The Unquiet Englishman
Page 18
Greene left Lagos at the end of March, stopping first in Accra, then at Roberts Field, an American air force base in Liberia, where the meals consisted mainly of foot-long overcooked steaks. The Americans had all of their food flown in, and although the barbecuing went on almost non-stop the meat was never shared with the local people who, as Tim Butcher learned, still refer to the place as ‘Smell-No-Taste’.9
Back in Freetown, Greene found a small house in the Brookfield flats below Hill Station, the European area. He wrote to his mother: ‘It’s terribly difficult to get anywhere to live alone in these days, so one can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. All the same I wish I was not just across the road from a transport camp in process of erection with two steam shovels going all day. And there’s no water although there are taps. Freetown has 147 inches a year, but distribution is so bad that there won’t be any water in my part till the rains six weeks hence. Drinking water I have to fetch in empty bottles from Freetown and then of course boil it, and bath water is fetched from a water hole.’10
The house had two bedrooms upstairs, a living room, and a dining room that served as his office. Rats swung from the curtains, while vultures loitered on the tin roof waiting for things to die. The house had been condemned on medical grounds since it stood in what was essentially an open latrine for the extremely poor neighborhood near by – when the rains came the ground turned into a fecal marsh. Greene advocated successfully to get lavatories for his neighbours, though they distrusted the angry man who came out at night in his pyjamas to throw rocks and swear at the howling pye-dogs. Greene hired a capable cook who then went insane and chased another servant with a hatchet.11 Austerity had certain involuntary benefits, of course – liquor was rationed, and during the war years Greene gave up smoking.12
However much he grumbled, Greene was in love with Sierra Leone: ‘ . . . in those first six months I was a happy man’.13 He had a history here, and in April he was visited by Aminah, the youngest of his personal servants from the Liberian trek who reported that the old cook was well but Amedoo was ‘under the ground’.14 Freetown also offered Greene a refuge from trouble back home, as he wrote to Elisabeth: ‘Things can be hell, I know. The peculiar form it’s taken with me the last four years has been in loving two people as equally as makes no difference, the awful struggle to have your cake and eat it, the inability to throw over one for the sake of the other . . . ’15 His time abroad postponed that reckoning.
Through the 1940s Greene was haunted by the question of whether his life was of use to anyone, especially as he was doing harm to his family and to Dorothy – a consideration that later brought him close to suicide. While in Sierra Leone, he told Raymond that he regarded his work in the service as having no value, but wrote to his mother: ‘Tomorrow’s Good Friday . . . Good Friday four years ago I went to a secret illegal Mass in Chiapas. I’ve had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring.’16
Boredom did catch up with him from time to time, even in Freetown, and one day he stood on the stairs of his bungalow for half an hour watching two flies copulate.17 Still, daily life was generally stimulating and distracting, something London offered only when the bombs were falling. Greene’s passion for West Africa is not reducible, however, to a flight from marital troubles or an effort to stave off depression. As we have seen, he distrusted the veneers of a comfortable life and felt that reality was only knowable under conditions of privation. His quest for absolutes required such conditions, and if Greeneland, a term he disliked, has a central place it may just be the little house in Freetown, which he came to regard as home.18
Greene’s career as agent 59200 got off to an awkward start as he was first told that his ostensible position would be that of inspector for the Department of Overseas Trade, but this cover was withdrawn. Then the British Council refused him a nominal appointment in Freetown, and so too the navy and air force both refused to grant him a rank. Finally, he was made an officer in the CID Special Branch.19
Greene was a minor figure in British intelligence, but Freetown was not an insignificant posting. At the time of his appointment there was rivalry between SIS and the rapidly expanding Special Operations Executive (SOE), which specialized in subversion and sabotage: although they collaborated in many theatres of the war, their interests were not the same, as SIS found it difficult to pursue the quiet work of gathering intelligence in places where SOE was blowing up trains and factories. SOE wanted to take control of intelligence gathering in West Africa, something SIS strongly resisted.20 With the Mediterranean closed to shipping, convoys to Egypt and North Africa had to sail south towards the Cape of Good Hope, with Freetown the main port of call. At the same time, there was some threat of attack by Vichy forces across the border in French Guinea. So Greene’s job required him to monitor shipping and, through a very small network of agents, to keep track of any French troop movements inland. He searched Portuguese ships for commercial diamonds, and watched for enemy agents and evidence of espionage. He interrogated a suspected spy just once, and hated it. He also discovered among the papers of another suspected spy the name of his friend, translator, and French literary agent Denyse Clarouin – her work for the resistance was evidently known to the Nazis and Greene assumed she had already been arrested.21 Deported in 1943, she was held first at the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, then died at Mauthausen in 1945.22
A great many ships docked at Freetown, often carrying officers to distant postings, among them Nicholas Elliott who, in late May, was on his way to Cairo. A very close friend of the double agent Kim Philby, whom he long supposed a patriot, he would later be sorely embarrassed when Philby defected. On the quay in Freetown, he met Greene, ‘who had the unrewarding task of trying to find out what was going on in Dakar’. Presently Greene became worked up on the subject of contraceptives in Sierra Leone – he could not get any – so Elliott obligingly took up a collection of French letters among passengers of his ship and handed them over. When reminded of this episode later, Greene ‘retorted that when I came ashore I was the tattiest Army officer he had ever seen. I had even, he said, omitted to put on my badges of rank.’23 It is curious to think of Greene caring much about such things
Greene was kept busy. A young woman came to help him with coding but he recalled that she was not particularly competent and the cables often had to be repeated. Greene’s relations with his superior at Lagos deteriorated, and in the late summer the two quarrelled openly about an occasion when Greene wanted to go inland to a meeting with an English commissioner and the superior wanted him to search a ship. Greene obeyed his orders, but complained vociferously, only to find his pay cut off. London intervened, removing Greene from the control of Lagos so that henceforth, without knowing it, he got his orders from Kim Philby, who was then a senior figure in the counter-intelligence section of SIS.
