Graham Greene

by Richard Greene

  TO EVELYN WAUGH

  IF YOU CAN’T READ THIS RETURN TO Mrs YOUNG FOR TYPED COPY!

  C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | Aug. 7 [1957]

  Dear Evelyn,

  I only got back on the night of the 5th from Martinique (a strange island populated by French royalists) & found Pinfold. Yesterday I read it – with enormous pleasure & some horror. It’s a wonderful book – I’m not sure that I don’t like it the best of all you have written.68

  I am off to Russia with my son on the 14th – a last holiday before he’s called up. Assuming that I don’t stay on as Burgess’s new assistant & advisor on Westminster diplomatic activity, 69 do let’s see each other.

  Affectionately,

  Graham.

  TO GILLIAN SUTRO

  Greene-Park Ranch, | Box 123 Cochrane | Alberta. |

  December 18 [1957]

  Dearest Gillian,

  How very sweet of you to write such a long letter. I’m feeling a bit better now – more than a fortnight practically without drink probably helps. I’ve done 21,000 words – but the quality isn’t as good as the quantity. I couldn’t write your sort of book in that time. Don’t be scared about my meeting with Laffont. It’s off until the spring!

  You may be right about Catherine, but I have a feeling that as she’s a far better Catholic than I am – a remarkable one really – providence has had a hand in the game & released her for a rather better sort of life than she could lead with me. So to give up Anita now would not only be a bit painful perhaps on both sides, but wouldn’t help. What you say about Stockholm is true – but it would be worse to take her away from her own place & force her to give up the theatre – even though she may think she wants to. One doesn’t want to start a relationship by imposing a sacrifice in the way of career & friends. I’m much more a free agent, & can work anywhere, & find reasons for mobility.

  I’d love to have a dinner with Evelyn. I’m devoted to him & long to see the ear trumpet.70 As I’ve had only one card & one telegram from Stockholm (she’s back on a film) I don’t know whether our date for December 31 still stands. If it does I’ll be home on the 5th or 6th – otherwise earlier.

  Lots of love to you both.

  Graham

  TO HERBERT GREENE

  In the late 1950 s and early 60 s, Herbert conducted a very odd feud with Hugh. Repeatedly, Herbert complained about programming decisions Hugh had made as director of news and current affairs at the BBC, embarrassing him in front of the Director General, Sir Ian Jacob, who was grooming him as his successor.

  10th February 1958

  Dear Herbert,

  I have just heard from Hugh that you are continuing to send these long absurd telegrams to the B. B. C., now directed towards the Director General. If any further telegrams of this kind are sent I shall assume that you no longer are in financial need of my allowance and will stop it forthwith, nor can you expect any presents financial or otherwise. You are making yourself a nuisance and holding yourself up to public ridicule. Can I have your assurance that this will stop otherwise I shall take the measures I mention.

  Yours,

  Graham

  Herbert was not persuaded and in 1960 led a protest against the BBC’s cancellation of the 9 O’clock News, which had featured the booming of the chimes of Big Ben (Daily Mail, 17 October 1960). He claimed that his complaint was not with Hugh but with the BBC.

  TO FRANCIS GREENE

  26th March 1958

  Dear Francis,

  I enclose a carbon of my letter to you; as you see it didn’t really contain anything in particular. The dinner I referred to should have come off last night but didn’t as the man was ill with ’flu. I do hope you hear soon from Aldermaston. By the way our governess sent her greetings to you in a letter! You would probably have preferred greetings from the beautiful daughter of our other friend.

  I’ve practically decided against Eyre & Spottiswoode now71 and that is really all the news except that I enjoyed myself at Charlie Chaplin’s and his autobiography is really extraordinarily good, what he has written of it so far. I also had an amusing lunch with the Queen of Spain and the Infanta and now I have to dash off to lunch with the Polish Ambassador – my contacts seem a bit mixed.

  I was in Stockholm for the week-end and it took me 13½ hours to get back as the plane tried twice to get into London, the first time going back to Amsterdam and the second time dropping me in Manchester where I had to catch a train. I certainly seem to have a hoodoo on planes.

