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Publishing career
Between 1944 and 1948, Greene was director at Eyre & Spottiswoode under chairman Douglas Jerrold, in charge of developing its fiction list. Greene created The Century Library series, which was discontinued after he left following a conflict with Jerrold regarding Anthony Powell's contract. In 1958, Greene was offered the position of chairman by Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre, but declined.
He was a director at The Bodley Head from 1957 to 1968 under Max Reinhardt.
After meeting his future wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning, Greene was baptised into the Catholic faith on 26 February 1926, and they were married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, North London. The Greenes had two children, Lucy Caroline (born 1933) and Francis (born 1936).
In his discussions with Father Trollope, the priest to whom he went for instruction in Catholicism, Greene argued with the cleric "on the ground of dogmatic atheism", as Greene's primary difficulty with religion was what he termed the "if" surrounding God's existence. He found, however, that "after a few weeks of serious argument the 'if' was becoming less and less improbable", and Greene finally was converted and baptised after vigorous arguments initially with the priest in which he defended atheism, or at least the "if" of agnosticism. Late in life, however, Greene took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic".
Beginning in 1946, Greene had an affair with Catherine Walston, the wife of Harry Walston, a wealthy farmer and future life peer. That relationship is generally thought to have informed the writing of The End of the Affair, published in 1951, when the affair came to an end. Greene left his family in 1947, but in accordance with Catholic teaching, Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, and they remained married until Greene's death in 1991.
Greene suffered from manic depression (bipolar disorder).
After falling victim to a financial swindler, Greene chose to leave Britain in 1966, moving to Antibes, to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known since 1959, a relationship that endured until his death. In 1973, he had an uncredited cameo appearance as an insurance company representative in François Truffaut's film Day for Night. In 1981, Greene was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society.
He lived the last years of his life in Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the same town Charlie Chaplin was living in at this time. He visited Chaplin often, and the two were good friends. His book Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980) is based on themes of combined philosophical and geographical influences. He ceased going to mass and confession in the 1950s, but in his final years began to receive the sacraments again from Father Leopoldo Durán, a Spanish priest, who became a friend.
In one of his final works, a pamphlet titled J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice (1982), Greene wrote of a legal matter that embroiled him and his extended family in Nice, and declared that organised crime flourished in Nice because the city's upper levels of civic government protected judicial and police corruption. The accusation provoked a libel lawsuit that Greene lost; but he was vindicated after his death when, in 1994, the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, was imprisoned for corruption and associated crimes.
In 1984, in celebration of his 80th birthday, the brewery which Greene's great-grandfather founded in 1799 made a special edition of its 'St. Edmunds' ale for him, with a special label in his honour. Commenting on turning 80, Greene said, "The big advantage...is that at 80 you are more likely these days to beat out encountering your end in a nuclear war", adding, "the other side of the problem is that I really don't want to survive myself [which] has nothing to do with nukes, but with the body hanging around while the mind departs"
In 1986, Greene was awarded Britain's Order of Merit. He died in 1991 at age 86 of leukaemia and was buried in Corseaux cemetery.
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