DON IN MEXICO
Stn,—I have never entered into controversy, and do not intend to begin now with a bad-tempered reviewer. Yet it is only fair, I think, to be allowed to say that Mr. Green attributes to me statements and ideas not found in my book, and abuses me for not inquiring into persecution in a place I never visited. He and his kind are the despair of those who try to make friendly contacts with people in America—a thing which has never been so important to our own country as it is at this moment.
If persecution is what interests Mr. Green, he might turn his eyes from Mexico to Spain, where (along with the outward manifes- tations of religion) he could find hundreds of thousands of innocent people reduced to slavery, and execution following execution with sickening regularity for no other crime than trying to defend their country from the same German and Italian enemies and the same totalitarian ideas from which the British people are defending theirs —
Cambridge. J. B. TREND [Mr. Graham Greene writes: " Professor Trend does not specify any of the statements and ideas wrongly attributed to him. It might be difficult, as I confined myself to quotation. He made a number of rash generalisations about the non-existence of religious persecution in Mexico on the strength of a stay in the capital and a few tourist resorts, and I corrected him. I am puzzled by his irrelevant and rather excited references to Spain. I am not a supporter of General Franco, and I don't understand what the situation there has to do with the points at issue—Professor Trend's inaccuracies and his whimsical literary style."] other
Previous page
