Why Graham Greene traveled to Africa, Mexico, Vietnam

Reading Graham Greene's autobiography A Sort of Life -- a cheap edition I got used for a few dollars -- I got to the part where he talks about a "war on boredom" that he began to fight, during a depression of what he later understood to be his manic depression condition. As part of this war on boredom, he engaged for a season in playing Russian roulette.

The first time, he was rewarded with "an extraordinary sense of jubilation" and of his renewed life's infinite possibilities. But when he repeated the experience later -- he describes having done so several times during the fall the year when he was nineteen -- he found the exhilarating effect of the experience lessened each time. Finally, when playing Russian roulette no longer had the power to give him even an adrenaline rush -- which he frankly describes as a "drug" he had come to enjoy -- he gave up doing it.

But the interesting part is at the end of the chapter when he says that this practice of using what he calls recklessness to fight his "war on boredom" is what underlies his subsequent journeys abroad:

A kind of Russian roulette remained too a factor in my later life, so that without previous experience of Africa I went on an absurd and reckless trek through Liberia¹; it was the fear of boredom which took me to [the Mexican state of] Tabasco during the religious persecution², to a léproserie in the Congo³, to the Kikuyu reserve during the Mau-Mau insurrection⁴, to the emergency in Malaya⁵ and to the French war in Vietnam⁶. There, in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver... in the lifelong war against boredom.

The references are, of course, to Greene's later books:
(1) Journey Without Maps -- actually this journey, which he undertook with a female cousin, was done on behalf of the British secret service, to assess whether Axis powers had a foothold in Liberia.
(2) The non-fiction The Lawless Roads and the novel The Power and the Glory
(3) A Burnt-Out Case
4 and 5 -- No book that I know of, but that's probably just my ignorance.
(6) The Quiet American

The lonely Brinks 'stockroom' man

It's one of those days when you read things in your spam inbox for entertainment. Usually I just peruse the subject lines, but I happened to open one of the typical Nigerian spam messages and realized just how quaint some of the assumptions are.

Dear/Madam,

I am happy to write to you this mail. I am glad that i have you as a friend and i hope that this mail gets to you with all happiness in your mind to help me out in this crucial matter.

First and foremost i want to tell you that i am the chief accountant with the Brinks Hellas Security Company Athens Greece with head quarters in Athens. i want to tell you that this matter all started last year 2004 when i was rounding up accounts for the year ended and also taking into stock what was in store.

Here we have a scenario worthy of the opening chapter of a Graham Greene novel. The formal, overly polite clerk of the Athens office of Brinks, somewhat marooned in his dusty backroom with God knows whatall. At the end of the year it's time to "round up" accounts, and he takes stock of "what was in store." Did I say Greene? It's almost Biblical.

Actually, I was taking into stock all the treasuries we have left, both the ones claimed and the ones not claimed, when i realized that there was this consignment that has been in the store room for about a year and a half now and no one has come to claim it. Really, i have been with this organization for about five years and know exactly when the consignments came in.

The actual destination of the consignments is from Malaysia belonging to one Mr. Hang Chen. All this stocks have been in my books and it is only me that knows whose goods have been claimed and whose goods are still in the store. ...

The letter then goes into the usual details designed to make the story more plausible -- the length of time (four months) Mr. Chen's goods were supposed to remain in the storeroom, a subplot about Mr. Chen flying to Dublin (of all places), and finally the literal money shot:

Now when i checked out the consignment late last year i decided to Scan it and found out that the consignments actually contains money and to my knowledge it contains 3 million dollars which are wrapped up. Honestly, this consignments has passed out the time lapse and i have already written it off the books.

Und so weiter. What impressed me was the opening: the figure of the lonely stockroom clerk, undoubtedly middle-aged; he's over-educated for a stockroom clerk, which raises the question of how he wound up there in the first place -- no doubt a sad tale of frustrated ambition, a sabotaged career, and bad luck. He passes the time by opening up unclaimed packages, really just out of curiosity. Imagine his surprise when he finds the three million dollars (dollars, not drachmas, yuan, Euros or whatever they use in Malaysia).

If it were a Greene book, the ensuing chapters might deal with shadowy agents seeking the true provenance of the three million dollars. It would turn out there was no such person as a Mr. Hang Chen. Inevitably, a lovely woman in her mid-30s with a classical name such as Helen or Daphne would appear mixed up in the thing, probably trying to protect someone, and the storeroom man would have to choose between his secret love for her and his moral duty.

But they don't write them that way anymore, except in spam emails.

technorati: hoaxes

'Mystery man'

Those who have been desultorily following George Orwell's diary for the last year or so as it has been posted on a website get the payoff this week and next, as Orwell reports the events leading up to the beginning of World War II. The entries are accompanied by photostats of newspapers of the day. Those accompanying today's entry are fascinating, as several pages from several newspapers are reprinted. Among them was this weird article from the Daily Mirror (from this page), a passage worthy of Graham Greene:

MYSTERY MAN AT EMBASSY

A mystery man who arrived in England by air yesterday spent three hours at the German Embassy in Carlton House-terrace, London. -- and is thought to have flown to Germany last night.

He arrived at the Embassy in a Diplomatic Corps car. All he would say when he left after three hours was: "I don't know who I am."

