April 3, 1991—British novelist Graham Greene, whose serious fiction and so-called “entertainments” alike probed the human heart hopelessly ensnared between love and other forms of commitment, died at age 86 of a blood disease in a hospital near his home in Vevey, Switzerland. An intelligence operative in WWII, he had, in his last days, become so alarmed by a rumor about a friend he’d sacrificed much for, the notorious Cold War traitor Kim Philby, that he was frantically rifling through papers to ferret out something he long knew was elusive and ambiguous: the truth of a life.
In neither his religious faith nor his politics was Greene a diehard loyalist; in fact, he spoke glowingly of “the virtue of disloyalty.” A convert to Catholicism in his twenties, his faith was decidedly heterodox, such that, by the end of his life, he termed himself a “Catholic agnostic.” He shed the Communism he embraced for a few weeks in his youth and denounced Soviet aggression in Czechoslovakia, but still spoke warmly of Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh.
If ever a person seemed to embody the rather hyperbolic 1938 comment of E.M. Forster—“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”—it was Greene.
He had upset many in Britain with a sympathetic (and preposterously argued) introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, My Silent War, that compared the secret Communism of his onetime M.I. 6 boss with the covert Catholicism of Elizabethan England. Philby had acted as a mole in the West at the behest of the murderous Stalin, Greene suggested, in the same way that "many a kindly Catholic must have endured the long bad days of the Inquisition with this hope . . . that one day there would be a John XXIII." It had long been rumored that a single Scandinavian voter had blocked a Nobel Prize for Greene because of his Catholicism, but the Philby defense probably dampened any enthusiasm at home not only for that prize but for a knighthood.
The story of the sudden dismay that gripped Greene in his final days has been told in two articles by the masterful literary journalist Ron Rosenbaum (Explaining Hitler). In the first, a 1994 New York Times Magazine piece, “Kim Philby and the Age of Paranoia,” Rosenbaum discussed the frantic efforts made by Greene, as he struggled with his fatal blood disease, to discover the truth behind a rumor passed along by biographer Norman Sherry from intelligence author Anthony Cave Brown: Perhaps Philby had not been a true-believing mole after all, Brown thought, but instead a double double-agent (i.e., a triple agent), given the most brilliant cover of all—the most damaging West-to-East defector on the Cold War—to undermine the Soviet Union from within.
Rosenbaum concluded that Philby was not, in fact, a triple agent, but nevertheless bent on a different form of deception: concealing a savage disillusionment with both his personal situation in the U.S.S.R. following his escape from British intelligence in 1963 (Philby was so distrusted that he was under virtual house arrest for several years after defecting) and with the grinding, endlessly dreary Soviet Communism of Leonid Brezhnev.
Philby (inevitably dubbed in the West “The Third Man,” referring to two Cambridge classmates that had fled to the U.S.S.R. earlier, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess) was dead three years when Greene was informed of Brown’s speculation. The ailing author never responded, but, as he reviewed in notes about their meetings—including a 1985 visit to the U.S.S.R. in which the novelist met Philby again—Greene might have felt that real life was suddenly conforming to Greeneland.
I refer to one of his best later novels, The Human Factor, written in Greene’s sixties but not published until 1977. The protagonist, stationed in Africa, decides to punish the West for the racism shown toward his wife and family by defecting to the East. His reward: a drab Soviet apartment, where he wanly dissembles to Western visitors about his degraded state.
The fact that Greene had rejected Philby’s urging to tone down this grim conclusion suggests that the novelist intuited the actual state of the defector’s endgame. The mole mastermind whose colossal, multi-decade deception haunted the memories and fiction of ex-spooks Greene, John le Carre (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and William F. Buckley Jr. (Last Call for Blackford Oakes), according to recent disclosures by his widow Rufina, reaped a penalty that few in the West could have foreseen (especially after being buried with the honors of a KGB general): drinking himself into oblivion night after night, angry that the society in which he now found himself was nothing like the nirvana he once envisioned.
“Why do old people live so badly here?” the old spy asked. “After all, they won the war.”
It was an ending and a hellish punishment that his old friend, the literary master of paradox, well understood.
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