It must have seemed to Greene that fate, perhaps even God, was against his Mexican trip. Because he felt it was the responsible thing to do, he took on the literary editorship of Night and Day (‘A horrid decision. I’d much rather have Mexico,’ he wrote to his mother) and Sheed was put on hold. And so Night and Day lived its short life. Thirteen days before the fatal Shirley Temple review appeared, Nancy Pearn wrote to Greene about a meeting with Sheed, doing her best to temper things: ‘I was seeing Sheed yesterday and he enquired about your plans for Mexico, saying that if persecutions were to stop there, the book would lose its value. I said I couldn’t tell him anything but I knew you had the whole thing in mind and believed you hoped to go in the New Year.’
It is apparent from the surviving correspondence that Sheed was losing interest but not taking a decision until he had consulted his American contacts. Greene was having his doubts about Sheed on two grounds: ‘Personally, I would much rather be published in this country by Longman’s [he wrote to David Higham], it would brand one less in the public eye as a Catholic writer. Also if the nature of the book when it was written offended Sheed’s susceptibilities …’8 And he began a tentative approach to Longman’s through his friend Tom Burns who was working there and was later to become the owner of the Tablet. Greene was proved right in his doubts about Sheed. On 10 December, David Higham received a letter from Sheed telling him that when he heard of the original postponement of Greene’s book on Mexico, he had got in touch with what he calls ‘the Mexican people who had been behind the original suggestion’ but that they were no longer in favour of the scheme: ‘The situation has changed in the last year and they would not be prepared to co-operate now. I am afraid therefore we shall have to drop it.’
Sheed was being rather astute here. Not only did he imply that the original idea for the book had come from Mexico via him and that he had chosen Greene as a suitable person to write it (though it had been Greene’s idea), but he got out of the contract by laying the blame firmly on Greene and also rubbing salt into the wound by referring to the demise of Night and Day: ‘It seems particularly unfortunate that the Editorship of Night and Day should have prevented his going [to Mexico] when we had arranged, and then proved impermanent.’
Greene’s agent then asked, ‘Shall I get straight in touch with Burns and see whether they won’t take the contract over? I won’t quite put it that Sheed has pulled out.’ So Burns was approached, David Higham explaining that he wasn’t doing Graham Greene a favour by taking over the book since he, the agent, was sure that he could sell it elsewhere, and that indeed Greene would insist that he approach his usual publisher Heinemann.
But there was an even more serious aspect to Sheed’s withdrawal, for he had the Mexican contacts as we can see from an early letter (September 1936) Greene wrote to his mother: ‘I had lunch with Sheed yday to talk over the Mexican book. My trip apparently has the blessing of the [Catholic] hierarchy, who are going to open their secret archives for me.’ Greene must have felt that with Sheed dropping out, his valuable contacts would disappear.
Many people at this point, having lost a publisher, Mexican contacts and access to archives, would have given up – not Greene! There were other ways of getting to Mexico, including suggesting a different book. His friend, David Mathew, ‘a wily and intelligent priest … a first class historian’, thought that Greene could get all the help he needed from the Mexican mission college in Texas:9 ‘You needn’t wash out Mexico altogether: this cold weather makes me feel more friendly towards it,’ he told his agent. And he proposed extending the scope of the book which had initially the dull (and limiting) title approved by Sheed, The Position of the Church in Mexico: ‘The other places I’m interested in are Paraguay – remains of old Jesuit missions, five revolutions or attempted revolutions since 1935, the totalitarian state transported to the centre of South America; and Ecuador, a half unexplored country, opera bouffe politics, a purely Indian state.’10
The elusive Sheed, as Higham called him, was again approached but had ‘departed to America without [Higham] being able to get any word out of him about his American firm’s attitude to a different Mexican book’. Other publishers were approached and David Higham was hoping that Frere at Greene’s regular publishers, Heinemann, would give a satisfactory offer, but Greene was not happy about this: ‘I feel very strongly’, he responded to Higham, ‘that it’s not worth jockeying Heinemann’s into a book which doesn’t really interest them; I’d really rather give it up, or if it’s financially practicable, take Longman’s offer’; for he had told Higham on 17 January 1938 that he had talked to Frere and found under the surface that Heinemann did not really want it: ‘With such a big amorphous overwritten scene as Mexico the only treatment … is a particular one – in this case religious. And Frere admitted that he hadn’t the faintest idea how to sell a religious book. Why they even sell the Bible as literature!!’
