by Jimmy Burns
Beyond this, Greene’s real motivation for choosing to go to Bilbao remains unclear. In his autobiography, he claimed that he travelled to Bilbao with a letter of recommendation from the Basque Delegation in London. The extensive archive which the Basque government preserved from that period contains no evidence of such a letter having existed – no copies, no exchange of correspondence or minuted meetings linked to it. The Delegation was not shy when it came to exploiting propaganda opportunities and yet Basques linked with that period have excluded any mention of recruiting Graham Greene to their cause in their accounts or those compiled by sympathetic historians. Nor have the BBC archives thrown up anything which might substantiate the claim made by Greene’s official biographer Norman Sherry that the author’s intention was to make a BBC broadcast about the besieged Basques.
According to Greene’s account, ‘they … [Sherry presumes that ‘they’ was the BBC]’ sent him ‘hurtling down to Toulouse’, where the Frenchman who was supposed to take him across the border and into Bilbao in a two-seater plane got cold feet because Franco’s guns were proving too accurate. But Sherry, drawing from a letter Greene wrote to his mother, offers a more mundane explanation – which is that the novelist wanted to return to London for the launch of a new magazine, Night and Day, to which he had been appointed literary editor the previous December, rather than waiting for an alternative way of getting to Spain.
No one was more pleased to see Greene cut short his trip to Bilbao than his friend Burns. Now that any thought of writing an anti-Franco novel based in Bilbao had effectively been scuppered, there emerged an alternative project with which Burns planned to tap Greene’s literary talents in a less hesitant defence of the Catholic faith.
The idea had already been implanted in Greene’s mind in embryonic form months before his aborted trip to Bilbao. On Burn’s recommendation, Greene had read a book called Mexican Martyrdom which had been published in 1936. Written by an American Jesuit called Fr Parsons, the book was a graphic account of the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico following the Revolution. Here, far off on a distant continent, was a drama that appealed to Greene as an author and a Catholic, one that he could engage in without provoking the hostility of friends.
The original idea for a book by Greene on Mexico came from Frank Sheed, of the publishers Sheed & Ward, which Burns had joined in 1926. Initial negotiations through Greene’s agent, David Higham, had led to an offer of an advance of £500. But progress towards a final contract was stalled with Greene initially diverted by the Basque situation in Spain, and subsequently by his taking up the literary editorship at Night and Day. The project was eventually dropped by Sheed, leaving it open for his former protégé Burns to make an alternative offer.
Burns was by now an experienced publisher with ideas of his own, and with a developed sense of the market and how it should be played. In early 1936 he had left Sheed & Ward and joined Longman, Green and Co., a long-established publishing firm that was looking to refresh its declining specialist list of Catholic and Anglican writing and to expand further its general list of authors, among them rising stars who preferred to call themselves writers and who were also Catholics.
Within months of securing Evelyn Waugh’s travel book on Abyssinia, Burns had signed up Greene on Mexico, having convinced him that Longman was on its way to being, if it wasn’t already, more that just a Catholic publishing house, with the greater market opportunities that that implied.
Burns and Greene had a friendship that drew strength from a similarity of character but contrasting circumstances. Both men stood out in the company they kept. They carried within them a radical strain which questioned orthodox assumptions in matters of faith as much as politics. Burns was still a bachelor, on the lookout for a woman with whom he could form a permanent relationship. He saw in Vivien, Greene’s young wife, the ideal woman, constant and forgiving, an echo of his own (Burns’s) mother, whom Burns had lived with briefly following his father’s death in 1924.
Invited to dinner at the Greenes’ home on Clapham Common, Burns was struck by how the ‘gentle and beautiful’ Vivien had ‘it all arranged with such care’. This ‘serenity in order in every detail’ seemed to Burns to be so different from everything that he had been able to observe in Greene himself.
When Burns and Greene were alone together, Greene revealed another darker and more restless side to him, one that Burns sympathised with but struggled to suppress within himself thanks to his Jesuit upbringing. As Burns later recalled of that period, ‘We were both too busy to see much of each other but there would come the occasional telephone call: “Let’s go to Limehouse tonight – there’s a ballet of Chinese nudes at the local theatre.”’ Even during his early days of sexual experimentation in Paris, Burns had drawn the line at brothels. Yet the topics of sex and religion, discussed over a bottle of whisky, produced a creative bond between the two men that was to last, off and on, till their dying days.
