Graham Greene was a complicated, acerbic, and contradictory man, with a wry sense of humor and a schoolboy's taste for pranks and practical jokes; he loved making a mystery of his life, and he kept the three different aspects of his identity—the writer, the public figure, and the private man—separate and distinct. So I was hardly surprised that the Graham Greene I knew seems to have eluded his two biographers, Norman Sherry and Michael Shelden.

Greene died in 1991. Two years ago, Sherry, a professor at Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas, published the second installment of his exhaustive three-volume “Life of Graham Greene.” (Volume I had appeared in 1989.) A few months later, Shelden, who teaches at Indiana State University, published his revisionist biography, “Graham Greene: The Enemy Within.” On the evidence of these books, one might almost think that Greene took malicious pleasure in leading Sherry, his pious official biographer, down the garden path, and that, similarly, if he were still around, the old mischief-maker would have been quietly amused by the way Shelden mistook his habitual secretiveness and prankster spirit for outright villainy.

The Graham Greene I knew best was the third man—the private, off-duty character—and when I met him it was, on my part, love at first sight (or, at any rate, besotted admiration). In the summer of 1950, I was sixteen, a student on holiday from Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school, and my uncle Alexander Korda, the film producer, had ordered me to Antibes, to join him and some guests for a cruise on his yacht, Elsewhere. Initially, I was overwhelmed by a party of grownups that included the film director Carol Reed; Vivien Leigh; my uncle's mistress and soon-to-be-wife, Alexa Boycun; and a swiftly changing cast of celebrities which included, at various times, Pamela Churchill, David Selznick and his wife, Jennifer Jones, and Marcel Pagnol. To say that I felt ill at ease would be putting it mildly. Since Alex did not much like children, he solved the problem of my presence by treating me as an adult, but I spent my first days on board trying to hide. Then, one day, when I went up on deck before lunch, still attempting to make myself invisible, a tall, lean Englishman (he could have been nothing else), with thinning sandy hair and the most alarmingly penetrating pale-blue, protuberant eyes—rather like intelligent gooseberries, I thought—appeared beside me and handed me a cocktail.

I looked at it suspiciously. My father had encouraged me to drink a glass of wine at dinner, but I did not think he would have approved of a cocktail before lunch. “Drink up,” the stranger said. “You look as if you need it.”

He had a curious way of speaking: very English, clipped, precise to the point of being old-fashioned and high-pitched, with a slight trace of an upper-class stutter—hardly more than an occasional hesitation in the middle of a word—and a tendency to turn every sentence into a question. It was altogether a very donnish voice, as I discovered later, when I studied at Oxford.

I sipped the cocktail cautiously.

“Go on,” he said. “It's a Martini. It can do you no possible harm. I'm Graham Greene, by the way.”

We shook hands rather formally. Soon enough, however, I realized that Greene, who was then forty-five, had an intuitive sympathy for young people, together with a sly, subversive determination to help them break the rules—qualities that were the result, no doubt, of his unhappy childhood as the son of an English public-school headmaster. I had heard of him, of course. Greene had co-written the screenplay for Carol Reed's recent successful thriller “The Fallen Idol,” based on his own short story, which was about a privileged boy who almost dooms the beloved butler who is his only friend—a perfect example of Greene's view of the danger of innocence—as well as the screenplay for “The Third Man,” which had been an enormous hit. My father, Vincent Korda, who had done the art direction for both pictures, had spoken of Greene with great affection.

Despite Greene's promise that the Martini would do me no harm, I felt my confidence, such as it was, ebbing with each sip, together with my sense of balance. My lips seemed to have become anesthetized, and I had no idea how I was going to get through a long luncheon with my uncle's guests, all of whom were now on deck and were shouting at one another at the top of their voices about friends whose names meant nothing to me.

“The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people,” Greene told me as I took another tiny sip of my Martini. “You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.” (He took his own advice: his various cruises on Alex's yacht became a masterly set piece of ironic comedy in his 1955 novella, “Loser Takes All.”)

Finding my voice, I told him that I thought Pamela Churchill, with her mane of red-gold hair, her large bright-blue eyes, and her slim ankles, was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen.

Greene stared at her. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “One can see that it would be possible for a young man to think that.” He paused. “But the main thing is to have a lot of women. Then you'll discover that looks aren't even the half of it.”

