The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  But it was what might happen after the war that pleased him most: ‘After the war I shall go in to the office properly & learn publishing, & Douglas Jerrold, the managing director, indicates that he will be retiring reasonably soon, & that there is no other director who knows anything about books. So there may yet be a family-business open to Francis!’ Greene’s son was four years old at this time.9

  During the war, Greene continued to receive his £100 tax-free allowance, and it remained an enticement to him to go into the firm after the war. The understanding was that he would help to build up Eyre & Spottiswoode’s fiction list (the firm’s weak link) when ‘the time was ripe’. According to David Higham, Douglas Jerrold thought he would be getting Greene’s future novels. And Greene toyed with the idea of signing up his next two novels after the war with Heinemann, instead of his usual three: ‘I feel that if I am in charge after the war at E. and S. it may very well be a good thing to change … After all a salary is something to cling to.’ He then added, as if he felt the war had ended his career as a writer, ‘I may not feel like writing any more books, except very occasionally.’11

  It is extraordinary that Greene wrote this letter soon after he had completed one of his greatest entertainments, The Ministry of Fear, but one of his biggest fears was that the creative vein would run thin or run out entirely. The move to the commercial world of publishing was a means of protecting himself and his family. It made good business sense to Greene to change publishers after developing Eyre & Spottiswoode’s fiction list, to move himself over in order to convince others to move also. Greene had a secret arrangement with Jerrold that Eyre & Spottiswoode would publish his future entertainments: ‘say nothing to Charles [Evans, he wrote to his agent] about future entertainments being published by Eyre & Spottiswoode’.12 But before that happened, he joined the firm, becoming a fully fledged publisher: ‘I’ve been signing up my post-war future: 5 year contract with Eyre & Spottiswoode beginning at £1000 & going up by usual increments to £1500: in addition one’s director’s fee & entertainment allowance – of course the money from one’s books. In confidence, Jerrold proposes to retire after giving me about 18 months training as a publisher & I shall then be in sole charge of the firm. This should be amusing.’13 It wasn’t entirely amusing. It was a desk job and Greene was busy. He was at his desk five days a week from ten o’clock till half-past five.

  What was he like as a publisher? Anthony Powell, who had substantial private reasons for criticising Greene as a publisher, nevertheless praised him:

  Greene … had spent the latter years of the war in the Secret Service. A man of very considerable practical ability (unlike many writers), his nervous energy, organising faculty, taste for conflict, sudden bursts of rage, would have made him successful in most professions … He soon set humming the veteran engine of Eyre & Spottiswoode … nevertheless, a chassis set rattling ominously under the force of the new dynamo.14

  Some letters have survived which show Greene ‘pushing’ his authors. When sending out his autumn list, he approached leading reviewers such as J. C. Trewin of the Observer, mentioning first his ‘best seller writers’ – Mrs Parkinson Keyes, Major Yeats Brown, Algernon Cecil, David Masters and Arnold Lunn, who ‘will obviously attract notice from their authors’ reputations’, but then singled out a number for special mention: Geoffrey Cotterell’s Then a Soldier, ‘one of the most amusing first novels which I personally have read in the last two years’; Colonel Wintle’s The Prisoner of Toulon, ‘the odd and extremely funny journal of a man who paints himself as something of a cross between a Blimp and a Card’; and Mervyn Peake’s Rhymes without Reason, ‘in the Carroll and Lear Tradition’.fn2, 15

  In February 1945 he sent Trewin his spring catalogue. He referred to other general books, but in speaking of novels selected only those which he felt he could genuinely recommend. Greene also began widening the scope of the Eyre & Spottiswoode list by bringing in foreign writers, specifically praising Transit Visa by the German communist Anna Seghers.16

  In his final year as a publisher he selected Frank Tilsley’s Champion Road for particular praise; again his judgment is succinct and accurate:

  Tilsley … in spite of the praise he has received both from the intelligent and the popular critics, has always been hovering on the edge of writing his best book. Champion Road contains all that was to be found in his previous work – particularly that strain of almost obstinate honesty which has enabled him to dig out the truth from even an apparently banal situation – and in addition there is so much more. This is the book of Tilsley’s which I have always wanted to publish and in it he reaches his maturity as a novelist.17