After one of their regular drinking sessions together, Greene wrote to his agent David Higham saying that he personally would much rather be published by Longman than Sheed & Ward as this would run much less of a risk of having him ‘branded as a Catholic writer’.
The reality was that Burns could offer Greene as good if not better contacts and introductions to the world of Mexican Catholicism as Sheed had promised. Still Higham attempted to raise the stakes. He approached Greene’s regular publisher, Heinemann, and suggested to Greene that he was on target for securing a satisfactory offer. Greene was unconvinced. He wrote back to Higham strongly expressing his view that it wasn’t worth ‘jockeying Heinemanns into a book which doesn’t really interest them’.
Further haggling followed before Higham drew up Greene’s contract with Burns, while refusing to contemplate a buyout of the option that Heinemann had on the author’s entire fiction output. Nevertheless, it had become clear to Burns that neither Heinemann nor any other publisher shared his and Greene’s interests. ‘For them Mexico was far away and religion a hazy notion,’ Burns later remarked. ‘Graham and I saw it quite differently and were able to persuade my somewhat bovine board at Longman to accept my view and come up with £500 – quite a sum in those days for a writer untried in the field.’ In fact the £500 was no more and no less than Sheed had offered Higham originally. Burns had got himself a bargain.
It was during the 1930s that Burns also developed a growing friendship with Evelyn Waugh. They courted the two Herbert sisters, forged ever closer links with the Jesuits and participated in joint publishing ventures. After publishing, with Burns’s encouragement, a biography of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit martyr, Waugh followed in Greene’s footsteps to Mexico on a writing commission funded by Clive Pearson, a younger son of the 1st Lord Cowdray, representing his family’s powerful commercial interests in Central America.
The travel book that Waugh wrote on Mexico, Robbery Under Law, received lukewarm interest when it was published in 1939. It was the year of transition from the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War, when the dark implications of Hitler’s ambition were finally beginning to dawn on the British public, and people had little time to get worked up over affairs in distant Mexico. Many writers on the left, like the journalist Tom Driberg, had been professionally engaged in the fight against Fascism for some time, while there were others – English socialites, like Unity and Diana Mitford – who held Hitler in awe, and supported Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, as the party which could unite Britain and prevent the slide to world war. As late as September 1938, as part of his work for the Anglo-German Fellowship, Beverley Nichols entertained leaders of the Hitler Youth to lunch at the Garrick Club. Robbery Under Law includes a visceral attack on the world of left-wing British intellectuals as epitomised by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which in Waugh’s view had contributed only to romanticising the antics of revolutionaries in foreign lands, justifying actions that they could never have countered back in England.
Describing the diff
erent tourists he met in Mexico, Waugh raged against the ideologues: ‘First in Moscow, then in Barcelona, now in Mexico, these credulous pilgrims pursue their quest for the Promised Land; constantly disappointed, never disillusioned, ever thirsty for the phrases in which they find refreshment.’
Waugh’s friend and biographer Christopher Sykes considers Robbery Under Law, the novelist’s most political book, a product of its time, when the ideological character of the Spanish Civil War incited numerous writers to proclaim their deepest beliefs. Neither Waugh nor Greene followed the example of authors like Laurie Lee, André Malraux, Orwell or Hemingway who took up arms in Spain. They chose instead their own idiosyncratic witness to European events, finding in Mexico a situation that allowed them to reconcile their faith with their political convictions.
Before going to Mexico, Waugh spent the first months of the Spanish Civil War initially in Abyssinia and then continuing his courtship in London of Laura Herbert, whom he married on 17 April 1937.
Laura was not the first of the Herbert sisters to have entered Waugh’s circle. It was thanks to the encouragement and introduction of Fr D’Arcy that in the summer of 1933 Waugh had met Gabriel, Laura’s oldest sister, while taking a Hellenic cruise with his Oxford acquaintance Alfred Duggan, the step-son of Lord Curzon, and a group of formidable Catholics. They included members of the Asquith family, and the Infanta Beatriz, the daughter of the Spanish King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia, or ‘Ena’ as she came to be more popularly known, his consort.
