Graham Greene (55 page)

Page 148.

Trevor Wilson belonged to MI6. I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend in MI5, thank God. Harold Lee was at Oxford but after my time. I didn’t know him there. I got to know him during my frequent visits to Hong Kong [going] to and from Vietnam.

Page 187.

I don’t know what this letter really means. I don’t remember ever making payments to Anita. Perhaps it was a mortgage on the house. It gives the impression that I used to pay her as my mistress which was quite untrue. She was and I am sure is an extremely independent girl. She even used to insist on paying for my lunches when I came to visit her in Stockholm. As these generally contained caviar I at last persuaded her to drop it. The final agreement to part came on the eve of one of my usual departures from Stockholm when we had friends of hers to dinner. After dinner I happened to say that I had enjoyed the Blitz, and the Swedes, not Anita, were deeply shocked by this. It was then I realized that it would be impossible for me to settle at all in Sweden and we discussed it in a friendly way afterwards. The next morning we made love before I caught the plane. By the way she has been down here recently with her friend Mrs Lam and we all had a meal together. She and Yvonne got on extremely well together.

[…]

In late
1987
Graham and Yvonne Cloetta made another trip through the Soviet Union, which included a visit with Kim Philby. Upon returning to England he sent, as Philby requested, a copy of Peter Wright’s
Spycatcher
, the publication of which caused a controversy in 1987
.

2nd December 1987

My dear Kim,

I am so glad that
Spycatcher
arrived safely even if it was two months late. I wonder where it spent the two months. The
Minehead postmark doesn’t mean that Elisabeth has changed her address. Elisabeth was on holiday and so my cassette went to my old secretary Josephine Reid who lives in Minehead to be typed. They both of them have stocks of my signed notepaper because I find it impossible to cope myself without dictating onto a cassette as I find I get on an average about 180 letters a month to deal with even though a lot of them go into the wastepaper basket.

Yvonne and I both protest against your apology for Aragvi’s
¹⁷
meal. We both enjoyed it immensely. Perhaps you mistook my lack of great appetite which is perpetual with me for a criticism!

We both hope that we shall be meeting again before too long and we both send our love to you and Rufa.
     Graham

Roderick Young was researching the figure of the Jew in twentieth-century English literature and had noticed that the uses of the word ‘Jew’ had been sharply reduced in later editions of
Stamboul Train
and
Brighton Rock
. He also told Graham a story about a poetry reading in the 1950 s, at which Emmanuel Litvinoff praised T. S. Eliot, who was in attendance, as a modern prophet but attacked him for his use of the Jew as a symbol of decadence
.

28th March 1988

Dear Mr. Young,

Yes, the changes in
Brighton Rock
and
Stamboul Train
and if there is one in
A Gun for Sale
were made by myself. After the holocaust one couldn’t use the word Jew in the loose way one used it before the war. Myatt in fact is one of the nicest characters in
Stamboul Train
, both brave and sympathetic. In the case of Colleoni I think I was wrong to have made him a Jew in the first place with such an Italian name. The casual references to Jews at one particular hotel is
a sign of those times when one regarded the word Jew as almost a synonym for capitalist. Big business seemed our enemy and such men who happened to be Jewish as Zaharoff
¹⁸
who indulged in the private sale of arms. Now we know that governments sell arms as recklessly as private individuals.
¹⁹

I liked your Litvinoff story and wish I had his poem to read.

Yours sincerely
     Graham Greene

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | April 10 ’88

Dear Muriel,

I have just returned to find your new book
²⁰
– no present could have given me greater pleasure. I write at once, because after the first three pages, I know that this will prove to be one of your finest novels since my previous favourite
Memento Mori
.

I have a great sense of guilt. You have sent me so many of your books & I don’t believe I have sent you mine. My last, I mean final, (& I don’t much care for it) I will be sending you in September. (I abandoned it 15 years ago). A poor return.
²¹

I wish we could have met after all these years more than one brief encounter.
²²

Yours admiringly,
     Graham Greene

P.S. I’m glad that the Russians are appreciating your books.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 13th April 1988

Dear Bernard,

Many thanks for your letter. Chuchu has still been ringing up at intervals and claims that he is in no danger. Noriega has now become a patriot in his eyes and I must admit that if I have to choose between a drug dealer and United States imperialism I prefer the drug dealer. I never much cared for him but Omar at least would have appreciated the way he is hanging on. I was delighted by the news from Honduras. I don’t feel much like returning to Panama at this moment. It would be so easy for the CIA to bump me off and blame it on Noriega and, vice versa, though I doubt if Noriega would do it. I seem to spend a lot of my time now going to and fro to Russia. I have been four times in the last two years and we are probably going again towards the end of May. […]

Kim Philby died in Moscow on
11
May 1988
.

La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur | 06600 Antibes |
May 15 ’88

Dearest Rufa,

We have been deeply distressed by the news of Kim’s death & we think of you with love and sadness. It was always the high point of our visits to Moscow when we saw you and Kim together. To me he was a good and loyal friend.

I do hope that the three of us will meet again before very long & please, please believe in our love for you.

Graham & Yvonne

[Yvonne adds a similar message in French.]

According to Andrew Biswell, the quarrel between Greene and Burgess was rooted in Burgess’s belief that Greene, whom he had venerated, did not take him very seriously. Burgess reviewed most of Greene’s work from 1961, and, as he said in April 1991, ‘never gave him a review less than almost fawningly laudatory’. Greene did not reciprocate, and by
1988
Burgess was conscious of the slight.
²³
His public outbursts were soon reported to Greene, who wrote two letters on the same day ending the friendship. It is interesting that apart from personal and literary matters, the first of Greene’s letters contains what appears to be a public declaration that his correspondence with Philby was vetted by security agencies on both sides – in fact, his correspondence with Philby was passed on to MI
6
though his brother-in-law Rodney Dennys
.

