Ways of Escape

by Graham Greene

  When I returned to London it was a question of files, files, endless files. I had been responsible in London, as I have written earlier, for counter-espionage in Portugal under Kim Philby, who, when he defected much later, in 1963, to the Soviet Union, was ironically dubbed ‘the Third Man’. No melodrama or violence disturbed us: only a certain boredom and lassitude induced by the closed-in life, since the nature of our occupation forced our small subsection of five men to live too closely together – there were few meetings with strangers outside the Service who might want to know what we were doing in this so-called ‘branch of the Foreign Office’. The only relic I left behind me when I resigned (my ‘hero’ in The Human Factor makes a passing reference to it) was a Who’s Who, limited to twelve copies, if I remember right, compiled by myself, of German agents in the Azores with two introductory essays – very much at second hand – on the administration and agricultural aspect of the islands and a contribution by Kim Philby on radio communications – this for the use of our invasion forces. Does a copy exist still somewhere on the files? It would have a certain value today.

  The Secret Service, of course, has changed much since those days, so in writing my novel I based my picture on rather outdated material. I began The Human Factor more than ten years before it was published and abandoned it in despair after two or three years’ work. I thought it would join all those other unfinished projects which had littered my desk (three abandoned novels lie there even today). I abandoned it mainly because of the Philby affair. My double agent Maurice Castle bore no resemblance in character or motive to Philby, none of the characters has the least likeness to anyone I have known, but I disliked the idea of the novel being taken as a roman à clef. I know very well from experience that it is only possible for me to base a very minor and transient character on a real person. A real person stands in the way of the imagination. Perhaps a trick of speech, a physical trait may be used, but I can write no more than a few pages before realising that I simply don’t know enough about the character to use him, even if he is an old friend. With the imaginary character I am sure – I know that Doctor Percival in The Human Factor admires the painting of Ben Nicholson, I know that Colonel Daintry will open a tin of sardines when he returns from the funeral of his colleague.

  Years passed and during those years I wrote The Honorary Consul, perhaps the novel I prefer to all the others. Ahead of me, I thought, were only blank years, and all the time The Human Factor, which didn’t even have a title, hung like a dead albatross around my neck. My imagination seemed as dead as the bird. And yet there were some good things in the twenty thousand words which I had written – I liked especially the shooting party at C’s country house. The memory of it nagged me. I couldn’t settle to any other work, and so reluctantly and doubtfully I took the novel up again, telling myself that the Philby affair belonged now sufficiently to the past.

  Perhaps the hypocrisy of our relations with South Africa nagged me on to work too. It was so obvious that, however much opposed the governments of the Western Alliance might pretend to be to apartheid, however much our leaders talked of its immorality, they simply could not let South Africa succumb to black power and Communism. If Operation Uncle Remus did not exist, it would certainly come into existence before long. It was less an invention than a prediction.

  The novel at last was written and I was free of the incubus, but that did not mean it had to be published, and for a long while I thought of leaving it in a drawer for my children to publish after my death. I am never satisfied with a novel, but I was more than usually dissatisfied with this one, I had betrayed my purpose. There was violence – the death of Davis – and Doctor Percival was hardly a typical figure of the British Secret Service. It wasn’t as realistic a picture as I had intended, and the novel was saved only by the human factor of the title. As a love story – a married-love story of an elderly man – I think it may have succeeded.

  I sent a copy of the book to Moscow, to my friend Kim Philby, and his reply interested me. His criticism was valid. I had made Castle’s circumstances in Moscow, he wrote, too bleak. He himself had found everything provided for him, even to a shoehorn, something he had never possessed before. (It was true, he added, that he was a more important agent than Castle.) As for Doctor Percival, Philby commented with justice that he must have been recruited from the CIA. Doctor L, whom we had both known, was hardly capable of deliberately poisoning a man, even though his diagnoses were notoriously inaccurate. (He had tried to prevent me going to West Africa by diagnosing me as a diabetic. A more reliable specialist found a small sugar deficiency.)

