Journey Without Maps Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Graham Greene

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Preface to Second Edition

  Quotes

  Map

  PART ONE

  1 The Way to Africa

  2 The Cargo Ship

  3 The Home from Home

  PART TWO

  1 Western Liberia

  2 His Excellency the President

  3 Into Buzie Country

  4 Black Montparnasse

  PART THREE

  1 Mission Station

  2 ‘Civilized Man’

  3 The Dictator of Grand Bassa

  4 The Last Lap

  5 Postscript in Monrovia

  Copyright

  JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

  Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel, The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa.

  As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography – A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections Reflections and Mornings in the Dark. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. Graham Greene died in April 1991.

  ALSO BY GRAHAM GREENE

  Novels

  The Man Within

  It’s a Battlefield

  A Gun for Sale

  The Confidential Agent

  The Ministry of Fear

  The Third Man

  The End of the Affair

  The Quiet American

  A Burnt-Out Case

  Travels with my Aunt

  Dr Fischer of Geneva or

  The Bomb Party

  The Tenth Man

  Stamboul Train

  England Made Me

  Brighton Rock

  The Power and the Glory

  The Heart of the Matter

  The Fallen Idol

  Loser Takes All

  Our Man in Havana

  The Comedians

  The Human Factor

  Monsignor Quixote

  The Honorary Consul

  The Captain and the Enemy

  Short Stories

  Collected Stories

  The Last Word and Other Stories

  May We Borrow Your Husband?

  Travel

  The Lawless Roads

  In Search of a Character

  Getting to Know the General

  Essays

  Collected Essays

  Yours etc.

  Reflections

  Mornings in the Dark

  Plays

  Collected Plays

  Autobiography

  A Sort of Life

  Ways of Escape

  Fragments of an Autobiography

  A World of my Own

  Biography

  Lord Rochester’s Monkey

  An Impossible Woman

  Children’s Books

  The Little Train

  The Little Horse-Bus

  The Little Steamroller

  The Little Fire Engine

  GRAHAM GREENE

  JOURNEY WITHOUT

  MAPS

  WITH A FOREWORD BY

  Tim Butcher

  Foreword

  I feel certain Graham Greene would have approved of the setting in which I first read Journey Without Maps. I was locked down in a dank hotel after curfew in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, trying to work out whether the noises outside were thunderclaps from rainy season storm clouds, or mortars going off as rebels circled the dying regime of the West African warlord, Charles Taylor. It was June 2003 and I had flown in as a reporter to cover what was the latest spasm in the cycle of decay that had bedevilled Liberia since 1980. Before I got on the plane, the only title I could find about the country was Greene’s first travel book, the account of his 1935 journey by train and truck through Sierra Leone and then on foot for roughly 350 miles through Liberia and Guinea.

  Writing about conflict and crisis for newspapers was something Greene would do extensively later in his career. Months after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967, Greene was commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph for a piece on the new and supposedly peaceful landscape of the Holy Land. After coming under Egyptian artillery fire close to the Suez Canal he wrote dryly that perhaps the war had been misnamed. Later that year, the Observer would fly him to Sierra Leone to write about a place that he had come to know well and which had just suffered the first of many post-independence coups. For generations of outsiders, Greene’s resulting essay framed the former British Colony perfectly as the ‘Soupsweet Land.’ The term ‘soupsweet’ was printed within the design of a cotton dress worn by a young woman whom Greene sat behind at Midnight Mass in Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone. He borrowed the term because, in his words, ‘what better description could there be of this poor lazy lovely coloured country?’And even back in 1935, when he headed to Africa as a thirty-year-old novelist who had never before ventured beyond Europe, he did so with an undertaking from The Times that it would consider publishing articles about what he found.

  I still have the paperback copy of Journey Without Maps that I took to war. The cover is stained with insect repellent, the pages encrypted with layers of marginalia and the spine collapsed through rereading, but the reason I cherish it is not as a piece of reportage. Indeed, close reading shows it contains enough errors to give palpitations to a Fleet Street sub-editor. Greene records incorrectly the national anthem of Liberia and misdates both the start and the endpoint of his own trip. When he meets an American missionary called George Harley upcountry in Liberia, he makes a mistake about the years Harley has been there.

  I love the fact Greene could get it wrong. To my eye it makes him mortal, it earths him, and the point is the occasional errors of fact do not in any way diminish the central power of Journey Without Maps as a book that allowed me to learn more both about Greene and about myself.

