Very movingly at the beginning of his second long journey which was to separate them she wrote: ‘I wanted to tell you at once how dear you are and how happy I’ve been with you for years & years & especially on this trip & the bits of New York … It’s funny that to me the strangeness of it all, & loveliness of being with you are almost concentrated in that first evening in the Yama tea-room & seeing R[ockefeller] Center in the dark with the skaters … I wish I were back with you on Fifth Avenue in the evening, or with you anywhere at all.’25 And when he was deep in the jungles of Chiapas, between Palenque and Salto de Agua, Greene’s mind also went back to that occasion. He was in a hammock slung under a verandah with the sound of animal movements around him in the dark – pigs with pointed tapir snouts, turkeys with hideous Dali heads, a great storm starting them hissing and scurrying: ‘Rockefeller Plaza rose in icicles of steel towards a cold sky; the ice-skaters moved in the small square under the stars.’ This was not the same world, he thought, as he hit furiously at a pointed snout.
Forty years later, reflecting on that separation, Vivien said:
I’m sure Graham has a lot of courage – takes risks. About Mexico, he took me as far as New Orleans, and I was left at the Shushan airport for about five days – it’s about 10 miles out of New Orleans, and of course that was a bit queer. I was all by myself – I had enough money. I had to wait. I never questioned any of this. He presumably had to go – timetables and things – there was nothing to do – nothing to read. I was going back by Dutch cargo boat. It was terrible. There were three others, rather doggy sort of people on board, but it was awful – it took 19 days – unbelievable.
Greene had asked an agent to book the passage. Someone telephoned, collected Vivien and put her on the boat:
It was tiny – it was a small cargo boat which took 4 passengers … the most terrible storm … the cabin was awash, the suitcases were all soaked and I was so ill … When I got back, I didn’t know where Graham was because he was moving about. There was trouble with Shirley Temple and I came back into the blast of it. I can hear the judge saying why was he out of England, but that’s all I remember.26
With hindsight she felt that Greene was a person who should never have married: ‘It took me some time to understand that. I understood it but not consciously. I was unsophisticated and didn’t think that he was somebody who was always wandering. When they were writing in the Sunday papers about the death of the last Marx brother, one of whose film characters was Otis P. Driftwood, I thought “That’s the name for Graham” – never staying in the same place for more than weeks together.’27
*
Greene’s search for experience brought an immediate return on the train journey to San Antonio. When he arrived there he sent a postcard to his wife: ‘Had a pleasant journey with a sad gentle turkey breeder who lives alone with his [1,100] turkeys all the year round, unable to leave them even at night. He has a little house fastened to a motor car & follows them through the fields without any human company.’
This sad little story is faithfully recorded in The Lawless Roads, the voice of the nameless breeder forever preserved in Greene’s travel book: ‘You see’, he said, ‘you’re at it night and day. You can’t trust a hired man. The birds are so sensitive they get nervous and sick if a stranger’s around.’28
But it is with his impressions of San Antonio that one begins to wonder whether experience is seeking him out or he is seeking it; whether he is also touching up his material for effect.
This raises the issue which has long disturbed Greene – the authenticity of what critics have named ‘Greeneland’, ‘a strange violent “seedy” region of the mind’. His response is, ‘“This is Indo-China … this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately described. I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist. I assure you that the dead child lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In the canal of Phat Diem the bodies stuck out of the water …” But I know that argument is useless. They won’t believe the world they haven’t noticed is like that.’29
The world they had not noticed (in San Antonio) began when he went at night to where the West side begins – ‘Wooden houses and raw shows and the brothels in Matamoras Street where the hold-ups happen nightly and the local paper prints a column of them at the week-ends’ – and where he ‘went into a freak show in a little booth … one got an awful amount for ten cents in the stuffy booth’:
I was the only person there; I had a sense that nobody had been for a long while – it couldn’t really compete with Matamoras Street – the dry exhibits were dusty with neglect. There were a Siamese sheep – eight legs sticking out like octopus tentacles – and calves with so-called human heads (like those of morons), and dogs created upside down rolling glass eyeballs towards legs that sprouted from somewhere near the backbone, and ‘a frog baby born to a lady in Oklahoma’.
