Greene on Capri Read online

  We began, from that time, a pattern loosely followed for many years—of meeting in spring and autumn when we were usually, all four, on Capri—Graham and Yvonne coming for a month or so, Francis and I for longer. Occasionally, we went up to the Rosaio for lunch, finding the house open to fine weather, and the garden—like all the island’s gardens in May—a riot of flowers and colours: whole hedges of white marguerites, swags of petunias and trailing geraniums, electric blue lobelia, trellised roses, and groups of amaryllis, pale or crimson—a radiance within white walls that was the work of Aniello, Carmelina’s husband. In autumn, when we often lunched at the Rosaio for Graham’s birthday on the second of October, there were tawny colours of the island’s late reflowering. Sometimes we arrived at evening, for a drink, before dining outdoors at an Anacapri trattoria, La Rondinella, where Graham reserved the one secluded table. In our early years of friendship, Graham and Yvonne once in a while came down from the Monte Solaro and made the stiff climb, of paths and steps, to lunch on our own covered terrace. More rarely, Graham might propose lunch by the sea, or a walk ending at a small restaurant. But our habitual place was Gemma, at evening. It was an easy arrangement: we turned up independently, usually without fixed appointment—Francis and I sometimes staying away so that Graham and Yvonne might dine by themselves. It was very pleasant, putting work aside at the end of the day, changing into fresh clothes, strolling to the piazza in that scene of sky and sea: the late light, the expectation of interest and pleasure, the welcome at the restaurant, where we all preferred to dine, by south Italian summer standards, quite early.

  By the time we knew him on Capri, Graham was not a heavy drinker. He and Yvonne might share a bottle of the Sicilian wine Corvo—“I like the name”—or of rosé from Ravello. We were light eaters of traditional dishes, of fish or shellfish from those waters. None of us gave first importance to food, or tended to discuss it at length—though Graham might occasionally hark back to a bad or costly meal eaten elsewhere, some episode rankling from the long past (“I still remember the severe price of a picnic lunch provided by the hotel” being his recorded impression of a postwar trip to Athens). Asceticism played its part in his paradox.

  While the evening excursion to Gemma’s restaurant was pleasurable to Graham, I think that for him the imperative of food remained something of a tyranny. He was preternaturally resistant to any form of compulsion; and nothing is more peremptory than the digestive system. Early in life, according to his memoirs, he had rebelled against the fixed hours of meals (“There is a charm in improvised eating which a regular meal lacks”). In childhood, he would steal currants and raisins from the school supply and “stuff my pockets with them, currants in the left, sultanas in the right, and feast on them secretly in the garden”—with queasy consequences, for “the meal ended always with a sensation of nausea, but to be secure from detection I had to finish them all, even the strays which had picked up fluff from the seams of the pockets.”

  In the fiction, food is almost always an unfavourable portent, invoked vengefully and with revulsion, or in regard to an unmasking. In The Heart of the Matter, there is the unwanted and distasteful lunch—“an enormous curry which filled a washing basin in the middle of the table”—served to Scobie and his hapless wife as she takes ship for Durban. In The End of the Affair, there is “the hideous meal” that Bendrix obliges the cuckolded Henry Miles to share with him (Henry having been dished, early in the story, over a plate of onions). At the ghastly lunch, Henry “was too ill at ease to comment on the dish and somehow he managed to ram the pink soggy mixture down.” Our Man in Havana, for his part, survives a murderous banquet of Chicken Maryland by giving his poisoned drink to the beloved dachshund of a sinister waiter. (“The dog collapsed at the waiter’s feet and lay there like a length of offal.”) The dog of Pyle, the Quiet American, has a tongue “like a burnt pancake.” The cowed dinner guests of the sadistic Dr. Fischer of Geneva force themselves to down the cold porridge that causes one of them to vomit. At Dr. Fischer’s, we have already learned, “the dinners are abominable.”

