The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Greene’s diary tells us little about his condition; perhaps it was the beginnings of dysentery: ‘Tum out of order again. Still rather flattened by the muggy heat.’

  They left Ganta on 17 February, but Greene was determined to be true to himself and follow the unmapped paths to Grand Bassa on the coast, a route unknown to white men, though known to Mandingo traders, and arduous because of the heavy bush. He was determined not to make straight for Monrovia.57

  The journey began with guilt. The carrier Babu, who had been always dependable, had to be left because he was sick. Knowing that if he gave Babu a good dash, the other carriers would go sick and demand the same, he pretended to be angry with Babu and gave him a small dash. He felt guilty, but the journey had to go on, though the loss of Babu meant that just when he felt, for the first time, he might need to use a hammock, he had to leave his hammock behind.

  At Zugbei, they at last did what Greene had long wished to do – turned south. At their stopping place a carrier called Siafa asked him to treat a venereal sore which he had had on his face for three years, yet had not shown to Dr Harley, who could have given him an injection. It had to be dressed daily. That night Greene recorded in his diary that he ‘dosed himself with Epsom [Salts]. Had to get up in the night. Bright moonlight. Absolute quiet. Goats wandering between the huts. Every door and window closed.’

  Afterwards they travelled into the thick bush, seeing monkeys, baboons, the pad marks of leopards, and bushmen – naked except for loin-cloths, carrying bows and steel-tipped arrows, their bodies cicatrised – and a man carrying a folding chair on his head and on top of it a black felt hat.

  They stopped at Peyi, a very poor village where nearly everyone was old, suffering from goitre and venereal sores, and where little groups of women were delousing each other’s heads. But they were offered a clean hut and although the carriers were given only one bucket of rice, yet under a full moon, ‘they bore no malice … the moon and its deep green light made them happy’. They shared their small meal with the chief and the ‘village was full of song and laughter and running feet’. As a European who had lost touch with the influence of the moon, Greene could only envy them. The lunar influence to the civilised, he reflected, meant ‘self-conscious emotion, crooners and little sentimental songs of lust and separation; at best a cerebral worked-up excitement’.58

  Greene noted in his diary: ‘Every movement we make is closely watched. If one puts on glasses, if one cleans one’s glasses, if one takes something from a pocket … two days growth with idea of a small beard.’59

  The Greenes, the first whites to be travelling this route, caused much excitement: ‘Children screamed when they saw us … Even the women we met in the bush away from their homes would give a horrified moan and dart away into the forest. In the villages … the natives … yelled with excitement, cutting off big branches from the trees and running along beside us. Sometimes they would dance, and our carriers with them, doing quite complicated steps with the heavy weights on their heads.’60

  To see a white man was amazing but to see a white woman was greater reason for rejoicing. A short note in Greene’s diary, ‘[went] by various villages where there was generally great outcry round B’, is developed in Barbara’s own book: ‘In one place the men of the village made me get into my hammock, and four strong men picked it up and rushed me round and round at a tremendous pace, shouting with joy, till Amadu and Laminah drew their swords and flew at the men with such a ferocious expression on their faces that they dropped my hammock and fled.’61

  *

  At Sakripie, they met with civilisation again. It was a bustling town with wide, clean streets and stores, and a middle-aged Mandingo trader in a scarlet fez, called Steve Dunbar, insisted on buying their chairs and table and bed when they reached Monrovia – though they did not see him again. The paramount chief lived there with his fifty-five wives. At sunset they were presented with the vision of two devils on stilts, twenty feet high and in black masks and black witches’ hats and striped pyjamas, stepping over walls and sitting on roofs.