Gabriel was a handsome, amusing and athletic twenty-two-year-old who had inherited her father Aubrey’s half-brother Lord Carnavon’s adventurous spirit. Waugh seems to have warmed to her particularly one night when she got drunk on too many gins.
Waugh kept no diaries from the summer of 1934 to the summer of 1936, but it was in this period leading up to the Spanish Civil War that he fell in love with Laura, while introducing Gabriel to his friend Burns, an introduction almost as fateful as that which had led the novelist to his first meeting with his future wife. While Waugh’s courtship of Laura was complicated by the tortuously slow process of the annulment of his first marriage, Burns’s romantic dalliance with Gabriel flourished, uncluttered by thoughts of marriage, or, as she perceived it in orthodox Catholic terms, carnal sin.
In July 1936, Waugh wrote a letter to Lady Mary Lygon, soon after his annulment had been granted by Rome, announcing that one of the reasons the marriage would not take place for several months was because Gabriel had got involved in the politics of Spain, and because he had yet to overcome a certain air of moral disapproval with which she contemplated his attachment to her sister.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War sharpened Gabriel’s fanatical Catholicism. It gave her a motive and a spur to action to defend her faith, drawing her into the network of English and Spanish Catholics that supported the Nationalists. She put her energies into helping channel funds to the nationalist side, and organising the transport of medical supplies from the UK, across France and over the Pyrenees, in a fleet of volunteer ambulances.
Overt Catholic fundraising was initiated within days of the military uprising with advertisements in two Catholic newspapers, the Universe and the Catholic Times. The fundraising then became coordinated by a committee presided over by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Hinsley, and composed of a selection of the great and good in the Catholic laity. The chairman was Lord Howard of Penrith, a former ambassador to Washington and Madrid, and a relation of the Dukes of Norfolk, with a formidable array of social and political contacts on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the UK, Howard was active in Catholic intellectual circles. He was a close friend of Fr D’Arcy, and his son Francis – educated by the Benedictines at Downside – had joined the journalistic and publishing circles that revolved round Burns, with whom he had shared a flat in Chelsea after leaving Oxford. Other members of the committee included two other publishing associates of Burns, Christopher Dawson and Frank Sheed, as well as Waugh.
The officially declared mission of the Bishops’ Committee for the Relief of Spanish Distress was listed as ‘the relief of the sick, wounded, refugees, and destitute children of Spain’. In fact the Committee was overtly anti-communist and determined to counter the attempts by the Spanish left to monopolise public opinion in Britain. The Committee maintained close ties with the Friends of Nationalist Spain.
More than a year earlier, in late September 1936, Evelyn Waugh noted a lunch he had with his sister-in-law-to-be, Gabriel, who was ‘off to Spain to relieve insurgents’. That evening both of them went to another fundraising event, this time organised by the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster’s ‘Spanish Association’. Gabriel opened the event by reporting on a meeting she had had with one of the Duke of Alba’s aristocratic friends, the Duchess of Laguna, and urged the Association’s committee to meet her demands for medical and other supplies as soon as they could be arranged. Waugh made a recommendation to the committee that Gabriel should be sent to Spain without more ado to see, on the ground, what was needed, and to coordinate the delivery of supplies. It turned into the first of several trips Gabriel made to Nationalist-occupied Spanish territory with an ambulance unit, mainly staffed by Spaniards. Gabriel’s growing enthusiasm for the nationalist cause as she worked as a volunteer nurse and intermediary between the medical team in Spain and the fund-raisers in London was conveyed in a series of private letters she wrote to friends and family members. During an interlude in London in 1937 – the precise date remains unclear – between trips to Spain, Gabriel wrote a report to her mother, Mary Herbert, with instructions that it be distributed among members of the English Catholic Bishops’ fund-raising ‘Spanish Association’.
Gabriel glowingly depicted the far right requetés from Navarre as the main standard-bearers of a heroic Catholic crusade which she claimed had been misunderstood by large swathes of the British media.
