Graham Greene (28 page)

Again very many thanks for so interesting and acute an essay.

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

Greene discusses the plan that he should write a screenplay of
Brideshead Revisited
for the American producer David O. Selznick
.

5 St. James’s Street | London S. W. 1 | July 17 [1950]

Dear Evelyn,

I completely missed the announcement in
The Times
of the new son
¹²
and only heard about it at secondhand on Sunday. Very many congratulations.

Thank you so much for your card. I have in theory agreed to do the script of
Brideshead
, but it is with great trepidation. For one thing I am very anxious that it should not in any way damage our relationship, and as you know a script writer does not have complete control over a film! I would rather it had been any other man almost than Selznick behind this, because he is an extraordinarily stupid and conventionally-minded man. I told Stone
¹³
that I would not agree to work in California and I urged him to get a French director for the film, by suggesting the man who made Gide’s
Symphonie Pastorale
.
¹⁴
This director, whose name I have forgotten, is a believing Protestant and the Protestants in France have somewhat a similar position as a minority religion to the Catholics in this country. He struck me when I met him as an extremely perceptive man. I don’t suppose however that Selznick will pay any attention to
this suggestion. The trouble is that in order to get a good script one must work almost daily with a sympathetic director, and I can’t think of anyone in England who would have the faintest idea of what
Brideshead
is about. Anyway we might have a certain amount of fun if you would collaborate with me and I think it would be essential if one had to go to California to discuss this script with Selznick that we went together. One man is more easily talked round than two.

I expect I will see you at the D’Arcy
¹⁵
dinner for which I am sending my cheque today.
^x

Yours,
     Graham

^x
Do sit me far away from Jeannie
¹⁶
& near somebody I like!

The plan was abandoned, apparently because Waugh, who had initially been enthusiastic, felt that if he relinquished control of the script the studios would produce a horror
.

The Roman Catholic chaplain at Whittington Hospital in London wrote to Greene about
The Third Man
saying that there is no evidence that diluted penicillin is dangerous. He also queried the role of an army orderly in the plot. He asked, ‘Is the story – as it seems to me – just a leg-pull?’

28th July 1950

Dear Father Harrington,

Yes, I am the author of
The Third Man
. The penicillin story is not a leg-pull as it was a definite racket of which a description was given me by the Chief of Police in Vienna. The same kind of racket took place I believe in Berlin. The point of danger in using diluted penicillin is the fact that even if you injected somebody with plain water the chances would be that you would cause death, or so I am told by doctors. There is the other point that in cases of meningitis very quick treatment with penicillin is needed, and in the case of the children in Vienna the diluted penicillin was not strong enough to work and it was too late for any other remedy, but in the cases of children losing their minds I am told that this might have been caused by the polluted water. The reason why a medical orderly was shown as taking part in this racket was that at the period of the film penicillin was only allowed to Military hospitals. There was therefore a big temptation to steal on the part of orderlies for the private and civilian market. I feel sure that there are several medical inaccuracies in the story but the general idea is based on fact.

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

After the death of Denyse Clairouin, her associate Marie Schebeko, who later married Jean Biche, became Greene’s agent in Paris. With absolute command of many languages and expertise in all matters pertaining to publishing, she was a formidable figure. She became one of Greene’s closest friends and devoted an enormous effort to his business and to his personal concerns
.

5 St James’s Street | London S.W.1 | 27th October 1950

Dear Marie,

I got back two days ago from Stockholm where I spent the last week of the holiday. Strictly between you and me it was to nurse my
constituency! I am one of the three candidates this year for the Nobel Prize, but the other two are much more the favourites in the running. Don’t tell Laffont or it will get into the press. As it was Stockholm papers made cracks about my having arrived two months too early.
¹⁷

As a result of a letter from my younger brother who has gone to Malay to conduct political warfare I have decided to spend a couple of months with him. He assures me he can lay on anything from a jungle patrol to a Chinese dance girl!

