Graham Greene (12 page)

Did you hear that General Aspinall-Oglander, the Gallipoli historian,
⁵⁹
wanted to dramatise
The Man Within
? You can read all about him as Colonel Aspinall in
Gallipoli Memories.
⁶⁰
It was all too funny for words; there was to be a happy ending, Elizabeth coming to life again just as the curtain fell.

I’ve become simply crazy about flying. I never want to go in a boat again.

Love,
     Graham

9 Woodstock Close, | Oxford. | March 18 [1934] Dear Hugh,

I enclose a card with a note on the back for B. I think it’s the best way. You could leave it at his house with one of your own. Tell him that you were at Oxford; he has a fondness for the place.
⁶¹

I don’t suppose I could afford to come through Berlin, much as I should like to. I’m pretty busy these days; I am starting fiction reviewing again for
The Spectator
. Derek
⁶²
rang me up on Friday to ask me to write 1200 words on ‘The Three Little Pigs’, the book of the Silly Symphony, by to-morrow, which explains this hasty & jaded note.

Father Bede died yesterday, the priest who got you those introductions. He was the nicest & most intelligent man I ever knew. Raffalovitch too died the other day.
⁶³

I hope your girl has lots of money!

Love,
     Graham

At the suggestion of the Norwegian poet Nordahl Grieg and Baroness Budberg, the mistress of H. G. Wells, Graham took a trip to eastern Europe
.
⁶⁴
The Baltic countries lay in the sights of both the Soviet Union and Germany, who were intent on installing sympathetic governments. The Soviets had recently concluded non-aggression pacts with Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In March, Estonia declared martial law in order to purge Nazis from government posts, and it was expected that a major trial would reveal the extent of foreign infiltration. Immediately after Graham’s departure from Latvia, Premier Ulmanis declared martial law to deal with Socialist and Nazi plots
⁶⁵
– a de facto coup. The trip would later influence the writing of
Our Man in Havana
(see p
. 403).

As from Hotel Room, | Tallinn, | Estonia. | Thursday

[12 May 1934]

Dearest, dearest darling love – I’ve just got your letter. I might have had it yesterday but I seem to have gone to the wrong place – it’s rather difficult when everything’s written in Russian! This afternoon I go on to Tallinn. Darling, I love you so much. Do take care of yourself. I believe I remember what you mean about the play. I made a silly joke after something you said quite out of key with situation! It’s not you are out of key with me one bit; you are like a juggler, I believe you could keep your Tyg & a score of Lucy’s in the air at once; it was only I think due to my staleness of mind. I began to feel all fresh from the moment of playing, but not quite enough to avoid a stupid joke which meant nothing at all. I believe one more play & I could quite have dispensed with this holiday.

Darling darling love. I do hope you are feeling well & that Lucy is allowing you to sleep. I don’t wonder at her being thirsty in this weather. I am drinking all day – soft drinks mostly, as the wine is much more expensive than in England & the beer is not very good. I’m feeling terribly well & sunburnt & selfish, at having left you
behind. I should be enjoying this so much more with you. One does get through a place terribly quickly by oneself. But Riga definitely rings a bell.
⁶⁶

One silly thing has happened. I lost my spectacles as soon as I got to Berlin. So I’m not reading much or going to cinemas. In a way it’s a blessing because it will force me to go to the oculist as I ought to have done a year ago. According to my present plans I shall get back to London late on Friday week. That’s to say about 9.30. So I shall come down on the Saturday before Whitsunday. I shall try to see an oculist on Saturday morning.

It’s only a week since I left you but it seems at least a month to me. One has covered a lot of ground! I caught a glimpse of Goering in Berlin. And Berns. was most interesting. Yesterday I had a comic time which may make an article in itself with Colonel Sudakov.
⁶⁷
I’m going to spend a night at Kovno on the way back to Berlin, but it sounds a one horse place.

[…]

Thursday 10 p.m.

