“Find a place for Saint Hugh,” someone cried. Looking back over my shoulder I saw an old man with a white beard and a cheerful smile, and I gladly made room for him though I had no idea who Saint Hugh could be, for surely all saints are dead even in the World of My Own.
Once I attended Mass with my mother in Crowborough, where my parents lived. We had found places in the front row. The priest was saying a Hail Mary in company with two servers. They made little steps towards the altar and halted between each line. I realized to my anger and disgust that the priest held a lighted cigarette in his hand, and so did one of the servers. At the end he turned to the congregation and said that soon a decision would be taken by Rome for or against the legend of the Virgin Birth, and that he wanted no trouble whatever the decision was. Then he walked down the aisle to greet the congregation as they left.
I was furious. I was determined, if I had the chance, to tell him what I thought of him. I slipped out and got to the door. He was busy talking to people. I hoped he would come to me, but I waited—I had the excuse of waiting for my mother. The priest returned into the church without speaking to me, and I followed him. He embraced a tall man, hanging as it were from his shoulders, and I found at last the courage to speak and told him how he had disgusted me. ‘Couldn’t you have waited for three minutes to smoke?’ He smiled back at me in a superior and complacent way.
Tonight at Mass a fat ungainly woman was helping the priest serve. She had plonked down a cup of tea on the altar beside the chalice, and this gave the impression that the priest was consecrating the tea as well as the wine. I felt very indignant and when Mass was over argued rather fiercely with the priest, who seemed a feeble and ignorant man.
I have never liked lecturing, and I certainly do not feel competent to speak on religious subjects, but all the same I found myself on one occasion in My Own World explaining to a number of people my theory of the common evolution of God and Man, and the common identity of God and Satan.
This is how that theory appeared later in The Honorary Consul:
The God I believe in must be responsible for all the evil as well as for all the saints. He has to be a God made in our image with a night-side as well as a day-side. When you speak of the horror, Eduardo, you are speaking of the night-side of God. I believe the time will come when the night-side will wither away, like your communist state, Aquino, and we shall see only the simple daylight of the good God. You believe in evolution, Eduardo, even though sometimes whole generations of men slip backwards to the beasts. It is a long struggle and a long suffering, evolution, and I believe God is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain.*
Someone was telling me that if I was visiting Israel I should go to Emmaus, a small village that had not changed at all since biblical times. It was there that Joseph met Mary. ‘But what brought him there,’ I asked, ‘from Nazareth?’
‘Perhaps,’ the reply came, ‘it was the same matter of taxation which later took the two of them to Bethlehem.’
It was in January 1973 that I read in a newspaper that I had been appointed Archbishop of Westminster. I was astonished and my feelings were somewhat ambiguous. I knew that I was quite unsuitable, but all the same I was rather attracted by the idea of taking part in some royal occasion a few days later, with the Archbishop of Canterbury. I found that all the members of my family had been given two seats each for the ceremony.
I had been planning to leave London, but I told my mistress that I thought I should stay behind to get the robes and mitre and to learn, as it were, my part. I would have to be ordained as a priest first and for that I would have to consult my predecessor, Cardinal Heenan. Then whom should I run into but the cardinal himself?
He looked at me very sourly when I said that my appointment had come as a complete surprise. ‘When it was announced,’ he told me, ‘it was a bombshell. I must talk things over with you.’
I went home with him. It seemed that he had asked a private detective to prepare a report on me. The report contained photographs, including shots in which the rather shabby and illiterate detective appeared with his witnesses.
‘Who is Mrs Burton?’ the cardinal asked. I replied that I didn’t know the name. Perhaps the detective was referring to a woman who had been my mistress many years ago and was dead. ‘He might at least have dug up someone more recent,’ I said.
The cardinal had interviewed the Inland Revenue, who claimed that I had cheated on income tax by transferring money abroad. This did make me uneasy. Might they intend to reopen the case? His dossier also included a rather mysterious story of my trespassing in a field. After a lot of thought I remembered that I had once had the idea of moving into the country and had gone with my publisher to inspect a field in which it might be possible to build a house. The dossier became more and more absurd and farther and farther from the truth. By this time the cardinal and I were both laughing. He was relieved to feel that there was no longer any danger of my going ahead with the comedy of my ordination.
Lying in bed, I made a great decision to turn my back on Christianity altogether and take up Buddhism. At that moment of decision I had the sense of Christ close by me. His outline was faintly visible in the dark, and he seemed unhappy at losing me. I regained at least my half faith.
I had been reading an interesting Jewish book on Christ. It compared Christ’s career with that of an earlier Jew called Mouskie. Mouskie had come to a very similar end. Jesus knew Mouskie’s story and therefore he saw the likelihood that he would die in the same way. Mouskie too had foreseen his end, but his knowledge had been based on the Prophecies while Jesus’s foresight was based on the history of Mouskie, which seemed to make Mouskie the greater figure.
Another interesting feature in the book dealt with the story of Nicodemus. He took refuge up a tree and refused to come down because he was afraid to speak to Jesus, since he saw that Jesus was guarded by two ‘rough Galileans’.
