Graham Greene (50 page)

Affectionately
     Graham

The Ritz, | Piccadilly, | Feb. 20 [1979].

Dearest Caroline,

Alas! I have to go into the King Edward VII Hospital this afternoon for an operation on the intestines – not serious but disagreeable. After lunch today no more food till after the operation on Friday. Then 4 days of intravenous. I should be out in 12 days. I only tell you this in case you try to get hold of me for some reason & can’t.

Lots of love,
     Graham

Graham was suffering from cancer of the intestines, but his surgery was successful
.

The journalist and historian Andrew Boyle sent Greene portions of the manuscript of
The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied for Russia (1979
) dealing with Philby’s progress through the ranks at MI
6
. Felix Cowgill was head of Section V when Philby arrived in 1941; when a new Section IX was established in late
1944
to study Soviet and Communist activity, Philby was given charge of it rather than Cowgill, who resigned
.

6th March 1979

Dear Mr. Boyle,

I don’t at all like you having me say that ‘I might have guessed there was something fishy about his rise’. I saw nothing fishy in Kim Philby’s rise – he was a very able man. What I think I have written somewhere is that I was glad to discover years later that his supplanting of Cowgill was not simply the desire for personal power.
²⁰
I would never use such a phrase as ‘blurted out the truth’ and it was a thing that could never possibly have happened. During the years that I knew him I never once saw him the worse for drink. Frankly I would much rather you left me out of your book entirely.

Yours sincerely
     Graham Greene

Although Boyle removed the passages Greene objected to and referred to this letter in the published version, he remained critical of Greene’s account of Philby as a Communist true-believer. In addition to Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt, the book discusses Greene’s friend the translator and literary scholar John Cairncross as the ‘fifth man’
.

This Parisian dentist noted the number of characters from her profession who appeared in Greene’s novels and asked if this indicated a repressed vocation
.

16th May 1979

Dear Doctor Rivière,

Many thanks for your letter and the nice things you say about my books. Yes, I am a little aware of dentists creeping in. The dentist in
The Power and the Glory
can be found also in
The Lawless Roads
and was actually a man I travelled up with to Villahermosa from Frontera.
²¹
I don’t think a repressed vocation is the explanation, but I am certainly aware of very unpleasant childhood memories. As a child I went to a very bad local dentist who caused me agonies. This has made me always associate stained-glass doorways and windows with the old-fashioned dentists. I am glad to say now I have an admirable dentist and friend who is also Greek Consul in Cannes. He has never caused me a moment’s agony!

Yours sincerely
     Graham Greene

P.S. I think there are more general doctors in my books than dentists, but perhaps that is due to having an elder brother who is a doctor.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | May 26 ’79

Dear Muriel,

How kind you are!
Territorial Rights
arrived today, just after I had
been reading in the
Nice-Matin
that our mail is being discovered in plastic bags off Cap d’Antibes by skin-divers.

I took the almost unreadable
New Statesman
out to lunch & saw that a woman called Elizabeth Berridge is advertised as saying of you ‘She is back in spanking form’ – that’s going to bring you quite a new class of reader. In the same number of the N.S. I read that ‘Fortunately a “little pat” is far from an adequate summing-up of Miss Redgrave.’ What are we coming to?

Tonight I shall read
Territorial Rights
. If I am disappointed (which I’m sure I shan’t be) it will prove that I am a typical N.S. reader seeking a spanking or a pat.

Love,
     Graham

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | June 5 ’79

Dear Muriel,

It’s your best, your very best. I thought you’d never top
Memento Mori
, but you have. I’ve been reading it all day in one gulp. Written with excitement at 9.35 p.m.

Love,
     Graham

The post office is on strike here & I doubt whether this will ever reach you. It’s like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea.

A London psychoanalyst and author, Rycroft was a critic of the theories of Sigmund Freud. His best-known work is
A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1973
). Greene found himself enthralled by
The Innocence of Dreams (1979).

18th June 1979

Dear Dr. Rycroft,

I am only writing this letter on the distinct understanding that you won’t bother to reply to it. As a writer myself I know how irritating it can be to receive letters from strangers however appreciative. I am at the moment reading your book
The Innocence of Dreams
and the fact that I am not yet half way through is a measure of my interest because I am a quick reader as a rule.

There are one or two questions not to be answered but which may be relevant to your own ideas.

1. I am unhappy by the use of message in referring to the unconscious dreamer. This surely supposes a conscious purpose in the dreamer which i find difficult to believe in.
   

2. This brings in the theory of the censor which you partly accept. Today is there anything in the world of morals that one cannot imagine oneself offending, so what room is there for a censor in our unconscious if we haven’t got one in our conscious self? Perhaps this is why the students reported by Calvin Hall did not report any dreams which referred to the dropping of the atomic bomb.
   ²²
   It was something they could perfectly well accept in their working life. The censor had nothing to do.
   

My interest in dreams dates from the age of 16 when I went to a psychoanalyst of no known school. Since then at intervals especially in the 60’s and early 70’s I have kept dream diaries when I have no work on hand if only to keep my hand in at writing.
²³
My experience bears out the fact that one dreams at least four or five times a night when once one has disciplined oneself to have a pencil
and paper beside one in bed! Is it possible (I repeat that I am not asking for an answer but only putting a question for you to consider) that a writer’s profession influences his dreams? I have had two or three dreams which have gone straight into short stories without any great change. I have also found that many dreams are serial going on for periods of more than three days.

