The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Although something of a burden, Dorothy had always been precious to Graham. It seems that the year that followed her death was a low time for him, and that he relied very heavily on Yvonne, but he was afraid she might end their relationship as Jacques was making a stand against the affair, and there was talk of the family moving to Switzerland.6

  These worries passed, and he had the novel to absorb his attention, but he felt lonely. In the late winter, he wrote to the South African novelist Etienne Leroux (pseudonym of Stephanus le Roux), who had visited him not long before, about the state of things in Antibes: ‘I can’t remember whether the new port had been started when you were here last. It’s now nearly finished except for the gardens which are going to be planted outside my windows. I hope the value of the apartment has risen to atone for all the dust and noise we have suffered for more than a year . . . I am not sure whether the whores are still in the Hotel Metropole. The bar has changed completely and become clean and a pizzeria . . . The mysterious man with the Mercedes who used to turn up in the old days is now wanted by the police both in Italy and in France and is rumoured to have escaped to Morocco. We have our dramas. I expect you read about the boat which was chased and shot at from Villefranche nearly to Marseilles which was overloaded with heroin.’7

  ‘We have our dramas.’ Indeed. He still suffered from a mood disorder and Yvonne saw that he would be absorbed in ‘violent urges’ for a time, only to emerge and curse himself for what he had said or done.8 But in his private life the dramas became fewer and fewer. Although they had quarrels from time to time, Graham and Yvonne had a calmer and more durable relationship than any he had had in the past, and this was partly owing to his improved state of mind.

  The journalist Julian Evans knew Yvonne well and thought her intuitive, generous, and ‘bloody intelligent’.9 The Canadian scholar Judith Adamson witnessed a flash of her insight in a conversation between Graham and Yvonne about Brighton Rock. Graham remarked: ‘It’s going into its 50th printing. It’s very popular. Who can identify with Pinkie?’ Yvonne answered that women would see something of their husbands in him, to which he replied, ‘I hope not.’10

  Her attitude was practical, and she had no time for myths about Graham: ‘People often called him “the hunted man”, but he was only ever hunted by himself, a victim of the traps that, unconsciously or not, he had set up around himself.’11 It would be hard to improve on that insight. Elisabeth Dennys thought that Yvonne was ‘wonderful’ in how she coped with Graham’s harsh moods.12 A frequent visitor to Antibes, the publisher A. S. Frere dubbed Yvonne a ‘happy, healthy kitten’, and Graham adopted that nickname for her, dedicating Travels with My Aunt to ‘HHK’.13

  Graham believed that one of the most important things he could do for Yvonne was to help out her daughters. In October 1972, one daughter, then in her early twenties, was trying to launch an acting career and hoped to get a part in François Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine, then being filmed in Nice. To put in a good word for her, Greene needed first to meet Truffaut, and as it turned out it was he, and not Yvonne’s daughter, who appeared in the film.14 Michael Meyer’s girlfriend was in the cast, so he went to the set, and found out that they needed an Englishman to play the tiny part of an insurance salesman. Truffaut rejected Meyer at a glance because his face was too ‘intellectual’.

  Meyer thought that maybe Graham Greene was the answer, but Greene’s only experience as a film actor had come in The Stranger’s Hand, when just his hand was seen grappling with some mooring ropes. They went to a party where the novelist, posing as ‘Henry Graham’, a retired businessman, was pointed out to Truffaut, who thought him perfect, and Greene agreed to take the part. But before his scene was to be shot, Greene decided there was a chance that journalists might notice what he was doing and perhaps pry into his relationship with Yvonne; he tried to back out, but Meyer coaxed him into appearing in the film.

