15 November 1971
Dear Amanda.
I am sorry to have missed you in the south as I’d very much like to meet Chris. I also missed Louise who very sweetly left me a note and would you send her my love when you next write. I will certainly let you know when I’m next in London and we’ll meet for dinner. I don’t expect to be in London except in immediate passage to Barbados for some months though.
The difficulty of Capri in the spring or early summer is that that is the very time when Yvonne and I are likely to be going there. If you could make your visit in the later summer it would be easier. August or September. Even in August my end of Anacapri is very quiet as traffic cannot pass the door and there is generally a slight breeze in the afternoon. But of course from the point of view of swimming the sea is very crowded.
Love,
Graham
TO W. A. SAUNDERS
After the publication of A Sort of Life in September 1971, Greene received many letters from people who had lived near Berkhamsted School and from people mentioned in the book. One old boy, W. A. Saunders, a former missionary to China who had settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, wrote him a thumpingly cheerful letter, chiding him for melancholy and for various errors of fact.
15 December 1971
Dear Mr Saunders,
Thank you very much for your long and interesting letter on the subject of Berkhamsted. It interested me a great deal. Who knows, one day I may be able to visit Ann Arbor, but I don’t know that my ‘melancholy would lighten a little’. Does anybody really want to change a little? A complete change, I suppose, one could accept, but not a small change – otherwise one would be losing one’s thing.
I had forgotten about ‘Tarzan of the Alps’ and I wish I had remembered at the time I wrote the book.29
A strange thing happened after the publication. I had forgotten the name of the train boy who was caned in our class until I received a letter from a woman written from Berkhamsted where she was living with her husband saying that her father had had a traumatic experience of Berkhamsted. He was now in hospital and she would like to send him an autographed copy of the book. His name was Mayo and I suddenly realized that he was mentioned in it. I sent the book and I heard from her that he had just finished reading it when he died.30
Was Carter really the name of my tormentor? I thought that I had invented the name.31
It is you who have your wires crossed about Edmunds. Clodagh, the golden-haired daughter, was Clodagh O’Grady quite definitely. I knew her before her mother remarried.
David Copperfield was one of those blackouts. It has been corrected in later editions.32
Was Whitehead ever really housemaster of Adders? I thought Whitehead was the master who left the school to take up law and in fact became a K.C. It was quite a remarkable achievement.
Poor old Sunderland Taylor who lost his son in the war was the one who gave me my only prize for a short story and he was very distressed about doing it because it was atheist. I must have been one of the few people in the school who liked ‘The Oily Duke’.33
Yours sincerely,
Graham Greene
TO MURIEL SPARK
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | Dec. 22 [1971]
Dear Muriel,
I only got your book34 yesterday because it had been waiting for me in Paris – & first I was in Chile & then London & then here & never in Paris.
What fools the reviewers have been. It’s a wonderful idea, brilliantly carried out, & to me your best book since Memento Mori – perhaps even better? I must reread M.M. I loved particularly the dialogue of Heloise & Pablo on page 95. All my congratulations. You have reached the point when all the little people become jealous.
Peter G.35 promised to arrange a meeting in Rome – but then his film blew up & he forgot. I still hope it may happen before I die of old age.
Affectionately,
Graham
TO MALCOLM RENNIE
Malcolm Rennie of Suffolk named his brown two-year-old filly ‘Aunt Augusta’ and asked Graham if he would like to buy a third-or half-share.
9 February [1972?] Dear Mr Rennie,
Thank you very much for your letter of January 29 and for the honour you have done me in naming your filly after Aunt Augusta. I wish I could take a share in the filly, but I am afraid that it’s not only out of my line altogether but there would be great difficulties in transferring money to England. The currency regulations here are almost as strict as at home. In any case I am afraid that with grandchildren to provide for it’s not a gamble I would take. I’ve even given up roulette! However I shall follow the filly closely and back her whenever I get the chance!
Yours sincerely,
Graham Greene
TO ETIENNE LEROUX
A leading Afrikaans writer, Etienne Leroux (pseudonym of S. P. D. le Roux, 1922–1989) was at this time best known for his novel Seven Days at the Silbersteins (1962). Graham’s evolving interest in South Africa had a direct influence on The Human Factor.
Dear Etienne,
[…]
I can’t reproach you with not having written for a long time, because I only write letters when I receive letters. I imagine that’s a common fault with a writer who feels he’s done enough when he’s put his five hundred words on paper. About two hundred words now in my case.
We shall miss you after Easter. Yvonne is off with the children – if one can call them still children – to Brazzaville for her usual African Easter and I shall fill up the time in Paris, Switzerland with my daughter and London. Both of us back again in mid-April and then we shall lack your presence.
