A Sort of Life

by Graham Greene

  The last term before I took Finals had been filled with frustrated efforts to decide the future. I don’t think my old dream of the Nigerian Navy ever led me very far, but I passed my viva for the Consular Service, having an idea of following in the footsteps of Flecker in the Levant, although in the end I never sat for the examination, for it would have entailed many months of being coached in French. I had at the time a great admiration for some of Flecker’s poems and I pictured myself in a caravanserai on the Golden Road to Samarkand or sitting beside a clicking jalousie, full of self-pity and nostalgia, in a Middle Eastern seaport:

  ‘Half to forget the wandering and pain,

  Half to remember days that have gone by,

  And dream and dream that I am home again!’

  More and more the wind-vane of my inclination swung in the direction of the East. I applied here, I applied there …

  For example there was an interview with the Asiatic Petroleum Company. Here I had been helped by my uncle, who was head of the Brazilian Warrant Agency; he had spoken on my behalf to a director. Unfortunately I found my interviewer knew all about a book of verse I had published at Oxford and he regarded this tendency of mine with deep suspicion. No one, he said, who worked with the Asiatic Petroleum Company could have outside interests. I tried hard to persuade him that my small book had been an aberration of adolescence: now that I was mature I had outgrown literature and my only ambition was to make a success in business. When I saw that nothing was of any avail I suggested to my mother that there might be an opening in the company for my eldest brother Herbert to whom unemployment was like a recurring flu – at least he hadn’t put himself out of court by publishing a book.2

  I had been play-acting to the director, but there was some truth in my desire to cut away from the past. I knew I could never be a good poet, I associated even the act of composition with unhappy love, and my first novel which I had written while at Oxford had never found a publisher. I was ready to wear any mask to escape from myself, and so now I flirted with a less important business opening than Asiatic Petroleum, and one far removed from Samarkand. The Lancashire General Insurance Agency had opened a branch at Oxford under a genial manager with a silky moustache called Captain Harris who was always good for a free drink and a doubtful joke; he was the more popular because he had a plump blonde secretary who hinted, when she was left for a moment without him, at all kinds of possibilities, even a weekend in Paris. Captain Harris offered me, as soon as I should go down, a job at three hundred and fifty pounds a year plus commissions, which might easily, so said the optimistic captain, amount to another eight hundred, but I had my doubts … I think I must have made contact with the captain and his girl when I offered to readers of the Oxford Outlook a free insurance against failure in examinations. They had only to fill in the coupon on page 37 and in case of failure they would receive a free champagne dinner for two at one of the Oxford restaurants. I suppose Captain Harris insured me against my risks. ‘Of course the chief attraction of the dinner,’ I wrote home, ‘will be its mixed character, and as stupid females have the reputation of being the prettiest, this ought not to be negligible.’

  Finals came and went with the future undecided. I managed to get a moderate second in Modern History, my only alpha being in Political Science of which I knew least, but I remembered how I had won my Balliol exhibition with the aid of a poem by Ezra Pound, and I carefully learnt by heart certain passages from authors who had not been required reading – Santayana was one of them – passages sufficiently general in idea for them to fit with a little ingenuity into almost any essay I might be required to write. I was much helped by a game we often played at Christmas called ‘Noun and Question’. In this game papers were handed round on which one person would write a noun, concealing it with a fold, another a question. The papers were all reshuffled and drawn from a hat, and a player would have to reply in verse to the question he picked, introducing the noun. One might be faced by such a word as ‘skyscraper’ and the question ‘Who is your favourite character in Shakespeare?’ Compared with this game, it was child’s play to insert a purple passage of Santayana on Hamlet into an essay on Machiavelli’s Prince.

  I never joined the Lancashire General Insurance Agency (although, of course, I suggested it might be a suitable opening for Herbert). Instead I found myself for two weeks an employee of the British-American Tobacco Company, destined for China in two months’ time.

  From the first I was daunted by the great concrete slab beside the Thames, with the uniformed porter like an officer of some foreign country demanding credentials; in the lift several middle-aged men were carrying files carefully like babies. The director who interviewed me (his name, I think, was Archibald Rose) had the appearance of a senior army officer, perhaps a brigadier, in plain clothes. He was correctly dressed in dark capitalist uniform with a well-tied bow tie, a well-groomed moustache; he had the politeness of a man speaking to his equal in age and position. He would have made a good Intelligence officer, and I have little doubt now that he belonged, however distantly, to the Secret Service. A man in his position, recruiting and controlling men for the Chinese hinterland, could hardly have escaped contact with the ‘old firm’, and perhaps for that reason he was not scrupulously accurate about the details of the employment. The end justified the means.

  ‘I want university men,’ he said in remarkable contrast to the director of Asiatic Petroleum, ‘because they have other interests. They can stand loneliness.’ It was the best chosen fly he could have attached to his hook. After one year, he said, spent in the treaty port of Shanghai, I would be appointed to some station in the interior with one other companion. The starting salary would be four hundred and fifty pounds a year. I discovered soon after joining the firm that both these facts were inaccurate. I would have to spend at least three years in the Shanghai office and maybe longer, and the salary was three hundred and sixty pounds. What was more important to me, because of my interest in a girl at Oxford, I should not be allowed to marry for the first four years after my appointment and only then with the permission of the directors. If I threw up the job before the end of my first year, I would not only have to pay my return fare, I would have to reimburse the company for my passage out.

  I went to work – if you can call it that – almost at once. I was shown into a large office like a classroom where there were rows of desks. I felt as though I were back in the Junior School – how civilized the big library table of the Sixth seemed in comparison. To make the resemblance to school even closer the new boys, some half a dozen of them, were all placed at the front of the class. Now I can remember only two of them. Mr Rose’s hook had caught one other university man: he was from Cambridge, where he had played cricket for his college but had not succeeded in taking a degree. The other sat at the desk next to mine. He had been a bank clerk in Cardiff, and he insisted on playing game after game of double noughts-and-crosses, which he invariably won. He was equally knowledgeable on the subject of motor-cycles. My tutor Kenneth Bell had written of me in his recommendation, ‘He is a good mixer,’ and I tried to live up to this unsound judgement, but noughts-and-crosses palled rapidly. I bought two paper-bound copies of Chinese Self-Taught and tried to keep my companion occupied, but we made small progress.

  There was absolutely no work for any of us to do. Far from being new boys who had to be bullied into learning, it seemed that we were favoured pupils who must be kept happy. We belonged to a privileged class because we were destined for China, though sometimes I felt we more closely resembled pampered prisoners who must not know the fate to which we were being led. Our passages had already been booked, and my heart sank when my companion, busily drawing his squares for yet another game, said, ‘We’ll be able to do this on the boat going out, won’t we?’ The excitements of the Forbidden City, the Boxer Rebellion, Captain Gilson’s Lost Column faded from my imagination, and only an awful inevitability of double noughts-and-crosses took their place. Perhaps we were to be chained t
ogether, not only on the boat and on the Shanghai Bund, but in that small up-country station, which had at first seemed so romantic a prospect.

  As there was no work to distract us from the enigmatic future, they gave us to read, to help pass the slow office hours, big folio ledgers, and in the pages of insignificant accounts an entry would sometimes stand sharply out: ‘For burial of coolie found dead on office steps … Radio for son of General Chiang Kai-shek on his twenty-first birthday …’

  The next week we were to go to the Liverpool factory for a month and watch from eight in the morning till seven at night the way cigarettes were made. Some of the older men were knowledgeable about the foreign substances which were added to the tobacco. There was no practical point so far as I could see in our stint at the factory, for we were to be concerned in all our working future in marketing cigarettes not making them.