O darling, this place is just too amusing to tintinnabulate, with its wall & towers Burgundian, with its minarets Turkish, with I should think its morals 20th century Mahommedan. I’ve been very lucky here. The train takes 10 hours to go the 100 miles from Riga, & as to fly only cost 25/-I flew, a pretty flight along the edge of the Baltic. My luck was to share a taxi to the aerodrome with the Vice-Consul at Tallinn.
⁶⁸
I had tea with him when we arrived. A charming rather disappointed character, a Catholic who reads nothing but Henry James! I noticed when he unpacked his suitcase that he was carrying
The Ambassadors
with him. So we more or less fell into each other’s
arms. He was also interested in Kovno. He has lived in Tallinn for 12 years with an interval when he was a commercial traveller in armaments. I gave him dinner to-night and to-morrow I’m having dinner with him. It’s all amazingly cheap here. We had for dinner, the two of us, 6 vodkas, a delicious hors d’oeuvres, 2 Vienna
[sic]
schnitzel with fried potatoes, & two glasses of tea. Total bill in one of the swell restaurants 3/6d.

I arrived too late to get to the Poste Restante, so am hoping for a letter to-morrow. The great film on here is Ramon Novarro in ‘Ben Hur’.
⁶⁹
Do you remember it in ’26 & how you didn’t wear your specs?

Darling, I so love you. I’ve got such a lot of amusing things to tell you. But I do wish we were having this time together, though
you
might be a bit of a responsibility. The Vice-Consul was quite astonished that I’d got here without knowing any languages.

Good night, dearest dearest heart, I’m going to bed early being sleepy after the vodkas. I’m leaving the night life for Major Giffey to show me. He is the standing joke here, as the hearty fellow, hard drinker, man-about-Tallinn.
⁷⁰

The army is a sweet caricature of the English. They wear the same uniform & it’s such a shock to come round a corner & find them playing marbles or photographing each other under the War Memorial. All so like Gibraltar, one feels, & yet how different!

My love to Lucy. How splendid about her weight. Riga was tropical in its heat. Here is lovely, but much cooler & fresher. I’m feeling extremely well but that only makes me miss you the more.

Goodbye, dearest heart.

Your Tyg.

P.S. I hear nothing but bad reports of Kovno, dirty, dull & expensive, so I may leave it out.

9 Woodstock Close, | Woodstock Road, | Oxford. |

August 5. [1934?]

Dear Mrs Kurath,

Forgive my delay in answering your letter; I have been very busy finishing a novel; I don’t suppose, as I see that is one of your questions, that it will come out before the new year.

My opinion of
Babbling April
is more or less unprintable: the sentimental emotionalism of adolescence slapped down on the page; useful for self-analysis but should never have been printed. I find myself mildly amused still by Page 4 et seq. and mildly approving of P.12 & 24. I continued to write verse for another year and a half, some of it a little better than this, but apart from a few things in weekly papers published no more. I have, thank God, written no more since 1927.

The Man Within
was the third novel I completed, the first published. The first page was written, while recovering from appendicitis, in 1926, without any idea of continuing the story. It was merely the description of an image which had persisted in my brain for some weeks. I had been reading Lord Troubridge’s (?)
⁷²
history of smuggling, in which is printed a remarkable letter from an informer to the revenue officers, a particularly mean letter. This to the imagination represented, I suppose, a challenge to make such a character sympathetic. The book was not begun for a long while after the first page was written; then for about 18 months it was written rather irregularly, as I was working at the time on the staff of
The Times
.

I think this answers your questions. I look forward to seeing your article.

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

9 Woodstock Close | Woodstock Road | Oxford |

Aug. 18 [1934]

Dear Hugh,

I wish I could have seen you in town to-day, but I had to come up on Thursday for a night to see about my Liberian project and can’t get away again so soon. This is the tenth letter I’ve had to write today and there are still two more to be done. Will you tell Barbara
⁷³
that alas I’ve found that air tickets to Amsterdam are over £8, more than to Paris and more than I had to pay Copenhagen to London.

