The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Graham had one final piece in The Berkhamstedian before leaving school. It is a satirical poem, brilliantly executed and entitled, ‘An Epic Fragment from The Dish Pioneers’. It deals with Sarah Beeton, the famous Victorian cookery expert. Before her entry into heaven Sarah Beeton sings:

  Roll the little oysters in the bacon,

  Never heed their childish woe;

  Fry them in their little shrouds, three minutes;

  Gently to their mothers break the blow.

  Lay the little corpses out quite gently,

  On their coffins of fried bread,

  Garnished with the lemon and the parsley.

  Weep no tears, for they are happy dead.

  Then Peter oped the loudly clanging gate,

  And all the mighty host rushed in to peace,

  But Sarah Beeton slowly went, for she

  Was just inclined to adiposity.17

  Graham was trying now to connect with, and stretch out to, others, but still sometimes he would suffer a relapse, an abrupt breaking away, a shutting himself off and living within his own loneliness. The shy Greene still remained, protected now by a carapace of self-possession, self-knowledge, confidence and the appearance, at least, of fearlessness – everything played in a low-key and self-deprecating fashion. He was to become rather intimidating himself, but he would never again be intimidated. Instead he would face every situation – and even seek out, deliberately, the most dangerous ones, not only to overcome boredom or find copy, but to prove himself to his own satisfaction, and his blue eyes would outstare the world. Never again would he confess easily to a Wheeler (though women and priests there have been many). He would ‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth and a door round about my lips …’,18 such discipline was now his.

  One other attribute his school crisis left him with was a sympathy with the suffering and difficulties of others and the urge to help them.

  Perhaps J. B. Wilson, Greene’s contemporary at school, describes with most insight the sea-change that Greene had undergone:

  I have thought over the years that it does almost look as if the boy who is withdrawn at school, who is an observer, who isn’t a go-getter, who doesn’t take part in things, isn’t a doer – maybe he’s reserving his energy and building up his potentiality and then afterwards he suddenly blossoms, and makes a tremendous impact in whatever branch it may be: law, diplomacy, finance, literature, what-have-you. And I can see that so many of the boys who were leaders at school, and popular at school, haven’t necessarily done anything after they left school.

  Graham at school was not in the picture at all. And then he developed his potentiality, which must have been there at the start, after he left school. To keep it in the family, his brother Raymond was brilliant at school. Now he did become an outstanding surgeon – he did do certain outstanding things. But it is no equation: Raymond’s final achievement is not equal or comparable to his potentiality as that was demonstrated at school. Graham’s potentiality as demonstrated at school was almost nil and has become almost infinite.19

  PART 2

  Oxford

  8

  Freshman at Balliol

  God be with you, Balliol men.

  – HILAIRE BELLOC

  A tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority.

  – HERBERT ASQUITH (on Balliol men)

  ‘I WENT UP to Oxford for the autumn term of 1922 to Balliol,’ Graham Greene records in A Sort of Life,1 and, several pages later, ‘Finals came … I managed to get a moderate second in Modern History’.2 Between these two cryptic statements he recalls some events which were important to him, but he gives us little idea of the real significance of those three years.

  University students (as always) celebrated their new-found freedom by kicking over the traces of conventional behaviour in their own way. Particularly at that time they formed clubs. One of the most notorious at Oxford was the Hypocrites’ Club of which Evelyn Waugh, John Sutro, Claud Cockburn, Harold Acton and Peter Quennell were members. Quennell recalled it as ‘a kind of early twentieth century Hell-fire club’3 and Cockburn described its premises as a ‘noisy, alcohol-soaked warren by the river’. Sutro was its ‘accomplished mimic’4 and Harold Acton was already an established student poet, renowned for his method of reciting his verses in rooms overlooking Christ Church Meadows and, having provided his guests with ‘an opulent luncheon, accompanied by large quantities of the steaming mulled claret’, he would declaim ‘from his balcony … his latest poems, through a large megaphone to crocodiles of Oxford school-children trotting back and forth among the trees.’5

