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Graham Greene: Political Writer Also by Michael G. Brennan : Fictions, Faith and Family : Fictions, Faith and Authorship THE SIDNEYS OF AND THE MONARCHY, 1500–1700 THE ORIGINS OF THE GRAND TOUR: The Travels of Robert Montagu, Lord Mandeville (1649–1654), William Hammond (1655–1658) and Banaster Maynard (1660–1663) THE TRAVEL DIARY OF ROBERT BARGRAVE, LEVANT MERCHANT 1647–1656 THE TRAVEL DIARY (1611–1612) OF AN ENGLISH CATHOLIC, SIR CHARLES SOMERSET LADY MARY WROTH’S LOVE’S VICTORY, THE PENSHURST MANUSCRIPT LITERARY PATRONAGE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE: The Pembroke Family THE ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION TO THE SIDNEYS: 1500–1700 (ed.) THE LETTERS (1595–1608) OF ROWLAND WHYTE AND ROBERT SIDNEY, FIRST EARL OF LEICESTER (ed.) THE CORRESPONDENCE OF DOROTHY PERCY SIDNEY [1598–1659], COUNTESS OF LEICESTER (ed.) THE SIDNEY PSALTER: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney (ed.) DOMESTIC POLITICS AND FAMILY ABSENCE: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney (ed.) THE SELECTED WORKS OF MARY SIDNEY HERBERT, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE, MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE TEXTS AND STUDIES (ed.) A SIDNEY CHRONOLOGY: 1554–1654 THE COLLECTED WORKS OF MARY SIDNEY HERBERT, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE (ed.) Graham Greene: Political Writer

Michael G. Brennan Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Leeds, UK

PalgravePalgrave macmillanmacmillan © Michael G. Brennan 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-34395-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the , Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-67432-9 ISBN 978-1-137-34396-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137343963 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the . A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. For Geraldine, Christina and Alice Brennan This page intentionally left blank Contents

Introduction: Political Writer ix Acknowledgements xxiv

1 Fictionalized Politics 1 2 National and International Politics 21 3 The Alienated Englishman 40 4 South America and the Outbreak of War 56 5 War Recollected and the 1950s 78 6 A Global Commentator and British Intelligence 96 7 The Alienated Writer 113 8 An International Commentator and Occasional Novelist 131 9 Looking for an Ending 153 Postscript 173

Notes 177 Bibliography 192 Index 197

vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction: Political Writer

All things merge into one another – good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics. Thomas Hardy: epigraph, Honorary Consul, 1973

The merging of ‘religion into politics’, as Hardy proposes, is a distinc- tive characteristic of Greene’s writings.1 The formulating presence of religious issues within his fictions, journalism and correspondence has long been a subject of critical attention. For over 65 years, Greene’s literary creativity and intellectual scepticism frequently depended upon his knowledge of religious matters to fashion dominant narrative and thematic concerns as he insistently wove theological elements into the fabric of his fictions. But his constantly shifting political perspectives, often closely linked with his religious affiliations, have proved much more difficult to categorize. Greene’s writings have been interpreted as offering evidence of earnest political convictions or profound cynicism. Equally, they have been viewed as the expression of a journalist’s dispas- sionate reportage or a novelist’s creative opportunism in utilizing world events as raw materials to stimulate his imagination. Greene admit- ted that he rarely committed himself absolutely to any specific cause because he was afraid of having the restrictive label ‘political author’ attached to his work. He supposed, however, that whenever he tackled political subjects, he would still be deemed a political writer, admitting that such a designation was perhaps inevitable since ‘politics are in the air we breathe, like the presence or absence of a God’.2 Nevertheless, broad agreement over the importance of politics to Greene’s literary imagination and creativity remains elusive. This study proposes that an awareness of Greene’s eclectic political perspectives from the mid-1920s until the late 1980s is crucial to an informed understanding of his literary productivity. For over six decades Greene’s writings, both fictional and factual, were inspired and under- pinned by his fascination with the essential human duality of political action and religious belief, coupled with an insistent need as a writer to keep the political personal. In September 1990, six months before his death, Judith Adamson concluded that Greene’s politics had never been associated with any ‘particular ideology’ since he firmly believed

ix x Introduction: Political Writer that writers should be ‘free of fixed affiliations’. He did, however, readily espouse some specific causes:

