Graham Greene Read Free

for you?
    Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene
        (Sec.)
    Lowell accepted for
29
April, but cancelled because of illness. She died of a stroke on
12
May
.
TO VIVIENNE DAYRELL-BROWNING (LATER VIVIEN GREENE)
    29 Museum Road [n.d.]
    Dear Miss Dayrell,
    Splendid. Do you mind keeping me company in disreputability? Respectability I have left behind at my Summertown digs, & I dare not fetch it, since my land lady believes I am at home, & would be horribly annoyed to find I’d merely changed my digs.
    The cinema with me has reached mania. I average four times a week. Every now & then I catch myself talking of live wires & the game kid, who could overdraw two dollars out of a Wisconsin County Bank, & was as quick as a Kentucky sausage.
    Will seven o’clock at the George suit you?
    I will pray for Skyscrapers & Sixshooters, for Black Jake of Dead Man’s Gulch, & the Man with the Broken Finger Nail.
    Yours,
     Graham Greene
TO VIVIENNE DAYRELL-BROWNING (LATER VIVIEN GREENE)
    Balliol College| Oxford | Tues. 26 May | 11.10 p.m.
    It must be rather fun collecting Souls, Vivienne. Like postage stamps. Last addition to collection Undergraduate Versifier, a common kind. Fair specimen, but badly sentimentalised. Colouring rather faded. Will exchange for Empire Exhibition Special Stamp, or ninepence in cash.
    I wish you weren’t so futilely far off. I don’t mean the mile & a half between Magdalen Street & Thorncliffe Rd. Or I wish I weren’t in love with you. I’ve always enjoyed it before, even when I thought I was being miserable. So I could stand outside & write jangly verse & say to myself ‘That’s a good idea. That’s how I feel.’ But I don’t know how I feel now. I enjoyed this evening marvellously, but now I’ve got back I feel you are just as far away as ever, & that it’s just as hopeless that you will ever be more than mildly interested in that blasted non-existent soul of mine. This letter will help you to analyse the specimen won’t it?
    What it all comes to, I suppose, is that I’ve never really been in love before, only suggested myself into a state of mild excitement in which I could draw fifteen bob out of the
Westminster
for a piece of verse. I can’t do that now though. I can’t think nearly clear enough to fit anything into a metre. You wouldn’t expect me to write verse when I was blind drunk would you? All this is ‘absurd.’ Of course it is to you. You can’t sympathise I suppose, any more than I can with the excitement & scurry of ants. Though how you can expect to know anyone’s mind or soul or anything, when you are so far off, I don’t know.
    I don’t know why I’m being so heavy & horrid, when really I’mfrightfully grateful to you for to-night. If you ask me to, I won’t say a single serious thing, when I next see you. I won’t even talk about you, if you ask me not to. It’s wonderful what you put up with. With love (which you won’t understand 18 ).
     Graham
    The blot is not carefully arranged to show desperation, but my thumb slipped.
    Do send me the snapshot you half said you would. Nine days! If you do, I’ll even discuss the Budget or the latest books with you. G.
TO A. D. PETERS
    On
1
May 1925, Basil Blackwell published Graham’s first book, a collection of poems. He had also finished a novel called ‘Anthony Sant’. Although Blackwell rejected it, the literary agent A. D. Peters liked it and tried, unsuccessfully, to find a publisher. In his last term at Oxford, Graham accepted a position in China with the British American Tobacco Company but resigned after a period of training
.
    The School House | Berkhamsted [
c
. June 1925]
    Dear Mr. Peters,
    I must confess to a horrid crime. Being rather bored & not knowing how long I shall remain in England, as I am running for a post in China, I sent the volume of verse altered & revised, under the title of
Babbling April
, to Blackwell, who published it last month. Alas! I went & contracted for first