Graham Greene (48 page)

Since early 1973, Graham had been discussing with Diederich the possibility of a visit to Panama. After a good deal of quiet negotiation by Diederich, who, as a journalist, preferred to keep a low profile, Graham finally received an invitation on
9
September
1976
from General Omar Torrijos
(1929
–81), the ‘Chief of Government’ of Panama
.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 15th September 1976

Dear Bernard,

I have at last had the telegram from Velarde
¹
and I have replied that the earliest I can go is December. There is a K.L.M. flight from Amsterdam which I would propose to take, arriving in Panama on Dec 4. I wanted to avoid passing by way of New York. Is there any chance of your being able to come up for a few days anyway and see me? I suppose in due course Velarde will be booking me in a hotel etc. Have you any idea whether the Government plan to pay my passage or only for my stay in the country? If all goes well I would plan to stay the best part of three weeks. It would be lovely to see you. I doubt if the C.I.A. will enjoy having me around! They didn’t like it in Chile.

Affectionately
     Graham

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes. | 29th November 1976

Dear Bron,

Have you read the first of two reviews in
Motor Sport
²
of Evelyn’s
Diaries
? It’s a wonderful achievement and is to be followed by a second article. The author deals only with the motorbicycles and cars mentioned in the
Diaries
and shows immense motoring scholarship in identifying them. It really is a prize piece and I wonder if your press cuttings have sent it to you.

I do hope you are better now. I would like to have news of you.

Affectionately
     Graham

This letter draws a portrait of José de Jesús Martinez
(1929
–91), called ‘Chuchu’ (the diminutive of Jesús). He held the rank of Sergeant and was the most trusted member of Torrijos’s security guard. He was also a poet and a professor of mathematics. Graham spent far more time in his company than with Torrijos, and he becomes the central figure in
Getting to Know the General (1984).

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 30 December 1976

Dear Bernard,

I am writing after my return from one of the most charming countries I have visited! I was very grateful for your support those first days and as you can imagine we had a running struggle with Mr. Velarde. He told Chuchu to report at every Guardia Nacional on the routes we took so that he could know where I was, but Chuchu
completely disobeyed instructions. In any case the General on, I think, our second meeting had told us to do the opposite of anything Mr. Velarde required. The downfall of Mr. Velarde occurred just before I left when the General was having one of his Saturday binges, which I began at 5 o’clock and ended at 10.00 and Mr. Velarde may have begun earlier. Anyway, Velarde was quite incapable and when he left me at my hotel he just managed to get out that he hoped I would have a cup of tea with him and the General next day, which seemed something of an improbability.

Chuchu was a tower of strength though, unlike what you thought, he always carried a revolver in his pocket! In fact his car had been blown up by a bomb a little before my arrival and so we travelled always in one of the General’s cars. I saw a great deal of the General and liked him more all the time. He soon came to realise that I was not an intellectual! I got involved even in his private life as well as Chuchu’s. Altogether it was a complete holiday and, apart from Mr. Velarde and that fat translator, I liked everybody. My only dislikes seemed to have been shared with the General. I even got an idea for a novel when I was in the country with Chuchu and, if it does seem to take root, I shall go back to Panama in July.

I was very touched by the little note left under my door and I was sorry to be out when you telephoned. With the help of Chuchu I tried to telephone Mexico several times but without success. I do hope you have had a nice holiday with your family in New Zealand, and perhaps we can meet again next summer. Everybody appreciated your piece in
Time
magazine, which occurred at psychologically the right moment, because of Mr. Bunker’s arrival with the negotiators.

Affectionately
     Graham

All good wishes for the New Year.

The new Carter administration would place a greater importance on concluding the stop–start negotiations conducted, on the American side, by Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker (1894–1984) and other diplomats. Greene distrusted Bunker, who had led a six-year mission to Vietnam and been a hawkish adviser to President Johnson. He had also handled negotiations in

the Dominican Republic following the crisis of 1965 –66. The agreements announced on
10
August
1977
ended the existence of the Canal Zone but allowed Americans to retain military bases until 2000. There was also a large aid package for Panama to supplement operating revenues from the canal.
³

30th Dec. 1976

My dear Chuchu,

I had a nightmare journey home! All the Dutch were going back from Curacao for Christmas and so I had no seat beside me to stretch out on and when we got to Frankfurt we were parked on the tarmac for a couple of hours because of fog in Amsterdam. I transferred to an Air France plane at a few minutes notice and got off to Paris and my flat, but of course all my luggage had to go on to Amsterdam and it was some days before I recovered it. It wasn’t such a happy journey as the one I had coming to Panama.

I miss you a great deal and our daily talks. I have no one to recite Rilke to me! And nobody here needs my sun glasses! I promise myself that I shall return next July and find you all as you were, but you know the kind of fears I have for the future. Are you still thinking of going up into the mountains? You must at any rate come down from them to find me. Do remember to send me your play and speaking all at random give my love to the three children I met!

I started writing an article and in fact have done about 1,700 words. I hope the
New York Review of Books
will publish it in America.
⁴
I hope the general won’t find my portrait too personal – though naturally I have left out the story of his wife and father-in-law. I keep on remembering him with greater and greater affection. I have tried to make his portrait a little bit of a warning to the

Americans – the portrait of a man with a sense of desperation who is prudent against his own will. He needn’t be afraid of any lack of charisma – I said that unlike the charisma of rhetoric (in the case of Churchill and Fidel) he has the charisma of desperation. I hope you find that true and it won’t offend him. Anyway, I write what I think.

