After decades of silence, interrupted only by sporadic, guarded communiqués, the correspondence of Graham Greene and Kim Philby was spurred into renewed intimacy by a troubled global situation: a middle eastern state, unbalanced by regime change, had begun taking western hostages, while in nearby Afghanistan, religiously motivated guerrilla fighters threatened efforts to prop up a secular regime. The year is immediately recognisable: it is 1979.
Despite the obvious parallels, Greene and Philby's decade-long conversation (the letters continue throughout the 1980s) takes place in a world far removed from the present: one frozen in binary opposition, during that weary interregnum before the cold war's end. It was under such conditions that the pair reprised their 50-year friendship - and their letters should be read in the light of that era, with its great power rivalry, spheres of influence, Salt treaties and proxy wars.
If discussion of such a musty correspondence seems belated, so is its appearance in the public realm. Philby died in 1988. His letters were first flushed out by Greene's friend, Rick Gekoski, during a visit to Philby's widow in Moscow. The material went under the hammer at Sotheby's, and eventually reached the Lauinger library at Georgetown University. Since then, access has been restricted to Greene's official biographer. It is only in recent months - 15 years after publication of the first volume of Norman Sherry's life of Greene - that the final restrictions have been lifted on the author's papers: a relaxation prompted by agitation from Greene's executors, other scholars, and the looming centenary of the author's birth.
So what do the letters tell us that the biographer has not already? Not a lot, and also a great deal. Sherry makes the most of the meagre fresh "political" content of the letters and raises various intriguing possibilities arising from them, but their alternative significance lies in what is left unsaid: whether or not Philby or Greene were double, or even triple agents, for instance. Both had been spies, but Greene was also a novelist. Where Philby lived determinedly in the world and used his considerable abilities to shape it to his own ends, Greene made only forays. When Philby quizzed him on his inveterate travelling, Green replied: "Why do I go? Only I suppose because I have a consuming curiosity." The spy lived in Moscow, but the novelist lived in "Greeneland."
In Greeneland, real people and stories exist to be exploited for fictional ends. Greene, emerging to artistic maturity as the iron curtain descended, found his most compelling contemporary figura in the spy, and, it followed, the most compelling theme: betrayal. Spying was Philby's profession; betrayal his donnée. And here lies the true significance and fascination of the letters: a conversation overheard between the artist and his muse.
Following the initial flurry inspired by the Iranian hostage crisis, the letters settle into a bantering, twice-yearly shuttle: Philby's neatly typed; Greene's mostly in his familiar scrawl. Greene sends books, Philby thanks him and they then return to gossiping of mutual acquaintances and enemies (Greene writes of his wariness around Malcolm Muggeridge, while Philby dismisses the late Bernard Levin as a "diarrheal charlatan"). They often discuss politics, with Greene on one occasion decrying the cold war impasse: "If the United States controls the globe or if Russia controlled the globe, what difference? Then why not divide it? So we get back spheres of influence and to hell with ideologies." Philby disabuses him. "I still jib at your idea of division. A goodly part of the world is already divided and the rest of it doesn't want to be." Greene often hedges his pronouncements as questions; evidence perhaps, that - despite being seven years Philby's senior - the novelist never sloughed off his pupil's skin.
Throughout, the letters are light-hearted, by turns nostalgic, ironic, acute. Theirs is the insouciant chatter of two Englishmen of the world, sharing backgrounds and convivial temperaments. They are charming interlocutors - so charming that the reader could fail to note the absence of any discussion of their core beliefs: Philby's communism and Greene's Catholicism. Perhaps it was a diplomatic silence in a correspondence undoubtedly monitored by outsiders, or a studied avoidance of potentially contentious topics.
The final impression is one of fondness, bolstered by a sense of mutual indebtedness. Philby, holed up in his Moscow flat with his Russian wife and week-old copy of the Times for company, would surely have clung to his sole apologist in the west, despite his sense of the utter certainty of his cause; while Greene, thankful for the tradecraft imparted by his mentor, must have also been aware of another, signal contribution made by Philby to his life. The arch-traitor had done the audacious thing: he was "the man who sold the bomb." He had provided Greene with a paradigm act of betrayal, around which he had built much of his fiction. "I always thought that you were one of the few people in England who would really understand," wrote Philby in 1968. Greene not only understood, he prospered by the lesson. Underlying his warm words is a tacit acknowledgement that Philby's fall had been, in a sense, his triumph, and that he owed his loyalty in recompense. It is as viable an explanation as any for his exculpatory efforts on the spy's behalf.
Loyalty to the great betrayer: a taxing moral contortion, but the sort at which Greene was expert. Indeed, the mere existence of this correspondence speaks of his lifelong attraction to "the dangerous edge of things/The honest thief, the tender murderer…"
Georgetown University's remaining restricted Graham Greene materials will be opened permanently to scholars and researchers on 2nd October
