Part Three
Most of the areas in which Greene travelled are mentioned in the autobiographical volumes, A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and Reflections. Paul Hogarth’s book, Graham Greene Country, offers pictures of (and comments on) various regions.
AMSTERDAM. The setting of an adulterous liaison in The Complaisant Lover.
ANTIBES. The coastal resort in the South of France where Greene lived in his later years; the setting of ‘May We Borrow Your Husband?’, ‘Beauty’ and ‘Chagrin in Three Parts’.
ARGENTINA. The region around Posadas (northern Corrientes), on the fluvial border with Paraguay, is the location of The Honorary Consul.
BELFAST. Wartime Belfast is described in ‘Convoy to West Africa’; Greene’s encounter there with the hostile housekeeper of a ‘nice young priest’ provided material for Act II, scene ii, of The Potting Shed.
BERKHAMSTED (Hertfordshire). This is where the young Greene lived. Its canal, railway bridge, common and remnants of a castle appear in numerous works, including It’s a Battlefield (Chap. 4), ‘The Innocent’, ‘The Other Side of the Border’, ‘Doctor Crombie’, The Human Factor and The Captain and the Enemy.
BRIGHTON. ‘No city before the war, not London, Paris or Oxford, had such a hold on my affections’ (WE, p. 78). This colourful town is seen not only in Brighton Rock but also in Travels with My Aunt, and is recalled in Carving a Statue. Many of the features that Greene mentions (such as the Clock Tower, the Palace Pier, the Royal Albion Hotel, the gardens of Old Steine) remain. Dr Brighton’s pub (the Star and Garter) has, sadly, been modernised, but the Cricketers (on the edge of the Lanes) has so far retained its Edwardian character, recalled fondly by Greene. The annual Brighton Festival sometimes includes conducted tours entitled ‘Graham Greene’s Brighton’.
CAPRI. Greene owned the Villa Rosaio in Anacapri, and numerous characters of Capri are described in the memoirs of Dottoressa Elizabeth Moor (An Impossible Woman), which Greene edited. She was one of the sources of Aunt Augusta in Travels with My Aunt. The veteran author and paedophile, Norman Douglas, was another of Greene’s friends there; he and Capri are affectionately commemorated in the essay ‘Norman Douglas’, which says: ‘Nepenthe [in Douglas’s South Wind] had not been Capri, but Capri over half a century has striven with occasional success to be Nepenthe’ (CE, p. 363). Eventually Greene was made an honorary citizen of Anacapri.
CHIPPING CAMPDEN. The market town in rural Gloucestershire where Graham and Vivien lived in the early years of their marriage. Its characters are described in ‘Death in the Cotswolds’ (R) and Chap. 11 of A Sort of Life.
CONGO. The Belgian Congo is the setting of his ‘Congo Journal’ and A Burnt-Out Case. In 1959 he spent a few weeks at the lèproserie at Yonda: ‘A garden city of 800 patients [;].….all here are contagious cases’ (IS, p. 16). His diligent research informs the account of the leper colony in A Burnt-Out Case.
CUBA Our Man in Havana is set in the Batista era and depicts Cuba as a police state mitigated by decadent, sleazy entertainments. ‘The Marxist Heretic’ (in Collected Essays), ‘Return to Cuba’ and ‘Shadow and Sunlight in Cuba’ (both in Reflections) offer predominantly flattering accounts of Fidel Castro and his Marxist dictatorship.
DUBLIN. ‘Impressions of Dublin’ (R) describes the atmosphere of the city in 1923, in the aftermath of the Civil War.
HAITI. Greene visited Haiti in 1963. The hideously tyrannical regime of Dr Duvalier is reported in Chap. 8 of Ways of Escape and in ‘Papa Doc’ (R), and is depicted in The Comedians. Duvalier’s ‘Department of Foreign Affairs’ responded with the pamphlet Graham Greene démasqué, which accuses Greene of sadism and ‘negrophobia’. (See WE, Chap. 8.)
JAMAICA, particularly Kingston: the location of ‘Cheap in August’.
KENYA. Greene toured Kenya during the Mau Mau insurgency, a tense time recalled in the tale ‘Church Militant’ and in Ways of Escape, Chap. 6. ‘British justice was not a sufficient gift to the Kikuyu people to win them for the future.’
LEWES and the South Downs of Sussex. Described evocatively in ‘A Walk on the Sussex Downs’ (R, pp. 17–18) and The Man Within.
LIBERIA. The African country traversed by Graham and Barbara Greene. Their ordeals are described in his Journey without Maps and her Land Benighted. It provides the location of ‘A Chance for Mr Lever’.
LONDON. Greene’s employment by Gabbitas & Thring of Sackville Street and subsequently by The Times is remembered in A Sort of Life, Chaps 9 and 10. ‘In It’s a Battlefield the Assistant Commissioner’s journey from Piccadilly to Wormwood Scrubs had to be followed street by street’, recalled Greene. That novel provides many sharp cameos of London districts in the early 1930s. Greene knew intimately the pubs and clubs round Tottenham Court Road and Soho: they are cited and recalled in numerous works (even in ‘The Third Man’). The Gower Street area, where he was a warden in the Blitz and worked for the Ministry of Information, is recalled in ‘Men at Work’, The Ministry of Fear and The End of the Affair. His journal of the Blitz is quoted in Ways of Escape, Chap. 4. Clapham Common, where his Queen Anne house at 14 North Side was bombed, features in The Ministry of Fear, The End of the Affair and, obliquely, in ‘The Destructors’. Belgravia, with its imposing houses, square and plane trees, is the setting of ‘The Basement Room’ (and therefore of the film The Fallen Idol and the tale ‘The Fallen Idol’). In Journey without Maps, Kensington Gardens is the location of an encounter with a perverted Old Etonian. ‘A Little Place off the Edgware Road’ is a horror story. Piccadilly is the location of ‘Jubilee’. Albany (once the residence of Lord Melbourne in Piccadilly) is a setting of The Return of A. J. Raffles. In the 1950s Greene rented a flat in Albany and once smoked opium there with Catherine Walston. Previously he had rented a flat at 5, St James’s Street, next to hers at number 6.
