I can’t remember where the title comes from; it must have been a quote, but whether it’s even Graham Greene I couldn’t tell you. A lot has changed in 30 years; for one thing, I never became much of a writer, a lesson in becoming which is what this essay is more or less about; or, if I was, it ended about 15 years ago. If I don’t feel I have much to contribute, I don’t wish to try; and my standard is high. It’s gratifying, however, that such a judge as Alan Ross, editor of London Magazine, liked this piece enough to publish it as my second (of three) in his magazine. The word I can’t stand to see now, to the point where I thought of rewriting the end and not acknowledging it, is “shuddered,” * right by the end — precious, self-dramatizing, vulnerable in quite the wrong way. “Paused” would have been better, more sincere. Evidently I still had a lot to learn — EW.
P.S. *I also dislike “heady” and “suffused” for similar reasons.
We may as well start with the glass chocolate factory of Nestle, where Jones the narrator of Doctor Fischer of Geneva worked, writing and translating letters for three thousand francs a month. The factory or office headquarters, as it does not much look like or smell like a manufactory of anything, is on the wrong end of Vevey, if we take as the right end of Vevey the road to Montreux, through the plush suburbs of La Tour-de-Peilz and Clarens: Anita Brookner’s Vevey, or Henry James’s in Daisy Miller. From Nestle directly out the highway rises above the street; heading under it, and around to the right, past the station funiculaire to Mont Pelerin, the road leads up a hill, its accompanying footpath walled high on one side. Two hundred yards on, a stone staircase breaks the even surface of the wall, and we should take it, to emerge in a quiet street of suburban half-villas. The gate is almost immediately on the right, and is usually open, and in the tiny matchbox cemetery we have entered, the grave of Graham Greene is the second on the left.
The long road which began for Greene in Berkhamsted in 1904 ended nearly ninety years later in Vevey, Switzerland. More clues from Doctor Fischer, beginning with its inscription: the novel is dedicated to Caroline Bourget, the author's daughter, at whose table in Jongny one Christmas dinner the idea for the story came to him. Mme Bourget is still listed in the phone book, still of Jongny, which if we were to avoid that stone staircase, merely following the road instead, we would have found: a suburb of vineyards tucked in the foothills of Pelerin, underneath the piers of the great autoroute which sweeps traffic high above the lake of Geneva from Montreux to Lausanne. When Greene was sick with the blood disease which would kill him, he removed himself from his home in Antibes in France and placed himself in the care of the Swiss doctors at the hospital in Vevey, near his daughter. At the hospital he died, on the 4th of April 1991, and—on whose request: his? Mme. Bourget’s?—was taken to the cemetery at Corsier and buried: permanently, it seems. A large marble slab has been erected, a rectangular border set into the ground, with pebbles, and on the stone, the name, Graham Greene, the dates 1904-1991, and nothing more: no epitaph, no snippet of verse, nothing even from Robert Browning.
I have visited Greene's grave twice, each April since he died, first in 1992 and then again earlier this year, missing the anniversary of his death each time by a few days only. This makes it sound like a pilgrimage when in fact it is coincidence. For part of the last two winters I have worked in the mountains near Montreux, and each time I have visited Vevey it has been on business: the first time to meet three small Japanese boys arriving on the train from Germany to attend our winter ski camp; the second time as chaperon to a coach-load of schoolchildren, European and American, from an international school in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, also in Switzerland to ski. As part of their programme we gave them a day off and a trip to the chateau of Chillon at Montreux—their first castle for many of them—then McDonald’s for lunch at the giant shopping mall opposite the railway station. While they ate and bought CDs and swatches, and Swiss officer knives, I sloped off to visit Mr. Greene. On my first visit, the year before, there had been no headstone, only a simple wooden cross with the name and dates again, the letters glazed in yellow. The ground below had been recently turned up, re-forming in matted clods, and dead flowers lay like twigs on the broken soil. Charlie Chaplin is supposed to be buried here too, but although there are not even a hundred graves at Corsier, I could not find it. The second time there I thought exactly as I had the first time, that it was a dull place, not pretty at all, and early April a dull season by the lake: the skies still gray, no flowers or colour to the trees, the vineyards so much dirt and scraggly brown vine on sticks. A wall rises around the cemetery, above it the backs of houses, again distinguished by nothing; there is no view. The lake is down the hill, the Savoy Alps across the water, rising steeply, suddenly above Thonon and Evian on the French side; towering over Montreux are the beautiful summits of Glion, Caux, and the Rock at Naye. From the cemetery at Corsier, however, none of this, just, to the north, the relentless autoroute, on it cars and coaches and heavy trucks, heading to Geneva, heading the other way towards the valley of the Rhone, or swarming towards a cleft, and the highway north to Berne and Zurich.
I am at the stage where having read nearly all of Greene’s books, I tend to pick one every month or two to re-read, most recently The Human Factor. It is family habit; as a young man in Belgium in the fifties my father learned English, he says, by re-reading Graham Greene. He has stopped now, but I have not. Trying still to become a writer, I think I can learn about writing from Mr. Greene, who learned his own lessons from Buchan, Conrad, and Henry James, also Rider Haggard. In his heady early days the young writer is suffused with the gross ambition of making Art; but soon learns to scale his ambition back, and become content instead with a sense of his work as craft, a good five or six hundred words a day, written out on unlined foolscap paper, with fountain pen, the word total neatly counted and circled at the end. In a gloomy moment the master said that he had no talent, that it had just been a matter of putting in the time. Well, yes, so it is with most of us, but from that might come rigour, the application of discipline and economy to style, which is all this reader-writer has wished to understand about English composition.
I have never stayed long at the cemetery of Corsier (perhaps Corseaux: the tourist office will tell you)—there being nothing more to see—and trudging down the hill each time to Vevey I have felt that I have seen a part of Greeneland, although I know he detested the term. It is all concrete and roadway, with a hint of parkland, dull prosperous suburban households, dogs and prams held tightly in check, like their owners, petrol stations and newsagents’, with the day’s headlines glaring back at us in black ink from a sheet of coloured paper stuck in the rubber webbing of a sandwich-board. In its way it must resemble the metroland of Greene’s own youth and early adulthood: very Berkhamsted, very Clapham Common. In Antibes Greene lived on a top floor of a high block of flats, with a road underneath, the harbour on the other side. The noise could be unbearable; apparently he found it difficult to work. These flats exist too in Vevey, indeed all of Switzerland, and create the same sense of disruption in the observer as they do anywhere. Perhaps—I read in one newspaper—if he had survived his stay in hospital, he would have purchased an apartment in Vevey and lived out his days there: in a flat possibly like Jones’s, near the chocolate factory. In the novel Jones wished to die but lived; and it is currency among his readers that for a long time before his own demise Greene wished to die too. He had lived a long time, and boredom, and melancholy, were always with him. As a schoolboy I read The Power and the Glory and forgot all about its author until I picked up Monsignor Quixote at eighteen, and read straight through to a passage I have not forgotten. . . ‘Why is it that the hate of a man—even a man like Franco—dies with his death, and yet love, the kind he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence—For how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for this love of his to continue? And to what end?’. . . and I shuddered, as I still do now, in the face of an old man still asking questions, knowing only doubt, humility having stopped him long ago from pretending to have answers.
Winter 1993
Photo from the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust