The Love-Charm of Bombs (56 page)

 

I was there do you remember when temporarily it was a British Military Transit hotel, full of specially imported black leather armchairs and, as Graham said, decaying marriages (the Occupation people and their wives). It was true that one heard fractious murmuring grumbles behind each door as one walked down the corridors. And they, the Military, wouldn't let one have breakfast in one's room; one jolly well had to come downstairs fully dressed and drink stewed black tea and eat baked beans. At least I didn't eat baked beans, but one was supposed to. And all that among that elegant glory – the whole of Sachers had such a marvellous atmosphere of former grand dukes and parma violets.

 

Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene did not have a close friendship. Recently, together with V. S. Pritchett, they had been collaborating on a public exchange of letters called
Why Do I Write
, in which Bowen described herself as ‘fully intelligent' only when she wrote, suggesting that writers wrote chiefly to work off ‘the sense of being solitary and farouche', and Greene and Bowen agreed about the necessity of disloyalty in the writer. This had brought them together intellectually, but they were not close enough for him to mention to her his longing for Catherine or for her to admit to him how much she was missing Charles. If they had been, perhaps each might have recognised the other's intense capacity for love; perhaps they might even have changed allegiances. Both writers were courageous enough to make the leap of faith that was proving more difficult for Catherine or Charles; both had the emotional strength to go beyond the long-drawn-out might-have-been. Instead, they both sought refuge in private longing.

Writing to Catherine, whom he had arranged to meet in Rome, Graham complained that the crowds of people made him feel more lonely; he wanted to be alone with her instead. Everything reminded him of Catherine. Even the blotting pad in his hotel room had the symbol ‘Ach/ille' pencilled on it by Graham's predecessor. Before leaving Vienna, he lamented that he desired her very badly and could not believe he had seen her only a week ago. He would have forgotten what she looked like, were it not for the photograph on the letter rack. And he was desperate to see a familiar face that was never familiar enough.

Both Graham and Elizabeth were now dependent on letters; both were living as much through letters as they were through the actual events of their days. For her part Elizabeth was more lonely than usual because a month earlier Charles had married his cousin, Sylvia Smellie. Charles had never intended to marry for love, and the union was largely a practical decision. In 1940, shortly before meeting Elizabeth, he wrote to his mother that it would be a mistake for him to marry anyone he was in love with as too much love made him claustrophobic. Instead, he considered that ‘the best thing for me would be someone companionable of whom I am fond like Sylvia'. Even during the war, when his relationship with Elizabeth was at its height, he was considering marriage, and never seems to have wished that it was possible to marry Elizabeth. ‘And marriage is an idea that I am always playing with in my mind now,' he wrote in his diary in November 1942, feeling rather at a loss with Elizabeth. ‘I might do more than play with the idea but for the complete absence of eligible girls in my life at present.'

Given the lack of eligible alternatives, in the autumn of 1944 Charles started considering Sylvia as a serious possibility. Rightly, perhaps, in view of her continual acceptance and patience after the marriage, he never seems to have doubted whether she would marry him. By the time he arrived in Canada in January 1945, Charles was set on the course that would lead to marriage. Quickly, he began to resent Sylvia's hold over him. About to leave for England, in December of that year, he observed that she was becoming a symbol of obligations, which was stripping her of charm in his eyes. ‘Now that I am leaving her, I begin to love her.' He spent the gloomy Christmas Day before his departure minding his ‘Death of the Heart, this paralysis of the mind', finding the situation with Sylvia sad and familiar: ‘I have been frozen in the same trance of indecision between love and doubt for twenty years.' Reawakened by Elizabeth, he returned to Ottawa convinced that Elizabeth was the ‘Love of my Life' and that he would never make the kind of charming, domestic, conventional marriage that he once longed for. And at last – ‘at long long last' – he had stopped caring much whether or not it would happen. Yet by May, he saw marriage looming ahead. ‘It is not so much marriage that frightens me as the necessity for a decision at a given moment at a given date.'

