Current Research

The purpose of the Current Research page is to highlight ongoing research into the life and works of Graham Greene and his contemporaries as well as to give notice of relevant exhibitions and lectures. If you are engaged in study of this kind in a professional capacity, as a doctoral or post-graduate student, or for any other reason, please do get in touch.

We are also happy to look to publish articles about any aspect of Greene’s writings not necessarily connected with academic studies.

The Overnight Bag – And Its Hidden Mysteries

In a candid interview with Phillipe Sejourne in which he elaborated, at length, his thoughts on short fiction, Graham Greene explained away the rather morbidly fascinating mystery of his short story The Overnight Bag with his answer – “He is not really bring a child back in his bag. It’s in his imagination.” And yet, for all those who have read and reread the story in question, the mystery has lingered inexorably in the mind. Despite his insistence that “there’s nothing in the bag”, we are all tempted to believe that be it in the BOAC overnight bag or not, there’s certainly something more than meets the eye in this short yet skilfully written story.

For one thing, when it came to Greene’s peerless mastery of the opening paragraph that ushered the reader into a whole new world of mystery, intrigue and drama unerringly, The Overnight Bag too has an opening paragraph that is instantly compelling, almost hypnotic in how it lodges itself in our memory – an introduction to its protagonist both vivid in its precise detail and satisfyingly delicious irony.

The little man who came to the information desk in Nice Airport when they demanded ‘Henry Cooper, passenger on BEA flight 105 for London’ looked like a shadow cast by the brilliant glitter of the sun. He wore a grey town-suit and black shoes; he had a grey skin which carefully matched his suit, and since it was impossible for him to change his skin, it was possible that he had no other suit.

This little man named Henry Cooper, obviously an Englishman, has already piqued our curiosity, perhaps because of his own Englishness. On the flight from Nice to London, his travelling companion – that large woman with horn-rimmed spectacles and a monstrous handbag that we see so frequently in every flight, is the first one to be perturbed by the contents of his overnight bag.

“But it should be in a coffin, not an overnight bag.”

“My wife didn’t trust a foreign coffin. She said the materials they use are not durable. She’s rather a conventional woman.”

“Then it’s your baby?” Under the circumstances she seemed almost prepared to sympathize.

“My wife’s baby,” he corrected her.

“What’s the difference?”

He said sadly, “There could well be a difference,’ and turned the page of Nice-Matin.

Henry Cooper, in all his fretful worry for his overnight bag getting squashed or shaken by the storms over London, manages to arouse all our curiosity. But once he lands at London Airport, Greene makes us realise that once home, he is hardly out of place in a land where eccentricity is only hidden casually, waiting to spill out stealthily without warning, as it happens in his conversation with his taxi driver with his “dashing, comradely air” who might know a thing or two about death.

“Anyway, you don’t need to worry – they can’t bruise after death, or can they? I read something about it once in the The Cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, but I don’t remember now exactly what. That’s always the trouble about reading.”

From the glitter of sun at Nice to the snowy, smoky dusk of London, Greene is, as ever, assuredly able to render atmosphere most convincingly and as the story reaches its fiendishly open-ended denouement, we find ourselves a far cry from across the Channel into the “large, white-washed Bayswater square.”

The houses resembled the above-ground tombs you find in continental cemeteries, except that, unlike the tombs, they were divided into flatlets and there were rows and rows of bellpushes to wake the inmates.

We return, with Henry Cooper, to his cosy home in a building called The House of Stare, where his favourite painting is a Life magazine reproduction of a Hieronymus Bosch, no less. The warm affable mother, awaiting him, with the shepherd pie ready to be baked in the oven, is no less paradoxically English than all these absurd yet familiar qualities and the closing image of Cooper’s relief at his return from what must have been one of his many interminable journeys is unmistakably English too.

“And now, dear,” his mother said, “tell me how it was. Tell me everything. Did you make some new friends?”

“Oh yes, Mother, wherever I went I made friends.” Winter had fallen early on the House of Stare. The overnight bag disappeared in the darkness of the hall like a blue fish into blue water.

And like the overnight bag with its unexplained mystery, many other mysteries of Henry Cooper, true to his trenchant Englishness, are similarly just buried out of sight, only momentarily, to resurface and linger in our mind. Just why does he go abroad every year and what has happened to his “wife” in Nice? Despite all his spurious mundanity, Henry Cooper is nevertheless worldly enough to know that foreign marmalade might even have a toe in it.

Greene was fond of skewering the often-stereotypical idea of the humdrum Englishman – isn’t Henry Pulling one such Englishman himself, travelling far and away from his suburban life of retirement and dahlias to reckless adventure in South America? And in a sense, The Overnight Bag is a droll and irreverent ode to the spirit of secretive, even seedy, spirit of mischief that could lie beneath the archetype Englishman, not least within its author’s sophisticated exterior himself.

On a side note, one can also find in the story an admirable little vignette of what air travel used to be back in those days when it was written, when there was enough room even in a Trident aeroplane to get a window seat all to oneself and when the pilot would be gracious enough to tell his passengers to look at the sights from that dizzying height. My father often regales me with stories of how, in the past, people here in Calcutta themselves would often request anyone who would be fortunate to travel abroad to bring home a BOAC overnight bag itself. And perhaps, some of us would then also reread The Overnight Bag to rediscover the lost charm of travelling in an aeroplane.

Zoeb Matin

[‘The Overnight Bag’ was first published in the Spectator Magazine in August 1965. It was re-printed in May We Borrow Your Husband and Other Comedies of the Sexual  Life in 1967 and subsequently other collections of Greene’s short stories.]

 

__________________

The Intermodernist Poetics of Ian Fleming and Graham Greene,

This thesis examines Ian Fleming and Graham Greene in relation to the schemata of inter-modernism, a critical proposition that situates mid-twentieth century authors of genre fiction as exhibiting unique literary characteristics that separate them from either modernism or postmodernism. In this thesis, Greene’s work will serve as a mirror to Fleming’s, and a comparative reading of both authors not only exposes the previously hidden influences of Greene’s writing on Fleming’s, but also reveals new insights into their personal, professional, and literary relationship. This positioning also buttresses Fleming’s position as an important mid-twentieth century writer by pairing him with a more canonical author. This thesis radically reshapes the canon of both Fleming and Greene by elevating their “minor” works of genre fiction, travel writing, short stories, journalism, and unpublished manuscripts to the level of their critically well-regarded novels, as it is in these “minor” texts that one can identify Fleming and Greene as intrinsically inter-modernist. The original contribution of this thesis is in its identification of Fleming’s and Greene’s association with, and incorporation of, the movements of modernism, and their intertextuality with other renowned modernist and inter-modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot and George Orwell. This thesis thus aims to reject the dismissive critical evaluations of Ian Fleming that have clung to the author for over seventy years, confirm Graham Greene’s position as an inter-modernist writer, and add to a growing body of twenty-first century scholarship that argues that both authors require serious re-evaluation in the canon of twentieth century literature.

