Graham Greene
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47 Raymond and Eleanor at 10 Holywell Street in Oxford.
48 Dr Shorrocks had attended the protracted delivery of Lucy Caroline on 28 December 1933.
49 Graham described her: ‘The middle-aged, fanatical rather bandy legged woman, Mlle B, who had given me so dubious an invitation [to protest against the Communists], turned out to be one of the leaders of the National Front which now claims 50,000 members….’ Suzanne Bertillon was a well-known journalist who had reported on the famine in the Ukraine; an anti-Soviet, she supported calls for Franco-German friendship and in 1935 wrote a famous article on whether Hitler would write a second volume of Mein Kampf.
50 Probably the American novelist, poet and translator Allan Updegraff (1883–1965). He was a friend of Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair and lived for many years in Paris.
51 She later wrote a biography of Alphonse Bertillon, pioneer of various forensic techniques including fingerprints and mugshots; he had been a witness in the Dreyfus trial.
52 The Norwegian poet, journalist and dramatist Nordahl Grieg (1902–43) surprised Greene with a visit to Chipping Campden in 1931. The two struck up a warm friendship, described in Ways of Escape, 18–22. He lived for a time in Moscow and during the war joined the RAF. He was shot down over Berlin in 1943.
53 The novelist and biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908-92) was an important and insightful early critic of Graham Greene’s fiction. Regrettably, he was the originator of the term ‘Greeneland’.
54 William Wycherley’s comedy (1675) was playing at the Ambassadors Theatre in London.
55 Not identified. Conceivably, Noël Margaret Tidy, who wrote on massage and physiotherapy.
56 Edward Knoblock (1874–1945), an American playwright who lived for many years in London and was a friend of Arnold Bennett and Edith Sitwell.
57 J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967) was a poet and memoirist, who worked as a producer with the BBC from 1928. He became the literary editor of the Listener in 1935 and spent twenty-four years in that job, exercising wide influence over the literary scene (ODNB).
58 Graham is probably referring to his cousin Felix Greene (1909–85), who worked with the BBC. He became notorious for his botched reporting of the huge famine in China in 1959–61 following Mao’s Great Leap Forward and for an obsequious interview with Chou En-lai. Journalists often refer to him mistakenly as the brother of Graham and Hugh.
59 The abundantly named Brigadier General Cecil Faber Aspinall-Oglander was the author of Military Operations, Gallipoli (1929). He generally wrote on naval subjects and may have regarded smugglers as falling under his nautical expertise.
60 A book by Sir Compton Mackenzie, published in 1929.
61 Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, who had provided the money for Graham’s jaunt to the Ruhr in 1924, was in constant peril under Hitler. A public opponent of the Nazis, he was dismissed from the London embassy and retired to private life. During the war, he ran an escape route for Jews from Germany to Switzerland; he was shot by the Gestapo c. 23 April 1945. (A Sort of Life, 100–1; Knut Hansen, Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff [Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996]; see pp. 394–5).
62 Derek Verschoyle brought Greene into the Spectator as a reviewer, and Greene was his replacement as literary editor when he was called up for military service. Citing Diana Athill, Jeremy Lewis writes of Verschoyle: ‘he kept a .22 rifle in the office in Gower Street, and would occasionally fling open his window and, his feet propped up on the desk, take pot shots at stray cats lurking in the garden or on the black-bricked wall beyond; but however unpopular he may have been with Bloomsbury cats, his convivial, heavy-drinking ways recommended him to his colleagues.’ (‘Grub Street Irregular’, unpublished ms.)
63 Andre Sebastian Raffalovich was a member of a wealthy Russian banking family. As a young man, he wrote poetry and fiction and was involved in a number of literary circles in London. He was received into the Catholic Church and contributed heavily to Church causes, including the construction of a new chapel at Downside Abbey. He visited Graham and Vivien at Chipping Campden, and NS suggests that he was the model for Mr Eckman in Stamboul Train (The Times, 24 February 1934; NS 1: 426).
64 See Ways of Escape, 19.
65 New York Times, 16 May 1934.
66 In the imagination.
67 The Times (20 October 1928) reported the expulsion of a Soviet military attaché named Sudakoff from Latvia. He and his secretary had been attempting to organise anti-constitutional groups. Presumably this is the same man.
