Preparing for his journey, Greene learnt from the League of Nations report and the British Blue Book of May 1934 that the diseases in the interior were elephantiasis, leprosy, yaws, malaria, hookworm, schistosomiasis and dysentery; the President was privately exporting slaves to Fernando Po;8 and a black mercenary called Colonel Davis, carrying out a savage campaign, had burnt 41 villages and killed 140 men, women and children; his troops had surrounded villages and poured volleys into the huts; the charred remains of six children were reported after the departure of his troops.
Other considerations pointed him to Liberia rather than to other parts of Africa and a clue to one of these was provided by the reporter for the News Chronicle. It seems that Sir John Harris, Parliamentary Secretary to the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, had been giving the young explorers advice before they set out, and he had some notions of the dangers ahead: ‘They are going into the hinterland farther than any white man had gone before … The negro tribes, which have been savagely oppressed, may welcome them – but you can never tell.’ Harris also gives a hint of a special mission: ‘I should think they ought to get through, and their information if they do will be very valuable.’ So it would appear that Greene would be seeking information about present oppressions, including slavery, for the Anti-Slavery Society. Barbara Greene (now Countess Strachwitz) in 1976 admitted that though she never knew whether Graham wrote a report about slavery, he did have a commission of some sort, ‘that gave him the idea of going there’.
If there was a commission, it seems to have been somewhat secret. There is no reference to it in the minutes of the committee meetings of the Anti-Slavery Society. However, Sir John Harris did report, rather cryptically, to his committee on 6 December 1934 that he and Lady Simon ‘had had an interview with Mr Graham Greene who was going out to Liberia early in the New Year with the object of writing a book. They were endeavouring to secure introductions for Mr Greene from the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office, to the British Consul at Monrovia and to the Governor of Sierra Leone. The publication of the book would involve the Society in no financial responsibility.’
Greene was able to talk to C. H. Buxton who had just returned from Liberia, but he himself had no experience of travelling through jungle – and he had no reliable map. He wrote to his brother: ‘The whole trip gets more and more fantastic every day … I have to take out cases of food and a book I’ve read on Sierra Leone says cheerfully that several Europeans have recently gone across the border [into Liberia] but none of them have returned! This, of course, is not to be repeated to the family.’9 At last he had managed to get ‘a fairly large scale map; most of it blank white with dotted lines showing the probable course of rivers!’ He also managed to get an American military map, though it showed whole areas left blank except for the word ‘Cannibals’. Something of the initial distaste for the journey appears on the outside flap of the envelope of the November letter he sent to Hugh: ‘Proposed title for Liberian book: “You Can Keep Africa”.’ But he had to go and, as with many future foreign journeys, it was an essential step into a new existence. Greene would certainly not be looking to the journey for any ‘fun’. Besides he had the responsibility for a young woman’s safety.
Their journey began on 4 January 1935 at Euston Station where they caught the 6.5 p.m. train and sat down immediately to what sounds like typical train fare – pieces of damp white fish. According to Barbara they were both shy people, and one wonders what they found to talk about, with Greene’s thoughts no doubt engrossed with what might lie ahead. They spent the night at the vast Liverpool Adelphi Hotel which looks down over the shopping and commercial centre of the city towards the River Mersey and the docks. Greene described the Adelphi as having been ‘designed without aesthetic taste but with the right ideas about comfort and a genuine idea of magnificence!’ The next morning, a cold January day, they embarked at the Prince’s Stage: ‘The black steamers knocking about in the yellow Mersey, under a sky so low that they seemed to touch it with their funnels … the grey mildness, shading away into black at every pretext.’10
Along with its account of their journey, the News Chronicle published a photograph of the cousins walking up the gangway of the cargo boat, the David Livingstone, a photograph which is striking, not because Greene is following his cousin and wearing a mackintosh, but because he looks desperately unhappy. He has recalled that he was furious over the interview Barbara had given to the News Chronicle. The reason for his anger, perhaps, was that he felt the interview might have cost him Harris’s support; this can be inferred from a letter Sir John wrote to Vivien (no doubt in response to one of Vivien’s pouring oil on troubled waters), a copy of which is in the archives of the Anti-Slavery Society: ‘Frankly, I was sorry to see the interview, for I was afraid it might do harm,’ wrote Harris. ‘However, unless something unusual happens, Liberia won’t see the News Chronicle.’
