*
After completing the play in October, Greene decided that he and Dean would travel to West Africa in December. The trip was to be the antidote to the void he would feel when Catherine returned to her husband: ‘[Africa] will help one get over the post-Italy depression. Work is the only constant possible in life: if only one could work. Everything is like benzedrine, a postponement.’17
Greene tried to arrange his journey to Sierra Leone from Paris, but he had trouble getting a yellow fever certificate from French officials. He spent the night at his publisher’s: ‘Last night at Laffont’s. I gloomily consented to return & in Paris, arriving here on the 18th – dinner with the Comtesse Beaumont; on the 19th book signing & press reception & lunch with the Dieu Vivant people on the 20th, returning to England the evening of the 21st.’ One thing he refused to do again was to sign books in Paris: ‘I simply cannot face another book signing … At the last one I was signing steadily for well over three hours and it is too exhausting.’18
Frustrated by the difficulties over his yellow fever certification and by being in Paris without Catherine, Greene writes drearily: ‘O dear, this is the silliest of all impasses – I don’t really want to hang around these empty streets for a week – they echo with you … I don’t really care a damn where I am – the whole routine of existence seems awfully pointless when our only contacts are telephone calls, letters, etc., but I’d prefer to be somewhere without memories or else absorbed in something that scares or excites me … there’s nothing to do now except look at the rain & wait for lunch.’ Greene feared that the trouble over the certificate would force him to return to England: ‘it looks as though the only news will be a return to No. 5 [St James’s] & watch the rain from there.’19 But suddenly and jubilantly at the end of the letter: ‘Hell of a day with officials, all well (D.V.!) Off tomorrow & love you so dearly … More from Freetown.’
Two days later, Greene was stuck at Dakar. The officials were unhappy about his lack of a certificate as Dakar had a bad record of yellow fever: ‘Hope to go on tomorrow where if the Freetown officials want to show their disapproval of me, they can slap me into quarantine.’20
Now that he was on a trek to unknown experiences, Greene’s melancholia disappeared like snow on the desert. His desire for extinction also vanished as he moved among the eccentric characters of his beloved Africa. Greene had been warned by Air France that if there were a problem with his yellow fever certificate in Dakar, it would be useless to go to the consul-general for assistance as he was always drunk after 8 a.m.:
We called at 4 & after ringing twice, the doorway opened, not by a servant but by a white man, who swayed slightly. ‘Is the Consul-General in?’ I said. ‘It’s him in person,’ he said. We stayed about half an hour, unable to get any sense out of him, & he developed a strong dislike of Basil [Dean] & an embarrassing liking for me – perhaps he scented someone who liked a drink too. He insisted on Basil photographing him & me & a black servant (‘good fellow – I knock him around a bit’) on the steps under the Royal Arms & urged me to come and stay with him: ‘Got two beautiful women to dinner tonight. Your friend – don’t know his name – nor yours – looks short tempered. You stay with me any time. Always have a room for you.’ I’d rather like to spend a night with him & see what happens. Another of his bons mots was after an embarrassing silence (he had been too drunk to get his telephone to work) he spread his arms wide and with a twinkle at me, ‘Tell me the latest story from London.’ Gin alas, not whisky is his drink.21
Finally, Dean and Greene were able to leave Dakar. Greene obtained a bogus medical certificate to say that he and Dean were unfit to be inoculated, which allowed Air France to put them on the plane, ‘but we may be still questioned by the strict English when we get to Freetown’.22 There were many comings and goings and wires to be pulled, but finally they arrived, after an awful journey, at the transit camp. Dean was depressed, not so Greene:
but suddenly getting under a mosquito net in the damp stuffiness, I felt at home – a familiar austere narrow home of four muslin walls. And this morning the light was beautiful & the black women passed by the window in robes of the loveliest colours, slouching by, chewing their sticks. I can never get this part right out of my system.23
Re-experiencing his past in Freetown helped to chase Catherine away or rather attach Greene to her in a different way. There was an alternative world to his frustrating but all-encompassing passion for Catherine:
I am too happy to be in West Africa … to mind what happens. (Dean is still asleep.) Next to you I love this hot wind and the black decorative women & the rather oafish friendly men in shorts & the mosquito net & the camp bed & the washed out madame behind the bar & this grey bright light. If I couldn’t be with you, I’d like to be here.24
Greene looked forward to the sights and smells of Freetown and hoped that he’d reach it the following day. He planned to seek out Ali, his servant during the war, ‘who is in the police band now’.
