Graham Greene
Our Quarterly Magazine
A Sort of Newsletter: A Quarterly Magazine
The Trust publishes a quarterly magazine, each February, May, August and November, titled A Sort of Newsletter (ASON). Friends of the Trust receive free print copies as part of their membership. Each issue contains a rich mix of articles, reviews, correspondence and news. ASON is not intended to be an academic journal; there is something for everyone with an interest in the writer.
Rarely does a month go by without Graham Greene featuring in the news in some form or other. A Sort of Newsletter will keep you bang up to date with information about the latest Greene-related books, films, reviews and associated news from around the world.
The annual Graham Greene International Festival, held in September each year in Berkhamsted is the principal event in the Birthplace Trust’s calendar. Naturally, it features prominently in the pages of the newsletter with information about forthcoming festival appearing in the May and August issues followed by retrospectives on each event in the November issue.
So, if you are interested in Graham Greene, his life and his books and you are not currently a Friend of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, then you are urged to turn to the Members’ page on this website which gives all the details about joining and receiving A Sort of Newsletter.
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SOME TASTERS
To give you a flavour of what to expect to find within the pages of the magazine, we regularly publish features from the last four issues :
ISSUE 99 August 2024
ARTICLE
The Empty Chair
In 2008 Professor Francois Gallix (on right, below, with Martyn Sampson) found a fragment of an early Graham Greene murder mystery that was later published with the title The Empty Chair.
Professor Gallix thought that the story was likely written in 1926. I suspect he was a year out in his estimation: on May 27th 1927, this paragraph was published in the British newspaper The Daily News.
A Detective Story Competition.
Those with the ambition – and which of us does not possess it? – to write a successful detective story, are to be given a splendid chance in Messrs. Methuen’s Detective Story Competition. The first prize is to be £250, the second prize £150. The MSS must not have fewer than 70,000 words or more than 100,000 words and all entries must reach Messrs. Methuen’s office by June 30, 1928. The judges will be Mr A.A. Milne, Father Ronald Knox, and Mr. H.C. Bailey.
Greene enjoyed entering competitions and noticed this paragraph, writing about it to his fiancée, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. He told her that he had thought of a plot whilst at Mass, involving an old Catholic priest. He hoped this might attract the attention of one of the judges, Father Ronald Knox. A few days later on 1 June Greene wrote again to Vivienne asking for help in writing clues as he’d never written a detective story.
Now it appears highly unlikely that Greene would write to his fiancée in 1927, asking for her help to write a detective story and telling her that he’d never written one, if he had indeed started such a tale in 1926. Although Graham Greene was well known for dissimulation, there would be little to gain here from subterfuge. It is therefore my belief that the book fragment known as The Empty Chair is the beginning of a detective novel that Greene started in June 1927, in the hope of winning the Methuen competition.
Understanding that the detective story was written in 1927, not 1926, and was intended to be a work of at least 70,000 words allows further investigation into the existing fragment. Professor Gallix notes in his introduction to the French copy of the story, that it was unusual that Greene did not mention The Empty Chair in either his letters or his diaries. The Professor does note another lost mystery story to which Greene refers, that had similarities to The Empty Chair – a tale that included a young governess, a girl and a priest, but that in this case the governess was the murder victim. It seems likely that there was no other story and The Empty Chair was indeed this tale. Norman Sherry also mentions this murder mystery describing the story as involving a murdered governess, a young girl of twelve, and a priest. He notes that it was the girl that committed the crime and the priest that worked it out.
It may have been that Professor Gallix was misled by Sherry’s details as in The Empty Chair, it is a mature man Groves who is murdered. But I do not think this contradicts what we know of the uncompleted work. The young girl is fourteen, not twelve, but all other elements remain the same. What we do not know is the events Greene planned for the last 50,000 words of the novel – but we do know that another would likely die, the governess, and that her killer would be the young girl!
