So it is that the material of a novel accumulates, without the author’s knowledge, not always easily, not always without fatigue or pain or even fear.
I think The Power and the Glory is the only novel I have written to a thesis: in The Heart of the Matter Wilson sat on a balcony in Freetown watching Scobie pass by in the street long before I was aware of Scobie’s problem – his corruption by pity. But I had always, even when I was a schoolboy, listened with impatience to the scandalous stories of tourists concerning the priests they had encountered in remote Latin villages (this priest had a mistress, another was constantly drunk), for I had been adequately taught in my Protestant history books what Catholics believed; I could distinguish even then between the man and his office. Now, many years later, as a Catholic in Mexico, I read and listened to stories of corruption which were said to have justified the persecution of the Church under Calles and under his successor and rival Cardenas, but I had also observed for myself how courage and the sense of responsibility had revived with persecution – I had seen the devotion of peasants praying in the priestless churches and I had attended Masses in upper rooms where the Sanctus bell could not sound for fear of the police. I had not found the idealism or integrity of the Lieutenant of The Power and the Glory among the police and pistoleros I had actually encountered – I had to invent him as a counter to the failed priest: the idealistic police officer who stifled life from the best possible motives: the drunken priest who continued to pass life on.
The book gave me more satisfaction than any other I had written, but it waited nearly ten years for success. In England the first edition was one of 3,500 copies – a printing one thousand larger than that of my first novel eleven years before – and it crept out a month or so before Hitler invaded the Low Countries; in the United States it was published under the difficult and misleading title of The Labyrinthine Ways chosen by the publishers (selling, I think two thousand copies). After the war was over its success in France, due to François Mauriac’s generous introduction, brought danger from two fronts, Hollywood and the Vatican. A pious film called The Fugitive, which I could never bring myself to see, was made by John Ford who gave all the integrity to the priest and the corruption to the Lieutenant (he was even made the father of the priest’s child), while the success of the novel in French Catholic circles caused what we now call a backlash, so that it was twice delated to Rome by French bishops. Some ten years after publication the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster read me a letter from the Holy Office condemning my novel because it was ‘paradoxical’ and ‘dealt with extraordinary circumstances’. The price of liberty, even within a Church, is eternal vigilance, but I wonder whether any of the totalitarian states, whether of the right or of the left, with which the Church of Rome is often compared, would have treated me as gently when I refused to revise the book on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in the hands of my publishers. There was no public condemnation, and the affair was allowed to drop into that peaceful oblivion which the Church wisely reserves for unimportant issues. Years later, when I met Pope Paul VI, he mentioned that he had read the book. I told him that it had been condemned by the Holy Office.
‘Who condemned it?’
‘Cardinal Pissardo.’
He repeated the name with a wry smile and added, ‘Mr Greene, some parts of your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.’
2
It amazes me to think that in those early days I could usually write a novel in nine months – but six weeks … The Confidential Agent was written in six weeks in 1938 after my return from Mexico. The Spanish Civil War furnished the background, but it was the Munich Agreement which provided the urgency. At that time, when trenches were being dug on London commons, when our children were evacuated carrying gas masks in little cardboard containers to strange homes in the country, many of us joined a mysterious organisation called the Officers’ Emergency Reserve which advertised for professional men, journalists, bankers, God knows what … When I write ‘mysterious’ I only mean that the reserve was mysterious in its motives like the forces of nature. The emergency but not the reserve passed; the trenches were left uncompleted; the children returned, but many of us were left with the uneasy sense that when war came – as undoubtedly it would in a matter of months or years – we would find ourselves caught up into the army a day, a week, after war was declared, leaving our families without support.
I was struggling then through The Power and the Glory, but there was no money in the book as far as I could foresee. Certainly my wife and two children would not be able to live on one unsaleable book, while I satisfied my conscience in the army.
So I determined to write another ‘entertainment’ as quickly as possible in the mornings, while I ground on slowly with The Power and the Glory in the afternoons. To create a proper atmosphere for work, free from telephone calls and the cries of children, I took a studio in Mecklenburg Square – a lovely eighteenth-century square in those days, but most of it, including my studio, was blown to pieces two years later.
Now that I had my place of work I lacked only an idea. The opening scene between two rival agents on the cross-channel steamer – I called them D and L because I did not wish to localise their conflict – was all I had in mind, and a certain vague ambition to create something legendary out of a contemporary thriller: the hunted man who becomes in turn the hunter, the peaceful man who turns at bay, the man who has learned to love justice by suffering injustice. But what the legend was to be about in modern terms I had no idea.
I fell back for the first and last time in my life on benzedrine. For six weeks I started each day with a tablet, and renewed the dose at midday. Each day I sat down to work with no idea of what turn the plot might take and each morning I wrote, with the automatism of a planchette, two thousand words instead of my usual stint of five hundred words. In the afternoons The Power and the Glory proceeded towards its end at the same leaden pace, unaffected by the sprightly young thing who was so quickly overtaking it.