I don't remember what my ambitions had been before that moment, but I decided on the spot that I wanted to be a writer. Any lingering doubts I might have had were dispelled the next morning, when I observed Graham (as he had asked me to call him) at work. An early riser, he appeared on deck at first light, found a seat in the shade of an awning, and took from his pocket a small black leather notebook and a black fountain pen, the top of which he unscrewed carefully. Slowly, word by word, without crossing out anything, and in neat, square handwriting, the letters so tiny and cramped that it looked as if he were attempting to write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, Graham wrote, over the next hour or so, exactly five hundred words. He counted each word according to some arcane system of his own, and then screwed the cap back onto his pen, stood up and stretched, and, turning to me, said, “That's it, then. Shall we have breakfast?” I did not, of course, know that he was completing “The End of the Affair,” the controversial novel based on his own tormenting love affair, nor did I know that the manuscript would end, typically, with an exact word count (63,162) and the time he finished it (August 19th, 7:55 A.M., aboard Elsewhere).

Greene's self-discipline was such that, no matter what, he always stopped at five hundred words, even if it left him in the middle of a sentence. It was as if he brought to writing the precision of a watchmaker, or perhaps it was that in a life full of moral uncertainties and confusion he simply needed one area in which the rules, even if self-imposed, were absolute. Whatever else was going on, his daily writing, like a religious devotion, was sacred and complete. Once the daily penance of five hundred words was achieved, he put the notebook away and didn't think about it again until the next morning. It seemed to me then the ideal way to live—far better than the routine followed by my father, who worked from dawn until late at night at a studio in London and then brought his work home with him.

That morning, Graham and I had breakfast together at a small dockside café. From time to time, he looked suspiciously at the people passing by, or at the fellow-patrons who sat down and ordered coffee and a croissant. Spies and informers were on his mind. He talked about his wartime espionage experience, and about international politics. With the natural anti-Americanism of an upper-class Englishman, he was suspicious of the motives of the United States in the Cold War and resentful of American assumptions of morality. The F.B.I., he told me, had an ever-expanding dossier on him. He had no doubt that his telephone was tapped and his mail was being monitored. This aura of political persecution made him even more glamorous in my eyes. After breakfast, I stopped at a stationer's and bought a small notebook and a fountain pen.

Over the next few weeks, my uncle's yachting party, with its ever-changing guest list, slowly sailed eastward along the Riviera and down the Italian coast, anchoring for the night in any port where there was a three-star restaurant. Both on the yacht and on shore, I followed Greene everywhere, like a faithful dog, and, as long as I was quiet, he didn't seem to mind being shadowed by a teen-age companion.

Despite the difference in our ages, we became friends. I was the cautious one; it was he who had the spirit of a daring schoolboy. He led, and I followed, fascinated and sometimes aghast. Before we left Antibes, he put me behind the wheel of Alexa Boycun's little Simca sports car and made me his chauffeur, despite the fact that I didn't have a driver's license. In Nice, he took me to see a lavishly furnished brothel, just off the Promenade des Anglais, explaining that this was an aspect of life about which every young man should be educated as early as possible. I began smoking English cigarettes, in imitation of him, and soon got used to a Martini before lunch.

I knew nothing about his private life. If his behavior seemed youthful, sometimes even childish, I was still at an age when I thought of all grownups as old. I was unaware that he no longer lived with his wife, Vivien, or that he had been conducting a long love affair with a married woman, Catherine Walston. Catherine had been unable to leave her husband behind, complaisant though he was, and join Graham for the summer, so Graham, apparently content, visited brothels and flirted gently with Alexa.

Even at the age of sixteen, I could tell that he was attractive to women. He clearly enjoyed their company—a characteristic that was rare in an Englishman of his age and class. He also possessed a feline love of gossip, and he had a forthright, unapologetic interest in sex. Like the great British explorer and erotic adventurer Sir Richard Burton, whom he much admired, Graham was a mine of lore about brothels and gambling dens, and, also like Burton, he did not take a romantic view of women. I may have remained ignorant about his mistress, but with women he made no secret of the fact that he was a Catholic living apart from his wife and involved with a married woman, and in their eyes this gave him a certain daredevil, doomed quality, a sense that he believed in the fires of Hell and was perfectly willing to risk them for, as he put it, “one good fuck.” I watched as he easily charmed every woman he met. He had a gift for intimacy, a remarkable ability to draw out women's life stories, and an unfeigned interest in every detail of what they told him. Women could talk to Graham—and did—about all the things that their husbands didn't want to hear about or know about, certain that he would appreciate every word. He was a “man's man” who was equally at ease with the opposite sex. It is not surprising that he is one of the few male English writers of his generation whose women characters are completely convinci

