Graham Greene Read online

  With much love to both in haste,

  Graham

  TO RAYMOND GREENE

  8 Heathcroft, | Hampstead Way, | N.W. 11.

  [postmark: 13 January 1929]

  Dear Raymond,

  How sweet of Charlotte & you to write. I hope you are better & Charlotte well. We should love to come down for a week-end. The difficulty is to get one. Flu’ & colds are rampant at the office. Awful fate! I’m terribly afraid that I’m going to succeed Leslie-Smith as Court sub-editor, he being removed to more exalted regions. A hellish job without the compensations of hell, save I hope a ‘rise’. However nothing is settled.

  It’s certainly fun about the book. I hoped that one day one might be taken but never in wildest dreams so to be received with open arms & told that in five years I should be at the head of the profession!! £80 in advance of royalties – £50 in America & £30 in England – & the possibility of a dramatisation. And the funniest part of the absurd, joyful situation is that the book is quite terribly second-rate.

  I went and saw my American publisher at the Savoy. He was a darling. What one has always imagined the Virginian gentleman of old family to be like. Tall & courteous with a little white imperial & advice as to exercising the ‘abdominal muscles’.

  I’ve been told that I’ve got to have another novel ready within a year; great fun & great sense of importance!

  Love to Charlotte & you

  from both of us,

  Graham

  TO CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

  The novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904–86), descended from the brewing Greenes of Bury St Edmunds, was Graham Greene’s distant cousin. His first novel All the Conspirators was published by Jonathan Cape on 18 May 1928.

  8 Heathcroft, | Hampstead Way, | N.W. 11. | April 15 [1929?]

  Dear Christopher,

  Will you forgive these terribly tardy congratulations on your fine novel & implicitly, therefore, my terribly tardy reading of it? I only wish I had been still reviewing when it appeared that I might have aided, if by no more than a tin whistle, to have trumpeted its praise. It is a far finer book than I believed that any of our generation could produce. I have but just finished it & must praise or burst.

  Yours with admiration & envy,

  Graham Greene

  TO HUGH GREENE

  Hampstead Heath, | Broiling gently. May 22[1929]

  Dear Hugh,

  You set me a terrible task. I know what I should get & if you would like to give me the money & thus save yourself wearing perplexity – But your lines of liking I do not know any longer. For instance do you care at all for literary criticism – if so there is nothing better than Avowals by George Moore (Heinemann, 10/6). Or do you like biography – François Villon by D. B. Wyndham Lewis is good (Gerald Howe, 12/6?). Or travel in weird places The Magic Island (Seabrooke, about 12/6, publisher I’m not sure of) is an interesting work telling of black magic & Voodoo worship in Haiti.4 Did you like A Path to Rome? Belloc’s The Voyage of the Nona, a bit of everything, travel, sailing, criticism, a medley, is good & can be got in Constable’s charming 3/6 series. Of novels I have read few that I like better than Joseph Hergesheimer’s Tampico, scene Mexico.5 Do you like Aldous Huxley? You ought to try him – Mortal Coils Phoenix Library, 3/6, is a good introduction to him. Or Chrome Yellow if you don’t mind a novel without a plot.

  The town sounds lovely.6 If the novel proves a best seller we must visit you. Next month we go to a Musicale in Mayfair! given by my American publisher, which necessitates the buying of tails, alas! Write again of your experiences & how life is with you.

  Love,

  Graham

  TO HUGH GREENE

  8 Heathcroft. | Hampstead Way N.W. 11 [28 June 1929]

  Dear Hugh,

  So many thanks for your letter. I’m very glad you liked the book. It’s selling fairly well & gone into a second impression. I’ve had very good reviews so far in The Times, Times Lit Supp., Sunday Times, Bystander, Piccadilly (with photo!), Spectator & Daily Telegraph. The provincial papers have been inclined to sniff. We went to a terribly grand party at the American publishers the day before publication, with people like the Duchess of Devonshire, Rudyard Kipling etc. floating about. We drank a lot of champagne & felt happy.

  […]

  TO RAYMOND GREENE

  8 Heathcroft, | Hampstead Way, | N.W. 11.

  [postmark: 3 July 1929]

  Dear Raymond,

  […] The book continues to sell well – about 5,000 have gone & Heinemann hope to keep it going through the autumn & are optimistic of 15,000–20,000. What a joke! How is the world fooled! But most amusing of all – I lunched with my managing director yesterday & he is preparing to give me a fixed yearly salary, in advance of royalties, of say six hundred in order that I may do nothing but write. No binding conditions. Just a book when I feel like it!

  Summer in England & winter in the South of France seem within reach. He has to discuss the plan with Doran of USA & I hear their decision next week. Apparently they did this for many years with H. M. Tomlinson until he became a best seller with Gallion’s Reach.7

  How is your throat? Have you yet had your operation? We are very sad that Charlotte didn’t come & see us as she half promised. Love to you & her from both of us,

  Graham

  P.S. First editions have gone up to 15/-!

  TO GLENWAY WESCOTT

  An American expatriate, Glenway Wescott (1901–87) established himself as one of the most promising talents of the 1920 s with his second novel The Grandmothers (1927), set in the midwest. He wrote to congratulate Graham Greene on The Man Within.

  8, Heathcroft, | Hampstead Way, | N.W. 11. | October 11 [1929]

  Dear Mr Wescott,

  Thank you very much indeed for your kind & generous letter. Your praise is particularly valuable to me as I both know & admire your work. Hitherto I have been haunted by the ominous silence of all those whose opinion I respect, while listening to a chorus of praise from those whose ideas & beliefs I have always despised.

  Are you ever in London? Because I should very much like to meet you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Graham Greene

  TO HUGH GREENE

  8 Heathcroft, | Hampstead Way, N.W. 11 [23 January 1930]

  Dear Hugh,

  What a bore! That O.U.D.S. is Macbeth, I mean. I don’t care for the Bard when he’s being all Bardic. And all the Scotch business. I always feel it was written at the command of Queen Victoria. The Bard at Balmoral. ‘This castle hath a pleasant seat.’ And Bertie – OUR PRINCE – acting Macbeth at private theatricals in kilts. His mother – the dear Queen – so liked to see his knees.

  However, how I do ramble on. I suppose it’s because I’m feeling so autumnal. Youth gone. Garrulous. Yes, but then Donne is such a comfort isn’t he? ‘No Spring nor Summer’s beauty hath such grace, As I have seen in one Autumnal face.’8 – however, as I was saying, would you be a dear & get us two seats for the first night if possible, the Wednesday if not? Somewhere central between the second & sixth row of stalls? Directly tickets are available? Then let me know how much & on my honour you shall have a cheque by return of post.

  Of course, easily the best talkie to date seems to me to be Atlantic. Wonderful & quite throbbing. Hallelujah is also good, but not to my mind comparable.9 And of course it puzzles me that you like Java Head10 better than ‘Tampico.’ A very good book, I grant, but rather encrusted.

  Oh yes, & that reminds me. If the sea is reasonably low I go to Coblenz to-morrow.

  Yesterday we went & had lunch & tea at the Windmill Press, Heinemann’s works in Surrey. A wonderful building, & they just let us choose a book each to take away with us.

  Love,

  Graham

  TO MARION GREENE

  The Name of Action, Graham’s second published novel, is set in Trier. With the manuscript nearly complete, he headed for Germany, hoping to reinvigorate his impressions of the country.

  8. Heathcroft |Ham
pstead Way. N.W.11 [2 February 1930]

  Dearest Mumma,

  We so much enjoyed having you & Da to tea the other day.

  I got back from Germany on Tuesday morning. Going I spent the night in the train between Ostend & Cologne. After Cologne, where I changed, the sun rose just as the train came alongside the Rhine, the water becoming the colour of this paper.11 There was also a ruined castle on a hill at the exact psychological moment, the whole affair being too like a stage back cloth for words. I spent one night at Coblenz, explored in the morning & evening, & in the afternoon walked across the river & out into the country behind Ehrenbreitstein.12 The French have gone now. It was apparently Carnival time, & all the hotels were having masked balls, females in masks & fancy dress disappearing coyly into lighted doorways from round dark corners.

