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 101 February 2025

ARTICLE

Nigel Purse lives near Tring and here reflects on a holiday he had in Mexico with his wife a little over a year ago. Nigel attended Berkhamsted School and comments that he ‘was lucky enough to be taught by David Pearce when I was 16-18. Of course, he gave us Graham Greene to read.’

The Power and the Glory

Mexico

29 October – 11 November 2023

‘It was like a shortcut to the dark and magical heart of faith … Faith, one was told, could move mountains.’

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

‘Two countries just here lay side by side.’

Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads

Standing inside Templo de San Juan in San Juan Chamula, the light dim, we saw a sight which I could barely have imagined. Overwhelmed by the scent of pine leaves which were piled and strewn on the floor of what was a former Catholic church in structure and design, there was an overabundance of humanity and thousands of candles, all stood on the floor, flickering madly and dropping wax onto the stones. There were no pews. Hung from the apex of the ceiling and draped down to half way up the walls were canopies. Shamans, dressed in black woollen jackets – save for one in white, who seemed to be in charge – roamed around in slightly minatory fashion. It was clearly their house and their show. At the far altar, bedecked in orange marigolds, were cabinets containing images of the saints and Christ, all dressed in indigenous apparel. Except the saints had been appropriated, in a curious inversion of the way the Spaniards had, in their turn, similarly appropriated some of the pre-Columbian traditions into Catholic ceremonies. Now those saints stood for Mayan gods again. The bustle was fervent. There was a hum of priestly murmurings. A strange smell of incense hung in the air, in contrast to the dirt-poor poverty and grime of the decaying streets we had just walked through outside (somewhat sinisterly overlooked by the hillside mansions the shamans enjoyed).

Faith has many forms and dimensions, but most contain a common basis: the idea that a greater source of moral power should be honoured. What befell us in that church, however, defied any idea I had of a religion. In an almost grotesque fusion of Catholicism and shamanistic cult families gathered, as is the custom in Chamula, for individual ceremonies. Each family sat, often three generations, as a shaman quietly uttered imprecations. While he did so the father of the family passed around small cups of pocha (a spirit which we tasted later in the morning and found to be like fire water, such a kick did it have), poured from large plastic bottles. Even the youngsters, their formal education banned by the shamans, took drafts. Incongruously, however, in what seemed to me to be a sacrilegious rite, but to them was part of the oblation, they also drank Coca-Cola, apparently in order to induce the burping out of evil spirits. As the shaman/priest chanted away a chicken was produced, clucking, from a plastic bin-liner bag and, with the shaman’s sleight of hand so as to suggest the miraculous, slaughtered (no doubt the faithful would have said ‘sacrificed’) in an act of worship which was believed to take away or atone for bad thoughts and events.

At one and the same time I had both stumbled across what Graham Greene – whose school at Berkhamsted had been mine, too – had called both, in his Mexican travel diary, ‘the lawless roads’ and also, in his great novel about a whisky priest on the run in Mexico, ‘the power and the glory’. Lawless, because the government’s writ does not run in Chamula: instead the townsfolk submit to the rule of the shamans. The power and the glory because, in spite of what I saw as their somewhat skewed morality, those indigenous people were in their own ritualistic interpretation merely doing exactly what their Spanish Catholic forbears and their human sacrificing Aztec ancestors did: they were practising their faith. Whilst the Aztecs had believed in the idea of the blood sacrifice of men to appease their gods and the Catholics had introduced the idea of the sacrifice of the blood of one god to redeem all mankind the shamans now practice what I had just witnessed: the sacrifice of an animal to atone for man’s failings. Was this, I wondered, the faith that Graham Greene talked of in The Power and the Glory: ‘faith … that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead.’? To the shaman doctors, for they are regarded as medicine-men too, and their entranced participants it was clearly piety. To me it was witchcraft: barbaric, even. It was more akin to what Greene had actually seen for himself on his Mexican sojourn and had described in The Lawless Roads: ‘the Indian religion – a dark, tormented, magic cult.’

