Sunrise with Seamonsters (50 page)

His greatest passion was language. In "Listen to the Mockingbird" he wrote, "As recently as 1918, it was possible for a housewife in Providence, where I grew up, to march into a store with a five cent piece, purchase a firkin of cocoa butter, a good second-hand copy of Bowditch, a hundredweight of quahogs, a shagreen spectacle case and sufficient nainsook for a corset cover and emerge with enough left over to buy a balcony admission to 'The Masquerader' with Guy Bates Post, and a box of maxixe cherries." He was parodying inflation, but it is impossible to read "cocoa butter," "Bowditch," "quahogs," "shagreen," "nainsook," and the rest without a sense of mounting hilarity. He worked hard for a kind of insane exactitude in his prose and would not settle for "sad" if he could use "chopfallen." I think his travels were bound up for his quest to find odd words or possible puns. They were more than mere souvenirs of travel: they were the object of his arduous jaunts. The uniqueness of his writing depends for its effects on linguistic virtuosity, finding room for "oppidan" or the verb "swan" or the weirder lingo he abstracted in India and Africa. E. B. White once wrote about how Perelman, after crashing his car in Florida, savored the phrase, "We totalled it!" and his pleasure in being able to use it took the sting out of the accident.

His interests and his travels swelled his vocabulary and gave him his style. But none of this would have been accessible without his memory, which was faultless. That too is a distinguishing feature in his fiction. A good memory is one of the most valuable assets a writer has, and Perelman's memory amounted to genius. One day, years ago, he was passing through Shropshire, and a glimpse of that green countryside stayed with him. He plotted to return to Shropshire and rent a house and live there like a squire; but, though he visited England often, he always became restive. Apart from the precincts of
Punch,
where he was feted, he found England tight and dry and a little dull. And the house rents in Shropshire were too high. He was too much of an Anglophile to like England greatly.

He died on October 17, 1979, in New York City, where he was born.

"I hadn't even realized that she was making notes," Graham Greene wrote in his 1978 Introduction to
Journey Without Maps,
"I was so busy on my own." And the reader looks in vain for a portrait of Barbara Greene in that book. She is named once, and mentioned ("My cousin ...") eleven times in three hundred pages. She is not important to his narrative; she hardly exists. Once, on the way to Bamakama, the cousins are separated. In Graham Greene's telling this is an incidental anxiety in a couple of paragraphs; in Barbara's it is six pages, something approaching adventure, before—in what is a sheer coincidence—the cousins bump into each other in the thick bush. We never see Barbara Greene's face in
Journey Without Maps,
we never hear her voice. This was deliberate. Graham Greene wanted to avoid "the triviality of a personal travel diary" by making it profoundly personal, filling it with "memories, dreams, word-associations", and so allowing it to become metaphorical and akin to fiction. "We share our dreams," he wrote, and it is true that our most powerful dreams are of wild places; the land of dreams—or nightmares—is pretty much unmapped.

It was for both a brave trip. They were young enough not to be intimidated by the risk they were taking. Graham was thirty-one, Barbara was twenty-three. The year was 1935, but the most detailed book on Liberia—Sir Harry Johnston's—had appeared thirty years earlier. The map of Liberia was blank—some rivers indicated, a few coastal towns, and the interior marked
Cannibals.
What was the appeal, then, of an exhausting journey along jungle tracks? Graham listed the attractions in his own book: it was a black republic, pledged to liberty and progress, which was brutal, disease-ridden and almost unknown to Europe; it was dark; it was the past. The lingo of Liberian politics was grandiose, but the political facts were of massacres and plagues. There was something seedy about the place: "seediness has a very deep appeal ... It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back."