Harris had been immensely kind to the young novelist, and understandably Greene would not want to lose his patronage. He had talked to the Colonial Secretary, and to the British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, to try to smooth Greene’s way at least through the British colony of Sierra Leone. He also gave Greene an introduction to the native chief at Cape Palmas. But more than this was involved.
Light-heartedly, Greene had written to his brother about other possible spin-offs from his relationship with Harris – an amazing result of the trip might be offers of a variety of jobs from the most august to the most farcical – ‘adoption by old Harris as his successor as Parliamentary Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society … I have to be stared at and my private life examined by a committee of philanthropists … On Wed. I have tea with Lady Simon.’ It was no idle fantasy, for he wrote to his mother: ‘Sir John Harris is so taken by me that he wants me to come in as his assistant when I get back and in three years succeed him, but I don’t think it’s really my sort of job …’
The journey, with its dangers, discomforts and trials, was to be well-documented. Both cousins kept diaries, each published an account, and Greene’s letters to his mother give a further dimension. He eventually concluded that Barbara proved ‘as good a companion as the circumstances allowed, and I shudder to think of the quarrels I would have had with a companion of the same sex after exhaustion had set in, all the arguments, and indecisions … My cousin left all decisions to me and never criticized me when I made the wrong one, and because of the difference of sex we were both forced to control our irritated nerves.’11 Barbara wrote that his brain frightened her. It was sharp and clear and cruel. She admired him for being always unsentimental, but noted, ‘always remember to rely on yourself … If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.’12 Although he tore down her cherished ideals so that she had to rebuild them, she also concluded he was the best companion one could have had on such a trip – and she was to learn far more than he expected.
*
The sea voyage at least was relaxing, the other passengers interesting, and there were some hilarious moments. In chapter 2 of Journey Without Maps, Greene wrote: ‘My cousin and I had five fellow-passengers in the cargo ship, two shipping agents, a traveller for an engineering firm, a doctor on his way to the Coast with anti-yellow fever serum and a woman joining her husband at Bathurst.’ Three days out, in the Bay of Biscay, he wrote to his mother, ‘Rather sick the second day and the sea getting up again now, but the Bay perfectly smooth … The other passengers very nice.’ He gave additional information: the commercial on his way to Nigeria was very fat, the young woman joining her husband very dull and the Elder Dempster agents very North Country.
Greene liked the skipper and the fat agent, a drunk with the stamina of a bull, whom he calls Younger in his travel book, but whose real name was Holt. There were some boisterous drinking parties on board and at Las Palmas the Greenes went ashore with ‘Younger’ and Phil who was the ship’s third officer. They all had a wild party at a
dance hall:
[Younger’s] inevitable expression, ‘You saucy little sausage’, could be heard throughout all the rooms, his progress was one long slap and tickle and free drink. The manager followed him around with bills he wouldn’t pay and Phil brought up the rear … afraid there would be trouble … Every now and again to keep the manager quiet Phil paid a bill and the manager tore it up and dropped it on the floor and wrote another. Then Younger stole the woman belonging to a man with a guitar … the manager wrote a bill, and Phil plucked at Younger’s sleeve and said, ‘Go steady, old man. Go steady.’ A madman came up and threatened Younger, but Younger didn’t understand, didn’t care anyway … He sat on a chair playing pat-paw with his stout black bitch; sometimes he made a pass at her mouth, but she avoided that, nudging with her elbow, pushing forward her empty glass while the manager wrote out another bill.13
The terse entries in Greene’s diary confirm this extraordinary account: ‘Holt runs riot. The language of slaps, the way the tart kept control of him, got drink after drink and always fended off her face. Lavish expenditure at the bar followed by refusal to pay the bill. You saucy old sausage. The third officer’s protest … The man with the banjo and the madman.’14 Barbara also recalled the madman, ‘drunk and with curiously twitching limbs, was walking round the room from table to table, screaming out all kinds of threats.’15 They returned to the ship in a rowing boat at 12.30 a.m. with a helplessly drunk and unconscious Younger.
