4
Brighton Rock I began in 1937 as a detective story and continued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as an error of judgement. Until I published this novel I had like any other novelist been sometimes praised for a success, and sometimes condemned with good enough reason as I fumbled at my craft, but now I was discovered to be – detestable term! – a Catholic writer. Catholics began to treat some of my faults too kindly, as though I were a member of a clan and could not be disowned, while some non-Catholic critics seemed to consider that my faith gave me an unfair advantage in some way over my contemporaries. I had become a Catholic in 1926, and all my books, except for the one lamentable volume of verse at Oxford, had been written as a Catholic, but no one had noticed the faith to which I belonged before the publication of Brighton Rock. Even today some critics (and critics as a class are seldom more careful of their facts than journalists) refer to the novels written after my conversion, making a distinction between the earlier and the later books.
Many times since Brighton Rock I have been forced to declare myself not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic. Newman wrote the last word on ‘Catholic literature’ in The Idea of a University:
‘I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man. You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than any Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all.’
Nevertheless it is true to say that by 1937 the time was ripe for me to use Catholic characters. It takes longer to familiarise oneself with a region of the mind than with a country, but the ideas of my Catholic characters, even their Catholic ideas, were not necessarily mine.
More than ten years had passed since I was received into the Church. At that time I had not been emotionally moved, but only intellectually convinced; I was in the habit of formally practising my religion, going to Mass every Sunday and to Confession perhaps once a month, and in my spare time I read a good deal of theology – sometimes with fascination, sometimes with repulsion, nearly always with interest.
I was still not earning enough with my books to make a living for my family (after the success of my first novel and the spurious temporary sale of Stamboul Train each novel added a small quota to the debt I owed my publisher), but reviewing films regularly for the Spectator and novels once a fortnight, I could make ends meet. I had recently had two strokes of good fortune, and these enabled me to see a little way ahead – I had received a contract from Korda to write my second film script (and a terrible one it was, based on Galsworthy’s short story The First and the Last – Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who had much to forgive me, suffered together in the leading parts), and for six months I had acted as joint editor with John Marks of the weekly Night and Day. My professional life and my religion were contained in quite separate compartments, and I had no ambition to bring them together. It was ‘clumsy life again at her stupid work’ which did that; on the one side the socialist persecution of religion in Mexico, and on the other General Franco’s attack on Republican Spain, inextricably involved religion in contemporary life.
I think it was under those two influences – and the backward and forward sway of my sympathies – that I began to examine more closely the effect of faith on action. Catholicism was no longer primarily symbolic, a ceremony at an altar with the correct canonical number of candles, with the women in my Chelsea congregation wearing their best hats, nor was it a philosophical page in Father D’Arcy’s Nature of Belief. It was closer now to death in the afternoon.
A restlessness set in then which has never quite been allayed: a desire to be a spectator of history, history in which I found I was concerned myself. I tried to fly into Bilbao from Toulouse, for my sympathies were more engaged by the Catholic struggle against Franco than with the competing sectarians in Madrid. I carried a letter of recommendation from the Basque Delegation in London to a small café owner in Toulouse who had been breaking the blockade of Bilbao with a two-seater plane. I found him shaving in a corner of his café at six in the morning and handed him the Delegation’s dignified letter sealed with scarlet wax, but no amount of official sealing wax would induce him to fly his plane again into Bilbao – Franco’s guns on his last flight had proved themselves too accurate for his comfort. With Mexico I was more fortunate, an advance payment for a book on the religious persecution enabled me to leave for Tabasco and Chiapas where the persecution was continuing well away from the tourist areas, and it was in Mexico that I corrected the proofs of Brighton Rock.
It was in Mexico too that I discovered some emotional belief, among the empty and ruined churches from which the priests had been excluded, at the secret Masses of Las Casas celebrated without the Sanctus bell, among the swaggering pistoleros, but probably emotion had been astir before that, or how was it that a book which I had intended to be a simple detective story should have involved a discussion, too obvious and open for a novel, of the distinction between good-and-evil and right-and-wrong and the mystery of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’ – a mystery that was to be the subject of three more of my novels? The first fifty pages of Brighton Rock are all that remain of the detective story; they would irritate me, if I dared to look at them now, for I know I ought to have had the strength of mind to remove them, and to start the story again – however difficult the revisions might have proved – with what is now called Part Two. ‘A lost thing could I never find, nor a broken thing mend.’
Some critics have referred to a strange violent ‘seedy’ region of the mind (why did I ever popularise that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world blinkered. ‘This is Indo-China,’ I want to exclaim, ‘this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately described. I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist. I assure you that the dead child lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In the canal of Phat Diem the bodies stuck out of the water …’ But I know that argument is useless. They won’t believe the world they haven’t noticed is like that.
