I was living, for a time, in Antibes when I first met Yvonne Cloetta. It was an ideal, Fitzgeraldian sort of regime of early-morning swims and work on a book I was writing, except that it was regularly punctured by crocodiles of loudly enthusiastic tourists winding beneath my window.
The journalist in me was dozing, but I became dimly aware that a friend of mine knew Mme Cloetta and with the opportunism of the profession, mingled with my admiration for many of Greene's novels, I asked him if he would put me in touch with her. I didn't think for a moment that she would agree to talk to me, but she did. She was in Switzerland, escaping the heat of the Côte d'Azure in the apartment on the shore of Lac Leman that she and Greene had shared, and I took a TGV to Geneva to visit her there.
She had been interviewed once before, in 1991, in an unpleasantly trivial way just after Greene died, and I was expecting the encounter to be difficult, a process of reading between the lines combined with outright refusal to talk about anything she regarded as too intimate about her life with Greene. One thing was in my favour - that summer, three years after his death, two books on Greene had been published, both of which I heard she had hated. At least we would have something to talk about.
She was nervous when we met, and the very opposite of difficult. She was in her early 70s, pale, slim, on a tiny frame. My first impulse, as she brought whiskey and glasses and pistachio nuts on to the terrace of the apartment at Corseaux, was admiration for the individuality of her fashion sense, for the fact that she still liked tight-fitting trousers and a lot of jewellery. She smoked constantly, but radiated an intense vitality.
As we sat on her terrace and one story about the novelist gave way to another, night fell. Cloetta carried on talking. I spent that evening and the next day with her at Corseaux. The comfortable but functionally furnished apartment seemed at times to echo with Greene's absence, but never when she talked about him. Then her voice, roughened by a lifetime's smoking, would soften noticeably. "I'm telling you the kind of man he was," she would say.
Before I left, we visited Greene's grave in the hillside cemetery at Vevey, lying under a lush covering of roses, begonias and blue sage planted by Cloetta. On the way to the station, she suddenly asked me to send her my article before it was published. I replied that I couldn't do that. She shrugged, as if she had already steeled herself to be let down again. Apparently the piece I wrote (for this paper, in September 1994) did not let her down.
There is a sort of perk to the job of feature journalism that involves the presumption of friendship - imagining, from time to time, that one is a friend of the person one has written about. Janet Malcolm, in her book The Journalist and the Murderer, has written about the falsities of such friendships, and I didn't want to get into that situation with Cloetta. So we exchanged two or three phone calls and letters, and at Christmas 1994, when I was back in England, I had a card from her postmarked Juan les Pins, a couple of miles from Antibes, from the house she still shared with her husband Jacques outside the summer months: "So the bird has flown... The phone doesn't answer. Gone for ever? I hope not. Your kind card lets me hope we might meet again. Your presence in Antibes reassured me. I don't know why, but it did."
When we had stood in the churchyard at Vevey, in front of Greene's headstone surrounded with flowers, I had said, stupidly, to break the silence, "It's not a bad end." Cloetta had answered, "It's not the end for me." She meant, I think, that among other, more important feelings, she was continuing to catch the flak from journalists and biographers who had written what they pleased about Greene, and it left her feeling vulnerable.
One of the strange things that struck me about these writers, as I read their accounts, is that they had rarely bothered to ask Cloetta for her view of Greene or, if they had, made no attempt to understand what it was that had attracted them to each other, and kept them together for more than 32 years. Above all, these writers seemed to find it impossible to grasp how a novelist of Greene's acuity, seriousness and fame could have a relationship with a woman of Cloetta's provincial, unartistic background. It did not accord with the formulas of literary celebrity. All they seemed to be able to do with it was trivialise it.
When Cloetta and Greene met, in Douala in French Cameroon in 1959, she was, it is true, a colonial wife, married to a Unilever executive - a woman who loved dancing and was 18 years younger than Greene. But her marriage to her husband Jacques was in turmoil, and Greene's attentiveness - one of his qualities that she most often returned to - revealed to her a man with considerable reserves of emotional understanding. On her side, she stabilised him. Greene was not an intellectual, though he was capable of thinking in complex ways, and in Cloetta he met someone who, like him, was led by their emotional responses.