Next day there was an indication of the other side of things – of the nature of the land they were approaching. Greene wrote to his mother that they had ‘passed through what is known as the Elder Dempster graveyard, because of the people … who catch fever there on the way home, the day was most curious and delicious: warm, damp with a strong smell of seaweed everywhere and haze over the sea.’ Barbara recorded that many ports were closed to them because of yellow fever. At Bathurst, a quarantined town, they dropped off the ‘frightened, repressed little woman who had never before left Liverpool … to join a husband she had not seen since her honeymoon’.
*
The Freetown Weekly News reported on 26 January 1935 that there had arrived on Saturday last by the David Livingstone from England, ‘Mr Graham Greene, one of the distinguished authors in London, who is on his way to Liberia. Mr Greene intends to write a book on his travels and proposes to travel to Monrovia overland from Kanri Lahun [Kailahun].’ The African newspaper tells us that he was for some time connected with one of the leading journals in London, and that Miss Greene, his cousin and travelling companion, ‘is an accomplished Lady’, followed by the expressed presumption (news to Barbara) that she would play an important part as a typist in the preparation of her cousin’s book.
For Greene, Freetown was ‘an impression of heat and damp’ and a mist which ‘streamed along the lower streets and lay over the roofs like smoke’.16 It was his first contact with a British colony, an outpost of the Empire which his father and the masters at school had praised: ‘Freetown. An intense seediness. Europeans had withdrawn to the hill. All shabbiness an English responsibility, the only colour native,’ he records in his diary. ‘The fish lying ten deep on the ground; Cabins standing in thick plantations.’ This reaction – the condemnation of the whites: ‘England had planted this town … Everything ugly … was European’;17 the romantic view of the natives – ‘if there was anything beautiful in the place it was native: the little stalls of the fruit-sellers which went up after dark at the street corners, lit by candles; the native women rolling home magnificently from church on a Sunday morning … the lovely roll of the thighs, the swing of the great shoulders’,18 was not unusual in first encountering the culture shock of a colonial settlement; indeed it was predictable in a man predisposed to anti-colonialism by his Independent Labour Party affiliations.
Greene’s views were supported by highly selective details – the peeling Remembrance Day posters, tin roofs, broken windows, the Anglican Cathedral of ‘laterite bricks and tin with a square tower’ and – part of the fraud – the Norman church built in the nineteenth century, and the vultures – ‘birds one turns away from at the Zoo with dusty feathers and horrible tiny heads sitting on the roofs, crouching in the gardens, like turkeys, seven out of my bedroom window’.