Such is the polychrome, polygenic pot pourri of popular culture in modern Mexico. If ever two countries lay side by side it is in those hills about San Cristobal. For, not half an hour later we were to visit another town home to an indigenous population: San Lorenzo Zinacantan. Here, amongst mint-fresh clean streets, we enjoyed demonstrations of local cloth weaving and, in a smoke-filled room, tortilla making while some of our party took the opportunity to try on local marriage attire. There was much mirth and a few family photo albums will, as a result, have some interesting snaps. In the Iglesia de San Lorenzo we found a charmingly well-kept church, full of sanctity and holiness. The contrast with those scenes in Chamula could not have been greater.

How appropriate it seems to me is the name of Mexico itself: a linguistic corruption by the conquistadors of the word ‘mestizo’, meaning mixed. But, today in Mexico ‘mestizo’ is a duality that underpins the very fabric of Mexican life. But such dichotomy is not new in Mexico. The Aztec myth of the serpent and the eagle, which determined where their capital, Tenochtitlan, was to be founded, also contained in the two animals the essence of Mexico’s struggle. And ‘mixed’ is how my wife, Irene, and I found modern Mexico.

‘Vamos,’ was a word our guide, Sonia, was to use a lot, recalling Greene’s whisky priest. We first heard it at Teotihuacan. Dating from just three centuries after Persepolis its scale was similarly overwhelming. According to a Nahuatl saying, it is ‘the place where men became Gods.’ It possesses both the numerical precision and imagination of a cosmological statement of belief made in the pre-Christian world of Mesoamerica.

‘heresy here was not an aberration of human feeling … but a mathematical error.’

Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads

For the Maya it was the source of both power and glory: the birthplace of the sun and moon, commemorated in two giant pyramids, where time first began to turn. It is also home, on a gigantic scale, to myriad palaces, altars and patios, covered with the barely visible, usually red in colour, wall paintings of the sun, rain and snakes. While it is chickens that are sacrificed in today’s Mexico, here five hundred years ago human sacrifice, which was conducted on a still visible platform directly in front of the sun pyramid, was central to the Aztec relationship with their gods.

In 2023 the glory of Mexico City must surely be the Anthropological Museum. Sonia steered us around the vast volume of artefacts, dwelling only on what mattered and providing the necessary narrative to explain. Herein lies the repository of Mexican culture, which is multi-dimensional: the rise and fall of the Olmec, Teotihuacan, Maya, Toltec, Aztec and Zapotec, all piled on top of each other with each successive civilisation borrowing what it found useful from its predecessor. Until, that is, Hernan Cortes arrived in 1519. Just as Pizarro later did in Peru, Cortes’ modus operandi was to destroy the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan and build, using the same stones, a Catholic cathedral exactly on top of where it stood. All around the Zocalo (the main square in the old town) a precarious twisting of elegant colonial buildings is the only testimony left to the fact that Moctezuma’s city lay on a lake, upon which the Spanish built today’s Mexico City.

In Chichen Itza and Palenque Greene found what he called ‘the enormous tombstones of history’. While the latter emerges, dripping, from he called the ‘wild nature’ of the jungle’s timeless clutches the former’s massive pyramid displayed an unarguable majesty all of its own. Here we found the physical remnants of the power and glory of Mexico before its conquest. One of Greene’s literary contemporaries concluded:

‘The architects of pre-Columbian America were more fortunate than most of those of Europe. Their masterpieces were never condemned to invisibility, but stood magnificently isolated, displaying their three dimensions to all beholders.’

Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay

Set high on the hills outside Oaxaca, and again on a vast scale, Monte Alban exuded the temporal might of palace and the spiritual tone of temple. For Greene, it ‘is the work of men who knew their architectural business consummately well.’ But, for once it was not his verdict which resonated with me, a founder member of Greenes House in 1976. Instead, it was here we understood what another early twentieth century author had noticed, ironically inspired this time by Berkhamsted School’s school psalm, number 121:

‘”I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my strength.” At least one can always do that, in Mexico.’

