Another Life (53 page)

Perhaps the most striking thing about Graham’s relationship with his publishers worldwide was his infinite capacity for attending to details and his determination to get them right. Although constantly traveling on mysterious journeys to faraway places—Vietnam, Panama, South Africa, Argentina—he kept in constant touch via his devoted secretary and later, when she resigned, his sister. The easygoing author who wrote his five hundred meticulous words every morning was an illusion of my youth. Nothing was too small to attract his attention—the exact shade of red of the English telephone booth on the dust cover of
The Human Factor
, a snide remark by William F. Buckley, Jr., in the
New York Post
alleging that Graham had said
America
was the word he hated most in the English language (
A LIE
.), and not only misprints in
his
books but in other people’s. He frequently sent for books from the S&S list and almost always read them carefully, listing any errors and giving me his often surprising opinions on other writers, such as his comment on a biography of H. G. Wells that Wells “is the best novelist on sex in the English language.” He often commented on the FBI’s pursuit of him and gleefully speculated on the size of his dossier and how much trouble it must have put them to over the years.

He was constantly in touch by letter and cable. A query from me inquiring whether he would allow
Penthouse
to publish a condensation of
one of his books, given the kind of photographs that it was likely to appear next to, was answered almost immediately from Switzerland with a cable saying that he had no objection to naked girls but disliked the way the magazine had cut and edited his text. A cable announcing that he was number two on the
New York Times
best-seller list which in my excitement I, not knowing where he was, had sent to his addresses in Paris, Antibes, and Capri received an instant reply chiding my “extravagance” for wasting money on three cables and suggesting that it might have been better spent on more advertising. About his photograph on the cover of
A Sort of Life
he complained that it made him look like “a Chinaman,” with narrowed eyes and yellow skin.

On the subject of jacket art, we almost invariably clashed. My very first attempt to please Graham in this area produced a cable from somewhere beyond Suez begging me to eliminate “the fancy lettering,” which we promptly did. I replied, in the best tradition of
Scoop
:
LETTERING PROMPTLY UNFANCIED STOP
, but there was an unbridgeable gap between Graham’s sensibilities about jacket art and those of the American book trade, as is so often the case with English writers. Generally, these could be solved by eliminating fancy lettering or, say, finding the correct windmill for the cover of
Monsignor Quixote
(
WINDMILL SPANISH
,
NOT DUTCH
), but when it came to the mass-market paperback editions of his works, Graham often lashed out in righteous anger. Graham liked the idea of cheap editions of his works—and of course what were, in those days, the big six-figure advances—but he hated the inevitable commercial packaging. Occasionally he approved them “in despair,” complaining that he had no time to argue about them across the Atlantic, but time and again he protested against “ghastly designs” and “vulgarities,” which had roughly the same effect on his reprinters as water on a duck’s back. A cable from me about the jacket for our reprint of
Twenty-one Stories
, inquiring whether it was the illustration or the lettering he objected to, produced the single-word reply,
BOTH
, while another about our reprint of
England Made Me
objected strongly to the “disagreeable” faces and the appearance, for no discernible plot reason, of a large swastika.

It should not be thought that all of Graham’s correspondence took place by cable, nor was it limited to complaints. Often his letters were long and full of fascinating detail, such as one in which he described in detail his horror at the “grisly sight” of seeing dictators in the flesh—Pinochet of Chile and Stroessner of Paraguay—or another in which he
expressed his pleasure that the film rights to
The Honorary Consul
had been optioned by Orson Welles because there was no danger of his actually making the film. From time to time, he gave me advice about marriage and parenthood, warning me against ever developing a sense of guilt about either—“to look for guilt one would have to go back to Adam and Eve,” he cautioned wisely, though it was no advice he applied to himself. My father’s death in 1979—they were neighbors in Antibes—shook him almost as deeply as Alex’s had in 1956, and if anything drew us closer.

