Authors: Richard Greene
[…]
Graham’s sister Elisabeth joined SIS in
1938
at Bletchley and recruited
Graham and Malcolm Muggeridge to the service
.
54
After training at Oriel College, Oxford, Graham sailed for his first posting in early December
.
The Spectator | 99 Gower Street | London W.C.1 |
Aug. 20 [1941]
Dearest Mumma,
This is just to tell you that I am going out to West Africa for the Colonial Office. I shan’t be going for two or three months as I shall be working in London first. The pay is very good, & the job interesting, & the shadow of a private’s pay – or even a lieutenant’s – is raised. I shall be able to leave plenty behind for the family. How long I shall be out there I don’t know. I hope not more than 6 months, but it might be a year – though I doubt if the war will last that long. I gave in my notice here yday.
[…]
On the first anniversary of the bombing of his house Graham used old letterhead with the address crossed out and a note in the margin, ‘Obit
. 18.10.40 1.a.m.’
Betjeman, who was then press attaché to the British Representative in Dublin, described himself as ‘a bloody little diplomatic sunbeam’. He sent Graham a poem by Patrick Kavanagh and invited him to come over and lecture
.
55
North Oxford Nursing Home, | Banbury Rd. | Oxford. |
Oct. 18 [1941]
Dear John,
It was good hearing from you in this place which is one after your own heart – diamond panes looking out on North Oxford chimney
pots, fumed oak furniture, and a few roses in a tooth mug, and water pipes which whistle sullenly in the wall. I left the
Spectator
nearly a month ago as I felt that very soon I shall find myself in the Pioneer Corps, the haunt of middle-aged professional men like myself. But the pay they tell me is
hardly enough to make both ends meet
. So I joined the Colonial Office & am supposed to be going out quite soon to West Africa, the pay being good but with a sinister absence of competition.
Then for reasons only known to themselves the C.O. thought it would do me good to get a military background, so I was sent for four weeks to a college here & taught how to salute with a little stick under my arm on the march (a thing I shall never have to do.) They also tried without success to teach me to motorcycle on Shotover – this always ended in disaster. As I seemed to be surviving better than the bicycles they gave it up, & gave me flu instead. This was definitely the military background – the hideous little M.O. with dirty yellow fingers, the no heating, the lavatories on the other side of a cold quad, the struggle for water to drink, the dreadful cold soggy steak & kidney pudding on iron trays … I packed a suitcase and fled here, but they’d already added bronchitis to the flu.
How I should love to come to Dublin & see you, but I’m a bad lecturer & I don’t think this time … I’ve got to gather my strength & shave now. One of the nurses said I looked like an old man & yesterday on the way to the lavatory I caught sight of myself in a glass huddled in an old yellow overcoat like a humble character in Dostoievsky pursuing the scent of a samovar into somebody else’s flat …
I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything about Kavanagh: my successor is W. J. Turner.
56
And I’m sorry too about my writing which gets worse every day here.
If W.A.
57
should get delayed – I’ll write & tell you, & do fix up something.
Yours,
Graham Greene
1
The film rights of
A Gun for Sale
had brought in a windfall of $12,000 (NS 1: 585) and the book itself was selling well.
2
It appeared in the
Spectator
(11 September 1936).
3
David Higham had been a literary agent with the firm of Curtis, Brown but joined with Laurence Pollinger and Nancy Pearn in 1935 to create the firm of Pearn, Pollinger and Higham, which handled most of Greene’s business.
4
Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) directed
The Secret Agent
, starring John Gielgud, for the Gaumont British Picture Corporation in 1936.
5
Look Stranger!
had been released the week before.
Journey Without Maps
had contained an epigraph from Auden’s ‘Five Songs’:
‘O do you imagine,’ said fearer to farer
,
‘That dusk will delay on your path to the pass
,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?’
