Ways of Escape

  ‘The storm broke and I hurried back to my hut as the rains came down. It was a big hut with two rooms, and before I went to bed I went and had another look at Graham. He was in a restless doze, muttering to himself, and soaked in perspiration.

  ‘To my great surprise Graham was not dead in the morning. I was quite amazed, and gazed at him for some moments without speaking. I went into his room expecting to see him either delirious or gasping out his last few breaths, and I found him up and dressed. He looked terrible. A kind of horrid death’s head grinned at me. His cheeks had sunk in, there were black smudges under his eyes, and his scrubby beard added nothing of beauty to the general rather seedy effect. His expression, however, was more normal, for the uncanny harsh light that had glowed in his eyes the day before had disappeared. I 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.

  ‘I went out and got hold of the boys and told them to find out how far it was to Grand Bassa. Tommy, I thought, might know, or perhaps the chief.

  ‘“Two days,” said Mark.

  ‘“Two weeks,” said Laminah.

  ‘“Oh, my God,” I said.

  ‘I asked the headman, “How far Grand Bassa? Ask chief.”

  ‘He gave his lovely vague smile, and said softly, “Too far.” And all round me like an angry chorus carriers echoed, “Too far, too far.”’

  I must admit that my cousin’s account is more in keeping with an adventure story than my few lines in pencil, for the absurd journey, which seemed so boring at the time, was in retrospect an adventure for a man of thirty-one who had never been in Africa before and a girl of twenty-three. And how did the second reflective ‘I’ recount this crisis of the journey? I find to my surprise, for now I have few memories of that night, that ‘I’ shared his cousin’s fear. Here is the passage from my book:

  ‘I remember nothing of the trek to Zigi’s Town and very little of the succeeding days. I was so exhausted that I couldn’t write more than a few lines in my diary: I hope never to be so tired again. I retain an impression of continuous forest, occasional hills emerging above the bush so that we could catch a glimpse on either side of the great whalebacked forests driving to the sea. Outside Zigi’s Town there was a stream trickling down the slope and a few ducks with a curiously English air about them. I remember trying to sit down, but immediately having to deal with the town chief over food for the carriers, trying to sit down again and rising to look for threepenny-bits1 the cook needed for buying a chicken, trying to sit down and being forced to stand up again to dress a carrier’s sores. I couldn’t stand any more of it; I swallowed two tablespoons of Epsom in a cup of strong tea (we had finished our tinned milk long ago) and left my cousin to deal with anything else that turned up. My temperature was high. I swallowed twenty grains of quinine with a glass of whisky, took off my clothes, wrapped myself in blankets under the mosquito-net and tried to sleep.

  ‘A thunderstorm came up. It was the third storm we’d had in a few days; there wasn’t any time to lose if we were to reach the Coast, and I lay in the dark as scared as I have ever been. There were no rats, at any rate, but I caught a jigger under my toe when I crawled out to dry myself. I was sweating as if I had influenza; I couldn’t keep dry for more than fifteen seconds. The hurricane lamp I left burning low on an up-ended chop box and beside it an old whisky bottle full of warm filtered water. I kept remembering Van Gogh at Bolahun burnt out with fever. He said you had to lie up for at least a week: there wasn’t any danger in malaria if you lay up long enough; but I couldn’t bear the thought of staying a week here, another seven days away from Grand Bassa. Malaria or not, I’d got to go on next day and I was afraid.

  ‘The fever would not let me sleep at all, but by the early morning it was sweated out of me. My temperature was a long way below normal, but the worst boredom of the trek for the time being was over. I had made a discovery during the night which interested me. I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.

  ‘It seemed that night an important discovery. It was like a conversion, and I had never experienced a conversion before. (I had not been converted to a religious faith. I had been convinced by specific arguments in the probability of its creed.) If the experience had not been so new to me, 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. Perhaps the sediment has value, the memory of a conversion may have some force in an emergency; I may be able to strengthen myself with the intellectual idea that once in Zigi’s Town I had been completely convinced of the beauty and desirability of the mere act of living.’

