Graham Greene

Berkhamsted, Balliol, and a conversion

Henry Graham Greene was born on 2 October 1904 at St John's, Chesham Road, Berkhamsted, a town north-west of London, the fourth of six children of Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene. His father was a housemaster at Berkhamsted School — a master in charge of one of the boarding houses — and became its headmaster in 1911, so the boy grew up as both pupil and headmaster's son, which is roughly the worst arrangement a school can offer anyone. He took his degree at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1925, edited the student magazine The Oxford Outlook, and met his future wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning when she wrote to tell him he had got something wrong in one of his articles.

Vivien was a Catholic convert, and in February 1926 Greene took religious instruction and was received into the Roman Catholic Church; they married in October 1927. He sub-edited at The Times in London until 1930 and published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929. The Catholicism is not decoration on the books that followed. Brighton Rock (1938) turns on Pinkie, a seventeen-year-old leader of a razor-carrying gang who believes in damnation and not in mercy, and on Rose, the girl who loves him and will not let him be judged; The Power and the Glory (1940) follows an alcoholic priest with an illegitimate child through a Mexican state that has outlawed the Church, and asks whether a bad priest can still be a real one.

Six hundred mornings in the dark

From 1935 to 1942 Greene worked for The Spectator, the London weekly of politics and the arts — first as its film critic, then from 1940 as literary editor. He reviewed over six hundred films in what he called mornings in the dark, and he marked hard. In June 1937 he also became film critic and literary editor of a new magazine, Night and Day; it lasted until December, when a libel action brought on behalf of the nine-year-old American film star Shirley Temple closed the magazine down. Greene's review had suggested that her films were being sold to grown men on the child's coquettishness, which the court treated as a gross outrage; damages were paid to Temple and her studio. He went to Mexico the following year partly to be somewhere else while the row burned out — and came back with the material for The Power and the Glory.

The best joke of the column was at his own expense. On 12 January 1940 The Spectator ran Greene's review of the film Twenty-One Days, starring the actors Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. "I have no good word to say of it," he began — and he had written most of its screenplay. He vowed, in the same review, never to do it again, and then spent decades doing it again: sixty-six films have been made from his work. The one everybody knows is The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed in 1949 from an original screenplay Greene wrote for the purpose and published as a novella in 1950 — the story of a man who arrives in post-war Vienna, then a bombed city divided into zones between the four occupying armies, to meet a friend and finds the funeral instead. In the British Film Institute's poll of 1999 it was voted the greatest British film ever made.

The war, and the man who turned out to be a spy

In 1940 Greene worked for the Ministry of Information, the British government's wartime department for propaganda and public information, commissioning books and pamphlets for the war effort; in October a German bomb wrecked the family house at 14 North Side, Clapham Common. In 1941 he was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service — SIS, better known as MI6, Britain's foreign spying agency — and in 1942 was posted to Freetown, in the British colony of Sierra Leone, a swampy, boring, malarial station where he wrote most of the novel The Ministry of Fear (1943). In 1943 he came home to Section V at St Albans, the counter-intelligence branch covering Spain and Portugal, where his immediate superior was Kim Philby, a rising officer of the service.

Philby was secretly working for the Soviet Union, and was not publicly exposed until 1963, when he fled to Moscow — which means Greene had spent the war reporting to a man whose real employer was the other side. Greene left the service in May 1944 and became a director of the publishers Eyre and Spottiswoode until 1948, but he kept what he called informal links with the old firm, his private name for the intelligence service, for most of his life. The tradecraft — the working craft of spying, the meetings, cover stories and reports — went straight into the fiction: the ruined agents of The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958) and The Human Factor (1978) are written by somebody who had filed the reports himself.

Catherine Walston

Catherine Walston was an American-born woman of great wealth — born in Rye, New York, in 1916, married at nineteen to the English farmer and politician Harry Walston, and the lady of a Cambridgeshire country house hung with paintings by Picasso and Renoir. She converted to Catholicism in 1945–46 and asked Greene, whose books had helped push her towards it, to be her godfather at the baptism; he agreed but did not attend, and his wife Vivien stood in for him at the ceremony. The correspondence began in September 1946 and the affair shortly after: a dinner at Rules, the old London restaurant, and a kiss afterwards on the grating outside, a February 1947 flight over the snow-covered flatlands of East Anglia. "A lock of hair touches one's eyes in a plane with East Anglia under snow," Greene wrote, "and one is in love."