She was, as I found as time went on, a person of great emotional warmth. She liked to say what she felt: it was a kind of transparency in her. When we first talked, she answered all the questions I put to her about their relationship, including sexual ones: she was happy to tell me about the disastrous night when Greene took her to a brothel in Paris early on in their relationship (he never suggested it again), and the times when they would go out for dinner but never arrive - Cloetta's only thought after a gin fizz at the Ritz being to go straight back to the apartment. Because she had such a strong emotional feel, I think, she was also able to cure Greene of his lingering attachment to Catherine Walston, the rich, slightly neurotic centrepiece of his published catalogue of amours. Cloetta simply insisted that he choose.
Cloetta had been well protected by Greene from journalists' questions while he was alive. After he died, she was hurt first by the newspaper articles written about him, then by the biographies. One of the books that had drawn her anger at the time of our first meeting was a single-volume biography, The Man Within by Michael Shelden (1994). She had welcomed Shelden in Switzerland when he was researching his work. Shelden had chosen the line that Greene was a whoring drunk, ruled by hate, disloyalty, cruelty, secrecy, financial greed and a homosexual kink he lied about throughout his life.
The other book published that summer was the second volume of Norman Sherry's authorised life of Greene. Cloetta said that Greene had not been pleased with the first volume, published two years before he died. With the second, she felt profoundly that Sherry simply hadn't "got" Greene.The novelist's biographers, she pointed out, routinely claimed that such and such a character was "based on" a living person, whereas he had on several occasions told her of the extraordinary hold his characters - Charley Fortnum in The Honorary Consul, Querry in A Burnt-Out Case - had over him.
"[The truth] totally contradicts the amalgam that these biographers make between the real life of a writer and his writing," she said. "The writer becomes the hostage of the characters he has created." (Another, hardly less significant aspect of their relationship is the importance Cloetta had for his creativity. At my first meeting with her, she conveyed an intuitive grasp of Greene's needs as a writer, and the difficulties that being a novelist caused him. Greene's nephew, Nicholas Dennys, agreed with me later when I talked to him about this. "I think she shared that with him," he said. "She was actually closer to him in his sources of writing than a lot of intellectual people ever could have been.")
In her initial openness towards her lover's biographers I'm sure Greene would have seen a danger, had he been alive: the danger facing Helen Rolt in The Heart of the Matter, Elizabeth in his first novel The Man Within, the dancer Coral Musker in Stamboul Train. In Shelden's concluding line of a letter he wrote to Cloetta in December 1991 - "The last thing I want to do is cause you any distress" - Greene would have immediately detected the note of false reassurance.
The distress caused to Cloetta by Shelden's presentation of her lover ran very deep: and he dismissed her relationship with Greene in a couple of sentences. "Although she was the principal woman in the last 30 years of his life, he was not one to restrict his interests to only one person. Until the last year of his life, he never lived with Cloetta, and gave no indication that he wished to." (This, incidentally, was absolutely wrong. Cloetta described many occasions on which she and Greene had talked about living together, or buying a house in the arrière-pays above Nice.)
I didn't see Cloetta for a couple of years, but in 1997 she wrote to say that she felt a need to do something about what was being written about him. She summarised her predicament: "Should I tell you I feel calm in spirit, and released from my obligations to a man who gave me so much? Of course not; I feel exactly the opposite. All these biographers, spurred on by who knows what spirit of revenge, by jealousy or sheer ignorance, have made me immensely angry and given me an ever-growing desire to establish the truth (or at least to try to)... but how, and at what cost? The more time passes, the more aware I am of the perils lying in wait and the more I hesitate to launch myself into the fight." She was not interested in defending her own name, only worried that she would not be up to defending Greene's.
I had suggested that we make a film together, but the idea of being on television frightened her even more than appearing in print. Despite the self-imposed strictures about friendships with the subjects of interviews, I worried about her, and we began to talk regularly on the phone and to meet whenever I went to the Côte. She had a lot to deal with - her husband Jacques was ill and her best friend, Eliane, died - and it sometimes seemed that her memories of Greene were the main thing that kept her going. Her letters always returned to him.
In the autumn of 1997 I was in Moscow and Yalta to make a radio programme about Chekhov. I sent her a tape of the programme. She wrote back, "What a wonderful subject. I remember one day in Paris going with Greene to an experimental cinema in the rue des Saints-Pères to see The Lady with the Dog. We came out afterwards feeling overwhelmed. 'A masterpiece,' Greene said." After listening to the tape she wrote again. "More and more I see that nearly all 'artists' have things in common... To give you an example: 'Give me a wife who, like the moon, does not appear in my sky every day.' It's Chekhov saying it. It could be someone else."