I can’t remember whether the new port had been started when you were here last. It’s now nearly finished except for the gardens which are going to be planted outside my windows. I hope the value of the apartment has risen to atone for all the dust and noise we have suffered for more than a year. The wife of the retired spy36 still prepares a good omelette. I am not sure whether the whores are still in the Hotel Metropole. The bar has changed completely and become clean and a pizzeria. Brandade Nimois is still obtainable at the Liberacion, my telephone is still the same, the Time chap arrives at intervals to see his children, but I haven’t seen any women leaving mysterious markings for about a year now. The beastly man with the dogs has left the little Hotel Belle Vue outside my window and now there’s a big fat man from the Loire who cooks excellently and we call Silvertooth. The mysterious man with the Mercedes who used to turn up in the old days is now wanted by the police both in Italy and in France and is rumoured to have escaped to Morocco. We have our dramas. I expect you read about the boat which was chased and shot at from Villefranche nearly to Marseilles which was overloaded with heroin.
[…]
TO BERNARD DIEDERICH
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. |
12 October 1972
Dear Bernard,
Your letter written on my 68th birthday came to me as quite a shock. Thank goodness Ginette and the children came back safely from Haiti. What a brave girl she is to have attempted the visit. Your story of her being taken under guard to see Cambronne and Claude was terrifying. Haiti on that last visit was to me quite a traumatic experience and I still at intervals dream of the place. My dreams even keep up to date – so that the last one I had Baby Doc was in charge and not Papa Doc. I suppose there’s still no news of our friends who may be in Fort Dimanche?
[…]
With the death of Papa Doc on 21 April 1971, the presidency-for-life of Haiti passed to the nineteen-year-old Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier (b. 1951). Less paranoid than his father, he operated a regime that was totally corrupt. Diederich’s wife Ginette, then a medical student, thought it reasonably safe to visit her family in Haiti. However, she was taken by the police from her parents’ home to see General Breton Claude, the persecutor of suspected Communists. Their interview the next day was interrupted by Luckner Cambronne, who declared that Bernard Di
ederich could never return to the country. As Minister of the Interior, National Defence and Police, Cambronne held a complicated portfolio of cruelties. Chiefly, however, he was the bagman for the Duvaliers. Often attired in sharkskin suits, he made vast sums of money from the export of cadavers and of blood plasma taken from impoverished Haitians. He also enjoyed a lucrative monopoly on quickie divorces. By 15 November, Cambronne lost favour and took refuge in the Colombian embassy.37
TO RAYMOND GREENE
Graham consulted his brother Raymond on the abduction of Charley Fortnum in The Honorary Consul (1973).
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 24 October 1972
Dear Raymond,
Many thanks for your letter. I am glad that you had a good time in Malta and Gozo and do hope you are feeling better for it.
I would prefer the knock on the head and morphia because of what you told me about the effect of morphia on somebody with a high alcoholic content. The man who would have given the injection is an educated man and there have been weeks if not months when his doctor friend could have given him practice. I suppose there’s something harmless one could use in practising. Anyway when proofs are ready I’ll send a set to you and we can probably tinker about a little with the situation.
[…]
TO MICHAEL MEYER
as from Antibes | 13 November 1972
Dear Michael,
Many thanks for sending me your memories!38 I wish however your printer had not misprinted Orwell’s letter to Fyvel and reversed the positions of France and England in the quotation. If you read it again you will see that it doesn’t make sense as it stands if I am to be the first Catholic fellow-traveller. It should read ‘A thing that doesn’t exist in England but does in France.’ I think too from page 131 it would have been fairer to say ‘that Graham partly admired him’. The only book of his I’ve really liked is Animal Farm and I found later the selected letters in the book of essays published by Penguin in four volumes almost deplorable during the war period. His rumour-mongering at the time of the blitz I think was really despicable.
The meeting between Truffaut and Martine went very well and he told her he had seen her on television and thought at the time that it was a good face for the films. I think he is putting her in touch with some form of agent on the coast and Suzanne was also very kind. Yvonne and I went to a little cocktail party on Friday evening at a hotel to celebrate the end of his film, but we only stayed about a quarter of an hour as it was really too noisy. We had also had Truffaut and Suzanne to dinner at Félix.
[…]
I hope to see you in England in December when I’m feeling better after the operation.
Love,
Graham
In 1972, François Truffaut (1932–84) and his collaborator Suzanne Schiffman (1929–2001) shot La Nuit américaine (Day for Night), starring Jacqueline Bisset (b. 1944), in Nice. Yvonne’s daughter Martine, an aspiring actress, wanted to discuss her prospects with the director. For Graham to help her, he needed to meet Truffaut. Michael Meyer took him, identified as ‘Henry Graham,’ a retired businessman, to a party and proposed him for the tiny role of an insurance agent in the film. Schiffman decided he was perfect. Apparently, Truffaut did not know whom he had directed until the scene was shot. This was the first time Graham’s face was seen in a film; his hand had already appeared in Mario Soldati’s The Stranger’s Hand (1954).39
TO PETER OWEN
In March 1972, having been asked by the publisher Peter Owen to provide an endorsement for Shusaku Endo’s novel Sea and Poison, Greene had found himself unable to finish it as it made him ill to read about surgery. For much the same reason he had been unable to read Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. Nonetheless, Greene was a staunch admirer of Endo and was willing to endorse his next work.