Greene proposed two schemes to his superiors. He suggested blackmailing an imprisoned African intellectual to provide information on French Guinea, but the man, a socialist, had influential friends such as the publisher Victor Gollancz, and Greene’s superiors feared that a question might be asked in Parliament. He also proposed setting up a brothel on a Portuguese island near Dakar to gather information, especially from the officers and men of the battleship Richelieu stationed near by. He found a cooperative Portuguese madam ready to set up shop, but, according to Greene, London nixed the idea on the grounds that all brothels were under the control of French intelligence.24 Philby recalls that they took the idea seriously but said no because it was ‘unlikely to be productive of hard intelligence’.25
Never very sociable, Greene made just a few friends in Freetown, going from time to time for drinks at the City Hotel, a gathering place for Europeans described in the opening pages of The Heart of the Matter. He found the company of expatriates tiresome as they spent their time complaining about the blacks and seemed immune to the horror of war; he wrote to Raymond: ‘As far as I can se
e their contribution [to the war effort] has been confined to cowardice, complacency, inefficiency, illiteracy and thirst . . . Of course one is referring only to the Europeans. The Africans at least contribute grace . . . People say the African is not yet ready for self-government. God knows whether he is or not: the Englishman here certainly isn’t.’ He added that it all amounted to ‘copy’ – he knew he would one day write about this place.26
Greene did become very friendly with Father Michael Mackey, an Irish missionary of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (the ‘Spiritans’) known to his confreres as ‘Mick’. Born in Waterford, he was sent in 1934 to teach at St Edward’s Secondary School in Freetown. In 1938, he was made vicar-general of the diocese and pastor of St Anthony’s Church, near the house in the Brookfield flats that the novelist would occupy in 1942. Mackey would regularly preach in the Sierra Leonean creole called Krio. A fine raconteur, he possessed a superb tenor voice, and was usually the centre of attention at parties – in fact, a profile of him preserved by his order remarks that sometimes he could be ‘over rumbustious’ but that he ‘mellowed’. He was also rather ‘abrasive’ for mission work and was sent on to other assignments after 1946, and was successful at almost everything he turned his hand to. In his later years, he lived in California and was popular with celebrities, including Bing Crosby, with whom he played golf.27 The character of Father Rank in The Heart of the Matter owes a good deal to Father Mackey.
Greene’s closest friend in Sierra Leone was Patrick Tait Brodie.28 The child of an Inverness wine merchant who died young, Brodie had earned his living as a ‘mechanical dentist’29 – he made dentures. In 1908 he went to South Africa as a labourer,30 and in the following year he joined the British South African Mounted Police, serving until 1912 when he took to hunting elephants and other big game. In the Great War, he served in the 2nd Rhodesia Regiment and then the King’s African Rifles, rising to the rank of captain; he was wounded twice and named in despatches three times, winning the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order.31 He remained with his regiment until 1923, when he became Police Commissioner in Sierra Leone, running a force of about three hundred men.32 In 1941, he was awarded an OBE.33
When Greene met him, Brodie was also working on behalf of MI5 (the branch of intelligence that investigates subversion and threats to internal security, in contrast to MI6 which gathers foreign intelligence). Each day Greene would bring his outgoing cables to Brodie for transmission and pick up those that had come in – all in code. The two men became close, and Brodie lent Greene money when his salary was cut off in the dispute with Lagos. Eighteen years older than the novelist, Brodie was worn out by his job, especially the ongoing struggle against corruption among his officers and continual demands and instructions from MI5 officials back in England.
According to Greene, one day during the rains, evidently in the autumn of 1942, Brodie went ‘out of his mind’.34 His career in Sierra Leone was over, and he was replaced within months.35 Greene insisted that Scobie was not a portrait of Brodie,36 and yet in addition to the similar-sounding names, the broad outlines of an upright police officer disintegrating under pressure are undeniably similar. However, the inner life of Scobie and his final act of self-destruction have little to do with Brodie, who lived another twenty years and eventually died in Wiltshire. Indeed, the dilemmas of Scobie are, in some respects, Greene’s own, and in other ways they are purely imaginary. As is often the case, Greene’s fictional character developed in the writing and became very different from the person who had been the initial inspiration.
