The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Greene thought he was close to catching ‘the other’ once, at a hotel in Rome. Then, in late 1959, a man thought to be named Peters approached a young woman at the Hôtel Prince des Galles in Paris and offered her a job as secretary to Graham Greene, supposedly his friend and business partner. She worked in a bookshop and knew all about Graham Greene. She could not quite believe her luck so got in touch with Marie Biche, who told her the offer was indeed a fraud but suggested that she keep her appointment with Peters and so find out what was going on. The young woman refused, fearing that she was about to fall into the hands of white slavers.3 And so, again, ‘the other’ slipped away.

  There were, of course, moments when the real Graham Greene was himself required to assume implausible identities, as for example on 14 June 1962, when he donned a gown of scarlet cloth with a lining of scarlet silk to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge. Greene walked in procession with Wilmarth Sheldon ‘Lefty’ Lewis, an almost insanely dedicated scholar who edited forty-eight volumes, each one Bible-thick, of the letters of Horace Walpole – Greene thought of him as a character out of Damon Runyon.4 Also receiving a degree was Lord Coggan, then Archbishop of York, later Archbishop of Canterbury, whose presence required Greene to conduct himself ecumenically. The sole representative of any world Greene actually belonged to was Dame Margot Fonteyn, who, by the logic of the ancient university, was honoured for her accomplishment as a dancer with a doctorate of laws.5

  It is difficult, likewise, to imagine Graham Greene in a top hat, but he wore one – under conditions of strict obedience. Caroline’s wedding to Jean Bourget took place at St Mary’s Cathedral in Calgary on 29 April 1961. Photographs of the extremely beautiful bride, her new husband, and the wedding party appeared in the local newspaper. Caroline and Vivien had overruled his objections, so Graham wore morning dress.6 In the photographs, he looks happy though a little confused. The new couple went to Quebec for a reception with the Bourget family, which Graham did not attend, and then on to their honeymoon.

  The story, so cheerfully begun, took a sorrowful turn. On 10 May 1962, Caroline gave birth to a boy named Richard Jean Graham Bourget. Delighted to have a grandson, Graham ordered copies of books by Dr Spock for Caroline, since they encouraged new mothers not to worry.7 However, Richard was found to have a heart defect, and his best hope lay in experimental surgery, to be performed in Oxford. He made it through the operation, but, shortly after, on 19 July 1962, he died. The parents were heartbroken. Afterwards, the doctors told them that owing to Richard’s surgery they could improve the procedure and save many other children – this was something of a comfort.8 Having returned to England at the time of the operation, Graham was also disconsolate. He dictated a letter addressed to Marie Biche, asking her to organize a holiday for Caroline and Jean, and his secretary added at the bottom: ‘How sad for Graham – he has taken it very, very much to heart.’9 Although he did not speak of it often, he was haunted by his grandson’s death, and in 1986 wrote that he was still ‘tormented’ by the tragedy.10 Caroline had a second child, Andrew, in 1963, then moved from Alberta to Montreal, where her third son, Jonathan, was born in 1964.

  The beginning of 1963 marked the unmasking of an old friend. Following the escape of Burgess and Maclean, Kim Philby, who had warned them in Washington that they were about to be questioned, had been brought to a form of trial by MI5 in November 1951. Although he used his stammer to frustrate the rhythm of the questions, those who listened to him were certain of his guilt; however, there was just not enough evidence for a charge. He was forced to resign from the Foreign Office, but MI5 felt he had got off lightly. He later said that he ended his friendship with Graham Greene at this time in order to spare him trouble.11

  It does not seem that the two had actually had much contact since the war. During the 1950s, they both had connections to Crowborough: Marion Greene still lived there, as did Philby’s mentally ill wife Aileen, from whom he was increasingly estranged, along with their children. Greene met her only once and that was during the war. At first, Philby came to Crowborough at weekends, but not after 1956, when he moved to the Middle East. Elisabeth and Rodney Dennys knew Philby well from the war years and from their posting in Istanbul, and they too moved to Crowborough in the 1950s. Their daughter, Amanda Saunders, later Greene’s secretary, recalls that her parents believed they had a close friendship with Kim Philby. The two families had a good deal of cheerful interaction. One of the children was about her own age, and they attended the same school. She recalled Kim Philby himself as a pleasant and compelling personality, but noted that her father, unlike Graham, was outraged once Philby’s conduct was exposed, not least because he had continued working closely with him almost to the end.12