Lucas Townsend

___________________

A Day Saved: The search for humanity, masked as a thriller

Monica Ali ends her astute and elegant introduction to The End of The Affair (Vintage Books, 2004) with her neat summary of Graham Greene’s accomplishment in a sentence – “we salute the deceptively simple complexity of a writer who never gives us easy answers to the question of what it is to be human.” That question is something that defines almost the whole of Greene’s fiction and, consciously so; in his literary essays, he championed writers such as Dickens, Trollope, James, Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, over writers such as Joyce and Woolf, who were more concerned, in his frank appraisal, with “the material world” than “the importance of the human act in the eyes of God.” Both “the human act” and the query of one’s humanity are omnipresent in Greene’s work, a quality perhaps unmatched in modern fiction. And that he would chronicle the human act and follow that query with that very simple complexity was also one of his most endearing achievements.

In Twenty-One Stories, all the contents are representative of these very qualities and one of them deserves particular attention. In his wonderful essay on It’s A Battlefield, Mr. Jonathan Wise observed correctly that “the period between 1932 and 1936 might be regarded as a time of experimentation” and it is most astute of him to include the short story A Day Saved in the same sentence as Stamboul Train and England Made Me, two novels completely dissimilar to each other. While Greene had already begun to experiment with genres in his short stories – murder thrillers (The Case for The Defence, Murder for The Wrong Reason), espionage (I Spy), social commentary and even Gothic horror (The End of The Party), A Day Saved was particularly innovative for the author. On the surface, the story is a thriller in the purest Greene tradition – a simple, quick and brisk tale of a man chasing another man across the borders of countries, but true to the ironical note of the title, it is also a surprisingly, almost unexpectedly thoughtful meditation on not only the nature of pursuit but also on the human condition.

One of the most unique qualities of the story is its conscious and deliberate lack of detail. Greene’s fiction is immediately distinguished by its clear-cut, journalistic realism – almost all his short stories in this collection are very recognizably set either in the England of his boyhood and youth, the London of the wartime years, or in the places he had visited (France, West Africa, Mexico and even a whiff of Bangkok), thus birthed from his own experiences or observations. A Day Saved, even for an early short story, defies the tradition deftly; it is closer in its stark surrealism to the dream-like quality of his later short fiction, primarily in A Sense of Reality. We do not know the names or identities of both the narrator – a man on a mission to pursue and possibly kill a man – and his intended victim and the only references to places are of a “train from Dover” and later, a “train from Ostend”. As for the rest, everything is intentionally left to the speculation of the reader but the effect is far from obscurity. Rather, by keeping the point of view narrowly close to that of his protagonist and his singular quest, Greene endows his story, not only with plausibility but also with the pathetic despair so indispensable to the human condition.

At the beginning of the story, Greene compels the reader to speculate on the possible mission of the pursuit at hand. All we are hinted at, by the narrator, is that his quarry possesses something “I dearly, despairingly wanted.” That would place him as either a thief, a murderer, or even a spy but beyond that hint of an explanation, the author adroitly refrains from revealing his true identity and cuts right to the pursuit at hand – a pursuit of protracted suspense that is abruptly cut short by the decision of the anonymous man being pursued to take a flight instead of the “long train journey” across borders, thus saving himself a day and ruining the best-laid plans of his pursuer, who had thought of murdering him in the relative privacy of that train journey.

It is intriguing how Greene delineates the two modes of conveyance and his characters’ approach towards them in the space of this slim story. For the pursuer, the long train journey presents an opportunity to ingratiate himself with his quarry and then dispose of him effectively. For his victim, however, the train journey, though more comfortable than his first flight, has already become a slower form of journey that would simply waste a day for him. The subtle yet profound differences between these two men and their decisions lends a striking depth of characterization unusual in a story of such crisp length.

True to the author’s signature theme of failure, A Day Saved too is about the inevitable despair that accompanies failure. The hunter tries earnestly throughout the shorter journey, by air, and then by a brief railway journey, to ingratiate himself with his intended victim, but he merely succeeds at developing a short-lived, trivial friendship that ends when the latter reaches his destination safely, happily, having saved his “day”. But it is the despair of this man that makes him so important in our eyes as it must be in the eyes of a God too. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist insists that he is no shadow, not even the cowardly shadow of Stevenson’s children’s poem, even as his quarry does not realize “what can be the use of him”. “You can feel me, touch me, hear me, smell me’, he pleads; he even yearns for credibility when rendering his account. He pleads almost that “I try to be exact. I pray to be exact.” And so, at the end of this futile chase, as he almost enviously and contemptuously sees his victim happy, safe, and welcomed warmly, he even wishes bitterly that the day saved would only be delayed until his victim is driven to the depths of despair himself.

For this lonely, unloved hunter (Raven in A Gun For Sale comes to one’s mind, as does the pathetic yet utterly doggish private detective Parkis in The End of The Affair), a day saved, paradoxically, is also a day wasted and now he is closer by a day to his inevitable fate, sealed with equally inevitable failure. It is then that one realizes, thanks in no small measure to Greene’s “simple complexity”, that all this while, this man, following his quarry, futilely like a shadow, has only coveted the latter’s most prized possession – the sense of being human.

