The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Even so, it was true that this short period of six months at Devonshire Terrace had a remarkable influence on Graham’s life. Sixty-three years later he wrote to Zoe, soon after his eightieth birthday: ‘Please believe that you represented one of the happiest periods of my life with your kindness – your beauty.’fn1, 35

  *

  It is possible also that Kenneth Richmond’s philosophy and beliefs, ‘wounded physician’ as he was, stretched far into Graham’s future as an influence. The experience of that change of environment, from the sense of imprisonment at St John’s to the enlightened freedom of Devonshire Terrace, may well have established his life’s pattern of escaping from the impossible or the boring into unknown and dangerous environments which would stimulate, offer fresh experiences and also provide copy for his novels.

  Possibly, too, Richmond, with his emphasis on ‘the God within you’, set him on the path to his eventual conversion to Catholicism.

  It is almost certain that, in releasing him from the thrall of his father and the school, Richmond gave him the freedom to express his opposition to public schools and the courage to question the notion of ‘loyalty’ – to the school first, but to other accepted ‘loyalties’ later, thereby opening the way for Graham to embrace ‘disloyalty’ as a principle.

  Although Graham was to become reconciled with his father, he never relented in his opposition to public schools and some, at least, of their products, though extraordinarily he sent his own son Francis to one. Proof of this can be seen in a 1938 review in the Spectator in which he questions the motives of men who return to their old school and seek out their old masters:

  There is a kind of hollow bombast in their manner … a patronage which doesn’t quite come off. They are the great world, of course, but the great world has turned out to be only a place on the Stock Exchange, lodgings in Aldershot or a general store in Sierra Leone – if they had been more successful, you feel, they would not have been here at all. A more imperative loyalty, a deep affection would have detached them from their school. Pity them a little, with their nostalgia for childhood and their unconvincing swagger.

  Four years earlier, Graham’s dislike of school games, the area of school activity in which he was a disastrous failure, had hardened into a principle:

  Games and school I should like to see kept rigidly apart, for games are used more than anything else to teach him narrow loyalties (that they do not teach him sportsmanship is obvious in any football match between rival public schools). It is at least better that he should learn loyalty to a town which includes all classes and both sexes than to an institution consisting only of his own sex and his own class. Why, in any case, he should feel more loyal to a school which is paid to teach him than to a butcher who is paid to feed him I cannot understand.36

  Graham is still distressed by the unquiet of an old hurt.

  Thirty years later, in a speech of considerable distinction on receiving the Shakespeare Prize from the University of Hamburg in 1969, the principle is carefully enunciated: ‘Loyalty confines you to accepted opinions; loyalty forbids you to comprehend sympathetically your dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages you to roam through any human mind.’ His unrelenting disloyalty towards and distrust of his own school has remained. On 11 September 1977, the Sunday Times tells us:

  Berkhamsted School’s current Appeal, which involves the sale of inscribed chairs, has met its match in old boy Graham Greene, whose memories of his school days are none too nostalgic. Asked if he would like to sponsor a pair at £12.50 each, to furnish Deans’ Hall, Greene said he would be delighted – if the chairs were dedicated to Diana Dors. I understand the school will not be pursuing the matter.

  Nine days after this appeared Graham Greene sent the cutting to his brother Hugh:

  See enclosed cutting! Who was the Sunday Times informer – you, Sherry, or the schoolmaster? Anyway I said Brigitte Bardot and not Diana Dors.

  fn1 Zoe Richmond died on 26 November 1986 at the age of ninety-eight. She retained her alert mind, and remained a spiritualist, until the end.

