Graham Greene (36 page)

[…]

The Governor here very amiable, but his wife – a sweet old thing – has written a novel & published it at her own expense & wants me to read it. My siesta interrupted yesterday by a schoolmaster who had also written a novel. I think if I found myself washed up on a desert island with one inhabitant he would have a novel he wanted published.

Lovely young women passing my window in gay cottons carrying babies on their hips – all lepers of course, but the babies are born clean & when they develop leprosy they can be cured (& permanently) in a year. The Brazilians separate the children at birth & 70% die as a result, but the Brazilians consider that more hygienic!

Lots of love,

G.

Box 1028 Coquilhatville Belgian Congo | Feb. 10 [1959]

Dearest Carol – Carol again now you are back in Canada. This is just a note to say Welcome to your own home & how lovely it was to see you in England again. I do hope you enjoyed your visit as much as all of us did. I’ll do my very best to see that Mummy and/or me come out this year – we miss you. Write to me when you get back & tell me how things are. You know that in any crisis I’d get on a plane & come to you, glad of the excuse!

Here I’m getting quite used to living in a little garden village of 800 people, everybody being a leper, except the babies. It’s better to let them stay because when they catch it after two or three years they can be cured quite easily in a year or so & don’t catch it again. Of course there are some rather hideous cases without fingers or toes, but I’m already used to that. I’m surrounded now by workmen chattering or singing & you would never know they were lepers – &
all contagious ones too. The non-contagious aren’t allowed here. Except sometimes a husband or wife of a contagious.

Tomorrow I set sail on the Bishop’s boat – like a tiny Mississippi paddle steamer – down a tributary of the Congo to two other leproseries – Ibonga & Wafanya, the first in the heart of the forest. No letters or anything for a fortnight then – ought to be back then a week more here [?], back to Leopoldville, down [?] the Congo to Brazzaville in French Equatorial Africa, then Douala for a few days in the Cameroons. Then Paris. Home about March 15.

Look after yourself, dearest Carol. I so want you to have a happy life.

All love from your wandering but loving

Daddy

Written over ten days (February 15 –24) travelling in the Congo, this letter is one of Greene’s longest; it includes observations made more gravely in his
Congo Journal
. Many details of the journey reappear in
A Burnt-Out Case
. His handwriting is here at its worst and the transcription is at several points tentative
.

Sunday. | Feb. 15 [1959] 8.00 a.m.

On the river Momboyo
.

Darling Catherine, I won’t be able to post this letter till I get back. Mass at 6 o’clock in the little deck house where there’s a slide-in altar on top of a cupboard with a panel of the Nativity behind. Since then breakfast & writing up my journal – which is also notes for the book. Then washed my brush & comb in soda water as the river water is a thick brown. Missed the sight of (boat stopped for a man in a canoe with a large fish for sale) a particularly big crocodile. The captain, Père Georges, who looks more like an officer of the Foreign Legion than a priest, tried to shoot it – his first instinct with any wild thing.

You would love this boat, a tiny version unpainted & decrepit of a
Mississippi paddle steamer & very pretty. Apart from the crew with some wives & sweethearts – one very attractive – there is nobody on board but Père Georges, the captain, myself & Père Henri, a convalescent taking the trip for a rest, tall & cadaverous & a joker.
¹²
I have taught them to play 421. I have the Bishop’s cabin which is quite roomy with a nostalgic photo of a church covered in snow over the bed. Yesterday we looked in at Flantria where there is an Englishman (ex-Indian army) in charge of the Lever palm estate. His little girl excited by an English voice stood on her head & was sick. He looked awful but turned out nice & intelligent: his wife very pretty & intelligent too. I may spend a night on the way back.

Now we are on the way to Imbonga, where there is a leproserie some miles in the forest: very primitive: no doctor: looked after by Sisters. I probably shall spend two days there & then on for another 3 days to Wafanya for my third leproserie – then home to Yonda.

You would love this boat, the river is narrowing now to less than half a mile, unchanging forest. Very restful. I’m reading
The Roots of Heaven
(the film is on in London) about a man who makes war on the side of the elephants in this – more or less – part of the world. It would have been a very good book if Conrad had never existed, but the echoes are too strong.
¹³
I’ve also got:
David Copperfield
, Tawney’s new book,
Business & Politics under James I
, Belloc’s
The Cruise of the Nona
, & the first volume of a complete Casanova.