  Aileen Philby, who had realized that Philby was a traitor and so become a threat to him and to his controllers,13 was found dead in her Crowborough house in late 1957. When Graham and Malcolm Muggeridge went to have a look,14 they found the garden overgrown, the post uncollected, everything like ‘a gypsy encampment’. They looked in the windows and saw scattered advertising brochures, unwashed dishes, and empty milk bottles.15 There was talk that Aileen had died of an overdose – however, the official cause of death was congestive heart failure, myocardial degeneration, respiratory infection, and pulmonary tuberculosis,16 and there is no basis on which to dispute that. Nonetheless, the circumstances are at least suspicious.

  It was the job of MI5 to catch traitors. SIS (MI6) had a different culture, and, according to Philip Knightley, there were within it three different attitudes towards Philby after 1952: a small group thought him guilty; a larger group thought him probably innocent but felt it best to have no more to do with him; and another small but influential group thought that he had been hard done by and should be helped out until an eventual restoration to the service. His most notable friends in SIS at this time were Nicholas Elliott and Tim Milne.17

  In 1955, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI leaked information to journalists that Philby had tipped off Maclean and Burgess in 1951, allowing them to escape to Moscow, and so Philby became known to the world as ‘the third man’ of the spy ring. The Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, disliked the intelligence services and was not much interested in the case. In exchange for Philby’s sacking (he technically remained on the books of SIS) and a re-organization of the service, Macmillan made a statement to the House of Commons on 7 November 1955 clearing him of suspicion. Philby followed with a circus-like press conference from his mother’s flat, in which, with a smirk and a tongue rolling inside his cheek, he answered many of the questions with ‘No comment’ and made solemn references to the Official Secrets Act. With the help of Elliott, Philby became a correspondent in Beirut for the Observer and The Economist in mid-1956. In 1960, Elliott, by then head of station in Beirut, brought him back as an agent, perhaps in order to have him feed traceable information to the Soviets and thus expose him as a traitor.18

  In any event, evidence against him was mounting, and even Elliott finally agreed that his friend must be guilty. A highly placed KGB figure, Anatoliy Golitsyn, brought clues concerning the identity of Soviet agents when he defected to the West in 1961, and an old friend of Philby’s named Flora Solomon revealed his early communist sympathies.19 Elliott was sent to confront Philby in January 1963, and their meetings have been much written about. At first, Philby remarked, ‘I rather thought it would be you’ – this troubling comment contained a hint that some other mole still active in the service had warned him to expect an inquisitor. Elliott offered immunity if he told all he knew. Philby confirmed that he had been a Soviet agent and provided a two-page confession, which Elliott took back to London.20

  Philby then turned to his controllers, who got him onto a freighter bound for Odessa, and by the end of the month he was in Moscow. The sudden disappearance of a long-suspected traitor became international news and, indeed, part of a huge controversy concerning spies. It coincided with the Profumo affair, in which the Secretary of
State for War, John Profumo, was forced to resign on 5 June 1963 over his affair with Christine Keeler, who was at the same time involved with a Soviet diplomat. On 1 July 1963, Edward Heath, as Lord Privy Seal, confirmed in the House of Commons that Philby had indeed spied for the Soviet Union and that he was now likely in an Eastern Bloc country.21

  Greene’s response to all this was surprising, but entirely in character. What he had to say about Philby was connected to his views of the Cold War, which was at its most perilous in these months. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 had brought the world close to nuclear war. Greene wanted to go back to the island, but first he decided to inspect for himself what was going on in Germany, the other place of confrontation between the great powers. With the country divided after the war, millions of people had been able to make their way to the West, especially through Berlin. In 1958, the Russians began to take a harder line against such defections, but they continued. On the night of 13 August 1961, a makeshift wall was erected, with construction continuing for years until it became a system of barriers, with hundreds of watch towers, as well as dog-runs and a ‘death-strip’ in which the guards had an open field of fire.