Elizabeth did her best to rationalise the marriage. In November 1946 she assured him that she was not ‘going to take your marriage au grand tragique. I can take it how you want me to, and I will.' Certainly, she had no intention of leaving Alan, although this did not stop her imagining married life with Charles. But Charles's marriage still seemed to take him even further away and, arriving in Prague en route to Vienna, Elizabeth missed him bereftly. ‘I thought it would make me feel better – I mean, less lonely for you – coming abroad,' she wrote just after her arrival; ‘actually up to now it has made me feel worse.' Walking around the small cobbled streets, she returned to memories of wandering around Paris with Charles. Prague seemed ghostly and unreal as a result: a photographic imitation of a real place. ‘When there's no sun, or under mistiness, the whole city blots out – it looks like a photograph with just a few details, red-brown roofs, occasional lawns of gardens, tinted in.' Writing to Isaiah Berlin after her return, Elizabeth described this straightforwardly as a miserable period: ‘As a matter of fact I spent much of my 3 weeks in Central Europe in floods of tears.'

All the time she was aware that it would only take Charles's presence to turn simulacrum into reality. ‘If I were here with you it would be extraordinary: I keep wondering what sort of life you and I would lead here. Actually I think we would get to love it. It is beautiful; and the strangeness itself would grow on one.' She was also imagining his actual life, ensconced in his new marital home. ‘I think so much about you. You are happy, my darling beloved, aren't you? And your new house is nice, and everything goes well?' But she could not move beyond the tone of a polite well-wisher in alluding to his married life, because all her passion was invested in her own desolation. ‘The fact is I'm lonely: I do not feel quite myself, quite in balance, quite in command of anything apart from you.' Like Graham Greene, she found that the presence of other people only served to make her feel more painfully alone. And, living for their meeting in Paris three weeks later, longing for the sight of one of Charles's blue envelopes, she was already dreading the day when Charles, escorted by Sylvia, would sweep back to Canada, across the Atlantic, in the autumn. ‘The idea of your being so far away again torments me.'

Elizabeth's despondency in Prague was also political. Czechoslovakia was currently ruled by an elected predominantly socialist coalition, with the pro-Stalin Prime Minister Klement Gottwald increasingly imposing Communist reforms. This was the closest Elizabeth had come to Soviet-style Communism. She was still horrified by the Labour government in Britain, which had recently nationalised the Bank of England, civil aviation, coal and the railways in what Attlee described as the introduction of a ‘planned economy' operated under the ‘Socialist principle of placing the welfare of the nation before that of any section'. The immediate results of British nationalisation had been depressing; the coal industry in particular lost many of its former administrators at the same time as supplies were frozen by the appalling snow and flooding. Elizabeth was not alone in linking nationalisation with the fuel crisis in the winter of 1947 and she was not prepared to regard Czech socialism favourably. Returning to London in March, she wrote to thank Charles's mother, Lilian Ritchie, for a parcel sent from Ottawa, and explained her reactions to Czechoslovakia. ‘If I lived in Prague,' she wrote, ‘I could almost imagine becoming a Communist out of sheer boredom with the drabness already produced by Socialism. No romanticness, no gaiety, hardly a handsome person to be seen!' She admitted to Charles's mother that she found it particularly unpalatable after the ‘already sufficient drabness of London under our present regime', which made Prague ‘almost impossible for me to take'.

In contrast, Elizabeth, unlike Graham Greene, was entranced by post-war Vienna. ‘The place I really did lose my heart to was Vienna,' she continued to Lilian Ritchie, ‘as I imagine everybody always has and always will. Even in its present tragic state it makes one catch one's breath with wonder and sheer pleasure.' She had the feeling that all the gallantry and grace that had been gradually fading out of the world since 1914 was still holding out in a last little pocket of resistance in Vienna. And she was far more impressed than Hilde Spiel by the insouciant cheerfulness of the Viennese: ‘the way they go on being gay on half a glass of wine, by the light of one candle. Really they are a lesson to one!'

