The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)
Page 15
She sent a copy of the letter to Greene, and another copy to his agent, Laurence Pollinger: ‘I got a menacing sort of letter from the Income Tax … It seems evident there is a flaw somewhere: the Korda, if it ever came off, was surely before the war?’31 The actual sum Greene received was £1,331.8s.6d and this included the Korda cheque. Three months later they were after Vivien again, but her fright had been replaced by anger: ‘Income Tax: the bastards are completely muddled & trying to make me pay three times over what I’ve already paid.’32
Greene’s journal entries contain mostly inconsequential matters, revealing a fascination with what others might find repelling. Having his Friday evening bath, he watches a beetle in the running bath: ‘Haphazard struggles until it came near the whirlpool of the tap: then strong brave breast strokes which made it oddly human. Took it out & threw it away.’33 He takes an interest in a lizard devouring its prey: ‘The moth flutters round the globe, comes to rest & the lizard pounces. It seems to hold it by the head while the wings flutter less & less’; and is strangely amused watching two flies ‘make love’ on the staircase near his bedroom.
To keep a journal when one was a spy was a serious dereliction of duty, and necessarily the extracts were terse. When he was discussing ‘secret’ matters, the entry was so cryptic that it could only be understood by its author. Sometimes classified material and ordinary details lie cheek by jowl: ‘Jan.i6 (Friday) Went in to town & shopped. Stories of alluvial gold digging. Story of bath filling from the stopped lavatory. Jan.17 (Sat.) Appalling suggestions from London.’
Life was not completely uneventful – on 13 February Greene had an unexpected fall: ‘All went well till the evening when I went to a very bad film … Ginger Rogers in Having a Wonderful Time: coming out I fell into a six foot open drain into African shit.’34 He enlarged on this in a letter to his mother:
I was just writing last night to somebody [again Greene carefully avoided naming names] saying that Friday the 13th had passed without mishap when I went out to a cinema. Coming out in the dark and hurrying to my taxi I suddenly trod on air and fell down a six foot open drain on top of unspeakable African muck; a nasty shock at the time and I thought I’d put my hip out. But after the drive, a stiff whisky and a cold bath I was all right, except for various scrapes – which in this climate takes ages to heal. My right thumb was rather torn … and I was a bit apprehensive of poisoning, but I swabbed it well with Dettol and all seems to be well.35
Vivien commiserated with the ‘poor bedraggled miserable Tom’. She was also practical: ‘I am very glad you had the Dettol: you should have poured a lot into a bath and soaked in it, not only dabbed the open scratches and bruises.’36
Ever meticulous, Greene observed the humans around him: ‘The black boy with red [next word indecipherable] on his features. You could see fleetingly the stupid fear of his white father. How a child like that would horribly tie one to Africa out of pity and love’;37 and the lust to kill: ‘Walking by the lagoon saw Syrian again with his gun & his children. Yday he killed a beautiful kingfisher & gives the body to his small children to play with: today there was a little heap of doves by the children’s side.’38
The next day, walking with his colleague L.P. to the club for breakfast, he noted his conversation: ‘L.P.’s conversation all bird observation & sex. “By Jove, look at that plumage. You know I shall have to do something about this soon. Look at those breasts.”’ Greene often became irritated by males whose company he had to keep – later he regretted his secret reactions for he kept his feelings to himself: ‘Got very irritated by poor L.P. Deafness is so like stupidity that one forgets to differentiate.’39
In Africa Greene was disturbed by the same type he had been when a schoolboy: ‘Dinner at Denton’s – fat rugger bugger type with soft sentimental eyes, information officer whose ambitions are centred on the M[inistry] of I[nformation].’40 It seems as if Greene was getting heartily sick of parties, but he briefly listed conversations in his journal: ‘Mass at 8.30. Chop with Wormwold [This closely approximates the name of his hero in his spy spoof, Our Man in Havana, British agent Wormold]. The fat engineer & his family history of repression.’