He has been vehemently opposed to American intervention in the affairs of smaller nations and has taken up the causes of Vietnam, , , Chile, Panama and Nicaragua in particular. At the same time his has been one of the major voices raised in defence of human rights in countries like the . Of late he has allowed that he is something of an old-fashioned social democrat, which is consonant with his quick attachment to Omar Torrijos (described in Getting to Know the General) and his vision of what was then a moderately socialist Panama. But just as often he has talked about the ‘virtue of disloyalty’ and the ‘price of faith’, about disinterested observation and the importance of doubt.3

As an internationally acclaimed writer, Greene habitually linked politics and religion within his fictions and public pronouncements. But his political concerns – whether expressed implicitly in his writings or explicitly in lectures, journalism and letters to newspapers – have tended to be utilized by critics primarily as a means of interpreting the morality of his narratives or his choice of geographical contexts. This book, however, will trace how his diverse and often complex political perspectives provided a foundational source of imaginative creativity for a remarkably productive literary career. Also, as Maria Couto notes, our critical understanding of Greene’s moral perspectives as a writer remains incomplete without recognizing the interdependence of his political and religious sensibilities to his creative impulses: ‘Graham Greene’s novels illuminate the moral sense by structuring the narrative within a framework of political consciousness and the religious sense. They illustrate that religion and politics, traditionally seen as antago- nistic forces, Church and State, sacred and secular, God and Caesar, are elements of the same reality.’4 This is not to say that Greene’s fictional political contexts should necessarily be associated with his beliefs as a private individual or that the latter can be traced into a coherently developing set of personal adherences. Greene never regarded himself as a political activist or factional polemicist and he rarely offered his total commitment to any cause for fear of being publicly labelled a ‘political’ writer. In The Other Man, his 1979 conversations with Marie-Françoise Allain, he insisted (not entirely accurately) that political action was for him ‘writing and nothing else’ (84) and he admitted that he had only ever voted once Introduction: Political Writer xi in a general election. He defined himself as a writer and not a political thinker and, asked whether he believed in the power of political lit- erature, he responded that while some books could exert significant political influence, his own did not belong in this category. He only wrote to defend ideas and did not wish to utilize literature for political purposes, insisting that even if his novels incidentally happened to be ‘political books’, they were never written to ‘provoke changes’ (80), just as his so-called ‘Catholic’ novels were not written to convert anyone. Nevertheless, even though Greene did not intentionally write ‘political’ books, politics, like religion, consistently provided him with essential and diverse inspiration for his writings. The sheer range of Greene’s political perspectives renders them an intriguing element in his fictions. In political matters he frequently combines conservatism and subversion, approval of and hostility towards socialism, a fascination with power (especially as a route to condemning the powerful) and overt sympathy with the underdog while revelling in expensive and decadent pleasures. Like his interests in religious affairs, Greene’s political views were passionately held, multifaceted and readily changeable. Consequently, his fictions and journalism often offer controversial, calculatedly provocative and even paradoxical commentaries and scenarios. The geographical range of his political engagements is also exceptionally broad and, as remarked, ‘The politics of Greene are world politics … British politics are too small for Greene’.5 Hence, Maria Couto’s assessment of the importance of politics in Greene’s novels seems indisputable: ‘The politics of his fiction is the politics of life itself.’6 This study offers the first sustained consideration of the interaction of Greene’s writings with contemporary politics and international affairs within the context of his extensive and politically engaged family. Earlier generations of Greenes had distinguished themselves in international commerce, local politics and establishment posts – although Greene preferred to ignore or play down such connections in his autobiographical writings. These included his arch-capitalist great-grandfather, Benjamin Greene (1780–1860), a brewer, West Indian plantation owner and vociferous opponent of the abolition of ; his wealthy great-uncle, (1808–1902), a promi- nent member of the Victorian plutocracy and a director and Governor of the ; and his uncle Sir William Graham Greene (1857–1950), Permanent Secretary to the Admiralty and a close associ- ate of Sir Winston Churchill. Perversely, in his memoirs Greene was more impressed by the sexual antics of his youthful great-uncle, Charles xii Introduction: Political Writer