  Is there any chance of your having leave72 and being in London in the near future? We’d try and think up another amusement though not as fantastic I’m afraid as the Sagan ballet. The Quiet American comes on at the end of this week and you might like to look in at The Potting Shed sometime without me – it goes on until May 3.

  Much love,

  Graham

  DAME EDITH SITWELL

  Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) was a fervent supporter of Graham Greene from his days in Oxford. In this letter he refers to her best-known work Façade, a sequence of apparent nonsense poems set to music by William Walton.

  C.6 Albany | London, W.1. | 29th April 1958

  Dear Edith,

  I am off to Brighton today and my plans are a little bit uncertain as I may have to go across to Sweden for a few days soon, and I know you will soon be off to Oxford for Façade. I shall know my plans for certain in the course of the next few days and I will write you again suggesting some dates for lunch or dinner, whichever suits you best.

  All good wishes to Façade and I wish I was there to hear it. I missed the original London production but I used to be an ardent player of the record until the blitz destroyed it. Can’t you make them re-record on a long-playing?

  Yours affectionately,

  Graham Greene

  TO R. K. NARAYAN

  C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 2nd June 1958

  My dear Narayan,

  I too was overjoyed to see the Lit. Supp. article on your work which I thought was admirably done.73 I sent the article the other day to my Swedish publisher who is staying in my cottage in Anacapri as I am anxious to see you published in Sweden as a possible Nobel prizewinner one day!

  I have been very hard at work finishing a rather hack job, an Entertainment called Our Man in Havana. I am getting too old to boil the pot. Now it’s finished and I’m going off for a month or two to Sweden and hope to do some more interesting work when I have settled down.

  I wish you’d come to London again.

  Affectionately,

  Graham

  TO MURIEL SPARK

  C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 27 June 1958

  Dear Mrs. Spark,

  It was very kind of you indeed to send me an inscribed copy of your new book. I read it on a dreary train ride up to Liverpool yesterday and the journey passed like lightning. I found Robinson fascinating and delightfully organised and written. It is a book which will certainly stick in one’s memory. I am delighted that you have produced so worthy a successor to The Comforters.

  Yours sincerely,

  Graham Greene

  1 Identified by Graham elsewhere as a ‘children’s nanny’; she seems to have been outspoken, to say the least.

  2 See Basil Dean, Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography 1927–1972 (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 305–7.

  3 Marie Schebeko (later Biche), Greene’s French agent. See p. 177.

  4 Cecil King (1901–87) was the newspaper magnate who organised the Mirror Group of newspapers. His mysterious employee has not been identified.

  5 Transcription: gracious?

  6 Belinda Straight, Catherine’s younger sister. (NS 2: 221–3)

  7 In 1948, Graham acquired the Villa Rosaio, a small house in Anacapri, where he did much of his writing in the years that followed.

  8 Dieu Vivant 16 (1950), 75–105.

  9 Moré argued that when Scobie opens the letter the reader learns that the two daughters, one still on earth, the other in heaven, are praying for their fa
thers.

  10 Jean-Joseph Surin was a seventeenth-century Jesuit and spiritual writer, whose life offers a bizarre parallel with Scobie’s. He performed an exorcism on three Ursuline nuns, but was so horrified at the sacrileges intended for them that he prayed he himself would be possessed instead. His prayer was granted, and for twenty years he was plunged into despair over his own damnation. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘He was healed eight years before his death and was thenceforth absorbed in the abundance of Divine communications.’ The quotation in the article refers to Surin’s experience of the violent conflict between demons and the spirit of God.

  11 Marie Des Vallées was the adviser and friend of the seventeenth-century Saint Jean Eudes, founder of the lamentably named Eudist Fathers. The quotation begins: ‘L’Amour divin est plus terrible que la Justice elle-même.’

  12 Septimus Waugh.

  13 Louis T. Stone, executive assistant to Selznick.

  14 La Symphonie Pastorale (1946) was directed by Jean Delannoy (b. 1908). In 1956 he directed Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  15 Rev. Martin D’Arcy, S.J. (1881–1976) was a prominent priest and author responsible for the conversion to Catholicism of numerous writers and poets including Waugh.

