Graham Greene, uneasy Catholic

In 1939 Graham Greene wrote to his brother Hugh: “A new shade of knickers and nightdresses has been named Brighton Rock by Peter Jones”, adding: “Is this fame?”. Greene was then thirty-five: Brighton Rock (1938) was his first critically acclaimed religious novel. It describes a betrayal of loyalties in gangland Britain and remains a disquieting parable of conscience. Greene had become a Catholic thirteen years earlier. In his three subsequent theological novels – The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951) – his gift was to locate the moment of crisis when a character loses faith, religious or otherwise, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder. By the time of his death in 1991, Greene had more than thirty novels to his name: he was a prolific chronicler of wretchedness and damaged faith.

All his life, Greene exercised a judicious censorship over his work and made no secret of his reluctance to appoint a biographer. His authorized biographer, Norman Sherry, devoted thirty years to his reclusive subject and  scrutinized Greene’s every depression, love affair and alcoholic spree. After Greene died at the age of eighty-six, more biographies followed. The American academic Michael Shelden offered a life study, Graham Greene: The enemy within (1994), which sought to expose the darker side of Greene. Shelden went to great lengths to arraign his subject on charges of sadism, anti-Semitism and alcoholism. Reportedly Greene had indulged in heterosexual buggery in Jamaica (“Such disgusting sheets”) and enjoyed the frisson of adulterous copulation behind Italian church altars. As if that were not enough, Greene was accused of complicity in a gruesome 1930s Brighton murder (to this day unsolved) of a pregnant woman whose dismembered body was found in two suitcases. Shelden also insinuated that Greene was essentially homosexual. In the race to commemorate Greene, a third man appeared: Anthony Mockler. Mockler’s Graham Greene: Three lives, came out in 1994. The cover proclaimed: “Novelist! Explorer! Spy!”, and the author’s description of Greene on his Swiss deathbed was accordingly Boy’s Own in tone: “Graham looked out of the antiseptic room over the sterile Swiss sky. No vultures gazed back . . .”. Clearly the shabby world of Greene’s fiction had exerted a spell.

Greene’s fallible, ambivalent characters are unlike any others in British fiction. Pinkie, the juvenile hoodlum of Brighton Rock, murders without a qualm, yet, as a lapsed Catholic, he fears damnation, and Greene establishes our empathy with him. In Catholicism Greene had found a sense of melodrama – an atmosphere of good and evil – that was useful to him as a novelist. Over the sixty years of his writing career he created characters who try to hide their weaknesses from the world and themselves. Few novelists have fathomed with such intensity the suffering of this earth. In Catholic terms, Greene was a moralist excited by human turpitude and evil in our times.

Although Greene claimed to dislike the label “Catholic novelist”, he retained his faith, if not his belief, in Catholicism all his life. To his dying day he kept a photograph in his wallet of the Italian stigmatic Padre Pio, whose hands and feet were said to display the wounds of Christ. Whether these lesions were of neurotic origin – psychological rather than supernatural – Greene did not care to know: he wanted there to be a mystery at the heart of life. It may seem incredible that an intelligent man could be awed by the irrationality of stigmatism. But as Greene told the Tablet in 1989: “There is a mystery. There is something inexplicable in human life”.

Over a period of fifty years the British Catholic weekly provided Greene with a forum for both his works-in-progress and his frequently unorthodox religious views. A writer of religious doubt rather than certainty, Greene was less interested in the rituals and practice of Catholicism than in the moral questions it raised. His reportage, book reviews and essays for the Tablet reflect this interest. Much of the material, which has not been seen since the 1930s, illuminates Greene’s pleasures, foibles and eccentric dislikes. It moreover confirms the novelist’s considerable wit, capacity for terse putdowns and fascination for what remained outside his class and culture – whether it was blue films in post-Franco Spain or Catholic churches in Indochina. Above all, it records a religious faith which endured.

Greene first contributed to the Tablet in 1936 when he was living in London with his wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who was expecting their second child. Brighton Rock was progressing by fits and starts; Greene was also busy with his journalism. As well as writing film reviews for the Spectator, he was subsequently literary editor of Night and Day, a New Yorker-style magazine which lasted for just six months of 1937. Greene had married Vivien, a committed Catholic, in 1927, having converted to Rome a year earlier. By introducing Greene to Catholic Christianity, Vivien changed the course of her husband’s life and enabled him to become the writer we admire today. In later years, however, she claimed that Greene defected to Rome because he was intellectually convinced by Catholicism, not merely to please her.