Greene (1821–40), who reputedly sired 13 illegitimate children before his untimely death on St Kitts. He seems to have been unaware (or chose to ignore) that this fecundity was facilitated by the then endemic raping of female slaves for personal gratification and to enhance a plan- tation’s labouring stock. From relatives of his own generations, the youthful Graham observed the post-Great War disillusionment of his father Charles H. Greene (1865–1942) with the politically destabilizing terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He monitored the political activities of his left-wing, half- German cousins Ben Greene (1901–78), a Quaker pacifist and Russophile, and Felix Greene (1909–85), an anti-American peace campaigner and Sinophile, both of whom stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. He also followed (and often shared) the political views of his talented brothers Raymond (1901–82), a distinguished doctor whose mountaineering exploits brought him into contact with, variously, the German military elite, the young Rudolph Hess and British military intelligence; and Hugh (1910–87), an outspoken anti-fascist newspaper correspondent in during the late 1930s and later propagandist in the Emergency Information Services in Malaya and Director General of the BBC. Greene’s early political engagements can sometimes appear contra- dictory in their impulses when matched against the privileged circum- stances of his own life. The youthful, upper-middle class Greene viewed himself, like many of his Oxbridge contemporaries, as a committed left-winger and in January 1925 he briefly joined the Communist Party. He later dismissed this student membership as merely the product of his tendency to find temptation in extremes since it then seemed possible to retain faith in the Bolshevik .7 Nevertheless, it should still perhaps be asked whether Greene at Oxford (like his friend and the double agent at Cambridge) did ever harbour communist sympathies. After all, in The Other Man he admitted that he was often ‘bound by certain ideas, though not by any clear polit- ical line. I’ve often felt a strong pull towards the Communist Party (but never towards the extreme Right). I shouldn’t be a good recruit, though, for my loyalty would change with circumstances’ (19–20). Similarly, little attention has been paid, especially in relation to his later involve- ments in , to his student intelligence-gathering trip to Ireland in June 1923 when he appears to have attempted to act as a double agent for both the British and Irish Free State authorities. In contrast to his outwardly professed egalitarian sympathies, Greene did not hesitate after completing his degree to utilize influential family and university Introduction: Political Writer xiii connections when seeking employment in colonial trading, provincial journalism and, successfully, as sub-editor at where he readily participated in strike-breaking during the 1926 General Strike. As will be discussed in Chapter 1, Greene’s first published novel, (1929), was located in early nineteenth-century England on the Sussex coast during the social upheavals caused by smuggling, class inequalities and legal corruption. Broadening his geographical horizons, Greene’s second novel, (1930), was based upon his German-embassy financed student trip to the Ruhr Valley in spring 1924 and set in the city of Trier, close to the German and Luxembourg borders, a politically liminal region where rival party fac- tions fermented the rise of . His third novel, Rumour at Nightfall (1931), focused upon nineteenth-century Carlist rebels in Spain and was endowed with a melodramatically inflamed political context. It reveals through its stylistic uncertainties and heavy dependence upon a single antiquated source – Thomas Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling (1851) – Greene’s primary need as a still inexperienced novelist to catalyse his fictions with personally experienced political and religious perspectives rather than mere historical reading. These three early novels also merit special attention because the latter two have never been republished. They remain largely inaccessible to the general reader although they occupy a seminal position in the early development of Greene’s self- conscious politicizing of his fictions. Chapter 2 examines the second phase of Greene’s development as a writer, marked by a broadening of the political contexts of his novels through adopting the genre to encompass domestic and inter- national locations. In (1932) Dr Richard Czinner, an idealistic Marxist revolutionary from , leaves England with a socially diverse group of fellow travellers, representing different political and social types. He is heading home to lead a revolution in , thereby enabling Greene to explore the tensions between revolutionary Marxism and European Catholicism. It’s a Battlefield (1934) is essentially a politicized tract disguised as a novel, with Greene casting himself as the novelist-advocate of the English working classes. He considered it his first overtly political novel since it was strongly influenced by The Coming Struggle for Power (1932) by the Marxist-Leninist John Strachey and The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos (1932) by the Fabian political theorist G. D. H. Cole whose socialist ideals prompted Greene to join the in August 1933.8 It has not previously been noted that the militant politics of It’s a Battlefield may also have been inspired by Greene’s residence in the mid-1920s in xiv Introduction: Political Writer

