The Third Man and the Fallen Idol
Graham Greene
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Graham Greene
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
The Third Man
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
The Fallen Idol
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
History of Vintage
Copyright
About the Book
The Third Man is Graham Greene’s brilliant recreation of post-war Vienna, a ‘smashed dreary city’ occupied by the four Allied powers. Rollo Martins, a second-rate novelist, arrives penniless to visit his friend and hero, Harry Lime. But Harry has died in suspicious circumstances, and the police are closing in on his associates …
The Fallen Idol is the chilling story of a small boy caught up in the games that adults play. Left in the care of the butler and his wife whilst his parents go on a fortnight’s holiday, Philip realises too late the danger of lies and deceit. But the truth is even deadlier.
About the Author
Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and he visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa.
As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography – A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections Reflections and Mornings in the Dark. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.
Also by Graham Greene
Novels
The Man Within
It’s a Battlefield
A Gun for Sale
The Confidential Agent
The Ministry of Fear
The End of the Affair
The Quiet American
A Burnt-out Case
Travels with my Aunt
Dr Fischer of Geneva or
The Bomb Party
The Tenth Man
Stamboul Train
England Made Me
Brighton Rock
The Power and the Glory
The Heart of the Matter
Loser Takes All
Our Man in Havana
The Comedians
The Human Factor
Monsignor Quixote
The Honorary Consul
The Captain and the Enemy
Short Stories
Collected Stories
The Last Word and Other Stories
May We Borrow Your Husband?
Twenty-One Stories
Travel
Journey Without Maps
The Lawless Roads
In Search of a Character
Getting to Know the General
Essays
Collected Essays
Yours etc.
Reflections
Mornings in the Dark
Plays
Collected Plays
Autobiography
A Sort of Life
Ways of Escape
Fragments of an Autobiography
A World of my Own
Biography
Lord Rochester’s Monkey
An Impossible Woman
Children’s Books
The Little Train
The Little Horse-Bus
The Little Steamroller
The Little Fire Engine
TO CAROL REED
in admiration and affection and in memory of so many early morning Vienna hours at Maxim’s, the Casanova, the Oriental
Introduction
When one has spent one’s life suffering the windy outpourings which call themselves statesmanship, political wisdom and human justice … it is soothing to go into the sewers and see the mire which is appropriate to all this.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Graham Greene’s darkest entertainment, The Third Man, ends with a shoot-out in the sewers of Vienna and the death of the penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. A convert to Catholicism, Greene had found an appropriate image for man’s fallen state in the city’s murky underground. And Lime, with his alley-rat amorality, is a familiar Greene character. Greene’s literary interest was not just in shabby crooks and other compromised characters; he wanted to dissect their morally ambivalent worlds.
Rollo Martins, a thirty-five-year-old hack writer, arrives in post-war Vienna at the invitation of his oldest friend Harry Lime. To his astonishment he learns that Lime has recently been killed in a motor car accident and is to be buried that day. On further investigation, Martins discovers that the accident is not what it seems. A police source reveals that Lime had been selling watered-down penicillin on Vienna’s black market. The adulterated contraband resulted in the death or brain damage of children with meningitis. Murder was a by-product of Lime’s racket. Martins sets off on a blundering quest to prove his friend’s innocence, only to discover that Lime has faked his own death in order to elude the police. The authorities then draw up a plan to use Martins as a decoy and bring Lime into the open. Martins confronts his old friend in the sewers and, taking the law into his hands, shoots him dead. As a result of Martins’ amateur sleuthing, three men (a porter, a policeman, and Lime himself) have died violently. Perhaps Martins should not have strayed into other people’s affairs.
Vienna provided Greene with a perfect setting for his tale of double-dealing and opportunist loyalties. The city stood on the border between the Soviet empire and the capitalist West and, on one level, The Third Man may be read as a Cold War allegory. Greene wrote it in 1948 when the tensions between West and East began to emerge after Stalin blockaded Berlin that summer. It is tempting to see Harry Lime as the fictional counterpart of the British spy Kim Philby, who had betrayed fellow agents to the Soviet Union. Greene knew Philby well during the war when he worked for him in British Intelligence, and he stayed in touch with his former chief long after he had been exposed as a Russian agent in 1963. Philby had helped Communists to escape through the Vienna sewers in 1934; newspapers later dubbed him ‘The Third Man’. Yet it would be a mistake to read too much into the idea of Lime as Philby. The racketeer is a compound of many men whom Greene had known. His surname suggests not only ‘Graham Greene’ (lime green) but the quicklime in which murderers were said to be b
uried.
