing Mrs Callifer, who had concealed the miracle to protect her atheist husband from what would have been a crisis of disbelief; she was played on this occasion by Dame Sybil Thorndike, who especially loved the first two acts of the play, but wondered whether Greene had a sense of dramatic form. There were artistic clashes on the set, as Thorndike and especially her husband, Sir Lewis Casson, playing Fred Baston, grew tired of Capalbo’s ‘Method’ approach to rehearsal – in their view, all talk and no acting.15
The script was changing almost every day, as Capalbo wanted Greene to enlarge the part in the third act of Sara Callifer, played by Leueen MacGrath. Greene threw himself into the task and even proposed changing the title to ‘A Lion on the Path’,16 which would have been a nightmare for publicists who had been advertising The Potting Shed for months. In the midst of this frenzy, he reported to Catherine: ‘I’m pretty tired & exist & work on dry Martinis, Scotch & Benzedrine.’17 Still Greene enjoyed the companionship of the theatre, loved the actors, and felt a pang when he left New York at the end of January. Despite his usual misgivings, the play did well: Capalbo telegraphed to him in Paris: ‘6½ raves out of 7 notices.’18 Receiving one Tony nomination as best play and another for Thorndike as best actress, the production moved to the Golden Theatre and had a run of 119 performances before packed houses.19
John Gielgud had turned down The Potting Shed as it seemed to him too poetic and hard to grasp, but seeing its triumph in New York he changed his mind and accepted the part of Callifer in the London production.20 He thought the play ‘morbid and gloomy but very sparely and concisely written and the first two acts are really fine in an Ibsenesque way’.21 Directed by Michael Macowan, this cast included Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Mrs Callifer and Irene Davies as Sara. After a week’s run in Brighton, it opened at the Globe on 5 February 1958; despite large audiences, it closed prematurely on 3 May 1958, as Gielgud was committed to appear in another play.22 The London notices were favourable, though more reserved than those in New York.
Gielgud was not the only one to change his mind about the play, as Greene scrubbed out the alterations he had made to the third act in the weeks before the New York opening. According to Gielgud, Capalbo wanted the changes without even having the company give the first version a full reading.23 For the London production, Greene cut out a discussion among rationalists of abandoning Christmas festivities in favour of ‘Children’s Day’, a notion he also treated in ‘Dear Dr Falkenheim’. Published by Viking in 1957, the American version suffers by comparison with the tighter one included in Greene’s Collected Plays. Looking back years later, Greene was fond of the first act but remained unsatisfied with the ending in both versions, and he may be echoing a conversation with Thorndike when he discusses the problem of dramatic unities in Ways of Escape.24 Even so, the third act, in either version, has some extraordinary touches in it, not least Callifer’s claim that he knew his uncle the priest no longer believed in the miracle merely by looking at his room: ‘Have you ever seen a room from which faith has gone? A room without faith – oh that can be pretty and full of flowers, you can fill it with Regency furniture and the best modern pictures. But a room from which faith is gone is quite different. Like a marriage from which love has gone, and all that’s left are habits and pet names and sentimental objects, picked up on beaches and in foreign towns that don’t mean anything any more. And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.’25
44
A MIXTURE OF PETROL AND VODKA
It is not just the loss of faith that resembles an empty room in The Potting Shed, but the loss of love, something Greene knew a good deal about. During 1956 and 1957, Greene could not choose between Anita and Catherine, so made a mess of both relationships. He decided to go to Portugal with Anita only after Harry had forbidden Catherine to visit him in Paris. Then, as described above, he travelled with Catherine to the Caribbean. At the end of that trip, they quarrelled, evidently about the presence of another woman in his life.