68 Peter Leslie (d. 1971) had been an Anglican clergyman but became a Catholic, an arms dealer and a spy for the SIS as presumably those things were nearer heaven. Much later, he made a gift to Greene of his collection of Henry James first editions. See pp. 301–2; Ways of Escape, 55–6; and Articles of Faith, 165–79.
69 Ramon Novarro (1899–1968) played the lead in Ben Hur (1925), with its famously huge cast of 125,000.
70 Major Giffey, a passport-control officer, was likely also engaged in espionage work as Tallinn, 250 miles west of St. Petersburg, served as a ‘listening-post’ for the Soviet Union (Articles of Faith, 165–79). Mockler (94) suggests that he is the model for the poker-playing attaché in England Made Me.
71 Unidentified. Her article appears not to have been published.
72 Greene’s query. He is actually thinking of Lord Teignmouth’s and Charles G. Harper’s The Smugglers, 2 vols. (1923), 1: 42–5. A man who called himself ‘Goring’ explained in detail the activities of a Sussex gang and proposed the means to capture them: ‘Do but take up some of the Servants, they will soon rout the Masters, for the Servants are all poor.’
73 Hugh was staying with their cousin Barbara Greene at 4 Ormonde Gate in London.
74 Though now largely forgotten, Sir John Harris (1874–1940) was a man of rare qualities. An Evangelical Christian, he had investigated and testified about the horrors of Leopold II’s exploitation of the Congo. He then travelled the world, often at the risk of his life, to report on enslavements of colonial peoples. From 1910 to 1940, he acted as parliamentary secretary to the amalgamated Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection societies. He served a term in Parliament as a Liberal and was knighted in 1933. (ODNB)
75 This title, which Greene preferred, was used for the American edition. It was retitled England Made Me for the English market.
76 ‘The Bear Fell Free’.
77 Journey Without Maps was published in May 1936.
78 He travelled with his cousin Barbara Greene (later Countess Strachwitz), who bore the physical strains of the trek better than he did. Without her presence he would probably have died of fever. Her book about the journey is Land Benighted (1938).
79 Rodney Ackland’s and Roy Lockwood’s plan to follow Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, whose independently produced Crime Without Passion had been released in August 1934, failed. Greene later sold the rights for a token sum to Ralph Keane, who had worked with him on a publicity film for Imperial Airways, because Keane was looking for an opportunity to make his first feature film. Unable to finance a production, Keane resold the rights to Sydney Box, who brought it to the screen in 1947 with an appalling script that represented torture with branding irons as part of the legal system in the nineteenth century. ‘After the experience I added a clause to every film contract forbidding a resale to Mr. Box’ (Ways of Escape, 14; Falk, 48).
80 Ingeborg was the girlfriend of Nils Lie, the Norwegian translator of The Man Within. Greene dedicated It’s a Battlefield to them. She also worked in Russia as secretary to Nordahl Grieg.
81 Dame Kathleen Simon, later Viscountess Simon (1863/4–1955), an Irish campaigner against slavery. As a researcher, writer and lecturer, she worked closely with Sir John Harris and was comparably devoted to the cause. Her husband, Sir John Simon, later 1st Viscount Simon, was the Foreign Secretary (ODNB).
82 Hugh had married his first wife Helga (née Guinness) 24 October 1934 in Chelsea (Tracey, 47).
83 RKN, 110–11.
&n
bsp; 84 Purna’s full name was Krishna Raghavendra Purna. He was born in Bangalore in 1911 and educated in Mysore. He came up to Exeter College in 1932 to prepare for a career in the civil service; his record card notes that he was ‘popular in his year’. An engaging man and a hard drinker, he died in June 1948. (Information from John Madicott, archivist of Exeter College; for further information see Susan Ram and N. Ram, R. K. Narayan: The Early Years 1906–1945 [New Delhi: Viking, 1996], esp. 143–5)
85 Dennis Kincaid (1905–37) was a novelist and historian of India.
86 His full name was longer than Greene knew: Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Naranayanaswami.
87 The Gates of Hell: An Historical Novel of the Present Day, trans. I. J. Collins (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1933). Greene reviewed it in the Spectator (15 December 1933).
