Pride and Prejudice

A convergence of cultural vectors has brought Graham Greene back to center stage. A film of “The End of the Affair,” starring Ralph Fiennes, has been released, and the BBC broadcast a tie-in titled “The Beginning of the End of the Affair.” The third and final volume of Greene’s authorized biography by Norman Sherry is due later this year. Amid howling winds of hype, Shirley Hazzard modestly hopes “there is room for the remembrances of someone who knew [Graham Greene]--not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well.” An esteemed novelist with a home on Capri, Hazzard and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, now deceased, were among the few inhabitants Greene socialized with during visits to his house on the island. Her memoir “Greene on Capri” is a pointillist masterpiece that manages to evoke a magical setting, remarkable people and vivid events, all in the space of 138 elegantly written pages.

Hazzard and Greene met in an encounter that “seems still, like an incident from a novel: a real novel, a good novel, an old novel.” In a cafe, Greene and a friend were discussing Robert Browning’s “The Lost Mistress.” Greene knew much of the poem by heart but couldn’t remember its last line, which Hazzard supplied. There followed a friendship that endured for three decades--a friendship distinguished, as one would expect of literary people (Hazzard’s husband was an author of many books, including biographies of Flaubert and Cocteau), by a great deal of spirited conversation, intelligent debate about various Italian writers, pleasant evenings at dinner and desultory strolls.

But as Hazzard quickly intuited, “Graham Greene did not come to Capri as earlier generations of foreign writers and artists had done, accessible to the island’s history and beauty, and curious for new experience there. If most of his travels were acknowledged ways of escape, his Capri visits in particular were a means of being ‘away’--from routine and interruptions, and from the consequent menace of accidie.”

Travel wasn’t Greene’s only way of coping with boredom and black moods. He frequently picked quarrels; “rows were almost a physical necessity to him” and he “appeared indifferent to harm done, hurt inflicted, trust eroded.” Even with friends he showed “a playground will to hurt, humiliate and ridicule.” No point was too petty for him to argue, and though he had a famously wicked sense of humor, “Graham’s pleasure in such jokes derived exclusively from spoofs practised by himself on others.” As Hazzard recounts, Greene baited her husband for being an American, expressing unremitting hostility to what he perceived as our “contemptible national quest for the Grail of happiness.”

But then she insightfully acknowledges that as hard as Greene could be on others, he was just as hard on himself and “held that a policy of good cheer was often a repudiation of feeling; a license for indifference or ruthlessness.” That he himself could be cruel Hazzard concedes, but taking the man’s measure down to his fingers, which were twisted with Dupuytren’s contracture, she speculates that he suffered from a similar psychic constriction.

Would that I had known all this before I met Greene. In 1972, I got his address, predictably, from a priest and wrote him. Though he was reputed to be wary of fawning readers and aspiring authors, he invited my wife and me to his place in Antibes for drinks. Summer nights on the Riviera were no longer so tender as during F. Scott Fitzgerald’s time. The streets of stark modern flats were clotted with cars and smothered in the smell of fried food and Bain de Soleil. I pressed a buzzer marked Green--was the deleted “e” for disguise?--and entered a building that had the sterile impersonality of an airport. As Hazzard notes, “He was not attached, through habit or memory, or aesthetically, to the rooms and houses and neighborhoods of his life.”

*

Greene was taller than expected and his apartment smaller--just a living-work space, bedroom and kitchen. Then 68, he stooped at the shoulders, as if listening closely and looking on with leaky blue eyes. His terrace door let in a din of cars and voices. Greene hated noise: “The world is a raucous radio held to one’s ear,” Hazzard quotes him complaining. As he lamented to me, “The traffic goes on until all hours, and everyone in the building has a barbecue on his balcony. They keep me up half the night. Some mornings I’m almost too tired to work.”

