Graham Greene (30 page)

The Korda trip has begun & then I go to Indo-China to do an article for
Life
. Hanoi about Oct. 21.

Love,
     Graham

M. Y. Elsewhere
³⁶
| Oct. 11 [1951]. nearly Athens.

Dear Elisabeth,

I was so disappointed not to get to Istanbul & do tell Rodney how sorry I am for all the trouble I must have given him with my cables. We got as far as Skiathos, an island in the Sporades, & there northeast gales stopped us for three days – there was no sign of a change (one Greek ship was lost off Lemnos), so we had to break south again. I’d have so loved seeing you all – & the ship’s company might have amused you – Korda, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh & Margot Fonteyn. I’ve lost my heart to the last, though she’s only sporadically pretty, but she likes cheap cafés & retsina wine & is a companion spirit. ‘Larry’ I like very much, & Vivien – who was terribly actressy for the first three days – is now great fun. We play endless canasta & eat enormous meals & drink a lot.

[…]

c/o British Consulate, | Hanoi, | Indo-China, | Nov. 16 [1951]

Dear Francis,

I wonder how you are & how things are going. I’d love to get a letter in this hot & rather dull town.

I haven’t had a very interesting time so far. The most amusing has been 24 hours with a bombing squadron. I went on two missions. The first was to bomb & machine gun round a town which the Communists had captured. My aircraft went alone. Tiny little cockpit, just room for the pilot (who was also gunner & bomber), the navigator & me – an hour’s flight each way & then three quarters of an hour over the objective. We did 14 dives. It was most uncomfortable, coming rapidly & steeply down from 9000 to 3000 feet. You were pressed forward in your seat & then as you zoomed up again your stomach was pressed in. I began to get used to it after about four dives.

Coming back we went down to about 200 feet & shot up a sampan on the Red River.

Next day I went in a formation of three aircraft & we tried to cut a road – I don’t think we managed it. This was quite comfortable horizontal bombing at 5000 feet. The leader made two circuits, dropping our trial bomb each time. Then we closed up nearly wing to wing, & sent down three sticks of bombs. It was interesting to watch them drift diagonally below one.

My next trip I want to see the naval boats at work among the islands.

It’s very very hot & difficult to write letters, so would you let Mummy see this one if you think she’d be interested in bombing!

Lots of love,

Daddy.

Greene returned to these scenes in
The Quiet American (142),
adding details he spared his son: ‘Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected ricefields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon
gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks; we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home. I thought again as I had thought when I saw the dead child at Phat Diem, “I hate war.” There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey – we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.’
³⁷

[near Macau] |Christmas Day [1951], 10.10 a.m.

[…]

There is so much to tell you. I thought I was going to disappear for four weeks with a Foreign Legion officer, but it didn’t come off. However I got where no newspaper man was allowed, into surrounded Phat-Diem – the rebels all round within 600 yards, flames, far too many corpses for my taste, & constant mortar fire. One slept in one’s clothes in a half wrecked mess with a revolver on the pillow. The bodies, especially those of a poor woman & her small boy who had got in the way of war, drove me to confession. So I went to the Cathedral where the whole town had taken refuge & found my friend, the Belgian priest, quietly reading his breviary at the top of the bell tower. But the French quite absurdly believed him to be a Viet Minh spy, so my friendship with him made me suspect again, & they edged me out. Also I’d gate crashed into a small operation with the parachutists, (on land!) & they weren’t happy about that.

[…]

Greene wrote in
The Quiet American (45
): ‘Twenty yards beyond the farm buildings, in a narrow ditch, we came on what we sought: a woman and a small boy. They were very clearly dead: a small neat clot of blood on the woman’s forehead, and the child might have been sleeping. He was about six years old and he lay like an embryo in the womb with his little bony knees drawn up
. “Mal chance,”
the lieutenant said.’

5 St. James’s Street | London S.W. 1 | Wed. [n.d.]

Dear Francis,

I wish I had seen more of you the other day – I was too busy with ‘affairs of no earthly importance’ & now it looks as if I shall see nothing of you this holidays. Remember to send me your blue card for next term, & let’s see also – if you feel like it – whether we can plan a small trip together somewhere queer or interesting on the Continent in the summer holidays. I mean two males together! Have you any views?

In any case a lot of love,

G.

The playwright Denis Cannan (b
. 1919)
collaborated with Pierre Bost
(1901
–75) on the dramatic version of The
Power and the Glory
. Greene revised the script before it was staged at the Phoenix in London in
1956
with Paul Scofield (b
. 1922)
in the lead, directed by Peter Brook (b
. 1925).

24th April 1952

Dear Denis,

I have now got as far as the last scene in your new draft and have made very few corrections indeed. About the last scene, however, I feel extremely doubtful. The trouble is that this scene should really contain the whole dialectic of the play and should be some kind of a debate between the Lieutenant and the Priest with the two points of view clearly but not bluntly expressed. In the book one used the device of the two men first being held up by rain before going back to the city, and afterwards of the night’s lodging on the way to the city. This was a reasonable setting for what is really a dialogue between two mystics. What I feel about your draft is that the dialectic has become a little too plain [?] and explanatory, and
therefore not very dramatic, while at the same time most of the space is given to dramatic incident. The drama of this last scene surely from the moment of the Lieutenant’s arrival must be only the drama of dialectic. I would very much like if it is possible for us to meet and discuss this in detail with the book as well as the play in front of us.

