Authors: Richard Greene
Yours,
Graham
Herbert was not persuaded and in
1960
led a protest against the BBC’s cancellation of the
9
O’clock News, which had featured the booming of the chimes of Big Ben
(Daily Mail, 17
October 1960). He claimed that his complaint was not with Hugh but with the BBC
.
26th March 1958
Dear Francis,
I enclose a carbon of my letter to you; as you see it didn’t really contain anything in particular. The dinner I referred to should have come off last night but didn’t as the man was ill with ’flu. I do hope you hear soon from Aldermaston. By the way our governess sent her
greetings to you in a letter! You would probably have preferred greetings from the beautiful daughter of our other friend.
I’ve practically decided against Eyre & Spottiswoode now
71
and that is really all the news except that I enjoyed myself at Charlie Chaplin’s and his autobiography is really extraordinarily good, what he has written of it so far. I also had an amusing lunch with the Queen of Spain and the Infanta and now I have to dash off to lunch with the Polish Ambassador – my contacts seem a bit mixed.
I was in Stockholm for the week-end and it took me 13½ hours to get back as the plane tried twice to get into London, the first time going back to Amsterdam and the second time dropping me in Manchester where I had to catch a train. I certainly seem to have a hoodoo on planes.
Is there any chance of your having leave
72
and being in London in the near future? We’d try and think up another amusement though not as fantastic I’m afraid as the Sagan ballet.
The Quiet American
comes on at the end of this week and you might like to look in at
The Potting Shed
sometime without me – it goes on until May 3.
Much love,
Graham
Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) was a fervent supporter of Graham Greene from his days in Oxford. In this letter he refers to her best-known work
Façade
, a sequence of apparent nonsense poems set to music by William Walton
.
C.6 Albany | London, W.1. | 29th April 1958
Dear Edith,
I am off to Brighton today and my plans are a little bit uncertain as I may have to go across to Sweden for a few days soon, and I know you will soon be off to Oxford for
Façade
. I shall know my plans for certain in the course of the next few days and I will write you again suggesting some dates for lunch or dinner, whichever suits you best.
All good wishes to
Façade
and I wish I was there to hear it. I missed the original London production but I used to be an ardent player of the record until the blitz destroyed it. Can’t you make them re-record on a long-playing?
Yours affectionately,
Graham Greene
C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 2nd June 1958
My dear Narayan,
I too was overjoyed to see the
Lit. Supp
. article on your work which I thought was admirably done.
73
I sent the article the other day to my Swedish publisher who is staying in my cottage in Anacapri as I am anxious to see you published in Sweden as a possible Nobel prizewinner one day!
I have been very hard at work finishing a rather hack job, an Entertainment called
Our Man in Havana
. I am getting too old to boil the pot. Now it’s finished and I’m going off for a month or two to Sweden and hope to do some more interesting work when I have settled down.
I wish you’d come to London again.
Affectionately,
Graham
C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 27 June 1958
Dear Mrs. Spark,
It was very kind of you indeed to send me an inscribed copy of your new book. I read it on a dreary train ride up to Liverpool yesterday and the journey passed like lightning. I found
Robinson
fascinating and delightfully organised and written. It is a book which will certainly stick in one’s memory. I am delighted that you have produced so worthy a successor to
The Comforters
.
Yours sincerely,
Graham Greene
1
Identified by Graham elsewhere as a ‘children’s nanny’; she seems to have been outspoken, to say the least.
2
See Basil Dean,
Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography
1927–1972 (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 305–7.
3
Marie Schebeko (later Biche), Greene’s French agent. See p. 177.
4
Cecil King (1901–87) was the newspaper magnate who organised the Mirror Group of newspapers. His mysterious employee has not been identified.
5
Transcription: gracious?
6
Belinda Straight, Catherine’s younger sister. (NS 2: 221–3)
7
In 1948, Graham acquired the Villa Rosaio, a small house in Anacapri, where he did much of his writing in the years that followed.
8
Dieu Vivant
16 (1950), 75–105.
9
Moré argued that when Scobie opens the letter the reader learns that the two daughters, one still on earth, the other in heaven, are praying for their fathers.
10
Jean-Joseph Surin was a seventeenth-century Jesuit and spiritual writer, whose life offers a bizarre parallel with Scobie’s. He performed an exorcism on three Ursuline nuns, but was so horrified at the sacrileges intended for them that he prayed he himself would be possessed instead. His prayer was granted, and for twenty years he was plunged into despair over his own damnation. According to the
Catholic Encyclopedia
, ‘He was healed eight years before his death and was thenceforth absorbed in the abundance of Divine communications.’ The quotation in the article refers to Surin’s experience of the violent conflict between demons and the spirit of God.
11
Marie Des Vallées was the adviser and friend of the seventeenth-century Saint Jean Eudes, founder of the lamentably named Eudist Fathers. The quotation begins: ‘L’Amour divin est plus terrible que la Justice elle-même.’
12
Septimus Waugh.
13
Louis T. Stone, executive assistant to Selznick.
14
La Symphonie Pastorale (1946) was directed by Jean Delannoy (b. 1908). In 1956 he directed Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
.
15
Rev. Martin D’Arcy, S.J. (1881–1976) was a prominent priest and author responsible for the conversion to Catholicism of numerous writers and poets including Waugh.
16
Presumably Jeanne Stonor (Lady Camoys). Graham was very fond of her husband Sherman (Baron Camoys), and often visited their estate near Oxford, which had a long recusant history. Something of a trophy hunter, Jeanne often flirted with Graham and maintained that she had had an affair with him – a claim he denied. He later became a friend to their daughter the Hon Julia Camoys Stonor, who has written a memoir of her mother,
Sherman’s Wife
(London: Desert Hearts, 2006). See p. 395.
17
Two prizes were given. One held over from 1949 went to William Faulkner, the other, for 1950, to Bertrand Russell. Over four decades the Nobel Committee, influenced by the anti-Catholic Artur Lundkvist, failed to honour Graham Greene.
18
Waugh’s novel
Helena
.
19
The aesthete Harold Acton (1904–94) whose home was at Villa La Pietra near Florence. Graham’s contemporary at Oxford, he had written a crushing review of
Babbling April
, which Graham eventually accepted as accurate.
20
Major Joey MacGregor-Cheers, one of Greene’s companions in Malaya.
21
A curved knife or short sword used by the Gurkhas.
22
The End of the Affair
.
23
The colonial adviser. He had once been a Dominican novice.
24
Ways of Escape
, 126.
25
Greene admired Jean Leroy for his skill as a soldier and his refusal to be corrupted. See Greene’s introduction to Leroy’s memoir
Life of Colonel Leroy
(1977), reprinted in
Reflections
, 298. Annam is an area in central Vietnam.
26
A facetious reference to Robert Speaight (1904–76), actor, author, and Catholic convert.
27
The disputed reference is probably that in ‘Henry James: The Private Universe’: ‘The sense of evil never obsessed him, as it obsessed Dostoyevsky; he never ceased to be primarily an artist, unlike those driven geniuses, Lawrence and Tolstoy …’
28
Waugh was going to what he called ‘that centre of Sadism’, Downside Abbey near Bath, for Holy Week.
29
The novelist, poet and essayist Léon Bloy (1846–1917) exercised enormous influence over French Catholicism, promoting the spiritual value of poverty and suffering. Greene cannot have thought too badly of Bloy as he quotes him in the epigraph to
The End of the Affair:
‘Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.’
30
Trevor Wilson was the British Consul in Hanoi and a fellow Catholic whom Greene had met at the SIS headquarters at St Albans during the war. Wilson introduced him to Vietnam, from which he was himself expelled in December 1951 for anti-French activities. In 1968, he rescued Francis Greene from a likely death in Laos (see pp. 294–5).
31
Thomas Gilbey, a Dominican priest and a friend of both Greene and Walston. It has been argued on fragmentary evidence that he had an affair with Walston. (See NS 3: 391–400).
32
From Browning’s poem ‘Before’:
Better sin the whole sin, sure that God observes,
Then go live his life out! Life will try his nerves,
When the sky which noticed all, makes no disclosure,
And the earth keeps up her terrible composure
.
33
Cyril Connolly (1903–74), author of
Enemies of Promise
(1938) and editor of
Horizon
, was a friend of Waugh and often the butt of his jokes. It is possible that the character of Waterbury, a literary journalist who appears in the last pages of
The End of the Affair
, is modelled on him.
34
Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1952) had been chaplain at Oxford and was known for an anarchic wit. He was a translator, detective writer and Catholic apologist. Waugh esteemed him and wrote his official biography. Greene found him precious and boring.
35
Greene remained convinced of the eroticism of these stories. In
The Honorary Consul
(1973), 27, he writes: ‘Perry Mason’s secretary Della was the first woman to arouse Plarr’s sexual appetite.’
36
Korda’s yacht. ‘For the first time - and I think the last - I drew a principal character from the life. Dreuther, the business tycoon in
Loser Takes All
, is undeniably Alexander Korda, and the story remains important to me because it is soaked in memories of Alex …’
(Ways of Escape
, 167) Bertram, the central character, and his wife Cary wait in Monte Carlo for the arrival of Dreuther in
The Seagull
, a boat modelled on
The Elsewhere
.
37
See also ‘A Memory of Indochina’,
Listener
(15 September 1955), reprinted in
Reflections
187–8.
38
Duff Cooper had resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty to protest against the Munich Agreement with Hitler, 3 October 1938 (ODNB).
39
See NS 2: 437–46.
40
See
Yours etc.
, 24–7, and NS 2: 445.
