Graham Greene (3 page)

Greene the spy writer has his dark and sad moments, revealed in
The Third Man
and
The Human Factor,
a tale which compounds treachery and error to conclude with the defection of a double-agent to Moscow—possibly a reference to Philby, Greene's wartime boss in MI6. But he never reaches to the pessimism and calculated confusion of le Carré, nor to the detached awfulness of Conrad's Verloc, a paid Russian agent who imperturbably drives his mentally disabled nephew to blow himself up in order to satisfy his diplomatic masters that ‘an event' has at last taken place. Somerset Maugham's
Ashenden,
also a work of the ‘realistic' school and based on the author's own career in espionage, skates through most of the shades and possibilities exploited by the three masters.

Espionage has attracted many authors. An earlier period of shifting loyalties provided us with Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe—both agents; Shakespeare's father, too, worked for the Elizabethan spy machine, as, it has been suggested (among other things), did Shakespeare himself. As Somerset Maugham says in
Ashenden,
a writer has passports—a public identity and a
reason for being almost anywhere—very useful to a spy. Writing itself involves creating identities: one could regard it as practising a certain kind of deception. The true spy story resembles real life as we all actually know it—a place where it is rarely quite clear what is happening and what one ought to do.
The Spy's Bedside Book
is a genial way of reminding us about all that, and I register only one complaint. After everything we have done for spying, there is, apart from the obligatory reference to Mata Hari, hardly anything in this book about women!

STELLA RIMINGTON

I
am scarcely qualified to write this preface, for I doubt whether I have known more than a dozen spies in my life, and I am still uncertain about two of them—a certain Swiss business man whose notebook I borrowed for a few hours many years ago (strangely it contained the address of a friend of mine two thousand miles away who died a year later in a Nazi concentration camp), and another man of rather indeterminate origin with whom I planned to spend a Christmas holiday in the Banana Islands, in the company of two African blind dates—malaria robbed me of that holiday, somebody else's malaria, which made it worse. Of one spy, however, I have reason to be certain: he had hardly the qualifications of the others, for he was illiterate, he couldn't count above ten, and the only point of the compass he knew was the East, because he was a Mohammedan. I was reminded of him in recent years by the report of a divorce case in which the judge expressed severe criticisms of a private detective. The detective was also illiterate, he rode to his work on a bicycle and dictated his reports to his landlady who was stone deaf. Life is strange.

How very strange life is the readers of this anthology will certainly learn if they have not learned the lesson already. I wonder how many would be able to detect truth from fiction in this anthology if the editors had not printed the names of the contributors. Does Cicero's visit to the German Embassy in Ankara seem more or less fictional than Hannay's to the headquarters of the British Secret Service? Could the reader really tell which was fiction, between Mr Dennis Wheatley's spy trapped in a bathroom at the Ritz, and Colonel Lawrence's misadventure in Arabia? Of the two I find Mr Wheatley's style a shade more convincing, for I cannot help wondering how Lawrence, bent by
his captors over a bench, could observe on his own body the marks of the Circassian whip. A good spy should not embroider—it is Colonel Lawrence's apparent embroidery which makes me, unwilling as I am to side with Mr Aldington under any circumstances, distrust the texture of his report. For in this strange funny nightmare world we welcome the prosaic. An intimate friend of mine once received simultaneously from two spies a report on the contents of a concrete shed on an African airfield—one spy said that it sheltered a tank, the other old boots. How could my friend help being biased in favour of the old boots? So I can believe in Mr Ambler's fictional Colonel Haki and his ambition to write a detective story, while I find it hard to believe in the real Colonel Baden-Powell on a butterfly-hunt in Dalmatia incorporating the plans of fortifications into the pattern of his butterfly's wings. Bond's travelling equipment imagined by Mr Ian Fleming is certainly no more fantastic than the furnishings of Herr Schellenberg's private office. This is true, that is untrue, take your pick.

For the characters in one section,
A Gaggle of Suspects,
I feel a personal sympathy, for there was an uncomfortable month during the winter of 1951 in Indo-China when I too found myself under suspicion. (Little did I realise that I was in such distinguished company—Wordsworth and Lawrence, Gauguin and Thomas Mann.) Some days passed before I realised what lay behind the literary interests of a member of the Sûreté stationed in Hanoi. Day by day he combed the bookshops for copies of my novels, and in the evening he would present himself with his little pile of books, seeking
dédicaces
for himself, for his wife, for his friends. At last I realised he was not the ‘fan' I had been vain enough to believe: he was trying inconspicuously to carry out the directions of the Commander-in-Chief, General de Lattre, who had on one embarrassing occasion and at his own dinner-table accused me of espionage. I was able after that to save
M. ‘Dupont' further trouble. We arranged to meet in the evenings for a drink and a game of
quatre-cent-vingt-et-un
at the Café de la Paix where I would tell him what I had been doing during the day. The courtesy of the Sûreté demanded that the guest—and suspect—should always win: the courtesy of the suspect demanded that the drinks should be equally divided. Unfortunately my police agent was unaccustomed to anything stronger than vermouth-cassis, and his wife refused to believe it was only duty which kept him up late and sent him home under so unaccustomed an influence. I still feel a sense of guilt towards my friendly watcher when I remember that sad tired bloodhound face, apparently sprung from some spiritual liaison between M. Fernandel and Mrs Browning, lifted from the glass he didn't want to drink, to listen to the story he didn't want to hear, apprehensive and reproachful. How merciless one can be when right is on one's side. He had a weak heart and there was an occasion when he passed completely out. Perhaps it was to quiet the memory of that kindly ineffective ghost that I have joined with my brother to compile
The Spy's Bedside Book
and to evoke figures far more absurd and improbable.