Greene’s journal suggests that whatever his training entailed, there was really little office work: ‘No telegrams ever seem to arrive & be acknowledged.’41 In his spare time he was writing:
25 Jan. (Sun.) Didn’t go to office, but typed all day at B[ritish] D[ramatists].
27 Jan (Tues). Came home in evening & worked.
His journal entry concerning his involvement in a minor car accident reveals the professional writer: ‘Slight motor crash coming back after siesta. Interminable 15 seconds waiting for the crash beside L.P. who was driving. Stupidly one made no attempt to duck but bent slightly sideways watching, as if one couldn’t bear to miss seeing it happen.’ This watchfulness appears everywhere: ‘I woke up, switched on my torch & saw little white ants swarming on to the edges of my pillow. Simply moved into centre of pillow & went to sleep again. This is acclimatization.’42
*
The trivialisation of life by the trainee agents is perhaps best shown by the nightly activity Greene and L.P. engaged in: ‘Every evening ends with a cockroach stalk. By making a sport of it one loses one’s repulsion towards them. Last night one felt deserted as none appeared – as though one were a sinking ship.’43 There is a further journal entry for 28 January: ‘Came back alone & triumphantly killed four giant cockroaches in my bathroom. 3 were found together, but not one escaped. Becoming very deft with a gym shoe.’
The strength of the interest here is curious, even disturbing. These cockroach stalks were done in order to cheer up himself and L.P.: ‘we used to hunt cockroaches by the light of electric torches, marking in pencil on the walls one point for a certain death, half a point if the roach had been washed down the lavatory bowl.’44 As if to recall their repugnance, Greene cautioned himself to remember: ‘The cockroach spreadeagled over the saucer of peanuts’.45
When Greene came to write The Heart of the Matter he used the cockroach stalk, which he’d been an original party to, and the rules of play, to reflect the limited nature of his characters Wilson and Harris. Harris is the cable censor, slightly pathetic and sanctimonious, but mealy-mouthed. He is a scandalmonger, attacking Scobie and at the same time getting in a clever dig at Scobie’s wife: ‘Perhaps if I had a wife like that, I’d sleep with niggers too.’46 In contrast, the character Wilson pretends to a simplicity which takes Harris in. His false identity is that of the new accountant, but he is in fact a member of MI5 seeking out corruption among the police.
At the time Greene was literary editor of the Spectator, Wilson Harris was its editor. Greene simply separated the two parts of his editor’s name to provide two characters with names. Greene had many passages of arms with the original Wilson Harris, though any sensitive person would have fallen out with the man. H. E. Bates recalls that Harris ‘had about as much humanity as a clothes prop, was cold, ascetic, distant’ to his employees and made Bates feel ‘very small, very, very inferior, very, very unhappy’.47
It is Harris who approaches Wilson about turning cockroach killing into a sport, and the details in the novel reflect the game as it was played in Lagos, though the humour and anger are an imaginative addition:
[Wilson] fixed his eyes on some symbols pencilled on the wall inside: the letter H, and under it a row of figures lined against dates as in a cash-book. Then the letters D.D., and under them more figures. ‘It’s my score in cockroaches, old man. Yesterday was an average day – four. My record’s nine. It makes you welcome the little brutes.’
‘What does D.D. stand for?’
‘Down the drain, old man. That’s when I knock them into the wash-basin and they go down the waste-pipe.’48
They decide to make a match of it for five minutes each night before bed: ‘It needs skill, you know. They positively hear you coming, and they move like greased lightning. I do a stalk every evening with a torch’:
To and fro across the room they padded, weaving their lights, smashing down their shoes, occasionally losing their heads and pursuing wildly into corners: the lust of the hunt touched Wilson’s imagination.49
To begin with, they are civilised in their responses, calling out ‘Good-shot’ or ‘Hard Luck’, but once they start to chase the same cockroach, their tempers become frayed – an example of the sudden effect the tropics can have:
A cockroach sat upon the brown cake of soap in the washbasin. Wilson spied it and took a long shot with the shoe from six feet away. The shoe landed smartly on the soap and the cockroach span into the basin: Harris turned on the tap and washed it down. ‘Good shot, old man,’ he said placatingly. ‘One D.D.’
