The Third Woman Book

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 HartRead More