A World of My Own

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVELS
The Man Within • Stamboul Train • It’s a Battlefield
England Made Me • A Gun for Sale • Brighton Rock
The Confidential Agent • The Power and the Glory
The Ministry of Fear • The Heart of the Matter
The Third Man • The End of the Affair • Loser Takes All
The Quiet American • Our Man in Havana • A Burnt-Out Case
The Comedians • Travels with My Aunt
The Honorary Consul • The Human Factor
Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party
Monsignor Quixote • The Tenth Man
The Captain and the Enemy

SHORT STORIES
Collected Stories (including Twenty-One Stories,
A Sense of Reality, and May We Borrow Your Husband?)
The Last Word and other stories

TRAVEL
Journey Without Maps • The Lawless Roads
In Search of a Character • Getting to Know the General

ESSAYS
Collected Essays • The Pleasure Dome • British Dramatists
J’accuse • Reflections • Yours etc.

PLAYS
The Living Room • The Potting Shed • The Complaisant Lover
Carving a Statue • The Return of A. J. Raffles • The Great Jowett
Yes and No • For Whom the Bell Chimes

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A Sort of Life • Ways of Escape

BIOGRAPHY
Lord Rochester’s Monkey • An Impossible Woman

CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Little Train • The Little Horse-Bus
The Little Steamroller • The Little Fire Engine

A few days before he died, when his daughter, Caroline, and I were with him at L’Hôpital de la Providence in Vevey, Graham Greene asked me to prepare this dream diary for publication. Only a strong desire to keep a promise made to him induces me, therefore, to write a modest foreword to this posthumous book he entitled
A World of My Own
.

Graham guarded his privacy as fiercely as he respected the privacy of others. He always refused to write an autobiography—after he had ‘closed the record at the age of about twenty-seven’ with
A Sort of Life
—because, as he said, it would have inevitably involved incursions into the privacy of other people’s lives. The private world of his dreams, however, was one that he nurtured carefully, recording it almost daily in the dream diaries that he kept over the last twenty-five years.

From those several volumes, he made this small
selection for public reading, choosing carefully and deliberately. The project engaged him in the last months of his life. It interested him. And one of the pleasures of this book is the pleasure that he himself clearly took in making the selection.

In this world of the subconscious and the imagination—a world
farfelu
as he used to call it—where everything intersects and gets tangled up beyond time, Graham obviously feels at ease and happy. ‘In a sense it is an autobiography,’ he says in his Introduction; and it’s true that between the secret world of dreams and the real world he lived in the divide is narrow. And the barriers have been lifted. Here he can gossip about others, or give free rein to his eagerness for adventure or his delight in the absurd. Dreaming was like taking a holiday from himself. As he confided to a friend: ‘If one can remember an entire dream, the result is a sense of entertainment sufficiently marked to give one the illusion of being catapulted into a different world. One finds oneself remote from one’s conscious preoccupations.’

I told him once that I was astonished by the clarity with which he remembered his dreams, the preciseness of detail he retained. He explained that the habit of remembering went back to the time he first kept a dream diary—when, as a boy, he underwent
psychoanalysis and was required by his analyst to retell his dreams (sometimes with embarrassing results—as when he had to confess to an erotic dream about his analyst’s beautiful wife). Later, when he again began to keep a dream diary, he always had a pencil and paper at hand on his bedside table so that when he awoke from a dream, which happened on average four or five times a night, he could jot down key words that in the morning would allow him to reconstruct it. He would then transcribe it into his diary. I remember the very first diary that he had—a large notebook of dark green leather, given to him by friends. Another was the colour of Bordeaux wine.

It is well known that Graham was always very interested in dreams, and that he relied a great deal on the role played by the subconscious in writing. He would sit down to work straightway after breakfast, writing until he had five hundred words (which in the last while he reduced to approximately two hundred). He was in the habit of then rereading, every evening before going to bed, the section of the novel or story he had written in the morning, leaving his subconscious to work during the night. Some dreams enabled him to overcome a ‘blockage’; others provided him on occasion with material for short stories or even an idea for a new novel (as with
It’s
a Battlefield
, and
The Honorary Consul)
. Sometimes, as he wrote, ‘identification with a character goes so far that one may dream his dream and not one’s own’—as happened during the writing of
A Burnt-Out Case
, so that he was able to attribute his own dream to his character Querry and so extricate himself from an impasse in the narrative.

