Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (2 page)

Veteran interviewees have a repertoire, and to begin with Greene relied fairly heavily on his anecdotal store. The time he joined the Communist Party with Claud Cockburn 'in hopes of getting a free trip to Moscow', the time he requested electric-shock treatment from a psychiatrist friend, the time he was deported from Puerto Rico by the American authorities, his experiments with benzedrine while writing
The Confidential Agent
(in the mornings) and
The Power and the Glory
(in the afternoons) before the war. Sensing my familiarity with these stories (I had just read the collected essays and the two volumes of autobiography), Greene said:

'As you see, I've got nothing new to say. One's said it all in one's work. It was embarrassing at the National Film Theatre the other day. I'd just received Quentin Falk's book about my experiences with film and films, and I had time to read it beforehand. Luckily it had been published only the day before. Because every
word
that I uttered in response to questions at the NFT had been taken from this book. I'd got absolutely
nothing
further to contribute.'

'You certainly get about a good deal.'

'I haven't much this year,' said Greene, who has visited Switzerland, England, Italy, Spain, Antibes and now Paris, all in the last couple of months. 'I've resisted the temptation of Panama, at least. I love long plane journeys, especially if I'm being paid for and I'm travelling first class. I used to go to Panama via Amsterdam to avoid going to the United States — a fifteen-hour journey, which I loved. I drank a lot of Bols gin, and I read. And there were no telephones and no letters. It's like being in a hospital. I'm very happy in a hospital. Nobody can really get at you.'

The telephone rang. 'Another professor,' sighed Greene.

'You say you avoid going to the United States . . .'

'Well, I don't
like
the United States. And I don't like New York. I don't like the electricity — I don't
like
getting an electric shock whenever I touch a door handle. I don't like the dirt, and on the whole — with many exceptions - I don't like Americans. They strike me rather as the English abroad strike me: noisy, and incredibly ignorant of the world. I had a woman who came to see me from Houston the other day, and she was the most incredibly stupid woman I've ever known, And she was a graduate. We talked about the Central-American situation. She'd never heard of it. She'd never heard of any troubles down there. Later she wrote to me saying that she'd talked to her colleagues about what I'd said and she found, to her astonishment, that a lot of them agreed with me.

'Reagan is a menace. I'm very disappointed by the death of Andropov. I had great hopes of him. I preached for some years that any reform in Russia could only come - not from the old men or the army - but from the KGB. A Polish film-director told me that the KGB let the army go to Afghanistan in order to get their feet in the mud ... Despite the obvious noises Reagan has been making he's as extreme as anyone in the Kremlin. I'm amused and interested by the fact that he's meeting Gromyko, but I have a feeling that Gromyko will not be helping the re-election. He will have a clever move to damage it. I don't think he will allow Reagan to pass himself off as a peacemaker.

'I felt the shadow darken when Reagan came to power. But perhaps we're all getting used to the idea. Perhaps the next generation will live under this shadow even more equably than your own. I've got a secret dream that Colonel Gadaffi will get hold of a couple of nuclear bombs and drop them somewhere. America and Russia will come together to extinguish the danger, and might never entirely separate.'

At one o'clock we tiptoed through the
merde de chien
and lunched in moderate bourgeois splendour at a Right Bank brasserie. 'We're stinging the
Observer
for this, are we? Good.' The lordly waiters seated Monsieur Greene with some reverence and listened shrewdly to his request for a
'martini-dry. Sec! Très,
très sec.' He added, 'I never do what the doctors tell me. I think the body knows better than the doctor. I never eat vegetables. Castro was shocked. He said — what regime do you have? His was very strict, you see. I said, I don't have one. I eat and drink what I like.'

'So if the body says — have a drink ...'

'Then I drink.'

*

Greene was drinking — moderately but with relish — the following night. By a fairly extraordinary coincidence, he has befriended
my
best friend in Paris, a youngish (English) artist who went down to Antibes several years ago to paint Greene for the National Portrait Gallery. So a picnic dinner was arranged at the private wine-cellar of another common friend. Old friends die but new ones are born - and it is clear that Greene has something like a genius for friendship. Friendship is complicated too, however, and nothing about Graham Greene is uncomplicated. There are contrary impressions to be dealt with.