Zoeb Matin

Playing Thomas Fowler:

Sir Laurence Olivier, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and the 1958 movie version of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American

 by Kevin Ruane

 In December 1955, Graham Greene’s Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American was published in Britain to admiring reviews. When the book appeared in the United States a few months later, the reception was rather different. At the height of the Cold War, and with the legacy of McCarthyism still poisoning America’s body-politic, critics rounded on Greene for questioning the ethics of US foreign policy. In particular, he was condemned for using the character of Alden Pyle, the eponymous quiet American, to personify US interventionism in the developing/post-colonial world as naïve, self-serving and ultimately dangerous. ‘Nobody liked it in America when it came out,’ Greene recalled. ‘I don’t think I had any good reviews.’[1]

Despite the novel’s anti-American slant, Hollywood was soon knocking at Greene’s door, and in early 1956 he sold the film rights to Figaro Incorporated, the production company of garlanded American film director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The money – a considerable sum – was used by Greene to help his daughter, Caroline, fulfil her dream of buying a ranch in Canada. Greene knew only too well how the movie business worked. ‘[W]hen you sell a book to Hollywood you sell it outright,’ he accepted. ‘The film producer can alter anything. He can turn your tragedy of East End Jewry into a musical comedy at Palm Springs if he wishes. He need not even retain your title, though that is usually almost the only thing he wishes to retain.’^[2] In the specific case of The Quiet American, Greene was initially unfazed. ‘I refuse to be distressed by what Mankeviecz [sic] does…I sold it with my eyes open with one intention and that was procuring a ranch in Canada for my daughter. That has been accomplished and the film will soon be forgotten – I hope sooner than the book!’[3]

In January 1957, Mankiewicz and a large film crew descended on South Vietnam to begin a two-month location shoot. Mankiewicz was known to Greene by reputation as ‘a bold and independent producer’, an Oscar-winner esteemed for earlier movies like A Letter to Three Wives (1949), All About Eve (1950) and 5 Fingers (1952). For this reason, Greene ‘hoped for the best’, but it was not long before troubling news reached him from local Saigon sources.[4]

Mankiewicz, director-producer-writer, appeared to have exorcised all trace of the novel’s anti-Americanism and was bent on making a Cold War propaganda vehicle in praise of the burgeoning alliance between the USA and the anti-communist state of South Vietnam. ‘Terrible reports of the changes made reach me,’ Greene recorded.[5] In Mankiewicz’s hands, the character of the English journalist Thomas Fowler became a naïve dupe of the Vietnamese communists, while Pyle was transformed into the hero of the piece. ‘Indignation seems to be divided and some people blame me more than Mankiewicz for allowing it,’ reflected Greene.^[6]

Primed as he was for disappointment, Greene was still shaken by the finished movie when it went on general release, first in America and then worldwide, in early 1958. The ‘most extreme changes I have seen in any book of mine were in The Quiet American,’ he later attested; ‘one could almost believe that the film was made deliberately to attack the book and its author.’[7] By reconfiguring the political trajectory of the story to make ‘the American very wise and the Englishman completely the fool of the Communists,’ Mankiewicz was guilty of ‘a real piece of political dishonesty’.^[8] The film, Greene railed, ‘is a complete travesty of the idea of the book.’^[9]

For anyone familiar with Greene’s life and work, his loathing of the 1958 movie will come as no surprise. What is less well known is that Mankiewicz’s liberties with the original story – what Richard Greene has called his ‘disgraceful’ manipulation of the novel’s politics – had lost him his first choice to play Fowler, none other than Sir Laurence Olivier, Titan of stage and screen.[10]

The customary version of Olivier’s in-out relationship with the movie has him agreeing in 1956 to play Fowler on condition that Montgomery Clift was cast in the role of Pyle, a pairing Mankiewicz accepted. When personal problems and serious injuries following a car crash obliged Clift to pause his acting career, Olivier began to cool. Then, when Mankiewicz announced that Audie Murphy would be the quiet American, Olivier, holding a low opinion of Murphy’s acting talents, decided to walk away.^[11]

This standard narrative is now in need of revision. If anything, it was Mankiewicz’s script, not Murphy’s limitations, that was the deal-breaker for Olivier. The evidence supporting this interpretation has languished for decades in the archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in Los Angeles, largely ignored by film historians and scholars of Cold War culture.[12] For Greene aficionados, the exchange of letters and telegrams between Mankiewicz and Olivier in 1956 (reproduced in full below) does more than shed light on the casting process of a major Hollywood production of one of Greene’s works: it shows both director and actor to be acute – if very different – literary critics. Olivier in particular writes with exceptional insight; indeed, his final condemnation of Mankiewicz’s script aligns very closely with Greene’s own subsequent publicly-expressed misgivings about the film.[13]

In due course, English actor Michael Redgrave, known for ‘an aristocratic mien coupled with a tortured sensibility’, replaced Olivier in the Fowler role, with the Pyle part staying with Murphy.^[14] When it was first announced that Murphy, a US World War II hero turned actor, was lined up for the film, American columnist Walter Winchel wrote of the unhappiness of many in Hollywood ‘about America’s most decorated soldier taking the lead…in a film version of The Quiet American which libels Americans’. But Greene, too, was unhappy: ‘I would have preferred a good actor.’^[15]

Nor was Greene impressed with the casting of Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress whom Pyle lures away from him with hints of marriage and a new life in America. Decades before problems connected with cultural appropriation were properly acknowledged in the film industry, Greene could be found lambasting the ‘appalling’ decision to have ‘[t]he Vietnamese girl Phuong…played by an Italian’, Giorgia Moll, an actress who only made her screen debut in 1956.^[16] There were, he was sure, ‘innumerable beautiful Indo-Chinese equally without film experience.’^[17]

I am grateful to the archivists of AMPAS for their help in locating, and then scanning, these materials, and for permission to reproduce transcripts of the letters here. For anyone interested in Hollywood and the US movie industry, there are riches indeed in the “Oscars Archive”, as the Mankiewicz-Olivier exchanges confirm. It was quite the contest. In one corner, the wise-cracking, live-wire American movie-man, in the other the urbane, measured but needle-sharp English actor-knight.

Enjoy the sparring.

Kevin Ruane is a By-Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of History, Canterbury Christ Church University. His talk at the 2023 Graham Greene Festival, entitled ‘Shooting Alden Pyle: The Quiet American on the Big Screen’, will soon be available as an audio file on the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s website, ‘Resources & Archive’ tab.

                                                                                         

THE MANKIEWICZ-OLIVIER CORRESPONDENCE, 1956

(AMPAS)

 Thursday 5 January 1956

 Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Figaro Inc., New York, telegram to Sir Laurence Olivier, London:

DEAR LARRY. I AM GOING TO WRITE AND DIRECT GRAHAM GREENE’S QUOTE THE QUIET AMERICAN UNQUOTE WHICH IS REALLY ABOUT AN UNQUIET ENGLISHMAN STOP HAVE YOU READ IT WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN PLAYING IT AND IF SO WHEN COULD YOU BE AVAILABLE. PLEASE LET ME KNOW SOONEST POSSIBLE. JOE MANKIEWICZ.[18]

Olivier reply, no date, but almost immediate:

DEAR JOE THANKS YOUR CABLE MOST INTERESTED IN SUBJECT WRITING LARRY OLIVIER.[19]

Sunday 8 January 1956

 Olivier, Notley Abbey, Buckinghamshire, letter to Mankiewicz, New York:

 [Handwritten on plain notepaper].

