Graham Greene (32 page)

The next startling thing was the initiations after the feast – the initiate wrapped in a sheet like a mummy was carried in on a man’s back to the cooking pit flames (extraordinary shadows), & one hand & one foot were drawn out of the cerements & held for as much as a quarter of a minute in the flames while the drummers drummed & the women shrieked their sacred songs. Last of all & quite suddenly (the intervals were filled with a kind of bacchanalian dancing) came ‘possession’. They believe that the various gods of war & love etc. start winging their way from Africa when the ceremony starts. They had taken about five hours to cross the Atlantic – & on this occasion it was the God of War. A man started staggering & falling & twisting. People held him up, twisted a scarlet cloth round his middle & put a rum bottle & a panga
⁵⁰
in his hand. Then he began to whirl around the room, falling & tripping & brandishing the axe; we had to leap up on benches to get out of the way. Sometimes he pressed the blunt end of the panga in someone’s stomach, & that man or woman knelt on the ground before him & kissed it, while he sprayed them with rum out of his mouth. Two of those got possessed too, but were quieted by the priest. I was glad when the man gave a shriek & collapsed, & the God had started back to Africa & the party was over.
⁵¹

I like Truman Capote very much. A most queer figure not only in
the technical sense. He is telling my fortune & it gives one the creeps because one half believes – there’s an odd psychic quality about him. The fortune depresses me for obvious reasons even though it might be called a happy one. I’ll put it on record.

Between September 1956 & February 1957 I marry a girl 20 years younger who is either Canadian, American, New Zealand or Australian. I am very much in love & she is 5 months gone with a daughter who proves herself a genius by the time she is 18. I see little of my other children. My whole life changes. We have a house abroad by the sea where we are very happy & about the same time I finish (or start) my best book. When I am in the seventies (I remain sexually active till the end!) we spend the summer in the mountains & the winters in the desert. We are very happy, but before we marry I go (in about 2 years time) through a great crisis with myself. Well, there it is – watch out. I’m oddly depressed by it. I want to be with you till death.

[…]

6th September 1954

Dear Natasha, and Peter,

Oh what a time! When I arrived at Puerto Rico I was formally asked by the Immigration Officer whether I had ever been a member of the Communist Party, and so of course I said ‘Yes, for about four weeks at the age of 19.’ That put him back quite a bit, and I had to wait reading my P. G. Wodehouse for about two hours until his boss could deal with the situation. I was then told that they couldn’t let me proceed and that I would have to be returned to Haiti. I remained extremely equable as I had no engagement in London and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I told them they would get a bit of publicity, but I don’t think they believed it.

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing they decided that I could spend the night at a hotel and not in the Airport if I gave my word of honour not to leave. Earlier before the boss took control I had
remarked that perhaps they would let me go as far as the bar for the night and sleep with the drink and was told ‘For you this is a dry Airport.’ I was then put in charge of two plain clothes Cuban officers and driven to a hotel. I gave them drinks in the bar at the expense of the Government or of P. A. A.
⁵²
I don’t know which, and this softened them up a bit and one of them said he would drive me around town if I liked. So back we got into the car and we went around town until two in the morning by which time one of the plain-clothes men was distinctly the worse for drink. The next morning they took me to the airport and a squabble ensued between the Immigration authorities and the airline as of course I hadn’t got a Haitian Visa any longer. So I slipped quietly away and sent a cable to Reuters with the results that I expect you know. At last they put me on a plane and at Port-au-Prince I had another quarrel with a disagreeable American manager of Delta, who refused to allow me to go on in the plane for Havana. He told me that he had fixed things with the Haitian authorities that I was to stay two or three days and then he would [be] ‘sending me’ to Jamaica. I refused to be treated as a parcel and said that I would not go to Jamaica and after a long wrangle I got back into the plane and went on to Havana.
⁵³

Havana has been a fascinating city, quite the most vicious I have ever been in. I had hardly left my hotel door before I was offered cocaine, marijuana and various varieties of two girls and a boy, two boys and a girl, etc. I smoked my first marijuana cigarette and went to what I am sure exists nowhere else in the world, a public blue film exhibition with advertisements outside, seats in the stalls at $1.20 and a pornographic bookshop in the foyer. I was stuck there for two days before I could get a passage so I sampled most of the delights!

