Graham Greene's Last Love

Not many of our acquisitions get reviewed in the press, but three London papers were prompt in picking up the story of our purchase of Graham Greene's letters to Mme. Yvonne Cloetta. Brief news items made the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard at the beginning of June, and a lengthy article written by Greene's authorized biographer, Norman Sherry, was featured in the Sunday Times on June 13.

Greene was introduced to Mme. Cloetta by friends in the French Cameroons in the late 1950s, but it was only after they met again somewhat later, in Antibes, where they began the affair that would last more than thirty years until the novelist's death, the longest active relationship Greene had with any of the many women in his life.

In all, more than 100 letters written between the early 1960s and the mid-80s in what Sherry aptly calls Greene's "not much better than chicken-scratching calligraphy," open up for us a relationship that had the characteristics of maturity and serenity that were so noticeably absent from Greene's marriage and his often stormy affair with Catherine Walston. Greene writes to Yvonne about the people and places he visits, and even of his fears of visiting some of them, like Haiti, but the narrative is interspersed with the sort of day-to-day affairs that those of us who aren't great novelists can easily understand: buying duty-free cigarettes, tending to the needs of a dog, a garden, and shopping, and of course the inevitable running commentary on the food and drink available and the acquaintances with whom they are shared. Dealing with such a wide variety of issues as they do, going beyond Greene's work as a writer, the letters convey to us a sense of the completeness with which he approached life in general. Reading the letters, we are convinced of his enduring love for Yvonne.

The letters were purchased with funds generously provided by Library Advisory Council member Robert M. Callagy (C'60) and his wife, Lynn. 4