Last night I had one of my awful dreams about you: jealousy. You told me you had slept with Douglas Jay
¹⁴
& three other men since leaving home, & what right had I to be jealous anyway? In revenge I started making love to someone – not a bit like the person she was supposed to be – in bed in front of you. Then you became angry & the third person was amused & malicious. In the end we almost had
made it up, & you said something profound about real love being always on the border of domesticity.

Dear, dear, dear.

We got to Imbonga before dark. Tomorrow a four mile walk each way to the leproserie. I’m in better condition than for a long time. If you were an X ray, you wouldn’t recognise my liver – 2 glasses of whisky at most after sundown, otherwise soda water. And I brought 10 bottles of whisky on this trip!

Feb. 18. 7.30 a.m.

We had two nights at Imbonga, & the first morning I walked over ten miles – good way in this climate. A far more primitive leproserie than Yonda, & I was glad to see around it alone without any white people. A nice leper brought me back through the forest carrying a dish of eggs – bad lesions on the face & one eye nearly gone, but chattered cheerfully in French. In spite of modern drugs there are still some horrors: an old man cheerily waving goodbye with hands & feet, but without fingers or toes. Half one hut was in complete darkness – one could just make out an enamel pot. My black companion called & one heard movements. Presently an old woman crawled into the half light like a dog out of a kennel – no fingers or toes or eyes of course & she couldn’t even raise her head.

It was odd last night 500 kilometres in the bush hearing of the disturbances at Brazzaville. One rather feels the end of European Africa is coming quickly. A lot of the people in Coquilhatville where there are about 300 whites are very nervous & sleep with guns beside them, & that’s the chief danger, that somebody in a panic will make an incident. Some of them are far more nervous than the lonely settlers were at the time of Mau Mau in Kenya. The French, after Algérie & Indo-China, a little laugh at them.

We should get to Wafanya tomorrow, stay a few days & then start back towards Paris & you. The current will be with us then & we’ll move quicker.

[…]

3 p.m.

It really is
too
hot. The river’s narrowed from about a mile & a half
to fifty yards & there’s no air at all. And of course we eat roast meat & lots of boiled potatoes!

5 p.m.

Started rereading
David Copperfield
. My goodness, the first two chapters are perfect. I don’t believe there’s been anything better in the novel – & that includes Proust & Tolstoy. One dreads the moment of failure, for Dickens always sooner or later fails.

Fr. Georges, the captain, sits stringing a rosary, & Fr. Henri plays Patience. He & I will have our whisky in an hour & then I shall be beaten at 421. Rather like the University of Notre Dame at football, their daily communions seem to ensure their victory at dice.

Feb. 19

We’ve been going up the river now for a week & it’s about enough! We should arrive at journey’s end tonight – 8 days. A lot of tsetse flies, but few white people get sleeping sickness.

[…]

The frontier has been closed between Leopoldville & Brazzaville on the other side of the Congo River because of the troubles, & unless it’s opened again by March 5 I’ll have to find a different route to Douala or leave it out & come to Paris Sabena via Rome. But I’ll telegraph any change & I’ll aim to keep to March 13 unless I hear from you.

Père Georges has just shot a beautiful fishing eagle. He always shoots a sitting target & even then it’s only winged, so one of the crew swims ashore & finishes it off with the branch of a tree.

[…]

Feb. 21

So encouraged because I got through all I wanted & gained a day. We started back (for Paris!) after lunch – but then we hit a snag in the river, damaged the steering. We are tied up in the forest & Lord knows whether the thing can be mended. Frustrating! Too hot to write. All the more frustrating because I had a most erotic dream of you last night when I fell asleep in the middle of a tropical storm.

2 hours later – they’ve managed to get the rudder on shore & now they have to build a fire to bend it. No chance of getting on tonight.