Battersea, the seat of the Indian-Parsi MP, Shapurji Saklatvala. He was a former member of the Independent Labour Party and England’s only communist MP, who in 1923 opposed the French occupation of the Ruhr and was imprisoned during the General Strike of 1926. During the 1930s the concept of a ‘battlefield’ became for Greene a dominant metaphor for the dislocated state of English society with its unending class wars and inequalities. During the early 1930s Greene’s travels and personal contacts were sometimes shrouded in mystery, such as his unexplained trip in 1934 to the Baltic States and his long-sustained contacts with the spy and prob- able double agent Maria (Moura) Budberg, the mistress of and H. G. Wells, who was somehow involved in this Baltic excursion. In (1935), set partly in Stockholm, Kate Farrant is the mistress of Erik Krogh, a Swedish manufacturer and the wealthiest man in Europe. His character was based upon the notorious Swedish match millionaire and fraudster, , whose biography Greene had considered writing. This novel introduces Greene’s preoccupation with corrupted capitalism and extreme wealth, culminating 45 years later in his disturbing novella about a malign Swiss toothpaste magnate, Doctor Fischer of Geneva. Finally, his exploration in 1935 of with his cousin Barbara was tacitly supported by the Foreign Office and his uncle Sir William Graham Greene. It produced his travelogue (1936) and Barbara’s equally informative Land Benighted (1938), thereby initiating his lifelong preoccupation with politically liminal Third World locations. Chapter 3 traces Greene’s formulation during the 1930s of the figure of the alienated or marginalized Englishman, traumatized by urban wastelands and the political lassitude of the ruling classes. (1936), published in the same year as the Jarrow March against unemployment and poverty, parallels the natural savagery of Greene’s experiences in Liberia with the casual violence and social decadence of provincial Nottwich (echoing Greene’s depressing time in Nottingham as a trainee newspaperman). As a telling gesture to contemporary European anxieties, this fast-moving thriller is endowed with an exploitative commercial background set within Balkan politics and international espionage. The blighted landscapes of A Gun for Sale high- light from a strongly left-wing perspective the dehumanizing qualities of English suburban life and directly inspire the degenerate urban decay of (1938). This most renowned of his ‘entertainments’, set within the gaudy, superficial gaiety of a seaside resort – a previ- ously unnoticed 1937 ‘seaside’ source from Night and Day, a short-lived Introduction: Political Writer xv journal edited by Greene, will also be discussed – develops into a disturbing moral fable of urban sin and damnation. Indeed, in his ‘entertainments’ Greene tends to be far more explicit in his analysis of poverty and social inequalities than in his later, more theologically oriented works. In both A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock there is clearly something rotten about the state of English provincial cities, as there is in To Beg I Am Ashamed (1938), a fictionalized account of the down- wardly spiralling life of a London prostitute, in which Greene had some level of compositional involvement. Chapter 4 examines Greene’s travelogue, (1939), initiated by his first direct contact with South American politics and the clash between revolutionary communism and traditional Catholicism. These tensions enabled him to create powerful fictionalized parallels between man’s infinite capacities for violence and self-destruction in Western Europe ( and The ) and South America (The Lawless Roads and ). The epi- graph of The Lawless Roads ominously quotes Cardinal Newman’s warn- ing, especially resonant for 1939, that ‘either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence … if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity’. Such a view reflects Greene’s mounting anger during the 1930s at the stark contrast between the self-interested motives of politicians and the unanswered needs of their impoverished people. Western Europe and Latin America ultimately coalesce in The Lawless Roads to form a nightmarish duality as images of Belgian First World War battlefields blend with the contemporary political conflicts of Russia, Spain and . This travelogue, a landmark text in the politicization of Greene’s writings, traces an insistent movement from the specific to the uni- versal, rendering the political situation in Mexico directly relevant to the impending crisis in Western Europe. News of the Spanish Civil War reaches Mexico as Greene travels back to England, on a German liner with Mexican volunteers for Franco, towards the apocalyptic clash between Christian Western Europe and the rising tide of National Socialism in Germany. On board, a young German farmer idolizes the memory of General Erich Ludendorff, the leader of military strategy during the First World War who in old age had been cynically exploited by the Nazis as an advocate of totaler Krieg (total war). The farmer fanati- cally debates the clash between Catholicism and fascism in Franco’s Spain before Greene arrives back in England to grim ARP posters, trenches and anti-aircraft guns. The Lawless Roads also prefigures the xvi Introduction: Political Writer comparative political ethics of The Power and the Glory (1940) in which the pervasive social corruption of native villages echoes that of English provincial urban life and the Lehrs’ Eden-like abode recalls illusory socialist Utopias. The idealistic Marxist Lieutenant shadows the aspira- tions of decent working-class British communists while the Mexican prison cell reflects a hellish microcosm of the fallen capitalist world, prefiguring the impending political catastrophe about to engulf both South America and Western Europe. The Confidential Agent (1939), with its striking avoidance of full names for its key protagonists, focuses on the encounters of the unworldly scholar ‘D.’ with the aristocratic ‘L.’, reminiscent of Spain’s General Franco. The Spanish Civil War, between the anti-clerical Republicans and Franco’s fascists supported by the Catholic hierarchy, provides the lightly disguised political background for this fast-paced thriller novel. Supposedly, Greene tried to travel to Bilbao, then under siege from the fascists, for the BBC and to seek material for an anti-Franco novel.9 Ultimately, these plans led nowhere but his disreputable eldest brother Herbert (1898–1968) did reach Spain and may have acted as a spy for the fascists. In an unreliable account of his exploits, Secret Agent in Spain (1937), Herbert claimed to have supported the Republicans and also to have cultivated links with Japanese intelligence. This chapter will highlight Greene’s previously unrecorded debts to Herbert’s work, from which he lifted various international espionage elements for The Confidential Agent and the memorable narrative device of naming its key protagonists, ‘D.’ and ‘L.’, only by their initials. Greene eventually sup- ported the Republican Basques of northern Spain whose priests fought alongside them, echoing the Catholic clerical revolutionaries of Mexico. The plot and locations of this fantastic thriller mark another major development in the politicization of Greene’s approaches to the social function of the novel, denoting his increasingly confident absorption of contemporary political contexts into his fictional landscapes. Chapter 4 also details Greene’s and other family members’ involve- ments in military and intelligence activities during the Second World War and its impact on his literary career. In 1940 Greene was called up for the Officers’ Emergency Reserve and secured a position at the overstaffed Ministry of Information, later satirized in his ‘Men at Work’. In a domestic context, his home at North Side, Clapham Common, was destroyed during the London Blitz of October 1940. This event, simultaneously a personal trauma for Greene’s family and a semi- nal moment in his fictional depictions of visibly disintegrating Western European civilization, culminated in one of his most disturbing stories, Introduction: Political Writer xvii