88 A pseudonym Graham had used since his student days. See p. 355.
89 John Grierson (1898–1972) was the central figure at the GPO Film Unit and was largely responsible for such films as Night Mail (1936).
90 Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981), German film director and scriptwriter.
91 Journey Without Maps and A Gun for Sale.
92 ‘The People’s Pilgrimage’, an article about George V lying in state at Westminster Hall (Daily Mail, 23 January 1936; reprint, Reflections, 37–9).
93 People of Britain (also known as Peace of Britain and the Peace Film) was directed by Paul Rotha in 1936, with music composed by Benjamin Britten; it was a propaganda film urging people to work for peace.
94 Strike Me Pink, starring Eddie Cantor and Ethel Merman.
95 The manuscript of Narayan’s second novel The Bachelor of Arts, in which the main character is named Chandran. Greene wrote highly appreciative introductions to editions of this novel appearing in 1937 and 1978 (see Reflections 55–7 and 299–302).
96 Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90) had taken a position in 1934 as assistant editor of the Calcutta Statesman.
97 Margaret Wilson (1882–1973) won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Able McLaughlins (1923). She also wrote extensively about India, where she had worked as a missionary. Her husband Colonel G. D. Turner was a prison inspector who had arranged for Greene to visit Wormwood Scrubs in preparation for writing It’s a Battlefield. Colonel Turner’s daughter by his first wife married the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis (Mockler, 701).
98 ‘My Worst Film’, Reflections, 318. In this essay of 1987, Greene quotes his own comments on the film in a Spectator piece of January 1940.
99 Greene had worked with the screenwriter Edward O. Berkman on the film of The Green Cockatoo (1937). Although he wrote respectfully of his collaborator, it is hard to imagine Greene satisfied with a man who could write Bedtime for Bonzo (1951).
100 Leonard Alfred George Strong (1896-1958) was a well-known poet and novelist.
101 Narayan’s ‘A Breach of Promise’ appeared in the Spectator (4 September 1936).
3
THE POWER AND THE GLORY
TO MARION GREENE
With Lucy (called ‘Bear’) in the care of her grandparents, Vivien gave birth to their second child, Francis, on 13 September 1936. Having recently completed the film treatment of the Galsworthy story, Graham was looking forward to the journey to Mexico that would lead him to write The Lawless Roads (1939) and The Power and the Glory (1940).
North Side. Clapham Common. | London. S.W. 4 |
August 29 [1936]
Dearest Mumma,
It’s a long time since I’ve written, but I’ve been in a rather inert condition. My run-downness culminated about a week ago in a poisoned face, which swelled up in a most embarrassing way. Painful too, like continuous tooth-ache. The day before yesterday I couldn’t stand it any longer and had a cut made by a doctor, and yesterday and today a good deal of the poison has been coming out. I think the swelling will be a lot down tomorrow, as I find I can get my toothbrush round this morning! Martha seems admirable, nice and a very competent cook. I only hope she’ll stay. I feel it must be rather dull for her until we get a second girl. There’s no chance now I’m afraid of having Bear back till the end of the month, I mean the end of Sept. We miss her a great deal.
When everything’s settled down, I shall try to take a week’s holiday. I’ve got to learn Spanish too [in] the next few months, for rather to my agent’s surprise Sheed & Ward, the Catholic publishers, have accepted our terms, £500 advance on English language rights, for a Mexican book on the religious persecution, and D.V. I shall be going off in January. I shall go via New York to pick up introductions and information and try to arrange a lecture tour for later in the Catholic states.
I can’t help hoping too that something might turn up from Hollywood when I’m actually in America. If I get across to Sonora in Mexico, where they had the Indian war in 1928, I shall be only about 300 miles from H.! I’ve just turned in the film treatment of the Galsworthy to Basil Dean. I expect we shall argue about it this coming week and then I’ll have to set to work on the shooting script, a thing I’ve never done before. Every camera angle has to be described, each angle being a scene, the average film having about 550 scenes. A long business. I find it very tiring, as you have to visualise exactly the whole time, not merely what the person is doing, but from what angle you watch him doing it. Vivien is very well, except for a nasty stye, and Dr Pink is pleased with her. Can you let us know how one sets about national insurance for a foreign maid?
