The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Over all these dreams hovered one persistent question, ‘Why am I here?’ And as yet there was no answer that he could give. But always day by day at a certain hour, with an incredible and almost superhuman punctuality, came the sound of the cracked bell. It would begin with comparative faintness as the ringer strode along the upper dormitory, and then, as he turned to descend the stairs, there would come with monotonous regularity the half choked clang, before the hand fastened on the hammer. Day by day Anthony in his state of semi-wakeness would listen and picture the act with a kind of mechanic precision … Anthony longed at times with almost stunning force that the hand would slip, that the bell for once would emit its full cry, as the boy came down the stairs. Anything would be welcome to break the monotonous terror of the routine. Anthony would cower beneath his bedclothes in real physical fear of that inevitable sound, and when it came, it would stab his flesh, like the pain from an exposed nerve.50

  Graham’s sole desire was to remain on the ‘right’ side of the border, which he expresses movingly in The Lawless Roads – Saturday night, the school orchestra playing Mendelssohn, and Graham alone in the dark on the croquet lawn:

  There lay the horror and the fascination. One escaped surreptitiously for an hour at a time: unknown to frontier guards, one stood on the wrong side of the border looking back – one should have been listening to Mendelssohn, but instead one heard the rabbit restlessly cropping near the croquet hoops. It was an hour of release – and also an hour of prayer. One became aware of God with an intensity – time hung suspended – music lay on the air; anything might happen before it became necessary to join the crowd across the border. There was no inevitability anywhere … faith was almost great enough to move mountains … the great buildings rocked in the darkness.51

  We can date this ‘hour of release’ accurately since the only time during his period at Berkhamsted that Mendelssohn was played at a school concert was on 14 December 1920.

  But faith was not able to rescue him from his unbearable situation – there was no blinding flash of revelation pointing to change. Like Rowe in The Ministry of Fear, imprisoned in the worst cell of all, himself, and realising there would be no release, he decided that, whatever the risk, he must break out. He could not turn to his father with his problems. That would have been treachery against the boys at St John’s and would have justified their treatment of him. Also he feared the ‘cold confidence of a grown-up’s retort’. Kipling, in a very similar predicament, explains, ‘Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.’

  His first idea was to inflict an injury on himself which would force his parents to take him home. On the stone stairs to the dormitory, he tried (and fortunately failed) to saw open his knee. The penknife used was too blunt or perhaps, as he suggests in A Sort of Life, his nerve failed him.52 In ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’, Sant also draws his pocket knife across the skin of his knee, but the cut is negligible and he hasn’t the courage to shut his eyes and stab. What Graham calls ‘other forms of escape’ should be called what they are: attempts at suicide. He sought a way of dying quietly in a peaceful trance. Perhaps the words of Peter Pan were in his mind: ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’:

  I tried out other forms of escape after I failed to cut my leg. Once at home on the eve of term I went into the dark room by the linen-cupboard, and in that red Mephistophelean glare drank a quantity of hypo under the false impression that it was poisonous. On another occasion I drained my blue glass bottle of hay-fever drops, which, as they contained a small quantity of cocaine, were probably good for my despair. A bunch of deadly nightshade, picked and eaten on the Common, had only a slightly narcotic effect, and once, towards the end of one holiday, I swallowed twenty aspirins before swimming in the empty school baths. (I can still remember the curious sensation of swimming through cotton wool.)53

  The twenty aspirins he recalled in 1971 were an increase on the fourteen he wrote about in a letter only five years after the event, when he records going for a swim, his legs like lead, then managing to get back home and sleeping uneasily for hours.54 We can add another attempted suicide to his list. Arthur Calder-Marshall recalled (in 1977) that he met Greene in 1940 and Graham said that that morning he had been reading his schoolboy diary in which he had written: ‘Ate a whole tin [of hair pomade]. But it didn’t work.’ All his attempts had failed.

  On the last day of his summer holiday he could not face returning to St John’s. ‘I endured’, he wrote, ‘some eight terms – a hundred and four weeks of monotony, humiliation and mental pain.’55 He decided on a different way out, perhaps the only means of bringing his unhappiness home to his parents. He ran away. He wrote a note and placed it on the black oak sideboard in the School House dining room under the whisky tantalus. It said, he tells us, that he had taken to the Common instead of returning to St John’s and that he would remain there in hiding until his parents agreed that he would never again have to go back to his prison.

  Once he reached the safety of the Common, ‘among the gorse and bracken of [his] chosen battlefield’, he felt a wonderful sense of release from all the tension and indecision. He had nothing to do but roam his ‘battlefield from bush to bush’; he wanted to be an invisible watcher, a spy on all that went on, and he moved restlessly among the bushes on the edge of the Common, waiting for the search party. He must have known that he had made the move which would guarantee his freedom. Coming down to look at his exposed flank, a steep clay path between oaks and beeches, he moved rashly out beyond the cover of the bushes and turning a corner, came face to face with his elder sister, Molly.

  Thus his escape came to an inglorious end for it would hardly have suited the dignity of his protest to run off and he went quietly back home with her.

