Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [188]
Graham’s output was constant but variable. Major novels such as The Honorary Consul and The Human Factor, which was originally called The Cold Fault (and which I mistakenly announced to the press as The Cold Vault, due to an error in cable transmission, much to Graham’s amusement), alternated with smaller books that reflected his diverse interests and his travels. Graham’s minor works produced occasional friction, for they became increasingly eccentric or hermetic, reflecting his involvement in causes and people unlikely to interest the American reader. For example, he edited the memoirs of his ninety-year-old neighbor, Dottoressa Moor, in Capri. He also wrote a pamphlet attacking the excesses of the criminal underworld, the police, and the politicians of Nice, J’accuse: The Dark Side of Nice, which took up with Zolaesque anger the case of a young Frenchwoman whose gangster husband had abused her and abducted her child. He took the failure or nonpublication of these books in the United States in stride, though I suspect it merely confirmed his already low opinion of America’s interest in the world beyond her shores. As he grew older, his restless curiosity and almost childlike fascination with eccentric and larger-than-life figures—a characteristic that he captured so perfectly in the person of Monsignor Quixote, the priest who tilts at the windmills of modern Spain and who in so many ways resembles the older Graham Greene—increased. He had always sought sainthood in secular figures and prized in others a simplicity and an innocence he had been denied, and his later works are a kind of pilgrimage in search of a different kind of faith.
In writing the flap copy for the dust jacket of his autobiography, Ways of Escape, I had referred to him as “enigmatic, secretive, and elusive,” and increasingly this rather romantic description, which he had accepted at first unwillingly, seemed true. He liked to feel he was living “on the dangerous edge of things,” and his skill at writing cloak-and-dagger novels was more than matched by his own adventures and divided loyalties. He was at once a sentimental leftist (about Africa, Cuba, Panama, and Vietnam at any rate) and a man of old-fashioned Tory attitudes when it came to England, complaining that the only things he missed when he was abroad were the sausages and dinner at Rule’s or Simpson’s, old-fashioned London restaurants where he always ordered roast beef. He was a friend of Kim Philby’s (and loyal to him to the bitter end), but continued to maintain his shadowy connections with the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), for which he had served as an agent during the war.
He traveled constantly and involved himself fearlessly—some would say recklessly—in politics, as if he was determined to add to the bulk of the FBI’s file on him. “Just think of the money I’m costing them!” he liked to say, delighted at the thought of the documents and reports on his activities piling up in Washington. In one letter, he reported that he was just back from visiting Panama, Nicaragua, and Cuba (where he spent twenty-four hours with Fidel Castro) and expressed horror that bombs were being distributed by the CIA in Nicaragua in the shape of Mickey Mouse dolls that would explode when a child picked one up—a story that sounds as if it might have been passed on to him by Fidel. Still, he never made any claim to objectivity, particularly when it came to the U.S. government, and the murky world of guilt, betrayal, and ruthlessness that formed the background of so many of his novels also influenced the way he saw the real world beyond his fiction.
Having been an agent for the SIS, Graham looked for conspiracy