Having concluded, rightly, that my father was unwilling to discuss the subject of sex with me, Graham assumed the role of adviser. If I wanted to go to bed with a woman, he said, I should ask her directly, and not beat about the bush. “It's usually the best way,” he told me.

While I was grateful for his advice, I was hardly in a position to put it into practice. But my education didn't stop there. Graham loved low dives, and in Genoa, where we put in to take on fuel and supplies, he took me to a bar full of sailors in drag. As part of the entertainment, a purser from a cruise ship, wearing a blond wig, a clinging red gown, and a feather boa, did a convincing imitation of Sophie Tucker singing “Some of These Days.” Only the five-o'clock shadow under his pancake makeup spoiled the effect.

The cruise was not all pleasure. The “team” of Graham Greene, Carol Reed, and Alexander Korda, having produced two hits, was now trying to come up with a successor to “The Fallen Idol” and “The Third Man.” In the afternoons, the three of them would sit on the bridge of the yacht together, trying to come up with another winner. Carol appeared to doze, a yachting cap pulled low over his eyes; Alex, with an old sea dog's grizzled beard, smoked cigars and played solitaire; and Graham, his shirt unbuttoned, smoked cigarettes and suggested ideas in his high-pitched voice.

“The Third Man” had come out of just such a session. One day, Graham had read aloud a few lines he'd written 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.” These words were the genesis of “The Third Man,” but at the time Graham wrote them he had had no idea what was to come after this beginning. Alex was thrilled with Graham's tantalizing opening, and begged him to finish the story, but he insisted that Graham move the setting from London to the still divided city of Vienna.

Graham wrote the screenplay; Anton Karas was commissioned to compose the film's zither score; Carol Reed eventually cast Orson Welles as Harry Lime; and the move to Vienna resulted in the inspired use of the city's ruins and sewers for the action scenes. Given the tremendous critical and financial success of “The Third Man,” it was all the more disappointing that Alex, Graham, and Carol were unable to agree on another project. Alex toyed with the idea of making “War and Peace” with Welles in the role of Pierre Bezukhov, but Graham wasn't interested in writing a screenplay for that. Carol urged them to do Conrad's “An Outcast of the Islands”—in part, I suspect, because after the sewers of Vienna he was eager to do a picture with a tropical setting. Copies of the book were expressed from London, and for a few days all hands, including me, immersed themselves in it, but Graham didn't feel that he could adapt his style to Conrad's. (Alex and Carol eventually did film the Conrad story, without Graham; it had Ralph Richardson, Trevor Howard, and Robert Morley in the lead roles, but it was not a great success, partly because the script, as the critics complained, lacked the crispness and the haunting sense of quiet that were Graham's hallmarks as a screenwriter.)

As the yacht moved from port to port, they lobbed ideas back and forth—the story of Lawrence of Arabia, which Alex then owned and later sold to Sam Spiegel; the sailing adventure “Kon-Tiki,” which was about to be published in America; a historical drama about Casanova—but somehow nothing came of them. Graham enjoyed the fame and money that “The Third Man” had brought him, but, unlike Alex and Carol, he had no desire to do the same thing all over again. His mind was already on other matters, and when he left the yacht, without having satisfied his host, it was to go to Malaya and then to Indochina, where the war between the French and the Vietminh was in full swing, and where he was to find the inspiration for “The Quiet American.” He never wrote another film for Alex, though as the years passed they grew, if anything, fonder of each other.