The acerbic Greene disappeared in Africa. He loved the French customs officials who were not troubled by his and Dean’s failure to have proper documents, but jovially warned them of what might happen when they passed through British customs in Freetown:
At the airport at i in the morning people were so charming – the Sante man who roared with laughter at our yellow fever letters but passed us through ‘Tell me what happens,’ he said, ‘Eight days quarantine. My English colleague’s very strict. You are the first British I have seen without proper certificates. O what fun you are going to have. 8 days quarantine. We French, we know how to dance,’ & began to dance on the floor. ‘We dance this way, that way, we dance …’
‘… The polka,’ I said.
‘Yes, the polka, but my English colleague, he doesn’t know how to dance.’25
In this same letter, one of Greene’s longest to Catherine, he expressed his love of Africa and Catherine in the same breath: ‘I have loved no part of the world like this & I have loved no woman as I love you. You’re my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different & yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.’26
When Greene arrived in Freetown he visited his old haunts: ‘I am sitting on the balcony where Wilson sat at the City Hotel & saw Scobie [in The Heart of the Matter]. It’s very very hot & sticky & I love Freetown … It’s too hot to write properly, & for the first time I don’t miss you physically (it’s too hot to make love) only mentally … Alas! There are no schoolgirls in the window opposite, but a horrible radio blares a woman resident’s impressions of Trinidad.’27 Wilson, who has only just come out from England, is sitting on the balcony of the hotel, when a man called Harris joins him:
‘Look down there,’ Harris said, ‘look at Scobie.’
A vulture flapped and shifted on the iron roof and Wilson looked at Scobie. He looked without interest in obedience to a stranger’s direction, and it seemed to him that no particular interest attached to the squat grey-haired man walking alone up Bond Street. He couldn’t tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined – the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.28
Greene met again the one-time Provincial Commissioner, ‘old Sayers … with a black mistress & black children’, now a public relations officer. And he wrote wistfully to Catherine: ‘Sometimes I have a crazy desire to ask for a job as assistant P.R.O. or something & simply stay in this place. When one of our holidays is over & there’s none on the horizon, life seems over too, & if one’s going to walk about as a ghost, this would be an agreeable place to haunt. Whisky is only 1/6 a glass, & gin even cheaper.’29
By travelling to Africa Greene rescued himself from the dark s
ide of his character, but the happiness of his two weeks there did not last. He had travelled up-country as he had done in the old days and suddenly he desired Catherine again. He tried hard to switch his thoughts away from her at night in order to get through it. He wrote to her as an adolescent in the throes of first love would write, the first sentence deliberately emphasised: ‘Please make a plan for us to see each other soon. Do you think sometime this Christmas you could meet my Mum? And can we go to Paris please in January for a week & either find a house or a dinette & have our old suite at the Ritz.’30 Because his hand was ‘pouring with sweat’, Greene stopped writing, but not before expressing his jealousy of Harry Walston: ‘I hate going to sleep without you & I can’t help hating the thought of the other bed beside you. Every night I have to switch the thoughts. One isn’t only jealous of sex – one is jealous of company & the first words on waking.’ In a postscript he repeats his thoughts of love and suicide: ‘O my dear, I miss you so much at night to lie down beside & sleep – how I sleep then. It’s at these times one wishes one was dead. Let me see you soon. It’s all I live for. God bless you & pray for me.’31
*
Soon after his return from Africa and Paris, Greene planned to travel to America on the Queen Elizabeth in early February 1950. He was desperately needed in Boston, for Basil Dean was running into serious difficulties in directing the play. If Greene had known the sad state of affairs he would have travelled by air.