  Another friend of mine in Moscow, Professor Valentina Ivasheva, pointed out that the days of the Russian stove were over – there was central heating everywhere now, so I altered ‘stove’ to ‘radiator’ when the book was reprinted. I didn’t however improve the other furnishings of Castle’s flat, for as I pointed out in my reply to Philby I had based these on the account given by his wife, Eleanor Philby, in her book The Spy I Loved.

  Nearly twenty years before I had assumed, after A Burnt-Out Case, that my writing days were finished – at any rate as far as the novel was concerned – and I assumed the same again now, but a writer’s imagination, like the body, fights against all reason against death. So it was that at lunch on Christmas Day, 1978, in Switzerland with my daughter and my grandchildren nine months after the publication of The Human Factor, a new book, Dr Fischer of Geneva, came without any warning to my mind. At the age of seventy-five I found my future still as unpredictable as when I sat down at my mother’s desk in Berkhamsted and began to write my first novel: ‘He came over the top of the down as the last light failed …’

  Epilogue

  The Other

  This book has not been a self-portrait. I leave such a portrait to my friends and enemies. All the same, I did find myself for many years in search of someone who called himself Graham Greene.

  When I bought Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems more than fifty years ago, one poem called ‘The Other’ haunted me, though I didn’t know why. It was not one of Thomas’s best poems. It told of a traveller who along his road, at this inn or that, continually stumbled on the trace of someone exactly like himself who had preceded him along the same route.

  I learnt his road and, e’er they were

  Sure I was I, left the dark wood

  Behind, kestrel and woodpecker,

  The inn and the sun, the happy mood

  When first I tasted sunlight there.

  I travelled fast, in hopes I should

  Out run that other, what to do

  When caught, I planned not, I pursued

  To prove the likeness, and if true

  To watch until myself I knew.

  The poem ends,

  He goes: I follow: no release

  Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.

  Some quarter of a century after I first read that poem, I came myself on the Other’s tracks, and few years have passed since without signs of his passage: letters from strangers who remember me at a wedding I never attended or serving a Mass I never served – once a telephone call from a woman in Rome, even photographs in a Geneva newspaper and a Jamaican one. The Other calls himself Graham Greene, perhaps his name is Graham Greene – there’s no copyright in names – though there are reasons to suppose in one of his appearances that he was a certain John Skinner, a notorious jail-breaker, or according to the Indian police someone with the improbable name of Meredith de Varg. He may be both – for there is no resemblance between the two blurred photographs I possess, both claiming to be me.

  It was a little case of blackmail which brought the Other first to my attention. My friend Alex Korda rang me up one afternoon in London. ‘Have you been in trouble?’ he asked.

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘The editor of a film magazine in Paris has telephoned me. He’s very distressed because he has found that one of his employees has tried to blackmail you.’

  ‘But I haven’t
been in Paris and I haven’t been blackmailed.’

  I remembered our conversation the next time I was in Paris when my friend and literary agent, Marie Biche, said, apropos of nothing, ‘If anyone tried to blackmail you, you’d come to me, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t pay up.’

  ‘Blackmail me about what?’

  ‘Oh, something about photographs with women – I don’t know – there’s a story going round.’

  It was the year 1955–6. The Other was very active that year. Stray bits of his past gathered round me – they could so easily have been bits of my own past. The editor of Mondanités (‘Revue de l’élite française’) wrote to me reminding me of our meeting at the Cannes Film Festival (which I had never attended) and praising my talent for tennis which I haven’t played since I was a schoolboy, ‘J’ ai eu la joie de vous voir fréquemment sur les courts de tennis, car votre talent littéraire ne cède en rien a vos qualités sportives.’ A woman wrote to me from Montevideo: ‘You once took me to have coffee in a Belgian pastry shop on a corner of Oxford Street (does it still exist?) and you introduced me to a girl from up North with whom you were very much in love. Did you marry her? You came to my wedding in November 1935 and I left for S. America soon after.’ The Other certainly seemed to leave strong impressions behind, particularly on women.

  It was a woman’s voice which spoke to me on the telephone at the Grand Hotel, Rome (I had gone to bed early after a long flight from Calcutta). ‘Hullo, Graham, this is Veronica.’

  ‘Oh yes, how are you?’ Who the hell, I wondered, was Veronica?

  ‘I rang up the George V in Paris and they said you had left for Rome. I know you always stay at the Grand’ – which was true enough.

  ‘Yes, I’ve just arrived. What are you doing?’ I asked, to delay the conversation in hope of a clue. I had forgotten the Other and thought it just possible that I had once known someone called Veronica.

  ‘I am lying in bed and reading the Odyssey in the new Penguin translation.’

  ‘I’m in bed too. What about a drink tomorrow? I’m so sorry, but I’m fixed for meals,’ I added with caution.

  Next evening I went with a friend and waited in the bar. He agreed to speak to her if she were unknown to me and not attractive. A woman in her forties entered in a long evening dress, with the extended face of an upper-class horse. I left her for my friend to deal with. He told me later that she was American and had met Graham Greene in Arabia.

  It was that summer, I think, that the Other hit the headlines. I had been in Brighton for a few days and returning to London I found an enquiry from Picture Post. They had received a telegram signed Graham Greene, dated from Assam, asking for a hundred pounds because the sender was in a kind of imbroglio with the Indian police as he had lost his passport. The editor had sent someone to Albany, off Piccadilly, where I had chambers, to enquire whether I was, in fact, in India. The porter replied with wise caution that he had not seen me for several days, so perhaps I was, and Picture Post telegraphed a hundred pounds to India. Then, of course, the news began to break. Indian Press stories percolated through – ‘Graham Greene Convicted. Sentenced to Two Years RI [rigorous imprisonment],’ as well as the only authentic letter I have seen from the Other himself. With its quiet assumption that he was on a mission for Picture Post it must have been written to convince the police – he could never have expected it would convince Picture Post.

  The Other wrote in a breezy Sapper style from Duklingia, Assam.

  Gentlemen,

  Possibly by this time, swarms of flatfooted policemen, intelligence agents in false beards and other peculiar characters have been swarming over the building asking questions about me. Graham Greene has suddenly become NEWS. A few days ago someone most unkindly pinched my bags, cash and passport. I accordingly as in duty bound telegraphed the information to the UK REP, the High Commission in Calcutta, asking them to make arrangements for my passage to Calcutta. They, in turn, having nasty minds, asked the local police to check up, which was, under the circumstances, a most stupid thing to do. This is a DISTURBED area and finding they had in their midst an unidentifiable foreigner, they were delighted, classed me as an agent of a foreign power engaged in assisting and advising the hostile NAGAS, and promptly locked me up. This, when I have recovered, will make an excellent supplement to the article as yet unborn on the NAGA PROBLEM. Two local tea planters, with infinite kindness, came along to court this morning and bailed me out, otherwise I should have remained there for God-knows how long.

  You have probably by this time received OIL and FLOOD. Father Christmas has gone up to Amritsar to snap the local temples and bearded Sikh gentlemen. He has missed the scoop of the century by failing to record for posterity – British Correspondent behind bars. I don’t intend to give him another opportunity!

  I now, very desperately, need some money. Please forward to this address, forthwith (or sooner) a hundred or so. Make sure there are no snags as to exchange control, otherwise it might be possible to arrange something through Orient Longmans at Calcutta.