I carried on an intermittent correspondence with Graham over the next few years, as I graduated from Le Rosey, served in the Royal Air Force, and went to Oxford. Occasionally, I saw him at dinner parties, at Alex's house in London, or on summer cruises on Elsewhere, and he was always full of amiable, if misplaced, advice for me. In 1956, I fought in the anti-Communist revolution in Hungary, where my father and uncles had grown up. Before I left London for Budapest, Graham introduced me to a gentleman from the British intelligence agency MI6, and, just like a character out of one of Graham's own novels, the man recruited me for the less than romantic job of memorizing the shoulder flashes and cap badges of Soviet military units. It was a task that bore a certain resemblance to Graham's wartime duties as a spy in Sierra Leone, where he hunted fruitlessly for Axis agents among the missionaries and remittance men of colonial Africa, and also to the activities of the bogus spy whom Alec Guinness played so memorably in the movie of Graham's “Our Man in Havana.”

Three years later, I landed a job as an assistant editor at Simon & Schuster, and the first letter I wrote on company stationery was to Graham. I expressed the hope that someday, perhaps far in the future, I might have the honor of publishing him. He wrote back to say that he hoped so, too, and wished me well, and there the matter rested. I saw him from time to time in London or in the South of France, and he continued to keep up a benign, though distant, interest in my fate.

For many years, Graham's American publisher had been the Viking Press. His books sold well, and there seemed to be no reason to expect that he would move to another house. I was therefore surprised when, one day in late 1971, I received a telephone call from Monica McCall, his American agent. By this time, I had become editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster. Monica came right to the point: Would I like to become Graham Greene's publisher? Of course, I replied. After all, to a publisher Greene represented both commerce and literature; he was that rare thing a serious writer of international stature (he was a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize) whose books sold in best-seller quantities.

I was ecstatic, but also astonished. Why, I asked, had Graham decided to leave Viking? “It's quite a story,” Monica replied. It began after Greene sent Viking the manuscript of his latest novel, “Travels with My Aunt.” Viking sent a copy of the manuscript to the Book-of-the-Month Club, but an executive called to say that, while they loved the book, they didn't like the title. Monica told me that Tom Guinzburg, the president of Viking, had decided, on reflection, that he didn't like the title much, either, so he asked Monica to send Graham a cable recommending that he change the title for the American edition. He and the other editors at Viking had meanwhile dreamed up a number of alternative titles. Apparently, Guinzburg had failed to get to know his irascible author sufficiently. Soon afterward, Monica said, she received a terse cable from Paris: “WOULD RATHER CHANGE PUBLISHER THAN TITLE. GRAHAM GREENE.”

During the next fourteen years, Graham and I worked together on ten books, and we often saw each other when I was in Europe. Graham had moved to Antibes in 1966, and I dined with him there and in London many times, often in the company of my father. My father was famous for his taciturnity, but Graham, normally the most talkative of men, seemed to enjoy endless dinners with him. The two men would sit facing each other for hours, never saying a word, apparently quite happy with the silent company. On one occasion, after a dinner during which neither of them had spoken more than a few words, I walked outside with Graham. Pausing before he got into a waiting taxi, he turned to me and said, “Your father is the cleverest man I know.” As for my father, he told me that Graham was the only Englishman he knew whose conversation was worth listening to.

Since Graham was such a careful writer, he hardly needed editing in the conventional sense of the word. Most of my work consisted of placating him, and although we were friends, I was not spared an occasional sharp rap on the knuckles. A message complaining about flap copy read, “I hate the word 'stunning.' ” He added, “I also dislike very much the title 'best selling author,' which is more applicable to Harold Robbins.” When I made the mistake of informing him of grandiose plans the company had for a paperback advertising campaign, this was his comment: “They filled me with dismay. Thank God I don't live in the United States.” On refusing a series of proposed interviews: “Sorry, but save me from Michiko Kakutani!” Sometimes an outburst was downright curmudgeonly. After we sent him a harmless list of questions from Simon & Schuster's libel lawyer, he had his secretary write me a note dismissing the questions as “complete nonsense,” and he added a sharp warning that if we were afraid to publish his book we should let his agent know, so that she could find him a more courageous American publisher. No matter was too small to claim his attention, whether it was getting the exact shade of red for the English telephone booth (later removed altogether) on the dust jacket of “The Human Factor” or the need to respond to William F. Buckley, Jr.,'s allegation that Graham had said “America” was the word he hated most in the English language: “A complete lie,” Graham wrote to me. He was outraged not only by misprints in his own books but also by misprints in other Simon & Schuster books.

