TO MURIEL SPARK 2 page

Love,
Graham

Astonished, Biche replied that ‘no present could make me happier! It makes me sad tho’ to realise what a bitch I am that you should have to go to such verbal pains to offer me this precious gift.’ She compared her excitement to that which she felt on getting her first bicycle. With his next letter, Graham enclosed a cheque to pay for a new Citroën.

TO BERNARD DIEDERICH

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes |

30 November 1977

Dear Bernard,

I hope you had luck this time with the General. Chuchu did tell me that he was hoping to have a holiday with his ex-wife from America and I’m glad to hear he got it. I have done a piece about the signing of the Treaty for The New York Review of Books¹³and The Spectator over here and I’ll send you a copy in due course when it appears.

Yes, I had had a news report that the Baptistes were dead. Maybe my challenge put an end to their misery.¹⁴

All good wishes to the two of you for Christmas.

Affectionately
Graham

TO FATHER LEOPOLDO DURÁN

6 April 1978

My dear Leopoldo,

Thank you for various letters which have come in – I begin to lose count of what I have written and what you have written. I am so glad that you and Laszlo Robert¹⁵got on so well together and I liked very much his drunken letter. Why is it that you are not drinking a little bit of whisky even these days? You won’t be able to qualify as one of my whisky priests. Thank you too for sending me Maria’s letter. She certainly loves you deeply and your letter must have given her great pleasure and confidence. It was very good of you to send it to me but I return it to you because it belongs to you. Perhaps you should indicate to her that we shall have a different chauffeur this time! I have an idea that she was a little bored by our friend and she will probably welcome our new conductor. I hope to bring you for your amusement the first chapter of Monsignor Quixote – the first and the last chapter because I doubt that the book will ever go on.

[…]

TO EVA KEARNEY

Greene received an enormous amount of mail from his readers. He took a surprising concern for these strangers, including a Dublin grandmother who confessed to having had ‘scruples’ when she first read his works. Scruples are, of course, an affliction of the devout, now thought to have been eradicated like polio.

28 April 1978

Dear Mrs. Kearney,

Thank you for what you say about my books and I am sorry that twenty years ago you had scruples! Perhaps I ought to tell you what

Pope Paul said to me in a private interview when I pointed out to him that among the books of mine he had read was The Power and the Glory which had been condemned by the Holy Office. His reply was ‘Parts of all your books will always offend some Catholics and you shouldn’t pay any attention to that.’¹⁶

As for your husband’s question I must admit that I don’t go to Mass every Sunday. I go once or twice a month probably on the average but no more. It always seemed to me an absurdity of the Church teaching to miss Mass without proper reason was a mortal sin. Luckily I have met many priests who admit that in all their years in the confessional they have never even heard a mortal sin confessed. A mortal sin in theology is a sin done in conscious defiance of God and I should imagine that is a very, very rare event. I think in Ireland you have always been rather black Catholics if you will excuse my saying so.

For that reason perhaps I don’t take as seriously as you do the question of your children – your grandchildren are hardly your responsibility. I think it was Saint Thomas Aquinas who attributed a sense of humour to God and I am sure that your children’s peccadilloes will probably please him as much as your children pleased you when they disobeyed a rule of the household. Even if you smacked one of them you were probably pleased by a certain independence and I see no reason why God should not be pleased by a certain independence on our side. Surely, or rather perhaps, the only important rule one should try not to break is that of charity and if there is a God he must be charitable too.

When I rather hastily said that if I was young today I would not become a Catholic I think I meant that the differences between the Christian beliefs were becoming less and less. For example I doubt if there would be a quarrel today between a Catholic and an Anglican on the subject of transubstantiation. Our idea of transubstantiation has become far less physical and more philosophical.¹⁷I dislike the new liturgy, but that is partly because I no longer feel at home in a church, especially abroad. If a new liturgy was required I don’t understand why a model should not have been made and translated into the various languages instead of allowing many priests to put in fancy prayers, sometimes of a rather sentimental kind, before the canon. In a foreign language these make one lose one’s place entirely! I think today I would be just as at home in an Anglican church and the English of the traditional Anglican service is rather better than the English of the new liturgy. This may sound a purely aesthetic criticism, but it’s not. Words have a certain holiness; they should be able to represent truthfully a certain emotion as well as a certain belief and I do think the language of the 17th century succeeded in this better than the language of the 20th century which is apt to date from one year to another. The language of the 17th century is a little bit like Latin – it doesn’t change its meaning.

Again many thanks for your letter.

Yours sincerely
Graham Greene

TO MICHAEL KORDA

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes |

13 May 1978

Dear Michael,

[…]

Certainly you can say No to the David Frost Show! If you could make the No a bit insulting so much the better. Perhaps you could put it that Mr. Greene wouldn’t dream of appearing on a David Frost Show!

Affectionately
Graham

Statement of 1971 on Eucharistic Doctrine, ‘The Word transubstantiation is commonly used in the Roman Catholic Church to indicate that God acting in the eucharist effects a change in the inner reality of the elements. The term should be seen as affirming the fact of Christ’s presence and of the mysterious and radical change which takes place. In contemporary Roman Catholic theology it is not understood as explaining how the change takes place.’

TO CATHERINE WALSTON

10th July 1978

Dearest Catherine,

I find at 74 that one is apt to forget present things though one remembers clearly the past and I don’t think I ever thanked you for your very nice long letter. Forgive this being dictated to Elisabeth, but I am off to Spain to spend my yearly fortnight with my only priest, Father Durán. (He has written a book in Spanish on my theology!) We do a trip each year to include Portugal and my Kenya friend, Maria Newall, who must be now 86 and is continually falling down and breaking bits of herself, but she remains in spirit younger than I am. Then in mid-August I am off for my yearly visit to Panama and my pal General Torrijos. This will be the third visit and I don’t quite know why I make it except to escape from the Côte in the summer. Perhaps one day a novel will come out of it. In between Spain and Panama I hope to be in England for some days and I’ll telephone and see if I can come down and see you. That poor Norman Sherry¹⁸who has been trying to follow in my footsteps in Mexico, Haiti, and Paraguay has returned to England very unwell. I do hope I’m not going to be the death of him.

Much love
Graham

TO ANITA BJÖRK

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes. | Sep. 9. &78

Dearest Anita,

I was so happy to receive your postcard just as I returned from my third visit to Panamá (I don’t think I want to go a fourth time as I feel exhausted – 18-hour flights are too much at 74!) My God, how you work! Play in Stockholm, film in Oslo! I wish I knew what play & what film. I too would like to see you in this life – do keep me posted about your movements if you come southwest. I always leave here mid-July to September & in October I go to Capri, but otherwise I can always get to Paris with a little notice. I still feel life is very long & sometimes I feel a hundred years old & that I ought to grow a white beard.[…]Much love, Graham

TO GLORIA EMERSON

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 9th January 1979

Dear Gloria,

Thank you so much for your postcard from Los Angeles, that sink of iniquity, where I once had a very good Chinese meal and accompanied that fat actor, Robert Morley, to the equivalent in those days of strip-tease. I have forgotten what it was called then, it’s so long ago. Thirty years ago.¹⁹

I have just begun re-reading Moby Dick in celebration of starting a new book which I thought I would never do. I suppose Nantucket is already spoilt and not worth visiting? A summer resort? At the moment, under the influence of Moby Dick which I never thought to read twice, it’s the only place in North America which I want to visit. Do tell me about it. What has become of it?

Affectionately
Graham

Emerson immediately began making firm arrangements for Graham to stay in Nantucket. He was amused at this response to his whim and wrote on 5th February 1979: ‘What an impulsive girl you are! You are positively dangerous!’

TO VIVIEN GREENE

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 5th February 1979

Dear Vivien,

The explanation why I keep my ship in the lavatory is that there is no other place available and also if I turn on the music the waves rise and fall and the ship wallows among them making one think of the seasick passengers on board. That is why it seems to me suitably placed. On another wall is a hurricane notice from Belize telling people what to do when the siren blows.

Affectionately
Graham

TO LUCY CAROLINE BOURGET

The Ritz, | Piccadilly, | Feb. 20 [1979].

Dearest Caroline,

Alas! I have to go into the King Edward VII Hospital this afternoon for an operation on the intestines – not serious but disagreeable. After lunch today no more food till after the operation on Friday. Then 4 days of intravenous. I should be out in 12 days. I only tell you this in case you try to get hold of me for some reason & can’t.

Lots of love,
Graham

Graham was suffering from cancer of the intestines, but his surgery was successful.

TO ANDREW BOYLE

The journalist and historian Andrew Boyle sent Greene portions of the manuscript of The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied for Russia (1979) dealing with Philby’s progress through the ranks at MI6. Felix Cowgill was head of Section V when Philby arrived in 1941; when a new Section IX was established in late 1944 to study Soviet and Communist activity, Philby was given charge of it rather than Cowgill, who resigned.

6th March 1979

Dear Mr. Boyle,

I don’t at all like you having me say that ‘I might have guessed there was something fishy about his rise’. I saw nothing fishy in Kim Philby’s rise – he was a very able man. What I think I have written somewhere is that I was glad to discover years later that his supplanting of Cowgill was not simply the desire for personal power.²⁰I would never use such a phrase as ‘blurted out the truth’ and it was a thing that could never possibly have happened. During the years that I knew him I never once saw him the worse for drink. Frankly I would much rather you left me out of your book entirely.

Yours sincerely
Graham Greene

Although Boyle removed the passages Greene objected to and referred to this letter in the published version, he remained critical of Greene’s account of Philby as a Communist true-believer. In addition to Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt, the book discusses Greene’s friend the translator and literary scholar John Cairncross as the ‘fifth man’.

TO DR. ELLEN RIVIÈRE

This Parisian dentist noted the number of characters from her profession who appeared in Greene’s novels and asked if this indicated a repressed vocation.

16th May 1979

Dear Doctor Rivière,

Many thanks for your letter and the nice things you say about my books. Yes, I am a little aware of dentists creeping in. The dentist in The Power and the Glory can be found also in The Lawless Roads and was actually a man I travelled up with to Villahermosa from Frontera.²¹I don’t think a repressed vocation is the explanation, but I am certainly aware of very unpleasant childhood memories. As a child I went to a very bad local dentist who caused me agonies. This has made me always associate stained-glass doorways and windows with the old-fashioned dentists. I am glad to say now I have an admirable dentist and friend who is also Greek Consul in Cannes. He has never caused me a moment’s agony!

Yours sincerely
Graham Greene

P.S. I think there are more general doctors in my books than dentists, but perhaps that is due to having an elder brother who is a doctor.

TO MURIEL SPARK,

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | May 26 ’79

Dear Muriel,

How kind you are! Territorial Rights arrived today, just after I had been reading in the Nice-Matin that our mail is being discovered in plastic bags off Cap d’Antibes by skin-divers.

I took the almost unreadable New Statesman out to lunch & saw that a woman called Elizabeth Berridge is advertised as saying of you ‘She is back in spanking form’ – that’s going to bring you quite a new class of reader. In the same number of the N.S. I read that ‘Fortunately a “little pat” is far from an adequate summing-up of Miss Redgrave.’ What are we coming to?

Tonight I shall read Territorial Rights. If I am disappointed (which I’m sure I shan’t be) it will prove that I am a typical N.S. reader seeking a spanking or a pat.

Love,
Graham

TO MURIEL SPARK

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | June 5 ’79

Dear Muriel,

It’s your best, your very best. I thought you’d never top Memento Mori, but you have. I’ve been reading it all day in one gulp. Written with excitement at 9.35 p.m.

Love,
Graham

The post office is on strike here & I doubt whether this will ever reach you. It’s like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea.

TO CHARLES RYCROFT

A London psychoanalyst and author, Rycroft was a critic of the theories of Sigmund Freud. His best-known work is A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1973). Greene found himself enthralled by The Innocence of Dreams (1979).

18th June 1979

Dear Dr. Rycroft,

I am only writing this letter on the distinct understanding that you won’t bother to reply to it. As a writer myself I know how irritating it can be to receive letters from strangers however appreciative. I am at the moment reading your book The Innocence of Dreams and the fact that I am not yet half way through is a measure of my interest because I am a quick reader as a rule.

There are one or two questions not to be answered but which may be relevant to your own ideas.

1. I am unhappy by the use of message in referring to the unconscious dreamer. This surely supposes a conscious purpose in the dreamer which i find difficult to believe in.

2. This brings in the theory of the censor which you partly accept. Today is there anything in the world of morals that one cannot imagine oneself offending, so what room is there for a censor in our unconscious if we haven’t got one in our conscious self? Perhaps this is why the students reported by Calvin Hall did not report any dreams which referred to the dropping of the atomic bomb.²²It was something they could perfectly well accept in their working life. The censor had nothing to do.

My interest in dreams dates from the age of 16 when I went to a psychoanalyst of no known school. Since then at intervals especially in the 60’s and early 70’s I have kept dream diaries when I have no work on hand if only to keep my hand in at writing.²³My experience bears out the fact that one dreams at least four or five times a night when once one has disciplined oneself to have a penciland paper beside one in bed! Is it possible (I repeat that I am not asking for an answer but only putting a question for you to consider) that a writer’s profession influences his dreams? I have had two or three dreams which have gone straight into short stories without any great change. I have also found that many dreams are serial going on for periods of more than three days.

One curious experience, or what seems to me curious, came to me in one novel where I was completely blocked and didn’t know how to continue the book. It was like coming to a river bank and finding no bridge. I knew what would happen on the other side of the bridge but I couldn’t get there. I then had a dream which seemed to me to belong entirely to the character in the book rather than to myself and I was able to insert it in the novel and bridge the river.²⁴

Perhaps my questions will be answered by your own book as I have only reached the half-way mark and am looking forward with great enthusiasm to finishing it. I repeat – please do not bother to reply to this letter. It is simply an expression of interest, even of enthusiasm, which needs no reply.

Yours sincerely,
Graham Greene

P.S. Perhaps you have answered my question about the message on page 66.²⁵

TO JOHN HARRIS

This reader of the The Human Factor suspected the character Daintry of being a sinister foreign agent because he did not know what Maltesers were, which the reader recalled as having been available at cinemas in his childhood.

31st July 1979

Dear Mr Harris,

I would defend the maltesers in this way: when the first draft of the book was ready my secretary told me that maltesers no longer existed and I very nearly took them out. However my wife to prove that they could be obtained sent me a packet, but apparently they are much rarer than they used to be. Daintry was a young man when the war came and perhaps he hadn’t moved in malteser cinema circles. Anyway they wouldn’t have been available in the war and when the war was over so many years later he may have forgotten all about them or perhaps he was confused by the conversation in the Club. As a matter of fact I had forgotten that he hadn’t heard of them.

Yours sincerely
Graham Greene

TO HARRIET OLIVERI

This woman in Holbrook, New York, asked Greene to comment on a disagreement she was having with her grandson over the morality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

15th September 1979

Dear Mrs Oliveri,

Thank you for your letter. I half agree with your grandson, John Gillen. I still remember the shock we felt in Europe at the news. But even if it were a crime I think we owe to the bombing the peacewhich so far has not been broken between the great powers. It might be argued that a demonstration of the bomb in a desert would have been sufficient to induce the Japanese to surrender, but I doubt whether it would have had the effect on the imagination of the actual bombing. Because of that bombing both great powers are afraid of atomic war. Whether in the long run this will prevent a war remains to be seen.

