[Kuala Lumpur | 22 December 1950]
[…]
Now for the Gurkhas. After a wild night which included shooting billiard balls at an opponent’s finger (3 hits a win!) ending with dinner at 1.15 a.m. Cheers,20 21 Gurkhas & myself set out. I’d never realized the heaviness of a pack before. They gave me a revolver instead of a rifle or I could never have stuck it. Our job was to make our way – on a compass bearing not a track, hacking our own trail – through a patch of jungle between two roads. 150 bandits were supposed to be in the area, & they had had an air strike at them. The going was awful. Heavy rubber soled anti-leech boots slipped all the time on the wet clay slopes. Elevations were sometimes this much / & the first day ended with 500 feet of climbing, hauling on to trees [?] which generally left thorns in one’s hands. At the end of the first day, as the crow flies, we had done 3 miles. I felt absolutely whacked. We started camping at 4 & the Gurkhas had to make a clearing with their kukris21 for the wireless set & also hack down trees for shelter. My batman had forgotten my spare trousers, so I had to sleep in trousers already dripping with sweat & rain. They built for Cheers & myself a kind of double bed with four posts, logs laid across a mattress of poles, leaves & a mackintosh covering & a mackintosh shelter which kept out the torrential rain in the night perfectly. But we both suffered badly from cramp & got very little sleep.
Second Day. The wireless failed to work & we were having an air drop by parachute of rations at 10. a.m. So after our early tea the Gurkhas had to make a clearing by simply knocking down a few 100 foot trees with their kukris. Then we sent up smoke bombs to mark our position & half an hour late the air drop was made: the parachutes dropping within 30 feet of a clearing no larger than a tennis court. Then we set out again – still going bang straight by compass, hill or no hill, path or no path. Our second camp was on the side of a hill & I felt much better – the day had produced a couple of abandoned bandit camps. And there was a running stream in which we could bathe: found a leech had been at work on my right bottom. Too tired to eat any supper & felt rather sick.
3rd Day. This was awful. I felt completely uninterested in bandits – the only effort was to keep up & not delay the patrol. Felt very sick & destroyed the silence of our halting places by retching. We had to climb up & down a 1500 foot hill – again this sort of angle of wet slippery clay /. Of course when we came out of the jungle again all the excitement had been near the place where we entered the jungle – a concentration of 100 Communists having been engaged, wearing the Gurkha hats & identity marks, by 7 police.
[…]
TO MARIE SCHEBEKO (LATER BICHE)
as from Majestic Hotel, | Kuala Lumpur, | Dec. 25 [1950]
Dear Marie,
Forgive this very tardy wish for a happy Christmas. Life has been a bit tiring here what with Gurkhas dragging me round the jungle in full kit & planters dragging me from bar to bar. I haven’t seen a bandit yet, but one of my new friends here has already been killed. There’s a daily casualty list of civilians & police. Apart from this the country isn’t wildly interesting. Difficult to work though & all I’ve done is some drastic revising of the novel22 – it’s still not right, & I know what’s wrong, but the book’s finished & I can’t bring myself to write new scenes.
I’m in Malacca at the moment with my brother. The only attractive (to me) part of the country because the only old part. Nature doesn’t really interest me – except in so far as it may contain an ambush – that is, something human.
[…]
TO CATHERINE WALSTON
The Residency, | Malacca. | Dec. 25 [1950]. | 8 a.m.
[…]
I filled up the time with Hugh to Midnight Mass at the City Park drinking whisky & watching the taxi girls dance around. I had forgotten till it was too late that Christmas Eve was Sunday & I didn’t go to Mass, but it was such complete inadvertence that I went to communion just the same. We went to an 18th century church in walking distance of the City Park which specialises in the Portuguese Eurasians. Such a crowd. It took half an hour to get through the communicants. Then we drove home in bright moonlight in two trishaws.
