Ways of Escape

by Graham Greene

  It is typical of Herbert Read’s character that I cannot remember where or how we first met. I think it must have been in 1935, the year when his only novel, The Green Child, was published, a novel which I would put among the great poems of this century along with David Jones’s In Parenthesis. I was already an ardent admirer of English Prose Style, which should be compulsory reading for any would-be writer, of his Wordsworth – no one had ever written so revealingly of Wordsworth, or so self-revealingly – and of The Innocent Eye, the account of his childhood on a Yorkshire farm, one of the best autobiographies in our language.

  T.S. Eliot and Herbert Read were the two great figures of my young manhood (they meant more to me than Joyce, and as for Pound he was somehow always a very long way off – an explorer of whose survivial at any particular moment one could never be quite certain). I had not the courage to approach Eliot or Read myself. What interest could they feel for a young and unsuccessful novelist? So it must have been chance which led to my first encounter with Read, and I was proud, surprised and a little daunted when I received a letter from him inviting me to dinner. ‘Eliot is coming, but no one else, and everything very informal.’ To me it was a little like receiving an invitation from Coleridge – ‘Wordsworth is coming, but no one else.’ He gave me very clear directions with a small map that looked like the sketch of a trench system on the Western Front torn from that young officer’s pad, and then for a moment the countryman, the author of The Innocent Eye, peeped out. ‘The Mall is what I call a “ginnel”, a narrow passage through a double gate.’ And I felt nearer to Yorkshire than to Belsize Park.

  Two years later when I became part-editor of the weekly magazine Night and Day I had the temerity, perhaps because I had gained more confidence in myself, to ask the author of Art Now to write for me regular reviews of detective stories and he promptly accepted. (At that dinner with Eliot we had talked of Arsène Lupin – a subject which always helped Eliot to unbutton – perhaps for a moment it made him feel safe from ladies going to and fro talking of Michelangelo.) Our new relationship was celebrated by a verse in red ink which accompanied the first review.

  Shall it be Graham or be Greene?

  There’s nothing betwixt or between.

  Shall it be Graham or be Greene?

  Neither is Christian or intime,

  But one is milk the other cream.

  So Graham let it be, not Greene.

  I would like one day to see those reviews republished, so different are they from the stock image of Herbert Read, the intellectual. The first, on July 8, 1937, contained a devastating and deserved criticism of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon. Later he was unfriendly to Peter Cheyney, but had a charitable word for Agatha Christie. I really believe he enjoyed writing these reviews more than that long series of art books which hid from so many eyes his real genius as a poet, literary critic and autobiographer. He knew I didn’t care very much for them and he never resented it; even when I put my feelings into print he only wrote: ‘You did make my bread and butter look pretty stale, but then it is …’ His reviews in Night and Day, I like to think, were a holiday to him, and his humour streamed suddenly and volcanically out. He quoted hilariously from second-rate authors who had certainly not learnt the lessons of English Prose Style.

  ‘“Maynard poured some more coffee and broke the narcissistic shell of another egg.” We have always found our eggs distinctly indifferent to their own appearance.’

  Alas that Night and Day died at the end of 1937, for on November 4 of that year, in an essay called ‘Life without a Shoehorn’, Herbert Read made his début as a comic writer under the name of James Murgatroyd. I seem to have objected to the pseudonym which was at first simply Murgatroyd, a name I thought more suitable to a character of Wodehouse. He wrote firmly back: ‘In defence of Murgatroyd. It is a perfectly real name, and if I had been born in the West instead of the North Riding it might easily have been my own name. Would it do if I gave him a Christian name as well, say James? In any case, I refuse to be called Bertram Meade. I once knew a man in the Ministry of Labour called that, and that is what it sounds like. I want something funny, and something vaguely evocative of something square and squat with protruding amphibian eyes; something weary and patient, like a frog in a drought. If it can wait until Tuesday, I will try and think of an alternative. But if I am to go on with the creature, he must have an inspiring name – like Murgatroyd.’