D.H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico

 All three sites, plus that of Uxmal – home to yet another magnificent pyramid which dramatically confronted us square on, seemingly touching the heavens, as we emerged from the entrance walkway – also contained the same pre-Columbian scene of both power and glory: the ball game. In courts with their distinctive hoops on the walls two teams fought with the desperation of gladiators, playing a game which seemed to combine the obscurity of the rules of the Eton wall game and the spectacle of real tennis to get a rubber ball through the hoops using only knees, thighs and elbows. There was glory, for sure, in the sporting outcome but also power in the consequences that one side (and, curiously, it is unclear whether it was the losers or the winners) were subsequently decapitated, as was depicted in wall carvings at Chichen Itza. Nowadays minatory buzzards circle over Monte Alban while humming birds hang, magically defying gravity with the beguiling delicacy of their exertions, sucking nectar from the flowers of the Cazahuati. By contrast, a vulture perched over the ruins of Kabah, master of all he surveyed with the entirety of our tourist companions in his thrall, obligingly wafted his wings. There was magic in all those stones.

   There was no such mystique in our journey from San Cristobal to Palenque. When Mexican roads are not clinging circuitously to hillsides they are arrow straight. They are still, in parts, as Greene found them, ‘lawless’. Forced to take a much longer route in order to avoid protestors who had developed an unfortunate habit of blocking the shorter route in a display of provincial defiance, we got up at 4 am to begin the journey and did not arrive until after dark. Our route, in contrast to the brown surroundings of the capital, was largely through long stretches of lush green rainforest. At times the roads passed through dirt poor, shanty communities which might just as well have belonged in one of Greene’s novels. The same thought crossed my mind in Chamula. There we saw indigenous people living in the misery of a poverty which was all too clear. In the incessant and unforgiving rain we walked down streets full of litter, past a butcher’s shop selling hooves on roads and pavements which were fractured and splitting.

On our journey to Palenque we dodged enormous, Brobdingnagian double trailer trucks and minuscule, Liliputian motor cyclists. The yellow line in the middle of the highway appeared to be only for guidance and not for demarcation. Once, we were stopped by police, vigilant in pursuit of illegal immigrants. The fugitive ghost of Greene’s whisky priest lives on, but in a rather different guise. Past brown sugar plantations and shack shops purveying outsize water melons and gorgeous looking, bulging pineapples. Fallen trees littered the landscape as we navigated floods and roadblocks alongside precipitous ravines and swollen rivers. Here we encountered neither power nor glory.

Glorious, by contrast, was the Mexican cuisine. The essence of even that could be described as mixed, which gives the food a distinctive complexity. There is no Mexican meal which does not involve a combination of sauces – predominantly red salsa, black mole and brown bean sauce, each themselves the product of multiple ingredients. Enchiladas, esquilladas, tacos, tamales. You name it, we tried it – in varying degrees of quality. Nothing escaped a dousing of lime juice. We passed on Oaxaca’s grasshoppers and larvae, mind you. Oaxaca is the food capital of Mexico and it contains, reputedly, the country’s finest restaurant; Casa Oaxaca. Booked for months in advance it defied Sonia’s efforts to find space for our party. Instead, with what we reasoned was nothing to lose, we went and stood at its front desk. Our luck was in and we relished the squashed vine soup with Mexico’s famous stringy cheese, squash blossoms and quesadillas. All garnished with a salsa, made by our waiter with a pestle and mortar at our table to our order from an array of spices and ingredients. Oh, the mole! It was a meal we will never forget. Greene had enjoyed Oaxaca, as I did, too. ‘Yes, Oaxaca is a fine place,’ he commented. Later we were similarly fortunate to experience the Caribbean culinary influence of the Yucatan at La Chaya Maya in Merida. All too frequently we found ourselves anointing our meals with margaritas: mescal based in Oaxaca; tequila everywhere else.

 Another of Mexico’s underrated glories is its wildlife. This we enjoyed up close and personal on a boat ride down the Sumidero Canyon on the Grijalva River. From the advantage of its velocity we glimpsed spider monkeys, gymnastically looping about in the trees, contemplative pelicans with exaggeratedly long beaks, delicate egrets perched on rocks, cormorants on the wing low over the waters and buzzards. Crocodiles lounged, louche, on the river bank, one or two with jaws wide open: very arresting. Under the shadows of the towering sides of the gorge itself we half expected two fugitives, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to come plummeting from the sky into the waters.

