Beauty and the Bottle

Andrew Varley reviews

The Third Woman: the secret passion that inspired The End of The Affair by

William Cash, Little, Brown and Company

Years ago - 1933, to be precise - the scholar A.C. Bradley's method of criticism was mocked in an essay called "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" William Cash, in his book about the affair between Graham Greene and Catherine Walston, does not aspire to get to the heart of the matter so unerringly. Perhaps "What was Lancelot Gobbo's inside leg measurement?" is nearer the mark.

The subject matter could hardly be better: Greene, the novelist with a worldwide reputation, obsessed with sin and passion; Walston, arguably the ideal woman, beautiful, rich, intelligent, and highly-sexed - but fated to die in a haze of alcohol. Mr Cash reduces this combination to banality, bringing to the task the peripheral skills of an investigative journalist and an unerring eye for irrelevant detail. His failure to understand the creative forces of fiction is a sad reflection on the English Department of the University of Cambridge, where, we are told, he studied; his struggle with the language ("I" is said to be a possessive pronoun), an embarrassment to his prep school masters. Careless and lazy writing abounds: the smoke from Chesterfield cigarettes is described as "exotic"; the famous scene in Brideshead Revisited, when Charles Ryder and Anthony Blanche drive out from Oxford to dine in what is clearly The Spread Eagle at Thame, is said to take place in Dorchester; there are many unintentionally hilarious remarks, such as the self-revalatory comment on "heroines of literature, from Stendahl to Flaubert...", which, one would have thought, is not a very great distance even for Mr Cash - certainly shorter than the hundred miles between Oxford and Dorchester. These may be trivilaities - and there are a hundred more examples - but it is through such trivialities that an author loses credibility.

Any writer of fiction uses his own experience and shapes it to his artistic purposes - a truism to you and me, a scoop to William Cash. It is refracted through his imagination and the dictates of plot and character. Sometimes the events and people he describes are recognisable: Lord Alconleigh in Nancy Mitford's novels is her father, Lord Redesdale; the long-distance diner Blanche is to a large extent based on Brian Howard but with elements of Harold Acton. Neither of these, of course, have to develop. They are party turns. It is not quite the same thing when it comes to central characters or elements of the plot. They have a life of their own which will transform the originals. It is a second-rate storyteller with little or no imagination who transcribes his own experience with only the names changed. Of course, plenty of these are selling a lot of books. On the other hand, and at a more profound level, a writer can describe someone in his fiction as they might have been under other circumstances or, especially in the case of a lover, as they were in his own mind. All these things are obvious enough and relevant to the relationship between Greene and Lady Walston, as she became when her millionaire husband was ennobled for services to the Labour Party. Greene's novel, The End of the Affair, is in the news at the moment because of the film which has been released recently. The book itself has enjoyed something of a vogue, to the extent, Mr Cash tells us, of his friend Miss Elizabeth Hurley underlining striking passages in green ink. It is possible that the vogue reflects modern day interest in the process and consequences of adultery than in the operation of divine providence.

It has become something of a conversational cliché to say that it is necessary to be a Catholic to understand The End of the Affair. I have no idea whether this provides an excuse for Mr Cash or not but the spiritual implications of the novel and that vital element of the actual relationship between Greene and Walston are cursorily treated. For all Mr Cash's wonderment at detecting parallels between the fiction and the real events, it would be a curious novelist who, in writing a book about an adulterous relationship where the beloved is ultimately lost, not to another man, but to God, did not draw on his own affair with a woman whom he met after being asked to stand as sponsor at her reception into the Catholic Church. Catherine Walston's motive in making this request to a man she had never met is unclear. Vivienne Greene remained convinced that her husband was already in the sights of the sexually rapacious Walston. Whatever was the case, their affair began not long after they finally met and continued on and off from the end of 1946 until the late fifties.

Attractive women, especially if they are rich, intelligent, and badly-behaved are treated quite differently from other mortals. Sexual and intellectual power is a powerful combination. Evelyn Waugh, whilst always susceptible to female beauty, was an acute observer of his friends' failings and something of a martinet when it came to social propriety. Whilst he would have regarded prudery as hopelessly middle-class, adulterous behaviour between fellow Catholics under his own roof was something he was unlikely to tolerate. Nevertheless, he was deeply impressed by Catherine Walston, partly because she refused too be overawed by him, something which he always found appealing, and urged Greene to bring her on visits to his house. There is no doubt that she had immense powers of attraction and a kind of distracted goodness which made her alcoholic decline, swigging Jameson's with the appalling Fr O'Sullivan even more tragic.

Unfortunately, in Mr Cash's account, Catherine Walston comes over as something of a tiresome monster. In the flesh, of course, it was a different proposition and, for most men, a seductive assault from her was hard to resist. She took a delight in exercising sexual power over priests. A theoretical explanation of this which appeals to Cash is that, since Henry Walston was in many ways the archetype of the complaisant husband, she needed to find someone from whom to provoke a reaction and selected God. Perhaps this idea fits too neatly with the bleak interior world of Greene's characters. There may be a simpler answer. It is not uncommon for addicts to find ways of bringing the house down around their ears, to find an escape in general ruin. Walston's solution may simply have been on an eternal scale. Greene again, of course. Is there a link between an addiction to sex, or at least to the power of seduction, and an addiction to booze? Proponents of the Addictive Personality would say so and common sense indicates that there must certainly be at least a possibility.

Greene's reading of the French theologian, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, inclined him to a kind of Catholic fatalism. Of course a cynic might say that it is very convenient if you are able to persuade yourself that sleeping with a beautiful millionairess is all part of the divine plan. Walston herself found this holy sinner approach to life attractive and, at a less tortuous level, sex, seduction, and booze can be glamorous. In the end, however, when they have been indiscriminately indulged, they become degrading. Psychological theories, Greene's view of humanity, and heterodox theologians apart, Catherine Walston's life was marked with the fatalism of the alcoholic. In becoming a Catholic, she was offered a release from her demons but, in the very act of reception, she began a relationship which could only make a mockery of her religion. In the end, self-loathing and the bottle do not spare even the rich and lovely. She saw herself as an Emma Bovary and their deaths were not dissimilar.