The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Greene’s own return to Europe from Sierra Leone led him to break a cardinal rule: he submitted to a television interview. The documentary-maker Christopher Burstall proposed a clever format in which the camera might play on the novelist’s hands but never on his face. Leaving from the Gare de Lyon on 4 April 1968,14 they retraced the route of Stamboul Train from Paris to Istanbul, and Burstall recorded Greene’s conversation over two days and three nights. Broadcast on the BBC’s Omnibus on 17 November 1968, Burstall used old photographs and dramatizations of the novels to provide the visual element. The absence of the novelist’s face added a man-of-mystery quirk to the production. When asked why he wanted to be interviewed this way, he said he was afraid of ‘playing the part of a writer – part of a Catholic. I don’t know, but I think it would be a little bit of a part. And I would cease to be a writer, and I would become a comedian. I feel myself infinitely corruptible. It is just possible that it might be successful and then I’d be tempted to do it again. Like a successful first night with a woman . . . ’

  Although he gave many interviews to print journalists, there was nothing in his career quite like this. He quoted a passage from Browning’s poem ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ that he thought might serve as an epigram for all his works:

  Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things,

  The honest thief, the tender murderer,

  The superstitious atheist, demirep

  That loves and saves her soul in new French books –

  We watch while these in equilibrium keep,

  The giddy line midway . . .15

  When asked about his attraction to seediness, he said, ‘I think it’s the same draw that a child has towards making a mud pie. Perhaps it’s a certain remaining infantility in one’s character. The seedy is nearer the beginning, isn’t it – or nearer the end, I suppose.’ Burstall asked why his books were set so far from England: ‘It’s a restlessness that I’ve always had to move around, and perhaps to see English characters in a setting which is not protective to them’16 – a statement which hints at why it is difficult to fit Greene into standard academic arguments about the colonial impulse in literature. There was one more very surprising thing: Burstall asked him to speculate on what a heaven might be like – he obliged, and what he said will come up again later in this book.

  The Orient Express was no longer so glamorous as in the 1930s, and Greene brought the modern, more workaday train service into Travels with My Aunt; it is a challenge for his characters even to get meals as they roll towards Istanbul, and at one point Henry counts himself lucky to get six ham rolls off a trolley. On the train, Henry encounters the uninhibited young wanderer Tooley and unwittingly smokes some pot she has obtained from the in-all-places-at-once Wordsworth. They talk about travel, love, religion, sex, and the CIA, and she eventually discloses the fear that she is pregnant by a hitchhiking boyfriend (whereabouts unknown). Inevitably, Henry falls a little in love with her.

  The novel proceeds according to a strange logic, which at times is dream-like, and, indeed, Greene had resumed recording his own dreams systematically in a diary in the 1960s. This may have affected his way of telling a story, as many of his late narratives are similarly enigmatic. Aunt Augusta belongs to the lawless world of dreams, and for Henry Pulling to find himself he needs a little lawlessness. He also needs to be made vulnerable. As Greene told Burstall, he liked to see his English characters in settings that did not protect them; so, it was necessary to bring Henry to ‘the dangerous edge of things’.

  At about this time, Greene was considering a visit to Paraguay, a repressive country with no industry to speak of, apart from smuggling. One of its distinctions was that its primary language was not Spanish or Portuguese, but Guaraní. He had been interested in this place for almost forty years, as around 1929 he had met the social reformer and historian R. B. Cunninghame Graham,17 who wrote of the Jesuit reducciones in Paraguay, a religious and social experiment that survives in modern memory through the film The Mission.

  In the early seventeenth century, the Society of Jesus attempted to create what amounted to an indigenous republic among the Guaraní of north-east Paraguay. By 1732, about 140,000 people lived in communes with shared ownership of most possessions. The Jesuits assigned just two priests to each of thirty missions, which would have had an average population of 4500, so they had little power of compulsion – the Guaraní lived in these places by choice. The Jesuits, of course, worked to make Catholics of the Guaraní; they also encouraged the development of a rich musical, artistic, and technical culture.18 For a time they were successful in protecting the Guaraní against slavers, but were finally overmatched, as many thousands were abducted and forced to work in Brazil. The priests were expelled and the reducciones destroyed; Cunninghame Graham called it, rather romantically, ‘A Vanished Arcadia’.19 Having made an enemy of the Portuguese government, the Jesuit order was suppressed by Rome in 1773, although it continued to exist vestigially in Russia and a few other places, before being revived in 1814. The history of the reducciones took on an enormous importance in the evolution of Catholic social thought, and Graham Greene in particular gave a good deal of consideration to it. He longed for a non-Marxist alternative to capitalism that would be respectful of indigenous peoples, and the reducciones contained the seed of such a thing.

