Excursions in Greeneland

Pilgrimage
(Graham Greene b. Berkhamsted, 2nd October 1904)

To make a pilgrimage to Berkhamsted
may seem eccentric. A shrine to facile grace—
oppressively polite—his bland birthplace
explains, perhaps, why all his life he fled
from bourgeois smugness. Saigon’s opium dens,
his antidote to prep-school tedium;
he feared, like death, the happy medium
and sought secret revenge in Port au Prince’s
tawdry brothels. God remained unprovoked,
and Greene, who sensed his faith only through guilt,
dispassionately observed his fading hope.
More Don Quixote than Don Juan, ‘to tilt
at windmills is my chosen fate’, he joked.
‘Towards my guttering faith I still must grope.’

The Comedians

Amongst us, who is ever what they seem?
The priest caught pilfering lingerie will take
a whore's confession all the same; both fake:
his murmured blessing, her orgasmic scream.
The great and good pursue utopian schemes;
the rest of us, consigned to minor roles—
mere apparatchiks, might well sell our souls
but cherish still our sadly tarnished dreams.
What lies beneath the P.A.'s polished poise,
the surly waiter's supercilious glance,
the barmaid's flirty quip ‘just for the boys’?
For others, not themselves, they play their part.
Suppressed: a kid who never got the chance,
a secret life, the lover’s broken heart.

Heart of the Matter

Now middle-aged and prey to sentiment,
he took a lover and discovered God.
Both sin and faith, he joked, were heaven-sent;
the words proved fatal to the path he trod.

A priest intones, ‘The blood of Christ.’ The wafer
dries on his tongue, in fear, he feigns belief.
Yet in his lover's arms he feels no safer,
profane or sacred love brings scant relief.

His wife and mistress, both prove hard to please—
to safeguard one he must deceive the other.
Before a gaudy statue, on his knees
he prays, ‘deliver me, O Holy Mother
from sin.’ Her smile is flat, like hollow laughter,
a hall of mirrors, mocking the hereafter.

The Man Within

The man within is co-conspirator,
ghost writing his existence’s novella.
The mind’s metropolis or heart’s favela—
there is no choice, it’s never either/or.
His inner voice, the tribal story-teller,
can see beyond the unconvincing cover
and whispers as he kisses his new lover,
‘This cannot last.’  Now nothing seems to quell her
burgeoning jealousy; ‘There is no other’
he lies. How she detests his secret life;
they cannot talk it through, he calls it tact.
She senses his sang-froid and says, ‘Why bother
the thing is doomed?’ and frets like his ex-wife—
‘the fiction always did outweigh the fact.’

The End of the Affair

Uncertain now quite how your lover feels,
console yourself that when you sense she fakes
that ‘petite frisson’, her sweet feline squeals
are put on poignantly for both your sakes.
Dishonesty may be true love's soul-mate,
insidious truth its secret enemy;
but as you drift towards a savage fate,
bereft in love's twilit Gethsemane,
all through these final scenes you still pretend
denial always was your saving grace.
One final lie—‘I'll always be a friend’
so plausible, your sweet, angelic face.
But truthfully, what is it you most dread,
this empty promise, or that empty bed?
 

A Journey without Maps

A Spanish Countess trounced him at canasta;
he fled on deck in quiet consternation.
Forseeing an obtuse social disaster,
he stared astern at unknown constellations.
Burnt-out, alone, in some malarial port
he sheltered in the seedy P.Z. store,
then wired his report: ‘News bad. Cash short.
“ancestral voices prophesying war.”’

Marooned upstream, his maps show empty space.
Unhinged by fever, spiralling in dreams,
he watched a shaman dance—‘such bestial grace.’
The drums incant ‘Beware, Beware.’ He screams,
‘Who's there?’ His pistol pressed against his head,
he wonders, ‘Will she miss me when I'm dead?’

The Human Factor

Control, in Whitehall, pours himself a tea,
‘Do pass the plate.’ (he takes an arrowroot,
Big Ben strikes three); then chats about Beirut
and weighing risk with opportunity.

A dapper figure in a linen suit
relaxes in a café by the sea;
which face, he wonders, is my enemy
remembering what they tell the raw recruit:
‘Heroics should be left to Mr. Bond.It’s solitude that is your greatest danger,
there is no rule that bombshells must be blonde.
Who can resist an artful, sultry stranger?’

Not even he, our most accomplished actor
was quite immune to the human factor.
 
The Third Man

Whose shadows shift across the wall—
the writer in his shuttered room,
the reader who believes it all,
the hero sentenced to his doom?

Dreaming of reflected glory
the writer makes a dangerous tryst;
the reader, captured by the story,
must vie with the protagonist
to plot against the winning villain.

The girl, of course, still loves the crook
and treats the hero with disdain.
Each, by ‘The End’ is brought to book:
The Third Man’s lost identity
is what each one needs him to be.


