Greene on Capri

This memoir recounts Australian-born writer Shirley Hazzard's friendship with the English novelist Graham Greene, formed and sustained over more than two decades of seasonal encounters on the Italian island of Capri. The book is also a portrait of Capri itself, its expatriate literary history, and the circle of figures who inhabited Greene's world. Hazzard's husband, the American writer and translator Francis Steegmuller, is a central presence throughout.

The friendship begins by chance on a rainy December morning in the late 1960s. Hazzard sits alone in the Gran Caffè in Capri's piazzetta, the island's small central square, when two tall Englishmen enter. She recognizes the elder, wearing a black beret, as Graham Greene. Seated with his friend Michael Richey, a writer and Director of the Royal Institute of Navigation, Greene begins quoting Robert Browning's poem "The Lost Mistress" but cannot recall the final line. As Hazzard leaves, she supplies it: "Or so very little longer." That evening, the four dine together at the restaurant Gemma, and what Hazzard calls "our years of seeing Greene on Capri" begins.

Days later, Greene invites them to lunch at Il Rosaio, his small house in Anacapri. Built around 1922, it is modest: four ground-floor rooms, a walled garden, old tiled floors. Greene boasts of buying it in 1948 for about 4,000 pounds, fully furnished, and Hazzard's description counters later characterizations of his Capri life as luxurious. The afternoon passes in talk and laughter, aided by local red wine. All four are writers and readers, and a pattern of shared literary pleasure is set.

Hazzard devotes close attention to Greene's temperament. In his mid-sixties, he retains the posture of an English schoolboy, with remarkably fine, strong hands. His blue eyes are his most famous feature, described by Greene's friend, the Italian novelist Mario Soldati, as containing "blue fire." They convey rapid shifts of mood: curiosity, amusement, and literary intelligence, but also, in anger, a "playground will to hurt, humiliate, ridicule." Hazzard observes that Greene's eyes never convey tenderness or self-forgetful surrender to affection. His self-acknowledged "sliver of ice in the heart" can reveal itself as an iceberg.

Greene's orientation toward suffering is, for Hazzard, central to understanding him. His generation, adolescent during the First World War and coming of age during the Great Depression, regards suffering as almost a code of honor. His hostility to the American "way of life" centers on what he considers a contemptible pursuit of happiness, equated with materialism. His recurring suicidal impulses, from adolescence through expeditions to war zones, are countered by a paradoxical entanglement with life and the energy that enables him to write.

Over the years, the friendship follows a loose seasonal rhythm. Greene and Yvonne Cloetta, his companion of later years, visit Capri in spring and autumn. Evenings center on the restaurant Gemma, where its proprietress, Gemma, holds both Greene's hands and smiles. At Gemma's death in 1984, Greene walks in her funeral procession.

Literature forms the friendship's deepest bond. Greene reveals that he first read Tolstoy's War and Peace aboard a wartime convoy to West Africa: "The book was like some great tree, always in movement, always renewing itself" (70). Characteristically, he then undermines his own feeling: "Of course, I wouldn't feel that now" (70). They discuss Dryden, Empson, Henry James, and Wordsworth, often reciting poetry from memory. Greene traces his calling to a childhood reading of Marjorie Bowen's The Viper of Milan. As Hazzard reflects, for Greene a fresh book never ceases to be a possibility: "It was, I think, his only consistent form of optimism" (43).

Hazzard examines Greene's attitudes toward women, which she finds rooted in his early decades. His 15-year love affair with Catherine Walston, "a beautiful girl" who had married the wealthy Englishman Henry Walston, holds Greene "in thrall between rapture and the rack." The novel The End of the Affair originates in this relationship. In his fiction, female characters tend to be handmaids, helpless, or sexually disposable. His deliberate naming of a series of cuckolded fictional husbands "Henry," after Catherine's husband, carries an irony: Greene's own first name was Henry.

Greene's need for conflict is a recurring subject. The journalist and writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew Greene well, records him saying that "rows were almost a physical necessity to him." Hazzard argues Greene is not simply split between two selves but gives rein to disparate states of mind, putting them to service in his work.

The memoir threads Greene's Capri life through the island's broader history, tracing its relationship with foreign visitors from Grand Tour travelers drawn by the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii to Russian intellectuals sheltered by the writer Maxim Gorky after the failed 1905 revolution. By the postwar decades, the expatriate colony centered on Norman Douglas, a Scottish writer and classicist who died on Capri in 1952. Greene's tribute to Douglas, the introduction to his cookbook Venus in the Kitchen, is what Hazzard calls his most affectionate portrait of a friend.

Among the memoir's most sustained episodes is an excursion to Villa Fersen—named for the French aristocrat Count Fersen, who had settled on Capri in 1904—and Villa Jovis. The group visits the decaying Villa Lysis, built on the cliffs below the Roman emperor Tiberius's palace. Greene is delighted by its haunted strangeness, especially the opium den. He reveals that the Dottoressa Elisabeth Moor, a Viennese doctor he had known since his first Capri visits, once gave him opium she claimed came from Fersen, providing several pipes smoked in his London flat. At Villa Jovis, Greene describes himself as "a Catholic agnostic." The Dottoressa later becomes the subject of Greene's memoir An Impossible Woman, in which he accepts her often fictitious accounts without enquiry. When Dr. Giorgio Weber, a Capri-born physician and former island health officer who had personally witnessed the events the Dottoressa claimed to describe, writes correcting fabrications, Greene refuses to amend the text.

Hazzard also devotes an extended portrait to Harold Acton, the Anglo-Florentine writer and aesthete and longtime friend of both Greene and the Steegmullers, whose passionate engagement with art contrasts with Greene's detachment from visual pleasure. When Hazzard proposes they lunch together on Capri, Acton declines: "I would not care to impose myself on someone who now takes so little pleasure in my society."

In the early 1980s, Greene becomes consumed by investigating organized crime along the Côte d'Azur, the French Riviera, producing the polemical book J'Accuse. The ensuing court case interrupts Capri visits. When Greene and Hazzard coincide on the island, he is exceptionally combative, though his refusal to mellow has, Hazzard notes, "something valiant" about it. On a late visit, Greene confides that after a lifetime's devotion to Henry James, he can no longer read the late novels, finding them self-indulgent. That evening, the mood turns when Greene announces, "There's a spy in this restaurant," accusing a young man of eavesdropping. The next evening, asked about the young man, Greene laughs.

By the late 1980s, Greene's health is failing. In August 1990, he writes that illness requiring regular blood transfusions has compelled him to sell Il Rosaio: "The journey was really becoming too much." On April 4, 1991, Hazzard hears of Greene's death the previous evening. Yvonne writes that his last words were "But I want to go," and that shortly before, he had spoken of hoping to be remembered "in the way that one recalls Flaubert."

In 1992, Richey writes to Hazzard asking her to confirm the details of their first meeting: the Browning poem, the café, the Christmas on Capri. Hazzard identifies this letter as the genesis of the memoir. She closes by reflecting that Greene will be absorbed into Capri's capacious story, and that her impressions of the two tall men talking of great writers might endure "into the Millennium, or so very little longer," echoing the Browning line that brings them together.