Greene, Graham--

The Missal in Latin and English. London, 1949, four small reproductive prints of Biblical Scenes loosely inserted, two of them inscribed on the reverse to Greene by his earlier mistress Catherine Walston (Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, for instance, inscribed "For Graham in Germany | during Holy Week 1950 - | with love from Catherine...")--Saint Andrew Daily Missal. Bruges, 1956, with the inscription "Graham Greene Stonor 1957" (but not in the novelist's hand); original leather and cloth bindings, 8vo, some slight wear to bindings (2)

Graham Greene, inscriptions to him by his earlier mistress Catherine Walston; given by Greene to his later mistress Yvonne Cloetta; thence by descent

The rich American-born beauty Catherine Walston (1916–1978), who was married to the Labour peer Lord Walston, was the great love of Greene's middle years (as Yvonne Cloetta was of his final ones). The affair started, bizarrely, after Catherine contacted Greene's wife Vivien to say she had decided to convert to Catholicism having read his books, asking that Greene might be her godfather. Between 1946 (when he separated from Vivien after she had opened one of his love letters) and the late 1950s he spent as much time as possible at her homes in Cambridgeshire and Achill and travelled extensively with her across Europe: they allegedly had a plan to commit adultery behind every high altar on the continent.  A "highly unconventional society hostess" who "liked to shock guests at her dinner parties by wearing jeans and doing cartwheels across the floor" (Michael Shelden, Oxford DNB) she was  the inspiration for his powerful novel about the pains and pleasures of adultery, The End of the Affair (1951). Greene became tormented when it became clear that she would not leave her husband and five children, nor desist from having other lovers; they quarrelled increasingly, and eventually (by the early 1960s) and following a painful series of separations, they drifted apart. When he realised that they would never be married Greene embarked on a series of overseas trips (all "Ways of Escape"), during one of which, in Africa in 1959, he met Yvonne Cloetta.