Feb. 22. Sunday

They got the rudder straightened & on again – with a great deal of singing – just by dark. I was never so hot in my life as yesterday & it was wonderful when dark came, in spite of the big ‘vampire’ bats creaking away over the forest. This morning off again at 6 – towards Paris & you. At Mass I noticed that one of the crew, who had a prayer book, had a holy picture, when he was reading – but when I looked closer it was Tom Mix or another in a big cowboy hat!

[…]

9.15 a.m. It’s too dark to write. There’s going to be one hell of a storm in a few minutes.

There was!

Oh, how tired one gets of trying to speak French. Mine gets worse & worse. All the same I’m very well. Only I have to take a sleeping pill every night because otherwise it’s too hot to sleep. For a holiday I’d prefer Tahiti.

Even in this remote spot one has to sign books. A young planter came down to the shore with a cargo of oil & brought with him a copy of
The Power & the G
.! I don’t a bit mind signing in these remote places. He had had his first holiday in Europe after 12 years in the Congo & had visited Capri.

Feb. 23

We are making good time & I should be back in Yonda the day after tomorrow: tomorrow Imbonga. The day after Flandria where I’m spending the night with the English plantation manager & getting a lift next day by car.

Bad night last night owing to a cold, but in the middle of the night I woke up & wrote down the last sentences of the new novel. I wonder if I’ll ever get that far. (I’ve abandoned four in my time).

[…]

Upon hearing of his mother’s death, Graham immediately wrote to his aged aunt who had been dependent on her and indirectly upon him
.

Hotels St James & D’Albany | Paris | Monday [21 September 1959] 10.30 p.m.

Dearest Aunt Nono,

I have just been speaking to Raymond on the phone. I feel that this is far worse for you than for Mumma’s children because it creates a greater gap for you. Perhaps as a Catholic I am more ‘cold-blooded’ because I believe there is a future & that she is probably happier at this moment than any of us. I’m glad that death came gently.

What I want to say now is hard to phrase. I want to be of any help I can & I want you to feel that anything I was able to do for Mumma at the end, I would like to transfer to you. Please between us of the School House days, between the favourite aunt & the most difficult nephew, don’t let’s have any shyness. I’ve told Raymond to speak to you about this. All of us feel an enormous debt of gratitude to you in these years – particularly the years since her accident. I know how much she depended on you & worried about you, so you
must
let me help.

[…]

So much love,
     Graham

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1., | 26th October 1959

Dearest Carol,

I’ve just come back from my walk with Francis. We did about sixty miles, but the Roman Wall where we started in Carlisle was the worst end and most of the time it was a case of trying to identify which farm track was the wall or which pile of stones. We were also
in deadly fear most of the time of bulls and bullocks and tore our clothes over barbed wire. In the end it rained so hard that we gave up altogether about two miles from where the wall became really interesting. Wet through, with blistered feet and Francis having lost his brief case containing his pyjamas, washing things and my whiskey flask, we got into a hired taxi and drove to the nearest comfortable inn. However it was fun in a way.

[…]

Biche reported that a man named ‘Peters or something similar’ had approached a young woman at the Hotel Prince de Galles in Paris and offered her a job as secretary to his friend and partner Graham Greene. Thinking this too good to be true, the young woman, who worked in a bookshop, checked first with Greene’s French publisher, Robert Laffont, and then with Biche, who confirmed that it had nothing to do with the real Graham Greene. Biche suggested she keep an appointment with the man and find out more, but she refused in the belief that she was being scouted by a ‘traite des blanches’ gang. Greene believed he had at least one impersonator and longed to catch up with him.
¹⁵

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 18th December 1959

PERSONAL

Dear Marie,

What a wonderful story and how I wish I had been in Paris to go along with your attractive young Frenchwoman. It would have been a wonderful scene. I narrowly missed the other Graham Greene once in Rome as I think you know and of course there was the character who was blackmailed in Paris and the gentleman who was in prison in Assam. Presumably this is the same character. I can’t help feeling when he starts trying to get hold of secretaries that the Police ought to be informed, but I leave that to you. It’s a curious coincidence
that when I was on his track in Rome he was staying at the George the Vth. It might be worth enquiring whether Mr. Peters is staying there. Anyway I think you ought to introduce me to the heroine one day in Paris!