The Third Woman: The Secret Passion that Inspired The End of the Affair. By William Cash. Little, Brown and Company. 318pp. £14.99.
Greene on Capri: A Memoir. By Shirley Hazzard. Virago. 149pp. £12.99 in UK.
William Cash tells us his book "is not another biography of Graham Greene" but rather "an inquiry into the creative debt that literature owes to adultery, as well as an investigation into one of the most remarkable secret literary love affairs this century".
Not so remarkable, actually, and certainly not secret. The relationship between Greene and the Anglo-American Catherine Walston has already been documented - soberly by Norman Sherry in his official biography of the novelist and luridly by Michael Shelden in his decidedly unofficial 1994 book. Shelden portrayed Greene as a phoney Catholic, a treacherous husband, a homosexual paedophile, an anti-Semite, a sadist and - in what John Updike termed "some sort of sensationalist low point in literary biography" - both the murderer of a woman found dismembered in Brighton in 1930 and a traitor to his country. Cash doesn't descend to these murky depths and indeed makes rather grand claims for his authorial intentions, but the result is a book as overheated and silly as it is disorganised.
Its selling point, if it has one, is fortuitous - documenting Greene's relationship with Catherine Walston and linking the details of it to the writer's 1951 novel, The End of the Affair, it appears at the same time as Neil Jordan's movie of the novel opens here, and will no doubt benefit from the coincidence.
The story, which he does not allow to tell itself, is not without interest, especially for Irish readers. Greene met Catherine Walston in the winter of 1946 when he was 43 and she 30. The wife of a millionaire financier and the mother of small children, she immediately captivated the writer and almost at once they embarked on an affair. The affair blossomed in Ireland - Catherine had a rented cottage on Achill and they escaped there whenever possible.
Greene, married to the long-suffering Vivien, had had other extra-marital relationships, including with prostitutes, before this, and was to have yet more afterwards, but this usually unemotional man was besotted by Catherine. The same could not be said of her. Before and during her time with Greene, she was carrying on with Ernie O'Malley just down the road from her Achill cottage (she fancied him, Cash assures us, because "in addition to being an Irish Republican tough guy, he could also talk painting, sculpture and literature").
A Republican with quite a past wasn't her only speciality. In the 1950s she had sexual liaisons with a succession of clerics, including Father Donal O'Sullivan, the Jesuit who was to become the autocratic, crony-promoting head of the Arts Council. At the time of his affair with Catherine - mainly conducted in the Fitzwilliam Square basement-flat she also rented, where they shared bed and booze - Father O'Sullivan was Master of Novices at the Jesuit college in Emo, Portarlington. Such, seemingly, is the kingdom of Heaven - or, at least, an Irish clerical version of it.
However, Cash quotes Cyril Barratt, SJ, defending Father O'Sullivan and regarding Catherine as the temptress of pure and holy men: "Oh, I've seen her photo many times and she would have attracted me. There is a type of woman who likes to seduce priests as part of their rebellion against Catholicism." Cash also quotes a story told to him by "a highly placed Jesuit" about Father O'Sullivan "apparently very much the worse for drink" at a posh dinner party "running naked around the house chasing after the 16-year-old daughter of his host". Ah, the Dublin of bygone days.
Catherine's mild-mannered husband, Harry, who knew of most of her affairs, couldn't abide the opinionated, supercilious Father O'Sullivan, though he stoically accepted her relationship with Greene, hoping she would eventually tire of it. This she duly did, and though Greene tried all sorts of entreaties and emotional blackmail to win her back, rhapsodically reminiscing in letters to her about their times in Ireland and later in Capri, the affair for her was over. Her latter years were marked by illness and alcoholism and she died in 1978, with her husband and eldest son at her bedside.
It's a poignant and sometimes bizarre story but Cash tells it very badly, with constant stops in the narrative while he digresses about his own experiences as a biographer-detective, with assertions that are impossible to substantiate all over the place and with no clue at all about what made the wilful Catherine tick.
Shirley Hazzard's brief memoir has much more to commend it. Written with elegance and tact, it recalls Greene from the first time she met him in Capri in the late 1960s until his death in 1991. During that period she and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, visited the island, where both they and Greene had holiday homes, every spring and autumn, and her reminiscences of the man, though generally fond, have the ring of truth that comes from clear observation and a perceptive mind. She saw in his eyes "candour, reasonableness and a degree of passing goodwill. But not, in my experience, tenderness: that is, there was no self-forgetful surrender - whether to affection or to the vulnerable shades of trust or remorse; still less, to any enduring state of happiness." He certainly didn't have that with Catherine, who "secured Graham as her trophy lover, holding him in thrall between rapture and the rack for 15 years". And elsewhere in the memoir Hazzard writes that "the tormented love affairs of adult years - and, supremely, the long passion for Lady Walston - brought him to the verge of insanity and suicide".
Still, he found a kind of peace, if not happiness, with Yvonne Cloetta, with whom he spent his last years in Capri and Nice. "Seeing them together," Hazzard writes, "hearing his tone to her, one found it impossible to imagine, in their attachment, the anguish or antagonism that had otherwise characterised, since youth, Graham's relations with women."
John Boland is a journalist, poet and critic.