3
If A Burnt-Out Case in 1961 represented the depressive side of a manic-depressive writer, Travels with my Aunt eight years later surely represented the manic at its height – or depth. The novel followed naturally enough May We Borrow Your Husband?, indeed, a number of tales I had only noted down as possible ideas at the time of that collection now found a place as ‘my aunt’s’ anecdotes in Henry Pulling’s narrative. I had opened my notebook for his inspection and he left it almost empty.
I had finished A Burnt-Out Case with the depressing certitude that this would be my last novel. My depression was caused in part by living for several years in company with my characters. It was not helped by a serious pneumonia which I had developed in Moscow in 1961 and a specialist’s suspicion that I had lung cancer, though the unpleasant experience of a bronchioscopy I was happily able to use in a short story, ‘Under the Garden’. What swung me out of the depression into the manic condition in which I wrote most of the stories in May We Borrow Your Husband? and then started work on Travels with my Aunt? I can only suppose it came from making a difficult decision in my private life and leaving England to settle permanently in France in 1966. I burned a number of boats and in the light of the flames I began again to write a novel.
Travels with my Aunt is the only book I have written for the fun of it. Although the subject is old age and death – a suitable subject to tackle at the age of sixty-five – and though an excellent Swedish critic described the novel justly as ‘laughter in the shadow of the gallows’, I experienced more of the laughter and little of the shadow in writing it. When I began with the scene of the cremation of Henry Pulling’s supposed mother and his encounter with Aunt Augusta I didn’t believe for a moment that I would continue the novel for more than a few days. I didn’t even know what the next scene was likely to be – I didn’t know that Augusta was Henry’s mother. Every day when I sat down before the blank sheets of foolscap (for as a symbol of my new freedom I had abandoned the single-lined variety where the lines seemed to me now like the bars on a prison window) I had no idea what was going to happen to Henry or Augusta next. I felt like a rider who has dropped the reins and left the direction to his horse or like a dreamer who watches his dream unfold without power to alter its course. I felt above all that I had broken for good or ill with the past.
I was even irresponsible enough to include some private jokes which no reader would understand. Why not? I didn’t expect to have any readers. So I christened ‘Detective-Sergeant Sparrow, John’ after that elegant scholar the ex-Warden of All Souls, Augusta’s black lover ‘Wordsworth’ after a villainous District Commissioner whom I had met more than thirty years before in Liberia, Mr Visconti’s son ‘Mario’ after my friend Mario Soldati who once greeted me and gave me lunch in Milan station with similar flamboyance on my way to Istanbul. I remember I even found room for Kingsley Amis’s surname which I gave to a character on whom I can’t at the moment lay my finger. The name Visconti for Aunt Augusta’s lover was adapted from my favourite character in Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan which I had loved as a boy, and it gave me an innocent amusement when I heard Detective Sparrow describing him as a viper. Some critics have found in the book a kind of résumé of my literary career – a scene in Brighton, the journey on the Orient Express, and perhaps a hint of this did come to my mind by the time Aunt Augusta arrived at the Pera Palace, but what struck me with some uneasiness, when I reread the book the other day, were the suggestions I found in it of where the future was going to take me. The boat which carried Henry Pulling from Buenos Aires to Asunción stopped for half an hour during the night in the little river harbour of Corrientes in northern Argentina, but I had no idea that I would be landing there from a plane some years later in search of the right setting for The Honorary Consul. And Panamá – the smuggling by the route Panamá – Asunción–Argentina played a minor role in the story of ‘my aunt’ and Mr Visconti, and no thought entered my head that nearly ten years later I would become so attached to that country of the five frontiers, poor, beautiful, bizarre Panamá.
