Greene on Capri Read online

  Francis said, “Like the oak that Prince Andrei sees, twice, in the forest.”

  “Yes. Massive, but alive in detail. One thought, Well, why write again?—since this exists.” Then, with curt, dismissive laugh: “Of course, I wouldn’t feel that now.”

  Strange that Graham, who had read incessantly since childhood, should have come to Tolstoy only in his late thirties.

  Walking home, F. and I spoke of the image of the tree, which had moved us both. I said, “It was perfect, and heartfelt. Yet he was compelled to undermine it.”

  Francis said, “Agreement can gall him as much as disagreement. He won’t share himself at length, or without reserve. The link is formed, repeatedly, only to be severed. All the same, the fine image prevails.”

  Over our years of Capri meetings, I seldom made “notes” after conversations with Graham and Yvonne. An underlying intention to record changes the nature of things, blighting spontaneity and receptivity: an imposition, like a snapping of photographs. In our appointments diary I sometimes find hieroglyphic reference to the evenings at Gemma, a few words of recall. One remembers long and well, and without prompting, what is truly interesting—the moments that, pondered, shared, revived, become part of the inward legend. Once in a while, in my notebook, I wrote in more detail of an evening with Graham; and I find that these were mostly occasions when pleasure was turned—as it seemed, gratuitously—to pain. One transcribed the puzzle, attempting to elucidate.

  Anne Fleming wrote of Evelyn Waugh: “He liked things to go wrong.” There was a strong element of that in Graham—the inclination or compulsion to foment trouble, to shake up tameness and disturb the peace. Like Waugh, Graham was arbiter and inflicter: things should go wrong, but only on his terms. Never a comfortable attribute, the bent for trouble is a kind of testing that can play merry hell with friendship. In these matters, Graham could be—like another of his literary admirations, Baron Corvo—“so amazingly unreasonable.”

  In an essay on the writer Saki, who was also among his Edwardian affinities, Graham aligns himself with those who “are quick to hurt before they can be hurt first.” Readiness to hurt even, or especially, those who were fond of him and wished him well, had become a reflex in Graham long before we knew him. His novel The End of the Affair is in part a discourse on that theme.

  Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew Graham from youth and was well disposed towards him, observes in his memoirs that Greene

  is a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony . . . I remember him saying to me once that he had to have a row with someone or other because rows were almost a physical necessity to him.

  “Someone or other” is chilling. Not only while the row was in him, but thereafter, Graham often appeared indifferent to harm done, hurt inflicted, trust eroded. Trust itself was an unwanted claim on him, another infringement. Chaos relieved the monotony of outward order and the dichotomy of his inner contending selves. Evidence of the pain he caused gave reality to his own existence, restoring him to his “better” self. All this is acknowledged in his writings—as in The Honorary Consul:

  Do you know what he said to me once? It was as if he were angry—I do not know who with—he said, “I am not unhappy here, I am bored. Bored. If God would only give me a little pain.”

  In Graham’s first novel, The Man Within, the central character—who is an early specimen of Greeneland’s man on the run—taunts himself with self awareness:

  He was, he knew, embarrassingly made up of two persons, the sentimental, bullying, desiring child and another more stern critic . . . Always while one part of him spoke, another part stood on one side and wondered, “Is this I who am speaking? Can I really exist like this?”

  Graham would at times speak scathingly of his own youthful work—as, in late years, he would occasionally deprecate his new fiction. We seldom asked him to inscribe our copies of his books—although, one way and another, he wrote in a number of them over the years. One afternoon, looking along our Capri bookshelves, he pulled out Francis’s copy of The Man Within, acquired in its year of publication, 1929. On the green flyleaf, around F.’s own bleached signature, he wrote in small, spidery hand:

  For

  Francis Steegmuller

  affectionately

  this ghastly first effort.

  Capri. June 1977.

  Many readers would not, I think, agree to the ghastliness of that first published novel, with its consuming fears and its cool intelligence that defuses the overheated plot.