  Graham was unable to remember much more – ‘a thick haze conceals all that happened next’ and he admits that perhaps he was nearer to a nervous breakdown than he had previously cared to believe. He remembers no reproaches from his parents, only being put into a warmed bed in the spare room next to his parents’ room.

  In contrast to the life he was escaping from, his actual escape as he recounted it fifty years later, lacks pressure and has an element of child’s play about it as if he wished to discount its seriousness. In retrospect, he changes the emphasis, wishing that he could have watched, observed and known how his family took his sudden disappearance – ‘what conferences were held, what tactics were suggested, what decisions were made’ – and adds, ‘it is too late for me to find out. All the protagonists are dead except myself – my father, my mother, my elder sister, even the head housemaid who would have known all.’

  But a letter has survived, unknown to Graham, written in 1948 by his mother to his wife and kept secretly by her for forty years. In it, Graham’s mother recalls the day he disappeared and his peace-destroying note. Even though she was writing long after the event, her deep concern over her disturbed and sensitive son is apparent:

  He went as a boarder to St John’s in September 1918. Raymond was still Head of the house but had no idea Graham was being persecuted by a particular boy. In what way I do not know nor did Guest who was a friend of Graham’s. I cannot date when the crisis occurred but between 1919 & 1920. I think Graham was not well the morning he should have gone back to St John’s – slight temperature and eyes peculiar. Doctor could not understand the eyes. I kept him in bed and went to do house-keeping & returned to find he was not there & a note to say he would not go back to St John’s – had tried to poison himself with eye-drops (accounts for eyes) in vain & had gone & we should not see him again.

  You cannot imagine how we felt. We did not want to go to the police at once. Uncle Eppy sent his bailiff whom he could trust to hunt along the canal. Dr McB. took me all over golf-links in his car – we searched woods calling all the time. Then after lunch Molly said she had a feeling she should find him & taking Miss Arnell & some food they set out. And they found him sitting in the
little wood where M. thought he might be. They brought him home & I put him to bed & told him he should never go back.

  This letter confirms Greene’s many attempts at suicide and his methods, but whereas he plays down the escape incident as a game of hide-and-seek (thus denying the feeling of terror which drives a youngster to run away), merely holding out on the Common until his parents gave way, his mother’s letter shows that it was much more serious and distressing and the note he left was much more disturbing than he suggests. A passage in ‘The Basement Room’ where a boy runs away from home reflects something of the real terror he must have been feeling: ‘The only thing he could do was to get away, by the back stair … and never come back again. You didn’t think of the cold, or the need of food and sleep; for an hour it would seem quite possible to escape from people forever … no one would ever find him again.’ Also in ‘The Basement Room’, the same boy is outwitted by Mrs Baines so that he gives away the fact that her husband is having an affair – with disastrous consequences. Graham had gained his release, but there was an after-math since, as his mother’s letter suggests, he revealed the name of his tormentor, probably winkled out of him by parental questioning. He has written, ‘So long as the torture continues the torturer has failed,’ and the torture stopped, so presumably Carter had succeeded.

  Charles Greene visited his son after he returned, ‘sitting on the bed and interrogating [him] seriously and tenderly’, which led to a misunderstanding between them since his complaints about the general filth of life at St John’s – meaning the unlocked lavatories, the farting, etc., gave his father the impression that he had been the victim of a masturbation ring. Graham adds, in a sentence ominous in its suggestion, that then ‘other investigations were set on foot among the innocent inhabitants of St John’s’. The differences between father and son, as shown by this, were great. The worst thing that could happen, so far as Charles Greene was concerned, was homosexuality, something the school’s system had been organised to prevent. In fact, his son had been subjected to sadistic mental torture, ‘the whole dark side of childhood’, which was totally outside his father’s comprehension.

  Greene’s attitude to such myopia, though he does not mention his father, comes out in his essay, ‘The Old School’. His criticism is of the system but his father was in charge of that system: ‘Too often the system interferes with its cult of suspicion and its abnormal fear of sexuality … One is alternatively amazed at the unworldly innocence of the pedagogic mind and at its tortuous obscenity.’56

  Later in his essay he comes back to the same point and is clearly criticising his father, suggesting that a boy, ‘his time free, and his speculation endless’, will pick up in the field or in the streets knowledge of sex:

  He will have learnt sex more truthfully in a farm yard than in a house-master’s study; and if he is a town child the jokes written on lavatory walls are likely to do less harm than the sentimentality, the embarrassment, the intellectual flummery of a set talk before confirmation on ‘the facts of life’. They will have taught him at any rate that sexual enjoyment is neither solemn nor dull.57

  It was Fry who introduced the large dormitories ‘broken up by six foot partitions into cubicles’.58 He also introduced the various other rules intended to abolish privacy. The young Graham Greene must have made the connection, perhaps even the identification, between his father and his father’s ‘sinister, sadistic predecessor’.

  *

  L. A. Carter left Berkhamsted School with no great distinction in the Easter term of 1921, without having entered the sixth form or completing his education at the school. His future career was not brilliant, and he retired early in life with a pension from the Cable and Wireless Company, suffering from stomach trouble. The question is, was he expelled from school as a result of Charles Greene’s enquiries? It would seem not since he returned to play cricket for the Old Boys against the Masters’ team and the most likely explanation for his early departure from the school is that, given the situation, his parents decided to withdraw him. Thus both families were able to avoid a scandal.

