Graham Greene on a Gun for
The greater part of A Gun for Sale takes place in Nottwich, which I later used as background for my play The
Potting Shed. Nottwich, of course, is
Nottingham where, as I have recounted A Sort of Life, I lived for three
winter months with a mongrel terrier, working in the evenings as a trainee on
the the Nottingham Journal. I don’t know why a
certain wry love of Nottingham lodged in my imagination rather as a love of
The main character in the novel, Raven the killer, seems to me now a
first sketch for Pinkie in Brighton Rock. He is a Pinkie who has aged
but not grown up…
If Raven is an older Pinkie, Mather I can
imagine to have been trained as police officer under the Assistant Commissioner
of It’s a Battlefield; a little of his superior’s sober temperature has
rubbed off on him. He is not, like the Assistant Commissioner, a born bachelor,
but I think in time he must have proved a little too square for Anne Crowder
with her indiscriminate passion for love.
What can I say of the other characters? Doctor Yogel
has something a certain police doctor near Blackfriars to whom I once went in
my youth, terrified that I might be suffering from what used to be called by an
ironic euphemism a social disease; he told me not to eat tomatoes, an
instruction which I have obeyed to this day. His dingy rooms on the top floor
of a tenement block and his abrupt furtive manner remained a memory which I
think contributed to the sketch of Doctor Yogel.
There are certain scenes which I like in this book. For example I am a
little proud of the air-raid practice in Nottwich
which enabled Raven to enter the offices of Sir Marcus. I wrote the scene in
1935 and the National Government had certainly not reached that point of
preparation, though such a practice would have been plausible enough four years
later. I like too the character of Acky, the
unfrocked clergyman, and of his wife—the two old evil characters joined to each
other by a selfless love. I had not chosen an Anglican clergyman for the part
with any ill intent—I doubted at the time whether such purity of love would
seem plausible in a married and excommunicated Catholic priest. I was to draw
one later in The Power and the Glory, Father Jose, but as a man I prefer
poor Acky. He was not the kind of sinner who has the
makings of a saint. His sense of guilt led only to innumerable letters to his bishop, of self-justification or accusation…He belongs to
the same world of wounds and guilt as Raven and Pinkie.
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