I came to Paraguay by a writer’s instinct. I had realised that Henry’s travels with his aunt had to reach as climax some destination more removed and less familiar than Brighton, Paris, Istanbul, Boulogne. I knew nothing of the city, but I believed I would find in Asunción some mingling of the exotic, the dangerous and the Victorian which would appeal to Aunt Augusta. How right I proved to be: a street named after Benjamin Constant, ‘a little white castellated Baptist church, a college built like a neo-Gothic abbey’ – these were the things which Henry Pulling, retired bank manager, and I noticed as we drove from the quayside into town.
As for the exotic and the dangerous we had come to a country ruled by the rough hand of General Stroessner, the protector of Nazi war criminals. One of the first friends I made, a charming and cultured man who spoke English well and was always ready to accompany me for an excursion or to a party, inadvertently let me see that he was carrying a police card. He quickly explained it away – he carried it only because he lectured sometimes at the police college. I pretended to believe him, for after all perhaps he had been allotted to me for my protection. Once I asked Luis Fernandez, the driver whom I had hired to take me on a country journey, ‘Motor accidents?’ as I wondered at the many small shrines for the dead lining the road on which we had encountered far more horsemen than cars. He replied, ambiguously, ‘Paraguayans hold life very cheap. If one comes from the city to a country place it is best to stay very quiet in a corner – there are always those who like to pick a quarrel with a knife or a gun. Of course to seem too withdrawn may look insulting. Like speaking Spanish, as though you consider Guarani a low language. But then if you speak to them in Guarani they may think you take them for uneducated fellows.’
I was fortunate to be in Asunción like my character Henry Pulling when the National Day was celebrated by the ruling party, the Colorado. In a country where Communism is a crime and even the Jesuits have their telephones tapped and where no criticism of the United States was allowed in the Press it surprised me to find when I woke that the whole of Asunción had gone Red – red banners, red skirts, red scarves, red flowers, red ties, red handkerchiefs; poor Henry Pulling was thoughtless enough to use his red handkerchief for blowing his nose – an appalling insult to the Colorado Party and the President. I was wiser, but then I had been properly warned.
None the less I was aware a few days later of having somehow transgressed. The man from the Foreign Office who came nearly every evening to my hotel for a drink ceased to turn up; the transport to the Chaco which had been promised me never materialised; only my friend with the police card remained faithful and friendly to the last. I could only assume that what offended the General had been this: the sixteen-year-olds at the local lycée asked to visit me, and the hotel provided an interpreter – a Belsen type of woman who smelt like an informer. She was irritated to find her services were not really necessary, for I could understand the students’ questions and most of them could understand my answers. She couldn’t control what was said. I chose to speak about Fidel Castro of whom the students knew nothing (Cuba was a banned subject in the Press), and to criticise Pope Paul’s encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae, which had been recently published. I doubt if the General minded my opinion of the encyclical, but he certainly would not have cared for my favourable portrait of Fidel Castro.
Ten years later in Washington, at the party given in 1977 by the Organisation of American States for the signing of the Panamá Treaty, I was standing as a Panamá delegate a few feet away from General Stroessner who looked in civilian clothes like the proprietor of a German bierstube, and I was introduced by my companion to someone passing by. ‘This is Señor So-and-so, one of General Stroessner’s Ministers.’ The minister at the sound of my name quickly withdrew his hand and spat his reply, ‘You passed once through Paraguay,’ before turning abruptly on his heel to join the General. I felt some pride – as I had when Papa
Doc so furiously attacked me – that a mere writer could irritate a dictator so irremovable, and a regret for that sad and lovely land to which I could never return as long as these men lived.
4
The origin of my next novel, The Honorary Consul, written between 1970 and 1973, lies in the cave of the unconscious. I had a dream about an American ambassador – a favourite of women and a good tennis player whom I encountered in a bar – but in my dream there was no kidnapping, no guerrillas, no mistaken identity, nothing to identify it with The Honorary Consul except the fact that the dream lodged inexplicably in my head for months and during those months the figures of Charley Fortnum and Dr Plarr stole up around the unimportant ambassador of my dream and quietly liquidated him.