  In 1985 L. A. Carter’s widow, then an old lady living in a home at Worthing, told me that Jacky Hill (a popular master at Berkhamsted) was Carter’s uncle on his mother’s side. This is another reason why no publicity would have been given to Carter’s leaving school early. But given the circumstances, Graham must have felt that he had betrayed his tormentor and his humiliation would have been complete. No one I have interviewed has criticised Carter, but one man who knew him when he was working for Cable and Wireless in Aden remembered him as a satirical man who could always make you feel foolish with a smirk and a turn of the lip.

  It is remarkable that a relationship between a few boys at a public school should have had such repercussions, bringing Graham Greene to an understanding of the bond between the torturer and the tortured, of sympathy for the outsider and the recognition that victims change. Writing of his difficulties with Carter and Wheeler in A Sort of Life, Greene refers to a novel by Quiller-Couch, a story of a man’s revenge in which, during a long, drawn-out pursuit the characters change places: ‘the pursued took on nobility, the pursuer the former vulgarity of his enemy’.59 Could it be that the burden of his youth, after the Carter experience was over, was that of guilt and betrayal, never successfully exorcised?

  Oddly enough, most contemporaries of Graham at school could not clearly recall him. Those who did thought he was something of a softy. Raymond Greene they all remembered and, in spite of his condescension of manner, they greatly admired him. They had heard of Graham Greene, the famous writer, an Old Boy and son of the headmaster, but at school he had not been noticed. When asked to read A Sort of Life and give their reactions to the account of Berkhamsted, the Old Boys’ response was that Graham had not had enough true grit: ‘schoolboys fart and what’s the fuss about?’ Moreover they felt that he should have praised their school – after all, damn it, his father was headmaster. They considered he had let the side down: he had spit into his own soup – a distasteful culinary habit. But then he was young for his age and very shy. The schoolmaster Sunderland-Taylor said, ‘He was the shyest little boy who ever passed through my hands.’60 In photographs of Graham at St John’s what we see is a very shy boy peeping out from a crowd of boys, unnoticed and seeming half afraid to be noticed.

  Graham was only too aware that there was a total contrast in standing between himself and Raymond on the one hand and himself and his father on the other. This is expressed in The Man Within when Andrew cries, ‘haven’t I a mind? Wasn’t my brain of any use to them that they should treat me like a child, never ask my opinion, have me there on sufferance only, because my father willed it?’61 And also, ‘I could see how they wondered that such a mountain [Charles Greene?] could bring forth such a mouse [Graham?].’62

  His breakdown was, therefore, the result of many pressures which brought him near to manic depression, of which he was showing the classic symptoms – loss of interest in or ability to experience pleasure; increasing feelings of worthlessness, and thoughts of suicide. There was also, I suspect, the delusion of being persecuted because of his apparent inadequacy. He was, of course, being persecuted, but he began to see persecution everywhere, as Anthony Sant’s comments reflect: whenever he ‘entered the schoolroom, an undertone of mockery seemed to creep into that endless chorus of voices … for twelve long weeks of term’.

  He was also turned inward, unable to tell his family what was happening or how he felt – not even his favourite aunt Nono could be confided in, even though she was living in London when he was having psychoanalytic treatment. In 1971, soon after the publication of A Sort of Life, Aunt Nono, in a nursing home, lay slowly dying of old age. Graham’s sister, Elisabeth, visited her daily and it was her aunt’s wish that she read her Graham’s autobiography. Elisabeth takes up the story:

  I went on reading A Sort of Life and one day I’d read to her for a long time, and with only one chapter left, I said to Aunt Nono,
‘Look, aren’t you tired? Should I come in tomorrow, and read you the last chapter’, and she said, ‘No, I want you to read it to me now’, and she died during that night. I remember her saying that Graham was such an enchanting little boy, it made her very sad to think he’d been so unhappy at school.63

  This would suggest that Marion and Charles Greene had not told even close relatives about the matter, perhaps because of Charles Greene’s interpretation of it.

  Always after this we will witness Graham’s tremendous sympathy for the hunted man (for he had felt hunted); the hunted man would become the staple of his fiction and he would have a profound interest in, and compulsive love for, the down-trodden everywhere. After Carter he would no longer look at the world in a child’s way and he would discover his appointed task on earth: to be a writer. He puts it this way in A Sort of Life: meeting Wheeler in 1950 in Malaysia he wonders on his way back to the hotel if he would ever have written a book had it not been for ‘Watson’ and Carter, if those years of humiliation had not given him an excessive desire to prove that he was good at something, however long the effort might prove.64

  In The Lost Childhood he puts it differently, attributing his desire to write to Miss Bowen’s The Viper of Milan, but then the value of the Viper, as he mentions there, was that he made the evil of Carter understandable.

  Thirty years after the events which drove him to breakdown, Graham Greene, writing on Charles Dickens, said, ‘the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share.’65 He had found his subject:

  In the lost boyhood of Judas