Graham Greene (10 page)

[…]

‘Writing a novel is a little like putting a message into a bottle and flinging it into the sea – unexpected friends or enemies retrieve it.’
¹⁶
So Graham wrote of his friendship with Denyse Clairouin, his first translator and then his agent in France. Her translation of
The Man Within
under the title
L’homme et lui-même
was published by Plon in the Roseau d’or series, edited by the Neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), who decided to cut some sexual references
.

Clairouin’s fate was a sad one: ‘when the war was over I learned how she had worked in occupied France for the British Secret Service. In
1942
in Freetown, where I was working for the same service, I received news from London that a suspected spy, a Swiss businessman, was travelling to Lisbon in a Portuguese liner. While he queued up at the purser’s for passport control, I sat in my one-man office typing out, as quickly as I could with one finger, the addresses in the notebook which he had been unwise enough to leave in his cabin. Suddenly, among all the names that meant nothing to me, I saw the name and address of Denyse. From that moment I feared for her safety, but it was not until the war was over that I learned she had died after torture in a German concentration camp.’
¹⁷

8 Heathcroft, Hampstead Way, | N.W. 11. | Friday [March 1931]

Dear Mlle Clairouin,

Your letter makes me feel very guilty, as if I had been selling the fort to the enemy. The fact is that I received what I thought a most courteous letter from Maritain the day after I wrote to Plon & you, & the consciousness that I had written very differently of him in the heat of the moment made me conscience-stricken. Also I assumed (perhaps wrongly?) that he is
the
Jacques Maritain, for whose work as a Catholic philosopher I have the greatest admiration. I, therefore, while asking him to reconsider the passages you suggested,
think
(I have no copy of the letter) that I left the decision with him. But I insisted on the inclusion of a note. How difficult it is to be fair & to
see clearly with all the Channel between. Now I feel that I have betrayed
you
, & that my letter may mean that your work (just as much as mine) will be tampered with, & I am not insincere when I say that yours has probably the greater value. However my insistence on the note may save all, as I will now write to Plon & withdraw that demand altogether if the five important passages are restored.

I feel that I have muddled the position & owe you many apologies. My excuse is that my nerves are in pieces at the moment as the result of writing against time, at the same moment as letting a flat & seeing to a removal into the country.

Our address after March 30 will be ‘Little Orchard’, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. I hope that you’ll let me meet you in town or in the country when you are over here.
¹⁸

I admire tremendously your phrase ‘flesh haunting hating man’ & regret exceedingly the weak courtesy of my rejoinder.

Sincerely yours,
     Graham Greene

Little Orchard, | Campden | Glos. | April 25, 1931

Dear Mlle Clairouin,

I received yesterday from Plon a copy of
L’Homme et Lui-Même
. The appearance is really very attractive, & they had (I suppose with tact) removed the label which called me the Stevenson of the Soul! I haven’t yet more than dipped into the translation, but what I have read makes me much prefer the book in French.

I was amused to read in a review in the
Lit. Supp
. this week of one of Maritain’s books several sentences which seem to fit in with your picture of the ‘flesh haunted hating man.’ They speak of a general impression ‘of a powerful nature powerfully suppressed …, an excessive tension of soul: not a liberation of the mind … but a
strained attitude.’
¹⁹
Which is the same thing in
Times
rather pompous English!

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

Rumour at Nightfall
was published by Heinemann in November 1931. In retrospect, Graham remarked of this novel and its predecessor: ‘Both books are of a badness beyond the power of criticism properly to evoke – the prose flat and stilted and in the case of
Rumour at Nightfall
pretentious (the young writer had obviously been reading again and alas! admiring Conrad’s worst novel
The Arrow of Gold),
the characterization non-existent.’
²⁰
Indeed, his disgust with these novels was such that he left several letters instructing his heirs not to reprint them.
²¹

Little Orchard, | Campden, | November 15 [1931]

Dear Hugh,

[…]

How splendid that Headington is doing well. I doubt if my book is. A good & longish review in
The Telegraph
, a short & bad review in the
New Statesman
, a short & meant-to-be-good review in
Everyman
, a good review in the
Nottingham Guardian
are all so far. I may be going up to town with a half-day ticket on Thursday for a cocktail party at my American publishers. There’s trouble in New York, as they are trying to cut out two pages as ‘impious’ & showing ‘a lack of knowledge of the Catholic faith’! They don’t know I’m a Catholic! There’s nothing like a fight to cure depression!

Love,

G.

Little Orchard, | Campden, | Glos. | Nov. 19 [1931]

Dear Lady Ottoline,

Your encouraging letter was a joy to receive, especially at this moment. I think myself the book to be my best, but I seem doomed to please no one after
The Man Within
. It has been out nearly three weeks & has received only three reviews. The
Lit. Supp
. which has always before been both kind & prompt remains grimly silent; one does not expect anything from
The Observer
, but
The Sunday Times
seems to have abandoned me. After praising extravagantly my first book, it never reviewed my second at all & looks like ignoring this one. Altogether I am feeling depressed. Books are a labour to write & a hell to publish; why does one do it? The grim spectre of a return to journalism looms on the horizon.

