Graham Greene's Entertainments

Graham Greene: The Complete Entertainments (Folio Society, 1996)
[Stamboul Train; A Gun for Sale; The Confidential Agent; The Ministry of Fear; The Third Man; Our Man in Havana]

Until roughly the mid-1960s, Graham Greene kept up a distinction between "novels" and "entertainments" in listings of his fiction. As you can see from the Folio Society boxset above, there are at least 6 of these, written over a period of three decades.

But is that collection really complete? I fear not. A quick glance at the "by the same author" page of some of his mid-career books reveals the following works listed under this heading:

1. Stamboul Train: An Entertainment (1932)
2. A Gun for Sale (1936)
3. The Confidential Agent: An Entertainment (1939)
4. The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (1943)
5. The Third Man and the Fallen Idol (1950)
6. Loser Takes All (1955)
7. Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (1958)

These, at any rate, are the canonical entertainments. Personally, I'd feel inclined to expand the list as follows, if it weren't for the fact that he'd stopped using the term by the time of Travels with my Aunt:

1. Travels with My Aunt (1969)
2. Doctor Fischer of Geneva (1980)
3. Monsignor Quixote (1982)
4. The Tenth Man (1937 / 1985)
5. No Man's Land (1950 / 2005)

Graham Greene: The Complete Entertainments / The Great Novels (Folio Society, 1996-1997)
[Brighton Rock; The Power and the Glory; The Heart of the Matter; The End of the Affair; The Quiet American; A Burnt-Out Case]

But what exactly constituted an "entertainment" for Greene? It seems to have been what would normally be called a thriller. Set side by side, in twin boxsets, with what the Folio Society refers to as the "Great Novels", I guess one can see a certain additional gravitas and sense of purpose about the latter. Brighton Rock is a thriller, too, but a kind of metaphysical one - where the dangerous and violent action is subordinate to the state of the characters' souls.

Graham Greene: Omnibus I (Heinemann Octopus, 1977)
[The Heart of the Matter / Orient Express {= Stamboul Train} / A Burnt-out Case / The Third Man / The Quiet American / Loser Takes All / The Power and the Glory]

Other attempts to collect large numbers of his novels together - in the Heinemann Octopus omnibus series, for instance - ignore the distinction altogether: as did Greene himself in his later years.

Graham Greene: Omnibus II (Heinemann Octopus, 1981)
[Brighton Rock / The End of the Affair / It's a Battlefield / England Made Me / The Ministry of Fear / Our Man in Havana]

•

Graham Greene: Rumour at Nightfall (1931)

I have, admittedly written a number of posts about Graham Greene already. There was a general one, "Greeneland", in 2019; then (more recently) a post about his 1957 anthology The Spy's Bedside Book. He continues to fascinate me, but lately my preoccupation has come to focus on this crucial (or completely accidental and meretricious, as his later abandonment of it would imply) distinction between serious "novels" and frivolous "entertainments" in his work.

Graham Greene: The Name of Action (1931)

Maybe it all goes back to that famous gap - the soul-crushing hiatus between The Man Within (1929) and Stamboul Train (1932). In his 1979 interview with Marie-Françoise Allain, he says of the two (later suppressed) novels he wrote during that period:

The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, were bad because the romantic young author I was at the time was too recognizable in the characters. A writer has to conform to two conflicting requirements: he must be involved in his novel and detached from himself. One detaches oneself in the course of merging into the characters. One doesn’t think, ‘Would I do this or that?’ One notes that ‘Smith has done it’. One doesn’t even say, ‘How would Smith react in this or that situation?’ because Smith acts on his own account. One simply forgets one’s own existence. It’s not so much a question of taking leave of oneself, if you like; it’s more a case of taking leave of one’s conscious ‘I’.

But that wasn't his only reason for forbidding them from being reprinted:

My first books were very bad, full of metaphors which I chose for their extravagance, influenced as I was by my readings in the twenties, when I was very attached to the English Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, who devoted themselves to highly complex rhetorical exercises. Today my early novels horrify me, they’re so absurd. There’s nothing worse than poetic prose.

Marie-Françoise Allain: The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (1983)

Marie-Françoise Allain then comes out and asks the question directly:

Have you suppressed the distinction between your ‘entertainments’ and your novels in order to escape an excessive popularity?

No. I established the distinction originally in order to escape ‘melodrama’. I’ve subsequently concluded that melodrama isn’t all that baneful. Anyway I told myself — wrongly as it happens — that if I occasionally wrote what in England is termed a thriller, in the manner of John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps, which I greatly admired, the ensuing novel might be free of melodrama. I started making this distinction with A Gun for Sale. I’d even considered writing under another name, but my publisher warned me, ‘We can’t give you more than a £50 advance, because in that case you’re a new writer on the market.’ So I gave up the idea and classed the novel as an ‘entertainment’. The last one to be conceived in this category was The Ministry of Fear. After that, novels and entertainments resembled each other more and more. Brighton Rock, for instance, started in my mind as a thriller. From the first sentence, my intention was to write a crime novel, but the novel eventually moved in quite a different direction. But the most absurd case, I think, is The Quiet American. I recently came across the manuscript, which one of my publishers kept in his safe. The first page is entitled, ‘Novel Number Thirteen — Entertainment’. I really can’t understand how I could ever have seen this book as a simple thriller. I abandoned the dichotomy once and for all with Travels with my Aunt, for it served no further purpose.

There's a lot to be unpacked in this answer. Greene, as ever, is somewhat economical with the truth. Certainly it's true that from A Gun for Sale on, "Novels" [N] and "Entertainments" [E] alternate as if by clockwork:

1. [N]: England Made Me (1935)
2. [E]: A Gun for Sale (1936)
3. [N]: Brighton Rock (1938)
4. [E]: The Confidential Agent (1939)
5. [N]: The Power and the Glory (1940)
6. [E]: The Ministry of Fear (1943)
7. [N]: The Heart of the Matter (1948)
8. [E]: The Third Man [published with "The Fallen Idol"] (1949)
9. [N]: The End of the Affair (1951)
10. [E]: Loser Takes All (1955)
11. [N]: The Quiet American (1955)
12. [E]: Our Man in Havana (1958)
13. [N]: A Burnt-Out Case (1960)

After that the scheme started to founder, presumably as Greene began to question its utility. By now his writing in both categories was sober and spare enough to avoid the terrible accusation of containing samples of "poetic prose". The bitter-sweet comedy Our Man in Havana is the last to receive the designation "an entertainment." After that they're all "novels" in subsequent lists.

