Ways of Escape

by Graham Greene

  SHOULD NOT BE TREATED LIGHTLY

  Money was no object in this case. The child had a very large income and the two film companies were wealthy concerns. It was realised, however, that the matter should not be treated lightly. The defendants had paid the film companies £1,000 and £500 respectively, and that money would be disposed of in a charitable way. With regard to the child, she would be paid £2,000. There would also be an order for the taxation of costs.

  In any view, said counsel, it was such a beastly libel to have written that if it had been a question of money it would have been difficult to say what would be an appropriate amount to arrive at.

  Miss Shirley Temple probably knew nothing of the article, and it was undesirable that she should be brought to England to fight the action. In his (counsel’s) opinion the settlement was a proper one in the circumstances.

  Mr Valentine Holmes informed his Lordship that the magazine Night and Day had ceased publication. He desired, on behalf of his clients, to express the deepest apology to Miss Temple for the pain which certainly would have been caused to her by the article if she had read it. He also apologised to the two film companies for the suggestion that they would produce and distribute a film of the character indicated by the article. There was no justification for the criticism of the film, which, his clients instructed him, was one which anybody could take their children to see. He also apologised on behalf of Mr Graham Greene. So far as the publishers of the magazine were concerned, they did not see the article before publication.

  His Lordship – Who is the author of this article?

  Mr Holmes – Mr Graham Greene.

  His Lordship – Is he within the jurisdiction?

  Mr Holmes – I am afraid I do not know, my Lord.

  Mr Theobald Mathew, on behalf of the printers, said that they recognised that the article was one which ought never to have been published. The fact that the film had already been licensed for universal exhibition refuted the charges which had been made in the article. The printers welcomed the opportunity of making any amends in their power.

  His Lordship – Can you tell me where Mr Greene is?

  Mr Mathew – I have no information on the subject.

  His Lordship – This libel is simply a gross outrage, and I will take care to see that suitable attention is directed to it. In the meantime I assent to the settlement on the terms which have been disclosed, and the record will be withdrawn.

  From film reviewing it was only a small step to scriptwriting. That also was a danger, but a necessary one as I now had a wife and two children to support and I remained in debt to my publishers until the war came. I had persistently attacked the films made by Alexander Korda and perhaps he became curious to meet his enemy. He asked my agent to bring me to Denham Film Studios and when we were alone he asked if I had any film story in mind. I had none, so I began to improvise a thriller – early morning on Platform 1 at Paddington, the platform empty, except for one man who is waiting for the last train from Wales. From below his raincoat a trickle of blood forms a pool on the platform.

  ‘Yes? And then?’

  ‘It would take too long to tell you the whole plot – and the idea needs a lot more working out.’

  I left Denham half an hour later to work for eight weeks on what seemed an extravagant salary, and the worst and least successful of Korda’s productions thus began (all I can remember is the title, The Green Cockatoo). So too began our friendship which endured and deepened till his death, in spite of my reviews which remained unfavourable. There was never a man who bore less malice, and I think of him with affection – even love – as the only film producer I have ever known with whom I could spend days and nights of conversation without so much as mentioning the cinema. Years later, after the war was over, I wrote two screenplays for Korda and Carol Reed, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, and I hope they atoned a little for the prentice scripts.

  If I had remained a film critic, the brief comic experience which I had then of Hollywood might have been of lasting value to me, for I learned at first hand what a director may have to endure at the hands of a producer. (One of the difficult tasks of a critic is to assign his praise or blame to the right quarter.)

  David Selznick, famous for having produced one of the world’s top-grossing films, Gone with the Wind, held the American rights in The Third Man and, by the terms of the contract with Korda, the director was bound to consult him about the script sixty days before shooting began. So Carol Reed, who was directing the film, and I journeyed west. Our first meeting with Selznick at La Jolla in California promised badly, and the dialogue remains as fresh in my mind as the day when it was spoken. After a brief greeting he got down to serious discussion. He said, ‘I don’t like the title.’