La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur | 06600 Antibes
|June 13 ’88

My dear Anthony Burgess,

I hear you have been attacking me rather severely on the French television programme
Apostrophes
because of my great age & in the French magazine
Lire
because of my correspondence with my friend Kim Philby.

I know how difficult it is to avoid inaccuracies when one becomes involved in journalism, but as you thought it relevant to attack me because of my age (I don’t see the point) you should have checked your facts. I happen to be 83 not 86 & I trust that you will safely reach that age too.

In
Lire
you seem to have been quoted as writing that I had been in almost daily correspondence with Philby before his death. In fact I received ten letters from him in the course of nearly 20 years. You must be very naïf if you believe our letters were clandestine on either side. Were you misinformed or have you caught the common disease in journalism of dramatizing at the cost of truth?

Never mind. I admired your three earliest novels & I remember with pleasure your essay on my work in your collection
Urgent Copy
, your article on me last May in the
Sunday Telegraph
& the novel (not one of your best) which you dedicated to me.

Yours,
      Graham Greene

La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur | 06600 Antibes
[June 13, 1988]

Dear Burgess,

I have now received another cutting in which you claim I told you of an aggrieved husband shouting through my window (difficult as I live on the fourth floor.) You are either a liar or you are unbalanced and should see a doctor. I prefer to think that.
     Graham Greene

Ian Thomson (b
. 1961
), the biographer of Primo Levi and editor of Greene’s
Tablet
articles, writes: ‘In 1988
, The Independent Magazine
sent me to the Estonian capital of Tallinn to write an article about my Baltic roots
—
To my astonishment, Graham Greene had visited Tallinn in the mid-
1930
s when my mother was a child there.’ As a result of the trip and his time with the diplomat Peter Leslie, Greene conceived ‘a film sketch, “Nobody to Blame,” about a British sales representative in Tallinn for Singer Sewing Machines, who is a spy. The film was never made yet it contained the bare bones of what was originally “Our Man in Tallinn,” later
Our Man in Havana
. Anticipating my visit to Tallinn, I wrote to Greene asking why he had moved his Cuban “entertainment” from Estonia in the 1930 s to Cuba in the 1950 s; I was also keen to know of his 50 -year-old impressions of my mother’s native land.’
²⁴

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes |
18th August 1988

Dear Ian Thomson,

The reason why I changed from Estonia to Cuba for
Our Man in Havana
was that one could hardly sympathise with the main character if he was to be involved with the Hitler war. I already knew Cuba and my sympathies were with the Fidelistas in the mountains. Nothing came of the suggested meeting with Grieg.
²⁵
I tried to track the famous brothel but failed. I think the hotel was called the Ambassadors but I am not sure. I am afraid I saw very little of Estonia apart from Tallinn and have very little memories of the place except that it had a great charm for me.

Yours sincerely
      Graham Greene

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 29th October 1988

Dearest Jocelyn,

Thank you so much for your letter. I do commiserate with you about having Freddy so much on your hands. I read about his four [minutes]
²⁶
of death which he wrote [about,] but one thing I could not understand. How does he know that the experience he had during those four minutes was not an experience he had immediately his heart began to beat again and before he became fully conscious. I don’t see that there is any proof there of the memory existing for a while after death. Do get him to explain that.

Lots of love
     Graham

In 1988, Freddie Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon and his heart stopped. He reported that in the four minutes before he was revived, he saw a red light responsible for the government of the universe but it was not doing its job well, ‘with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw, was slightly out of joint’. Ayer died again without being revived on 27 June 1989
.

Greene was actually very interested in near-death experiences, and in his late years seemed to debate with himself the possibility of an afterlife, finding it marginally easier to believe in the existence of a God than in the survival of the soul. In Cloetta’s view, he decided the matter a few days before his death, remarking: ‘If we human beings come on this earth only in order to spend about eighty years here, that makes no sense. What is eighty years compared to eternity? So there must be something else.’ Earlier, he had written, ‘
…
perhaps in Paradise we are given the power to help the living. I picture Paradise as a place of activity. Sometimes I pray not for the dead friends but to dead friends, asking their help.’
²⁷

Robert Cecil (b
.1913
) was a historian and the biographer of the defector Donald Maclean
.

14th February 1989

Dear Robert Cecil,

Thank you so much for getting your publisher to send me your book which I found fascinating reading. It was a change to have a well-written book on the subject and not the usual journalistic type. I never knew Maclean and I only met Burgess twice, once over coffee with David Footman
²⁸
during the war and once when he forced himself on me on my visit to Moscow as a guest of British Airways in 1961. I don’t know why he particularly wished to see me as I didn’t like him. I was leaving early the next morning and I had begun a serious attack of pneumonia. However curiosity won and I asked him in for a drink. He drove away my very nice translator saying that he wished to be alone with me but the only thing that he asked of me was to thank Harold Nicolson for a letter and on my return to give Baroness Budberg a bottle of gin!

One thing strikes me as odd. On page 138 you speak of his telephone call to Stephen Spender to ask for Auden’s address in Ischia which ‘falls into the same pattern of deception.’ I wonder why he was playing the same deception all those years later in 1961 when he told me in the course of our meeting that he had intended to split from Maclean in Paris and go on to stay with Auden in Ischia. I remember he said that he was caught up in the arrangements which had been made for them and had to go on to Prague with Maclean. Perhaps he thought I would write an article about our meeting, but why persist with the Ischia story after so many years?