A new Order was being formed in the Church by a group of priests who were giving an exaggerated importance to Saint Paul, almost a priority over Christ. A symbol of the Order, which could be bought in shops selling pious objects, was a bust in china of Saint Paul with three arms, and heads growing out of his arms. I think the Order flourished best in Spain.
A reaction against the Order was being led by a priest I know, who had written a book criticizing it. Late one night he was rung up on the telephone by someone needing an urgent confession: a rendezvous was agreed to at a church on the other side of town. He set out but slowly became suspicious. Was he being followed? He turned and went back.
On returning, he found the street in which he lived ablaze—not only his house but the houses of four other priests who had opposed the new Order.
Archbishop David Mathew, who was an excellent novelist as well as an historian, was a good friend who saved me by his advice in our Common World from the attempted censorship of The Power and the Glory by the Holy Office. All the more strange do I find the account of his funeral in My Own World.
I attended David Mathew’s funeral in December 1964. It was a very bizarre service. I sat in the gallery of the church with a friend and was much annoyed by the whispering, even giggling, which went on in the congregation below. I wanted to call down to them, ‘The archbishop is my friend and he is dead.’ Then my companion whispered to me, ‘One of the priests—I do believe he’s trying not to laugh.’ It was very odd, and I might have put it down to the hysteria of grief had not another of the serving priests seized the altar by its end with a gay laugh a moment later and wheeled it quickly, like a table, out of the church. The service came to an end in a riot of gaiety.
Now, looking back after the passage of many years, I ask myself whether the end of life should not always be celebrated in some such way.
*In conversation with me, Graham Greene described how this passage found its way into the novel from the dream, so for the interest of readers I have added it here. YVONNE CLOETTA
VIII
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Brief Contacts with Royalty
King Leopold
One night in 1964 I was rung up by ex-King Leopold of the Belgians, who wanted my advice. He was organizing a fair to represent the history of Belgium, to be held in all the world capitals, and he was wondering how to deal with the unfortunate history of the Congo. I suggested that he should simply leave it out, but my reply satisfied neither of us.
I then proposed that he should be completely frank, and admit the crime of his great-great-grandfather (I wasn’t quite sure that I had got the relation right) and the mistakes of the Belgian government. ‘You might compare them with the crimes of other countries including my own—the massacre of Amritsar, for example.’ I have never known whether he took my advice.
Queen Elizabeth
In 1966 there was a muddle about my reception at Buckingham Palace to receive the Companion of Honour. There had been a change of date and I was away in the Congo when the note came. For some reason my secretary lied and told the Palace that I had not received it. When I turned up for the changed appointment I was taken to one side by a state official.
‘Tell me the truth,’ he said. ‘Your secretary lied, didn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine why. I was in the Congo.’
We passed by the Queen, who was sitting on her throne, and I paused to shake hands. She gave me a smile. ‘Not yet,’ she said, ‘it would be a breach of protocol.’ I had lost my place in the queue.
We went into the garden to pass the time. There were a lot of bishops about, and children sitting at tables eating buns and ice-cream. After an hour we went back in. I was feeling hungry and so, obviously, was the Queen, for she seated herself at the table and ate a bun. I was a little put out because she called me by my original first name, Henry, which I have always disliked.
It was two years earlier when, quite by chance, I found myself sitting beside the Queen during a service in Windsor Chapel. The officiating clergyman preached an absurd sermon and I found myself in danger of laughing. So, I could see, was the Queen, and she held the Order of Service in front of my mouth to hide my smile. Then Prince Philip entered. I was not surprised at all that he was wearing a scoutmaster’s uniform, but I resented having to surrender my chair to him. As I moved away the Queen confided to me, ‘I can’t bear the way he smiles.’
King Ibn Saud
I encountered King Ibn Saud in a small by-street in Westminster. He was wearing his robes and dark glasses and had apparently just left his young mistress at a tobacconist’s, where she lived over the shop. I was impressed by the great courtesy he showed her as he walked backwards to his taxi with his eyes fixed on the windows of the upper room.
An Unknown Princess
I found myself in the company of a young Princess whose father the King was dying in a castle surrounded by watchers. Her life was endangered by his death. Suddenly there was a noise through the wall of his room, like a long whistle and then a sigh. ‘That is the noise of dying,’ I told her.
It was essential that the watchers should not know that the King had died, so immediately gay music began to be played within the castle.
I said, ‘You must escape now, before the watchers know.’ I tried to assemble the batteries for my electric torch, for it was dark outside, but the batteries were old and used up. ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘it’s nearly day.’
I looked out of the narrow window and saw the watchers far below. It was essential to escape not only the watchers but the dwellers in the castle, and at least temporarily we succeeded. We found ourselves in a field of grass where there were the ruins of an old monastery. We walked through the ruins, but there were tourists there and I heard one say, ‘Surely that’s the Princess. I recognize her hair.’