  After Mass next day I took the train to Trier, a lovely journey following the Moselle. Trier of course was beautiful, & I spent the night there. It’s the loveliest place I’ve ever been to; it has a curious emotional effect on me every time I see it. I think it must have been my home in a previous incarnation. I had to drag myself away in the morning to Luxembourg. I had lunch there & came back by a night boat from Dunkirque. It was an awful crossing. I’ve never heard such wind. Every time a wave hit the boat it was like a collision & the whole boat shook. I wasn’t ill though.

  […]

  TO MARION GREENE

  The Name of Action was published on 6 October 1930. Reviews were negative and sales bad.

  8 Heathcroft. | Hampstead Way. | N.W. 11| October 20[1930]

  Dearest Mumma,

  Many thanks for your card. I hope Michael Sadleir13 will prove quotable. So far The Times is the only valuable review I’ve had. All very depressing. The Oxford Mail’s (C.F. I presume is Fenby,14 the editor) is the most understanding review, I think, I’ve ever had, but it cuts no ice. I’m getting tired of kind friends who tell me they like this, but of course they much prefer the other!! The Man Within, I’m convinced, is a moderately bad book, while this, I’m equally certain, is a moderately good one. I don’t agree with you about Elizabeth in the other. I don’t think she’s a character at all, but a sentimental complex. But though I sez it as shouldn’t I think Anne-Marie Demassener quite adorable!

  There was a painted old woman I used to see occasionally wandering about Oxford, rather a revolting spectacle. I used to wonder who she was. Now she’s suddenly cropped up in the form of Lady Ottoline Morrell & invited us to tea. It appears that Aldous Huxley recommended her to read The Man Within! The bugbear again! I’m beginning to hate the sound of it!

  […]

  The literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938) became a friend and supporter of Graham in the early years of his career. Sometimes cruelly drawn, her portrait appears in novels by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. Graham modelled the sympathetic character of Lady Caroline in It’s a Battlefield (1934) on her.15

  TO HUGH GREENE

  at The British Library | Nov. 15 [1930]

  Dear Hugh,

  Forgive a. these tardy good wishes & b. the pencil. I have practically speaking no money & therefore can send you no present. I hope by Christmas that I shall be better off & be able to give you two in one. You find me, as it were, deeply engaged working on my magnum opus, ‘Strephon: The Life of the Second Earl of Rochester’ – that is to say I am waiting in patience while half a dozen books of varying shades of indecency are brought to me. I’ve forgotten my ink so I can’t go on with my third novel – now 1/7th [?] done!

  […]

  TO DENYSE CLAIROUIN

  ‘Writing a novel is a little like putting a message into a bottle and flinging it into the sea – unexpected friends or enemies retrieve it.’16 So Graham wrote of his friendship with Denyse Clairouin, his first translator and then his agent in France. Her translation of The Man Within under the title L’homme et lui-même was published by Plon in the Roseau d’or series, edited by the Neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), who decided to cut some sexual references.

  Clairouin’s fate was a sad one: ‘when the war was over I learned how she had worked in occupied France for the British Secret Service. In 1942 in Freetown, where I was working for the same service, I received news from London that a suspected spy, a Swiss businessman, was travelling to Lisbon in a Portuguese liner. While he queued up at the purser’s for passport control, I sat in my one-man office typing out, as quickly as I could with one finger, the addresses in the notebook which he had been unwise enough to leave in his cabin. Suddenly, among all the names that meant nothing to me, I saw the name and address of Denyse. From that moment I feared for her safety, but it was not until the war was over that I learned she had died after torture in a German concentration camp.’17