Greene boarded the Queen Elizabeth and at 9.10 p.m. that night recalled his last sight of Catherine: ‘Dear heart, I still see your hand against the window of the car. Never, never have I felt going away from you more.’32
On board ship, he was pleased that his name was not on the passenger list, and he felt at peace. He passed the time by reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he found ‘very good except the sex part. That’s ham.’
Greene met a man who was a hero of his, and he found it odd and rather sad that life should ‘reduce’ one’s heroes:
First Mauriac, whom one is used to now. This evening I was having drinks with a little man, a Spanish basque, who had read my books & who turned out to be one of my heroes of the 30’s – the President of the Basque Republic [José Antonio Aguirre, 1904–60], the Catholic who fought Franco (I tried to fly to Bilbao during the siege & broadcast from there). Now the Hero had suddenly become just a man of my own age who liked The Power and the Glory. Thank God, Captain Scott & Captain Oates are safely dead & can’t turn into retired naval officers who read novels.33
Throughout the voyage thoughts of Catherine were with him by day (‘Like the Hail Marys that fit into the corpus of one’s thoughts, so I say over & over again, I love you, Catherine’) and night: ‘I dreamed of you last night & as a result miss you more than ever: “When I waked / I cried to dream again.”’34 As usual, his letters soon returned to marriage: ‘Do think hard of living with me & eventually (I’m sure) really marrying in the Catholic Church. In a few years your children will all be away from home, & there’ll be just you & Harry. It won’t be so very long before we are both old, but you are the only person (+ a few priests) that I want to be old with … I want to be with you when even desire is dead.’35
On arriving in New York Greene discovered that the bookings for the play were not going well: ‘Rodgers & Hammerstein have appealed to me to give interviews. They say I’m their only card, as the English cast is unknown.’36 Greene was seen on to the train to Boston by a representative of David Selznick and arrived there at 9 p.m. only to find no one about. Hammerstein called the next morning and walked with him to the theatre through the snow. Greene had lunch with Basil Dean before the dress rehearsal. He found that the play was ‘a terrible affair except for the last act’.37 The next day his diary records exhausting activity: ‘Typed out notes & went through them with Hammerstein at noon. They are having terrible trouble with Dean & are glad of my coming … Down to theatre where Dean hopelessly behind schedule … having light rehearsal (enormous trouble taken that resulted in fiasco at rehearsal). Dress rehearsal call postponed from 6.30 [p.m.] till 8.15. Actually started at 10.30. First act went smoothly in spite of its faults. Second act very poor. Finished about 3. Cast nervous, despairing, exhausted.’38
The rehearsals came as a bad shock to Greene. Although he did not care about the success of the play too much, he did care whether what he’d done was competent. Although Dean’s direction was the cause of many of the production’s problems, Greene thought the fault rested with the play itself:
Basil of course has slave driven the cast & reduced them to bad nerves. His production too is old-fashioned. The dresses are awful. But it’s no use pretending that the main fault is that it’s a bad play.
I had to have a press conference on Wednesday with the dramatic critics – about two dozen of them. We got on well, & the result is a kindly intelligent Press – they might have torn the whole thing in pieces especially with all the things that went wrong on the first night in the way of stage management. Poor Oscar Hammerstein was more fussed than me. I like him enormously. Rodgers less so. Dean has treated both very badly, so that they have welcomed me all the more.