  16 Presumably Jeanne Stonor (Lady Camoys). Graham was very fond of her husband Sherman (Baron Camoys), and often visited their estate near Oxford, which had a long recusant history. Something of a trophy hunter, Jeanne often flirted with Graham and maintained that she had had an affair with him – a claim he denied. He later became a friend to their daughter the Hon Julia Camoys Stonor, who has written a memoir of her mother, Sherman’s Wife (London: Desert Hearts, 2006). See p. 395.

  17 Two prizes were given. One held over from 1949 went to William Faulkner, the other, for 1950, to Bertrand Russell. Over four decades the Nobel Committee, influenced by the anti-Catholic Artur Lundkvist, failed to honour Graham Greene.

  18 Waugh’s novel Helena.

  19 The aesthete Harold Acton (1904–94) whose home was at Villa La Pietra near Florence. Graham’s contemporary at Oxford, he had written a crushing review of Babbling April, which Graham eventually accepted as accurate.

  20 Major Joey MacGregor-Cheers, one of Greene’s companions in Malaya.

  21 A curved knife or short sword used by the Gurkhas.

  22 The End of the Affair.

  23 The colonial adviser. He had once been a Dominican novice.

  24 Ways of Escape, 126.

  25 Greene admired Jean Leroy for his skill as a soldier and his refusal to be corrupted. See Greene’s introduction to Leroy’s memoir Life of Colonel Leroy (1977), reprinted in Reflections, 298. Annam is an area in central Vietnam.

  26 A facetious reference to Robert Speaight (1904–76), actor, author, and Catholic convert.

  27 The disputed reference is probably that in ‘Henry James: The Private Universe’: ‘The sense of evil never obsessed him, as it obsessed Dostoyevsky; he never ceased to be primarily an artist, unlike those driven geniuses, Lawrence and Tolstoy …’

  28 Waugh was going to what he called ‘that centre of Sadism’, Downside Abbey near Bath, for Holy Week.

  29 The novelist, poet and essayist Léon Bloy (1846–1917) exercised enormous influence over French Catholicism, promoting the spiritual value of poverty and suffering. Greene cannot have thought too badly of Bloy as he quotes him in the epigraph to The End of the Affair: ‘Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.’

  30 Trevor Wilson was the British Consul in Hanoi and a fellow Catholic whom Greene had met at the SIS headquarters at St Albans during the war. Wilson introduced him to Vietnam, from which he was himself expelled in December 1951 for anti-French activities. In 1968, he rescued Francis Greene from a likely death in Laos (see pp. 294–5).

  31 Thomas Gilbey, a Dominican priest and a friend of both Greene and Walston. It has been argued on fragmentary evidence that he had an affair with Walston. (See NS 3: 391–400).

  32 From Browning’s poem ‘Before’:

  Better sin the whole sin, sure that God observes,

  Then go live his life out! Life will try his nerves,

  When the sky which noticed all, makes no disclosure,

  And the earth keeps up her terrible composure.

  33 Cyril Connolly (1903–74), author of Enemies of Promise (1938) and editor of Horizon, was a friend of Waugh and often the butt of his jokes. It is possible that the character of Waterbury, a literary journalist who appears in the last pages of The End of the Affair, is modelled on him.

  34 Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1952) had been chaplain at Oxford and was known for an anarchic wit. He was a translator, detective writer and Catholic apologist. Waugh esteemed him and wrote his official biography. Greene found him precious and boring.

  35 Greene remained convinced of the eroticism of these stories. In The Honorary Consul (1973), 27, he writes: ‘Perry Mason’s secretary Della was the first woman to arouse Plarr’s sexual appetite.’

  36 Korda’s yacht. ‘For the first time - and I think the last - I drew a principal character from the life. Dreuther, the business tycoon in Loser Takes All, is undeniably Alexander Korda, and the story remains important to me because it is soaked in memories of Alex …’ (Ways of Escape, 167) Bertram, the central character, and his wife Cary wait in Monte Carlo for the arrival of Dreuther in The Seagull, a boat modelled on The Elsewhere.

  37 See also ‘A Memory of Indochina’, Listener (15 September 1955), reprinted in Reflections 187–8.

  38 Duff Cooper had resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty to protest against the Munich Agreement with Hitler, 3 October 1938 (ODNB).

