Graham Greene (56 page)

Again thank you so much for this excellent book.

Yours ever
     Graham Greene

P.S. I see that you have answered my question about Burgess in your final pages!

Before his escape to the Soviet Union, Burgess tried to create a cover-story by calling Stephen Spender and asking for Auden’s address in Ischia. Cecil notes that the KGB sought to surround the British defectors in as much disinformation as possible to avoid giving credibility to the revelations in
1955
of the Soviet defector Vladimir Petrov. Burgess himself entertained hopes of returning to England.
²⁹

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 24th May 1989

Dear Michael,

Poor Anita is suffering from a bombardment of letters from Norman Sherry. I have told her to put them all in the wastepaper-basket. He will probably get onto you and I do hope you will refuse to give him any information about Anita. She has a right to her private life.

Love,
     Graham

Born in Pakistan but having lived many years in Bradford, Akhtar led protests against Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses
. He opposed violence, but helped organise a ritual burning of the book. His own book entitled
Be Careful with Muhammad: The Salman Rushdie Affair
was published in 1989. In the midst of the controversy he wrote to Greene, asking for advice
.

3 July 1989

Dear Dr. Akhtar,

I sympathise with you over this silly Rushdie affair. I doubt whether I can be of much help however. I haven’t read Rushdie’s book and have no desire to. I can sympathise with anyone who loses his faith altogether, but then there is no need to preach disbelief. One should allow others to believe what one has ceased to believe oneself. On the other hand I disapprove equally of death sentences.
³⁰

As a very doubting Catholic (that is to say I very much doubt the infallibility of the Pope) I would be on Rushdie’s side perhaps if he hadn’t apparently made a mock of all believers. I have occasionally mocked the Pope but that is quite different from mocking those who believe in the existence of Christ. I respect their belief and sometimes share it. I think your articles are excellent and I think you should persist in what you are doing.

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

PS Without having read his book and judging by reports I would say that Rushdie was guilty of shocking bad taste but that hardly justifies violence and death.

Greene never admired Islamic culture. His first direct encounter with it was in Liberia in 1935, where, as he remarked in old age, one offensive Mandingo porter aroused in him ‘a few prejudices reinforced today by that horrible old man Khomeini’. Throughout his life Greene took the side of the Israelis against the Arabs. A particular admirer of Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Six Day War, he feared nonetheless that Menachem Begin and the Likud Party might fail to take the steps necessary for peace. See Allain
, 107
–16
.

La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur | 06600 Antibes | 28th July 1989

Dear Ralph,

It was very nice seeing you the other day and I hope you are safely home now. I have read your book with great pleasure. I have a habit of marking with a little tick poems I particularly like and I find I have marked thirteen – a good score. The three I particularly liked were
O Hidden God, Jericho
and
Distance
.

Yvonne and I send our love,
     Graham

Even when the author was someone as close to him as Ralph Wright, Graham Greene was incapable of praising thirteen poems he did not like. This ‘good score’ is a remarkable endorsement of Wright’s little-known collection
, Seamless (1988).

Huerta said he was ‘plowing’ through the recently published first volume of Sherry’s biography. He had also heard rumours that Graham had left the Church
.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 1st August 1989

Dear Fr. Huerta,

Leopoldo
³¹
has just spent a few days here but I have too much work, too much age.

Reviewers have been rather kind to Sherry’s first volume, but I found it far too long and full of unnecessary details. Anyway I hate
being written about and there is another man Mockler
³²
coming on the scene shortly. At least Sherry writes well but Mockler doesn’t.

Your rumour is not quite correct. I usually go to Mass on a Sunday but sometimes I have too many people to see or too much work to do. I disagree with a good deal that the Pope has said and done but that doesn’t mean that I have left the Church. I would call myself at the worst a Catholic agnostic!

All good wishes,
     Yours ever,
       Graham Greene

The Swiss theologian Hans Küng (b
. 1928
) served with his friend and colleague Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) as a theological consultant to the Second Vatican Council. Whereas Ratzinger turned to the right after 1968, Küng became a dissident within the Church. Largely in response to his
Infallible? An Inquiry (1971
), Pope John Paul II stripped him of his licence to teach theology
.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | Oct. 24 89

Dear Hans Küng,

I was delighted to get your essay
³³
with its generous & undeserved dédicace. The admiration is all on my side & the gratitude, for helping me to keep one foot in the Catholic church. It’s a delight to add this essay to the five books of yours I have on my shelves.

Yours with gratitude, admiration and friendship.
     Graham Greene

It is no small task to interview an ironist. Typically, Greene was both defensive and provocative when he spoke with journalists. In an interview with John Cornwell that was published as ‘Why I am still a Catholic’ in
The Tablet (23
September 1989), he debunked eucharistic doctrine and natural law, compared Gorbachev to John XXIII and the curia to the politburo, and he talked about the taste of Trappists for gossip. He also hinted that he only received the sacraments to make Father Durán happy
.

25 October 1989

Dear Tom,

I rather rashly gave permission to
The Tablet
to syndicate the interview because I thought that Cornwell’s book on the death of John Paul I was excellent. I regretted it later when it all appeared again in
The Times, Telegraph, Observer
and
Independent
. Because of the silly personal paragraph
Vogue
have now asked for it from America but Wilkins
³⁴
I am glad to say is cutting out that paragraph. How could I possibly refer to somebody I have known for thirty years as a girlfriend? I think I must have thought the interview was over and we were talking vaguely but not as vaguely as that. There were other minor errors. I have two armchairs and not one and I have never drunk a vodka cocktail in my life. It would have been pure virgin vodka!

