Graham Greene Read online

TO DENYSE CLAIROUIN

  14 North Side: Clapham Common: SW4 | July 14 [1938]

  Dear Denyse,

  A hurried line. The Spectator has just rung me up to say would I cover the King’s visit to Paris for them. I propose flying across on Monday & back on Wednesday. Could you possibly give me a bed? or if you can’t, do you think the Golls25 would (they mentioned a spare bed to me)? I’ll get in touch with you when I arrive & perhaps you’d have some suggestions for where one might observe some bizarre celebrations.

  Yours in great haste,

  Graham

  Graham’s account of the visit opens with an instructive phonetic rendering of the British national anthem that appeared in Paris Soir: ‘Godd saive aour grechieuss Kinng. Long laïve aour nobeul Kinng. Godd saive ze Kinng.’26

  TO MARION GREENE

  Hitler’s demand to annex the Sudetenland led to a war panic in September 1938. Having recently taken on an expensive house in London, Graham was worried about the safety of his family and his ability to support them if he was called up for military service.

  14 North Side: Clapham Common: SW4 | Sep. 27 [1938]

  Dearest Mumma,

  Don’t worry too much about arrangements. Vivien, Lucy and Francis are going down with Eleanor27 tomorrow afternoon, in case Parliament declares a state of emergency right away. Eleanor is seeing if she can get a room for Freda28 near her cottage. In which case I shall send her by train. R. has suggested I should join him, but as long as old cook sticks I shall stay at home. Elisabeth too may join me, as she doesn’t much relish being alone in her flat. I had to drag old cook almost by main force to be fitted for a gas mask yesterday. V., Freda and the children are being done this morning. We had an hour’s wait in a queue. Nasty smelly things! Eleanor, I’m sure, will be able to keep the children for quite a long while so don’t feel rushed. I should strongly advise you not to stay Wed. night in town, in case you weren’t allowed to go back on Thursday. At some point it is obviously going to be impossible for adults to travel till the schools have been evacuated, and you might get caught.

  Of course war may not come, but one has to organize on the assumption that it will.

  I see things rather as follows: immediate conscription is certain. Therefore a. one may find oneself in the army with or without a commission. This means small earning power and only a small allowance. In that case one must make one’s savings go as far and as long as possible. Under those circumstances I should feel very grateful if my family were boarded out either with Eleanor or you on some sharing basis: we’d contribute of course to rates, labour etc as well as board. And this house would be shut up or let.

  b. one would find oneself in some ministry – of information or propaganda at a reasonable salary. In that case I should take as cheap lodging as possible in town or get someone to share expenses of this house, and find a cottage, perhaps at Campden for the children.

  I imagine, as far as foreign maids are concerned, the Gov. will take that out of your hands. Their legations will see to their evacuation.

  Anyway here’s hoping for all of us.

  Love,

  Graham

  TO R. K. NARAYAN

  14 North Side: Clapham Common: SW4 | Oct. 16 [1938]

  Dear Narayan,

  Just a line to wish every success to the new book.29 I noticed an advertisement in one of the weeklies this week-end. I certainly shouldn’t be despondent if I were you. Macmillan’s are a very rich and influential firm & you have now at last hope of some continuity in the effort to sell your books. I look forward to the fourth – somebody who is as much an artist as you will have to write it whether he wants to or not.

  Brighton Rock has done well critically, but it’s by no means a bestseller – somewhere about 6,000 which is good for me. But I’m feeling horribly sterile – my only idea one of frightening difficulty & hazard.30 When one has a family to support one hates to try something new which may drop one’s sales back to the old level.

  Vivien is well & sends her remembrances to you & your wife, & we both look forward to seeing you in the flesh next year.

  Yours ever,

  Graham Greene

  TO JOHN BETJEMAN

  14 North Side: Clapham Common: S.W. 4 | Dec. 30 [1938]

  Dear Betjeman,

  How nice of you to write. I was very worried because the Spectator printed vowels instead of towels.31 O well.

  Can I enlist your support to an Association of Perpetual B.A.’s, to sign a manifesto pledging themselves never to take an M.A. & add thus to the funds the university misuses? The words Perpetual B.A. have a pleasant Barchester ring, I feel, & recall Mr. Crawley, the high-minded & tiresome perpetual curate.

  I wish I could see Piper’s aquatints.32 I have met him – but I am always frightened by the nobility of artists.

  Yours

  Graham Greene

  TO HUGH GREENE

  14 North Side, Clapham Common, SW4 | April 7 [1939]

  Dear Hugh,

  Sorry I couldn’t manage Paris. I wanted to badly, but money and notice were both too short. Curiously enough for other reasons I had been having a passionate nostalgia for Paris the last ten days.

  In confidence, life at the moment is devilishly involved, psychologically.33 War offers the only possible solution. Glad you liked The Lawless Roads. Considering it was written in six months. I don’t think it’s bad. […]

  A new shade for knickers and nightdresses has been named Brighton Rock by Peter Jones.34 Is this fame?

  […]

  TO DAVID HIGHAM

  In The Confidential Agent important characters are represented merely by initials. Collier’s Magazine in the United States, which was serialising the book, complained about the lack of names to the agent Mary Pritchett, who suggested that Higham and Graham take up the matter with Heinemann.

  14 North Side, Clapham Common, SW4 | June 6 [1939]

  Dear David,

  No, I haven’t heard from Mary yet. On no account take up the name point with Heinemann’s. Let them think of it themselves if they want to. My own feeling is that the initials which take the place of three names are important as not localising the country from which these people come. Ruritanian names to my view stink of grease paint. I have always found too that Americans – I have noticed it in proof readers – resent any departure from the usual practice. How often have I had an adjective queried and some banal cliché suggested in its place. However if Charles or Frere feel anything about it, we can argue it out.

  Any chance of getting contract and cash through next week?

  Yours,

  Graham

  TO R. K. NARAYAN

  Narayan’s young wife Rajam died of typhoid in June 1939.

  14 North Side | Clapham Common | SW4 | July 4 [1939]

  Dear Narayan,

  To send the sympathy of strangers at such a cruel time seems like a mockery. But I’ve been happily married now a long time, and I can imagine how appalling everything must seem to you now. I don’t even know what your faith allows you to hope. I’ll let Higham know. We were talking about you only the other day, and of how Murray’s admired your work. And I was saying how you had a long book in mind. I’m glad of that. I don’t suppose you’ll write again for months, but eventually you will, not because you are just a good writer (there are hundreds), but because you are one of the finest. My wife sends her deepest sympathy, feeling too how cold the words sound. If you ever have a snapshot of yourself and your child, do send it us. We still hope that one day we shall see you, here or in India. If there is no war. Write again, please, as soon as you feel able to.

  Ever yours,

  Graham Greene

  Narayan did not remarry but found comfort in spiritualism. He described his experience of Rajam’s sickness and death in The English Teacher (1945), which he characterised as ‘autobiographical in content, very little part of it being fiction’.35

  TO NANCY PEARN

  14 North Side, Clapham Common, SW4 | July 15 [1939]r />
  Dear Nancy,

  David will tell you of a contract he is just fixing up for me with Heinemann called Refugee Ship. My idea is a non-fiction book, describing one of these rather appalling voyages from Constanza in Rumania on old wooden Greek boats carrying 3 or 400 Jews. They try to smuggle them into Palestine and are generally nabbed by British destroyers. Don’t you think there’s a very good human interest story for the Express? I should have thought it worth say three articles: the port, the voyage, the landing – or the arrest.