  Greene started the Century Library, intending to bring back into print a series of forgotten classics. As he explained to Mrs Belloc Lowndes (the sister of Hilaire Belloc and author of the famous Informer) the series would ‘consist of a representative selection of the best fiction of this century’. Greene was not writing to Belloc Lowndes to suggest that he reprint one of her novels, but rather approaching her because he thought she might know who the executors of Rhoda Broughton were, as he wanted to publish Broughton’s A Waif’s Progress. When he asked Evelyn Waugh to contribute an introduction to Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington, Waugh replied that he would be delighted to do so, but refused payment by cheque (‘because the state will snatch it’) and suggested payment in kind:

  Money is not really much use these days … If you intend to publish a large number of novels in this series perhaps you might have the free intro. for a set; perhaps you could bind the Unbearable Bassington handsomely for me? Perhaps you would even give me some signed copies of your own work?18

  Greene also approached George Orwell, whom he had met through a mutual friend, Michael Meyer, to write an introduction to any work by Merrick. Orwell jumped at the suggestion and offered to write one for The Position of Peggy Harper. Alas, when Greene left Eyre & Spottiswoode, Douglas Jerrold discontinued the Century Library and Orwell did not write his introduction.

  *

  On 1 August 1944 the Polish underground rose in Warsaw, but all were massacred. On 25 August the German commander in Paris surrendered to the Allies and Montgomery overran the V1 launching sites, but that only ended the first phase of the V1 bombing. The Germans then began releasing the V1s from planes and another 750 came over in the next few months. Then London had to face a greater and more sinister weapon of terror, the V2s.

  The V2 rockets were 45 feet long and weighed 14 tons. They were silent, giving no warning, and were the most destructive weapons seen crossing London skies. It took only four V2s, falling on Croydon, to damage 2,000 homes. They travelled fast and the noise of the explosion, when it came, was very loud, like that of a gas explosion. Indeed, initially, the government put it about that they were gas explosions, but the great flashes of white light in the sky were enough for the general public to know that another secret weapon had arrived, one which gave no time for the anticipation of death.

  During the period of the V1 and V2 bombing, Greene was on voluntary fire-watching duty, though not without causing trouble for staid, unimaginative authority, of the kind which always got up his sensitive nostrils.19

  On one occasion Greene attacked Mr Webber because of his ‘fantastically inefficient and childish ideas of organising a fire-guard’:

  Understanding that one had to report not later than half an hour before black-out, I arrived at 25 Gilbert Street last night about 10.15. I was told to go to 47 Mount Street and found the house locked. Half an hour later I tried again and found a guard there. He had an office chair to sit on – nothing else, not even a blanket.

  With the help of a watchman, Greene eventually found his post, ‘the absurd death-trap’ at the head of a twisting iron emergency ladder, and set up his bed in room 2541 on the fourth floor below. There were no directions as to where a stirrup pump (to immobilise incendiary bombs) could be found or where water was available, and no issue of torches (in case of electricity failur
e). Greene ended his letter to Webber: ‘If at any time you care to ring me … I will be delighted to tell you what you can do with your fire-guard duties.’20

  Nine days later Webber replied to Greene in a detailed memo, which ended with a veiled threat: ‘I am submitting a copy of this letter and the Fire Guard instructions together with a copy of your letter to the proper authorities in P.I.D. for appropriate action.’21 Greene responded two days later denying most of Mr Webber’s counter-charges and concluding: ‘As I gather you wish to give a larger distribution to this personal memoranda, I enclose an extra copy for your convenience.’22

  When Greene’s quarrel with Webber was criticised, Greene gave a month’s notice and tendered his resignation as a fire-guard.fn3, 23

  *

  But what was Greene, the publisher like at his office? We have his managing director’s account, somewhat sardonic, certainly humorous, and often penetrating:

  When he was a publisher he always came to our office very early in the morning, and always, from the first moment or so, in his favourite pose … of a man who had not been particularly early to bed and might leave again at any moment to get rid of his hangover at the Dog and Duck. He had usually announced his intention of going to be bored before leaving the previous evening, and when I asked him how the evening had passed off he always replied with a look of intense pleasure, ‘It was perfectly ghastly’ … His club must be what he calls ‘the seedy club’; if he goes to a party it must be ‘simply appalling’ or ‘perfectly ghastly’; even a quiet cocktail with two or three friends becomes, on leaving, ‘a dreary little drink’.fn4, 24

  Douglas Jerrold was excellent on how Greene spent the early part of his morning on arriving at his ‘director’s desk’: ‘He would settle down to the serious business of the day, telephoning with rapid succession to his bank, to his stockbroker, to his insurance agent, to his literary agent, to a film company or two, and, if it was really a busy morning, to two or three editors.’ And Jerrold noted slyly: ‘During these conversations the tortured conscience so frequently and so movingly on exhibition in his novels was notably absent.’ Douglas Jerrold’s distinction between the bright, capable publisher and Greene’s wrestling with problems of good and evil is valuable: ‘There was as much of the “Man Within” in the easy certainties implicit in the titles of the three novels of his maturity – The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair – as in the un-ease with which the characters within the covers of these very fine books wrestle with the problem of good and evil, which is central to all Graham Greene’s important writing.’ And Jerrold went on to speak of the ‘dangerous excited child’: ‘The child who, playing with the revolver, wanted sin without the guilt and now, in his maturity, wants the guilt without the sin’25 which is too easy a judgement.

  Part of this ‘childishness’ is reflected in Greene’s pranks. Unlike the pranks of Victor Rhodes, the cuckolded husband in his 1959 play, The Complaisant Lover, Greene’s pranks were on a more heroic scale. He would play a gigantic hoax on someone or some organisation, working the details out precisely. We can see this best in the case of Mrs Montgomery, a tale told by Jerrold but authenticated by Greene in interview:

  Who is ‘Mrs Montgomery’? The answer must be that there is no such person. She was invented to lighten his hours of work as a publisher … She began, with us, as the author of manuscript lost in the office and, not unnaturally, never found. In her righteous anger she summoned all and sundry by telephone to urgent meetings at impossible times in inconvenient places.27

  Mrs Montgomery then took on a further reality. A notice from her biographer appeared in the Spectator asking to borrow any letters of Mrs Montgomery’s which might be in the possession of others. This was followed by a letter from Mrs Montgomery protesting that the proposed biography ‘was unauthorized and an impertinent intrusion on a life which she wished to remain private’.28

  According to Jerrold, calls from Mrs Montgomery continued and when the manuscript could not be found, ‘the spotlight fell on all Graham’s colleagues, past and present, in turn’. Mrs Montgomery sent infuriated messages to all and sundry, for there can be no worse tragedy for a writer than the loss of a manuscript without a copy. Complaints came fast and furiously to colleagues at Eyre & Spottiswoode from many curious sources, even waiters, butlers, and bar owners. This is how Jerrold ended his story:

  I innocently asked the proprietor of our favourite bar if he had seen ‘Mrs. Montgomery,’ to be met with an enraged complaint that I was the sixth person who that morning had been badgering him about her. The next one who did so would be thrown out. He was!

  Jerrold attributes the success of the prank to Greene’s amazing attention to detail: ‘It was [Greene’s] care for detail, the meticulous attention to the psychology of the different recipients of messages and letters, the timing, the carefully concocted atmosphere of authenticity and urgency, which kept “Mrs Montgomery” alive among us for so long.’29

  Greene once confided to me that he often acted like this during one phase of his depressive cycle:

  Mrs. Montgomery was a character I invented who sent a manuscript to Eyre & Spottiswoode which was unaccountably lost. Naturally they couldn’t trace it. I had a woman [Dorothy Glover] phone up Jerrold as Mrs. Montgomery. Also I had ‘Mrs. Montgomery’ involved with a project for a magazine which would combine literature and psychoanalysis and I got a man (who was no friend of mine) involved in meeting Mrs. Montgomery to discuss the project. The rendezvous was made at El Vino’s, whose manager I also didn’t like. Thus I had it that various other people converged on El Vino’s asking for Mrs. Montgomery before the man was to arrive to discuss the project. By the time the man … arrived, the manager of El Vino’s was half off his head and was very rough in turning him out of the bar.30

