Free A World of My Own by Graham Greene Page A

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. Perhapsthere 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 reading 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 elsethe 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.
    I replied that that happened to everyone with age, and he had left a fine body of work behind him. He admitted that ‘The Midnight Skaters’ was a good poem, and I tried to remember the title of another which ended with the line ‘Look up with hatredthrough the glass.’ I started glancing through a collection of his, but I couldn’t identify the poem.

    Somebody had shown me a book by Sacheverell Sitwell in which he claimed that he and his wife had gone to live in Kenya because of something I had written about him. They were suffering from intense