6
Greene was generally dismissive of the poet Stephen Spender (1909–95), whose best-known work figures in
The Heart of the Matter
(30) as part of Literary Louise’s high-brow reading, ‘A lovely poem about a pylon.’ Geoffrey Grigson (1905–85), a poet and vituperative reviewer, was the editor of
New Verse
, the most influential poetry journal of the 1930s. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann (1901–90) had recently completed
The Weather in the Streets
(1936).
7
See Adamson, 27–8; Falk, 11–14.
8
George Robey (1869–1954) was a famous music-hall comedian, specialising in panto dames. Through 1937, he appeared at the Prince of Wales theatre in a non-stop revue, performing sixteen times a day. (ODNB)
9
Pa Oakley appears on p. 50 of the first edition but disappears from later editions.
10
Hugh’s infant son Graham Carleton Greene.
11
See
Ways of Escape
, 47–50.
12
See Bevis Hillier, ‘The Graham Greene Betjeman Knew’,
Spectator
(2 October 2004).
13
John Marks, joint editor, with Greene,
of Night and Day
.
14
RKN, 114.
15
After service in the First World War and a stint of journalism in the early 1920s, A. S. Frere (1892–1984) took a job with F. N. Doubleday, who soon purchased William Heinemann Ltd. Frere was made a director of Heinemann in 1926 and managing director, under the chairmanship of Charles Evans, in 1932. He was guilty of some indiscretions, such as claiming at a party that his firm’s leading author John Galsworthy went about erecting stiles to help lame dogs over them. Frere was an expert talent-spotter and his personal charm included a skill at tap-dancing (ODNB). He became Greene’s most important literary adviser.
16
No such book was written, but Paraguay remained a fascination for Greene; he set the last section of
Travels with My Aunt
(1969) and much of
The Honorary Consul
(1973) there.
17
The letter is addressed to Berlin, where Hugh was a correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph
.
18
NS 1: 613–14
19
Mary Pritchett, Greene’s American agent.
20
Tom Burns (1906–95) was a publisher with Longman’s and a junior director of the Catholic magazine the
Tablet
, of which he served as editor from 1967 to 1982. He met Greene in 1929 and the two became lifelong friends. An account of their friendship and Burns’s own memoir of Greene may be found in
Articles of Faith
, xiii–xxv and 146–50.
21
Ways of Escape
, 58–60.
22
See
The Lawless Roads
, 42-61.
23
While none bore the title ‘A Postcard from San Antonio’, several of Greene’s pieces about Mexico appeared in magazines, including ‘A Day at the General’s’ in the
Spectator
(15 April 1938), 330–2. Most of this material was incorporated into
The Lawless Roads
.
24
A novel by Sigrid Undset.
25
It is possible that Graham is referring to the French-German poet and anthologist Yvan Goll (1891–1950), who was associated with André Breton and the surrealists.
26
Spectator
, 22 July 1938;
Reflections
, 69–72.
27
Raymond’s wife.
28
A servant.
29
The Dark Room
.
30
Presumably,
The Power and the Glory
.
31
Graham’s review of Betjeman’s
An Oxford University Chest
in the
Spectator
(16 December 1938) contains this phrase: ‘… the hollow donnish voices mildly complain, hands are raised in little Pilate gestures with dainty North Oxford vowels …’
32
The designer and artist John Piper (1903–92).
33
A reference to the beginning of his ten-year relationship with the stage-designer Dorothy Glover.
34
A large shop in London, now owned by the John Lewis Partnership.
35
RKN, 129.
36
The Power and the Glory
, 102.
37
Goronwy Rees (1909–79), a Welsh novelist and assistant editor of the
Spectator
.