Displaying no knack for the continuity of conventional conversation, he preferred anecdotes, and as he skipped from topic to topic, I kept up the best I could. “It’s gotten so I hate to say who I am or what I believe. I told an interviewer I’m Gnostic. The next day’s newspaper announced that I had become an agnostic.” Here, I thought, was a man who demanded accuracy and strict attention.

He said he wrote each morning until he met his quota, now down to 100 words, “just to keep my hand in. I used to work much faster. I liked to bring out a new book every year. It was a reaction against the Bloomsbury people, most of whom seemed content to do a few things, build a reputation and rest on it. Now it takes me years to finish a book, and sometimes it still isn’t right.”

It puzzled me that practice didn’t make the process easier. “You’d think once a writer had been through it a few times and developed confidence in his talent. . . .”

“One has no talent,” Greene interrupted. “I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.”

This seemed to me reminiscent of his paradoxical characters who grow strong because they are weak, who are driven to sainthood because they are sinners. Because I had doubts about my talent, I wanted to believe I’d succeed by working hard. And because I could never lead a life as varied as Greene’s, I took heart when he said, “Interesting experiences, fascinating people you meet in extraordinary places--of course that’s all very enjoyable. But they don’t make one a better writer and they don’t always make for good books. Failure and boredom, the feeling of loneliness, of being flat and empty, have more influence on a novelist.”

He soon mentioned his mistress, Yvonne Cloetta. She was married to a Swiss, Greene said, who either didn’t suspect or didn’t object to his wife’s infidelity. This sounded less like a discreet Englishman than an American, the kind he’d hate, inclined to “over-share.”

As my wife admired the sculpture moquettes on a coffee table, Greene said, “Henry Moore gave me that one. I’m told it’s worth 50,000 pounds.”

Picking up a different piece, silver-plated and phallic, my wife mused that it might be a Brancusi. Greene said he bought it from a chemist in Nice. When she asked whether it came with papers, Greene deadpanned that the papers recommended using it for itching and inflammation. He had hemorrhoids and this was a medicine applicator. “It’s so decorative, I couldn’t bear to throw it away.”

In the appalled silence that followed, my wife set it back on the table and resisted an urge to wipe her fingers on Greene’s shirt front. The butt of his prank, we couldn’t fathom his motives. But as Hazzard observes, “Readiness to hurt even, or especially, those who were fond of him and wished him well, had become a reflex in Graham. . . . Evidence of the pain he caused gave reality to his own existence, restoring him to his ‘better’ self.”

In this case, his “better” self reappeared almost immediately. He gave me a signed one-of-a-kind copy of “The Quiet American” with a test cover that had never been released. Then as we left, he said he’d call next week. He did and took us to a restaurant in Juan les Pins that served shepherd’s pie. Eventually he introduced us to Yvonne, a pretty woman with a cap of prematurely silver hair. And he continued to unspool anecdotes--about West Africa during World War II, East Africa during the Mau Mau uprising, the Sinai in ‘67, Prague in 1968 during the Russian invasion and Chile, where, he claimed, the CIA monitored his every move. He showed us a book, published at Papa Doc Duvalier’s expense, to discredit “The Comedians.” It portrayed Haiti as a tranquil paradise and Greene as an infamous racist. Graham maintained he couldn’t be a racist; a branch of his family in the West Indies had had black children, one with his name.

He spoke about Vietnam, gave an imitation of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem’s hysterical high-pitched laugh and described interviewing Ho Chi Minh after smoking a pipe of opium. He had met Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra. It was cold at that altitude; Castro’s men were freezing and needed warm clothes. So Greene came back bundled up like an Eskimo and molted layers of socks, trousers and sweaters. Once Castro came to power, he presented Greene a painting in gratitude. It hung on the wall of his apartment, he said.

For years, I dined out on these stories. Then a Playboy editor asked me to write them up. Before I agreed, I got Greene’s permission. Despite having once flown to South Africa on assignment for Playboy, he expressed misgivings about the magazine but told me to proceed with the proviso that I not mention Yvonne.