In its first incarnation, The Third Man was not intended to be read as a book, but was an early draft for a screenplay (commissioned in 1947 by the London-based film producer Alexander Korda). Greene wanted to write the Lime story first as a novella in order to explore characterisation and detail. The result was one of the greatest films of the twentieth century, The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed and starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime. Greene wrote the book version in just eight weeks while on holiday in Italy in 1948. It has many of the virtues of the film, not least a sharp dialogue and fast-paced action. Lime’s last stand in the sewers could almost be a burlesque of the cheap Western novels which Martins writes for a living. The book also appears to parody the Victorian detective novels (Is He The Man?, The Nameless Man) which Greene avidly collected.1 For some, however, the film is better than the book; it has a greater suspense and atmosphere, as well as the instantly recognisable theme tune played on an Austrian zither.
The origins of the Harry Lime story are shadowy. In his autobiography, Ways of Escape, Greene relates how in 1947 he had scribbled an idea for the opening of a story on the back of an envelope: ‘I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.’ That was it – one sentence. Greene went to Vienna early the following year in order to develop the story. After two weeks, Greene claimed, the story was still no further advanced until he met a British Intelligence officer who told him of the city’s vast sewer system and the black market in penicillin. Greene had found his plot.
However, a slightly different story is told by the surviving documents. In his book, In Search of The Third Man, Charles Drazin shows conclusively that Greene already had the beginning, middle and end of The Third Man a good five months before he visited Vienna. As early as September 1947 he wrote to his lover Catherine Walston:
Tonight … I felt restless, so I walked all up Piccadilly and back and went into a Gent’s in Brick Street, and suddenly in the Gent’s, I saw the three chunks, the beginning, the middle and the end, and in some ways all the ideas I had – the first sentence of the thriller about the dead Harry who wasn’t dead, the Risen-from-the-dead story, and then the other day in the train all seemed to come together. I hope to God it lasts – they don’t always.
Twelve weeks later, in December 1947, Greene and his director friend Carol Reed were invited to dinner by the film producer Alexander Korda at his offices in Piccadilly. Talk was of Reed’s recently completed movie The Fallen Idol, based on Greene’s mesmeric tale about the corruption of childhood innocence, ‘The Basement Room’. Greene had begun this story – one of his best – on his way home from Liberia in 1935 on board a cargo ship. It tells of a small boy who has been left alone by his parents in a grand London house in the care of their butler Baines and his jealous wife. The seven-year-old Philip wants to see what lies beyond ‘the green baize door’ – the dark basement inhabited by Mr and Mrs Baines – and he embarks on a hazardous exploration of the grown-up world. Philip is clearly devoted to the butler and idealises him quite as much as Rollo Martins had idealised Harry Lime. Eventually the hateful Mrs Baines is killed by her unfaithful husband, and the boy is innocently forced to betray the butler to the police. He remains emotionally scarred by his betrayal.
Critical reception of The Fallen Idol was good when it opened as a film in London. Greene’s writing had transposed sympathetically to the screen, and Ralph Richardson was memorable as the genial if adulterous butler Baines. The story touched on Greene’s personal anxiety about the ‘green baize door’. His father had been headmaster of a public school in Berkhamsted near London, and each day as a young boy Greene would experience a conflict of loyalties as he left the family quarters to enter the pupils’ world. Frontiers have a dynamism of their own in Greene’s fiction: they set off a reflex of unease.
As a Jewish refugee with his own experience of betrayal in Fascist Hungary, Korda was impressed by the out-takes he had seen of The Fallen Idol. Now he wanted Greene to write an original screenplay for a film to be set in bomb-shattered Vienna. The city would make a good setting for a thriller, Korda believed. Virtually every Viennese was involved in black-marketeering of one kind or another; there was not merely defeat in the former Nazi outpost, but debasement. Greene mentioned to Korda the germ of his tale about the ‘risen-from-the-dead’ Harry Lime. Korda was taken with the idea, and a few days later he agreed to act as backer.