  Did I learn the lesson of Zigi’s Town? I doubt it.

  It used to be a habit with Victorian novelists to give brief résumés of the future fate of their minor characters. I can do little in that way and the little I can do is not very cheering – no happy marriages or births. Six years later, back in wartime Freetown, I one day encountered Laminah – he was no longer ‘a small boy’ in shorts wearing a woollen cap with a scarlet bobble on it. War had brought him prosperity and dignity. I had already searched in vain for traces of Amedoo, my impeccable headboy, who had made the journey possible, but it was about the old cook I enquired first, whose name I could never remember, whom I saw only as a figure in a long white robe that slowly disintegrated as he strode through the bush, kitchen knife in hand. He must be very old indeed, I thought, by now, if still alive. ‘Old cook,’ Laminah replied, rocking with laughter at the irony of life, ‘old cook, he fine, but Amedoo he dead.’

  Another character is dead too: the mysterious German whom the District Commissioner of Kailahun on the Sierra Leone border mistook for a messenger from Liberia come to guide us to Bolahun.

  ‘It was a long while before anyone thought of asking whether he was the Liberian messenger. He wasn’t, the messenger had disappeared from Kailahun, the stranger was a German. He wanted a bed; he had dropped in to Kailahun as casually as if it were a German village where he would be sure to find an inn. He had a bland secretive innocence; he had come from the Republic and he was going back to the Republic; he gave no indication of why he had come or why he was going or what he was doing in Africa at all.

  ‘I took him for a prospector, but it turned out later that he was concerned with nothing so material as gold or diamonds. He was just learning. He sat back in his chair, seeming to pay no attention to anyone; when he was asked a question, he gave a tiny laugh (you thought: I have asked something very foolish, very superficial), and gave no answer until later, when you had forgotten the question. He was young in spite of his beard; he had an aristocratic air in spite of his beachcomber’s dress, and he was wiser than any of us. He was the only one who knew exactly what it was he wished to learn, who knew the exact extent of his ignorance. He could speak Mende; he was picking up Buzie; and he had a few words of Pelle: it took time.’

  Years were to pass before I learned his fate and the news arrived as ambiguously as he had done. It was 1955 and I was sitting up late in a hotel room in Cracow drinking with a Polish novelist and talking with caution. Gomulka had not yet come to power – it was still a Stalinist Poland. I knew nobody in Cracow except the novelist. We were both taken aback by a rap on the door and the same notion of the secret police came to both our minds. The man who came in was an obvious German. He looked from one to another of us and asked, ‘Mr Greene?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You knew my brother,’ he said, ‘in Liberia.’

  I searched my memory in vain. ‘He walked with you to Bolahun.’

  Then I remembered and asked his whereabouts now
. ‘He was killed in 1943 on the Russian front.’

  Politeness forced me, unwilling though I was, to ask the stranger to join us over my flask of whisky; since I had visited Auschwitz and seen those long halls filled with women’s hair and children’s toys and old suitcases marked with the names and addresses of the dead, all the economy of a German murder camp, I had no desire to sit at a table with a German in Poland. My companion, who had been a Polish officer and afterwards a member of the underground army, cared for the German’s company even less than I. And he proved as ambiguous as his brother. We had been that day to Zakopane, I told him, and he remarked on the beauty of the place, ‘where I stayed for two or three years during the war’, as casually as an Englishman might speak of his residence in Switzerland. My companion and I were both aware that it was not often that a German soldier stationed in Poland stayed so long in one place, but there were other employments than the army for Germans at that period …

  I asked, ‘Why have you come back?’

  ‘I am painting pictures,’ he said.