  In essence it is a book of two journeys. The first is the genuinely arduous trek Greene made through remote Africa with his travelling companion and cousin, Barbara Greene, four servants and twenty-six bearers. In 2009, long after the war finished in Liberia, I followed every blistering inch of their trip and came to see a very different side to Greene from the creative, literary one I had previously dwelt on. After struggling for weeks with the withering climate and the chokingly enclosed atmosphere of jungle-covered terrain, I came to see Greene as a man not just of considerable physical toughness, but also of enormous mental strength.What he did in 1935 was a significant travelling achievement, something that demanded both practical nous and spirited determination.

  Strictly speaking this first trip is not a ‘journey without maps’, more a ‘journey without good maps’. Greene took two maps with him, rather ropey o
nes produced for military planners from Britain and America and although they marked the outline of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, the inner details were scant.

  The second journey touched on in Greene’s book is one for which truly there are no maps, a metaphysical trip searching inside himself for private ideas and memories of quintessential importance. Several times within the book he borrows from the vernacular of psychoanalysis, drawn from his own experience as a young man when he underwent psychiatric treatment. He writes of being taken back to ‘repressed ideas’ and ‘primal memories’ and for this internal journey Liberia is not important as a destination but as a means to unlock the mind. It is not so much a case of going back physically to Africa but going back mentally by Africa.

  And this is why the book inspires me. Back in 2003, reading of Greene’s own personal troubles dealing with the hinterland of Liberia, gave me a degree of comfort as I struggled to make sense of the particularly chaotic and brutal war then raging in the country. And on reading the book more recently, it has made me consider the prejudices that I, as a white outsider, sometimes seek to project, not just onto Liberia but wider Africa as well. The snapshots of seediness from his own youth that Greene weaves into the book can appear troubling and even indecipherable but this has had the effect of drawing me back to the book. Each time I have read Journey Without Maps I have taken something new from the experience, truly the hallmark of the best writing.

  Tim Butcher, 2010

  PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

  SIX years after this book was written I found myself living in Sierra Leone – a writer should be careful where he goes for pleasure in peacetime, for in wartime he is only too likely to return there to work. It was odd flying up from Lagos, following from the sky the line of surf along the Liberian coast, seeing the huddle of tiny shacks which called itself Grand Bassa, where I had dismissed my carriers, passing over the small white isolated building which was the British Consulate at Monrovia. It was odd too retracing my steps from Freetown to Kailahun, travelling in the same tiny lamp-lit train, staying in the same rest-houses.

  I can look back now with a certain regret at the hard words I used about Freetown, for Freetown is now one of the homes I have lived and worked in through all the seasons. I have been able to recognize in myself after a year’s sojourn the inertia which as a tourist I condemned so harshly in other people. But if there are fallacies into which the passing visitor falls, there are fallacies too which come from a close acquaintance. After a little while there is so much one ceases to notice, and if I were writing of Freetown now, how unnaturally rosy would my picture be, for I begin to remember mainly the sunsets when all the laterite paths turned suddenly for a few minutes the colour of a rose, the old slavers’ fort with the cannon lying in the grass, the abandoned railway track with the chickens pecking in and out of the little empty rotting station, the taste of the first pink gin at six o’clock. I have begun to forget what the visitor noticed so clearly – the squalor and the unhappiness and the involuntary injustices of tired men. But as that picture is true too, I let it stand.

  London, November 1946

  ‘O do you imagine,’ said fearer to farer,

  ‘That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,

  Your diligent looking discover the lacking

  Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?’

  W. H. Auden

  The life of an individual is in many respects like a child’s dissected map. If I could live a hundred years, keeping my intelligence to the last, I feel as if I could put the pieces together until they made a properly connected whole. As it is, I, like all others, find a certain number of connected fragments, and a larger number of disjointed pieces, which I might in time place in their natural connection. Many of these pieces seem fragmentary, but would in time show themselves as essential parts of the whole. What strikes me very forcibly is the arbitrary and as it were accidental way in which the lines of junction appear to run irregularly among the fragments. With every decade I find some new pieces coming into place. Blanks which have been left in former years find their complement among the undisturbed fragments. If I could look back on the whole, as we look at the child’s map when it is put together, I feel that I should have my whole life intelligently laid out before me . . .

  Oliver Wendell Holmes

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  THE WAY TO AFRICA

  Harvest Festival

  THE tall black door in the narrow city street remained closed. I rang and knocked and rang again. I could not hear the bell ringing; to ring it again and again was simply an act of faith or despair, and later sitting before a hut in French Guinea, where I never meant to find myself, I remembered this first going astray, the buses passing at the corner and the pale autumn sun.

