GREENE, GRAHAM. Typescript of his book about Mexico, The Lawless Roads. [?London, late 1938]. 343 pages, plus title-page, 4to, double-spaced, the original ribbon copy WITH INK CORRECTIONS AND REVISIONS BY GREENE THROUGHOUT, cloth-backed blue wrappers, tied with blue cord, typed label on front, typing agency stamp ("Alex. McLachlan...St. Leonards-on-Sea") on final blank leaf and inside rear cover, the yapp edges of the wrappers chipped, cloth slipcase.
In the schema of the work (published in 1939) this typescript follows an incomplete holograph manuscript of 127 pages in the Greene archive at the University of Texas (R.A. Wobbe, Graham Greene: A Bibliography and Guide to Research, New York, 1979, p. 296) -- apparently the only other known draft of the book. Greene obviously went over this typescript with exactness: there are about 600 words of corrections and revisions by him on some 160 pages -- ranging from one-word emendations to the insertion (on p. 230) of an 117-word paragraph (there are also five other major revisions of from 11 to 45 words each in the typescript). In addition there are deletions (14 are heavy, including the complete scoring through of pages 337 and 338) and punctuation and spelling changes, etc., on these 160 pages and the others: almost all of the typescript's 343 pages bear at least one correction or revision by Greene. There are also numerous pencilled editorial corrections and queries (some on paper-clipped slips).
The Lawless Road was the result of Greene's trip to Mexico in spring 1938 to write a book (he had received an advance) on the persecution of the Catholics under the revolutionary socialist regime of President Calles ("the fiercest persecution of religion anyshere since the reign of Elizabeth" -- Graham Greene, Ways of Escape, New York, 1980, p. 66). The book was published first in England in March 1939, and then in America in June under the altered title Another Mexico; it has since gone through many editions.
Greene's Mexican journey also inspired his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory, a novel published in 1940. As Wobbe notes (pp. 47 and 54): "...[Greene]...points out that the source for The Power and the Glory can be found [in The Lawless Roads] in the section called 'Frontera,' and in the succeeding pages...the priest's trek [in the novel] across Tabasco and Chiapas is very like the trip Greene described in The Lawless Roads." Also, "much of the material of the story 'Across the Bridge' can be found in Chapter 1 of The Lawless Roads, particularly the description of the border country" (Wobbe, p. 47).
Greene himself writes of the two books in Ways of Escape, pp. 68-69: "Now, of course, when I reread Another Mexico, I can easily detect many of the characters in The Power and the Glory. The old Scotsman, Dr. Roberto Fitzpatrick, whom I met in Villahermosa...put me on the track of Father José in my novel...Above all he presented me with my subject: the protagonist of The Power and the Glory. 'I asked about the priest in Chiapas who had fled. "Oh," he said, "he was just what we call a whisky priest...He was little loss, poor man."' But long before the drunken priest another character had come on board my awful boat in Frontera, where my story was to open -- the dentist I called Mr. Tench...His character needed no 'touching up.' He was as complete in Another Mexico as he was in The Power and the Glory...Of invented characters [in the novel] how very few seem to remain apart from the two protagonists, the priest and the Lieutenant of Police; when I came to write I was handing out alternative destinies to real people whom I had encountered on my journey [recounted in The Lawless Roads/Another Mexico]."
WE ARE AWARE OF NO OTHER GREENE TYPESCRIPT OR MANUSCRIPT OF THIS SIGNIFICANCE IN PRIVATE HANDS.