It lasted, in one form or another, until her death in 1978, and it produced roughly four hundred thousand words of letters, some sixty per cent of them written between 1947 and 1952. Nearly thirteen hundred of them are now at Georgetown University in Washington. The affair also produced the novel: The End of the Affair (1951), in which a wartime love ends because the woman has made a bargain with a God she does not believe in. Greene had been separated from Vivien since 1939 and never divorced her; she outlived him by twelve years.

Antibes: the France that was not Paris

In 1959 Greene met Yvonne Cloetta in Dahomey, the French colony in West Africa that is now Benin — a French-Swiss woman who became, in his word, his companion for the rest of his life. In 1966, the year Britain made him a Companion of Honour, an award limited to sixty-five living people at a time for services to the nation, he left London for Antibes, partly for tax reasons and partly to be near her, and never lived in England again. It was a small, contained life on a walled harbour: the fourth-floor flat above the port, a walk across town to his regular table at the restaurant Auberge Provençal, and a habit of being out of the country during the tourist season. He stayed until late 1990.

The oddest thing that happened to him there was a film. In 1972–73 François Truffaut, the French director whose Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), released in English as The 400 Blows, had helped launch the New Wave — the movement of young French film-makers who shot in real streets with light cameras and made a virtue of improvisation — was shooting La Nuit américaine near Antibes. The title is the French term for the trick of filming in daylight through a filter so that the scene reads as night, which is why the film is called Day for Night in English. Unhappy with the actor playing a small part, an English insurance man, Truffaut advertised in the local paper for an English gentleman of a certain age. Greene, who admired his films, went and auditioned under the name Henry Graham, got the part, and played it. Truffaut had no idea who he had cast until someone recognised the face in the screening room after shooting; he telephoned to apologise and offered to cut the scene. Greene told him he had enjoyed himself enormously, and asked only that the credits not carry his name. The film won the Academy Award — the American film industry's Oscar — for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974.

J'Accuse: the dark side of Nice

Ten miles up the coast from Antibes is Nice, then run by Jacques Médecin, who had been its mayor since 1966 and, since 1967, a deputy — a member of the lower house of the French parliament — in the National Assembly, and who also controlled the local daily paper, Nice-Matin. Greene's quarrel with the city was personal before it was public. Yvonne Cloetta's elder daughter, Martine, had married a man from Nice; the marriage broke down in 1979, and after a divorce that gave Martine custody of the children, her former husband took one of them from her parents' house and the police did nothing. Investigating, Greene found that the man had a long criminal record and was on close terms with police officers and at least one judge, and that Martine's own lawyer had been visiting him throughout the divorce.

Greene's first move was to try to hand back his Légion d'honneur — France's highest decoration, which he held — to the French government. It was returned to him with the note that only his death or disgrace could forfeit it, and that keeping it might be useful to his campaign. In 1980 he wrote to Alain Peyrefitte, the writer who was then Minister of Justice, and an inspector general was sent to Nice; one local judge was transferred to another post. In January 1982 Greene took it public with a letter to The Times of London, and the press descended on Antibes. Médecin accused him of spitting in the soup — the French expression for fouling the place that feeds you; Nice-Matin wrote that the only scandal was the novelist's impudence.

The pamphlet came later that year: J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice, borrowing the title of the open letter the novelist Émile Zola published in a Paris newspaper in 1898 to accuse the French state of framing Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer wrongly convicted of spying for Germany. "I realize that the title has been used before," Greene said, drily, when he was still calling it tentative. He was seventy-seven, and he framed the point plainly: he was testing what a world reputation could do against a network of local officials protecting one another, and thinking of everyone who has no eminent writer to push their case. He did not live to see the end of it. Médecin fled France for Uruguay in September 1990 rather than face prosecution, was convicted in his absence in 1992, was extradited back to France in 1993 and convicted again of embezzlement and fraud; he died at Punta del Este in 1998.

Greene left Antibes in late 1990 for Corseaux, on Lake Geneva near Vevey in Switzerland, where his daughter Lucy Caroline lived. He was awarded Britain's Order of Merit — a personal gift of the sovereign, held by only twenty-four living people — in 1986, and published his last novel, The Captain and the Enemy, in 1988. He died at Vevey on 3 April 1991, aged eighty-six.