  ‘No? We thought …’

  ‘Listen, boys, who the hell is going to a film called The Third Man?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s a simple title. It’s easily remembered.’

  Selznick shook his head reproachfully. ‘You can do better than that, Graham,’ he said, using my Christian name with a readiness I was not prepared for. ‘You are a writer. A good writer. I’m no writer, but you are. Now what we want – it’s not right, mind you, of course it’s not right, I’m not saying it’s right, but then I’m no writer and you are, what we want is something like Night in Vienna, a title which will bring them in.’

  ‘Graham and I will think about it,’ Carol Reed interrupted with haste. It was a phrase I was to hear Reed frequently repeat, for the Korda contract had omitted to state that the director was under any obligation to accept Selznick’s advice. Reed during the days that followed, like an admirable stonewaller, blocked every ball.

  We passed on to Selznick’s view of the story.

  ‘It won’t do, boys,’ he said, ‘it won’t do. It’s sheer buggery.’

  ‘Buggery?’

  ‘It’s what you learn in your English schools.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘This guy comes to Vienna looking for his friend. He finds his friend’s dead. Right? Why doesn’t he go home then?’

  After all the months of writing, his destructive view of the whole venture left me speechless. He shook his grey head at me. ‘It’s just buggery, boy.’

  I began weakly to argue. I said, ‘But this character – he has a motive of revenge. He has been beaten up by a military policeman.’ I played a last card. ‘Within twenty-four hours he’s in love with Harry Lime’s girl.’

  Selznick shook his head sadly. ‘Why didn’t he go home before that?’

  That, I think, was the end of the first day’s conference. Selznick removed to Hollywood and we followed him – to a luxurious suite in Santa Monica, once the home of Hearst’s film-star mistress. During the conferences which followed I remember there were times when there seemed to be a kind of grim reason in Selznick’s criticisms – surely here perhaps there was a fault in ‘continuity’, I hadn’t properly ‘established’ this or that. (I would forget momentarily the lesson which I had learned as a film critic – that to ‘establish’ something is almost invariably wrong and that ‘continuity’ is often the enemy of life. Jean Cocteau has even argued that the mistakes of continuity belong to the unconscious poetry of a film.) A secretary sat by Selznick’s side with her pencil poised. When I was on the point of agreement Carol Reed would quickly interrupt – ‘Graham and I will think about it.’

  There was one conference which I remember in particular because it was the last before we were due to return to England. The secretary had made forty pages of notes by this time, but she had been unable to record one definite concession on our side. The conference began as usual about ten thirty p.m. and finished after four a.m. Always by the time we reached Santa Monica dawn would be touching the Pacific.

  ‘There’s something I don’t understand in this script, Graham. Why the hell does Harry Lime …?’ He described some extraordinary action on Lime’s part.

  ‘But he doesn’t,’ I said.
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br />   Selznick looked at me for a moment in silent amazement.

  ‘Christ, boys,’ he said, ‘I’m thinking of a different script.’

  He lay down on his sofa and crunched a benzedrine. In ten minutes he was as fresh as ever, unlike ourselves.

  I look back on David Selznick now with affection. The forty pages of notes remained unopened in Reed’s files, and since the film proved a success, I suspect Selznick forgot that the criticisms had ever been made. Indeed, when next I was in New York he invited me to lunch to discuss a project. He said, ‘Graham, I’ve got a great idea for a film. It’s just made for you.’

  I had been careful on this occasion not to take a third martini.

  ‘The life of St Mary Magdalene,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘no. It’s not really in my line.’

  He didn’t try to argue. ‘I have another idea,’ he said. ‘It will appeal to you as a Catholic. You know how next year they have what’s called the Holy Year in Rome. Well, I want to make a picture called The Unholy Year. It will show all the commercial rackets that go on, the crooks …’

  ‘An interesting notion,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll shoot it in the Vatican.’

  ‘I doubt if they will give you permission for that.’

  ‘Oh sure they will,’ he said. ‘You see, we’ll write in one Good Character.’

