The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  This lively banter and youthfulness shows itself in a poem he probably wrote when he was eighteen, called ‘Irritation’, published on 24 May 1923, indicating perhaps not only the comic influence of Edward Lear but the concern of his parents as to what Graham was going to do with his life. The poem carries no by-line but his initials H.G.G. are written in ink in a hand recognisably his mother’s:

  Irritation

  Father muttered ‘The Home Civil’,

  Mother she said ‘No.’

  Then she talked a lot of drivel

  Of a House in Paternoster Row.

  Sister squeaked, ‘Why not a Vicar,

  Or a manufacturer of cork?’

  But I did not wait to kick her,

  So I went and left them to their talk.

  Then I spilt a lot of treacle on the stairs,

  And I emptied the slops,

  In a number of shops,

  And I broke the Bank Manager’s chairs.

  I wasn’t angry, Oh, no! Only a trifle put out.

  I got hold of a halbert,

  And seized on Prince Albert,

  And fed him on golf balls and stout.

  You see I was young and saw nothing wrong

  In setting fire to the High,

  With a pink-spotted tie,

  And half of a vulgar song.

  I shall not boast. There was nothing in that –

  I got hold of a Dean,

  And painted him green,

  And gave him a three-cornered hat.

  I wasn’t angry. Oh, no! Only a trifle hurt.

  I called on the Master

  And mixed all his castor

  Sugar, with best London dirt.

  I returned to my family much relieved –

  You may take it as true,

  If I tell you, too,

  I had been a little peeved.

  Father said, ‘What’s it to be?’

  Mother, she said ‘What?’

  ‘I’d like to be Sir Herbert Tree,

  And endow an infant’s cot.’

  But since it’s rather hard to change

  My virtuous heart to sinister,

  I’ll take a post with larger range

  And be a Baptist Minister.

  We are used to the Roman Catholic Greene, but at University he was a convinced atheist, his psychoanalytical experience having reinforced his disillusionment with the Protestant church. His first published story in the Oxford Outlook (February 1923), entitled ‘The Trial of Pan’, was about a pagan who outwits God and takes over heaven – much to the relief of its inhabitants.31

  In the following year a curious story by him (signed ‘G.G.’) appeared in The Cherwell32 entitled ‘The Improbable Tale of the Archbishop of Canterbridge’. Satan has come to Britain and ‘this lunatic’ has led her ‘to dabble her feet in blood’. ‘The madman with his talk of the joys of war has bewitched mankind’ and it is expected that the world ‘will be fighting like a pack of mad dogs’. The Archbishop takes it upon himself to shoot Satan and then fears God’s justice, but the dying Satan quietens his fears:

  ‘You need not be [afraid] – you will find no God.’

  ‘Will you blaspheme even as you are dying? Who are you to say there is no God?’

  ‘I am God,’ said the man, and choked up fresh blood.

  ‘But if you are God … how can you die?’

  ‘I made myself man … a miracle … Very rash … I’ve done better in my day … such miracles I’ve done … Woods, and wars, and sheep paths, and – you, my dear Canterbridge!’

  And in a bubble of bloodstained laughter God died.

  In a poem entitled, ‘Après Vous’ (The Cherwell, 22 November 1924), Greene writes of going to heaven – though not before his loved one, ‘for I am shy and hate strange company’, and he says to her, ‘when I skate on thin ice talking of Satan,/Warn me with that little twisted frown of yours.’ She must tell St Michael:

  Do not mind his rudeness, he is shy.

  And do not be offended if he does not listen to your talk.

  He thinks too much on me.

  And do not, do not let him talk to God

  Of the superiority of Hell’s constitution!

  According to Tranmire, ‘It was not like Graham to argue for argument’s sake. Careful thinking led him to it and he would propound his own strong atheism. I think in my life I’ve never heard atheism put forward better than by Graham, although one was fighting it at that time. But he was, apparently, a convinced atheist – not arguing it but merely explaining it. That’s why it wasn’t undergraduate argument.’33

  *

  In Ways of Escape (1980), writing of Stamboul Train and A Gun for Sale, Greene says: ‘I can detect in both books the influence of my early passion for play-writing which has never quite died,’34 and certainly his interest in the theatre, which started at school, increased at University where he went through the whole gamut of theatrical experience as actor, playwright and entrepreneur. He wrote to his mother during his first month at University: ‘A new dramatic society has just been formed at Balliol for the production of plays by undergraduates … I just missed getting mine taken.’35

  Six months later there was a Balliol drama competition. Graham submitted a second play (we do not have the titles of either) and one of the judges, possibly Harley Granville-Barker, found it ‘marred by sentimentality’, though stressing not ‘banal sentimentality’. He found that it was competent within its own limits, and had a certain charm. He added: ‘If, as I venture to suppose, you are as yet fortunately young, it is exactly as it should be for your future development. I feel fairly sure that … we shall hear of you again.’36

  At Oxford he tried to form his own drama company. He wrote to his mother: ‘the first week of next vacation we are going for a tramp, acting plays in small villages.’ Typical of his energy is the extraordinary speed with which he put this idea into operation. His letter continues: ‘Raymond may be coming. Otherwise it consists of self, Fergusson (Balliol), Guest, Cockburn, York-Lodge (Keble). I got going fairly quickly, as I formed the idea at 11.15 Tuesday morning, and had got the company together by tea time; and had decided on one play. We are doing three one acters, of which one is the Monkey’s Paw.fn3 Guest is taking any properties we need in his side car.’ Financially alert, he asks: ‘P.S. To get off the Entertainment Tax, must all takings go to charity? Or only profits?’37 Though that particular venture fell through, another was started, a purely Balliol affair with more ambitious plays. They decided on Macbeth, with cuts: ‘I’m taking [the part of] Banquo, and an English doctor’, wrote Graham, ‘and Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest which I am stage managing, and acting a young bounder.’38

  Joseph Macleod recalls that Greene acted in a play of his at Oxford in 1924: ‘My play, The Fog Spider, was a psychological-symbolical-something-or-other protest against suburban family life. I played the Father, Peter Quennell my Wife … and Graham my Son. The action really took place inside the Son’s neurotic brain, and Graham did try to establish some atmosphere of terror with eyes staring, hands clutching and extending, and back bent. But we all lacked experience. What was meant as dead tragic was found by the audience killingly comic. It was a disaster.’

