A Colossal Wreck by Alexander Cockburn Read Free Book Online

he was and the fact that I didn’t notice it must have meant I was equally drunk.”
    The transcript of this conversation turns up in Sherry’s first volume, plus my father’s gloss to the assiduous biographer on what heavy drinking meant at Oxford in the mid-1920s.
    “I got up fairly early, 8 a.m. I would then drink a large sherry glass of neat whiskey before breakfast and drank heavily throughout the day. I drank approximately a bottle and a half of whiskey every day, exclusive of wines and beers. God the amount of liquor one took on board! How the hell could I notice how much Greene had. I suppose I was two-thirds stewed the whole time. It seems to me I remembered everything—perfectly alert and so on. In those days it was alright.”
    Evelyn Waugh, my father’s cousin and also at Oxford at that time, added helpfully that drinking is the “greatest thing Oxford has to teach.”
    Shelden roots about, coming up with supposed dirt about Greene’s deviousness, penchant for dirty tricks and double crosses of a wife, mistresses and friends.
    Under this sort of earnestly malicious scrutiny most peoplewouldn’t look too good, and it takes an effort of will to turn aside from Shelden’s litany of presumptive encounters with women and young things of both sexes (scant evidence offered in the latter two instances) to remember that Greene essentially had three serious relationships with women in his life: his wife, Vivien; Catherine Walston, the American heiress with whom he had a tortured life in the ’40s and with whom he planned to have sexual congress behind every altar in Italy; and Yvonne Cloetta, in whose company he spent much of the last quarter century of his life. This is scarcely the helter-skelter progress of a committed Don Juan.
    Greene’s Catholicism is another irresistible opportunity for biographers to turn out page after page on guilt, the bite of conscience, the nature of evil and so forth. My father regarded Greene’s conversion in a more mundane light: “I knew him before Vivien. Quite early on, Graham said to me that he had fallen madly in love with this girl, but she wouldn’t go to bed with him unless he married her. So I said, ‘Well, there are lots of other girls in the world, but still if that’s the way you feel, well go ahead and marry her. What difference does it make?’ And then he came back and said (this went on over quite a number of weeks), ‘The trouble is that she won’t marry me unless I become a Catholic.’ I said, ‘Why not? If you’re really so obsessed with this girl, you’ve got to get it out of your system.’ He was rather shocked, because he said, ‘You of all people, a noted atheist.’ I said, ‘Yes, because you’re the one that’s superstitious, because I don’t think it matters. If you worry about becoming a Catholic, it means you take it seriously, and you think there is something there.’ I said, ‘Go right ahead—take instruction or what ever balderdash they want you to go through, if you need this for your fuck, go ahead and do it, and as we both know the whole thing is a bloody nonsense. It’s like Central Africa—some witch doctor says you must do this before you can lay the girl.’ And then to my amazement the whole thing suddenly took off and became serious and he became a Catholic convert. So I felt perhaps I’d done the wrong thing.”
    Greene wasn’t that complicated a fellow, though the biographers have a vested interest in making him so. He loved elaborate practical jokes and often these were designed to cock a snook at authority,“throw grit in the State machinery,” as he once put it. What more estimable course for a writer?
    August 9
    The Unabomber got several thousand words of his prose published at the start of August in the New York Times and Washington Post . Price of his admission: Three murdered people, plus maimings, with threats of more to come. Of course you can find people with a much higher career body count—Henry