However, the setting of Brighton Rock may in part belong to an imaginary geographic region. Though Nelson Place has been cleared away since the war, and the Brighton race gangs were to all intents quashed for ever as a serious menace at Lewes Assizes a little before the date of my novel, and even Sherry’s dance hall has vanished, they certainly did exist; there was a real slum called Nelson Place, and a man was kidnapped on Brighton front in a broad daylight of the thirties, though not in the same circumstances as Hale, and his body was found somewhere out towards the Downs flung from a car. Colleoni, the gang leader, had his real prototype who had retired by 1938 and lived a gracious Catholic life in one of the Brighton crescents, although I found his name was still law when I demanded entrance by virtue of it to a little London nightclub called The Nest behind Regent Street. (I was later reminded of him when I watched the handsome white-haired American gangster, one of Lucky Luciano’s men, spending the quiet evening of his days between the piazza of Capri and the smart bathing pool of the Canzone del Mare restaurant at Marina Piccola.)
All the same I must plead guilty to manufacturing this Brighton of mine as I never manufactured Mexico or Indo-China. There were no living models for these gangsters, nor for the barmaid who so obstinately refused to come alive. I had spent only one night in the company of someone who could have belonged to Pinkie’s gang – a man from the Wandsworth dog-tracks whose face had been carved because he was suspected of grassing to the bogies after a killing at the stadium. (He taught me the only professional slang I knew, but one cannot learn a language in one night however long.)
The Brighton authorities proved a little sensitive to the picture I had drawn of their city, and it must have galled them to see my book unwittingly advertised at every sweet-stall – ‘Buy Brighton Rock ?
??’ but the popular success of the book was much more limited than they realised. About eight thousand copies were sold at the time and just lifted me out of debt to my publishers.
Would they have resented the novel even more deeply if they had known that for me to describe Brighton was really a labour of love, not hate? No city before the war, not London, Paris or Oxford, had such a hold on my affections. I knew it first as a child of six when I was sent with an aunt to convalesce after some illness – jaundice, I think. It was then I saw my first film, a silent one of course, and the story captured me for ever: Sophie of Kravonia, Anthony Hope’s tale of a kitchenmaid who became a queen. When the kitchenmaid rode with her army through the mountains to attack the rebel general who had tried to wrest the throne from her dying husband, her march was accompanied by one old lady on a piano, but the tock-tock-tock of the untuned wires stayed in my memory when other melodies faded, and so has the grey riding habit of the young queen. The Balkans since then have always been to me Kravonia – the area of infinite possibility – and it was through the mountains of Kravonia that I drove many summers later and not through the Carpathians of my atlas. That was the kind of book I always wanted to write: the high romantic tale, capturing us in youth with hopes that prove illusions, to which we return again in age in order to escape the sad reality. Brighton Rock was a very poor substitute for Kravonia, like all my books, and yet perhaps it is one of the best I ever wrote.
Why did I exclude so much of the Brighton I really knew from this imaginary Brighton? I had every intention of describing it, but it was as though my characters had taken the Brighton I knew into their own consciousness and transformed the whole picture (I have never again felt so much the victim of my inventions). Perhaps their Brighton did exist, but of mine only one character remained, poor hopeless Mr Prewitt, the lawyer, watching with sad envy ‘the little typists go by carrying their little cases’ (I think no one has remarked the echo of Beatrix Potter in that phrase). It was Mr Prewitt with a difference who had spoken to me one December night more than ten years earlier in a shelter on the sea-front with the thin phosphorescent line of the surf smoothed back by a frosty wind: ‘Do you know who I am?’ the voice sadly enquired, but I hadn’t even seen in the darkness that the shelter had another occupant. ‘I’m Old Moore,’ it said, naming that anonymous astrologer whose predictions still appear every year. It added, ‘I live alone in a basement. I bake my own bread,’ and then, humbly, because I hadn’t taken its meaning, ‘The Almanac, you know, I write the Almanac.’
1 All our money was in threepenny-bits because the Liberian carriers recognised no higher currency. They also demanded Queen Victoria’s head on the pieces. The only smaller change were Liberian ‘irons’—strips of metal.
2 In the USA the title was This Gun for Hire, my American publisher being a stickler for accuracy.
Chapter Three
1
It is a curious experience to read an account of one’s own past written by – whom? Surely not by myself. The self of forty years ago is not the self of today and I read my own book, The Lawless Roads, as a stranger would. So many incidents in my story have been buried completely in my subconscious: so many I now recall only faintly like moments in a novel which I once read when I was young. And yet The Lawless Roads is not a novel, only a personal impression of a small part of Mexico at a particular time, the spring of 1938, shortly after the country had suffered at the hands of President Calles – in the name of revolution – the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth. In Tabasco and Chiapas the persecution lingered on. These are all facts, I tell myself. These things really happened to me – in 1937-8 – or at least to that long-dead man who bore the same names on his passport as I do.
