The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Carter’s first attack on Graham was physical – ‘there was Collifax who practised torments with dividers’. This first published account appeared in The Lawless Roads in 1939, but Greene had already dealt with it in an unpublished novel, ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’, as early as 1923. Its special value lies in the fact that he was then still a fledgling in disguising the autobiographical sources of his fiction, and I believe we have in the surviving typescript a close record of his life at St John’s. The three central characters in the novel – Hardy, Webber and Sant – are based on Wheeler, Carter and Greene. Webber (Carter) first attacks Hardy (Wheeler) and then it is Anthony Sant’s turn, and he, in feelings and personality, is a twin of Graham Greene, with the exception of one important and significant feature which we shall come to later. ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’ is convincing in its reconstruction of the schoolroom situation:

  Slowly Anthony felt an arm creeping behind his back … There was a jerk and a muttered exclamation from Hardy. The hand withdrew itself and Anthony saw that Webber had been using a pair of dividers … A quarter of an hour later once again came the disturbed flurry behind his back … Furiously he seized his own box of geometry instruments, and prepared to retaliate. Then caution predominated again in his brain … But he was too late to disguise the first aggressive movement. Webber had noticed it and Anthony felt a small warning prick in his calf … Webber was subtle. He half realized Anthony’s character, his fear of precipitating an unnecessary struggle, his passionate desire to be left in peace … three or four times during every future evening, Anthony’s dreams would be broken by that warning prick … Webber did realize the existence of two methods of torture, the physical and the mental … to Anthony the last was the most terrible.31

  A variant of this appears in England Made Me where Minty, one of Greene’s grotesque figures, nevertheless shares an experience of Graham’s at school: ‘It was only that Minty had more self-control. The twisting of his arm had taught him it, the steel nibs dug into his calf.’32 Three years later Greene returned to the theme in Brighton Rock where it has lain unnoticed. Pinkie, the boy gangster, is cornered and attacked by another gang:

  [He] … saw the faces ringing him all round. They grinned back at him: every man had his razor out … the long cut-throat razors which the sun caught slanting low down over the downs from Shoreham. He put his hand to his pocket to get his blade, and the man immediately facing him leant across and slashed his knuckles. Pain happened to him, and he was filled with horror and astonishment as if one of the bullied brats at school had stabbed first with the dividers.33

  Greene is dealing closely here with Carter’s opening shots in a game of mental and physical torment and with his own tremendous sense of being humiliated. A friendly master in the novel, Mr Penley (based on Mr Dale at Berkhamsted School) says to Anthony: ‘They don’t fight fair … they send out their little insidious worms, brain worms, which creep into your mind so softly that you don’t notice them but all the time they are gnawing away at the foundations.’34

  Whenever Sant ‘entered the schoolroom, an undertone of mockery seemed to creep into that endless chorus of voices, which was to din, din its way into Anthony’s ears for twelve long weeks of term.’35 And always, Anthony stresses Webber’s subtle knowledge of his character. He unceasingly nags Anthony as in life Carter nagged Graham. And surely Anthony’s frantic hope, as a new term approaches, that life would be different, that he would find a real friend, and that the torture would cease derives from Graham’s own hopes. But there was no change. Deliberately and calculatingly, Webber turns the screw, working on Sant’s intense fear of ridicule. From the following passage in ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’, we have a good notion of Graham’s initial problem of personality:

  And then would come suddenly one of those flashes, not so much of self-revelation, as of self-distortion, when he pictured himself the ridiculous figure which he thought all must picture him … If someone insulted him he had not the courage to fight. He was not physically afraid, but was overcome by the mental panic of seeming ridiculous.36

  Like Sant, Graham’s own fear of ridicule and humiliation was more intense than his fear of death.

  Possibly he had little ability then to defend himself physically. The evidence is slender but when the agent D, in the novel The Confidential Agent, is attacked there is a strong sense that a boy not a man is being attacked by a bully, and it is likely that this records one painful experience Graham had as a boarder at St John’s.

  He felt a little sick with apprehension. He hated personal violence: to kill a man with a bullet, or to be killed, was a mechanical process. But the fist was different: the fist humiliated; to be beaten up put you into an ignoble relationship with the assailant … he would have been prepared to answer any charge to escape the physical contact. He shut his eyes and leant back against the mirror: he was defenceless. He didn’t know the first thing about using his fists.37

  Like Sant, Graham had no means of establishing himself with his classmates. Everything about him was cause for ostracism and provided ammunition for Carter – his odd appearance and speech, his manner, his inability at games and the physical feats most admired in the school. He records how at O.T.C. parades Carter and Wheeler were always ready to exploit his inadequacies as he fumbled under their ‘ironic eyes’. All he could do was to become clever at evasion. To avoid fielding practice he invented extra coaching in mathematics and even named the master supposed to be teaching him.38

  An extract from Anthony Sant’s diary in ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’ gives us the events of two weeks in his life. In all probability it is modelled closely on Greene’s own schoolboy diary (now lost) for the last two weeks in July, probably of 1920. It shows signs that he was nearing a breakdown. From 14 to 18 July, the diary records either ‘school in morning. Cricket in afternoon’ or ‘school in morning and afternoon’. The entries then become more detailed:

  July 19. Sat. School in morning. Felt miserable. Webber at me again. Got off cricket by saying Mr Penley had invited me to tea. I don’t know what Crooks will say if he finds out.

  20. Sunday. Chapel in morning and evening. Hardy wanted me to go for a walk. Said I was already walking and felt like a beast. Went to my usual hiding place. After prep., Webber sang ‘darkie’ songs at me.

  21. Monday. School in morning. Cricket in afternoon. Awful house game. Missed two catches …

  24. Thurs. School in morning and afternoon. Said I was kept in and cut practice …

  26. Sat. School in morning. Cricket in afternoon. Webber & Co. gave me a rotten time in changing room afterwards. I wish they’d try and hurt me physically, then I’d fight. Why am I so damnably afraid of being ridiculous?39

  The significance of Webber’s ‘darkie’ songs is that in transmuting his experiences into fiction, no doubt in order to explain a schoolboy situation which might otherwise seem ordinary, Graham made Anthony Sant black, and therefore at that time a natural target for persecution and one who stood out as different from the pack. It is also possible that scandalous rhymes about the headmaster, of a kind not unusual in most schools, were repeated in his presence. One can imagine the sneering nicknames which might have been applied to Graham, for Carter was like some dark magician. He was always able to shut down Graham’s contact with others, halt a friendship, imprison him in permanent isolation, and like a young Satan entice Graham to betray brother and father.

  *

  The name ‘Carter’ appears in a number of Greene’s novels, but the characters with this name are not like the actual Carter. One suspects that Carter really appears in the character Hilfe in The Ministry of Fear, where the hunted hero, Arthur Rowe, trusts him and is fascinated by him and his very blue eyes – and Hilfe plays with him as a cat does with a mouse. Hilfe controls the situation between them with an adroit cunning; he is unshocked and unshockable. Everything in life is a game. He gives off a blithe innocence, is charming and yet utterly ruthless, and utterly without any belief. He is somethin
g new in Rowe’s experience. Both Carter and Hilfe are without any psychological scars. They both enjoy baiting for the sake of baiting, for its cleverness. Like Hilfe, Carter was ‘good-looking, very young and even inoffensive to look at’. A contemporary recalled him as ‘good-looking, clean-cut, blue eyes’. Here is Hilfe, after his part in creating a Ministry of Fear has been discovered by Rowe:

  He was deeply and completely at peace, and so defenceless that he seemed to be innocent … The face seemed to Rowe very beautiful, more beautiful than his sister’s, which could be marred by grief or pity. Watching the sleeping man he could realize a little of the force and the grace and the attraction of nihilism – of not caring for anything, of having no rules and feeling no love. Life became simple … The pale blue eyes held full knowledge of the situation; there was nothing to explain. He smiled and Rowe caught himself in the act of smiling back. It was the kind of trick a boy plays suddenly, capitulating, admitting everything, so that the whole offence seems small and the fuss absurd.40

  But perhaps most significant as far as the Carter/Greene relationship is concerned was Hilfe’s ability to destroy Rowe’s illusions about life: ‘You’ve got so many illusions of grandeur, heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism,’ Hilfe says to Rowe, listing the ideals Graham’s father had instilled in class and from the pulpit and those Graham had absorbed from his childhood reading, and it would seem that Carter, while introducing him to the possible physical and mental cruelties of life, attacked and destroyed his illusions of man’s heroic nature and so wrenched Graham’s nature out of true.

  Two stories that Graham contributed to The Berkhamstedian, both unsigned, reflect his personal crisis at that time. The first, entitled ‘The Tick of the Clock’, suggests a deep-seated loneliness, being about an old lady, close to death and totally friendless, whose only sense of companionship comes from the ticking of her clock – an unusual conception for a sixteen-year-old boy. Equally curious was ‘The Poetry of Modern Life’, published in March 1921 at the height of Carter’s persecution. The story, in spite of its unemotive title, deals with the effect of Carter’s attack on Graham’s view of human nature, for there was no longer to be any ‘poetry’ in modern life:

  It was just a voice in the street that I heard as I passed along ‘Poetry and Romance are dead’ … when I heard that voice, the busy movement of the streets pressed in upon me, seeming to shut out all colour, and changing everything into a dull monotony … it penetrated into my slumbers so that I seemed to be surrounded with legions of devils, all crying out, ‘Poetry and Romance are dead.’

  The narrator is so disturbed that he seeks reassurance from a knight – a traditional, picture book, chivalrous knight – who admits, ‘I and my kind are dead’, and, as if reflecting Graham’s losing battle with Carter, he can only offer the consolation that there is heroism even in the ‘poetry of defeat’. The story ends with an example of this: ‘Three men lay there. Death through hunger and cold had almost come; yet one was still striving to write some last letters to those at home.’

  I suspect Graham has in mind here the death of Captain Scott of the Antarctic, and his comrades Wilson and Bowers. Scott’s death in 1912, amidst the snow and ice, made him among British schoolboys an archetypal hero.

  Perhaps the dying man’s attempt to write letters home reflects Graham’s desire to write to his parents about his misery, though he could not. In the face of Carter’s undermining of Greene’s cherished boyhood beliefs, it is not surprising that he turned to a less romantic vision. The knight in the story offers some hope, arguing that ‘as long as the great world struggle between Good and Evil lasts, so long will there be poetry in life.’41 It is possible that Carter, with his inexplicable cruelties, his nihilism, his ability to feign innocence, put Greene on to his fundamental theme, the nature of Good and Evil and the conflict between them. Thus Graham is seeking an answer to his personal problems in his earliest published pieces. They represent his cry in the night for help. Carter’s powerful mockery at this time was sapping Graham’s belief in his boyhood dreams and chivalric standards.

  *

  In A Sort of Life, Graham speaks of a ‘great betrayal’ and tells us that Wheeler deserted him for Carter. J. B. Wilson, who was a boarder at St John’s at the same time as Graham and knew Carter and Wheeler, had this to say: ‘Granted that Carter looked very young and inoffensive, he could have turned against Graham – there was something sly about him. Wheeler in contrast was one of those no-character people. I mean he was just there. He was an efficient member of the House. He was always cheerful and grinning.’

  A no-character he may have been but there is no question that he betrayed Graham. Again Graham gives us nothing of substance beyond the statement that he was betrayed, but the weight of that betrayal, its effect on Graham appears in an interview that Greene gave to Ronald Matthews in 1957 and is to be found in Matthews’s book Mon Ami Graham Greene:

  One didn’t know where one was, and that might be a good definition of nightmare. The world of nightmare is a world without defences because each defence may be nullified. What would be the point in preparing to prevent an attack when your best friend might suddenly without any reason turn into your worst enemy?42

  There is much feeling here but little factual detail. Yet we can speculate about the betrayal. This was a time in Graham’s life when changes in body and mind were taking place. He had reached puberty and was turning towards poetry inspired by love. He found extraordinary beauty and passion in the work of Sir Lewis Norris, in his Epic of Hades, for example, where Helen comments on the nature of her love for Paris and her need for freedom:

  Fair with a woman’s fairness, yet in arms

  A hero, but he never had my heart.

  It was not he seduced me, but the thirst

  For freedom … my child,

  Born to an unloved father, loved me not,

  The fresh sea called, the galleys plunged, and I

  Fled willing from my prison and the pain

  Of undesired caresses …43

  It was from Lewis Norris’s poetry that he learnt of the carnal loves of Helen and Cleopatra. To read such poetry, he would steal out of school, miss classes, avoid fielding practice and escape to a solitary lane where he had a secret hideout. It provided him with the age-old security of the womb: ‘On one side was a ploughed field: on the other a ditch with a thick hawthorn hedge which was hollow in the centre and in which I could sit concealed and read my book.’44 This hideout is also described in ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’ where Anthony Sant indulges in the ‘crime’ of reading poetry. Could Graham have trustingly told Wheeler of these things, perhaps confessing such secrets in the first flush of friendship? And if Wheeler carried them to Carter who then made cynical use of them surely this would fill Greene with a sense of ridicule and mortification.

  Some support for this view can be found in Greene’s first published novel, The Man Within. There Carlyon, a leader of the smugglers, makes a curiously unexpected outcry to Elisabeth about Andrews, his one-time friend, now his enemy: ‘Was he laughing at me the whole time … while we were friends? … I told him all the things I liked. I read him things, shared what I loved with him.’45 The Judas figure, a powerful character in some of Greene’s finest novels, could well have derived from Wheeler. The prevalent view then among schoolboys of those who read poetry for pleasure was that they were ‘lily-livered girls’.46 Hardy pleads with Sant to stop reading poetry or he would never hear the last of it.

  Greene never forgot Wheeler and he desired, long after he left school, to have his revenge, not only because by his defection his isolation had become almost complete, but because he came to suspect that Wheeler’s friendly overtures were made in order to betray him later to Carter. Even the way in which Greene writes about him suggests an anger harboured over long years:

  I found the desire for revenge alive like a creature under a stone. The only change was that I looked under the stone less and less often … But still every few years
a scent, a stretch of wall, a book on a shelf, a name in a newspaper, would remind me to lift the stone and watch the creature move its head towards the light.47

  What brings Anthony Sant to crisis is the theft of his diary by Webber and the enormous fun Webber gets out of holding the diary aloft as a trophy:

  A hand swooped suddenly down and whisked the diary away, and when Anthony looked up, Webber was again at the stove, with the book open in his hand.

  ‘Oh, do just look at this,’ he crowed. ‘It’s Sant’s diary. I’ll read you some. It’s priceless.’ … ‘Beastly unhappy to-night. Webber and everyone teasing as usual. Diddums then.’48

  Graham has not suggested that his diary was seized in a similar manner (though it could have been) or that as a consequence his life was brought to a crisis, as Sant’s was.

  In England Made Me, there is an account of a gang of schoolboys breaking up Minty’s pictures of the Madonna and Child, ‘jeering, belching, breaking wind’,49 and perhaps what happened to Graham emotionally was something of this sort. In The Lawless Roads, recalling that he ‘couldn’t sit in the plaza for more than a few minutes without a gibe’, he makes a comment which surely looks back to his schooldays: ‘It preyed on my nerves: it was like being the one unpopular boy at school.’ Graham must have been at breaking point once Wheeler joined forces with Carter.

  Throughout Greene’s work there are references to a cracked bell, even in such a commercial work as The Third Man, which becomes symbolic of a desperately unhappy boyhood. It appears in The Lawless Roads: ‘In the land of … stone stairs and cracked bells ringing early, one was aware of fear and hate’, but if we look at Graham’s first reference to the cracked bell in ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’, and accept that his experience was Anthony Sant’s, we can understand that he was on the verge of a breakdown. His hopeless brooding led him to a belief that every boy in St John’s (there were forty of them) was in league against him – all potential enemies because his father was headmaster: