Graham Greene (46 page)

[…]

I hope to see you in England in December when I’m feeling better after the operation.

Love,
     Graham

In 1972, François Truffaut
(1932
–84) and his collaborator Suzanne Schiffman
(1929
–2001) shot
La Nuit américaine (Day for Night),
starring Jacqueline Bisset (b
. 1944),
in Nice. Yvonne’s daughter Martine, an aspiring actress, wanted to discuss her prospects with the director. For Graham to help her, he needed to meet Truffaut. Michael Meyer took him, identified as ‘Henry Graham,’ a retired businessman, to a party and proposed him for the tiny role of an insurance agent in the film. Schiffman decided he was perfect. Apparently, Truffaut did not know whom he had directed until the scene was shot. This was the first time Graham’s face was seen in a film; his hand had already appeared in Mario Soldati’s
The Stranger’s Hand (1954
).
³⁹

In March 1972, having been asked by the publisher Peter Owen to provide an endorsement for Shusaku Endo’s novel
Sea and Poison
, Greene had found himself unable to finish it as it made him ill to read about surgery. For much the same reason he had been unable to read Solzhenitsyn’s
Cancer Ward
. Nonetheless, Greene was a staunch admirer of Endo and was willing to endorse his next work
.

La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes | 12 February 1973

Dear Mr. Owen,

I read
Wonderful Fool
in typescript and I would certainly be glad to comment on it. It was simply my squeamish stomach that made
me refuse comment on the previous book of Endo’s that you published. I still think it very sad that his best book about the Jesuit missionaries never had more than a paperback publication in England. Perhaps one day you could revive it in hardback. A marvellous book – so much better than my own
Power and the Glory
.
⁴⁰

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 16 March 1973

Dear Bernard,

Thank you so much for your letter. I am glad the holidays went well in New Zealand, but I shall be sad to see you go so far off. I have always wanted to spend some time in Australia but I have always thought of New Zealand as the dullest of the countries in the old Commonwealth, although of course if you have a farm it can hardly be dull!

[…]

I’m very drawn towards Panama and have been for some years. Unfortunately my sole excuse for visiting South America has gone now that I’ve finished my three year old novel. It had become quite a habit to visit the Argentine and neighbouring countries in the summer. I wish we could have had another trip like our Dominican one before you shake the dust off your feet.

Personally I would very much like to read a book on May 30, 1961 – whether the great public would I don’t know. I’d like to put the idea up to my publisher, but he’s not very enterprising unless he can see certain commercial gains. I hope this time if you do it you
will do it alone. I felt that the collaboration was the cause of a certain amount of disorder in Papa Doc. For [the] title what about
The Death of the Goat
?
⁴¹

How amusing that the filming of James Bond was done at Ocho Rios.
⁴²
I used to know Ocho Rios well and once I rented Ian Fleming’s house from him for a month. He offered to let me have it rent free if I would write an Introduction to an omnibus volume of his novels for America, and I had rather tactfully to explain that I would prefer to pay rent. He had a villainous old housekeeper with the evil eye. He had told me to order all drink through her as she would get it at trade rates, but after a week or so I grew suspicious and asked for my bills. She was charging more for the drinks than one paid in the shops and there was a considerable row. She then started muttering curses on the doorstep and we found it better to depart before we were poisoned. A friend of Ian’s was kind enough to take us in a house nearby and getting out of the swimming-pool I slipped and did something to my shoulder from which I suffered for some months, so that evil eye really worked. She must have disliked Ian for letting me go there because when he returned he had his stroke.

Have you any useful contacts, preferably English-speaking, in Panama as I really would rather like to visit that country perhaps in the summer or would it be a terrible climate then? I have managed to take Cuba in August without suffering too much.

My love to you and Ginette,
     Graham Greene

51 La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 23 March 1973

Dearest Carol,

It was a very nice visit! I look forward to the next and seeing the house even more advanced. I’ve lost all my keys. I expect they fell out of my sack when I broke a bottle of whisky in it at Orly airport and tried to pour the liquid into an almost closed pot for cigarette ends, but it’s just possible it fell out in the boot of your car. You remember my passport slipped out and we recovered it. Could you have a look? Don’t bother to send the keys if they should be there but keep them for me as I’ll have some copied.

Much love,
     Daddy

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 23 March 1973

Dearest Gillian,

I returned from a short visit to Lucy in Switzerland to find your letter. I must say my post was not an encouraging one. A young American writer in Florida wrote to say how he had been held up at the point of a black banana by a robber in his own house, a Czech writer and old friend wrote to say that he was dying of cancer ‘in inconceivable pain’, a nice South African writer and friend wrote to say that he was about to be charged of manslaughter because one of the horses on his immense farm had strayed on to the road and caused a car accident in which a woman was killed and he had seen her die.
⁴³
Now poor John’s breakdown.
⁴⁴
It was quite a post.

I do feel so much for you and I do admire your courage and the way in which you manage to carry on. I know admiration doesn’t help but it’s there and it has to be expressed. When I think of the state John was in that time when I was present in the flat I can only wonder at his power of recuperation – he seemed so well on the last two times I’ve seen you.

[…]

All my love and sympathy
     Graham

Koffiefontein | Aug. 4 [1973] Dearest Caroline,

[…]

I had ten very full days in the Transvaal – the most interesting a visit to the Rain Queen, who makes rain. One was not supposed to look at her directly & all conversation had to be directed through an intermediary. He wore a very good European suit & crawled over the floor like a snake & made notes on the palm of his hand with a ballpoint. The queen looked very kind & nice – but she’s probably only got two more years before she’s moved on – with the choice of a poison cup or starvation! Very Rider Haggard.

