Yvonne Cloetta, the French wife of a Swiss businessman, was Graham Greene’s mistress for the last 30 or so years of his life. Her husband spent most of the year in Africa; she lived at Juan les Pins with her two daughters, Greene in a flat overlooking the harbour in Antibes. When I first met her with Greene on the Côte d’Azur in the 1970s she seemed like one of those elegant, meticulously made-up women one sees behind the perfumery counters in French department stores. It was an impression that betrays a shaming strain of English snobbishness, but now, after reading these reminiscences of her life with Graham Greene, I feel that it was not far off the mark.
In Search of a Beginning is the transcript of Cloetta’s conversations with the French journalist Marie-Françoise Allain, who before his death had interviewed Greene for The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene. Loyal and discreet during her lover’s lifetime, Cloetta seems to have been provoked into defending his posthumous reputation by some of the disrespectful biographies that followed his death, in particular Michael Shelden’s muck-raking Graham Greene: The Man Within.
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