Graham Greene (27 page)

5 St. James’s Street | London [8 July 1949]

My dear, after all this time have we got to say goodbye. Harry says I am not to speak to you. Is this final?

You always said you would stick to me. I don’t know what to do. For God’s sake send me a line.

5 St. James’s Street | London S.W.1| Sunday [10 July 1949] | off to Mass.

Dear,

I loved getting your letter. I still feel in a curious way knocked out by Thursday & the awful Friday when I believed an iron curtain had dropped & you had chosen the other side of it. I shan’t ring up today. Twinkle’s
¹
letter, that like everybody else, I was ‘time-demanding’ is, I think, true – nor do I want to hear Harry’s voice at the other end. My dear dear dear, I mustn’t be time-demanding. When you feel like a word ring me up, & see me or not as you like on Tuesday or as circumstances demand.

At 10 tomorrow morning I’m off to Shepperton to see the film. This afternoon I go to see Korda who wants me to produce an idea for Carol Reed & Laurence Olivier. A French company want to do a play of
The Power & the Glory
. I have provisionally accepted a free luxury holiday in Biarritz from July 29 to August 5 in the company of Cocteau, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich & Orson Welles! (This is part of my effort not to be time-demanding).

[…]

Greene and Basil Dean collaborated on a dramatisation of
The Heart of the Matter
, with Dean mainly responsible for the structure and Greene for the dialogue. In December 1949, they visited Sierra Leone to take photographs that would be helpful for sets and atmosphere. When the play was produced by Rogers and Hammerstein, it flopped.
²

Air France Transit Camp | Dakar | Thursday [8 December 1949]

Cafryn dear, we got here, after a rather awful journey starting from the Invalides at 6, at about 1 in the morning, & the plane for Freetown today has been cancelled!

What a time it was on Tuesday. I had to be revaccinated & get a bogus medical certificate to say that we were both unfit to be inoculated. That allowed Air France to put us on the plane, but we may be still quarantined by the strict English when we get to Freetown. It was a day of frantic telephonings, taxiings & visits to police stations – Marie
³
was an angel & did most, though the British Embassy & a mysterious employee of Cecil King called Mme Vanon also pulled wires.
⁴
Now we are confined to this rather beastly camp (we have no visas) unless a friend of a friend of Marie’s helps us.

Dean was rather depressed by this place, but suddenly getting under a mosquito net in the damp stuffiness, I felt at home – a familiar austere narrow home of four muslin walls. And this morning the light was beautiful & the black women passed by the window in robes of the loveliest colours, slouching by, chewing their sticks. I can never get this put right out of my system.

Interrupted by an unimportant first-drink-of-the-day with the steward of the plane at 7 in the morning. This encouraged me to get on the phone to Marie’s f. of an f. & she’s fetching us in her car at 2. I’m too happy to be in West Africa simply to mind what happens (Dean is still asleep). Next to you I love this hot wind & the black decorative women & the rather raffish kindly men in shorts & the mosquito net & the camp bed & the washed out madame behind the bar & this grey bright light. If I couldn’t be with you, I’d like to be here. I believe I could even work in West Africa – I did once. But I hope tomorrow we get to Freetown, & one will see & smell the place again, & look up Ali who is in the police band now.

This is all very sentimental, but you & West Africa both make me sentimental. The French language here seems oddly natural like a native dialect. And at the airport at 1 in the morning people were so charming – the Santé man who rocked with laughter at our yellow fever letters but passed us through. ‘Tell me what happens,’ he said. ‘Eight days quarantine. My English colleague very strict. You are the first British I have seen without proper certificates. O, what fun you are going to have. 8 days quarantine. We French we know how to dance’ & he began to dance on the floor, ‘we dance this way, that way, we dance …’

‘The polka,’ I said.

‘Yes, the polka, but my English colleague he doesn’t know how to dance.’

And the elderly customs man – I had tried
½
an hour before to get my bag cleared out of turn, because I should have done police & Santé first – greeted me again with a huge beam, ‘Ah, it is the poor M. Graham,’ & chalked them up with a grin.

(Oh, I haven’t told you that when Dean & I were filling up the police forms at Les Invalides, an official brought me an extra form & asked me to sign the back of it because his wife was a Catholic &
liked my books! Dean was rather impressed!)

This must be the longest letter you’ve ever had from me with the least love stuff, & yet really the love stuff is in every word – I have loved no part of the world like this & I have loved no woman as I love you. You’re my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does so that one all the time is loving something different & yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here. And I am happy talking nonsense about you as I am about Africa.

On Tuesday night Marie & I talked about you. She loves you after this visit. After the first visit she said she was worried that you seemed hard but now she said from the first in the Ritz room, when you were relaxed & content, she saw the point, aesthetically & psychologically, & she liked you more & more each time of this visit. Please let’s go again before the awful disappearance.