  I went to see Archibald Rose and told him of my uncertainties. He was a little impatient. After all I was being paid five pounds a week for doing nothing at all. It was time I made up my mind, one way or another. (I nearly offered my brother Herbert in my place.) Then I went back to my lodging in Chelsea and tried to go on with my second novel – I had abandoned all hope for the first.

  Conrad was the influence now, and in particular the most dangerous of all his books, The Arrow of Gold, written when he had himself fallen under the tutelage of Henry James. I have long forgotten the details of my plot. The setting was nineteenth-century London when Carlist refugees lived around Leicester Square. A young Englishman became involved in their conspiracy. There was a girl, of course, as romantic and ill-defined as Donna Rita. The book was a greater struggle to write than the first had been, for I had now much less hope. How could I abandon the chance of being a businessman, when it seemed my only escape from the hated obsession of trying to make imaginary characters live? I went to Oxford for a weekend to confide my fears, became engaged to be married and sent a telegram to Archibald Rose telling him that I was not returning to the office. I was ashamed of my cowardice, but I couldn’t bring myself to face him: I had taken ten pounds of B.A.T. money and ten pounds seemed a lot in those days.

  Again I was without a future, for I had no confidence in those five hundred words a day on single-lined foolscap. What did I know of Carlist Spain or Spain at all except from the pages of Conrad? And yet I returned to the place and period three years later with less happy results, because the book was published and can still be found in second-hand catalogues under the title Rumour at Nightfall. As for the London refugees my only material lay in Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling – the one book by Carlyle which I have been able to read with pleasure.

  There was the problem of money. I had dropped my allowance when I took my job and I couldn’t live at home, for the house was closed and my family at the seaside. It was Sackville Street or nothing. To the young men of my generation, down from the university without work, recourse to Sackville Street was like recourse to the pawnshop in earlier days. Among the ‘gentlemen’s tailors’ stood an office with the Dickensian name of Gabbitas & Thring. I have always, most unfairly, thought of the interview between Nicholas Nickleby and Mr Squeers as taking place there.

  There was a Dickensian mustiness about Sackville Street in those days, in the old-established tailors’ shops on either side, where prostitutes kept flats on the second floor. The office of Gabbitas & Thring (chief rival of the equally Dickensian Truman & Knightley) might have been that of an old family solicitor, with strange secrets concealed in the metal file-boxes. It was not the cream of educational aspirants which trickled through Sackville Street. I doubt if many young men ever reached Eton or Harrow with the aid of the ‘partners’, for a man with a first-class degree did not require their help. They were the last hope of those needing a little temporary aid. You pawned yourself instead of your watch.

  I had a horror of becoming involved in teaching. It was a profession into which you could so easily slip, as my father had done, by accident. He had intended to be a barrister, had ‘eaten his dinners’ and taken on the job of temporary master only to tide him over a lean period. Had he been afraid of feeling the trap close, as I was now? I wanted nothing permanent, I explained in near panic, to the partner. Was there not, perhaps, some private tutoring job which was available just for the summer? He opened his file with an air of disappointment: there were certainly good opportunities, he suggested, in the coming school term, for an exhibitioner of Balliol with an honours degree. As for private tutoring I was too late in applying, such men were needed immediately the schools broke up (he whisked over page after page), there was really nothing he could offer for someone of my qualifications … I would hardly be interested in this (he had detached a page with the tips of his fingers), a widowed lady living at Ash-over, a village in Derbyshire, who required someone to look after her son of eight during the holidays. I would not be asked to live in the house: I would have a room in a private hotel with all my meals, but there was no salary attached. When I accepted, he looked at me with disappointment and suspicion – there must be something disgracefully wrong in my background.

