Graham Greene (51 page)

2nd February 1980

Dear Nick,

Many thanks for your letter. I am glad you had such a good day with David Low. He’s a very nice man. He wrote to me that he had enjoyed it too. Of course you should sell my letter for what it will fetch and any future ones!

Nelson Sevenpennies: I would like
Major Vigoreux
of Q. and also
In Kedah’s Tents
of Merryman and
Born in Exile
of Gissing. Ask Elisabeth to pay you what you ask out of petty cash! Of course I will sign your book for you. Why not leave it with Elisabeth.

I am afraid I don’t know anybody but Hugh and I who collect Nelsons. I have none in dust-wrappers but we saw a number in dust-wrappers and a good collection in a bookshop in Leicester once. As I am going there for my play I shall look in again.

Which days are you visible in the Portobello Road? I’d like to call on your stall one day.

Love
     Graham

Muggeridge reminded Graham of a compact they had made in Galilee to go on television together when they were eighty and asked him to ‘put this rendez-vous forward a year or so’
.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 26th March 1980

Dear Malcolm,

I am afraid my decision is a fixed one. I won’t appear on television. As for the 80th birthday that is still quite a long way off and I hope to escape having to break my promise!

I have found in writing autobiographical pieces how often memories of even things long past fail or are altered. I noticed a small alteration in your memories in a cutting I received the other day from was it
The Daily Mirror
? I was already installed at SIS when you were recruited, so I can’t have asked my sister to put our names up on the top of the In Basket. I had been destined for Monrovia but the Liberians refused to have me and when I was appointed to Freetown I learnt that they needed a man in Lourenço Marques and suggested you in order that you should escape those wintry rides on a motor-cycle.

My love to Kitty

Affectionately
     Graham

Martine Cloetta, the daughter of Yvonne and Jacques, found herself bullied and harassed by her estranged husband, a man with underworld connections that kept him safe from the law. Greene concluded that Nice was being run by crooks. He wrote a pamphlet
J’Accuse (1982
), which some, including his friend Michael Korda, who decided against publishing it in the United States, regarded as an old man’s eccentricity.
²⁹
Perhaps a case of domestic abuse would be harder to trivialise a quarter of a century later; feminism has won that argument
.

9th April 1980

Dearest Leopoldo,

Thank you for your letter of March 28. I do hope that you had a happy rest in Galicia at your village and also in our monastery. I am afraid that when I came back from England things were in a rather more violent situation than they had been before. Last week the fiend tried to break into the house of Yvonne and the police had to be called. The next day when Martine was returning to her apartment with her children he was waiting and attacked Jacques
³⁰
who was saved by Martine with the help of a tear-gas bomb. The authorities seem hopeless in this affair, but now my friend Pierre who is the Honorary Consul-General for Ireland
³¹
has written to the Préfet enclosing a letter which I have proposed to write to
The Times
about the conditions of the law here. A kind of blackmail.
³²
I have to go to England now for my medical check up and then to see my daughter in Switzerland but I shall be back on April 16. I hope
through this intervention of the Préfet something can be done. The law seems powerless.

I have also had a letter from General Salan in reply to one of mine which definitely establishes that whatever he may say he never belonged to the OAS – the secret army that he always claims was the cause of his imprisonment.
³³

About the end of May, God and not I know whether it would be a good thing. If only we could get a period of peace it might well be the only time when Yvonne and I could go off to Capri and I would be able to do a little bit of work in tranquillity. I want very much to see you and to discuss certain things with you, but we also need a short period of rest. England was a very short period and only led to the drama when he assaulted the house and assaulted Jacques.

When I come back from Switzerland I will write to you again and tell you what the situation is. Certainly we have need of all your prayers. I do hope you had a happy time with the Trappists and I really long to be there again with you. All three of us send our love.
     Graham

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | April 17. 80

My dear Barbara,

[…]

This is only to explain how impossible it is to be sure when I’ll be in England again (I shall have to be there for a medical in October –
my
birthday month!). Gozo is a dream,
³⁴
but if we can get this man
behind bars (my writing becomes unreadable) we
have
to go to Anacapri to see my little house (I am now an honorary citizen) in the spring – God knows if it will be possible. Impossible even to work at the moment. Anyway let’s keep in touch – this comic nightmare must end before long either in blood or a laugh. Today I discussed the matter with the mayor of Antibes who is at least alerting his police & he said, ‘But you are living one of your own books.’

Anyway, a lot of love,
     Graham

In his last decade, Graham relied on his niece as the editor of his works. Here he discusses drafts of
Ways of Escape
, his second volume of memoirs, which she knitted together out of his articles and his introductions to the novels
.

17th June 1980

Dear Louise,

Thank you so much for your letter of June 7 with the enclosures. I wish I could have been at the party and discovered with you the secret stair and eaten – however is it made? – the caviar pie. I do think you are a wonderful publisher – apart from Frere much the best that I have known. If I have been able to give you a little help it was worth all the work on the book. Don’t worry about letting me know about all these subsidiary rights. I have absolute trust in you as a publisher.

Love
     Graham

A professor of English studies, Ivasheva was one of Graham’s closest friends in Russia. Here he responds to the news that her husband has committed suicide by throwing himself from the balcony of their seventh-floor apartment in Moscow
.

17th June 1980

My dear Valentina,

Your letter was a great shock. I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am. How terrible it must be for you – much more so than a death in bed. I am quite sure you have nothing to blame yourself for. In his condition it was almost certain that your husband would kill himself one day but now at any rate he is at peace. I don’t believe myself that death is the end of everything, or rather my faith tells me that death is not the end of everything and when my belief wavers I tell myself that I am wrong. One can’t believe 365 days a year, but my faith tells me that my reasoning is wrong. There is a mystery which we won’t be able to solve as long as we are alive. Personally even when I doubt I go on praying at night my own kind of prayers. Why not try at night talking to your husband and telling him all you think. Who knows whether he mightn’t be able to hear you and now with a mind unclouded?