[…]

5 St. James’s Street | London S.W. 1 | Oct. 26 [1950]

Dear Evelyn,

I only got back yesterday afternoon from three nice weeks in Italy & one rather wearing week in Stockholm & found your sumptuous present.
¹⁸
Thank you again & again. I’ve read the book with enormous interest in
The Month
but from all accounts the untruncated version is better still. I shall now have to buy a reading copy though because one can’t mark a limited edition & I never feel as though I own a book until I’ve done | for approval & VVVVVVVVV for disapproval. I’ve never got to the Victorian point of ? & !!

In Italy we saw Harold.
¹⁹
How nice & dear he is, & how I didn’t realise it at Oxford.

I’m planning to go to Malaya in December & January. I wish you’d come too. There are a lot of very proud Portuguese Eurasian Catholics in Malacca.

Affectionately,
     Graham

Left Hand, Right Hand (5
vols
, 1945
–50), the autobiography of Sir Osbert Sitwell
(1892
–1969), describes an eccentric father, a genially domineering butler, a feckless mother, and three siblings of genius, through decades of bizarre entanglements. Though now neglected, the series was regarded at the time as a masterpiece of English prose. Graham’s comments on books written by his acquaintances were usually drawn from the well of faint praise. Not in this case
.

5 St. James’s Street | London S.W. 1 | Friday, Oct. 27 [1950]

Dear Osbert Sitwell,

I’ve returned home to find – as I confess I’d hoped – the last volume of your autobiography. How one wishes one did not say last. Thank you so much for completing a set which I value more, I think, than any other book of my time – Proust is before my time! I am not going to read it yet, for in three weeks I depart to Malaya for awhile & I feel I should need your sense of style & values deeply there.

With so many regrets that the book is finished.

Yours,
     Graham Greene

5 St. James’s Street | London S.W. 1 | [before 16 November 1950]

Dear Evelyn,

I must write you a hasty line to say how much I like
Helena
. The truncated version in
The Month
didn’t do it justice. It’s a magnificent book. I think particularly fine & moving was Helena’s invocation to the three wise men. How it applies to people of our kind – ‘of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.’

With great admiration & affection.
     Graham

After Communist rebels in Malaya killed three planters in June 1948, the British declared a state of emergency and found themselves engaged in a jungle war, involving constant attacks by guerrillas on civilians. Hugh Greene went to the country to organise psychological warfare and invited Graham to come out as well. One of the highlights of his trip was a patrol with the Gurkhas. The visit to Malaya led to a major article in
Life (30
July 1951), later incorporated into
Ways of Escape.

[Kuala Lumpur | 22 December 1950]

[…]

Now for the Gurkhas. After a wild night which included shooting billiard balls at an opponent’s finger (3 hits a win!) ending with dinner at 1.15 a.m. Cheers,
²⁰
21 Gurkhas & myself set out. I’d never realized the heaviness of a pack before. They gave me a revolver instead of a rifle or I could never have stuck it. Our job was to make our way – on a compass bearing not a track, hacking our own trail – through a patch of jungle between two roads. 150 bandits were supposed to be in the area, & they had had an air strike at them. The going was awful. Heavy rubber soled anti-leech boots slipped all the time on the wet clay slopes. Elevations were sometimes this much
/
& the first day ended with 500 feet of climbing, hauling on to trees [?] which generally left thorns in one’s hands. At the end of the first day, as the crow flies, we had done 3 miles. I felt absolutely whacked. We started camping at 4 & the Gurkhas had to make a clearing with their kukris
²¹
for the wireless set & also hack down trees for shelter. My batman had forgotten my spare trousers, so I had to sleep in trousers already dripping with sweat & rain. They built for Cheers & myself a kind of double bed with four posts, logs laid across a mattress of poles, leaves & a mackintosh covering & a mackintosh shelter which kept out the torrential rain in the night perfectly. But we both suffered badly from cramp & got very little sleep.