  7

  Realism and Fantasie – a Reconciliation

  Human kind

  Cannot bear very much reality

  – T. S. ELIOT

  ‘I WISH,’ MARION Greene wrote to Graham’s wife, ‘I had not torn up Kenneth Richmond’s letter about [Graham]. I cannot now remember how we took Graham to him but he was a different person after that treatment … Kenneth R. felt being able to express himself in writing would help so much.’1

  Not everyone approved of the change in the young Graham. Eric Guest commented, ‘Before psychoanalysis he was shy, he was diffident, he was insecure socially of himself. Afterwards he was much surer, and much less delicately minded.’ Ben Greene also had an opinion about the ‘changed’ Graham: ‘Graham was not a man gifted with intimacy but the one I remember and liked best was Graham before the psychiatrist. He was as a boy a very withdrawn separate kind of person getting really in touch with comparatively few people, but if he did, the sort of depths of his mind soon became apparent and he was then most fascinating.’ Ben Greene argued that ‘if you are a perfectly ordinary diffident boy’ you could be ‘corrupted by, twisted by, a psychiatrist, so that dangerous fantasies are put into your head.’2 Afterwards, according to Ben Greene, Graham remained almost equally detached but he was much more meaty and turned his attention more to living than to the sort of mental climate which he had favoured before.

  Graham, much later, was able to assess the change in himself from the point of view of others: ‘I had left for London a timid boy, anti-social, farouche: when I came back I must have seemed vain and knowing. Who among my fellows in 1921 knew anything about Freud or Jung?’ He now listened avidly to his parents’ accounts of their dreams and analysed them, as Claud Cockburn recalled:

  As was the custom of many old-fashioned people at the period, the Greenes used at breakfast innocently to describe to one another anything interesting, bizarre or colourful they had had in the way of dreams during the previous night. Mr and Mrs Greene were unaware that their third son, Graham, had at about this time discovered Freud. He would leave the bacon cooling on his plate as he listened with the fascination of a secret detective. When necessary he would lure them on to provide more and more details which to them were amusing or meaningless but to him of thrilling and usually scandalous significance.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ he said to me once, ‘what those dreams disclose. It’s startling – simply startling’, and at the thought of it gave a low whistle.

  Looking back, Graham was able to wonder whether the excitement of the search for hidden motives did not gain too great a hold over him, fostering in him a desire to turn up every stone to discover what lay beneath, to question motives, to doubt.3

  He had friends in the London literary world now and could show them off at Berkhamsted: ‘That summer [he] invited Walter de la Mare to a strawberry-tea in the garden with [his] parents … [he] posed proudly as the poet’s friend.’4

  His life at school had been transformed: he was no longer a boarder at St John’s, but a day boy, living with his parents and going to school each day. He had real friends, among them Eric Guest, Claud Cockburn and Peter Quennell. And he no longer feared school games and gymnastics. Richmond had written to Graham’s mother (no doubt after his fainting fit) suggesting that he must not be involved in heavy physical exercise. He also escaped the O.T.C., and in the company of Peter Quennell, he took instead riding lessons from Sergeant Lubbock, gym master at the school and an ex-cavalryman: ‘Sometimes [Graham wrote] returning at a walk down the long road from the Common … we would pass on a hot summer’s day the sweating trudging ranks of the O.T.C. singing a gloomy military song, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here”.’5

  This did not go unnoticed. Years later, in a doctor’s surgery in Berkhamsted in November 1976, a contemporary of Graham’s at school told another Old Boy of how there was tremendous keenness for the O.T.C
. and that every boy in the Senior School was in it, with the exception of four: ‘Two of them were congenitally lame and the other two’, he said with some asperity, ‘were Graham Greene and Peter Quennell.’6 Quennell and Greene had other interests. Graham, for example, recalls the two of them, both in their bold teens, sitting on a gravestone in the old disused churchyard reading aloud to each other from The Yellow Book ‘with a sense of daring and decadence’7 and no doubt fascinated by Aubrey Beardsley’s brilliantly risqué drawings. Peter Quennell remembered Graham reading:

  Madame Bovary, not the kind of novel that either his father or mine would have encouraged us to open. His talk had an exuberantly sceptical and blithely pessimistic turn; and his contemplation of the horrors of human life appeared to cause him unaffected pleasure. His pessimism did nothing to sour his temperament; while Evelyn Waugh would change beyond all knowledge, the young and the old Greene have remained relatively consubstantial. At each fresh insight he obtained into human absurdity or wickedness, his pallid, faintly woebegone face would assume an air of solemn glee.8