  2

  Four and a half years of watching films several times a week … I can hardly believe in that life of the distant thirties now, a way of life which I adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun. More than four hundred films – and I suppose there would have been many, many more if I had not suffered during the same period from other obsessions – four novels had to be written, not to speak of a travel book which took me away for months to Mexico, far from the Pleasure Dome – all those Empires and Odeons of a luxury and an extravagance which we shall never see again. How, I find myself wondering, could I possibly have written all those film reviews? And yet I remember opening the envelopes, which contained the gilded cards of invitation for the morning Press performances (mornings when I should have been struggling with other work), with a sense of curiosity and anticipation. Those films were an escape – escape from that hellish problem of construction in Chapter Six, from the secondary character who obstinately refused to come alive, escape for an hour and a half from the melancholy which falls inexorably round the novelist when he has lived for too many months on end in his private world.

  The idea of reviewing films came to me at a cocktail party after the dangerous third martini. I was talking to Derek Verschoyle, the Literary Editor of the Spectator. The Spectator had hitherto neglected films and I suggested to him I should fill the gap – I thought in the unlikely event of his accepting my offer it might be fun for two or three weeks. I never imagined it would remain fun for four and a half years and only end in a different world, a world at war. Until I came to reread the notices the other day I thought they abruptly ended with my review of Young Mr Lincoln. If there is something a little absentminded about that review, it is because, just as I began to write it on the morning of September 3, 1939, the first air-raid siren of the war sounded and I laid the review aside so as to make notes from my high Hampstead lodging on the destruction of London below. ‘Woman passes with dog on lead,’ I noted, ‘and pauses by lamp post.’ Then the all-clear sounded and I returned to Henry Fonda.

  Those were not the first film reviews I wrote. At Oxford I had appointed myself film critic of the Oxford Outlook, a literary magazine which appeared once a term and which I edited. Warning Shadows, Brumes d’Automne, The Student of Prague – these are the silent films of the twenties of which I can remember whole scenes still. I was a passionate reader of Close Up which was edited by Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher and published from a château in Switzerland. Marc Allégret was the Paris Correspondent and Pudovkin contributed articles on montage. I was horrified by the arrival of ‘talkies’ (it seemed the end of film as an art form), just as later I regarded colour with justifiable suspicion. ‘Technicolor,’ I wrote in 1935, ‘plays havoc with the women’s faces; they all, young and old, have the same healthy weather-beaten skins.’ Curiously enough it was a detective story with Chester Morris which converted me to the talkies – for the first time in that picture I was aware of selected sounds; until then every shoe had squeaked and every door-handle had creaked. I notice that the forgotten film Becky Sharp gave me even a certain hope for colour.

  Rereading those reviews of more than forty years ago I find many prejudices which are modified now only by the sense of nostalgia. I had distinct reservations about Greta Garbo whom I compared to a beautiful Arab mare, and Hitchcock’s ‘inadequate sense of reality’ irritated me and still does – how inexcusably he spoilt The Thirty-Nine Steps. I still believe I was right (whatever Monsieur Truffaut may say) when I wrote: ‘His films consist of a series of small “amusing” melodramatic situations: the murderer’s button dropped on the baccarat board; the strangled organist’s hands prolonging the notes in the empty church … very perfunctorily he builds up to these tricky situations (paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities) and then drops them: they mean nothing: they lead to nothing.’

  The thirties too were a period of ‘respectable’ film biographies – Rhodes, Zola, Pasteur, Parnell and the like – and of historical romances which only came to a certain comic life in the hands of Cecil B. de Mille (Richard Coeur de Lion was married to Berengaria according to the rites of the Anglican Church). I preferred the Westerns, the crime films, the farces, the frankly commercial, and I am glad to see that in reviewing one of these forgotten commercial films I gave a warm welcome to a new star, Ingrid Bergman – ‘What star before has made her first appearance on the international screen with a highlight gleaming on her nose-tip?’

