The Third Woman (Hardcover)

At the age of 43, Graham Greene, successful author and married Catholic, met and began an affair with Catherine Walston, a 30-year old American beauty, also married. Catherine was a pure femme fatale, stringing along several lovers simultaneously, and generally driving men mad. Her affair with Greene lasted 15 years, and not 13, as has hitherto been believed--one of Cash's new findings--and it included a bizarre exchange of secret (and of course completely meaningless) "marriage vows" in Tunbridge Wells Catholic church. All in all, it was a story, in William Cash's words, of "deep betrayal, sexual obsession, jealousy, hatred, tortured religiosity, despair, blasphemy and literary revenge." Cash has had privileged access to 1,200 of Greene's love letters and poems (not all of them very impressive) and makes judicious use of them. On the other hand, the text appears hastily edited and, unusually for a book of this kind, it has no index or bibliography. Cash also has a habit of interpolating his own thoughts, feelings and experiences into the text, which worked to better effect in, say, Peter Ackroyd's monumental biography of Dickens but here it can seem too much like mere egotism. So: yes, there are some new findings and it reads briskly. But if you really want a trip to that strange, bleak country of Greeneland, The Third Woman would be better read in tandem with Greene's own novel on the same subject, The End of the Affair. --Christopher Hart

In The Third Woman, his story of the 'secret passion' between Graham Greene and Catherine Walston which provied the background to Greene's novel, The End of the Affair, William Cash has invented a new kind of writing. In case you thought that most of what was interesting about this secret passion was already known and told by two previous biographers, think again: did you know the phone number Catherine Walston dialled when she rang Marshall's aerodrome (56291)? and the extension she was put through to (40)? and how the pilot of her plane turned on the engine ('the steel propeller of a single-engine Proctor V is started by an electric button close to the control dials')? It is all gripping stuff which, while perhaps not doing much to explain Cash's thesis, how and why Catherine Walston was the 'hidden spring behind much of Greene's most powerful creativity,' does go a long way to meeting his other criteria: to provide a 'full background' to The End of the Affair. But Cash does not stop here. Not only are we furnished at last with this full background (and thankfully without the author's paying heed to any of those irritating contemporary ideas about the biographical details of an author not having much relevance to the public reception of his work) - we are also given a blow by blow account of the trouble Cash went to in order to provide these details to his grateful reader. And here lies his most brilliant narrative trick: rather than boring us with another framing device, a story within a story, of which we have seen so many in modern literature, the effect of Cash's authorial interventions is to obliterate the impact of the tale he is telling. So instead of exploring the relationship between Greene and Walston we have the far more interesting story of Cash-the-Sleuth, Cash the Charmer, Cash the lover, Cash the burnt-out-journalist. But the most fascinating persona in this exploration of a fragmented personality is Cash the literary celebrity, breaking new ground with his 'study of the creative debt literature owes to adultery.' It is only to be regretted that we hear no more about this debt other than the reiterated claim that this is what the book is about: no doubt the author was afraid he might bore us. The effect of Cash's book is that the characters he is writing about remain shadowy, while the author himself emerges as hero. We watch Greene's voice, so dominant in the literature of the twentieth century, fade out to be replaced by the distinctive tones of William Cash, and it little matters that we learn next to nothing about what made Catherine Walston tick, because we learn so much instead about the mind of the author. As a biographer, Cash succeeds where many lesser Gods have failed: he presents himself as more interesting than those whose lives he so painstakingly pursues. This is one of the many original aspects of The Third Woman, and what can we do but applaud the author's radical decision to overlook tedious literary conventions such as modesty, good writing or narrative organisation. Instead we have a prose style which is refreshingly self-absorbed, pompous and pretentious. 'I had not been expecting the interview to be a champagne sort of occasion,' Cash tells us of his meeting with Greene's wife, 'But as I twisted the cork out of the bottle and poured two glasses, it occurred to me that Vivienne Greene may have been waiting for fifty years to speak her mind about Catherine Walston'. Thank God for William Cash. Even the acknowledgments, usually the dullest and most dry part of a book, allow us an envious glimpse into the author's life. We learn that his girlfriend is called Louise King and that he has been with her now for three years but missed her play during the writing of this book. We learn about his research assistant, Rebecca, who is going on to do her PhD on Thomas Hoccleve, the fifteenth-century cleric, poet, and philanderer' at Cambridge and will no doubt have a 'brilliant academic career'. Thankfully, all his hard work has paid off: The Third Woman has amazingly come out at the same time as the Neil Jordan film of The End of the Affair. (Kirkus UK)