Ways of Escape

  ‘A sandwich,’ I suggested desperately.

  ‘I regret …’

  Then the porter’s heart relented. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘there is a way. In the basement we are holding a servants’ ball. There will be refreshments. If you would care to try … they may allow you …’

  In the basement we found that we were not the only ones in search of food. The Venezuelan Ambassador was there dancing ponderously with the fat cook, and there were other members of the Diplomatic Corps. A nice chambermaid made room for us at her table and pointed out the celebrities – ‘That is the First Secretary from the Uruguayan Embassy – that is the valet from the third floor – that is Josef – he is in charge of the pastry – someone from the Central Bank, I don’t know what he does.’ If this was really a revolution it seemed to me not so bad. The band played, everyone was happy, the beer flowed. After my third glass I thought of Wordsworth – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.’ The ambassador returned to our table with the cook. He put his arm round her stout waist and squeezed gently and persistently. As far as I could make out – but I was getting down to my sausage and potatoes – he was asking her to promise him that next time he came to the restaurant upstairs she would make sure he had a really large oversized schnitzel. He pressed her with one hand and gestured with the other – ‘just that thick’.

  Who could have foretold on that fantastic night the Slansky trial, all the Stalin horrors, the brief spring, and then Dubček and Smrkovsky dragged as prisoners to Moscow? Twenty-one years later, in February 1969, I came back: the Russian troops were in occupation and I had a meeting one morning before breakfast with Smrkovsky, already a tired sick man with cancer of the bone. I asked him, ‘In the West we have an impression that perhaps Kosygin was more sympathetic than Brezhnev to your case. Is that true?’ He said, ‘The three men, Brezhnev, Kosygin and Suslov, came into the room together and sat down opposite us. I could see no difference at all between Brezhnev and Kosygin. There was one moment when I imagined that I could detect in Suslov’s eyes a hint of sympathy, but he spoke exactly like the others.’ It seemed to me I was much more than twenty-one years away from the servants’ ball.

  That night in 1948 I didn’t sleep very well. It was not the fault of the sofa, but I was anxious to observe two special correspondents in action during a revolution. A lot of noise and singing began early in the streets, but at half past eight neither of the two men had begun to stir. I didn’t want to wake them, although I was impatient to go outside. At last about nine thirty one correspondent aroused himself to go as far as the bathroom: the other moved sleepily across to the telephone, trailing his dressing-gown cord, and dialled the number of his stringer. ‘Anything happening? No? Well, then I’ll look in later. About eleven? I was up terribly late last night.’ He looked a little puzzled when he saw that I was already getting dressed. ‘Going out?’ he asked. ‘You might come and tell us if you see anything interesting.’ To be a special correspondent was not after all to belong to a very dynamic profession.

  In the streets there were processions and red flags and shouting. I walked at random, confused by the Czech street names, until I saw a building marked British Information Office and I went in to try and borrow or buy a map. When I came out I was aware of being followed. I turned down one street and then another: the thin man in a dark suit and a respectable hat followed. At last I paused and let him overtake me. He said, ‘Please. If you will turn left here.’ We went into a small quiet street and left the processions behind. I was a little worried by his furtive air.

  ‘You are British?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you do something for me? It is very important. The fate of my poor country is at stake.’

  He really talked like that, like a character in a bad film.

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘You have to see your ambassador and tell him. I explain myself badly.’ At intervals when someone appeared in the street he would stop talking until whoever it was had passed well out of hearing. He said, ‘I must tell you. I am an inventor and I have invented a parachute which can be guided for fifty kilometres after the drop. I gave my invention to the Ministry of Defence, but now these people who are taking charge, they will hand over my plans to the Russians. You can see how important this is for your country as well as my own.’

  He was very convincing in spite of the melodrama. I began to imagine how an army might be guided through the sky … the Channel no obstacle … I asked him to give me his name and he wrote it on a scrap of paper. In my mind I was already halfway to the Embassy, but caution made me ask him another question. ‘Have you invented anything else?’

  He replied promptly, with enthusiasm, ‘I have made a machine for building walls. That too I will give to the British Government. It builds a wall one foot every second.’ With a sense of disappointment I decided that it would be better not to go to the Embassy.

  Nothing during the week I stayed in Prague lived up to the happiness of the servants’ ball or even the fantasy of the parachutes. Already the bitter humour of defeat was circulating – mainly jokes about the weight of the fat wife of Gottwald, the Communist leader.

  I visited my Catholic publisher twice, and the second time there was an armed sentry at the foot of his stair. His vigil was in our minds as we drank slivovitz (my publisher was soon to vanish into prison for ten years).

  I was taken out by a Communist literary agent to the castle which had been allocated to the Union of Writers. There was only one writer to be seen: he was up a ladder in the library picking out a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. ‘Our chief authority on Shakespeare,’ I was told over tea in a magnificent drawing-room hung with chandeliers. The authority mentioned Hamlet and the literary agent kicked him sharply on the ankle under the table. ‘Mr Greene hasn’t come all this way to hear you talk about Shakespeare,’ he said. I began to realise that to be alive in this dawn was not necessarily bliss.

