Graham Greene
Page 39
Love,
Graham
The post office is on strike here & I doubt whether this will ever reach you. It’s like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea.
TO CHARLES RYCROFT
A London psychoanalyst and author, Rycroft was a critic of the theories of Sigmund Freud. His best-known work is A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1973). Greene found himself enthralled by The Innocence of Dreams (1979).
18th June 1979
Dear Dr. Rycroft,
I am only writing this letter on the distinct understanding that you won’t bother to reply to it. As a writer myself I know how irritating it can be to receive letters from strangers however appreciative. I am at the moment reading your book The Innocence of Dreams and the fact that I am not yet half way through is a measure of my interest because I am a quick reader as a rule.
There are one or two questions not to be answered but which may be relevant to your own ideas.
I am unhappy by the use of message in referring to the unconscious dreamer. This surely supposes a conscious purpose in the dreamer which i find difficult to believe in.
This brings in the theory of the censor which you partly accept. Today is there anything in the world of morals that one cannot imagine oneself offending, so what room is there for a censor in our unconscious if we haven’t got one in our conscious self? Perhaps this is why the students reported by Calvin Hall did not report any dreams which referred to the dropping of the atomic bomb.22 It was something they could perfectly well accept in their working life. The censor had nothing to do.
My interest in dreams dates from the age of 16 when I went to a psychoanalyst of no known school. Since then at intervals especially in the 60’s and early 70’s I have kept dream diaries when I have no work on hand if only to keep my hand in at writing.23 My experience bears out the fact that one dreams at least four or five times a night when once one has disciplined oneself to have a penciland paper beside one in bed! Is it possible (I repeat that I am not asking for an answer but only putting a question for you to consider) that a writer’s profession influences his dreams? I have had two or three dreams which have gone straight into short stories without any great change. I have also found that many dreams are serial going on for periods of more than three days.
One curious experience, or what seems to me curious, came to me in one novel where I was completely blocked and didn’t know how to continue the book. It was like coming to a river bank and finding no bridge. I knew what would happen on the other side of the bridge but I couldn’t get there. I then had a dream which seemed to me to belong entirely to the character in the book rather than to myself and I was able to insert it in the novel and bridge the river.24
Perhaps my questions will be answered by your own book as I have only reached the half-way mark and am looking forward with great enthusiasm to finishing it. I repeat – please do not bother to reply to this letter. It is simply an expression of interest, even of enthusiasm, which needs no reply.
Yours sincerely,
Graham Greene
P.S. Perhaps you have answered my question about the message on page 66.25
TO JOHN HARRIS
This reader of the The Human Factor suspected the character Daintry of being a sinister foreign agent because he did not know what Maltesers were, which the reader recalled as having been available at cinemas in his childhood.
31st July 1979
Dear Mr Harris,
I would defend the maltesers in this way: when the first draft of the book was ready my secretary told me that maltesers no longer existed and I very nearly took them out. However my wife to prove that they could be obtained sent me a packet, but apparently they are much rarer than they used to be. Daintry was a young man when the war came and perhaps he hadn’t moved in malteser cinema circles. Anyway they wouldn’t have been available in the war and when the war was over so many years later he may have forgotten all about them or perhaps he was confused by the conversation in the Club. As a matter of fact I had forgotten that he hadn’t heard of them.
Yours sincerely
Graham Greene
TO HARRIET OLIVERI
This woman in Holbrook, New York, asked Greene to comment on a disagreement she was having with her grandson over the morality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
15th September 1979
Dear Mrs Oliveri,
Thank you for your letter. I half agree with your grandson, John Gillen. I still remember the shock we felt in Europe at the news. But even if it were a crime I think we owe to the bombing the peacewhich so far has not been broken between the great powers. It might be argued that a demonstration of the bomb in a desert would have been sufficient to induce the Japanese to surrender, but I doubt whether it would have had the effect on the imagination of the actual bombing. Because of that bombing both great powers are afraid of atomic war. Whether in the long run this will prevent a war remains to be seen.
Yours sincerely
Graham Greene
TO ANTHONY BURGESS
Anthony Burgess (1917–93) shared with Greene a fascination with Catholic subjects. According to his biographer Andrew Biswell, Burgess was corresponding regularly with Greene by 1961, when he dedicated the novel The Devil of a State to him.26 Few of their letters have come to light; it is possible that most were disposed of following their public row in 1988. Here, Greene refers to a radio lecture Burgess gave on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. At the time, the two were caught in a disagreement between their French publisher Robert Laffont and their translators Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier.
9th October 1979
Dear Burgess – or can I say Anthony or should I say Tony?
Just to put the record straight about your very generous broadcast: it was not The Heart of the Matter which was condemned by the Holy Office but The Power and the Glory and it was The Power and the Glory that Paul VI had read. It does make a good deal of difference because in my opinion The Heart of the Matter would be quite rightly condemnable but not The Power and the Glory. I do hope you are going to come and see me one day without Georges. I am faced at the moment with a difficult job of writing a letter to Robert Laffontto say that I am leaving him and following Georges. One of those things one postpones until the last moment.