The most startling aspect of his dreams was their warning nature. One day, I remember, he appeared looking terribly upset. When I enquired after the reason for that distress, he replied: ‘I dreamt of a catastrophe. I hope nothing has happened to one of my family or a close friend.’ A few hours later we heard on the radio that a plane had crashed into the sea between Corsica and Nice, only a few miles away from his flat in Antibes, killing, I believe, all on board. One of the passengers on the flight was General Cogny, whom Graham knew well from his days in Vietnam.

Examples of that kind are numerous. Visions of panic and distress, visions of happiness—the impressions left in his mind by a dream were so vivid, so clear in every detail, that they would sometimes pursue him and influence his mood for hours after he awakened.

Today, remembering, I can’t help thinking about a persistent dream of his which, like a kind of riddle, now seems to have sheltered a personal message. In
A Sort of Life
he refers to a series of dreams which recurred over the years after the death of his father in 1943, and he writes: ‘In them my father was always shut away in hospital out of touch with his wife and children—though sometimes he returned home on a visit, a silent solitary man, not really cured, who would have to go back again into exile. The dreams remain vivid even today, so that sometimes it is an effort for me to realize that there was no hospital, no separation and that he lived with my mother till he died.’ His unhappiness at these frequent returns to the hospital is perhaps just coincidence, but it is difficult not to see in the dreams a premonition of what he himself would have to endure, nearly half a century later, at the end of his life—his own enforced exiles in hospital, which he suffered from so much.

In this last book of his, he gives us a glimpse of the strenuous inner life, his elusive source of creativity, that lay beyond that door which he always kept firmly closed, for fear an intruder might destroy ‘the pattern in the carpet’. As a kind of farewell, Graham opens a door for us on the world of his own.

Graham—

In
The Power and the Glory
you wrote: ‘The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise; the
world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died.’

If such a place exists, you certainly have found it.

Yvonne Cloetta      
Vevey, Switzerland
October 1991
       

It can be a comfort sometimes to know that there is a world which is purely one’s own—the experience in that world, of travel, danger, happiness, is shared with no one else. There are no witnesses. No libel actions. The characters I meet there have no memory of meeting me, no journalist or would-be biographer can check my account with another’s. I can hardly be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for any incident connected with the security services. I
have
spoken with Khrushchev at a dinner party, I
have
been sent by the Secret Service to murder Goebbels. I am not lying—and yet, of all the witnesses who share these scenes with me, there is not one who can claim from his personal knowledge that what I describe is untrue.

I decided to choose, out of a diary of more than eight hundred pages, begun in 1965 and ended in 1989, selected scenes from My Own World. In a
sense it is an autobiography, beginning with Happiness and ending with Death, of a rather bizarre life during the last third of a century (the wars described here belong to the sixties, not the forties)—but no biographer will care to make use of it, even though I may sometimes include a date when I want to give for my own satisfaction the day and the year when an unusual event or an unusual meeting took place.

For that reason I thought at first of beginning with my unexpected encounter with Henry James on a river boat in Bolivia in the spring of 1988. However, my plan to begin with this strange episode changed when in January 1989 I experienced for the first time, in all the records which I have kept of this private world for more than twenty years, happiness. Great names are a commonplace in this World of My Own, but real meaningless and inexplicable happiness—this is the only experience of it I have recorded.

It has often been suggested that opium helps to open the closed door of this World, but I have no evidence for this. In the fifties, when I was smoking opium in Vietnam and Malaya, I was busy keeping a diary of violent events in the Common World, but I have in my memory only one remarkable happening in the World of My Own, remarkable because it goes so far back in time—in fact to the year 1
AD
.