Graham Greene
A Life in Letters
Edited by Richard Greene
446pp. Little, Brown. £20.
978 0 316 72793 8

Ever since Rome established its domination of the Mediterranean, letter-writing has been a regular adjunct of civilized life. The spread of Latinitas and reliable couriers allowed Cicero to exchange personal messages and canvass cronies throughout the Roman world. His letters, like those of many subsequent writers, are at once seemingly off the record and artfully composed. The epistolary Cicero is as much the advocate of his own fame, and poster-boy of his wit, as Cicero the orator. If a writer’s correspondence seems to reveal him without artifice, his prose is professionally calculated to entertain, seduce or intimidate. “When an artist spits”, the Dadaist said, “that’s art!” And when Graham Greene writes a letter, it is no less (or more) his work than anything else. To believe that letters affect to show what he was “really like” discounts his mutability. In any case, to be “like” implies approximation, if not imposture, the novelist’s working habit. It was said of a portrait by John Singer Sargent that you couldn’t see the man for the likeness. Greene was like many things, but no one essential thing, unless it was English: “Anglais, terriblement anglais”, was a French critic’s sighing encomium.

As his autobiographical book Ways of Escape (1980) indicates, Greene travelled as if to shake off his own shadow, although he eventually licensed the adhesive Norman Sherry to sniff in his tracks. Was the latter chosen as his biographer in small part because he rhymed with Querry (the anti-hero of A Burnt-Out Case) and/or because his professorial chair happened to be at San Antonio, Texas, the starting-off point of Greene’s pre-war travels in Mexico, which he anatomized in The Lawless Roads? In that caustic account of a country he came to abominate (even the ruins of Palenque left him indifferent), the author confesses to speaking little Spanish. At the beginning of The Power and the Glory, the expatriate Mr Tench reacts with weary joy to the sound of an English-speaking voice.

Although Greene lived for many years in France, his editor says that he had “no great command” of the language. Was its fluent formal use in his “Cher Maître” open letter to André Malraux (uncited here), denouncing the secret trial of Henri Alleg in Algiers and printed in Le Monde in June 1960, sub-edited by a local grammarian? It is certainly an instance of Greene’s capacity for fighting the good fight, especially when foreigners misbehaved: in his late, hyperbolic pamphlet J’accuse, he posed as the Émile Zola of the Côte d’Azur. He never, of course, accused anyone, however criminal, of behaving worse than “the Americans”, although an American woman, Catherine Walston, here pet-named “Cafryn”, was his greatest passion. His somewhat abject ten-point letter (already spelt out by Sherry, but here reprinted), when he still hoped to come to marital terms with her, is painfully importunate, but lacks endearing riffs. Jazzing was never his style.

Like Alan Bennett’s image of Guy Burgess, Greene was always an Englishman abroad. For all his outlandish errantry and taste for louche company, he relied on upper-middle-class charm and arrogance when he needed to pull rank or strings. His penchant for dictators, such as General Torrijos or “Fidel”, was of a piece with the presumption that an Englishman of a certain class, or fame, had the right to knock on any door. Even the vile Papa Doc of Haiti was, in some respects, more his kind of monster than was Ronald Reagan. If Greene’s widely advertised pity for “les damnés de la terre” was not an affectation, it was also tinged with the Kiplingesque vanities of the Edwardian age (and the minor public school) into which he was born. The great misfortune of those “without the law” was not to be English.