The high point of the freak show was two dead gangsters:
Dutch Kaplan and Oklahoma Jim, his henchman, lying in open coffins, mummified. Jim was dressed in rusty black, with a loose fly button and the jacket open to disclose the brown hollow arch of the breast, and his former leader was naked except for a black cloth across the loins. The showman lifted it to disclose the dry, dusty, furry private parts. He showed the two scars upon the groin through which the taxidermist had removed all that was corruptible and put his fingers there (a terrible parody of St Thomas) and urged me to do the same – it was lucky to touch the body of a criminal. He put his finger in the bullet-hole where the brains had been blasted out and touched the dingy hair.30
Greene asked him where they got the bodies from. The question irritated the showman, who replied ‘The Crime Prevention League’, and promptly changed the subject. In the corner of his postcard to Vivien, posted later in the Mexican border town of Laredo, he wrote: ‘I spent the evening at a grim Barnum show – mummified gangsters – & a Mexican cinema & variety.’31
The freak show with the mummified gangsters did exist then in San Antonio. In an earlier edition of The Lawless Roads he evokes the ‘hideous vision’ of Dutch Kaplan and Oklahoma Jim: ‘a hundred years hence, sanctified by age and ritual, with ten thousand invisible finger marks upon the groin.’ The vision was untrue. The mummified figures have long since disappeared.
There is no record of a Dutch Kaplan and an Oklahoma Jim in any almanac of the underworld; but the showman could have invented the names. The freaks, according to Greene, were created by man to satisfy some horrifying human need for ugliness.
The brothels in Matamoras Street, though remembered by some citizens of San Antonio, have long since disappeared, but the top end of the street was inhabited by the Class A prostitutes, followed by Class B, then the lowest, Class C. Before Greene arrived, a ‘Directory of Houses and Women’ had been published, listing the girls in alphabetical order from The Arlington (a Class A) living at 507 Matamoras Street to Bell Wilson (Class C) living at number 209. No doubt some of those girls were still there when Greene went to explore the street. The ‘Mexican cinema & variety’ he discovered must have been one of the ‘Carpas’, tent shows, once popular in the town, which were usually followed by a festival.
During his short stay in San Antonio there was also a strike of the workers at the pecan canning factory who had had their wages cut, even though they earned less than fifty cents a day. The strike had been originally led by a Father López and it was the first example Greene had come across of genuine Catholic Action on a social issue – ‘a real attempt … to put into force the papal encyclicals which have condemned capitalism quite as strongly as Communism’. But he had to admit that ‘there was something a little pathetic about Catholic Action in San Antonio’. Father Lopez had a naïve belief that the employers could be persuaded to open their books to the workers’ representatives and restore wages if the books did not justify a cut.fn1
In his condemnation of employers’ greed Greene quotes St James: ‘Go now, ye rich men: weep and howl in your miseries which shall c
ome upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered: and the rust of them shall be for testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh like fire …’ Greene comments, ‘Those are the words of revolution – not the dim promise that account books shall be inspected (how can a Mexican worker living on thirty-five cents a day trust an account book?).’32
But he liked San Antonio, describing it on a postcard to his wife as lovely: ‘Very hot, palmy, old Spanish Cathedral, a river winding in & out of the town, very clean & skyscraping & ancient at the same time. Mass in Spanish, the old Archbishop very sweet & useless.’
*
On Sunday 27 February he ‘got a seat in a car going to Laredo. Doc Williams drove it, with an unlit cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth … A shabby man with a hacking cough sat in the back seat; he had come down from Detroit without luggage and his sister was dying in Laredo.’33 To Vivien he wrote jubilantly that he had heard of a cheap way of getting to Mexico City by buying a seat in a car for about fifteen dollars. He had been told in San Antonio that if he waited at the border he would catch a fine German car on its way to Mexico City.