Yours ever
Graham
TO ANTHONY BURGESS
31st October 1979
Dear Anthony,
I don’t envy you your American trip. I have managed to avoid going there now for about 15 years except for my few days in Washington with the Panamanians.
I can’t imagine what kind of contract you signed to give Laffont four new novels before you go. In the bad old days in England fifty years ago one had to offer an option on two novels if one was a first novelist but today no options are required. I realise that things are rather different in France but all the same … Laffont has no options on my novels. All the same after discussions I am staying with him if Georges continues to translate me. I think there were certain faults on both sides and anyway Georges told me that he and Hortense did not wish me to come to them. It was hitting Laffont too hard and of course I have known him since around 1946.
I am going off to Paris for about a week next week, but after that do ring me up at 33.71.80 and suggest a date for meeting.
Graham
In the background of this letter is a problem Yvonne Cloetta was handling for Graham. Even after many years in France, he had no great command of the language and no basis on which to judge the quality of translations. Cloetta, who moved expertly between French and English, made the final judgement on these questions – usually placing her trust in the distinguished Belmont. The point has a broader significance, since Cloetta is sometimes spoken of as lacking the intelligence to be an equal companion with Graham.27
TO AUBERON WAUGH
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes. | Jan. 29. 80
Dear Bron,
/>
I got your letter today with great relief (letters between England & France take at least seven days) because I thought my radio talk – which wasn’t scripted but done impromptu – might have hurt.28 I prepared myself for the ordeal in the King Edward VII Hospital by rereading almost every book of Evelyn’s. I look back with nostalgia to that time of peace. Oh, for another operation. But, thank God, you weren’t hurt anyway by the shortened version. I was responsible for the absurd mistake – that’s what comes of speaking without a script – of ‘the cross-Channel’ instead of ‘trans-Atlantic’ love affair. No one to my horror seems to have noticed it.
[…]
TO NICHOLAS DENNYS
This letter to Graham’s nephew, a bookseller, refers to Nelson Sevenpennies, which Graham and Hugh collected, a series of casebound volumes once published by the Scottish firm Thomas Nelson and Sons, priced at 7 d. The letter mentions David Low, a bookseller whom Graham had known for many years; their ‘bibliophilic correspondence’ was published as Dear David, Dear Graham (1989).
2nd February 1980
Dear Nick,
Many thanks for your letter. I am glad you had such a good day with David Low. He’s a very nice man. He wrote to me that he had enjoyed it too. Of course you should sell my letter for what it will fetch and any future ones!
Nelson Sevenpennies: I would like Major Vigoreux of Q. and also In Kedah’s Tents of Merryman and Born in Exile of Gissing. Ask Elisabeth to pay you what you ask out of petty cash! Of course I will sign your book for you. Why not leave it with Elisabeth.
I am afraid I don’t know anybody but Hugh and I who collect Nelsons. I have none in dust-wrappers but we saw a number in dust-wrappers and a good collection in a bookshop in Leicester once. As I am going there for my play I shall look in again.
Which days are you visible in the Portobello Road? I’d like to call on your stall one day.
Love
Graham
TO MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
Muggeridge reminded Graham of a compact they had made in Galilee to go on television together when they were eighty and asked him to ‘put this rendez-vous forward a year or so’.
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 26th March 1980
Dear Malcolm,
I am afraid my decision is a fixed one. I won’t appear on television. As for the 80th birthday that is still quite a long way off and I hope to escape having to break my promise!
I have found in writing autobiographical pieces how often memories of even things long past fail or are altered. I noticed a small alteration in your memories in a cutting I received the other day from was it The Daily Mirror? I was already installed at SIS when you were recruited, so I can’t have asked my sister to put our names up on the top of the In Basket. I had been destined for Monrovia but the Liberians refused to have me and when I was appointed to Freetown I learnt that they needed a man in Lourenço Marques and suggested you in order that you should escape those wintry rides on a motor-cycle.
My love to Kitty
Affectionately
Graham
TO FATHER LEOPOLDO DURÁN
Martine Cloetta, the daughter of Yvonne and Jacques, found herself bullied and harassed by her estranged husband, a man with underworld connections that kept him safe from the law. Greene concluded that Nice was being run by crooks. He wrote a pamphlet J’Accuse (1982), which some, including his friend Michael Korda, who decided against publishing it in the United States, regarded as an old man’s eccentricity.29 Perhaps a case of domestic abuse would be harder to trivialise a quarter of a century later; feminism has won that argument.
