Graham Greene (37 page)

[…]

[Reno, Nevada] | Feb 4 [1960]

Hope to be with you in less than a fortnight.

Love to both,

G

Won our night’s lodging on the slot machines.

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 23rd March 1960

Dear Michel,

I wonder if you are back from Abyssinia yet. I am struggling towards the end of my novel which is now called
A Burnt Out Case
and I am wondering if I don’t as I am inclined to do put it in the fire whether you would allow me to dedicate it to you as a poor return for all your kindness. I have another request to make. If I sent you a roneo’d copy of the book in due course with pages turned down wherever there was some reference to leprosy do you think you could glance at these and correct any mistakes. Don’t hesitate to say that you are far too busy because I know what a burden this could be.

If you will allow me to dedicate the book to you I shall do it in a form of a letter which will enable me to point out that the book is in no way a picture of one leproserie and that none of the characters are those of living people.

My affectionate regards to you both,
     Graham

C.6 Albany, | London, W.
I
. | April 18 [1960]

Dearest Carol,

Thank you so much for your delightful Easter card. I’m afraid I can’t come to you because I came back from Moscow awfully ill & the same night was put on a stretcher & carted by ambulance to hospital. Pneumonia! I’m still there after two weeks, but I’m leaving tomorrow.
This is TOP SECRET. Mummy & Francis don’t know as yet
. I didn’t want people to worry & I felt too tired for visits, so I kept the affair secret. Only about four people got to know. I feel very silly because I’m never ill.

Of course it rather spoilt Moscow because I was feeling pretty poorly. However I went to the Bolshoi & to the Circus & to
The Quiet American
(very bad, & speeches & I had to make a speech from the stage). I’ve become a capitalist there & opened a bank account! Guy Burgess rang me up & came & had a drink my last night, & I had supper in a Russian home for the first time – quite quietly
en famille
which made me feel quite accepted. I kept going on vodka & everybody was very kind. I only did the public things (Bolshoi, Circus & Brit Embassy with the party).

I must stop now because I’m rather tired. Off to Italy on May 1 where I hope to feel better.

Lots of love,

Daddy.

C.6 Albany, | London, W. 1. | 22nd June 1960

Dear Evelyn,

Thank you so much for your letter and telegram. I think you are wise not to come to the sale but I can’t resist it. I admit that I shall
be a little piqued if Nancy Mitford’s manuscript or a poem written out by Mr. Betjeman fetch more than mine!
¹⁶

I also looked for you in the theatre the other night. I waited till the lights went on watching approximately a spot where I had seen you last but couldn’t see you at all. I then went out and searched the pavements but I expect you had already gone. I agree with you about the second act – I’d really enjoyed the first, but when it turned serious the play went all to pieces. I couldn’t understand all this business about the heroic little man that the papers spoke of– he was only heroic after he had done his best to turn into a rhinoceros and failed.
¹⁷

I long to come down and see you. I’ve got into an awful jam with commitments because I went to hospital for two weeks with a pneumonia that I caught in Moscow and somehow those two weeks have not yet been caught up. I’ve also got to go back into hospital next month for a check up but would some time in August be a possibility? I know you wouldn’t mind if I brought a film script of
The Living Room
to work on.

Yours ever
     Graham

The twenty-year-old Auberon Waugh’s
(
1
939
–2001) first novel
The Foxglove Saga
appeared in the summer of 1960
.

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | [July 1960]

Dear Auberon,

I hope my long friendship with your Father allows me to call you that. I have been reading your book in hospital – by a strange coincidence, I was, like Father Thomas, about to be given a
bronchoscopy although I did not have an enema and the result was more satisfactory. I got to that bit half an hour before my sedative, so at that stage I was reading the book with mixed feelings.

Now my feelings are not mixed at all. Only once this fifty years, I think, has there been a first night like this – and that too was in the Waugh family. It is superb, your book, in its fun and deceptive ease. Lady Foxglove and Stoat are magnificent; even the baby Tarquin.

You are going to suffer a lot of irritation when every hack reviewer compares you to Evelyn, but
The Foxglove Saga
has only one parent and stands magnificently alone.

A thousand congratulations.
     Graham Greene

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1 | Jan. 3 [1961]

Dearest Lucy – I mean Carol,

I was so overjoyed at your news & the fact that you sounded so happy – it has quite made my new year. I thought John
[sic]
sounded very nice too.

I long for details. What does he do in oil? Will you have to find a house or an apartment? How old is he – rumour says 35 which sounds ideal? A photograph please. Mummy will be asking you all the necessary questions about the wedding. Full name please for an announcement in
The Times
. Any ideas for wedding presents? Do I, oh horror, have to get myself tails & a top hat? (I
hope
it’s not the Canadian custom) What are
you
wearing? Can you find what you want in Calgary? Are you going to get the bishop? I shall come out on my way to Japan so let me know dates as soon as possible. How sad that Granny isn’t alive to hear – she’d have been so excited.

[…]

Lucy Caroline Greene married Jean Bourget on
29
April 1961. They divorced in 1970
.