[…]

[Paris] | Sunday. 11:30 a.m [18 December 1949]

Dear, forgive this letter in advance, a humiliating wail of self-pity that I am ashamed of. But I’m missing you terribly here – the fortnight doesn’t seem to have helped & I just feel at the end of my tether, or near it. After Mass I was stupid enough to walk across the river, & I found myself crying in the Tuileries Gardens. I don’t know what to do. It was all right yesterday when I spoke to you, but one can’t telephone all the time. Then I held you at bay till 3 in the morning drinking with Marie, but one can’t go on doing that, though I am going out again with her tonight. You captured Rome & Dublin, & now at the second assault you’ve captured Paris. I talked to Marie last night about the house & she’s going to set about finding one, but what’s the good? My dear my dear. I used to like being alone, but now it’s a horror. One thinks of times when we were happy & one tries to shut off thought. It’s horrible that one can’t be
happy thinking of happy times like one can in an ordinary relationship.

I don’t know what to do about next year. One wishes over & over again that one of these planes will crash & they never do. I so long for your company – I don’t, at this moment, want to make love. I want to sit on the floor with my head resting between your legs like at the Ritz & be at peace. The telephone pulls at my elbow but what’s the good? My dear, I never knew love was like this, a pain that only stops when I’m with people, drinking. Thank God, from tomorrow there are lots of engagements.

For God’s sake, dear, don’t hold this letter against me, & be sweet on Thursday. You can always cure this pain by coming in at a door. You don’t know how I need you.

Pray for me.
     Graham

5 St. James Street | London S.W. 1 | Monday [30 January 1950]

Dear heart,

I’m so sorry that all the trouble has started again. Please remember that I love you entirely, with my brain, my heart & my body, & that I’m always there when you want me.

I don’t like or approve of Harry’s judgements. When a man marries, he is like a Prime Minister – he has to accept responsibility for the acts of a colleague. My marriage failed (only God can sift all the causes), but the
responsibility
for failure is mine. One can’t lay the blame on one’s wife. Your marriage, intrinsically, had failed before I knew you, & the man must accept responsibility – which doesn’t mean guilt. It had failed because marriage isn’t maintaining a friend, a housekeeper or even a mother. The Catholic service says ‘with my body I thee worship’, & if that fails the heart has gone out of it.

My dear, any time you say I would lay out a plan of action for living together. I’m certain I could make you happy, & the church would not be excluded. You would be unhappy for a time – that’s all,
but the division would be over. Harry could not divorce you without your consent &
therefore
he could not shut down the doors between you & the children. You could insist on sharing them in any separation, just as if I chose I could insist on mine. He is not legally in a position to lay down terms or a way of life for you.

Dear, this letter may make you angry. Don’t be. I must, at times, present a practical plan. It’s the dearest wish I have – the only wish – to have you with me & to make you happy with me. I believe I could do it, after the bad period was over. I love you now so infinitely more than even a year ago. I have great trust, admiration & gratitude (because of the amount of happiness you have given me & patience you have shown during my bad period). I want you to come away with me for six months & test me. That was what Vivien suggested to me – I think in the long term she is proving more generous
⁵
& more loving than Harry. I’m sorry (& this will anger you) I don’t believe in Harry’s love for you or anybody, but his small unit of power.

Dear heart, the cabins [?] are there. Come with me on the 15th & stay with Binny
⁶
until you are rested & can sort things out. I’ll stay with you & look after you for weeks, months, years, a lifetime. (Strike out the phrase not required!) I want to grow old with you & die with you.

Your lover, who loves you for ever. God bless you & pray for me.

5 St. James’s Street | London S.W.1 | Monday 2 p.m. [30 January 1950]

My dear, if things are getting bad, & the curtain is liable to fall, you must forgive me for presenting my case. I wouldn’t love you so much if I wouldn’t fight to the last ditch.

My previous letter was one to be burned. This one put in the
black box because it really is the sketch for a plan of action – & though you may not need it now, you may need to consider it one day.

How I want to be with you when you are in trouble, & put my arms round you, with your face turned to my face, & hear you sleeping.

Dear dear dear

Graham.

Order of Battle in the unlikely event of your choosing me
.

1. During the ‘unhappy period’ we would consider basing ourselves on Achill and Anacapri,
   ⁷
   or we would take a long trip into strange territory with the help of the Express – South Seas, India, Palestine, what you will.
   

2. We would immediately begin steps to see whether I could get my marriage annulled on
   two
   possible grounds.
   

3. In the meanwhile proper arrangements would be made for you to have access to your children.
   

4. While the annulment proceedings went on, it might be worth while considering changing your name by deed poll to mine, for two reasons
   

   • 1) I think it would make the whole business go down all right with your family.
     