  There were dangers, I was to discover, in film-reviewing. On one occasion I opened a letter to find a piece of shit enclosed. I have always – though probably incorrectly – believed that it was a piece of aristocratic shit, for I had made cruel fun a little while before of a certain French marquis who had made a documentary film in which he played a rather heroic role. Thirty years later in Paris at a dinner of the haute bourgeoisie I sat opposite him and was charmed by his conversation. I longed to ask him the truth, but I was daunted by the furniture. Then, of course, there was the Shirley Temple libel action. The review of Wee Willie Winkie which set Twentieth Century-Fox alight cannot be found here for obvious reasons. I kept on my bathroom wall, until a bomb removed the wall, the statement of claim – that I had accused Twentieth Century-Fox of ‘procuring’ Miss Temple ‘for immoral purposes’ (I had suggested that she had a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men). Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief Justice, sent the papers in the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions, so that ever since that time I have been traceable on the files of Scotland Yard. The case appeared before the King’s Bench on March 22, 1938, with myself in absentia, and on May 23, 1938, the following account of the hearing appeared among the Law Reports of The Times. I was at the time in Mexico on a writing assignment. It is perhaps worth mentioning in connection with the ‘beastly publication’ that Night and Day boasted Elizabeth Bowen as theatre critic, Evelyn Waugh as chief book reviewer, Osbert Lancaster as art critic, and Hugh Casson as architectural critic, not to speak of such regular contributors as Herbert Read, Hugh Kingsmill and Malcolm Muggeridge.

  The case appeared as follows in The Times Law Reports:

  HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE

  King’s Bench Division

  Libel on Miss Shirley Temple: ‘A Gross Outrage’

  Temple and Others v. Night and Day Magazines,

  Limited, and Others

  Before the Lord Chief Justice

  A settlement was announced of this libel action which was brought by Miss Shirley Jane Temple, the child actress (by Mr Roy Simmonds, her next friend), Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, of New York, and Twentieth Century-Fox Film Company, Limited, of Berners Street, W., against Night and Day Magazines, Limited, and Mr Graham Greene, of St Martin’s Lane, W.C., Hazell, Watson and Viney, Limited, printers, of Long Acre, W.C., and Messrs Chatto and Windus, publishers, of Chandos Street, W.C., in respect of an article written by Mr Greene and publi
shed in the issue of the magazine Night and Day dated October 28, 1937.

  Sir Patrick Hastings, KC, and Mr G.O. Slade appeared for the plaintiffs; Mr Valentine Holmes for all the defendants except Hazell, Watson and Viney, Limited, who were represented by Mr Theobald Mathew.

  Sir Patrick Hastings, in announcing the settlement, by which it was agreed that Miss Shirley Temple was to receive £2,000, the film corporation £1,000, and the film company £500, stated that the first defendants were the proprietors of the magazine Night and Day, which was published in London. It was only right to say that the two last defendants, the printers and publishers, were firms of the utmost respectability and highest reputation, and were innocently responsible in the matter.

  The plaintiff, Miss Shirley Temple, a child of nine years, has a world-wide reputation as an artist in films. The two plaintiff companies produced her in a film called Wee Willie Winkie, based on Rudyard Kipling’s story.

  On October 28 last year Night and Day Magazines, Limited, published an article written by Mr Graham Greene. In his (counsel’s) view it was one of the most horrible libels that one could well imagine. Obviously he would not read it all – it was better that he should not – but a glance at the statement of claim, where a poster was set out, was quite sufficient to show the nature of the libel written about this child.

  This beastly publication, said counsel, was written, and it was right to say that every respectable distributor in London refused to be a party to selling it. Notwithstanding that, the magazine company, with the object no doubt of increasing the sale, proceeded to advertise the fact that it had been banned.

  Shirley Temple was an American and lived in America. If she had been in England and the publication in America it would have been right for the American Courts to have taken notice of it. It was equally right that, the position being reversed, her friends in America should know that the Courts here took notice of such a publication.