Graham Greene (43 page)

[Paris] | 11 October 1967

Dear Trevor,

Any news of Francis? Rumours reach me that he was shooed out of Laos. I hope he hasn’t got you into any trouble like I used to! Is it true that he’s in Hanoi? I hope all goes well with him.

Affectionately,
     Graham

Francis Greene had become a documentary maker and photo-journalist. His impulse to travel equalled his father’s, and in the summer of
1967
he set off for South-East Asia. In Laos he was, as he later wrote to his father, ‘nabbed’ for seeing too much of the Americans, ‘who of course aren’t there’. He was placed, naked, under ‘protective custody’ in a stockade in the Bolovens plateau where he contracted a specially virulent form of malaria. He believes he would have been shot but for the intervention of Trevor Wilson, then Cultural Attaché at the British Embassy in Vientiane, who had been tipped off by a midnight telephone call from an anonymous American radio operator
.

51 La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | Feb. 27 [1968]

Dearest Carol,

[…]

Francis I’ve been very anxious about, but say nothing to your mother, as she doesn’t read the papers. First he got a very bad dose of malaria in Laos & when he was over that went on to Saigon & has been around there ever since. For about ten days he was cut off in the Delta & no one knew where he was – I could hardly sleep at night & had telegrams flying everywhere. At last he reappeared, but I do hope he leaves those parts soon.

[…]

Like his father, Francis did not wish to be protected. After the episode of the telegrams, which Graham sent to any English-speaking person who might have information about his son, Francis told him to ‘call off the hounds’
.

A professor of English Studies at Moscow University, Ivasheva was one of Graham’s close friends in the Soviet Union. She wanted to interview him for a profile she was writing. As a protest against the trials of Sinyavsky and Daniel he was refusing to visit the Soviet Union
.

19 March 1968

My dear Valentina,

I am sorry about all this. A book usually is worse in translation than in the original and to me Sinyavsky’s books have great quality and are not in any way an attack on the Soviet Union. I was glad to see that my old friend Kim Philby in an interview agreed that the trial had been a mistake! We Catholics have had a great experience of literary censorship. The argument for the inquisition was that
there was only one true religion and it was the duty of every man to defend it. I can’t help feeling that your censorship is rather like our censorship two hundred years ago. Now we realize there is no absolute truth and that people must be allowed to express their criticisms and opinions. The danger is suppression and not liberty of expression in the long run.

I agree, of course, that the Sinyavsky case is a very small thing compared with what the Americans are doing in Vietnam, but I think it is one’s friendship for the Soviet Union that makes one criticize anything which seems to go against the constitution. As you know I am organizing a big protest by members of the American Academy of Letters against the Vietnam war,
¹
and I would feel that I had less right to speak up on this point if I didn’t speak up on the smaller case of Sinyavsky. There is a meeting of protest in London at the end of next week at which I intend to be present. No doubt this will offend some of my friends in the Soviet Union, but it does not mean that I have ceased to be on your side if the world has to choose between America and Russia. But I want my side free from any easy criticisms.

I am sure that I shall be coming and staying in your flat before long when we can treat this whole matter as a thing of the past.

Affectionately,
     Graham

P.S. If only you would send me material on the case I would be happy. I have pre-judged nothing – except as my opinion S. is a very good writer.

Gran Hotel del Paraguay | Asunción | Aug. 7 [1968]

Dear Marie,

I was delayed a fortnight in B. A. because the boats were full, & so I only got here on August 5 after five days on the river – an
eccentric voyage. Does anyone want 2,000,000 plastic drinking straws because I know where to get them at a rock bottom price?!
²
B.A. was a rather terrible experience – an author from Europe is treated like Elizabeth Taylor – I have an impression of clutching hands & hungry women of a certain age.

This is a dream town for anyone who has lost ambition – old colonial houses & the constant smell of orange blossom, syringa, camellias [?]. A lovely old hotel with jacaranda trees in blossom & five (good) courses at every meal. Not at all luxury.

After a first scurry of journalists on the boat when I arrived all is very peaceful after B. A. – exactly the place I wanted for ‘my aunt’. The President has sent a message that he is ‘gratified’ that I have come in time for his third inauguration & expressing his desire to help me in any way! So I hope to get a lot of free travel at the expense of the air force.

[…]

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | Oct. 25 [1968]

Dear Bron,

Without any personal experience of Biafra I feel quite unable to compose with any savagery a letter attacking these faceless politicians whom the people of England have elected to save their pockets & not their honour. But I will willingly sign any letter that you compose.
³

Affectionately,
     Graham

I shall be at the Ritz to see a doctor from the 27th to the 31st (probably) if you had time for a drink. Your editor has failed to publish a letter of mine in reply to a faceless reviewer who said I had a ‘repugnant mien.’!
⁴

In 1968, the novelist Josef Skvorecky (b
. 1924)
left Czechoslovakia, fearing for his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, whose father, a bookseller, had already fled, and whose brother had been arrested. After the invasion of August 20 –21, the couple returned, but left again by January. They settled in Canada, where Skvorecky became a professor of English in the University of Toronto and he and Salivarova established Sixty-Eight Publishers for works in the Czech language
.

28 October 1968

Dear Mr. Skvorecky,

Thank you very much for your letter of October 19. I think it is very courageous of you to have made the decision to return and if at any time I can be of any help please let me know if it is possible. I suggest that if serious trouble occurs your wife should write to me asking permission to translate
The Man Within
. On receipt of such a letter I would try to get some agitation going.