One curious experience, or what seems to me curious, came to me in one novel where I was completely blocked and didn’t know how to continue the book. It was like coming to a river bank and finding no bridge. I knew what would happen on the other side of the bridge but I couldn’t get there. I then had a dream which seemed to me to belong entirely to the character in the book rather than to myself and I was able to insert it in the novel and bridge the river.
²⁴

Perhaps my questions will be answered by your own book as I have only reached the half-way mark and am looking forward with great enthusiasm to finishing it. I repeat – please do not bother to reply to this letter. It is simply an expression of interest, even of enthusiasm, which needs no reply.

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

P.S. Perhaps you have answered my question about the message on page 66.
²⁵

This reader of the
The Human Factor
suspected the character Daintry of being a sinister foreign agent because he did not know what Maltesers were, which the reader recalled as having been available at cinemas in his childhood
.

31st July 1979

Dear Mr Harris,

I would defend the maltesers in this way: when the first draft of the book was ready my secretary told me that maltesers no longer existed and I very nearly took them out. However my wife to prove that they could be obtained sent me a packet, but apparently they are much rarer than they used to be. Daintry was a young man when the war came and perhaps he hadn’t moved in malteser cinema circles. Anyway they wouldn’t have been available in the war and when the war was over so many years later he may have forgotten all about them or perhaps he was confused by the conversation in the Club. As a matter of fact I had forgotten that he hadn’t heard of them.

Yours sincerely
     Graham Greene

This woman in Holbrook, New York, asked Greene to comment on a disagreement she was having with her grandson over the morality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
.

15th September 1979

Dear Mrs Oliveri,

Thank you for your letter. I half agree with your grandson, John Gillen. I still remember the shock we felt in Europe at the news. But even if it were a crime I think we owe to the bombing the peace
which so far has not been broken between the great powers. It might be argued that a demonstration of the bomb in a desert would have been sufficient to induce the Japanese to surrender, but I doubt whether it would have had the effect on the imagination of the actual bombing. Because of that bombing both great powers are afraid of atomic war. Whether in the long run this will prevent a war remains to be seen.

Yours sincerely
     Graham Greene

Anthony Burgess (
1917
–93) shared with Greene a fascination with Catholic subjects. According to his biographer Andrew Biswell, Burgess was corresponding regularly with Greene by 1961, when he dedicated the novel
The Devil of a State
to him.
²⁶
Few of their letters have come to light; it is possible that most were disposed of following their public row in 1988. Here, Greene refers to a radio lecture Burgess gave on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. At the time, the two were caught in a disagreement between their French publisher Robert Laffont and their translators Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier
.

9th October 1979

Dear Burgess – or can I say Anthony or should I say Tony?

Just to put the record straight about your very generous broadcast: it was not
The Heart of the Matter
which was condemned by the Holy Office but
The Power and the Glory
and it was
The Power and the Glory
that Paul VI had read. It does make a good deal of difference because in my opinion
The Heart of the Matter
would be quite rightly condemnable but not
The Power and the Glory
. I do hope you are going to come and see me one day without Georges. I am faced at the moment with a difficult job of writing a letter to Robert Laffont
to say that I am leaving him and following Georges. One of those things one postpones until the last moment.

Yours ever
     Graham

31st October 1979

Dear Anthony,

I don’t envy you your American trip. I have managed to avoid going there now for about 15 years except for my few days in Washington with the Panamanians.

I can’t imagine what kind of contract you signed to give Laffont four new novels before you go. In the bad old days in England fifty years ago one had to offer an option on two novels if one was a first novelist but today no options are required. I realise that things are rather different in France but all the same … Laffont has no options on my novels. All the same after discussions I am staying with him if Georges continues to translate me. I think there were certain faults on both sides and anyway Georges told me that he and Hortense did not wish me to come to them. It was hitting Laffont too hard and of course I have known him since around 1946.

I am going off to Paris for about a week next week, but after that do ring me up at 33.71.80 and suggest a date for meeting.
     Graham

In the background of this letter is a problem Yvonne Cloetta was handling for Graham. Even after many years in France, he had no great command of the language and no basis on which to judge the quality of translations. Cloetta, who moved expertly between French and English, made the final judgement on these questions – usually placing her trust in the distinguished Belmont. The point has a broader significance, since Cloetta is sometimes spoken of as lacking the intelligence to be an equal companion with Graham
.
²⁷

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes. | Jan. 29. 80

Dear Bron,

I got your letter today with great relief (letters between England & France take at least seven days) because I thought my radio talk – which wasn’t scripted but done impromptu – might have hurt.
²⁸
I prepared myself for the ordeal in the King Edward VII Hospital by rereading almost every book of Evelyn’s. I look back with nostalgia to that time of peace. Oh, for another operation. But, thank God, you weren’t hurt anyway by the shortened version. I was responsible for the absurd mistake – that’s what comes of speaking without a script – of ‘the cross-Channel’ instead of ‘trans-Atlantic’ love affair. No one to my horror seems to have noticed it.

[…]

This letter to Graham’s nephew, a bookseller, refers to Nelson Sevenpennies, which Graham and Hugh collected, a series of casebound volumes once published by the Scottish firm Thomas Nelson and Sons, priced at
7
d. The letter mentions David Low, a bookseller whom Graham had known for many years; their ‘bibliophilic correspondence’ was published as
Dear David, Dear Graham (1989).