Graham Greene
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Yours in most sincere friendship
Graham Greene
Angel Cuadra Landrove (b. 1931) was a poet and activist released in May 1982 after fifteen years in prison; he was refused an exit visa and required to report weekly to the police. It was feared that he would be re-arrested. In 1984, he was finally allowed to leave. At the time of this letter, the poet Jorge Valls Arango was being confined incommunicado and had had no family visits in two years. He is now in exile in the United States.
TO RICHARD INGRAMS
One of the founders of Private Eye and for many years its editor, Ingrams (b. 1937) has become the world’s authority on pseuds.
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | Sep. 27 ’83
Dear Richard Ingrams,
No letters are being accepted for ‘abroad’ at this moment, so I must send very tardy thanks for the Oxford Book of Pseuds which you have so kindly sent me. I was delighted by it a) for the binding,
b) for the exposure of poor Burgess & (I won’t say poor) Levin,
c) for the confirmation of my belief that the true home of the Pseuds is in the so-called ‘quality’ press. The Sunday Times, as one would have expected, narrowly beats The Observer: S. T. 16 entries, Observer 15 – The Times takes a close third place with 14 examples & The Guardian unexpectedly lags behind with only 10. I’m rather sorry to see that the New Statesman with 5 has been beaten by The Spectator (whom I am sure we both love) with nine.
Anyway I hope that this research shows my appreciation of your present. Only one complaint: you have given T. S. Eliot one L too many.
Yours ever,
Graham Greene
TO ED ROLLMAN
Having read The Power and the Glory, Ed Rollman of Bremerton, Washington, wrote to Greene on 24 October 1983 : ‘What troubles me and so I would like to ask you is do you really believe in Marxism? Because to me that is really scary. I mean to be a Marxist is to be communist isn’t it?’
9th November 1983
Dear Mr. Rollman,
No, I am not a communist nor am I a Marxist. Perhaps you will find my position best expressed in a novel called Monsignor Quixote. Personally I find Das Kapital unreadable, though I have struggled with it. The trouble is that your rulers are apt to consider anyone who is left of centre, even Social Democrats, Marxist. The word has become completely misused.
Yours sincerely
Graham Greene
TO EDWARD GREENE
In a letter of 26 December 1983, Graham’s cousin Edward (1904–90), known as ‘Tooter’, recalled how in his two years as a coffee trader he had visited Nicaragua and El Salvador and seen traders living in luxury, children starving and governments propped up solely because they were not Communist.
2nd January 1984
My dear Tooter,
Forgive a dictated letter, but my hand is not very good at writing. I agree with every word you write in your letter. I have been to Nicaragua twice since the revolution, in 1980 and 1983, and I am very impressed by what they are doing. They had the brilliant idea of sending school children who had reached the higher class for several months into the countryside to live with the peasants and to work with them and in the evening to teach them to read and write. In this period they reduced illiteracy from I think it was 30% to 13%. Five of the school children were murdered by Somozista guerillas and a number died of sickness, but they had a huge national greeting when they returned to Managua.
I know Tomas Borge the Minister of the Interior, Umberto Ortega the Head of Defence, Daniel Ortega the chief man in the Junta, Father Cardenale the Minister of Culture and Lenin Cerna the Chief of Security. I have just met Father Escoto the Foreign Minister. Of course there are Marxists in the Government –Tomas Borge in particular, but the presence of the two Catholic priests as Ministers and the fact that health and education are in the hands of a Jesuit guarantees that this will not be a conventional Communist government.
[…]
TO ELISABETH DENNYS (NÉE GREENE)
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes. | March 19 ’84
Dearest Elisabeth,
We only really got to know each other at the time of Munich, but how much I have owed to you since to the present day. A very happy birthday to you, & this is a totally inadequate present. Buy something stupid & pretty, or perhaps it will help with a holiday.
All my love & Yvonne sends hers too.