Graham’s output was constant but variable. Major novels such as
The Honorary Consul and The Human Factor
, which was originally called
The Cold Fault
(and which I mistakenly announced to the press as
The Cold Vault
, due to an error in cable transmission, much to Graham’s amusement), alternated with smaller books that reflected his diverse interests and his travels. Graham’s minor works produced occasional friction, for they became increasingly eccentric or hermetic, reflecting his involvement in causes and people unlikely to interest the American reader. For example, he edited the memoirs of his ninety-year-old neighbor, Dottoressa Moor, in Capri. He also wrote a pamphlet attacking the excesses of the criminal underworld, the police, and the politicians of Nice,
J’accuse: The Dark Side of Nice
, which took up with Zolaesque anger the case of a young Frenchwoman whose gangster husband had abused her and abducted her child. He took the failure or nonpublication of these books in the United States in stride, though I suspect it merely confirmed his already low opinion of America’s interest in the world beyond her shores. As he grew older, his restless curiosity and almost childlike fascination with eccentric and larger-than-life figures—a characteristic that he captured so perfectly in the person of Monsignor Quixote, the priest who tilts at the windmills of modern Spain and who in so many ways resembles the older Graham Greene—increased. He had always sought sainthood in secular figures and prized in others a simplicity and an innocence he had been denied, and his later works are a kind of pilgrimage in search of a different kind of faith.

In writing the flap copy for the dust jacket of his autobiography,
Ways of Escape
, I had referred to him as “enigmatic, secretive, and elusive,” and increasingly this rather romantic description, which he had accepted at first unwillingly, seemed true. He liked to feel he was living “on the dangerous edge of things,” and his skill at writing cloak-and-dagger novels was more than matched by his own adventures and divided
loyalties. He was at once a sentimental leftist (about Africa, Cuba, Panama, and Vietnam at any rate) and a man of old-fashioned Tory attitudes when it came to England, complaining that the only things he missed when he was abroad were the sausages and dinner at Rule’s or Simpson’s, old-fashioned London restaurants where he always ordered roast beef. He was a friend of Kim Philby’s (and loyal to him to the bitter end), but continued to maintain his shadowy connections with the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), for which he had served as an agent during the war.

He traveled constantly and involved himself fearlessly—some would say recklessly—in politics, as if he was determined to add to the bulk of the FBI’s file on him. “Just think of the
money
I’m costing them!” he liked to say, delighted at the thought of the documents and reports on his activities piling up in Washington. In one letter, he reported that he was just back from visiting Panama, Nicaragua, and Cuba (where he spent twenty-four hours with Fidel Castro) and expressed horror that bombs were being distributed by the CIA in Nicaragua in the shape of Mickey Mouse dolls that would explode when a child picked one up—a story that sounds as if it might have been passed on to him by Fidel. Still, he never made any claim to objectivity, particularly when it came to the U.S. government, and the murky world of guilt, betrayal, and ruthlessness that formed the background of so many of his novels also influenced the way he saw the real world beyond his fiction.

Having been an agent for the SIS, Graham looked for conspiracy everywhere and found it, partly because he liked to spend his nights with the kind of shadowy figures who might actually be spies—or, like him, enjoyed pretending to be—partly because it pleased him to suppose that the tentacles of the SIS or its rivals and enemies extended everywhere, embracing people who seemed on the surface quite innocent and ordinary, like the harmless vacuum-cleaner sales representative who becomes a spy in
Our Man in Havana
. Graham himself was quite capable of giving even the most harmless of activities a twist to thrill a naive listener, though very often with tongue in cheek. Thus, he hinted to his biographer that he and my Uncle Alex had “surveyed” for the SIS the waters off Yugoslavia during a cruise on Alex’s yacht, although given the guest list (which included both men’s mistresses), Alex’s myopia, and the fact that there were no cameras onboard except mine, it is hard to imagine what kind of surveying they could have done, even if there
was anything about the Yugoslavian coastline worth knowing or that the SIS couldn’t have gotten out of a Baedeker travel guide.

