University of Virginia Library

Second Thoughts on "Graham Greene's Second Thoughts": The Five Texts of The Heart of the Matter
by
Philip Stratford

I have in my possession an interesting piece of Greenealia, a privately printed pamphlet, The Virtue of Disloyalty, which draws its title from an address Greene read on receiving the Shakespeare Prize from the University of Hamburg in 1969. The dedication reads, in part, "from that old trickster Graham Greene who has just snatched the first edition from Viking." This refers to the fact that although he had agreed to let Viking Press use the address, hitherto only published in the prize ceremony programme, as the closing selection to The Portable Graham Greene which I was editing, he had subsequently decided to scoop the American publisher with his own first edition, printed in 300 copies by The Bodley Head and sent to friends at Christmas 1972, a few months before The Portable came out.

The pamphlet is a good example of Greene's habitual, often elaborate prankishness. It is also a minor illustration of his practising what he preached—the virtue of disloyalty. He had just terminated a contract of over thirty years with Viking (ostensibly on the grounds that he disliked the garish covers they were putting on the paperback edition of his books). Whereas granting permission to publish a Portable was a parting concession to mark the long relationship, his snatching the first edition of the last selection was a parting shot.

The reason I refer to the pamphlet, however, is other. Near the end of page 7 in my copy is a correction in ink (the printer had put "role" instead of "roll"—as in "the roll of honour" of disloyal writers). An asterisk sends the reader to the bottom margin where he can make out, in Greene's spidery, quasi-illegible hand, "No elegantly printed book escapes its misprint!"

In the 1977 Studies in Bibliography David Leon Higdon undertakes to examine many of the inescapable misprints and voluntary changes between the first and last editions of The Heart of the Matter and proposes to show the author "clarifying intention, satisfying his own sense of craftsmanship and remaking his fictive reader."[1] Unfortunately, Professor Higdon has not

been sensitive enough to the almost organic possibilities of alteration and error as a book lives on from one edition to the next, on one side of the Atlantic or the other. He takes as his early source, describing it as "similar" to the first edition (London, 1948), the Viking Compass edition of 1960, and as his late text the Viking Compass edition of 1974 which, he says, "is apparently identical" to the Collected Edition (London, 1971) (p. 250). In fact, both Compass editions differ considerably from their British counterparts which Greene used when making revisions. The 1960 Compass is identical to the American first edition, but not the British; the 1974 Compass was set from the Portable text which is similar but not identical to the Collected Edition. Professor Higdon makes no mention of another alternate, the Uniform Edition, which is unlike the rest.

In brief, the story of these various editions is as follows. The British first edition appeared in May 1948; the American, with numerous changes of which Greene was unaware, in July the same year. While it is true that Greene revised his novel extensively for the Collected Edition in 1971, he had already begun to make revisions for the Uniform Edition in 1951. Finally, even the Collected Edition had its fair share of errors, many of which were caught and corrected, with Greene's approval, on the publication of the Viking Portable Graham Greene in 1973.

One can see what dangers lie in the path of the bibliographer who does not take all five editions into account: he may mistake changes made in 1971 for ones made twenty years earlier; he may congratulate or berate Greene for decisions made, in fact, by some anonymous New York copy-editor in 1948; he may rely on the text of the Collected Edition as definitive when, to date at least, that of The Portable is the best available.

I cannot delineate all variants but will choose a few examples from each category as illustrations. In seven cases Professor Higdon ascribes changes made in the Uniform Edition to the 1971 revision. The changes in themselves are not so important. It makes little difference, except for accuracy, to know that the Portugese captain's drawer contained "a little bundle of dirty photographs" (46) in the original text and a bundle of "dirty handkerchiefs" (51) by the 1951 Uniform Edition, or that Wilson said of Louise Scobie not "She's wonderful," (61) but "She's too good for him" (71) in the earlier of the two revisions and not in 1971 as Professor Higdon implies. What is important to note is that Greene's second thoughts about this novel were beginning to jell long before he undertook the major rewrite.