  Noticing, on another raking of our Capri shelves, Leon Edel’s volumes of Henry James’s letters, Graham said that he, too, brought those books to Capri: “They make me want to write.”

  To write fiction is to learn to inhabit other skins, whether thinner or thicker than one’s own. (Thus Auden, paraphrasing the Book of Revelation, pays tribute to the novelist who must among the Just / Be just, among the Filthy filthy too.) In his best work, Graham excelled at those acts of convinced imagination and irresolute morality. There was, also, an authorial distance that could make it hard to establish where his sympathies lay—in Brighton Rock, for instance—or whether sympathies were engaged at all, as in The Quiet American, where cynicism, scarcely stirred by sensuality, expresses itself in violence and displeasure. In The End of the Affair, the temperament of the narrator, Bendrix, is unsparingly close, in anger, wit, and struggle, to Graham’s own—so faithfully drawn as to challenge the credibility of the character by seemingly improbable contrasts of mood: an accomplished exercise in self knowledge.

  I think that Graham was not simply “made up of two persons.” Rather, that he gave rein to disparate states of mind as they successively possessed him, putting these to service in his work. Of his plots and characters, he might have said, with Anthony Trollope, “They have served me as safety valves to deliver my soul.” His aversion to synthesis—that inconsistency of opinion and conduct to which he held as if to a principle—may have stemmed in the first place from a chimerical nature and predilection for disguise. With years, however, it had come to prevail for its own sake as a mood of defiance, directed against the tedium of rational existence. If paradox and secrecy were strong in him, so was a strain of candour, a clear instinct for discerning and stating simple truth. No less disarming—in view of the tenacity with which he insisted on his particular private myths—was Graham’s freedom from the stock pretensions of knowingness. I never heard him pronounce on a book he hadn’t read, or invoke an influential name in order to impress. The common emblems of “importance”—social and public attention, an air of authority, the flaunting of “edge”—were not his forms of egoism.

  Malcolm Muggeridge concludes the passage quoted earlier, on Graham’s need for conflict, by stating: “All the same, Greene is a very loveable character.” The assertion has perverse truth to it, not least because of Graham’s own manifest engagement with the laocoön of his existence. The laocoons of others, however, must defer to his.

  We were speaking of Dryden. The theme literally arose while we were at lunch outdoors near a cliff formation called the Arco Naturale and saw far below us a circle of dolphins breaking a smooth sea. Graham said, “The skaly herd.” Whether or not dolphins have scales, the phrase couldn’t be bettered. Lifelong admirer of Dryden, Graham was impressively familiar with the prolific plays and the critical writings. Francis said that he had always contrasted Dryden’s self consciousness, even in the ribald plays, with the large genius of the Elizabethans. And so they talked, as we sat under vines at the Grottelle, drinking the traditional yellow Capri wine that was still, in those years, sulphurous as retsina.

  I knew only the grand “occasional” poems, such as the “Annus Mirabilis” from which Graham had quoted. I said that William Empson had cited, in a work of criticism, Samuel Johnson’s observation that what was claimed by Augustus for the city of Rome—that he “had found Rome brick, and left it marble”—might figuratively be said of Dryden in resp
ect to English literature.

  Graham nodded. “Not necessarily a good thing, of course.”

  I remembered afterwards that I had first seen that aphorism quoted in Graham’s British Dramatists, where it is presumably drawn from Empson’s vague citation. We spoke then of Empson’s youthful, extraordinary poems; and of his critical writings, enjoyed for originality, language, lack of bombast.

  Francis remarked that it was the first time that “literary criticism” had come up with us. Graham pointed out that Empson was a poet: “Practising rather than prating.” We mentioned other mid century examples of good prose by good poets—Auden, in The Dyer’s Hand, Eliot, Randall Jarrell. Some comments were made, far from favourable, about Deconstruction, which had begun, then, to cut its swath through the universities; and about the modern obsession with explication and analysis that blighted the singular experience of literature. Graham said that there had been phases of the kind before, though never, probably, on such a scale or with such implication of the larger vacancy.

