Ways of Escape

by Graham Greene

  But long before that point of despair was reached I had found myself so out of practice and out of confidence that I couldn’t for months get the character Wilson off his balcony in the hotel from which he was watching Scobie, the Commissioner of Police, pass down the wide unpaved street. To get him off the balcony meant making a decision. Two very different novels began on the same balcony with the same character, and I had to choose which one to write.

  One was the novel I wrote; the other was to have been an ‘entertainment’. I had long been haunted by the possibility of a crime story in which the criminal was known to the reader, but the detective was carefully hidden, disguised by false clues which would lead the reader astray until the climax. The story was to be told from the point of view of the criminal, and the detective would necessarily be some kind of undercover agent. M15 was the obvious organisation to use, and the character Wilson is the unsatisfactory relic of the entertainment, for when I left Wilson on the balcony and joined Scobie I plumped for the novel.

  It was to prove a book more popular with the public, even with the critics, than with the author. The scales to me seem too heavily weighted, the plot overloaded, the religious scruples of Scobie too extreme. I had meant the story of Scobie to enlarge a theme which I had touched on in The Ministry of Fear, the disastrous effect on human beings of pity as distinct from compassion. I had written in The Ministry of Fear: ‘Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn’t safe when pity’s prowling round.’ The character of Scobie was intended to show that pity can be the expression of an almost monstrous pride. But I found the effect on readers was quite different. To them Scobie was exonerated, Scobie was ‘a good man’, he was hunted to his doom by the harshness of his wife.

  Here was a technical fault rather than a psychological one. Louise Scobie is mainly seen through the eyes of Scobie, and we have no chance of revising our opinion of her. Helen, the girl whom Scobie loves, gains an unfair advantage. In the original draft of the novel a scene was played between Mrs Scobie and Wilson, the M15 agent who is in love with her, on their evening walk along the abandoned railway track below Hill Station. This put Mrs Scobie’s character in a more favourable light, for the scene had to be represented through the eyes of Wilson, but this scene – so I thought when I was preparing the novel for publication – broke Scobie’s point of view prematurely; the drive of the narrative appeared to slacken. By eliminating it I thought I gained intensity and impetus, but I had sacrificed tone. In later editions I reinserted the passage.

  Maybe I am too harsh to the book, wearied as I have been by reiterated arguments in Catholic journals on Scobie’s salvation or damnation. I was not so stupid as to believe that this could ever be an issue in a novel. Besides I have small belief in the doctrine of eternal punishment (it was Scobie’s belief not mine). Suicide was Scobie’s inevitable end; the particular motive of his suicide, to save even God from himself, was the final twist of the screw of his inordinate pride. Perhaps Scobie should have been a subject for a cruel comedy rather than for tragedy …

  All this said there are pages in The Heart of the Matter (and one character, Yusef) for which I care, descriptions of Freetown and the interior of Sierra Leone which bring back many happy months and some unhappy ones. The Portuguese liners with their smuggled letters and smuggled diamonds were very much a part of the odd life I led there in 1942–3. Scobie was based on nothing but my own unconscious. He had nothing to do with my Commissioner of Police, whose friendship was the human thing I valued most during fifteen rather lonely months. Nor was Wilson – who obstinately refused to come alive – based on any of the M15 agents who trailed – in two cases disastrously – down the West African coast in those days.

  ‘Those days’ – I am glad to have had them; my love of Africa deepened there, in particular for what is called, the whole world over, the Coast, this world of tin roofs, of vultures clanging down, of laterite paths turning rose in the evening light. My cook who went to prison for witchcraft, my steward who was sentenced unjustly for perjury, the boy from the bush who arrived with no recommendation from anyone and took charge of me as faithfully as Ali did of Scobie, refusing the bribes offered by the representative of another secret service, SOE, to leave my employ – were they just inhabitants of Greeneland? As well tell a man in love with a woman that she is only a figment of his imagination.

  1 Later note. This man died suddenly one night when alone with the girl. Another warden, David Low, the secondhand bookseller, and I should have been inspecting the shelter at the time, but all was quiet and we didn’t go down. We were caught out badly by this death.

  2 A skin-deep dislike. Later she would offer us sweets and be quite ready to make us ‘at home’.

  3 Later note. A lot of this wire came down on Heal’s store, marked with Heal’s name: they had been concerned in the manufacture.

  4 The Ministry was also a beacon guiding German planes towards King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations. Hardly a night passed without the blackout being ignored, and in my area we suffered for it. I wrote a letter to the Spectator with the title ‘Bloomsbury Lighthouse’. I signed it prudently ‘Air Raid Warden’ for a policeman visited our post and demanded the name of the writer. No one informed on me and afterwards the lights were dimmed, but I wonder on what charge under what regulation I would have been brought to court.

  5 For days afterwards there was the sweet smell of corruption in Store Street.

  Chapter Five

  1

  My film story, The Third Man, was never written to be read but only to be seen. The story, like many love affairs, started at a dinner table and continued with headaches in many places: Vienna, Venice, Ravello, London, Santa Monica.