  Tom Driberg wrote that the Club had been the scene of some lively and drunken revels, mainly homosexual in character: ‘I remember dancing with John F., while Evelyn [Waugh] and another rolled on a sofa with … their tongues licking each other’s tonsils.’6

  Certainly, it would seem, homosexuality flourished. Maurice Bowra, a future Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University but then a young don at Balliol, talked, according to Anthony Powell, ‘as if homosexuality was the natural condition of an intelligent man.’7 And there was ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, Dean of Balliol, who was to become one of Waugh’s hated men. Should Waugh pass through Balliol at night he would assure the college in a thunderous voice, ‘The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men,’ sung to the tune of ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May’.8 But I think we can agree with Dacre Balsdon when he writes of Oxford homosexuality: ‘It may be doubted whether much went on … which could have interested the police. There was a pretty elegance and affectation about it.’9

  *

  Into this environment, in 1922, came Graham Greene just turned eighteen, ‘a muddled adolescent who wanted to write but hadn’t found his subject, who wanted to express his lust but was too scared to try, and who wanted to love but hadn’t found a real object.’10 He was young both in appearance and outlook. Acton remembered him as a ‘thin, tall, blue-eyed, gangling boy, after any adventure’,11 and Claud Cockburn said that he had told Graham he was the greatest case of arrested development he had ever met. Possibly it was not only immaturity in his case: it may also have been an early sign of a great artist’s almost magical ability to stay in touch with his own most vivid youthful instincts. Certainly Greene’s initial and personal celebration of freedom from school and family life (though the latter ties remained strong) was more juvenile and unsophisticated than that of many of his contemporaries.

  The youthfulness was demonstrated during his first month at Balliol. He wrote to his mother of a party in ‘a certain Fergusson’s rooms’: ‘We played Chicken Food, and then “Dicky, Dicky show a light,” round the quad, until the Dean informed us that we were turning Balliol into a nursery.’12 Eighteen days later, to commemorate Armistice Day, students played football with tin trays down the High, and with a bucket up Saint Giles. In the process, Greene cut his ankle getting it wedged in the bucket and tripping up on it. On another occasion he went to the Hysteron Proteron Club which, as he told his mother, once a term had a backwards day, with breakfast at eight o’clock at night: ‘The meals … started with toast and marmalade, then bacon and eggs, and lastly porridge. We then returned backwards to Balliol … This morning started with bridge in dinner jackets … before working backwards through dinner.’

  Although he looked slightly frail (his father chose to send him to Balliol because it was then anti-athletic),13 he had a deceptive energy shown by the sheer volume of his activities. On 24 October 1922 he wrote to his mother: ‘On Sunday I went for a sixteen mile walk with Turton. I am going to the theatre, “The Wandering Jew” with a certain Howard … Went and heard Lord Robert Cecil at The Union. This evening I’m going to a meeting of the Mermaid, a University Literary Society.’ During his first term he started to play golf with Claud Cockburn, who recalled the experience ending abruptly:

  The only time I played golf was with Graham. We teed up and Graham took a tremendous swipe and struck his caddy by accident because he swung round too far, and the caddy reeled
and recovered himself. Then it was my turn and I unfortunately swung round much too far and hit the ball straight into the bus to Headington or whatever bus was passing, and it shot through the driver’s seat, narrowly missing the driver, the bus nearly crashed, and so I said to Graham, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ And that was our last golfing experience.14

  Not surprisingly, Graham was not a member of the Hypocrites’ Club. ‘When I met Greene at Balliol, I can’t say we clicked,’ said Acton. ‘I fancied him a crude puritan – he did rather look like one, yes. He did look puritanical and rather disapproving.’15 But he did belong to a club, one of his own making. Writing to Evelyn Waugh on 10 September 1964, he explained why they had not met at Oxford: ‘I was not suffering from any adult superiority at Oxford to explain our paths not crossing, but I belonged to a rather rigorously Balliol group of perhaps boisterous heterosexuals, while your path temporarily took you into the other camp.’

