Graham Greene Studies

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This article examines the extraordinary—but regrettably brief—friendship between Graham Greene and the Norwegian novelist, poet, dramatist, political activist, and war correspondent Nordahl Grieg.
In his diary Greene detailed his first encounter with Grieg in 1932, describing the Norwegian writer as “charming with his accent, his courtliness, his unexpectedness, which I could not follow closely enough.” Although Greene and Greig corresponded for several years, they didn’t meet again until after the German occupation of Norway in April 1940. Grieg fled to London, smuggling the gold from the Norwegian Bank out of his occupied home country. Immediately following his dangerous adventure, Grieg phoned Greene from the hotel and invited him over. During his London exile Greig was eventually allowed to join RAF bomber fighters as a correspondent. His plane was shot down by German bomber planes on a raid over Berlin, and three of the squadron’s four war correspondents were reported missing—among them Nordahl Grieg.
“Nordahl Grieg was an omen or a myth, and he remained a myth,” Greene later wrote of his Norwegian friend. “Even his death was to prove legendary, so that none will be able to say with any certainty, ‘In this place he died.’”

Nordahl Grieg’s Friendship with Graham Greene

Before writing A Burnt-Out Case, Greene went—as usual—on location to find inspiration for a dramatic plot and characters and to collect contextual and technical information to compose its background. During the five weeks Greene spent in the Belgian Congo he kept a diary, which was published eleven months after the novel.
This widely available published version of his “Congo Journal” however, differs strongly from the original manuscript of Greene’s diary. In fact, Greene subjected the manuscript not to one, but to at least five revisions before allowing it to go to print. The revisions involved, among other things: the addition of a whole set of footnotes providing explanations and knowledge Greene gathered after returning from the Congo; deletion of passages of an erotic nature; omission of references to his extramarital affairs in Europe; modification of originally depreciative portrayals of persons he had met in the Congo (some of these portrayals he turned into squarely opposite, positive ones); putting his host Dr. Lechat less in the foreground; and other types of significant alterations.
Using an easy-to-follow chart, this article compares the original manuscript (column 1) with
Josephine Reid’s typescript and Greene’s revision of Reid’s typescript (column 2), the galley proofs, Greene’s revision of the galley proofs, and final publication (column 3) with a focus that includes only modifications pertinent to the content of Greene’s perceptions and experiences with persons, places, events, and himself.

Graham Greene’s Congo Journal: A Critical Edition

The account of Graham Greene telling Max Reinhardt that he missed publishing and was looking for something to do after he had written his five hundred words a day is deeply entrenched. But there is more to the story. Like most writers, Greene wanted a publisher who would do what he said, and perhaps this was what he thought he would find when he eventually accepted Ian Parsons’s offer of a literary editorship. “Graham Greene as Publisher” traces Greene’s journey through the publishing world from 1926, when he followed his five hundred words a day sorting grammar, redundancies, and clichés at The Times, through 1987 when—having worn many different hats during his years a full-blown publisher—he was touted for his part in the protest against the commercial pressures on editors and authors based on the principle that the author should call the tune.

Graham Greene as Publisher

Quentin Falk explores the relationship--or non-relationship--between Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock.

Greene & Hitchcock: A Marriage Made in Hell? Or, the What-ifs & the Why-nots

Review of Richard Greene's Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene.

Graham Greene Studies (Vol. 2)

Items in this collection

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Nordahl Grieg’s Friendship with Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s Congo Journal: A Critical Edition

Graham Greene as Publisher

Greene & Hitchcock: A Marriage Made in Hell? Or, the What-ifs & the Why-nots

Greene on Greene: Richard Greene: Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene

Christopher Hull: Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel

Sarah Rainsford: Our Woman Down in Havana: Reporting Castro's Cuba

Graham Greene's The Last Interview and Other Conversations

Dedication

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