Graham Greene - The Tenth Man
Introduction
In 1948 when I was working on The Third Man I seem to have completely forgotten a story called The Tenth Man which was ticking away like a time bomb somewhere in the archives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in America.
In 1983 a stranger wrote to me from the United States telling me that a story of mine called The Tenth Man was being offered for sale by MGM to an American publisher. I didn’t take the matter seriously. I thought that I remembered-incorrectly, as it proved-an outline which I had written toward the end of the war under a contract with my friend Ben Goetz, the representative of MGM in London. Perhaps the outline had covered two pages of typescript-there seemed, therefore, no danger of publication, especially as the story had never been filmed.
The reason I had signed the contract was that I feared when the war came to an end and I left government service that my family would be in danger from the precarious nature of my finances. I had not before the war been able to support them from writing novels alone. I had indeed been in debt to my publishers until 1938, when Brighton Rock sold eight thousand copies and squared our accounts temporarily. The Power and the Glory, appearing more or less at the same time as the invasion of the West in an edition of about three thousand five hundred copies, hardly improved the situation. I had no confidence in my future as a novelist and I welcomed in 1944 what proved to be an almost slave contract with MGM which at least assured us all enough to live on for a couple of years in return for the idea of The Tenth Man.
Then recently came the astonishing and disquieting news that Mr. Anthony Blond had bought all the book and serial rights on the mysterious story for a quite large sum, the author’s royalties of course to be paid to MGM. He courteously sent me the typescript for any revision I might wish to make and it proved to be not two pages of outline but a complete short novel of about thirty thousand words. What surprised and aggravated me most of all was that I found this forgotten story very readable-indeed I prefer it in many ways to The Third Man, so that I had no longer any personal excuse for opposing publication even if I had the legal power, which was highly doubtful. All the same, Mr. Blond very generously agreed to publish the story jointly with my regular publishers, The Bodley Head.
After this had been amicably arranged mystery was added to mystery. I found by accident in a cupboard in Paris an old cardboard box containing two manuscripts, one being a diary and commonplace book which I had apparently kept during 1937 and 1938. Under the date 26 December 1937 I came on this passage: “Discussed film with Menzies [an American film director]. Two notions for future films. One: a political situation like that in Spain. A decimation order. Ten men in prison draw lots with matches. A rich man draws the longest match. Offers all his money to anyone who will take his place. One, for the sake of his family, agrees. Later, when he is released, the former rich man visits anonymously the family who possess his money, he himself now with nothing but his life…”
The bare bones of a story indeed. The four dots with which the entry closes seem now to represent the years of war that followed during which all memory of the slender idea was lost in the unconscious. When in 1944 I picked up the tale of Chavel and Janvier I must have thought it an idea which had just come to my mind, and yet I can only now suppose that those two characters had been working away far down in the dark cave of the unconscious while the world burned.
The unexpected return of The Tenth Man from the archives of MGM led also to a search in my own archives where I discovered copies of two more ideas for films, and these may amuse readers of this book. The first idea (not a bad one, it seems to me now, though nothing came of it) was called “Jim Braddon and the War Criminal.”
Here is how the outline went-a not untimely story even today, with Barbie awaiting trial.
Jim Braddon and the War Criminal
1
THERE IS AN OLD LEGEND THAT SOMEWHERE IN THE WORLD every man has his double. This is the strange story of Jim Braddon.
Jim Braddon was a high-grade salesman employed by a breakfast cereal company in Philadelphia: a placid honest man who would never have injured anything larger than a fly. He had a wife and two children whom he spoiled. The 1941 war had affected him little for he was over forty and his employers claimed that he was indispensable. But he took up German-he had a German grandmother-because he thought that one day this might prove useful, and that was the only new thing that happened to him between 1941 and 1945. Sometimes he saw in the paper the picture of Schreiber, the Nazi Inspector-General of the concentration camps, but except that one of his children pretended to see a likeness to this Nazi, nobody else even commented on the fact.
In the autumn of 1945 a captured U-boat commander confessed that he had landed Schreiber on the coast of Mexico, and the film opens on a Mexican beach with a rubber dinghy upturned by the breakers and Schreiber’s body visible through the thin rim of water. The tide recedes and the land crabs come out of their holes. But the hunt for Schreiber is on, for the crabs will soon eliminate all evidence of his death.
The push for postwar trade is also on, and Braddon is dispatched by his firm for a tour of Central and South America. In the plane he looks at Life, which carries the story of the hunt for Schreiber. His neighbor, a small, earnest, bespectacled man full of pseudoscientific theories, points out the likeness to him. “You don’t see it,” he says. “I doubt whether one person in ten thousand would see it because what we mean by likeness as a rule is not the shape of the face and skull but the veil a man’s experience and character throw over the features. You are like Schreiber, but no one would notice it because you have led a very different life. That can’t alter the shape of the ears, but it’s the expression of the eyes people look at.” Apart from the joking child he is the only person who has noticed the likeness. Luckily for Braddon-and for himself-the stranger leaves the plane at the next halt. Halfway to Mexico City the plane crashes and all lives but Braddon’s are lost.
Braddon has been flung clear. His left arm is broken, he is cut about the face, and he has lost his memory from the concussion. The accident has happened at night and he has cautiously-for he is a very careful man-emptied his pockets and locked his papers in his briefcase which of course is lost. When he comes to, he has no identity but his features, and those he shares with a dead man. He searches his pockets for a clue, but finds them empty of anything that will help him: only some small change, and in each pocket of the jacket a book. One is a paper covered Heine; the other an American paperback. He finds that he can read both languages. Searching his jacket more carefully, he discovers a wad of ten-dollar notes, clean ones, sewn into the lining.
It is unnecessary in this short summary to work out his next adventures in detaiclass="underline" somehow he makes his way to a railroad and gets on a train to Mexico City. His idea is to find a hospital as quickly as he can, but in the washroom at the station he sees hanging by the mirror a photograph of Schreiber and a police description in Spanish and English. Perhaps the experiences of the last few days have hardened his expression, for now he can recognize the likeness. He believes he has found his name. His face takes on another expression now-that of the hunted man.
He does not know where to go or what to do: he is afraid of every policeman; he attracts attention by his furtiveness, and soon the papers bear the news that Schreiber has been seen in Mexico City. He lets his beard grow, and with the growth of the beard he loses his last likeness to the old Jim Braddon.
He is temporarily saved by Schreiber’s friends, a group of Fascists to whom Schreiber had borne introductions and who are expecting him. Among these are a brother and sister-a little, sadistic, pop-eyed Mexican whom we will call Peter for his likeness to Peter Lorre and his shifty, beautiful sister whom we will call Lauren for obvious reasons of casting. Lauren sets herself the task of restoring Jim’s memory-the memory which she considers Schreiber should possess. They fall in love: in her case without reserve, believing that she knows the worst about this man; in his with a reserve which he doesn’t himself understand.