Dr. Christopher Hull from the University of Nottingham, UK, came to the Harry Ransom Center on a British Studies Fellowship to research the Graham Greene collection. His initial plan is to write and publish a book on Greene and Cuba, concentrating on the writer’s journeys to the island prior to writing Our Man in Havana (1958), his depiction of the island and the Cold War in this iconic novel, and his continuing relationship with the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro after 1959. His larger project is to write a book on Greene and Latin America. He shares some of his findings in the collection here.
Supported by a British Studies Fellowship, I spent five profitable weeks at the Harry Ransom Center in June 2011 researching its Graham Greene collection. I was particularly interested to read material related to Greene’s contacts with Latin America, specifically three of his novels: Our Man in Havana (1958), The Comedians (1966), and The Honorary Consul (1973). The Center holds all the manuscript drafts for these works, as well as Greene’s screenplays for film versions of the first two novels. They offer a fascinating insight into the gestation of storyline and characters by one of Britain’s most renowned twentieth-century novelists.
As well as full-length manuscripts, the Ransom Center holds many of Greene’s shorter works, including unfinished and unpublished scripts, journalistic articles and opinion pieces, and an assortment of personal letters. Among these, we can see that the writer’s reputation for practical jokes and a mischievous sense of humor sometimes got him into trouble. In 1953, Greene was returning from a visit to Edinburgh with a friend after meeting “two delightful Texan girls” in a hotel. After imbibing a few pints of Black Velvet on their southbound train to London, the author and his friend decided as a joke to set up a new society. They published an announcement in The Times: “May we beg the courtesy of your columns to announce the formation of the Anglo-Texan Society?” It had the avowed objective of “establishing cultural and social links” between Britain and the Lone Star state.1
Abroad on a journalistic assignment in Kenya to cover the Mau-Mau rebellion, Greene soon received the perturbing news that the Society had received 60 membership applications on its first day. By the time Greene had returned to Britain, the Anglo-Texan Society had already held an inaugural cocktail party. His friend was now the Society’s Chairman and Greene its President. There was, however, some cynical reaction from the United States. The New York Times wondered if Greene, known as a creator of “diabolisms and plenty of hells” and no great supporter of U.S. foreign policy, might have a dastardly plan underfoot to make Texas cede from the Union. But the Society went from strength to strength, and during another of Greene’s absences in Vietnam, prior to the publication of The Quiet American (1955), his friend presided over a jamboree at a film studio outside London. The Houston Fat Stock Show lent four prime steers and three Hillbilly bands to delight 1,500 Texans and Society members. Double-decker “Texas to Piccadilly Circus” buses carried 300 of the overseas visitors from London to the event. 2
Greene diplomatically resigned his presidency of the Society, using his frequent absences abroad as a credible excuse. The sobering Anglo-Texan Society experience dampened his enthusiasm for large-scale practical jokes, but the Society was still holding events 25 years after its formation.
Perhaps the biggest source of riches in the Harry Ransom Center’s Graham Greene collection is its series of “Dream Diaries.” As a troubled teenager, his headmaster father had sent Greene to London for six months of psychoanalysis alongside his pretty first cousin. Forty years later, when suffering from recurrent depression in the 1960s, a psychoanalyst recommended the peripatetic British author to write down the content of his dreams. The advice produced remarkable results, and gives an invaluable insight into the mind of the prolific author. Several volumes contain the writer’s memories of his dreams, intermittently, for the years 1964–66, 1972–75, 1979–81, 1983–86, and 1988. Greene’s “Dream Diaries” detail the writer’s nightly obsessions, fantasies, and episodes of repeated paranoia, as well as memories of past events. Among many fantastical accounts, the diaries recount his experiences from childhood and adulthood, his many travels to dangerous spots around the world, famous personalities (both living and dead), and time spent with several female partners in addition to his long-estranged wife. Four decades after his teenage experience of psychoanalysis, Greene was still fantasizing about an affair and possible marriage to his pretty cousin.
The recounting of most people’s dreams does not make for stimulating entertainment, but in Greene’s case they are riveting. Greene had served as an air-raid warden in Central London during the blitz. And his house in Clapham (South London) was destroyed by Nazi bombs in World War II. One of his recurrent fears was evidently a German invasion of Britain and further bombing raids. He also feared persecution by Haiti’s voodoo-worshiping President-for-Life “Papa Doc” Duvalier, years after his novel The Comedians had painted a dark picture of the dictator’s rule.
From a writer described by Lord of the Flies author William Golding as the “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness,” even less dramatic nocturnal thoughts come alive. In his miniscule handwriting, for example, is the following dream from 1981:
Having dinner at Bentley’s I felt rather strange as I was wearing my dressing gown & had bare feet. I was relieved that no waiter objected. Evelyn Waugh was at the next table with three men—one of whom had an exceedingly ugly voice. I was glad when he separated from Evelyn & went to the other end of the table with a companion where his voice was more subdued. Later I had a better opinion of him when he was reproached by a woman at another table for having left his wife. She urged him to return, but he said it was out of the question – he could not live with her. I became impatient at the bad service & called out to a wine waiter – “I ordered a glass of port half an hour ago & a Welsh rarebit three quarters of an hour ago.” I wondered whether the bad service was due to the way I was dressed.3
Currently, only a brief and sanitized collection of these dreams exists in published form.4 Greene fans must relish the day when his recorded dreams can be transcribed and published in their entirety.
1 The Times, Aug. 22 1953, p. 7.
2 ‘The Joke That Went Wrong’, Jan. 29 1974, Box 19.1, Graham Greene Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
3 ‘Dream Diaries’ (1979–81), Jan. 17–18 1981 (p. 15), Box 38.3, Graham Greene Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
4A World of My Own: A Dream Diary (London: Viking, 1992).