  There doesn’t seem to be much else. JUNGLE RECLAMATION will have to wait until I have taken a deep breath. The NAGA PROBLEM is still a problem – to me anyway. Everyone assures me that everything is now under control and that the bad boys are behaving themselves. I being a born cynic feel otherwise. It is extremely difficult to persuade the powers that be that I am simply a newsman after the truth, Much as I wish to write what promises to be the most fascinating article, the difficulties are stupendous. Perhaps after all, they do NOT wish the truth to be published. Sincerely, Graham Greene

  I suggested to Picture Post that they might send me to interview the Other in his Assam prison, but I was deterred by the thought that it was the monsoon season and by a conversation I had on the telephone with an official at the High Commissioner’s office in London. He warned me to give him advance notice of my leaving for Calcutta, otherwise I would be in danger of arrest on arrival as the Other had broken his bail. Not only had he broken bail, but he had gone off with a typewriter, a wristwatch and some clothes of the tea planters who had befriended him. An Indian friend wrote me further details: ‘It appears that he calls himself at times Graham Greene and at other times Graham Green – without the “e”. He’s supposed to be an Australian by birth, but this is only a conjecture (from his accent) for he has no identity papers with him. For a long time he has been moving about from one tea estate to another, living on charity, living the life of a tramp and claiming to be a professional writer.’

  Re-arrested, the Other disappeared for a time into an Indian prison, but even in these straits he had a woman to speak up for him, although she had not seen him for a dozen years. She wrote to me from Bournemouth asking me to help him. ‘Mr Graham Greene is a man of courage and is not indifferent to principles, and although he may have been in a forbidden place, due to his roving adventurous spirit, I do feel sure that the charge against him is without much foundation.’ Adventurous spirit indeed. ‘The accused was wanted,’ the Statesman of Calcutta reported, ‘in a series of cases in Calcutta, Patna, Ranchi, Lucknow, Meerut, Poona, Bombay, Delhi and other places.’ A lot for one man: perhaps he was both John Skinner and Meredith de Varg.

  For nearly two years I heard nothing more of the Other; he went out of my mind until one day I was booking a passage to New York in the BOAC office. ‘Are you staying only one night in New York?’ the girl asked me with surprise.

  ‘No. I’m not sure how long …’

  ‘But we have you booked next day on the return flight New York – London.’

  Could the other passenger be the Other returning from jail in India? One thing is certain, that in December 1959 he had come back into circulation. Marie Biche wrote to me that month to tell me that an attractive young French-woman had gone to apply for a job with an American businessman staying at the Hotel Prince de Galles. After being interviewed by him in the lobby and having failed to get the job because she didn’t have English shorthand, she was stopped on t
he way out by another American who gave his name as Peters or something similar. He told her that he had overheard part of the conversation and understood she was looking for a job; he was on the lookout for a secretary for his friend and partner, the writer Graham Greene, who was coming to Paris to work for two months before going on a trip of several months across the United States, where he would be renting a house here and there as he travelled around, a habit of his as he couldn’t work in hotels. Would she like to be offered the post?

  The girl was working part-time in a Paris bookshop, and feeling that the job sounded too good to be true she called up my publisher, who put her on to Marie. In between she had checked with the Prince de Galles and learned that they had no one by the name of Peters staying there. Marie suggested it would be worth going to the appointment to try and lead the man on to volunteer a little more about himself and his partner, but the girl wouldn’t go as she was convinced that Peters was a scout for a white slavery gang. He had said that, if she had a nice friend who would like to come along as a housekeeper for Graham Greene on his American tour, it would be possible to arrange it as he was looking for someone to fill that post too.

  It was the last big intrusion of the Other into my life – the rest have been only passing appearances: for example a photograph in a Jamaican paper of ‘Famed Novelist Graham Greene and Missus drink with the Scudders (centre) at Galleon Club.’ Everyone is laughing, glass in hand; the Other with Pompidou eyebrows is very debonair in a white jacket, and Missus is an attractive woman. Neither corresponds with a photograph in La Tribune de Génève of Mr and Mrs Graham Greene at the airport of Cointrin – a man much older than I was then, a bit travel-worn and wearing an absurd little tweed hat, an out-of-focus woman in a toque and dark glasses. ‘Thick set, a pipe between his teeth, the British writer Graham Greene arrived yesterday afternoon [July 7, 1967] at Cointrin. Coming from Paris where he lives now the author of The Third Man has begun his wandering holidays at Geneva.’ Asked whether he was writing a new book, he said no, he was taking a true holiday.