‘D.D. be damned,’ Wilson said. ‘It was dead when you turned on the tap.’
‘You couldn’t be sure of that. It might have been just unconscious – concussion. It’s D.D. according to the rules.’
‘Your rules again.’
‘My rules are the Queensberry Rules in this town.’
‘They won’t be for long,’ Wilson threatened. He slammed the door hard behind him and the walls of his own room vibrated round him from the shock. His heart beat with rage and the hot night: the sweat drained from his armpits. But as he stood there beside his own bed, seeing the replica of Harris’s room around him, the washbasin, the table, the grey mosquito-net, even the cockroach fastened on the wall, anger trickled out of him and loneliness took its place. It was like quarrelling with one’s own image in the glass. I was crazy, he thought. What made me fly out like that?50
Harris’s interest in Wilson springs from his discovery that Wilson and he were old boys from the same public school.
Harris shows Scobie a letter to the secretary of the school describing (vaguely) what he is doing in the tropics and talking about Wilson, the other old Downhamian boy: ‘As I’m a cable censor you will understand that I can’t tell you much about my work … We are in the middle of the rains now – and how it does rain. There’s a lot of fever about, but I’ve only had one dose and E. Wilson has so far escaped altogether … We’ve got an old Downhamian team of two and go out hunting together but only cockroaches (Ha! Ha!)’51
Of course Greene is making fun of Harris. Later, Harris, looking through a copy of the school magazine, and skimming through an account of five matches, comes upon a fantasy entitled ‘The Tick of the Clock’. This is the first story Greene wrote at the age of sixteen and it appeared in the school magazine, The Berkhamstedian. The description Harris conjures up of the school, as he lies on his bed in a tiny room in the tropics, is Greene’s description of his own school, his own unhappiness, and is used by him on different occasions, especially the cracked bell, the boots beating on the stone stairs, though the phrase ‘the loyalty we feel to unhappiness’ is out of place when applied to Harris: ‘The walls of Downham – the red brick laced with yellow, the extraordinary crockets, the mid-Victorian gargoyles – rose around him: boots beat on stone stairs and a cracked dinner-bell rang to rouse him to another miserable day. He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness – the sense that that is where we really belong.’52
It is difficult to imagine that the relationship between Harris and Wilson had its origin in life, for it smacks of being cobbled together, merely a plot device. However, Greene did meet (in Bathurst, Gambia, not Freetown) an old Berkhamstedian while he was stationed in Freetown:
I forgot to tell you [he wrote to his mother] that I met an old boy from Uppers at Bathurst left about 1922: Harwood. He’s intelligence officer with the R.A.F. there. He made one feel terribly old because he seemed so very young, though at school at the same time. He had a touch of fever before I left but everybody was having that. Nearly a 100 people down.53
Something of Wilson’s dangerously youthful air is derived from Harwood. It was Harwood who invited Greene to Bathurst for Christmas 1942. Using his new skills, Greene replied by means of his code-books: ‘As the chief eunuch said I cannot, repeat cannot, come.’54
On Sunday, 8 March, Greene made his last entry in his journal before leaving Lagos: ‘A new sort of comfort – to lie in bed and realise that life is really running short. It seems such a short while since my first book was published: the same number of years & I shall be fifty.’55
His three months of training over, he was ready for action in Freetown.
10
Our Man in Freetown
There is all Africa and her prodigies in us.