 Sun Jan 8. 56.

Dear Joe.

Thank you very much for your nice cable and very interesting offer re – “The Quiet American.” May I say that while admiring the book as a book and Graham’s writing enormously – I myself would have shrunk from making a picture of it because I would never wish to be thought anti-American, and I was afraid that the book might have caused sufficient angry feelings in America to sink the picture there if made by an Englishman – do you follow me? Of course the author’s inner prejudices need never come out as most are expressed through the thoughts of the Englishman and not in action or dialogue.

But for the same reasons I would like to be satisfied that the sympathies would not be reversed by the clever cunning of the producer [Mankiewicz], because if I hesitate to make an anti-American picture you will, I am sure, understand a like reluctance to make an anti-English one. But I am quite sure that with a little ingenuity all honours can be satisfied, all “anti’s” stilled, and all nationalistic hackles patted gently into place, and still give them a bloody good picture.

There is one thing about which perhaps I should warn you and that is that in my agreement I would like it to be understood that whilst not interfering in any way with the production or direction, but doing what I’m told like a good boy – I would insist that no cuts or departures be made from the agreed script in the final version that might alter the shape of my part without my consent. This I’m afraid is a condition I would insist on, following my experience in “Carrie” from which the precise elements and qualities in the part that made me want to play it were entirely removed from it.[20]

I’m not a difficult person, you understand, but a teensy bit old to have my pants removed with becomingly boyish submission.

I may be coming to New York the beginning of February – but until then I shall be vagrant and itinerant in Europe, so if you wish to contact me Cecil Tennant of MCA in London is the chap.[21]

I am immensely happy at the prospect of working with you.

Sincerely,

Larry Olivier.

P.S. I am available now, and the sooner the better as I have tentative plans after July. Where & for whom will the picture be made?[22]

 Friday 13 January 1956

 Mankiewicz, New York, letter to Olivier, London:

 [Typed on plain notepaper; carbon copy, original probably Figaro Inc. notepaper].

 Dear Larry:

Your letter arrived yesterday, just after I cabled you in happy reply to your first cable.[23] Your interest has delighted me, and I cannot recall having looked forward to a project with more enthusiasm.

Actually, THE QUIET AMERICAN has not yet been published over here. It will be brought out some time in March. No one can say, of course, what the critical reaction to the anti-Americanism will be. It may well happen that, as in most of the English reviews, the infantile level of Greene’s distortions will be considered unworthy even of rebuttal. In any case, I have no more intention of putting a Coca-Cola-swilling, crew-cut, Mom-loving, dollar-waving Yankee on the screen, than I have of portraying an umbrella-toting, tea-crumpet-and-warm-beer Pukka-stout-fella Limey.

Greene’s inability to keep what must be an uncontrollably deep and bitter and consuming, but nonetheless child-like, rage (and an equally child-like Catholicism) from permeating his work – much like a chef who will insist upon spraying his finest dishes with insecticide before serving – is a major frustration in the literary world. I know of no more accomplished story teller, and damn few more vivid writers. Fortunately, as you point out, in this case both the story and the writing can be wonderfully realized on film – and the insecticide removed – without damage to either.

Your request for assurance that your part in the finished film would not be so altered in the cutting, etc. as to change its original concept is startling to me. I cannot believe that a properly written part could be materially altered in such a manner – and I have never had any personal experience with such shenanigans, but your request is certainly understandable. You have that assurance. If you want it included in your agreement – and if it can be properly set down in words – I have no objection. Just what the hell did happen in Carrie?

I shall write the script, of course, and direct. The producing company will be Figaro – my own company – and the film will be released by United Artists. There are, literally, no artistic controls in anyone’s hands but mine. We have always the Breen office[24] and the Catholic Church but, like Death and Taxes, we meet such things as we come to them.

There will be a finished, final script before we start production. For better or worse I have never started a film otherwise. “Where?” has not been decided. I am flying out to Saigon next week. I will sniff and smell about for ten days, then return here to start writing. If at all possible, I should like to do the exteriors at the actual locations, and the interiors at some European studio. It may become necessary to do it all in Europe, reconstructing the Indo-Chinese backgrounds in, say, Italy.

Unhappily, the “when” can not possibly be before June, at the earliest. The script will require careful writing, the production must be properly planned and, above all, it must be exquisitely cast.

Could you let me know, confidentially, just what the “tentative plans after July” are? And how tentative? Also, on the subject of confidential information, I would appreciate your not bruiting about my comments about Greene. They have nothing to do with my profound professional admiration for him, and certainly do not inhibit the excitement and enthusiasm I have for THE QUIET AMERICAN as a film of potential importance and distinction.

Robby Lantz[25] has informed Tennant that I will be in Paris on January 22^nd. That is, I arrive in the morning from New York, and leave in the afternoon for Saigon. Will you be near by? It would be most helpful if we could talk. In any case, I shall keep you informed of my whereabouts – and do thou likewise.

Yours [Joe Mankiewicz].[26]

Tuesday 24 April 1956

 Olivier, London, letter to Mankiewicz, New York. Handwritten on Lowndes Cottage, Lowndes Place, London S.W.1 notepaper:

 [Mankiewicz had visited South Vietnam in January 1956 to assess locations for the film shoot. On his return to New York he completed a first draft of the script which was then passed on via Lantz/ to Olivier for comment].

Personal & Confidential

My dear Joe.

I am awfully grateful to you for your courteous and thoughtful promptness in sending me the Screenplay of “The Quiet American”.

But I am terribly sorry to have to tell you that it disappointed me very much. Perhaps disappointed is the wrong word as it implies that I expected it would be “better” when, indeed, I did not know what to expect only knowing from our last conversation in N.Y. that you were landed with a very tough proposition in keeping the balance of two story stories distributed as in the book while eliminating as much as possible the anti-American feelings expressed by the central character.

You will forgive my frank opinions, I trust, as even if you do not agree with them I presume they are what you want as we certainly wouldn’t get very far without them – I will make them as brief as possible.

