{"id":8,"date":"2009-10-14T09:35:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-14T09:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/?p=8"},"modified":"2009-10-14T09:35:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-14T09:35:00","slug":"graham-greene-in-nottingham-and-the-pretender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/graham-greene-in-nottingham-and-the-pretender\/","title":{"rendered":"Graham Greene in Nottingham and ‘The Pretender’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Nottingham Playhouse’s production of ‘Our Man In Havana’ opens tomorrow and plays Nottingham before touring<\/a>. Below is an article I wrote about Greene, Nottingham and my novel ‘The Pretender’. The article (along with interesting pieces about Havana and working with Greene) can be found in the programme for the play, which I’m going to see next week.<\/i><\/p>\n

When Graham Greene arrived in Nottingham, he was an Oxford graduate, just turned 21, who wanted to be a journalist. He hoped that a brief spell as a trainee subeditor on the Nottingham Journal would stand him in good stead for a post in London. On November 1st, 1925, he moved into lodgings on Hamilton Road in Forest Fields. \u2018When I read Dickens on Victorian London,\u2019 he wrote in his autobiography, A Sort Of Life, \u2018I think of Nottingham in the \u201820s. Trams rattled downhill through the goose-market and on to the blackened castle. Against the rockface leant the oldest pub in England with all the grades of a social guide: the private bar, the saloon, the ladies\u2019, the snug, the public\u2026 I had found a town as haunting as Berkhamstead, (one) where years later I would lay the scene of a novel and of a play.\u2019<\/p>\n

Green visited many of the town\u2019s cinemas, where matinee seats in the stalls cost fourpence. He loathed his boarding house, though he mined it for material. After two weeks, he moved from Hamilton Road to Ivy House, Ivy House, near the Arboretum, later fictionalised as \u2018two rows of small neo-Gothic houses lined up as carefully as a company on parade.\u2019 Ivy House was probably on what is now All Saints Road and accessed from a road which was then nameless but known as \u2018All Saints Terrace\u2019 and is now officially Goodwin Street (see the photos two posts below). It has been claimed as the model for disreputable houses in several of Greene\u2019s novels. <\/p>\n

Greene was very taken by the city\u2019s fogs, writing to his fianc\u00e9e Vivien:<\/p>\n

\u2018There\u2019s a most marvellous fog here today, my love. It makes walking a thrilling adventure. I\u2019ve never been in such a fog before in my life. If I stretch out my walking stick in front of me, the ferrule is half lost in obscurity. Coming back, I twice lost my way, & ran into a cyclist, to our mutual surprise. Stepping off a pavement to cross to the other side becomes a wild and fantastic adventure\u2026 if you never hear from me again, you will know that I am moving round in little plaintive circles, looking for a pavement.\u2019<\/p>\n

The only writer Greene met in Nottingham was Cecil Roberts, now best known for the room named after him in the City library but, in his day, a prolific and popular novelist. Roberts invited Greene to tea. They talked for an hour, after which Greene wrote \u2018an educated person in Nottingham is as precious & rare a find as jam in a wartime doughnut!\u2019<\/p>\n

In order to marry Vivien, it was necessary for Greene to convert to Roman Catholicism, which later became so important in his fiction. He took instruction in the Catholic Cathedral opposite Nottingham Playhouse. His tutor was Father Trollope, once a West End actor and himself a late convert. <\/p>\n

Greene only stayed in Nottingham for four months, a period he shortens by a month in his autobiography. He left without a job to go to, and wrote to Vivien from London: \u2018Thank God, Nottingham is over. It\u2019s like coming back into real life again, being here.\u2019 Ten days later, he got a job on The Times, a job he wouldn\u2019t have got without his experience on the Nottingham Journal. <\/p>\n

Greene set one of his best early novels, A Gun For Sale in Nottingham, lightly fictionalised as Nottwich, as well as his play The Potting Shed. Although he later talked about the city affectionately, the author was not so kind while he was here. \u2018This town makes one want a mental and physical bath every quarter of an hour,\u2019 he wrote. \u2018There\u2019s absolutely nothing worth doing in this place. No excitement, no interest, nothing worth a halfpenny curse.\u2019 Yet the city was important \u2013 some argue, crucially important \u2013 to his fiction, presenting him with a first hand experience of the working class that may have prevented him from becoming yet another chronicler of upper middle class life in London.<\/p>\n

As a student arriving in Nottingham as a student in the late 70\u2019s, I had no idea of Greene\u2019s connection with the city. I discovered his novels in the university library and devoured all of them in the space of a month. Later, I worked my way through his short stories while revising for my finals. I\u2019ve have remained an admirer ever since. Inevitably, there had to be a Greene story about Nottwich in my novel about literary forgery, The Pretender.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s about Mark, a precociously talented young man who develops a lucrative capacity for literary forgery. A Hemingway pastiche he\u2019s written is taken for the real thing and sells for a fortune. To help save the literary magazine he works for, Mark decides to forge a \u2018lost\u2019 Greene story. I had the idea for this novel when I was in my 20\u2019s and Greene was still alive. I considered writing to the author, asking for his blessing and perhaps a page of \u2018real\u2019 Greene to pass off as a forgery (I wouldn\u2019t dare include an actual imitation). Then, I wasn\u2019t audacious enough to approach Greene, though now, of course, I wish I had. I like to think the idea would have amused him.<\/p>\n

More recently, when I came to write the published version of the novel, I chose to set it in 1991, the year that Greene died. The faked Greene story at the heart of the novel has a Nottingham connection. It was supposedly written in what I think of as Greene\u2019s peak period, the 1950\u2019s, and mentions Our Man In Havana because Greene\u2019s 1958 novel has a reference to the fictional Nottwich and because it is my favourite of the novels that Greene described as \u2018entertainments\u2019. On my first visit to Cuba, I visited many of the novel\u2019s settings, which are easy to track down in present day Havana. <\/p>\n

In The Pretender, Greene gets to see Mark\u2019s faked story just before his death. Unsurprisingly, he cannot remember writing it. But prolific authors cannot be expected to remember everything they produce, particularly when, as Greene did during that period, they use chemical stimulants to increase their productivity. Greene expresses his doubts privately, but is happy to let the forgery be published. One of the best things about Greene, as playgoers new to Our Man In Havana will discover, is his wicked sense of humour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nottingham Playhouse’s production of ‘Our Man In Havana’ opens tomorrow and plays Nottingham before touring. Below is an article I wrote about Greene, Nottingham and my novel ‘The Pretender’. The article (along with interesting pieces about Havana and working with Greene) can be found in the programme for the play, which I’m going to see next week. When Graham Greene arrived in Nottingham, he was an Oxford graduate, just turned 21, who wanted to be a journalist. He hoped that a brief spell as a trainee subeditor on the Nottingham Journal would stand him in good stead for a post in London. On November 1st, 1925, he moved into lodgings on Hamilton Road in Forest Fields. \u2018When I read Dickens on Victorian London,\u2019 he wrote…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}