He is an ideologue. You sense that his beliefs are embedded in past struggles and ascendancies. (In Catholic Central America, with its hot and cold wars, the old polarities are still vivid.) His life and work have been grounded on faith, and on its opposites and counterparts: loyalty and betrayal, stoicism and doubt. He is fond of quoting Browning: 'Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things./The honest thief, the tender murderer,/The superstitious atheist . . .'; and he has always been drawn to moral bandit-lands. 'Human beings are more important to believers than they are to atheists,' he has said. But they are less important too, in a sense; and we remember Bendrix's remark in
The End of the Affair,
that even with love we get 'to the end of other people', and must look for something else.

'There is a certain sympathy,' he told me, 'which the present Pope doesn't seem to recognise, between the believing communist and the believing Catholic ... I don't feel as though I've changed much since I joined the CP at the age of twenty-seven. Curiously enough there's an Indian woman who's writing a book claiming that I'm the only one of the Thirties group whose beliefs remained unchanged. Orwell changed, and Auden changed. Isherwood changed. I retain this sympathy for the
dream
of communism anyway, though I agree that the record is very discouraging. We're all unbelievers within our own faiths.'

I taxed him with his oft-misquoted remark that he would rather end his days in Russia than in America.

'What I meant was that I would end my days
sooner
in Russia because there they pay writers the compliment of regarding them as a danger.'

'But if it came to it?'

'All right. Yes. I would rather end my days in the Gulag than in — than in
California.'

'That's a very typical remark, if you don't mind me saying so.'

But he didn't seem to mind at all.

Observer, 1984

Postscript:
Geopolitical change has made Greene's opinions and preoccupations sound rather more antique than they sounded in 1984; but I suspect that his legend will increasingly tend towards the nostalgic, the romantic, the regressive. It is, as Communists used to say, no accident that his novels work most powerfully on the adolescent. For my generation Graham Greene was inevitably the first serious writer you came across: he seemed exemplarily adult and exemplarily modern. Now he seems neither. Now
he
seems adolescent, though in the richest and (again) the most romantic sense. It is a commonplace to say that his novels, for all their geographical variety, did not 'develop'. Greeneland stays the same. What happened was that he got older as he wrote about it. His manner changes (the surprising poetry of the early novels, the gaunt and sober maturity of the Forties and early Fifties, the more playful and forgiving later work), but the oppositions, the relationships, the moral trade-offs are all recognisably constant. I do not find this world 'over-schematic' so much as weirdly suspenseless. The faithbreaker must die. The policeman's pistol will tend to be phallic. The adulterer will never be redeemed . . . Greene's influence, none the less, will remain deep and formative. We happened to read him before we read anybody else. He was an awakener.

Two additional memories survive this visit. When we exchanged the man-made earth-colours of Greene's apartment (he
did
look like a headmaster, and his sitting-room looked like a headmaster's study) for the bright lights and tuxed waiters of the prosperous Right Bank brasserie, there was a third person present: Greene's woman friend, whom I had agreed not to mention (and shall not name here, even though her identity is well enough known). As we were being seated by the
maître d'hôtel,
or some comparably exalted personage, the lunchers fell silent; then came a surge of agitated murmurs. This had nothing to do with Graham Greene. It had to do with the removal of his friend's overcoat, revealing: a woman of a certain age but still fiercely gamine, in purple angora sweater and skintight shiny black trousers. Greene enjoyed this frisson, this minor
épatement,
as clearly as he enjoyed his pre-lunch Martini — and his friend's conversation: we had several acquaintances in common, and she proved to be a passionate and talented gossip.

When I returned from the Boulevard Malesherbes to my hotel in the Latin Quarter I entered a scene from one of Graham Greene's darker entertainments. In the lobby people were wielding mops and buckets with an air of resigned and weary lamentation. A member of the staff had just been decapitated in the lift-shaft.