‘’ (1954). Despite its horrors, Greene seemed excited by the wanton destruction of the Blitz, relishing the European disintegra- tion of an ‘old dog-toothed civilisation’.10 In July 1941 Greene was recruited into SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6: Military Intelligence, Section 6) with assistance from his younger sister Elizabeth. She had been working in London since 1938 as a secretary in ‘G’ section (responsible for overseas stations) to SIS’s regional head, Cuthbert Bowlby, whose operations were moved in August 1939 to Bletchley Park. In September 1941 she accompanied Bowlby to Cairo where he ran an SIS office under the cover of the Inter-Services Liaison Department.11 In the following December Greene sailed from Liverpool for a posting in , a stressful voyage documented in his travelogue, ‘Convoy to West Africa’. Masquerading as a CID officer, he served as a SIS counter-espionage officer, gathering intelligence on industrial diamond smuggling and Vichy airfields in French Guinea. Henceforth, Greene’s writings tended to portray melan- choly worlds in which duplicity, deception and betrayal were accepted norms of human politics. This study will also trace, through several chapters, the literary impact of Greene’s still far from fully documented involvements with British intelligence, including the SIS, PID (Political Intelligence Department) and MI5 (Internal Security Service), along with his enduring and complex relationship with Kim Philby, culminat- ing in his centrality to . Returning from West Africa, Greene was posted in March 1943 to SIS headquarters at St Albans where he worked closely with Philby. Unexpectedly, on 9 May 1944 he resigned from SIS – perhaps to distance himself from Philby whose motives he may have begun to suspect – and moved to PID where he edited the cultural anthology Choix, copies of which were quixotically dropped over occupied . Although Greene’s literary productivity inevitably dipped during wartime conditions, (1943), focusing on an out- landish conspiracy of fifth-columnists in England, drew directly on a recent trauma for the Greene family by tracing the experiences of his cousin Ben Greene, who was unjustly imprisoned as a fifth columnist. Ben, a dedicated Quaker and pacifist whose mother was German, was a member of the ’s Party and ran the ‘Peace & Progressive Information Service’. He also compiled various unpublished typescripts on the history and decadence of British politics, which are examined for the first time in this study. A visit to Germany in 1936 led to personal links with the Anglo-German Fellowship (which Philby had recently infiltrated) and his pamphlet, The Truth About the War (1939), was xviii Introduction: Political Writer viewed as crude pro-Hitler propaganda.12 Denounced and imprisoned under the Emergency Powers regulations, Ben spent seven months in Brixton Prison and the brutal incarceration of Major Stone in The Ministry of Fear reflects his treatment there. His half-German sister Barbara (with whom Greene had travelled through Liberia) inspired the novel’s Anna Hilfe and her brother, Willi, was based on her German husband. Chapter 5 examines two works set during the Second World War, (film script 1948, film 1949, novella 1950) and The Tenth Man (c.1937–1944, published 1985); and Greene’s meditation on the suppression of religion by atheist totalitarianism in ‘The Last Pope’ (1948). His two other war novels, (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951), are also considered from perspec- tives, respectively, on the decline of British colonialism in Africa and the impact of the London Blitz upon contemporary social morality. Danger always attracted Greene and the early 1950s became a period of constant international travel within war zones for the combined pur- poses of journalism and creative inspiration. As Cates Baldridge notes, ‘secular redemption in the later Greene’, coupled with the attainment of self-knowledge and an ability to love, seemed ‘largely a matter of undertaking a dangerous political commitment’.13 By 1950 Greene’s brother Hugh was head of the Emergency Information Services in Malaya and, through his influence, Greene was commissioned by Life magazine to observe the insurgency there between November 1950 and February 1951. He made four winter trips to Vietnam (1951–55) and his novel (1955) offers an overtly political perspective on the decline of French colonialism and the disturbing growth of in the Far East. It also interrogates the dual role of journalism – as either objective reportage or polemical commentary – through its world-weary protagonist Thomas Fowler and another deeply flawed journalist, Bill Grainger. Greene’s often fraught dealings from this period onwards with the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (recorded in his now released but heavily redacted FBI security file) are also reconsidered in relation to his North and South American political contacts and their crucial impact on his literary creativity. Chapter 6 traces how during the 1950s Greene was increasingly rec- ognized as an informed and often acerbic global commentator. He care- fully stage-managed problems with US immigration and, as a journalist and informal intelligence gatherer for SIS, visited Kenya (to cover the Mau Mau Rebellion) and Stalinist Poland. Another important element Introduction: Political Writer xix in Greene’s political writings was generated in 1957 by his three-week trip to China where he involved himself in opposing the persecution of Catholics and other dissidents. While sustaining its ruthlessly repressive regime, the Chinese Communist Party had adopted a policy, piquantly titled ‘the Blossoms in the Garden’, supposedly allowing freer speech to its citizens and visitors. These injustices lingered in Greene’s mind and almost 30 years later he wrote ‘A Weed Among the Flowers’ (The Times, 27 May 1985), a withering condemnation of Chinese communist oppression. Greene’s wartime involvements with British intelligence inspired his most successful comic novel, Our Man in (1958). He based the team of fictitious agents run by his hapless protagonist, James Wormold, upon the strategically crucial activities of two real-life double agents: a Lisbon-based Czech businessman, Paul Fidrmuc (code name OSTRO), and a Catalan poultry farmer, Juan Pujol Garcia (GARBO). During the war both had created networks of imaginary informers and agents to support their work for the British Secret Service. While Greene scholars have long known of these two real-life sources, it has not previously been noted that Greene also drew upon similarly fraudulent reports to Japanese intelligence from imaginary field agents made by his brother Herbert and recorded in his Secret Agent in Spain. Greene had already written some ten years earlier a film sketch, ‘Nobody to Blame’, about an English salesman and intelligence agent in the Baltic city of Tallinn. He recalled in The Tenth Man that the British Board of Film Censors had rejected outright this treatment because they could not countenance certificating a film mocking the British Secret Service. Instead, this act of censorship instigated the subversively farcical perspectives on inter- national espionage of . Chapter 7 traces how Greene’s writings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially his (long) short story ‘A Visit to Morin’ (1957; rpt. 1960) and A Burnt Out Case (1961), focused upon alienated figures adrift in callous and uncomprehending societies, reflecting his own growing disillusionment with global politics and international affairs. A Burnt Out Case, based upon his visit to the Belgian Congo in early 1959, revi- talized his consideration of the moral function of documentary jour- nalism and creative fiction through the dilemma of the disillusioned architect, Querry, and the itinerant journalist, Montague Parkinson, who regards distinctions between fact and fiction as trivial irrelevances. Greene’s informal involvements in intelligence gathering during the early 1960s and his responses to the defection in 1963 of Kim Philby to Moscow are also examined. xx Introduction: Political Writer