  8 Heathcroft, Hampstead Way, | N.W. 11. | Friday [March 1931]

  Dear Mlle Clairouin,

  Your letter makes me feel very guilty, as if I had been selling the fort to the enemy. The fact is that I received what I thought a most courteous letter from Maritain the day after I wrote to Plon & you, & the consciousness that I had written very differently of him in the heat of the moment made me conscience-stricken. Also I assumed (perhaps wrongly?) that he is the Jacques Maritain, for whose work as a Catholic philosopher I have the greatest admiration. I, therefore, while asking him to reconsider the passages you suggested, think (I have no copy of the letter) that I left the decision with him. But I insisted on the inclusion of a note. How difficult it is to be fair & to see clearly with all the Channel between. Now I feel that I have betrayed you, & that my letter may mean that your work (just as much as mine) will be tampered with, & I am not insincere when I say that yours has probably the greater value. However my insistence on the note may save all, as I will now write to Plon & withdraw that demand altogether if the five important passages are restored.

  I feel that I have muddled the position & owe you many apologies. My excuse is that my nerves are in pieces at the moment as the result of writing against time, at the same moment as letting a flat & seeing to a removal into the country.

  Our address after March 30 will be ‘Little Orchard’, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. I hope that you’ll let me meet you in town or in the country when you are over here.18

  I admire tremendously your phrase ‘flesh haunting hating man’ & regret exceedingly the weak courtesy of my rejoinder.

  Sincerely yours,

  Graham Greene

  TO DENYSE CLAROUIN

  Little Orchard, | Campden | Glos. | April 25, 1931

  Dear Mlle Clairouin,

  I received yesterday from Plon a copy of L’Homme et Lui-Même. The appearance is really very attractive, & they had (I suppose with tact) removed the label which called me the Stevenson of the Soul! I haven’t yet more than dipped into the translation, but what I have read makes me much prefer the book in French.

  I was amused to read in a review in the Lit. Supp. this week of one of Maritain’s books several sentences which seem to fit in with your picture of the ‘flesh haunted hating man.’ They speak of a general impression ‘of a powerful nature powerfully suppressed …, an excessive tension of soul: not a liberation of the mind … but a strained attitude.’19 Which is the same thing in Times rather pompous English!

  Yours sincerely,

  Graham Greene

  TO HUGH GREENE

  Rumour at Nightfall was published by Heinemann in November 1931. In retrospect, Graham remarked of this novel and its predecessor: ‘Both books are of a badness beyond the power of criticism properly to evoke – the prose flat and stilted and in the case of Rumour at Nightfall pretentious (the young writer had obviously been reading again and alas! admiring Conrad’s worst novel The Arrow of Gold), the characterization non-existent.’20 Indeed, his disgust with these novels was such that he left several letters instructing his heirs not to reprint them.21

  Little Orchard, | Campden, | November 15 [1931]

  Dear Hugh,

  […]
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  How splendid that Headington is doing well. I doubt if my book is. A good & longish review in The Telegraph, a short & bad review in the New Statesman, a short & meant-to-be-good review in Everyman, a good review in the Nottingham Guardian are all so far. I may be going up to town with a half-day ticket on Thursday for a cocktail party at my American publishers. There’s trouble in New York, as they are trying to cut out two pages as ‘impious’ & showing ‘a lack of knowledge of the Catholic faith’! They don’t know I’m a Catholic! There’s nothing like a fight to cure depression!

  Love,

  G.

  TO LADY OTTOLINE MORRELL

  Little Orchard, | Campden, | Glos. | Nov. 19 [1931]

  Dear Lady Ottoline,

  Your encouraging letter was a joy to receive, especially at this moment. I think myself the book to be my best, but I seem doomed to please no one after The Man Within. It has been out nearly three weeks & has received only three reviews. The Lit. Supp. which has always before been both kind & prompt remains grimly silent; one does not expect anything from The Observer, but The Sunday Times seems to have abandoned me. After praising extravagantly my first book, it never reviewed my second at all & looks like ignoring this one. Altogether I am feeling depressed. Books are a labour to write & a hell to publish; why does one do it? The grim spectre of a return to journalism looms on the horizon.