The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  This incident in a hotel near Paddington station is based on fact. It was not the first time that Greene and Dorothy had made love, but Vivien Greene recalled her husband’s experience:

  He took Dorothy to a lodging house in the road that’s opposite Paddington Station, and when they got there found it was kept by somebody who had been on the set, not acting but in some other capacity, of the film or play of Brighton Rock. I don’t know why he went to a lodging house with her. But I know that he did go to this house and the door was opened by this woman. He told me all this, and said how taken aback, and what a sort of strain of superstition he felt. It was so extraordinary that out of the thousands and thousands of houses that he could go to, that this person should turn up there. Dorothy was one of the great loves of his life, he told me.11

  Greene thought that Dorothy was slightly younger than his wife, but her birth certificate shows that she was born on 17 May 1901, so was older than Graham by three years and Vivien by four. She was already thirty-eight when she met Greene. David Low, the bookseller who knew Greene and Dorothy during the blitz, recalled that she was ‘happy, small, rather stoutish, not smart but very friendly – she radiated friendliness. She gave you a sense of feeling at home in her company – she had a nice laugh.’ David Higham’s account tallies with Low’s:

  I used to know Dorothy. She was a strange little person – very small. Greene was kind to her – she was always hard up: she was an accident-prone girl. She was always breaking her leg or her wrist or something. She was short and a bit stout (though not fat), stocky more than anything. I could see no sexual attraction at all. She was nice. I liked her, but that’s a different thing.12

  Greene’s brother Hugh, admitting she was very small, less than five foot (Hugh was six foot six), remembered her as thin and boyish with short bobbed hair.13

  Many people were mystified by Greene’s interest in Dorothy, in particular Malcolm Muggeridge: ‘I was thinking of old Glover who rather strangely enough was very intimate with him and whom he was extraordinarily good to. She was a person who, on the grounds of attractiveness, was absolutely a non-starter. I mean, she was alright but she was a very ordinary kind of person and not the sort of person you’d think in worldly terms he’d be attracted to, and yet he was devoted to her.’14 But Muggeridge also stressed Greene’s enigmatic nature:

  He’s a curious man in the sense that there is no one who has any ultimate intimacy with him, not any man, perhaps some woman. [Later Muggeridge doubted even this.] The characteristic of Greene is that he has shunned intimacy, even with his brother Hugh, his closest friend. He would know more about him in the sense that they were brothers and shared the same background but he’d be the same enigma to him also.fn3, 15

  A partial account of Dorothy, though no less accurate, was provided by Vivien Greene. Dorothy was in her fifties when Vivien met her for the first and only time; the ‘thin, little girl’ Hugh Greene admired (and Greene’s brother did admire her enormously) had long since disappeared, though Graham Greene’s love had not. Greene had been separated from his wife half a dozen years at the time of this meeting. Vivien came to London and visited him unexpectedly – something she normally did not do:

  We went upstairs and came in. I don’t think we went much further than the hall, and we were just chatting. He was a bit uneasy and presently a small stoutish woman in blue glasses, like a character in a Victorian novel, came up the stairs. She was quite small and roly-poly, and she came up and was taken aback and said, ‘Oh! Graham, I came to ask if I could borrow your telephone – I wanted to telephone my furrier.’ At once I thought, ‘Fancy climbing three flights of stairs to borrow a telephone and then to telephone your furrier at about 6.45.’ He introduced us, and I made a get-away. He was taking her out to dinner obviously, and this ridiculous story about a furrier.16

  Very little is known about Dorothy’s background, though by the time Greene met her she was a book illustrator and, probably, along with her mother, a landlady as well. Vivien remembered Greene telling her that Dorothy had danced in the chorus of Chu Chin Chow and that she had married an American soldier in the First World War (she would have been very young to have done that), but that the marriage broke up.17

  A theatre review of the revival of Chu Chin Chow appearing in the Spectator on 1 August 1941, and signed D. M. Glover, stated: ‘During the last war I watched every performance of Chu Chin Chow from the stage – as a small urchin in any scene; where there was an odd corner to fill … Last week I watched the revival of Chu Chin Chow at the Palace Theatre from the stalls.’ The First World War version of Chu Chin Chow was popular between the years 1916 and 1919, so Dorothy was not a small urchin but a teenager; perhaps she was hiding her real age from her lover.

