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TO W. A. SAUNDERS

After the publication of A Sort of Life in September 1971, Greene received many letters from people who had lived near Berkhamsted School and from people mentioned in the book. One old boy, W. A. Saunders, a former missionary to China who had settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, wrote him a thumpingly cheerful letter, chiding him for melancholy and for various errors of fact.

15 December 1971

Dear Mr Saunders,

Thank you very much for your long and interesting letter on the subject of Berkhamsted. It interested me a great deal. Who knows, one day I may be able to visit Ann Arbor, but I don’t know that my ‘melancholy would lighten a little’. Does anybody really want to change a little? A complete change, I suppose, one could accept, but not a small change – otherwise one would be losing one’s thing.

I had forgotten about ‘Tarzan of the Alps’ and I wish I had remembered at the time I wrote the book.29

A strange thing happened after the publication. I had forgotten the name of the train boy who was caned in our class until I received a letter from a woman written from Berkhamsted where she was living with her husband saying that her father had had a traumatic experience of Berkhamsted. He was now in hospital and she would like to send him an autographed copy of the book. His name was Mayo and I suddenly realized that he was mentioned in it. I sent the book and I heard from her that he had just finished reading it when he died.30

Was Carter really the name of my tormentor? I thought that I had invented the name.31

It is you who have your wires crossed about Edmunds. Clodagh, the golden-haired daughter, was Clodagh O’Grady quite definitely. I knew her before her mother remarried.

David Copperfield was one of those blackouts. It has been corrected in later editions.32

Was Whitehead ever really housemaster of Adders? I thought Whitehead was the master who left the school to take up law and in fact became a K.C. It was quite a remarkable achievement.

Poor old Sunderland Taylor who lost his son in the war was the one who gave me my only prize for a short story and he was very distressed about doing it because it was atheist. I must have been one of the few people in the school who liked ‘The Oily Duke’.33

Yours sincerely,
Graham Greene


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 693


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