  In a bookshop in the old town I was handed a note. Someone would guide me to see a Catholic deputy who was in hiding. I thought he needed help to escape and I brought a variety of currencies in my pocket, but he explained he did not require such help – he had merely thought the situation would interest me because I had written The Power and the Glory.

  One day the novelist Egon Hostovsky who was employed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs came and sat on my bed – I had obtained a room by this time – and told me how that afternoon Masaryk, the Minister, had said goodbye to his staff. He wept as he told the story and between us we finished my whisky. A few days later Masaryk was dead.

  I was glad to take my plane to Rome. There were no passengers except myself and a young married couple. The husband was Prince Schwarzenburg and he had been appointed Minister to the Vatican by the former government. I noticed that they had a lot of luggage with them, and I was not surprised to hear a few weeks later of the prince’s defection.

  Just before the plane left a loudspeaker called me back to the immigration officer who demanded to see my passport again. I wondered whether after all I would be able to keep my rendezvous in Rome. I remembered the armed sentry at my publisher’s office, Hostovsky weeping on my bed and the deputy hidden in a tortuous street of the old city, waiting for the right number of rings at the door that indicated a friend. The officer examined my passport closely. He said, ‘This passport is valid for two visits. This is your first visit. You can come again,’ but it was twenty-one years before I returned and then the Russians were there without the help of parachutes.

  3

  In Italy I wrote the treatment of The Third Man, but more important for the future I found the small house in Anacapri where all my later books were to be at least in part written. (I am proud now to be an honorary citizen of that little town of five thousand inhabitants.)

  Writing a novel does not become easier with practice. The slow discovery by a novelist of his individual method can be exciting, but a moment comes in middle age when he feels that he n
o longer controls his method; he has become its prisoner. Then a long period of ennui sets in: it seems to him he has done everything before. He is more afraid to read his favourable critics than his unfavourable, for with terrible patience they unroll before his eyes the unchanging pattern of the carpet. If he has depended a great deal on his unconscious, on his ability to forget even his own books when they are once on the public shelves, the critics remind him – this theme originated ten years ago, that simile which came so unthinkingly to his pen a few weeks back was used nearly twenty years ago in a passage where …

  I had tried to escape from my prison by writing for the films, but The Third Man only beckoned me into another and more luxurious prison. Before I returned to what I considered my proper job I read Great Expectations. I had never before found Dickens a very sympathetic writer, but now I was captivated by the apparent ease with which he used the first person. Here seemed an escape from the pattern, a method I had not tried. The first person had always offered an obvious technical advantage – the chosen point of view was insured against any temptation to deviate, ‘I’ could only observe what ‘I’ observed (though Proust cheated shamelessly) – but when I sometimes encountered the use of the first person in the novels of Somerset Maugham and his imitators, I always thought it a little too easy and dry, too close to clumsy human speech, colourless …

  Dry and colourless perhaps it was, but easy, no. Many a time I regretted pursuing ‘I’ along his dismal road and contemplated beginning The End of the Affair all over again with Bendrix, my leading character, seen from outside in the third person. I had never previously had to struggle so hard to lend the narrative interest. For example how could I vary the all-important ‘tone’ when it was one character who was always commenting? The tone had been set on the first page by Bendrix – ‘This is a record of hate far more than of love’ – and I dreaded to see the whole book smoked dry like a fish with his hatred. Dickens had somehow miraculously varied his tone, but when I tried to analyse his success, I felt like a colour-blind man trying intellectually to distinguish one colour from another. For my book there were only two shades of the same colour – obsessive love and obsessive hate; Mr Parkis, the private detective, and his boy were my attempt to introduce two more tones, the humorous and the pathetic.

  The book began to come to life in December 1948 in a bedroom of the Hotel Palma in Capri before I moved to my cottage. I have always imagined it was influenced by the book I was reading at the time, a selection from Baron von Hügel, in particular by passages from his study of St Catherine of Genoa. I have a habit of marking the books I read, and yet I can find no passage marked on St Catherine which has any relevance. But in another essay of von Hügel’s I come on this underlined: ‘The purification and slow constitution of the Individual into a Person, by means of the Thing-element, the apparently blind Determinism of Natural Law and Natural Happenings. … Nothing can be more certain than that we must admit and place this undeniable, increasingly obtrusive, element and power somewhere in our lives: if we will not own it as a means, it will grip us as our end.’

  Nothing could have been further from von Hügel’s meaning than the story which now began to itch at my mind – of a man who was to be driven and overwhelmed by the accumulation of natural coincidences, until he broke and began to accept the incredible – the possibility of a God. Alas! It was an intention I betrayed. There is much that I like in the book – it seems to me more simply and clearly written than its predecessors and ingeniously constructed to avoid the tedium of the time sequence (I had learned something from my continual rereadings of that remarkable novel The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford), but until I reached the final part I did not realise the formidable problem I had set myself.