Graham went because of the risks and discomforts. He was not seeking self-destruction—that would have been pure folly—but self-discovery. In
the 'thirties, English writers "were inclined to make uncomfortable journeys in search of bizarre material," but Graham rejected Brazil, Europe, the mapped parts of Africa, and he turned his back on an Intourist ticket into "a plausible future." He wrote, "My journey represented a distrust of any future based on what we are." But it would be wrong to see his motives as especially high-minded and inspired by the possibility of allegory. He clearly liked the idea of utter awfulness, or perhaps getting lost, of being out of touch (at a time when so many writers wanted to be in touch). He was physically strong and had a growing reputation; he was confident; throughout the early parts of
Journey Without Maps
one senses that the author is seeking adventure, and to hell with the comforts of literary London.

So far, so good. But he did not go alone.

Barbara Greene is Graham's first cousin (Christopher Isherwood is also a cousin). While Graham is elusive and even somewhat fictionalized in his own account of the journey through Liberia—as if glimpsed from between the dense overhang of tropical jungle—Barbara is completely straightforward. She is modest and a bit self-mocking; Graham led, she followed—sometimes miles behind. She left all decisions to her cousin. This was an age when men were expected to take command. Graham dealt with the carriers, the cook, the immigration formalities, the bad tempers, the disputes. It must have been a great strain—the strain certainly shows. What started as something of a lark turned out to be an obsession; and, a critical moment, it was Graham who fell ill and was near to dying of an obscure fever. To give him his due, Graham did not make much of this near-fatal illness—"A Touch of Fever" that chapter is called—and there is no self-pity and little self-regard in
Journey Without Maps.

Land Benighted
is quite a different pair of shoes. It is the book that Graham wanted to avoid writing, and at the time he admitted to being "disappointed" that Barbara wrote it. After Graham's almost Conradian push through the African darkness, how deflating it must have seemed when his companion in this trek revealed herself as a pretty young thing, not really a hiker ("I love my creature comforts"), who agreed to walk across Liberia ("wherever it was") because she was a bit tipsy on champagne. She is almost at pains to portray herself as the "Oh, dear!", "What a muddle!" and "Mustn't grumble!" sort of traveling companion, though this could hardly have been the case. When her book appeared in 1938, reviewers remarked on Barbara's pluck. It seemed to be full of the sort of details which, if concerned with another place or time or
companion, might have been regarded as trivial. Unlike Graham's, there were no flashbacks to Riga or Nottingham, no quotes from Baudelaire or Eliot. Graham had Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy
in his luggage; Barbara had Maugham and the stories of Saki. It is a wonderfully telling fact, and as the trip wore on Graham became more melancholy, and Barbara began to sparkle like a light-hearted deb in a Saki story. After weeks in the bush, they came upon a small black schoolmaster, one Victor Prosser who wears "short artificial taffeta trousers in a delicate shade of mauve." Mr Prosser asks Barbara to describe London. She tells him about the underground railway and then is sorry she has done so:

It all sounded horrible, and I almost felt that I did not want to go back—til, of course, I remembered Elizabeth Arden, my flat, and the Savoy Grill.

Notice that Saki-ish "of course".

What might have seemed trivial or unimportant about
Land Benighted
in the 'thirites, now—over forty years later—is like treasure. What if Waugh had had such a companion in Abyssinia, or Peter Fleming's cousin had accompanied him to Manchuria? What if Kinglake, or Doughty, or Waterton had had a reliable witness to their miseries and splendors? We would not have thought less of these men, but we would have known much more of them.

Graham had a little twitching nerve over his right eye. When he felt particularly unwell it would twitch incessantly, and I watched it with horror. It fascinated me, and I would find my eyes fixed upon it till I was almost unable to look anywhere else. I did not tell him about it, for I got to know it so well that I was able to gauge how he was feeling without having to ask him.