I caught the Princess up outside the ruins and I told her we must get away as far as possible before someone reported us to the watchers. ‘Take off your beret,’ I said to her. ‘They will say you are wearing a beret.’ Presumably we escaped, for I remember no more.
IX
The Job of Writing
Writing plays only a small part in the World of My Own. Once I came up with an idea for a short story called ‘The Geography of Conscience’, about a woman in Canada—an Irish Catholic who was going to rejoin her husband in Italy. She telephoned to her bishop asking permission to use contraceptive pills and he told her to follow her conscience, so she took one. Then she found herself in Rome in a totally different moral climate and she began to have a bad conscience about the pills. The story was intended to be a comedy and it needed to have a third twist of the geographical conscience. The idea seems a possible one to me still, but I have never found in the Common World the necessary third twist.
An idea for a novel also came to me. The scene was a rather large, ruined old house, and the story would pass from room to room, always avoiding the attic, until the reader began to wonder what there was in the attic. Only in the last chapter would we see inside. The attic would be littered with scraps of old newspapers, and in putting these together the reader would finally discover what the novel was about.
The opening sentences of the story were all that made their way across into the Common World.
IN THE ATTIC
I doubt if the furnished flat which I had chosen to buy would have pleased anyone but myself. But as soon as the lift reached the top floor and I saw the cracks in the door, it was as though the flat held out a hand to me in welcome; it seemed to say, in a voice that creaked like itself, ‘How good it is to see you here again.’
My few friends never understood my new friendship. All they saw was the decrepitude of my dwelling: hinges gone, cracks in the ceiling, a basin that leaked, a radiator that gave no heat. The state of the kitchen didn’t trouble me, for most of the food I had enjoyed when I was young could now be bought in tins. I remember still the first night I spent there, and the dream I had. The dream, like all dreams, had many gaps, passages which memory has failed to retain. I sometimes wonder whether the memory is often a merciful censor, so that even a nightmare has been trimmed of the worst terror by the time we open our eyes.
As in the Common World, writing in the World of My Own has an almost nightmare side. On May 3, 1983, I started revising a typescript of my book Getting to Know the General. I found it impossibly bad. There were long, rambling sentences that led nowhere.
The next night I was working on my novel Monsignor Quixote and I realized that a whole long stretch of it was boring. I decided to amputate this whole section, but that would entail completely altering the end with the monsignor’s death, and what other end could the book have?
In June 1965 I was rehearsing a play which I had adapted from a rather bad translation. My experience as actor-director was very similar to what I had experienced in 1964 in the World which was not My Own, when I was working on Carving a Statue. Peter Wood, who had directed that play, was now again directing, and Ralph Richardson was again playing the principal part with his usual flamboyant, false bonhomie and determination to get his own way. He continually wanted to revert to the old literal translation, which I had changed, and he had made his own marks in the text, which he didn’t want me to see. There was one boastful moment when he put on his Edwardian-style hat, which was phosphorescent in the dark. I became more and more bored and irritated with the whole business. I told Wood how badly Richardson’s part as ‘the detective’ was translated. He disagreed and I realized that my adaptation would soon, by agreement between himself and Richardson, be abandoned, so I told him that in two days I would leave for the South of France. There were no protests. I repeated, ‘In two days—and I shall be happily lunching at the Colombe d’Or in St-Paul-de-Vence.’
I had somehow against my will been persuaded to allow my suppressed novels, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, to be published. I had insisted on writing introductions to show my reasons for suppressing them and to demonstrate how bad they were. All the same, I was very worried and I imagined the fun the critics
would have with them. I thought of forbidding any paperback edition, but apparently it was too late for that.
On May 5, 1973, I had an awful experience which I am thankful never occurred in the Common World. I had sent a love scene in a new novel to my secretary to make a draft, but her draft was full of gaps—that was only tiresome. What was awful was that, as I read the scene aloud to the woman I loved, I realized how false it was, how sentimental, how permissive in the wrong way. She too knew how bad it was and that made me angry. I threw it away. ‘How can I read it to you,’ I demanded, ‘if you interrupt and criticize? It’s only a draft, after all.’
But I knew that the whole book was hopeless. I said, ‘If only I could die before the book is published. It’s got to be published to earn money for the family.’ The thought of Russian roulette came to me. Had I recently bought a revolver or was that a dream? My mistress tried to comfort me but it only made things worse.
X
Stage and Screen
A strange experience remains printed on my brain like a newspaper headline—‘The Suicide of Charlie Chaplin’. It began with a rumour of my friend’s death. I was in a great crowded cinema and I expected that at any moment an announcement would be made. I was even a little afraid of a panic among the audience at the news. However, later, the rumour was denied. A ring came at my flat door and when I opened it Charlie was assisted in. He really looked a dying man. Apparently he had taken poison but presumably not enough, and he made a gesture to indicate how much as he lay down. The poison had come from a tin. I asked his companion to give me the tin—‘It might prove useful for me one day.’ It was an ordeal to watch Charlie slowly dying, as I believed, but the situation suddenly changed—he recovered and was able to leave without assistance.
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