MALAYA. Greene’s experiences during the emergency there are described in Ways of Escape, Chap. 6.
MEXICO. The border crossing on the Rio Grande (Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico) is the setting of ‘Across the Border’. Greene’s journey through Tabasco and Chiapas is recorded in The Lawless Roads and exploited in The Power and the Glory. The port of Frontera becomes ‘Obregón’ in the novel; the fictional capital is based on Villahermosa, humid capital of Tabasco. Veracruz is the location of ‘The Lottery Ticket’.
MONTE CARLO. The appropriate setting of a novella of gambling, Loser Takes All. In 1955 Greene stayed at the Hôtel de Paris (‘chargeable as an expense to my income tax’) while pursuing research at the Casino.
MOSCOW. The bleak destination of Casde in The Human Factor. In Moscow in 1987, Greene declared to Mikhail Gorbachev: ‘There is no longer a barrier between Roman Catholics and Communism’ (R, p. 317).
NOTTINGHAM. Recalled in Stamboul Train, A Gun for Sale (as Nottwich), The Confidential Agent, The Potting Shed and Chap. 9 of A Sort of Life.
OXFORD. See ‘Harkaway’s Oxford’, ‘Anthony à Wood’ and ‘Inside Oxford’ (CE). Greene’s college, Balliol, is the location of The Great Jowett and appears in ‘When Greek Meets Greek’.
PANAMA. Greene’s involvement in Panamanian politics and, particularly, his friendship with General Torrijos and his henchman Chuchu are described in ‘The Country with Five Frontiers’ and Getting to Know the General. Panama is the setting of the second half of The Captain and the Enemy.
PARAGUAY. Discussed in ‘The Worm inside the Lotus Blossom’ (R). Asunción and its locality feature in Travels with My Aunt and The Honorary Consul.
PARIS. The tale ‘Brother’ is set in the Faubourg du Temple; ‘Strike in Paris’ (1934, R) reports the background. ‘Two Gentle People’ opens in the Parc Monceau.
PEACEHAVEN. In the 1930s this was a dreary, largely unfinished township (begun in 1922), mainly of cheap bungalows arranged on a grid pattern, speculatively built on a windswept coastal plateau north of the cliffs between Brighton and Newhaven. The location mocks the haven of divine peace invoked by ‘dona nobis pacem’ In Brighton Rock, after driving there with Rose, Pinkie leaps to his death at Telscombe Cliffs, contiguously to the west of Peacehaven.
SIERRA LEONE. Greene visited Freetown in 1935 and worked there as an agent for MI6 during the Second World War. His ‘brighter schemes’ for collecting information included ‘a brothel to be opened in Bissau for visitors from Senegal’. His house there, evidently of a Greeneland design, was infested by rats, spiders, ants and flies; it backed on to an area of scrub-land used as a public lavatory. Freetown is the setting of The Heart of the Matter and features in ‘The Other Side of the Border’ and, briefly, in ‘Convoy to West Africa’. His return at Christmas 1967 is described in ‘The Soupsweet Land’ (CE): ‘I felt the guilt of a beach-comber manqué : I had failed at failure. ’
SPAIN. Rumour at Nightfall is set in Spain in the late nineteenth century, but Greene said: ‘I knew next to nothing of Spain where the story takes place (at sixteen I had spent one day between Vigo and Coruña)’ (WE, p. 19). The Spanish Civil War provides the political background to The Confidential Agent.
STOCKHOLM. Greene visited Stockholm with his brother Hugh in 1933 to research England Made Me. The young woman who slapped his face by the lakeside there was transformed into Loo, the tourist from Coventry who slaps Anthony Farrant. Between 1955 and 1959, Greene was a lover of the Swedish actress Anita Björk, and bought a house for her near Stockholm.
TRIER. This ancient city on the Mosel River on the western border of Germany is the birthplace of Karl Marx and the location of The Name of Action.
VIENNA. The city in the late 1940s, devastated by war, is the setting of The Third Man.
VIETNAM. In the 1950s Greene made several tours of this war-torn land: they are described in Ways of Escape, Chap. 6, and in Reflections, pp. 160–88. The fictional outcome was The Quiet American. Greene’s interview with Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi is reported in ‘The Man as Pure as Lucifer’ (CE, pp. 402–4). Under communist rule, Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, has lost its brothels and opium-dens; the French perfumeries on the leafy rue Catinat have been replaced by jewellery shops; the Roman Catholic cathedral at the top of the street is still a ‘hideous pink’. The Place Gamier (where the bomb explodes in The Quiet American) now, as Lam Son Square, houses the building of the People’s Committee, a fast-food shop called Planet Saigon, and the Queen Bee Karaoke Restaurant. Fowler might be disappointed.