Graham Greene (49 page)

An editor at Knopf, Lee Goerner
(1947
–95) sent Graham a copy of Michael Herr’s
Dispatches (1977),
a memoir of the Vietnam war that reads like a rock-and-roll dithyramb
.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 9th July 1977

Dear Mr. Goerner,

I read
Dispatches
naturally with great interest. I was rather put off by the opening part which seemed to me too excitable, but Herr calmed down a bit later. I think when one is dealing with horrors one should write very coldly. Otherwise it reads like hidden boasting – ‘just see what a brave chap I am to have voluntarily put myself in the way of such experiences.’ To adapt Wordsworth, horror should be remembered in tranquillity.

Yours sincerely
     Graham Greene

Now in her mid-eighties, Pistol Mary from Kenya was living in Sintra, Portugal, where Graham and Father Leopoldo Durán, a Spanish literary scholar, would visit her in the course of their Quixotic journeys
.

1st August 1977

Dearest Maria,

I am dictating this letter to Elisabeth because I know how difficult my handwriting is. The Holy Father, myself and Michael
¹⁰
got safely back to Madrid via a monastery in Badajoz and a parador in Guadalupe. I was nearly suffocated in the monastery in Badajoz by the Holy Father who inadvertently turned on in that very hot city the heating in my room and I didn’t realise it until I had undressed and had to wander the corridors of the monastery seeking help because there seemed to be no way of turning off the heating. In the parador I was startled to receive a call from the Holy Father carrying his toothpaste and toothbrush and soap because he wanted to clean his teeth and wash his hair in my bathroom. I said surely you have
got a bathroom and he admitted he had, but of course then he couldn’t talk. All the same I love him dearly and he is immensely fond of you after those three days. I am sure he would fly off at a moment’s word to see you.

From Madrid we made two excursions without Michael. The first to Cuenca which was quite sensational and the other to El Toboso which I hadn’t realised existed apart from the imagination of Cervantes until I happened to be reading an essay of Unamuno in Madrid. El Toboso was completely unspoilt except of course there was a little library containing translations of Don Quixote signed by all the heads of state including Hitler – the copy signed by Stalin had mysteriously disappeared. The English copy was signed by Ramsay MacDonald.
¹¹
We were the only tourists in the village.

Father Durán was delighted by the story I started writing in my head – asking for his aid in technical matters – of a book to be called
Monsignor Don Quixote
. We added to the adventures of the Monsignor as we went along the road. Chuchu in Panama is going to be worried as I have now got another character to play with.
¹²

All this is nonsense, but what is not nonsense is how much we all of us enjoyed our stay with you and I wish it had been longer.

Much love,
     Graham

51 La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | Oct. 26. 77

Dear Marie,

I know this letter will annoy you, but be patient with me & try to understand. After all we have been friends for nearly thirty years & I know how much you’ve done for me during that time, so be reasonable
& do something – which will hurt you – to please me. I’m scared of your reaction & afraid you’ll disappoint me, but please say Yes & allow me this year for Christmas to give you instead of a classic shirt from the Faubourg unsuitable for country wear, allow me – I ask it with trembling voice – to give you a small car – Volkswagen or what you like. This year I’ve earned an absurd amount of money & I hate to save all of it for not very long a future. Please say Yes & please me.

Love,
     Graham

Astonished, Biche replied that ‘no present could make me happier! It makes me sad tho’ to realise what a bitch I am that you should have to go to such verbal pains to offer me this precious gift.’ She compared her excitement to that which she felt on getting her first bicycle. With his next letter, Graham enclosed a cheque to pay for a new Citroën
.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes |

30 November 1977

Dear Bernard,

I hope you had luck this time with the General. Chuchu did tell me that he was hoping to have a holiday with his ex-wife from America and I’m glad to hear he got it. I have done a piece about the signing of the Treaty for
The New York Review of Books
¹³
and
The Spectator
over here and I’ll send you a copy in due course when it appears.

Yes, I had had a news report that the Baptistes were dead. Maybe my challenge put an end to their misery.
¹⁴

All good wishes to the two of you for Christmas.

Affectionately
     Graham

6 April 1978

My dear Leopoldo,

Thank you for various letters which have come in – I begin to lose count of what I have written and what you have written. I am so glad that you and Laszlo Robert
¹⁵
got on so well together and I liked very much his drunken letter. Why is it that you are not drinking a little bit of whisky even these days? You won’t be able to qualify as one of my whisky priests. Thank you too for sending me Maria’s letter. She certainly loves you deeply and your letter must have given her great pleasure and confidence. It was very good of you to send it to me but I return it to you because it belongs to you. Perhaps you should indicate to her that we shall have a different chauffeur this time! I have an idea that she was a little bored by our friend and she will probably welcome our new conductor. I hope to bring you for your amusement the first chapter of Monsignor Quixote – the first and the last chapter because I doubt that the book will ever go on.

[…]

Greene received an enormous amount of mail from his readers. He took a surprising concern for these strangers, including a Dublin grandmother who confessed to having had ‘scruples’ when she first read his works. Scruples are, of course, an affliction of the devout, now thought to have been eradicated like polio
.