Greene was in a mood: he was still smarting from having lost Night and Day; he was having a great struggle to finish Brighton Rock while these scattered negotiations were going on; and the bitterly cold winter was getting him down. His nerves were ragged and truly he wanted to get out of ‘this bloody country’.11 To his agent he gave vent to his feelings: ‘I’m feeling rather bored with everything. I don’t know how I shall get the vitality to think of another novel unless I can get out of bloody Europe.’ His agents, trying desperately to assist him (as usual), suggested an approach to the publisher Collins. Greene replied: ‘Collins is not a suitable publisher for the book I have in mind, but I daresay none is. Let’s call it a day till after the world war.’12 And war was certainly on the European horizon.
Although the general public in England, following its newspapers, developed a passionate interest in whether Princess Juliana of The Netherlands was pregnant, and if she was, whether the baby would be a boy or a girl (if it should be a girl then the Dutch would have a succession of Queens whose lives would span a century), there were more important political issues – namely the rise of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. Winston Churchill, speaking of the new German air force as early as November 1934, when he was in the political wilderness soon after the Nazis had come to power, forecast that in a few years Germany could have 10,000 planes: ‘Beware: Germany is a country fertile in military surprises’, he warned. In 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain would be pursuing a policy of appeasement towards both Hitler and Mussolini, but already by April 1937 an Air Raid Precautions service had been set up in Britain and in the same year police and local government employees were being given training in anti-gas measures.13 The ranting speeches of Hitler could be heard on British radio and in May 1937, following Chamberlain’s attempt to placate Mussolini, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden resigned, declaring that ‘we must not buy goodwill’. The next year saw the occupation by the Nazis of Austria, and the Austrian Chancellor’s imprisonment in the concentration camp at Dachau.
However, by January 1938, Greene had found publishers for his Mexican book and finally sailed for America. ‘Mexico’, he wrote jubilantly to Hugh, ‘has suddenly come off after all. Longman’s here, Viking in America. I’m off with V[ivien] at a week’s notice to New York; then I’m taking her to New Orleans, she’s finding her way home, I’m going to San Antonio, Texas, where there’s a mission college for Mexico, to get some dope [confidential information], and on down. Back middle of May. I wish you could meet me in Mexico City.’14
Greene’s going to Mexico was evidence of a more serious and intense compulsion than this letter might suggest. Only weeks before his departure he wrote in his diary: ‘And they say that religion is an escape. The man who believes in eternity must often experience an acute nostalgia for atheism to indulge himself with rest. There is the real escape.’15 Perhaps already he was thinking of what he would find in Mexico – extremes of religious martyrdom and atheism. In the preface to Ways of Escape Greene writes: ‘I can see now that my travels, as much as the act of writing, were ways of escap
e …’16 He was, in his sense, escaping to Mexico. The tone and content of his letters tell us what he was escaping from – the incessant work, the loss of Night and Day, being cooped up in London and living the life of a ‘gentleman’ author in a ‘gentleman’s establishment’. Arthur Calder-Marshall regarded Greene as the epitome of the ‘Established Writer’, with his stylish home in Clapham Common. He added:
I was particularly impressed by Vivien’s behaviour as the Protective Wife. One could not telephone Graham in the morning, because he was writing. Messages would be taken and passed on at more convenient times. (This, when I was writing short stories on marble topped tables in Lyon’s Corner House, or over sixpenny pints of bitter in the Wells Hotel saloon bar).
Yet, at the same time, when we met (preferably in pubs) I was conscious that there was another part of Graham which felt imprisoned by the comfort of the house in Clapham and his protective wife, which yearned for the seedy, the dangerous, the uncomfortable.17
Maclaren-Ross, on visiting 14 North Side, gained a similar impression. An elderly housekeeper treated him on the doorstep as if he were a salesman: ‘I said, “Could I see Mr Graham Greene please?” She said, “We don’t want anything today, thank you.” I said: “He’s expecting me to lunch.”’ She said, ‘“Oh. Well why didn’t you say so then. Come in.”’