The task of publishing Graham changed as he aged. At the start, he was still writing the last of his major novels, including “The Honorary Consul” (1973) and “The Human Factor” (1978), both of which became best-sellers. After “The Human Factor,” however, while Graham kept to his usual meticulous writing schedule, the books became slimmer, less ambitious, and sometimes esoteric. His eye for human frailty was as sharp as ever, and an acute moral conflict was always present, but the scale had diminished. “Monsignor Quixote,” while amusing, was a pastiche of Cervantes and Voltaire's “Candide”; “The Tenth Man” was a rewrite of a screen treatment Graham had done for M-G-M in 1944; and “Doctor Fischer of Geneva; or, The Bomb Party” was a strange and hermetic little fable about greed, which left readers puzzled. There was a certain estrangement between Graham and Simon & Schuster as his sales declined, but this didn't adversely affect our friendship.

Graham's late, minor works were increasingly eccentric, reflecting his involvement with causes and people unlikely to interest the American reader. “An Impossible Woman” (1976) was a memoir by a ninety-year-old neighbor in Capri, which Graham edited; “J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice” was an angry and somewhat paranoid denunciation of municipal corruption in that French city. Simon & Schuster declined to publish these incidental works; some were not published here at all. Though Graham's letters conveyed disappointment, he seemed to take the changes in stride, and I suspect that they merely confirmed his already low opinion of America's interest in the world beyond its shores. As he grew older, his curiosity and his almost childlike fascination with eccentric and larger-than-life figures increased. In spite of his Catholicism, he was always trying to discover sainthood in secular figures; he prized in others a simplicity and an innocence that he had been denied, and his later works are a kind of pilgrimage in search of a different kind of faith.

Graham liked to feel that he was living “on the dangerous edge of things,” and the sensibility behind his cloak-and-dagger novels was reflected in his restless travels and also in his divided loyalties. He was a sentimental leftist when it came to Africa, Cuba, Panama, and Vietnam but a man of old-fashioned Tory attitudes when it came to England. While he remained a friend of Kim Philby, out of dogged personal loyalty, he also maintained his shadowy connections with the British Secret Intelligence Service until near the end of his life.

He often commented on the F.B.I.'s pursuit of him and gleefully speculated on the size of his dossier and on how much trouble the F.B.I. must have had in preparing it. He travelled constantly, and involved himself fearlessly—some would say recklessly—in politics, as if he were determined to add to the bulk of that dossier. “Just think of the money I'm costing them!” he liked to say, delighted at the thought of the documents and reports concerning his activities piling up in Washington. In 1983, he wrote to me that he was just back from visiting Panama, Nicaragua, and Cuba (where he'd spent a day with Fidel Castro). He never made any claim to objectivity, particularly when it came to the United States government; and the world of guilt, betrayal, and ruthlessness which formed the background for so many of his novels influenced the way he saw the real world.

Graham looked for conspiracy everywhere, and found it. He was quite capable of giving even the most harmless activity a sinister interpretation, particularly if his listener was naïve, or credulous about such things. Thus, it has become an accepted fact that in the early fifties he and Alexander Korda were “surveying” the waters off Yugoslavia for the Secret Intelligence Service during an Adriatic cruise on Alex's yacht, even though in all the years I was a regular guest on Elsewhere I never saw anything pursued but pleasure.

With Graham, it was always difficult to tell where the spy novelist left off and the spy manqué began. From time to time, they came together—as in 1977, when Graham turned up in Washington in the guise of a Panamanian diplomat in the entourage of General Omar Torrijos, the President of Panama. He was photographed standing behind Torrijos and President Carter at the signing of the Panama Canal treaty, and he claimed that no one on the White House staff recognized him. The joke, of course, was that since the early fifties he had been unable to obtain a visa to visit the United States except by obtaining a waiver as “a former Communist,” although his membership in the Party had been limited to a few weeks when he was an Oxford undergraduate, in the twenties.

Over the years, Graham became more determined to track down his F.B.I. file, as if it were the Holy Grail. He assumed that somewhere in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, in Washington, someone was gathering a witches' brew of information and misinformation and using it against him at every opportunity.

