Graham Greene (40 page)

Just finished
The Journal of Thomas Moore
(the poet). Fascinating. Do read it. Batsford paper back. 12/6. In the plane I read Galbraith’s
The Liberal Hour –
he’s my favourite American writer, but at least he was born in Canada. The essay on Henry Ford enthralling. In Penguin. I hear the dog barking up the road.

[…]

In his autobiography
A Little Learning (1964)
Waugh recalled how as a schoolboy he visited the house of W. W. Jacobs
(1863
–1943), author of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, in Berkhamsted. Waugh became close friends with Jacobs’s daughter Barbara, who was engaged to his brother Alec. Her elder brother was a student at Berkhamsted School, but none of these early connections led to a meeting with Greene. At Oxford, the two were acquainted but not close, as they would later become, since Greene seemed to look down on his group as ‘childish and ostentatious’
(200
). He noted with apparent amusement, that whenever Greene wished to portray an unpleasant character with a pathetic attachment to a minor public school, he made it Waugh’s own school, Lancing
(120).

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 10 September 1964

My dear Evelyn,

I was delighted to receive the autobiography which I have been anxiously awaiting. As always I have nothing but admiration for the style and content, though may I make two little personal corrections?

I never knew Jacobs’s son at Berkhamsted as I was a boarder and he was a day-boy and as in so many schools a great gulf divided the two. Probably it was the same at Lancing! Or were you so buried in the depths of the country that you didn’t have any day-boys? I think I began to use Lancing as my symbol of a minor public school after being given the life of one of the headmasters to review in very early days.
⁴
There seemed to be so much in common between Lancing and Berkhamsted that I thought I could safely depend on transferring impressions from one school to another!

I was not suffering from any adult superiority at Oxford to explain our paths not crossing, but I belonged to a rather rigorously Balliol group of perhaps boisterous heterosexuals, while your path temporarily took you into the other camp. Also for a considerable period of my time at Oxford I lived in a general haze of drink. I’ve never drunk so much in my life since! There was also in the last two years a would-be Oxford
Horizon
called the
Oxford Outlook
to keep me occupied. Harold used to contribute to this and Eddy Sackville-West and Edith Sitwell. Alas I had no chance of printing anything from you.

I’ve just been going through a horrible experience with a play which has determined me never again to write for the stage. In a few days the worst will be over and I depart to the peace of France.

Affectionately,
     Graham

Greene’s play
Carving a Statue
, directed by Peter Wood, had its first performances in Brighton, then opened at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on
17
September 1964. It closed after a month and Graham believed that the biggest problem with the play was Ralph Richardson’s humourless interpretation of the lead role as a man in search of God
.

14 September 1964

My dear Ralph,

I feel that in the last weeks I have been very patient, but my patience is now exhausted. Only once have I had an experience comparable to the last fortnight at Brighton, and on that occasion the leading actor had at least the excuse of drink.

You have been sacrificing the whole cast in order to build up – with a minimum of effort – your own idea of your own image. Peter Wood and I have done our best to enlighten you about your part, but you have consistently turned a deaf ear, though it seems reasonable to suppose that the author and the director understand a good deal more than you do about the play. Alas, you fancy yourself as a literary man, and I have as little faith in your literary ability as in your capacity to judge a play. I have found you – not for the first time – incapable of understanding even your own part. Last Friday in your dressing-room after a performance in which you had not shown the elementary courtesy of knowing or playing my lines, we agreed on a text together in the presence of Peter Wood and Binkie.
⁵
I now hear you have changed the dialogue agreed and introduced lines snatched out of context for your exit at the end of the first act, thus killing the curtain for your young and less experienced colleague. I am sure this should be attributed to stupidity and not to jealousy, but since you waited to break our agreement till I had left for France I cannot acquit you of cowardice.

The time has come to call an end to the selfishness, the laziness and
the obstinacy which has impeded nearly every rehearsal. In France there is a law which protects the author’s rights. In England the author must defend himself, and I assure you that if you do not from now on speak the lines which I have written, I will see that the gist of this letter has a wide circulation – and I don’t exclude the press. The vanity of an ageing ‘star’ can do far more damage to the living theatre than any censorship exercised by the Lord Chamberlain.

Yours sincerely,
     Graham

Greene and Richardson quickly patched up their personal differences, but reviewers were appalled by the play. Greene continued to believe that the failure was due to Richardson’s handling of his part. Reprintings contain his ‘Epitaph for a Play’, insisting that the work is farcical, not symbolic
.

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. [19 September 1964]

Dear Max,

A lunch yesterday with my friend, the Indian novelist R. K. Narayan plus this morning the appearance of one of his books
The Dark Room
published by Macmillan in 1938 in a Rare Book catalogue at the price of three guineas, has determined me to bring up his case to you.

He is at present under contract to Heinemann who published his last novel, which is still in print having sold between four and five thousand copies,
The Man-Eater of Malgudi
. They are also bringing out a book of his on Indian mythology, which hasn’t the same interest as his novels, at the beginning of next year. He’s about half way through a new novel, which he described to me and which sounds up to his best form, and this is contracted to Heinemann. Then his contract lapses.

I brought him to Heinemann myself when Frere was in charge and introduced him to Frere who has a high opinion of his work. He has become in his own way a minor classic already in England since Hamish Hamilton published his first book right back in the depression
years. From Hamish Hamilton he went to Nelson and I wrote an introduction to his second novel
The Bachelor of Arts
. When I went to Eyre & Spottiswoode I took back the rights in his old books and reprinted them, except for this one published by Macmillan that I’ve just mentioned. I also published several new books including a very fine collection of short stories, humorous and sad, called
An Astrologer’s Day
. All the books did reasonably well, but in those days there was a paper shortage and I saw to it that he had a proper allotment.

