The Tenth Man

2

THE SECOND SKETCH FOR A FILM, ENTITLED NOBODY TO Blame, was written about the same time for my friend Cavalcanti. He liked the idea, but our work on it never began, for when he submitted it to the Board of Film Censors, he was told that they could not grant a certificate to a film making fun of the Secret Service. So this story too joined the others for a while in the unconscious, to emerge some ten years later as a novel-simplified but not, I think, necessarily improved-called Our Man in Havana.

There is no censorship for novels, but I learned later that MI5 suggested to MI6 that they should bring an action against the book for a breach of official secrets. What secret had I betrayed? Was it the possibility of using bird shit as a secret ink? But luckily C, the head of MI6, had a better sense of humour than his colleague in MI5, and he discouraged him from taking action.

Nobody to Blame