Our correspondence became more frequent, and she began to question me on my own relationships, including my relationship with her. The second I could answer more easily than the first, particularly as she had already decided that there was between us "a sort of 'transmission of thought' that I'd call intuition". I had come on the scene, she said, at exactly the moment when she was full of "dullness and sadness", and I seemed to phone or write at exactly the moment when she needed to hear from me.
This was of course not true: what happened was that I phoned her from time to time and wrote, and when I went to see her, once or twice a year, we would go out to lunch at the Auberge Provençale or the Hôtel Royal at Antibes - both places she had often been with Greene - and we would smoke and drink too much and turn it into a bit of a party.
The last time I saw her was a sunny morning in the spring of 2000, when we didn't have time for lunch but sat for an hour talking in the deserted bar of the Royal - one of those occasions when a change of routine makes time stop. We had a glass of wine, and the sun angled through the windows. She had had another shock. An American novelist named Shirley Hazzard, who with her husband, the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, had known Greene and Cloetta during their annual visits to Greene's house on Capri, had written a memoir of Greene. Cloetta asked me to read it and tell her what I thought.
Back in London, I saw what Hazzard had done. A talky, literary-minded New Yorker, she had cornered Greene at every opportunity to discuss literature. Oblivious of her effect, she had failed to see that he didn't appreciate this kind of conversation or intrusion. Eventually, in subtle ways, Greene had shown his displeasure. Now, writing under the guise of friendship, Hazzard was complaining of Greene's misogyny, his "will to hurt, humiliate, ridicule", and his lack of tenderness. Cloetta once again felt betrayed; Hazzard's book had also, like the biographies, practically ignored Cloetta, though that was not what upset her.
We continued to write. She was also, at last, working with a friend, Marie-Françoise Allain, on a book about her life with Greene. I got married later that spring, and Cloetta was intensely interested in the details of the wedding, partly because it had taken place in Odessa, on the Black Sea, in an Orthodox monastery. I sent her some wedding pictures, and she wrote back, "Now I believe you. You'll have noticed how, like Saint Thomas, I only believe my own eyes - I knew someone else like that - and you must admit it was a considerable surprise, that morning at the Royal, when you told me you were getting married just like that, out of the blue."
I didn't know then (though looking at her letters now I can see a tremor starting in her handwriting) that her health was deteriorating. We started speaking more on the phone; I went to Odessa with my wife and baby son for six months, and stopping on our way back in Antibes in September 2001, I phoned her in Juan les Pins. Her husky voice was shaky. "I'm not terribly well," she said. "Can we make it another time?" She died a month later.
Before we left Antibes, I posted her a letter and some family photos. The same day I heard of her death, a reply arrived from her, dictated to her daughter Brigitte, in which she apologised for her illness and regretted that it would pass too late for her to see us. "But in life nothing is ever definitive, and everything begins again," she wrote.
Thinking about her life, I feel that that enigmatic phrase could well be applied to our understanding of Greene and of their relationship. Perhaps it ought to be, in memory of Cloetta.
The views of professional biographers, however definitive they claim to be, only hold until someone with better insight or another view, or both, displaces them. For example, Greene's biographers have assumed that his wife Vivien, who died last year, was a vital element in their assessments of his life and have paid her considerable attention. Yet she and Greene were together only 10 years; she was a difficult conquest, and an immature love that he grew out of. Cloetta was with him for 32 years, more intensely and companionably than Vivien ever was. He underlined her importance to him, six months before he died. "If she didn't exist," he wrote, "I'd put a bullet through my head."
For those who like to move in intellectual circles, Yvonne Cloetta, the Breton housewife with the little cocker spaniel who liked bright clothes and had nothing to do with the literary racket, did not count. I can't help feeling, however, that her version of events has more human truth to offer than Greene's biographers have managed so far. And human truth - from a woman who has waited, patiently, nervously, all this time to be heard - is also a sign of literary value.
© Julian Evans 2004
· In Search of a Beginning by Yvonne Cloetta and Marie-Françoise Allain is published by Bloomsbury, price £16.99