  In spite of Greene’s efforts, the chief did not provide food for their carriers, and the next day he upbraided the chief in English – though neither the chief nor the carriers understood, it pleased the carriers: ‘I cursed him,’ Greene writes. ‘I was very Imperialistic, very prefectorial, as I told him a chief must be judged by his discipline, that he ought not to allow his headman to disobey him.’ Barbara recorded: ‘Graham did not get up, and the carriers stood round in a ring. Slowly, with many biting expressions … that no one except myself understood, Graham delivered his lecture. The effect on our men was miraculous. They loved it.’62

  The road to Baplai took five hard hours. They had to be carried over much of the road, since the storms had turned the paths into swamps, and they had to avoid the guinea-worm which makes its way through ‘any sore in the foot, going up as far as the knee’. When the foot was put in water afterwards the worm spewed ‘its eggs into the water through the sore’. In the absence of a doctor, one had to ‘find its end like a thread of cotton and wind it out in a long unbroken length round a match-stick.’63

  Baplai was another ‘low’. The Grio tribe, as he noted in his diary, were a ‘scoundrelly looking lot of bushmen’, naked except for loin-cloths and so thin that he expected to see the bones through the venereal sores. Mr Nelson, the tax-gatherer, was yellow with disease and was squeezing money from the villagers living on the edge of subsistence. Once the villagers understood that Greene was not a government official their mood changed, and the chieftain brought their carriers the best food they had had on the whole journey – fourteen bowls of chop and three of meat scraps, together with palm wine. Greene’s headman was quite drunk long before dark and Greene himself got a little drunk and wandered round the village, ‘listening to the laughter and the music among the little glowing fires and thinking that, after all, the whole journey was worthwhile’. Waxing philosophical, he thought that ‘it did reawaken a kind of hope in human nature. If one could get back to this bareness, simplicity, instinctive friendliness, feeling rather than thought, and start again …’64

  Yaws, venereal sores and guinea-worms had been forgotten, and a young black Catholic, Victor Prosser, head teacher of Tapee-Ta mission school, asked Barbara many geographical and historical questions, such as, ‘Was it true that Queen Elizabeth was a Protestant, and Mary Queen of Scots a Catholic like himself? Where did the Thames rise? Was London on the Tiber as well as the Thames?’ They joined him singing ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ as they ‘picked their way through the Liberian jungle’.65

  They went on through Greh, a primitive village, with a very sick Laminah who had to be carried, to signs of progress in the shape of a wide, exposed road of white soil, the glare from which blinded them, to Tapee-Ta where they unexpectedly met the President’s special agent, Colonel Elwood Davis, the American black mercenary, leader of the Liberian force and known as the Dictator of Grand Bassa. In the British Blue Book he had been accused of being responsible for atrocities against the Kru people – the skewering of children on his soldiers’ bayonets, the burning alive of women imprisoned in native huts. Amedoo feared that this ‘wicked man’ would make trouble for Massa.

  Greene left his carriers outside the District Commissioner’s compound – an impressive place with groups of bungalows behind a stockade, well guarded and with the Liberian flag flying – and they lay down, as Barbara recorded, as if their bones were rotting. Graham, dirty, absurd in his stained shorts, stockings falling over his ankles, and wearing a pith helmet, went in to find a centre of military and diplomatic activity. The verandah was crowded with blacks who had ‘just finished lunch and were smoking cigars and drinking coffee … clerks kept on delivering messages and running briskly off again, sentries saluted … and … supercilious diplomatic gentlemen leant over the verandah and studied with well-bred curiosity the dusty arrival’ – Graham Greene.

  The Distr
ict Commissioner was ‘a middle-aged man with a yellow face, Victorian side-whiskers’ and bad teeth. His name was Words-worth, and he had Graham and Barbara housed in the paramount chief’s home, ‘a palatial building of four rooms and a cookhouse’, where Greene sank exhausted into a wooden chair. Greene bargained for rice for his carriers, and finally was promised a few moments only with Colonel Davis, the Dictator of Grand Bassa, though this developed in fact into several hours. There was something attractive about him. He had personality and carried himself with a military swagger, was well dressed, and had a small pointed beard.66