28 April 1978

Dear Mrs. Kearney,

Thank you for what you say about my books and I am sorry that twenty years ago you had scruples! Perhaps I ought to tell you what

Pope Paul said to me in a private interview when I pointed out to him that among the books of mine he had read was
The Power and the Glory
which had been condemned by the Holy Office. His reply was ‘Parts of all your books will always offend some Catholics and you shouldn’t pay any attention to that.’
¹⁶

As for your husband’s question I must admit that I don’t go to Mass every Sunday. I go once or twice a month probably on the average but no more. It always seemed to me an absurdity of the Church teaching to miss Mass without proper reason was a mortal sin. Luckily I have met many priests who admit that in all their years in the confessional they have never even heard a mortal sin confessed. A mortal sin in theology is a sin done in conscious defiance of God and I should imagine that is a very, very rare event. I think in Ireland you have always been rather black Catholics if you will excuse my saying so.

For that reason perhaps I don’t take as seriously as you do the question of your children – your grandchildren are hardly your responsibility. I think it was Saint Thomas Aquinas who attributed a sense of humour to God and I am sure that your children’s peccadilloes will probably please him as much as your children pleased you when they disobeyed a rule of the household. Even if you smacked one of them you were probably pleased by a certain independence and I see no reason why God
should
not be pleased by a certain independence on our side. Surely, or rather perhaps, the only important rule one should try not to break is that of charity and if there is a God he must be charitable too.

When I rather hastily said that if I was young today I would not become a Catholic I think I meant that the differences between the Christian beliefs were becoming less and less. For example I doubt if there would be a quarrel today between a Catholic and an Anglican on the subject of transubstantiation. Our idea of transubstantiation has become far less physical and more philosophical.
¹⁷
I dislike the
new liturgy, but that is partly because I no longer feel at home in a church, especially abroad. If a new liturgy was required I don’t understand why a model should not have been made and translated into the various languages instead of allowing many priests to put in fancy prayers, sometimes of a rather sentimental kind, before the canon. In a foreign language these make one lose one’s place entirely! I think today I would be just as at home in an Anglican church and the English of the traditional Anglican service is rather better than the English of the new liturgy. This may sound a purely aesthetic criticism, but it’s not. Words have a certain holiness; they should be able to represent truthfully a certain emotion as well as a certain belief and I do think the language of the 17th century succeeded in this better than the language of the 20th century which is apt to date from one year to another. The language of the 17th century is a little bit like Latin – it doesn’t change its meaning.

Again many thanks for your letter.

Yours sincerely
     Graham Greene

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes |

13 May 1978

Dear Michael,

[…]

Certainly you can say No to the David Frost Show! If you could make the No a bit insulting so much the better. Perhaps you could put it that Mr. Greene wouldn’t dream of appearing on a David Frost Show!

Affectionately
     Graham

Statement of 1971 on Eucharistic Doctrine, ‘The Word transubstantiation is commonly used in the Roman Catholic Church to indicate that God acting in the eucharist effects a change in the inner reality of the elements. The term should be seen as affirming the fact of Christ’s presence and of the mysterious and radical change which takes place. In contemporary Roman Catholic theology it is not understood as explaining how the change takes place.’

10th July 1978

Dearest Catherine,

I find at 74 that one is apt to forget present things though one remembers clearly the past and I don’t think I ever thanked you for your very nice long letter. Forgive this being dictated to Elisabeth, but I am off to Spain to spend my yearly fortnight with my only priest, Father Durán. (He has written a book in Spanish on my theology!) We do a trip each year to include Portugal and my Kenya friend, Maria Newall, who must be now 86 and is continually falling down and breaking bits of herself, but she remains in spirit younger than I am. Then in mid-August I am off for my yearly visit to Panama and my pal General Torrijos. This will be the third visit and I don’t quite know why I make it except to escape from the Côte in the summer. Perhaps one day a novel will come out of it. In between Spain and Panama I hope to be in England for some days and I’ll telephone and see if I can come down and see you. That poor Norman Sherry
¹⁸
who has been trying to follow in my footsteps in Mexico, Haiti, and Paraguay has returned to England very unwell. I do hope I’m not going to be the death of him.

Much love
     Graham

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes. | Sep. 9. &78

Dearest Anita,

I was so happy to receive your postcard just as I returned from my third visit to Panamá (I don’t think I want to go a fourth time as I feel exhausted – 18-hour flights are too much at 74!)
My God, how you work! Play in Stockholm, film in Oslo! I wish I knew what play & what film. I too would like to see you in this life – do keep me posted about your movements if you come southwest. I always leave here mid-July to September & in October I go to Capri, but otherwise I can always get to Paris with a little notice. I still feel life is very long & sometimes I feel a hundred years old & that I ought to grow a white beard.[…]Much love, Graham

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 9th January 1979

Dear Gloria,

Thank you so much for your postcard from Los Angeles, that sink of iniquity, where I once had a very good Chinese meal and accompanied that fat actor, Robert Morley, to the equivalent in those days of strip-tease. I have forgotten what it was called then, it’s so long ago. Thirty years ago.
¹⁹

I have just begun re-reading
Moby Dick
in celebration of starting a new book which I thought I would never do. I suppose Nantucket is already spoilt and not worth visiting? A summer resort? At the moment, under the influence of
Moby Dick
which I never thought to read twice, it’s the only place in North America which I want to visit. Do tell me about it. What has become of it?

Affectionately
     Graham

Emerson immediately began making firm arrangements for Graham to stay in Nantucket. He was amused at this response to his whim and wrote on
5
th February
1979
: ‘What an impulsive girl you are! You are positively dangerous!’

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 5th February 1979

Dear Vivien,

The explanation why I keep my ship in the lavatory is that there is no other place available and also if I turn on the music the waves rise and fall and the ship wallows among them making one think of the seasick passengers on board. That is why it seems to me suitably placed. On another wall is a hurricane notice from Belize telling people what to do when the siren blows.