  Francis told him that Gibbon had identified the same phenomenon as a signal of Rome’s decline. (“The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.”) He asked whether Graham wasn’t beleaguered by theorists and dissectors of his work.

  “Well, they do get in touch. But Antibes is off the track, you know. And I’m often abroad. When I’m in London they sometimes find me. They’re wounded people. I feel that one has to give them special attention, because of their huge disappointment. One has to be specially nice to them.” And suddenly, explicitly to me: “As one is to Indians and women.”

  Later—l’esprit de l’escalier—I told Francis, “I might have asked, ‘And are you especially nice to Indians and women?’ ”

  F. said, “The remark is shocking, and so one falls silent. Of course, Graham counts on that.”

  I don’t believe that Graham was racist; nor, when we knew him, was he anti Semitic. He was not even anti British, although his countrymen had been his foremost culprits. A resentment of women—of their hold on his life—would break out in him, smouldering from past fires. When need for an enemy was acute, he would lash out at whatever came handy, always with the exception of Yvonne. Some of the long antagonisms were, like his anti Americanism, reasoned as well as subjective, and called for thought rather than mere indignation. The more general condition was unattractive, sometimes cruel; the target often transitory, even momentary. Terrors of the playground were, yet again, relieved by bitter sarcasm.

  When—before its airing at his acceptance of the Jerusalem Prize in 1981—the accusation of anti-Semitism in his early work was first publicly raised against Graham, he spoke to us of it, saying, as he had said previously, that he reread his past work with reluctance but had taken up the book most in question, The Confidential Agent, to see if the accusation held water. “And yes, there is anti-Semitism in it. I don’t believe I was anti-Semitic. I don’t find it in myself, or in my past. But the thing was in the air, between the wars, an infection. Of course it would have been better not to fall for it at all. Many people didn’t.”

  Such failures are not resolved. Those who had affection for Graham Greene had cause, at times, to bear in mind these words from The Comedians: “It was as though somebody I hated spoke from my mouth before I could silence him.”

  Accepting the Jerusalem Prize, Graham was obliged to deal with anti-Semitic strains in his prewar writing. Nevertheless, since the prize is awarded, every two years, “to an author who expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society,” who will doubt that Graham Greene was, through his life’s work, well qualified to receive it?

  Graham quietly declined the Malaparte Prize, a literary award given annually, on Capri, under respectable auspices and accepted by numerous celebrated writers from around the world who are probably unaware of the viciously fascistic past of the writer Kurt Eric Suckert, who published under the name of Curzio Malaparte. In his years as Mussolini’s most influential literary propagandist, Malaparte exalted fascist brutalities, urging Italians to “burn the libraries and disperse the families of the vile species of Intellectuals.” His principal association with Capri is his long, Futuristic, scarcely habitable house built, by Mussolini’s special permission, near sea level on a stretch of otherwise preserved Capri coast: an architectural phenomenon much admired by some, and deplored by others. Those who saw it first in postwar years will not easily dissociate it from the German blockhouses which then flanked it and which its form resembles. Malaparte, a consummate opportunist, turned Communist after the Allied victory in Italy. He died in 1957.

  One afternoon, as we passed, by sea, the red, low-slung Casa Malaparte, Graham remarked, “I refused their Malaparte Prize.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Because of Malaparte.”

  To explore Graham’s irreconcilable moods is seemingly to question whether he possessed any coherent centre of personality and conviction. Julian Symons once asked, “Can somebody so much in love with doubt be truly said to hold any beliefs at all?”—going on to answer, affirmatively, his own rhetorical question by drawing on a passage from the letter of dedication with which Graham introduced his novel A BurntOut Case: “This is not a reman a clef, but an attempt to give dramatic expression to various types of belief, half-belief, and non-belief . . .”