You may have been puzzled by some of my small changes in the dialogue in the scenes I gave back to you. In several cases I went back to the dialogue of the book because I felt that in order to make the meaning clear to the audience you had sometimes lost the dramatic mystical flash. A religious idea is often a paradoxical one and I don’t feel that one wants to smooth out the paradox too much. I remember an awful Jesuit once giving a long sermon in Farm Street to explain away the statement about there being more rejoicing in heaven over two sinners being penitent than over ninety-nine just men. By the time the priest had finished he had reduced the paradox to a very reasonable statement by the headmaster of a public school. I don’t of course mean that in any place you went as far as this!

Yours,
     Graham

In July
1952
the politician, diplomat and author Duff Cooper
(1890
–1954) was created 1st Viscount Norwich. His wife was the memoirist and socialite Lady Diana Cooper (née Manners) (1892–1986). She did not use the title Viscountess Norwich since she thought it rhymed with porridge. After his retirement as Ambassador to France in 1947, they lived in Chantilly (ODNB). Graham and Lady Diana Cooper were both close friends of Evelyn Waugh
.

5 St. James’s Street | London S.W. 1 | June 6 [1952]

My dear Diana,

First a thousand congratulations to both of you. Seldom does one feel so wholeheartedly pleased. So many of my generation have been
Duff fans ever since his magnificent Munich resignation.
³⁸
What a lot of plaudits there will be too from the dead as well as from the living.

I got back from Italy yesterday & found your card. Well, it is true in a way, but really the villa is in Anacapri &, for foreign consumption, it is owned by the Societa Anacapri! I would have liked to let it – except to you & Duff to whom I’d love to lend it any time. It’s very quiet & simple with one maid who cooks rather inadequately, shops & launders – perhaps adequately. There are 2 little houses in a small but pretty garden under the slope of Monte Solario. One house has one double bedded room, one single bedded room & bathroom. The other has one double bedded room, one single, living room, dining room, bathroom & kitchen. It will be empty from now until nearly the end of July.

Catherine will want me to send her love. We hope to be in Paris for a couple of days at the end of July with her sister, to coincide with Harold Acton whom we all love dearly. Can we come & see you if you are at Chantilly?

Devotedly,
     Graham

5 St. James’s Street | London S.W. 1 | 17th June 1952

Dear Herbert,

I am sending a lot of pants and vests etc. which I weeded out in going through my drawers. I don’t suppose any of it fits you but I am sending it on the chance. The queer stains on some are due to a broken bottle of Chinese wine!

Love
     Graham

At the suggestion of Robert McClintock, an American diplomat in Brussels, Graham attempted to execute a piece of mischief against the American government. He revealed in a
Time
magazine cover-story
(29
October 1951) that he had been a member of the Communist Party for six weeks while a student at Oxford. This put him, as a religious and literary celebrity, on the wrong side of the McCarran Act, which attempted to keep Communists and other subversives out of the United States. In early
1952
he was denied the usual twelve-month visa and given instead a three-month one. In the United States he spoke to various newspapers about the danger of McCarthyism. By September he was planning a return visit and new provocations.
³⁹

12th September 1952

Dear Mary,

Partly for the fun of baiting your authorities and partly because I think it would be useful from the point of view of the play, I wish to apply for a six-month’s visa for the U.S.A. with the ostensible object of visiting you sometime between January and April 1953. The authorities demand evidence that necessary funds for my maintenance are available while I am in the United States. This should take the form of a bank letter. Is it possible for you to procure a bank letter which would guarantee that I was supported whilst there? Naturally I can when the time approaches obtain the necessary travellers’ cheques from the Bank of England, but I want if possible to put the American authorities in the position of either granting me or refusing me a visa before the Elections in November so that I can stir up a little trouble if necessary! I cannot ask the Bank of England for the funds until the actual date of my journey is known and therefore I think your bank letter would be necessary to apply now. I do think from the point of view of the future it is necessary to clarify the situation with the U.S. authorities, and I hope you will help me. If it is
possible for you to arrange some bank letter by return of post I should be grateful.

Affectionately,
     Graham

Shortly after this letter he wrote a public protest against the treatment of Charlie Chaplin, who had lived for forty years in the United States. The Attorney General ordered that Chaplin be detained when he tried to re-enter the United States because of speeches he had given in support of Russia when it was invaded by Germany. Doubtless as a result of the publicity, Graham was himself granted a visa for only eight weeks
.
⁴⁰

Villa Rosaio, | Anacapri, | October 2 [1952]

Dear Evelyn,

I’ve just finished
Men At Arms
, which I took with me to read in the relative peace of this place. I do congratulate you. You’re completely crazy when you think it not up to the mark – I think it may well be the beginning of your best book. Apthorpe outplays Crouchback in this part, but C. is such a good starter that one looks forward impatiently to the horses coming round again. As for style you’ve never, except in isolated passages written better, or, I believe, as well. This all sounds pompous & dogmatic, when all I want to say is thank you for a book I admire & love – & I’m no indiscriminate fan. There are two books of yours I don’t like!

It rains most of the time & Catherine is ill with bronchitis & I am 48 today – & I don’t like any of these inescapable facts. But I love
Men at Arms
.

Affectionately,
     Graham

7 November 1952

A thousand congratulations. The Nobel jury have honoured themselves.
⁴¹
     Graham Greene

The director George More O’Ferrall
(1907–82) faced difficulty bringing the film of The Heart of the Matter
to a close since a suicide by Scobie, played by Trevor Howard
(1913–88), would not pass the censors. The script they came up with had Scobie in a parked car ready to shoot himself, when he sees a boy being beaten; he intervenes, only to be shot. His last words are, ‘Going on trek. Tell Missus, God made it all right for her.’ Graham felt this missed the point of the book.
⁴²