  R. S. Stanier recalled Graham’s return to Berkhamsted and it does seem that a cheeky, self-assured, rebellious adolescent had taken the place of the shyest of shy boys. Even Stanier used to think that Graham was getting away with it, on his return, because he was the headmaster’s son, but with hindsight, he realised that the masters were handling him with kid gloves as a boy who had had a nervous breakdown, quite regardless of whether he was the headmaster’s son or not:

  You couldn’t just whisk him off and beat him or something of that kind if he was cheeky, but he could be rather annoying. I remember in those General Science things we were doing the origin of species and heredity and that kind of thing and we used to have a test from time to time to see how much we knew. I remember Graham Greene producing a facetious answer in verse, beginning something like ‘Old Mendel was a funny man who used to play with peas’, which of course he did very well, and that did get a raspberry from the very sensible science master A. G. Coombs.9

  In creativity and competitiveness, Graham was also developing. Strangely, for a fundamentally shy person, even before his psychoanalysis he had wanted to act: ‘When I was sixteen,’ he wrote to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, ‘my greatest ambition was to be an actor.’10 And in the same letter, he admits that while he always found it embarrassing to read aloud an essay or poem before others in class, he did not mind in the least acting in a much larger group in the Deans’ Hall. He acted not only in The Lost Silk Hat but also in the interlude of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Thanks to Charles Greene there had been a revival of drama at the school. The editor of The Berkhamstedian wrote: ‘One phase of school life has certainly revived during the past few terms – to wit, the Dramatic Art.’ Perhaps it was this that stimulated Graham into writing plays:

  I began to write a fantastic play of which I cannot even remember the title. It celebrated what I liked to believe was the sense of poetry inherent in the ceremony of afternoon tea. In 1920 tea was still one of the important meals of the day, and the most aesthetic. The silver pot, the tall tiered cake-stand, like a Chinese temple, two kinds of bread and butter, white and brown, cucumber and tomato sandwiches cut razor-thin, scones, rock-buns, and then all the cakes – plum, madeira, caraway seed – the meal had about it the lavishness of a Victorian dinner. My play, I don’t know why, except that Dunsany’s had taken much the same road, moved from London to Samarkand.11

  Such a subject is un-Greeneian and yet not unexpected, given Olga Franklin’s remarks in 1980 on his aunt’s poem written on his seventh birthday about his being kissed, and his later poem on the same subject when he was eleven expressing disapproval of this Victorian family ritual. Perhaps his lost play was equally critical though his comments above suggest otherwise. Nevertheless, it does point to one curious aspect of Graham’s character: the way in which a subject first thought of in early youth is not wasted but is returned to as a topic to be written up at a much later date. There are numerous instances of this astonishing continuity of ideas throughout his long life.

  Whatever the quality of that first play, it was accepted – in a way. Graham gives a droll account of it:

  I sent the play to one of the many dramatic societies which existed in 1920 … and I was excited to receive a letter signed with a woman’s name accepting it for production. So up I went to London one morning to meet my first management. The address was somewhere in St John’s Wood, a district which in those days still retained the glamour of illicit love-nests. There was a long delay, after I sounded the bell, and when at last the door was opened, it was by an over-blown rosy woman holding a dressing-gown together, who was watched from the end of the passage by a naked man in a double bed. She looked with astonishment at my blue cap with a school crest while I explained that I had come about my play. Then she gave me a cup of rather weak Mazawattee tea … and she became carefully vague, as she scrutinized me, about casting and the date of production. I don’t remember that I ever heard from her again, and the society, I am sure, soon ceased to exist.12

  We know that he had written many imitations of The Viper of Milan, ‘stories of sixteenth-century Italy or twelfth-century England marked with enormous brutality and a despairing romanticism’,13 but he also decided to enter the school essay competition. He wrote to his mother from Richmond’s house on 6 October 1921 asking for details: ‘If Da does happen to get particulars, would you write. If not, I’ll just wait till I return. By particulars I mean whether there is a word limit, whether you can send any type of prose, plays or anything. I haven’t got that number of the Berk.’ The story he submitted was entitled ‘Castles in the Air’. The setting is a fair, the central figure a grotesquely ugly piper who, on the concert manager’s accidentally saying, ‘in the devil’s name’, takes this as a password and plays such notes that the noise and fun of the fair cease forthwith and everyone listens utterly entranced, for the tune brings to each the ‘pangs of mortal sadness’. Afterwards the piper disappears like an apparition and the suggestion is that people, without knowing it, have been witness to a visitation of the devil to earth. It is a beautifully told tale for a seventeen-year-old and it gained Graham, as an ‘Essay in the Imaginative or Descriptive Writing’, first prize.

  Graham was coming into his own. Even while under treatment, he continued his school work. He wrote to his mother asking her to ask Eric Guest to get his Warner and Martin [History] from his locker in the library and have it sent to him. In another letter he asked his father to send him a Latin Loeb Classic to read and in yet another he enclosed ‘two more history essays for Da’ – evidence that he had his future as a student at Oxford in mind.

  He gained his School Certificate, reached the sixth form, and dropped mathematics, Latin and Greek in favour of the modern side with French, History and English as his main subjects. There were only a few boys in the sixth and they enjoyed frequent free periods and were allowed to work alone in the library.

  In his last year at school there appeared another story of his in The Berkhamstedian, the first piece to carry his initials H.G.G. It was entitled ‘The Tyranny of Realism’. A child lies bound in a cold marble hall. There is the smell of a prison, of discipline, repression and corruption. In the distance is the throne of the tyrant King Realism. At the feet of the imprisoned boy lies a maiden with mournful lips – her name is Fantasie. The boy asks the King why Fantasie has been taken from him – she whom he loves more than life. He also asks why he had sent Spiritualism to drive away his dreams – the ghosts who used to kiss his lips and hair. ‘Once I loved in a great unknown country of dark caves and hidden ways … where every morning … found new beauties and new terrors. And even the fears were sweet. Now you hold me bound, cramped, within a small room and never is anything new.’ But the King indicates that he is not bound, and thus the walls of his prison melt and beside the King on the throne now sits Fantasie, their lips pressed together in a long passion
of joy.14

  In this allegory, Graham is obviously trying to come to terms with his new world after psychoanalysis – his earlier character and his developing one. It also shows that Graham began early as a writer to use his personal difficulties as fictional material on which to build. The term ‘spiritualism’ is interesting when we remember the Richmonds were both spiritualists. At a literal level, the allegory is probably a pointer to Graham’s hope that because he felt he must in the future write in a more realistic vein it did not mean (as clearly he had feared) that his fantastic imaginings could not also flourish.

  *

  No match for his brother Raymond at school – he never became a prefect – Graham was nevertheless establishing himself in his own way. He even took part, not with great success, in two debates.

  The first was on the motion: ‘That in the opinion of this House the Government’s Policy of reprisals in Ireland is unjustifiable.’ As today, there were appalling atrocities being committed by the military wing of the Sinn Fein – the burning of houses, the killing of people – but the difference lay in Lloyd George’s response. That wily Welshman enlisted retired army officers and men, called locally Black and Tans, and they decided to beat the Sinn Fein at their own game. They were a ruthless auxiliary police used against the Republicans from July 1920 to July 1921 so that when the debate took place on 12 February 1921 reprisals were still going on. R. S. Stanier recalled, fifty-six years afterwards, that Graham spoke with great passion: ‘He made an eloquent speech referring to the Indian Mutiny and how useless the atrocities had been then. He mentioned the Indian mutineers being blown from a gun and whatever one thinks of that as a method of dealing with a massacre, it certainly didn’t go on and on as things have in Ireland.’15

  The only report in The Berkhamstedian of Graham’s being involved in a second debate is short indeed. On 18 February 1922 the motion was: ‘That in the opinion of this house science destroys beauty.’ The motion was lost by 17 votes to 20. All Graham’s friends spoke – J. B. Wilson, Claud Cockburn, Eric Guest – and it was recorded that they distinguished themselves. Of Graham the report simply stated: ‘H. G. Greene spoke at some length and somewhat off the point.’16