Waugh was distressed by
A Burnt-Out Case
, which, on the heels of the bleak short story ‘A Visit to Morin’, suggested that Greene was finished as a Catholic. The book also struck Waugh as technically deficient, repeating the main character’s predicament three times, once ‘painfully’ in a fairy story. He regarded Deo Gratia’s attempted escape as poorly handled and the death of Querry as ‘absurdly melodramatic’. On the whole, he thought Greene’s skills were ‘fading’.
¹⁸
He refused to review it and apologised for his own Rycker-like behaviour in promoting Greene as a Catholic author.
¹⁹

C.6 Albany, | London, W. 1 | 4th January 1961

Dear Evelyn,

A typewritten letter always looks so formal, but I know you can’t read my handwriting. I’m very sorry to hear that you won’t be reviewing
A Burnt-Out Case
(I’m afraid I committed the indiscretion of suggesting that you should do so to Father Caraman),
²⁰
but I quite understand your feelings in the matter. I was all the more anxious that you should review the book because I realize it will cause a certain amount of hostility in the Catholic press and, although I expected severe criticism from you, I felt sure that it would be at least founded on genuine unemotional principles. Whatever Querry may have felt about his Catholic critics, I have certainly not felt at any time about you. I have always found our points of disagreement – as in the case of
The Heart of the Matter –
refreshing and enlightening and miles away from the suburbia of
The Catholic Herald
or
The Universe.
I do really assure you that never once have you behaved like Rycker!

With a writer of your genius and insight I certainly would not attempt to hide behind the time-old gag that an author can never be identified with his characters. Of course in some of Querry’s reactions there are reactions of mine, just as in some of Fowler’s reactions in
The Quiet American
there were reactions of mine. I suppose the points where an author is in agreement with his character lend what force or warmth there is to the expression. At the same time I think one can say that the parallel must not be drawn all down the line and not necessarily to the conclusion of the line. Fowler, I hope, was a more jealous man than I am, and Querry, I fear, was a better man than I am. I wanted to give expression to various states or moods of belief and unbelief. The doctor, whom I like best as a realized character, represents a settled and easy atheism; the Father Superior a settled and easy belief (I use ‘easy’ as a term of praise and not as a term of reproach); Father Thomas an unsettled form of belief and Querry an unsettled form of disbelief. One could probably dig a little of the author also out of the doctor and Father Thomas!

Anyway whatever the rights and wrongs of this book I do want you to believe that never for a moment have I felt other than pleasure or an interested dismay at your criticisms and never for a moment anything other than affection for yourself. I do hope that we can meet some time in the not too distant future. I heard rumours of your presence in London the other day which happened to coincide with one of my rare presences. I wish you would ring me up when you do come to town, but I know your hatred of the telephone.

Yours with deepest affection,
     Graham

Waugh found this letter pretentious and flimsy. On
5
January
1961
he wrote that he was not so dotty as to think Rycker only a portrait of himself, but that it was a caricature of a number of Graham’s Catholic admirers including himself who had failed to recognise the broad hints that he had now amplified into ‘a plain repudiation’ of faith. He said that he found the notion of an easy and settled atheism meaningless since an atheist denied the central purpose of his life – to love and serve God. Graham would not
encounter hostility from Catholics so much as regrets for a ‘Lost Leader’: ‘God forbid I should pry into the secrets of your soul. It is simply your public performance which grieves me.’
²¹

C.6 Albany, | London, W. 1 | 6th January 1961

My dear Evelyn,

This is rapidly becoming a Claudel–Gide correspondence!
²²
I think you have carried your identification in this novel much too far. Must a Catholic be forbidden to paint the portrait of a lapsed Catholic? Undoubtedly if there is any realism in the character it must come from the author experiencing some of the same moods as Querry but surely, not necessarily, with the same intensity; I hope you don’t attribute to me Querry’s suicided mistress! I suppose, if one chose to draw the character of an atom-scientist traitor, there would be an element in one’s own character which would make the description of his motives plausible, but I’m sure that you wouldn’t accuse me, as Dame Rebecca West did both of us, of having a treasonable inclination.
²³
I suggest that if you read the book again you will find in the dialogue between the doctor and Querry at the end the suggestion that Querry’s lack of faith was a very superficial one – far more superficial than the doctor’s atheism. If people are so impetuous as to regard this book as a recantation of faith, I cannot help it. Perhaps they will be surprised to see me at Mass.

What I have disliked in some Catholic criticism of my work, particularly some of the books which have been written about it in France, is the confusion between the functions of a novelist and the functions of a moral teacher or theologian. I prefer the statement of Newman. ‘I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man. You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than any Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all.’

I will match you quotations from Browning with Bishop Blougram:

Ever affectionately,
     Graham

The quotations from Newman and Browning take Greene back to his exchange with Bowen and Pritchett (see pp.
147–58
). However, Waugh seems to have made a deep impression on Greene, who wondered if he had gone too far in the expression of doubt.

A poet and playwright, Joseph Macleod (pseud. Adam Drinan)
(1903–84)
was Greene’s closest friend at university. He qualified as a barrister, but pursued careers in radio, film and theatre. Eventually, he settled in Florence.

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 6th February 1961

Dear Joseph,

I’ve just come back to England for a couple of nights from France and found your night letter telegram. How it brought back the days
when you would leave in my room a new poem for the
Oxford Outlook.
Even your writing hasn’t changed very much. I’m proud and flattered after all these years to receive another even though I have no paper to publish it in.

Here I am talking on without even congratulating you and your wife on your son, but you had buried the news quite a number of lines down in the poem.
²⁴
Did I really make a ground plan for the future one day in the meadows?! I am glad I don’t remember, for how awful it would be to find it fulfilled.

I have put the night letter poem into my copy of the
Ecliptic
²⁵
which has survived all these years and the blitz.