It remained for me to discover the scene of the action. Of Uruguay I knew nothing and the Tupamaros were far too efficient an organisation to make the mistake of kidnapping an unimportant English honorary consul in place of an American ambassador. Paraguay was quite another matter. Under the heavy rule of Stroessner no guerrilla organisation had been able to grow, and it seemed plausible that a small inexperienced group working across the border into Argentina might make the blunder which I needed for my story. I was certainly right about the Tupamaros who almost at the same time as I was finishing my novel succeeded most efficiently in kidnapping the British Ambassador in Montevideo. His story when he came to write it contained some interesting parallels to my own. There was even, he believed, a priest among his kidnappers.
My choice of setting was an easy one. For some reason Corrientes had penetrated my imagination like the first injection of a drug. Indeed there is a tradition in that proud little city, founded long before Buenos Aires by the conquistadors coming from the north, that anyone who once sees it will always return. My boat to Asunción stopped for only half an hour – a few lights along the quay, a solitary sentinel outside a warehouse, a small public garden with something resembling a classical temple, and the slow tide of the great river – those were all on which I based my expectations.
In Buenos Aires when I stopped on my way north I encountered a serious problem. My story needed a brothel where Charley Fortnum, the Honorary Consul, would find the girl he married, but when I sought information I was reminded that there were no longer legal brothels in Argentina – only clandestine houses in Buenos Aires for the rich. The kind of public brothel I desired, I was told, could no longer be found anywhere in Argentina. There was a certain character – a friend of a friend – who would certainly know if any such brothel existed anywhere, and from his appearance I felt certain of his authority on sexual matters. I borrowed his features for one of my minor characters, Gustavo Escobar: ‘his face, brick-red as laterite, resembled a clearing which had been hacked out of the bush and his nose reared like the horse of a conquistador,’ but that description was all he contributed to my story, for the only information he could give me was of a brothel which existed on the Uruguayan border four hundred kilometres from Corrientes.
None the less the brothel proved the least of my problems and the soonest solved. Corrientes, a very independent state with a military station, was a law to itself, and I had not been forty-eight hours in the city before I was able to describe the friendly establishment of Señora Sanchez with its little patio, where Fortnum discovered a wife and the novelist Saavedra a character.
A more serious problem arose on my first morning as I lay in bed and looked at the local paper El Litoral. On the main news page I read what was very nearly the story I had come there to write – a Paraguayan consul from a town near Corrientes had been kidnapped in mistake for the Paraguayan Ambassador and a demand for the release of political prisoners had been delivered to General Stroessner, who was on a fishing holiday in the south of Argentina.
All day I thought how wasted my journey had been. How could I continue to plan a novel so clearly anticipated by reality, and what was the use of staying in Corrientes? However, a few days later the General replied to the kidnappers that they could do what they liked with their prisoner – he wasn’t interested in anything but his fishing – and the consul was released and forgotten. I was encouraged to go on with my story. I had been right to choose Paraguayans to organise so inefficient a kidnapping.
I passed two happy and interesting weeks in Corrientes. My friends in Buenos Aires couldn’t understand my interest in a city which I had seen so briefly from a boat. They said it was the wrong time of year in Corrientes, it was still hot and humid summer in the north – and the city had no interest at all. Nothing, they assured me, really nothing, ever happened in Corrientes. As day followed day I remembered with amusement what they had told me.
My second day there a third-world priest working in the barrio of the poor had been turned out of his church by the Archbishop, and a Mass was said that Sunday by a strange priest in an empty church while the congregation stood outside carrying banners – ‘Give us back our priest.’ Next day the Archbishop himself was put under house arrest by the Governor. After all something was happening in Corrientes.
Perhaps it was on my fourth day in the city that I took up an invitation from the director of the airport to go for a walk with him. We began to walk across the fields near the airport; he wanted to show me where the rafts of timber were floated south on their journey of two thousand kilometres to the sea. He said to me as we started off, ‘Every day when I arrive at the airport I ask my manager, “Any robberies? Any murders?” This morning he said to me, “No robberies, but one murder.”’