  Vivien recalled Dorothy with a dispassionate air: ‘She was quite a lot older and looked it. She was square and small, but Graham said something about the most terrific sort of sexual thrill he had was seeing her sitting in a red dressing gown in front of a dressing table. He did tell me such things. I think there was a certain element of seeing what my reaction would be. I think very largely too as a novelist.’18

  *

  But if Vivien suspected an affair, her letters early in the war reveal only her love, often expressed in small domestic ways. At one point Greene had asked about a present she’d sent him which he believed hadn’t arrived: ‘Oh you poor, poor darling – the tiny present was only Jaeger socks. Didn’t you notice you sent 1 sock & 2 came back?’

  Greene’s letters also contain no hint that he was no longer living at 14 North Side. On one occasion, she telephoned him in the morning without catching him. Graham explained, rather dubiously, why this was so: ‘9 is a bad time to ring up: I’m either shaving in the bathroom & can’t hear, or out getting my breakfast. And at night there’s always the chance that I’m in bed or out …’19

  His affair with Dorothy was thriving, but his love for Vivien still flourished and sometimes there is a faint whiff of guilt in the phrasing of a letter:

  Your letter today made me miss you so much … I’ve been to a bad film and it’s pouring with rain and I was cut off from you on the phone because of a trunk call … Now there’s lightning and a drum, drum, drum on the skylight. Lightning in November. The whole world’s crazy … It’s like when I go to Mexico or Liberia or some place: I only know how deeply I love you when you are not at hand to speak to.20

  The New Year came in with bitter cold – ‘it is so cold’, Vivien wrote three days into 1940, ‘that one isn’t much enticed out, even for a jaunt’. But her concern was for her husband’s welfare: ‘Darling … keep warm, don’t economise on warm food. You must eat well & have Nescafe or “Camp” & Bovril in the house when you want a hot drink … awfully important to have one the moment you feel chilled or seedy.’

  When Vivien worried about their future together – ‘There’s no one to nuzzle up to. Will we ever have our teas together, I wonder? It will take years after the war for things to come right again, won’t it?’ – he replied gently, ‘Darling, don’t feel so sad. It won’t take any time to get back to normal and our teas. Things are strange and unshipped, I know: one doesn’t feel properly oneself. But cats can see in the dark, and we’ll come creeping along to find each other.’21 Vivien immediately responded: ‘Your letter was so perfect & made me so consoled & happy. I put it in the gold envelope with the telegram & shall carry it about & keep it under my pillow.’22 Believing that true love had returned, she expressed herself in her ‘special’ language, not realising that both cat imagery and cat-like activities (which early in his marriage pleased him as evidence of her love), now felt ‘sticky’ – much too sentimental and too physically close. She did not know that what she wrote had the opposite effect to the one she intended: ‘Darling, it is always & will always continue to be touching & wonderful that “Sourpuss the Jamesian” likes being loved and purred over. Well, I do purr over you and stroke you … & wish to burnish your fur with much caressing & soft words of trust an
d affection.’fn4, 23

  What Vivien was working up to was to return to 14 North Side, for the blitz had not yet materialised and people were returning to London in droves:

  I would like to come & look after you, especially if it wouldn’t destroy the romantic … feeling. You wouldn’t see much of me. I would banish you to work & only notice you really at tea time. You could have a meal on a tray in your study when you liked, if you didn’t want to stop the ‘run’ – absolutely no bother. And it wouldn’t cost very much more, as you’d have the 15/- for me here, & we’d live very simply. I’d not open any A/Cs for us two but trot out with a basket & buy just what was wanted & pay so when I went back to Crowb[orough]., there’d be no complications.24

