Two tall figures under umbrellas appeared in the empty square and loped across to the café: a pair of Englishmen wearing raincoats, and one—the elder—with a black beret. The man with the beret was Graham Greene. I recognised him—as one would; and also because I had seen him in the past on Capri, at the restaurant Gemma near the piazza, where he dined at a corner table with his companion, and great love of the postwar decade, Catherine Walston. That was in the late 1950s, when I used to visit Naples and Capri from Siena, where I then spent part of the year. One knew that Greene had a house in the town of Anacapri, in the upper portion of the island, which he had visited faithfully if sporadically for many years.

On that damp December morning, Greene and his dark-haired friend came into the Gran Caffè, hung their coats, and sat down at the next tiny table to mine. I went on with my puzzle; but it was impossible not to overhear the conversation of my neighbours—or, at any rate, not to hear one side of it. Graham Greene certainly did not have a loud voice, but his speech was incisive, with distinctive inflections, and his voice was lowered only in asides or to make confidences. It was an individual voice, developed before the great British flattening, when one’s manner of speaking might, beyond any affectation of class, become personal speech: one’s own expressive instrument casting its spell in conversation. I would in any case have noticed what he was saying, because he began to quote from a poem by Robert Browning called “The Lost Mistress.” The poem opens:

[...]

And then he could not remember the very end. He recurred to this several times, trying to draw it up from his memory, but did not manage it.

When I had finished my coffee and my puzzle, and had paid, and had taken my raincoat and umbrella from the dank stand, I said, “The line is

“Or so very little longer.”

Graham then was in his midsixties; Francis, two years younger; Michael Richey, late forties. I was in my thirties. Graham and Michael were both Catholics, Graham having converted at the time of his youthful marriage. (Years later, after Graham’s death, Michael wrote to me: “One bond—if it’s not too highfalutin’ a concept—was Catholicism; it would not have been the same without that.”) Francis, raised in a Catholic family, had withdrawn from the Church in early youth. I had grown up a perfunctory Anglican. We were, all four, writers and readers in a world where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount—beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings.” We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.

Graham had many pleasures and, perhaps, even in later years, some euphoric moments. But enjoyment was transitory and not, to him, a necessity: a disposition, deeply attributable to temperament, which should also be referred to his background and generation. As with other Englishmen of his age—who had become adolescent during the slaughter of the 1914-18 war, and adult with the Great Depression—pleasure could not be an assumption and was not a goal; whereas suffering was a constant, and almost a code of honour. Suffering was the attestable key to imaginative existence. “Happiness” had an element of inanity, verified by Greene in life and in his fiction: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.”

One of Graham’s rare contemporary admirations, Padre Pio—a south Italian village priest said to be afflicted with the stigmata—asserted that “suffering is the test and testimony of love.” In Greene, however, I think that suffering was a requirement of consciousness itself: an agitation of spirit providing some defence against the dreaded accidie. “I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive”—so writes the exhausted protagonist of Graham’s A Burnt-Out Case in the opening sentence of that novel.

Indignation that would not be roused by a degree of industrial wealth no novelist could ever envisage will regularly be directed at the prosperity—rare enough—of a gifted writer. And Graham Greene, since his death, has been rebuked by commentators eager to demonstrate that, in his having caused millions of readers to buy his books throughout half a century, and having profited from that seemingly harmless transaction, he had relinquished his immortal soul. Creative writing, which, alone among the arts, seems delusively accessible to every articulate person, has immemorially attracted that confusion of esteem and envy, centred on the independence in which it is conceived and composed: a mystery of originality that never loses fascination for the onlooker. In W. H. Auden’s view,

this fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artist works; he, and in our age almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue not of some special talent, but of their humanity, could do if they tried.

Aversions to food have prompted knowing comment since antiquity, and interpretations are not lacking in our own assiduous day. However that may be, Graham’s “case” was consistent with his hostility to all matters imposed on him—whether by circumstance or natural forces, or at the will of others: a motif unmistakable in the pattern of years. The helplessness or complicity of our humanity in its involuntary needs, cravings, and decay aroused a resentment conspicuous above all in many of Graham’s responses to women. For much of his life he had wrestled, in love and in his books, with the paradox of desire and consummation, illusion and disgust, ecstasy and blame. It was not difficult to imagine him holding the view ascribed by Plutarch to Alexander the Great—another abstemious eater—that “sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was merely mortal.”

From the 1920s into the 1940s, Greene and several of his talented male contemporaries were working, in English fiction, related veins of anxiety and intelligence, anger and danger, sex and sensibility, and contrasting an ironic private humanity with the petty vanities and great harm of established power. Their narrative frequently centred on the difficulty of being a moody, clever, thinskinned—and occasionally alcoholic—literate man who commands the devotion of a comely, plucky, self denying younger woman. These were demonstrable elements of educated life in Britain between the sexes and between the wars, and they lingered in Graham’s fiction ever after, briefly “orientalised” in The Quiet American.

Among the multiple causes of Graham’s disconnection from Italian scenes one might count his unconcern with aesthetic pleasures important to many who visit the peninsula. Evelyn Waugh, who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, regretted having neglected Europe during his youthful travels of the 1920s and ’30s, later wrote that restless young British writers of his generation had deludedly imagined that

Europe could wait. There would be time for Europe . . . These were the years when Mr. Peter Fleming went to the Gobi Desert, Mr. Graham Greene to the Liberian hinterland; Robert Byron . . . to the ruins of Persia. We turned our back on civilisation. Had we known, we might have lingered . . . Had we known that all that seeming-solid, patiently built, gorgeously ornamented structure of Western life was to melt overnight like an ice castle . . . Instead, we set off on our various stern roads; I to the Tropics and the Arctic . . . At that time it seemed an ordeal, an initiation to manhood.

Noticing, on another raking of our Capri shelves, Leon Edel’s volumes of Henry James’s letters, Graham said that he, too, brought those books to Capri: “They make me want to write.”

To write fiction is to learn to inhabit other skins, whether thinner or thicker than one’s own. (Thus Auden, paraphrasing the Book of Revelation, pays tribute to the novelist who must among the Just / Be just, among the Filthy filthy too.) In his best work, Graham excelled at those acts of convinced imagination and irresolute morality. There was, also, an authorial distance that could make it hard to establish where his sympathies lay—in Brighton Rock, for instance—or whether sympathies were engaged at all, as in The Quiet American, where cynicism, scarcely stirred by sensuality, expresses itself in violence and displeasure. In The End of the Affair, the temperament of the narrator, Bendrix, is unsparingly close, in anger, wit, and struggle, to Graham’s own—so faithfully drawn as to challenge the credibility of the character by seemingly improbable contrasts of mood: an accomplished exercise in self knowledge.

He asked whether I could remember a poem at sight. I told him that I had rarely “memorised” a poem, even at school, and had no “system”; that I remembered particular lines at once, being moved by them, and then might read the poem over, bear it in mind, say it aloud when I was alone. Then I might remember it always. That had been the case since childhood. In adolescence and in my early twenties, when I had much solitude whether circumstantial or inward, I was able to recall poems from a reading or two if they were not very long. There was nothing diligent in it. Recollection was spontaneous, easier than breathing. One remembered all manner of lines that captured ear and imagination. Where there was greatness, the words seemed inevitable, as if memory had been awaiting them.

For Graham, something of the same: memory, rather than memorising. He found that he added less and less with age, and rarely recalled lines of new poets, even if he liked their work: “I don’t think one is so accessible to poems that come after one’s own era.” Sensations aroused by poetry were in any case private, intuitive, unaccountable. In the past, poetry had been a presence that cut across the generations and the classes. One never knew where it would turn up. Like mercy.