  Aversions to food have prompted knowing comment since antiquity, and interpretations are not lacking in our own assiduous day. However that may be, Graham’s “case” was consistent with his hostility to all matters imposed on him—whether by circumstance or natural forces, or at the will of others: a motif unmistakable in the pattern of years. The helplessness or complicity of our humanity in its involuntary needs, cravings, and decay aroused a resentment conspicuous above all in many of Graham’s responses to women. For much of his life he had wrestled, in love and in his books, with the paradox of desire and consummation, illusion and disgust, ecstasy and blame. It was not difficult to imagine him holding the view ascribed by Plutarch to Alexander the Great—another abstemious eater—that “sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was merely mortal.”

  Repeatedly singled out as a writer of his “era,” Graham, even so, long eluded literary chronology. His best work, with its disarming blend of wit, event, and lone fatality, has not staled; and he himself, always ready, with eager scepticism, for life’s next episode, did not seem to “date.” However, in one respect—his attitudes to women—he remained rooted, as man and writer, in his early decades.

  From the 1920s into the 1940s, Greene and several of his talented male contemporaries were working, in English fiction, related veins of anxiety and intelligence, anger and danger, sex and sensibility, and contrasting an ironic private humanity with the petty vanities and great harm of established power. Their narrative frequently centred on the difficulty of being a moody, clever, thinskinned—and occasionally alcoholic—literate man who commands the devotion of a comely, plucky, self denying younger woman. These were demonstrable elements of educated life in Britain between the sexes and between the wars, and they lingered in Graham’s fiction ever after, briefly “orientalised” in The Quiet American.

  In the characterisation of women, the male novelists of those years wrote as though Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, Becky Sharp, and Emma Bovary had never been created. Woman, ideally, should be the handmaid of man, or sexually disposable. In his collection of essays, Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly addresses the grim fate of good writers—for him, exclusively male—who are misguided enough to marry, a pitfall alleviated only by sufficient fortune and a wife with no hankerings for self fulfilment:

  a wife who is intelligent and unselfish enough to understand and respect the working of the unfriendly cycle of the creative imagination. She will know at what point domestic happiness begins to cloy, where love, tidiness, rent, rates, clothes, entertainings and rings at the doorbell should stop and will recognise that there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

  This passage so exactly expressed Graham Greene’s own sentiments that he invoked it, in The Quiet American, through his ageing protagonist, the journalist Fowler, who is out East in flight from British suburbia—from “the kind of house that has no mercy—a broken tricycle stood in the hall.” Fowler’s diminutive young Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, is a toy for her lover, present in his room or his bed when he needs her, and otherwise obligingly non existent. As Phuong prepares Fowler’s opium pipe, “she lay at my feet like a dog on a crusader’s tomb.”

  Both Connolly and Greene had long and extravagantly unhappy affairs—and, in Connolly’s case, a marriage—with handsome, dynamic women utterly removed, in temperament and ambition, from that fictional domestic ideal. The congested English hallway of prams and tricycles drove Graham and his characters to far off places; but the dream of womanly selfeffacement never ceased to haunt his work. In The End of the Affair, Sarah Miles is drawn from Catherine Walston, who, in her husband’s house, lived in wealth and ease among the influential figures of her time. The fictitious Sarah, whose married circumstances are similarly privileged, contemplates the happier existence she might enjoy if she left her long suffering husband for her short tempered lover, who is a writer. S
arah, still young, has no thought of developing, in changed conditions, her own latent qualities. Instead, she reflects: “On typing alone, with me to help, we should save fifty pounds a year.”

  Rose, in Brighton Rock, is literally ready to die for love: “I’ll do anything for you. Tell me what to do.” Rose, in the play The Living Room, does die for love, taking her own life: “Just say what you want. I’m awfully obedient.” In Graham’s early fiction, ability is suspect. Girls can be humorous and lively, but never proficient. When Louise, the tiresome, tearful wife of Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, proposes to get a wartime job, her husband, a good man, responds, “I hope we shall be able to manage without that.” Scobie’s mistress, Helen, is, at nineteen, reassuringly incompetent: “I’m not really any good at anything.” Rescued from a lifeboat, Helen has been installed in a prefabricated hut, where Scobie visits her. Loving him, she is figuratively shipwrecked, without purposes or prospects. Helplessness is her attraction: “He never forgot how she was carried into his life on a stretcher.” This time, it is the hero, Scobie, who, torn between two dependent women, takes his own life.