It seemed that Greene grappled with this argument all his life. John Cornwell’s celebrated interview with the novelist for the Tablet in 1989 (“Why I am still a Catholic”) suggests an eighty-five-year-old who was troubled by theological doubts but still dogged by the possibility of God. Many ambiguities emerge from the interview. For example, Greene claims to be agnostic yet he occasionally attends Mass. In old age he refused to take Communion and did not like to go to confession: frequent lapses into lust and adultery had prevented him from leading a virtuous Catholic life. (Revealingly, Greene tells Cornwell that he dislikes the word “sin”: he did not feel himself to be in a state of grace.) Greene’s soured religious faith was never more amply expressed than in the Tablet interview.

In the 1930s the Tablet offices were in the City of London at 39 Paternoster Row (a building later destroyed in the Blitz). The Editor was the portly Douglas Woodruff, an acquaintance of Evelyn Waugh and Hilaire Belloc. Under Woodruff’s urbane editorship the Tablet became less “churchy” and began to reach out to the laity. By instinct, tradition and education, however, Woodruff was a conservative; like Belloc, he favoured Franco’s Catholic cause in Spain and was attracted to the thorny asceticism of Spanish Catholicism. A “Red scare” had spread across Europe in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Woodruff was among a generation of younger Anglo-Catholics who were seeking an alternative to atheist Communism. In Spain the leftist government that preceded Franco’s had been virulently and crudely anti-religious; the persecution and slaughter of Spanish priests was roundly condemned by Evelyn Waugh and others in the Tablet circle.

Though Greene did not know him until later, the most influential of the Tablet’s associates in the 1930s was Fr Martin D’Arcy, SJ, a charismatic if faintly snobbish figure bent on casuistical “persuasion” and the conversion of Anglicans to Rome. Greene met D’Arcy twenty years after he had been received into the Catholic Church and was not an enthusiastic admirer. (“I don’t believe that any priest ever converts anyone”, he tartly remarked.) Indeed, while Greene’s 1930s Tablet journalism dutifully scorned Communism, it did not endorse D’Arcy’s or Woodruff’s Francoist sympathies; Greene was a declared anti-Fascist.

Politically, his position at the Tablet was thus somewhat awkward. In the received notion, any Englishman who was openly anti-Fascist in the 1930s was assumed to be anti-Catholic and for the Spanish Republic. Yet Greene was a Catholic – and a leftist. Not surprisingly, these conflicting loyalties and shifting political allegiances would colour Greene’s novels. The Spanish Civil War may even have reflected a personal anxiety of Greene’s. His father had been the pious Anglican headmaster of a public school in Berkhamsted near London; Graham experienced divided loyalties as each day he left the family quarters to go to class. Frontiers (whether geographical, religious or political) have a dynamism of their own in Greene’s fiction and set off a reflex of unease.

At first Greene reviewed for the Tablet’s “Fiction Chronicle”, and was given free rein to choose what novels he liked. Broad-minded, he praised Stevie Smith’s first fiction, Novel on Yellow Paper (so named after the yellow paper on which the novel was typed), as well as Djuna Barnes’s extravagantly baroque novella Nightwood, which was ignored by the British quality newspapers and Sunday broadsheets. Though occasionally wordy, Greene was a lucid critic for the Tablet, fiercely set against the nebulous or abstruse; any author he considered to be pretentious or self-indulgent was neatly tossed and gored. John van Druten, the playwright and novelist, caters for “lonely middle-class ladies with artistic interests”, while the multifarious Eric Linklater is upbraided for his Rabelaisian excess (“Words, words, words”). The notion that literary style is a decoration – something you can apply to your subject – never appealed to Greene.

Some of Greene’s literary judgements are perplexing. The American novelist John Dos Passos is dismissed as a “heavy-handed Socialist Galsworthy”, yet his leftist support of Republican Spain and the Joycean experiment of his fiction impressed Greene. (Indeed, Greene said as much on accepting the John Dos Passos Prize for literature in 1980.) Another surprising target is the St Petersburg-born novelist William Gerhardie. The author of Futility and The Polyglots has “great talent”, Greene concedes, “but he never quite achieves anything completely memorable”. In his private correspondence, however, Greene expresses an admiration for Gerhardie; whether he had patronized him in the Tablet from a contrary whim or a stubborn streak is unclear.