But are they all novels? As I've intimated above, I suspect that the category survived in the back of his mind somewhere. At any rate, this is how I myself (quite unofficially) would taxonomise the rest of his oeuvre:

1. [N]: The Comedians (1966)
2. [E]: Travels with My Aunt (1969)
3. [N]: The Honorary Consul (1973)
4. [N]: The Human Factor (1978)
5. [E]: Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1980)
6. [E]: Monsignor Quixote (1982)
7. [E]: The Tenth Man (1985)
8. [N]: The Captain and the Enemy (1988)
9. [E]: No Man's Land [published with "The Stranger's Hand"] (2005)

So far as Greene (and his publishers) were concerned, though, there were only ever seven "entertainments", and these were later folded back to be counted with the other canonical novels in the mid-1960s.

So far as I'm concerned, however, there are at least 12 works in the present list of 27 novels (or long-form novellas) which constitutes his collected fiction - excluding the short stories, which are a different matter entirely - which could easily be classified as "entertainments."

But of course that begs the question of what these works actually meant to Greene, why he needed them at all? Luckily for us, Marie-Françoise Allain was there to ask him:

These flights into the fantastic, into what you call ‘fantasy’, to which you return, notably in Doctor Fischer of Geneva, what do they represent for you?

I don’t really know. Perhaps you’re right: I’m escaping. For example, if one can remember an entire dream, the result is a sense of entertainment sufficiently marked to give one the illusion of being catapulted into a different world. One finds oneself remote from one’s conscious preoccupations.

Graham Greene: England Made Me (1931)

What in your work is the proportion of ‘entertainment’ to these ‘conscious preoccupations’?

I really couldn’t say. In my earlier books I didn’t permit myself many of these flights. The sense of entertainment crops up for the first time in Stamboul Train, and more markedly in England Made Me, but it doesn’t come fully into the open until after 1945. I’ve noticed, in working on the introductions to the collected editions, that all my humorous stories date from the Second World War, as though the proximity of death provoked this irresistible urge to laugh and to ‘unwind’. Travels with my Aunt was also written when I was well up in my sixties, in the awareness that I was gradually approaching the wall that does not give way.

That's very interesting, very interesting indeed. We've heard from Greene, earlier in the interview, that the point of his entertainments was to enable him "to escape ‘melodrama'". He also says that it was to avoid the "metaphors which I chose for their extravagance" which he used to employ so readily in the 1920s.

Today my early novels horrify me, they’re so absurd. There’s nothing worse than poetic prose.

Now he's saying that they also served as an outlet for humour and fantasy: "the illusion of being catapulted into a different world."

It's a bit hard to see how all of these things can be true at once. When you add to them the statement that "the proximity of death provoked this irresistible urge to laugh and to ‘unwind’", you begin to wonder seriously if he isn't just taking the piss.

But logic-chopping aside, there's another way to see it. These (so-called) entertainments do seem to have offered Greene a way of making light of death. And the fact that they tend to take place in the dream-worlds of screen melodrama or postcard foreign parts also serves to sever them from the more serious implications of weightier works such as The Power and the Glory or The Quiet American.

Graham Greene: A World of My Own: A Dream Diary (1992)

Greene did, after all, compile his own 800-page dream diary, extracts from which were published after his death as A World of My Own. He clearly put a lot of stock in them. They accorded, too, with his omnipresent desire to escape - signalled in the title of his second volume of autobiography:

Graham Greene: Ways of Escape (1992)

Escape from what, you may ask? From depression, I suppose - from guilt, from responsibility, from the dreary sameness of England and all it stood for ... This, after all, was the man who recorded a series of early experiments with playing Russian Roulette in his first autobiographical volume, A Sort of Life.

Graham Greene: A Sense of Reality (1963)

The novella-length story "Under the Garden" which opens his 1963 short story collection A Sense of Reality heralds - paradoxically enough - a plunge "into fantasy, dreams, false memories and imagination."

The crucial significance of this story is picked up on by the ever-astute Marie-Françoise Allain:

Do you not yourself cultivate this sense of the unreal which these unexpected developments bring about? One has the feeling that your stories are sometimes tales for adults written for your own benefit. I am thinking especially of that strange story in which a sick man returns to the home of his childhood and sees, as he is about to go to sleep, the adventures of the little boy who had gone for a walk ‘under the garden’. What is the meaning of this dream inside a dream about a dream? Is it just a story which you took pleasure in writing?

Oh, I never ‘take pleasure in writing’. But I did perhaps free myself temporarily from the tensions of reality, or rather from too realistic a way of writing. No doubt I wanted to go back to my childhood, because the house depicted in "Under the Garden" is similar to the one in which we spent our summer holidays. There was also a pond with an island in the middle — and when I went back many years later, like the narrator in the story, I discovered that there was no need for a raft or a boat to take one across to the island. A jump was all that was needed, for the pond was scarcely bigger than a puddle. The gardener, on the other hand, was still the real gardener. I make the same sort of escape in a passage in The Human Factor in which Castle, the adoptive father, tells his son the story of the dragon which hides on the Common and only comes out in order to visit him in school. I never knew a dragon, but as a small boy, I knew of plenty of caves which might have been its lair, because the Common was riddled with trenches dating back to the First World War.

Perhaps the true significance of this story, first published in 1960, two years after the last official "entertainment", was to signal that that category was no longer needed because it had taken over. There would be no more entertainments - not because such works were to be reclassified as novels from now on, but because the dream of escape had grown capacious enough to swallow up all other forms of fiction.

Graham Greene: Under the Garden (1963)

•

Anthony Palliser: Graham Greene. National Portrait Gallery (1981-83)

Henry Graham Greene
(1904-1991)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Fiction:


1. The Man Within (1929)
   • The Man Within. 1929. Uniform Edition. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1952.
2. The Name of Action (1930)
   • The Name of Action. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1930.
3. Rumour at Nightfall (1931)
4. Stamboul Train [aka "Orient Express"] (1932)
   • Stamboul Train: An Entertainment. 1932. The Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1959.
   • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus I. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1977.
5. It's a Battlefield (1934)
   • It's a Battlefield. 1934. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1953.
   • It's a Battlefield. 1934. Introduction by the Author. The Collected Edition, 2. London: William Heinemann / The Bodley Head, 1970.
   • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus II. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1981.
6. England Made Me [aka "The Shipwrecked"] (1935)
   • England Made Me. 1935. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1954.
   • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus II. 1981.
7. A Gun for Sale [aka "This Gun for Hire"] (1936)
   • A Gun for Sale. 1936. Introduction by the Author. The Collected Edition, 9. London: William Heinemann / The Bodley Head, 1973.
8. Brighton Rock (1938)
   • Brighton Rock. 1938. Uniform Edition. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1947.
   • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus II. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1981.
9. The Confidential Agent (1939)
   • The Confidential Agent: An Entertainment. 1939. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1976.
10. The Power and the Glory [aka "The Labyrinthine Ways"] (1940)
    • The Power and the Glory. 1940. The Vanguard Library, 3. London: William Heinemann Ltd. / Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1954.
    • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus I. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1977.
11. The Ministry of Fear (1943)
    • The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment. 1943. Uniform Edition. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1956.
    • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus II. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1981.
12. The Heart of the Matter (1948)
    • The Heart of the Matter. 1948. London: The Reprint Society Ltd. / William Heinemann Ltd., 1950.
    • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus I. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1977.
13. The Third Man [published with "The Fallen Idol"] (1949)
    • The Third Man and the Fallen Idol. Prefaces by the Author. 1950. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1955.
    • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus I. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1977.
14. The End of the Affair (1951)
    • The End of the Affair. 1951. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1978.
    • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus II. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1981.
15. Loser Takes All (1955)
    • Loser Takes All. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1955.
    • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus I. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1977.
16. The Quiet American (1955)
    • The Quiet American. 1955. World Books. London: The Reprint Society Ltd. / William Heinemann Ltd., 1957.
    • The Quiet American: Text and Criticism. 1955. Ed. John Clark Pratt. The Viking Critical Library. New York: Penguin, 1996.
    • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus I. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1977.
17. Our Man in Havana (1958)
    • Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1958.
    • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus II. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1981.
18. A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
    • A Burnt-Out Case. 1961. London: The Reprint Society Ltd. / William Heinemann Ltd., 1962.
    • Included in: Heinemann Octopus Omnibus I. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1977.
19. The Comedians (1966)
    • The Comedians. 1966. Melbourne: Readers Book Club, 165. / London: William The Companion Book Club, 1967.
20. Travels with My Aunt (1969)
    • Travels with My Aunt. 1969. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: The Bodley Head, 1972.
21. The Honorary Consul (1973)
    • The Honorary Consul. 1973. London: Book Club Associates / The Bodley Head, 1974.
22. The Human Factor (1978)
    • The Human Factor. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
23. Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1980)
    • Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party. London: The Bodley Head, 1980.
24. Monsignor Quixote (1982)
    • Monsignor Quixote. 1982. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
25. The Tenth Man (1985)
    • The Tenth Man. 1985. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
26. The Captain and the Enemy (1988)
    • The Captain and the Enemy. 1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Reinhardt Books Ltd., 1989.
27. No Man's Land [published with "The Stranger's Hand"] (2005)
    • No Man's Land. Ed. James Sexton. Foreword by David Lodge. Hesperus Modern Voices. London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2005.

Collected Editions:


28. The Bodley Head Collected Edition. 22 vols. London: William Heinemann / The Bodley Head, 1970-1983.
    1. Brighton Rock (1938)
    2. It's a Battlefield (1934)
    3. England Made Me (1935)
    4. Our Man in Havana (1958)
    5. The Power and the Glory (1940)
    6. The Heart of the Matter (1948)
    7. The Confidential Agent (1939)
    8. The Collected Stories (1972)
    9. A Gun for Sale (1936)
    10. The Ministry of Fear (1943)
    11. The Quiet American (1955)
    12. Stamboul Train (1932)
    13. The End of the Affair (1951)
    14. A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
    15. The Man Within (1929)
    16. The Third Man & Loser Takes All (1949 & 1955)
    17. The Comedians (1966)
    18. Journey Without Maps (1936)
    19. The Lawless Roads (1939)
    20. Travels with my Aunt (1969)
    21. The Honorary Consul (1973)
    22. The Human Factor (1978)
29. Heinemann Octopus Omnibus I (1977)
    • The Heart of the Matter / Stamboul Train / A Burnt-out Case / The Third Man / The Quiet American / Loser Takes All / The Power and the Glory. 1948, 1932, 1961, 1950, 1955, 1955, 1940. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1977.
30. Heinemann Octopus Omnibus II (1981)
    • Brighton Rock / The End of the Affair / It's a Battlefield / England Made Me / The Ministry of Fear / Our Man in Havana. 1938, 1951, 1934, 1935, 1943, 1958. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1981.
31. The Complete Entertainments (London: The Folio Society, 1996)
    1. Stamboul Train (1932)
    2. A Gun for Sale (1936)
    3. The Confidential Agent (1939)
    4. The Ministry of Fear (1943)
    5. The Third Man (1950)
    6. Our Man in Havana (1958)
32. The Great Novels (London: The Folio Society, 1997)
    1. Brighton Rock (1938)
    2. The Power and the Glory (1940)
    3. The Heart of the Matter (1948)
    4. The End of the Affair (1951)
    5. The Quiet American (1955)
    6. A Burnt-Out Case (1961)

Short Stories:


33. The Bear Fell Free [1935a]
34. The Basement Room [1935b]
    1. The Basement Room
    2. The End of the Party
    3. The Second Death
    4. I Spy
    5. Proof Positive
    6. A Day Saved
    7. A Chance For Mr Lever
    8. Jubilee
35. Nineteen Stories [1947]
    1. The End of the Party
    2. The Second Death
    3. Proof Positive
    4. I Spy
    5. A Day Saved
    6. Jubilee
    7. Brother
    8. A Chance For Mr Lever
    9. The Basement Room [aka "The Fallen Idol"]
    10. The Other Side of the Border
    11. The Innocent
    12. A Drive in the Country
    13. Across the Bridge
    14. A Little Place Off the Edgware Road
    15. The Case for the Defence
    16. The Lottery Ticket
    17. Alas, Poor Maling
    18. Men at Work
    19. When Greek Meets Greek [aka "Her Uncle Versus His Father"]
36. Twenty-One Stories [1954]
    1. The End of the Party
    2. The Second Death
    3. Proof Positive
    4. I Spy
    5. A Day Saved
    6. Jubilee
    7. Brother
    8. A Chance For Mr Lever
    9. The Basement Room [aka "The Fallen Idol"]
    10. The Innocent
    11. A Drive in the Country
    12. Across the Bridge
    13. A Little Place Off the Edgware Road
    14. The Case for the Defence
    15. Alas, Poor Maling
    16. Men at Work
    17. When Greek Meets Greek [aka "Her Uncle Versus His Father"]
    18. The Hint of an Explanation
    19. The Blue Film
    20. Special Duties [aka "A Peculiar Affair of Westbourne Grove"]
    21. The Destructors
    • Twenty-One Stories. 1947 & 1954. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
37. A Visit to Morin [1960]
38. A Sense of Reality [1963]
    1. Under the Garden
    2. A Visit to Morin
    3. Dream of a Strange Land
    4. A Discovery in the Woods
    • A Sense of Reality. 1963. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
39. May We Borrow Your Husband? [1967]
    1. May We Borrow Your Husband?
    2. Beauty
    3. Chagrin in Three Parts
    4. The Over-night Bag
    5. Mortmain
    6. Cheap in August
    7. A Shocking Accident
    8. The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen
    9. Awful When You Think of It
    10. Doctor Crombie
    11. The Root of All Evil
    12. Two Gentle People
    • May We Borrow Your Husband? And Other Comedies of the Sexual Life. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1967.
40. Collected Stories [1972]
    1. Twenty-One Stories (1954)
    2. A Sense of Reality (1963)
    3. May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)
41. How Father Quixote Became a Monsignor [chapter one of Monsignor Quixote (1982)] [1980]
42. The New House [1988]
43. The Last Word and Other Stories [1990]
    1. The Last Word
    2. The News in English
    3. The Moment of Truth
    4. The Man Who Stole the Eiffel Tower
    5. The Lieutenant Died Last
    6. A Branch of the Service
    7. An Old Man's Memory
    8. The Lottery Ticket
    9. The New House
    10. Work Not in Progress
    11. Murder for the Wrong Reason
    12. An Appointment With the General
    • The Last Word and Other Stories. 1990. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Reinhardt Books Ltd., 1991.
44. The Complete Short Stories [2005]
    1. Twenty-One Stories (1954)
    2. A Sense of Reality (1963)
    3. May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)
    4. The Last Word (1990)
    5. The Blessing
    6. Church Militant
    7. Dear Dr Falkenheim
    8. The Other Side of the Border
    • The Complete Short Stories. 1954, 1963, 1967, 1990. Introduction by Pico Iyer. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2005.

Stories:


1. The End of the Party (1929) [1935b] [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
2. The Second Death (1929) [1935b] [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
3. I Spy (1930) [1935b] [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
4. Proof Positive (1930) [1935b] [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
5. A Day Saved (1934) [1935b] [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
6. The Bear Fell Free [1935a]
7. The Basement Room [aka "The Fallen Idol"] (1935) [1935b] [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
8. A Chance For Mr Lever (1935) [1935b] [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
9. Jubilee (1935) [1935b] [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
10. Brother (1936) [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
11. The Other Side of the Border (1936) [1947] [2005]
12. The Innocent (1937) [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
13. A Drive in the Country (1937) [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
14. Across the Bridge (1938) [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
15. A Little Place Off the Edgware Road (1939) [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
16. The Case for the Defence (1939) [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
17. The Lottery Ticket (1940) [1947] [1990] [2005]
18. Alas, Poor Maling (1940) [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
19. Men at Work (1940) [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
20. When Greek Meets Greek [aka "Her Uncle Versus His Father"] (1941) [1947] [1954] [1972] [2005]
21. The Hint of an Explanation (1948) [1954] [1972] [2005]
22. The Stranger's Hand (1953) [No Man's Land (2005)]
23. The Blue Film (1954) [1954] [1972] [2005]
24. Special Duties [aka "A Peculiar Affair of Westbourne Grove"] (1954) [1954] [1972] [2005]
25. The Destructors (1954) [1954] [1972] [2005]
26. Church Militant (1956) [2005]
27. A Visit to Morin (1960) [1960] [1963] [1972] [2005]
28. Under the Garden (1963) [1963] [1972] [2005]
29. Dream of a Strange Land (1963) [1963] [1972] [2005]
30. A Discovery in the Woods (1963) [1963] [1972] [2005]
31. Dear Dr Falkenheim (1963) [2005]
32. The Blessing (1966) [2005]
33. May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
34. Beauty (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
35. Chagrin in Three Parts (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
36. The Over-night Bag (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
37. Mortmain (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
38. Cheap in August (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
39. A Shocking Accident (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
40. The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
41. Awful When You Think of It (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
42. Doctor Crombie (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
43. The Root of All Evil (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
44. Two Gentle People (1967) [1967] [1972] [2005]
45. How Father Quixote Became a Monsignor [chapter one of Monsignor Quixote (1982)] [1980]
46. The New House (1988) [1988] [1990] [2005]
47. The Last Word (1990) [1990] [2005]
48. The News in English (1990) [1990] [2005]
49. The Moment of Truth (1990) [1990] [2005]
50. The Man Who Stole the Eiffel Tower (1990) [1990] [2005]
51. The Lieutenant Died Last (1990) [1990] [2005]
52. A Branch of the Service (1990) [1990] [2005]
53. An Old Man's Memory (1990) [1990] [2005]
54. Work Not in Progress (1990) [1990] [2005]
55. Murder for the Wrong Reason (1990) [1990] [2005]
56. An Appointment With the General (1990) [1990] [2005]

Plays:


45. The Great Jowett (1939)
    • Included in: Collected Plays. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
46. The Living Room (1953)
    • Included in: Three Plays. London: The Heinemann Group of Publishers, 1962.
    • Included in: Collected Plays. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
47. The Potting Shed (1957)
    • Included in: Three Plays. London: The Heinemann Group of Publishers, 1962.
    • Included in: Collected Plays. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
48. The Complaisant Lover (1959)
    • Included in: Three Plays. London: The Heinemann Group of Publishers, 1962.
    • Included in: Collected Plays. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
49. Three Plays (1962)
    • Three Plays: The Living Room / The Potting Shed / The Complaisant Lover. 1953, 1957 & 1959. Mercury Books, 15. London: The Heinemann Group of Publishers, 1962.
50. Carving a Statue (1964)
    • Included in: Collected Plays. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
51. The Return of A.J. Raffles (1975)
    • >The Return of A. J. Raffles: An Edwardian Comedy in Three Acts Based Somewhat Loosely on E. W. Hornung’s Characters in The Amateur Cracksman. 1975. Penguin Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
    • Included in: Collected Plays. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
52. Yes and No (1980)
    • Included in: Collected Plays. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
53. For Whom the Bell Chimes (1980)
    • Included in: Collected Plays. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
54. Collected Plays (1983)
    • Collected Plays: The Living Room / The Potting Shed / The Complaisant Lover / Carving a Statue / The Return of A. J. Raffles / The Great Jowett / Yes and No / For Whom the Bell Chimes. 1953, 1957, 1959, 1964, 1975, 1939, 1980, 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Screenplays:


55. The Future's in the Air (1937)
56. The New Britain (1940)
57. 21 Days [based on the play "The First and the Last" by John Galsworthy] (1940)
58. Brighton Rock (1947)
59. The Fallen Idol (1948)
60. The Third Man (1949)
    • The Third Man: A Film by Graham Greene and Carol Reed. 1968. Modern Film Scripts. London: Lorrimer Publishing Limited, 1969.
61. Loser Takes All (1956)
62. Saint Joan [based on the play by Bernard Shaw] (1957)
63. Our Man in Havana (1959)
64. The Comedians (1967)
65. Monsignor Quixote (1985)

Verse:


66. Babbling April (1925)
67. A Quick Look Behind: Footnotes to an Autobiography (1983)

Travel:


68. Journey Without Maps (1936)
    • Journey Without Maps: A Travel Book. 1936. Uniform Edition. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1962.
69. The Lawless Roads [aka "Another Mexico"] (1939)
    • The Lawless Roads. 1939. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1971.
70. In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (1961)
    • In Search of a Character: Two African Journals. 1961. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: The Bodley Head, 1977.
71. A Weed Among the Flowers (1990)

Autobiography:


72. A Sort of Life (1971)
    • A Sort of Life. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: The Bodley Head, 1974.
73. Ways of Escape (1980)
    • Ways of Escape. 1980. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
74. Getting To Know The General: The Story of an Involvement (1984)
    • Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1984.
75. A World of My Own: A Dream Diary (1992)
    • A World of My Own: A Dream Diary. 1992. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.

Biography:


76. Lord Rochester's Monkey: Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1974)
    • Lord Rochester's Monkey: Being the life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester. London: The Bodley Head Limited, 1974.

Essays and criticism:


77. British Dramatists (1942)
78. Why Do I Write? An Exchange of Views between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett (1948)
79. The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1951)
    • The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. 1951. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode (Publishers) Ltd., 1954.
80. Collected Essays (1969)
    • Collected Essays. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1969.
81. The Pleasure-Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935–40. Ed. John Russell Taylor (1980)
    • The Pleasure-Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935-40. Ed. John Russell Taylor. 1972. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
82. J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice (1982)
    • J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1982.
83. Yours, etc.: Letters to the Press (1989)
    • Yours, etc.: Letters to the Press, 1945-89. Ed. Christopher Hawtree. Viking. London: Reinhardt Books Ltd. / Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
84. Reflections on Travels With My Aunt (1989)
85. Why the Epigraph? (1989)
86. Reflections (1991)
    • Reflections. Ed. Judith Adamson. London: Reinhardt Books, 1990.
87. The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews and Film Stories [aka "Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader"]. Ed. David Parkinson (1993)
88. Articles of Faith: The Collected Tablet Journalism of Graham Greene. Ed. Ian Thomson (2006)

Children's books:


89. The Little Train. Illustrated by Dorothy Craigie (1946) / Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone (1973)
90. The Little Fire Engine. Illustrated by Dorothy Craigie (1950) / Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone (1973)
91. The Little Horse Bus. Illustrated by Dorothy Craigie (1952) / Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone (1974)
92. The Little Steamroller. Illustrated by Dorothy Craigie (1953) / Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone (1974)

Edited:


93. The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934)
    • The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands. 1934. Oxford Paperbacks. London: Oxford University Press, 1984.
94. [with Hugh Greene] The Spy's Bedside Book (1957)
    • [with Hugh Greene] The Spy's Bedside Book. 1957. Introduction by Stella Rimington. Illustrated by Nick Hardcastle. London: The Folio Society, 2006.
95. An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri (1975)

Secondary:


96. Greene, Barbara. Too Late to Turn Back: Barbara and Graham Greene in Liberia. ['Land Benighted', 1938]. Introduction by Paul Theroux. 1981. Penguin Travel Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
97. Allain, Marie-Françoise. The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene. 1981. Trans. Guido Waldman. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1982.
98. Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols (1989-2004):
    1. 1904-1939. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1989.
    2. 1939-1955. 1994. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.
    3. 1955-1991. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 2004.
99. Greene, Richard, ed. Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. 2007. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008.
100. Greene, Richard. Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene. Little, Brown. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2020.

•

Graham Greene: The Bodley Head Collected Edition. 22 vols (1970-83)

•

Engrams

Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Soap bubbles


I don’t really remember what happened
I just know that Hutchinson

one of my school-friends
invited a group of us to come round

and play in the bush near his home
after much excitement and build-up

we all turned up
with our plastic guns

and headed for the trees
I recall crouching in a ditch

waiting for something
then    

[blank]

crying bitterly 
all the way home

the day was a failure    
my fault    of course

(default position)
perhaps a play fight 

turned into a real one?
it is the future generation 

that presses into being
by means of these soap bubbles

said Schopenhauer
sometimes I think 

he might be right 
and I should just cut myself 

some slack

Tall Trees (NZ)

•

Barry Miles: Call Me Burroughs (1978)

So apparently William Burroughs used to bore everyone rigid by going on and on about these things called engrams - defined as "a mental recording of a traumatic past event that occurred while an individual was partially or fully unconscious" - and how it was possible to "clean" them by recording them on tape and playing them over and over again until, eventually, they elicited no emotional response whatever.

He got this idea from Scientology, where auditors are trained to ask structured questions "intended to help a participant identify and address past experiences and emotional difficulties." They use a device called an E-meter to pick up "changes in the subject's mental state, including helping [to] identify which topics contain emotional or spiritual distress, and when a procedure is completed."

Outside Scientology, the device is regarded as a type of skin galvanometer that measures variations in skin resistance. It is not considered a scientific instrument, and its use and interpretation are not supported by evidence in psychology or medicine.

In the end, even Burroughs got tired of this procedure, and began to see flaws in its theoretical basis - not to mention developing reservations about the bizarre Scientology mythos of ancient aliens and billion-year-old struggles between all-knowing, quasi-immortal thetans and corrupt physical beings.

However, that didn't prevent him from continuing to try and identify just when the (so-called) "ugly spirit" had entered him, and proceeded to "squat on his life" (a bit like Larkin's toad work). Burroughs came to believe that it all stemmed from an early incident of child abuse:

It was Billy's Welsh nanny, Mary Evans ... who remained uppermost in his memory because of a traumatic incident that occurred when Burroughs was four years old. Little Billy was very close to his nanny, so much so that when she had her Thursday off he would throw hysterical tantrums, screaming, "All I want is Nursy!" ... Burroughs later assumed that his need for her must indicate that she fellated him to calm him and send him to sleep, but he also told one of his analysts that Nursy was "severe" and said that when she caught him masturbating she threatened to cut off his penis ...