  Yours,

  Graham

  Shelden (145–55) carefully selects evidence to make the claim that until the war was over Greene ignored the oppression of Jews in Europe. The book about the refugees was the second Greene proposed that would have taken up Jewish concerns (see p. 86). For Greene’s own remarks on Jewish stereotypes in his early fiction, see pp. 398–9. It is worth noting that the plight of the Jewish refugees seems to have been on Greene’s mind at just this time, as he speaks of the whisky priest as ‘a man without a passport who is turned away from every harbour.36

  TO VIVIEN GREENE

  14 North Side: Clapham Common: SW4 | Aug. 30 [1939]

  It was lovely hearing from you, dear heart: I was getting anxious. I miss you so much particularly in the evening which makes me rather moony and uncommunicative over my pint. I saw Goronwy Rees37 yday, and the editor is quite ready to take a weekly London diary in the event of war. This would help a great deal. I’ve found the wills which I enclose, but not any bank receipts. News seems a tiny bit better. London very odd. Dim lighting, pillar boxes turned into white zebras in some parts. The common a mass of tents, and nobody about on North Side. A dubious old man living in Clapham who has for fifty years collected Victorian curiosa has written to Henry Ash and it has been forwarded here.38 Our cobbler has a daughter in the Bank of England. All the old shabby notes which would have been destroyed are being stored in the country in case the printing works is destroyed. Spectator may go to Yeovil at weekend. Derek refuses to cut short his holiday in France by a day which is causing much work. Says the Embassy have told him there’s no reason to leave but they don’t, as Goronwy remarks, tell anybody else that. I like the conscienceless savoir faire.

  You are missing nothing here. Only the faint susurrus of the intellectuals dashing for ministry posts. Spender feathered his young nest in Ministry of Information.39 Had Clack in yday. A mistake. She broke the latchkey in the door (I’ve got a new one) and messed up a telephone call. I was having my bath when the Clack voice called outside, ‘Go round at once’, and disappeared. I got out and dried and went, towelclad, to find her. She didn’t know who had called. Wasn’t sure of message. It was a man. I said, ‘Next time, tell them to hold on, and fetch me.’ I had got my pants on, when she pounded up. Same man. She had asked him to hold on. Ran down; to find she had put back the receiver! He never rang again. Might have been Pat40 to tell you to go at once. Might have been anything. I think one gets on better without the Clack. Sully’s carpenter is in now, fitting plywood over the skylight, to prevent glass falling in. Good bye, my dearest, for a little while.

  With all my love,

  Tyg

  TO VIVIEN GREENE

  14 North Side: Clapham Common: SW 4 | Sep. 4 [1939]

  My dearest, a very hurried letter in return for your lovely long one. Yes, we had two warnings yday, one just as I’d begun my cinema article and the other about 2.45 this morning, both false alarms. Nobody seems to mind much. No scurrying at all. I went into central London for the second black-out on Saturday night, and heard Douglas Byng very funny and Nellie Wallace like[wise?] at the Prince of Wales.41 Very lovely and impressive with all the sky signs gone and little blue phosphorescent milk bars and a hurdy-gurdy invisibly playing – rather like a Paris back-street. Newspaperman calling, ‘Ave a paper tonight’, plaintively. Another one very conversational, ‘Reminds me of the trenches. Never knew which way you was going.’ […]

  After the all-clear went last night it was curiously like Christmas morning: the voices of air raid wardens going home like people returning from Midnight Mass. After the sirens began yday morning a woman passed slowly along leading a dog, no hurry, and all the balloons began to rise round the sky; the pigeons made a mass dive for shelter. I’m very snug: work in the morning, then go out and see people and have my three halves, and wander round.

  […]

  TO JOHN HAYWARD

  The anthologist and critic John Hayward (1905–65), who suffered from muscular dystrophy, is now remembered chiefly as the close friend and adviser of T. S. Eliot, with whom he shared a flat in Chelsea from 1946 to 1957. Graham had first consulted him in 1931 about the Earl of Rochester, whose works Hayward had edited while still an undergraduate.

  14 North Side: Clapham Common: SW 4 | Thursday

  [14 September 1939]

  Dear John,

  I’ve just been ringing up your flat to see whether you were still in London &, if you were, to beg a cup of tea from you. I don’t like shop tea, & I can’t be bothered to make my own, & at the same time tea I love above all things. I’ve evacuated all my family & wait here, having finished a novel yesterday,42 to be called up on this Army Officers’ Emergency Reserve, as a second-lieutenant. Horrible to think of the lieutenants one will have to salute.

