Read Online Getting to Know the General by Graham Greene - Free Book Online
Authors: Graham Greene
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the Congo. My novel, so I believed, was taking form in my head, hope was reborn, and I thought that I had found in Conrad an epigraph for On the Way Back. But now when I reopen Conrad’s story at the page which I had marked, the sentences seem more suitable to the book I am writing now:
It seems I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream’s sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment and a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible . . .
In the peace of Taboga I felt captivated by Panama, by the struggle with the United States, by the peasants barking like dogs, by Chuchu’s strange wisdom and complicated sex life, by the drumbeats in the slums of El Chorillo, by the General’s dreams of death, and as for revolt, I was to feel that too at moments in the years that followed – the desire to be back in Europe with the personal, understandable problems there.
Next morning I began trying to compose in my diary the first sentences of the novel, describing how a young French woman journalist was engaged by a fashionable Paris left-wing editor to go to Panama to interview the General. They proved in fact not to be the first sentences in the chapter which I was finally to write and then abandon:
He was tall and lean and he would have had an air of almost overpowering distinction if his grey hair had not been quite so well waved over his ears, which were again of the right masculine size. She would perhaps have taken him for a diplomat if she had not known him to be the editor of a very distinguished weekly which she seldom read, being out of sympathy with its modish tendency towards left-wing politics. Many men come alive only in their eyes: his eyes were dead, and it was only in the gestures of his elegant carcase that he lived.
I admit that I had a certain editor in mind whom I had only met once in a Lisbon bar, and, for the first time as a novelist, I was trying mistakenly to use real characters – the General, Chuchu, even this editor – in my fiction. They had emerged from life and not from the unconscious and for that reason they stood motionless like statues in my mind – they couldn’t develop, they were incapable of the unexpected word or action – they were real people and they could have no life independent of me in the imagination.
12
The helicopter landed with military punctuality on the beach to fetch us and back in Panama City I took a long siesta to prepare for this odd party of which I was to be the host, host to a lot of strangers chosen by Chuchu and Señor V. The Greek bookseller was the only one I would even know by sight.
On the invitation cards the party was timed for eight till ten. Chuchu and I arrived punctually and so did many of the guests, but not the drinks. Time passed very slowly without them. The party stagnated. A lot of photographs were taken of disconsolate groups. Chuchu was looking tired. He told me he had spent the afternoon with a prostitute. The party grew larger and larger, but there were still no drinks, and the hypocrisy of such parties came bitterly home to me. Nobody goes to a party to meet anyone: everybody is there for free drinks. There were no drinks and I was supposed to be the host.
I took a strong dislike to the Cuban Attaché for Political Affairs who seemed to regard me with deep suspicion after I told him that I had been three times to Cuba since the revolution and had known the country in the days of Batista. Luckily I was saved from him by a very nice young Cuban press officer. Chuchu slipped away (in search of the drinks, he had explained to me), and after what seemed a long time he returned triumphantly with a lorry load of them. Apparently he had given the wrong address to the National Guard.
The party quickly cheered up. The leading Communist in Panama proved very friendly. He told me how his party supported the General’s
It seems I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream’s sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment and a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible . . .
In the peace of Taboga I felt captivated by Panama, by the struggle with the United States, by the peasants barking like dogs, by Chuchu’s strange wisdom and complicated sex life, by the drumbeats in the slums of El Chorillo, by the General’s dreams of death, and as for revolt, I was to feel that too at moments in the years that followed – the desire to be back in Europe with the personal, understandable problems there.
Next morning I began trying to compose in my diary the first sentences of the novel, describing how a young French woman journalist was engaged by a fashionable Paris left-wing editor to go to Panama to interview the General. They proved in fact not to be the first sentences in the chapter which I was finally to write and then abandon:
He was tall and lean and he would have had an air of almost overpowering distinction if his grey hair had not been quite so well waved over his ears, which were again of the right masculine size. She would perhaps have taken him for a diplomat if she had not known him to be the editor of a very distinguished weekly which she seldom read, being out of sympathy with its modish tendency towards left-wing politics. Many men come alive only in their eyes: his eyes were dead, and it was only in the gestures of his elegant carcase that he lived.
I admit that I had a certain editor in mind whom I had only met once in a Lisbon bar, and, for the first time as a novelist, I was trying mistakenly to use real characters – the General, Chuchu, even this editor – in my fiction. They had emerged from life and not from the unconscious and for that reason they stood motionless like statues in my mind – they couldn’t develop, they were incapable of the unexpected word or action – they were real people and they could have no life independent of me in the imagination.
12
The helicopter landed with military punctuality on the beach to fetch us and back in Panama City I took a long siesta to prepare for this odd party of which I was to be the host, host to a lot of strangers chosen by Chuchu and Señor V. The Greek bookseller was the only one I would even know by sight.
On the invitation cards the party was timed for eight till ten. Chuchu and I arrived punctually and so did many of the guests, but not the drinks. Time passed very slowly without them. The party stagnated. A lot of photographs were taken of disconsolate groups. Chuchu was looking tired. He told me he had spent the afternoon with a prostitute. The party grew larger and larger, but there were still no drinks, and the hypocrisy of such parties came bitterly home to me. Nobody goes to a party to meet anyone: everybody is there for free drinks. There were no drinks and I was supposed to be the host.
I took a strong dislike to the Cuban Attaché for Political Affairs who seemed to regard me with deep suspicion after I told him that I had been three times to Cuba since the revolution and had known the country in the days of Batista. Luckily I was saved from him by a very nice young Cuban press officer. Chuchu slipped away (in search of the drinks, he had explained to me), and after what seemed a long time he returned triumphantly with a lorry load of them. Apparently he had given the wrong address to the National Guard.
The party quickly cheered up. The leading Communist in Panama proved very friendly. He told me how his party supported the General’s
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