Greene’s most dynamic work of the 1960s, (1966), a satirical politico-thriller about the regime of Papa Doc Duvalier on Haiti, is his only fictional piece which seeks to promulgate a specific political point of view by condemning the horrors of Duvalier’s brutal regime. Greene had visited Haiti in 1963 and wrote a powerful article for the Sunday Telegraph (29 September), ‘The Nightmare Republic’, describ- ing the daily lives of the natives who were descended from liberated slaves of Hispaniola. His novel about the island’s social disintegration abounds with dark political paradoxes. The protagonist Brown meets on Haiti Dr Maigot, a Marxist idealist who seeks a co-operative alliance against tyranny between Catholics and communists – a conjunction which became of signal importance to Greene with the rise of libera- tion theology in Latin America. Brown’s dying mother Yvette is a deco- rated heroine of the French Resistance while his mistress on the island, Martha Pineda, is the daughter of a Nazi war criminal. Predictably, and to Greene’s delight, the novel provoked an outraged response from Duvalier’s regime. Its Department of Foreign Affairs published a lurid denunciation, Graham Greene démasqué, and the film of the novel had to be shot in Dahomey (Benin). This chapter concludes by examining Greene’s voluminous letter writing to newspapers during this period, through which he vented his anger at US foreign policy in Vietnam and the and injustices in the Soviet legal system while still professing an idealized admiration for Russian communism and Castro’s Cuban regime. Chapter 8 examines how Greene, now permanently based at Antibes in the south of France, continued his work as a political commenta- tor and international journalist, visiting Israel in autumn 1967 during the aftermath of the Six Day War and then Sierra Leone. His sustained interests in international espionage, including his controversial pref- ace to Kim Philby’s memoirs, My Silent War (1968), provided him with a productive framework for implicit but often scathing political com- mentaries in his fictions. His riotous novel (1969) draws its innocent protagonist, Henry Pulling, into the complex world of South American politics. It satirizes the imperialist tendencies of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) via the hippy girl Tooley, whose father works for the agency in General Stroessner’s Paraguay then notorious for sheltering Nazi war criminals. Greene’s unequivocal denunciation of American political censorship, effectively forbidding negative comment on either the President or the United States, led to his temporary exclusion. He also wrote an article for the Telegraph Magazine (3 January 1969), ‘The Worm Inside the Lotus Blossom’, Introduction: Political Writer xxi outlining the bloody history of Paraguay’s dictators and fostering his fascination with links between Catholic missionary work and Latin American communism. Of special importance in this context is Greene’s lecture, ‘The Virtue of Disloyalty’ (6 June 1969), an address at the University of Hamburg accepting its Shakespeare Prize. It contrasts the heroism of the Elizabethan Catholic martyr Robert Southwell with the subtle pragmatism of Shakespeare (whose works avoided direct religious commentary) to encapsulate Greene’s conception of the writer’s essential role as a devil’s advocate of political and religious commentary. As his political journalism became more explicit in its judgements, Greene’s memoir, (1971), strongly reaffirmed his view of the writer’s importance as a social and moral commentator. In an arti- cle for the Observer Magazine (2 January 1972), ‘Chile: The Dangerous Edge’, he offered his tempered support for its Marxist-Socialist presi- dent, Doctor Salvador Allende, along with an outspoken attack on US and CIA involvements in South America. He was also impressed by the markedly politicized role of the in Chile and the broadly ecumenical nature of Chilean socialism and liberation theol- ogy. He hopefully concluded that the Marxist-Communist ideal in Chile might just have a ‘sporting chance’ – an optimism confounded by a military coup in September 1973, leading to a four-man junta led by General Augusto Pinochet who abolished civil liberties, banned union activities and dissolved the National Congress. (1973), set on the Argentinian side of the Paraguayan border, implicitly condemns US support for Stroessner’s right-wing dictatorship. The novel meditates upon the theme of per- sonal commitment and the political duties of a Christian in an unjust society. Greene had travelled to Paraguay in the late summer of 1968 and made a second visit there in March 1970. His focus in the novel on the doomed political activism of the laicised Catholic priest, Father León Rivas, recalls the political activism and heroic death in February 1966 of Father Camilo Torres who had supported the creation of a revolutionary mass movement to seize power from the church and state in order to establish an egalitarian socialist society. Torres’ heroism provided Greene with proof that the concept of a revolutionary social- ist and Marxist Christian was a viable model for repressed Third World countries. Ultimately, The Honorary Consul offers an evolutionary- revolutionary metaphysic, proposing a potential route towards reconcil- ing the past and present sufferings of the world through a politicized desire for a more perfect human world of social and divine interaction. xxii Introduction: Political Writer