Sub specie Britannitatis, the right breed of eccentric retains an old school stripe, even when his heart is in Moscow Centre. For the happy few, treason could be passed off as a camp form of patriotism. Greene’s defiant loyalty to Kim Philby (defiance being more to his taste, one suspects, than loyalty) could be excused, in accordance with E. M. Forster’s apostolic dictum, as an instance of Epicurean sodalitas. Or was it egotism dressed as principle? A much nastier – because more callous – operator than Burgess, the adulterous Philby expanded Les Liaisons dangereuses into politics: the twentieth-century Valmont reported not to Madame de Merteuil but to his KGB control. If duplicity included causing the deaths of more or less unknown colleagues, as Philby did in his assiduous betrayals of MI6 agents who had been dispatched to Eastern Europe, well, the great game always involved casualties, especially if – as in Thomas Mann’s repeated joke in Royal Highness – only insignificant, nameless players get killed. When Greene got together with – or even wrote to – Philby, they were like old school chums. Traitor and dupe could raise amused glasses to each other, as Greene also did with Augustus Wheeler, a bully from his Berkhamsted schooldays, when they bumped into each other in Malaya in 1950. By saying that his friend was motivated by fidelity to a Cause (so what if it was a mass-murdering tyranny?), Greene promoted Philby to a sort of Marxist priesthood, graced with redeeming affinity to the recusant peers martyred by the Tudors.

Richard Greene (no relation) has undertaken the honourable, tendentious task of rehabilitating the novelist exhumed, when still alive, by Sherry and assailed, when dead, by John Banville, in his novel The Untouchable. In a cull from thousands of letters written in a busy lifetime, the father, brother, lover and friend is presented largely in fond form. Greene’s quondam buddy Anthony Burgess, however, was bid adieu in 1988, after telling tales, on Bernard Pivot’s literary chat show Apostrophes, of an aggrieved husband shouting through Greene’s window. “Difficult,” Greene told him, “since I live on the fourth floor. You are either a liar or you are unbalanced and should see a doctor.” Greene never said things like that to Philby.

Christopher Hawtree’s 1989 collection of letters to the press, Yours etc., supplied a scarcely less vivid portrait of a writer whose public correspondence is now shown to have been larkier, and sparkier, than his private. Greene was vigilant for his own reputation and, rather oddly, his good name in the old moral sense: he got very grand when accused – falsely so he promised – of recourse to plaisirs tarifiés with young girls in Haiti. Yet he could parade elsewhere in the role of a quasi-Michelin inspector of whorehouses, opium fumeries and strip joints. He was, it seemed, perpetually torn between wishing to be the world’s monitor and a fear – cousin to hope? – of being reported to the headmaster. The eternal green baize door swung both ways.

Quick on the trigger with targets not much bigger than a misprint or a misquotation, Greene could visit absentee rage (“I’ll be among ye” was Byron’s fistic threat) on those who thought to evade his long-sightedness. In a review, I once made nit-picking allusion to the exile’s anachronistic attribution of “fly-buttons” to the trousers of a character in The Human Factor (1978), at a time when zips were sartorially usual. Perhaps because I had not much praised that skimpy un-thriller (said by Richard Greene to have “addressed . . . the questions of apartheid”), Greene claimed to have caught me with my trousers down, since – he said – no such buttons figured in the novel; but they do. Shown to be wrong, he did not apologize. I cite this triviality because it hints at an abiding wish to be aggrieved: what had been done to him was always worse than anything he did.

Greene’s sustained vigilance when it came to the British press is a reminder that his first regular employment was as a subeditor on The Times. Averse to an excess of adverbs and adjectives, he was never more trenchant, or more generous, than when giving nuts-and-bolts advice, whether to Muriel Spark (whose debut he sponsored with regular subventions) that she should conduct a “which-hunt” in her prose or when, as a publisher, he urged Mervyn Peake to put the scissors into his verbal obesities (wounding advice, later gratefully taken). Nor did the editorial Greene hesitate to accuse Anthony Powell of writing a “bloody boring book” about John Aubrey. The subsequent row led to Greene’s departure from Eyre and Spottiswoode, although he wrote genially to “Tony” afterwards: “Now that we are again in the position simply of friends and not of author and publisher, do look in for a drink!”. The civility is amiable, but forced; that terminal exclamation mark smacks of chilly cheeriness from the man the French were said to pronounce “grim grin”.

