I replied that that happened to everyone with age, and he had left a fine body of work behind him. He admitted that ‘The Midnight Skaters’ was a good poem, and I tried to remember the title of another which ended with the line ‘Look up with hatred through the glass.’ I started glancing through a collection of his, but I couldn’t identify the poem.
Somebody had shown me a book by Sacheverell Sitwell in which he claimed that he and his wife had gone to live in Kenya because of something I had written about him. They were suffering from intense loneliness but couldn’t make up their minds to return. One terrible and true phrase sticks in my memory: ‘Loneliness is not shared with another—it is multiplied.’
To my astonishment my publisher, Frere of Heinemann, began to praise the novels of C.P. Snow. He said they had a world-wide reputation. I denied this. In France, I said, he was practically unknown, and I began to point out the absurdities of his style. There was a character in the book Frere was reading who ‘had’ or ‘took’ his wife. However, I couldn’t shake his inexplicable admiration.
I wanted to read certain poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses to my small son (no longer small in that Common World we share). I couldn’t find the collected poems, which had been edited by Janet Adam Smith, although I knew I had a copy both in Antibes and in Paris. All I could find was a selection with very bad illustrations, and it left out all the poems I liked (including the one I wanted to read, which contained the line ‘a sin without pardon’). My son was pleased with the illustrations, which made me all the more disappointed not to find the poem. I at last, but too late, after he had gone, found the edition I wanted tucked away in a cupboard.
With a French friend I had been wandering through Paris. Only in retrospect do I realize what a Victorian Paris it still is. We came to a kind of market with second-hand bookshops on the periphery, and in the centre people engaged in the manufacture of books: Stalls where type was being set, stalls where books were being bound. In the first second-hand stall I stopped at, I saw with delight bundles of old Strand magazines tied with string. Nothing was in very good condition, but all the same it was a shop after my own heart. Mixed in with one bundle was a Nelson sevenpenny—I think by Booth Tarkington—but not one I wanted. However, I found a Dick Donovan for my collection of Victorian detective stories, and another detective story by an author unknown to me, but to my great disappointment the bookseller told me that his stock was for lending only. I continued round the market, but the other stalls contained mainly reference books.
In My Own World recently my mother read poetry to me—poems I had liked when a boy and perhaps neglected since, for they now seemed to take on a new quality. One poem was by Robert Bridges: ‘Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding.…’
XIII
Science
A Nobel Prize Winner
I had been reading a very interesting book written by a woman doctor who thought she had found a cure for a fatal disease of the intestines caused by a virus know as Fugger. She injected a wasp with Fugger—from which she was suffering herself—and induced it to sting her on the stomach. She was cured. She consulted a medical friend who asked her whether she really believed in the cure, and she admitted she was only a half-believer. However, he encouraged her to continue her research. Two patients were cured, the third died, but then a fourth was cured. She was awarded a Nobel Prize for medicine, but then two more patients died. The doctor friend suggested that the cure depended on the psychology of the patient and the degree of his or her belief. She was depressed by the bad results and her own half-belief. Her husband volunteered to help her by being injected with Fugger and treated by the wasp sting. His heroic act was rewarded—he was cured.
Outer Space
A friend showed me two objects which had fallen from the sky through his roof. One was a ball of rock which might have been a natural product; the other was a beautifully fashioned skull in a white substance like marble. This could only have been carved by an intelligence resembling the human. It really seemed a proof of intelligent being existing in outer space.
Studying the moon’s surface through binoculars, I suddenly discovered a human face carved on a great crag. I was immensely excited by this discovery and all that it suggested, but I couldn’t get anyone else to see it.
XIV
Love?
I spent a sad summer evening in July 1965. I was engaged to be married to a girl whose mother detested me and longed to see the affair at an end. Harassed nerves caused a quarrel between me and the girl and her pride added its quota, while I pushed the quarrel to its extreme so that the girl broke with me and I accepted the break. The mother listened with satisfaction and then took the girl upstairs.
I felt sad and guilty and I knew that my relief at this final solution would not last. A party was going on at the house and the mother reappeared with her daughter in her arms, small and shrunken and ready to vomit. The mother appealed to me to find something and I brought a vase into which the girl vomited. I felt pity and guilt and love too, and I realized for the first time how much she loved me and what I was losing.
Among the guests was Henry Moore, and as I left the room I apologized to him for not having recognized him earlier, as I had been so preoccupied with my quarrel. I left the house and went for a walk with the girl’s brother. He was very sympathetic to both of us. We met her father, whom I had always liked, and appealed to him. ‘I am not such a rotten beast, am I?’ He smiled to reassure me.