41
In the presentation speech, Mauriac was praised ‘for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which you have in your novels penetrated the drama of human life’.
42
See Falk, 102–3, and Adamson, 81.
43
Ian Dalrymple (1903–89), a producer and scriptwriter.
44
A facetious reference to Cardinal Bernard Griffin, Archbishop of Westminster, who in his Pastoral Letter for Advent 1953 had condemned
The Power and the Glory
and other works by Catholic writers for offending against the sixth commandment. (See Richard Leon Higdon, ‘A Textual History of Graham Greene’s
The Power and the Glory’, Studies in Bibliography
33 [1980], 234.)
45
See
Ways of Escape,
67.
46
See Peter Godman, ‘Graham Greene’s Vatican Dossier’,
The Atlantic Monthly
(July–August 2001), 84–9. While a draft of Greene’s letter to Pizzardo is in the Boston College archive, it underwent revisions before being sent to Rome. I have not been able to obtain a copy of that version so rely on Godman’s published transcription.
47
Published under this title by Methuen in 1955.
48
The French novelist Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) died on 3 August 1954. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris refused to allow a Catholic funeral because she was divorced. She was given a state funeral attended by thousands, including Graham Greene, who also wrote a public letter of protest, which Waugh thought ‘fatuous and impertinent’. See Amory, 429, and
Yours etc.,
40–2.
49
Graham had begun reading about haiti at least twenty-five years earlier. See p. 34.
50
A Heavy, Broad-Bladed Knife Like a Machete.
51
Greene drew on these images in ‘The Nightmare Republic’
(SUNDAY TELEGRAPH,
22 September 1963;
Reflections,
221–8) and in
The Comedians
(179–83).
52
Pan American Airways.
53
For more about this episode, see
Ways of Escape,
162–7, and
Reflections,
303–5.
54
An evident typing error resulting from the use of a dictaphone. The original says ‘Percheron’, but Bernard Diederich advises that this must be Le Perchoir, a restaurant in Boutillier with a tremendous view of Port-au-Prince.
55
In the original ‘Diard’. Diederich believes that this should be D. R., since from the top of the mountains there is a view of the Dominican Republic in the distance.
56
Graham must be referring to inner tubes as tyres would sink.
57
Ways of Escape
, 145.
58
In January 1954, the King’s African Rifles began Operation Hammer, which led in time to the capture of 5500 rebels and the deaths of twenty-four band leaders.
59
Officers and Gentlemen
.
60
Pioneered by the South African naturopath Johanna Brandt in the 1920s, the grape cure is supposed to remedy advanced cancers, loosen arthritic joints, detoxify the liver and promote weight loss. A small industry is based on it.
61
Spark, 205.
6
Without indicating the source or date, Cash (228) refers to an episode when Greene looking though a window spotted Catherine kissing Evelyn Shuckburgh, who was then an assistent under-secretary of state in the Foreign Office.
63
Adlai Stevenson (1900–65), twice the Democratic nominee for president, seems to have wanted Greene to write a filmscript about the UN.
64
The Sutros were friends of the actress Lillian Gish.
65
Parts of
Our Man in Havana
were written at the ranch. Milly Wormold’s horse Seraphina is certainly modelled on Silence, and the novel contains various private jokes between Graham and Caroline (as an adult, she has preferred to use her middle name); nonetheless, this letter and others confirm that Graham was proud of his daughter’s venture in ranching.
66
As partners in the ranch, Caroline provided the land, and Geoff and Pearl Parker provided the livestock and equipment.
67
E-mail to RG, 7 February 2006.
68
Later, Graham settled in the view that
Brideshead Revisited
was Waugh’s best novel. He continued to admire
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
, remarking on it as Waugh’s self-examination: ‘But in this strange book he has left out all his fine qualities: physical courage, private generosity, loyalty to friends.
Pinfold
, I think, shows him technically almost at his most perfect. How well he faces the problem of linking passages between the scenes. There is almost a complete absence of the beastly adverb - far more damaging to a writer than an adjective.’
(Ways of Escape
, 200)
69
Guy Burgess (1911–63) was a member of the Cambridge spy ring. In the late 1930s he joined the BBC as a talks producer and was mainly responsible for ‘The Week in Westminster’. In 1938, he was recruited to British intelligence and, after Dunkirk, secured Kim Philby’s entry to MI6. In 1951 he and Donald Maclean defected. In Moscow, he worked for the Foreign Language Publishing House and drank himself to death. (ODNB)
70
At this time Waugh was using an ear-trumpet to confound bores.
71
Graham was invited to become chairman of Eyre & Spottiswoode, by now much enlarged, but he turned down the offer in order to devote his time to writing.
72
Francis was then doing his National Service.
73
The
TLS
(9 May 1958) contained a long article surveying RKN’s career, judging that he ‘has few equals among modern novelists’.