Much more titillating and inexplicable are the changes made between the British and American first editions. There are thirteen of these in the article, all treated as though due to Greene's pen rather than to editorial intervention at The Viking Press. So, for example, Greene's original statement that a post-mortem in West Africa "was difficult" (291) becomes "impracticable" (301) in the American edition; "gin and bitters" (56) becomes "pink gin" (58); "clucking" (36) becomes "chuckling" (38); "hulk" (53) turns to "bulk" (54); "bare" (214) to "skinned" (218); "All Souls' Night" (256) to "Allhallows Eve" (264) and so on.

A lot of interesting work might be done on this transatlantic tampering. Scarcely a single Greene novel escapes it. In the first 50 pages of A Gun for Sale, for instance, (American title This Gun for Hire) there are 35 changes. Many of these are crass substitutions: "bitterly" (4) for "primly" (2)[2]; "thinking" (17) for "dreaming" (22); ""Kensington" (32) for "Kennington" (44); "fellow" (38) for "bastard" (54). The rest are omissions, inversions, and inaccurate changes to grammar and syntax far beyond what is required to make British usage understandable in the U.S.A. The American text of The Third Man is an even more flagrant example. Here, besides countless annoying unmotivated alterations of the type noted above, a political factor seems to be in play. All unkind references to the Russians are eliminated from the American text, a strange phenomenon in the Cold War era, one would think, until one realizes that this diplomatic pussyfooting is bartered against the removal of many of Greene's more acid references to Americans.

Close research will reveal like alterations in nearly all Viking editions of Greene's novels. In a footnote (p. 256), Professor Higdon refers to many changes in 'accidentals' that "result from Viking house-styling," but fails to say more. The changes I refer to, however, are much more than accidental and could hardly be excused under even the very broadest interpretation of "house-styling." Here in fact is a much more credible reason for Greene terminating his association with Viking than salacious cover illustrations.

The last category—changes made to The Heart of the Matter after its appearance in the Collected Edition—is not dealt with in Professor Higdon's article, for he does not distinguish between the 1971 British edition and the better Portable text. In proof-reading the Collected version of the novel for inclusion as the cornerstone selection of The Portable, another anonymous Viking copy-editor, a sharp-eyed and objective one in 1972, made up for the indiscretions committed by his colleague in 1948. He discovered eight blemishes in the Collected Edition and suggested revisions which in correspondence Greene acknowledged as "quite correct."[3] These included errors which had persisted through all British editions: "hordes" (CE 71) was changed to "hoards" (VP 162); "holiday" (176) to "holy day" (249); and a misquotation from Helen Rolt's letter to Scobie was corrected. "My darling," (229) the letter opened the first time Scobie read it in the British text, and "My dear," he read when "his eye went back to the letter." (231) (Ironically, the first American edition got all these three right.) There were also errors that had been committed in the 1971 version only: an "I" omitted in the preface (xiv); "mosquisto" (140) and "post-morten" mis-spelled, and an odd late decision on Greene's part, for this edition only, to change the spelling of the malaria drug "atabrine" to "atebrin."

The eighth discovery was an oversight of major proportion. In Scobie's letter to Helen he had said, in all editions before 1971, that he loved her "more than God," and he had recalled this statement twice, later in the novel.

Greene intended, as Professor Higdon notes, to tone down Scobie's declaration of love by deleting all three references from the Collected Edition. In fact, he neglected to delete the third, which necessitated a four-line excision (277) and drew from Greene the admission that he had been "very careless"[4] in missing this discrepancy.

So the elegantly printed Collected Edition also fails "to escape its misprints" and the sempiternal search for the pure text goes on. In Greene's brief pamphlet, The Virtue of Disloyalty, there was a second, undetected error. "If only writers could maintain that one virtue of disloyalty—for them more important than charity—unspotted from the world," the text read on page 10. Knowing that in Why Do I Write? (1948) a similar phrase had run "so much more important than purity," I wrote to ask Greene if he had really intended "charity" or if someone had experienced difficulty with his handwriting. "You are quite right," he replied. "'Charity' should read 'chastity.'"[5] The ubiquitous misprint again! But in matters of bibliography chastity must be mitigated with charity. I would myself like to claim that the text of The Portable is "pure," but Professor Higdon's probing has turned up two errors which escaped me. The first is a reference to Tallit's grandmother's lips as "his lips" (161), an error which stands in all but the first American edition; the second, the omission of an apostrophe in "Its" (156) in The Portable alone. And God knows there may be more.

Notes