[…]

Greene was twice called upon as intermediary in kidnappings by Salvadoran rebels. In the first case, two bankers were released upon payment of a
$5,000,000
ransom by their employer, a branch of Lloyd’s. The second case involved Ambassador Dunne of South Africa. Graham’s contact with the guerrillas was through the novelist Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico City
.

130 Boulevard Malesherbes, | Paris 17. | Sep. 11 1980

Dear Francis,

This ‘happy birthday’ will arrive a bit late I’m afraid. I’m back from Panama (again the guest of Omar Torrijos) & three days in Nicaragua (the guest of Borge – most equal among the equal Sandinista junta) & meeting in Panama the rather creepy little head of the San Salvador rebels (‘pen name’ Marcial) & putting in a word for the poor South African ambassador who has been in their captivity for about 9 months. My fifth trip to Central America! Why? I suppose anything to get away from Antibes in August.

[…]

The Popular Liberation Front (FLP) led by Salvador Cayetano (‘Marcial’) was one of the groups that combined into the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Greene had met with Cayetano
c. 20
August
1980
and provided the names of two South African millionaires who might pay the ransom. His mediation proved vain. Ambassador Dunne died in captivity several months later
.
³⁵

John Michael Gibson approached Greene to provide a preface to
A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle (1983
). He had compiled this book in collaboration with Richard Lancelyn Green, whose bizarre suicide in
2004
was said to have been modelled on ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’
.

20th October 1980

Dear Mr. Gibson,

Thank you very much for your letter of October 4. It is very kind of you to invite me to write a preface to your bibliography of Doyle’s writings and if you didn’t mind a very unscholarly and short one I would be pleased to do it. One point I would like to make is how
good a writer he was apart from [the] Sherlock Holmes works. I can reread him as I find myself unable to reread Virginia Woolf and Forster, but then I am not a literary man.

Yours sincerely
     Graham Greene

51 La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | Jan. 16. ’81

My dear Anne & Francis,

The splendid box of goodies arrived today (the box worthy of the contents). Thank you so much. I hastened to unpack it before Yvonne arrived in case it contained a bomb. One lives a strange life here. A week ago an anonymous type rang me up & asked whether I would receive 3 Brigades Rouges. I said, ‘No!’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I would have to leave France if I did.’

There have been other dramas. Daniel, the ex-husband, attacked his mistress with such violence her nose was broken & she came to Yvonne & ‘told all’ (his corruption of the police & even a member of the procureur’s office. Also his obsession with murdering Yvonne by putting some explosive substance in the oil of her car.) I thought that at last we had to go to the top. So I sent a letter to the Chancellor of the Legion returning my insignia & saying that I wanted to be free to speak out against the corruption of justice on the Côte. I sent a copy with another letter to Alain Peyrefitte, the Minister of Justice.
³⁶
Immediate action. The Grand Boissieu
³⁷
returned my insignia & Peyrefitte wrote & spoke to me on the telephone, saying he was sending his Inspector General & a colleague down the next day. Two extremely nice men. He had expected to stay 24 hours & stayed four days – he was quite
overwhelmed by what he found. Now I think action will not be long delayed. Light at last at the end of the tunnel.

Love from us both,
     Graham

Alicja Wesolowska, who had been a doctoral student in New York, was on her way to a UN posting in Outer Mongolia when she was arrested on
10
August
1979
in Poland on an espionage charge, something that often happened to returning exiles. Despite protests on her behalf, she was imprisoned until 1984
.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur,| 06600 Antibes | 17th January 1981

Dear Shirley,

It was nice hearing your voice on the telephone. Perhaps by this time you have received my letter about cancelling my Polish visit. Apparently it did go off safely from London! In April I am getting something called the Jerusalem Prize which is given for the defence of the individual. I shall have to make a short speech apparently and if our hunger striker has survived and nothing has been done about her case I would like to introduce it into my speech. It might catch the attention of journalists. Could you send me not a lot of documents but a brief resumé of the whole affair in your own words. I would have to receive it before I leave for Israel on April 2. Do include in your resumé the attempts to get that awful man at the head of the United Nations to take action.

Our love to both of you
     Graham

P.S. I notice that Kurt Waldheim omits from
Who’s Who
whatever career he had between 1939 and 1945. Can you give me details? Why does he omit all this from
Who’s Who
which is always provided by the character himself?
P.P.S. This morning January 17 I have received the following telegram from Waldheim:

‘Dear Mr Greene. Your telegram of 13 January raises the problem of United Nations employees under detention. Particularly Ms. Alicja Wesolowska. I can assure you I have personally followed this problem very closely and expressed my concern both privately and publicly. As recently as 13 January 1981 I reiterated my appeal to the government of Poland to exercise clemency in Ms. Wesolowska’s case and requested access to her by a United Nations representative. My efforts will continue as long as necessary. Yours sincerely (Kurt Waldheim – General United Nations).’

One would like to know what reply he received to his appeal of January 13. The telegram is addressed to me at Résidence des Pleurs. Somewhat symbolic?

Graham’s remarks about Waldheim’s war years anticipated the revelations during his
1986
campaign for the Austrian Presidency that he had served in a German army unit guilty of atrocities in Yugoslavia. A prominent novelist, Hazzard wrote two books and a number of articles on the failures of the UN, most importantly
The Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990).