I am a pilgrim.
For some, a celebrity pilgrimage might entail visiting the childhood home of assassinated central American freedom fighters whose patchily-bearded profiles adorn ten-thousand dorm room posters. For others, it’s seeking out the final resting place of a hip-swivelling whiteboy who brought black music to mainstream Western music stations before ballooning into a rhinestone-festooned jumpsuit. For me, it’s tracking down the former holiday home of an uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin, serial philandering, occasional MI6 agent who also happened to be, in my opinion, the greatest English writer of the twentieth century.
I read my first Graham Greene novel at twenty and, within few years, devoured the other twenty-three available (he repudiated two from the early thirties which have never been reprinted), plus his auto- and not so auto biographies, short story collections, plays, collected journalism and film treatments. I can’t quite explain why I fell under his spell so hard, though I expect it had something to do with his hunted prose (his protagonists were constantly on the run, either from shadows or themselves), uncanny depictions of the human condition and the literary questing of his travelogues. He travelled the world to find himself and found the world lacking.
As a lapsed agnostic (take that how you will), I considered his Catholicism enchanting, not least because he only seemed to grasp onto it through some kind of desperate, unrequited traditionalism. He was contradictory, conflicted and crotchety. He also, I’ve come to realise, got as close as anyone’s ever come, in their writing, to replicating the voice in my head.
We all have one. Well, actually, that’s not true. Apparently, lots of people don’t have an inner monologue battering away at their reason with exhaustive restlessness from dawn to dusk. It stunned me to discover that some people don’t, and it must be bliss. I suspect there aren’t many writers who don’t have this ‘gift’. Anyway, the voice in my head is Graham Greene’s.
So, that’s how I ended up here, halfway up a stranger’s wall in the middle of Anacapri’s historical centre, blindly taking photos of a private courtyard like a common burglar. Truly, this tiny patch of an expensive Italian island is my Graceland, my Père Lechaise, my Mulholland Drive. Bennifer and the Clooneys might bring the holiday-makers to the other half of Capri, a bustling hotspot of petrol, limoncello and overpriced sandals, but here, in the old district, you see Capri as she always was, with her quiet piazzas, stuttering Vespas and old men eating panini on the green benches.
To get to il Rosaio, the quiet retreat Graham Greene owned for over 40 years, visiting twice a year for roughly a month in spring and again in the autumn, you take the bus from the bustling port from just outside la Gemma, Greene’s favourite restaurant, and endure travel sickness as you wind your way through steep, serpentine chicanes over vertiginous drops until you’re deposited mere minutes from the former home of England's third greatest storyteller (articles on my attempts to break into homes in Stratford-upon-Avon and 48 Doughty Street will not be following at any point; they’re more fiercely guarded). Walk on towards the unassuming Piazza Caprile, with its fruit and veg and betting shops then down the alley next to Max Toys, following the thin lane onto Via Ceselle.
The first gate you see hides the dwelling where most novels from The End of the Affair onward (my first and still the most favoured of his output) were at least partly scribbled. Here, amid whitewashed walls and a canopy of bougainvillea and azure skies, Mr Greene sat in his utilitarian idyll (like most holiday homes, I suspect it was frugally decorated) and wrote in uninterrupted solitude, once claiming to create as much in four weeks as in six months anywhere else. Most writers have that special place, their Goldeneye, where they feel the inspiration speak louder than in other locations (I once blithered on about such a thing here).
The sad thing is, though he was made an honorary citizen of Capri in 1978, the only trace left of him is a faded Lions Club plaque outside his house. I asked in two bookshops on the island if they stocked anything by Graham Greene and neither did. The man himself never wrote about Capri and I’d have loved his take on the place, and especially boisterous, bombastic Naples across the bay, where I lived for over five years.
Your next question is why didn’t I visit his former home while I lived across the water from it, and the honest answer is that I didn’t know he had a house here until I read Russian Roulette by Richard Greene. In never writing about the place he chose to visit twice a year for forty years, he kept his secrets, as befitting a spy, close to his chest. On an island that boasts celebrity royalty, he’s a mere footnote, and in the warrens of Capri (on more than one occasion I retrace my steps to find the pathways have changed behind me), he discovered true escapism.
I picture him, in his younger years, staggering home from the Gran Caffe after a grappa or two or, in later times, sipping at his aperitivo in le Grottelle with a notebook in hand, watching the passers-by for characters of interest, and it’s impossible not to feel his presence on the island, despite the overabundance of John Grisham in the traitorous bookshops.
My fear that his lack of fame on this island is a symptom of his fading esteem elsewhere. Despite being nominated twice, Graham Greene never won the Nobel for literature (it’s long been suspected that a personal vendetta with one of the panel and his socialist politics prevented such an accolade), but his major works - Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, The End of the Affair, Our Man in Havana - deserve more attention. His books haven’t been adapted into major films for some time, with the last truly great adaptation (The End of the Affair) not even this millennium, and he’s never, unlike Orwell or Golding for example, on any school curricula.
So, do yourself a favour, pick him up again. Begin your own pilgrimage. You won’t have to scale any walls if you don’t want to, but consider this a leg-up.
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