He said it rather sadly and shook his head. He spoke in good English, with the track of a foreign accent. Then he was driven away.

An hour later three men arrived in a car at Heston Airport. One was seen off in a German plane understood to be bound for Amsterdam and Berlin. The airport officials would not say who he was.

The visitor to the Embassy was a tall, sunburned man, in a grey striped suit and black Homburg hat, carrying gloves and an umbrella.

He jumped out of the Diplomatic Corps car shortly before 3 p.m.

He did not appear to know by which door to enter the Embassy.

After his three hours' visit, he left by the car in which he had arrived.

Having refused to tell his name, he was pressed to say if he had arrived by air from Croydon or elsewhere. He waved his hand in a gesture that might have meant agreement or denial and the car sped away.

He Watched Crowds

The car was driven into Belgravia by a roundabout route which included Pall Mall, The Mall Horse Guards-parade (where there were crowds of sightseers), Birdcage-walk and past Buckingham Palace where there were also a number of spectators.

The car slowed down near the Horse Guards-parade, as if the passengers wished to look at the crowds by the Foreign Office and in Downing-street, but did not stop. ...

technorati: Orwell, Graham Greene

Characters who grow in the dark

I'm reading, for the first time, Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana." It's about an obscure expat in pre-Castro Havana who is recruited, against his will, as an agent by British intelligence. He finds he is expected to recruit sub-agents and to send London reports about them. He has no intention of acting as a secret agent at all, but since he does need money, he makes up a bunch of agents and then files reports for their fictional expenses. Then London sends him a female agent to act as his secretary, and things start to get difficult for our Mr. Wormold. There follows a fascinating passage in which Greene compares the imagination of the penny-ante con artist-cum-agent, Wormold, with that of the novelist:

The more Beatrice asked Wormold about (Raul Dominguez), the more his character developed, and the more anxious she became to contact him. Sometimes Wormold felt a twinge of jealousy towards Raul and he tried to blacken the picture. "He gets through a bottle of whisky a day," he said.

"It's his escape from loneliness and memory," Beatrice said. "Don't you ever want to escape?"

"I suppose we all do sometimes."

"I know what that kind of loneliness is like," she said with sympathy. "Does he drink all day?"

"No. The worst hour is two in the morning. When he wakes then, he can't sleep for thinking, so he drinks instead." It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness -- he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action. Soon after Beatrice arrived Raul had a birthday and she suggested they should give him a case of champagne.

"He won't touch it," Wormold said. He didn't know why. "He suffers from acidity. If he drinks champagne he comes out in spots. Now the professor on the other hand won't drink anything else."

"An expensive taste."

"A depraved taste." Wormold said that without taking any thought. "He prefers Spanish champagne." Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge. What was Teresa doing down there, out of sight? He didn't care to think. Her unabashed description of what life was like with her two lovers sometimes shocked him. But the immediate problem was Raul. There were moments when Wormold thought that it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.

Wormold always thought best in his bath. He was aware one morning, when he was concentrating hard, of indignant noises. A fist beat on the door a number of times, somebody stamped on the stairs, but a creative moment had arrived and he paid no attention to the world beyond the steam. Raul had been dismissed by the Cubana air line for drunkenness. He was desperate; he was without a job; there had been an unpleasant interview between him and Captain Segura, who threatened....

"Are you all right?" Beatrice called from outside. "Are you dying? Shall I break down the door?"

Raul, "the professor," and Teresa are, of course, merely figments of Wormold's imagination. But they fix his attention, they concern him, and -- most wonderful of all -- they "grow in the dark without his knowledge" until he is asked about them, and immediately a character sketch comes to mind.

This passage shows the similarity between any kind of professional bullshitting -- whether one is, say, a comedian or actor who improvises, a con artist (think of Ratso Rizzo's request for money to cover "management expenses"), a parent, a salesman -- and the creative writer.

One of the ironic touches is that Wormold, whose real line of work is selling vacuum cleaners, is a terrible salesman. He just isn't interested enough. But the need for money, and the growing need to keep from being caught in his subterfuge, focuses his imagination as selling never did.

Tear yourself away from CNN

The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley did a look back at Flannery O'Connor today. The author quotes O'Connor's words in which she compared her self to fellow Catholic novelist Graham Greene:

If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it; Greene's is something else.

The L.A. Times did a profile of Reza Aslan, author of No god But God (sic), an examination of Islam and the possibilities of reform. (The link to the Aslan profile courtesy Moorish Girl.)

The NY Times does a story on how more than one book winds up using the same stock photo -- or other similar design -- on its cover. Everyone involved professes embarrassment. I see it as a niche business opportunity, a sort of publishing due diligence: before a book cover design is finalized, validate its originality by submitting it to a firm whose whole business is to watch out for such things.

Speaking of publishing, a woman who posed as, variously, a publisher and a literary agent, is under federal indictment for bilking hopeful writers. The suspect went so far as to claim one of her false identities had been killed in the World Trade Center in 2001. But she's not the only one; the story says there's a website called Writer Beware that lists 400 "questionable" literary agents and 200 such publishers.

Flannery O'Connor, Jonathan Yardley, Reza Aslan, Moorish Girl