  I was thinking out an idea yday of an organisation of war authors parallel to the war artists. They would be given acting rank & assigned to the various fronts, to do an objective, non-newsy & unpropaganda [?] picture of the war – for publication in England & America – composite books probably. I can’t help feeling there’s something here: they should be people who are published in America anyway on their name [?]. Of course the idea behind it is to avoid being sent for six weary months of training to Catterick43 or some other hole. If you know someone in the War Office (not in that beastly den, the Ministry of Information) won’t you put it up, organise it & assign me to some picturesque theatre of war?

  I suppose you’ve succeeded in either letting your flat or surrendering the lease. I ask because a nice, intelligent & reliable friend of mine, a girl who designs theatre costumes,44 asked me to look out for someone who couldn’t let his flat & would accept a nominal rent of not more than 30/-a week in return for a careful eye being kept on his things.

  I must stop & read an incredibly funny & indecent Hugh Walpole (I am doing Spectator fiction to earn some money).45

  ‘Standing up they embraced until they were indeed one flesh, one heart, one soul. But it hurts to make love standing, so Joe said: “Let’s not bother about lunch.”’

  Yours,

  Graham

  Another gem: ‘For weeks they had been constantly together, & during the last week had been without a break in one another’s arms, spiritually when it had been too public to be so physically.’

  TO LAURENCE POLLINGER

  By April 1939, Graham was involved in a very serious relationship with Dorothy Glover (1901–71), which continued until the late 1940 s. Although Glover’s short, stout appearance was hardly prepossessing, he admired her direct and forceful character, which offered a decided contrast to Vivien’s. She lived with her mother in Mecklenburgh Square and met him when he came to rent a studio from them.46 The two remained in London through the blitz, mainly at another studio at 19 Gower Mews. Graham did his best to promote Dorothy’s career and went on to collaborate with her on several children’s books. In later years Dorothy became a Catholic. Hard drinking eventually destroyed her health.

  14 North Side, Clapham Common, SW4 | Feb. 8 [1940]

  Dear Laurence,

  I have advised a friend of mine, Dorothy Glover, to send you a play she has written. She is a theatrical designer, costume and sets, so, although this is her first, she has had plenty of experience of the stage. I read it in the rough and it seemed to me as good as most plays one sees put on. A farcical-thriller. Anyway perhaps you’ll look out for it.

  I’ve just heard from Gyde that the novel is not being publishe
d till March 11.47 Isn’t this rather a lousy date, as it only gives it ten days to run before Easter gums up the works? Good Friday is the 22nd. What do you think?

  Yours,

  Graham

  D.G. asked me how many copies you’d need of a play. I said I thought two – one for managements & one for files. Is that right?

  TO MICHAEL RICHEY

  In this letter Graham responds to comments on The Power and the Glory from Michael Richey (b. 1917), who became one of his closest friends. Briefly a monk, then an apprentice to the artist Eric Gill, Richey served on a minesweeper and other ships in the Royal Navy. After the war he became a prominent navigator and author.

  14 North Side | Clapham Common |S.W.4 | June 5 [1940]

  Dear Michael,

  I’m afraid I’ve been a long time answering your letter. Frantically busy about affairs of no earthly importance. I’m glad you like P. and G., and you are probably right about the length. I don’t agree with you otherwise. The priest may have kicked up a fuss, but his rightness is neither here nor there. He was the sort who would. Read some lives of the saints and see what a fuss they make. He was a bit of a religious materialist, I meant him to be, though I think you are wrong in saying that he found the toothglass odd. In fact you are objecting to him on the same grounds as people who object to a book because it has no nice characters. The answer is: they are not meant to be nice.

  If you ever get leave, do come and see us. You certainly live now in a stranger world than that priest’s.

  Yours,

  Graham

  TO MARION GREENE

  On 18 October 1940, 14 North Side was bombed. Vivien and the children were in Oxford and Graham was at the studio in Bloomsbury, so the house was unoccupied.