‘…huge gorges covered with forest, sometimes grey walls of rock falling like a curtain for five hundred feet, trees grasping a foothold in the cracks and growing upwards…’

Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads

     Merida, ruled as it had been direct from Spain and not Mexico City, seemed to have a singularly acute sense of its past. Here, there was power but little glory. The part run down, part magnificently restored colonial mansions and calle were almost more Spanish than Spain. The vividly enormous ‘Realistic’ art murals of Fernando Castro Pacheco in the Governor’s Building and the vibrant carvings on the splendid Monumento a la Patria to Mexico’s history – in the middle of a roundabout, a bit like Piccadilly Circus, where, devoid of shade, we nearly cooked as Sonia related the stories of Mexico’s more recent past – seemed, according to our guide’s narrative, to contain as many villains as heroes.

 Rather amusingly, in one of Merida’s calle, down which we so enjoyed strolling, we passed a most entertaining advert for a dentists’ practice, prominently featuring a drill. Given its prominence, I do not suppose they have so much trouble in sourcing drill bits as Greene’s dentist, Mr Tench, did, I reflected.

As if to draw our attention to the Spanish heritage our delightful hotel in Merida is a former Franciscan church and convent, named after Frey Diego, the Spanish bishop who encouraged the missionary zeal of the Counter-Reformation’s most ardent evangelical hit-squads to convert and wipe out all trace of the Mayan way of life. It looks like he succeeded. While Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, has been virtually erased from Mexico – such is the lingering hatred of the conquest – much of Diego’s legacy remains.  In Oaxaca’s San Domingo the immense power of Spain was on show: a masterpiece of the Counter-Reformation from floor to ceiling. Commanding awe, its imposing Baroque design was a statement direct from God himself: ‘I am in charge,’ it seemed to say. There was no doubting that it was no earthly authority that holds sway there. Greene’s response considered only the political, not the ecclesiastical: ‘One stoops under the weight of the monstrous Spanish dynasty,’ he wrote. Here was both glory and power, I thought.

   At La Soledad – in what Greene found to be ‘the most human church … in Oaxaca.’ – we enjoyed an ethereal organ recital of distinctly European flavour (Bach?, we mused). Merida’s cathedral was enormous: domineering because of scale, but entirely plain. Campeche’s merely sweated in the evening heat. San Cristobal’s churches we found in a near permanent state of closure, supposedly for restoration. By contrast, the post-modern Basilica de Guadalupe, one of five churches in a higgledy-piggledy complex in Mexico City, spoke of today’s world and, with its pictures and statue of John Paul II, merely reminded us that the pull of Catholicism in Mexico today is stronger than ever. Power, indeed.

In San Cristobal only faded authority in the form of the crumbling Spanish haciendas and the churches was visible. Disfigured beggars vied for the streets with roaming dogs. Ambulantes (street vendors) abounded while the bars pumped out a constant beat. While Greene had enjoyed the early hours in San Cristobal – ‘It was a lovely town to wake to in the morning light,’ he writes – I found delight in the evenings. There, amongst the troubadours and the vivid colours, we enjoyed one of Mexico’s most authentic glories. We sat on a street table, supping up the distinctly and characteristically bitter hot chocolate for which Mexico is justly famous. We had seen it made, pressed from beans, in Oaxaca. Reflecting on the brief influence the French had in nineteenth century Mexico, I realised, sitting under the stars of the San Cristobal night, why Aldous Huxley had concluded that, ‘Mexican culture still remains predominantly French.’

    We have been blessed on our travels with many, many fine guides and Sonia is one of the very best. She could be described as politically ‘progressive’. I admired the way she railed against what she sees as social injustice. We are regularly (and, delightfully) treated to her views on the corruption of past presidents and Big Oil and the modern drug cartels which bedevil parts of Mexico today. For Sonia, her Mexico is all power and no glory. The 500,000 Pesos per month allowance for former Presidents (corrupt or otherwise – and there aren’t many who seem to qualify as ‘otherwise’) is a particular thorn in her world view, along with the oil barons who, she alleges, syphoned off large volumes of the black stuff into their personal accounts. We are left in no doubt who will get her vote in the forthcoming presidential elections. Her final, acerbic verdict on the politicians was delivered with genuine contempt: ‘They don’t do nothing. They are lucky. They are feared.’ What I loved most about Sonia was her insatiable appetite for learning. Her historical thirst, in particular, was utterly unquenchable.