  Greene handled the threatened return of his wife by suggesting that Vivien visit him once a fortnight. Her desire to return is palpable: ‘I must come & see how you are & do a cake,’ but one senses her fear also: ‘I have a key & shan’t trouble you. I would arrive about 11 I suppose after buying materials. If you can remember to tell me measurements of window & door-window in kitchen as I will order blackout blinds.’ Her anxiety grew as the time for her short visit came near – the first since she’d been forcefully evacuated. Clearly she saw it as a period when love would be renewed since the children would be staying at Crowborough: ‘I do love you. You will telephone if you want me? I will come home in about 10 days for my first fortnight.’ The visit was only a week away and whilst admitting that owing to the cold weather, her brain was functioning very slowly – it was one of the coldest Januarys on record – she went on to say pathetically: ‘I do feel Stupe & that is vaguely dispiriting. As we haven’t been to Tenerife or Fez together you don’t know & can’t imagine how amusing I might or could be or what an affectionate Love! These are true words.’25

  On the occasion of their twelfth wedding anniversary, Greene still asserted his love ‘as I have always said & shall always say – how dearly I love you & how glad I am we got married’, and he urged his wife not to be depressed: ‘There are good times coming I feel sure. We’ll all be snug again together with your objects [Victorian objets d’art] & my books.’26

  Greene, I should imagine, had little hope that good times were coming for he was never sanguine about his future. Always sensitive to another’s pain, he was simply trying to comfort Vivien. However, at this time he was involved in an ordinary, rather shabby deception, but one practised casually enough in many lives.

  *

  Vivien, though often under strain, was not always unhappy and she cleverly presents us with the tedious character of living as an evacuee in wartime Britain with in-laws: Greene’s mother is M, Father is Da, and N is his Aunt Nora:

  M: Oh, Nora, remind me I must ring up Miss Hazlett about the sandwiches for Weds W.I.

  Da: (Ponderously) One thing the War has done is to draw the Empire together …

  N: Are you having rock cakes as well for the soldiers?

  Da: I wonder what Stalin is thinking now about the Petsavo peninsula …! (Very Slowly)27

  Greene’s father was a diabetic and Marion Greene attended to his every need, religiously giving him injections of insulin. She also read aloud to him countless detective stories, which were his passion. Vivien recalled a further scene: ‘Aunt N is resting with a [hot water] bottle, Mumma is faithfully reading aloud to Da, I hope for her sake Trollope & not Scott. Did I tell you that she read [Dorothy Sayers’s] BUSMAN’S HONEYMOON aloud!! Helga [Hugh’s wife, also living at Crowborough] and I insisted she must have skipped for the sake of Da’s delicacy: he said quite interested – “I didn’t notice you skipping. Did you skip?” Mumma smiled rather mysterious & said It was too long ago to remember.’28

  But ‘Da’s delicacy’ was his wife’s also. Little wonder that Greene broke away from the limiting conventions of the household. On one occasion Marion Greene, reading Old Moore’s Almanack for 1939 and noticing that it failed to suggest that war would break out that year, expostulated, ‘He doesn’t seem to know anything …’ Vivien wanted to read the almanack, but was not allowed to because Greene’s mother felt that the advertisements were indecent. She intended to tear it up and later did so.29

  Marion Greene treated Vivien as if she were not yet old enough to make adult decisions: ‘It is so awful,’ she explained to her husband, ‘being a schoolgirl after having been a proud ’ook [Vivien’s nickname for being a wife].’

