The unquiet American
Selina Hastings
THE THIRD WOMAN: THE SECRET PASSION THAT INSPIRED THE END OF THE AFFAIR by William Cash Little, Brown, £14.99, pp. 336 in June 1948 Graham Greene sent a letter to his wife explaining why there could be no question of giving up his mistress. `The fact has to be faced, my dear,' he wrote, 'I shall always & with anyone have been a bad husband. Unfortunately the dis- ease is also one's material. Cure the dis- ease and I doubt whether a writer would remain.'
At this point in his life, the mistress who was his disease was Catherine Walston, beautiful American wife of an immensely rich gentleman farmer; Greene had met her after she wrote asking him to stand as godfather at her reception into the Roman Catholic Church. Within three weeks they had started a long, passionate, turbulent and tormented relationship, recently iden- tified as the source of Greene's novel, The End of the Affair. The similarities of the life to the fiction are there for anyone to see, but as William Cash argues in his perceptive, idiosyncratic, at times mad- dening book, 'the crucial point is that the novel is not about Catherine; it is a book to her.'
In The Third Woman Cash traces the course of this mutual passion partly through unpublished letters and the pages of Catherine Walston's personal diaries held at Georgetown University, for some reason largely ignored by Greene's previ- ous biographers, the much mocked Nor- man Sherry and the now notorious Michael Shelden. The affair began in 1946 when Greene and his wife, Vivien, were invited to spend the weekend at the Walstons' sybaritically luxurious house at Thriplow, near Cambridge. Preparing to catch the train to return to Oxford, they were aston- ished when their hostess, slim, glamorous, dark-haired, smelling deliCiously of Guer- lain scent, insisted not only on telephoning for a private plane (an unheard of extrava- gance in that era of postwar austerity) but on coming with them for the ride. As they stood huddled together on the snowy air- field waiting to board, Catherine's dark hair brushed against Greene's face. 'The act of creation is awfully odd and inexplica- ble like falling in love,' he wrote to her a year later. 'A lock of hair touches one's eyes in a plane with East Anglia under snow and one is in love.'
For Greene, Catherine became an obsession. Charming, wilful, sexy, hard- drinking, spoilt, she was also profoundly serious about her religion, of paramount importance, of course, to Greene. He was possessed by her, physically, spiritually and emotionally, and repeatedly implored her to leave her husband and marry him. But this she was never quite ready to do. Harry Walston, although he adored his wife, was an exceptionally complaisant husband: he was also extremely rich. As long as she stayed with him, she could have as many lovers as she pleased — he was unfailingly courteous to Greene, welcoming him as a regular guest at Thriplow, allowing him to take Catherine off for months at a time to the south of France, Capri, the West Indies — and Catherine was reluctant to abandon such an agreeable arrangement, not to speak of her five children, for an uncertain existence with a self-confessed manic- depressive, violently possessive and prone to fits of jealous rage.
And there was another consideration. Catherine in sexual terms was high-voltage, and Greene was only one of many lovers. After her conversion, she specialised in the seduction of priests, conducting a long affair with, among others, the Jesuit, Father Donal O'Sullivan. She would take O'Sullivan, as many times she took Greene, to her remote and romantic• cottage on the west coast of Ireland, where she could play at the simple life, drink, and discreetly indulge in exotic sexual practices almost entirely unobserved.
Himself a Catholic, Cash shows a subtle understanding of the importance of reli- gion to both protagonists in the context of their adultery. In terms of his faith Greene used to describe himself as a fatalist, `accepting all the eventualities of life as God's will', including the course of his love for Catherine. He and she saw their illicit love affair as part of their relationship with God, with the concomitant guilt and suffer- ing potent ingredients of the whole. And as Greene once wrote to Catherine, 'What would a novelist do without a sense of guilt?' (Or as Nancy Mitford phrased it rather more frivolously, `[For Catholic writ- ers] the story is always there to hand, will he won't he, will he won't he, will he save his soul?') Both of them had close friends among the priesthood, and Cash is right to point out the social as well as spiritual sig- nificance in those days of Farm Street; under the influence of such humane sophisticates as Fathers Caraman, Martin- dale and D'Arcy, Farm Street 'operated like a fashionable literary salon'.
The Third Woman is designed as a quest, with the author himself as one of the char- acters, tracking down the details of his story. His dedicated sleuthing has yielded some astonishing results, although his method is sometimes maddening when it wrenches the reader away from such an intensely absorbing plot. To make his own persona as interesting as those of his sub- jects requires a great deal of artifice, and this Cash has modestly failed to apply to those sections of his book in which he ram- bles on about himself, for instance, visiting the golf club to which Catherine's father once belonged in Rye, New Hampshire. `Taking matters into my own hands, I walked upstairs and knocked on the gener- al manager's office door . . .' Although he can write well enough, he is apt to relapse into sloppy journalese — IGreene's] C6 Albany flat in London's Piccadilly' — and his text is too generously seeded with minor inaccuracies.
All this having been said, the book is a remarkable achievement. Not only has Cash succeeded in piecing together an extraordinary story, but he has painted a vivid portrait of these two complex and fas- cinating people about whom he has uncov- ered some revealing new material, much of it given in candid interviews he somehow obtained from Greene's wife, Vivien, and from his mistress for the last 30 years of his life, Yvonne Cloetta. Cash shows great per- spicuity in dealing with his cast of charac- ters, and his eye for telling detail is acute. Not only does he conjure up the sexual, rich woman's allure of Catherine Walston, with her lustrous dark hair (done at Eliza- beth Arden), the pearls and mink, the bold, bare feet and jeans, but he also captures to perfection the pathos of the abandoned wife, Vivien, so hopelessly uninteresting in, every aspect to her husband, with her collection of dolls' houses, her preoccu- pation with rabbit-hutches for her children, her cloying little nickname, `Ticki', which always drove him to distraction. 'My talents were for nest-building,' she sadly says, 'and that was the last thing Graham wanted.'
Most crucially, Cash shows us a different side of Graham Greene, not the well- known one of detached observer with the splinter of ice in his heart, but a man des- perately in love, completely submissive in an almost feminine manner to a strong dominating woman. To Vivien he appeared `basically a very cold man', while to Cather- ine Walston he was writing, 'I can't get you out of my heart, you've splintered inside it and surgeons are useless.'
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