[…]
TO MIECZYSLAW GRYDZEWSKI
Mieczyslaw Grydzewski (1894–1970), editor of the Polish-language journal Wiadamosci, asked Greene to discuss his views of Joseph Conrad.
5 St. James’s Street | London, S.W. 1 | 5th April 1949
Dear Mr. Grydzewski,
I have always since the age of sixteen been a very great admirer of the works of Joseph Conrad, in particular The Secret Agent and The Heart of Darkness. It is, therefore, very easy for me to reply to your first question, that I believe he has a permanent place in English letters which at least compares with that of Dostoievsky in Russian, and that the reaction against his work which was experienced in the thirties is very temporary. Certainly, I would place him far and away above Virginia Woolf, who, perhaps, was responsible for that reaction.
As far as the other question is concerned, it is of course possible to detect in Conrad’s work a certain rhetoric which is not in the main lines of English prose style. I think it is possible to say that his books sometimes read as though they were extremely brilliant and understanding translations from the French, but this does not destroy in any way the value of his contribution to English letters.
Yours faithfully,
Graham Greene
TO FRANÇOIS MAURIAC
Hotel Pont-Royal [Paris] | May 19 [1949]
Cher maître et ami,
I wanted to see you after the Conférence,59 but you were busy signing books, & I had to leave the reception afterwards before you had arrived. May I say once again how much pleasure & pride I receive from knowing you, & how I regret the barrier between our languages? Your remarks in the Figaro were very generous.60 Please believe that though I am no longer your English publisher, I am your admirer, your disciple & your friend.
Very sincerely yours,
Graham Greene
1 Ways of Escape, 89–95; see also ‘The Soupsweet Land’ in Collected Essays, 339–45.
C/O Bank of B. W. A. | Freetown | Sierra Leone |
April 2 [1942]
Dearest Mumma,
I had a very pleasant surprise today with a letter from you and your present of books. Thank you so very much: the letter was as welcome as the books. My last mail missed me here and is now pursuing me up and down the coast, so I hadn’t heard anything for a long time.
1 2 Sir Hubert Craddock Stevenson (1888–1971) served as governor of Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1947.
1 3 Other letters at this time indicate that the area around the house was essentially an open latrine.
4 Elisabeth’s war years were divided between Cairo and Algiers.
5 James Greene, Hugh’s son, suggests that Graham’s letters to his mother were, in effect, letters to both parents.
6 The British assault on Vichy-held Madagascar quelled all resistance by 7 May.
7 Morgan’s novel The Fountain had taken the award in 1932.
8 The specific reference is not clear, but during the war, Raymond worked with SOE (Special Operations Executive), which specialised in sabotage, subversion and guerrilla warfare. He helped them with high-altitude and cold-climate military plans that, as a doctor, he was expert on given his Everest experience. He spent a lot of time at the SOE Station at Grendon Underwood and at Scapa Flow, from which a number of secret expeditions were launched across the North Sea. (Information from Oliver Greene)
9 Probably the Field Security Police, a branch of military intelligence also known as MI11.
10 After an on-and-off engagement, Elisabeth married an intelligence officer named Rodney Dennys in 1944. In the early days of the war, he had pulled off a daring escape from the Nazis in Holland. The couple met at Bletchley and again when they were both stationed in Cairo. (See Christopher Hawtree, obituary of Elisabeth Dennys, Guardian, 10 February 1999)
11 In August and September 1942 Hugh was in Stockholm trying to find out how the BBC might counteract the jamming of its transmissions. His eventual recommendation was that presenters should speak very clearly. (Tracey, 85)
12 A Sort of Life, 20.
13 On 29 November 1942, Churchill had referred to Operation Torch, the landing of Allied forces in Vichy-controlled Algeria and Morocco, as a ‘majestic enterprise’.
14 The producer Bill Linnit.
15 The script was written by Frank Harvey.
16 Graham originally wrote and then amended ‘I wish I were dead’.
17 The allusion is to Matthew Prior’s ‘A Better Answer to Cloe Jealous’ (1718), which includes these lines:
What I speak, my fair Cloe, and what I write, shows
The diff’rence there is betwixt nature and art:
I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose:
And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.
18 In early 1942, Evans’s youngest son David had been shot down in a bombing raid and was posted missing. After five months his death was confirmed. The loss seems to have broken Evans’s health, as he died himself on 29 November 1944. (St John, 305)
19 Evans: see preceding letter.
20 See G. Peter Winnington, Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake (London: Peter Owen, 2000), 166–9.
21 NS 2: 191.
22 Ways of Escape, 200.
23 Orwell wrote a new introduction to Leonard Merrick’s The Position of Peggy Harper (1911), but the projected reprint did not appear. See ‘Introduction to “The Position of Peggy Harper”’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950 (1968), 52–6.
24 Barry Pain (1864–1928) was a parodist and humorist well known for sketches of working-class life. His most successful novel was Eliza (1900).
25 Walter Lionel George (1882–1926), biographer and novelist; his Caliban was published in 1920.
26 Guy Boothby (1867–1905), Australian playwright and novelist, best known for Dr. Nikola’s Vendetta (1895) and its sequels.
