Graham Greene (45 page)

Love,
     Grandpa

Richmond wrote that her husband, Kenneth, who had psychoanalysed Graham in 1921, had been a medium and that his spiritual activities had
brought about a miraculous cure of alcoholism and psoriasis. His first activities as a medium around
1916
led him into psychology. His early ‘scripts’ had just been published
.

27 August 1971

Dear Zoë,

Your letter caught me as I was passing through London on my way to South America and I was so pleased to hear from you and with such good news of your happiness. I am sending you a copy of the book so Anne
²⁷
will have to find a different one for you for Christmas. I was most interested in all that you told me about Kenneth. How odd that I should have described him as having a head of a musician when I knew nothing of that start. Nor did I know anything about his psychic activities. I am very interested to see the pamphlet and if you don’t mind I
will
keep it and your best wishes too.

It is quite true what I wrote that the six months I spent in the house with you and Kenneth were among the happiest in my life.

Yours affectionately,
     Graham

In a subsequent letter she remarked that Graham was a repressed medium and that this sensitivity made him a great novelist
.

Salvador Allende
(1908
–73) was the socialist President of Chile from
1970
to 1973. Greene met with him in mid-September 1971, and wrote ‘Chile: The Dangerous Edge’ for the
Observer Magazine
(2 January 1972; reprinted in
Reflections, 275
–83)
.

13 October 1971 Dear Doctor Allende,

I do want to thank you most warmly for all the help you gave me on my visit to Chile. I particularly enjoyed my visit to the north and I was very sorry that circumstances prevented our meeting again before I left. I was very glad that the Argentine affair ended satisfactorily, for it must have been a cause of great anxiety to you.
²⁸

I do hope that one day I may have the pleasure of revisiting Chile and meeting you again.

Yours very sincerely,
     Graham Greene

Amanda Dennys, the daughter of Elisabeth Dennys, was close to Graham, as were her sister, the publisher Louise Dennys, and her brother, the bookseller Nicholas Dennys. Although Graham here expresses a passing wish to meet Chris Todd, her first husband, this did not happen. He did, however, become friends with Ron Saunders, her second husband, and attended their wedding. Elisabeth Dennys had become Graham’s personal secretary in 1975, but when she suffered a stroke in
1989
Amanda took over her work. After Graham’s death, she and her brother oversaw the sale of his papers to the Burns Library at Boston College. She served as secretary of the literary estate until her untimely death on
14
February 2007
.

15 November 1971

Dear Amanda.

I am sorry to have missed you in the south as I’d very much like to meet Chris. I also missed Louise who very sweetly left me a note and would you send her my love when you next write. I will certainly let you know when I’m next in London and we’ll meet for dinner. I
don’t expect to be in London except in immediate passage to Barbados for some months though.

The difficulty of Capri in the spring or early summer is that that is the very time when Yvonne and I are likely to be going there. If you could make your visit in the later summer it would be easier. August or September. Even in August my end of Anacapri is very quiet as traffic cannot pass the door and there is generally a slight breeze in the afternoon. But of course from the point of view of swimming the sea is very crowded.

Love,
     Graham

After the publication of A
Sort of Life
in September 1971, Greene received many letters from people who had lived near Berkhamsted School and from people mentioned in the book. One old boy, W. A. Saunders, a former missionary to China who had settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, wrote him a thumpingly cheerful letter, chiding him for melancholy and for various errors of fact
.

15 December 1971

Dear Mr Saunders,

Thank you very much for your long and interesting letter on the subject of Berkhamsted. It interested me a great deal. Who knows, one day I may be able to visit Ann Arbor, but I don’t know that my ‘melancholy would lighten a little’. Does anybody really want to change a little? A complete change, I suppose, one could accept, but not a small change – otherwise one would be losing one’s thing.

I had forgotten about ‘Tarzan of the Alps’ and I wish I had remembered at the time I wrote the book.
²⁹

A strange thing happened after the publication. I had forgotten the name of the train boy who was caned in our class until I received a letter from a woman written from Berkhamsted where she was living with her husband saying that her father had had a traumatic experience of Berkhamsted. He was now in hospital and she would like to send him an autographed copy of the book. His name was Mayo and I suddenly realized that he was mentioned in it. I sent the book and I heard from her that he had just finished reading it when he died.
³⁰

Was Carter really the name of my tormentor? I thought that I had invented the name.
³¹

It is you who have your wires crossed about Edmunds. Clodagh, the golden-haired daughter, was Clodagh O’Grady quite definitely. I knew her before her mother remarried.

David Copperfield was one of those blackouts. It has been corrected in later editions.
³²

Was Whitehead ever really housemaster of Adders? I thought Whitehead was the master who left the school to take up law and in fact became a K.C. It was quite a remarkable achievement.

Poor old Sunderland Taylor who lost his son in the war was the one who gave me my only prize for a short story and he was very distressed about doing it because it was atheist. I must have
been one of the few people in the school who liked ‘The Oily Duke’.
³³

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | Dec. 22 [1971]

Dear Muriel,

I only got your book
³⁴
yesterday because it had been waiting for me in Paris – & first I was in Chile & then London & then here & never in Paris.

What fools the reviewers have been. It’s a wonderful idea, brilliantly carried out, & to me your best book since
Memento Mori
– perhaps even better? I must reread
M.M
. I loved particularly the dialogue of Heloise & Pablo on page 95. All my congratulations. You have reached the point when all the little people become jealous.

Peter G.
³⁵
promised to arrange a meeting in Rome – but then his film blew up & he forgot. I still hope it may happen before I die of old age.

Affectionately,
     Graham

Malcolm Rennie of Suffolk named his brown two-year-old filly ‘Aunt Augusta’ and asked Graham if he would like to buy a third-or half-share
.

9 February [1972?] Dear Mr Rennie,

Thank you very much for your letter of January 29 and for the honour you have done me in naming your filly after Aunt Augusta. I wish I could take a share in the filly, but I am afraid that it’s not only out of my line altogether but there would be great difficulties in transferring money to England. The currency regulations here are almost as strict as at home. In any case I am afraid that with grandchildren to provide for it’s not a gamble I would take. I’ve even given up roulette! However I shall follow the filly closely and back her whenever I get the chance!

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

A leading Afrikaans writer, Etienne Leroux (pseudonym of S. P. D. le Roux
, 1922
–1989) was at this time best known for his novel
Seven Days at the Silbersteins (1962
). Graham’s evolving interest in South Africa had a direct influence on
The Human Factor.

Dear Etienne,

[…]

I can’t reproach you with not having written for a long time, because I only write letters when I receive letters. I imagine that’s a common fault with a writer who feels he’s done enough when he’s put his five hundred words on paper. About two hundred words now in my case.

We shall miss you after Easter. Yvonne is off with the children – if one can call them still children – to Brazzaville for her usual African Easter and I shall fill up the time in Paris, Switzerland with my daughter and London. Both of us back again in mid-April and then we shall lack your presence.

I can’t remember whether the new port had been started when you were here last. It’s now nearly finished except for the gardens which are going to be planted outside my windows. I hope the value
of the apartment has risen to atone for all the dust and noise we have suffered for more than a year. The wife of the retired spy
³⁶
still prepares a good omelette. I am not sure whether the whores are still in the Hotel Metropole. The bar has changed completely and become clean and a pizzeria. Brandade Nimois is still obtainable at the Liberacion, my telephone is still the same, the
Time
chap arrives at intervals to see his children, but I haven’t seen any women leaving mysterious markings for about a year now. The beastly man with the dogs has left the little Hotel Belle Vue outside my window and now there’s a big fat man from the Loire who cooks excellently and we call Silvertooth. The mysterious man with the Mercedes who used to turn up in the old days is now wanted by the police both in Italy and in France and is rumoured to have escaped to Morocco. We have our dramas. I expect you read about the boat which was chased and shot at from Villefranche nearly to Marseilles which was overloaded with heroin.

[…]

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. |

12 October 1972

Dear Bernard,

Your letter written on my 68th birthday came to me as quite a shock. Thank goodness Ginette and the children came back safely from Haiti. What a brave girl she is to have attempted the visit. Your story of her being taken under guard to see Cambronne and Claude was terrifying. Haiti on that last visit was to me quite a traumatic experience and I still at intervals dream of the place. My dreams even keep up to date – so that the last one I had Baby Doc was in charge and not Papa Doc. I suppose there’s still no news of our friends who may be in Fort Dimanche?

[…]

With the death of Papa Doc on
21
April 1971, the presidency-for-life of Haiti passed to the nineteen-year-old Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier (b
. 1951
). Less paranoid than his father, he operated a regime that was totally corrupt. Diederich’s wife Ginette, then a medical student, thought it reasonably safe to visit her family in Haiti. However, she was taken by the police from her parents’ home to see General Breton Claude, the persecutor of suspected Communists. Their interview the next day was interrupted by Luckner Cambronne, who declared that Bernard Diederich could never return to the country. As Minister of the Interior, National Defence and Police, Cambronne held a complicated portfolio of cruelties. Chiefly, however, he was the bagman for the Duvaliers. Often attired in sharkskin suits, he made vast sums of money from the export of cadavers and of blood plasma taken from impoverished Haitians. He also enjoyed a lucrative monopoly on quickie divorces. By
15
November, Cambronne lost favour and took refuge in the Colombian embassy.
³⁷

Graham consulted his brother Raymond on the abduction of Charley Fortnum in
The Honorary Consul (1973).

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 24 October 1972

Dear Raymond,

Many thanks for your letter. I am glad that you had a good time in Malta and Gozo and do hope you are feeling better for it.

I would prefer the knock on the head and morphia because of what you told me about the effect of morphia on somebody with a high alcoholic content. The man who would have given the injection is an educated man and there have been weeks if not months when his doctor friend could have given him practice. I
suppose there’s something harmless one could use in practising. Anyway when proofs are ready I’ll send a set to you and we can probably tinker about a little with the situation.

[…]

as from Antibes | 13 November 1972

Dear Michael,

Many thanks for sending me your memories!
³⁸
I wish however your printer had not misprinted Orwell’s letter to Fyvel and reversed the positions of France and England in the quotation. If you read it again you will see that it doesn’t make sense as it stands if I am to be the first Catholic fellow-traveller. It should read ‘A thing that doesn’t exist in England but does in France.’ I think too from page 131 it would have been fairer to say ‘that Graham partly admired him’. The only book of his I’ve really liked is
Animal Farm
and I found later the selected letters in the book of essays published by Penguin in four volumes almost deplorable during the war period. His rumour-mongering at the time of the blitz I think was really despicable.

The meeting between Truffaut and Martine went very well and he told her he had seen her on television and thought at the time that it was a good face for the films. I think he is putting her in touch with some form of agent on the coast and Suzanne was also very kind. Yvonne and I went to a little cocktail party on Friday evening at a hotel to celebrate the end of his film, but we only stayed about a quarter of an hour as it was really too noisy. We had also had Truffaut and Suzanne to dinner at Félix.