TO THE EDITOR, BALLIOL COLLEGE MAGAZINE

Anthony Powell reviewed Sherry’s first volume in the Balliol College Record (1989). He complained about the amount of paraphrase of published works and described the whole as ‘interminable’. He disputed Sherry’s description of Greene’s personality as private, since some of the information he had supplied, especially about sex, ‘borders on the exhibitionist’.

[Note in Greene’s hand: Don’t send the letter to Balliol!]

7 November 1989

Dear Sir,

I am no defender of Norman Sherry’s biography, perhaps I can defend myself a little. I accepted him as biographer because I had a great admiration for his two books on Conrad. I would certainly have cut massively his biography of me if I had had an opportunity. However I received no galley-proofs of the book, only the final proofs. I would have reduced it if I had had galley-proofs by at least 60 or so pages and I have insisted that for the second volume I must receive the necessary galley-proofs. To have cut as I wished the first volume would have meant reprinting the whole book which I could not expect the publisher to do.

Yours truly,
Graham Greene

TO MARIE-FRANCOISE ALLAIN (‘SOIZIC’)

The daughter of Greene’s murdered friend Yves Allain, Marie-Françoise Allain was a literary journalist who compiled volumes of interviews with both Greene and Cloetta.

January 1, 1990

My dear Soizic,

[—] Your question about Cambridge is difficult to answer. All the five concerned were at Cambridge long after I was at Oxford. Generations at university go in three years. I belong to the 1922 generation and Kim and the others belonged to a much later one – at the beginning of the thirties. It was then apparent that Germany was the main threat and the hunger marchers were busy. It was more natural in the early thirties to side with our possible ally Russia. Years later after I had left the Service I received a letter from an authority asking the same question as you. What about Oxford? They named one man whom I had known but who I am convinced had not the making of a double agent. An obvious candidate would have been my friend Claud Cockburn, but he was so openly a communist that he would not have made a very good double.

Your second question about Kim. I had grown to like Kim immensely during the period when I worked with him in 1942–3 and later after he had left for Moscow he wrote to me supporting my action in asking for my books no longer to be published in Russia because of the imprisonment of two people whose names I temporarily forget.³⁷He said this was an honorable action and he hoped it would have an effect. He also wrote to me on the subject of the Afghan war saying that he was against it and he knew nobody there who was for it – in other words he indicated that the KGB had been against the war. In the last years of his life I saw a lot of him on my four or five visits to Russia. As you may have read [in] my speech at Hamburg published under the title The Virtue of Disloyalty I never believed in the prime importance of loyalty to one’s country. Loyalty to individuals seems to me to be far more important.

I hope the time won’t be long off when we can meet again and discuss things more closely perhaps also with Bernard Violet.³⁸

Much love,
Graham

PS It may amuse you to hear that when I published Our Man in Havana MI5 rang up the head of MI6 to say that I should be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. The head of MI6 laughed.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 770