  (I am reminded by this story of another memorable lunch in a suite at the Dorchester when Sam Zimbalist asked me if I would revise the last part of a script which had been prepared for a remake of Ben Hur. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we find a kind of anti-climax after the Crucifixion.’)

  Those indeed were the days. I little knew that the reign of Kubla Khan was nearly over and that the Pleasure Dome would soon be converted into an enormous bingo hall, which would provide quite other dreams to housewives than had the Odeons and the Empires. I had regretted the silent films when the talkies moved in and I had regretted black and white when Technicolor washed across the screen. So today, watching the latest soft-porn film, I sometimes long for those dead thirties, for Cecil B. de Mille and his Crusaders, for the days when almost anything was likely to happen.

  3

  I had been temporarily saved from the danger of destitution by Stamboul Train, but I had squandered my reserves by writing It’s a Battlefield which in spite of the praise from Ezra Pound and V.S. Pritchett remained almost unread. Second to it in public indifference came England Made Me. It was urgently necessary to repeat, if I could somehow manage it, the success of my first ‘thriller’, but the decision was not, all the same, entirely a question of money. I have always enjoyed reading melodrama, and I enjoy writing it. An early hero of mine was John Buchan, but when I re-opened his books I found I could no longer get the same pleasure from the adventures of Richard Hannay. More than the dialogue and the situation had dated: the moral climate was no longer that of my boyhood. Patriotism had lost its appeal, even for a schoolboy, at Passchendaele, and the Empire brought first to mind the Beaverbrook Crusader, while it was difficult, during the years of the Depression, to believe in the high purposes of the City of London or of the British Constitution. The hunger-marchers seemed more real than the politicians. It was no longer a Buchan world. The hunted man of A Gun for Sale2, which I now began to write, was Raven not Hannay; a man out to revenge himself for all the dirty tricks of life, not to save his country.

  The subject: I cannot remember now the name or nature of the commission which in the thirties enquired into the private manufacture and sale of armaments. Did I attend some of the hearings because I was already writing A Gun for Sale or did the idea come to me after attending them? My chief memory of the hearings is the politeness and feebleness of the cross-examination. Some great firms were concerned and over and over again counsel found that essential papers were missing or had not been brought to court. A search of course would be made … there was a relaxed air of mañana. About the same time somebody had written the life of Sir Basil Zaharoff, a more plausible villain for those days than the man in Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps who could ‘hood his eyes like a hawk’. Sir Marcus in A Gun for Sale is, of course, not Sir Basil, but the family resemblance is plain. I had not met Sir Marcus’s agent Mr Davis nor did I ever meet him, but after the book was written I did, for the only time in my life, encounter a former traveller in armaments. No one could have been less like Mr Davis.

  I was one of two passengers on a small plane flying from Riga to Tallinn, then the capital of the independent Estonian Republic. (I was there for no reason except escape to somewhere new.) I happened to be reading a novel of Henry James and when I glanced at my fellow passenger I saw that he too was absorbing James in the same small Macmillan edition. In the thirties it was more rare than it is today to find a fellow devotee of James. Our eyes went to each other’s books and we immediately struck up an acquaintance.

  He was a man considerably older than myself and he was serving as British Consul at Tallinn. Since he was not very busy and a bachelor – indeed he struck me as a man rather scared of women – we spent a good deal of time together during those periods when I was not vainly searching for a brothel which had been run by the same family in the same house for three hundred years – a picturesque feature of the little capital on no account to be missed, according to my informant, Baroness Budberg, though, alas, I failed to find it. (When I asked the help of a waiter in Tallinn’s most elegant hotel, patronised by the Diplomatic Corps, he was puzzled by my antiquarian interest. ‘But there is nothing of that kind which we cannot arrange for you here,’ he said.)