GRAHAM GREENE

FOR BEGINNERS

By our first strange and fatall interview …

JOHN DONNE

had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant's telegram. It was at Furling, the big country house in Hampshire where I had come to convalesce after Loos, and Sandy, who was in the same case, was hunting for the marmalade. I flung him the flimsy with the blue strip pasted down on it, and he whistled.

“Hullo, Dick, you've got the battalion. Or maybe it's a staff billet. You'll be a blighted brass-hat, coming it heavy over the hard-working regimental officer. And to think of the language you've wasted on brass-hats in your time!”

I sat and thought for a bit, for that name “Bullivant” carried me back eighteen months to the hot summer before the war. I had not seen the man since, though I had read about him in the papers. For more than a year I had been a busy battalion officer, with no other thought than to hammer a lot of raw stuff into good soldiers. I had succeeded pretty well, and there was no prouder man on earth than Richard Hannay when he took his Lennox Highlanders over the parapets on that glorious and bloody 25th day of September. Loos was no picnic, and we had had some ugly bits of scrapping before that, but the worst bit of the campaign I had seen was a tea-party to the show I had been in with Bullivant before the war started.

The sight of his name on a telegram form seemed to change all my outlook on life. I had been hoping for the command of the battalion, and looking forward to being in at the finish with Brother Boche. But this message jerked my thoughts on to a new road. There might be other things in the war than straightforward
fighting. Why on earth should the Foreign Office want to see an obscure Major of the New Army and want to see him in doublequick time?

“I'm going up to town by the ten train,” I announced; “I'll be back in time for dinner.”

“Try my tailor,” said Sandy. “He's got a very nice taste in red tabs. You can use my name.”

An idea struck me. “You're pretty well all right now. If I wire for you, will you pack your own kit and mine and join me?”

“Right-o! I'll accept a job on your staff if they give you a corps. If so be as you come down tonight, be a good chap and bring a barrel of oysters from Sweeting's.”

I travelled up to London in a regular November drizzle, which cleared up about Wimbledon to watery sunshine. I never could stand London during the war. It seemed to have lost its bearings and broken out into all manner of badges and uniforms which did not fit in with my notion of it. One felt the war more in its streets than in the field, or rather one felt the confusion of war without feeling the purpose. I dare say it was all right; but since August 1914 I never spent a day in town without coming home depressed to my boots.

I took a taxi and drove straight to the Foreign Office. Sir Walter did not keep me waiting long. But when his secretary took me to his room I would not have recognised the man I had known eighteen months before.

His big frame seemed to have dropped flesh and there was a stoop in the square shoulders. His face had lost its rosiness and was red in patches, like that of a man who gets too little fresh air. His hair was much greyer and very thin about the temples, and there were lines of overwork below the eyes. But the eyes were the same as before, keen and kindly and shrewd, and there was no change in the firm set of the jaw.

“We must on no account be disturbed for the next hour,” he
told his secretary. When the young man had gone he went across to both doors and turned the keys in them.

“Well, Major Hannay,” he said, flinging himself into a chair beside the fire. “How do you like soldiering?”

“Right enough,” I said, “though this isn't just the kind of war I would have picked myself. It's a comfortless, bloody business. But we've got the measure of the old Boche now, and it's dogged as does it. I count on getting back to the Front in a week or two.”

“Will you get the battalion?” he asked. He seemed to have followed my doings pretty closely.

“I believe I've a good chance. I'm not in this show for honour and glory, though. I want to do the best I can, but I wish to Heaven it was over. All I think of is coming out of it with a whole skin.”

He laughed. “You do yourself an injustice. What about the forward observation post at the Lone Tree? You forgot about the whole skin then.”

I felt myself getting red. “That was all rot,” I said, “and I can't think who told you about it. I hated the job, but I had to do it to prevent my subalterns going to glory. They were a lot of fire-eating young lunatics. If I had sent one of them he'd have gone on his knees to Providence and asked for trouble.”

Sir Walter was still grinning.

“I'm not questioning your caution. You have the rudiments of it, or our friends of the Black Stone would have gathered you in at our last merry meeting. I would question it as little as your courage. What exercises my mind is whether it is best employed in the trenches.”

“Is the War Office dissatisfied with me?” I asked sharply.

“They are profoundly satisfied. They propose to give you command of your battalion. Presently, if you escape a stray bullet, you will no doubt be a Brigadier. It is a wonderful war for
youth and brains. But … I take it you are in this business to serve your country, Hannay?”