  Some people were killed trying to get past the Berlin Wall, and others made it, occasionally by strange means. Their efforts were in the news in early 1963. In February, an acrobat crawled across a disused electrical cable over the heads of guards armed with sub-machine guns; eventually his arms tired so he straddled the now swinging cable and slid along before tumbling at last to the bank of a canal – though injured, he survived.22 Just after Greene’s visit in April, a mechanic drove an armoured car into the wall and made a hole, but he could not get through it, so, assisted by people on the other side, he climbed over the top; in the process, he was shot twice by the guards, but he too survived. As he made his escape, the guards’ bullets threw up stone chips that wounded a policeman on the West side, so other police briefly returned fire. The guards on the East side then used water cannon for two hours to disperse the crowd on the West side, which included cameramen.23 Such border incidents – and there were many of them – could have escalated into a new war.

  Greene arrived in Hamburg on 7 April 1963 for a visit organized by Rudolf Walter Leonhardt, a journalist with Die Zeit who had worked in England for a number of years.24 The two flew to Berlin the next day, where Leonhardt had tried, unsuccessfully, to arrange a meeting for Greene with the mayor Willy Brandt, soon to be chancellor of West Germany. Leonhardt took Greene for a close-up look at one side of the wall. The novelist was struck by its shabbiness, and he thought there was something mean-spirited in the way it had divided streets and neighbourhoods, and run straight across the only entrance to a church.25

  Around noon on 10 April 1963, Greene walked, unaccompanied, past the famous white shed at Checkpoint Charlie, and went to a meeting with his East German publishers. The next day, he asked his driver to take him to Dresden by side roads. Returning via Potsdam he visited Arnold Zweig, best remembered for his novel The Case of Sergeant Grischa. In East Berlin, he went to look at the wall from the other side and was given a half-hour propaganda lecture by a young army captain. Greene had tried to keep his visit quiet, but encountered cameramen at the wall, so the best he could do was to refuse interviews. Then, after a mere two and a half days, he was back in the West. Whether his trip involved an errand for SIS is not known.

  Leonhardt had not been able to accompany Greene east but later asked him to write something not in the manner of a leader writer, but as Fowler would – that is, as a reporter. Having spent such a short time in Germany, and not speaking the language, he did not feel competent to write in that way. Instead, he wrote a ‘Letter to a West German Friend’ describing for Leonhardt and his readers his own fleeting impressions. In it he compared his thoughts when he first passed Checkpoint Charlie to those of someone converting to Catholicism, accepting all the dogma and being left with one more – say, the infallibility of the pope – beyond which the commitment would be complete. For one who could accept the doctrines of Marxism, and was willing to be converted, this wall, when all you could see was the wall, would serve as the last obstacle.

  Problems of belief were the lens through which Greene interpreted new places. It had served him well at times – especially in Mexico, Vietnam, and Kenya. But as a means to interpret the monolith of the Soviet empire, one could carry the metaphor only so far before it became reductive, or even a category error. Nonetheless, he found in his short visit that communists, too, could inhabit the world of Morin; a formerly observant Jew remarked: ’I gave up my faith when I was eighteen and joined the party. Now at fifty one realizes that everything is not known.’26 Whether Greene intended it or not, this article set up the terms of his response to Philby’s defection.

  ‘In the lost boyhood of Judas / Christ was betrayed.’ Graham Greene often quoted these lines from the Irish poet ‘A.E.’ (George William Russell), and they may have guided his first public comment on Philby’s defection. In an article called ‘A Third Man Entertainment on Security in Room 51’,27 just after Edward Heath’s statement to the House of Commons, Greene declared a ‘great affection’ for the man now universally condemned in the West. He spoke of their working together during the war in an Edwardian house in Ryder Street that their service shared with the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, and of security arrangements that allowed Greene to play practical jokes on the Americans. When on fire watch in the building, he would pull top-secret documents from a damaged cupboard and stack them on the duty officer’s desk as if they had been found in the open, and in the morning some bemused American would be fined for a security breach. Greene asked: ‘Which of us then were betraying secrets to our American allies? Which of us in the far past at Oxford and Cambridge had become corrupted by the capitalist way of life?’