Graham
TO BERNARD DIEDERICH
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes. | 3rd April 1984
Dear Bernard,
Many thanks for your letter. Your spelling of Espriella48 has gone rather astray! Chuchu arrived safely and corrected many misspellings of mine. I would have liked you to have seen the book before publication but we are anxious to get it out before the American elections – Chuchu is especially anxious. He likes it better than I do. His character really overshadows Omar in the book and I feel it an uneasy falling between two stools of memoirs and autobiography. However I will follow Chuchu’s advice and publish.
I have hopes that Hart will beat both Mondale and Reagan. I don’t feel it likely somehow that Reagan will go whole-hog on an invasion of Nicaragua. After all the Pentagon decided that it would need a hundred thousand troops to guard the Canal so I should imagine it would need close to half a million to do anything in Nicaragua.
I begin to feel old and tired, so though Chuchu brought me letters from Colonel Diaz, Noriega and Espriella, who sent me a picture also, I doubt whether I shall take off again for Central America. I shall probably go no further than Spain this year.
Affectionately
Graham
TO JONATHAN BOURGET
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | Oct. 23 ’84
My dear Jonathan,
I’m afraid that in my fleeting visits we have little time to talk, but I am so glad to hear that you called on Martine & the children. They were all delighted with you, & want to see you again.
I know that life for you at this stage is not very easy (it’s not all that easy at my stage!), but I do want you to feel that you can write to me in confidence & if there is any way that I can help I’ll do my best. We are too alike to remain strangers!
Love,
Graham
TO JOCELYN RICKARDS (DONNER)
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 5th November 1984
My dear Jocelyn,
I haven’t read Freddie’s autobiography, but next time I am in Hatchards I’ll look in the index and find what he says! Of course write what you like. I’m no more ashamed of our affair than you are. It will probably bring my biographer Norman Sherry on your heels, but he’s a nice man and I don’t think that he is going to bother much about the private life.
Much love
Graham
Rickards had had a long affair with the sceptical philosopher A. J. Ayer and a short one with Graham c. 1953. Ayer’s second volume of autobiography More of My Life was published in 1984. Greene’s The End of the Affair was, in some respects, a dispute with the ideas of Ayer.
TO MAHAUT COSTE
13th March 1985
Dear Mlle Coste,
I first used the distinction between entertainment and novels because I thought some of my books were more adventure stories and less serious than the others. I found more and more that the distinction was a bad one and that the two types of book came closer and closer to each other. I abandoned the distinction altogether in the case of Travels with My Aunt, which I thought was on one side quite a funny book and could be described as an entertainment but on the other hand it was a book that described old age and death. The difficulty began with Brighton Rock. Brighton Rock was published under the category of entertainment in the United States but I dropped that distinction in England where it was published under the heading of novel. The whole idea of distinguishing between the two genres was a mistake from the beginning and I am
glad that I have abandoned it.
Yours sincerely
Graham Greene
P.S. I think the first time that I distinguished a book as entertainment was A Gun for Sale where I wanted my publisher to issue it under an assumed name49 but I found that if I did so I would have a very small advance which I couldn’t afford to accept so instead of the assumed name I used the word entertainment.
TO ROALD DAHL
Roald Dahl (1916–90), the author of James and the Giant Peach and Charley and the Chocolate Factory, wrote a memoir Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984), which recounted odd episodes of school fagging, such as having been forced by an older boy to warm a frost-covered toilet seat with his buttocks.
13th May 1985
Dear Roald Dahl,
I have just finished reading Boy with immense pleasure and great horror. It’s extraordinary to me that you had an operation for removing the adenoids without an anaesthetic in those past days when in 1910 I remember having a total anaesthetic at home and my tonsils and adenoids removed. I was shocked too by all the beatings and I realize now even more what an advanced man my father was as Headmaster of Berkhamsted. No prefects or fagging there. I look forward immensely to the sequel and I look forward too to a visit again from you here.
Yours ever
Graham Greene
1 Fabian Velarde was an adviser of Torrijos’s. Greene thought him comic and sinister, but felt guilty for teasing him when he dropped dead after one of his visits.