  After a lifetime of writing and rewriting scripts, Greene took a pen to his own lines, explaining to Meyer that he could not pronounce the letter ‘r’ so was changing ‘three-quarters of an hour’ to ‘half an hour’. The inconsequential scene required many takes. Truffaut was known to explode if he found himself lied to, and he was soon on to this ‘Henry Graham’, asking if he was an actor: his face was familiar – had he appeared in a documentary? Looking through the camera viewfinder, he felt he recognized that face. Finally, his assistant whispered in his ear, and after an uncertain moment in which he might have erupted, Truffaut laughed, and the two men became friends, emerging from the studio with their arms around each other.15

  Even as he tried to be helpful to Yvonne’s children, Graham was never going to be a family man. Although generous and friendly towards his own children and grandchildren, he remained distant. He particularly liked Francis’s wife Anne (née Cucksey); in the mid-1970s they settled in Devon, where he visited them from time to time. Caroline and her sons were now living in Vevey, Switzerland, and Graham made a good many brief visits there. She had decided to move there once her marriage ended, because the climate would suit her younger son, Jonathan, who suffered from asthma.16

  On a couple of occasions, Caroline took her father to the ancient Abbey of St Maurice not far from her home. These visits made a surprising impression on him. He wrote in his journal on 30 January 1977: ‘Last Easter (?) there was the sermon of the Abbot & the passage from John describing like an eye-witness the race to the empty tomb – & he came second. This time a private Mass in Latin for Lucy & me in a chapel by Father Fox – the gospel & the epistle – the epistle most striking – you can have faith & hope & it doesn’t count compared with charity. I haven’t faith & not much hope – can I claim to have charity? Doubtful. Being burnt at the stake counts too for nothing. How many martyrs have falsely been nominated as saints. Thomas Becket? And what does it matter anyway?’17

  Greene’s body caused him nearly as much trouble as his spirit. He was awkward, and practical details sometimes muddled him. After a visit to Vevey he wrote to Caroline: ‘I’ve lost all my keys. I expect they fell out of my sack when I broke a bottle of whisky in it at Orly airport and tried to pour the liquid into an almost closed pot for cigarette ends, but it’s just possible it fell out in the boot of your car. You remember my passport slipped out and we recovered it. Could you have a look?’18 Some years later, Caroline was surprised when her father proposed calling an electrician to his flat to replace a light bulb; she reached up and dealt with it herself.19

  Light bulbs were one problem, spotlights another. Greene suffered from a certain amount of sloppy journalism, but he also tended to recoil once he saw even the most accurate interviews in print. In June 1973, the publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson proposed to commission a short biography of him, and he rejected the notion out of hand, but here was a problem he had to think about.

  One way or another, his story would be told, either during his lifetime or soon after his death. Already many scholars were writing about Graham Greene and his books, not least among them the poet and editor Philip Stratford and the novelist and critic David Lodge. In the early 1970s Greene received some letters from a professor of English at Lancaster University named Norman Sherry, who had written books on various nineteenth-century authors and then a major biography of Joseph Conrad, which Greene admired. A common friend, the drama critic and Catholic journalist Bill Igoe, wrote to Greene in 1973–4, suggesting first that he meet with Sherry and then that he should allow Sherry to get on with a book.20

  Greene disliked Christopher Sykes’s biography of Evelyn Waugh, and wanted his own story to be told only by a stranger and a non-Catholic.21 Sherry assured him that he was himself a lapsed Catholic, and that it would not be a hagiography. Also Sherry proposed to look primarily at his involvement in trouble spots, and as their relationship unfolded gave this assurance: ‘Understanding your fears, I will try to keep away from the personal, where this is irrelevant to my work. I will try to work in the manner of my Conrad but if the work begins to move in
a biographical direction you will be free to censor it . . . If I seem to be moving into the more private sphere I’ll consult with you hurriedly.’22 On the strength of this undertaking, which would protect Yvonne and the other women in his life, Greene allowed him to proceed.

  Contrary to what is believed, Greene saw little of his authorized biographer, remarking in 1987: ‘ . . . he’s left me alone. An occasional written question – we haven’t, since the first meeting, spent ten minutes together.’23 He saw somewhat more of Sherry than this suggests, but generally kept him at arm’s length. After much travel in Greene’s footsteps, some of it arduous, as in Paraguay where he lost a portion of an intestine to gangrene, Sherry eventually published a first volume in 1989, which Greene disliked because of its great length and its intrusion into his sexual life, something contrary to their original agreement. After a couple of sharp confrontations, Sherry was allowed to continue his work, only to face a different sort of trouble: in the later stages of his project he was developing dementia. His third and final volume, published in 2004, was strangely incoherent, so received many negative reviews. It is difficult for one biographer to write graciously of such a predecessor, not least because of the problem of glass houses. It is, however, necessary to state that the common view of Sherry’s work is that it was a lost opportunity.