  So Murgatroyd it was. He was planning a series. If he had completed it, we might have had a worthy successor to The Diary of a Nobody. Is it possible that a few of these essays remain among his papers?

  I write of trivial matters, but when one loves a man, as I loved him, it is the small things which others may have forgotten or not known which first come to mind before the great enduring achievements, The Green Child, Wordsworth, The End of a War, The Contrary Experience, and that essay on Vauvenargues in which he suddenly speaks of the ruling passion that links these autobiographies with a steel thread: the search for glory. ‘Glory is now a discredited word, and it will be difficult to re-establish it. It has been spoilt by a too close association with military grandeur; it has been confused with fame and ambition. But true glory is a private and discreet virtue, and is only fully realised in solitariness.’ He had known military glory: from the danger and squalor of the front line he was able to write in a private letter: ‘If I were free today, I’m almost sure I should be compelled by every impulse within me to join this adventure,’ but when, on November 11, 1918, as a bell in Canterbury pealed for victory and with heart numb and mind dismayed, he turned to the fields ‘and walked away from all human contacts’, it was towards glory that he walked, glory ‘realised in solitariness’ and finally achieved in his last years among the hills and moors, within hearing of the millstream of his childhood, the setting of The Innocent Eye.

  Nothing became him better than his terribly painful end – the young man in France would have suffered less from gas or shell-burst, but courage in facing agony and death had not diminished in the fifty years that had passed, and the deep sense of glory which he had first felt as a lonely boy in the streets of Leeds was maintained through the savage suffering at the end. He looked at death with the same clear, shrewd, gentle eyes he turned on a friend. In the last months of his life he had been planning, after yet one more operation, to go and stay awhile in a small cottage which I had come to possess in Anacapri, and he wrote to me more frequently and intimately during that last period than ever before. ‘I am haunted by the thought of Freud and did you read Jones’s life of him? I have exactly the same condition in the same place … I don’t think I worry about my own remaininǵ years – it is only the thought of leaving Ludo alone, though there again I could comfort myself with the thought that we have such devoted children.’ Then suddenly the last letter came, the last he ever wrote, to say that he must abandon the idea of Anacapri – ‘I had built up the Lourdes spirit and there was going to be a miraculous cure.’

  The reference to Lourdes from this most Christian of unbelievers came as no surprise. Hadn’t he written in the autobiographies of another essential aspect of his idea of glory? ‘At certain moments the individual is carried beyond his rational self, on to another ethical plane, where his actions are judged by new standards. The impulse which moves him to irrational action I have called the sense of glory.’

  1 Another novel about spiritualism had been abandoned. I find the opening paragraphs in my journal: ‘“Pleased to meet you, Little Flower,” said Mrs Partlett. “Can you tell us something of Summerland?”

  ‘“Everything is very, very beautiful,” the high imperfect child’s voice spoke through the dark. “There is music everywhere.”’

  Chapter Two

  1

  The further back we research the past, the more the ‘documents in the case’ accumulate and the more reluctant we feel to open their pages, to disturb the dust. To a stranger they would appear innocuous enough – a diary in pencil, an African’s
letter scribbled probably by a public letter-writer according to a recognised formula, a scrap of indecipherable writing found in a Vai hut – but one is never certain what vivid memory may not revive, and the longer life goes on the more surely one finds that old memories will be painful, and hung around with associations, like the cobwebs in a room whose occupant left many years ago ‘under a cloud’. And yet in 1935 I rashly proposed to make memory the very subject of my next book, Journey Without Maps, for forty-five years ago I could play happily enough even with the darkest and furthest memories of childhood – they were not so dark or so distant as they seem to me today.