  In 1938, he had pitched a book about Paraguay to his agent. From 1932 to 1935, the country had fought its neighbour Bolivia, another landlocked country, over possession of the desolate Chaco region, thought to have oil reserves, and over control of rivers that would, with Argentina’s cooperation, give access to the sea. It was a dire conflict in which nearly a hundred thousand people died.20 Paraguay won, partly owing to the support of Argentina, but was internally riven with coups and revolutions. At the time, Greene saw in Paraguay ‘the totalitarian state transported to the center of South America’.21

  And he was right. A civil war fought in 1947 saw the deaths of another fifty thousand people and the emergence of the right-wing Colorado Party as the dominant force in the country.22 In 1954, General Alfredo Stroessner, afterwards known as ‘El Excelentísimo’,23 seized control and ruled as dictator for thirty-four years. His regime was nationalist, corrupt, and repressive, and it maintained a large force of paramilitary killers. Since it had democratic pretensions and hunted down possible communists, the regime enjoyed American support. He had no real policy platform, and ran the country on the basis of what one historian has called ‘neo-sultanism’24 – he gave orders and expected them to be obeyed.

  From the mid-1970s, Paraguay was a very active participant in ‘Operation Condor’ along with Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and later Peru and Ecuador. This secret cross-border arrangement, backed by the CIA, facilitated the pursuit, torture, and killing of supposed subversives. In 1992, an enormous cache of records now known as the ‘Archives of Terror’ was discovered in Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, documenting the deaths, disappearances, illegal detention, or torture of hundreds of thousands of people throughout Latin America.25 Some of these documents were later used in the prosecution of Augusto Pinochet, dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. The Truth and Justice Commission/Commission for Historical Memory of Paraguay found that under Stroessner 19,862 people were detained illegally, 19,722 tortured, and 459 murdered or disappeared. It is hard to deny the dictator’s close involvement in all of this, as his summer residence near Ciudad del Este, known as the ‘house of horrors’, was understood to be a centre for torture; human remains were discovered there, under the floor of a bathroom, in 2019.26

  Greene arrived in Buenos Aires in mid-July 1968 and found himself treated like a film star, pursued by the press and by amorous women.27 He planned to travel up the Paraná River, which formed a boundary between the countries, to Asunción, but was delayed two weeks trying to organize his passage.

  His main contact in Argentina was his publisher and translator, Victoria Ocampo, whom he had first met in 1938 and for whom
he had a considerable fondness though they seldom saw each other. A leading figure in South American letters, she owned two houses, now UNESCO sites, one in San Isidro outside Buenos Aires and the other in Mar del Plato, to which she welcomed many authors and intellectuals, including Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Camus. She had a mystical bent, with interest in the Gospels, Dante, Buddhism, and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, and this combination led her to pursue social justice and, especially, women’s rights.28 An opponent of Juan Perón, whom she regarded as a fascist, she had been imprisoned for a month in 1953 as the police tried, without evidence, to connect her to a bomb attack on the leader.29

  At the time of Greene’s visit in 1968, Argentina was under the authoritarian rule of General Juan Carlos Onganía, and there was unrest in the country. The northern state of Tucumán was near insurrection, largely over wages in the sugar industry; in the absence of labour leaders, parish priests led the protests.30 At the same time, the Montonero rebel group, consisting of Catholics, socialists, and left-wing Peronistas, pursued a small-scale urban insurgency, and would make international headlines two years later by kidnapping and killing a former president, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu; this group became a special target of right-wing Peronistas once the Dirty War started in 1974.31

  Ocampo arranged for Greene to spend an evening with a ‘clandestine’ group of young Catholic revolutionaries, whom he thought naive and in love with theories. However, some of what they said did get his attention. They told him that in Paraguay opponents of the regime had been flung from planes and that their bodies, with hands bound, had been known to wash up on the Argentine bank of the Paraná – he did not know whether to believe them.32 This was early evidence of the death flights which were later common practice in several South American countries. The best-known victim of a death flight was the Argentine chemist Esther Ballestrino, a very close friend of Jorge Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis.

  Greene was struck by the young people’s devotion to Camilo Torres, a Colombian priest and sociologist who had joined a group of rebels and been killed in a skirmish in 1966. He is now regarded as one of the pioneers of liberation theology, which sought to reconcile the demands of the Gospel with a Marxist critique of class relations, but it is actually a very loose term, and can include quite traditional thinking about doctrine, a gradual approach to social reform, and a commitment to non-violence. Because Father Torres took up arms, his legacy is controversial. There were many other priests who joined revolutionary movements or endorsed them, but Torres stands out partly because he could turn a phrase: ‘I took off my cassock to be more truly a priest’; ‘The duty of every Catholic is to be a revolutionary. The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution’; ‘The Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin.’33 Greene spoke of him as the ‘Catholic equivalent of Che Guevara’,34 but he had little hope for the struggle such men were waging. Torres lodged in Greene’s imagination and was part of the inspiration for the rebel priest Father Rivas in his next novel, The Honorary Consul, also set largely in Paraguay. Greene later told Bernard Diederich that Torres was a ‘romantic’ figure and so somewhat different from Father Rivas.35 Nonetheless, had there been no Torres, there would have been no Rivas.

  Greene finally got on a steamboat on 1 August 1968 for the 1300-kilometre river voyage north to Asunción, a journey with its absurd aspects: among the passengers was a Hungarian plastics manufacturer trying to find a buyer for two million drinking straws.36 Greene worked him into the story. The five-day journey provided the background for an encounter between Henry and Tooley’s father, a CIA operative obsessed with his own bladder. Indeed, the comic and pathetic elements of his novel at times mask an underlying horror at the political situation of Paraguay. Sailing north, he looked upon the fallen walls of the reducciones on either side of the river as if they contained the lost promise of justice and peace.