Although sometimes disobliging about the movies and movie people, Greene had a prompt sense of how Henry James’s nostrum “Dramatize, dramatize” had acquired, in the twentieth century, the addendum “Visualize, visualize”. He was, you might argue, a modern Joseph Conrad (Sherry’s earlier biographical subject) with a cinematic imagination: compare the verbose beginning of Nostromo with the sharply focused opening shots of The Power and the Glory. Although his career as a film critic, on Night and Day, ended with a notorious libel action after he had dared to say what was manifestly true, that little Shirley Temple’s “dubious coquetry” was a sexual temptation to “middle-aged men and clergymen”, Greene’s accurate sarcasms alerted Alexander Korda to recruit him as a screenwriter. The two became close enough friends for Greene to end his cited letter “affectionately”. Korda’s yacht, Elsewhere, provided a convenient location when Greene was in the middle of his affair with Catherine Walston.

He referred at times to Hollywood’s “slave-contracts”, but in the 1960s, we discover, he could get $100,000 for a script. He worked hard to accommodate his genius to the movies, sometimes too hard: when making The Third Man, Carol Reed trumped his writer’s banal idea of fading out on a clinch between the “hero” and Alida Valli by substituting the latter’s long walk past the waiting American hack (originally an Englishman called Rollo, a name the actor Joseph Cotton thought sounded homosexual, unlike the preferred “Holly”, presumably).

In a 1967 letter to Evelyn Waugh’s biographer, Christopher Sykes, Greene tells how he once reproached Waugh for his “anti-Semitic rudeness” to Korda at a dinner party. Waugh said “He had no right to bring his mistress to Carol Reed’s house”, to which Greene said, “But I had my mistress with me”. Waugh’s casuistic reply, “That is quite different. She is a married woman”, deserved a monosyllabic retort, which Greene remained too deferential to deliver. However, he was snappy enough to omit punctuation (“Really you old school prefect come off it”) when Waugh chided him, at the instance of Lord Birkenhead, for declining to become a “Companion of Literature”, a title which the presiding coterie of the Royal Society of Literature bestows on ten living worthies. He reminds Waugh that Kipling refused a knighthood: “I prefer his attitude”. In literary matters, however, Waugh was always the master; he could reproach Greene for his increasingly unorthodox notion of Catholicism, but even Waugh’s ploddingly pious Helena was greeted effusively by the man who signed his letters “Love, Graham”.

As for suggestions of anti-Semitism in Greene’s own pre-war books, he was forthright in confessing to my kinsman Roderick Young (now a rabbi) that he later made mitigating emendations, “after the holocaust [when] one couldn’t use the word Jew in the loose way one used it before the war”. In his 1988 letter, he defends himself for attacking Sir Basil Zaharoff while conceding that now “governments sell arms as recklessly as private individuals”, but maintains that Myatt is “one of the nicest characters in Stamboul Train”. Since John Sutro and Michael Meyer, the translator and biographer of Ibsen, were his close friends, Greene clearly never shared Waugh’s suburban prejudices.

He was also a supporter of Israel, a consequence maybe of noticing, in July 1939, that clapped-out, overloaded wooden boats, carrying Jewish refugees from Constanza, were being denied access to Palestine by the British. He wrote to his literary agent that he calculated he could squeeze three articles out of the traffic. It was to culminate with the sinking, in 1942, of the Struma. Although unseaworthy, she was towed out into the Black Sea after her hundreds of passengers, whose only hope was refuge in Palestine, were refused visas by HMG. The ship foundered, or was torpedoed, and all but one on board were drowned.

The easy style (and morals) of showbiz attracted Greene throughout his life. Two of his happiest contingent loves were the Swedish actress Anita Bjork (a memorable Miss Julie) and the designer Jocelyn Rickards on whom – as her memoirs revealed – famous names often dropped. She was also the mistress of A. J. Ayer, about whose notion of having had an after-death experience, when he choked on a piece of smoked salmon, Greene took a logical-positivistic view. Greene often figured in triangles, the last being with Yvonne Cloetta, with whom he lived for his last thirty-two years, though only in the case of Catherine Walston’s husband Harry, a very rich Labour politician, did he make love to his mistress “presente viro”, in Catullus’ phrase. Walston was driving, Sherry reports, while the lovers made out in the back. Walston later put the brakes on the affair.