2 See issues for November and December.
3 See Getting to Know the General, 29, 91, and Howard B. Schaffer, Ellsworth Bunker: Global Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
4 ‘The Country with Five Frontiers’, NYRB (17 February 1977).
5 Graham and Chuchu had stopped at a house said to be haunted by a screaming woman. Graham was not able to get into the house until his next visit when he was presented as a medium on his way to a spiritualist conference in Australia (Getting to Know the General, 86–7).
6 Graham’s unfinished novel On the Way Back, based on his travels with Chuchu, is described in Getting to Know the General, 49–50. Part of The Captain and the Enemy (1988) is set in Panama and the character of Pablo has a remote resemblance to Chuchu.
7 Four Crowded Years: The Diaries of Auberon Waugh, 1972–1976, ed. N. R. Galli (London : Private Eye Productions, André Deutsch, 1976).
8 Evelyn Waugh; George Grossmith, author of Diary of a Nobody (1892); George Birmingham (pseudonym of James Hannay), a prolific novelist from whose works Greene drew the title for The Captain and the Enemy (1988); P. G. Wodehouse.
9 This is the case of John Fagan, a Glasgow dockworker whose sudden recovery from stomach cancer in 1967 was scrutinised by various physicians. In February 1977, Pope Paul VI concluded that a miracle had occurred at the intercession of the Blessed John Ogilvie (d. 1614). Ogilvie was then canonised.
10 Presumably, Miguel Fernandez, the driver or ‘third man’ in the party. He is identified in a photograph in Durán’s memoir of Greene.
11 Such a ‘Museum of Signatures’ is described in Monsignor Quixote, 17.
12 Monsignor Quixote effectively took over the structure of the abortive Panamanian novel; in both stories, two characters travel by road and eventually one is killed.
13 ‘The Great Spectacular’, NYRB (26 January 1978).
14 Graham had issued a public appeal, largely composed by the journalist Greg Chamberlain, on behalf of the Baptistes in the Guardian (15 March 1976). See pp. 288–9.
15 A Hungarian documentary maker.
16 See p. 278.
17 Dr Priscilla Chadwick, the current principal of Berkhamsted Collegiate School, suggests that Greene’s comments reflect a reading of the reports of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), of which her father the theologian Professor Henry Chadwick was a member. According to The Windsor
18 Greene had authorised the Conrad scholar Norman Sherry (b. 1925) to write his biography.
19 Robert Morley (1908–92) played the part of Dreuther in Loser Takes All (1956).
20 Greene had written in the introduction to Philby’s book, My Silent War (1968): ‘I saw the beginning of this affair – indeed I resigned rather than accept the promotion which was one tiny cog in the machinery of his intrigue. I attributed it then to a personal drive for power, the only characteristic in Philby which I thought disagreeable. I am glad now that I was wrong. He was serving a cause and not himself, and so my old liking for him comes back …’ (rpt in Collected Essays, 313).
21 See The Lawless Roads, 108–27. The dentist in The Power and the Glory is an extremely important character. As an Englishman viewing the persecution, he seems to stand in for the author and is given the name Tench, a variation on Greene’s pseudonym Hilary Trench.
22 Rycroft (63 notes that the psychologist Calvin Hall was collecting dreams from American students in the last few days of the war and did not find one that referred to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. From this, Rycroft concludes that dreaming is an egotistic activity just as sleep is.
23 On his deathbed, Greene asked Yvonne Cloetta to organise the publication of selections from the diaries. A World of My Own appeared in 1992.
24 ‘Querry’s dream in A Burnt-Out Case, dealing with a lost priesthood and the search for sacramental wine, is an exact reproduction of one of my own dreams which occurred while I was writing the novel at the precise moment when I needed it. I wrote it in the next morning. My novel, It’s a Battlefield, had its origin in a dream.’ (In Search of a Character, 75; A Burnt-out Case, 42–3).
