The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Fascination with disguise and espionage led Greene on the first of many adventures in the world’s trouble spots. The Ruhr Republic lured him under the sponsorship of German Intelligence. Greene covered his travel expenses by promising articles based on the journeys and with a youthful recklessness ventured into perilous situations almost without care.

  At university, both before and after his twentieth birthday, Greene flirted with death. He played Russian roulette six times in five months: ‘The revolver would be whipped behind my back, the chamber twisted, the muzzle quickly and surreptitiously inserted in my ear … the trigger pulled.’

  The cool objectivity used to describe so terrible an action against his own person is astonishing. It is as if a third person were doing this to him, as if the revolver had a will of its own, exacting that penalty from this particular ear. Behind the deed lay a strong sense of despair and a desire for annihilation. Greene’s attempt to shoot his head off was a necessary testing of himself – the uninspired weakling on the playing fields of Berkhamsted becomes the inspired adventurer off them, an example of his need to live on the dangerous edge of life, what he called ‘life reinforced by the propinquity of death’.

  More significantly, perhaps, during his last two terms at Oxford his first volume of verse, Babbling April, was published and he began his first novel, Anthony Sant (never published). In 1925 he fell in love with nineteen-year-old Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who was employed by his publisher, Basil Blackwell.

  Vivien was handsome, independent-minded and a devout Catholic convert. Greene deluged her with almost 2,000 letters in thirty months, sometimes as many as three a day. Initially she treated him with reserve, but her feelings for him gradually warmed.

  But most important, on graduating, was his need to find work. Uncertain whether to choose a domestic or a foreign job, Greene sought employment with the British American Tobacco Company hoping to leave for China, but the tedium of work, the crassness of his co-workers, and his fear of losing Vivien made his resignation inevitable. He next turned to journalism, but, lacking experience, was unable to land himself a job with any London daily. Instead, he accepted a position as a trainee, sub-editing on the Nottingham Journal without salary.

  Nottingham provided Greene with a rich reservoir of experience of working-class life from which he created memorable, sometimes mysterious, and often seedy characters. Here he also received instruction from Father Trollope which led to his conversion to the Catholic Church, though the motivation was chiefly his love for Vivien. The domestic atmosphere of the sub-editor’s room at the Journal provided a peaceful interlude, but Greene soon began seeking work in London.

  In March 1926, with less than five months’ experience on the Nottingham Journal, Greene was offered a post as a sub-editor with The Times. By supplementing his income with reviews, marriage was beginning to be within his financial reach. However, Vivien’s commitment to him was still in question. To overcome her fear of sex, Greene, in an extraordinary gesture, offered a celibate marriage.

  It was while Greene was sub-editor at The Times that the country experienced the General Strike, and London ground to a halt with mass pickets and riots. Young Greene was exhilarated by working as a packer, manual labourer, and member of the newspaper’s ‘shock troops’ during the nine-day strike, but the excitement ended too quickly and monotony loomed. The possibility of unending years of sub-editing at The Times gave impetus to his literary efforts. He finished his second novel, The Episode, but encountered repeated rejections and the novel remained unpublished. Having forsaken any hope of his first two novels being published, he started a third, The Man Within.

  Greene and Vivien were married on 15 October 1927. They honeymooned in France and returned to live in London at a house affectionately known as ‘the basket’, a reflection of Vivien’s passion for cats.

  At the age of twenty-four, still working at The Times, and only ten days after The Man Within was submitted, Greene was telephoned by Charles Evans of Heinemann with the news that his novel had been accepted. It was an immediate success, with two reprints sold before publication. Within six months the novel went into six impressions and was translated into five languages. On publication day in June 1929 a literary star had been discovered.

  Overconfident as a result of the success of The Man Within, Greene persuaded Heinemann to take him on salary in order to write full time. He resigned his position at The Times, but his next two novels, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, were failures. The Name of Action hardly sold 2,000 copies and Rumour at Nightfall barely 1,200. Financial pressures forced Greene and Vivien to move from London to a primitive cottage in Chipping Campden. Greene became increasingly depressed by the growing debt to his publisher, but for Vivien this isolation and financial struggle was an idyllic period.