Writing 'Burlesques' opened up the possibilities of what might be done with sequences of poems around a common theme. From late 2002, for the next eighteen months or so, I worked on two sequences simultaneously. One thing became apparent to me as I participated on the board; whereas some of the participants were able to produce well written sonnets apparently overnight, I tended to make much slower progress and from first draft to a poem ready even to workshop could take months. Circumstances partly explains this. Work became ever more demanding on my time, 45 hour weeks as the norm became 60 hour weeks. I always worried about the effect on family life and often writing seemed like a selfish indulgence, but I had become a habitual poet in the same way social drinkers develop into habitual drinkers.

I recall it was while I was on holiday in Crete that I came up with the idea of writing something based around Graham Greene novels. I'm not 'well read', at least not so far as novels are concerned, that being said, I have enjoyed reading Greene all my adult life. I came to his work via the collection of short stories, 'A sense of Reality' when I was in my late teens. I then read his some of his later books, 'The Honorary Consul', 'The Human Factor' and 'Our Man in Havana'. When I met Gill I discovered  that she too was a bit of a Greene aficianado and a voracious consumer of novels generally. As Graham's later work came out, we read them, 'Dr Fischer's Bomb Party' then ' Monsignor Quixiote'.

The publicity around the time of his death led to a spate of re-reading and a bit of an effort to read a few more of the books that I had not read such as 'Travels with my Aunt', 'The Comedians' 'The Quiet American' among others. Then, when I was clearing the family home, after my Father's death in May 1998, to my surptise I came across a hardback 'bookclub' copy of 'Heart of the Matter' amongst the handful of Ian Flemings, Neville Shutes and H. E. Bates' that made up the family library. I found that the most powerful of Greene's books read to date, partly, I think as my early middle age kicked-in, the themes of faith, doubt, deception and death that lie beneath even Greene's comedic work seemed more real and prescient.

In October 2002 we re-visited Georgiopolis in Crete. Staying at the simple, but stylish Papadakis Apartments, I remember it as being a wonderfully sunny and and joyful time

The reception area had a box of 'passed-on' books for deckchair reading. I was pleased to find amongst the chunky bonk busters and meaty thrillers a somewhat old and tatty copy of Greene's  'End of The Affair'. It is the most personal and emotionally raw of his novels and I remember being quite affected by it, so much so, I have to admit that I purloined the copy when I left. In my small black notebook some phrases based on the title are scribbled next to a list of Graham Greene novel titles in green felt-tip. What I planned to do was write a sequence of sonnets using the titles of Greene's books as jumping-off points. At the back of my mind I thought that with the centenary of his birth coming up in 2004 someone might be willing to publish the poems. It was the first time I think that I had begun to consider publication as a serious possibility. In the event, I actually got sidetracked with my other Edward Hopper based project. Going back through the Sonnet Board archive it shows a flurry of activity in the late Spring and Summer of 2004 to bring 'Excursions in Greeneland' to fruition. That really was too late to get them included in any major literary publication for the October centenary. Anyway, I had not really any track record or 'name' and looking back my ideas of TLS triumph do appear naive and slightly embarrassing. The sequence did get into print, but not until my first chapbook appeared in late 2007.

The other issue that comes to light when looking back though all of this is that my recollections are flawed, I am an  unrelable narrator!  What the Sonnet Board archive shows is that 'The Comedians' was posted to the board in the previous June, prefaced by the comment "recently I've been re-reading some Graham Greene, and this was the result..."  Looking at the poem, you can see, in the way it attempts to 'pack-in' big ideas and themes within the 14 lines, that it resembles poems such as 'Parting Shots' and Biographia Literaria'. Other poems in the sequence such as 'Journey Without Maps' and 'The Human Factor' are more situational and filmic and resemble more the sonnets I wrote during 2003 for my other 'project' based on Hopper's 'Nighthawks'.

So it is irrefutable that I must have read 'The Comedians' well before my trip to Greece, even though that's not how I recall it. Developing a reliable chronology is not easy due to the way I work. I have a little black notebook where I jot down ideas and phrases - never dated, sometimes entries are subsequently found to be illegible and not always in a strict page order. Mixed up in this are longer drafts of things if I've been on holiday without access to a computer. Mainly though, I work staight into Word.

However I also have a running Word file called 'new stuf' which I have kept going since 2001. This is the computer equivalent of the black notebooks and equally a haphazard mixture of first ideas and working drafts punctuated with links to other interesting on line material. To add to the confusion, some poems got re-drafted on-line based on feedback in the Sonnet Board workshops. The dating here can be a little suspect here too since the site crashed some years ago. Furthermore, when poems have been submitted for publication the editors sometimes make minor amendations to punctuation and grammar. All this means that dating material can be difficult and settling on a final version problematic. From my perspective the definitive versions of what I've written to date are the ones here. So far as the dating of poems is concerned that is a little more approximate; all you can say for this sequence is that it is dated between July 2002 and July 2004 when the 'Pilgrimage' sonnet was added as a 'prequel' at Mike Alexander's behest. Without dated draft copies it's impossible to tie down exactly  the order in which  I wrote most of my poems.