  Greene’s early letters to his separated family often listed incidentally what he saw:

  Steel helmets on sale in fashionable hatters in Jermyn St. This explains men with steel helmets waiting for buses; prostitute ensconced for custom in a sandbag dog trot outside Swan and Edgar’s in the black-out. Yesterday afternoon I saw a lovely sight in a blue sky. Eleven planes making an enormous diving arc with their exhausts, pursued apparently by our fighters in another huge circle. They were like skaters on blue ice & their tracks stayed in the sky for about ten minutes afterwards.30

  Vivien’s letters were about domestic happenings, and her love for her husband and children, but she could express her isolation delicately: ‘Bizet wrote Carmen, Wagner wrote Lohengrin. Nobody writes me: Gee, I’m lonesome!’31

  *

  In London, Greene was looking for new and exciting ways to be employed: ‘I’ve written to Frere who is now some big gun in Whitehall to do with man-power,’ he wrote to Vivien, ‘suggesting that a group of younger writers should be formed, parallel to that of the war artists in the last war, to record various aspects of all the fronts.’ And he added, ‘Seems to me something might be pulled in that way.’32

  He was as busy as ever writing reviews of fiction and films for the Spectator, he was working on The Power and the Glory, while his agent Nancy Pearn was trying to place his work in the popular press – unsuccessfully as it turned out. Greene sent Pearn a short synopsis of stories for the Daily Herald, but it wasn’t acceptable. The synopsis was offered to the Strand magazine and again turned down: ‘After all, five hundred words is mighty little in which to outline five stories,’ wrote the editor, ‘for everything depends on the plot and treatment of each story.’ But the editor’s chief objection was that the outline was depressing, such insistence being made on the sordidness and squalor surrounding the whole concern. ‘I should love to have a Graham Greene story set in a London scene, and if needs be I wouldn’t mind it reasonably tough, but I don’t want the atmosphere to be just gloom.’33

  The month war was declared, Greene’s thriller The Confidential Agent (a perfect title to attract a nation entering upon the uncertainties of conflict) appeared, and in October was published in America.

  He was still working on The Power and the Glory when ‘during the Winter of 1939’ he received a summons to meet the draft board for emergency reserve officers. The days of anxiety which had driven him to write so fast and which had led to an addiction to benzedrine were over and he passed Ai in health. The board consisted of a major-general and two colonels.34 They first asked him how he ‘visualized’ himself. On Greene not giving them the answer they wanted, they rephrased the question, ‘but how do you see yourself?’

  All three watched with anxiety. I was aware of their bated breath, and I felt some sympathy for what they had endured day by day from all my fellow reservists … I believe they dreaded the thought that once again they were to suffer that word ‘Intelligence’. They leaned a little forward in their chairs and I had the impression that they were holding out to me, in the desperation of their boredom, a deck of cards with one card marked. I decided to help them. I took the marked card and said, ‘I suppose … the Infantry.’

  One of the colonels gave a sigh of relief and the general said with unmistakable pleasure, ‘I don’t think we need ask Mr Greene any more questions, do you?’

  I had so evidently pleased them that I thought I could safely make a small request. I only needed a few more months to complete The Power and the Glory. Could my call-up be postponed for a few months?

  The general positively
beamed. Of course I should have those precious months – ‘Shall we say until June [1940]?’35

  Greene’s vagueness about the date of this meeting (‘Winter of 1939’) was perhaps deliberate. We know the meeting took place in September because a letter to Vivien, though undated, refers both to his board (‘I was a little surprised at the Medical Board giving me Grade one. I thought weight, chest expansion and eyes would prevent that’) and to his involvement in a Spectator competition, an account of which appeared in the magazine on 29 September 1939.

  Suggesting a more exact date for the meeting is significant, for if he went in front of the board in late September, he must have already completed The Power and the Glory. Indeed, a letter to his wife dated 19 September indicates this: ‘It feels awfully peaceful – to have a book [The Power and the Glory] finished on the day another one [The Confidential Agent] comes out.’ Thus Greene persuaded the draft board for reserve officers to give him a further six months to finish The Power and the Glory when it was already completed. No doubt he felt it necessary to seek a further reprieve from the draft in order to find extra cash for his family before being called up. In his letter of 19 September to Vivien, Greene added: ‘I really do have time to look around. On the chance of a boom I think I shall get a volume of essays ready & see if Mary can sell a volume of short stories in U.S. I feel I can take 3 months before I start another novel or thriller … Say 2 months holiday.’