Nursy was allegedly responsible "for a major trauma that occurred when Burroughs was four years old, something so extreme and shocking that despite ten years of psychoanalysis he was never able to properly retrieve it":

One Thursday in the late summer or autumn of 1918 ... Mary Evans took him along with her on her day out. Mary Evans had a girlfriend whose boyfriend was a veterinarian who worked from his home on the outskirts of St. Louis. They went there for a picnic. ... The general concensus among his analysts was that Mary had encouraged Billy to fellate the vet, and that, scared, Bill had bitten the man's penis, causing him to smack Billy on the head. Bill also theorized that he had witnessed Mary and her girlfriend having sex ...

In any case, "Whatever happened, it disturbed Billy greatly."

Reading the immensely detailed chronicle of Burroughs' life compiled by the indefatigable Barry Miles, I wondered from time to time if this demonisation of the nanny mightn't itself be a screen memory for some even earlier trauma to do with his parents, who supported him with saint-like patience throughout his turbulent life, but whom he seems to have (simultaneously) avoided physically, and refused to criticise on any level whatsoever.

But perhaps that's just the old Freudian in me rearing his shaggy locks again.

Ernest Jones: Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953-57)

The jury's out on engrams at present, but they may well be perfectly real. Defined as "a unit of cognitive information imprinted in a physical substance," they are:

theorized to be the means by which memories are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain or other biological tissue, in response to external stimuli.

The term was first coined by German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon in his book Die Mneme (1904). As a result:

Demonstrating the existence of, and the exact mechanism and location of, neurologically defined engrams has been a focus of persistent research for many decades.

It's possible that particular types of memory may be localised in particular parts of the brain. There have certainly been some suggestive results from time to time. For instance:

In 2016, an MIT study found that memory loss in early stages of Alzheimer's disease could be reversed by strengthening specific memory engram cell connections in the brains of Alzheimer mouse models.

Engrams certainly can't be detected by "E-meters", however, and there seems no reason to believe that an individual can be cleaned of them by having them played back to them again and again, as Burroughs and the Scientologists claimed.

Reddit: The first digital E-meter (2026)

•

Robert Lowell: 'To Speak of Woe That Is In Marriage' (1957)

Robert Lowell's searing mid-career poem 'To Speak of Woe That Is In Marriage' begins with a rather elliptical quote from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:

It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.

Schopenhauer seems to be implying that our traumas may be driven as much by the future - what's to come for us - as by the past: what's already been. As it turns out, the title of Lowell's poem is also a quote: from the Wife of Bath in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:

Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage;
For, lordynges, sith I twelve yeer was of age,
Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve,
Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve ...

Lowell's poem, too, is written in the voice of the wife, not the husband, which is clearly not an aspect of "experience" which he could claim as his own. The husband in question does sound a bit like a self-portrait, though:

My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.

If so, it's a pretty searing indictment.

Fred W. McDarrah: 'Lowell with his soon-to-be-ex second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick (1960s)

Whether or not there are actual physical "engrams" involved, I'm sure that we all have our fair share of traumatic experiences involving "emotional or spiritual distress" (as the Scientologists put it). The question is if they can be cleared in any way by repetition, as Burroughs - at least initially - believed.

The poem "Soap bubbles", above, is an attempt to record one of my own childhood traumas: albeit one as masked and inaccessible to me as Burrough's own alleged experience of infantile abuse.

Mine may be a minnow beside his sperm whale, but it used to bug me nevertheless - until I wrote it down. I began to notice, over the years, that when I'd forced myself to write about any particularly puzzling or embarrassing experience, that it had the effect of externalising it. After that, it was simply a syntactic artefact which could be worked on and revised like any other piece of work.

Strangely enough, this process also robbed it of its potency somehow.

Edward Gorey: Cover illustration for Lucky Jim (1954)

Kingsley Amis, in an early novel, has his protagonist Jim Dixon refer to "those three or four memories which could make him actually twist about in his chair or bed with remorse, fear or embarrassment":

... the present top-of-the-list item [was] the time he'd been pushed out in front of the curtain afer a school concert to make the audience sing the National Anthem. He could hear his own voice now, saying in those flat tones, heavy with insincerity: 'And now ... I want you all ... to join with me, if you will ... in singing ...' And then he'd led off in a key which must have been exactly half an octave above or below the proper one. Switching every few notes, like everybody else, from one octave to the other, half a beat in front of or behind everybody else, he'd gone through the whole thing. Cheers, applause and laughter had followed him when he ducked his burning face back through the curtains.

I recognised that churning, twisting sensation when I first read Lucky Jim. I can't count how many such memories bedevil my life. So gradually, bit by bit, I've tried to disarm them - by writing them down. Admittedly, new ones arise as I deal with the old ones, so I doubt that the process will ever be finished. Sometimes it results in work I feel can be shared with others; sometimes not. It doesn't seem to make much difference to the effectiveness of the technique.

I don't know if this approach would work for anyone else, but I do think there's something in William Burroughs' ideas. They might sound a bit eccentric on the surface, but there's generally a bedrock of good sense beneath them. Anyway, I don't what else one can do about these self-imposed torments: writhing about or punching the wall doesn't really seem to help longterm. A modified version of his engram theory very well might.

Burroughs himself appears to have tried this "externalisation" idea quite early on, in a passage from an early draft of Naked Lunch, written in Tangier around 1957-58:

We are prepared to divulge all and to state that on a Thursday in the month of September 1917, we did, in the garage of the latter, at his solicitations and connivance, endeavor to suck the cock of one George Brune Brubeck, the Bear's Ass, which act disgust me like I try to bite it off and he slap me and curse and blaspheme. [...] The blame for this atrociously incomplete act rest solidly on the basement of Brubeck, my own innocence of any but the most pure reflex move of self-defence and - respect to eliminate this strange serpent thrust so into my face [...] so I [...] had recourse to nature's little white soldiers - our brave defenders by land - and bite his ugly old cock.

William S. Burroughs: Interzone. Ed. James Grauerholz (1989)

When he included this passage in the late compilation of outtakes, Interzone, Burroughs' longterm friend and editor James Grauerholz did some background research which failed to reveal any veterinarians named George Brune Brubeck in St. Louis at the time, although "there is an Edward H. Brune":

'Brune' ...B-R-U-N-E ... 'the Bear's Ass' ... bruin ... this name, although unearthed from a work of fiction, seems well established in Burrough's mind. With all due respect to the late Dr. Brune's descendants, we cannot convict him on this slender evidence, but it certainly points in an interesting direction.