For all its vinegary humour, Greene’s Tablet journalism imparts a lively sense of involvement in the politics and literature of the time. During the mid-1930s Greene made trips to the Estonian capital of Tallinn; there he got to know a British diplomat, Peter Leslie, who was a Catholic and apparently involved in espionage. (See “Our Man in Tallinn”, TLS, March 3, 2006.) An habitué of shadowy places, Greene was the only Catholic writer in Britain to recommend Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine. As the title suggests, the novel is fraught with the symbols of the Eucharist, and moreover carries a Christian socialist message of redemption for Italy’s poor. By the time Bread and Wine reached its first readers in 1937, Mussolini had conquered Abyssinia and further allied the Fascist State to the Catholic Church. To many Catholic conservatives, Silone was a left-wing propagandist, but Greene defended Silone’s attempts to reconcile Catholicism with socialism: “His criticism is not hasty, shallow or partisan”, but “profoundly Christian”. On the whole, Greene was at pains to champion anti-Fascist writers like Silone who advocated “social justice”. (It is unlikely, however, that he knew of Silone’s alleged espionage activities, which involved Greenean elements of treachery and double-dealing.) Many other authors who came under Greene’s review are now forgotten. John Masefield, a former Poet Laureate, is scarcely read today. Arthur Calder-Marshall is also unfortunately neglected. Other literary aspirants whom Greene praised in the Tablet, though, have endured. R. K. Narayan, the South Indian novelist, benefited greatly from Greene’s advocacy of his work in the Tablet and elsewhere. (Greene even advised the author on what pen-name to use and moreover saw to his financial security.

Whenever Greene was at the Tablet he made a point of visiting Tom Burns. Two years younger than Greene, Burns was a junior director of the Catholic newspaper and a publisher with Longman’s. The Jesuit-educated Burns was outwardly very different from the theologically troubled Greene and certainly did not share his taste for brothels. (“Let’s go to Limehouse tonight, there’s a ballet of Chinese nudes at the local theatre!”, Greene once suggested to Burns.) They first met in 1929 after Greene had completed his third (but first to be published) novel, The Man Within. To Burns the twenty-four-year old Greene seemed “witty, evasive, nervous, sardonic”; nevertheless Burns remarked on the “serenity” of the novelist’s Queen Anne house in Clapham. No doubt this air of calm was due to Vivien Greene’s homemaking, as Greene was not interested in domesticity. Unknown to Vivien, indeed, he had begun to frequent prostitutes.

Over drinks one evening, Greene told Burns of his plan to write a book about the recent persecution of the Mexican Church under President Plutarco Calles and the Cristero peasant revolt it provoked. Calles had ordered the most pitiless clampdown on Catholicism anywhere “since Queen Elizabeth I”, said Greene. Cristero rebels had marched courageously under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe to demand that their churches be reopened; by 1927 most of the leaders had been defeated, captured or executed. In Mexico (where some 50,000 Cristeros had died during the neo-Stalinist purge of Catholicism), Greene was to catch a glimpse of what the world might be like without religion. Evelyn Waugh’s 1935 biography of the Catholic martyr Edmund Campion had already deeply moved him. In Waugh’s tale of heroism and holiness in Tudor England, Greene found parallels between Campion’s fate and the fate of Father Pro and the other priests martyred in revolutionary Mexico. Waugh’s biography, not surprisingly, was written with the help of Douglas Woodruff; it is a work of sturdy, Catholic piety.

The Catholic publishers most likely to back Greene, Sheed & Ward, were wary. Mexico was too far away and it was feared that Greene’s book would lose its relevance if the persecutions were to cease entirely. In early December 1937 Greene therefore made a tentative approach to Longman’s through Tom Burns. “Burns would be quite ready, I think, to take over the English rights from Sheed if it can be arranged”, Greene wrote to his London agent. He added: “Personally, I would much rather be published by Longman’s – it would brand one less in the public eye as a Catholic writer”. Eventually, thanks to Burns, Longman’s commissioned Greene’s book, The Position of the Church in Mexico (as it was originally and rather blandly titled), for £500, an appreciable sum in those days.