  In 1940 Greene, at the height of the blitz, recalled that remarkable man. After speaking of the atrocities connected with his name, he admitted: ‘He was a Scoutmaster and he talked emotionally about his old mother and got rather drunk on my whisky. He was bizarre and gullible and unaccountable: his atmosphere was that of deep forest … and an injustice as wayward as generosity.’67

  Davis’s career had been remarkable. He had once been a private in the American army, probably as a medical orderly, had served in Pershing’s disastrous Mexican expedition and later seen service in the Philippines. He had landed in Monrovia without any medical degree, but was soon appointed medical officer of health and worked his way up in Liberian politics. He told Graham and Barbara many exciting stories, so tinged with melodrama that they were almost unbelievable but for the tone of them, the general goodwill, and the confidence with which they were told. He gave the Greenes an account of his activities to show that, rather than having perpetrated atrocities, he had been a benefactor to the women and children he had been accused of burning alive.68

  But the small prison standing next to the bungalow they stayed in was a reminder to the Greenes that all was not civilised in Liberia. The prison was a small dark hut with tiny portholes for windows: ‘Each port-hole, the size of a man’s head, represented a cell. The prisoners within, men and women, were tied by ropes to a stick which was laid crosswise against the port-hole outside. There were two or three men who were driven out to work each morning, two skinny old women who carried in the food and water, their ropes coiled round their waists, an old man who was allowed to lie outside on a mat tied to one of the posts which supported the thatch. In a dark cavernous entrance, where the whitewash stopped, a few warders used to lounge all through the day shouting and squabbling and sometimes diving, club in hand, into one of the tiny cells. The old prisoner was a half-wit; I saw one of the warders beating him with his club to make him move to the tin basin in which he had to wash, but he didn’t seem to feel the blows. Life to him was narrowed into a few very simple, very pale sensations, of warmth on his mat in the sun and cold in his cell, for Tapee-Ta at night was very cold.’69

  They did not see Colonel Davis on their last night there as, in spite of having stated that there was no yellow fever in Liberia, he went down with a bad attack. Quartermaster Wordsworth, the brother of the District Commissioner, whose lustrous eyes and correspondence with Greene indicated his fascination and love for this white man, entertained them on his last evening. In what was almost their last conversation, he commented on the fact that the Buzie people had a wonderful cure for venereal disease: ‘You tie a rope round your waist’ – though he had never tried it. ‘I guess you white people aren’t troubled with venereal disease,’ he said, wistfully. He intercepted Graham that night as he was going into the forest to relieve himself, and said that there was ‘a very good closet behind the Colonel’s bungalow with a wooden seat’, but in the circumstances, Greene preferred the forest.70

  *

  Greene was now definitely ill with a fever coming on. His urge was to get out of Liberia and return home. In his diary he wrote: ‘Longing too much for V. If only there was a wireless station before Monrovia. The worst is being out of touch, not being able to say how much I think of her, and how dearly I love her. I want to be off, off, off. Going for a walk before lunch, I planned to take an aeroplane from Liverpool. Sudden dread that there might be bad news at M[onrovia] that she might be ill or unhappy.’

  His diary shows that he was retiring to bed, completely exhausted. Barbara felt that Graham had caught some ‘strange internal disease. He felt sick, and yet he was hungry all the time, and I wondered what was the right treatment for him. We had so little medicine with us, and were forced to put our entire trust in Epsom Salts.’71

  Their next stop was Zigi’s Town. Afterwards he could not remember much of that: ‘8 and a half hours solid trek.’ His temperature was up and he went to bed.72 His one thought then was getting to the coast at Grand Bassa, still a week to ten days away: ‘it seemed like heaven. There would be another white man there; the sea in front instead of bush; there might be beer to drink.’73 But as soon as he began to walk to Zigi’s Town at 6.45 a.m. he felt sick. He needed a hammock, but that had been left at Ganta. Perhaps Dr Harley’s opinion was justified – fever was the result of a white man travelling too far each day.

