The Third Woman - Softcover

Cash, Sir William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349113688 ISBN 13: 9780349113685

Publisher: Abacus, 2001

Synopsis

The 12-year affair between Graham Greene and Catherine Walston, the sexually adventurous 1940s and 1950s society hostess, was only made public in a silence-shattering article in "The Sunday Times" after Greene's death in 1991. It was a relationship that was to have crucial creative and destructive effects on the lovers and also their contemporaries - in particular their partners - and was the direct inspiration for a work regarded by many as Greene's masterpiece, "The End of the Affair", dedicated to "C" and praised by William Faulkner as "one of the most true and moving novels in anybody's language". Exploring the creative debt that literature owes to adultery (what Greene himself called "the necessity of sin") and re-encountering the physical landscape of their romance - from Rules restaurant in Covent Garden where they had dinner before making illicit love for the first time in a cheap Paddington hotel in 1947, to Tuscany where it is alleged that the couple had sex behind a succession of church altars (Greene's unusual way of dealing with Catholicism) - this volume seeks to unravel the enigma of Graham Greene as well as offer a compelling literary detective story.

About this title

Review:

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

Review:

'A remarkable achievement...His eye for telling detail is acute.' -- SPECTATOR

'Compelling reading' -- FINANCIAL TIMES

*'A succinct masterpiece' -- A N Wilson, EVENING STANDARD

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0349113688
• ISBN 13: 9780349113685
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320