  Most novelists, I suppose, carry round in their heads or in their notebooks the first idea for stories that have never come to be written. Sometimes one may turn them over after many years and think regretfully they would have been good once, in a time now dead. So it was that long before, on the flap of an envelope, I had written an opening paragraph: ‘I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.’ I, like my hero, had not the least inkling of an explanation, so when Alexander Korda over dinner asked me to write a film for Carol Reed – to follow our Fallen Idol which I had adapted from my short story ‘The Basement Room’ a year before – I had nothing more to offer him except this paragraph, though what Korda really wanted was a film about the Four-Power occupation of Vienna. In 1948 Vienna was still divided into American, Russian, French and British zones, while the Inner City was administered by each Power in turn for a month and patrolled day and night by groups of four soldiers drawn from the Four Powers. It was this complex situation which Korda wanted put on film, but he was prepared all the same to let me pursue the tracks of Harry. So to Vienna I went.

  For me it is impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. A film depends on more than plot; it depends on a certain measure of characterisation, on mood and atmosphere, and these seem impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a conventional treatment. I must have the sense of more material than I need to draw on (though the full-length novel usually contains too much). The Third Man, therefore, though never intended for publication, had to start as a story rather than as a treatment before I began working on what seemed the interminable transformations from one screenplay to another.

  On the continuity and the story-line Carol Reed and I worked closely together when I came back with him to Vienna to write the screenplay, covering miles of carpet a day, acting scenes at each other. (It’s a curious fact that you cannot work out a continuity at a desk – you have to move with your characters.) No third ever joined our conferences, not even Korda himself; so much value lies in the cut and thrust of argument between two people. To the novelist, of course, his novel is the best he can do with a p
articular subject; he cannot help resenting many of the changes necessary for turning it into a film play; but The Third Man was never intended to be more than the raw material for a picture. The reader will notice many differences between the story and the film, and he should not imagine these changes were forced on an unwilling author: as likely as not they were suggested by the author. The film in fact is better than the story because it is in this case the finished state of the story.

  Some of these changes have obvious superficial reasons. The choice of an American instead of an English star involved a number of alterations – the most important, Harry had to become American too. Joseph Cotten quite reasonably objected to my choice of name, Rollo in the story, which to his American ear apparently involved homosexuality. I wanted the name none the less to be an absurd one, and the name Holly occurred to me when I remembered that figure of fun, the nineteenth-century American poet Thomas Holley Chivers.

  One of the few major disputes between Carol Reed and myself concerned the ending, and he was proved triumphantly right. I held the view that an entertainment of this kind was too light an affair to carry the weight of an unhappy ending. Reed on his side felt that my ending – indeterminate as it was, with no words spoken, Holly joining the girl in silence and walking away with her from the cemetery where her lover Harry was buried – would strike the audience who had just seen Harry’s death and burial as unpleasantly cynical. I was only half convinced: I was afraid few people would wait in their seats during the girl’s long walk from the graveside towards Holly, and the others would leave the cinema under the impression that the ending was still going to be as conventional as my suggested ending of boy joining girl. I had not given enough credit to the mastery of Reed’s direction, and at that stage, of course, we neither of us anticipated Reed’s discovery of Anton Karas, the zither player. All I had indicated in my treatment was a kind of signature tune connected with Lime.

  The episode in the treatment of the Russians kidnapping Anna (a perfectly plausible incident in Vienna in those days) was eliminated at a fairly late stage. It was not satisfactorily tied into the screenplay, and it threatened to turn the film into a propagandist picture. We had no desire to move people’s political emotions; we wanted to entertain them, to frighten them a little, even to make them laugh.

  Reality in fact was to be only the background to a fairy tale, though the story of the penicillin racket was based on a grim truth, all the more grim because so many of the traffickers were innocent, unlike Lime. A surgeon I knew took two friends to see the film. He was surprised to find them subdued and depressed by the picture which he had enjoyed. They told him that at the end of the war, when they were with the Royal Air Force in Vienna, they had both sold penicillin. The consequences of their petty larceny had never occurred to them till they saw the film and the scene in the children’s hospital where watered penicillin had been used.

  When Carol Reed came with me to Vienna to see the scenes which I had described in the treatment I was embarrassed to find that between winter and spring Vienna had completely changed. The blackmarket restaurants, where in February one was lucky to find a few bones described as oxtail, were now serving legal if frugal meals. The ruins had been cleared away from in front of the Café Mozart which I had christened ‘Old Vienna’. Over and over again I found myself saying to Carol Reed, ‘But I assure you Vienna was really like that – three months ago.’

  It had proved difficult to find my story – Harry’s phoney funeral was the only scrap of plot I had to cling to. All that came as the days too rapidly passed were bits of photogenic background; the shabby Oriental nightclub, the officers’ bar at Sacher’s (somehow Korda had managed to fix me a room in the hotel, which was reserved for officers), the little dressing-rooms which formed a kind of interior village in the old Josefstadt Theatre (Anna was eventually to work there), the enormous cemetery where electric drills were needed to pierce the ground that February. I had allowed myself not more than two weeks in Vienna before meeting a friend in Italy where I intended to write the story, but what story? There were three days left and I had no story, not even the storyteller, Colonel Calloway, whom I see now always in my mind with the features of Trevor Howard.

  On the penultimate day I had the good fortune to lunch with a young British Intelligence officer (the future Duke of St Albans) – my wartime connection with the SIS used to bring me useful dividends in those days. He described how when he first took over in Vienna he demanded from the Austrian authorities a list of the Viennese police. A section of the list was marked ‘Underground Police’.

  ‘Get rid of these men,’ he ordered, ‘things have changed now,’ but a month later he found the ‘underground’ police were still on the list. He repeated his order with anger, and it was then explained to him that ‘underground police’ were not secret police, but police who literally worked underground along the enormous system of sewers. There were no Allied zones in the sewers, the entrances were dotted throughout the city disguised as advertisement kiosks, and for some inexplicable reason the Russians refused to allow them to be locked. Agents could pass uncontrolled from any zone to another. After lunch we dressed in heavy boots and macintoshes and took a walk below the city. The main sewer was like a great tidal river, and as sweet smelling. At lunch the officer had told me of the penicillin racket, and now, along the sewers, the whole story took shape. The researches I had made into the functioning of the Four-Power occupation, my visit to an old servant of my mother’s in the Russian zone, the long evenings of solitary drinking in the Oriental, none of them was wasted. I had my film.

  My last evening I gave dinner to my friend, Elizabeth Bowen, who had come to Vienna to lecture at the British Institute, as a guest of the British Council. I took her afterwards to the Oriental. I don’t think she had ever been in so seedy a nightclub before. I said, ‘They will be raiding this place at midnight.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I have my contacts.’

  Exactly at the stroke of twelve, as I had asked my friend to arrange, a British sergeant came clattering down the stairs, followed by a Russian, a French and an American military policeman. The place was in half-darkness, but without hesitation (I had described her with care) he strode across the cellar and demanded to see Elizabeth’s passport. She looked at me with respect – the British Council had not given her so dramatic an evening. Next day I was on my way to Italy. All was over except the writing.

  2

  The view of an outsider at a revolution is an odd and slanting one, rather like a pretentious camera-angle; he may sometimes even be unaware that anything is happening around him at all. I remember in the thirties, when I came back from my holiday in Estonia to spend a few days with my brother Hugh, who was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Nazi Berlin, I had to change trains at Riga, at midnight. There were two hours to kill and so I took to the streets around Central Station and the Post Office: I was charmed by the old droshky drivers with Tolstoy beards asleep over their bony horses, and by the prostitutes who might well have been plying their trade in Victorian London. They stood at street corners and, when the young foreigner passed, they raised a skirt just far enough to disclose an elegant ankle and the beginning of a well-shaped calf. When I arrived at breakfast time in Berlin my brother met me. ‘What about Riga,’ he asked me, ‘and the revolution?’

  ‘Revolution?’

  ‘There was a military coup d’état at midnight. The Post Office has been taken and the Central Station. There are machine-guns at every corner.’

  It was true, it must have been true, I read it afterwards in the Telegraph, but I had seen only the old droshky drivers and the Victorian tarts.

  The only way to keep my rendezvous in Rome in 1948 and begin my screenplay was to fly from Vienna by way of Prague. I thought I would take the opportunity to stay a few days and see my two publishers – one, a Social Democrat, published what I called my ‘entertainments’, the other, a Catholic, had published The Power and the
Glory. On the evening I left Vienna there were rumours of a Communist takeover, but I was more concerned about the heavy snow which delayed the plane for hours from taking off. There were two English correspondents travelling on the same plane, one belonged to an agency and the other to the BBC. They told me they were on their way to report the revolution.

  ‘Revolution?’

  I remembered how years ago in Riga …

  ‘Have you booked a room?’ one of them asked.

  ‘No. I didn’t think it necessary at this time of year.’

  ‘Hotels are always full,’ the other said with professional knowledge, ‘when there’s a revolution.’

  ‘I’ve been recommended the Ambassador.’

  ‘We are sharing a room there. It was the last one they had. Better stick to us.’

  The snow fell thicker and thicker and the plane was very late. It was well after midnight when we landed and none of us had eaten since lunch. Food seemed even more important than a bed, but at least, I thought, there would be no difficulty about food at an international hotel. How wrong I was. There was no bed, but that was quickly solved. There was a sofa in the correspondents’ room – I could have that, and now, at one thirty in the morning, surely some simple nourishing food … ‘I am sorry,’ the porter said, ‘but the restaurant is closed. All the restaurants in Prague are closed.’