In January 1984 I went to see a classic play called The Game of Croquet. I had a seat in the front row of the stalls and I felt a little nervous because a few days before in the opening scene Paul Scofield, who played the leading role, had inadvertently sliced a croquet ball into the stalls and blooded a spectator in one eye. However on this night nothing unfortunate happened. I found myself listening to a very interesting dialogue. The play was about three students who for final exams had to go to the house of an old academic and attend a party where each would be judged on his behaviour. One of the three was obviously very shy. The academic proved to be most friendly, and he seemed to be helping the shy one through his paces—helping him in fact to grow up and become adult. The dialogue ran easily and amusingly. I felt as though I were making it up myself.
In May 1965 I was closely involved in the production of a blank-verse historical play with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I found them both more agreeable than I had expected, and Taylor more beautiful than I had thought, and a better actress.
The play was presented, for the first time, in the open air in Canterbury with the cathedral in the background. Burton made the opening speech before the appearance of a half-mad king—Henry VI?—played by my friend Alec Guinness. Guinness missed his cue and Burton covered up for him by improvising a verse referring to ‘the recesses of this cavernous tent.’ The audience laughed sympathetically when they realized what he was at, while Guinness looked around and said, ‘I dried up.’
I was furious. I had the feeling he was behaving like this through jealousy of Burton, and I leant forward from my front seat and said, ‘You swine.’ He looked at me with injured surprise. Burton was unperturbed, but the performance for that night was off.
The opening was postponed till the following night. It was hoped that the critics would wait in Canterbury, but the next night the seats were all empty. Guinness played with his part in his hand, and although a television camera was there Burton treated the occasion like a rehearsal, interrupting the other players. A disaster!
Later in 1965 I was engaged in making a film with Peter Glenville, from an original story set in Mexico in the nineteenth century. Peter wanted to go riding with me and he had found a small black horse for me, but I don’t care for riding and I let him practise alone, riding in circles.
We arrived at the point in the script where an innocent hero, Drew, in company of a man called Houghton, is being pursued by sheriffs after a bank robbery. They rest their horses for a moment by one of those branching cacti known in Mexico as a ‘candelabra’. Peter thought this presented an unnecessary difficulty, but I assured him that making a film about Mexico without showing a cactus was like filming Paris without the Eiffel Tower. He would only have to go a few miles south of Mexico City before finding such cacti.
The character Drew would see the candelabra and quote a nursery rhyme to Houghton, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head,’ and at that moment the sheriffs’ posse would appear on the horizon.
I was asked to act the part of a priest who committed suicide at Mass, in a play to be performed in a small theatre in North Africa, but I was given no dialogue and the script gave no explanation of my actions.
I decided to extemporize.
A priest was preaching when I came on the scene. He told the audience that not only were the consecrated water and wine holy, but also ‘the implements’ of the Mass, the chalice and paten. I called out that I didn’t care a damn about these objects. ‘I am a priest and I am killing myself, God, because you have ceased to love me.’
Next day I went into the town and asked two Africans if I had succeeded in shocking the audience. They assured me that the people were very shocked indeed, and were still talking about it. Incidentally, they told me that Saint Augustine had lived in this town.
I was taking a walk in the West End with Randolph Churchill when he suggested that I help him to write a film script about his father. The danger, I told him, was banality. I had an idea for an original treatment of the subject, with the title A Great Man. The story would be about minor fictitious characters, showing how their lives were changed by certain emotional points in Churchill’s life—VE Day, for example, and his last sickness. He liked the idea and told me he would try to get the Queen’s co-operation.
I was commissioned to direct a film of one of Ibsen’s plays, and I had done no homework. I had thought of no camera angles, cuts, etc. Ralph Richardson was to star in it, and someone had warned me that he intended to get me sacked and humiliated on the first day.
It was Richardson who introduced me to the équipe —about twenty men sitting at long tables, having refreshments. I made the mistake of apologizing for my inexperience and they shouted back their mocking agreement. If only I could get through the first day’s shooting, I thought, I’d be able to study the play at night.
A remark of Ralph’s gave me a clue. ‘I want to begin,’ I said, ‘with an exterior shot of your monocle lying on a doorstep. We pan up and see you cursing from a window above—whatever curses you are in the habit of using.’
But after that promising beginning we began to quarrel. He talked of appealing to his agent. ‘Are you threatening me?’ I said.
‘Yes. I am.’
‘I shan’t appeal to anyone,’ I told him. ‘I shall cut your face open with a riding whip.’
I had been reading a play about Everyman for stage production. At a certain moment he makes his great decision to destroy the world with the help of a nuclear bomb. I felt the scene should be produced more or less on these lines: The moment of his decision must not be melodramatic; it should take the form of quiet and banal dialogue—something the audience would hardly notice—but for the sake of theatrical effect there must be a long pause after the simple lines, and then a great lighting effect, perhaps taking the form of the shadow of an enormous bird.
