TO BERNARD DIEDERICH

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 16 March 1973

Dear Bernard,

Thank you so much for your letter. I am glad the holidays went well in New Zealand, but I shall be sad to see you go so far off. I have always wanted to spend some time in Australia but I have always thought of New Zealand as the dullest of the countries in the old Commonwealth, although of course if you have a farm it can hardly be dull!

[…]

I’m very drawn towards Panama and have been for some years. Unfortunately my sole excuse for visiting South America has gone now that I’ve finished my three year old novel. It had become quite a habit to visit the Argentine and neighbouring countries in the summer. I wish we could have had another trip like our Dominican one before you shake the dust off your feet.

Personally I would very much like to read a book on May 30, 1961 – whether the great public would I don’t know. I’d like to put the idea up to my publisher, but he’s not very enterprising unless he can see certain commercial gains. I hope this time if you do it you will do it alone. I felt that the collaboration was the cause of a certain amount of disorder in Papa Doc. For [the] title what about The Death of the Goat?⁴¹

How amusing that the filming of James Bond was done at Ocho Rios.⁴²I used to know Ocho Rios well and once I rented Ian Fleming’s house from him for a month. He offered to let me have it rent free if I would write an Introduction to an omnibus volume of his novels for America, and I had rather tactfully to explain that I would prefer to pay rent. He had a villainous old housekeeper with the evil eye. He had told me to order all drink through her as she would get it at trade rates, but after a week or so I grew suspicious and asked for my bills. She was charging more for the drinks than one paid in the shops and there was a considerable row. She then started muttering curses on the doorstep and we found it better to depart before we were poisoned. A friend of Ian’s was kind enough to take us in a house nearby and getting out of the swimming-pool I slipped and did something to my shoulder from which I suffered for some months, so that evil eye really worked. She must have disliked Ian for letting me go there because when he returned he had his stroke.

Have you any useful contacts, preferably English-speaking, in Panama as I really would rather like to visit that country perhaps in the summer or would it be a terrible climate then? I have managed to take Cuba in August without suffering too much.

My love to you and Ginette,
Graham Greene

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 696