This catalogue of woes is a poor return for a letter which was the bright spot in my week. You have certainly understood the
motif
. Even Caveda was meant to be a kind of third part of a more than Siamese twin.

My wife sends her regards.

Yours very sincerely,
     Graham Greene

Little Orchard | Campden | Glos. | December 17 [1931]

Dear Lady Ottoline,

It was very nice of you to write & I found your letter very encouraging. The wave of depression at the book’s failure has passed, now that the next one is forming in the mind. ‘Rochester’ I have just got packed off to Kenneth Bell,
²²
of Balliol, to be vetted for historical blunders, & I believe it’s coming out in April. It’s not the
book it ought to have been, as I was writing against time. It will be amusing to be reviewed by a new set of people for a change! I wish I could have been in town to-day. I miss Thursday teas!

Thank you very much again for writing.

Yours very sincerely,
     Graham Greene

As it turned out, he was not ‘writing against time’. Rejected by Heinemann owing to its sexual content
, Lord Rochester’s Monkey
was not published until September 1974
.

‘The reviewing of novels at the beginning of the thirties was at a far lower critical level than it has ever been since. Gerald Gould, a bad poet, and Ralph Strauss, a bad novelist, divided the Sunday forum between them. One was not elated by their praise nor cast down by their criticism
…
’
²³
The last sentence need not be believed, as Greene certainly resented Gould’s mixed review of
Rumour at Nightfall (Observer, 13
December 1931). Writing to Vivien’s maternal uncle, a lawyer and sometime poet in Bath, he takes a run at Gould for his praise of Guenther Birkenfeld’s
A Room in Berlin
, and at a more substantial target, the diplomat, biographer and diarist Harold Nicolson
(1886
–1968), who had raved over Lady Eleanor Smith’s now-forgotten
Flamenco
, a novel about gypsies
.

As from Little Orchard | Campden| Glos. |

December 26 [1931?]

Dear Uncle Bob,

A thousand thanks for my share in your exquisite present. The second poem I already knew & admired: indeed I had a cutting from the Westminster ragged & worn in my copy of
The Veil.
²⁴
To have it in beautiful print is a delight.

I’m in the last desperate throes of the final revision of a life of Rochester which is to come out in the spring: on January 1, I have to begin another novel for the autumn. The life of a novelist, alas, is not all beans & bacon. Apropos of which my Ballade
against
Certain Reviewers.

*
A favourite expression of Mr G… ld G… ld, who used it in particular in describing
A Room in Berlin
.

^x
of ‘Flamenco’ Mr H… ld N… n said ‘It is impossible to get more out of a novel than out of this.’

Ever yours,
     Graham

Little Orchard, | Campden, | Glos. [20 July 1932]

Dear Hugh,

We should love to have you,
but

Frankly! –

we are on the verge of bankruptcy, & we had someone to stay last week, whom we didn’t want to see nearly so much as you, & we can’t afford to put you up for four nights; we have been trying since we lost £250 a year to make p.g.s
²⁷
the rule at 2/6 a night, but it’s difficult.
But do come for two nights
, if you can manage to stay a day longer at Crowborough & go to R.
²⁸
a day earlier. One can manage two nights without increasing housekeeping.

Love

G.

[7 November 1932]

Dear Hugh,

Many thanks for your letter. We were given an unexpected lift into Oxford last Friday, but found you were away. We tried to go to
Wedding Rehearsal
²⁹
but times were wrong & we had to go to
Love on Wheels
³⁰
–
which was just seeable in spite of Hulbert & the caricature of Clair.
³¹

Do come over some time.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal, & R.K.O. all seem biting at
Stamboul Train
.

We are dreaming of a flat in Oxford if we get rich. We looked at one the other day in Broad St., but it was too large.

Love

G.

Little Orchard, | Campden, | Glos. | Nov. 30 [1932]

Dear Hugh,

Stamboul Train
is not appearing till the 8th. On Monday Priestley appeared at Heinemann’s and said that if it was published as it stood he would bring an action for libel. He remained adamant and I had a frantic day on the phone arranging for alterations. 13,000 copies were all printed and bound and they all have to be unstitched and some pages printed over again.

Yours in exhaustion,

Graham.

J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) spotted a portrait of himself in the character of Quin Savory, a popular novelist. Greene was forced to rewrite offending passages at the last minute, dictating revisions in a phone booth.
³²
He came to admire Priestley for his wartime broadcasts but never for his books
.

Little Orchard, | Campden, | Glos. | January 27 [1933]

Dear Denyse Clairouin,

But I should be terribly pleased if you translated ‘The End of the Party’. I send it in its most portable form. Don’t trouble to return this copy.

Yes, ‘S.T.’
³³
has done well. A week ago it had turned 15,000. It’s all rather dull because it all goes to pay the yawning deficit of Heinemann on the last book. So I have no hope of a holiday in Burgundy this year.

I do hope you are successful with S.T. But how I wish it was
Rumour at Nightfall
, which obstinately in spite of publishers & public I so much prefer. You heard I expect how J. B. Priestley sabotaged S.T. at the last moment with a threatened libel action, costing Heinemann £400!