I find that in exonerating Pyle to a large extent, you have obviously added blame to Fowler making him the mental case, so to speak (or is it Greene you are after?) instead of Pyle, who now becomes relative innocent and rather characterless and Fowler a completely twisted degenerate who has no real cause to resent Pyle except through his jealousy over Phuong and his anti-American obsessions.

After he has virtually murdered Pyle it emerges that Vigot[27] is the real central character being the only one with any discrimination or worthy of any sympathy.

In other words what I feared might take place has done so.

Mr. Lantz in his [covering] letter says “obviously, the picture will be neither anti-British, nor anti-American, nor anti-French – this is an entirely human story, told in terms of human emotion”. I don’t agree. To me it is palpable that in a story about an American, a Frenchman and an Englishman the sympathy is stacked against the nationality of the one who turns out to be the most unpleasant.

From a more practical point of view I find that the story-telling method of flash-backs, dreams and opium sessions an unhappy one and confusing – though this may be a purely personal view.[28]

Over all I find that the central character is no longer as seen through the author’s eyes, but has become the author as seen through your own rather naturally resentful ones, and frankly I don’t like the part!

I am so sorry.

Thank you for letting me see it.

Ever, with warmest regards,

Larry O.[29]

[1] Greene quoted in Gloria Emerson, ‘Our Man in Antibes: Graham Greene’, Rolling Stone, No. 260 (9 March 1978), pp. 45-49.

[2] Graham Greene, ‘The Novelist and the Cinema – a Personal Experience’, in William Whitebait, ed., International Film Annual, Vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 55-56.

[3] Greene to Berval, 24 August 1956, Graham Greene Papers, Boston College, USA (hereafter GGP/BC), box 11, folder 83.

[4] Greene letter, Le Monde, 3 February 1958.

[5] Greene to Redgrave, 26 February 1957, GGP/BC, box 32, folder 27.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Greene, ‘Novelist and the Cinema’, pp. 55-56.

[8] Greene quoted in Christopher Hawtree, ed., Graham Greene: Yours Etc., Letters to the Press 1945-1989 (London: Penguin, 1991 edition), p. 57.

[9] Greene to Evans, 24 February 1958, GGP/BC, box 59, folder 17.

[10] Richard Greene, Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene (London: Little, Brown, 2020), p. 270.

[11] See for example Kenneth L. Geist, Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (New York: Scribner’s, 1978), William Russo, Audie Murphy in Vietnam (Boston: Long Time Ago Books, 2012), and Kevin Lewis, ‘The Third Force: Graham Greene and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ “The Quiet American”’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1998).

[12] An exception is Simon Willmetts who utilised AMPAS in producing his outstanding book In Secrecy’s Shadow: The OSS and CIA in Hollywood Cinema 1941-1979 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

[13] For AMPAS, see https://www.oscars.org/film-archive.

[14] Sir Michael Redgrave, obituary, New York Times, 22 March 1985.

[15] Graham Greene, ‘Freedom of Information’, The Spectator, 7 April 1984, p. 10.

[16] Greene quoted in Hawtree, ed., Yours Etc., p. 57.

[17] Greene to Redgrave, 26 February 1957, GGP/BC, box 32, folder 26, hereafter GGP/BC.

[18] Mankiewicz to Olivier, 5 January 1956, AMPAS, Joseph L. Mankiewicz Papers (hereafter AMPAS/JLMP), file 430/ID-7148926.

[19] Olivier to Mankiewicz, n.d., January 1956, ibid.

[20] Carrie (1952) directed by William Wyler and based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900). Olivier starred opposite Jennifer Jones.

[21] Cecil Tennant (1910-1967), English producer and actors’ talent agent who ran MCA’s London talent office.

[22] Olivier to Mankiewicz to Olivier, 8 January 1956, AMPAS/JLMP, file 430/ID-7148926.

[23] ‘DEAR LARRY DELIGHTED AT YOUR INTEREST AND AWAITING YOUR LETTER WITH HIGH HOPES BEST JOE’, Mankiewicz to Olivier, 12 January 1956, ibid.

[24] A reference to Joseph Breen (1888-1965), American film censor with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America; although Breen retired in 1954 as Hollywood sentinel of Big Screen morality, the code of ethics and political correctness he espoused continued to be applied for some years to come.

[25] Robert Lantz (1914-2007), US film industry talent agent.

[26] Mankiewicz to Olivier, 13 January 1956, AMPAS/JLMP, file 430/ID-7148926.

[27] In the novel, Inspector Vigot is the French detective tasked with investigating the murder of Pyle.

[28] The use of flashbacks was much favoured by Mankiewicz in his movies. In the final 1958 film, all references to opium – of which there were many in the novel and a number in Mankiewicz’s draft script – were omitted to ensure a green light from Hollywood’s Production Code Administration (the ‘Breen office’).

[29] Olivier to Mankiewicz, 24 April 1956, AMPAS/JLMP, file 430/ID-7148926.

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The book that Never Was

On perusing Prof. Carlos Villar Flor’s book Graham Greene’s Journeys in Spain and Portugal, Travels with My Priest (Oxford University Press, 2023), I read about Chuchú (nickname of sergeant José de Jesús Martínez), General Torrijos’s aid who was Greene’s interpreter and guide during his visits to Panama. Born in Managua in 1929, he was multifaceted: polyglot, poet, mathematician, pilot. He obtained a doctorate degree in philosophy from Madrid University in 1958 with a thesis entitled The Problem of Death, directed by Prof. Ángel González Álvarez, who had the chair of Metaphysics that had been held by the famous Prof. José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955).   Chuchú was Professor of Marxist Philosophy in the University of Panama, but he left the chair and joined the Panamanian National Guard at 45 years of age.

I was curious to see what the web could offer about Chuchú. There is an entry in Wikipedia, short, incomplete but available in four languages: Spanish, English, Arabic  and Russian. The Arabic version only includes the birth and death dates and places, and the Russian is the longest but lists only seven of the thirteen books by Chuchú mentioned in the Spanish and English versions. A philosophy page (www.filosofia.org/ave/003/c040.htm) provides his second surname, Navarrete, which was his mother’s family name -it is customary in many Spanish speaking  countries to have two surnames, the first from the father and the second from the mother- and more information on his books. There are other entries, too, with biographical sketches, comments on his poems, references to his books, and an obituary.