  The 1930s were difficult times and the Greenes were not unaffected by the Depression. Although temporarily elated that his next novel Stamboul Train was selected as a Book Society choice, Greene was forced to share the expense of reprinting twenty pages of the soon-to-be-released book on threat of a libel action from J. B. Priestley (then at the height of his fame), who concluded that the character Mr Savoy was based on him.

  In spite of the last-minute difficulties Stamboul Train was the Christmas rage and a breakthrough success for Greene. Excellent reviews poured in and by late January sales had passed the 16,000 mark. Greene, still facing financial hardship, applied for a position at Bangkok University (unsuccessfully) while continuing to review for the Spectator.

  The central metaphor of his next novel, It’s a Battlefield, was of life as ‘a battlefield in which individuals, ignorant of the extent of the whole war, fought their own separate battles …’ The romantic relationships of It’s a Battlefield with their premise that love complicated a simple act of lust suggested that Greene, though still in love with Vivien, frequented prostitutes.

  After moving from Chipping Campden to Oxford and finishing It’s a Battlefield, Greene spent three weeks in Sweden trying to concoct a biography of the Swedish Match King, Ivar Kreuger, which never materialised. Instead, Greene began England Made Me, set in Sweden, which condemned the antiquated precepts of ‘honour’ so central to the public school system in which he had suffered. A major character, Anthony Farrant, was modelled on his eldest brother Herbert, the black sheep of the family.

  Shortly after his first child Lucy was born in December 1933, Greene impulsively decided to explore Liberia. Over a glass of champagne his 23-year-old cousin, Barbara Greene, agreed to accompany him to a country still largely unexplored by Westerners. The attraction for Greene was that the most reliable map available was an American military one with sections blank except for the word ‘Cannibals’.

  At Freetown, Sierra Leone, he found that everything ugly and seedy was European and everything beautiful was native. At the start of his journey Greene was a novice African traveller, but by the time he reached Monrovia he was seasoned, as a result of overcoming endless difficulties. He led his small expedition with vigilance, walking hour after hour through perilous terrain, sometimes getting lost. In spite of the heat and the difficult conditions, he dutifully recorded his observations, which had the qualities of nightmare – the old man he’d seen beaten with a club outside a poky little prison at Tapee-Ta, the naked widows at Tailahun covered with yellow clay, the great wooden-toothed devil swaying his raffia skirts between the huts.

  Greene pushed himself to the limit, physically and mentally, nearly exceeding even his formidable determination. He contracted a strange disease and became profoundly exhausted from constant travel. The travellers had very little medicine and they had to rely on Epsom salts. One night Barbara was certain that Greene would die, but curiously his fever broke and the next morning, discovering a renewed interest in living, he was anxious to travel. After weeks of pressing through dense jungle they emerged at Grand Bassa and by April were back in England. Greene found a compelling new desire to succeed as a writer, and his book
Journey Without Maps, probably one of the best travel books of our time, was published in 1936.

  Greene moved from Oxford to London in order to be at the hub of the publishing world. Having experienced the unknown and survived by his own wit and determination, he had a surge of creative energy. He began the thriller Brighton Rock, edited the short-lived magazine Night and Day, and reviewed films for the Spectator. It was his review of the Shirley Temple film Wee Willie Winkie which hastened the financial downfall of Night and Day. In its libel action Twentieth Century Fox claimed that Greene ‘had accused [it] of “procuring” Miss Temple “for immoral purposes”’, a bizarre comment.

  With Brighton Rock published and the libel suit threatening, Greene departed for Mexico under the patronage of Longman’s to write about religious persecution there. His hatred of Mexico started at a ceremonial cockfight in San Luis Potosi, with the beggars of Mexico City, and the unnerving abrazo (embrace) grown men used when meeting each other. With little knowledge of the language and less of the terrain, Greene journeyed by mule from Salto to Palenque recording his extreme suffering.

