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By Root 645 0

to get them right. Although constantly traveling on mysterious journeys to faraway places—Vietnam, Panama, South Africa, Argentina—he kept in constant touch via his devoted secretary and later, when she resigned, his sister. The easygoing author who wrote his five hundred meticulous words every morning was an illusion of my youth. Nothing was too small to attract his attention—the exact shade of red of the English telephone booth on the dust cover of The Human Factor, a snide remark by William F. Buckley, Jr., in the New York Post alleging that Graham had said America was the word he hated most in the English language (A LIE.), and not only misprints in his books but in other people’s. He frequently sent for books from the S&S list and almost always read them carefully, listing any errors and giving me his often surprising opinions on other writers, such as his comment on a biography of H. G. Wells that Wells “is the best novelist on sex in the English language.” He often commented on the FBI’s pursuit of him and gleefully speculated on the size of his dossier and how much trouble it must have put them to over the years.

He was constantly in touch by letter and cable. A query from me inquiring whether he would allow Penthouse to publish a condensation of one of his books, given the kind of photographs that it was likely to appear next to, was answered almost immediately from Switzerland with a cable saying that he had no objection to naked girls but disliked the way the magazine had cut and edited his text. A cable announcing that he was number two on the New York Times best-seller list which in my excitement I, not knowing where he was, had sent to his addresses in Paris, Antibes, and Capri received an instant reply chiding my “extravagance” for wasting money on three cables and suggesting that it might have been better spent on more advertising. About his photograph on the cover of A Sort of Life he complained that it made him look like “a Chinaman,” with narrowed eyes and yellow skin.

On the subject of jacket art, we almost invariably clashed. My very first attempt to please Graham in this area produced a cable from somewhere beyond Suez begging me to eliminate “the fancy lettering,” which we promptly did. I replied, in the best tradition of Scoop: LETTERING PROMPTLY UNFANCIED STOP, but there was an unbridgeable gap between Graham’s sensibilities about jacket art and those of the American book trade, as is so often the case with English writers. Generally, these could be solved by eliminating fancy lettering or, say, finding the correct windmill for the cover of Monsignor Quixote (WINDMILL SPANISH, NOT DUTCH), but when it came to the mass-market paperback editions of his works, Graham often lashed out in righteous anger. Graham liked the idea of cheap editions of his works—and of course what were, in those days, the big six-figure advances—but he hated the inevitable commercial packaging. Occasionally he approved them “in despair,” complaining that he had no time to argue about them across the Atlantic, but time and again he protested against “ghastly designs” and “vulgarities,” which had roughly the same effect on his reprinters as water on a duck’s back. A cable from me about the jacket for our reprint of Twenty-one Stories, inquiring whether it was the illustration or the lettering he objected to, produced the single-word reply, BOTH, while another about our reprint of England Made Me objected strongly to the “disagreeable” faces and the appearance, for no discernible plot reason, of a large swastika.

It should not be thought that all of Graham’s correspondence took place by cable, nor was it limited to complaints. Often his letters were long and full of fascinating detail, such as one in which he described in detail his horror at the “grisly sight” of seeing dictators in the flesh—Pinochet of Chile and Stroessner of Paraguay—or another in which he expressed his pleasure that the film rights to The Honorary Consul had been optioned by Orson Welles because there was no danger of his actually making the film. From