She wrote: ‘To those men, who watched the creeping disorder spreading over Spain, threatening the Church … and bringing disaster into the balanced order of their farming lives, who witnessed the powerlessness of the government to restrain the growing unrest to prevent churches being burnt and priests murdered, it was not unnatural to go and fight in defence of their religion and their right to live in their own homes.’
Gabriel had developed strong personal bonds with the requetés because during her first year in Spain they were the great majority of soldiers she nursed in hospital on the northern front. But far from a romantic adventure, the experience intensified her ideological commitment to the Franco cause, and her blind acceptance of its propaganda for which she acted as an energetic conduit. ‘To a people tired of injustice and misrule, Franco appeared as their only hope – a hope which has been justified,’ she wrote in notes prepared for a book she planned to write but never did.
It was a project for which she earned the approval of her spiritual mentor Fr D’Arcy whenever she returned to London. It also gave a fresh frisson to her on-off courtship with Burns, who retained fond memories of his first dances with Gabriel when she was a debutante. Many years later Burns described the third and final prologue to his main Spanish performance, his reunion with Gabriel, thus: ‘A chance encounter with a friend in a London street led her to ask what I was doing for a summer holiday. I told her that I had no plans. She asked me if I could drive an ambulance, which had been donated by English Catholics, to Burgos, the Spanish Nationalist headquarters. I accepted at once and was delighted to know that my companions would be a family friend, General Pereira (retired but, I suspect, not restrained from observing the situation for military intelligence) and Gabriel Herbert, a friend of debutante dancing days who was a volunteer nurse with the Nationalists, later decorated for valour.’
Their destination in Spain was the old Castilian town of Burgos, a city disproportionately populated by soldiers and priests. The birthplace of El Cid, the legendary eleventh-century-conqueror of the Moors, Burgos had backed the milit
ary uprising with scarcely a shot being fired in opposition. ‘The very stones are nationalist here,’ the pro-Franco Condesa de Vallellano told Marcel Junot, a Red Cross doctor. In fact, what opposition there was found itself brutally repressed before it had had time to organise itself. Republican sympathisers who were identified in local police files were taken from their families and shot.
Within days Burgos was transformed into the effective capital of Franco’s Spain, a safe haven as well as a gathering place for some of the aristocrats and other anti-Republican civilians who had fled Madrid. By the time the ambulance, driven by Burns, and with Gabriel Herbert as his passenger, reached it, the town was also home to foreign journalists covering the Nationalist advance on the north of the country. Burns and Herbert, identifying themselves as two volunteer Catholic ‘aid workers’, were initially welcomed by a delegate of the Red Cross, the Duchess of Lecera. Of his meeting with the Anglophile Spanish aristocrat, Burns would later recall: ‘A diminutive but dynamic lady with cropped hair, in a peaked cap and khaki uniform. She spoke perfect English … Her somewhat bovine husband was rumoured to be at least the would-be lover of Queen Ena. I was to learn later that, unless they moved in a circumambient atmosphere of scandal, Spanish aristocrats would feel themselves unclothed.’
While Gabriel and her team of Spaniards oversaw the distribution of medical supplies, and drew up lists of further orders, Burns went out drinking with the press corps, a convivial group of semi-alcoholics. He discovered that one of their number, Kim Philby, was then out of town.
Philby had first arrived in Spain in February 1937, having secured accreditation as a freelance from the London Evening Standard and a German magazine called Geopolitics. As he later recalled, his immediate assignment was to get first-hand information of the Franco war effort and transmit this to his Soviet contacts, who in turn would pass it on to the Republican army. However, his main mission was to assist in an abortive Soviet attempt to assassinate Franco. For the purpose, Philby attached himself initially to the nationalist’s southern logistical command in Seville. The assassination plot was aborted after Philby nearly had his cover blown during a visit to Cordoba. He was in the Andalusian town with the aim of watching a bullfight but inadvertently strayed into a restricted military area. He was arrested by Civil Guards and questioned while his luggage and clothes were searched. When asked to turn his pockets out, Philby threw his wallet across the table – a move that distracted his interrogators and, so he later claimed, gave him time to put into his mouth a small ball of paper on which his secret codes were written, before swallowing it.