His last book was My General Torrijos (Mi General Torrijos, Ediciones Casa de las  Américas, La Habana, 1987). As I mentioned long ago (Why I am a Greene enthusiast, ASON, Spring 2001;p:7-9), Getting to Know the General, Graham Greene’s memoir on his visits to Panama invited by General Torrijos, had prompted me to read everything I could possibly find by Greene. So, the book by Chuchú interested me because of its connection with Greene’s book. I found it on the Internet, bought it and read it.

My General Torrijos is 271 pages long and is divided into 14 chapters.  Graham Greene is mentioned in 16 pages:

• Page 44: Greene is flying with Torrijos and Chuchú on the FAP-205 airplane, the same in which Torrijos would die later. Greene asked Torrijos about his fundamental rule of his political moral. Torrijos answered that it was the same as that of the pilot: not to fall down.
• Pages 54 and 55: Greene had an interview with a chief of the Bayano region. The interpreter was beside him to translate what he said into Cuna However, the chief laughed at Greene’s humour before hearing the translation. Chuchú thought that the chief did not need the interpretation but he obliged them to translate for him. Later Greene said that not even speaking with the Queen of England had he felt so much the weight of tradition.
• Page 69: Greene dedicated one of his books to Matisse, Torrijos’ dog, saying that he hated him. The reason was that Matisse liked to rub his privates against Greene’s knees.
• Page 74: Torrijos listened to and learnt from the peasants. One day, a peasant told him that there was a difference between ‘party’ and ‘drunkenness’, and Torrijos wanted to apply it to Greene. Torrijos told him that when they, the Europeans, drank, it was because they had an alcoholic problem; but if they, the Panamanians, drank, they were drunkards. It seems that Greene did not take it too well, and Torrijos added that he would invite him next Saturday to drink together. Greene was worried about Saturday during the whole week. He even thought of declining the invitation saying that he had the flu but he finally went and all that Chuchú says is that they had a very good time.
• Page 75: Torrijos thought that it was important not only to improve the material wellbeing of the people but to change them, by educating them and changing their mental structures. He commented this issue with Humberto Ortega, Commander of the Sandinist Popular Army, and, during a dinner Ortega offered to Greene, he ordered all guerrilla soldiers who were there to watch the film Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa) by Cuban director Pastor Vega. This 1979 film participated in the 11^th Moscow International Film Festival and Daisy Granados, in the role of Teresa, won the Best Actress Award. Teresa was a married housewife working in a factory. She was appointed cultural secretary of the factory and this promotion raised her husband’s jealousy. After a strong discussion, she kicks her husband out of home and she has to struggle alone to raise three children and face the problems many Cuban women have. Chuchú mentions this episode of Greene’s visit to Panama because he thought it was rather uncommon that a Commander of an army offered a dinner to a writer and, on top of it, ordered his army staff to watch a film. Pastor Vega also directed La Quinta Frontera (The Fifth Border, 1978), homonymous of the book that Torrijos wrote on the North American neo-colonization of the Panama Zone (La Quinta Frontera: partes de la batalla dipomática sobre el Canal de Panamá; 1978, Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana).
• Pages 114 and 115: Greene wrote an article on Panama and the negotiations with the USA on the Canal. It seems that he wrote with irony and even mocked the Chief of the National Guard. Chuchú was in charge of translating the article for its publication in Panama. He read it to Torrijos and when he arrived at the conflictive paragraph he suggested that it could be removed. Torrijos, in a menacing tone, said ‘don’t touch even a comma written by Greene’. Chuchú mentioned this because when Greene wrote his book on his visits to Panama, he invited Chuchú to France to read the manuscript before publication. Chuchú found parts that he would remove and even a few historical mistakes, but he remembered what Torrijos had said and suggested no changes to Greene´s original text.
• Page 125: according to Chuchú, Torrijos had a happy and optimistic revolutionary morale. This appreciation, however, would be incomplete if it were not framed within the context of a tragic morale. Greene understood clearly the tragic aspect of the General that he attributed to his daily coexistence with the idea of death.
• Page 129 and 130: Greene travelled to Nicaragua quite often. He refers to these visits in his book about Torrijos. He said that in these countries ‘politics is a matter of life or death’. Then, it seems that he complained about their restaurants. It is not clear to me if he meant the Nicaraguan or the Panamanian. Chuchú understands that it is difficult to compare their restaurants with those that Greene knew in Paris and other parts of the world.  This is a strange comment because Greene was frugal, although this does not mean that he did not appreciate good cuisine.
• Page 141: Chuchú had an airplane model Cessna 185 that he liked very much. He was proud to have transported very distinguished people on it: Graham Greene, Ernesto Cardenal, Carlos Mejía and many guerrilla commanders. One day, Ernesto Cardenal wanted to try to fly it. On doing so, he held the steering handle very strongly. Chuchú told him to treat it like a woman. Ernesto Cardenal, being a priest, expressed his surprised. Then, Chuchú added, ‘well, treat it like a consecrated wafer’.
• Page 249: The palomares – dovecotes – were houses where the revolutionaries and refugees could hide or stay for some time. Chuchú told Greene about these places and Greene wanted to visit them. Greene started to interview people and they told them their stories, the hardships, torture and repression they had endured. Among those in the dovecotes was Rosario Murillo, Daniel Ortega’s wife, with whom Greene made friends. When Greene died, one of the scenes shown on Spanish TV was Greene on stage congratulating Daniel Ortega on his presidency of Nicaragua, most probably in 1985, when Ortega began his first term as president. I wonder what Greene would say and write on the present situation of Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo repress the opposition, the Catholic church, the educational institutions, etc. Greene said that he was on the side of the victims but, he added as a warning, the victims change.
• Page 252: Greene wanted to give some money to Commander Marcial (Salvador Cayetano Carpio), founder of the Farabundo Martí Popular Liberation Front, and leader of the Communist Party of El Salvador. Marcial told him to give the money to Chuchú because he would know how to spend it in a better way. This money originated from Greene’s rights as author of the book about Torrijos. So, Chuchú thought it was a posthumous homage to General Torrijos, and that the General was still fighting like Cid the Champion, who, already dead, fought the Moors on back of his horse Babieca holding his sword Tizona in Spain in the 11^th No doubt, Chuchú was well versed in history to have thought of this association.
• Pages 261 and 262: this is in the last chapter of the book that deals with Torrijos’s death. Chuchú had no doubt that Torrijos had been assassinated by the CIA. Torrijos was the strongest and most efficacious politician in the region to oppose the imperialist strategies and, therefore, there were political reasons to eliminate him. When Chuchú had to fly over the site of Torrijos’s death, he turned his head not to look at it. He was afraid of Marta Hill. But when Greene went to Panamá after the General’s death, he asked Chuchú to take him to the site. Chuchú took Greene on a helicopter and when they flew over Marta Hill Chuchú felt that Torrijos had spread over all the jungle and that he was everywhere, a sort of pan-humanism. The hill that he did not dare look at before inspired him peace, security and love. That was the only time Chuchú felt like that. Next times, he always saw Marta Hill as a black, unfriendly and assassin hill. He wondered what could have happened the day he flew over it with Graham Greene.