Yours sincerely
Graham Greene

TO ANTHONY BURGESS

Anthony Burgess (1917–93) shared with Greene a fascination with Catholic subjects. According to his biographer Andrew Biswell, Burgess was corresponding regularly with Greene by 1961, when he dedicated the novel The Devil of a State to him.²⁶Few of their letters have come to light; it is possible that most were disposed of following their public row in 1988. Here, Greene refers to a radio lecture Burgess gave on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. At the time, the two were caught in a disagreement between their French publisher Robert Laffont and their translators Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier.

9th October 1979

Dear Burgess – or can I say Anthony or should I say Tony?

Just to put the record straight about your very generous broadcast: it was not The Heart of the Matter which was condemned by the Holy Office but The Power and the Glory and it was The Power and the Glory that Paul VI had read. It does make a good deal of difference because in my opinion The Heart of the Matter would be quite rightly condemnable but not The Power and the Glory. I do hope you are going to come and see me one day without Georges. I am faced at the moment with a difficult job of writing a letter to Robert Laffontto say that I am leaving him and following Georges. One of those things one postpones until the last moment.

Yours ever
Graham

TO ANTHONY BURGESS

31st October 1979

Dear Anthony,

I don’t envy you your American trip. I have managed to avoid going there now for about 15 years except for my few days in Washington with the Panamanians.

I can’t imagine what kind of contract you signed to give Laffont four new novels before you go. In the bad old days in England fifty years ago one had to offer an option on two novels if one was a first novelist but today no options are required. I realise that things are rather different in France but all the same … Laffont has no options on my novels. All the same after discussions I am staying with him if Georges continues to translate me. I think there were certain faults on both sides and anyway Georges told me that he and Hortense did not wish me to come to them. It was hitting Laffont too hard and of course I have known him since around 1946.

I am going off to Paris for about a week next week, but after that do ring me up at 33.71.80 and suggest a date for meeting.
Graham

In the background of this letter is a problem Yvonne Cloetta was handling for Graham. Even after many years in France, he had no great command of the language and no basis on which to judge the quality of translations. Cloetta, who moved expertly between French and English, made the final judgement on these questions – usually placing her trust in the distinguished Belmont. The point has a broader significance, since Cloetta is sometimes spoken of as lacking the intelligence to be an equal companion with Graham.²⁷

TO AUBERON WAUGH

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes. | Jan. 29. 80

Dear Bron,

I got your letter today with great relief (letters between England & France take at least seven days) because I thought my radio talk – which wasn’t scripted but done impromptu – might have hurt.²⁸I prepared myself for the ordeal in the King Edward VII Hospital by rereading almost every book of Evelyn’s. I look back with nostalgia to that time of peace. Oh, for another operation. But, thank God, you weren’t hurt anyway by the shortened version. I was responsible for the absurd mistake – that’s what comes of speaking without a script – of ‘the cross-Channel’ instead of ‘trans-Atlantic’ love affair. No one to my horror seems to have noticed it.

[…]

TO NICHOLAS DENNYS

This letter to Graham’s nephew, a bookseller, refers to Nelson Sevenpennies, which Graham and Hugh collected, a series of casebound volumes once published by the Scottish firm Thomas Nelson and Sons, priced at 7 d. The letter mentions David Low, a bookseller whom Graham had known for many years; their ‘bibliophilic correspondence’ was published as Dear David, Dear Graham (1989).

2nd February 1980

Dear Nick,

Many thanks for your letter. I am glad you had such a good day with David Low. He’s a very nice man. He wrote to me that he had enjoyed it too. Of course you should sell my letter for what it will fetch and any future ones!

Nelson Sevenpennies: I would like Major Vigoreux of Q. and also In Kedah’s Tents of Merryman and Born in Exile of Gissing. Ask Elisabeth to pay you what you ask out of petty cash! Of course I will sign your book for you. Why not leave it with Elisabeth.