A Gun seems to have been doing pretty well.1 I’m trying to follow up with another thriller, scene to be set at Brighton.
Our love to both of you,
Graham
TO R. K. NARAYAN
North Side, Clapham Common, S.W.4 [September 1936]
Dear Narayan,
A hasty line to say that I have placed a second story for you with The Spectator: ‘Gandhi’s Meeting.’2 Today I forwarded you a cheque from The Spectator by airmail for the first story. A copy of the paper went off to you a week ago. I feel sure your luck has turned now. I spoke to David Higham3 to-day on the phone about your book & asked him to arrange for payment to be made on signing the contract – so as not to wait for publication. I have to write a preface of a thousand words, & I would welcome any information from you: your age, etc. Your other short stories are now in the agent’s hands. Did you ever hear from New Stories or receive a copy of the paper containing the story they printed – or at any rate accepted?
Hamilton tells me that he only sold 230 copies of ‘Swami’. Never mind: I think it is quite possible that we shall see this book revived.
[…]
TO HUGH GREENE
14 North Side, Clapham Common, S.W.4 | Oct. 31 [1936]
Dear Hugh,
I should dearly love to come, but I don’t think it can be managed – either from the point of view of work or finance. These bloody boils have been going on for more than two months, four days in seven painfully, & one has no certain feeling that one day they will stop. At the moment I have them on me, all just broken – the lip, the thigh & the scrotum – so they’ve ceased to hurt.
I may have to decide between Mexico & the literary editorship of a new paper – if it gets all its finances by Christmas. A horrid decision. I’d much rather have Mexico, but the L.E. would be worth £600 a year.
I have to decide too between buying this house or leaving next year: the lease won’t be renewed.
I had to see Hitchcock the other day about possible work for G. B. A silly harmless clown. I shuddered at the things he told me he was doing to Conrad’s Secret Agent.4
The baby is crying, & I have ten books accumulated for review & this damned thriller to write.
I have broken with Doubleday’s more or less, & have tried to buy back from them, without success, Journey Without Maps, which the Viking Press offered to take on. They, the V.P., are going to have my next book anyway, though D’s keep on sending anxious cables.
Auden’s new book of poems (I haven’t had time to read it yet) looks very good.5
I
had a painful purgatorial lunch yday with Grigson, Spender & Rosamond Lehmann, my mind clouded with aspirins. I hadn’t met S. before: he struck me as having too much human kindness. A little soft.6
Love,
Graham
TO HUGH GREENE
In his reviews, Graham savaged the films of Alexander Korda (1893–1956), who decided to deal with his harshest critic by hiring him as a writer, so in late 1936 they began a close, if unlikely, friendship. Greene wrote the original story and scenario for The Green Cockatoo, an initial foray into the world of homicidal racetrack gangs that would provide the material for Brighton Rock. This film, directed by William Cameron Menzies, with John Mills in the lead, was not actually released until 1940, when it was universally panned.7
14 North Side, Clapham Common, S.W.4 | Dec. 19 [1936]
Dear Hugh,
This is to wish you from both of us a cheerful Christmas. We are sending you a compilation which seems intelligent and amusing: forgive the thumbmarks on the jacket. We both wanted to read it before sending it.
Have you heard that I’ve got in with Korda. I had to write him an original film story in three weeks, for which he pays 175 down whether used or not. This runs to 12,000 words. I hear today all is O.K. Shooting to begin in Jan., so he now has to pay me a salary of 125 a week for 4 weeks to work on the film. With an option on my services for the same salary for 6 months. There is a typical Korda snag. The story is a fairly realistic low-life thriller about race gangs, the hero a stool-pigeon. Korda wishes me to write in a part for George Robey!8
The other fly in the ointment is a libel action. I don’t know whether you remember the drunk party at Freetown in Journey Without Maps. I called the drunk, whose real name was quite different, Pa Oakley. It now turns out that there is a Dr P. D. Oakley, head of the Sierra Leone Medical Service. The book’s been withdrawn (luckily all but 200 copies have been sold), writs have been served, and he’s out for damages! Anxious days.9 This and Korda are delaying my Mexican trip. I shan’t get out there now till the autumn.