This chapter also considers one of Greene’s most politically inflected novels, The Human Factor (1978). Kim Philby’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1968 had initially prompted this sombre depiction (writ- ten over ten years) of the British security system. Greene’s preface to Philby’s My Silent War was followed by amicable meetings in Russia during the 1980s. Unlike the comic bungling of the British security services in Our Man in Havana, the SIS is now depicted as cynically col- laborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa and its ruthless secret service BOSS. The existential angst of its protagonist, Castle, fol- lowing the death of his first wife and his colleague Davis (poisoned by the SIS’s house doctor), culminates in the despairing nihilism of Castle being spirited away by the KGB to a life in Moscow (echoing Philby’s) devoid of significance. As examined in Chapter 9, the political diversity of the aged Greene’s writings during the 1980s is striking and, despite old age and debilitating illness, his creative inventiveness at this period is still underestimated. His generically elusive novella, Doctor Fischer of Geneva (1980), set within the clinical austerity of the super-wealthy of Switzerland, focuses on the corrupting nature of Western European capitalism and how rampant materialism ‘crushes spirituality and dehumanizes individuals and relationships’.14 In the same year his memoir Ways of (1980) expressed his escalating sense of political alienation from contempo- rary society, also evinced in his angry responses to Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In contrast, Greene’s gently picaresque novel, Monsignor Quixote (1982), echoes Cervantes in narrating the exploits of a humble Catholic priest and his loyal friend ‘Sancho’, a communist ex-mayor. Although their discussions cover such controversial topics as the political legacy of General Franco and the heroic activism and oppression of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, critics have tended to view this novel as evidence of the marked diminution of Greene’s political interests as a writer. But this study will also trace how such an apparently innocuous work was drafted in response to what Greene regarded as the most terrifying period of his life, when he courageously stood up to the intimidations of the Milieu (Mafia) in the south of France. In response to their threats, he published his incendiary Dreyfus-echoing pamphlet, J’Accuse (1982) and drafted a previously unknown manuscript denunciation of his chief antagonist (Daniel Guy, the son-in-law of his companion, Yvonne Cloetta), which was secretively buried (in characteristic espionage mode) for later eyes to discover in a proof copy of Doctor Fischer of Geneva. Introduction: Political Writer xxiii