Carol Reed told me that Peter Ustinov wanted him to direct King Lear on the stage. Ustinov would play King Lear. I felt doubtful whether he would be suitable, though there were parts where I thought he might be very good—as in the scene on the blasted heath.
I was in bed while we were discussing this and Carol warned me that Ustinov was going to bring me my breakfast. He arrived with a sheet over his head, which he removed when he had put down the tray. He had grown a snow-white beard, and it had transformed his face into something gentle, saintly, even sentimental. He began to recite the long passage in which I had thought he would be at his worst—‘Pray you, undo this button.’ To my surprise he was excellent.
I was in a very confused state in 1973 about a play I had written rather in the line of The Potting Shed. Peter Glenville had criticized it very severely and I began to rewrite it. I quite realized its faults. There was a scene where the principal male character knelt and made a long prayer. I altered the stage direction to indicate that he sat on the edge of his bath, and prepared to cut the prayer drastically, but to my surprise it was only two lines long. Suddenly I realized that the play was very short, and with an exhilarating sense of creativity I began to add lines, and a new scene right at the end.
XI
Travel
I have travelled as much, I believe, in the World of My Own as I have in the Common World. My travels in both have not been without drama, but in My Own World one travels at the speed of the fastest jet.
West Africa
I seemed to have only just embarked, in 1965, when I found myself in Sierra Leone—no longer the colonial country I had known and grown to love during the war, but part of independent Africa—where my young daughter was on trial for her life. She had been heard to criticize the President.
There seemed to be no defence counsel to cross-examine witnesses, and I couldn’t understand the tribal language they spoke. Was it Temne? Was it Kru? Was it Iguazu? One man strode across the court making an oration which he interrupted to shake my hand. I recognized him. I remembered how, more than twenty years befor
e, I had cracked his skull with a stone, but he bore no malice. We liked each other. He was a chief and his name was Tumba and I wished he could be in charge of the country.
During an adjournment I sought in vain to find a solicitor. I wished to appeal to the judge and tell him that my daughter had only been in the country for a few hours; anything she had said she must have learnt from me, and I wished to take her place in the dock. All must have ended happily, for my daughter is very much alive.
Arabia
Sometime in the 1960s I was cruising at night off some point of Arabia. In the interior not far away was the ruined castle of Orbutum. There were stories that somewhere along this coast were the lost mines of King Solomon. Mysterious lights shone in the sky above the castle, and there was a legend that, if you named someone you had loved, a light would fall and indicate where the treasure lay. I whispered a name (a Swedish name) but nothing happened—was it perhaps that I had not loved enough?
None the less, I persuaded the captain that we should search in the ruins. We had to take out permits for our hunt, guaranteeing to keep no more than one percent of what we found. That was no matter in the captain’s view—they would never know what the correct percentage was. But before we could start our hunt, an American naval officer arrived who claimed sole rights. We told him we had priority, but he indicated that that meant nothing. In his papers it was printed that the American government kept the castle of Orbutum in repair for tourists, and in return the government had the first right to prospect. There was no arguing with the American government.
China
In November 1964 I was lucky enough to have an interview with the Emperor of China, in the city which I still prefer to call Peking. I was travelling with my friend Michael Meyer, the translator and biographer of Ibsen, but he proved a poor travelling companion as he continually suffered from headaches and other small ailments.
I was dressed unsuitably in a sports shirt, and I began to apologize to the Emperor for my informal attire. The Emperor surprised me. He half ran, half slid into the room, a thin elderly man dressed in a black-tailed suit but without the tie. He was followed by some high mandarins in traditional dress, and after a few words they took us driving in the streets of Peking. At one moment the Emperor inexplicably left us, and a moment later we heard him calling from behind. We had not time to turn our taxi before he reached us in another taxi and transferred back to our car.
I was tired of the streets and walls of Peking and suggested for the sake of Michael, who had never been in China before, that we might see a little of the country outside. ‘I remember among the rice fields a small green village around a temple, very beautiful.’
The Emperor left us again and one old mandarin asked about my previous visit. I wanted to show him some lovely photographs in colour which I had taken, but I found in my pocketbook only grey sad photos of naked starving people (and a few of police violence which I shuffled hastily away). I couldn’t help showing him the others, but I tried to minimize the effect by localizing it in place and time. ‘They were taken,’ I said, ‘that year when there were bad droughts in Kyoto.’
