Graham Greene Read Free Page B

then the end seemed badly botched, and I can see that it was strangely optimistic for one of my temperament. I made the young man find a kind of content by joining a ship at Cardiff as a Negro deckhand, so escaping from the middle class and his sense of being an outsider.’
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    Balliol College | Oxford [
c
.
    June 1925] Dear Mr. Peters,
    Many thanks for your letter. I’ve been at work on ‘Anthony Sant’. I found a lot of small things I wanted to alter in the first chapter, mostly in the way of terribly banal adjectives.
    I’ve got Ch. IV properly sorted now, so that there’s no break in the narrative; I’ve also eliminated all the first persons.
    I’m just beginning on the last chapter. Do you think the public must have Anthony settling down somewhere with a woman? My idea now is so to alter the character of the prostitute, as to make her return to the old trade not particularly unpleasant to a soft hearted reader. A. would then recover not only from his attempted suicide, but also a little of his sense of humour. The whole drift of the story hitherto has been in the difficulty of reconciling his colour with his civilised sex instincts. Now he will find a perfectly happy compromise by cutting out any idea of the ‘love instinct.’ And he’ll be left in the stoke hold of a ship, finding happiness in physical fatigue, & in mixing with a medley of nationalities, where his colour does not give him any inferiority complex, & where he is completely cut off from his family & caste. The idea would wind up with a description of the furnaces etc. conveying the feeling thatthis in its way is like the forest, which he has been aiming at in his dreams. 20
    It sounds very crude put like this, but I think it could be worked out all right, & seems to me more plausible than a sexually happy ending. Do you think it might go down all right?
    Then there’d be quite a number of titles one might have. What about ‘Escape’, ‘The Joyful Compromise’, or ‘Open Sea’?
    Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene
    P. S. I hope I may have the chance of seeing you in the vac.
TO A. D. PETERS
    Following the failure of the Germans to pay war indemnities, the French attempted to set up a ‘Revolver Republic’ in the occupied Ruhr in 1922. They assembled a loose army of German separatists, thugs recruited from brothels and French prisons, to assist the collaborators. Graham persuaded the Count von Bernstorff at the German embassy to finance a trip in the spring of
1924
for himself, his cousin Edward Greene (called ‘Tooter’) and Claud Cockburn, so they could write articles on the crisis from the German perspective. While there, the three conceived a novel after the manner of John Buchan, but nothing came of it. 21 A year later, Graham made another attempt at the thriller. He returned to the subject in
The Name of Action (1930).
    The School House | Berkhamsted [1925]
    Dear Mr. Peters,
    I enclose the first 20,000 (circa) words of the ‘shocker’ in the hope that you may be able to serialise it. Is it necessary to give a synopsis of the whole plot? Once again I do not like the title, but atpresent I have been unable to think of anything else. There is another point also. Try as I would I could not introduce a love interest before, at the very earliest, Ch. VI. Will this militate against its being taken as a serial? I expect you will find the whole story rather derivative, though the main theme of the German Separatists has, I think, not yet been taken in this type of fiction.
    Re Anthony Sant’s title. What do you think of ‘Crouching Dust’ from Blunden’s lines (I quote from memory)
    ‘And all my hopes shall with my body soon
    Be but as crouching dust & wind-blown sand.’?
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    Yours very sincerely
     Graham Greene
    P.S. Let me know if you require a synopsis of the rest of this story.
TO VIVIENNE DAYRELL-BROWNING (LATER VIVIEN GREENE)
    37 Smith St. |Chelsea, S.W. | Aug. 7 [1925]. 6.30 p.m.
    Darling,
    I got your second