Beskrivelse
GRAHAM GREENE [1904-1991]
Typewritten letter, SIGNED by Graham Greene.
Letter to Jens Folkman, director of information at the Norwegian Opera, later Norwegian Film and the publishing house Cappelens Forlag.
Written on Greene’s private stationary from his address in Antibes, dated May 10th, 1982. Greene is thanking Folkman for sending him photos and material on Nils Lie and ”my friend” Nordahl Grieg.
IN ADDITION: Greene’s two memoir books «A sort of Life», The Bodley Head, 1971 and «A sort of Life», 1980. Both first editions, first printings. Fine condition.
Nils Lie [1902-1908], was a Norwegian author, translator and publisher consultant. He wrote the classic crime novel «Bergens- toget plyndret inat!», with Nordahl Grieg in 1923.In 1942, he resigned his position in the publishing house Gyldendal in protest against their Nazification. 1942–45 Lie was in London, from 1943 as a press officer in the Norwegian navy. After the war he went back to Gyldendal, and i 1952 he translated Graham Greene’s «A Gun for Sale» [1936].
Nordahl Grieg [1902-1943], Norwegian poet, political acti-vist and war reporter. The British Air Force let him join a bombing mission over Berlin. The Lancaster-bomber was shot down over Berlin and the whole crew lost their lives. In his memoirs, Graham Greene remembers his friend Nordahl Grieg.
«Ways of Escape», 1980, pp. 20-26.
[…]
”I had now published three novels of which the first had some success and the other two had deservedly failed, and I felt the desolate isolation of defeat, like a casualty who has been left behind and forgotten. The sudden arrival in 1931 down a muddy Gloucestershire lane of a Norwegian poet whom I didn’t know from Adam seemed unaccountable, dreamlike and oddly encouraging. Like the appearance of three crows on a gate, Nordahl Grieg was an omen or a myth, and he re-mained a myth. Even his death was to prove legendary, so that none will be able to say with any certainty, ’In this place he died.’ He was shot down in an air raid over Berlin in 1943. I can remember with distinctness only three meetings. Each of our meetings was separated by a space of years from the next, yet I would not have hesitated to claim friendship with him – even a degree of intimacy. I was unable to read his books – for only one had been translated into English (in any case his poetry would have been untranslatable) – and so he struck me less as a fellow author with whom I must talk shop than as a friend I had grown up with, to whom I could speak and with whom I could argue about anything in the world.
I can’t remember what we talked about that first time, when he came ’to look me up’, as he put it as sole explanation, in the cottage my wife Vivien and I had rented in the village of Chipping Campden, but I immediately felt caught up into his intimacy which seemed as impersonal – in the sense that I did not have to deserve it or work for it – as sunlight. The dreamlike atmosphere of his friendship remained: it was a matter of messages, warm and friendly and encouraging and critical, mostly in other people’s letters. The only time I visited Norway he was away living in Leningrad, but the messages were there awaiting me. Nordahl Grieg, like a monarch, never lacked messengers.
I sometimes wonder whether he didn’t also leave spells in far places which drew me there long afterwards. Why did I take a solitary holiday in Estonia in the thirties? Was it because I was following in his footsteps? And Moscow in the fifties? It was no longer any use then going to Room 313 in the Hotel Novo Moscowskaja, the address he had the year missing from the date as it always was, as though only the day of the month was important and the mere years could be left to look after themselves. ’I assure you that you before or later must come to Estonia, and please come now. It is a charming country, absolutely unspoilt, and the cheapest in the world. I am a very poor author, but here I can afford absolutely everything – a strange and marvellous feeling. If the weather is good, do let us hire a sailing boat and go for a week among the islands. The population there has scarcely seen a white man before, and for a few pieces of chocolate we could certainly buy what native girls we wanted to. Do come.’” […]
”How I wish I had borrowed, begged or stolen the necessary funds and replied to at least one of those messages – ’I arrive on Saturday.’
I suppose we may have met between 1931 and 1940, but I am not sure. Suddenly, instead of a message in a letter, he was a voice on the telephone. I was at the Ministry of Information by that time, in a silly useless job, the German invasion of Norway had begun, and here he was, just arrived from Narvik and war. His voice pulled me out of the great dead Bloomsbury building into his bedroom at the Charing Cross Hotel which was full of his countrymen, sitting about on the bed, the dressing-table, the floor, propped against the mantel-piece, discussing, planning, hoping while the telephone rang, with Narvik and disaster just behind them and an immense confidence and the future all round them (a confidence you couldn’t have found except in official handouts in the building I had left). And even in that setting I felt the old intimacy like sunlight; while everyone was talking plans, propaganda, future campaigns, Nordahl, making a private corner between bolster and bedpost, was talking of anything that seemed at the moment to matter – Marxism or the value of history or the Spanish war and Hemingway’s new book, neglecting even the extraordinary adventure from which he had just emer-ged with the gold of the Bank of Norway. That I had to piece together while his cabinet in exile chattered around him.”