When I got back to the house the girl was there, and everything was all right again between us.
XV
A Small Revenge
A small revenge is as sweet in My Own World as it is in the world we share, and all the more when it comes unexpectedly, as it did during the afternoon of November 20, 1988.
My sister Elisabeth had called on me unexpectedly with a friend just as I was leaving my Paris flat and I invited them for a drink in a usually quiet bistro round the corner. There were more people seated there than usual, and I was hesitating whether to stay when Elisabeth spoke sharply to a man sitting apart who seemed to be writing notes. ‘Do you always wear spectacles?’ she asked him.
‘No,’ he replied with some astonishment.
‘Would you take them off?’
He obeyed and my sister said, ‘Oh yes, I thought I knew you.’ She explained to me, ‘He’s a lawyer who’s been against you in about four libel actions.’
‘Did he win them?’
‘Never more than a few hundred pounds.’
Everybody in the bar was listening attentively.
‘You are Mr Creen?’ the man asked.
‘My name is Greene,’ I told him, ‘not Creen. But I suppose you would think both names were a Screen.’
XVI
My Life of Crime
I found myself concerned with a woman in a murder. We had concealed the body in a railway truck—a porter passing in one direction could not see it, but to others it was still visible. We began to make our getaway, but looking back I saw that a crowd had gathered.
At the entrance to the station there was a control, but we passed safely through. Then again at the exit from the station yard there was another control, and a small queue had formed. The guard was on the telephone, probably being warned about the murder. I managed to push my way through, but my companion was held up.
I walked rapidly down the street and took the first turning that came. It led to another station and here I was rejoined by my companion. She had struggled successfully with the guard. I told her that the best thing for us was to take the first available train anywhere. One was just beginning to move and we scrambled on without a ticket, but we bought tickets from the collector, and found the train was bound for somewhere on the Marne.
‘It’s a grim grey region,’ my friend said.
‘Never mind,’ I replied. ‘If we had stayed in Paris they would have only one place to search. Now on the Marne they will have ten t
housand places to look, and we shall be on the way to the east.’
Unfortunately, just behind us in the carriage was an inquisitive couple, and the man had been reading a newspaper which contained an account of the murder. My friend was wearing a very distinctive pointed cap and I feared it might appear in a photograph in the paper. I told her to take it off and I held it scrumpled up on my knees.
Our fellow traveller continued with his questions. I told him we were writing a story together—a story about some criminals. Well, hardly criminals. There was no question of a big crime. It was a tale about a troop of jongleurs who stole venison and cooked it on stolen wood.
I was living in a small room with my mistress and I was wanted by the police in connection with a robbery. Some of the stolen things were concealed in the room. Looking through the window, I saw the police gathering for a raid. I was determined to fight capture but suddenly the room was full of tiny birds with blue wings—they flew back and forth like a shoal of fish. When they began to settle on my shoulders my first reaction was fear and abhorrence, for I have always been afraid of a bird’s touch, but then my fear went. I could feel them against my neck as soft as a kitten. My whole mood changed. Love came in place of fear and defiance, and when the police broke in I made no resistance. They allowed me to walk behind them to where other prisoners were gathered. We were put into a Black Maria and during the trip one of the prisoners attacked a guard with his handcuffs. I held him back.
In May 1965 I stole something of great value, although it looked like no more than a scrap of black lace. If it was discovered I would suffer a long term of imprisonment. A plainclothes policewoman came to search my apartment. She was quite sympathetic but very thorough. I kept the scrap in my hand for a long time, but I feared that eventually I would be searched myself. When she was occupied with something else I hid it in a carton of lump sugar, pushing it under the lumps. Unfortunately she finally reached the point of opening the carton and peering inside. I hoped it would be too dark in the carton for her to see a scrap of black. She looked for a long time and then closed the box. The search was at an end.
I asked her if the police would now be satisfied that there was nothing in my apartment and she agreed, but I didn’t quite trust them not to make a sudden return visit and I tried to think of a better hiding-place. Perhaps I had learnt my lesson, for in the twenty or more years that followed I find no reference to another theft.
XVII
Unpleasant Experiences
I had a very unpleasant experience. I found crevettes were coming out of my penis with my urine. There were about twelve in the lavatory bowl, and one langoustine.
There I was sitting in my favourite small restaurant with this old tart in her sixties. What had ever induced me to pick her up—pity? I talked to her politely. She didn’t look like a tart, I thought, and hoped again. I heard my name mentioned at a neighbouring table and tried in vain to hear what they were saying about me. She expected me to go home with her after this, and what was I to do? I was stupid enough to tell her that this was my favourite restaurant. I thought: I won’t be able to come here for months in case she looks for me here.