It was a lesson she was finding it hard to learn. On 27 February she had lunch with Charles in Paris on her way back to London. In late March, Charles came to London to see her play,
Castle Anna
, which was premiering at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, and he and Elizabeth spent a day together. But this was not enough, and he seemed less accessible now that he was married. A week after Charles's London visit, Elizabeth wrote to him from Bowen's Court, disappointed because a blue envelope had appeared in the previous day's post which turned out on closer inspection to be not from Charles but from Isaiah Berlin. This letter was itself a source of sadness; a reminder that old friendships had come to matter less, as she and her friends became more successful and so many of the things they used to enjoy together, principally each other, had been crowded out. ‘I feel sometimes', she added to Charles, ‘I have let the whole weight of my life lean too heavily on you. But you see apart from everything else you are such a friend.'        

She went on, talking, she said, as a friend to a friend, to wonder if she had failed Charles in understanding. ‘You are extraordinary, I am extraordinary, we have been extraordinary together. I ought (I can see how you could feel it) to be able to take one more extraordinary thing (your marriage).' But she had not bargained on sadness, which ‘seems to take away all one's powers – it's like getting something into one's eye so that one can't see properly, or losing teeth so that one can't bite properly on anything, can't bite on what happens. It not only queers one, it somehow dulls one.' As a result of Charles's marriage, Elizabeth's belief in their imaginary togetherness was failing. Now she was a woman before she was a writer, and her imaginative strength was not enough to protect her from loneliness and grief.

 

 

Graham Greene flew from Vienna to Prague on 23 February, delayed for hours by heavy snow. He had heard rumours about the possibility of a Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, but it was not until he talked to two English correspondents on the plane that he realised how serious the situation now was. They told him that they were on their way to report the revolution and asked if he had booked a room. He had not; this turned out to be a mistake. ‘Hotels are always full', he was told severely, ‘when there's a revolution.' They landed after midnight and Greene managed to procure himself a sofa to sleep on in the correspondents' room.

The so-called revolution had been precipitated by a cabinet crisis on 20 February, when the non-Communist ministers resigned from the government in protest against Gottwald's attempts to purge the security forces of non-Communists and introduce Soviet-style reform. Backed by Stalin, Gottwald was now seizing total power by force. At the time, these events seemed to Western liberals like a people's revolution. Certainly, by arriving in the middle of the coup, Greene had stumbled into a more glamorous side of Prague than Bowen had managed to find on her visit. When he asked the hotel porter where he could find something to eat, he was informed that all the restaurants in Prague were closed. He pleaded, and was told that there was a servant's ball currently taking place in the basement. There he found the Venezuelan Ambassador dancing with the hotel cook, as senior officials and servants celebrated the coup together. For a brief period at least the revolution was looking hopeful; the next morning he went out into the streets and was greeted by processions and red flags.

A week later Graham at last met Catherine for their promised reunion in Rome. Together, they explored the Amalfi coast, finding the same peaceful happiness in Italy that Rose Macaulay had found in Spain and Portugal, despite the fact that parts of Italy had been badly bombed. As always, it was a working holiday for Graham; he was writing the novel version of
The Third Man
, which he would use as a basis for the screenplay. All he had shown to Korda so far was a scrap of paper describing the resurrection of the absent anti-hero, Harry Lime, who has staged his own death in order to avoid detection for his penicillin racketeering. Rollo Martins (whose name would be changed to Holly in the film) arrives in Vienna to see Harry and, innocently mourning the death of his friend, falls in love with Harry's girl Anna. Resurrected, Harry is prepared to betray both his oldest friend and his loyal lover. It was somewhat audacious in the circumstances for Graham to give the villain the name of Catherine's husband. Graham finished the story quickly, and read it to Catherine in bed in Ravello. Graham and Catherine then visited Anacapri, where they found a small villa, Rosaio, which Graham would buy later in the year with the proceeds of
The Third Man
. Here, once again, Graham found the peace he had experienced in Achill. At the end of their holiday he wrote Catherine a poem which compares the ‘great peace' offered by the Friars with the quieter peace accessible for ordinary mortals: