A Sort of Life

by Graham Greene

  As I lay in the ward after the operation (in those days they kept the patient at least a week) I began to plan my third novel, the forlorn hope. I called it The Man Within, and it began with a hunted man, who was to appear again and again in later less romantic books. But curiously enough there came to me also in the ward, with the death of a patient, the end of a book which I would not begin to write for another six years.

  It was our second death. The first we had barely noticed: an old man dying from cancer of the mouth. He had been too old and ill to join in the high jinks of the ward, the courtship of nurses, the teasings, the ticklings and the pinches. When the screens went up around his bed the silence in his corner was no deeper than it had always been. But the second death disturbed the whole ward. The first was inevitable fate, the second was contingency.

  The victim was a boy of ten. He had been brought into the ward one afternoon, having broken his leg at football. He was a cheerful child with a rosy face and his parents stayed and chatted with him for a while until he settled down to sleep. One of the nurses ten minutes later paused by his bed and leant over him. Suddenly there was a burst of activity, a doctor came hurrying in, screens went up around the bed, an oxygen machine was run squeaking across the floor, but the child had outdistanced them all to death. By the time the parents reached home, a message was waiting to summon them urgently back. They came and sat beside the bed, and to shut out the sound of the mother’s tears and cries all my companions in the ward lay with their ear-phones on, listening – there was nothing else for them to hear – to Children’s Hour. All my companions but not myself. There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer. I watched and listened. This was something which one day I might need: the woman speaking, uttering the banalities she must have remembered from some woman’s magazine, a genuine grief that could communicate only in clichés. ‘My boy, my boy, why did you not wait till I came?’ The father sat silent with his hat on his knees, and you could tell that even in his unhappiness he was embarrassed by the banality of his wife’s words, by the scene she was so badly playing to the public ward, and he wanted desperately to get away home and be alone. ‘Human language,’ Flaubert wrote, ‘is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.’

  After two weeks I returned to The Times, but perhaps because I had returned too soon, I fainted my first evening at work. I was given another week’s holiday and went to Brighton, as I had so often gone in the past with my aunt after a childish sickness. I thought no more of the affair, unaware of the time-bomb ticking in my mother’s desk. (I have the little machine before me now, a letter written five years before, in 1921, to my father by Kenneth Richmond.)

  My mother wrote to me in Brighton asking me when I returned to London to go and see my old analyst. I was a little puzzled, but I was pleased at the thought of seeing him again; I was aware that he had deliberately severed our relationship, for fear that I might come to depend on him, but to me he represented the happiest period of my life. One night at Brighton I was sitting quite alone, or so I thought, in one of the shelters on the front, when a voice spoke to me unexpectedly in the darkness. ‘Good evening,’ it said in the accent of old age.

  ‘Good evening,’ I replied, trying to see through the night.

  ‘I am Old Moore,’ the voice said. So perhaps I should have been warned.

  Kenneth Richmond no longer lived in the trim little house in Devonshire Terrace off Lancaster Gate, but a larger and darker house without any memories for me. We talked a little of my second novel and he offered to help me in my search for a publisher, but I felt sure this was not the purpose of my invitation. And then, speaking as unexpectedly as Old Moore on the Brighton front, he reminded me of what I had quite forgotten, the occasion when I had once fainted at his dinner table. Afterwards he had taken me to see a specialist in Harley Street: a small dark intense man whose features are now confused in my memory with those of the actor Ernest Milton and of Colonel de Castries of Dien Bien Phu.

  ‘Your mother tells me you are engaged to be married,’ Richmond said. ‘Now about this fainting attack at The Times …’

  I remembered how the specialist had questioned me about earlier attacks of fainting in the summer stuffiness of the school chapel. Many children, I told myself, went through such a phase.

  ‘Doctor Riddick diagnosed epilepsy,’ Richmond said.

  Epilepsy, cancer and leprosy – these are the three medical terms which rouse the greatest fear in the untutored, and at twenty-two one is unprepared for so final a judgement. Epilepsy, Richmond went on, could be inherited: I must consider the risk carefully before marriage, and he sought to comfort me by pointing out that Dostoievsky too had suffered from epilepsy. I couldn’t think of a reply. Dostoievsky was a dead Victorian writer, not a youth without a book to his name who had pledged himself to marry … ‘Let me see your novel,’ Richmond said, meaning to be kind. ‘What is the title?’

  ‘The Episode,’ I said.

  I left the house and began walking fast towards South Kensington, the King’s Road, Oakley Street, the Albert Bridge, away from this episode. When I got home I wrote a letter; they had left things rather late, I said, before informing me. Poor souls, I can sympathize with them now as I read the letters which were written to them on the same day by Richmond and Doctor Riddick. Doctor Riddick’s was frightening, even in its moderation. ‘The attacks to which he is occasionally subject are, I think, epileptic; but since he has lost consciousness in three only, there is a reasonably good chance that, with suitable treatment, the condition may be arrested.’ The treatment seemed to consist of good walks and Keppler’s Malt Extract. Richmond’s letter was more encouraging, and my mother in pencil has pathetically underlined all the optimistic phrases she could find, perhaps to comfort my father – ‘quite likely to clear up completely’ … ‘no cause for alarm’ – even the phrase about Dostoievsky is trotted out and surprisingly underlined, but then follows what I think was unfair and dangerous advice: ‘We agreed that Graham ought not to be told what is the matter in any terms that included the word epilepsy.’

  Was the diagnosis right? With the hindsight of forty years, free from any recurrence, I don’t believe it, but I believed it then. I remember next day standing on an Underground platform and trying to summon the will and the courage to jump. It was not my new Catholicism which restrained me. There was no theological despair in what I felt. I was simply tired out by the thought of starting a completely different future than the one I had planned. But suicide requires greater courage than Russian roulette, the trains came and went, and soon I took the moving staircase to the upper world.

  My next thought was of an elderly priest Father Talbot of the Oratory. I had been passed on to him – a fashion priests have – by Trollope, and I had spent many agreeable hours with him in discussion and argument at his quiet chambers in the Oratory, as unclerical as rooms in college. He was a man of very liberal views, and surely, I thought despairingly, he would have some answer to my greatest problem: that if I were epileptic, I must avoid having children. Surely there must be some cranny of canon law or moral theology that would contain a ruling for just such a case as mine.

  He asked me to go out with him, and for the next hour we drove in a taxi, crossing and recrossing the same rectangle between the Brompton Road and Bayswater, just as we crossed and recrossed the same lines of argument. Under no circumstances at all was contraception permissible. ‘The Church forbids me to marry then?’

  ‘Of course we don’t forbid marriage.’

  ‘Do you expect married people to live together without making love?’

  ‘The Church expects you to trust God, that’s all.’

  Up and down, over and over, a useless embroidery which made no pattern.

  How differently he would have answered my question today, telling me, I have no doubt, to follow my conscience, which even then was elastic enough for almost anything. Catholic
s have sometimes accused me of making my clerical characters, Father Rank in The Heart of the Matter and Father James in The Living Room, fail unnecessarily before the human problems they were made to face. ‘A real priest,’ I have been told, ‘would have had something further to say, he would have shown a deeper comprehension, he wouldn’t have left the situation so unchanged.’ But that is exactly what in those days, before John Roncalli was elected Pope, the priesthood was compelled to do. There was no failure in comprehension. Father Talbot was a man of the greatest human sympathy, but he had no solution for me at all. There was only one hard answer he could honestly give (‘the Church knows all the rules,’ as Father Rank said), while the meter of the taxi ticked away the repetitions of our fruitless argument. It was the Rock of Peter I was aware of in our long drive, and though it repulsed me, I couldn’t help admiring its unyielding façade.

  My misery did not last long. My brother, by this time a doctor, was the first to question the diagnosis, and then the medical correspondent, Doctor McNair Wilson, who had been in the subeditors’ room when I fainted, confirmed that he had seen no symptom whatever of epilepsy.

  6

  I married, and I was happy. In the evenings I worked at The Times, in the mornings I worked on my third novel. Now when I write I put down on the page a mere skeleton of a novel – nearly all my revisions are in the nature of additions, of second thoughts to make the bare bones live – but in those days to revise was to prune and prune and prune. I was much tempted, perhaps because of my admiration for the Metaphysical poets, by exaggerated similes and my wife became an adept at shooting them down. There was one, I remember, comparing something or someone in the quiet landscape of Sussex to a leopard crouching in a tree, which gave a name to the whole species. Leopards would be marked daily on the manuscript, but it took a great many years for me to get the beasts under control, and they growl at me sometimes yet.

  One day in the winter of 1928 I lay in bed with a bad attack of flu, listening to my wife in the kitchen washing up the breakfast things. I had posted copies of the typescript to Heinemann and The Bodley Head about ten days before, and I was now resigned to a long delay. Hadn’t I waited last time nine months for a refusal? Anyway, uncertainty was more agreeable to live with than the confirmation of failure. The telephone rang in the sitting-room and my wife came in and told me, ‘There’s a Mr Evans wants to speak to you.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone called Evans,’ I said. ‘Tell him I’m in bed. Tell him I’m ill.’ Suddenly a memory came back to me: Evans was the chairman of Heinemann’s, and I ran to snatch the telephone.

  ‘I’ve read your novel,’ he said. ‘We’d like to publish it. Would it be possible for you to look in here at eleven?’ My flu was gone in that moment and never returned.

  Nothing in a novelist’s life later can equal that moment – the acceptance of his first book. Triumph is unalloyed by any doubt of the future. Mounting the wide staircase in the elegant eighteenth-century house in Great Russell Street I could have no foreboding of the failures and frustrations of the next ten years.

  Charles Evans was a remarkable publisher. With his bald head and skinny form he looked like a family solicitor lean with anxieties, but a solicitor who had taken an overdose of some invigorating vitamin. His hands and legs were never still. He did everything, from shaking hands to ringing a bell, in quick jerks. Perhaps because the flu had not entirely departed, I expected at any moment the legendary figures of Heinemann authors to enter the room behind me, Mr Galsworthy, Mr John Masefield, Mr Maugham, Mr George Moore, Mr Joseph Hergesheimer. I sat on the edge of the chair ready to leap up. The bearded ghost of Conrad rumbled on the rooftops with the rain.

  I was quite prepared to hear what I had always understood to be the invariable formula – ‘of course a first novel is a great risk, we shall have to begin with a small royalty’ – but that was not Evans’s way with a young author. Just as he had substituted the direct telephone call for the guarded letter, so now he brushed aside any ancient rite of initiation.

  ‘No publisher,’ he said, ‘can ever guarantee success, but all the same we have hopes …’ The royalty would begin at 12½ per cent, with a fifty-pound advance, he recommended me to take an agent, for in the future there might be subsidiary rights to deal with … I went out dazed into Great Russell Street. My day-dream had never continued further than a promise of publication and now my publisher (proud phrase, ‘my publisher’) was suggesting even the possibility of success.

  He was as good as his word, selling more than 8,000 copies of the novel, so that I was all the more unprepared for the failures which succeeded it. In the flush of that success I would have refused to believe that success is slow and not sudden and that ten years later, with my tenth novel, The Power and the Glory, the publisher could risk printing only 3,500 copies, one thousand copies more than he had printed of my first novel.

  The Man Within is very young and very sentimental. It has no meaning for me today and I can see no reason for its success. It is like the book of a complete stranger, of a kind for which I have never much cared – and this makes another judgement on the book yet more mysterious to me. My uncle Eppy – the rich worldly business uncle of the Brazilian Warrant Agency – wrote to me: ‘It could only have been written by a Greene.’ I thought of my parents, I thought of all those aunts and uncles and cousins who had gathered together at Christmas, and of the two unknown Greene grandfathers, the guilt-ridden clergyman and the melancholic sugar-planter dead of yellow fever in St Kitts, and then I thought of the novel, the story of a hunted man, of smuggling and treachery, of murder and suicide, and I wondered what on earth he was driving at. I wonder still.

  7

  Leaving The Times was even more difficult than joining it and took almost as long. A few months after the publication of The Man Within, while I struggled with another novel, The Name of Action (the only good thing about the book was its title and that was suggested to me by Clemence Dane), I wrote to Charles Evans a blackmailing letter: I told him I must choose between The Times and novel-writing – I couldn’t continue to do both. He replied offering me, if I chose to resign, six hundred pounds a year for three years (half to be supplied by my American publisher) in return for three novels. I did so choose, but how was I to set about it? I had been happy on The Times, I couldn’t just write a letter to the manager and walk out. I consulted George Anderson, and we held long dialogues together, while he reasoned with me. I had a great future, he assured me – one day, if I were only patient for a few more years, I might hope to be the correspondence editor. Already, when the correspondence editor was on holiday, I tasted the glory of deputizing for him and this brought me into direct contact with the editor, Geoffrey Dawson himself. Closeted with the editor every afternoon at four o’clock I argued the merits of the letters and we decided which was to lead the page. I was exalted by the contact, especially when, as sometimes happened, I won the argument and even perhaps secured the promotion of one of Walter Sickert’s frequent letters which offended Dawson’s tidy mind by being almost illegibly written over large sheets of lined paper in thick black ink, apparently with a matchstick and usually with an impenetrable smudge over an operative word, a calligraphy which suited his savage non sequiturs on subjects far removed from painting.

  At last Anderson realized how strong was my determination to leave, but he agreed that first I must have a word with the editor, and the editor was hopelessly elusive. There were even moments when I wondered whether Anderson had warned him of my intention. If I tried to make an appointment he was heavily engaged, if I went to his room it was empty or he was busy with a distinguished visitor. It was weeks before I caught him – I had the uncomfortable sense of doing something beyond the bounds of polite manners like wearing a bright coloured tie with a dinner jacket. Indeed I began to believe that no subeditor had ever before resigned from The Times, just as no one had ever been sacked from the paper since the ungentlemanly days of Lord Northcliffe. Dawson, when I cornered hi
m at last, took the conversation urbanely into his own hands. He said he understood that I had written a novel, and he congratulated me on its success – his wife had demanded a copy from her circulating library. The Times, he assured me, would have no objection if I continued to write novels in my spare time. The art critic, Mr Charles Marriott, had done so for many years, and even the dramatic critic, Mr Charles Morgan, had published one or two. Indeed the time might have almost come to try me out with an occasional third leader. However, if my mind were really made up, he could only say it was a rash and unfortunate decision.

  I had a further interview before leaving on 31 December 1929, with the assistant editor, Murray Brumwell, who resembled an elderly schoolmaster and perhaps for that reason always transformed me into a tongue-tied pupil. It was too late to argue with me now, he said, but he would implore me to take care of my health and not to overwork. I smiled a little, thinking how I had been doing two jobs and working eleven hours a day. It was only later I realized that overwork is not a matter of hours and that he had good reason.