The Catholic Cheshire Cat
Piers Paul Read
IN SEARCH OF A BEGINNING: MY LIFE WITH GRAHAM GREENE by Yvonne Cloetta, as told to MarieFrancoise Alain, translated from the French by Euan Cameron Bloomsbury, 06.99, pp. 209, ISBN 0747571082 yvonne Cloetta, the French wife of a Swiss businessman, was Graham Greene's mistress for the last 30 or so years of his life. Her husband spent most of the year in Africa; she lived at Juan les Pins with her two daughters, Greene in a flat overlooking the harbour in Antibes. When I first met her with Greene on the Cote d'Azur in the 1970s she seemed like one of those elegant, meticulously made-up women one sees behind the perfumery counters in French department stores. It was an impression that betrays a shaming strain of English snobbishness, but now, after reading these reminiscences of her life with Graham
Greene, I feel that it was not far off the mark.
In Search of a Beginning is the transcript of Cloetta's conversations with the French journalist Marie-Francoise Main, who before his death had interviewed Greene for The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene. Loyal and discreet during her lover's lifetime, Cloetta seems to have been provoked into defending his posthumous reputation by some of the disrespectful biographies that followed his death, in particular Michael Shelden's muck-raking Graham Greene: The Man Within.
Much of what she says comes across as sentimental and banal although for this Allain must share the blame. 'Would you say,' she asks Cloetta, 'that your life together was "one long, quiet stream" '? One senses that Euan Cameron, the fine translator, struggled to raise the prose above the level of a Mills & Boon romance. 'Those were wild, crazy years. We allowed ourselves to be carried away by passion, without worrying about the future at all. Only one thing mattered to us: to preserve our love, come what may'.
Why did Greene fall for such an apparently ordinary woman? Cloetta herself believed that she provided him with 'a certain stability which he hadn't known before': after his tempestuous years with Catherine Walston, this is no doubt true. She was the -H. H. K.' to whom he dedicated Travels with my Aunt, his 'Healthy, Happy Kitten'. Yvonne offered him sex and devotion with no strings attached. 'My roots are in rootlessness,' Greene used to say. He could come and go as he liked.
Also, Greene — although he insisted that he was no genius — took himself very seriously as a writer and Cloetta was in awe of the great man. She noted down his pensees in a notebook, her Carnet Rouge. An example of their pillow-talk: 'You are undeniably a "man of instinct" more than a "man of reason". What connection would you make, in this context. between the man and the writer?' Greene would read and annotate what she had written.
Did Greene avoid the company of his intellectual peers? His travelling companion, the Spanish priest Fr Leopoldo Duran, to judge from his account of his friendship with Greene, was a man of impressive simplicity. Beyond his family, most of Greene's friends seem to have been professional contacts such as the publishers, Robert Laffont and Max Reinhardt. 'In England,' Yvonne tells us, 'his best friends among writers were undoubtedly Evelyn Waugh and Herbert Read' — a revealing judgment in that Greene saw little of either.
Greene's friendship with my father, Herbert Read, dated from his days as editor of the ill-fated Night and Day. In 1967, when my father was ill with cancer, Greene suggested a holiday in his villa on Capri but he died before he could take up the offer. In this book, Cloetta expresses surprise that, after this act of kindness, 'Read's son, Piers Paul, should go along, I would say, with Michael Shelden at the time his biography appeared'. This seems unfair: in a review in the Mail on Sunday on 4 September, 1994, I wrote that Shelden 'tarnishes his reputation as a serious biographer by carrying his speculation to ridiculous lengths'.
Shelden's view, however, that Greene was a bogus Catholic who 'did a fine job of betraying' his religion finds support in Yvonne Cloetta's reminiscences. Cloetta describes Greene, at the time she met him, as a 'burnt-out case' — 'As a man, he no longer believed in anything' — and how his interests subsequently shifted from religion to politics. He supported revolutionary causes, particular in South America, and in 1987, on a visit to the Soviet Union, he told Gorbachev that 'my dream before I died was to see a Soviet ambassador posted to the Vatican, so he could provide the Pope with some pieces of good advice'.
Here he was no doubt playing the role he enjoyed of agent provocateur: Main suggests that Greene was 'still an adolescent at heart' and Cloetta concedes that 'like all men he had a slightly puerile side'. Yet one still wonders, as does Main, how Greene could 'reconcile his Catholic faith with visiting brothels in Havana' and sleeping with another man's wife. 'He did not see how the fact of making love to a woman,' Cloetta tells her, 'with her consent, of course, and thereby making her happy, could be an offence towards God, which is how sin is actually defined ... A love like this can only be a Gift from God and he could not disagree with it without disavowing himself.' A Mills & Boon theology matched Yvonne Cloetta's Mills & Boon style.
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