  39 See NS 2: 437–46.

  40 See Yours etc., 24–7, and NS 2: 445.

  41 In the presentation speech, Mauriac was praised ‘for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which you have in your novels penetrated the drama of human life’.

  42 See Falk, 102–3, and Adamson, 81.

  43 Ian Dalrymple (1903–89), a producer and scriptwriter.

  44 A facetious reference to Cardinal Bernard Griffin, Archbishop of Westminster, who in his Pastoral Letter for Advent 1953 had condemned The Power and the Glory and other works by Catholic writers for offending against the sixth commandment. (See Richard Leon Higdon, ‘A Textual History of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory’, Studies in Bibliography 33 [1980], 234.)

  45 See Ways of Escape, 67.

  46 See Peter Godman, ‘Graham Greene’s Vatican Dossier’, The Atlantic Monthly (July–August 2001), 84–9. While a draft of Greene’s letter to Pizzardo is in the Boston College archive, it underwent revisions before being sent to Rome. I have not been able to obtain a copy of that version so rely on Godman’s published transcription.

  47 Published under this title by Methuen in 1955.

  48 The French novelist Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) died on 3 August 1954. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris refused to allow a Catholic funeral because she was divorced. She was given a state funeral attended by thousands, including Graham Greene, who also wrote a public letter of protest, which Waugh thought ‘fatuous and impertinent’. See Amory, 429, and Yours etc., 40–2.

  49 Graham had begun reading about haiti at least twenty-five years earlier. See p. 34.

  50 A Heavy, Broad-Bladed Knife Like a Machete.

  51 Greene drew on these images in ‘The Nightmare Republic’ (SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, 22 September 1963; Reflections, 221–8) and in The Comedians (179–83).

  52 Pan American Airways.

  53 For more about this episode, see Ways of Escape, 162–7, and Reflections, 303–5.

  54 An evident typing error resulting from the use of a dictaphone. The original says ‘Percheron’, but Bernard Diederich advises that this must be Le Perchoir, a restaurant in Boutillier with a tremendous view of Port-au-Prince.

  55 In the original ‘Diard’. Diederich believes
that this should be D. R., since from the top of the mountains there is a view of the Dominican Republic in the distance.

  56 Graham must be referring to inner tubes as tyres would sink.

  57 Ways of Escape, 145.

  58 In January 1954, the King’s African Rifles began Operation Hammer, which led in time to the capture of 5500 rebels and the deaths of twenty-four band leaders.

  59 Officers and Gentlemen.

  60 Pioneered by the South African naturopath Johanna Brandt in the 1920s, the grape cure is supposed to remedy advanced cancers, loosen arthritic joints, detoxify the liver and promote weight loss. A small industry is based on it.

  61 Spark, 205.

  6 Without indicating the source or date, Cash (228) refers to an episode when Greene looking though a window spotted Catherine kissing Evelyn Shuckburgh, who was then an assistent under-secretary of state in the Foreign Office.

  63 Adlai Stevenson (1900–65), twice the Democratic nominee for president, seems to have wanted Greene to write a filmscript about the UN.

  64 The Sutros were friends of the actress Lillian Gish.

  65 Parts of Our Man in Havana were written at the ranch. Milly Wormold’s horse Seraphina is certainly modelled on Silence, and the novel contains various private jokes between Graham and Caroline (as an adult, she has preferred to use her middle name); nonetheless, this letter and others confirm that Graham was proud of his daughter’s venture in ranching.

  66 As partners in the ranch, Caroline provided the land, and Geoff and Pearl Parker provided the livestock and equipment.

  67 E-mail to RG, 7 February 2006.

  68 Later, Graham settled in the view that Brideshead Revisited was Waugh’s best novel. He continued to admire The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, remarking on it as Waugh’s self-examination: ‘But in this strange book he has left out all his fine qualities: physical courage, private generosity, loyalty to friends. Pinfold, I think, shows him technically almost at his most perfect. How well he faces the problem of linking passages between the scenes. There is almost a complete absence of the beastly adverb - far more damaging to a writer than an adjective.’ (Ways of Escape, 200)