In fact, with Graham it was always difficult to tell where the spy novelist left off and the spy himself began. From time to time they came together, as when Graham turned up unexpectedly in the White House in the guise of a Panamanian diplomat (complete with diplomatic passport) as part of the entourage of General Omar Torrijos, the leftist ruler of Panama from 1968 to 1981, during an official visit. He was photographed standing behind Torrijos and President Carter, without anybody in the White House or the press recognizing him—ironic in view of the fact that he was still unable to obtain a visa to visit the United States except by making a special application as “a former communist,” which he was unwilling to do as a matter of principle.

Over the years, Graham’s FBI file began to obsess him more and more. Ostensibly, his brief flirtation with communism, which he claimed was a student prank, was the cause of the U.S. government’s refusal to grant him a visa. Behind that simple explanation, however, was a layer of misunderstandings about Graham among Americans who had never met him (particularly those who either made or supported American foreign policy), most of whom bitterly resented his portrait of Alden Pyle, the naive but deadly central figure of
The Quiet American
, whose love for Phuong does not prevent him from helping to plant a bomb that kills dozens of innocent Vietnamese.

Each brush with America made Graham more determined to track down this famous file, as if it were the Holy Grail. He saw it as the source of all his problems with America, possibly even as the source of his problems with the Nobel Prize for Literature committee; he assumed that he was being watched, his correspondence opened, his telephone calls recorded, while someone, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., gathered this information and misinformation and used it against him at every opportunity.

Early in 1981, when we met for a drink at the Ritz Bar in London, one of his favorite haunts, he asked me if I would be willing to do him a great favor. Anything, I said. He nodded darkly, his long, slim fingers touching as if in prayer. He glanced to either side and drew himself closer to me. He had read about the Freedom of Information Act, he said, and wondered if I could find a way of getting him access to his FBI file. I had no idea how the Freedom of Information Act worked and said
so, but I promised to do my best. He confirmed it by letter, adding that given his views on America’s involvement in Vietnam, it was likely to be a bulky dossier, possibly even sufficient material for a short book. He thought it would be particularly interesting to know who had informed on him in various places all over the world over the years. The only thing he really wanted at this point in his life was a look at his FBI file—and, of course, the Nobel Prize, which was still being withheld from him by one vote, from a man who seemed determined to outlive him.

When I got back to New York, I looked into the matter, which turned out to be amazingly simple—though I did not tell Graham this, since he would have been hugely disappointed. All I had to do was get a lawyer in Washington to make an application to the FBI, then wait. Time, it appeared, was the major factor, perhaps because the government hoped that some applicants would simply lose patience. In this case, time dragged on for months, while Graham inquired impatiently whether there was any news and wondered if the FBI was using the time to destroy or alter their records on him.

Finally, there arrived in my office a slim envelope containing the FBI’s famous Graham Greene dossier. Though many of the names and some of the information had been carefully blacked out, my heart sank instantly at the sight of it—this was not at all the bulky package Graham had been expecting for all these years. One typical item was a clipping from Walter Winchell’s column in the New York
Daily Mirror
, dated December 19, 1956, in which Winchell wrote: “Hollywood newspaper people are not happy about America’s most-decorated soldier (Audie Murphy) taking the lead role in the film version of ‘The Quiet American,’ which libels Americans. The author of the book admits to being an ex-Commie.” The clipping had been pasted carefully to a sheet of paper, at the top of which Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant, housemate, and reputed lover, had written his initials to indicate that Hoover had read it.

Another item, also bearing Tolson’s initials, was a reply to a request for information from Marvin Watson in LBJ’s White House, where apparently they wondered who Graham Greene was and why several antiwar groups were quoting him on the subject of Vietnam. The FBI memo explained helpfully that he was “a well-known Catholic British writer.”