And so Wormold, determined to vindicate friendship and love over treachery and murder, finds it surprisingly easy to discover what he must do. In three sentences that might almost define the world we know as “Greeneland”:
He stood on the frontier of violence, a strange land he had never visited before; he had his passport in his hand. “Profession: Spy.” “Characteristic Features: Friendlessness.” “Purpose of Visit: Murder.” No visa was required. His papers were in order.
At such a critical moment, no Greene character would refrain from at least some reflection on faith, however terse and bitter:
Vengeance was unnecessary when you believed in a heaven. But he had no such belief. Mercy and forgiveness were scarcely virtues in a Christian; they came too easily.
Even so, when it comes to the moment of truth—or “reality”—Wormold is almost unable to destroy another human being and has to rationalize his actions even as he is undertaking them. He is thankful that the decision is taken out of his hands by Carter’s vile conduct, and indeed is still rationalizing busily when the shock moment of actual crisis occurs, and the question of will or volition is snatched (unlike the fortunately purloined gun) out of his hands.
This stroke of impulsive decision does not succeed in dispelling the mist of moral ambiguity. Wormold still has to live in the world that he has—with his own lies and practical jokes—helped to make. Once again, a rationale is required of him, and he chooses (as does Beatrice) a version of E. M. Forster’s celebrated moral calculus. If one had the choice of betraying one’s country or one’s friends, said the author of Howards End and of that momentous phrase “the world of telegrams and anger,” one should hope for the courage to betray one’s country. Wormold’s confected cables to London have some of the absurdity of William Boot’s telegrams to Lord Copper’s Daily Beast, but his anger takes a Forsterian form:
I don’t give a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations.… I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
Many years later, in his rash introduction to Kim Philby’s KGB-vetted autobiography My Silent War, Greene was to write, again with a question mark that asked rather a lot:
He betrayed his country—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?
With or without its “perhaps,” this is bound to strike many readers as a bit too glib and convenient (as indeed it is). And how many times, after all, does a choice between country and friends really come up? But, safely back in London, where admittedly there are no torturers or executioners, Wormold and Beatrice discover that their secret employers, too, are immersed in moral ambiguity and expert in the means of manipulating it. In essence, and in return for his silence about the whole fiasco, Wormold is offered a sinecure and an official decoration. In one of the weaker sections of the book, Beatrice then repeats at greater and less probable length everything that Wormold has just declaimed above. In retrospect, we can see that this Greene “entertainment” was in many ways the curtain-raiser for the bleak universe of Le Carré’s George Smiley, and of the shadowland where any appeal to loyalty and the old decencies was little more than a rhetorical prelude to a stab in the back.
The conclusive end of the Cold War, and the implosion of one party to it, now makes some of Greene’s own rhetoric seem even more facile. The revolution did indeed come to Cuba, and the Captain Seguras did indeed take themselves off to Miami, and for a while Greene himself was an honored guest of—and ardent apologist for—the Fidel Castro regime. (His admiring chronicler Norman Sherry gives some disquieting instances in Volume III of his immense biography.) Greene was not, in fact, neutral in the Cold War, nor a sincere practitioner of moral equivalence. He was by inclination a supporter of the “other” side and, above all culturally and politically hostile to the United States. In 1969 he delivered a lecture entitled “The Virtue of Disloyalty” in Hamburg, in which (never mind Lamb’s Tales) he accused Shakespeare himself of having been too patriotic, and too reticent about Catholic dissidents sent to the gibbet. He was delighted when a Soviet cosmonaut took Our Man in Havana into outer space. But his audience and readership were in the “West,” so the “shades of Greene” were adjusted accordingly. And this needful ambivalence was often useful in his novels, since it compelled him to phrase his ethical dilemmas in liberal and individual, rather than Marxist or collective, terms.
Having already touched on Greene’s debt to Waugh, and most especially to Brideshead Revisited, I ought to try to return the compliment, even if obliquely. Writing in praise of Brideshead many years after its first publication, Greene said that he had remembered the novel’s beautiful opening chapter as very long, and was thus astonished to find, upon rereading, that it was as brief as it was. This he certainly intended as a compliment. One should say the same for his own swiftly-drawn but contemptuous portrait of the British ambassador to Cuba, whose appearance in the novel occupies no more than a page and a half. The desiccated and frigid envoy repeatedly insists that he knows nothing of what has been going on, and wishes for nothing more than to remain in this blessed state of unawareness. It is Greene, not the provincial and suburban Wormold, who is able to assemble a whole diplomatic biography from the objets d’art on view while he is being kept waiting by this dignitary:
Wormold thought he could detect a past in Tehran (an odd-shaped pipe, a tile), Athens (an icon or two), but he was momentarily puzzled by an African mask—perhaps Monrovia?
In “real” life, Greene was to greatly annoy the British Foreign Office by writing some devastating letters to the press a few weeks after the publication of Our Man in Havana. Announcing a post-revolution cancellation of the sale of weapons to Cuba, the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd had claimed that, when the weapons contract had been signed, there had been no evidence of strife. Greene wrote at his withering best:
Any visitor to Cuba could have given Her Majesty’s Government more information about conditions in the island than was apparently supplied by our official representatives: the mutilation and torture practiced by leading police officers … the killing of hostages.