  66

  ABOUT MY BEST

  Some people really did read Playboy for the articles. The magazine had paid Greene $20,000 for a section of Travels with My Aunt that appeared in the November 1969 issue,1 and in early 1973 asked him to write about South Africa. They were especially interested in soldiers of fortune who lived there, such as the famous Mike Hoare, an Irish-born accountant turned mercenary. In the Congolese civil war he led a group of anti-communist commandos and there was blood all over his adding machine. In the 1970s, he was still a celebrity, but that would fade by 1982, when he and his men, disguised as a drinking club called the Ancient Order of Froth-Blowers, were apprehended on their way to overthrow the government of the Seychelles. Hoare then spent three years in prison.2

  Greene did not commit to an article specifically about mercenaries, but he was willing to do the research – and to get a free trip to South Africa. For about five years, he had been in correspondence with Etienne Leroux, whose darkly funny novels delighted Greene. He was part of the Sestigers (‘sixtiers’) movement of Afrikaans writers, a counter-cultural group who generally worked in exile, wrote in a somewhat experimental manner, and set themselves against the apartheid system.3 He was best known for Seven Days at the Silbersteins, a satire on sex, courtship, and marriage, which was denounced in South Africa as morally subversive and yet won the country’s highest literary prize. When it appeared in English, Greene named it his book of the year,4 and he gave another of his novels, One For the Devil, an enthusiastic review.5 For his part, the younger novelist had been strongly influenced first by Brighton Rock and then Greene’s other novels,6 and he grew devoted to Greene as a friend and mentor.

  Following an itinerary laid out by Leroux,7 Greene spent a little over a month in South Africa. Arriving on 20 July 1973, he was met in Johannesburg by Leroux and his friend Kowie Marais, a judge from the Transvaal and a leading figure in the Progressive Party, of which the anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman was the best-known member.8 Greene spent much of his time at Marais’s house in Pretoria, and the two talked about the politics of the country and the use of torture by the security services.9 He spent some very pleasant days at Leroux’s 60,000-acre sheep farm near Koffiefontein in the Orange Free State – a place he found idyllic. At Leroux’s urging, he turned down an invitation to go to a war zone in Angola as he might be blown up by a landmine; in the past, landmines might have attracted him. Sadly, Leroux could not contact Hoare, who was, apparently, pursuing murderous business opportunities in the Far East.

  Greene visited several universities, where he was keen to learn about the relative representations of the races among students and faculty. He met an array of Afrikaner intellectuals, and attended a party at the Cape Town home of the tobacco and liquor magnate Anton Rupert, a contradictory figure who though a member of the ruling National Party opposed many of its hardline positions and was one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund.10

  Greene met the Foreign Minister Hilgard Muller on 30 July 1973, and they discussed Rhodesia; the UN, which was then pressing the South Africans about the status of Namibia; relations with Paraguay; and the possibility of back-channel contacts with African leaders.11 Although Greene did visit some black homelands, his itinerary generally kept him in the company of Afrikaners, among whom he found many reform-minded people. A proposed meeting with Mangosuthu Buthelezi, founder of the Inkatha Freedom Party and ruler of the KwaZulu territory, seems not to have taken place. Greene was able to report to Caroline about a rather vivid encounter with the Rain Queen in Limpopo Province: a matrilinear ruler with numerous wives as a form of property, she was believed to have powers over the weather. Greene knew of her as the inspiration for Ayesha in Rider Haggard’s novel She.12

  In August, after three weeks in South Africa, Greene suffered an attack of lumbago and was taken to hospital. He was given an injection, which left him groggy, and he lost ‘the coloured tablets to which I’m condemned for life’; for years he had suffered from digestive trouble, and this medication, Celevac, allowed for the correct functioning of his bowels.13 He went on to Lesotho, then flew to Paris around the 28th, exhausted and miserable.14