In Laredo he waited all day: ‘Every half-hour I walked down to the river bank and looked at Mexico.’ He went to the cinema to kill time. He went to Pete’s Bar and had a brandy. He went down to the river bank again and when the lights were coming out on the other side of the Rio Grande he caught a taxi and crossed into Nuevo Laredo, depositing 500 pesos at the customs. He was now in Mexico and he put up for the night. He had crossed the border into a different world: ‘There was a large cockroach dead on the floor of my room and a sour smell from the water closet.’ He was getting deeper into Greeneland.
Travelling and sight-seeing did not stop his writing. Before leaving Monterrey for Mexico City he sent a story to Nancy Pearn which he hoped might have ‘enough action for the Strand’ and sent a small descriptive article to the Spectator, ‘A Postcard from San Antonio’, and proposed sending another article, ‘A Day at the General’s’ – both articles he thought would suit the New Statesman and Time and Tide, and, ‘If anything should be printed – proofs to my wife.’
Vivien was not to receive them. Nancy Pearn wrote to her that although the Strand had an increasing interest in Greene as a short story writer, ‘Across the Border’ was not their type of thing – ‘this editor regards him as so essentially one of the front rank fiction writers of the day, that he never ceases to hope that sooner or later he will turn his attention to writing for the Strand.’ The Spectator turned down ‘A Post-card from San Antonio’ and the Daily Telegraph was ‘not very interested in Mexico until something really happens. As you know, there are events of some importance nearer home. I suggest’, Nancy Pearn went on, ‘that you from your end cable if you know any decisive factor which at a given moment is going to result in revolution.’
Vivien could not contact Greene about these things, a letter from Nancy Pearn sent Post Restante, General Post Office, New Orleans, arrived after he had left; her report on the Strand’s rejection only reached him when many weeks later he arrived in Mexico City suffering from dysentery. And there was no revolution in Mexico. Although President Cardenas expropriated foreign oil companies and foreigners withdrew great sums of money from the banks and the British Ambassador, Owen St Clair O’Malley, behaved arrogantly, the Mexicans were persuaded that they must tighten their belts and accept that this was an indication of their independence from foreign influence.
At Monterrey Greene felt he ‘had been whisked back … to Texas – one of those bad dreams where you never reach your destination … The hotel was American, the rooms were American, the food and the voices all American,’34 but he was being drawn into Mexico.
In the first week of March in San Luís Potosí he interviewed the rebel General Cedillo, an Indian who had refused to enforce the anti-religious laws, though the Catholics he defended did not trust him – many people had an affection for him, ‘an affection for an animal whose cage you enter with caution’.35 Greene got on the wrong side of Cedillo for, having spent a week waiting to interview him, he went on to Mexico City the next day: ‘The General blew himself out: his neck and cheeks extended like rubber. I could see … that I had committed an atrocity.’36
His account of Mexico City shows that he is still a tourist there, though trying to get into the true Mexico as a traveller (like George Borrow whose Travels with the Bible in Spain he makes reference to). He describes the city as being ‘elongated and lopsided on its mountain plateau’; there is the great square with the Cathedral and the National Palace close to each other, the high, dark stony streets near the university quarter, tramways, red-light districts, street markets; ‘a whole family of Indians eating their lunch on the sidewalk edge’; near the Cathedral the remains of an Aztec temple Cortés destroyed; hidden behind the new American hotels old baroque churches and convents; Cinco de Mayo and the fashionable streets and shops; the Avenida Hidalgo ‘where hideous funeral wreaths are made, ten feet high and six across, of mauve and white flowers’.
Trotsky was there, living upstairs in Rivera’s villa in a suburb, revising his Life of Stalin, ‘a revolver on his desk, reporters searched for arms, the villa floodlit at night and guarded by Federal soldiers – the papers … full of a Stalinist plot against his life’.fn2, 37 It seems a shame in retrospect that Greene did not interview Trotsky rather than the insignificant rebel Indian General Cedillo.