The Confidential Agent is one of the few books of mine which I have cared to reread – perhaps because it is not really one of mine. It was as though I were ghosting for another man. D, the chivalrous agent and professor of Romance literature, is not really one of my characters, nor is Forbes, born Furtstein, the equally chivalrous lover. The book moved rapidly because I was not struggling with my own technical problems: I was to all intents ghosting a novel by an old writer who was to die a little before the studio in which I had worked was blown out of existence. All I can say as excuse, and in gratitude to an honoured shade, is that The Confidential Agent is a better thriller than Ford Madox Ford wrote himself when he attempted the genre in Vive Le Roy.
I was forcing the pace and I suffered for it. Six weeks of a benzedrine breakfast diet left my nerves in shreds and my wife suffered the result. At five o’clock I would return home with a shaking hand, a depression which fell with the regularity of a tropical rain, ready to find offence in anything and to give offence for no cause. For long after the six weeks were over, I had to continue with smaller and smaller doses to break the habit. The career of writing has its own curious forms of hell. Sometimes looking back I think that those benzedrine weeks were more responsible than the separation of war and my own infidelities for breaking our marriage.
The anxiety that had driven me to write so fast had an ironic end. I was summoned to a draft board for the Emergency Reserve during the winter of 1939 – it had taken a few weeks of phoney war before the authorities had reached the letter G. The days of the shaking hand were over and I was passed A for health and went in to see the Board, consisting of a major-general and two colonels. They were obviously puzzled by their brief and knew as little as I did what the reserve of untrained officers was intended to do. ‘How do you visualise yourself?’ the general asked with a certain pathos. I muttered something about the original advertisement for the reserve having mentioned journalists among the
categories of men required. I had once been a journalist.
‘Yes, yes,’ the general said with a complete lack of interest, ‘but how do you see yourself?’
All three watched with anxiety. I was aware of their bated breath, and I felt some sympathy for what they had endured day by day from all my fellow reservists ranging from Ab to Go. I believe they dreaded the thought that once again they were to suffer that word ‘Intelligence’. They leaned a little forward in their chairs and I had the impression they were holding out to me, in the desperation of their boredom, a deck of cards with one card marked. I decided to help them. I took the marked card and said, ‘I suppose … the Infantry.’
One of the colonels gave a sigh of relief and the general said with unmistakable pleasure, ‘I don’t think we need ask Mr Greene any more questions, do you?’
I had so evidently pleased them that I thought I could safely make a small request. I only needed a few more months to complete The Power and the Glory. Could my call-up be postponed for those few months?
The general positively beamed. Of course I should have those precious months – ‘Shall we say until June? Try and keep fit, though, Mr Greene, in the meanwhile. What I mean is …’ (I could see him searching for the mot juste) ‘I mean sometimes when you want to take a bus, walk instead.’ Strange to think that it was in that world the Commandos were born.
As it turned out the Infantry were not to find themselves burdened with my inefficiency. Why, even at school I had to be left out of important parades because I failed to master the fixing of a bayonet, and in 1941 the commandant of an intelligence course had to abandon the idea that I would ever be able to learn to ride a motorcycle after I had damaged two. An intelligence course? Yes, it had not proved so easy to escape in war the many-armed embrace of Intelligence.
There are certain things I like in The Confidential Agent: for example the predicament of the agent with scruples, who is not trusted by his own party and who realises that his party is right not to trust him. In this case it was the predicament of a Communist (though D did not in fact possess a Party card). A writer who is a Catholic cannot help having a certain sympathy for any faith which is sincerely held and I was glad when more than twenty years later Kim Philby quoted this novel when explaining his attitude to Stalinism. It seemed to indicate that I had not been far wrong, although at the period I wrote I knew nothing of intelligence work.
There are other moments which seem to belong to a period much later: surely the delinquent gang of Woolhampton who helped D to sabotage the mine and their fathers’ jobs just for the fun of the thing belongs to the postwar period and so too does the awful hotel of Southcrawl called The Lido, which with its organised fun resembled the Butlin’s holiday camp at Clacton where many years later the artist Edward Ardizzone and I spent two extraordinary days before we packed secretly and fled from the red blazers of the prefects in the dining-halls, which were loyally called Gloucester and Kent after the two royal dukes, and the grey sea which no one visited. Mr Forbes of my story had had the idea long before Mr Butlin. ‘We are advertising it as a cruise on land. Organised games with a secretary. Concerts. A gymnasium. Young people encouraged – no reception clerk looking down his nose at the new Woolworth’s ring.’ Swimming pools too and when D asks about the sea, Mr Forbes dismisses it in the true Butlin manner. ‘That’s not heated.’