When I left Eyre & Spottiswoode, like all my favourite authors except Mauriac, he was cancelled out by Douglas Jerrold and then went to Methuen who had an extremely good press for
The Guide
(which has been filmed) but did very little with him, so that I was glad to transfer him under Frere’s banner. David Higham has done nothing whatever about paperback rights and here I feel a great deal could be done by persuading one of the paperback firms to produce three of his best novels simultaneously. A great range of quotation could be used on the jackets from E.M. Forster to myself!

[…]

Having weighed the matter ‘seventy times seven’ times, Biche suggested to Graham that he was now neglecting Catherine Walston, who was depressed after two surgeries and heavy medication to deal with a broken hip. From
1964
Graham spent more and more time in France with Yvonne Cloetta, who, despite being married, provided him through the last thirty-two years of his life with the happiness and stability he had not found in earlier relationships
.

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | Dec. 5 1964

My dear Marie,

Thank you for your letter, but you don’t really understand the character of either Catherine or myself. Since I arrived here a week ago I have written two (for me long) letters to C. & had intended to write a third today – but I choose to write to you instead & there are limits to what the old hand can write when one’s trying to average more than
600 words a day of work. I can assure you there is no one (apart from dictated letters – I never dictate a letter to C.) to whom I write so much or so often as to Catherine. Far more than to Yvonne even during the summers of separation. It’s not a duty, but I love Catherine dearly.

You must realise that what she says depends very much on her mood. One might have written six times in a month, but if at the moment she felt low she would say that she seldom got a letter. ‘Buying books in Brighton’ – I suppose we’ve done that once in 15 years – I know it’s a symbol, & I try to arrange other symbolic things. I hoped that we could spend 2 weeks in Anacapri this last summer, but I realised how impossible it was when one thought of the bus rides, the jostling crowds in the piazza – she would have been a prisoner in Anacapri. Before I knew that she would have to have another operation, I was planning that this February we should both take a holiday in Vienna with the Dottoressa, but now … It’s not poor Catherine’s fault that rendezvous after rendezvous has had to be cancelled during the last 18 months – but nor is it mine – if anybody’s it’s the fault of a Dublin surgeon!

There is a geographical difficulty which Catherine does not easily admit. I have never been able to work in London since 1940 & I’ve confined my work to all intents to the two months’ holiday we had together during a year. Now I spend I suppose 7 months of the year in France working – instead of 1 in Italy & 1 in the West Indies – but it means that the opportunity of seeing each other is reduced. I doubt if I could have continued to earn a living by working 2 months a year – & a few weeks at Brighton as an extra, & for that reason I planned a flat in France long before I knew Yvonne…. If Yvonne had never existed, I would have had to face a situation where less London, less Cambridge was essential if things were not going to go to pieces. I would love to retire & dangle around [?] & write more letters & less work – but the fact is I’m working harder now than during the last 16 years. This C. does not realise.

Love,

G.

I’ll write the third letter in 10 days tomorrow when the shock of yours has worn off.

One of the most important figures in Graham’s later life, the journalist, biographer and historian Bernard Diederich
⁶
was born in New Zealand in 1926. He left school at sixteen and joined the crew of the four-masted barque the
Pamir
, the last of the great square-riggers, and finished the war in a modern ship of the United States merchant marine. He settled in Haiti from 1949, operating an English-language newspaper, the
Haiti Sun
. He was the resident correspondent for the
New York Times
and other international news organisations during the early years of François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s dictatorship, reporting on killings, repression and corruption. In
1963
the regime determined to silence him; he was arrested by the Tonton Macoutes, imprisoned and finally exiled
.

Diederich, whose memoir of Greene is eagerly anticipated, first met him when he visited Haiti in
1954
and got to know him better when he returned with Catherine Walston in 1956. After Greene’s trip to Haiti in 1963, Diederich met him at the airport in Santo Domingo and acted as his guide in the Dominican Republic. In early January 1965, Diederich took him on a tour of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, which became the setting for the climactic scene in
The Comedians (1966).

C.6 Albany, | London, W. 1 | 19 January 1965

Dear Bernard,

Thank you so much for sending me those publications. I have been meaning to write again and again to say how much I enjoyed our time together and how grateful I am to you [for] giving up two days to the trip. I always suspected that that tyre was no good. I tried to point out a hole in it to our friend the priest but he didn’t seem to think it mattered!
⁷

I had already sent off a copy of the play to you when I got your letter. I hope you won’t find it as boring as the critics did. All good wishes to both of you.

Affectionately,
     Graham

In January 1965, John Sutro, deep in debt, tried to kill himself. His doctor set up a consultation with a psychiatrist for two weeks later, by which time there was a reasonable chance he would be dead. Gillian sent Graham an ‘SOS’. With Raymond’s help, he arranged John’s admission to Holloway Sanatorium
.

C.6 Albany, | London, W. 1. | Feb. 5 [1965]

Dear John,

Thank you so much for your letter. It gave me great pleasure to think that you were well enough to write it & I hope you are safely home by the time you get this.

For goodness sake stop flagellating yourself. We all make mistakes, we all make people we love suffer in one way or another – c’est la vie, & luckily people don’t love us for our virtues or we’d be in a bad way. Only the saints are allowed to beat their chests & accuse themselves! So do forgive yourself because then we can all be at ease again & laugh again over a shepherd’s pie.

[…]

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 4 March 1965

Dear Evelyn,

Rumours reach me from many sides that you are not well. I do hope these are false, but your friends are anxious to know. I hope
that it’s nothing worse than flu, forgetfulness and gout which are my own particular minor afflictions.