I believe Norman Sherry also inadvertently revealed another detail about The Empty Chair: Greene’s proposed title of the book! The biographer noted that in the mid-twenties, Greene sent Vivienne the first four chapters of a ‘shocker’. This was called ‘Queen’s Pawn’. Sherry said that it had been lost. These four chapters must surely be the four and a half chapters found by Professor Gallix in 2008. The fact that they are in Greene’s own handwriting indicate that this was work that had just been produced by Greene. He sent it to his wife-to-be, hoping that she might contribute to the story with some ideas or clues, as he had suggested in his letter of June 1927. That the story was not completed is no surprise – the couple had a more important engagement on their mind – their imminent marriage in October of that year.
‘Queen’s Pawn’ is an apt and excellent title for what we know about the fragment of manuscript. The Queen is Lady Perriham, an actress whom Greene indicates in the story is a version of another manipulative Queen, Lady Macbeth. The pawn is Sylvia, a young girl of fourteen who in a yet to be revealed way, is controlled by the Queen. And the action of the story? Well perhaps it is like a game of chess with, as in the classic opening of queen’s pawn, Sylvia being two steps ahead of everyone else on the board! It is evident from reading the fragment that was written, that Greene was experimenting with the whodunnit formula in an interesting way. The story was likely not only written as a puzzle of ‘who was the murderer?’ but also as one of ‘who is going to solve it?’ with four potential sleuths, the actor Collis, the police Inspector, Chief Inspector Maybury and Father Valentine !
So, The Empty Chair is almost certainly the first chapters of a detective story that Greene planned to write for a Methuen competition. The completed book would have been over 70,000 words long and was provisionally titled ‘Queen’s Pawn’. Interestingly in 1959 Greene wrote to his friend Gillian Sutro saying that he had abandoned four novels. He quoted them as ‘Across the Border’, ‘Fanatic Arabia’ and ‘Lucius’, but could not remember the fourth. It was, I think, ‘Queen’s Pawn’.
Greene did not complete ‘Queen’s Pawn’ or, as far as we know, enter the competition. The winning books were published by Methuen in February 1929. First prize went to N.A. Temple-Ellis with a weak thriller titled The Inconsistent Villains, second prize to T.L. Davidson with The Murder in the Laboratory. Another nineteen competition entries were subsequently published in a series titled Methuen Clue Stories. One of these books was The Man in the Queue, written by Gordon Daviot. This was a pseudonym used by Elizabeth Mackintosh, better known as Josephine Tey. This book, the first of Tey’s ‘Inspector Grant’ mysteries, was the real ‘find’ of the competition.
Philip Hormbrey
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ISSUE 98 May 2024
ARTICLE
Lucius: the mystery of the motive
ASON readers will perhaps recognise the name Lucius. It’s an unfinished novel written by Graham Greene in the second half of 1958; it was the subject of a talk I gave at the 2017 Festival, which in turn formed the basis of an essay in Volume 3 of the bibliography Jon Wise and I published in 2022. The novel is very autobiographical, and is, as Greene wrote in A Sort of Life, ‘a school novel of a timid boy’s blackmail of the housemaster who had protected him.’
A quick recap. Lucius begins with a prologue in which a UK Foreign Secretary, Sir Luke Winter, visiting his former boarding school (clearly based on Berkhamsted School) for their annual prize-giving. While there, he is challenged by his old school matron, who asks him: ‘Do you still betray your friends?’ The question seems to relate to one of Winter’s old teachers, a man called Stonier, who, it transpires, left the school and later killed himself. The story then scrolls back perhaps forty years to Winter’s first term at school, revealing the terrible bullying the boy endured; we even hear that Winter’s real name was actually Lucius Darling, a name he changed at the suggestion of his housemaster in order to give the bullies one less thing to pick on him for. That housemaster, Stonier, realises the boy’s distress, and does his best to advise and protect him – without much success. At the same time, Lucius becomes aware of an illicit affair between Stonier and the school matron, and the seeds are sown for Lucius’s future use of that knowledge.
And there, as Christmas approaches and the first term ends, Greene abandoned the novel, having written around 23,000 words of it. So, although we know from the prologue that Lucius had ‘betrayed’ Stonier, and of Stonier’s eventual fate, we don’t find out quite how the ‘blackmail’ Greene refers to in A Sort of Life would actually have played out if the novel had been finished. Perhaps above all, we have no idea what Lucius’s motive could have been in both betraying and blackmailing Stonier – a man, after all, who had done his level best to protect the boy.