I am afraid I don’t know anybody but Hugh and I who collect Nelsons. I have none in dust-wrappers but we saw a number in dust-wrappers and a good collection in a bookshop in Leicester once. As I am going there for my play I shall look in again.

Which days are you visible in the Portobello Road? I’d like to call on your stall one day.

Love
Graham

TO MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

Muggeridge reminded Graham of a compact they had made in Galilee to go on television together when they were eighty and asked him to ‘put this rendez-vous forward a year or so’.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 26th March 1980

Dear Malcolm,

I am afraid my decision is a fixed one. I won’t appear on television. As for the 80th birthday that is still quite a long way off and I hope to escape having to break my promise!

I have found in writing autobiographical pieces how often memories of even things long past fail or are altered. I noticed a small alteration in your memories in a cutting I received the other day from was it The Daily Mirror? I was already installed at SIS when you were recruited, so I can’t have asked my sister to put our names up on the top of the In Basket. I had been destined for Monrovia but the Liberians refused to have me and when I was appointed to Freetown I learnt that they needed a man in Lourenço Marques and suggested you in order that you should escape those wintry rides on a motor-cycle.

My love to Kitty

Affectionately
Graham

TO FATHER LEOPOLDO DURÁN

Martine Cloetta, the daughter of Yvonne and Jacques, found herself bullied and harassed by her estranged husband, a man with underworld connections that kept him safe from the law. Greene concluded that Nice was being run by crooks. He wrote a pamphlet J’Accuse (1982), which some, including his friend Michael Korda, who decided against publishing it in the United States, regarded as an old man’s eccentricity.²⁹Perhaps a case of domestic abuse would be harder to trivialise a quarter of a century later; feminism has won that argument.

9th April 1980

Dearest Leopoldo,

Thank you for your letter of March 28. I do hope that you had a happy rest in Galicia at your village and also in our monastery. I am afraid that when I came back from England things were in a rather more violent situation than they had been before. Last week the fiend tried to break into the house of Yvonne and the police had to be called. The next day when Martine was returning to her apartment with her children he was waiting and attacked Jacques³⁰who was saved by Martine with the help of a tear-gas bomb. The authorities seem hopeless in this affair, but now my friend Pierre who is the Honorary Consul-General for Ireland³¹has written to the Préfet enclosing a letter which I have proposed to write to The Times about the conditions of the law here. A kind of blackmail.³²I have to go to England now for my medical check up and then to see my daughter in Switzerland but I shall be back on April 16. I hope through this intervention of the Préfet something can be done. The law seems powerless.

I have also had a letter from General Salan in reply to one of mine which definitely establishes that whatever he may say he never belonged to the OAS – the secret army that he always claims was the cause of his imprisonment.³³

About the end of May, God and not I know whether it would be a good thing. If only we could get a period of peace it might well be the only time when Yvonne and I could go off to Capri and I would be able to do a little bit of work in tranquillity. I want very much to see you and to discuss certain things with you, but we also need a short period of rest. England was a very short period and only led to the drama when he assaulted the house and assaulted Jacques.

When I come back from Switzerland I will write to you again and tell you what the situation is. Certainly we have need of all your prayers. I do hope you had a happy time with the Trappists and I really long to be there again with you. All three of us send our love.
Graham

TO COUNTESS STRACHWITZ (BARBARA GREENE)

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | April 17. 80

My dear Barbara,

[…]

This is only to explain how impossible it is to be sure when I’ll be in England again (I shall have to be there for a medical in October – my birthday month!). Gozo is a dream,³⁴but if we can get this man behind bars (my writing becomes unreadable) we have to go to Anacapri to see my little house (I am now an honorary citizen) in the spring – God knows if it will be possible. Impossible even to work at the moment. Anyway let’s keep in touch – this comic nightmare must end before long either in blood or a laugh. Today I discussed the matter with the mayor of Antibes who is at least alerting his police & he said, ‘But you are living one of your own books.’

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 846