  This ‘rigorously Balliol group’ was small. Chiefly, it consisted of Greene and his friends – the late George Whitmore, the late (Sir) Robert Scott,16 the late Robin Turton (Lord Tranmire) and the late Joseph Gordon Macleod, well known as a radio announcer during the Second World War.fn1 It was called the Mantichorean Society and had its own tie – blue and silver with black stripes.

  Many of the exploits of this Society were prompted by Graham. They were ‘rather below [those of] the normal adolescent age.’17 Certainly they took a schoolboy form of games, tests and competitions.18 On one occasion the Mantichoreans had a competition to see who could collect with the aid of a screwdriver at night the most metal plates with the words ‘No hawkers, no tradesmen’ or ‘Beware of the dog’ printed on them from those little villas in Oxford.19 Greene later recalled how some of them had decided to enliven the little town of Wallingford.20 Robert Scott, disguised as a middle-aged clergyman hunting for a runaway wife, called at the rectory and ‘took tea with the sympathetic wife of the rector. She urged him to be generous and forgive, and after tea they prayed together.’ Meanwhile, Greene was sitting at an easel in Wallingford drawing ‘souls’ at 6d. a time and writing ‘verse on any subject to order’. ‘I’d got quite a crowd before the end,’ he told his mother.21

  Then there was the ‘Moorish’ exploit when they dressed as Moors and went to a Moorish café for a Moorish meal, pastry done in layers, a mixture of dates, nuts and honey. There was one common dish, from which each of them tore portions. Afterwards, they marched out and, followed by about sixty people, created a sensation by carrying a censer in front of them, and, turning to Mecca, praying on their knees. Later they prayed again outside the Clarendon and had dinner on poufs in a room through which all the customers had to pass to get to the restaurant and lounge. They concluded the event by throwing morsels of food at Robert Scott (who again appeared as a clergyman) which frightened away several elderly lady customers.22

  Some of their exploits were of a more testing and adventurous kind: ‘Yesterday morning [Greene wrote to his mother] I spent on a competition to see how far one can get in six hours, without paying and not walking more than a quarter of a mile on foot between each change of vehicle, with no lifts allowed from a friend. One mark is given for each mile, and one for each vehicle … I did twenty five miles, with six changes. I used a coal lorry, a side car and lorry with rocks and bricks, and a private motor car.’

  In the same spirit, he made his first trip in an aeroplane and saw Oxford from the air: ‘It was a perfectly glorious sensation. I’ve never felt anything so lovely before.’23 We have to take into account that flying was then considered a dangerous pastime and that John Galsworthy had written to The Times two years earlier suggesting that aircraft should be banned ‘for any purpose whatsoever because of the danger involved’. In 1925 Graham tried to persuade his future wife to take a flight, but, since she refused, he took it himself and threw oranges at Oxford’s dreaming spires.

  There were also some skirmishes into public morals and politics. When Aleister Crowley (Beast 666), a self-styled saint and drug-addict dedicated to a life of debauchery with overtones of witchcraft and black magic, visited Oxford, the Mantichorean Society was worried that he might seduce the whole of the University and tried to lure him and his companion, Betty Loveday, away from Oxford ‘to prevent this most awful world-wide tragedy’.fn2 They did not succeed in removing Crowley even though they went so far as to seek the help of Scotland Yard, where they were told there were no grounds on which they could turn him from Oxford.24

  Politically, Greene’s attitude at this time reflects a youthful urge to ‘send up’ the whole business. He wrote to his mother: ‘I have now turned violent Conservative and wander round canvassing the unfortunate poor. I am getting quite good at admiring babies.’ This did not prevent him going to the Labour Club to listen to Ellen Wilkinson, the new member for Middlesbrough, who made a charmingly left-wing speech: ‘She would make school-girl eyes in the middle of the most violent and revolutionary statements.’ Political candidature was treated as something absurd. In 1922, he wrote to his mother about a bogus candidate called Jorrocks and was enough impressed by the sheer drollery of the situation to send her two skits on political publicity sheets, which she kept. It seems Jorrocks appeared in town and made speeches wearing a mask: his platform was that he belonged to no party and supported no politics. The sheets proclaimed that he was ‘the only triangular candidate’, ‘the only candidate keeping silent’ and asserted the need to give up nothing – ‘Let Jorrocks hold what Jorrocks held.’ Graham admitted to his mother that the local people thought Jorrocks a real candidate and several scrimmages took place as a consequence. It was all good undergraduate fun of a juvenile kind, but Greene was concerned with the success of these adventures: ‘I’d got quite a crowd before the end’, ‘we were followed by quite 60 people’ and ‘the local people thought Jorrocks a real character’.