Now we have an answer to at least that last question – Lucius’s motive. ASON readers will know that Graham Greene’s own library of over 3,000 books was sold to Boston College in the USA in 1995. Many of those books are heavily annotated by Greene himself: he was an inveterate scribbler who would often have a book at hand when a thought occurred to him, and down the thought went, in the margins or on the endpapers of the book. Sometimes it was a comment on the book itself, sometimes jottings the meaning of which can’t now be established, sometimes brief observations of fellow diners at Chez Felix in Antibes. And sometimes the comments were thoughts about his current writing, ideas for the way forward with work in progress. Graham Greene’s library is thus a very rich source of information about his creative processes.
Some of Greene’s jottings were included in a small pamphlet, From the Library of Graham Greene (Gloucester Road Bookshop, 1993). One of the selected annotations reprinted there, I find, concerns Lucius, and the boy’s motive. Inside The Notebooks of Henry James, which Greene must have been reading in 1958, is this annotation:
The story of the schoolboy, scared, bullied, protected by the housemaster and matron. The housemaster explains the nature of the bully – the temptation of power – ‘It will be possible for you one day. Avoid it because you understand.’ The discovery of the relationship between housemaster and matron. The realization that this can be used, in blackmail, to exercise power, to impress his persecutors. The suicide of the housemaster who doesn’t know who his blackmailer is, the realization by the matron.’
Here we have Greene’s overall plan for Lucius. It tells us a little about how the story would have continued had it been completed – in particular, that Lucius’s attempt at blackmailing Stonier was to have been anonymous, but worked out by the matron. But more significant here is Greene’s mature reflection on the nature of bullying, and hence the rationale of Lucius’s motives. Graham Greene, himself the victim of bullying at Berkhamsted School, came to realise that it was all about the exercise of power. It is this temptation to exercise power over others through physical or mental mistreatment that Stonier was to warn Lucius about – making him aware of the nature of bullying, trying to make Lucius less vulnerable thereby, and to make him less likely to become a bully himself. The completed novel Lucius would thus have been an exercise in irony. The bullied becomes a bully, through blackmail. The power he wields through persecution is precisely ‘to impress his persecutors.’ The teacher who warns against bullying becomes himself a victim. And the timid boy grows up to be a top politician, confident and assertive, and with a new identity recommended by the man he went on to blackmail.
What a pity that Graham Greene never finished Lucius.
Mike Hill
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ISSUE 97 February 2024
ARTICLE
Stuart Maye-Banbury and Angela Maye-Banbury live on Achill Island, County Mayo in the Republic of Ireland. They are both great admirers of Graham Greene’s work. Stuart is a composer, writer and guest lecturer specialising in music and memory. Angela, a scholar of place, memory and meaning, is the Founder and Chairperson of Achill Oral Histories and Emeritus Fellow in Oral History at Sheffield Hallam University.
Ache of Heart: The impact of Achill Island on Graham Greene’s life and work
‘A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’ So Greene wrote in the opening line of The End of the Affair. As we entered the Dooagh cottage on Achill Island on the stormy evening of 10 August 2023, it too felt like a census point in the ever-evolving Greene/Walston Achill story. John O’ Donnell, who had returned to Achill from Cleveland with his family, had generously agreed to show us around the cottage which is located next to his family home. As Mr O’ Donnell shone his torch to guide us safely through the door, our own portals of the imagination began to open. We were entering the place where it all began – Greene’s exhilarating and intensive thirteen year-long affair with Catherine Walston, an experience which was to impact on his work most profoundly. Greene and Walston first stayed in the Dooagh cottage in April 1947 and were frequent visitors there until 1949. Yet despite the palpable impact of Achill on Greene’s work, we know little about Greene’s time in Dooagh. If these rustic Irish walls could talk, they most certainly would have a tale to tell.
The cottage, now boarded up, sits a fraction off the main road up the hill from Gielty’s Bar, reputedly the westernmost pub in Europe and just a stone’s throw away from the current home of John ‘Twin’ McNamara, the island’s most respected bard. It is modest in its design and languishes in plain sight. But its views are far from ordinary – it sits a stone’s throw from the mighty Atlantic Ocean with magnificent views of Achill, Clew Bay, Clare Island and beyond. At the height of the tourist season, thousands of visitors pass by the Dooagh cottage oblivious to the fact that in the late 1940s, it played host to one of the most respected authors of the 20th century. Achill Island, Ireland’s biggest island, is renowned for its sublime landscape, traditional way of life and the gentility of its people. For centuries, it has been a magnet for writers, artists and musicians. Greene was captivated.
Walston had chosen the situation of her Achill retreat astutely. It was the perfect retreat for Greene who yearned for tranquillity to write undistracted. ‘I so long for somewhere like Achill or Capri where there are no telephones’, he later wrote to Catherine in 1950. The simplicity of the lifestyle in Achill, as a temporary interlude, suited them both. The cottage sits on the farthest outskirts of the townland of Dooagh on the gradually inclining road that stretches from the industrious hub of Achill Sound to the isolated splendour of Keem Bay.
Greene, then aged 43, was in love. For Greene the writer, the word ‘Achill’ evoked a Proustian rush of memory. Walston’s Achill cottage became synonymous with love, liberty and languor. Today, Greene’s presence in Achill may well be conspicuous by its absence. But there is no shortage of evidence about the profound impact his time on the island had on his work. Achill unleashed Greene’s imagination enabling him to write what is arguably some of his best work. With Catherine Walston at his side, the tranquillity of Achill stood in sharp contrast to the torment of the act of writing. Greene’s novel The End of the Affair was inspired by his time with Walston in the Achill retreat. It was also in Achill where Greene worked on The Heart of the Matter, published in 1948 but ironically banned in Ireland. He also worked on the film versions of The Fallen Idol, Brighton Rock and The Third Man as well as writing some of his best poetry in Achill. His collection of love poems, After Two Years, published two years after his first stay in the Dooagh cottage, reveals his intense feelings for Walston. Only 25 copies were printed and distributed to Greene’s family and friends. In a poem in the collection, Greene wrote: ‘In a plane your hair was blown, and in an island the old car lingered from inn to inn like a fly on a map. A mattress was spread on a cottage floor and a door closed on a world, but another door opened.’ A further collection, After Christmas, was published in 1951, with only 12 copies printed. These intimate collections, comprising two tiny volumes, were the sole output of the Greene’s publishing house the Rosaio Press. Greene found his experiences on the west coast of Ireland intoxicating. On his time in Achill in the late 1940s, he wrote ‘I who learned Ireland first from you.’ After returning from his second stay in Dooagh in August 1947, he told Walston that ‘Ireland is breaking in on me irresistibly.’
Writing to Catherine Walston in 1949, Greene said: ‘Somehow I feel an awful reluctance and ache of heart when I address the envelope to Achill. That was where we began […] we probably would never have done more than begin if we hadn’t had these weeks, but only an odd couple of days in England […] I wish I could make you feel, not just by faith, how missed you are the moment the door closes and how life begins when the door opens.’ The door to which he referred was both literal and metaphorical, a portal into new opportunities of both heart and mind. It was the physical entrance to the cottage where he first stayed with Catherine Walston, née Catherine Macdonald Crompton. Walston, born in New York State, was the beautiful bohemian wife of wealthy landowner, Labour Party politician and later peer Henry Walston. Greene too was married to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a talented poet in her youth who was working for Blackwells in Oxford at the time of their meeting. Greene and Walston’s affair had an air of inevitability with their respective partners watching helplessly as the affair gathered pace.
Yet despite the widespread critical acclaim Greene’s work received, his time on the island has been consigned to the margins of history and is fading faster with each passing day. Other than a cursory reference to Greene’s work on Achill Tourism’s ‘Arts and Culture’ web pages, the now privately-owned cottage is neglected entirely on the tourist trail. There is no plaque to signify the literary status of its former occupant. Nor is there any signage to indicate Greene’s presence on Achill. Perhaps most significantly, not one volume of Greene’s writing is to be found for sale on the island. On face value, the dearth of information on Greene’s time on Achill may seem a curious omission on an island that depends on tourist attractions for its summer months’ life’s blood. However, the reason for this is not hard to unravel. Greene’s peripatetic lifestyle stands in sharp contrast to Achill’s other noted author, Heinrich Böll who lived full-time on the island and is now represented by a writer’s retreat, festival and foundation. Consequently, memories of Greene’s visits to Achill are less enmeshed in the collective and cultural memory.