The social details which Barbara gives about herself—the longing for the Savoy Grill, and smoked salmon and a manicure—fix that aspect of the book in a particular time and give it its privileged pre-war flavor. The trivial, after a time, becomes revealing and even necessary, which is why we put the hairpins and buttons of Roman matrons in museums. But more important than this are the two chief virtues of
Land Benighted.
The first is that it is an intimate portrait of Graham Greene as a young man in a foreign country. It is the quintessential Greene; the 'thirties' were a time for him of almost manic energy, when he still believed that "seediness has a very deep appeal" and wrote the books that made his name a resonant adjective. That Greene mood is the mood of
Journey Without Maps.
The other virtue, but it is unintentional, is that
Land Benighted
shows that however light-hearted a departure is, if the traveler is generous, observant, and dedicated to the trip, the traveler will be changed. From a rather
scatty socialite at the beginning, Barbara Greene becomes hardy and courageous without ever being tempted into the role of
memsahib.
How easy it would have been for her to accept the traveling style of the missionary widow of Zorzor, who in Graham's book (where she appears as "Mrs Croup") "always travelled in a hammock specially made to carry her weight, with eighteen hammock-carriers. She drove them hard; a ten-hour trek was nothing to her." Indeed, it is at this very odd woman's house (pet cobra, black baby, Biblical pamphlets) that Barbara reflects:

I was feeling most extraordinarily well. My feet had nearly healed and were getting beautifully hard. The long walks seemed to suit me, and although the heat was almost too much of a good thing, it now seemed to tire my mind only and not my body. I was getting used to being bitten all over by insects and just went on scratching automatically, thankful that although they bit every other part of my body, they never attacked my face.

Barbara had agreed to go to Liberia because "It sounded fun." It wasn't fun. It was almost hell. But after weeks of it, she changed. Habitually she marched behind. Then Graham fell ill, and although he recovered he was still, in her words, "sub-normal." "He looked rather weak, and for the first time I was the one who was marching on ahead." It is an extraordinary reversal. She had come as a companion, to follow and take orders. But her health was better than Graham's towards the end—her spirits were certainly higher—and on the last lap it was she who set the pace. In the course of this reckless trip, she had grown up and even in a small way taken command. She never says so in the book, just as she never boasts of her good health; but it is clear from what she describes of the last part of the trip. She followed obediently, she nursed Graham through his illness, she made a careful record of the journey. It is no wonder that Graham dedicated his book to her.

Barbara is too modest, too self-effacing, to make any claim for her book. It was not an adventure story, she said. It was not knowledgeable. The reader "will learn nothing new." In a delightful aside she says, "It was the little everyday things that pleased me most."

One of these things was Graham's presence. How was she to know that in time he would be regarded as one of the greatest English writers ? Just as Graham avoids mentioning Barbara in his book, so Barbara never mentions that Graham is a writer, that she has read his books, or that he is making this difficult journey with the intention of writing a book about it. (He had already received, and spent, his advance of £350.) "I looked up to him," she says, but her role in this trip was every bit as important as Graham's, and just as literary. She is the witness, like the narrator of a novel who sometimes becomes part of the action. She did not know at the
time that she was telling a Graham Greene story. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, she took out her diary and analyzed him.

His brain frightened me. It was sharp and clear and cruel. I admired him for being unsentimental, but "always remember to rely on yourself," I noted. "If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you." For some reason he had a permanently shaky hand, so I hoped that we would not meet any wild beasts on this trip ... my cousin would undoubtedly miss anything he aimed at. Physically he did not look strong. He seemed somewhat vague and unpractical ... Apart from three or four people he was really fond of, I felt that the rest of humanity was to him like a heap of insects that he liked to examine ... He was always polite. He had a remarkable sense of humour and held few things too sacred to be laughed at. I suppose at that time I had a very conventional little mind, for I remember he was continually tearing down ideas I had always believed in, and I was left to build them up anew. It was stimulating and exciting, and I wrote down that he was the best kind of companion one could have for a trip of this kind. I was learning far more than he realized.

Long after he took the trip, Graham wrote, "My cousin left all decisions to me and never criticized me when I made the wrong one ... Towards the end we would lapse into long silences, but they were infinitely preferable to raised voices."

"Graham," Barbara writes in her book, "would sometimes become rather obstinate, hanging on to some small, unimportant point like a dog to a bone." And then, she adds, "But we never quarrelled, not once."