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Graham
Greene on The Confidential Agent:
The opening scene between two rival agents on the cross-channel steamer—I called them D. and L. because I did not wish to localize their conflict—was all I had in mind, and a certain vague ambition to create something legendary out of a contemporary thriller: the hunted man who becomes in turn the hunter, the peaceful man who turns at bay, the man who has learned to love justice by suffering injustice. But what the legend was to be about in modern terms I had no idea. I fell back for the first and last time in my life on Benzedrine. For six weeks I started each day with a tablet, and renewed the dose at midday. Each day I sat down to work with no idea of what turn the plot might take and each morning I wrote, with the automatism of a planchette, two thousand words instead of my usual stint of five hundred words. In the afternoons The Power and the Glory proceeded towards its end at the same leaden pace, unaffected by the sprightly young thing who was so quickly overtaking it.
from Ways of Escape, pp.69-71 © Melody Yiu Images and quoted text on this website may be protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. They are presented here for academic interest and personal entertainment. No distribution, reproduction, re-transmission or other rights are given or implied by their appearance. If you have any copyright concerns, please notify me. |
The Confidential Agent was written
in six weeks in 1938 after my return from Mexico. The
Spanish Civil War furnished the background…I was
struggling then through The Power and the Glory,
but there was no money in the book as far as I could
foresee. Certainly my wife and two children would not be
able to live on one unsaleable book…so I determined
to write another "entertainment" as quickly as
possible in the mornings, while I ground on slowly with The
Power and the Glory in the afternoons.
The
Confidential Agent is one of the few books of mine
which I have cared to reread—perhaps because it is
not really one of mine. It was as though I were ghosting
for another man. D., the chivalrous agent and professor
of Romance literature, is not really one of my
characters, nor is Forbes, born Furtstein, the equally
chivalrous lover. The book moved rapidly because I was
not struggling with my own technical problems: I was to
all intents ghosting a novel by an old writer who was to
die a little before the studio in which I had worked was
blown out of existence. All I can say as excuse, and in
gratitude to an honoured shade, is that The
Confidential Agent is a better than