The housekeeper pointed to the drawing room at the top of the Adam staircase and left saying, ‘He’s out. You’ll have to wait.’ Maclaren-Ross waited upstairs for a while and glanced round, and as he did so Greene appeared quite silently in the open doorway: ‘I was startled because not even a creak on the stairs had announced his approach. Seeing me there gave him also a start, and he took a step back. He was wearing a brown suit and large horn-rimmed spectacles, which he at once snatched off as if they had been his hat … this was the only time I saw him wearing spectacles. I had not expected him to be so tall. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he said. He had a spontaneous pleasant smile. “Nobody told me you were here. Would you like a cigarette? Something to drink?” “Something cold if possible,” I said accepting the cigarette avidly.’18
There was no beer in the house and so they set off to the pub on the other side of the Common, each carrying a large jug. In the course of conversation Maclaren-Ross disclosed that he supplemented his salary from writing plays for the B.B.C. by selling vacuum cleaners from door to door. Greene was interested – was he doing it to get material? He was doing it for money. Did he earn much at it? Eight to ten quid a week. ‘I thought’, said Greene, ‘of signing up myself at one time. To write a book about it afterwards of course. I never knew one could actually sell the things.’ He was intrigued by Maclaren-Ross’s use of the term ‘dem-kit’ – the suitcase containing the demonstration machine – and Greene recalled that a salesman who came to their house carried his machine in a golfbag – ‘I suppose less heavy. I used it in a novel of mine [England Made Me].’ He also began to understand Greene’s obsessive search for useful experience and copy – in the pub he attempted to smoke a Menzala to get used to Mexican tobacco as he was going out there, but he let it burn out in an ashtray on the bar.
There is some difficulty in dating this meeting, even though Greene is quoted as saying that he was off to Mexico soon, since Ross says that he had with him a review by James Agate of Brighton Rock which appeared in the Daily Express of Thursday 14 July 1938. Ross’s account might well be, therefore, a compilation of two separate visits to 14 North Side. Certainly a number of irritations made Greene wish to get out of the country at that time (including the fact that Viking weren’t ‘exactly snatching at Mexico’); he came up with yet another idea for escape which he put to his brother: a collaboration with Malcolm Muggeridge – the two of them doing ‘a fairly light book on the Palestine civil war’, with Greene coming from Syria and Transjordan with Arab introductions and Muggeridge from Tel Aviv with Jewish. They would meet at the Holy Sepulchre and argue, Muggeridge being pro-Arab and Greene pro-Jew at that point. But they could not find a publisher to support the idea.19
Escape was obviously essential, but what was he escaping to? It would seem to be a long-held dream. In 1926, when he was twenty-one, having read D. H. Lawrence’s novel about Mexico, The Plumed Serpent, he developed a yearning to see Mexico, and wrote to Vivien: ‘When you feel it’s about time for me to go off on an adventure, alone, I’ll visit it.’ They sailed on the Normandie on 29 January 1938.
*
It was not an entirely enjoyable trip. Even in good weather the Normandie was likely to produce a rocking sensation on the high seas, and they were disturbed by the noise and vibration of the ship. Moreover, they ran into an awful gale – ‘For 56 hours we lay in bed’, he wrote to his mother from the Bedford Hotel on East 40th Street, New York, though afterwards they enjoyed the food and life on board. They arrived in New York a day late, having been stuck in a fog on the river and missing the tide. Even after they landed, Vivien still felt the world wobbling under her feet.