The man Evelyn Waugh nicknamed “Grisjambon Vert” left London for Mexico on January 29, 1938. He was thirty-three and his career prospects looked dismal after Night and Day had been forced to close down the previous month owing to a lawsuit. (Twentieth Century Fox had issued libel proceedings against Greene for his “defamatory” remarks about Shirley Temple in her film Wee Willie Winkie; the child-star exuded a “dimpled depravity”, Greene wrote in Night and Day, which would appeal to elderly clergymen.) To top it all, the recent birth of Greene’s son Francis had filled the novelist with anxiety for the future. By the time Greene arrived in Mexico the worst of the persecutions were in fact over. However, the evidence lingered in the burned churches, the smashed effigies of saints, and the ridicule of priests in broadsheets and burlesques.
 

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The five weeks which Greene spent in Mexico resulted in The Lawless Roads (1939), an exceptionally bleak and dyspeptic travel book. Portions of it first appeared in the Tablet. Oddly, while journalists are the most heinous characters in Greene’s fiction (think of the mannish Mabel Warren in Stamboul Train, or the cynical Montagu Parkinson in A Burnt-Out Case), Greene was a superb reporter. The controlled understatement and unsparing lucidity of his Mexican reportage unforgettably portrays the aftermath of the violent “revolution” begun by President Calles: churches stand shuttered in the “mosquito-noisy air”; buzzards have “tiny moron” heads.

Though Greene’s Catholicism had surely wavered since his conversion, in Mexico it was greatly strengthened. The novel that emerged from his Mexican travels, The Power and the Glory, investigates the operation of divine grace through one man’s destitution. The book’s wretched whisky-priest moreover provides a symbolic re-enactment of Campion’s martyrdom; all the blood, hatred and derision of 1920s Mexico is visited on that priest. In the padre’s alcoholic journey towards martyrdom, however, the Vatican suspected an attempt by Greene to denigrate orthodox Catholicism. (This would not be the first time that Greene, a provoking and paradoxical writer, incurred pontifical displeasure.)

When Greene returned to England in May 1938 the country was preparing for war. Body bags, buckets of fire-fighting sand and generators were put on standby. Following the declaration of war on September 3, 1939, Vivien Greene took her two children to Crowborough to stay with her parents-in-law, and afterwards to the safety of Trinity College, Oxford. (Greene had originally intended that they decamp to Jamaica.) Greene stayed on in London, where his life was about to change. In 1940, during one of his infrequent visits to Oxford, he told Vivien that a “landmine” had destroyed their Clapham house. At the time of the destruction Greene was living in secret with another woman and so escaped harm (“Graham’s life was saved by his infidelity”, Vivien later acidly remarked.) On visiting the house at 14 North Side, Clapham Common, Greene’s wife found that most of the Queen Anne furniture had been stolen, and her photographs, diaries and letters destroyed. Greene would describe such scenes in his 1942 novel of London during the Blitz, The Ministry of Fear, and later in The End of the Affair.

As the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, Greene’s contact with Douglas Woodruff diminished; theirs was anyway an incongruous relationship, based on a hatred of Communism (which Greene did not always share), and a love of G. K. Chesterson’s Father Brown and Victorian mystery tales. Under Woodruff’s guidance, however, Greene was persuaded to publish in the Tablet his extraordinary essay on Catholic devotion to Mary and Marian apparitions. “Our Lady and Her Assumption” had first appeared in Life magazine in 1951. The essay is touched by the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and the brutality of Stalin’s technocratic Russia. “Today the human body is regarded as expendable material, something to be eliminated wholesale by the atom bomb, a kind of anonymous carrion.” If Greene’s determination to see God beneath the banalities of everyday life occasionally feels contrived, his essay on the Assumption reveals a man of lingering and, I think, instinctive piety.

Indochina, even more than 1930s Mexico, brought Greene face to face with physical danger and the feelings of exhilaration he claimed to crave. (An American friend of Greene in Saigon believed the novelist wanted to be “crucified on an anthill in a third world country”.) Greene first visited South-East Asia in the early 1950s, for the beauty, he said, of its women. Vietnam was then in a state of civil war. The colonial French were being ousted by the Communist Viet Minh, and France’s post-war rule in the region was coming to an end. An extract from Greene’s Indochina journal, “Catholics at War”, appeared in the Tablet in 1954. There, Greene related how his jeep stopped short of a landmine; he and his driver escaped death, yet Greene takes his reprieve ungraciously: “It is too difficult to thank God with any sincerity for this gift of life”. For Greene, the thrill of travel on the dangerous edge was perhaps a way out of depression, or simply a means to escape boredom. Some of his personal observations in “Catholics at War” later found their way into The Quiet American (1955), Greene’s greatest political novel, set in Vietnam.