Second Day
. The wireless failed to work & we were having an air drop by parachute of rations at 10. a.m. So after our early tea the Gurkhas had to make a clearing by simply knocking down a few 100 foot trees with their kukris. Then we sent up smoke bombs to mark our position & half an hour late the air drop was made: the parachutes dropping within 30 feet of a clearing no larger than a tennis court. Then we set out again – still going bang straight by compass, hill or no hill, path or no path. Our second camp was on the side of a hill & I felt much better – the day had produced a couple of abandoned bandit camps. And there was a running stream in which we could bathe: found a leech had been at work on my right bottom. Too tired to eat any supper & felt rather sick.

3rd Day
. This was awful. I felt completely uninterested in bandits – the only effort was to keep up & not delay the patrol. Felt very sick & destroyed the silence of our halting places by retching. We had to climb up & down a 1500 foot hill – again this sort of angle of wet slippery clay
/
. Of course when we came out of the jungle again all the excitement had been near the place where we entered the jungle – a concentration of 100 Communists having been engaged, wearing the Gurkha hats & identity marks, by 7 police.

[…]

as from Majestic Hotel, | Kuala Lumpur, | Dec. 25 [1950]

Dear Marie,

Forgive this very tardy wish for a happy Christmas. Life has been a bit tiring here what with Gurkhas dragging me round the jungle in full kit & planters dragging me from bar to bar. I haven’t seen a bandit yet, but one of my new friends here has already been killed. There’s a daily casualty list of civilians & police. Apart from this the country isn’t wildly interesting. Difficult to work though & all I’ve done is some drastic revising of the novel
²²
– it’s still not right, & I
know what’s wrong, but the book’s finished & I can’t bring myself to write new scenes.

I’m in Malacca at the moment with my brother. The only attractive (to me) part of the country because the only old part. Nature doesn’t really interest me – except in so far as it may contain an ambush – that is, something human.

[…]

The Residency, | Malacca. | Dec. 25 [1950]. | 8 a.m.

[…]

I filled up the time with Hugh to Midnight Mass at the City Park drinking whisky & watching the taxi girls dance around. I had forgotten till it was too late that Christmas Eve was Sunday & I didn’t go to Mass, but it was such complete inadvertence that I went to communion just the same. We went to an 18th century church in walking distance of the City Park which specialises in the Portuguese Eurasians. Such a crowd. It took half an hour to get through the communicants. Then we drove home in bright moonlight in two trishaws.

One sad thing. Did I tell you how I met on my last visit here a young Englishman who was crackers about Macao, dreamed of going back & living there (the earthly paradise), could talk of little else? We met in the City Park dance place & he had a Chinese girl with him who he fondly believed was a virgin – ‘see her home every night: can’t touch her.’ He had extraordinary clear wild blue eyes & loved the Chinese. When I came with Hugh to the dance hall I saw his girl – she was taxiing, & I was afraid of seeing him because I couldn’t remember his name for introductions. I described him to our companion. He said, ‘Oh, that was Jolly.’ Jolly I knew as the name of a young man who was shot a week ago. I had noticed his tiny absurd car & had said to Noel Ross,
²³
‘That would be good for an ambush,’ but they put five bullets in him very accurately in spite
of the tiny car. It was oddly sad being afraid of meeting him & seeing his ‘virginal’ Chinese girl taxiing & then finding he wasn’t here or back in Macao or anywhere at all.

Another queer encounter just before I came away. A man came up to me in the Cold Storage shop where I was buying drinks – a tall foxy faced rather heavy man, who introduced himself as Wheeler. Wheeler was at school with me & belonged to the bad period. We were in the junior school together & then in the same house. (He told me, though I’d forgotten it, that I used to do his Latin prep for him). The real misery of that time began when he was suborned onto the side of my great enemy, Carter (who he told me the other day was dead). I put Carter into
The Lawless Roads –
‘spreading terror from a distance.’ What a lot began with Wheeler & Carter – suspicion, mental pain, loneliness, this damned desire to be successful that comes from a sense of inferiority, & here he was back again, after thirty-five years, in a shop in Kuala Lumpur, rather flash, an ardent polo player. And instead of saying ‘What hell you made my life 30 years ago,’ one arranged to meet for drinks!