For some reason we left the restaurant separately, and I thought for a moment of creeping round the corner, but I decided that would be unfair and unkind, and then I heard her ‘coo-ee’. I explained to her as well as I could that there simply wasn’t time to go home with her that afternoon, and that anyway I was too tired. In that case, she said, I’d have time to look in at an exhibition of religious art in the church at the end of the street. I agreed though I had no intention of going, and I pressed a hundred-franc note into her hand.
XVIII
Animals Who Talk
It is one of the charms in this World of My Own that animals talk as intelligibly as human beings. For example, on the evening of October 18, 1964, I was caressing a tabby kitten who boasted to me in a small clear voice that she had killed four birds that day. I rebuked her with pretended anger since I am not very fond of birds. She replied with a certain pathos, ‘But you know, I got forty-two francs for them.’
I was worried and a little frightened by a beastly little yapping dog who resented me coming into the house. When I turned my back on him I could hear him making dashes at my heels. I shook my finger at him and scolded him and he collapsed on his side and whimpered out, ‘Are you going to punish me?’ I replied, ‘I damned well am.’ He made a little pool of spittle in his fear.
In a hut by the sea where I was living I received a visit from a remarkably intelligent dog. I had met him once before, with his owner. He had close, curly black hair. He opened the door himself and came and laid his head upon my knee. He asked wistfully, ‘Am I faster than Diamond?’ Diamond was a cat. I said, ‘Yes.’
‘Am I faster than.…’ He mentioned an old spaniel.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but remember he’s very old.’
Later I had to reprove him for putting his paw on the table laid for two and stretching it towards the sugar basin. I tapped his paw gently and he left the room, opening the door himself and closing it behind him.
In Milan with my friend Yvonne and her setter dog, Sandy. Yvonne went into the cathedral and, when I looked around for Sandy, a bystander told me he had followed her in. But this was not true—it was a different dog. Sandy was lost, and we were about to leave Milan. I went round all the side streets, calling his name with increasing anxiety. At last someone said, ‘Here he is,’ and a setter bounded towards me with enthusiasm. Only when I had brought him back to the hotel did I realize he was of the wrong colour. So back I went calling ‘Sandy!’ and to my relief he came. He said to me, ‘If only I had carried a handbag with a little money for a taxi. I was lost, and I didn’t even know the name of the hotel.’
XIX
Disease and Death
I had to have a massage for the back. The masseur—who seemed to be American—found two black spots on my buttocks at the base of the spine. He said he had to get them out, and pinched one very hard while giving me a running commentary. It hurt quite a lot before he was successful with the first. I looked over my shoulder, expecting to see nothing longer than a match head, but he was holding a large scampi wrapped in a transparent caul.
‘Is it alive?’ I asked.
‘Sure it’s alive,’ he said.
‘I would have thought that I would feel it eating away at me.’
The masseur was hot from his exertion and mopped his brow. ‘It doesn’t eat you. It’s like a vegetable. It sort of lies in you, as though it were in the earth.’
He began to work on the second one. This was even more difficult. He said, ‘They can give you hepatitis. Maybe I’ve saved you from that in time.’
He gave an angry exclamation. I think he had broken off the head of the second one, leaving the body in the flesh.
My mother had died and her dead body had to be lifted from a bed and carried into another house. I didn’t want to help, but I had to, and I didn’t want to look, but it was necessary. The body was very thin and dry and shrunken. It was easier to move it in a standing position, and at moments it resembled my elder sister, who had died many years before.
Then I heard the body speak as I moved it. It said, ‘Cold. Cold.’ I tried to convince the others that the body could not really be dead, but they paid no attention. I told the body that I would light a fire and soon it would be warm. There was no reply, but I felt a horrifying pity. One could suffer after death, it seemed.
I had a discussion about the fear of extinction by death. I began by telling of a dream of mine which suggested to me that there was an afterlife for those who believed in it. In the dream I had been aware of people I had loved who called to me to join them. But I had chosen, by my lack of belief, extinction. A great black cone like a candle extinguisher was to be dropped over my head.
In the discussion that followed, I argued that we all, whatever our beliefs, feared extinction.
In this World of My Own I found my
self writing a bit of verse for a competition in a magazine called Time and Tide, but, needless to say, the paper never received it. It was about my own death.
From the room next door
The TV talks to me
Of sickness, nettlerash, and herbal tea.
My breath is folded up
Like sheets in lavender.
The end for me
Arrives like nursery tea.
A World of My Own Page 7