   • 2) It would enable us to economise when we travelled in only taking one room!
     

5. I would hand over to you half my controlling shares in the new company which would in effect give you 1/3 of all film and theatrical earnings in perpetuity. (After all a
   husband
   can be expected to make financial provision).
   

6. Our finances – apart from my arrangement with Vivien & the children – would be in common, & we would make a mess in common or a success in common.
   

7. Wherever we settled for any length of time, we would have two rooms
   available
   , so that at any time without ceasing to live together & love each other, you could go
   to Communion (we would break down again & again, but that’s neither here nor there).
   

8. I love your children, & you would spend any time you wanted with them.
   

9. My love for you will go on till death, & I would guarantee never to break up our relationship except by your wish. No ‘tipsy frolic’ would make me walk out. It might make me sore as hell for 24 hours, but so far I don’t think I’ve managed to be sore that time!
   

10. I would tell the truth to you always. Your part of our life should be yours. I trust you as I trust no other living person. I am yours entirely. I love you & will always love you. As I said in Paris you are the saint of lovers to whom I pray. God bless you & treat this seriously.
    

A greatly condensed version of this letter to a French scholar was published in
Dieu Vivant (17
November 1950) as a sequel to two other pieces on Greene. It constitutes Greene’s most detailed statement on the Catholic dimensions of
The Heart of the Matter.

5 St. James’s Street | London S. W. 1 | 12th July 1950

Dear Mons. Moré,

Very many thanks for your letter and for the copy of
Dieu Vivant
with the two articles. I did not realise that I was quite so dogmatic at the Table Talk, but it is nice to be made to appear to speak French so fluently and well! Your article on ‘Les Deux Holocaustes de Scobie’
⁸
interested me very much and it seemed to me to be a very close and acute study of the character, enlightening me a little. A few points I would like to point out –

1. On page 91
   . If I said at lunch that the point of the child’s
   death had no other purpose than to show Scobie making a gesture natural to any man under the circumstances I was talking loosely. You know how it is with authors – in conversation we feel embarrassed at talking about our own books and are apt to try and cut the conversations short by an abrupt half-truth. Obviously one did have in mind that when he offered up his peace for the child it was a genuine prayer and had the results that followed. I always believe that such results, though obviously a God would not fulfil them to the limit of robbing him of peace for ever, are answered up to a point as a kind of test of a man’s sincerity and to see whether in fact the offer was one merely based on emotion.
   

2. I knew very well what I was about when I used the Portuguese captain’s daughter as a comparison with Scobie’s dead child, but I had not thought of the explanation which you give on
   page 94
   of his first act of faith. It seems to me an admirable point and I wish it had been consciously in my mind as it certainly explains an otherwise rather abrupt revelation of character.
   ⁹
   Curiously enough the book I am writing now deals also with a holocaust and I have been very discontented with the psychology of the moment of holocaust. In this case it is a prayer of a non-Catholic and a non-Christian, and I have not satisfactorily explained how it came about. Your remarks on
   page 94
   have given me the clue to the whole situation and will make, I hope, all the difference to the book and I am very grateful to you for that fact.
   

3. I have not read the passage from Père Surin
   ¹⁰
   which you
   quote on
   page 99
   and I am grateful, too, for your drawing my attention to it. It seems to me to be a remarkable description of a state of mind which comes home to many of us: a kind of religious schizophrenia.
   

4. Page 101
   . Scobie’s last prayer has lost the point that I intended in the French because of the inability to translate into French ‘Oh God, I love.…’ without adding the subject of the love. My own intention was to make it completely vague as to whether he was expressing his love for the two women or his love for God. My own feeling about this character is that he was uncertain himself and that was why the thing broke off. The point i would like to make which is probably heretical is that at the moment of death even an expression of sexual love comes within the borders of charity. After all when a man knows that he is dying in a few moments sexual love itself becomes completely altruistic – pride can no longer enter into it, nor can the hope of receiving or giving pleasure, it is love pure and simple, and therefore there must be some confusion in the mind as to the object of love. This was what i intended but in the translation, owing to the exigencies of the French language, we are definitely told that scobie makes an act of love towards God which of course rules out the ambiguity of his future.
   

5. Page 102.
   I was very interested to see the parallels you found between certain passages in the book and the letters of Ste. Thérèse as I had not read the letters at the time that I was writing the book.
   

6. Page 105
   . I am fascinated and interested by the quotation you give from Marie Des Vallées.
   ¹¹
   It is always pleasant to find one’s own thought confirmed in the work of people who know more about faith than I do. There is a parallel passage, I think you will find, to this in ‘La Puissance et La Gloire’ on
   page 314
   where the terror inspired by the love of God is expressed.