By 1947 Greene had announced to his wife that he no longer loved her; he was involved with a married American, Catherine Walston. In her husband’s absence, quaintly, Vivien cultivated an interest in antique dolls’ houses. It seemed that she found comfort in the miniature world of these houses since her own home had been destroyed by fire. Euan Cameron visited Vivien some time in the late 1980s, as he hoped to publish a book on her collection. Cameron had been a director of Greene’s publishers, Bodley Head, and knew Greene personally. Before he left, Vivien took him on a tour of her Oxfordshire house. Cameron recalled: “On entering one of the bedrooms, she announced to me: ‘This is Graham’s room’. I was amazed, for I knew they had not lived together for over forty years. There, on a pillow, with the crisply ironed linen sheet turned back, was a pair of men’s pyjamas. ‘They’re ready for when Graham comes home’, said Vivien, as she turned away to continue our tour”. Marriage was an indissoluble sacrament for the devout Vivien, who referred to herself as “Mrs Graham Greene” until her death in 2003.

The last of Greene’s companions, Yvonne Cloetta, was with him when he died and is mentioned in the novelist’s letters to Tom Burns. Greene first met Cloetta on a visit to French Cameroon in 1959, when his love for Catherine Walston was waning. Cloetta was then married to a wealthy French businessman based in Africa and, by her own account, bored. The meeting seems to have been a classic coup de foudre. Cloetta, stylish, blonde, petite, captivated Greene and, in a decorous way, he began to court her. At fifty-five, Greene was twenty years older than Cloetta, burdened by his failed marriage and, he felt, on the ebb-tide of his achievements. His greatest work – the “Catholic” novels – was behind him. Cloetta became his counsellor and confidante, and effectively his spouse for the rest of his life; indeed, he was furious when she was described in the 1989 Tablet interview as his “girlfriend”. (“How could I possibly refer to somebody I have known for thirty years as a girlfriend?”, Greene complained to Tom Burns. “I think I must have thought the interview was over and we were talking vaguely but not as vaguely as that.”)

In 1966, Greene moved to France to be near Cloetta, who was then living in the Midi with her husband. From his fourth-floor flat overlooking the harbour at Antibes, Greene maintained a spirited correspondence with the Tablet. In his twenty-odd letters to the paper he attacked Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Archbishop Marcinkus (the Vatican’s financial chief), and the dictators Augusto Pinochet and Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier.

At the age of seventy-one, in 1976, Greene was appointed a trustee of the Tablet Trust headed by the Duke of Norfolk. To begin with he demurred, as he did not want any financial involvement. “I hadn’t realised that the Trustees would hold at any rate some nominal shares in the Tablet and this disquiets me”, Greene wrote to Burns. “It is out of the question for me to hold any shares in England as I am domiciled abroad, so I think that at the next meeting you should offer my regretful resignation as Trustee.” However, Greene was reluctant to disappoint an old friend, and remained on the board.

Burns had taken over in 1967 from Douglas Woodruff as Editor of the Tablet. For thirty-one years the Catholic paper had been “D. W.’s Weekly”, but the world was now a different place. Woodruff’s vision of the Holy See as conservative and hierarchical had failed to represent the emergent new Church following the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). In 1963 (no doubt to Greene’s approval) the beaming Pope John XXIII had published his famous encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), which opened up a dialogue between the Catholic and Marxist worlds. Europe was changing, and Burns wanted the Tablet to catch the new mood. He had spent much of the Second World War as press attaché to the British Embassy in Madrid, and, unlike Woodruff, was not uncritical of Franco. Under his fifteen-year editorship until 1982 the Tablet was transformed into the Catholic equivalent of the Guardian or the Observer, open to divergent theological and political views.

Greene’s correspondence with Burns radiates an impish sense of mischief and candour; yet it has been ignored by the novelist’s several biographers and all academics. Greene provided Burns with ideas to enliven the Tablet. He proposed Lord Longford, the philosopher A. J. Ayer and the novelist Piers Paul Read as candidates for a Tablet questionnaire on the subject of religious beliefs (“What do you mean by God?”, “Do you pray, and if so, why?”). However, Greene thought the paper’s literary standards had declined over the years, and he told Burns as much. “Considering how few books of fiction you review it does seem rather a waste of space to give up anything to enthusiastic reviews of Morris West . . . . If to be widely read is a criterion for being reviewed in the Tablet, then I think the sooner I cease to be a Trustee the better.”