At the edge of the field ahead of us two policemen stood guard over what looked like a large brown paper parcel ‘There,’ the director said.
A piece of brown paper bad been spread over the body: only the feet protruded at one end. I wanted to photograph the strange package, but a policeman with too friendly zeal took off the brown paper and left only an uninteresting corpse. We took a small path down through the trees to the waterside: a trickle of blood had not yet been dried by the sun. The director said, ‘I came out here and met the murderer. I said to him, “He was your friend. Why did you do it?” He said, “He was stronger, but I had a knife.”’
I asked the director, ‘Weren’t you scared? You were unarmed.’
He smiled. ‘No, no. These are my people. I told him I must go back to the airport and telephone the police, and he disappeared into the woods.’
The incident stayed in my mind, destined to find a place in the novel I was planning. I spoke of it later to my friend Mario Soldati and he gave me some advice which corresponded with the experience I had when I wrote The Quiet American. ‘You must never when you write a novel include something which has happened to you without in some way changing it.’ So it was with this incident. The words of the director, ‘These are my people,’ I put into the mouth of Colonel Perez, the chief of police, in The Honorary Consul, and the body I deposited on one of the rafts across which with trepidation I now followed the director, the logs sinking and heaving at every step.
Certainly my friends in Buenos Aires had exaggerated the dullness of Corrientes. In my first week there had been the abortive kidnapping, the expulsion of the third-world priest from his church, the arrest of the Archbishop, the murder near the airport, and a few days after that a small and unimportant bomb was discovered in the cathedral. On the day I left I noticed a crowd of people bunched on the parapet above the Paraná. I asked my driver what they were doing there. He said they were waiting for the frogmen.
‘The frogmen?’
‘Yes. Ten minutes ago a family committed suicide. A man drove his wife and children off the jetty where the river is deepest. The windows of the car were closed and the doors locked.’
The Honorary Consul was one of the novels I found hardest to write. In my experience, after a few months, an author usually feels that his novel is taking control. There has been the drive at increasing speed of the plane along the runway, then the slow lift and you feel that the wheels no longer touch the ground. But with The Honorary C
onsul it was only in the last chapter that I found myself at last in the freedom of the air. Now when I read the book again I have the impression that I must have been dozing at the controls, for the plane had taken to the air on the very first page when Doctor Plarr stood at night in the small port ‘among the rails and yellow cranes’, as I might have observed him years before while I stared through the darkness at the same scene from the deck of the Asunción boat and the passenger whom I had identified as a smuggler told me with a sceptical smile that ‘the people here’ always said that those who once saw Corrientes returned.
5
1929 to 1978 is a long lifetime of work, but, before I could consider retiring, there was one engagment I had made with myself. My ambition after the war was to write a novel of espionage free from the conventional violence, which has not, in spite of James Bond, been a feature of the British Secret Service. I wanted to present the Service unromantically as a way of life, men going daily to their office to earn their pensions, the background much like that of any other profession – whether the bank clerk or the business director – an undangerous routine, and within each character the more important private life. When I had spent a few years in the Service during the war, first in West Africa and then in London, I had certainly found little excitement or melodrama coming my way.
There were some conflicts of personalities under the shadow of the enormous conflict – that time, for instance, in my one-man station in Sierra Leone when I had been for a while cut off from supplies by my boss a thousand miles away in Lagos; or when I had watched with sympathy the Commissioner of Police in Freetown, who had survived twenty years of hard life and a dose of blackwater fever, driven into a nervous breakdown by a young puppy from M15. Melodrama was sadly lacking – one last-minute scramble to persuade the Navy to stop a Portuguese liner outside territorial waters in order to arrest a Swiss suspected of being a German spy, but in that affair I was only a glorified messenger-boy.