Syria
It was in June 1965 that I found myself in Syria during a horrible massacre of children, even babies. I had seen something rather like it once in Damascus on a feast day, but not on this scale. I was one of a party and I thought it unwise to go out in the streets, but I was overruled—there was said to be no danger for foreigners. Men were going around with knives, and later, when we were sitting at dinner, a woman came in with a baby on a platter, and she sliced it in half as you open a bag.
Australia
In July of the same year I was travelling through Australia, a country I had never known in the Common World except for one day in Sydney. My car had got sunk in a stream and four men helped me to lift it out. I felt grateful until one of them started talking of the cost of ‘salvage’. He said that I owed them between eighty pounds and a hundred and twenty pounds. He was a real bully and I felt scared of him. In the end I paid out the eighty pounds. He took it grudgingly. He obviously hated the English. I knew that I couldn’t continue to live in such a country.
Liberia
I seem to have been travelling a great deal in 1965, for two weeks after Australia I found myself in Liberia on a visit for the Sunday Times. It was more than thirty years since I had walked through Liberia with my cousin Barbara in the world I share with others. A great deal had changed in Monrovia, the capital. I found myself in what could truthfully be called a luxury hotel. My purpose was to interview various members of the government, and I asked someone how I could set about this. ‘Nothing easier,’ he told me. ‘Leave it to your secretary. She’ll manage.’ And manage she did. I found I had a rendezvous arranged with nearly everyone except the President—and I was very glad not to see him, for he had every reason to hate me, since he was Doctor Duvalier, late of Haiti, Papa Doc.
The same month found me again in West Africa, where there was a dangerous situation with some villagers who were enraged against the whites. It was suggested that someone unarmed should go in and talk to them. Not without some fear, I volunteered. I joined another man and we went in together. Someone had questioned my qualifications and I replied that I had always liked Africans. The situation was tense in the village, but all passed off well. As we left, we met a group of nuns who were only too pleased to see us.
The U.S.S.R.
I was walking with four companions through Moscow at night, but a KGB car frightened my friends and they left me alone. I thought it best to go up to the KGB officers of my own accord and ask the way to the Europa Hotel. The officers said, ‘Get in the car. We’ll take you there.’ At the hotel someone brought a high-chair for the second officer, and I could see now that he was a dwarf. I asked him why people were not allowed in the streets at night. He replied, ‘We want the streets to be safe.’ I said, ‘Safe for whom, if nobody’s allowed in them?’ He admitted that I had a point there he hadn’t thought of.
Cuba
I was taken by car across a frontier to Havana. In a bureau there I spoke to a member of the government. My friend who had brought me assumed I would now be given a car and would travel south, but I was getting tired of the Cuban revolution, and unwilling to take risks. The minister as usual was quite unco-operative. My friend said that all the priests had left and the countryside was in the hands of the suffragettes—magnificent-looking women, but what horrors! I told the minister that I had written much in favour of the revolution, but I had had no help at all from his side. He said evasively, ‘You have seen more than we have.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘None of us has seen a priest drunk.’ He was referring to a character in my last article—a priest I had seen in an aeroplane when I was returning home.
South Africa
While I was in South Africa I read an account in an Afrikaans newspaper of a police interrogation which I had suffered. Everybody sympathized with me. I took off my left glove to show a rather twisted hand, but I refused to accuse the police of torture. ‘They were just angry at my answers,’ I said. I felt rather proud of my generous attitude, but at the same time secretly pleased at being regarded as a hero. ‘It was a woman who twisted your fingers, wasn’t it?’ ‘To tell you the truth, I only remember two men. Perhaps there was a woman there. I seem to remember very little of what happened.’ I thought I would try to send a message to my friend Etienne Leroux, a novelist I admired, to say that I was in Cape Town, but I didn’t want to get him into trouble so I thought I would use the name Verdant, which he might recognize as Greene.
XII
Reading
I had just been reading with great pleasure (and I had marked many passages) a new translation of the Bible by my friend George Brown, the Labour politician. I liked particularly his treatment of the Psalms, which had always bored me. George had left only stray fragments of them, so that they gave some of the intriguing interest we feel for the scraps of a mutilated papyrus.
In read
ing Boswell I came across this remark by Samuel Johnson, which I found amusing. It concerned farting.
‘The Canons kept the wind under their robes until the smell could be attributed to the ladies, or else the ladies had waited until the wind could be attributed to the Canons.’
A crowded party, everyone helping themselves to food and drink. I joined Claud Cockburn, who was talking to a young writer with the surname Graham. They were discussing George Orwell. I said that 1984 was a bad novel, like all his novels. It was only his essays which were good.
A Jesuit priest called Blunden wanted to talk to me about a criticism I had made of the Pope. When we met I asked him if he was a relation of my friend the poet Edmund Blunden. He said, ‘No,’ and made a derogatory remark about his poetry. He said Blunden had run out of steam.