This is a flippant example of what hardly bears too much thought. Dunne has written in An Experiment with Time of dreams which draw their symbols from the future as well as the past. Is it possible that a novelist may do the same, since so much of his work comes from the same source as dreams? It is a disquieting idea. Was Zola, when he wrote of the imprisoned miners dying of poisoned air, drawing something from a ‘memory’ of his own death, smothered with fumes from his coke stove? Perhaps it’s just as well for an author not to reread the books he has written. There may be too many hints from an unhappy future. Why in 1938 did I write of D listening to a radio talk on the Problem of Indo-China? (Was there any such problem then serious enough to reach the English radio?) Six years were to pass before the French war in Vietnam began and eight more before the problem of Indo-China became vivid to me as I stood, scared motionless, beside the canal filled with Viet Minh bodies near the cathedral of Phat Diem.
Chapter Four
1
In the winter of 1941 I found myself on a small Elder-Dempster cargo-ship in the North Atlantic, part of a slow convoy bound by a roundabout route for West Africa. I had been recruited into the Secret Service, commonly known as M16 or SIS, by my sister Elisabeth. Only after recruitment did I realise the meaning of all those parties, given by a mysterious Mr Smith, to which I had been invited in London where, in spite of the blitz and the rationing, there seemed no lack of liquor and where everybody seemed to know each other. I was being vetted. I was also of course vetted by Scotland Yard who turned up traces of the Shirley Temple case.
During the voyage I finished writing a short book called British Dramatists between the watches of the day – one aeroplane watch and one submarine watch. Ten days out of Belfast we reached the latitude of Land’s End, having gone north nearly to Iceland, and at that rate the West African coast seemed very far away. I had brought with me a steel trunk full of books, but they would have to last me until my leave which might be two years off, so I read what I could find in the ship’s library.
One of these books was by Michael Innes – an author whom I didn’t then know. I had never cared much for English detective stories. With all their carefully documented references to Bradshaw’s timetable or to the technique of campanology or to the geography – complete with plan – of a country house, I found them lacking in realism. There were too many suspects and the criminal never belonged to what used to be called the criminal class.
Outside the criminal class sexual passion and avarice seemed the most likely motives for murder; but the English detective writer was debarred by his audience of the perpetually immature – an adjective which does not preclude a university professor here or there – from dealing realistically with sexual passion, so he was apt to involve his readers in a story of forged wills, disinheritance, avaricious heirs, and of course railway timetables. Michael Innes’s book provided a surprising and welcome change. It was a detective story both fantastic and funny.
Lying at night in my bunk with a half-hope that a warning siren – so many short blasts, so many long – would prelude a return to England (submarines only seemed a real menace to those going home on leave), I developed the ambition to write a funny and fantastic thriller myself. If Innes could do it, why not I? Perhaps it was the circumstances of the time – December 1941, Japan had just struck at Pearl Harbor, the German armies were smashing their way towards Moscow – we listened every night to the news on the steward’s radio – that made the plot I chose for The Ministry of Fear seem to me a funny one: a man acquitted of the murder of his wife by a jury (though he knows his own guilt) who finds himself pursued for a murder of which he is entirely innocent but which he believes he has committed. It sounds a bit complicated told like that, and long before I finished the book I realised the story was not after all very funny, though it might have other merits.
It was not written in the easiest of circumstances. After three months of ‘training’ in Lagos I had found myself master of a one-man office in Freetown (and after four months or so of a secretary). I do not think I can have begun the book in Lagos where my days were spent coding and decoding in an office and my nights were passed with a colleague in a disused police bungalow on a mosquito-haunted creek. To cheer ourselves we used to hunt cockroaches by the light of electric torches, marking in pencil on the walls one point for a certain death, half a point if the roach had been washed down the lavatory bowl. I described this pursuit later in The Heart of the Matter. Greeneland perhaps: I can only say it is the land in which I have passed much of my life.
My house in Freetown stood on the flats below Hill Station, the European qua
rter, opposite a transport camp of the Nigerian Regiment which attracted flies and vultures. The house had been built by a Syrian and was remarkable for having a staircase and a first floor in this land of bungalows. It had been condemned by the medical officer of health, but houses were not easily obtainable now that the Army, the Navy and the Air Force had moved into Freetown. When the rains came I realised why it had been condemned: the ground on which it stood became a swamp. Between it and the sea stretched a few acres of scrub used as a public lavatory by the African inhabitants of the slum houses close by.
At six in the morning I would get up and have breakfast. The kitchen equipment was limited and once I was roused by the cries of my cook (who later went off his head completely); he was chasing my steward with a hatchet because the boy had borrowed the empty sardine tin in which the cook was accustomed to fry my morning egg. Life was very different from the blitzed London of my story, but it is often easier to describe something from a long way off.
At seven I would take my little Morris car and drive into Freetown, do my shopping at the stores—PZ or Oliphant’s – and collect my telegrams at the police station to which I was fictitiously attached by my cover employment of CID Special Branch. They arrived in a code unintelligible to the police and were handed me by the Commissioner, a man at the end of his middle years, to whom I became greatly attached. Then I would drive home and decode the telegrams and reply to them as best I could, write my reports or rearrange the reports of others into an acceptable form – work was over by lunchtime, unless an urgent telegram arrived or a convoy had brought a bag to be opened and dealt with.