His diary confirms a swing from white to native: ‘Kru Town. Long hanging breasts’, which becomes ‘breasts falling in flat bronze folds’ in his travel book, and to his eyes they seem more beautiful than the ‘small rounded immature European breasts’.19 This, for Greene, remained a quintessential aspect of Africa and when a year or two later he reviewed a film which attempted to portray the white civilisation of the coast by means of a picturesque market and a native hospital, he stressed the need for a different set of images: ‘Tin roofs … broken windows, long dreary bars and ants on the floor, vultures pecking like turkeys in arid back gardens.’20
Characteristically, his interest was in the unsuccessful as opposed to the career men, the colonial officers, the kind who came from just such a school as his own – the rulers. He could sympathise with the whites at the sharp end of the stick, whom he found drinking in the City Bar: ‘Worms and malaria, even without yellow fever, are enough to cloud life in “the healthiest place along the Coast”. These men in the City Bar, prospectors, shipping agents, merchants, engineers, had to reproduce English conditions if they were to be happy at all. They weren’t the real rulers; they were out to make money; and there was no hypocrisy in their attitude towards “the bloody blacks”.’21
He returned to this topic many times. As late as 1968 he wrote of the City Bar failures who ‘knew more of Africa than the successes who were waiting to get transferred to a smarter colony and were careful to take no risks with their personal file.’22 These latter, ‘the real rulers, came out for a few years, had a long leave every eighteen months, gave garden parties, were supposed to be there for the good of the ruled. It was these men who had so much to answer for.’23
The City Bar men were those who had stayed put into ‘the beginnings of old age … The dream which had brought them to Africa was still alive: it didn’t depend on carefully mounting the ladder of a career.’24 ‘One came home and wrote a book,’ he guiltily admitted, ‘leaving the condemned behind … eking out a miserable living in little tropical towns.’25
Moreover, the City Bar men gave Greene an insight into human purpose and behaviour which was to influence his future work. He would seek a significance and a virtue in the sordid. His long-standing friend, A. S. Frere, who succeeded Charles Evans as head of Heinemann, admired Greene, but had a strong impression of his difference from other people. ‘If you read the opening of The Power and the Glory’, he said, ‘and all that heat and squalor that he enjoys – I don’t think he’s interested in the softer human emotions. The things that come first, good food, good drink and comfortable sleep – Graham is never interested in these.’26 Barbara Greene extends this assessment of her cousin: ‘Apart from three or four people he was really fond of, I felt that the rest of humanity was to him like a heap of insects that he liked to examine, as a scientist might examine his specimens, coldly and clearly.’ But she adds, ‘He was always polite.’27
*
The Weekly News reported on their activities during their stay: ‘Mr Greene and Miss Greene had the pleasure of meeting several European ladies and gentlemen and had a jolly drive to Lumley Beach and other interesting places worth seeing. Mr Greene hopes on the homeward voyage D.V. to meet with as many Africans as possible. They left on Wednesday morning by the Bo train.’
What the reporter did not know was that during those few days it was essential that the Greenes acquired more information about their journey, yet it seemed impossible to come by any that was reliable. Barbara commented: ‘Graham had never done anything like this before … It was, in fact, not in his line … For some reason he had a permanently shaky hand, so I hoped we would not meet any wild beasts on our trip. I had never shot anything in my life, and my cousin woul
d undoubtedly miss anything he aimed at. Physically, he did not look strong. He seemed somewhat vague and unpractical, and later I was continually astonished at his efficiency and attention to every little detail.’28
He had indeed tried to arrange everything in advance. When they came on shore they were met by an elderly Kruman who had received a cable from London asking him to be there. ‘My name’, he said, ‘is Mr D.’ ‘He knew the Republic well’, writes Greene, and describes a visit to Mr D’s home in Krutown – ‘one of the few parts of Freetown with any beauty’. Barbara, who accompanied him, described Mr D as ‘a very black gentleman who, for some reason … had been banished from Liberia’. She recalled being bitten by insects. Mr D did his best, but could not be sure ‘to a matter of ten miles’ where the places were on the route he was recommending they should take.
To go up country they needed carriers and servants. Apart from provisions, one had to take furniture and cooking utensils. Greene thought this had been arranged through a man he calls Jimmie Daker (probably not his real name, though the diary gives no other), but Daker had forgotten to do it: ‘He was vague, charming, lost, and a little drunk.’ Fortunately, at a cocktail party, they met the irresistibly attractive ‘Daddy’, who, although drunk, drove them round Freetown erratically while subjecting them to an interrogation which brought home their inadequacy:
Had [they] ever been in Africa before? Had [they] ever been on trek? What on earth made [them] choose to go There? … Had [they] any idea of what [they] were up against? Had [they] any reliable maps? Had [they] any boys? Had [they] let the D.C.’s [District Commissioners] up the line know of [their] coming and engaged rest-houses? No, [Greene] hadn’t known it was necessary. When [they] crossed the border, how were [they] going to sleep? In native huts. Had [they] ever considered what a native hut meant? The rats, the lice, the bugs.29
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 65