  *

  Other exploits suggest a deeper and more serious commitment to emerging aspects of Greene’s character. The ‘barrel-organing’ episode was an example. In 1923 Greene wrote with seeming innocence to his mother: ‘I hear that The Daily Mail last vac. had a paragraph on two undergraduates who were touring with a barrel-organ.’ The two in question were Graham Greene and Claud Cockburn, and fifty-five years later Cockburn recalled:

  Graham suggested that we might go on a barrel-organ trip through territory which we both knew very well, like the Berkhamsted territory, so with enormous difficulty, we hired a barrel-organ and disguised ourselves as sort of tinkers, and in those days barrel-organs were rather more common – so it wasn’t quite so spectacular to have a barrel-organ, but anyway there we were, in sort of semi-rags, and faces painted up and looking we hoped, like tramps and apparently we did, because we went to Berkhamsted and we went all round the school, the school gates and the gates of the various Houses, and so on, and nobody recognised us, and if anybody said anything, they said, ‘Who are these two tramps?’, and this caused a good deal of glee … as far as I remember we made a little money, and anyway it paid for the trip, and caused a most frightful scandal among everybody who discovered who these two tramps were that they’d been giving money to.25

  It was part of the ground-rules that they would take no money with them and try to live on their scanty earnings: ‘four separate elderly ladies gave us four separate sixpences on condition that we moved on to a neighbour’s house.’ Thus after three bitter December days, Cockburn and Greene finished up with a few pence profit. More important, they made the discovery that only the obviously poor gave money to tramps.26 They were not allowed in any inn in Langley near St Albans because of their dirty faces and rags; they tried to sleep in a field ‘iron-bound’ with ice and then found shelter in a half-built house, the wind coming in chilling gusts through the gaps for windows.27

  Greene was to return to this episode, which retained significance for him, many years later in the New Statesman, 31 May 1968, when he brought out the element of disguise involved. Apparently at one p
oint in their journey they both wore ‘Christmas masks’, Claud Cockburn’s being a Billy Bunter mask with a perpetual toffee-fed grin, and the effect of these masks was that each of them became enraged by the other’s false face so that they began to defend the respective attitudes on life of their adopted personae and ‘would most certainly have come to blows … if [they] had not … taken off [their] false faces and changed [their] clothes’. They ‘parted, not quite such good friends for a while as [they] had been.’

  The excitement and secrecy involved impressed Graham and he was to continue to seek such experiences. It was his way of carrying on ‘the life-long war against boredom’ and of trying to get behind the façade of conventional life.

  Lord Tranmire felt Graham was both younger and older than his contemporaries at University: ‘He would wrinkle up his eyes, which you get in a child, and you don’t really get so much of in an adolescent. He had a very well-developed sense of fun, like you get in a child, but in some ways he was older than all of us.’28 The youthfulness, energy and adventurousness were to be permanent characteristics. ‘He remains’, Acton said, ‘an adventurous boy, ready to go to any country immediately something starts – a revolution or something. [He is] not a Dorian Gray type of youth, and is a bit raddled now in appearance but the mind and the eye are still those of a boy on the chase, on the look-out.’29 Tranmire recalled meeting him after thirty-five years, in 1961: ‘I asked him to lunch in the House of Commons. He walked in and looked exactly as he had at Oxford. I thought how terribly little he’d changed. And he talked exactly the same: the same rather lively banter that he always had. Very frank and not dissembling. He’s a very involved character but he wouldn’t dissemble.’30