I am so glad that Wilkins is keeping
The Tablet
on the liberal lines which you instituted after your very conservative predecessor.
³⁵
It remains a monument to your work. I can’t help wondering whether Newman was not welcoming a compromise rather than welcoming the idea of infallibility at all. I don’t see why the church – a very vague term which includes you and I – can be any more infallible than the Pope. I disbelieve in infallibility anywhere in this world.

Love
     Graham

At the First Vatican Council in 1870, John Henry Newman opposed the Ultramontane party which argued for a very strongly worded definition of papal infallibility, but he did accept the more moderate definition that was passed; still, he would have preferred to wait.
³⁶

Anthony Powell reviewed Sherry’s first volume in the
Balliol College Record (1989
). He complained about the amount of paraphrase of published works and described the whole as ‘interminable’. He disputed Sherry’s description of Greene’s personality as private, since some of the information he had supplied, especially about sex, ‘borders on the exhibitionist’
.

[Note in Greene’s hand: Don’t
send the letter to Balliol!]

7 November 1989

Dear Sir,

I am no defender of Norman Sherry’s biography, perhaps I can defend myself a little. I accepted him as biographer because I had a great admiration for his two books on Conrad. I would certainly have cut massively his biography of me if I had had an opportunity. However I received no galley-proofs of the book, only the final proofs. I would have reduced it if I had had galley-proofs by at least 60 or so pages and I have insisted that for the second volume I must receive the necessary galley-proofs. To have cut as I wished the first volume would have meant reprinting the whole book which I could not expect the publisher to do.

Yours truly,
     Graham Greene

The daughter of Greene’s murdered friend Yves Allain, Marie-Françoise Allain was a literary journalist who compiled volumes of interviews with both Greene and Cloetta
.

January 1, 1990

My dear Soizic,

[—] Your question about Cambridge is difficult to answer. All the five concerned were at Cambridge long after I was at Oxford. Generations at university go in three years. I belong to the 1922 generation and Kim and the others belonged to a much later one – at the beginning of the thirties. It was then apparent that Germany was the main threat and the hunger marchers were busy. It was more natural in the early thirties to side with our possible ally Russia. Years later after I had left the Service I received a letter from an authority asking the same question as you. What about Oxford? They named one man whom I had known but who I am convinced had not the making of a double agent. An obvious candidate would have been my friend Claud Cockburn, but he was so openly a communist that he would not have made a very good double.

Your second question about Kim. I had grown to like Kim immensely during the period when I worked with him in 1942–3 and later after he had left for Moscow he wrote to me supporting my action in asking for my books no longer to be published in Russia because of the imprisonment of two people whose names I temporarily forget.
³⁷
He said this was an honorable action and he hoped it would have an effect. He also wrote to me on the subject of the Afghan war saying that he was against it and he knew nobody there who was for it – in other words he indicated that the KGB had been against the war. In the last years of his life I saw a lot of him on my four or five visits to Russia. As you may have read [in] my speech at Hamburg published under the title
The Virtue of Disloyalty
I never
believed in the prime importance of loyalty to one’s country. Loyalty to individuals seems to me to be far more important.

I hope the time won’t be long off when we can meet again and discuss things more closely perhaps also with Bernard Violet.
³⁸

Much love,
     Graham

PS It may amuse you to hear that when I published
Our Man in Havana
MI5 rang up the head of MI6 to say that I should be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. The head of MI6 laughed.

La Résidence des Fleurs, |Avenue Pasteur,| 06600 Antibes | May 14, 1990

Dear Bernard,

Many thanks for your letter. My sickness is not a painful one only boring because one sees no end to it.
³⁹
I do hope you will get back to Haiti for the Pope’s visit. I was astonished to read that Fidel had sent him an invitation!

Yvonne and I send our love to you and Ginette and Jean-Bernard and I look forward to his photographs.

Affectionately,
     Graham

Simon & Schuster asked Greene to provide a blurb for Kenneth L. Woodward’s book
Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t and Why
. Greene complied, but wrote a separate letter to Woodward about his own encounters
with two saints, the stigmatic Padre Pio, whose picture Greene as an old man still carried in his wallet,
⁴⁰
and Pope Pius XII. Woodward, a religious affairs specialist with
Newsweek
, responded to musing by David Lodge on whether Greene was actually a believer at the end of his life by offering the letter not as conclusive proof but as evidence that Catholicism was still of interest to Greene in his last months.
⁴¹

September 11, 1990

Dear Mr. Woodward,

I’ve been reading your book
Making Saints
with great interest. I thought you might be interested in your turn by my own experience at a Mass of Padre Pio in a village in Southern Italy. He was a friend of a great friend of mine, the Marquess Patrizi,
⁴²
and I went to the village with a woman friend
⁴³
of mine. I was invited to see him that night in the monastery, but I made excuses not to go as neither of us wanted our lives changed! We were both Catholics. However the next morning we went to his Mass. He was not allowed to say Mass at the high altar but only at a small side altar and he had to say his Mass at 5.30 in the morning. There were only a few women outside the monastery gates waiting for them to open, and during the Mass we were only about six feet away from him. The women had all immediately gone to the confessional box as directly his Mass was over he went into the confessional until lunch time.

Throughout the Mass he tried to hide the stigmata by pulling his sleeves halfway down his hands, but of course they kept on slipping. He was presumably not allowed to wear gloves. I had been warned that his Mass was a very long one so I was surprised to find it of average length, except that it was spoken clearly and without, as some Italians do, gabbling. I was even more surprised when we left
the church to find that it was seven o’clock and I had no idea where this long period of time had been lost.
⁴⁴