38
Something very odd seems to have happened. Henry Ash was one of several pseudonyms Greene used when writing letters to the editor. However, there was a real Henry Ash, a draughtsman best known for his sketches of cable-laying expeditions in the 1870s and 80s. He was by now eighty-nine and living in Brighton. The letter Greene received was possibly meant for this man – and although Greene would later make much of there being another Graham Greene (see pp. 246–7), in this case he was himself merely the other Henry Ash. (See Judith Adamson,
Graham Greene, the Dangerous Edge: Where Art and Politics Meet
[London: Macmillan, 1990], 184–6. I am grateful to Bill Turner for information about the draughtsman.)
39
Stephen Spender had actually attempted to enlist but was twice deemed medically unfit. He joined the Auxiliary Fire Service in 1941. (ODNB)
40
Vivien’s brother Patrick, an artillery officer who fought in Italy and achieved the rank of brigadier.
41
Douglas Byng (1893–1988) and Nellie Wallace (1870–1948) were famous music hall entertainers. Wallace generally sported a threadbare boa and Byng worked in drag.
42
The Power and the Glory
.
43
Catterick Camp, now Catterick Garrison, is a large military training facility in North Yorkshire.
44
Dorothy Glover.
45
Review of
The Sea Tower
by Hugh Walpole in the
Spectator
(22 September 1939).
46
See NS 2: 19–20, but note that in a letter of 15 October 1942 (
this page
) Greene says that the relationship is actually four years old.
47
Arnold Gyde was head of the editorial department at Heinemann and the firm’s chief publicist. (St John,
passim) The Power and the Glory
was actually released on 4 March 1940.
48
See NS 2: 38
49
‘[Greene] was staying near the ministry in a little mews flat where I spent an occasional evening with him, the invariable supper dish being sausages, then still available. Whatever his circumstances, he had this facility for seeming always to be in lodgings, and living from hand to mouth. Spiritually, and even physically, he is one of nature’s displaced persons. Soon after his house on Clapham Common had been totally demolished in the Blitz, I happened to run into him. There was no one in the house at the time, his family having moved into the country, and he gave an impression of being well content with its disappearance. Now, at last, he seemed to be saying, he was homeless,
de facto
as well as
de jure.’
Malcolm Muggeridge,
The Infernal Grove
(London: William Collins, 1973), 82–3.
50
Graham managed to get £2000 from a film contract with Alexander Korda. To the great disappointment of an Inspector of Taxes who menaced Vivien while Graham was serving in Africa, the payments were split between two tax years.
51
Ways of Escape
, 84–8.
52
High explosive.
53
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
54
Christopher Hawtree, obituary of Elisabeth Dennys,
Guardian
, 10 February 1999.
55
See Bevis Hillier, ‘The Graham Greene Betjeman Knew’,
Spectator
(2 October 2004).
56
The poet W. J. Turner (1889–1946) took over as the literary editor of the
Spectator
.
57
West Africa.
After three months in Lagos, Graham took up his post in Freetown, where he remained until February 1943. In a drab bungalow where rats swung on his bedroom curtains and one servant chased another with an axe, he quickly wrote
The Ministry of Fear
, his most successful thriller. His experiences there led also to the writing of
The Heart of the Matter (1948
). In this letter, he complains about difficulties and inconveniences of his posting, yet his attitude towards this place was surprisingly passionate. He believed that what was essential about life was most likely to be apprehended on the move or in conditions of privation and danger. He wrote of 1942 : ‘“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’
.
1
I left Lagos last Saturday (today’s Thursday) and flew to Accra. What I saw of it I didn’t like – except the superbly beautiful old Danish fort in which the Governor lives – like a stage set of Elsinore in dazzling white with the surf beating below on two sides. I stayed in an American transit camp for the night: a wind blowing up the red dust all the time, bad food and morose or drunk tough Americans belonging to the airline. Then on the Sunday I flew on here coming down in Liberia at a new aerodrome the Americans have made, for lunch – an overcooked steak literally a foot long. The planes are uncomfortable – freight planes in which the passengers sit upright facing each other the whole length on little metal seats like lavatory seats. The heat until you get well up is appalling and then of course the metal turns cold.