Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [182]
Despite hiring endless numbers of distinguished literary editors, most of whom left before they had made any impact on the S&S list, the one area in which we remained deficient was serious literature. Dick liked to pretend that this didn’t matter, and of course in a way it didn’t, but it still annoyed him, and he yearned for an author of Nobel Prize potential.
Unexpectedly, one fell into our laps in the shape of Graham Greene, whom I had known—and loved—since I was a teenager and whose difficult, convoluted personality and wishes it soon became my job to interpret for Dick over the next few years.
THERE WERE always three separate and distinct Graham Greenes—the writer, the public figure, and the private man—so it is hardly surprising that his character seems to have eluded his biographers, both Professor Norman Sherry, whose definitive, authorized, multivolume biography idolizes Greene, and Michael Shelden, whose revisionist biography, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within, reviles and demonizes him. Greene himself was an acerbic, contradictory, and complicated man. He had a wry sense of humor and a schoolboy’s taste for pranks and practical jokes, and he loved making a mystery of his life. Apparently, he took a malicious pleasure in leading both Sherry and Shelden down the garden path.
The Graham Greene I knew best was the private man, and on my part it was love—or at any rate besotted admiration—at first sight. I met him for the first time in 1948, at the age of fifteen, in Antibes on my Uncle Alex’s yacht Elsewhere.
Greene had—as I was soon to discover—an intuitive sympathy for young people, together with a sly, subversive determination to help them break the rules, the result, no doubt, of his own unhappy childhood as the son of an English public-school headmaster, from which he attempted to escape by playing Russian roulette with a revolver. I, somewhat overwhelmed by a party that included Carol Reed, Vivien Leigh, Randolph Churchill, and his about-to-be ex-wife, Pamela, was doing my best to hide when a tall, lean Englishman with thinning sandy hair and the most alarmingly penetrating bright blue, protuberant eyes—rather like intelligent gooseberries, I thought—appeared beside me and handed me a cocktail. I looked at it suspiciously. My father had encouraged me to drink a glass of wine at dinner, but I did not think he would have approved of a cocktail before lunch. “Drink up,” the stranger said. “You look as if you need it.”
He had a curious way of speaking, very English, clipped, precise to the point of being old-fashioned and high-pitched, with a slight trace of a speech impediment and a tendency to turn every sentence into a question—a very donnish voice, as I was to discover when I eventually went to Oxford. I sipped the cocktail gingerly.
“Go on,” he said. “It’s a martini. It can do you no possible harm. I’m Graham Greene, by the way.”
We shook hands rather formally. I had heard of him, of course. He had cowritten the script for The Fallen Idol (based on one of his stories, “The Basement Room”), and my father, who had done the art direction, spoke of him with great affection.
Despite Greene’s promise, I felt that my lips seemed to have become anesthetized, not a bad thing under the circumstances, since Alex’s view was that teenagers should be seen only if absolutely necessary but certainly not heard. I had no idea how I was going to get through a long luncheon with these people, all of whom were shouting at one another at the