  Henry, which was the given name of Catherine Walston’s husband, was heartlessly bestowed by Graham on the betrayed and ludicrous husband in The End of the Affair, the novel, intense as a love letter, which, originating in Graham’s first years with Catherine, was published in 1951—when that affair, far from ending, had still a decade to run. Henry Walston, whose gentle complaisance throughout Catherine’s various infidelities and, in particular, during the extended drama with Graham invites incredulity, maintained a long “policy” of tolerance, kindness, and submission, apparently founded on the belief that his beautiful wife would never leave him. In that conviction he was ultimately vindicated; though one can hardly call it winning. Meantime, the afflicted Henry Scobie of The Heart of the Matter had given place to a series of pusillanimous Henrys—Henry Miles, Henry Pulling, “poor Henry” Hawthorne (“I wish you wouldn’t call him Henry”)—all marked down for ridicule in Graham’s fiction, where Henry had become a byword for naïvete” and impotence.

  Henry was also Graham’s own name. In the autumn of 1904, the year of his birth, Graham had been christened Henry Graham Greene. He had known some early use of that first name, into his twenties. With Graham, no such play of circumstance could be inadvertent.

  During one of our early reunions on Capri, Graham asked Francis whether there were “more letters from Egypt.” We were sitting outdoors in the Gran Caffè, à quatre, before dinner, and Graham was speaking of Francis’s translations of letters of Gustave Flaubert that had appeared in 1954—a selection that was the forerunner of extensive annotated volumes of Flaubert’s correspondence published by F. in later years. Francis assured Graham that there was indeed more Oriental material—letters, journals, other commentary: “a lot of good stuff,” some of it previously considered unpublishable in English because of its indecency, an inhibition since dissolved by transformations of mores and, in Britain, by the Lady Chatterley trial of 1959.

  Graham said that, among publishers, indecency was now becoming “a competition rather than an obstacle.” (I remember that he added, with reference to his own work, “I don’t do much of that, myself.”) He proposed that, if Francis would undertake to translate and edit an expanded account of Flaubert’s Eastern travels of 1849-50, he would arrange to publish it with The Bodley Head, the London firm of which he was a director. The book became Flaubert in Egypt, first appearing in 1972. Francis liked to look back on its genesis, settled in few words over a whisky on a May night in the little piazza of Capri. Flaubert himself, at Naples in 1851 during the return journey from his Near Eastern trip, had been, as he put it, “set on going to Capri; and very nearly remained there—in the deep,” having narrowly survived a squall on a stormy sea. As the site of Graham’s literary suggestion, the island might be seen as offering a late gesture of atonement in Flaubert’s direction.

  By then, Graham had a consultant’s role at The Bodley Head, not concerning himself with the daily business of the firm but continuing to bring writers to its list. He read manuscripts and—from habit and for pleasure—a wide sweep of new books and reviews. The book pages of The Observer and The Sunday Times—whose regular reviewers were then Graham’s literary contemporaries—were sought with unjaded curiosity each Monday from the Anacapri newsstand, and would be mentioned at dinner. Among American publications, Graham habitually saw The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books—The New Yorker, where his work had only once appeared, coming in for some blunt reproof. (That brief story, “Men at Work,” published in 1941, satirically depicts, against the backdrop of blitzed and embattled London, the sententious irrelevance of a ministerial meeting: a theme that, freely and ironically aired in wartime British writings, achieved its apotheosis in 1943, with Nigel Balchin’s masterly little novel, The Small Back Room.)

  A review by A. J. Liebling of The Quiet American, published in The New Yorker of April 7, 1956, legitimately rankled, and came up in our earliest conversation about the Vietnam War. Naïve and punitive, the review dismissed the possibility that a United States government would engage in death dealing intrigue, and condemned the author’s irresponsibility as conscious evil. Even in the earnest America of that era, it was a memorably obtuse piece of writing from an experienced journalist; and Graham spoke of it with his particular smile conveying contempt and rage. The magazine’s subsequent and eloquent exposures of America’s recklessness in Southeast Asia gratified him, but could not atone.