9th April 1980
Dearest Leopoldo,
Thank you for your letter of March 28. I do hope that you had a happy rest in Galicia at your village and also in our monastery. I am afraid that when I came back from England things were in a rather more violent situation than they had been before. Last week the fiend tried to break into the house of Yvonne and the police had to be called. The next day when Martine was returning to her apartment with her children he was waiting and attacked Jacques30 who was saved by Martine with the help of a tear-gas bomb. The authorities seem hopeless in this affair, but now my friend Pierre who is the Honorary Consul-General for Ireland31 has written to the Préfet enclosing a letter which I have proposed to write to The Times about the conditions of the law here. A kind of blackmail.32 I have to go to England now for my medical check up and then to see my daughter in Switzerland but I shall be back on April 16. I hope through this intervention of the Préfet something can be done. The law seems powerless.
I have also had a letter from General Salan in reply to one of mine which definitely establishes that whatever he may say he never belonged to the OAS – the secret army that he always claims was the cause of his imprisonment.33
About the end of May, God and not I know whether it would be a good thing. If only we could get a period of peace it might well be the only time when Yvonne and I could go off to Capri and I would be able to do a little bit of work in tranquillity. I want very much to see you and to discuss certain things with you, but we also need a short period of rest. England was a very short period and only led to the drama when he assaulted the house and assaulted Jacques.
When I come back from Switzerland I will write to you again and tell you what the situation is. Certainly we have need of all your prayers. I do hope you had a happy time with the Trappists and I really long to be there again with you. All three of us send our love.
Graham
TO COUNTESS STRACHWITZ (BARBARA GREENE)
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | April 17. 80
My dear Barbara,
[…]
This is only to explain how impossible it is to be sure when I’ll be in England again (I shall have to be there for a medical in October – my birthday month!). Gozo is a dream,34 but if we can get this man behind bars (my writing becomes unreadable) we have to go to Anacapri to see my little house (I am now an honorary citizen) in the spring – God knows if it will be possible. Impossible even to work at the moment. Anyway let’s keep in touch – this comic nightmare must end before long either in blood or a laugh. Today I discussed the matter with the mayor of Antibes who is at least alerting his police & he said, ‘But you are living one of your own books.’
Anyway, a lot of love,
Graham
TO LOUISE DENNYS
In his last decade, Graham relied on his niece as the editor of his works. Here he discusses drafts of Ways of Escape, his second volume of memoirs, which she knitted together out of his articles and his introductions to the novels.
17th June 1980
Dear Louise,
Thank you so much for your letter of June 7 with the enclosures. I wish I could have been at the party and discovered with you the secret stair and eaten – however is it made? – the caviar pie. I do think you are a wonderful publisher – apart from Frere much the best that I have known. If I have been able to give you a little help it was worth all the work on the book. Don’t worry about letting me know about all these subsidiary rights. I have absolute trust in you as a publisher.
Love
Graham
TO VALENTINA IVASHEVA
A professor of English studies, Ivasheva was one of Graham’s closest friends in Russia. Here he responds to the news that her husband has committed suicide by throwing himself from the balcony of their seventh-floor apartment in Moscow.
17th June 1980
My dear Valentina,
Your letter was a great shock. I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am. How terrible it must be for you – much more so than a death in bed. I am quite sure you have nothing to blame yourself for. In his condition it was almost certain that your husband would kill himself one day but now at any rate he is at peace. I don’t believe myself that death is the end of everything, or rather my faith tells me that death is not the end of everything and when my belief wavers I tel
l myself that I am wrong. One can’t believe 365 days a year, but my faith tells me that my reasoning is wrong. There is a mystery which we won’t be able to solve as long as we are alive. Personally even when I doubt I go on praying at night my own kind of prayers. Why not try at night talking to your husband and telling him all you think. Who knows whether he mightn’t be able to hear you and now with a mind unclouded?
[…]
TO FRANCIS GREENE
Greene was twice called upon as intermediary in kidnappings by Salvadoran rebels. In the first case, two bankers were released upon payment of a $5,000,000 ransom by their employer, a branch of Lloyd’s. The second case involved Ambassador Dunne of South Africa. Graham’s contact with the guerrillas was through the novelist Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico City.
130 Boulevard Malesherbes, | Paris 17. | Sep. 11 1980
Dear Francis,
This ‘happy birthday’ will arrive a bit late I’m afraid. I’m back from Panama (again the guest of Omar Torrijos) & three days in Nicaragua (the guest of Borge – most equal among the equal Sandinista junta) & meeting in Panama the rather creepy little head of the San Salvador rebels (‘pen name’ Marcial) & putting in a word for the poor South African ambassador who has been in their captivity for about 9 months. My fifth trip to Central America! Why? I suppose anything to get away from Antibes in August.
[…]
The Popular Liberation Front (FLP) led by Salvador Cayetano (‘Marcial’) was one of the groups that combined into the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Greene had met with Cayetano c. 20 August 1980 and provided the names of two South African millionaires who might pay the ransom. His mediation proved vain. Ambassador Dunne died in captivity several months later.35