EMERGENCY LANDING

When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower. And although I wasn't exactly goosing the stewardesses or singing 'Viva España' (this was a BA flight to Malaga), I was certainly in a holiday mood. In fact I had just called for my second pre-lunch cocktail — having enjoyed, oh, I don't know, a good three or four on the ground - when I began to sense that something was up.

Suddenly withdrawing the half-dozen meal-trays she had just laid out, the flustered blonde stewardess told me that the bar-service had been suspended. In answer to my very anxious enquiries, she told me that the bar-service would soon resume. I was still grumbling to myself about this when the Captain's voice came on the public-address system. 'As you have probably noticed,' he began (I hadn't), 'we have turned full circle and are heading back to Gatwick. For technical reasons.'

Now I saw that the sun had indeed changed places, and that we were flying north over France towards the Channel. Unworriedly I resigned myself to the usual frustrations: the six-hour wait, the free orangeade, the bun-voucher. Now I saw also that the stewardesses were systematically searching the overhead compartments. So. A bomb scare. But this bomb didn't scare
me.

The Captain came on again. In a bored voice he levelled with us about the 'alert'; then, more urgently, he added that, in view of the time factor, it was now thought necessary to make an emergency landing, at Dinard. At this point, still feeling no more than mildly devil-may-care, I took the second half of my Valium 5, helping it down with a swig of duty-free whisky. I offered the bottle to the girl in the window seat, whose clear distress I began, rather grandly, to pooh-pooh. The bottle was taken away from my hand by the stewardess and fondly restored to its yellow bag. We speared down on Dinard, not in the cruising, wallowing style that aeroplanes usually adopt for landing, but with steep and speedy purpose.

Seats upright. Place your forehead on the back of the seat in front of you. There will be more than one bump. Don't be alarmed by the reverse thrust. Leave all your hand-baggage. Move as quickly as you can to the exits and slide down the escape-chutes. When you are on the ground — run.

I glanced, for the first time in my life, at the benign cartoons of the safety-procedure card. Then I hunkered down for the final seconds. I thought of my wife and eight-month-old son, whom I was flying to join. I had escorted them to Gatwick ten days previously, on the same morning that an Air India jumbo had been blown to pieces (or so we then thought) over the seas of south-west Ireland. My apprehension at Departures that day had been far more intense than anything I was feeling now. What I was feeling now was, mainly, relief that my wife and child weren't with me. Had they been, everything would now be different. For a start, I wouldn't be drunk. I placed my wallet on my lap (I had no jacket), and waited.

The 737 landed like a skimmed stone, like a bomb itself, like a dam-buster. The reverse-thrust came on with such preternatural power that the tail seemed to lift, as though the whole aircraft was about to start toppling end over end.

In this weird squall of gravity and inertia, my wallet shot off my lap and slithered along the floor, four or five rows away.

Now the plane was quenched of its speed; seatbelts clicked, and immediately a pressing queue had formed in the aisle.

My paramount concern at this point was, of course, to find my wallet. Coolly lingering in a vacant three-pack, I was well placed to watch the passengers flee past me to the end of the aeroplane. As they awaited the stewardess's order (the doors had to open, the chutes had to inflate), the passengers pressed forward, four or five women — perhaps those with children - in the forefront. Physically they showed no more agitation than, say, people in fairly desperate need of a bathroom. But their voices contained an edge of panic. In those few seconds I remember only one word being spoken, and often repeated. 'Please . .. Oh please.' Soon the stewardesses were urgently shooing them down the aisle. I waited. Then, grumbling and swearing, I crawled around in search of my wallet and scattered credit cards, which had themselves been torn loose by the Gs.

At last I strolled to the door. 'Sit and jump,' said the stewardess. Those elongated dinghies are a lot less stable than they look, but down I went — wheee! — and jogged' away from the aircraft, which, I saw, had reached the very brink of its runway and had jarred to a halt midway through a ninety-degree turn. Five yards from its nose lay the edge of a lumpy brown field.