  Arriving in Asunción for a three-week stay, he had a brief encounter with the press but was then left alone. He met the British ambassador, who told him that artists accepted certain rules of censorship here and must not openly criticize the United States.37 Greene noted that such constraints were intolerable to the leading Paraguayan writer, Augusto Roa Bastos, a magic realist who spent most of his career in exile. Greene received a letter from Stroessner saying he was ‘gratified’ that the novelist was there in time for his inauguration to a new term as president and offering him any help he could38 – he had no idea the Englishman was about to embarrass him much as he had recently embarrassed the President for Life of Haiti.

  Greene did meet members of the government but was more interested in the activities of the Jesuits, who were trying to create a new kind of Catholicism in Paraguay, peacefully emphasizing the rights and dignity of the Guaraní and encouraging the formation of peasant cooperatives. He admired these priests, but again had little hope of them succeeding. It was dangerous work in a right-wing dictatorship; as the Brazilian Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara put it: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they’re poor, they call me a communist.’39 In 1969, the police invaded a church in Asunción in search of radical Jesuits and beat up some elderly priests, an act for which the Minister of the Interior was excommunicated.40 For obvious reasons, the regime preferred the traditional clergy of monsignors and army chaplains, who, in the midst of a malnourished country, specialized in grace after meals.

  Paraguay had a superficial air of peace, which would suit the dream-like but menacing conclusion of his novel. The flowers of the capital alone were intoxicating. He came upon a large old house, which later provided the setting for the last section of his novel. It had a garden, sweet-smelling with jasmine and roses. Oranges fell to the ground and lay ungathered. There were also lemon, grapefruit, and palm trees in this Eden of privileges. It could be purchased for £3000 and the necessary servants employed for just £40 per month. Greene later framed his article on Paraguay with descriptions of this house. It stood as a temptation. One could end one’s life as a lotus eater in a country without income tax and in such a house. The additional cost would be bearable – just living in a military dictatorship: ‘Only 150 men in the police station cells to forget and the children dying of malnutrition – no evil comparable at all to the wholesale massacres in Biafra and Vietnam. Perhaps if one were sufficiently fond of beef . . . ’41

  64

  NO ONE’S POODLE

  ‘Would rather change publisher than title. Graham Greene.’1 So the novelist cabled his New York agent Monica McCall when Viking Press asked that he make a switch; they also published John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and did not wish to introduce confusion into their list by the addition of an aunt.2 No one’s poodle, Greene stuck by Travels with My Aunt and, and in August 1969 asked Michael Korda, to whom he had once handed a first martini in the Elsewhere, and whom he had introduced to a brothel in Nice and a sailors’ drag bar in Genoa, to become his new publisher in the United States. By then a senior figure at Simon & Schuster, Korda answered ‘yes yes yes’.3

  Greene had no more patience with Viking. He had been furious when they refused to make a quick pay-out of the money from The Comedians in early 1967 (see p. 370), and this request for a change of title merely proved, as far as he was concerned, that they were not only skinflints but had no clue about his work. As it played out, Viking did publish Travels with My Aunt, and Greene worked with them on other books, but Michael Korda became his main publisher in the United States.

  Travels with My Aunt was released in the United Kingdom in November 1969, and in the United States two months later. The novelist and playwright Nigel Dennis was mightily amused and wrote that the book was about sin – the almost unforgivable sin of respectability – and that Greene, as ever, wanted to ‘to get our goat, to tread on our Bunyans’.4 On the whole, however, Greene was disappointed that British reviewers would not, as he put it, allow him to be funny.5

  He had a good time writing this story and assumed i
t would soon be made into a film. The producer Robert Fryer, backed by MGM, bought the rights for about $110,000,6 but that was all the pleasure Greene got out of it. The script abandoned much of the plot, including the ending. Maggie Smith played the lead in a very weak film, released in December 1972, and Greene found it unwatchable.7 In fact, in the coming years, he would have little to do with the films made from his novels. When England Made Me was finally filmed in 1972, he attended a viewing and left a note for the director, Peter Duffell: ‘Pleased enough.’ He was far less pleased with nearly bankrupt Otto Preminger’s version of The Human Factor, which despite a solid script by Tom Stoppard moved at a glacial pace and had lost all the intensity of the original. After years of struggle to find financing and arrive at a final script, a fairly flat production of The Honorary Consul came to the screen in 1983 under the title Beyond the Limit, with Michael Caine and Richard Gere the leads. Greene is reputed to have approached Caine in a restaurant and said that he hated the film, but liked his performance.8

  At the end of 1969 Greene felt that he had more to say about South America. There had recently been at least half a dozen high-profile kidnappings; most notably, the American ambassador to Guatemala had been killed in an attempted abduction, and the American ambassador to Brazil had been kidnapped and released after three days.9 Usually, the captors sought to exchange their hostages for political prisoners, of whom there were a vast number in South American dictatorships.