“He was staying near the Ministry [of Information] in a little mews flat where I spent an occasional evening with him, the invariable supper dish being sausages, then still available. Whatever his circumstances, he had this facility for seeming always to be in lodgings, and living from hand to mouth. Spiritually, and even physically, he is one of nature’s displaced persons.” That was how Malcolm Muggeridge recalled Graham Greene’s way of life in the second year of the war. He was trying to get some money together to support Vivien and the children once he was called up, so having signed a £2000 scriptwriting contract with Korda, he took a job as head of the writers’ section in the Ministry of Information, which allowed him to leave the Officers’ Reserve.
Located in the University of London Senate House, the ministry set up a huge bureaucracy to manage awkward facts and expound useful falsehoods. Famously, George Orwell drew from it his inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in 1984. Greene saw it as trivial, and his short story “Men at Work,” published in 1941, satirized it as a self-contained universe of committee meetings. Mainly, he commissioned patriotic books and pamphlets, and suppressed some others deemed harmful to the war effort.
According to Muggeridge, also employed at the ministry, Greene took a “professional” approach to his job, “coolly exploring the possibility of throwing stigmata and other miraculous occurrences into the battle for the mind in Latin America to sway it in our favour.” Greene was only a little ahead of his superiors in thinking his work useless. At the end of September, the Director-General of the Ministry of Information, Frank Pick, a former transport administrator responsible for, among other things, London’s Tube map, “Pick-axed” him—his position was eliminated. The following year Greene was invited to return but refused.
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