  In Villahermosa, decrees were passed insisting that priests should marry. God was denounced from his own pulpit, people were forced to destroy altars, religious ornaments were smashed, even torn from people’s necks. Priests in Tabasco were hunted down and eventually shot, except one who wandered for ten years under cover in the forest and swamps and became the itinerant ‘whisky’ priest. Greene knew that ‘The greatest saints have been men with more than normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have sometimes narrowly evaded sanctity.’

  PART I

  War

  1

  Rumours at Nightfall

  Just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given …

  – FRANCIS BACON

  AFTER GREENE’S DEVASTATING trip on a mule through the state of Chiapas, he returned to Mexico City (in early May 1938) in very poor health. He’d had dysentery on the interminable journey back. He had to go into a stony field to relieve himself and be sick. He had kept himself going with thoughts of a luxurious hotel, ‘all brandy cocktails and bourbon’. Instead, in the Hotel Canada, he read the newspaper clippings about the Shirley Temple libel case (‘it looks as if I shall be arrested when I land [in England] if the L[ord] C[hief] J[ustice]’s bite is as bad as his bark’),1 worked on the proofs of the American edition of Brighton Rock, and while applying heated beeswax to his behind to extract ticks embedded there during his journey, listened to a hysterical woman screaming and sobbing in the room below.

  He returned to England in May 1938 with vital material, which enabled him to produce his brilliant travel book The Lawless Roads and his greatest novel The Power and the Glory, but it was material which reflected his dislike: ‘I hate this country and this people.’ Hatred was certainly very much part of the tone of The Lawless Roads, yet it became modified by the time he was writing The Power and the Glory, and his response to England was perhaps an indicator of why this happened. He sailed for Europe on the Orinoco, longing to see his wife and children again, and arrived in England on 25 May, only to suffer another culture shock.

  He began to wonder why he had disliked Mexico so much, as he compared the Catholic religious observances in England with those in Mexico: ‘Mass in Chelsea seemed curiously fictitious; no peon knelt with his arms out in the attitude of the cross, no woman dragged herself up the aisle on her knees. It would have seemed shocking, like the Agony itself. We do not mortify ourselves. Perhaps we are in need of violence.’2

  London was a culture shock for him on his return:

  One jolted through the hideous iron tunnel at Vauxhall Bridge, under the Nine Elms depot and the sky-sign for Meux’s beer. There is always a smell of gas at the traffic junction where the road is up and the trams wait; a Watney poster, a crime of violence … In the grit of the London afternoon, among the trams, in the long waste of the Clapham Road, a Baptist chapel, stone and weed.3

  And war seemed to be brewing, but perhaps, not yet.

  Upon returning, he gave himself too much to do: ‘I see no further for the next twelve months than the grindstone.’ He knew war was inevitable (‘How could a world like this end in anything but war?’) yet curiously hatched a plan of escape as if it were not so: ‘In about two years or so, I want to go & stay up the Amazon with an odd delightful German whom I met on the way home, but he has to serve a short sentence in Hamburg first.’4

  Greene’s ‘odd delightful German’ was a rare creature. They had met on the Orinoco, and Greene discovered that Kruger had been wrongfully gaoled in Mexico and had endured appalling conditions – an open cell crowded with thieves and murderers, the floor crawling with worms, covered with urine and excrement, and no food or water for eight days. What struck Greene about him was his gentleness, his amazing gratitude for life and the extraordinary sense of goodness surrounding him. This sense of essential goodness Greene passed on to his whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, Kruger being one source for the famous fictional figure.fn1

  On the Orinoco, Kruger and Greene made vows to meet in two years’ time in Iquitos. It was not to be. With the war intervening, it was not possible to visit the Amazon nor did he ever hear what happened to Kruger after he returned to the Fatherland to finish his sentence.