Is there any hope of seeing you here? Leslie, the nice Consul in Tallinn, wrote to ask me for a line of intro. to you. He’ll be passing through Berlin while you are on holiday, so I suggested he might find you on the way back to Esthonia. I’ve got to be in town one day of the week beginning Aug. 27, in order to see Sir John Harris, of the Anti-Slavery Soc. who’s going to help me over Liberia.
⁷⁴
Any chance of seeing you that week? Otherwise do suggest a day and I’ll come up. Feeling horribly overworked, so would rather get bubonic plague than write another novel for a year. It was nice seeing Barbara on Thursday. Hope I wasn’t too drunk. I found when I left the Café that I was wearing a woman’s brown belt and had my braces in my pocket!

Charles Evans is enthusiastic over Liberia and has offered to pay all my expenses in advance.

Give Mumma my love. I have been meaning to write for weeks, but the bloody old nib, or rather typewriter has never been so hard pressed. Why, I’ve even had to turn down a perfectly good offer from a publisher to do a short story, to be published all by itself at first,
swell as a daisy, in a limited edition at 15/-. Blast, I sprained my wrist on Thursday night putting the Editor of the Theatre World to bed and even typing is hurting.

The Old School
went into a second impression this week-end, 1500 copies sold. Not bad for a joke of that kind.

Love,
     Graham

9 Woodstock Close | Woodstock Road | Oxford |

Nov. 22 [1934]

Dear Denyse,

[…]

I’ve just finished a novel to be called
The Shipwrecked
,
⁷⁵
but I don’t think you’ll be able to do anything with it, though, of course, I shall send you a copy. I enclose a short story. I’m afraid it will seem bad to you who are French. I’m working on another which Grayson are supposed to be publishing in a limited edition.
⁷⁶
I’ll send you a typescript when it’s ready. Then on Jan. 5 I leave on the most absurd trip. I’m going to Liberia; Heinemann have contracted for a travel book.
⁷⁷
I get off at Freetown, Sierra Leone, and try to make my way from the border at Pendembu to Monrovia by the jungle with carriers. As I can find no one silly enough to go with me,
⁷⁸
and as I have never managed natives or been in the tropics, it’s all rather silly. But I did want a rest from novels. France is very interested in Liberia, isn’t she? I suppose there’s no sort of investigating job to be picked up from your Colonial Office? Do you know anyone in French Guinea? I shall probably be stepping off at Conakry.

Do tell me who the English woman is and why she’s lecturing on me. I should love to hear what nonsense she talks.

I think the irony of an English author being continually censored in France is delicious. It quite atones for the cuts. Tell them I’m a Catholic. Perhaps one can do more if they are certain I’m inside the fold!

Remember me to the angelic Updegraffs.

Ever yours,
     Graham

P.S. I was in Germany in October & feel too pessimistic for words. I wish the world could be rid of that nice, sentimental, abysmally stupid race.

9 Woodstock Close | Woodstock Road | Oxford |

Nov. 26 [1934]

Dear Hugh,

I never wrote and thanked you for the cheque as I was frantically busy, finishing
The Shipwrecked
, doing a short story which is supposed to be coming out in a limited edition (!), and getting ready for Liberia. Now there’s a slight calm before the storm, but my God what a storm – I’ve got to pay a small fortune in insurance.

What I’m really writing is to tell you amusing news about
The Man Within
. Ronald
[sic]
Ackland, the dramatist, and a young man called Roy Lockwood, who has been editing and assistant directing in various companies since he went down, have found a tame financier and they are going to do the Hecht Arthur stunt of film making on their own. They are proposing to start off with
The Man Within
. They can only afford to pay me £200, which is Godsend enough to me, but their object is to make a really first class film. I think the result may be very amusing. They’ve got apparently a very good camera man, the financier will put up as much money as they need, and they propose to get started directly I come home from
Liberia.
⁷⁹
One really begins to feel as if one wants to come back more or less intact. Especially (another good joke) as someone’s lecturing on me in Paris in April.

Did Barbara tell you I’d had a long letter from poor Ingeborg? written at five o’clock in the morning with a stump of pencil belonging to Mikael, Mikael with a high fever in one bed and herself feverish in another. Scandinavians are terribly Scandinavian. Apparently she arrived back from Moscow ‘dirty, tired and full of longing’ on Christmas Eve of all days to hear that night from Nils that he was in love with someone else. Now she’s found work in a bookshop.
⁸⁰