  In a sense, Greene’s defence of Philby began in the dormitory at Berkhamsted School where he had been caught between loyalty to the other boys and loyalty to his father, out of which emerged a personal mythology concerning trust and betrayal. Growing up under the shadow of the Great War, he found nationalism distasteful, and preferred loyalty to individuals over loyalty to states. He absorbed a longstanding Catholic disdain for American forms of culture and government as one of the soulless outcomes of the Enlightenment – an idea which seems odd nowadays, when conservative, often wealthy, American Catholics lead the opposition to a reformist pope, but Greene was influenced by these ideas, especially in the 1930s. However, his anti-Americanism grew most acute after his sojourns in Vietnam. He felt that American meddling in foreign countries was as bad as that of the Russians, so he was not going to be sanctimonious if an old friend happened to have looked east when most Britons were looking west. In addition to all this, Greene liked fights and he liked underdogs. He was going to stand up for Kim Philby.

  Greene’s view of Philby’s defection was more than eccentric. Even during the Khrushchev interlude, the Soviet Union was being run by Stalin’s protégés. Francis Greene understood Russia more deeply than his father did and rejected all sympathy with Philby, whom he thought a scoundrel. Quarrels about Philby nearly destroyed Greene’s friendship with John Sutro.28 Rodney Dennys was outraged about Philby, as around 1950 Dennys had had a part in training Albanian partisans to fight as maquis against the regime of Enver Hoxha – on the strength of Philby’s revelations, almost all these men had been slaughtered. No one in Greene’s circle shared his sympathy with Kim Philby, but that did not bother him.

  56

  THE REAL END OF THE WORLD

  ‘I was quite converted to Castro without any effort on their part,’ wrote Graham Greene to Marie Biche in August 1963.1 A great deal had changed since his last visit to Cuba. In 1960, Castro, sensing a threat from the Americans, had entered into trade agreements and then a political alliance with Moscow. In April 1961, Cuban exiles sponsored by the United States invaded and were repulsed in the Bay of Pigs operation. On 31 August 1962, Senator Kenneth Keating announced
that the Russians were putting together missiles in Cuba, and, shortly after, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, warned the Americans of war if they invaded the island. U2 spy-plane photographs soon provided a clear view of the suspected sites, and on 22 October 1962 John F. Kennedy declared a naval blockade and promised retaliation if any missile was fired. On 28 October 1962, Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the weapons while Kennedy made a secret concession to withdraw American missiles from Turkey, and so the Cuban Missile Crisis came to an end.

  Given that the world was not going be incinerated after all, there was still work for roving journalists. Graham Greene quickly acquired an undeserved reputation for having predicted the crisis in Our Man in Havana; those who said so had forgotten that Wormold’s missiles were a hoax. Still, Greene had a knowledge of Cuba that few outsiders could rival. Around the beginning of 1963 the Sunday Telegraph commissioned him to go back to Cuba and to Haiti, though, because of other commitments, he could not do it before late July. The new embargo made travel to Cuba difficult, roundabout, and time-consuming. He decided that he should go via Mexico, which he had not visited for twenty-five years. It proved a useful stop, as he later wrote: ‘For Mexico is a warning to revolutionaries: it presents a remarkable tableau of a revolution that failed.’2 Indeed, so completely had the business ethic reasserted itself that within ten minutes of getting off the aeroplane he was pickpocketed. His real point was that a socialist revolution had withered in Mexico without trade sanctions by the Americans.

  He reached Mexico in a depression, which, oddly enough, the pickpocket helped rouse him from: ‘he acted & I reacted’.3 Greene attended Mass in an old church, where everyone carried a pink flower and sang beautifully. He was moved by the devotion of the crowd, which included many indigenous people, and then spent a long time in prayer to the recently deceased Pope John XXIII, whom he regarded as a saint, so that Yvonne could be spared an operation – and she was. Greene teasingly wrote to her that he was going to see his ‘favourite virgin’ – the black Madonna in Guadalupe.4 His time in Mexico was darkened by news from home that his sister Molly had died but he regarded this as a mercy, since she had been in great pain. He noted in his journal: ‘I always seem to be out of England for all our deaths.’5 He wrote to Jeanne Stonor asking for a Mass to be said for Molly in the chapel at Stonor.6 While in Mexico, he began work on his next play, Carving a Statue.7