Between 1975 and 1985 Greene continued to travel widely, visiting Panama, Belize, Costa Rica and Cuba. He twice acted as an interme- diary in kidnappings in El Salvador, described in Getting to Know the General (1984), and became embroiled in Panamanian politics through his friendship with its charismatic dictator, General Omar Torrijos Herrera. Greene was a member of the official Panamanian delegation to Washington in 1977 when a Canal Zone treaty was ratified between President Carter and the General. He also sympathized with the Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua, splitting the royalties of Monsignor Quixote between them and the Spanish monastery of Osera. His auto- biographical journalism, Getting to Know the General, recounts his inti- macy with Torrijos and the latter’s suspicious death in a plane crash in August 1981. Greene was greatly impressed during a trip in 1978 to Belize when he met with its later prime minister, George Cadle Price, who lived humbly like a priest and became for Greene the projection of the ideal model for a dedicated and incorruptible Catholic socialist leader in South America. After almost five decades, Greene had finally found in Price a living expression of his dream for a unified socialist and Catholic guardianship of the rights of all citizens, both rich and poor. Greene’s final published work, The Captain and the Enemy (1988), was partly set in the Panama of General Torrijos and – in a self-reflective act of authorial closure – recalls several plot elements and characters from his first published novel, The Man Within (1929). Its protagonist, Victor ‘Jim’ Baxter, is a failed writer and, like Greene, a humanitar- ian of conscience, struggling with the callous politics of a threatening world. Greene seems to suggest in this last novel that the concerns of his first novel could only be given moral substance for an audience of the late 1980s by reframing memories of its central relationships within the testing politics of Panama. In this sense, Baxter becomes not only a revitalized version of Andrews, his anxiety-laden counterpart in The Man Within, but also a representative of the kind of disappointed writer that Greene himself might have become if he had not persevered after the failure of his next two novels, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, to ensure that his subsequent writings possessed more mean- ingful political, social and religious contexts. Acknowledgements

During the compilation and production of this book I have been greatly indebted to the expertise of the following at Palgrave Macmillan: Ben Doyle (Senior Commissioning Editor, Literature), Peter Cary (Commissioning Editor, History), Tomas René (Editorial Assistant, Literature), Caroline Richards (Copyeditor) and Linda Auld (Editorial Services Consultant). Finally, I am very grateful to numerous academic colleagues from the School of English and Faculty of Arts, University of Leeds, for their informative discussions and generosity in responding to my various queries about aspects of twentieth-century literature and politics.

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