Most of the letters in this collection are quite short. After 1950, their copious brevity can be explained by the fact that nearly all were recorded on a “dictabelt” which was then sent to a secretary in England who typed them to fit above the signatures on a deck of prepared stationery. Constriction entailed that the bread-and-butter rarely has much jam on it. Greene seems unguarded only when writing to lovers or launching a tirade against Ralph Richardson for being “incapable even of understanding your own part” (in Greene’s last play, Carving a Statue). The editor promises that “Greene and Richardson quickly patched up their personal differences”. In general, the editing is discreet and the annotations pertinent, but there are more clichés (“eagerly anticipated”, for instance) than an acute subeditor would tolerate. Greene himself might have excised or corrected his own “I’ll do my very best to see that Mummy and / or me [sic] come out this year”. He would certainly have spotted that, in a note on page 358, quoting Charles Rycroft on dreams, his editor appears to have omitted a “not” after “cannot”, without which the phrase makes no sense. In dreams, Rycroft is arguing, begin irresponsibilities; and also novels, in Greene’s experience.

In a mock-modest late letter, to a postulant bibliographer, Greene denied being a literary man, to excuse “preferring Conan Doyle to Virginia Woolf or E. M. Forster”. Who doesn’t? However, his epigraphs alone are conspicuous evidence of his literary finesse. A few days before he died, he is reported as saying to Yvonne’s daughter Martine Cloetta about his own work, “A few, yes, are good books. Perhaps people will come to think of me from time to time as they think of Flaubert”. For all his famous skittishness, it is unlikely that he was referring to a shared faiblesse for tart-spotting. In letter-writing, however, the great Gustave leaves Graham far behind. Only the least personal of the items collated here comes close to the quality of Flaubert’s retort to Sainte-Beuve’s criticism of Salammbô. In two long 1948 “letters”, of a formality that betokens the status which The Heart of the Matter had clinched for him, Greene spells out (for the benefit of Third Programme listeners) his notion of the writer’s shifty role in society: “Isn’t disloyalty as much the writer’s virtue as loyalty is the soldier’s?”. Although there is good sense here (not least in the repudiation of state aid to novelists, because the price will always be too high aesthetically), there is also the usual naughtiness: “If at times we are able to feel sympathy for Hitler, isn’t it because we have seen the woods of Dunsinane converging on the underground chambers of the Chancellory?”.

By the end of this long, but somehow lightweight, compendium it is easier to feel pity than admiration. Perennial shyness reduced Greene to commonplace proprieties where Byron, for instance, managed spontaneous warmth. A condolence letter to the publisher Charles Evans, whose son had been killed in action, contains the inept, self-conscious sentence “I always pray that I shall never see the death of one of my children”. Greene was indeed terriblement anglais, not least in the anti-Americanism now so congenial to the soft Left, the group to which George Orwell percipiently allotted the young author. As for Greene’s apparently straightfaced (and repeated) claim to prefer the USSR to the USA, it is kindest to take this as of a piece with an unflagging determination to put a twist in his tales. Taken seriously, it would betoken wilful moral blindness. Might Greene’s long disdain for Uncle Sam also have something to do with his apparent indifference to American literature? His passion for Henry James is the rule-proving exception. When it came to dialogue and phrase-making, he failed to appreciate, still less match, the scope of America’s best writers and wits (Mike Nichols’s and Elaine May’s spoof visit to Albert Schweitzer might have supplied the satyr-play to A Burnt-Out Case). The globetrotting fugitive always sported a certain insularity.

Frederic Raphael is the author of Some Talk of Alexander: A journey through space and time in the Greek world, 2006. His novel, Fame and Fortune, the sequel to The Glittering Prizes, appeared late last year.

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