I can't help feeling that the engram theory may take us in a more helpful direction here than such direct attempts to identify the true nature of the crime, interesting though Grauerholz's speculations undoubtedly are.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8: 32). Possibly so. But the mere act of writing it down, then editing it for rhetorical effectiveness, might have the same result of making it no longer simply a part of you. As the wiseacres are keen to tell us, you don't actually remember things, you just remember yourself remembering them, and then remember yourself remembering yourself remembering them - and so ad infinitum.

If you want to get rid of them, they have to be first snared in the ether, then fixed and mounted on some kind of memory board: real or metaphorical.

Joseph Cornell: Untitled (Butterfly Habitat) (c.1940)

•

Being There

Sam Mendes: Empire of Light (UK, 2022)

There's a wonderful scene in Sam Mendes' recent nostalgia-fest Empire of Light where Olivia Colman's character watches a movie for what seems to be the first time in her life. It's at midnight, a private screening hastily set up by her friend, a cinephile projectionist played (inevitably) by Toby Jones. And what does he select to initiate her? Peter Sellers in Being There, of course.

Hal Ashby, dir.: Being There (US, 1979)

It's an inspired choice. Peter Sellers' last great performance, as the hapless Chauncey Gardiner / Chance the Gardener, rhymes perfectly with Colman's character Hilary's struggles with mental health at the old Art Deco cinema she works at, in the coldly perfect seaside town of Margate in the early 1980s.

Sellers, too, was no stranger to such problems. Hhis former wife Britt Ekland recalled:

He obviously suffered from or was bipolar, severely bipolar. He was a very tormented soul who should have had more help. But instead he was unable [to] because he was such a valuable asset.

Interestingly enough, very few of the people who praise the film and Sellers' performance in it make much mention of the screenplay writer, Jerzy Kosiński, who based it on his own 1971 novel.

Eric Koch: Jerzy Kosiński (1969)

And why is that, I wonder? Because he got cancelled, that's why: one of the first examples of this now nearly ubiquitous phenomenon. There can be little doubt that this drying up of attention and acclaim inspired his suicide in 1991. It's not a happy story.

•

Let's start with a small parenthesis:

James Thurber: Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940)

The very proper gander
by James Thurber

Not so very long ago there was a very fine gander. He was strong and smooth and beautiful and he spent most of his time singing to his wife and children. One day somebody who saw him strutting up and down in his yard and singing remarked, "There is a very proper gander." An old hen overheard this and told her husband about it that night in the roost. "They said something about propaganda," she said. "I have always suspected that," said the rooster, and he went around the barnyard next day telling everybody that the very fine gander was a dangerous bird, more than likely a hawk in gander's clothing. A small brown hen remembered a time when at a great distance she had seen the gander talking with some hawks in the forest. "They were up to no good," she said. A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. "He said to hell with the flag, too," said the duck. A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb. Finally everybody snatched up sticks and stones and descended on the gander's house. He was strutting in his front yard, singing to his children and his wife. "There he is!" everybody cried. "Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flag-hater! Bomb-thrower!" So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.

Moral: Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

•

Jerzy Kosiński: The Painted Bird (1965)

Before we get to The Painted Bird, by far the most famous of his novels, it's probably necessary to begin with some biographical data:

Kosiński was born in 1933 as Józef Nikodem Lewinkopf in Łódź, as the only child of Polish Jews Mieczysław (Mojżesz) Lewinkopf and Elżbieta Liniecka. As a child during World War II, he lived in occupied central Poland under a false identity, Jerzy Kosiński, which his father gave him. Eugeniusz Okoń, a Catholic priest, issued him a forged baptismal certificate, and the Lewinkopf family survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers who offered assistance to Polish Jews, at grave personal risk.
... After the war, Kosiński's father aligned himself with Poland's communist regime, and the family was relatively well off ... By age 22 [Kosiński] had earned degrees in history and sociology at the University of Łódź ... [he] also studied in the Soviet Union, and served as a sharpshooter in the Polish Army. A biographer writes that Kosinski disliked conformity and therefore the communism that his father had sworn allegiance to, and because of this developed anti-communist views.
In order to emigrate to the United States in 1957, he created a fake foundation which ostensibly sponsored him, and forged letters from prominent communist authorities guaranteeing his return to Poland, which were then required for anyone leaving the country.
Kosiński first worked at odd jobs to get by, including driving a truck, and he managed to graduate from Columbia University. In 1965 he became an American citizen.

Wikipedia: Jerzy Kosiński

Along the way he published, under the pseudonym "Joseph Novak", two non-fiction books containing analysis of Communist ideology and the Eastern Bloc in general.

The Painted Bird, however, written in the form of a childhood memoir, was a success on a far grander scale. It was marketed as a novel, but Kosiński let it be understood in conversation that it was based on his own childhood experiences in war-torn Poland. Certainly the huge attention and fame it eventually accrued was influenced by readers' belief that the events recorded in it were substantially true. Holocaust-survivor Elie Weisel, for instance, described it as "one of the best ... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity".

Kosiński used it as a springboard to launch his career as a major American novelist, and followed it up with a series of teasing metafictions such as the National Book Award-winning Steps (1968) and the bitingly satirical Being There (1971).

He was, in short, very much a writer of his time, exploring themes and techniques we might tend to associate with fellow magical realists such as Jorge Luis Borges and Milan Kundera.

•

Jerzy Kosiński: Steps (1968 / 1983)

In June 1982, a Village Voice report by Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith alleged Kosiński wrote The Painted Bird in Polish, and had it secretly translated into English. The report said that Kosiński's books had been ghost-written by "assistant editors", finding stylistic differences among Kosiński's novels. Kosiński, according to them, had depended upon his freelance editors for "the sort of composition that we usually call writing."

That was the first problem. The second was the question of the book's faithfulness to its author's own experience. Kosiński commented on this in his introduction to a 1976 reissue of the book:

Well-intentioned writers, critics, and readers sought facts to back up their claims that the novel was autobiographical. They wanted to cast me in the role of spokesman for my generation, especially for those who had survived the war; but for me, survival was an individual action that earned the survivor the right to speak only for himself. Facts about my life and my origins, I felt, should not be used to test the book's authenticity, any more than they should be used to encourage readers to read The Painted Bird. Furthermore, I felt then, as I do now, that fiction and autobiography are very different modes.