  It was a period when ‘young authors’ were inclined to make uncomfortable journeys in search of bizarre material – Peter Fleming to Brazil and Manchuria, Evelyn Waugh to British Guiana and Ethiopia. Europe seemed to have the whole future; Europe could wait. In 1940 it was a shock to realise that the door to Europe was closed – perhaps for ever – and that I had more memories of Mexico and Liberia than of France. As for Italy, one night in Naples had been for me the sum.

  We were a generation brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous disillusionment of the First World War, so we went looking for adventure, much as in the summer of 1940 I used to spend Saturday nights in Southend, looking for an air raid, with little thought that in a few months I should have my fill of them in London day and night.

  I had never been out of Europe; I had not very often been outside England, and to choose Liberia and to involve my cousin Barbara, a twenty-three-year-old girl, in the adventure was, to say the least, rash. My invitation to her can only be excused because I had drunk too much champagne at my brother Hugh’s wedding, and I never expected her to accept. I did my best afterwards to discourage her. I sent her a League of Nations report on conditions in the interior, on the unchecked diseases, on Colonel Davis’s savage campaign against the Kru tribes and on President King’s private export of slaves to Fernando Po. The report had rendered me nervous, and Sir Harry Johnston’s account of his travels in the interior, his endless difficulties with carriers, whom he could only take from village to village, made me realise that perhaps Liberia was a tough venture for a young man who had never been further than Athens on an Hellenic cruise. I felt the need of a companion, but I panicked, when the champagne had worn off, at my choice.

  Luckily for me my cousin appeared unmoved by the reading material I sent her, for she proved as good a companion as the circumstances allowed, and I shudder to think of the quarrels I would have had with a companion of the same sex after exhaustion had set in, all the arguments, the indecisions … My cousin left all decisions to me and never criticised me when I made the wrong one, and because of the difference of sex we were both forced to control our irritated nerves. Towards the end we would lapse into long silences, but they were infinitely preferable to raised voices. Only in one thing did she disappoint me – she wrote a book. However, her generosity was apparent even there, for she waited several years, until my own book had appeared (and disappeared, for it was suppressed almost immediately by the threat of the libel action from the unknown doctor) before she published her Land Benighted. I hadn’t even realised that she was making notes, I was so busy on my own.

  It had seemed simple, before I set out, to write a travel book, but when I returned and was faced with my material I had a moment of despair and wished to abandon the project. A diary written in pencil with increasing fatigue and running to less than eighty quarto pages of a loose-leaf notebook, the piece of paper on which I kept the accounts of my carriers’ advances (the headman had usually drawn ninepence, most of the others threepence at a time only), a few illiterate notes from Mr Wordsworth, the District Commissioner of Tapee-Ta, and from Colonel Elwood Davis, the Commander of the Liberian Frontier Force, some political literature from Monrovia, a selection of Liberian newspapers, a few Buzie swords and musical instruments long lost (they seemed so valuable then), a number of photographs taken with an old vest-pocket Kodak, and memories, memories chiefly of rats, of frustration, and of a deeper boredom on the long forest trek than I had ever experienced before – how was I, out of all this, to make a book? But I had already spent on the journey the three hundred and fifty pounds which my publishers had advanced to me, and I could earn no more until the book was written.

  The problem to be solved was mainly a problem of form. I was haunted by the awful tedium of A to Z. This book could not be written in the manner of a European tour; there was no architecture to describe, no famous statuary; nor was it a political book in the sense that Gide’s Voyage au Congo was political, nor a book of adventure like those of Peter Fleming – if this was an adventure it was only a subjective adventure, three months of virtual silence, of ‘being out of touch’. This thought gave me a clue to the form I needed. The account of a journey – a slow footsore journey into an interior literally unknown – was only of interest if it paralleled another journey. It would lose the triviality of a personal travel diary only if it became more completely personal. It is a disadvantage to have an ‘I’ who is not a fictional figure, and the only way to deal with ‘I’ was to make him an abstraction. To all intents I eliminated my companion of the journey and supported the uneventful record with memories, dreams, word-associations: if the book in one sense became more personal, the journey became more general – if Jung is to be believed we share our dreams. It was not when I come to think of it a very new form for me. The idea of A to Z has always scared me, like the thought in childhood of the long summer term, and I have always broken the continuity of a story with the memories of my chief character, just as I was now to break the continuity of the journey with the memories of ‘I’.