  He was profoundly exhausted – never in his life had he been so exhausted, and always before them was the impenetrable forest. His diary entries become extremely brief. Just outside Zigi’s Town, there was a stream trickling down a slope. He noted: ‘Ducks on a pond’, and the unexpected English scene made him want to sit down, but he could not – there were always decisions to be made. At last he took more Epsom Salts and twenty grains of quinine, wrapped himself in a blanket and lay down under a mosquito net.

  He knew he had fever and remembered De Groot and his fever, ‘the sweat on his golden stubble’. In his diary he wrote, ‘Thunderstorm. Want to get back to V. desperately. Shadow on the mosquito net, the dim hurricane lamp, the empty whisky bottle on the chop box.’ Barbara’s account of that night gives a vivid description of Graham’s condition and an insight into her response to it.

  Graham was tottering as we got to Zigi’s town; he was staggering as though he was a little drunk. He could get no rest from the carriers while he was up, for they came to him as usual with all their troubles, but I managed to persuade him to go to bed. I took his temperature and it was very high. I gave him plenty of whisky and Epsom salts, and covered him with blankets, hoping that I was doing the right thing.

  She had supper by herself while the thunder roared; and the boys served her with grave faces. The same thought was in all their minds. Graham would die. She never doubted it for a minute. He looked like a dead man already. The stormy atmosphere made her head ache and the men quarrelsome. She could hear them snapping at each other, but she left them alone.

  She took Graham’s temperature again, and it had gone up. She felt quite calm at the thought of Graham’s death. To her own horror she felt unemotional about it. Her mind kept telling her that she was really very upset, but actually she was so tired she was incapable of feeling anything. She worked out quietly how she would have her cousin buried, how she would go down to the coast, to whom she would send telegrams.

  Only one thing worried her. Graham was a Catholic, and into her weary brain came the thought that she ought to burn candles for him if he died. She was horribly upset, for they had no candles. She felt vaguely that his soul would find no peace if she could not do that for him.74 To cheer herself up, she smoked an extra cigarette after supper and tried to write up her diary, and although she was tired she was still feeling fit. She found the village pleasant and friendly, Laminah and Mark walking behind her as she went through the village, making her understand that whatever happened they would protect the Greenes to the end of the journey. She realised again what valuable and loyal friends their boys were.

  Before going to bed she had another look at Graham who was in a restless doze, muttering to himself and soaked in perspiration. ‘I went to my room,’ she wrote, ‘… but did not dare to sleep very much in case my cousin should call out. Outside the rains descended and the thunder roared.’ Next morning, she went into her cousin’s room ‘expecting to see him either delirious or gasping out his last few breaths’. To her amazement, he was up and dressed, thou
gh he looked terrible. A kind of horrid death’s head grinned at her. His cheeks had sunk in, there were thick black smudges under his eyes, and his scrubby beard added to his seedy effect. His expression, however, was more normal, for the uncanny harsh light that had glowed in his eyes the day before had disappeared. She took his temperature and it was very subnormal.

  ‘We must go on quickly,’ he said. ‘I’m all right again.’

  ‘Won’t you rest just one day?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Graham impatiently. ‘We must get down to the coast.’

  The coast. My cousin was craving to get down to the coast as a pilgrim might crave to get to a holy city.75

  Greene discovered that night that he had a passionate interest in living: ‘I had always assumed before … that death was desirable. It seemed that night an important discovery. It was like a conversion … I should have known that conversions don’t last, or if they last at all it is only as a little sediment at the bottom of the brain.’76 Some of his own experience is used in ‘A Chance for Mr Lever’ in which the narrator, with an eighteenth-century cynicism, comments that, ‘The story might very well have encouraged my faith in that loving omniscience if it had not been shaken by personal knowledge of the drab empty forest through which Mr Lever now went so merrily, where it is impossible to believe in any spiritual life, in anything outside the nature dying round you, the shrivelling of the weeds.’ Mr Lever, seeing Davidson die, now knows the nonsense of the ‘Solemnity of Death: death wasn’t solemn; it was a lemon-yellow skin and a black vomit.’77