In early December 1956, Catherine sent a conciliatory letter and he at last explained to her his year-old relationship with Anita.1 She responded in such a way that he then stated plainly his willingness to leave Anita for her. He also said that he regretted having told her the truth about Anita, rather than just letting that relationship run its course, and said that it had been a mistake for her to tell him about her other lovers.2 In June, they took a holiday together in Rome and it ended in another row. Their bleak correspondence continued through 1957, and around the beginning of November she broke up with him in a telephone call.3
Greene made repeated visits to Stockholm in 1957 but found it lonely as, apart from Anita, he had just two friends there, Michael Meyer and the publisher Ragnar Svanström. Greene’s humour seemed to alienate Swedes, and he was certainly doing himself no good in his campaign for the Nobel Prize. With Anita, he was trying family life again, but dealing with small children was, for him, purgatorial. He and Anita considered buying a house in Versailles, but this would have ended Anita’s career at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and Greene, to his credit, felt this was too much to ask of an artist. It appears that at some point he asked her to marry him, as he had repeatedly asked Catherine.4
For her part, Anita was aware that she faced competition from Catherine and that this was eating away at their relationship. In late June, they travelled to Martinique and remained in the West Indies until the beginning of August. While there, Greene believed they would break up, but the crisis passed, or at least it was postponed. Shortly afterwards, he was obliged to look happy when Anita announced she might be pregnant, but Greene promised God that if he were spared this child he would consider making a long retreat at a religious house. There was no baby, so he considered the matter and left it at that.5
Greene accepted an invitation to go as part of a delegation to the People’s Republic of China in April 1957. This month-long trip was paid for by the Chinese government, who d
oubtless saw in the author of The Quiet American a possible sympathizer; in fact, he thoroughly disliked the regime. Greene agreed to the trip in a brief period of relatively free expression in China, encouraged by Mao Zedong’s slogan ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend’, which was promptly followed by new repression of intellectuals and opponents of the government.6
The Foreign Office briefed Greene about priests and writers who had been imprisoned, and once he got to China he tried, with limited success, to make contact with Catholics. He was forced to spend most of his time with the lawyer and Labour peer Robert Chorley; with Professor Joseph Lauwerys, an expert on comparative education and an advisor to UNESCO;7 and a Mrs Brown, who was an orthodox communist from Hampstead.8 Greene had expected to travel with Margaret and John Hastings, who were friends of his and of the Walstons, but he discovered at the airport that there were two British groups who would travel separately and meet in China. At Greene’s urging his group went from Beijing to the old imperial city of Xi’an, then to Chongqing, followed by a four-day journey down the Yangtze to Hankou, and a return to Beijing.
Among the British visitors was the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, the guest of honour at that most unlikely thing, a Robert Burns festival in Chongqing. In Greene’s recollection, the Scot was displeased to encounter an Englishman at the event and warmed to him only after he displayed a knowledge of Scotch whisky. MacDiarmid recalled their encounter as very friendly, with Greene giving him a small stoneware jar of the sorghum-based spirit Maotai, which the poet thought tasted like ‘a mixture of petrol and vodka’. Greene would not take it on the plane for fear it would explode.9
On this trip, Greene himself exploded several times – something consistent with his mood disorder. He took against Lauwerys, who liked to explain things and spoke in full paragraphs. Greene gave him such a hard time that while they were on the boat the professor threatened to throw him into the Yangtze. That night, Greene heard strange sounds and imagined that Lauwerys was strangling someone, perhaps their guide, so beat on his door, ‘Stop that fucking noise, you bugger.’ As it turned out, the noise was merely the conversation of cooks in the galley.
During the journey, Greene and his party visited universities, factories, a collective farm, and at his request a cinema school. At a May Day celebration in Beijing, he saw Chairman Mao from a distance and shook hands with Zhou Enlai.10 However, the most memorable event occurred in Chongqing. At a dinner with the mayor Greene asked about the case of the art theorist Hu Feng. In a long report to the cultural bureaucracy, this man had rejected Mao’s belief that the purpose of art was objective and political, and instead emphasized the importance of the individual mind. Arrested in July 1955 as a counter-revolutionary and Taiwanese spy, he would spend the next twenty-five years in prison, with his whereabouts concealed for the first decade. In a broader purge of intellectuals, the government also imprisoned Hu’s friend the novelist Lu Ling, and a ‘Hu Feng clique’ of two hundred writers and artists, some whom had never met the man.11
At first avoiding Greene’s question, the mayor merely confirmed that Hu Feng lived in Chongqing. Greene pressed the point and suggested that the mayor, once a friend of Hu Feng, would be relieved to see him brought to trial and his guilt or innocence decided. The mayor responded that he must be guilty or he would not have been arrested. Lord Chorley then decided to get their host off the hook and said that he had been studying the case: ‘All of us here realize the special difficulties you suffer from in the People’s Republic, overrun as you are by spies from Taiwan.’ Greene was on his feet again instantly, saying he was outraged to hear an English lawyer speak in such terms: ‘Was a man considered in his eyes to be guilty without being tried?’ If that was so, Greene could no longer travel in Lord Chorley’s company. With that, the dinner broke up. Although the two shook hands that night, the events overshadowed the rest of their stay in China, and led to a public exchange in the Daily Telegraph once they got back home.12 Regretting the Maotai and the irritability, Greene later described his own behaviour as abominable,13 but it is hard not to see it as also magnificent.
45
HANDSHAKES AND CONTRACTS
Greene worried about money. Since he had left The Times at the end of 1929 and sunk within three years to near-bankruptcy, he had never trusted writing as a profession. Having so often failed in his relationships, he felt strongly that he should at least help people out financially, a concern that animates some of his characters, notably Scobie in The Heart of the Matter and Wormold in Our Man in Havana. Reasonably enough, he supported Vivien and his children in comfort: Vivien complained about money, but she did have a substantial house in Oxford, along with a sufficient income to travel and to pursue her scholarly interests – in the 1960s she set up a private museum dedicated to antique doll’s houses, which her husband paid for.