I would very much like to come to Prague and to stay with you if this didn’t increase your danger. I was one of the signatories of a protest made on the Russian service of the B.B.C. against the occupation. This too might prevent me getting a visa. What I would have most liked would have been to accompany you to Prague so that I would have been present at your reception, but again this might in fact only add to your risk.

If Faber and Faber turn down
Emöke
and
Bass Saxophone
would
you let me try to arrange publication with my own publishers The Bodley Head?
⁵

With my very best wishes,
     Graham Greene

51 La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes.| 10 March 1969

Dearest Gillian,

Forgive a dictated letter. I was so glad to get a long one from you. I came back from Prague pretty tired as in the course of a week I had covered Prague and Bratislava and plunged myself into protests via television, radio, interviews, conferences etc. Unfortunately when I left, I left my passport behind in Bratislava! I think I’m the first person to have been able to leave Prague airport since 1948 without a passport!
⁶

I had three nights at Le Mas des Serres with Yvonne before collapsing into bed in Antibes. Now I’m feeling much better and I hope that the next analysis will show the bug has vanished. I had a very unpleasant radio of my kidneys but all was well. Poor Yvonne has had much the worse time. Whilst I was away the mother of her maid was dying slowly of cancer in hospital and she had to visit her every day and then I was no sooner out of my fever when her father went down with another heart attack in the hospital and she had to visit him every day. She’s really tired out and we are trying to escape for two nights to St. Paul de Vence on Wednesday.

In Prague I had an interesting time seeing Smrkovsky
⁷
among others who impressed me enormously.

Alas, there’s no chance of my being in London on April 23. Yvonne returns from her fortnight in Africa on the 13th and I don’t want to go and leave her so quickly after her return.

Yes I knew Michael Meyer had written a play – in fact it’s been published and he sent it to me.
⁸
I can’t say I was very enthusiastic. Over
Rosemary’s Baby
⁹
I disagree with you and agree with John. I found it repulsive and frightening but excellent.

Lots of love,
     Graham

The novelist Anatoly Kuznetsov
(1929
–79), author of
Babi Yar
, had fled the Soviet Union and sought asylum in England on
30
July 1968. He was later murdered in London, probably on KGB orders. Greene wrote to
The Times
on
6
August asking his fellow novelists to refuse permission for their works to be published in the Soviet Union ‘so long as work by Solzhenitsyn is suppressed and Daniel and Sinyavsky remain in their prison camps’. The secret police soon claimed to have found letters from Greene and others in Kuznetsov’s apartment, a claim Greene denied in a letter of
15
August.
¹⁰

16th August 1969

Dear Skvorecky,

Thank you very much for your long and most interesting letter on the subject of Ginsberg’s visit.
¹¹
I feel a little guilty as you could
almost have written a short story in this space of time. And my letters are always so brief and dull. I am asking my secretary Miss Reid to enclose if she can two letters I have written to
The Times
about Kuznetsov’s defection. I am afraid my honeymoon with the Russians is over! The raid on Kuznetsov’s apartment in Tula and the announcement that a lot of letters from me had been discovered there – of course I didn’t know Kuznetsov and have never once written to him – looks like a reply to my protest. If so it’s a satisfactory one as they seem to have taken it a bit to heart. Forgive this very hurried note, but I am off for a fortnight to Finland – another frontier place!

Yours ever,
     Graham Greene

An earlier letter (pp
. 61
–2) tells how Greene and Peter Leslie, a British diplomat on his way to Estonia, struck up a friendship when they discovered they were both devotees of Henry James. Thirty-five years later Leslie wrote to offer Greene his collection of first editions of James.
¹²

3 September 1969

My dear Leslie,

How very nice to hear from you after all these years. I always remember the moment in the plane between Riga and Tallinn when we saw that we were reading a volume of Henry James in the same pocket Macmillan edition. Alas you were never able to find for me that brothel in Tallinn recommended by Moura Budberg which had been in the same family for 500 years.
¹³

It is very kind indeed of you to offer me those first editions. I have a number of James’s firsts – including
In the Cage
, but not the ones
you mention and I can assure you that they will have a good home. I am living in France now but I wonder if you wouldn’t mind sending them to my secretary, Miss Reid, at 9 Bow Street, London, W.C.2., as I move around so much. I wonder whether there is any chance of your looking in on me in Paris one day? I am astonished to hear that you are eighty-six. I am just reaching sixty-five and I never realised there were so many years between us.

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

P.S. As a poor return for the Henry Jameses I am asking my secretary to send you the volume of
Collected Essays
which came out the other day.

Since a disagreement over payments from the Literary Guild in February 1966, Greene had grown sceptical of his American publisher, the Viking Press. When it was suggested that he change the title of
Travels with My Aunt
to something more saleable, he sent the following cable to his American agent in September 1969 :

In August 1970, Graham left Viking for Simon & Schuster, where Michael Korda, the nephew of Alex Korda, became his new editor
.
¹⁴

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | Nov. 22 [1969]

Dearest Carol,

Just a line to tell you that Herbert has died. It was, of course, a release for him & Audrey from that ghastly Parkinson’s disease, but one feels sad for him all the same. He didn’t have much luck in his life – except Audrey.

Love,
     Daddy
      X X X

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 25 November, 1969

My dear Auberon,

Thank you for your amusing review in
The Spectator
, but I must protest against your statement that the CIA had employed a man full-time for twenty years to track down a stolen Old Master. As far as I can make out from reading the book he had been employed on this job for less than a year. You were quite right to guess the dénouement on page 16 – that was the page where I intended the reader to guess. I wonder where you got that idea about the CIA man.
¹⁵