Graham Greene (17 page)

Hotel Canada [Mexico City] | March 11 [1938]

Dear Nancy,

I’ve arrived here rather late – detained by an interesting political character in San Luis Potosi. I’m off again to Vera Cruz in a day or two: there to Tabasco, & then a fortnight’s ride by horse across T. & Chiapas to the road & the rail again. This should be interesting – almost untraveled [?] ground. Then I come back here to recuperate.

Listen! I enclose a story which I verily hope may have enough action for the
Strand
. The title can be changed. I have sent a small descriptive article to
The Spectator
called ‘A Postcard from San Antonio’ & told them if they don’t want it to send it to you. It might do for
New Statesman
or
Time & Tide
. In a few days I am sending them another article – ‘A Day at the General’s’ – with the same instructions.
²³

Mail address still Cook’s [?].

Adios,
     Graham

If anything should be printed –
proofs to my wife
.

Graham spent five weeks in the country examining the effects of anti-religious laws in Chiapas and especially in Tabasco, where many priests had been imprisoned or executed. Here, he writes to his friend the novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973); he had been glad to find one of her novels in the home of a Norwegian family on whom he based the Fellowes family in
The Power and the Glory.

Hotel Español | Ciudad Las Casas, Chis., Mex. | April 13 [1938]

Dear Elizabeth,

I can’t resist writing to you a line of gratitude. About 9 days ago I got landed in a rather wretched village in Chiapas called Yajalon waiting for a guide & mules to bring me here. (Why do they call this stuff ink?) I was driven distracted by rats when I discovered in the house of a Norwegian, the widow of an American coffee planter, a copy of
The Hotel
, the only book of yours I hadn’t read. – I must give up this ink. O, I’ve just discovered it’s really for rubber stamps. So all of two nights, I was able to sit up & read by an electric torch & drink bad brandy & quite forget the rats. Your book was so infinitely more actual than the absurd situation. After I finished it I had to fall back on
Kristin Lavrandsdottir
²⁴
(the husband had belonged to the Book of the Month Club), but that didn’t work at all – the rats beat 14th century Norway every time.

This is an awful & depressing country for anyone like myself who doesn’t care for nature. And guides have a conviction – I haven’t enough Spanish to share it – that 12 hours is a reasonable ride per day. Thank Goodness in San Cristobal one’s back on the road again. I went to my first bootleg Mass today – in Northern Mexico & the capital some of the churches are open: no sanctus bell & the priest arriving in a natty motoring coat & a tweed cap, & the woman of the house immensely complacent.

I found a cable waiting for me in Mexico City asking me to agree to apologise to that little bitch Shirley Temple – so I suppose the case has now been settled with the maximum publicity. How I shall miss your dramatic criticisms.

Yours,
     Graham

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 Golls
²⁵
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

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 Eleanor
²⁷
tomorrow afternoon, in case Parliament declares a state of emergency right away. Eleanor is
seeing if she can get a room for Freda
²⁸
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

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

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

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?

[…]

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

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

14 North Side, Clapham Common, SW4 | July 15 [1939]

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

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 Rees
³⁷
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.