27 Richard Marsh (Heldmann) (1857-1915) was a prolific mystery writer whose best-known work The Beetle was published in 1897.
28 The brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest William Hornung (1866–1921) wrote a popular series at the turn of the century recounting the feats in burglary and cricket of A. J. Raffles. Two collections of the stories were reprinted in The Century Library. His other novels including The Camera Fiend (1911) and Witching Hill (1913) had no comparable appeal. Greene’s play The Return of A. J. Raffles was first performed at the end of 1975.
29 Graham had spent most of April with Walston in a cottage on Achill island in the west of Ireland.
30 Scobie in The Heart of the Matter.
31 The Walstons’ home was at Newton Hall in Thriplow, six miles south of Cambridge.
32 ‘[Louise] had joined [Scobie] the first year of the phoney war and now she couldn’t get away: the danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail.’ (The Heart of the Matter, 7)
33 Reed’s most recent film was Odd Man Out (1947) about the last twenty-four hours of a wounded IRA man. The short story was made into The Fallen Idol, in which, in a memorable scene, Baines asks his wife for his freedom. The film also presents a symbolic emasculation when Mrs Baines destroys MacGregor, the little boy Philippe’s pet snake.
34 This typed letter was sent with another, handwritten, from the day before.
35 ‘Once in sleep [peace] had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, Arctic and destructive in the moments before the world was struck …’ (The Heart of the Matter, 50)
36 Early in their relationship, Catherine had organised on short notice a plane ride for Graham from her home in Cambridgeshire to Kidlington, near Oxford.
37 J. M. Synge’s travel book first published in 1907. Graham regarded his time with Catherine in Ireland as edenic.
38 The letter is written in pencil, and this sentence is especially difficult to read. Among several points of uncertainty is the word ‘character�
� which could also be rendered as ‘chunks’ (see NS 2: 242). The dash between ‘train’ and ‘all’ has been added and may alter meaning.
39 Maude Royden (1876–1956) was a suffragist, social hygienist and preacher.
40 Hic jacet: here lies …
41 The French novelist François Mauriac (1885–1970) had argued that the dilemma for Christian writers was to show readers the evil in human nature without tempting them.
42 Graham often quoted or alluded to Robert Browning’s ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’:
All we have gained then by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt:
We called the chess-board white - we call it black.
43 In 1946, Andrey Zhdanov, the Leningrad Party chief, denounced the poet Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko in a speech to the Leningrad Union of Writers. The two were immediately expelled from the Union and so could no longer publish.
44 The quotations are taken from Newman’s Discourse IX: ‘Duties of the Church towards Knowledge’, sections 7 and 8.
45 Hood’s poem opens:
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread–
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the ‘Song of the Shirt!’
46 Presumably, Greene is thinking of Paine’s remark in Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795), ‘He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.’
47 Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger (c. 1521–1554), Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1538–1572) and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1565–1601) were all executed for treason.
48 Ezra Pound (1885–1972), under indictment for treason arising from his wartime broadcasts, was incarcerated at St Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane, in Washington, DC. Christopher Smart (1722–71), William Cowper (1731-1800), John Clare (1793–1864) and Nathaniel Lee (1653–1692) were all confined for madness.
49 The Heart of the Matter was published 27 May 1948, with a dedication to Vivien and the children.
50 Greene’s bipolar illness had not yet been diagnosed.
51 The Tablet (5 June 1948) and The Commonweal (6 July 1948). Cartmell’s remarks appear in The Tablet (5 June 1948).
52 See Amory, 280, and NS 2: 294–300.
53 Walston was staying at a convent in Surrey.
54 In New York.
55 NS 2: 200–01.
56 A second secretary at the Spanish Embassy who was writing an article on Greene.
57 See NS 2: 303.
58 Greene had told Waugh that the book showed not that Scobie was a saint but what happens when a person with good will gets off the rails (see p. 160). This letter suggests that at some point Greene shared Scobie’s basic views. Waugh may have been uncomfortably close to the mark.
59 Both Greene and Mauriac Were Participants in the Grand Conférence Catholique.
60 Greene is referring to a tribute paid to him by Mauriac in Le Figaro (30 October 1948) and often reprinted. He remarks on Greene’s exploration of the realms of sin and grace and how grace utilises sin in The Power and the Glory.
5
THE END OF THE AFFAIR
TO CATHERINE WALSTON
5 St. James’s Street | London [8 July 1949]
My dear, after all this time have we got to say goodbye. Harry says I am not to speak to you. Is this final?
You always said you would stick to me. I don’t know what to do. For God’s sake send me a line.
TO CATHERINE WALSTON
5 St. James’s Street | London S.W.1| Sunday [10 July 1949] | off to Mass.
Dear,
I loved getting your letter. I still feel in a curious way knocked out by Thursday & the awful Friday when I believed an iron curtain had dropped & you had chosen the other side of it. I shan’t ring up today. Twinkle’s1 letter, that like everybody else, I was ‘time-demanding’ is, I think, true – nor do I want to hear Harry’s voice at the other end. My dear dear dear, I mustn’t be time-demanding. When you feel like a word ring me up, & see me or not as you like on Tuesday or as circumstances demand.
At 10 tomorrow morning I’m off to Shepperton to see the film. This afternoon I go to see Korda who wants me to produce an idea for Carol Reed & Laurence Olivier. A French company want to do a play of The Power & the Glory. I have provisionally accepted a free luxury holiday in Biarritz from July 29 to August 5 in the company of Cocteau, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich & Orson Welles! (This is part of my effort not to be time-demanding).
[…]
TO CATHERINE WALSTON
Greene and Basil Dean collaborated on a dramatisation of The Heart of the Matter, with Dean mainly responsible for the structure and Greene for the dialogue. In December 1949, they visited Sierra Leone to take photographs that would be helpful for sets and atmosphere. When the play was produced by Rogers and Hammerstein, it flopped.2
Air France Transit Camp | Dakar | Thursday [8 December 1949]
Cafryn dear, we got here, after a rather awful journey starting from the Invalides at 6, at about 1 in the morning, & the plane for Freetown today has been cancelled!
What a time it was on Tuesday. I had to be revaccinated & get a bogus medical certificate to say that we were both unfit to be inoculated. That allowed Air France to put us on the plane, but we may be still quarantined by the strict English when we get to Freetown. It was a day of frantic telephonings, taxiings & visits to police stations – Marie3 was an angel & did most, though the British Embassy & a mysterious employee of Cecil King called Mme Vanon also pulled wires.4 Now we are confined to this rather beastly camp (we have no visas) unless a friend of a friend of Marie’s helps us.
Dean was rather depressed by this place, but suddenly getting under a mosquito net in the damp stuffiness, I felt at home – a familiar austere narrow home of four muslin walls. And this morning the light was beautiful & the black women passed by the window in robes of the loveliest colours, slouching by, chewing their sticks. I can never get this put right out of my system.
Interrupted by an unimportant first-drink-of-the-day with the steward of the plane at 7 in the morning. This encouraged me to get on the phone to Marie’s f. of an f. & she’s fetching us in her car at 2. I’m too happy to be in West Africa simply to mind what happens (Dean is still asleep). Next to you I love this hot wind & the black decorative women & the rather raffish kindly men in shorts & the mosquito net & the camp bed & the washed out madame behind the bar & this grey bright light. If I couldn’t be with you, I’d like to be here. I believe I could even work in West Africa – I did once. But I hope tomorrow we get to Freetown, & one will see & smell the place again, & look up Ali who is in the police band now.
This is all very sentimental, but you & West Africa both make me sentimental. The French language here seems oddly natural like a native dialect. And at the airport at 1 in the morning people were so charming – the Santé man who rocked with laughter at our yellow fever letters but passed us through. ‘Tell me what happens,’ he said. ‘Eight days quarantine. My English colleague very strict. You are the first British I have seen without proper certificates. O, what fun you are going to have. 8 days quarantine. We French we know how to dance’ & he began to dance on the floor, ‘we dance this way, that way, we dance …’
‘The polka,’ I said.
‘Yes, the polka, but my English colleague he doesn’t know how to dance.’
And the elderly customs man – I had tried ½ an hour before to get my bag cleared out of turn, because I should have done police & Santé first – greeted me again with a huge beam, ‘Ah, it is the poor M. Graham,’ & chalked them up with a grin.
(Oh,
I haven’t told you that when Dean & I were filling up the police forms at Les Invalides, an official brought me an extra form & asked me to sign the back of it because his wife was a Catholic & liked my books! Dean was rather impressed!)
This must be the longest letter you’ve ever had from me with the least love stuff, & yet really the love stuff is in every word – I have loved no part of the world like this & I have loved no woman as I love you. You’re my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does so that one all the time is loving something different & yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here. And I am happy talking nonsense about you as I am about Africa.
On Tuesday night Marie & I talked about you. She loves you after this visit. After the first visit she said she was worried that you seemed hard but now she said from the first in the Ritz room, when you were relaxed & content, she saw the point, aesthetically & psychologically, & she liked you more & more each time of this visit. Please let’s go again before the awful disappearance.
[…]
TO CATHERINE WALSTON
[Paris] | Sunday. 11:30 a.m [18 December 1949]
Dear, forgive this letter in advance, a humiliating wail of self-pity that I am ashamed of. But I’m missing you terribly here – the fortnight doesn’t seem to have helped & I just feel at the end of my tether, or near it. After Mass I was stupid enough to walk across the river, & I found myself crying in the Tuileries Gardens. I don’t know what to do. It was all right yesterday when I spoke to you, but one can’t telephone all the time. Then I held you at bay till 3 in the morning drinking with Marie, but one can’t go on doing that, though I am going out again with her tonight. You captured Rome & Dublin, & now at the second assault you’ve captured Paris. I talked to Marie last night about the house & she’s going to set about finding one, but what’s the good? My dear my dear. I used to like being alone, but now it’s a horror. One thinks of times when we were happy & one tries to shut off thought. It’s horrible that one can’t be happy thinking of happy times like one can in an ordinary relationship.
Graham Greene Page 20
