Graham Greene’s love affair with the mysterious ‘C’ is revealed obliquely in his books and private papers. Robert McCrum has read them
Graham Greene was a novelist who understood the meaning and mechanics of mystery. He patrolled with impressive vigilance the perimeter fence of his privacy, while at the same time scattering tantalising clues about his life in the most unlikely places. An elusive public presence who relished controversy, he would have been delighted at the fuss that’s currently surrounding Neil Jordan’s brilliant film of The End of the Affair (opening in South Africa on March 3).
Central to the brouhaha (“The truth behind the affair of the century” screamed one headline) is the rather second-hand revelation, by an improbable cast of relatives and commentators, that the “C” (or, in American editions, Catherine) to whom The End of the Affair is dedicated was Catherine Walston, the beautiful and high-spirited American wife of the Labour peer Henry “Harry” Walston.
The role of Catherine Walston in Greene’s life as his mistress and muse, roughly between 1946 and 1957, has been an open secret to Greene scholars and among his family and friends for many years.
The release of this exceptional film, with its haunting, quasi-documentary recreation of London life during and after the Blitz (the period in which the novel is set), combined with the publication this spring of two Greene memoirs – Graham Greene on Capri by Shirley Hazzard and The Third Woman: The Secret Passion that Inspired The End of the Affair by William Cash – has stirred up a frenzy of interest in the “autobiographical” nature of The End of the Affair, a complicated private story which demonstrates yet again how much stranger fact is than fiction.
The novel, which contains the familiar Greene ingredients of sex, death, jealousy and God, describes an adulterous affair between a writer, Maurice Bendrix, and Sarah, the beautiful wife of an unsuspecting civil servant, Henry Miles, “one of misery’s graduates”. When Bendrix is injured by a bomb during an air raid on London, Sarah, a Catholic, makes a deal with God: if He will save Bendrix, she will end the affair. Her unaccountable departure from his life is the mystery that Bendrix sets out to uncover, in the process reclaiming, or perhaps destroying, his lost mistress.
In real life, Greene met Mrs Walston when, after her conversion to Roman Catholicism, she asked him, out of the blue, to be her godfather, a ceremony actually witnessed by Greene’s wife Vivien. He was 42 and internationally celebrated for novels such as The Power and the Glory; she was 30, and the mother of six children.
Greene subsequently arranged to meet his unknown god-daughter, fell in love and then sustained a long and passionate affair which was conducted with the full knowledge of all members of the Walston and Greene families. Harry Walston himself came to be utterly and helplessly complicit in the relationship.
Greene, a Roman Catholic convert, was always tortured by the affair, and left in his personal papers a fascinating trail of clues as to the importance of the relationship in his life. Appropriately for a literary man, the key that unlocks the heart of Graham Greene lies in his private library (now preserved in Boston College). What is unique about Greene’s library is the cornucopia of personal annotation, reflecting a long life of writing, politics, travel and sex, that’s scattered along the margins and jotted on the endpapers of the books he was reading, books he left behind at his death in 1991.
Greene’s habit of private and personal commentary seems to have proved infectious to those close to him. It is the marginal annotations of Catherine Walston – “C” – that provide the richest insights into perhaps the most secret of Greene’s many love affairs. Thus, on the flyleaf of Elizabeth Bowen’s history of Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel, we find Catherine recalling the beginning of their affair: “To Graham in January 1952. It was at the Shelbourne almost five years ago – C”.
Catherine’s inscriptions in the books she gave her lover betray passion, devotion, and a sharp eye for mundane detail (“500 lire for Bananas!”). In a copy of Nothing, by his contemporary Henry Green, she writes “In a thunderstorm on a train to Milan … June 13th 1950.” Added, in a different pen, are the words “Catherine Greene – pen name for all novels.”
Catherine Walston also seems to have acquired Greene’s taste for subterfuge. In a copy of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (“with love, Ritz December 2-4, 1949”) she concludes a long dedication with this coded message: “1. PTMP 2.ILYB 3. SIMB 4.ROF 5. LLEOFE 6. ILY 7. IHGOOTB.”
Other inscriptions recall ocean nights, Armagnac on villa patios, and opium smoked in the hotels of the East. In one of Greene’s volumes of Kierkegaard there’s a set of Scrabble scores for C and G. A dedication, dated Christmas, 1949, in The Life of Benvenuto Cellini gives a tantalising snapshot of their relationship: “How happy I was today in Cambridge buying roller skates and drinking Irish whiskey …”
In 1951 Catherine gave Greene a copy of The Face of Innocence by William Sansom “as we tied up in Salerno on Elsewhere” – Alexander Korda’s yacht – “because there is nothing else to give you”. Six years later, after the publication of The Quiet American, and with Catherine’s passion cooling, Greene began another relationship – with the Swedish actress Anita Bjork.
On the endpapers of William Sansom’s The Loving Eye Greene provides a window onto his emotional state of mind at the end of the affair with “C”. In a fine, spidery but legible hand, he writes: “Stockholm (Rather drunk after a solitary supper, waiting for a curtain to go down. Feb 9, 1957) … Women like war, periods of waiting. Waiting while a car is late, a dentist’s appointment, a curtain to fall. For everyone one has ever loved one has waited.”
When I was shown this extraordinary library by Greene’s executors in the months after his death I also spent several days reading through the correspondence that accompanied the books. It was clear that Greene had continued to correspond with “C” until her death (from cancer) in 1978. A letter, annotated “C’s last letter” by Greene himself, and dated May 18, runs as follows:
“Dearest Graham, Your letter arrived and what a pleasure it was as I had heard nothing from you since you were here in November and I thought you were angry about something. And now today … you go to Capri. What happy times I had there with you and won’t ever forget them from the day we walked through the gate for the first time with Bernardo …
“What a vast amount of pleasure you have given me playing Scrabble on the roof at Rosaio [Greene’s villa] and teaching me to swim underwater at Ian Flemming’s [sic] house; smoking opium at Ankor etc …. There has never been anyone in my life like you and thanks a lot.”
But the most extraordinary letter, in which Greene’s life and art are finally united, is the response Henry Walston wrote to his wife’s lover acknowledging his condolences on the occasion of her death. In heartbreakingly repressed sentiments that might have sprung from a Greene novel, and mimicking in the the most uncanny way the language of Henry Miles, the cuckolded husband in The End of the Affair, Walston wrote on September 18 1978:
“Dear Graham, I’ve left your letter to the last to answer, because it’s the most difficult. I’ve thought a lot, but I still don’t really know what to say. You should not have remorse. Of course you caused pain. But who can honestly say he has gone through life without causing pain? And you gave joy too. One can’t draw up a balance sheet of pluses and minuses.
“But you gave Catherine something (I don’t know what) that no one else had given her. It would not be right to say it changed her life: but it developed her into a far more deeply feeling human being than before … Yes, let us meet. Tell us when you’re next in England. Love Harry.
“PS I find I have omitted the ostensible purpose of this letter – to thank you for writing. I do.”