They liked New York. The weather was lovely and Vivien was having an orgy of shopping. Unexpectedly they found Arthur Calder-Marshall staying at their hotel. Calder-Marshall and his wife were returning from Hollywood in January 1938 and by chance ‘stayed in the same New York City hotel as Graham, who was en route for Tabasco’. He added, though Greene has denied it, that: ‘He already had the germ of the whisky priest story and his research consisted in gaining the material to flesh it out.’20
The Greenes attended several parties in New York: ‘We are having dinner with Felix [Greene] tonight, my agent [Mary Pritchett] is giving a party for us tomorrow, & on Friday my new publisher [Viking]. We are also seeing a film friend Paul Rotha who is working here. So life is busy.’21
During their seven days in New York it is likely that Greene had some discussions with the ‘mysterious Father Miranda’ and he was very interested in learning anything he could about the conditions of the Church in Mexico. Some of the information he was given was obviously false. For example, he was told that a General Rodriguez had 40,000 armed men on the Texas border and he would be missing everything if he missed Rodriguez. He never found Rodriguez or his army of discontented farmers, but he discovered that he lived, in fact, by ‘having fool newspapermen in New York write about him’.22
On Sunday night, 13 February, the Greenes left for Washington, where Graham was hoping to meet a Father Parsons at Georgetown University. Parsons had written Mexican Martyrdom (1936), a book which Greene must have read, in which is recorded the history of the political suppression of the Church in Mexico – families invaded, churches and haciendas confiscated, bishops exiled. In 1936 Parsons had returned to academic life as Professor of Political Science at Georgetown, and Greene had written to him: ‘Could I trespass a very little on your time & hear from you some news of Mexico?’ He enclosed a letter from his publisher, Tom Burns, which in effect indicates the terms on which Greene’s projected book had been accepted. Greene was ‘to study the present conditions in the country with a special eye to the religious situation for a book which Longman’s will publish.’ ‘Greene’, Burns states, ‘is in the first rank of novelists here, a good journalist as well, and a Catholic’, and he asked Parsons to put Greene ‘on to people who would be useful to him in Mexico’. There is a warning: ‘I want his book to be unofficial and quite personal in character, so I will trust you not to put him in touch with any quarters which might impose inconvenient restrictions on his movements or sources of information.’ Burns stressed that: ‘The book will be very good if he is given a free hand … and would be quite spoilt if his attitude were to be dictated to him by any officialdom.’23 One can detect Greene’s voice behind this.
Greene cannot recall meeting Parsons, yet he had been at pains to engage his interest before going to Washington, and he would have been a valuable contact since he was constantly receiving documented reports about the political and religious situation inside Mexico – no one in Washington would have more up-to-date information sin
ce his couriers in Mexico brought him private dispatches across the border at El Paso and the secret details were then sent to Parsons by telegraph wire.
They did meet, though it appears from Parsons’s unpublished autobiography that he was very circumspect and what he told Greene was limited, reflected in some vague remarks in The Lawless Roads: ‘there seemed to be no priests at all in Tabasco … they believed not a church was left standing – not even the cathedral.’24 Parsons may, however, have provided some useful contacts in Mexico.
From Washington, the Greenes went on to New Orleans. In a letter to his mother from New York, he says, cryptically: ‘Our address will not be c/o Cooks – there is no Cooks. But Poste Restante, G.P.O., New Orleans. We’ll cable you Vivien’s return from there.’
*
Greene went on from New Orleans to San Antonio, having taken Vivien to the airport hotel, from which she wrote to him: ‘After I saw you go away, dear heart, yesterday, I got 2 magazines & a Taxi to Canal Street (a long detour because of crowds) & got a most curious silver or nickel brooch for Aunt Nono.’ It was their custom, when they were to be separated, for the one departing to leave a secret letter for the other, and in her letter, which gives us an impression of her feelings of loss and loneliness, she wrote: ‘I waited as long as I could & finally I read [your letter] after dinner in our room, with the fire on, & again lots of times & finally before I put out the light, while the dance band was playing … A liner came in this morning & woke me up – almost sounded as if it was going to alight in my bath. So loud. After breakfast it was “All Aboard. All Aboard”, calling in the hall: it is still exciting however often it happens.’ She spent the following day reading Trollope and watching the planes come in: ‘The little green plane has arrived & a pillar-box scarlet one is off. The airport is buzzing with people – I think mostly to see planes or have a Coca Cola … Now an all-scarlet one: Oh dear, you would like all this activity so much, dear, dear, love. The little green one is off again already & so is a yellow one.’
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 84