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THE WRITER AND HOLLYWOOD
to argue with him, saying that he had really been rather unfair to America in this book.
"Oh, I don't know," said Greene; "some of those bombs that went off in Vietnam, it was generally thought that the Americans were behind that."
He gave a slow, sly smile. "It's very dangerous writing a book in the first person. Everybody thinks I am Fowler — well, I share some of his views about the Americans. But I'm not as bitter about them as he is. I didn't have my girl stolen by an American."
This statement has, I think, wider significance. Greene himself, it seems, is not as bitter about anything as his characters. Or perhaps he works off all his accumulated bitterness in his writing and has little left over for casual conversation.
"Do you find writing gets more difficult," someone wanted to know, " or is your head full of plots and ideas? " "More difficult," he said. "Definitely." "Why should that be?"
' c Getting old, " he said wryly. "I'm over fifty, you know. ' ' I said: "For an author, that's practically adolescence. Shaw was seventy when he wrote St. Joan."
Greene gave a little chuckle: he looked bashful. "I don't think," he said, "that Shaw lived quite as hectically as I do." And as someone dragged him off to be photographed with Otto Preminger, he threw out a plea that I felt came from the heart, "Gould I have another whisky, please."
To follow the story of the birth of a Graham Greene film, I thought, might help me in my quest for the Seven Deadly Sins of Hollywood. After all, Mr. Greene is an acknowledged authority on sin — it is his field, so to speak — and he must also have some knowledge of Hollywood, after having had so many of his books filmed there.
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