In Mexico City he changed his hotel for a dustier, noisier brand (probably the Hotel Canada, for a letter has survived on this hotel’s notepaper), and obtained a room with a shower, plus three meals a day for 5.50 pesos (7s.). Lunch consisted of six courses with a cocktail and coffee. Music was supplied through the street door; a succession of marimba players took up a collection …38 which does not sound like the Hotel Canada.
He explored the city, visiting a cinema, a cabaret (where ‘a Mexican dancer with great bold thighs’, pleased the men and troubled the women in the audience),39 a picture gallery, and discovered a dark winding passage which ‘at every curve disclosed a brightly lighted cell – with a monk in a cowl flogging a naked woman or interrogating one by torchlight, whip in hand. The women’s bodies had been constructed with tender sensuality – pink haunches and round breasts.’40
He visited priests secretly at work; Father Q. who had suffered imprisonment for his beliefs: ‘“It was the happiest time,” Father Q. said, chuckling, remembering the camaraderie of the cells, the hope and exultation, under the light of death.’41 He visited the Bishop of Chiapas, now exiled from his state, old, thin, and dressed in ‘seedy black’: ‘he looked like a village priest and showed a kind of humble confused embarrassment at my genuflexion.’
One has the impression that all was not well with Greene, and indeed it was not. It was not a matter, as it had been in Liberia, of encountering the primitive, danger, fear, discomfort and total uncertainty: it was that his long-cherished dream of Mexico was turning into disillusion and nightmare – even hatred for the country, a hatred which began in San Luís Potosí when he witnessed a cockfight.
Men in big decorated cartwheel hats and tight charro trousers were watching. A procession of horsemen entered with a band of fiddlers. Then two of the charros (horsemen) ‘took little bright spurs out of beautiful red leather cases and bound them on the cocks’ feet with scarlet twine, very slowly, very carefully’, preparation for ‘the scurry on the sand, pain in miniature, and death on a very small scale.’ Granted that Greene was aware of the significance of the ritual (‘Men make rules and hope in that way to tame death’), the cocks crowing and a brass band blaring from stone seats, he suddenly felt an impatience with all ‘this mummery, all this fake emphasis on what is only a natural function; we die as we evacuate; why wear big hats and tight trousers and have a band play? That, I think was the day I began to hate the Mexicans.’42
He was troubled by Mexico City beggars. The kind he saw at Huichapan station, north of Mexic
o City, horrified him. These were not the resigned patient kind waiting dumbly for alms, but the ‘get-rich-quick’ type ‘scrambling, and whining and snarling with impatience, children and old men and women … pushing each other to one side, lifting the stump of a hand, a crutch, a rotting nose’. He gives an example of what he saw:
A middle-aged paralytic worked himself down the platform on his hands – three feet high, with … feet twisted the wrong way. Someone threw him a coin and a child of six or seven leapt on his back and after an obscene and horrifying struggle got it from him. The man made no complaint, shovelling himself farther along; human beings here obeyed the jungle law, each for himself with tooth and nail.43
After five weeks away from Mexico City, Greene saw on his return a beggar woman bent double by some hideous disease: ‘She could only beg your boots for alms. Sweeping round towards fresh pairs of feet she slipped and fell. She lay there with her mouth and nose pressed on the paving, unable to move and unable to breathe until she was lifted.’44
Nothing in Mexico seemed to please, even the food he found awful, tasteless and repellent: ‘just a multitude of plates planked down on the table simultaneously, so that five are getting cold while you eat the sixth; pieces of anonymous meat, a plate of beans, fish from which the taste of the sea has long been squeezed away, rice mixed with what looks like grubs – perhaps they are grubs … a little heap of bones and skin they call a chicken … It is all a hideous red and yellow, green and brown …’45 In Cuernavaca there were ‘little obscene bone figures of men with movable phalli sold secretively by small boys near the bus stop’;46 in Mexico City ‘dead fleas dressed up as little people inside walnuts’;47 in Taxco, there was an American colony ‘for escapists with their twisted sexuality and their hopeless freedom. The place has rotted – the soldiers lie about in the streets at night with their women like dogs.’48
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 85