In early February 1948 Greene left London for the ‘smashed, dreary city of Vienna’. The Austrian capital was divided into four occupied zones – Russian, American, French, British – and everywhere Greene went he saw evidence of the moral and material ruins of Hitler’s collapsed empire. Some families were still camped out with their children, competing with the rats for food and shelter. Vienna offered as sad a spectacle as Sarajevo or Baghdad would to a later generation, and Greene brings the city to life in his descriptions of the destroyed baroque elegance along the Danube and the ‘great wounded spire’ of St Stephanskirche. Kim Philby’s old channels of pursuit and escape – the Vienna sewers – had become an international no-man’s-land where criminals like Harry Lime could move about unchecked by the city’s quadripartite control.2
Venturing into the Russian zone, Greene went up on a Ferris wheel in a bombed-out amusement park. As he looked down at the dots of people far below, he got the idea for the book’s key episode. In the famous Ferris wheel scene, Harry Lime asks an appalled Martins whether he would really care if any of the ‘dots’ on the ground stopped moving. For twenty thousand pounds a dot, Lime believes that anyone would be happy to wipe out one dot after another. In this chilling scene, Lime is a twentieth-century equivalent of the devil’s ambassador, who takes Martins to a high place to survey the world, alternately threatening and tempting him. ‘Nobody thinks in terms of human beings,’ Lime says in justification of his penicillin racket. ‘Governments don’t, so why should we?’ These cynical lines are spoken in the shadow of the industrialised killings of Treblinka and the blinding flash of Nagasaki, which had brought unprecedented destruction. Whatever his detractors might say, Greene was a moralist troubled by human turpitude and evil in our time. In an article for the Catholic journal Tablet in 1951 he wrote: ‘Today the human body is regarded as expendable material, something to be eliminated wholesale by the atom bomb, a kind of anonymous carrion.’
The book differs in many significant ways from the film. Carol Reed was courageous enough to give his movie a determinedly unhappy ending, which even the pessimistic Greene was reluctant to endorse. Reed stuck to his conviction that Lime’s girlfriend, the political refugee Anna Schmidt, would not have any cause to love the man who had just shot him. So the film ends with Anna walking imperiously past Martins as he waits for her in the cemetery after Lime’s burial, not even pausing to acknowledge him. It is one of the great moments in screen history. Other changes were made with a view to box-office profit. In the book Anna is a physically unremarkable woman. (‘It wasn’t a beautiful face,’ Greene writes of her. ‘It was a face to live with.’) But in the film Anna is played by the mournfully beautiful Alida Valli, whose stylish reserve belies a history, one suspects, of Central European terror and Stalinist persecution. The film makes much of Anna’s fatal love for Harry Lime and the irresistible attraction she holds for the lovelorn Martins. When Martins moves his hand to her lovely face in the film, Anna turns away: she has no need of this ‘romantic fool’ who brings her flowers at midnight and drinks too much.
Other changes made by Reed with Greene’s consent were no less decisive. Rollo Martins and Harry Lime are British subjects in Greene’s treatment, but American in the film. In Ways of Escape Greene explains that he chose Rollo as a deliberately ‘absurd name’, but Cotten objected that it would be considered ‘sissy’ by American audiences. Reluctantly Greene substituted Holley, derived from ‘that
figure of fun, the nineteenth-century American poet Thomas Holley Chivers’. (After that, Cotten recalled, ‘I stopped complaining for fear he’d change it to Pansy’.) Interestingly, the episode in Greene’s original story of the Russians kidnapping Anna on the grounds that she was carrying false papers was eliminated from the film. Reed did not want to make an overtly propagandist picture that peddled anti-Soviet, Cold War nostrums. His first intention was to thrill and amuse.
In their different ways, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol reflect an awareness of sin and human wretchedness that can be termed ‘Catholic’. Greene’s gift in these novellas was to locate the moment of crisis when a character loses faith, religious or otherwise, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder. Not surprisingly, the unsparing bleakness of his vision has influenced a number of contemporary writers, from Muriel Spark to the Irish novelists Brian Moore and Ronan Bennett. However, Greene remains inimitable. Few novelists have fathomed with such intensity the suffering and dark places of this earth. And Harry Lime, the shabby Catholic compromised by greed and self-deceit, has become part of popular culture.
Ian Thomson, 2005
1 See Victorian Detective Fiction: A Catalogue of the Collection Made by Dorothy Glover and Graham Greene (1966, Bodley Head).
2 In 1994 I visited the sewers of Vienna with a local Third Man enthusiast, Dr Brigitte Timmermann. The entrance by the Stadtpark U-bahn was much as it had been in Greene’s day, said Dr Timmermann, and I half expected to see the police in pursuit of Lime. As we descended into the darkness I could make out a graffito on the wall: ‘Lime is my favourite fruit.’
THE THIRD MAN
Preface
The Third Man was never written to be read but only to be seen. Like many love affairs it started at a dinner table and continued with many headaches in many places: Vienna, Venice, Ravello, London, Santa Monica.
Most novelists, I suppose, carry round in their heads or in their notebooks the first ideas for stories that have never come to be written. Sometimes one turns them over after many years and thinks regretfully that they would have been good once, in a time now dead. So years back, on the flap of an envelope, I had written an opening paragraph: ‘I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.’ I, no more than my hero, had pursued Harry, so when Sir Alexander Korda asked me to write a film for Carol Reed – to follow our Fallen Idol – I had nothing more to offer than this paragraph. Though Korda wanted a film about the four-power occupation of Vienna, he was prepared to let me pursue the tracks of Harry Lime.