Shortly before Christmas 1978, nevertheless, Greene submitted to the Tablet an unfinished story about a priest called Fr Quixote. The fragment was inspired by the boozy motoring excursions in Spain which Greene had enjoyed over the years with Fr Leopoldo Durán (the model for his fictional Quixote). Bottles of Galician wine were stowed in their car as the men checked into monasteries and hostels. (Perhaps Greene had wanted to turn Durán into a whisky priest: Durán was often squiffy from tots of Cutty Sark.) Burns was delighted with the story, and asked Greene to write further episodes in the fortunes of the Spanish padre. Greene hesitated: Fr Quixote was quite different from the alcoholic, fear-ridden priest of The Power and the Glory, and he could not see how his character might be developed. After an interval, however, Greene offered two more stories, by which time Fr Quixote had acquired a personality of his own. The novel which became Monsignor Quixote (1982) was thus born in the pages of the Tablet.

Throughout the 1970s Greene continued to take an interest in the Tablet. With his customary generosity he offered Burns a selection of his own manuscripts for a Tablet fundraising sale at Sotheby’s in 1979. One of these, “One Hundred and Ten Airports”, was the first volume of Greene’s autobiography, subsequently retitled A Sort of Life. Greene also sent Burns the typescript for a “new play”, For Whom the Bell Chimes (to this day unperformed), along with the introduction, written in 1936 or 1937, to Narayan’s second novel, The Bachelor of Arts. In the course of their sixty-year friendship, Greene and Burns were tactful with each other, and Burns was quick to commiserate with Greene when his friend Omar Torrijos, the Panamanian military leader, died in August 1981. Greene had revered Torrijos for his struggle to disengage from American control. “Torrijos is one of the friends whom I miss most now that he is not there”, he explained to Burns. “A great man in a tiny country who was having a big influence and yet remained completely human. We had fun together and laughed a lot and he was always ready to help in any way possible.” The kernel of Getting To Know The General – Greene’s 1984 tribute to General Torrijos – is contained in that brief letter.

In 1982, on the eve of Burns’s retirement from the Tablet, the Falklands War broke out. In a celebrated editorial, Burns urged Britain to desist from Margaret Thatcher’s “narrow patriotism” against Argentina, and Greene found himself in agreement. However, when Burns asked him to write down what he would say to Pope John Paul II if he had just five minutes of his time, Greene replied tetchily: “I think my five minutes with the Pope would only lead to excommunication!”. It was the spring of 1982 and John Paul was about to visit Britain; Greene disagreed with his views on birth control and with much of his politics: “I must say I find the present Pope intolerable”, he wrote to Burns. “He has been a disaster in Central America. A disaster also with his views on contraception etc. God knows what he is going to do with poor Vatican II”. Greene’s estrangement from John Paul II is the subject of Alberto Huerta’s 1991 Tablet essay, “Graham Greene’s Way”. In Fr Huerta’s view, Greene was an advocate of liberation theology and the leftist Jesuitism now represented in trouble spots from China to Haiti. (“It is impossible for a Catholic to remain on the side-lines”, he quotes Greene as saying.)

After the papal visit to London in 1982, John Wilkins succeeded Tom Burns as Editor of the Tablet. Like Greene, Wilkins was a left-of-centre former Anglican, and Greene expressed his approval of him to Burns: “I am so glad that Wilkins is keeping the Tablet on the liberal lines which you instituted after your very conservative predecessor” (meaning Douglas Woodruff); he added affectionately: “The Tablet remains a monument to your work”. Greene’s final contribution was a poem, “The Grass”, published in 1987. The verse is tinged with an autumnal sense of loss and self-examination of an old man looking back on his life.

Greene’s last known letter to Tom Burns was dated June 6, 1990, after cancer of the blood had been diagnosed: “Forgive a short note but I have been rather ill and am living in-between blood transfusions”. Graham Greene died a year later; a Memorial Requiem Mass was celebrated for him at Westminster Cathedral.
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This is an edited version of a talk to be given at the Berkhamsted Greene Festival (September 28–October 1).