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 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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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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