I think I’ve spotted the main faults of the play. Today I’ve revised the last act & part of the second, cutting two scenes altogether. We should get that into rehearsal tomorrow. Next week I’m going to alter the whole character of Wilson & practically rewrite the first act. Maybe it won’t be a bad play when it gets to New York.39
The Boston Daily Globe’s headline read: ‘BRITISH NOVELIST GRAHAM GREENE TURNS PLAYWRIGHT – AND LIKES IT.’ The journalist admitted that Greene didn’t fit preconceived notions of the famous author of Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter. ‘Tall and a little stooped with a serious but friendly face, he did not look at you either austerely or analytically. Those eyes which had seemed so sharp in photographs were pale-blue, but neither penetrating nor cool. Obviously a shy man, he did not fit the conventional idea of a cosmopolitan world traveller, as he faced the circle of questioning Boston newspaper people. But his ease asserted itself – and drew a sympathetic laugh from the group – when asked if such collective interviews were done in England, he replied in his soft voice and with a laugh: “No, thank God.”’40
Greene described to the press how he and Basil Dean worked on the dramatisation: ‘Part of it they wrote together, part separately, and then compared their work. Greene now feels the theatre to be fascinating and wants to do a solo play … Mr. Greene has another book in mind [The End of the Affair] and also another film play for a director in Italy [The Stranger’s Hand, directed by Mario Soldati]. But the idea of doing a solo stage play is actively in his mind.’41
Greene was trying hard to improve the play before it got to New York: ‘Friday: Typed out 6 pages of notes suggesting changes. At the theatre all the afternoon, while Dean rehearsed some changes. Had dinner with Dean at hotel & then with Hammerstein to first night … Terribly embarrassing performance with everything going wrong. Post mortem till 2 a.m.’42 The following day Greene worked all day to compress Act 3 into three scenes, which were ready in time for the Sunday afternoon rehearsal. On the Monday he rewrote the Bamba scene (in the novel, the occasion when the assistant District Commissioner commits suicide) and changed the end of the first love scene. On the Tuesday he wrote the epilogue, retouched the Bamba scene and then went to sleep, but in the afternoon when he was asked to dinner by Rodgers and Hammerstein he guessed the worst. In his diary he wrote: ‘Play to be withdrawn. Face-saving announcement of production in Autumn. Sat up very late trying to comfort Dean.’43 On 1 March the announcement appeared in The Times:
The producers of the play The Heart of the Matter, the dramatization by Mr. Graham Greene and Mr. Basil Dean of Mr. Greene’s novel of the same name, have decided to end its run in Boston on Saturday night and to defer until next season any further performances. It was to have opened here on March 16. The reason given for the withdrawal was that too mu
ch rewriting was necessary in the short time given to the adapters.44
Greene had failed in his first attempt at writing a play and was more hurt and disappointed than he admitted. As a letter to Basil Dean in July shows, he was reluctant to revive any interest in the play, in himself or others:
I have read the new version of THE HEART OF THE MATTER and I am afraid that I cannot agree to its production in Liverpool or elsewhere. There is no use in pulling punches on this matter, and it seems to me to be a far worse version than the original. The original at least did contain a certain amount of good scenes and also the subject of the book. The good scenes in this case have got the guts removed from them and the new material has not to my view any value whether of dialogue or drama. The whole subject of the book has not only been lost but been sentimentally travestied. You will understand therefore my desire not to go on with the matter as I am not prepared to do any more work myself on the play. In fact the new version could not be made presentable from my point of view however much work I did on it.45
*
Most people would have been deeply unhappy about having so much work come to nothing, but the Boston disaster didn’t trouble Greene as much as his inability to bring Catherine to his side. Even before Rodgers and Hammerstein closed down the play, he was on the verge of a breakdown:
I feel desperate, darling. If you walked in the door now I should break down & cry (like I’ve been crying in bed). I can’t sleep more than three or four hours & that’s with the help of pills. It’s like after West Africa only worse. I’ve raised the price for anybody with a gun now to 5000 [pounds]. I look at the nembutal with such longing but people would say it [the suicide] was because I’d written a flop. But I don’t care a damn about the flop – it’s this working & working on something dead, & the tightness, & the hearing so little of where you are & what is happening to you … I can’t get you out of my mind & I don’t know how to keep going. This is all nerves & tiredness & the bloody American atmosphere … And for 1947 & 1948 [breaking up with Vivien and Dorothy] I’d exchange this for the break up time willingly. It was awful, but there was something to look forward to the other side, & this beastly loneliness wasn’t then. I say Our Fathers & Hail Marys but it doesn’t work, & I can’t telephone to you or the Jesuits. I can’t even see anybody.46
The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 40