  *

  In London, the telephones were cut off, the anti-aircraft guns set up on Clapham Common, and trenches were being dug. Air-raid wardens had been appointed and air-raid posts set up in anticipation of war and the inevitable onslaught of German bombers. Greene believed that under the conditions of war novels, short stories, reviews and articles would not be saleable products, and the subsequent loss of earnings would make it difficult to support his family. Thus he forced himself to take on extra writing commitments. His urge to make money stemmed from a fear that his family might experience the poverty he and Vivien had known in the early 1930s, with the added fear that with his family increased by two he would not be able to provide for them.

  At home his two lively small children made it difficult to concentrate on writing and he sought ways of getting his family from under his feet. His mother took them off his hands for a holiday: ‘It’s very good of you to have all my family & domestic.’ He pleaded with her to look after Vivien: ‘See that she takes regularly her particularly foul medicine, that she goes to bed early and that she has a car to take her on Sunday to Mass.’ At the beginning of August he asked his mother to approach his sister Molly to take his daughter for ten days – ‘She can really dress herself now’ – for he was planning to go to a country pub for a week or two in the hope of getting a lot of work done – ‘there are so many interruptions in town’. He wanted to visit his mother: ‘I wish I could come down, but there isn’t a chance. As well as going to the office [of the Spectator] every day as literary editor,fn2 I’ve signed up again for at least four weeks with Denham [film studios] at 125 pounds a week …’ But a more serious concern was soon to vie with the urge to work.

  By 14 September 1938 war seemed inevitable and Greene wrote in his diary: ‘A curious air of unreality – a rather silent [Clapham] Common – too many strangers talking together in pairs. The papers: CRISIS LATEST, FRENCH WAR CHIEFS HERE, HITLER CALLS HIS GENERALS, THE NEXT FEW HOURS WILL DECIDE PEACE OR WAR.’ It was the day after his son’s second birthday and there was thunder in the air and later slow rain fell. In the context of impending war Graham, the least domesticated of men, found some peace in domesticity: ‘The nursery – everything – looking prettier than I remembered it.’ Yet in spite of the distractions of the time, he did complete a review of The History of the Film, but in his diary questioned, ‘Who on earth will bother about that?’ Indeed, he wondered whether his review would appear once war started and whether he would be paid: ‘Nothing to do but go out and look at the latest posters. This heavy day, one feels, can’t end in peace.’5

  September was filled with fear and uncertainty. But it was clear that there were to be many mo
re such months, when Hitler occupied the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia containing three million Germans, which he called his ‘last territorial demand in Europe’. The Czech response was to impose martial law on the Sudetenland and to send troops there. On 14 September, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden to meet Hitler as tension grew in France and Britain. But instead of confronting Hitler, Chamberlain conceded areas of Czechoslovakia. On 22 September, Chamberlain returned to Germany and met the German leader again at Godesberg. Two days later Greene wrote in his diary: ‘Chamberlain’s second meeting with Hitler apparently ended in failure … Back again where we were on September 14 with war almost certain … Rain pouring down: a dreadful unreality over everything.’6 In London parks there was what amounted to panic trench-digging, and thirty-eight million gas masks were issued.

  On 29 September plans were published to evacuate two million people, mostly children, from London. Greene recalled a ‘small, rather timid-looking man, the headmaster of an L.C.C. school, while an aeroplane droned low overhead’, explaining evacuation plans: ‘Railways to be taken over, children to be sent to unknown destinations – the parents informed later by telegrams. The Mother Superior, an old lady with a bone-white face and a twitching upper lip, sat taking notes … Most of the London boroughs fitting gas masks …’ Greene recorded in his diary: ‘Had to pack a bag for Lucy to take to school in case of evacuation. Blanket, one change of underclothes, food for one day. Marked H 105, the mark of the school.’7 That night was grim and wet. Greene’s younger sister Elisabeth came to dinner and they played poker dice for pennies. In Berlin Hitler made a belligerent speech. The next day, 27 September, Greene told his mother how he had ‘to drag the old cook almost by main force to be fitted for a gas mask. Vivien and the children are being done this morning. We had an hour’s wait in a queue. Nasty smelly things!’