25 Rycroft writes, somewhat enigmatically: ‘The dream agent is some thing that is part of oneself but also more than oneself, that is personally impersonal and impersonally personal, that sends messages without ever willing or deciding to do so but only because it cannot do so.’
26 See Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005), esp. 379–84.
27 See Cloetta, 87–8.
28 ‘Graham Greene on Evelyn Waugh as a Novelist’, BBC Three, 4 October 1979.
29 Michael Korda, ‘The Third Man’, New Yorker (25 March 1996), 49.
30 Jacques Cloetta, Yvonne’s husband with whom Graham had an amicable relationship.
31 Pierre Joannon was Honorary Consul General for Ireland in Antibes.
32 Such a letter appeared in The Times (25 January 1982); rpt. Yours etc., 207–8.
33 General Raoul-Albert-Louis Salan (1899 –1984) had been head of the OAS, the secret army opposed to Algerian independence. A death sentence for his part in the attempted coup against de Gaulle was commuted to life imprisonment and he was released in 1968. Graham first knew him in Vietnam (Ways of Escape, 126 and 139).
34 After the death of her husband, Barbara Greene, who had accompanied Graham on his trek through Liberia in 1934, bought a house around 1970 on the Maltese island of Gozo and spent four to six months there every year (information from Rupert Graf Strachwitz).
35 Getting to Know the General, 134–41.
36 Alain Peyrefitte (1925 –99), historian and Minister of Justice under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
37 General Alain de Boissieu was then the Grand Chancellor. He returned the insignia with the observation that Greene might find it useful in his campaign.
38 Meyer’s Lunatic and Lover, a play about Strindberg, had been produced both on stage and radio.
39 A Kurosawa film set in sixteenth-century Japan.
40 In Their Trade is Treachery (1981), the journalist and novelist Chapman Pincher named Sir Roger Hollis (1905–73), the former head of MI5, as a member of the Cambridge spy-ring.
41 A translator named Boris Izakov.
42 ‘Freedom of Information’, Spectator, 7 April 1984, rpt. Reflections, 303–5.
43 George Price, a former seminarian, was the first prime minister of Belize. Greene admired him as a man of principle, and Diederich recalls his
frugality with his nation’s money was such that when he visited Miami he would take a bus downtown rather than a taxi (e-mail to RG, 5 February 2005).
44 Not otherwise identified.
45 Greene’s comedy The Return of A. J. Raffles, based on Hornung’s stories about a gentleman burglar and cricketer, had failed owing to bad reviews (NS 3: 614).
46 In an interview with James Willmerth (Time, 24 January 1983), Roberto Guillén claimed that he had left the counter-intelligence service of the Defence Ministry and joined the defector Eden Pastora’s guerrillas in Costa Rica because of the Sandinistas’ use of torture and disappearances against their political foes. He claimed that he himself had been asked to organise the slaughter of eight hundred Miskito Indians.
47 After the death of Omar Torrijos, the politically flatfooted General Ruben Dario Paredes took over, but Colonel Diaz Herrera and Colonel Manuel Noriega (soon to promote himself to General) were locked in a struggle for power. Greene was sympathetic to Diaz, who later succumbed to a mental illness and went into exile (e-mail Bernard Diederich to RG 19 February 2005). Although Greene speaks well of him here, he came to distrust Noriega and by 1988 believed that Noriega might kill him and blame it on the CIA if he returned to Panama (see p. 400).
48 Ricardo de la Espriella had resigned the presidency of Panama under duress on 13 February.
49 Hilary Tench. See p. 71.
10
THE LAST WORD
TO KIM PHILBY
In a letter of 10 October 1985 Philby thanked Greene for the gift of The Tenth Man and remarked that if it and not The Third Man had been filmed he might have been spared some personal notoriety. He joked about Graham’s numeric titles, remarking that seven and thirteen would have a cabbalistic significance: ‘you seem to prefer ordinals to cardinals’. He wished that the Pope would not talk about birth control and that ‘the White House phoney wouldn’t talk, period’.