  More than forty years have passed since I wrote the book and I cannot bring myself to reread it as a whole (the last time I read it through was in 1945 after I had returned from my wartime sojourn in shabby Freetown, when I wrote a preface for a new edition to mark a change of attitude). It has occurred to me now to make a small psychological experiment and to see how one particular experience, recorded in my diary, was changed when I came to write the book, and how it appeared to a third party, my cousin – three parties because surely ‘I’ the diarist and ‘I’ the writer were distinct persons.

  Towards the end of the journey, between Ganta and the sea, I became ill. I had seldom walked for less than fifteen miles in a day, and I was unused to the climate – stiflingly hot during the hours of sun and sometimes at night in a native hut cold enough for two blankets. I was forced to press on because the rains were threatening and if they broke central Liberia would become impassable. My cousin did not realise the need of haste and thought these forced marches were a form of nerves connected with my sickness. One night on arriving at a village I collapsed.

  This is what I find in my diary:

  ‘A long tiring day to Zigi’s Town. Started at 6.45. Took eight and a half hours solid trek. Ducks on a pond. My temperature up and went to bed. It went up a bit more at bedtime and I sweated all night naked between the blankets. Took violent dose for my stomach. A thunderstorm. Shadow on the mosquito-net, the dim hurricane lamp, the empty whisky bottle on the chop box.’

  Not much there, less really than in the briefer record next day: ‘Last tin of biscuits, last tin of milk, last piece of bread.’

  With Barbara’s permission I print now what my cousin made of that unpleasant night.

  ‘Graham was tottering as we got to Zigi’s Town; he was staggering as though he was a little drunk. He could get no rest from the carriers while he was up, for they came to him as usual with all their troubles, but I managed to persuade him to go to bed. I took his temperature and it was very high. I gave him plenty of whisky and Epsom salts, and covered him with blankets, hoping that I was doing the right thing.

  ‘I had supper by myself while the thunder roared; and the boys served me with grave faces. The same thought was in all our minds. Graham would die. I never doubted it for a minute. He looked like a dead man already. The
stormy atmosphere made my head ache and the men quarrelsome. I could hear them snapping at each other, but I left them alone.

  ‘I took Graham’s temperature again, and it had gone up. I felt quite calm at the thought of Graham’s death. To my own horror I felt unemotional about it. My mind kept telling me that I was really very upset, but actually I was so tired that though I could concentrate easily on the practical side of it all, I was incapable of feeling anything. I worked out quietly how I would have my cousin buried, how I would go down to the coast, to whom I would send telegrams. I had no fear of going on alone, for I realised by this time that with Amedoo I would be perfectly safe. Only one thing worried me in the most extraordinary way. Graham was a Catholic, and into my muddled, weary brain came the thought that I ought to burn candles for him if he died. I could not remember why I should burn candles, but I felt vaguely that his soul would find no peace if I could not do that for him. All night I was troubled by this thought. It seemed to me desperately important.

  ‘It was a pleasant little village. I walked through it, enjoying, as I always did, the friendliness of the natives. Laminah and Mark came with me, but I told them I was not in the mood to talk, and with graceful understanding they immediately dropped ten yards behind me, giving me the feeling that I was alone and yet showing me that they were there to protect me. Amedoo stayed within hearing distance of Graham. They were doing their best to try to make me understand that whatever happened, they would never forget that they had given their word in Freetown that they would protect us to the end of the journey. It was only that evening in Zigi’s Town that I realised how much I cared for our boys, and what valuable and loyal friends they were.