La Résidence des Fleurs | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes | 12 February 1973
Dear Mr. Owen,
I read Wonderful Fool in typescript and I would certainly be glad to comment on it. It was simply my squeamish stomach that made me refuse comment on the previous book of Endo’s that you published. I still think it very sad that his best book about the Jesuit missionaries never had more than a paperback publication in England. Perhaps one day you could revive it in hardback. A marvellous book – so much better than my own Power and the Glory.40
Yours sincerely,
Graham Greene
TO BERNARD DIEDERICH
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 16 March 1973
Dear Bernard,
Thank you so much for your letter. I am glad the holidays went well in New Zealand, but I shall be sad to see you go so far off. I have always wanted to spend some time in Australia but I have always thought of New Zealand as the dullest of the countries in the old Commonwealth, although of course if you have a farm it can hardly be dull!
[…]
I’m very drawn towards Panama and have been for some years. Unfortunately my sole excuse for visiting South America has gone now that I’ve finished my three year old novel. It had become quite a habit to visit the Argentine and neighbouring countries in the summer. I wish we could have had another trip like our Dominican one before you shake the dust off your feet.
Personally I would very much like to read a book on May 30, 1961 – whether the great public would I don’t know. I’d like to put the idea up to my publisher, but he’s not very enterprising unless he can see certain commercial gains. I hope this time if you do it you will do it alone. I felt that the collaboration was the cause of a certain amount of disorder in Papa Doc. For [the] title what about The Death of the Goat?41
How amusing that the filming of James Bond was done at Ocho Rios.42 I used to know Ocho Rios well and once I rented Ian Fleming’s house from him for a month. He offered to let me have it rent free if I would write an Introduction to an omnibus volume of his novels for America, and I had rather tactfully to explain that I would prefer to pay rent. He had a villainous old housekeeper with the evil eye. He had told me to order all drink through her as she would get it at trade rates, but after a week or so I grew suspicious and asked for my bills. She was charging more for the drinks than one paid in the shops and there was a considerable row. She then started muttering curses on the doorstep and we found it better to depart before we were poisoned. A friend of Ian’s was kind enough to take us in a house nearby and getting out of the swimming-pool I slipped and did something to my shoulder from which I suffered for some months, so that evil eye really worked. She must have disliked Ian for letting me go there because when he returned he had his stroke.
Have you any useful contacts, preferably English-speaking, in Panama as I really would rather like to visit that country perhaps in the summer or would it be a terrible climate then? I have managed to take Cuba in August without suffering too much.
My love to you and Ginette,
Graham Greene
TO LUCY CAROLINE BOURGET
51 La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 23 March 1973
Dearest Carol,
It was a very nice visit! I look forward to the next and seeing the house even more advanced. I’ve lost all my keys. I expect they fell out of my sack when I broke a bottle of whisky in it at Orly airport and tried to pour the liquid into an almost closed pot for cigarette ends, but it’s just possible it fell out in the boot of your car. You remember my passport slipped out and we recovered it. Could you have a look? Don’t bother to send the keys if they should be there but keep them for me as I’ll have some copied.
Much love,
Daddy
TO GILLIAN SUTRO
La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 23 March 1973
Dearest Gillian,
I returned from a short visit to Lucy in Switzerland to find your letter. I must say my post was not an encouraging one. A young American writer in Florida wrote to say how he had been held up at the point of a black banana by a robber in his own hous
e, a Czech writer and old friend wrote to say that he was dying of cancer ‘in inconceivable pain’, a nice South African writer and friend wrote to say that he was about to be charged of manslaughter because one of the horses on his immense farm had strayed on to the road and caused a car accident in which a woman was killed and he had seen her die.43 Now poor John’s breakdown.44 It was quite a post.
I do feel so much for you and I do admire your courage and the way in which you manage to carry on. I know admiration doesn’t help but it’s there and it has to be expressed. When I think of the state John was in that time when I was present in the flat I can only wonder at his power of recuperation – he seemed so well on the last two times I’ve seen you.
[…]
All my love and sympathy
Graham
TO CAROLINE BOURGET
Koffiefontein | Aug. 4 [1973] Dearest Caroline,
[…]
I had ten very full days in the Transvaal – the most interesting a visit to the Rain Queen, who makes rain. One was not supposed to look at her directly & all conversation had to be directed through an intermediary. He wore a very good European suit & crawled over the floor like a snake & made notes on the palm of his hand with a ballpoint. The queen looked very kind & nice – but she’s probably only got two more years before she’s moved on – with the choice of a poison cup or starvation! Very Rider Haggard.
Now I’m resting on my friend Etienne Leroux’s little farm of 60,000 acres. Tomorrow we move to Cape Town for a week.
Graham Greene Page 35