  I had kept Liebling’s article from the time of its publication, as if expecting it to account for itself. It never did. Twenty years, and a long war, later, I gave it to a friend who was writing on Vietnam.

  Graham’s years in journalism and publishing had sharpened an eye and ear not only for fresh talent but for what might sell. If a new book had vitality, an element of opportunism, even of trashiness, did not necessarily bother him; although his judgment was ultimately literary and his regard for language remained uncompromised. From women who wrote, he in general required some tinge of the inexorable as a countering of sensibility—some strain of the sardonic or bizarre, or of a nearly asexual astringency, such as he had first singled out in The Viper of Milan.He could weigh in heavily against irreverent female depictions of relations between the sexes, and rather mistrusted expositions of love written by intelligent women. When he told me that he had never read Pride and Prejudice, it was with the implication that he didn’t intend to.

  Promptly generous with time and public praise for new books that pleased him, he brought enthusiasm to his reading. A fresh book never ceased to be a possibility, a promise. It was, I think, his only consistent form of optimism.

  Although Graham took exception to the designation of “Catholic writer” or “Catholic novelist” applied to himself in the press, he did have special curiosity about fiction in which Catholicism figured; and a number of his younger writing protégés and preferences were Catholic. He retained, too, a taste for books of “pilgrimage,” about difficult adventures in the world’s disregarded byways. Our responses to books mostly coincided—and almost always with respect to the past; but Graham had unappealable antipathies, his curt condemnations being of a vehemence that discouraged discussion. In the contemporary torrent of new books, he kept a clear memory of work he had liked—a single novel, an obscure memoir, a collection of trenchant stories—and bore the author’s name long in mind. Finding that we knew the novelist Frank Tuohy, who had for a time fallen silent, Graham asked, with indignation, “And what about Tuohy? Where is Tuohy? Tuohy’s good.” His own productivity, unbroken almost to the end, made him impatient of the lapses of others.

  Hard headed about profitable publishing, Graham nevertheless felt, as a matter of course, the writer’s point of view. When he learned that a young writer whom he had brought with success to The Bodley Head had soon been let go, he told us: “They said his new manuscript wasn’t his best. But one can’t always be
at one’s best.”

  Graham relied on Max Reinhardt, who directed The Bodley Head, to maintain the character and prosperity of the firm. He also looked to Reinhardt, more personally, for ballast and discretion. In March 1972, when the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was killed—apparently by an explosive device related to Feltrinelli’s own clandestine ventures—Graham wrote to us that one would prefer one’s publisher to represent stability: “I don’t see Max blown up under a pylon.”

  Graham Greene did not come to Capri as earlier generations of foreign writers and artists had done, accessible to the island’s history and beauty, and curious for new experience there. If most of his travels were acknowledged ways of escape, his Capri visits in particular were a means of being “away”—from routine and interruptions, and from the consequent menace of accidie, at his headquarters in Antibes. And a means, too, of being alone with the beloved, a term that should encompass his work.

  He had never remained on the island at length. That short stay in spring, and again in autumn, in the Anacapri house was occasionally preceded or followed by a few days in other Italian places already familiar to him from the past with Catherine Walston. He and Yvonne might spend a few days at Ravello, on a height above Amalfi; or in Rome, where, choosing to travel by train, they stayed overnight at the Grand Hotel near the station. Even in those brief travels, Graham did not seek serenity, and his letters often recount, without displeasure, mild disruptions of routine. (“When we arrived in Rome we found police on every floor of the Grand Hotel because the Queen was coming. In pyjamas from the bedroom window during our siesta we watched her arrival”) In the 1970s, he visited Harold Acton at Florence, and Kenneth Macpherson—an early Capri connection, through Norman Douglas—in another handsome villa, at Cetona. For Graham, Capri was a hiatus. At the Rosaio, he settled to his pages each morning—“I must do my three hundred and fifty words”—and took up the habits of his island life. It was a simulation, or as much as he could tolerate, of “home.”