  My new friend had travelled in armaments – for Beardmore I think – after the First World War. He was surely unique among armaments salesmen, for I doubt if any of his colleagues could have claimed to be a former Anglican clergyman. When the Great War started he became an army chaplain. Before it ended he was converted to Catholicism and was about to be received into the Roman Church by the Archbishop of Zagreb when an Austrian air raid interrupted things and the Archbishop fled to the cellar. When the war was over his conversion was consummated, and he was left without a job. For want of anything better he became an armaments salesman. He was a very gentle, very solitary man, in whom James might well have discovered a character, in spite of his bizarre past (James would have wrapped it in folds of ambiguity) – someone a little like Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady, the novel I was reading in the plane from Riga. He received something like six hundred pounds a year as Consul, but in those days the cost of living in Tallinn was extraordinarily low. He had a little flat in the capital, with a daily woman to look after it, and a small wooden dacha in the country, and he was still able to leave half his income in England with his mother. For a fortnight, thanks to Henry James, we were close friends. Afterwards? I never knew what happened. He must have lost his home when the Russians moved in. It seemed hardly a danger in those days – our eyes were on Germany.

  Out of the blue, more than thirty years later, I received a letter from him. He had remembered our mutual interest in James and now that he had reached the age of eighty he wished to pass on to me his first editions – thus crowning one of the most pleasant chance encounters of my life.

  The greater part of A Gun for Sale takes place in Nottwich, which I later used again as a background for my play The Potting Shed. Nottwich, of course, is Nottingham where, as I have recounted in A Sort of Life, I lived for three winter months with a mongrel terrier, working in the evenings as a trainee on the Nottingham Journal. I don’t know why a certain wry love of Nottingham lodged in my imagination rather as a love of Freetown was to do later. It was the furthest north I had ever been, the first strange city in which I had made a home, alone, without friends.

  The main character in the novel, Raven the killer, seems to me now a first sketch for Pinkie in Brighton Rock. He is a Pinkie who has aged but not grown up. The Pinkies are the real Peter Pans – doomed to be juvenile for a lifetime. They have something of a fallen angel about t
hem, a morality which once belonged to another place. The outlaw of justice always keeps in his heart the sense of justice outraged – his crimes have an excuse and yet he is pursued by the Others. The Others have committed worse crimes and flourish. The world is full of Others who wear the masks of Success, of a Happy Family. Whatever crime he may be driven to commit the child who doesn’t grow up remains the great champion of justice. ‘An eye for an eye.’ ‘Give them a dose of their own medicine.’ As children we have all suffered punishments for faults we have not committed, but the wound has soon healed. With Raven and Pinkie the wound never heals.

  If Raven is an older Pinkie, Mather I can imagine to have been trained as a police officer under the Assistant Commissioner of It’s a Battlefield; a little of his superior’s sober temperament has rubbed off on him. He is not, like the Assistant Commissioner, a born bachelor, but I think in time he must have proved a little too square for Anne Crowder with her indiscriminate passion for love.

  What can I say of the other characters? Doctor Yogel has something of a certain police doctor near Blackfriars to whom I once went in my youth, terrified that I might be suffering from what used to be called by an ironic euphemism a social disease; he told me not to eat tomatoes, an instruction which I have obeyed to this day. His dingy rooms on the top of a tenement block and his abrupt furtive manner remained a memory which I think contributed to the sketch of Doctor Yogel.

  There are certain scenes I like in this book. For example I am a little proud of the air-raid practice in Nottwich which enabled Raven to enter the offices of Sir Marcus. I wrote the scene in 1935 and the National Government had certainly not reached that point of preparation, though such a practice would have been plausible enough four years later. I like too the character of Acky, the unfrocked clergyman, and of his wife – the two old evil characters joined to each other by a selfless love. I had not chosen an Anglican clergyman for the part with any ill intent – I doubted at the time whether such purity of love would seem plausible in a married and excommunicated Catholic priest. I was to draw one later in The Power and the Glory, Father José, but as a man I prefer poor Acky. He was not the kind of sinner who has the makings of a saint. His sense of guilt led only to innumerable letters to his bishop, of self-justification or accusation… He belongs to the same world of wounds and guilt as Raven and Pinkie.