Mexico too has changed, though perhaps not in essentials – not in the cruelties, injustices and violence. All successful revolutions, however idealistic, probably betray themselves in time, but the Mexican revolution was phoney from the start. I went back to Mexico City more than a dozen years ago on my way to Havana and drove around the new suburb for the rich built on lava – the most expensive house of all belonged to the Chief of Police. That was a Mexico I could recognise, as I could recognise the extreme poverty a few streets away from the American hotels and the tourist shops. The Mexican Government made a hypocritical pretence of supporting Cuba by allowing a Cubana service between Mexico City and Havana, but it was a one-way service. If you went out it was very hard indeed to get a transit visa to return. This was one method used then to reduce the numbers of American students illegally visiting Cuba – to return to the States they would have to make an expensive round trip via Madrid. There was another inducement not to go. As one passed Immigration a camera flashed – the photograph of every passenger travelling to Havana ended on the CIA or FBI files. With difficulty and much argument I obtained from the Mexican Embassy in Havana a tourist visa for my return through Mexico City, but it was valid for forty-eight hours. The return plane contained only about twenty-four passengers, but it took me three hours to get through Customs and Immigration. (The customs officer made a very diligent search between the leaves of David Copper-field.) This was how the Mexican revolutionary government made a pretence of supporting Castro with one hand and helped the United States authorities with the other. During my brief stay a Mexican friend told me, over an evening drink, ‘There is nothing you need to change in your book. All is the same.’
I had not meant to write more than this one book, commissioned by a publisher, on the religious persecution. I had no idea, even after I had returned home, that a novel, The Power and the Glory, would emerge from my experiences. The proofs of Brighton Rock, while I was away in Mexico, had occupied my thoughts, and perhaps the Franco volunteers on the German ship I took back to Europe began a train of ideas which ended in The Confidential Agent. Now, of course, when I reread The Lawless Roads, I can easily detect many of the characters in The Power and the Glory. The old Scotsman, Dr Roberto Fitzpatrick, whom I met in Villahermosa, with his cherished scorpion in a little glass bottle, was the kind of treasure trove that falls to the lucky traveller. In recounting the story of his own life he told me of the kindly disreputable Padre Rey of Panamá with his wife and daughter and the mice – not a scorpion – which he kept in a glass lamp. So it was that the doctor put me on the track of Father José in my novel; perhaps he even showed me the road to Panamá which I was to postpone visiting for nearly forty years, and then was amply rewarded. Above all he presented me with my subject: the protagonist of The Power and the Glory. ‘I asked about the priest in Chiapas who had fled. “Oh,” he said, “he was just what we call a whisky priest.” He had taken one of his sons to be baptised, but the priest was drunk and would insist on naming the child Brigitta. “He was little loss, poor man.”’
But long before the drunken priest another character had come on board my awful boat in Frontera where my story was to open – the dentist I called Mr Tench, who made his living with gold fillings even in that abandoned little port. In fact he was American and not English. He was married to a Mexican woman, who was some relation to the State Governor, and he came on board to flee from his wife and children. He took refuge in my hotel in Villahermosa – I don’t think there was another – but after a few days his family ambushed him in the corridor. I remember him always wearing an old yachting cap, even at meals which he would interrupt if a bone or a piece of gristle stuck in his throat by vomiting promptly and skilfully upon the floor. He would take swigs too out of a bottle of olive oil for the sake of his health. His character needed no ‘touching up’. He was as complete in The Lawless Roads as he was in The Power and the Glory, and as I read on I encounter more and more characters whom I have forgotten, who beckon to me from the pages and say ironically, ‘And did you really believe you had invented me?’ Here is the amiable corrupt Chief of Police in Villahermosa, and in the village of Yajalon I encountered ‘a mestizo with curly sideburns and two yellow fangs at either end of his mouth.
He had an awful hilarity and an inane laugh which showed the empty gums. He wore a white tennis shirt open at the front and he scratched himself underneath it.’ After a week of his company I would find it impossible to abandon him for ever, and so he became the Judas of my story. And the Lehrs – the kindly Lutheran couple – they didn’t belong to my imagination, for here they are giving shelter to a tired traveller in the same fashion as they did to the whisky priest. Of invented characters how very few seem to remain apart from the two protagonists, the priest and the Lieutenant of Police; when I came to write I was handing out alternative destinies to real people whom I had encountered on my journey.
It was a journey I wouldn’t like to take today. I rode from Yajalon through the Chiapas mountains for three days on a mule, not knowing I was following the footsteps of my whisky priest in his escape from the lieutenant, before I came finally to the city of Las Casas, spread out under the mountains at the end of the mule-track. In Tabasco all the churches had been destroyed. Here they were still standing, and even open, but no priest was allowed to enter them, and because it was Holy Week bizarre services were celebrated by the Indians from the hills who tried to remember what they had been taught – scraps of strangely pronounced Latin and odd uncanonical gestures. Perhaps I was even less happy in this city than I had been in Villahermosa, for the place was full of swaggering pistoleros – any of whom might have been a model for my Chief of Police – and it was impossible to sit in the plaza at evening without being insulted, or to order a drink in a cantina without being refused, for by this time diplomatic relations with England had been broken because of the nationalisation of the oil companies.