  But eventually the hoax got curiously out of hand: ‘And then a mysterious letter arrived from Edinburgh which wasn’t part of the plot at all. I didn’t know from whom it came. It referred to Mrs. Montgomery: it referred to the whole history and I thought that somebody else had interfered and taken a part in this, and it was time to finish the whole thing.’31

  *

  To improve the fiction list of Eyre & Spottiswoode, Greene decided he would try to enlist the French novelist François Mauriac. Knowing that Muggeridge was going to Paris, Greene asked him to seek out Mauriac and get him to agree to an English translation of his work. Promptly, in the early days of the Liberation, Muggeridge presented himself at the office of Mauriac’s publisher, Grasset. Bernard Grasset had been a sympathiser if not a German collaborator and had, Muggeridge tells us, ‘retired’ to a psychiatric institution. His wife, a fierce red-haired woman, was left in charge, and when a uniformed Muggeridge appeared at their offices unannounced he caused some consternation. But Madame Grasset was greatly in favour of the translation and advised Mauriac to allow it. His acquiescence was by no means certain.

  Muggeridge found Mauriac to be ‘a frail, intense man of a kind often found among French writers and intellectuals, who seem to shake themselves to pieces with the vigour and urgency of their thoughts and words … In his case, the impression was intensified by some impediment in his throat which caused him to speak always in a hoarse whisper.’32

  Greene took up the story: ‘Mauriac was very Anglophobic. I told Muggeridge to go to Mauriac and ask permission to bring out his books in a uniform edition. Mauriac, when he saw somebody in a British uniform come to his door, wondered what trouble he was in. When Muggeridge said, “I’ve come here on behalf of Eyre & Spottiswoode because they want to publish a collected edition of your books,” why his whole attitude to England altered overnight. He became a great friend of mine.’33

  The translation was brilliantly done by Gerard Hopkins and the first title, La Pharisienne, appeared as A Woman of the Pharisees in 1946. Greene brought Mauriac to England and with the help of the Oxford don, Enid Starkie (biographer of Baudelaire), ‘wangled Mauriac an honorary degree at Oxford. I conta
cted Enid Starkie and got her in on it and we got it through. It was good for Eyre & Spottiswoode and of course it made Mauriac very pleased. The university bestowed on him an Honorary D.Lit. We had a party at a house I rented in Beaumont Street in Oxford.’34 To his mother Greene wrote:

  I came back … in time for the party with eggs, ham and chocolates to help. The party was a huge success. Over 40 people and no one stirred till midnight. Mauriac stayed too to the bitter end. His address at the Taylorian (which I didn’t go to) contained a great boost for me! We had a buffet in the dining room with some drinks, and more drinks in the drawing room and chairs and nightlights in the garden.35

  To her son, as late as 1970, Vivien spoke about the party she prepared for Mauriac:

  Don’t people remember, what the war, and YEARS following were like? The whole of the food was contrived by me and cooked by me, out of my own saved rations; (rations for one were 4 oz. butter weekly; eggs and tinned things like ‘points’ which meant you could have them if they were in stock and you happened to be lucky – say 1 or 2 eggs monthly) Well I fed 50 people, including Maurice Bowra, David Cecil, Rosamond Lehmann, etc.36

  Mauriac and Greene, so different in character, shared a certain gloomy Catholicism in their creative artistry and admired each other. Mauriac wrote a preface to Greene’s The Power and the Glory: ‘There’s really no news,’ Greene wrote to his mother, ‘except what is rather nice that François Mauriac has written a preface for the Power and the Glory in France – a very nice one which ends up with a personal apostrophe: “Dear Graham Greene, with whom I have so many ties …”’ And then with his sense of personal world weariness, Greene added: ‘This would have been beyond my dreams 20 years ago, at the time when one did dream.’37