By one of those right-place-right-time occurrences that swelled his reputation as both journalist and novelist, Greene had stumbled into contact with rebels and lawyers—Armando Hart, Haydée Santamaria, Melba Hernandez—whose names are still totemic in the Cuban Revolution and some of whom are admired even by those who later underwent a painful rupture with Castro. Whether it is deliberate or not I cannot say, but Greene’s description of the Havana Seville-Biltmore’s upper rooms as being “built as prison cells round a rectangular balcony” is a near-analogy to the “Panopticon” jail in which Castro was held by Batista on the Isle of Pines after his legendary attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953. Greene was well ahead of the story, before he fell well behind it. His secular and personal religion, which always stressed “the side of the victim” and which ostensibly forbade him to “see no evil,” did not safeguard him from letting both his Communism and his Catholicism get in the way of truth-telling about the rebel-turned-caudillo as the years went on.
By an irony of his beloved Cuban Revolution, which has left the island stranded in time and isolated from many recent currents of history and political economy (with its still-bearded leader now paunchy and gray and the only remaining Latin American head of government always to be seen in a uniform), the city of Havana has been compelled to remain very much as Greene described it.* The more flamboyant and amoral nightclubs did undergo a period of eclipse, but the sex trade has rebounded with a vengeance as the regime has become more dependent on tourism than Batista ever was. Communism, though—“the highest stage of underdevelopment,” as Hans Magnus Enzensberger once tautly summarized the case—has preserved (some might like to say “spared”) the old harbor-front and
its hinterland. Ernest Hemingway’s old haunts at the Floridita and the Bodeguita del Medio, the Calle Obispo and the “pock-marked pillars on Avenida de Maceo”; all the little landmarks of Wormold’s life, are still rather seedily there. Nor is this depiction valued only by nostalgic foreigners. Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Cuba’s great chronicler of low-life and the author of Trilogía Sucia de La Habana (Dirty Havana Trilogy), has devoted an entire novel to the imaginative reconstruction of Greene’s visit, and titled it Nuestro GG in Havana (Our GG in Havana). Greene’s ability to evoke a sense of place and time, as in his clever mention of Havana’s “blistering October” are encoded in this book as in no other, and remain redolent and real. In some ways, indeed, the existence of an antique rather than a modern Havana, until the day when the dam breaks and the full tide of Americanization flows in, is part of his literary and political bestowal. As is, of course, the silhouette of the anomic and rumpled and disillusioned Englishman in a torrid zone, nursing a bottle of scotch and musing ineptly on Pascal while caught somewhere between the status of émigré and internal exile. The human condition seen through the bottom of a glass: darkly.
Writing to his mistress Catherine Walston in 1956, Greene told her that Our Man in Havana was potentially a “very funny plot which if it comes off will make a footnote to history.” I feel almost as if I owe an apology for having taken so long to illustrate his elementary point.
(2007)
* I completed this essay on the day before Fidel Castro fell ill and handed over power to the Cuban armed forces, in the shape of his brother Raúl, in August 2006.
Loving Philip Larkin
Review of Letters to Monica, by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite.
IN MAY 1941, Philip Larkin was the treasurer of the Oxford University English Club and in that capacity had to take the visiting speaker George Orwell out to dinner after he had addressed the membership on the subject of “Literature and Totalitarianism.” Larkin’s main recollection of the evening was that the meal was an indifferent one at a “not-so-good hotel,” the club’s hospitality funds having been hopelessly depleted by an incautious earlier invitation to Dylan Thomas.
Nudged and intrigued by this near-miss of a potential meeting of minds, I once attempted a comparison and contrast between Larkin and Orwell, as exemplars of a certain style of “Englishness.” Both men had an abiding love for the English countryside and a haunting fear of its obliteration at the hands of “developers.” (Here I would cite Larkin’s poem Going, Going and Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air.) Both were openly scornful of Christianity but maintained a profound respect for the scripture and the Anglican liturgy, as well as for the masterpieces of English ecclesiastical architecture. (See Larkin’s poem Church Going and the same Orwell novel, as well as numberless of his letters and reviews.) They each cherished the famous English affection for animals and were revolted by any instances of human cruelty to them. (Here consult Larkin’s poem Myxamatosis, about the extirpation of the country’s rabbit population, as well as at least one Orwell source that’s too obvious to require mentioning.)
In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class. Orwell’s detested father was a servant of the Empire who specialized in the exceptionally nasty sub-division that traded opium between India and China, and Larkin’s detested father was a professional civil servant who came to admire the “New Germany” of the 1930s and supported the British Union of Fascists. But these similarities in trait and background produced radically different conclusions. Orwell educated himself, not without difficulty, out of racial prejudice and took a stalwart position on the side of the workers. Larkin energetically hated the Labour movement and was appalled at the arrival of emigrants from the Caribbean and Asia. Orwell traveled as widely as his health permitted and learned several foreign languages, while Larkin’s insularity and loathing for “abroad” was almost parodic. In consequence, Orwell has left us a memory which gets English decency rated as one of humanity’s versions of grace under pressure, whereas the publication of his Selected Letters in 1992, and a biography by Andrew Motion in 1993, posthumously drenched Larkin in a tide of cloacal filth and petty bigotry that was at least somewhat self-generated.
I now wish I had understood enough to push my earlier comparison a little further. For there is another aspect of “Englishness,” netted in discrepant ways by Harold Pinter and Monty Python, in which both men had a share. This is the world of wretched, tasteless food and watery drinks, dreary and crowded lodgings, outrageous plumbing, surly cynicism, long queues, shocking hygiene and dismal, rain-lashed holidays, continually punctuated by rudeness and philistinism. Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying is the most graphic distillation of all this in his early fiction, but it is an essential element of the texture of Nineteen Eighty-four, and was quarried from the “down and out” journalism of which he produced so much. A neglected aspect of the general misery, but very central once you come to notice it, is this: We are in a mean and chilly and cheerless place, where it is extraordinarily difficult to have sex, let alone to feel yourself in love. Orwell’s best shorthand for it was “the WC and dirty-handkerchief side of life.”
Philip Larkin’s own summary was if anything even more dank: He once described the sexual act as a futile attempt to “get someone else to blow your nose for you.” These collected letters reflect his contribution to a distraught and barren four-decade relationship with Monica Jones, an evidently insufferable yet gifted woman who was a constant friend and intermittent partner (one can barely rise to saying “mistress” let alone “lover”) until Larkin’s death in 1985. During that time, he strove to keep her to himself while denying her the marriage that she so anxiously wanted, betrayed her with other women sexually, and eagerly helped Kingsley Amis to employ her as the model for the frigid, drab and hysterical Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim.
On an initial scrutiny, Letters to Monica struck me as rather thickening the squalid atmosphere of some of the preceding accounts. But so unalleviated—I almost wrote “artless”—is its tone that the material takes on a certain integrity and consistency. Not unlike Larkin’s paradoxical infatuation with jazz, also, it helps furnish a key to his muse. The key in both cases—which is why “artless” would be such a mistake—is that about suffering he was seldom wrong. The dismal paltriness of the suffering doesn’t really qualify this verdict.
One of his ways of keeping Monica while keeping her at bay—they did not co-habit until very near the end, forced into mutual dependence by decrepitude on his part and dementia on hers: perhaps the least romantic story ever told—was to make an over-full confession of his own inadequacies as a male. “I’m sorry our lovemaking fizzled out,” he writes after a disappointing provincial vacation in 1958. “I am not a highly-sexed person.” This comes just after a letter in which he invites her to consider their affair in the light of “a kind of homosexual relation, disguised: it wdn’t surprise me at all if someone else said so.” And even earlier—it is not as if this is the record of a hot thing cooling—he writes in December 1954 that “if it were announced that all sex would cease on 31 December, my way of life wouldn’t change at all.” This naturally prompts one to review one of his best-known poems, Annus Mirabilis:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban,
And the Beatles’ first LP.
The lines can easily be read as a non-literal satire on the exuberant 1960s in general. The less-quoted succeeding verse is arguably more revealing:
Up till then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
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In Larkin’s mind, marriage was invariably a trap set by females; a ring in exchange for some perfunctory sex and then a lifetime of domestic servitude and—even more appalling—the rearing of children. Once again the poetry is unambiguous. The Life with a Hole in It conveys the cringe with greater complexity, but Self’s the Man is not unrepresentative:
He married a woman to stop her getting away.
Now she’s here all day.
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier.…
Even The Whitsun Weddings, in which he manages to write with some tendresse about a famous northern English nuptial tradition, closes with an extremely melancholy metaphor of energy mutated into futility, or possibly potency into liquefaction: “A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” And as for the thought of parenthood, not just by or from oneself, but even of oneself, we need look no further than the celebrated poem that probably convinced his admirer Margaret Thatcher that he wasn’t the family-values type. This Be The Verse opens by saying “They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do,” and closes by advising “Get out as early as you can / And don’t have any kids yourself.” There are virtually no references to children in Larkin that are not vivid with revulsion, the word “kiddies” being the customary form which the automatic shudder took.
No keen analyst is required to unravel this. Not only did Larkin have a bombastic fascist for a father, but he also had a simpering weakling for a mother. Sydney Larkin had the grace to die early but his widow Eva lingered on, querulous, demanding and hypochondriac (as well as extremely unwell) for decades. She may not have meant to make her son’s life a nightmare of guilt and annoyance, but she did. This resulted in Monica Jones winning at least one round. On no account, she told her man, should he be blackmailed into living with Eva. “Don’t be robbed!” she beseeched him. “Don’t be robbed of your soul.” If she couldn’t have him, she at least wouldn’t surrender him to that form of “the other woman.”