In 1999, Oliver Walston visited Achill some forty years after he was there as a child to reconnect with the cottage which had proved pivotal to his mother’s affair with Greene. Although the affair technically began outside Rules Restaurant in Maiden Lane London, Oliver Walston believes that it was Achill where Walston and Greene’s relationship truly flourished. Speaking in the BBC documentary ‘The Beginning of the End of the Affair’ (broadcast in 2000 to coincide with the opening of Neil Jordan’s film about Greene and Walston’s affair), Walston explained, ‘This was the first time she’d ever had a house of her own. It meant a terrific amount to her. This house is, I think, actually where the affair began … And 10 years later in April 1957, he wrote her a letter saying “Ten years ago, it all started in Achill.”’
The work of French philosopher Pierre Nora reminds us of the fallibility of memory and with it, the importance of marking these important lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) and the people with whom they are associated so we may remember never to forget. The relationship between people and place is intimate and complex. The Dooagh cottage is one such site of memory, an enduring feature on Achill’s landscape which played host to one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century.
Stuart and Angela Maye-Banbury
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ISSUE 94 May 2023
ARTICLE
Brighton Rock: the US first edition
The extensive coverage in February’s ASON of two variant opening sentences of Brighton Rock (’Hale knew …’) came to the conclusion that the US and the British first editions had different starts: ‘Hale knew that they meant …’ for the US, ‘Hale knew, before he …’ for the British. One reader has since suggested that the US edition went straight to the point about murder, rather than leaving it to the end of the sentence, because that suited the American temperament. Perhaps so; maybe we Brits can wait a few moments for our thrills. One thing to add to that whole debate, though: the US edition was actually published in June 1938, before the British release in July. So you could argue that ‘Hale knew that they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours’ is the true original version, even though the sub-claused British version now reigns supreme.Leaving aside that whole question of the novel’s opening sentence, that first US edition of Brighton Rock continues to cast a shadow. Lucas Townsend emailed with some questions to ask about his US edition of the book, as follows:
‘… my first copy of Greene’s Brighton Rock I owned I purchased in 2019 in the USA, and it is the 2004 Penguin Centennial Edition (with the watercolor(?) art of presumably Pinkie on the cover. The other centennial editions in this style were Orient Express, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, and Travels with My Aunt).
‘Now, on the very last page of the book – not page 269, which contains the closing lines about Rose walking towards “the worst horror of at all” – but rather, page 270, contains the following passages with no detailed explanation of who actually put them there:
‘ “NOTE TO AMERICAN READERS
‘ “During the summer season in England certain popular newspapers organize treasure hunts at the seaside. They publish the photograph of a reporter and print his itinerary at the particular town he is visiting. Anyone who, while carrying a copy of the paper, addresses him, usually under some fantastic name, in a set form of words, receives a money prize; he also distributes along his route cards which can be exchanged for smaller prizes. Next day in the paper the reporter describes the chase. Of course, the character of Hale is not drawn from that of any actual newspaperman. – G.G.
‘ “Brighton Rock is a form of sticky candy as characteristic of English seaside resorts as salt-water taffy is of the American. The word ‘Brighton’ appears on the ends of the stick at no matter what point it is broken off. – E.D. ”
‘Several questions here! Presumably “G.G”. is Greene, but when did he write this? Was this from the first Viking Press edition in America, or sometime later? Why is it in the back of the book, and not the front? Is this in every American edition? And who is “E.D.”? Surely an editor would say “Editor” or “ED.” with no period in between?
