Volume 47, Number 19 · November 30, 2000
Our Man on Capri
By Yvonne Cloetta, Reply by David Lodge
In response to Friendship
(June 15, 2000)
To the Editors:
As someone who spent about two months a year with Graham Greene on Capri for twenty-two years (1967-1989), I have a few comments to make after reading David Lodge's review of Shirley Hazzard's book, Greene on Capri [NYR, June 15].
In my opinion, Hazzard's book is based on a misunderstanding between the two protagonists, who fundamentally disliked each other but never dared to admit it and played a kind of parody of friendship on both sides. This paradoxical situation gives the clue to Ms. Hazzard's assessments of Greene.
It is true that they both shared a great love for literature, but little else. Moreover, during these long conversations between them at the restaurant da Gemma in the evening, he was well aware that she was scrutinizing him which he resented strongly.
Shirley Hazzard is a very cultivated woman; there is no doubt about that, but in this cold little book, she doesn't show any psychological intuition and is thus completely mistaken in her observations about Greene.
—She claims that he didn't like either Capri, or his house the villa Rosaio in Anacapri. In point of fact, he fell in love with both in 1948 and was very sad when, forty-one years later in 1989, he had to leave the island and sell the house because of health problems.
—She claims that he was mean, giving as an example his wish to take a bus rather than a taxi to go back home after dinner. But for Graham—as he confided to me later—that phrase "have to take the last bus" was just an excuse to escape from her constant talking which he couldn't bear any longer.
—She assumes that the last thing he wanted in life was peace. I would contend that, on the contrary, peace was what he had been searching for all his life. I have good reasons for making this assertion.
—She claims that he lacked tenderness, but I never found this to be true in thirty-two years of closeness between us and I feel pretty sure that his friends—his real friends—would share my feelings.
It is a pity that David Lodge, for whom Graham Greene had a great esteem, was taken in by all the wicked lies hidden behind the beautiful prose of Shirley Hazzard.
The National Post in Toronto of May 6, 2000, published a review of this book by Julian Evans. The title of this article, "Hazzardous revelations," speaks for itself and the last sentence, "Did you ever ask yourself, Shirley, why he wasn't as fond of you as you would have liked him to be?," raises the right question to which I have been trying, here, to bring some elements of response.
Yvonne Cloetta
Juan-les-Pins, France
David Lodge replies:
It seems to me that the appropriate person to respond to this letter would be Shirley Hazzard herself.To the Editors:
Graham Greene's last companion, Yvonne Cloetta, does violence to the relation formed over many years between herself and Greene and my husband Francis Steegmuller and me: an association that, marked by Graham's reversals of mood, was also the occasion of irrefutable liveliness and enjoyment. In the years since Graham's death, and until publication of my recent memoir, Mme Cloetta was cordially in touch with me by letter and telephone, invoking our shared past. When I began my reminiscence of the Capri years, she told me—as I think she will recall—that she looked forward to this work "by one who loved him and and whom she loved." I have wished not to idolize but to revisit and pay tribute to Graham in his restless engagement with life; and, despite the dramatization it has now been given in Yvonne Cloetta's frenzied letter, my book remains, as David Lodge described it in these pages, "an affectionate but not uncritical" remembrance.
"Scrutinizing," or the attention thinking people give to their familiars, was certainly part of our exchange. Graham was himself a formidable "scrutinizer"; and, famously, a "strong resenter," with intermittent compulsion to test the indulgence of his friends. In those enkindled episodes, he, who knew himself profoundly, might have said—like Sartre's Inez in Huis Clos—"J'ai besoin de la souffrance des autres pour exister." In fiction he portrayed unsparingly his own recurrent need to elicit pain. On each of three occasions when we gave up on him, it was Graham who sent a disarming apology acknowledging his "evil temper" and inviting us to renew our meetings. An instance of this appears in my book.
In her eagerness for indignation, Yvonne garbles my explicit words. I did not "claim that he lacked tenderness"—since a man will naturally be, with his mistress, more demonstrative than in society. Rather, noting that conviction, courage, candor were visibly expressed in his person, I added, "But not, in my experience, tenderness"; and I hold to that carefully qualified opinion. I nowhere suggest that he "didn't like either Capri, or his house the Villa Rosaio," both of which pleased and suited him. As I have written, I think that Greene's Capri visits were less a homage to the island than "a means of being 'away.'…And a means, too, of being alone with the beloved, a term that should encompass his work." From his first years of possession, Graham wrote and spoke of selling the Rosaio; yet he came there, as I point out, "season after season, year after year," and in the event "the house gave him shelter longer than any other."
None of these impressions should, in my view, have required explication.
I have not said that Graham was "mean." From time to time he chose to flourish frugality—presumably to counter assumptions of his wealth. With this went a scrupulous reticence concerning his many acts of financial generosity—of which, as I wrote, one learned only through the chance testimony of others.
Greene's reiterated longing for peace, contrasted with a willfully agitated existence that drew him to scenes of conflict and oppression, is a general dichotomy I need not reexamine here. Similarly, the "real quiet love" for Yvonne that Graham indubitably felt, and of which he wrote to Catherine Walston, is illuminated, in the same letter, by his piercing comment on a lack of stimulus in that last attachment. (The letter has now been published by a biographer with whom Yvonne Cloetta incautiously cooperated.) It has never occurred to Yvonne that one had sought to spare her.
In constituting herself Graham Greene's proprietress, Mme Cloetta has obstinately cooperated with writers who have abused her credulity—while breaking with Greene's own chosen biographer, now completing his work of a quarter-century, and denouncing him in terms still less attractive than those she directs at me. The article, in a Toronto newspaper, to which she refers, and which patently though undeclaredly derived from Yvonne herself, was sent to me anonymously and followed by an anonymous phone call. Although the author addresses me by the first name, I have never heard of or from him. I have declined to respond to a series of Yvonne's provocations until now, when she obliges me to make the rejoinder I preferred to avoid.
My book speaks for itself. I will allow Mme Cloetta's letter to do the same.
Shirley Hazzard
Naples, Italy
Letters
January 11, 2001: The Editors, Corrections