Now I’m resting on my friend Etienne Leroux’s little farm of 60,000 acres. Tomorrow we move to Cape Town for a week.

Lots of love,
     Graham.

P.S. The queen has a lot of wives!

‘She’ in Rider Haggard’s novel is a Rain Queen of the Lovedu – the rain queens had wives as a form of property and were required at the age of about sixty to drink a poison made from the entrails of a crocodile
.

Skvorecky kept Greene informed about the literary scene in Czechoslovakia and about individual writers such as Ladislav Fuks
(1923
–94). He often included in his letters grimly amusing anecdotes, including the story of Comrade Balasova, the director of Prague television, who enforced a strict dress-code which, among other things, required women employees to be checked for bras
.

15 October 1973

Dear Skvorecky,

[…]

As usual your descriptions of the literary scene in your poor country fill me with a mixture of amusement and despair. I particularly like the story of the horse Fuks. Considering the situation I was rather surprised to receive a letter from my publisher Vysehrad asking whether they could publish
The Honorary Consul
on the same terms as they had published
Travels with My Aunt
. I said yes. Am I still regarded as a safe author in Czechoslovakia? I also received a letter from my Russian translator of the past saying that now Russia had joined the Berne Convention could he get the publishers to approach me about the new novel, and I replied that I had already made my situation clear and this was not altered by any adhesion to the Berne Convention. As long as the situation of the dissident writers in Russia remained what it was I was not going to sign any contract for any book to be published in Russia. Am I wrong not to take up a similar attitude with Czechoslovakia? Other so-called democratic republics continue to publish my books – Rumania and Poland. I’ve done nothing in the case of Czechoslovakia because one feels that all the governments are acting under the tutelage of Big Brother, and it’s only Big Brother that one should take the firm line with. I would like your opinion about all this.

Your description of Comrade Balasova amused me enormously. I wish you would allow me to write that I had received the story from a friend in Czechoslovakia and send it to
The Times
, naturally with
quotation marks. Perhaps however this would somehow get back to its source. I do think that farce is the best way of attacking these people.
⁴⁵

I liked Allende very much and I liked the type of communists who were around him who belong much more to the school of Dubcek than to Moscow, and I was horrified but not surprised by the putsch.
⁴⁶
It’s an odd thing to be able to say that about two years ago one was at a lunch party – not a very big lunch party – of men only, of whom three have now died by violence. This was in Santiago and the dead men are Allende, his naval attaché Captain Araya
⁴⁷
and his Minister of Finance at that moment Vuskovic
⁴⁸
with whom I visited one of the taken-over factories and whom I liked very much. Another member of the lunch party is now in exile in France and two others I have no news of and may have been executed. The Chile affair was horribly efficient and far more murderous than the Prague putsch. But perhaps in the long run it was less corrupting. If there is anything I can do for your friend from Chile do let me know – not that I have influence with anyone on the right or the left.

Yours ever,
     Graham Greene

Eric Quayle, an expert on children’s literature, sent Graham a copy of his
Collector’s Book of Boy’s Stories (1973).

130 Boulevard Malesherbes, | Paris 17. | 6 December 1973 Dear Quayle,

A thousand thanks for the handsome
Collector’s Book of Boys’ Stories
. I have never collected them in a big way myself, although when I had more space
⁴⁹
in England I used to collect the boys’ stories which had had what I thought a formative influence on me! I am sorry for that reason you have rather scamped Captain Gilson! I must have read
The Pirate Aeroplane
⁵⁰
a dozen times and it had some effect on a book of mine called
England Made Me
. I look too in vain for Jack Harkaway,
⁵¹
though that was a later discovery. I had dealings at one time with Captain Gilson’s son (a drop-out) who was arrested by the French police at Lyons and he told me fascinating stories about ‘Herbert Strang’ who were friends of his father. I can’t remember which of the collaborators was an alcoholic and worse.
⁵²
I suspect that a lot of these boys’ writers led most extraordinary lives and I suggest you do a book on the oddities among them. Again many thanks.

Yours ever,
     Graham Greene

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 23 March 1974

Dear Narayan,

Marshall Best
⁵³
sent me the proof of
My Days
and I’ve read the book with enormous pleasure. I almost begin to believe in horoscopes! We are both Libra, we both write novels, we have both published an autobiography, and both our fathers were headmasters. One can even see a parallel between us when we both left college and were trying unsuccessfully to settle down to a job.

I was fascinated by your adventures with the Prime Minister (of Mysore: Sir Mirza Ismail). Would it be possible for me somehow to buy a copy of your Mysore? I want to add it to the collection of your books on my shelves.
⁵⁴

With all my affection,
     Graham

The journalist Bernard Levin
(1928
–2004) wrote in
The Times (31
May 1974) that while President Nixon might be guilty of all that he was accused of in the Watergate scandal and so be unfit for office, many of his pursuers in the liberal establishment were motivated by desire to undo the election of
1972
and ‘shove that landslide back up the mountain’
.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | May 31 [1974]

Dear Francis & Shirley,

Forgive the address on the envelope. I have no other.

Certainly you have seen this piece absurd even for barrow-boy Bernard. It doesn’t merit a reply in words, but haven’t you some friend in Washington who would collaborate with a plausible address perhaps for a reply in a telegram?

‘The President has much appreciated the stand you have taken in the London Times of May 31 & he would like to invite you to be the guest of the government in Washington on June 15–22. During that week the President will be making an important statement off the record. A room has been booked for you at… Hotel. Only if you are unable to be present please reply to … White House.’