It was, in short, fiction - a novel by someone who had indeed survived the Holocaust years in Poland, but had not lived through the bizarre events reported by the small boy at the centre of his novel. An academic named D. G. Myers, in his review of a 1996 biography of Kosiński, claimed that the author had passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own life during the Holocaust: "Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry."

But do obscure English Professors from Texas often get invited to such parties? And how likely is it that Myers, a man born in 1952, was an habitué of the New York literary scene in the mid-1960s? So, despite the fact that his claim is pure hearsay, repeated without evidence or even a clear attribution, it's been quoted and requoted ever since.

It seems quite likely that Kosiński did say a lot of things which weren't strictly true whilst partying with the likes of Norman Mailer and Dorothy de Santillana (who happened to be a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin). So what? We should judge people on the claims they make in print, not on the random gossip surrounding them.

It didn't help that there was a concerted campaign to discredit him mounted by the Communist regime in Poland. Alleged "originals" for long passages in The Painted Bird were unearthed by assiduous, state-sponsored critics. It was also claimed that he'd been a C.I.A. plant all along.

In other words, he was either (in Poland) a plagiarist who'd ripped off more valid accounts by actual sufferers, or (in America) a fantasist who'd invented it all out of his own head. He'd either stolen it all from Polish writers and turned it in slick American prose, or written it all in Polish and had a series of shadowy "assistants" translate it for him.

The fact that these two scenarios directly contradicted each other didn't really seem to matter. There was something distinctly fishy about the man. He was just a bit too smug and successful for comfort.

•

Vanity Fair: Jerzy Kosiński's Fall from Grace (2023)

So, from being a very proper gander - the darling of the newspapers and the literary set - Kosiński had become a lying fraud. Everything he wrote had (it seemed) been stolen from somebody else: private love letters (in The Devil Tree), the débâcle of his own unsuccessful marriage (in Blind Date).

When he eventually wrote a book, The Hermit of 69th Street, which satirised the impossibility of documenting every assertion in a work of fiction by "inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book", one sneering critic remarked of it: "Ironically, possibly his only true book is about a successful author who is shown to be a fraud."

The New York Times: Sharon Tate Murder (1969)

By now everyone knew he was tainted, but nobody quite knew why. Doesn't a novelist have the right to make things up? Apparently not - if he's called Jerzy Kosiński. It reached such heights of absurdity that his casual remark that he'd just missed being a house guest of his good friend Roman Polanski on the night of the Sharon Tate murders was subjected to merciless ridicule: such a big liar that he even claims acquaintance with the dead! Shame on you, Jerzy! How tasteless to include details of the massacre in Blind Date!

But what are the facts of the matter? Kosiński certainly was friends with Roman Polanski; they met at the National Film School in Łódź:

In 1984, Polanski denied Kosiński's story in his autobiography. Journalist John Taylor of New York Magazine believes Polanski was mistaken. "Although it was a single sentence in a 461-page book, reviewers focused on it. But the accusation was untrue: Jerzy and Kiki had been invited to stay with Tate the night of the Manson murders, and they missed being killed as well only because they stopped in New York en route from Paris because their luggage had been misdirected." The reason why Taylor believes this is that "a friend of Kosiński [Clement Biddle Wood] wrote a letter to the Times, which was published in the Book Review, describing the detailed plans he and Jerzy had made to meet that weekend at Polanski's house on Cielo Drive."

Umberto Eco: Travels in Hyperreality (1967 / 1973)

Eliot Weinberger, in his 2000 book Karmic Traces, dismisses Kosiński as a "genuine fake" - whatever that's supposed to mean. In the era of Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality (retitled in the US Faith in Fakes), it seems astonishing that such clumsy categorisations can still be taken seriously. Kosiński's star remains in eclipse thanks to facile accusations which could be levelled at virtually any writer of the postmodern era.

The obvious - to a contemporary reader, at any rate - magical realist elements of The Painted Bird were not yet as commonplace as they would become after the appearance of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), along with the other great novels of the Latin American Boom. Kosiński was slightly ahead of the curve, as befits a Central European intellectual, and that failure to be ponderous enough for a public accustomed to the weighty tomes of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal proved, in the end, his downfall.

And yes, he did have a collaborator on the Being There screenplay: he was its co-writer, not its sole author. What a scandal! "A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb." Maybe he did get a bit of help from time to time. So did Alexandre Dumas. So did Truman Capote. Does it matter?

A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. "He said to hell with the flag, too," said the duck.

Requiescat in Pace, Jerzy Kosiński. And as for the rest of you Cold War morons who hounded him to his death, hang your heads in shame.

Chauncey Gardiner / Chance the Gardener in Being There (1979)

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Jerzy Kosiński (1973)

Józef Nikodem Lewinkopf
[Jerzy Kosiński]
(1933-1991)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Fiction:


1. The Painted Bird (1965
   • The Painted Bird. 1952. 1965. London: W. H. Allen & Company, 1966.
2. Steps (1968)
   • Steps. 1968. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1969.
3. Being There (1971)
4. The Devil Tree (1973)
   • The Devil Tree. Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1973.
5. Cockpit (1975)
6. Blind Date (1977)
7. Passion Play (1979)
8. Pinball (1982)
9. The Hermit of 69th Street (1988)

Non-fiction:


10. [as Joseph Novak] The Future Is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with the Russians (1960)
11. [as Joseph Novak] No Third Path (1962)
12. The Art of the Self: Essays à propos Steps (1968)
13. "Packaged Passion". The American Scholar 42: 2 (Spring, 1973)
14. Passing By: Selected Essays, 1962–1991 (1992)

Cinema

Adaptations:

15. Being There, dir. Hal Ashby, writ. Jerzy Kosiński with Robert C. Jones [based on the former's 1971 novel] (USA, 1979)
16. Nabarvené ptáče [The Painted Bird], dir. & writ. Václav Marhoul [based on Jerzy Kosiński's 1965 novel] (Czechia / Slovakia / Ukraine, 2019)

Actor:

17. Being There [cameo in gala scene] (1979)
18. Reds [as Grigory Zinoviev] (1981)
19. The Statue of Liberty [interview] (1985)
20. Łódź Ghetto [voice of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski] (1989)
21. Religion, Inc. [as beggar] (1989)

Interviews:


22. Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski. Ed. Tom Teicholz (1993)
23. Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller (2012)

Secondary:


24. Sloan, James Park. Jerzy Kosinski: a Biography (1996)

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James Park Sloan: Jerzy Kosinski: a Biography (1996)

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