BOOKS
Under western eyes
Auberon Waugh
THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE VOLUME TWO 1939-1955 by Norman Sherry Jonathan Cape, £20, pp. 549 Graham Greene was the sweetest, gen- tlest, most considerate of men once he had accepted you into the circle of his friends. His loyalty was total, although in extreme old age he grew crochety and alienated many of the younger writers he had earlier befriended, including some of his previous disciples and sycophants. But the other side of the coin was an instant exclusion of any- one and everything he disliked, which made him many enemies, especially in the fields of literature and journalism. As a famous writer, he had bores and monsters trying to push themselves on him from every quarter. I remember on one occasion in his Paris flat, planning to go out to din- ner at a smart restaurant in the Avenue Marceau, he insisted that I telephone the restaurant first to make sure there were no Americans in it. He had the same arrange- ment with his favourite restaurant in Antibes, where he lunched on most days of the week. It would be hard to say which he hated most, the moronic mass culture of Hollywood or the ponderous solemnity of American academic criticism. But the love of his life was an American lady as described in this second volume of Nor- man Sherry's monumental biography, and Americans need not have taken it personally.
Needless to say, many of them did, although the sense of corporate rejec- tion took some time to seep through, and it is only with the arrival of the all- American Clintons to express a new pride in their culture's most revolting aspects — the hamburger 'n' soft drink kingdom of Oz, where Mickey Mouse reigns — that the academic opposition has dared show its face. Last week we saw Michael Shelden's News-of-the- World-style denunciation: unable to for- give Greene for his fairly frequent unseriousness, Shelden excoriates him for his real (and imagined) sexual eccentricities, his many excellent practi- cal jokes (how could any civilised per- son work for MI6 without playing practical jokes on his colleagues?) and what Shelden sees as his heartless frivolity. I think Greene would have enjoyed Shelden's book in all its massive humourlessness and wrongheadedness, hinting at homosexuality, a taste for anal sex and even at the murder of an unidenti- fied, pregnant woman in Brighton. I hope he would also have enjoyed the second vol- ume of Norman Sherry's great work, but I am not so sure. Sherry is not in the least bit shocked by Greene's eccentric taste for prostitutes and brothels and opium dens, and studiously avoids any moral judgment, on his own behalf, about Greene's treat- ment of his wife, or of his first long-term mistress, Dorothy Glover. We leave the story just when the relationship with his second mistress, Catherine Waltson, the love of his life, is beginning to break up; Sherry is careful not to apportion blame.
Sherry seems to know little or nothing of the Catholic Church, and I think that is a useful qualification. At one point he describes Catherine as having stolen some communion glasses from a Catholic church as a childish prank. What on earth are communion glasses? Those who are inter- ested in Greene's Catholicism had better read the book (Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, HarperCollins) by his confessor and friend, the Spanish priest Father Leopold Duran, who turns out rather sur- prisingly to have been a highly conservative theologian, staunch supporter of General Franco and general good egg.
But in an age which is bored by Greene's Catholicism and unimpressed by his romantic left-wing politics (if that is what they were), I think Professor Sherry is in many ways the ideal biographer, and it was a stroke of genius on Greene's part to recognise this, all those years ago. It was their shared enthusiasm for Conrad which settled the matter, and Greene's life, so infinitely more colourful than that of most contemporary writers, responds well to the Conrad treatment. The first volume took us to Sweden, Liberia and Mexico, in the middle of its atrocious revolutionary peri- od, as well as through numerous suicide attempts and all the conventional para- phanalia of upper-middle class English neurosis. This second volume takes us through the London Blitz (one of Professor Sherry's best passages, a salutary reminder to all of us who missed it of the experience shared by so many hundreds of thou- sands of Londoners at that time) as well as wartime Intelligence work in West Africa (much less interesting) and working with Kim Philby in the Penin- sular Office of MI6, the Malayan emer- gency and the Vietnamese war of independence against the French, as well as the opium dens and brothels of the Far East. The next volume promis- es Haiti, Cuba, the Congo, Panama as well, no doubt, as the definitive state- ment that Greene was always an Intelli- gence agent for the West, prepared to suffer the odium of defending Philby for the greater good of defending this country.
I confess I am only quite interested in the political aspects of Greene's life — his mixed motives seem obvious enough to anyone prepared to ponder them — and even less interested, after reading this volume and Father Duran's book, in his Catholicism. The essential ingredient in Greene's charac- ter — apart from his brilliant writing which made us all catch our breaths for 40 years — is that he was a man who was more loved than loving. Many would have been spoiled by this ability to inspire love, he merely agonised over it. I would have liked to hear more from his widow, Vivien, and much more about his first, older mis- tress, Dorothy Glover, caddishly described by Muggeridge:
She was a person who, on the grounds of attractiveness, was absolutely a non-starter. I mean; she was alright [sic] but she was a very ordinary kind of person and not the sort of person you'd think in worldly terms he'd be attracted to, and yet he was devoted to her.
'Very little is known about Dorothy's background,' says Sherry. This won't do. He dug up her birth certificate, proving she was older than Greene supposed, and if he could do that, he could have found out more. But I have the impression that the veil of discretion may be the result of some sort of Boy Scout promise Sherry made to Greene to spare his womenfolk. He could easily have discovered where she came from, whether she was any relation to Stephen Glover, the gifted young former editor of the Independent on Sunday, and all the other things we want to know. We are given no impression of her charm, her sexuality, her essential appeal, and this is no way to treat a human being who lived with Greene through the Blitz and meant so much to him.
In Catherine Walston, Greene met his match. I think she reduced him, by virtue of her greater integrity. His love letters to her are some of the most boring and whingeing I have ever read. Her Catholi- cism was even dottier than his, and reduced his to absurdity, solemnly proposing that they should marry but occupy separate bedrooms so that they could always confess and communicate between lapses. I felt my legal nostrils quiver at the suggestion that one of her five children was neither her husband's nor Greene's nor even hers, but people will have to read the book to find out what is suggested. Perhaps such anec- dotes are acceptable in these bohemian cir- cles.
I would like to know more about Herbert Greene, the black sheep of the family, who spied for the Japanese before the war, and more about the occasion when Greene was taken to hospital in New York, bleeding copiously from his penis. What was diag- nosed? How was it brought on? Also, a lit- tle more about Greene's two children, who receive scarcely half a dozen mentions. That accursed Boy Scout promise, I sus- pect. My biggest criticism is of the lengthy passages relating Greene's real life experi- ence to what later emerged in his novels. Those I found seriously boring, and should have been left to Eng.Lit. students to dis- cover for themselves. But essentially the enterprise is brilliant and admirable, cap- turing not only the pity and the despair, the anger and the nihilism of Green's witness, but also the incorrigible sense of fun — something for which the Americans will never be able to forgive him.
In the next volume I would like to learn much more about Yvonne Cloetta, the 48th woman in his life (a long way behind Simenon). She was his consort for 30 years but few of his friends were ever allowed to meet her. I hope that on this occasion Pro- fessor Sherry will exchange his Boy Scout shorts for a pair of grown-up trousers.
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