Novelist Graham Greene was born on this day in 1904. Robert McCrum, novelist and Literary Editor at London's Observer newspaper, was one of those who examined the books in Greene's library prior to their sale after his death (they are now in Boston College). He thinks that "the key that unlocks the heart of Graham Greene....is the cornucopia of personal annotation, reflecting a long life of writing, politics, travel and sex, that's scattered along the margins and jotted on the endpapers of the books he was reading." Some of these annotations are by others, notably Catherine Walston, the American wife of the Labour peer Henry 'Harry' Walston -- the mysterious 'C,' with whom Greene had a long, passionate affair. Greene worked for the British Secret Service for years, and as McCrum puts it, "Catherine Walston also seems to have acquired Greene's taste for subterfuge":
In a copy of Wilde's De Profundis ("with love, Ritz December 2-4, 1949") she concludes a long dedication with this coded message: "1. PTMP 2.ILYB 3. SIMB 4.ROF 5. LLEOFE 6. ILY 7. IHGOOTB."
Other inscriptions recall ocean nights, Armagnac on villa patios, and opium smoked in the hotels of the East. In one of Greene's volumes of Kierkegaard there's a set of Scrabble scores for C and G. A dedication, dated Christmas, 1949, in The Life of Benvenuto Cellini gives a tantalising snapshot of their relationship: "How happy I was today in Cambridge buying roller skates and drinking Irish whiskey...." Greene's relationship with Walston became source material for his The End of the Affair.
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