One sad thing. Did I tell you how I met on my last visit here a young Englishman who was crackers about Macao, dreamed of going back & living there (the earthly paradise), could talk of little else? We met in the City Park dance place & he had a Chinese girl with him who he fondly believed was a virgin – ‘see her home every night: can’t touch her.’ He had extraordinary clear wild blue eyes & loved the Chinese. When I came with Hugh to the dance hall I saw his girl – she was taxiing, & I was afraid of seeing him because I couldn’t remember his name for introductions. I described him to our companion. He said, ‘Oh, that was Jolly.’ Jolly I knew as the name of a young man who was shot a week ago. I had noticed his tiny absurd car & had said to Noel Ross,23 ‘That would be good for an ambush,’ but they put five bullets in him very accurately in spite of the tiny car. It was oddly sad being afraid of meeting him & seeing his ‘virginal’ Chinese girl taxiing & then finding he wasn’t here or back in Macao or anywhere at all.
Another queer encounter just before I came away. A man came up to me in the Cold Storage shop where I was buying drinks – a tall foxy faced rather heavy man, who introduced himself as Wheeler. Wheeler was at school with me & belonged to the bad period. We were in the junior school together & then in the same house. (He told me, though I’d forgotten it, that I used to do his Latin prep for him). The real misery of that time began when he was suborned onto the side of my great enemy, Carter (who he told me the other day was dead). I put Carter into The Lawless Roads – ‘spreading terror from a distance.’ What a lot began with Wheeler & Carter – suspicion, mental pain, loneliness, this damned desire to be successful that comes from a sense of inferiority, & here he was back again, after thirty-five years, in a shop in Kuala Lumpur, rather flash, an ardent polo player. And instead of saying ‘What hell you made my life 30 years ago,’ one arranged to meet for drinks!
[…]
In his work Graham depicts in various guises the figure of Lionel Carter (b. 1904), a boy who attacked him physically and subjected him to ingenious mental cruelties. Carter offered him friendship, then withdrew it and taunted him as a traitor in the dormitory. In The Lawless Roads he is called Collifax, ‘who practised torments with dividers’ (14). The most detailed account of these episodes is found in A Sort of Life (59–62), where Augustus Henry Wheeler (b. 1904) is given the name Watson. As David Pearce, a retired housemaster at the school and an authority on Old Berkhamstedians, notes, Wheeler’s father, a military officer from Eastbourne, was dead by 1916 and his mother sent him to a distant private school, a recipe for bullying. Sherry (1: 75), relying on information from Carter’s widow, says that Carter died in 1971. Pearce remarks: ‘The Wheeler mention of an earlier death sounds like the blarney of an alcoholic OB. “Dead, my dear boy, dead.”’
TO FRANCIS GREENE
Hotel Majestic | Kuala Lumpur | Jan. 7 [1951]
Dear Francis,
I got back from Kalantan & the China Sea (where I bathed twice in big breakers) to find a small parcel which I think was in your handwriting – it contained a very pretty plaque of St. Christopher. Was this from you? Thank you very much indeed if it was – otherwise you must pass on the thanks to the real giver.
There’s really no news, & I’ve had no real adventures since I went with the Gurkhas. The nearest I’ve come to an ambush was when a convoy that had taken me somewhere last week was ambushed on the way back (when I wasn’t with them). It was a very small ambush – one soldier had a finger shot off. That’s all.
Will you let me know when you go back to Ampleforth? I shall be back about mid-February – I go to look at the war in Indo-China on the 25th.
Lots of love,
Daddy.
P.S. I’ll send you soon a photograph of myself all dressed up like a Gurkha officer!