  An errand boy came to my help, asking me whether I wanted the Consul, and when I said yes, that was what I wanted, the boy led me straight to the entrance of St Dunstan’s Church and up the steps and into the vestry. It wasn’t the sort of beginning I’d expected when I was accumulating the tent I never used, the hypodermic syringe I left behind, the automatic pistol which remained hidden underneath boots and shoes and bags of silver in the money-box. They were preparing for the harvest festival; the vestry was crowded with large dressy yellow blooms and litters of vegetable marrow; I couldn’t see the Consul anywhere. The errand boy peered among the flowers in the dim light and at last pointed to a little intent woman bent above the blooms. ‘There she is,’ he said, ‘that’s her, She’ll tell you.’

  I felt very self-conscious, picking my way among the vegetables in St Dunstan’s asking: ‘Could you by any chance tell me? Is the Liberian Consul – ?’ But she knew and I left that street for another.

  It was three o’clock and lunch at the Consulate was just over. Three men, I could not distinguish their nationality, overcrowded the tiny room which was deeply buried in the huge new glittering office block. The window-sill was lined with old telephone directories, school textbooks of chemistry. One man was washing up lunch in a basin stuck in the top of a waste-paper basket. Unidentifiable yellow threads like bast floated in the greasy water. The man poured a kettle of boiling water from a gas jet over a plate which he held above the basket; then he wiped the plate with a cloth. The table was littered with bursting parcels of what looked like stones, and the lift porter kept on putting his head in at the door and flinging down more parcels on the floor. The room was like a shabby caravan held up for a moment in a smart bright street. One doubted whether, returning in a few hours’ time to the gleaming mechanized block, one would still find it there; it would almost certainly have moved on.

  But everyone was very kind. It all came down to a question of paying money; no one asked me why I wanted to go, although I had been told by many authorities on Africa that the Republic of Liberia resented intruders. In the Consulate they had little guttural family jokes among themselves. ‘Before the war,’ a large man said, ‘you didn’t need passports. Such a fuss. Only to the Argentine,’ and he looked across at the man who was making out my papers. ‘If you wanted to get to the Argentine you even had to give your fingerprints a month ahead, so that Scotland Yard and Buenos Aires could get together. All the scoundrels in the world went to the Argentine.’

  I examined the usual blank map upon the wall, a few towns along the coast, a few villages along the border. ‘Have you been to Liberia?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no,’ the large man said. ‘We let them come to us.’

  The other man stuck a round red seal on my passport; it bore the National Mark, a three-masted ship, a palm tree, a dove flying overhead, and the legend ‘The love of liberty brought us here’. Above the same red seal I had to sign the ‘Declaration of an Alien about to depart for the Republic of Liberia’.

  I have informed myself of the provisions under the Immigration Law, and am convinced that I am eligible for admission into the Republic thereunder.

  I realize that if I am one of a class prohib
ited by law from admission, I will be deported or detained in confinement.

  I solemnly swear that the above statements are true to the best of my knowledge and that I fully intend when in the Republic to obey and support the laws and constituted authorities thereof.

  The only thing which I knew of the law was that it forbade a white man to enter the country except through the recognized ports unless he had paid a large sum for an explorer’s licence. I intended to enter the country from the British border and make my way through the forest of the interior to the coast. I am a Catholic with an intellectual if not an emotional belief in Catholic dogma; I find that intellectually I can accept the fact that to miss a Mass on Sunday is to be guilty of mortal sin. And yet ‘I solemnly swear’ . . . these contradictions in human psychology I find of peculiar interest.

  Blue Book

  I had read in a British Government Blue Book that May:

  The rat population may fairly be described as swarming, the wooden and corrugated iron houses lend themselves to rat harbourage . . .

  The absence of any attempt by the Government, not only to take effective steps to control yellow fever or plague, but even to arrange for the notification of yellow fever, as well as the complete lack of medical supervision of ships touching the Liberian coast . . .

  The great majority of all mosquitoes caught in Monrovia are of a species known to carry yellow fever . . .

  Altogether forty-one villages have been burnt and sixty-nine men, forty-five women and twenty-seven children, making a total of one hundred and forty-one, killed . . .

  A case was also reported to me from several sources of a man who had been wounded close to Sasstown and wished to surrender. Although unarmed and pleading for mercy he was shot down in cold blood by soldiers in the presence of Captain Cole.

  The soldiers crept into the banana plantations, which surround all native villages, and poured volleys into the huts. One woman who had that day been delivered of twins was shot in her bed, and the infants perished in the flames when the village was fired by the troops . . .