[…]

C.6 Albany | London, W. 1 | 2nd December 1954

Dearest Natasha,

[…]

I loved Haiti and we did quite a number of things which we should have done and didn’t, i.e. we went up to Le Perchoir,
⁵⁴
though not for a meal, and to another village right at the top of the mountains with a view towards the D.R.
⁵⁵
To the D.R. I did not go, nor did I want to. I think I told you on a postcard that we obeyed the Commander in the Marine Gardens this time and it was simply wonderful, being towed on rubber tyres
⁵⁶
across the reefs and the fishes coming to take food out of one’s hands. We also went and bathed on that beach which you and I spotted on the drive back from Cap Haitien and where we planned to go for a Sunday Lunch. We needn’t have been dissuaded – there was plenty of shade! We borrowed masks and swam there too but got a severe surprise when a large octopus suddenly opened up with all its tentacles and flashed underneath us. In Havana we found much better blue films than I had and we tried something which was called cocaine but which I suspect was boracic powder. Anyway it had no effect except giving me a hangover next day.

I have decided not to go to the Far East this winter as to escape bankruptcy I must really finish a book. So I am going to Brighton instead. Perhaps you will visit me there. Do you ice skate? I don’t. Anyway I still plan the Far East for the year after so we may yet find ourselves all together in Hong Kong or Macao.

Give my love to Peter and lots of it [to] yourself.
     Graham

In
1953
, Graham visited Kenya to report on the Mau Mau rebellion, which, among other things, set long-trusted servants against their masters: ‘Jeeves had sworn, however unwillingly, to kill Bertie Wooster
…’
⁵⁷
Although Graham was always sympathetic to rebels, he was struck by the cruelty of the Mau Mau and by the courage of some white settlers, especially Maria Newall, a former decorator who had gone from England to Kenya in
1949
and operated, without the help of other Europeans, a farm in Nakuru on the edge of a forest where the Mau Mau were active. In a development typical of the conflict, she discovered that her very pious servant Stephen had both taken the oath of the Mau Mau and served as a police informer. She decided to keep him as there was little chance of her being able to trust anyone more. Nonetheless, she warned him that if he broke the curfew she would shoot him. Greene referred to her affectionately as ‘Pistol Mary’.

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 31st January 1955

Dear Maria,

I think you ought to know that your letter of the 23rd was neatly slit open at the side of the envelope. Are your infuriated settlers beginning to censor the mail or your Africans doing it? It seems unlikely that it should have been cut open in England.

Forgive this typed letter but I am off to Indo-China next week and am clearing up things in a great hurry. I hadn’t meant to go East this winter, but when
The Sunday Times
asked me to I couldn’t resist the temptation.

I so agree with everything you say. It is inconceivable that anybody could wish to hang 5,000 people which was what it would have amounted to. I do think that it should be publicised that there were 82 cases of murder pending when an amnesty was given to the Security Forces, but I won’t say a thing about this unless you give me permission. I would like to draw the attention of an M.P. to it. I suppose though it is best to let bygones be bygones on both sides.

I hate the idea of your new boy Stephen, and the whole business
of your living up beside your farm instead of in your nice house, though I suppose there is no real difference in the danger.

I shall be back in England at the end of March and do go on occasionally writing and telling me how you are.

I had a slight hope that Operation Hammer
⁵⁸
plus the offer of an amnesty might bring the thing temporarily to a close, but as far as one can judge from this end nothing much seems to have resulted.

It is silly to say do look after yourself, but one says it just the same.

Love, Graham

Although no novel emerged from his time in Kenya, Greene did produce the short story ‘Church Militant’
(1956),
set in Kikuyuland
.

Lucy Caroline eventually went to Canada to work on a ranch and married Jean Bourget. After the break-up of the marriage, she moved with her two sons to Switzerland, where she still lives
.

19th May 1955

Dear Vivien,

I have come to the conclusion that the best plan as Lucy seems to be really firmly bent on British Columbia, is for me to arrange a reconnaissance visit this summer which I think I may be able to swing on the expenses of Graham Greene Productions if I can find a sufficient excuse. We would go together for a few weeks and visit some of the ranches out there and see if one can find a suitable one for her to do 6 months as a student. It doesn’t seem really feasible to send her out into the blue to find one entirely on her own and I think this is a good solution. Then she would return home and I hope we would have fixed something for her departure in the spring for a trial period.

I am writing to the Agent General of British Columbia and the Agent General of Alberta to ask for their help in introduction to ranches but I have not let out the real motive as I want the journey on the surface to be connected with one’s business.

Love
     Graham

C.6 Albany, | London, W. 1. | July 2 [1955]

Dear Evelyn,

I got back yesterday to find your novel.
⁵⁹
I am so grateful & proud of my inscribed set, & I am always reluctant to begin a new book of yours & not have it any longer sitting there in mint condition waiting to give pleasure – like a love affair when one was young which hadn’t yet begun.

While I was away I had to have a liver cure – injections of grape
⁶⁰
(why not of Chambertin 29) & no spirits. Still a fortnight to go. But I finished – unsatisfactorily – a novel I’ve been doodling at for three years & a play.

Affectionately,
     Graham

Gillian Sutro was a fashion journalist and the wife of the scriptwriter and producer John Sutro, who had been Graham’s contemporary at Oxford
.

[Calgary, Alberta | 16 August 1955]

The lines are from ‘The laws of God, the laws of man’ in A. E. Housman’s
Last Poems (1922
). Graham’s sense of the strangeness of Calgary bore fruit in ‘Dear Dr. Falkenheim’
(1963),
a short story in which Father Christmas gets caught in the blades of a helicopter
.

A recent convert to Catholicism, Muriel Spark
(1918
–2006), later Dame Muriel Spark, was seeking a publisher for her first novel
The Comforters
, which was eventually taken by Macmillan and published in 1957
.

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 2nd December 1955

Dear Mrs. Spark,

I am delighted to hear that you are better and I do hope that Macmillan’s will publish your book. Perhaps they are not quite the publisher for anything weird and if you have trouble there don’t hesitate to ask advice on another publisher. At the end of a misspent life one has quite a lot of experience.

I will certainly speak to anybody I can about the possibilities of a part-time job, but I am going to be out of London until the end of next week and again for Christmas. Perhaps early in the New Year you would come and have a drink and I could find out exactly what you had in mind, apart from reading. Don’t hesitate to use my name in approaching, say, Tom Burns of Burns Oates, or Jonathan Cape or A. S. Frere of Heinemann’s, in the meantime. Hamish Hamilton, too, might be worth trying and again say that I suggested it.

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

Speaking at Greene’s memorial service, Spark recalled how, when she was young, ill and poor, he sent her £
20
each month. With the cheque he would often send a few bottles of red wine, ‘which took the edge off cold charity’
.
⁶¹

C.6 Albany, | London, W. 1. | In bed. | Wed. 3 p. m. [7 March 1956]

Dearest Catherine,

I feel we are at a critical stage again: it seems to happen every year, but perhaps each one becomes more serious & although we haven’t quarrelled, this one may be more serious than Rome. I feel guilty because at least twice I’ve prevented & fought against the idea of finishing, even though that may be better for you. The trouble it seems to me is that we both want to simplify our lives (even your feeling for walking in Ireland or Switzerland may be part of it) & yet if you simplify you can only do it by excluding me (after all I’m a kind of barnacle on your boat), & if I should simplify it would be by excluding you (living abroad etc).