One day early in 1981, when we met for a drink at the Ritz in London, he asked me if I would be willing to do him a great favor. Anything, I said. He nodded solemnly and joined his long, slim fingers together as if in prayer. He glanced to either side and drew himself closer to me, indicating that this was serious business. He had read about the Freedom of Information Act, he said, and wondered if I could find a way of getting him access to his F.B.I. file. I had no idea how the Freedom of Information Act worked, I told him, but I would do my best. He repeated his request in a letter, adding that, given his views on America's involvement in Vietnam, it was likely to be a bulky dossier, and might possibly provide sufficient material for a short book. He thought that it would be particularly interesting to know who had informed on him over the years. The only things he really wanted at this point in life, he said, were the Nobel Prize and a look at his F.B.I. file.

When I looked into the matter, it turned out to be amazingly simple, but I did not tell Graham this, since he would have been hugely disappointed. All I had to do was get a lawyer to make an application to the F.B.I. and then wait. Time, it seemed, was the major impediment; perhaps the government hoped that applicants would simply lose patience and give up. Over the next few months, Graham asked me many times if there was any news, and he wondered if the F.B.I. was using the delay to destroy or alter its records on him.

Finally, the Graham Greene dossier arrived, in a disappointingly slim envelope. My heart sank. There were only a dozen or so documents, several of them newspaper clippings. One item was a clipping from Walter Winchell's column in the New York Mirror, dated December 19, 1956. Winchell wrote, “Hollywood newspaper people are not happy about America's most-decorated soldier (Audie Murphy) taking the lead role in the film version of 'The Quiet American,' which libels Americans. The author of the book admits being an ex-Commy.” The clipping was carefully pasted to a sheet of paper, at the top of which Clyde Tolson, Hoover's assistant, had checked a line next to his name, to indicate that he had read it. Another item was a reply to a request for information from Marvin Watson, a Presidential aide in the Lyndon Johnson White House. He wondered whether any of the public figures he had seen mentioned in some anti-Vietnam War literature, including Graham Greene, were Communists. The F.B.I.'s memo to Watson explained helpfully that Greene was not a Communist and that he was “a well-known Catholic British writer.”

The only other document of note was a lengthy report on preparations for a World Congress of Intellectuals, which was held in Wroclaw, Poland, in 1948. Graham Greene was on the list of planned participants, along with Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Louis Aragon, Le Corbusier, Brecht, Peter Ritchie Calder, Randall Jarrell, and Ruth Benedict. A note at the bottom of the list of names warns that John Rogge, an Assistant Attorney General during the New Deal, “is bringing an address from Henry Wallace.” Apparently, the worst thing that the F.B.I. could produce about Graham was that he planned to listen to an address from the former Vice-President of the United States. Some documents had been withheld, and several memos to J. Edgar Hoover had been completely blacked out, but I could turn up no evidence that the F.B.I. was concealing a major investigative cache. There were no spies, no records of telephone conversations, no surveillance of his visit to Fidel Castro or his travels in Vietnam, no accusations of smoking opium or visiting prostitutes, no mention, even, of his having been a member of the British Intelligence Service or a close friend of Kim Philby. He had not been a thorn in Hoover's side, nor had he been a target of constant F.B.I. surveillance. I mailed the file to Graham, knowing that it was going to be a terrible letdown for him.

It was. Graham brooded darkly on the possibility that the F.B.I. dossier was a fake—that the real file, with all the dirt, had been concealed somewhere—and from time to time he urged me to inquire further.

Perhaps because Graham associated me with this blow, our publishing relationship finally deteriorated beyond the possibility of repair. With a message just as cutting as the one he had sent Tom Guinzburg, he dismissed Simon & Schuster as his publisher and went back to Viking. The ostensible reason was that he had been upset upon learning that so many copies of “Getting to Know the General” had been remaindered. (Its commercial fate should not have been surprising, since the 1984 memoir was a slim volume praising the late General Torrijos and suggesting that the C.I.A. might have arranged the plane crash in which he was killed.)

We continued to correspond, and I continued to see him whenever I went to Europe. In some ways, it was easier to consider him a friend when I was no longer his editor, and I suspect the same was true for him.

I had thought of Graham as old when I was sixteen, but the last time I saw him, in the late eighties, he really was old, his eyes an icy blue, so pale that he seemed almost blind, and his face puffy where it had once been gaunt. In his last letter to me, he said that he was well “except for the incurable disease of age.”

He never did win the Nobel Prize. ♦