  He was very fond of Leroux and treasured their time together on the farm, but the trip had failed. As he told John Anstey of the Telegraph, he had ‘been dragged about 6000 miles in four weeks’. He had not been able to get off by himself to pursue separate lines of enquiry, and felt incapable of writing about the country.15 The readers of Playboy would have to do without an article from Graham Greene. In the long run, however, the trip did have a value as it gave him plenty of new material for The Human Factor, which had been waiting in the drawer since 1968.

  Though tired and sick at the beginning of September 1973, Greene soon had cause to rejoice. The Honorary Consul was a hit even by his standards. The critic Michael Ratcliffe called it ‘exemplary’ and said of Eduardo Plarr: ‘ . . . he is one of the most haunting of all the Greene heroes who have cut down desolation and put their hand in the fire’.16 Peter Lewis described it as ‘perhaps the most enduring novel that even he has given us’.17 And so it went on in both Britain and the United States.

  Although he often feigned indifference about such things, Greene was thrilled. He wrote to Bill Igoe: ‘The book was hell to do and never seemed to get off the ground, but finally after seven revisions it does seem to me to be about my best. I was getting tired of having to say that The Power and the Glory was the best – published in 1940!’18

  67

  LONG SPOONS

  It was 1974, and the dentists were getting their revenge for all that Graham Greene had written about them. It was an orgy of grinding, drilling, and tugging. They got rid of four teeth and recapped others. They installed a bridge that might have done nicely at the River Kwai, and relieved him of something like £5000 in a string of appointments that went on for the whole year.1 In the summer, his doctors worried, yet again, that he was suffering from cancer – thankfully he was not. In December, he suffered an electric shock from a defective lamp that might have killed him.2

  In the midst of all this, he needed some diversion, so while in Anacapri in August and September3 he wrote a lighthearted play based on the A. J. Raffles stories of E. W. Hornung, the brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When they appeared in the early years of the century, these stories of a gentleman thief and cricketer and his dim sidekick Bunny were hugely popular. After David Niven played the part in the 1939 film of the same name, Raffles rather slipped from view.

  The Return of A. J. Raffles was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in December 1975. The director, David Jones, said that Greene had seen their prod
uction of Sherlock Holmes, which premiered in January 1974 with Denholm Elliott in the lead, and decided to bring back Raffles from the grave at the South African battlefield of Spion Kop, to which Hornung had consigned him.4 In Greene’s pastiche, the burglar, using a top hat as a dark lantern, helps Lord Alfred Douglas get revenge on his father, the Marquess of Queensberry, for his hand in the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde and for withholding his allowance. The Prince of Wales comes into the story, and by the end preserves Raffles from imprisonment. The play, Greene’s first in eleven years, was pure fun – something to get his mind off his teeth.

  Apart from Raffles, it was a time of entrances and exits in Greene’s world. After seventeen years of service, his secretary Josephine Reid resigned, saying she could no longer bear the weight of the job, though she did continue to take on occasional tasks for him. Reid had been able to keep private things private, and Greene was not happy about losing her,5 but her replacement was even better placed to enjoy his confidence. From the end of August 1975, his sister Elisabeth took over, working from her home in Crowborough. She was someone Graham could rely on absolutely, and she remained in the position until suffering a stroke in 1989, when the job was taken on by her daughter Amanda, who had been a stills photographer for the BBC.

  Other important changes were in the works. For many years, Laurence Pollinger had been Greene’s main literary agent. Although Greene and Pollinger never seem to have been close friends, the agent was steady and methodical, and so a good counter to the author’s impulsiveness. He died in April 1976,6 leaving the business to his sons Gerald and Murray. Greene remained a client of the firm for about fourteen years, but never regarded the younger Pollingers as he had their father. Near the end of his life, he left the firm altogether. He went back to David Higham Associates, whose founder, of course, had been his primary agent until the 1940s.