TO EMMET HUGHES
After a brief visit to Vietnam in January 1951, Greene received a
request from Hughes (1920–82), then articles editor at Life, to write on the country. However, the magazine rejected an important piece that subsequently appeared in Paris Match (2 July 1952; reprinted in Reflections, 129–47). During his first visit, Greene had met the ferociously anti-communist Colonel Leroy, who controlled the area of Ben Tre near Saigon, and the Bishop of Phat Diem, Le Huu Tu, who ruled his diocese like a medieval prince-bishop and maintained a small army. After an initially warm reception, the French Commander-in-Chief General de Lattre concluded that Greene was a spy.24
5 St. James Street | London S. W. 1 | 15th February 1951
Dear Emmet Hughes,
I shall try and get down to a Malaya article this week-end and send it to you as soon as possible. I received your telegram about Indo-China, but although I think this is a fascinating and interesting country I was only there for ten days and I don’t feel I could write any general article on it. I concentrated mainly on seeing some of the queer little private armies that are operating there now for the moment in support of the French. For instance, I visited a young ex-Catholic Leroy in the south who is keeping the islands round his own estates clear with an army of 2,000 Annamite catholics;25 I spent a night with the Annamite Bishop of Phat-diem who is Commander-in-Chief of a small army of 2,000 to protect his diocese. This was both interesting and moving as here there was some genuine antagonism to Communism. I also visited the Caodaists, a new Annamite religious body who have a highly disciplined army of 25,000 men, who worship by means of spiritualism, Buddha, Christ, and Confucius, and have three lesser Saints, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, Victor Hugo and an ancient Chinese philosopher! The whole place was very reminiscent of the middle ages with the barons juggling for position according to the skill of their armies and the border towers, similar in structure to our own Welsh border fortresses, going up every kilometre along the roads.
This might make one particular article, but if at any time you felt it worth while and if the fighting intensified again, as it certainly will before long, I should be very ready to go out there again and to study the country properly. The months I would most favour are March–April or August, but of course [the] Viet Nimh may not decide that those are suitable months for attack! The French received me extremely cordially and I had cars and ’planes whenever I wanted them, and General de Lattre I am quite certain would give me every facility if I returned.
As for Malaya, I never want to see the place again!
Yours ever,
Graham Greene
TO EVELYN WAUGH
On 17 March 1951, Waugh wrote to thank Greene for sending The Lost Childhood and Other Essays, especially praising those on Henry James, but he added that the praise of Lawrence ‘sickens me’. He suggested that Greene sometimes confused the terms ‘artist’ and ‘genius’.
5 St. James’s Street | London S.W. 1 | 19th March 1951
Dear Evelyn,
How nice it is to know you are back in England. Rumours of it reached me a day or so ago from Dame Robert Speaight.26 I don’t suppose you knew that she knew! I long to see you again and to hear about the Palestine trip – my trip in Malaya was rather dreary and wet, but I loved Indo-China and finding a new Eastern religion in which Victor Hugo is venerated as a saint.
I feel sure we would not agree about many people, but don’t you like Rider Haggard? I am puzzled by your reference to my praise of Lawrence as I don’t like the man much. Surely it must have been a very incidental reference and I imagine I was using genius in a particular way. It seems to me genius is not a term of praise but a psychologically descriptive one. It always seemed to me that Lawrence was ruined as an artist by his genius.27
I wish that I could be at Downside with you28 even though I hate the headmaster so much, but I am going to be in France at that time. Do let me know when you have any plan to be in London. I shall be back here sometime in April.
Naturally I rather liked Moré’s article in Dieu Vivant, but I thought like everything about him it was a little bit exaggerated. I don’t really like these Léon Bloy29 converts.
Yours affectionately,
Graham
TO HUGH GREENE
26th June 1951
Dear Hugh,
[…]
Paris Match is pressing me for [a] definite date for Indo-China and I have told them that I am prepared to go after July 20 but I am still waiting to hear from Trevor Wilson in Hanoi. He is taking a holiday sometime and I definitely don’t want to go when he is away as he gives me free accommodation in Hanoi as well as being an immense source of information.30
I seem to have missed the bus in the last few weeks when Ho Chi Minh put on a big offensive to cover the infiltration of guerillas in an attempt to steal the rice crop. My nice Bishop was completely surrounded in his diocese and had to be rescued by parachute troops. It would have been fun to have been with him and seen him in a crisis. I will let you know directly I am certain when I am going to be there and it will be enormous fun if you can make the excuse of a tri-partite conference to come too. The weather will be foul but I suppose one can put up with that.
Love
Graham
TO CATHERINE WALSTON
5 St. James’s Street | London S.W.1| [10 August 1951]
My dear,
In this nervous condition, speaking on the telephone, it seems impossible to convey a meaning without over-emphasis or abruptness.
What I want to say is this. A human relationship, like ours has been, is inextricably physical & mental. I have no real belief that the physical side is seriously wrong in the particular circumstances, but you will remember that for the last two years I’ve urged you to go to confession & communion between our meetings. I can see a great benefit in that. Communion might help to reduce the occasions happily. All that I would support to the hilt.
I don’t however believe that as long as there’s strong desire it’s possible to tease oneself while we are together without nerves, anger, impatience – all the things that ruin a relationship finally. You know the peace & quiet we had last time in Anacapri. That was only because the relationship was complete. Do you really think we could go back there now, & live in separate houses for safety, without even the friendly silly cheerful drinking together, working together atmosphere disappearing.
You say the last 4½ years have been a fairy tale. Thomas31 has probably said that, but he hasn’t lived them. It was at least a fairy tale which might have lasted another five before one side of the relation died slowly & naturally out. The fairy tale you are substituting is one in which one will be afraid to come into the same bedroom, afraid to kiss, afraid to touch you, when we shall be so self-conscious that the body will be always in one’s mind because never at peace. I don’t know what kind of ‘intellectual companionship’ we shall get out of that.
[…]
I’m afraid I’m wholly on Browning’s side, ‘Better sin the whole sin sure that God observes.’32
I think the only way to stay together for life is to go back & back to Confession & Communion after every time or period, but I don’t believe – even Thomas doesn’t believe in the possibility, I think – of suddenly switching a relation onto the unphysical level. We should try, I agree, when we go away together not to think & emphasise in our own minds beforehand what it entails, there are other motives in being together, but a teasing affair of– let’s hold out another day, another two days etc, would only prevent the physical love from taking the right proportions.
And whatever the Church may say it gives a lot of scope to the individual conscience, & it goes dead against my conscience to believe that it hasn’t been far better for you & me to have been faithful to one person for four & a half years than to have lived as we were apt to live before.
Dear heart, if all you mean is this: that in future we should get back to confession & communion as frequently as we can, that we should want to want God’s will (which we don’t & can’t know), then I am with you all the way. I don’t question the value of an eventual in
tention, but if we are simply to cut off the whole physical side of loving each other, I can’t share the immediate intention & can’t go further than praying ‘to want to want’. And as I can’t share that immediate intention, it would be better – if that’s in your mind – to cut right away.
I hope & pray you don’t because life would be a real desert without you, & God knows what shabby substitutes one would desperately try to find. But try & answer clearly, dear love.
I love you & I want you & I can’t separate the two.
God bless you,
Graham
TO EVELYN WAUGH
5 St. James’s Street | London S.W. 1 | August 20 [1951]
Dear Evelyn,
I’m typing because I know how impossible it is for you to read my writing. Your letter came as an absolute Godsend. Several times in the last day or two I’ve nearly wired you. Things have been battering one about like nobody’s business. Will you mind a semi-corpse who will try to work and will succeed in drinking? About dates I expect to go with Thomas Gilbey to Austria tomorrow or the next day until the end of the month. Could you after that put up with me for ten days? Say frankly if that’s too long. What I’d do would be to come down in the afternoon of Sep. 3 and leave on Sep. 14. Catherine might be able to come down for Sep. 11, 12, and 13. If you’d rather I came later than Sep. 3 tell me.
I had an awful time the other day with Cyril Connolly33 who said he’d been commissioned to do a profile of you for Time. He kept on saying what a friend he was of yours till I asked God to save me from such friends.
Graham Greene Page 22