Through his months in West Africa, Greene had written some of his most lyrical and evocative letters to his parents, as if he could speak more freely now that he was away from England. It is assumed that the letters, addressed to Marion, were actually written to both parents and that she would read them aloud to Charles,37 who spent much of his time in his study with the curtains drawn. A passionate chess player, he taught the rudiments of the game to Lucy Caroline when Vivien brought the children to visit.38 He had had the benefit of insulin, but diabetes gradually ruined his health, and he died on 4 November 1942.39 Rather as had happened with the death of Vivien’s mother, Graham received first a telegram informing him of his father’s death and then a second advising of his serious illness.
Stricken with regret for arguing with his father about politics and morals,40 he arranged for Father Mackey to say a Mass for him and the priest suggested a useful memorial tribute, which Graham described to his mother: ‘This may seem Popish superstition to you, or it may please you, that prayers are being said every day for Da in a West African church, & that rice is being distributed here in his name among people who live on rice & find it very hard to get.’41
Naturally restless, he wrote to Hugh: ‘This place will be most amusing to look back on, I daresay, but it’s extraordinary how dull and boring the bizarre can be at the time.’42 After his row with Lagos, he was offered another appointment but did not have the languages necessary to take it up, and yet in the last months of 1942 he wanted and expected a transfer.43 The intelligence situation changed on 8 November when the Allies commenced Operation Torch, a series of successful assaults on Morocco and Algeria, after which there was less need for the information officers further south could provide. In February, he sailed back to England for a new assignment. He later wrote: ‘ “Those days” – I am glad to have had them; my love of Africa deepened there, in particular for what is called, the whole world over, the Coast, this world of tin roofs, of vultures clanging down, of laterite paths turning rose in the evening light.’44
19
THE MINISTRY OF FEAR
Greene had little time for British detective stories – too many country houses, too many Bradshaw’s timetables – but while sailing from Liverpool to West Africa he had read a book by Michael Innes, which prompted him to write a ‘funny and fantastic thriller’ of his own, The Ministry of Fear. As Greene observed, this book did not turn out to be particularly funny though it had, in his understated phrase, ‘other merits’.1 Many years later, L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, claimed through a publicist that Greene had stolen the idea for the novel from him and then proposed, as a remedy, that they collaborate on new stories. Finally nagged into a response, Greene dismissed both suggestions with polite scorn.2
Greene began writing the book once he had settled in Freetown in April 1942, worked quickly despite the burden of his official tasks, and finished around the beginning of August. Getting the manuscript home was a problem, as so many of the ships were sinking and he did not want to lose it – indeed, he valued it at £600. Working in the evenings and typing with one finger, it took him almost as long to produce a typescript as it did to write the story.3
He regarded The Ministry of Fear as the best of his ‘entertainments’, but this novel seems ill-served by that term. Although it is a story of spies, bombs, abductions, and killings, it is also a subtle exploration of memory, selfhood, politics, psychoanalysis, and the growth of pity. The main character, Arthur Rowe, has served a brief detention for the mercy killing of his sick wife. The story opens with him attending a church fête in bombed-out Bloomsbury, where some fifth columnists mistake his identity and arrange for him to win a cake containing microfilm. They try to get it back it from him, then to silence him by making him believe he has committed another murder. Trying to uncover the facts, he encounters two of the spies, a brother and sister named Hilfe, refugees from Austria; Rowe and Anna Hilfe fall in love, but the brother remains true to the cause. A bomb in a suitcase wipes out Rowe’s memory of his adult life and leaves him temporarily happy. Under the name Richard Digby, he is placed in a sanitorium, resembling Berkhamsted School even down to the green baize door, run by a blackmailed psychiatrist who refuses to help Rowe recover his memories. The plot plays out with several killings and a suicide, in the course of which Rowe does recover his memories, especially that of killing his wife. He and Anna come together but have much
to conceal from one another. Greene ends on a chilling note: ‘after all one could exaggerate the value of happiness’.
The book is built around dream-logic; the daily round of bombs, politics and treachery are understandable only by a larger form of psychoanalysis. A Special Branch investigator, Mr Prentice, based on one of the men who trained Greene for intelligence, is said to be ‘the surrealist round here’. In anticipation of The Heart of the Matter, the book is fundamentally concerned with the errors of pity that might lead one to kill, but also with the possibility of pity as a ‘mature passion’ – in Greene’s lexicon ‘pity’ is usually, but not always, inferior to ‘compassion’.
In its way, this book is nearly as concerned with theology as Brighton Rock or The Power and the Glory. Pity forces one into fellowship with wretched humanity: ‘Wasn’t it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them, rather than be saved alone?’ This is a variation on the thinking of Charles Péguy, and it is also reminiscent of the whisky priest at home in the prison cell.