Cobbling together all his anecdotes, I drafted an adulatory valentine to Greene. Playboy rejected it as too literary, revealing too little of his private life. When my agent failed to place it elsewhere, I sold it to The Nation for $70 and London Magazine for 30 pounds and sent Greene a copy. He replied with a scathing letter, accusing me of gross inaccuracy and wholesale invention. I was wrong about the CIA in Chile; there was no black Graham Greene; he hadn’t met Castro until after the revolution; it was absurd to imply he was high from a single pipe of opium. He took particular exception to the quote: “One has no talent. I have no talent.” He threatened to annotate my errors in an article of his own and “sell it for a large sum.”

Furious, I confessed to the journalistic crime of gullibility. “Why would I write an article which was entirely favorable,” I demanded by mail, “and continue for two years to try to get it published, if I knew it was full of falsehoods? If the information and anecdotes didn’t come from you, where did they come from? Quite frankly, some of them are so good, if I had invented them I would have used them in my own fiction--which is perhaps what you should have done.”

After another vitriolic letter from Greene, an Italian magazine asked to reprint the piece. I told Greene this was his chance to set the record straight. He replied that he couldn’t remember what his objections had been; I was free to republish the article as it stood. In 1988, I again invited Greene to correct any errors. Again he declined and permitted me to include the profile in my collected essays.

Over the years we kept in touch by telephone, and he was a faultless correspondent. His letters arrived in distinctive blue-gray envelopes typed by his sister Elisabeth Dennys. Occasionally we had lunch in Antibes at Felix au Port with Yvonne and her golden spaniel, Sandy. He never mentioned the imbroglio. As Hazzard points out, he wasn’t one to apologize. The closest he came to an explanation was to comment that as he got older, his mood swings flattened--no more manic highs or bleak lows. He attempted to draw a line under the past, but his gnarled fingers traced a jagged arc.

Although he sometimes rounded the rough edges off the truth, he remained an amusing raconteur and a friend. Late in life he offered to sell me his house on Capri at a bargain price. Still, he never lost that splinter of ice in his novelist’s heart. (Hazzard declares Greene’s “splinter” was “the tip of an iceberg.”) When his longtime publisher didn’t like the title “Travels With My Aunt,” he shot off a telegram: “Easier to change publishers than title.”

In 1979, The New Yorker published a profile of Greene, which he promptly dismissed in the New Statesman as the “product of Mrs. [Penelope] Gilliatt’s rather wild imagination. . . . It will be safer . . . to assume that almost anything there I am made to say is probably--to put it kindly--inaccurate.”

I felt sorry for poor Penelope--until I read the profile. It opened with Greene on the terrace in Antibes complaining about noisy neighbors. That sounded familiar, as did her description of his eyes, his stooped shoulders, his work schedule, his travels in Dubcek’s Prague and Allende’s Chile. When I reached the quote “I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time,” I wondered whether this was plagiarism or a cruel practical joke. Had Greene told Gilliatt the same tales and enticed her into repeating them? No, New Yorker editor William Shawn conceded she “unconsciously” lifted material from my article and paid a financial settlement. According to Renata Adler’s recent book “Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker,” the magazine’s famed fact checkers warned Shawn in advance “that Ms. Gilliatt’s piece tracked, to an extraordinary degree, an article in the Nation by Michael Mewshaw.”

The next time I visited Greene, he admitted he hadn’t noticed the similarities between Gilliatt’s article and mine. But he was visibly delighted by the entire debacle.

In 1991, I sent Greene a letter days before his death. Weeks later, a familiar blue-gray envelope arrived. Like Scobie in “The Heart of the Matter” who receives reversed telegrams--the first saying his daughter is dead, the second that she’s in hospital--I experienced a pang of absurd hope. But it was a note from his niece saying Graham was gone. I miss him. So, clearly, does Shirley Hazzard. As do his many readers.