He also contributed handsomely to the support of his mother and of his brother Herbert, and established financial covenants for his sister Elisabeth’s children. He paid a steady allowance to Dorothy Glover, and frequently made open-ended loans or gifts of money to Trevor Wilson, Elisabeth Moor, Claud Cockburn, and other friends who were down on their luck. Even aristocrats looked to him for loans or handouts – a Catholic friend, Sherman Stonor (6th Baron Camoys), whose ancient house near Henley-on-Thames resembled Greene’s fiction in that it had once harboured fugitive priests, asked him to pay his son’s school fees at Downside, and Greene was very surprised when the money was eventually repaid; he was fond of Sherman Stonor and would have forgiven the debt.1
At Greene’s memorial service in 1991, Muriel Spark recounted how when she was very poor in the 1950s, he had sent her £20 each month, often with a few bottles of red wine, ‘which took the edge off cold charity’.2 He also urged her to use his name when seeking employment with publishers, and made various small, helpful gifts such as a typewriter. He contributed constantly to charitable, ecclesiastical, and political appeals. He made his flat in Albany and his house in Anacapri available to family and friends who wished to use them in his absence. In later years, he handed over a flat he rented in Paris to an ailing Marie Biche.
Helping so many people was a matter of conscience for him, but it caused him great anxiety. His financial juggling would create problems in the early 1960s, but for now he thought there might be security in a return to publishing. A rising figure in the business, Max Reinhardt, had acquired the Bodley Head, a venerable firm in need of new blood, and in June 1957 he made Graham Greene a director.
Reinhardt would become one of Greene’s most devoted friends, in many ways replacing Alex Korda, who had once advised him on how to borrow money from banks: always ask for more than you need, then the decision will be made by someone at the top.3 Of course, Reinhardt was more cautious than the swashbuckling Korda, especially about tax law and currency regulations. A secular Jew, he was born in 1915 in Constantinople, his father an Austrian military officer and his mother belonging to an Italian-Ukrainian family in the shipping business. Reinhardt was educated chiefly in English but spoke a number of languages. In the late 1930s, he worked with an uncle, Richard Darr, in the Paris office of the family firm – Darr remained his closest business associate for over forty years and took care of numerous transactions involving Graham Greene. At the beginning of the war, they left Paris for London, where, after a brief internment, Reinhardt served in RAF intelligence and studied at the London School of Economics. He became close friends with the actors Ralph Richardson and Anthony Quayle, and with Louis Albert ‘Boy’ Hart, who became the head of the Ansbacher bank, financing many of Reinhardt’s ventures and handling some transactions for Greene. Reinhardt’s early publishing efforts in London concentrated on textbooks and theatrical works. He had a set of rooms at Albany, so crossed paths with the novelist.4
Greene proved a very active director at the Bodley Head, asking right away about publishing some of the authors he had handled at Eyre & Spottiswoode, among them Barbara Comyns, whose books
he described as ‘crazy but interesting’. He urged Reinhardt to keep an eye on young authors such as Muriel Spark and Brian Moore, and was curious about the sales of George Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest. He argued for a reprint of the works of Ford Madox Ford, something opposed by another new director, J. B. Priestley, but Greene eventually had his way, editing a multi-volume series. Entirely at Greene’s suggestion, the firm published a selection of Stig Dagerman’s work.5
Greene cabled Charlie Chaplin to tell him of his joining the firm and to let him know that they would make an offer on his autobiography: the pursuit of Chaplin, who preferred handshakes to contracts, went on for years, but Greene eventually edited the manuscript and it became a worldwide bestseller in 1964. One that got away was Nabokov. Having largely created his fame through the John Gordon Society, Greene urged the firm to make an offer for the British rights in Lolita and proposed that, if successful, he should sign the contract since that would make him the one to appear in court if there was an obscenity charge.6 Priestley objected to Lolita and resigned. By the time Reinhardt made his offer it was too late: Weidenfeld & Nicolson had acquired the British rights. In later years, Greene persuaded Reinhardt to publish many books he admired, including some by his old friend R. K. Narayan, whom he believed likely to win the Nobel Prize.7
How deeply Greene wanted to go into publishing again was put to the test in early 1958, when Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre asked him to come back to a much-expanded Eyre & Spottiswoode as managing director on an annual salary of £6000.8 At first, he simply dismissed the proposal, but then saw its attractions – financial certainty and the opportunity to promote the authors he most admired. However, he felt the risk of ‘claustrophobia’ as he would need two or three months each year to travel.9 Also, he believed he was nearly finished as a novelist and feared that too steady an income might finally destroy his motivation to write, and so refused the offer: ‘I am first and last a writer even though the vein may be running thin and I cannot help fearing that without the necessity of writing I might abandon it altogether. This is a psychological problem for me alone . . . ’10
The Unquiet Englishman Page 34