  The position suited me, for I had the evenings free when I could work at my novel. The country was beautiful with the grey Pennines standing all around, a few wandering sheep on desolate deserted hills, loose stone walls and occasional cottages with an Irish air of dilapidation. The widow was undemanding. She didn’t want her son to be overworked. A little mathematics perhaps in the morning (I had forgotten all I ever knew), a quarter of an hour of Latin (equally forgotten), some games after lunch … I had what I thought the bright idea of teaching him a little carpentry, though I had never practised it myself. There was a large shady garden which reminded me of my uncle’s at Harston with lots of out-houses in which I discovered wooden crates, nails, hammers. I suggested we should build a toy theatre. My pupil agreed readily enough: he was a boy without initiative: he was quite ready to stand around holding the nails. Unfortunately the toy theatre failed to take even a rudimentary shape, so that after two days’ work I decided that what we had been making without knowing it was a rabbit hutch. He was quite satisfied, even though there was no rabbit; he was as undemanding as his mother.

  Back in the private hotel, which was called Ambervale, I plodded on till dinner time, among the Carlist refugees in Leicester Square, but the oppression of boredom soon began to descend. Once on my free day I walked over the hills to Chesterfield and found a dentist. I described to him the symptoms, which I knew well, of an abscess. He tapped a perfectly good tooth with his little mirror and I reacted in the correct way. ‘Better have it out,’ he advised.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but with ether.’

  A few minutes’ unconsciousness was like a holiday from the world. I had lost a good tooth, but the boredom was for the time being dispersed.3

  The only other distraction lay in the old ladies – a gay crowd who insisted on playing paper games they didn’t properly understand after dinner under the direction of an elderly gentleman: ‘Famous general beginning with the letter B’, the sort of thing to which family life had accustomed me. They were regarded with cynical impatience by the only other young people, a pale slang-ridden schoolboy and a girl with bobbed hair who wanted a hotel flirtation. She went with me to the pub where the landlord showed us into a private room, where we sat gingerly on the edge of a table and kissed dryly, then took refuge in a half of bitter and a gin and lime. She offered me a mongrel wirehaired terrier as a souvenir, which was to be sent by rail from Leicester to Berkhamsted and was to prove the bane of my life. Later the dog played an off-stage part in a play of mine, The Potting Shed, and Mr Kenneth Tynan, for reasons which remain mysterious to me, believed that he represented God. At lunch I would share a table with the flapper and her fat mother because the manageress thought it would be nice for the young people to get together. The mother was too shy to talk and whinnied like a frightened horse whenever I spoke to her.

  The afternoons were the worst, for t
hen there was not even the pretence of lessons. When I was tired of hide-and-seek for two I invented a game of pirates which involved a lot of physical activity on the walls of the vegetable garden. Luckily my pupil fell off the wall and cut his leg. This, in the eyes of his mother, made mathematics impossible, so now I could read to him all day while he lay stretched in a deck-chair. And so my second job came slowly and undemandingly to an end. My family returned from the seaside, the mongrel dog, called Paddy, arrived by train in a highly nervous condition from Leicester, and I was back at square one in Berkhamsted.

  2

  Three months of blank days went by, and then I arrived one wet night in Nottingham and woke next morning in the unknown city to an equally dark day. This was not like a London smog; the streets were free of vapour, the electric lights shone clearly: the fog lay somewhere out of sight far above the lamps. When I read Dickens on Victorian London I think of Nottingham in the twenties. There was an elderly ‘boots’ still employed at the Black Dog Inn, there were girls suffering from unemployment in the lace trade, who would, so it was said, sleep with you in return for a high tea with muffins, and a haggard blue-haired prostitute, ruined by amateur competition, haunted the corner by W. H. Smith’s bookshop. Trams rattled downhill through the goose-market and on to the blackened castle. Against the rockface leant the oldest pub in England with all the grades of a social guide: the private bar, the saloon, the ladies’, the snug, the public. Little dark cinemas offered matinée seats for fourpence in the stalls. I had found a town as haunting as Berkhamsted, where years later I would lay the scene of a novel and of a play. Like the bar of the City Hotel in Freetown which I was to know years later it was the focal point of failure, a place undisturbed by ambition, a place to be resigned to, a home from home.