One day, I remember, he appeared looking terribly upset. When I enquired after the reason for that distress, he replied: ‘I dreamt of a catastrophe. I hope nothing has happened to one of my family or a close friend.’ A few hours later we heard on the radio that a plane had crashed into the sea between Corsica and Nice, only a few miles away from his flat in Antibes, killing, I believe, all on board. One of the passengers on the flight was General Cogny, whom Graham knew well from his days in Vietnam.
Examples of that kind are numerous. Visions of panic and distress, visions of happiness—the impressions left in his mind by a dream were so vivid, so clear in every detail, that they would sometimes pursue him and influence his mood for hours after he awakened.
Today, remembering, I can’t help thinking about a persistent dream of his which, like a kind of riddle, now seems to have sheltered a personal message. In
A Sort of Life
he refers to a series of dreams which recurred over the years after the death of his father in 1943, and he writes: ‘In them my father was always shut away in hospital out of touch with his wife and children—though sometimes he returned home on a visit, a silent solitary man, not really cured, who would have to go back again into exile. The dreams remain vivid even today, so that sometimes it is an effort for me to realize that there was no hospital, no separation and that he lived with my mother till he died.’ His unhappiness at these frequent returns to the hospital is perhaps just coincidence, but it is difficult not to see in the dreams a premonition of what he himself would have to endure, nearly half a century later, at the end of his life—his own enforced exiles in hospital, which he suffered from so much.
In this last book of his, he gives us a glimpse of the strenuous inner life, his elusive source of creativity, that lay beyond that door which he always kept firmly closed, for fear an intruder might destroy ‘the pattern in the carpet’. As a kind of farewell, Graham opens a door for us on the world of his own.
Graham—
In
The Power and the Glory
you wrote: ‘The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise; theworld was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died.’
If such a place exists, you certainly have found it.
Yvonne Cloetta
Vevey, Switzerland
October 1991
The waking have one world in common
,
but the sleeping turn aside each
into a world of his own
.
HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS
500 BC
Introduction
It can be a comfort sometimes to know that there is a world which is purely one’s own—the experience in that world, of travel, danger, happiness, is shared with no one else. There are no witnesses. No libel actions. The characters I meet there have no memory of meeting me, no journalist or would-be biographer can check my account with another’s. I can hardly be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for any incident connected with the security services. I
have
spoken with Khrushchev at a dinner party, I
have
been sent by the Secret Service to murder Goebbels. I am not lying—and yet, of all the witnesses who share these scenes with me, there is not one who can claim from his personal knowledge that what I describe is untrue.
I decided to choose, out of a diary of more than eight hundred pages, begun in 1965 and ended in 1989, selected scenes from My Own World. In asense it is an autobiography, beginning with Happiness and ending with Death, of a rather bizarre life during the last third of a century (the wars described here belong to the sixties, not the forties)—but no biographer will care to make use of it, even though I may sometimes include a date when I want to give for my own satisfaction the day and the year when an unusual event or an unusual meeting took place.
For that reason I thought at first of beginning with my unexpected encounter with Henry James on a river boat in Bolivia in the spring of
Examples of that kind are numerous. Visions of panic and distress, visions of happiness—the impressions left in his mind by a dream were so vivid, so clear in every detail, that they would sometimes pursue him and influence his mood for hours after he awakened.
Today, remembering, I can’t help thinking about a persistent dream of his which, like a kind of riddle, now seems to have sheltered a personal message. In
A Sort of Life
he refers to a series of dreams which recurred over the years after the death of his father in 1943, and he writes: ‘In them my father was always shut away in hospital out of touch with his wife and children—though sometimes he returned home on a visit, a silent solitary man, not really cured, who would have to go back again into exile. The dreams remain vivid even today, so that sometimes it is an effort for me to realize that there was no hospital, no separation and that he lived with my mother till he died.’ His unhappiness at these frequent returns to the hospital is perhaps just coincidence, but it is difficult not to see in the dreams a premonition of what he himself would have to endure, nearly half a century later, at the end of his life—his own enforced exiles in hospital, which he suffered from so much.
In this last book of his, he gives us a glimpse of the strenuous inner life, his elusive source of creativity, that lay beyond that door which he always kept firmly closed, for fear an intruder might destroy ‘the pattern in the carpet’. As a kind of farewell, Graham opens a door for us on the world of his own.
Graham—
In
The Power and the Glory
you wrote: ‘The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise; theworld was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died.’
If such a place exists, you certainly have found it.
Yvonne Cloetta
Vevey, Switzerland
October 1991
The waking have one world in common
,
but the sleeping turn aside each
into a world of his own
.
HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS
500 BC
Introduction
It can be a comfort sometimes to know that there is a world which is purely one’s own—the experience in that world, of travel, danger, happiness, is shared with no one else. There are no witnesses. No libel actions. The characters I meet there have no memory of meeting me, no journalist or would-be biographer can check my account with another’s. I can hardly be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for any incident connected with the security services. I
have
spoken with Khrushchev at a dinner party, I
have
been sent by the Secret Service to murder Goebbels. I am not lying—and yet, of all the witnesses who share these scenes with me, there is not one who can claim from his personal knowledge that what I describe is untrue.
I decided to choose, out of a diary of more than eight hundred pages, begun in 1965 and ended in 1989, selected scenes from My Own World. In asense it is an autobiography, beginning with Happiness and ending with Death, of a rather bizarre life during the last third of a century (the wars described here belong to the sixties, not the forties)—but no biographer will care to make use of it, even though I may sometimes include a date when I want to give for my own satisfaction the day and the year when an unusual event or an unusual meeting took place.
For that reason I thought at first of beginning with my unexpected encounter with Henry James on a river boat in Bolivia in the spring of
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