Do keep on at the General over those awful Walt Disney signs and also persuade him just for the sake of interest to probe into the history of the haunted house.
⁵

I even miss Doctor Velarde. It was fun escaping from him. Now the routine of life is a little bit difficult to bear. Some books are going off to you and of course I’ll send you any news of any articles which may appear. I know you thought I ought to write the novel
⁶
and not write the articles, but I prefer to put in a blow quickly. Who knows what the situation may be by the time a novel is finished?

Do give messages of friendship to all those I like, the architect, the Communist, etc. etc.

Affectionately,
     Graham

Presumably a joint effort, this letter is in Graham’s hand, but the return address is that of the Sutros
.

A.311 Château Périgord | Monte Carlo | [January 1977]

Sir,

Although I am an old lady (past 70 alas!) & living in enforced retirement here because of the abominable taxes I would still like to
make the acquaintance of your Mr Peter Conrad who writes that ‘for Isolde death is as easy, & as infinitely repeatable, as an orgasm.’ He must be some boy! I have led a somewhat rackety life & prided myself on not being what people call ‘a cold fish’ – but ‘infinitely repeatable’ – he must be some man or his girl friend’s out of my class. Forgive a rather flippant letter, but all the same … Mary Procter

The letter was returned with a form-letter citing limitations of space
.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | Feb. 4 [1977]

Dear Bron,

I much enjoyed ‘Stand up & Be Counted’ & I’m glad to hear that your Diaries pleased Martin Amis – they certainly pleased me.
⁷
But I wish you had taken the opportunity to mention that Amis Père had made an advertisement for W. H. Smug naming it (& photo of himself) his favourite bookshop. I suppose the poor man needed money, but some of us would rather live abroad (though we still pay taxes) than fall to that level.

Evelyn could never read my handwriting so I always dictated letters to him – so forgive me inflicting it on you.

How are you? With Evelyn, Grossmith, George Birmingham & P.G.W.
⁸
dead, we have only you to depend on when life is grey.

Affectionately,
     Graham

15th February 1977

Dear Victoria,

Thank you so much for your letter. Don’t be angry with me because I liked General Torrijos. He is a very different type to Perón and I doubt whether he got on with him. Tito is more his type and Fidel. However I shall ask him all about Perón when I next see him!

[…]

Malraux: I knew him slightly soon after the war when we were on the same committee judging translations from English into French. I never took to him very much and I wrote an open letter to him in
Le Monde
at the time of the atrocities in Algiers. He probably did not like that. It was at the time when he was a Minister in De Gaulle’s government. I don’t like his rhetorical style and when I re-read
La Condition humaine
, because somebody asked me to do a film script of it, I was deeply disappointed. I remembered liking it very much when I was young. I dislike too his mythomania. The pretence that he had been in China during the Chinese revolution, the way in which he almost swallowed up the Resistance in France although he was a Resistant of the last moment, his exaggeration of his achievements in Spain during the Civil War. Oh well, I am speaking of a friend of yours but you asked me to tell you.

Lots of love
     Graham

Greene admired the gallantry and insight of Gloria Emerson
(1929
–2004), a foreign correspondent who reported on the Vietnam war for the
New York Times.

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06600 Antibes | 6th April 1977

Dear Gloria Emerson,

Of course I would be delighted to see you. I wouldn’t regard meeting you as being an interview! You won’t however find me at Cap d’Antibes where the millionaires live. I am only three minutes walk from the station on the edge of the Port. I can’t promise to be in Antibes at the end of April as I may have to be in Paris, but I am almost certain to be here in early May. I quite agree that
Rolling Stone
would be more amusing than
Atlantic Monthly
.

Yours sincerely
     Graham Greene

The interview appeared in the
Rolling Stone
(9 March 1978). Their meeting on this occasion and subsequent correspondence inspired Emerson to write
Loving Graham Greene (2000),
a novel in which a character haunted by her friendship with him attempts to protect the freedom of writers in Algeria
.

Brian Moore had held a visiting part-time appointment teaching creative writing at the University of California at Los Angeles and was applying for a permanent position. The chairman wrote to Greene for a letter of reference
.

22 April 1977 Dear Mr. Thorslev,

All I can say in reply to your letter of 11 April is that I consider Mr. Brian Moore one of [the] three or four best novelists in the English language at the moment and I think that the University would be lucky to have him. In my opinion his style has the simplicity and depth only equalled in my generation by Evelyn Waugh.

Yours
     Graham Greene

Svanström was Greene’s publisher in Sweden. His wife Greta had recently suffered a recurrence of breast cancer
.

13th May 1977

My dear Ragnar,

I am terribly sad to hear the news of poor Greta. I had thought after twenty years she was safe. It must in a way be even worse for you. I shan’t tell Yvonne about it because it will awaken fears for her daughter who had a dangerous cancer of the leg four years ago and who we hope is out of trouble. But with cancer one can never be certain. I thought at the time four years ago that Yvonne was going to have a nervous breakdown from her anxiety but I think she forgets about it a lot now. She and her daughter are very close.

For Greta I shall continue to hope as long as possible. The human body is mysterious and one knows of cases like the one in Scotland the other day when the body seems to react even at the last moment and win. The case in Scotland was of a man who was not expected to survive the night with a cancer which had spread very much throughout his body. They talk of a miracle of course and a priest is being canonized who was killed in their religious persecution and to whom the village were praying.
⁹
I prefer to be an agnostic and think that the body itself produces its own miracle.

[…]