My General Torrijos shows the admiration and personal esteem Chuchú had for his General. His prose is fluent and lively, and the book makes a good read.

If you have read Getting to Know the General, you will remember that Greene appreciated Chuchú very much, and that he even planned to write a book about him entitled On the Way Back.  When Greene and Chuchú  travelled in Panama sometimes they did not stop to visit one place or another, and Chuchú always said that they would stop on their way back but, on their way back, they never stopped. Greene must have appreciated Chuchú as a very special character: an academic turned military, intelligent, well read and travelled, with a number of children whose names he could not remember, with whom he could talk about politics, literature, poetry, international affairs, etc. Chuchú was, indeed, worth a book. But, it so happened that Greene started travelling in Spain with Father Leopoldo Durán, a very peculiar character, too, that captured his attention even more than Chuchú, and the book about Chuchú and Panama became the book about Greene’s and Father Durán’s adventures in Spain: Monsignor Quixote. (For a more scholarly explanation of why Greene did not write that book, read Mansfield C and Gessel DA, Making Sense of Greene’s Panama: A Fuliginous Process. Graham Greene Studies 2021;2:271-281). Monsignor Quixote is a delightful book where the reader finds humour, religion, doctrine, theology, Saints, politics, geography but, overall, a growing friendship between two persons of different background, political thought and faith. It probably was the culmination of Greene’s dream to unite Communism and Catholicism as they both had the goal to improve the material and spiritual well-being, respectively, of humanity.

We missed a book but gained another one. Then, nothing was really lost.

Ramón Rami-Porta

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Dislocation and Disillusionment in England Made Me

“Perhaps, no one can write in depth about a foreign country – he can only write about the effect of that country on his own fellow countrymen, living as exiles or government servants or visitors”, wrote Graham Greene in his introduction for R.K. Narayan’s The Bachelor of Arts, gently lamenting the inability of a writer to describe a foreign land comprehensively. He was, of course, being a little too modest in his reverence and his own books can hardly be deemed as superficial or facile in their portrayals of the foreign lands he travelled and chronicled. However, a crucial facet of his work has been a study of the dislocation and disorientation in which his Englishmen, either abroad or exiled, themselves, are vulnerable to the unexpected and ineluctable forces of moral corruption, vice and even larger events of revolution and war. There are the weary and disillusioned dentist Mr Tench and the idealistic Captain Fellowes, stranded in the anti-clerical state of Tabasco in The Power And The Glory; there are the civil servants and their atabrine-yellowed wives of Sierra Leone in The Heart Of The Matter and there is even the meagre, three-man English community of Corrientes in The Honorary Consul. Each of these novels portrays the Englishmen exiled in these strange, seductive but dangerous regions, trying, and even failing to reconcile themselves to their new outposts of escape.

Perhaps this portrait of exiled Englishness can be traced back to this fifth published, at least at a first glimpse, most uncharacteristic novel. England Made Me was written in the wake of the modest success of Stamboul Train – the first of Greene’s brilliant entertainments – and already, this 1934 novel witnessed Greene willing to take the literary risk of writing a comparatively serious and introspective novel that also encapsulated the contemporary themes of the decade with discerning depth. The result, indeed, seems like a Greene novel unlike most Greene novels – there is no simmering revolution in the cold, almost frosty milieu of Sweden, there is no detritus of a fallen empire to critique or even a despotic dictator to eviscerate skilfully – though one of the characters in this sad, strangely elegiac story comes almost close to wielding his will as irascibly as any tyrant. And yet, with the nuanced prescience of its themes, its complex portrayal of fraternal and human relationships and its typically solid characterisation, it emerges as characteristic as any Greene novel.

The epigraph to the novel, rather strangely, is a quote from a Walt Disney film – “All the world owes me a living.” This sentence is employed as a pun to imply the theme of the novel; at one level, England Made Me illustrates the disparity between the already rich and successful and those striving to reach this high plateau of success and affluence. The latter, then, believe that the world does owe them a living but the former, trapped in their gilded cages, cannot help but feel that the world owes them a “living” of a simpler kind – a life of companionship, love, and empathy.

The four protagonists of the story stand on opposite sides of this boundary of success and sordid struggle, of wealthy solitude and a comfortable spirit of seedy integrity. On one hand, then, is the omnipresent Erik Krogh, a self-made Swedish businessman who has ascended from the humblest of origins into an all-powerful financier with his name emblazoned like a household name across the civilised world. Despite his enviable status of access and affluence, Krogh, modelled on the real-life tycoon Ivar Kreuger and not too dissimilar from the present-day, self-aggrandising business tycoon, is nevertheless in the throes of a state of alienation; he cannot interact with or relate easily with his doting subordinates and servants or the respectable gentility with whom he must socialise. He doubts his own choice of the abstract statue that adorns the entrance of his office already strewn all over with his initials; he cannot understand the subtleties laden in English poetry, even when written by the Minister of the English Legation and in opera, he always chooses an empty place where he could also sleep, undetected. He is a rich man whose shyness derives from his consciousness of his peasant background and how it jars with the civility of his present surroundings.

In stark contrast to Krogh’s self-conscious diffidence, stands Anthony Farrant, the young and cocksure Englishman, always wandering from one outpost of the Empire to the other, in and out of jobs, forever an exile, carrying his battered, bruised luck with him around. His very spirit of bohemian shabbiness reeks on the surface of a jaunty, ragged optimism but the past of too many defeats and failures cling to him as inevitably as his false school tie that still wins him a few favours. Still, Anthony’s confidence, practised as it is, is the perfect foil for Krogh’s insecurities and when the two men meet and associate as master and bodyguard, the Swedish man of business is finally able to thaw some of his frosty reticence that conceals his inadequacies.