           As we struggled, windswept and cold in the driving rain, up the hill to the top of Chamula it was impossible to ignore the shell of a ruined church and the rows of crosses in its adjacent graveyard, festooned in yellow marigolds as it was for the Day of the Dead. Greene had dealt with this sight in his fiction:

‘A grove of crosses stood up blackly against the sky’

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

But, he had seen it for himself and his epitaph on the mountains outside San Cristobal de las Casas was impossible to ignore:

‘here in the mountainous strange world of Father Las Casas, Christianity went on its own frightening way. Magic, yes, but we are apt to minimize the magic element in Christianity … The great crosses leaned there in their black and windy solitude.’

Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads

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ISSUE 100 November 2024

OBITUARY

François Gallix

At this year’s Festival I heard the sad news that François Gallix has died.

François Gallix – Professor of Contemporary Literature in English at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris – hit the headlines in 2008 when The Times published the first chapter of a detective story Graham Greene wrote at the age of around 22. François had found the unfinished whodunit at the archive in Austin, Texas, and the whole 22,000 words were eventually published by Strand Magazine with the title ‘The Empty Chair’, each chapter with an introduction by Professor Gallix. François was very active in the whole field of Greene studies, organising a conference on The Power and the Glory at the Sorbonne and publishing in France a number of volumes containing or concerning Greene’s writings.

François first spoke at the Graham Greene Festival in 2008. His topic was Brighton Rock as a literary Catholic detective story. It was the first of a whole series of Festival talks Professor Gallix gave over the years – on Greene’s unpublished material, on his books for children, on Greene, Spies and MI6, on Greene’s Magic Places, and on To Beg I am Ashamed, the book that Greene never wrote. For over a decade François was a Festival regular.

François was a delight to know. He was a seriously scholarly French intellectual, but he wore his learning lightly, and he was always an interesting, friendly and humorous companion at Festival time. He was such a collector of Greene’s work that he confessed himself an addict, always the first at Oxfam’s Berkhamsted bookshop during the Festival in the hope of scooping up an unregarded first edition. At the end of Festival talks, François would always have a penetrating question or two for the speaker, always stimulating and thoughtful. I came to regard him as a friend, and he was more than happy to provide references and other support to Jon Wise and myself as we pursued our bibliographical researches.

As the years go by we register that we are missing some of those who brought insight, delight and friendship at Festival time. François Gallix was one such.

 Mike Hill

Remembering François Gallix

I have always treasured the memory of Graham Greene Festivals not simply for the valuable knowledge gained but for the enduring friendships formed. One such special friendship was with François Gallix. I cannot quite recall our first meeting but we must have hit it off more or less instantly for we continued corresponding between Festivals and in his correspondence he would address me as ‘my English twin’.

François was a regular and popular speaker at earlier Festivals. He was a formidable literary scholar and translator, publishing French editions of works by Greene, Conrad, Sillitoe, D.H. Lawrence, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Atwood, Graham Swift and others. Yet he had the gift of making his erudition entertaining and his lectures seemed always to be delivered with a twinkle in his eye. He was a generous and supportive soul. I owe to François the opportunity to give a lecture at the Sorbonne on The Power and the Glory. When I was writing a book on the great Hollywood director George Stevens and noticed that France’s leading film journal Positif were publishing a special brochure on his work, I asked François if he could possibly send me a copy. He obliged instantly.

I have two predominant recollections of François at the Festival and they both make me smile. One year, when I was invited to be the Festival Director, one of my first thoughts was to ask François to give a talk about his remarkable discovery of an early unpublished story by Greene, ‘The Empty Chair’, which was immediately recognised as a find of great literary interest. When I introduced François’ talk, I remember inadvertently referring to the story as ‘The Empty Table’, confusing it in my mind with a film of that title by the esteemed Japanese director, Masaki Kobayashi. I can still hear François’ voice gently interrupting to point out that I had got the wrong item of furniture.

My other recollection is the occasion when François introduced a lecture on Brighton Rock by producing a stick of rock which he had travelled specially to Brighton to buy and which he then presented to Graham Greene’s daughter, Caroline as a memento. I said to myself: this is a man who clearly believes in first-hand research. I don’t know whether Caroline ever ate it. I think I would have been tempted to have it framed.

My abiding memory is that we laughed a lot together, which is a delightful thing to recall of someone whom I will always think of fondly as ‘my French twin’.

Neil Sinyard

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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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