– SIR THOMAS BROWNE
GREENE LEFT LAGOS in the middle of March and flew to Accra. What he saw of it he didn’t like ‘except the superbly beautiful old Danish fort in which the governor lives – like a stage set of Elsinore in dazzling white with the surf beating below on two sides’.1 He stayed in an American transit camp for the night: ‘a wind blowing up the red dust all the time, bad food and … drunk tough Americans belonging to the air line’.2 Then on Sunday he went on to Freetown, but first landed in Liberia and had lunch at a new aerodrome that American personnel had made: ‘the overcooked steak literally a foot long’.3 He flew in a freight plane for the first time: ‘The passengers sit upright facing each other the whole length on little metal seats like lavatory seats. The heat until you get well up is appalling and then the metal turns cold.’4
Greene arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, a parched land of stifling heat. He had no accommodation arranged, but a kind governor put him up for a couple of nights, which gave him enough time to employ a ‘couple of boys and a cook’, and then he moved into a ‘dingy little Creole villa about two miles out of town’.5 This villa was to play an important part in his life, for it was both home and his base for SIS operations. It stood on the flats below the European quarter (there was no room on the hill) and had been condemned by the medical officer of health. Unsought, the house brought him into contact with a seedy Greeneland.
‘It’s terribly difficult to get anywhere to live alone in these days, so one can’t look a gift horse in the mouth,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘There is no water although there are taps.’ Freetown receives 147 inches of rain a year, but the distribution is so bad that Greene’s area was without water until the rains began six weeks after his arrival. Drinking water was fetched in empty bottles from Freetown and then boiled; bath water was carried in kerosene tins from a native water hole: ‘One tries not to think of germs and what the blacks do there and have done and pours in sanitas …’6
He told his sister in Cairo that he had no water at all, but that he had a ‘plague of houseflies’ because of the army camp just across the road. Worse still, the few acres of scrub were used as a public lavatory by Africans living in slum houses close by. ‘It sometimes puts one off one’s food to know where the flies have landed last. It’s lucky I have a masochistic trend and a feeling for squalor.’7 Practically everything was unobtainable: for example, there was no ink or soda water, which was troublesome in a country where you had to boil and filter every drop of water (if, as Greene said, ‘you could get a drop’). Even in town, the taps stopped running at about two in the morning. All the Europeans kept two inches of their morning bath to serve them again at night: ‘This isn’t so good when you’ve sweated all day,’ he remarked.8
Greene succeeded in getting a public lavatory for the Africans. He wrote to the Colonial Secretary demanding one, but the official responded by telling him that his request should go through the proper channels by way of the Commissioner of Police. In reply, Greene quoted what Churchill said of ‘proper channels’ during wartime and the toilet was built. He also sent a final tongue-in-cheek letter to the Colonial Secretary, saying that ‘in the annals of Freet
own his name like Keats’s would be writ in water’.fn1, 9
Those early days in Freetown, before the rains came, tested his vaunted love of Africa, and thanking his literary agent for a cable enquiring as to his well-being, he admitted that the enquiry had cheered him a lot ‘in this God-forsaken hole, Freetown’. Two letters to his sister stressed his objections: ‘Nothing that I ever wrote about this place is really bad enough.’10 After four months, he was still unhappy: ‘Life here is pretty grim. The delights of Freetown are beginning to pall. I have a horrible fear that I’m being cured relentlessly of my nostalgie de la boue.’fn2, 11 His hatred of birds of any kind (a hatred stemming from a childhood fear) is reflected in his fascination with vultures. In the heat and humidity of the day, taking a siesta (as is natural in the tropics), he would be disturbed by their heavy movement: ‘when one took off or landed it was as though a thief were trying to break through the iron roof’. Sometimes he witnessed as many as six perched up on his roof ‘like old broken umbrellas’.12
Once the rainy season arrives in Freetown, rain often falls daily, especially during July and August. The rains begin with a series of violent squalls, marked by thunder and lightning, and the ground on which Greene’s house stood became a swamp. After rain, the night is filled with an intolerable plague of houseflies:
at night there are far too many objects flying and crawling … Wherever one wants to put one’s hand suddenly, to turn on a switch or what not, there always seems to be a gigantic spider. Whenever one kills something which has flopped on the floor the ants come out and get to work, stripping the corpse and then heaving and pushing the skeleton towards the door.13