‘Presumably this information would be helpful for a first-time reader of the book, and should go on the front page; I certainly had no clue what Brighton Rock (the sweet) was when I first read it in the States and did not understand what Hale’s role was, until I saw this note on the last page…’
I can I hope answer all Lucas’s queries. First, ‘G.G’ is of course Graham Greene, and his note about the ‘treasure hunt’ organised by British newspapers was included in the ‘Note’ in the first US edition in 1938. Presumably US newspapers had not adopted the idea by the late 1930s. ASON readers may be interested if I expand on Greene’s words on the whole business by quoting from Wikipedia’s entry on ‘Lobby Lud’, the original for Greene’s ‘Kolley Kibber’:
Lobby Lud is a fictional character created in August 1927 by the Westminster Gazette, a British newspaper, now defunct. The character was used in readers’ prize competitions during the summer period. Anonymous employees visited seaside resorts and afterwards wrote down a detailed description of the town they visited, without giving away its name. They also described a person they happened to see that day and declared him to be the ’Lobby Lud’ of that issue. Readers were given a pass phrase and had to try to guess both the location and the person described by the reporters. Anyone carrying the newspaper could challenge Lobby Lud with the phrase and receive five pounds (about £320 in 2023).
The competition was created because people on holiday were known to be less likely to buy a newspaper. Some towns and large factories had holiday fortnights (called ‘wakes weeks’ in the north of England); the town or works would all decamp at the same time. Circulation could drop considerably in the summer and proprietors hoped prizes would increase it.
The character’s name was derived from the paper’s telegraphic address, ‘Lobby, Ludgate’.
The British colloquial phrase ‘You are (name) and I claim my five pounds’ is associated with Lobby Lud, despite being based on a similar idea thought up by a different paper.
After the demise of the Gazette in 1928 the competition continued in The Daily News, which became the News Chronicle from 1930, in turn being absorbed into the Daily Mail in 1960. Other newspapers such as the Daily Mirror ran similar schemes. ‘You are (name) and I claim my five pounds’, the most well-known phrase, seems to date from a Daily Mail version after World War II. A train, the Lobby Lud Express, was run to take Londoners to resorts Lobby visited.
In 1983 an original Lobby Lud – William Chinn – was discovered aged 91 in Cardiff, Wales. The Daily Mirror‘s ‘Chalkie White’ continues to visit resorts, and the idea has been taken up by local radio stations and other media, often offering lesser prizes.
It’s perhaps worth adding that Greene’s name ‘Kolley Kibber’ – Fred Hale’s equivalent of Lobby Lud in Brighton Rock – is in turn based on Colley Cibber (1671-1767), an English actor-manager, playwright and, from 1730, Poet Laureate.
But back to Lucas’s queries. He is right of course that ‘E.D’ should be ‘ED’, standing for ‘Editor’ – LibDem leader Ed Davey has not started moonlighting by editing Graham Greene’s novels. The ‘ED’ note was also included in the 1938 Viking Press US first edition of the novel, along with Greene’s own note, and presumably each subsequent US edition of the novel. (In fact, I have a 1997 Folio Society edition of the book, published in the UK, which also contains the ‘Note to American Readers’.) As the accompanying illustration of the US first edition shows, that edition has simply ‘Note’ as the heading, not the ‘Note to American Readers’ that Lucas’s edition has – presumably it was assumed that the 1938 edition would only be read by American readers, so there was no need to specify that, while in the internet age the Centennial Edition would be read worldwide, not just in the USA.
However, I have not been able to establish the name of Greene’s American editor in 1938 – presumably the one who settled on ‘Hale knew they meant to murder him…’ as the opening sentence: can any ASON reader shed any light on the editor’s identity?
As an American reader of Brighton Rock, Lucas is not alone in needing the editor’s help in explaining the very British idea of ‘rock’ as a long, hard, round stick of candy popular at seaside resorts. No doubt the problem for non-Brits partly explains why the 1947 film version of Brighton Rock was given the title Young Scarface in the USA, and also why a French Livre de Poche edition of the novel in the 1960s had the title Les rochers de Brighton, with a cover illustration of a steep rock face.
Finally, I can only agree and sympathise with Lucas’s point about the ‘Note to American Readers’ being placed at the back of the US, Centennial edition he read. Not very helpful. But in the 1938 first Viking edition, the ‘Note’ is at the beginning, as it should be – immediately after the Dedication page.
Mike Hill
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