  Graham’s lifelong preoccupation with the equivocations that beset all men and women, and his consciousness of his own contrariety, themselves supplied a cohesive factor that, transmuted in art, gave the novels their distinctive voice. His presence was similarly unified by awareness. His keenest insight, Greenely “modern,” was always, like his best writing, intuitive of the long echo in human affairs. There is immemorial humanity in the disappointment that Scobie, in The Heart of the Matter, notes in himself over the confused sequence of telegrams intended to announce, first, the illness, and then the death, of his child. The earlier telegram, giving hope, was delivered last; and

  I was so muddled in my head, I thought, there’s been a mistake. She must still be alive. For a moment until I realised what had happened, I was—disappointed. That was the terrible thing. I thought “now the anxiety begins, and the pain,” but when I realised what had happened, then it was all right, she was dead, I could begin to forget her.

  That phenomenon, of death, false hope, and repudiation, is evoked throughout literature. Tacitus calls it “the double bereavement.” It is found in Shakespeare, and in Byron. In Conrad, it is a theme of The Planter of Malata. In Proust, it is again associated with a muddle of telegrams. Oscar Wilde, resurrecting the mythical Ernest from supposed extinction, elicits it from Miss Prism:

  After we had all been resigned to his loss, his sudden return seems to me peculiarly distressing.

  In Graham’s case, the observation was drawn from events of his own life; in particular, from a disordered announcement of his father’s death. The ability to refresh innate perception with specific modernity was among his most attractive gifts, accurate and compassionate.

  Certain large themes, absurd pretensions, paltry personalities causing huge harm did arouse Graham’s indignation, moving him to solidarity with the afflicted. His resentments fuelled discernment. They also led him to tolerate, as lesser evils, some infamies not arising from great power. Antipathy to the American colossus prompted him—as Seneca wrote of the aged Hannibal—“to side with any king at war with Rome.” None of this invalidated Graham’s prescience concerning United States policies in Asia or Latin America; or his loathing and harassment of Papa Doc and Augusto Pinochet. It did undercut the respect of those who valued his judgment; but that, I think, would not have worried him. He did not greatly care to be relied on.

  In 1980 and 1981, only Graham among prominent persons supported an unavailing appeal, on behalf of human rights, made by the United Nations
staff to Kurt Waldheim, then the UN Secretary-General. The incident aroused Graham’s curiosity about Waldheim’s falsifications of his wartime past—which became apparent to Greene, as to others; and, in 1981, we exchanged letters on the subject. When we next met on Capri, Graham marvelled that exposure had not caught up with Waldheim long since. (That would have to wait until 1986, years after Waldheim’s departure from the United Nations.) I said that the truth was clearly known to thousands, and throughout the political and diplomatic circle; yet no one came forward.

  Graham said, “They all have so much on one another.” He meant, in particular, Intelligence connections, which ever maintained their hold on his imagination, and in regard to which his assumptions have been abundantly vindicated. His own predilection for concealment and disguise, and for the clandestine underside of life—paradoxically made plain in his work—was shared with many educated Britons of his times. “I like to have a secret love affair, a hidden life, something to lie about,” remarked the statesman Duff Cooper, speaking for a fair segment of his acquaintance—and for an inveterate tendency of humankind.

  We were talking about France in wartime. Graham had asked Francis about his return to Paris during the late months of the war in Europe, when F. was serving with the Office of Strategic Services and subsequently working with Jean Monnet. Francis spoke of “euphoria, unreality, anguish” in liberated Paris, and of reunions with old friends: “Even the French were inarticulate with emotion.” One of the cruellest phases of the war lay ahead, but “we let ourselves be hopeful, being in the city one had most feared never to see again.” Filled with uniforms, the city nevertheless proposed a return to civilian life. Soon Francis would see other uniforms, those of prisoners repatriated from the death camps. Still wearing their desolating stripes, those spectres gathered in reception areas at stations and ambulance posts, and were fed at a mess—a scarcely converted café—where F. would sometimes go at evening to eat at the counter, “on the periphery of their silence.”