  Sarah, the chief character, was dead, the book should have continued at least as long after her death as before, and yet, like her lover, Bendrix, I found I had no great appetite to continue now she was gone beyond recall and only a philosophic theme was left behind. I began to hurry to the end, and although, in the last part, there are scenes, especially those which express the growth of tenderness between Bendrix and Sarah’s husband, which seem to me successful enough, I realised too late how I had been cheating – cheating myself, cheating the reader, cheating Baron von Hügel. The incident of the atheist Smythe’s strawberry mark (apparently cured by Sarah after her death) should have had no place in the book; every so-called miracle, like the curing of Parkis’s boy, ought to have had a completely natural explanation. The coincidences should have continued over the years, battering the mind of Bendrix, forcing on him a reluctant doubt of his own atheism. The last pages would have remained much as they were written (indeed I very much like the last pages), but I had spurred myself too quickly to the end.

  So it was in a later edition I tried to return nearer to my original intention. Smythe’s strawberry mark gave place to a disease of the skin which might have had a nervous origin and be susceptible to faith healing.

  An episode in the book which many of my critics have disliked is the discovery that Sarah had been secretly baptised a Catholic by her mother when she was a child. It seems to the agnostic reader – with whom I increasingly sympathise – to introduce the notion of magic. But if we are to believe in some power infinitely above us in capacity and knowledge, magic does inevitably form part of our belief – or rather magic is the term we use for the mysterious and the inexplicable – like the stigmata of Padre Pio which I watched from a few feet away as he said Mass one early morning in his monastery in South Italy.

  The episode of Sarah’s secret baptism I drew from the life of Roger Casement. The Catholic chaplain of Casement’s prison, to whom he had applied for reception into the Church, found after enquiries that he had been secretly baptised when he was a child. We are not necessarily in the realm of ‘magic’ here or coincidence – we may be in the region of Dunne’s Experiment with Time.

  The End of the Affair was a greater success with readers than with critics. I felt such doubt of it that I sent the typescript to my friend Edward Sackville-West and asked his advice. Should I put the book in a drawer and forget it? He answered me frankly that he didn’t care for the novel but none the less I should publish – we ought to have the vitality of the Victorians who never hesitated to publish the bad as well as the good. So publish I did. I was much comforted by words of praise from William Faulkner, and I was later grateful for the two years’ practice I had had in the use of the first person or I might have been afraid to use it in The Quiet American, a novel which imperatively demanded it, and which is, technically at least, perhaps a more successful book.

  Chapter Six

  1

  The fifties were for me a period of great unrest. It was with some intuition that Pius XII told the then Bishop Heenan that he had been reading The End of the Affair (strange reading for a pope) and said to him, ‘I think this man is in trouble. If he ever comes to you, you must help him.’ (Needless to say, I never went to Heenan.)

  I was in that mood for escape which comes, I suppose, to most men in middle life, though with me it arrived early, even in childhood – escape from boredom, escape from depression. If I had been a bank clerk, I would have dreamed of betraying my trust and absconding to South America.

  God bless the thoughtful islands

  Where never warrants come;

  God bless the just Republics

  That give a man a home.

  Kipling’s poem has always appealed to me. But I had no employer from whom to escape – only myself, and the only trust I could betray was the trust of those who loved me. I asked a psychiatrist friend to arrange for an electric-shock treatment, but he refused. I seemed to be finding my way the long road back to Berkhamsted Common, where as a boy I had played at Russian roulette to escape an unhappy love.

  In The End of the Affair I had described a lover who was so afraid that love would end one day that he tried to hasten the end and get the pain over. Yet there was no unhappy love affair to escape thi
s time: I was happy in love. There are difficulties, of course, even in a love affair, but the chief difficulty was my own manic-depressive temperament. So it was that in the fifties I found myself tempting the end to come like Bendrix, but it was the end of life I was seeking, not the end of love. I hadn’t the courage for suicide, but it became a habit with me to visit troubled places, not to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity which I had enjoyed in the three blitzes on London – 1951, three months of travel in Malaya during the Emergency as a correspondent of Life; 1951–1955, four winters in Vietnam reporting the French war for the Sunday Times and Figaro; 1953, in Kenya reporting the Mau Mau outbreak for the Sunday Times; 1956, a few weeks in Stalinist Poland, though there the only insecurity I felt was when I had to pass a gold watch to a musician on the turn of a staircase so as to give him the means of escape to the West (but he didn’t want to escape and I let him keep the watch); 1958, the furthest escape of all (I don’t mean geographically), to a leper colony in the last days of the Belgian Congo.

  Malaya was the first of my escapes.

  A cloud of moral disapprobation hung over Malaya in 1951 – how heavily I only realised later when I went on to Indo-China. To the Englishman war is a departure from the normal, like passion. To the Frenchman war is just a part of human life: it can be pleasant or unpleasant, like adultery. ‘La vie sportive’ – that is how a French commandant described to me his life on a small landing craft in the delta south of Saigon, hunting for Viet Minh guerrillas in the narrow channels, within easy mortar-fire from either bank.