Between the two men, between Krogh’s existential discomfort and Anthony’s ragged adaptability, lies Kate Farrant and her own compelling tangle of feelings and conundrums. A companion to Krogh and even before that a sibling of Anthony, Kate is thus effectively torn in her loyalties, to the rich man to whom she has pledged her life and freedom and to the English twin to whom she is inextricably bound. Beneath her prim, sophisticated demeanour, she is herself assailed by self-doubt and even feelings of ambivalence over the two men who are so immovably established as signposts in her journey from her cloistered upbringing back in England to the cold comfort of Krogh’s companionship. On one hand, she prizes the refuge of settled stability but on the other hand, her rise to this position of Krogh’s confidence is driven by a hidden motive – of making it easy for Anthony, too, to be with her by offering him the chance of a career. With Anthony beside him, however, Kate feels distinctly uneasy and is unable to reconcile herself to the true nature of her feelings.

The relationship between Kate and Anthony deserves some scrutiny, notably for being one of the complex relationships that Greene was so deft in chronicling in his novels and stories. It has been widely speculated, not baselessly, that the two are in an implicitly incestuous relationship with each other and Greene himself agreed to this inference. More than once, in the novel, the reader will be aware of the close bond between the siblings that goes further than just fraternal love and is even marked by sexual overtones – Anthony finding Kate more attractive than any of his girlfriends and the latter, in turn, yearning for sexual fulfilment while yearning inwardly for her twin – and yet, on almost all occasions, both characters end up either denying or shoving their feelings aside. Some had remarked, at the time of the novel’s publication, that Greene was afraid of exploring the dimension of incest in his novel but one agrees more with what the author himself said, that his characters are fully aware of their feelings and yet are never able to reconcile themselves to the same.

Greene steps ahead to introduce yet another memorable and compelling character into the fray: the seedy and sordid, yet oddly dignified tabloid journalist Ferdinand Minty, chasing whatever scoop on Krogh and his dealings he can dig out and intrigued by Anthony when he spots the latter wearing a Harrow tie. In his unmistakable aura of seedy Englishness, consisting of the gaunt, pigeon-chested physical appearance, the ragged ability to adapt and survive, the stiff upper lipped demeanour and even an inextricable bond to one’s past as a schoolboy, Greene further infuses another element that would soon be found in many of his other memorable characters – a sordid spirit of faith to which he clings like a refuge. Minty is, thus, at one level, one of the author’s working models for similarly sordid characters such as Raven and Pinkie Brown, young men broken and bruised by a lifetime of torture and with only their faith (or an absence of it) and their hostility as a means of defence. Minty’s defence is also his weary cynicism – the way he derides and mocks the formality and snobbery of the rich and well-established people around him – the Minister of the Legation who keeps putting off his requests for another school reunion, Krogh and even Anthony Farrant. Yet beneath that cynical exterior is yet another exile – another outcast completely cut out of the world of Krogh’s affluence and Anthony’s opportunism to rise in ranks by only his association to Krogh’s companion. Minty resents Anthony’s good fortune that leads the latter to success, no matter how short-lived, even on the strength of his false Harrow tie. And yet, as any Englishman would depend on his fellow countryman, Minty still must rely on Anthony’s new position to make his own living – to get some scoop, no matter how malicious or insidious, that can help him survive for a little longer in his chosen place of exile.

And so, between these four characters, their motives and aspirations, their feelings of solitude and despair and their need for companionship and empathy, Greene weaves a skilfully rendered story, a slender but taut narrative thread, pitting together these three characters to play off each other masterfully in a deceptively simple story that reveals a little of each character’s fatal flaw or incorrigible virtue. There is the threat of Krogh’s plan, to strengthen his shallow empire, almost on the brink of collapse, with an unscrupulous gambit, to be exposed to the public; there is also the threat of Kate losing the refuge of her business-like relationship and Anthony’s companionship again, as the latter reveals himself, unexpectedly, to be capable of a shred of old-school dignity that won’t allow him to fall in for the rich man’s ambitions. And Greene hints at these possible events and consequences subliminally and subtly, gently escalating a disquieting sense of tension, while he also orchestrates a few incidents in the background leading to a similarly bitter fate for these characters.

Kate finds herself torn between the future – Krogh’s sterile stability – and the past – Anthony’s unshakable Englishness, his yearning for a home of mundane pleasures, brought about his attraction and love for an English girl whom he meets in Sweden. The author portrays her ambivalence as unerringly as Minty’s frustration at a world of ill-gotten wealth and affluence and he also humanises, convincingly, Krogh and his insecurities that fuel his almost devious ambition at the cost of integrity and dignity.

Yet, with such skill are empathetic characterisation and the fluid, almost compelling narrative balanced, that the resultant novel, even in its short length, is profound without being ponderous, almost quietly suspenseful without resorting to contrivances. These are flawed yet utterly believable characters and Greene, with all the prowess of a consummate storyteller, brings them together along with minor but equally vital characters such as Andersson, the young and idealistic factory worker who sets out to make an appeal to Krogh’s sympathies and Fred Hall, the doggishly loyal right-hand man, also English, who will do anything to save his employer from disgrace, in the unexpected travesty, that then leads us to the bitter denouement of the novel. What is even more impressive is his unerring ability to weave in detail and nuance to the slender storyline and draw a vividly observed yet realistic portrait of a foreign land with the same authenticity as he would later do for Africa, Indo China, or South America. His Sweden is rendered unmistakably as beautiful but frosty with a stirring, mesmeric, almost poetic skill at description, blending effortlessly into the elegiac narrative and his ability to orchestrate the actions and impulses of his characters is as flawless as ever, leaving many an indelible scene of camaraderie and introspection etched unforgettably on our minds.

In his much later novel Travels With My Aunt, the protagonist Henry Pulling concurs, while reading an issue of Punch that the English character is unchangeable. True to this, the English characters, be it Hall or Minty, are indeed fatally and irrevocably unchangeable in their personality too. As Anthony himself muses, “they were really only happy when they were together.” England Made Me is an exquisitely written and emotionally resonant tragedy of the dislocation and disillusionment of an Englishman abroad in an European country more alienating and confounding than any remote colony of the Empire. With a cinematic style of prose that lends dramatic weight to an intricately minute narrative, with even a few daring detours into a subconscious dreams and thoughts more compelling and hypnotic than any stream of consciousness and with a dark, pensive climax inspired by one of his favourite books in boyhood, Greene ended up writing one of his most moving, dramatic and surreal triumphs, an underrated gem that deserves rediscovery indeed.

Zoeb Matin

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