• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 817 0

everywhere and found it, partly because he liked to spend his nights with the kind of shadowy figures who might actually be spies—or, like him, enjoyed pretending to be—partly because it pleased him to suppose that the tentacles of the SIS or its rivals and enemies extended everywhere, embracing people who seemed on the surface quite innocent and ordinary, like the harmless vacuum-cleaner sales representative who becomes a spy in Our Man in Havana. Graham himself was quite capable of giving even the most harmless of activities a twist to thrill a naive listener, though very often with tongue in cheek. Thus, he hinted to his biographer that he and my Uncle Alex had “surveyed” for the SIS the waters off Yugoslavia during a cruise on Alex’s yacht, although given the guest list (which included both men’s mistresses), Alex’s myopia, and the fact that there were no cameras onboard except mine, it is hard to imagine what kind of surveying they could have done, even if there was anything about the Yugoslavian coastline worth knowing or that the SIS couldn’t have gotten out of a Baedeker travel guide.

In fact, with Graham it was always difficult to tell where the spy novelist left off and the spy himself began. From time to time they came together, as when Graham turned up unexpectedly in the White House in the guise of a Panamanian diplomat (complete with diplomatic passport) as part of the entourage of General Omar Torrijos, the leftist ruler of Panama from 1968 to 1981, during an official visit. He was photographed standing behind Torrijos and President Carter, without anybody in the White House or the press recognizing him—ironic in view of the fact that he was still unable to obtain a visa to visit the United States except by making a special application as “a former communist,” which he was unwilling to do as a matter of principle.

Over the years, Graham’s FBI file began to obsess him more and more. Ostensibly, his brief flirtation with communism, which he claimed was a student prank, was the cause of the U.S. government’s refusal to grant him a visa. Behind that simple explanation, however, was a layer of misunderstandings about Graham among Americans who had never met him (particularly those who either made or supported American foreign policy), most of whom bitterly resented his portrait of Alden Pyle, the naive but deadly central figure of The Quiet American, whose love for Phuong does not prevent him from helping to plant a bomb that kills dozens of innocent Vietnamese.

Each brush with America made Graham more determined to track down this famous file, as if it were the Holy Grail. He saw it as the source of all his problems with America, possibly even as the source of his problems with the Nobel Prize for Literature committee; he assumed that he was being watched, his correspondence opened, his telephone calls recorded, while someone, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., gathered this information and misinformation and used it against him at every opportunity.

Early in 1981, when we met for a drink at the Ritz Bar in London, one of his favorite haunts, he asked me if I would be willing to do him a great favor. Anything, I said. He nodded darkly, his long, slim fingers touching as if in prayer. He glanced to either side and drew himself closer to me. He had read about the Freedom of Information Act, he said, and wondered if I could find a way of getting him access to his FBI file. I had no idea how the Freedom of Information Act worked and said so, but I promised to do my best. He confirmed it by letter, adding that given his views on America’s involvement in Vietnam, it was likely to be a bulky dossier, possibly even sufficient material for a short book. He thought it would be particularly interesting to know who had informed on him in various places all over the world over the years. The only thing he really wanted at this point in his life was a look at his FBI file—and, of course, the Nobel Prize, which was still being withheld from him by one vote, from a man who seemed determined