  Greene’s literary tastes at the time appeared decided. According to Sir Harold Acton: ‘He espoused the cause of people that I didn’t particularly care for, like the Georgian poets. He was then for de la Mare, those delicate rural poets. I belonged to what I thought to be avant garde, the Sitwells, Aldous Huxley and so forth. He was intensely Berkhamsted English and I was intensely non-English from Italy and loved Latin culture.’39

  But Acton was only partly right: Greene’s literary tastes were more complex than this. Just before he went up to Oxford, in a poem published in the Weekly Westminster (30 September 1922) and signed H. Graham Greene, he wrote of being tired of old authors – Browne, Herrick, Wotton:

  … No Browne brings me such pleasure,

  As my loved Barrie, Conrad, Bern
ard Shaw.

  My Rupert Brooke, my Yeats, my de la Mare,

  Hold memories and scents in richer store.

  A letter to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, his future wife, reveals an unexpected passion for a minor poet, T. E. Brown:

  I had his large green Macmillan Collected Poems. People used to come into my room and look at the shelves, and say ‘Brown? What on earth have you got that for?’ And I would grow wild and frantic and leap on chairs and declaim excitedly, ‘He’s somebody I’d like to anthologise’ … I always think a lot of the excitement comes from his prosaicalness. When one’s read the first three lines of a Shelley, one knows whether it’s going to be good or not. But one reads a Brown poem, as rather interesting, well-knit, masculine prose, and then suddenly at the end, he’ll catch his breath in a kind of gasp and one’s miles above the ground … I warn you, darling, you’ve hit on one of my enthusiasms.40

  Balliol was a fine college: the life of an undergraduate entirely desirable. It was possible, so long as it was arranged in advance, to order excellent lunches, as Graham explained to Vivien in 1927: ‘Your description of the iced pudding suddenly gave me a wave of greedy longing to be back to the summer of 1924 when I was still in Balliol & could give lunch parties in college. One could arrange a really topping lunch. One got a card from Sligger authorizing it & then went down into the kitchens & interviewed the chef & collaborated in a fascinating menu. I wish I’d known you then.’

  Graham also showed himself to be a typical student of the 1920s in drinking to excess, though without losing control. The justification was, as Kenneth Bell, his tutor, remarked one evening to the freshmen: ‘Gentlemen, you have come to this ancient University to study a very large number of different subjects. It is our duty to see that you get the best opportunities for studying [them]. But there is one … which you will have in common, and that is what we propose to teach you in this college. And that is to take your drink like gentlemen.’41

  Graham recalled to Evelyn Waugh that for a considerable period of his time at Oxford he lived in a general haze of drink. ‘I’ve never drunk so much in my life since!’42 In A Sort of Life he gives an example from his final year: ‘For nearly one term I went to bed drunk every night and began drinking again immediately I woke.’ He had given up going to lectures after his first term, judging them less useful than reading. He was within a few terms of his final exams, and had only to be sober once a week when he read an essay to his tutor, but even that demanded more discipline than he could muster. He was drunk at the end of term ceremony called ‘The Handshake’, when each student had to sit opposite the Master and Dean while his tutor commented on the work he had done during term:

  I was helped as far as the door by two of my friends, Robert Scott and George Whitmore, who held me on a steady course through the quad. Then I slumped into a chair beside Kenneth Bell and faced the Master and the Dean. I don’t think it occurred to either of these two that an undergraduate would appear before them drunk at that early hour and on such a serious occasion and they probably put down any strangeness in my manner to nerves. My tutor recognized my state, but he was sympathetic … Bell’s pupils were aggressively heterosexual and were inclined, like himself, to drink large quantities of beer. So he stage-managed skilfully what might have been a disastrous Handshake, and I was released safely into the care of my friends who had a taxi waiting and they lodged me as though I were something breakable in the train for Bletchley.fn4, 43

  A television team, interviewing Claud Cockburn, referred to the fact that Greene had said that he was in his first term at Oxford ‘dead drunk every day’ and Cockburn answered, ‘Well, I didn’t notice.’ The interviewer asked, ‘You mean he wasn’t?’ and Cockburn’s reply was, ‘No, Greene is a very truthful man and if he said he was dead drunk every day, he was and the fact that I didn’t notice it must have meant that I was equally drunk.’44

  Greene did also have some special and moving experiences as a student. For example, he told his wife:

  That July I went for a marvellous walk. I only wish it had been with you, but I didn’t know you then. I’d had dinner at the Hall and it was a hot evening. And Tooter said, ‘Come for a walk’, and I said, ‘Let’s go to the Bridgewater Arms. We’ll get there just before tea!’ And then Ave joined us, and we went and we had a drink at the B.A. and it was dark. And I, not expecting to be taken at my word, said, ‘Why go home on such a lovely night? Let’s go to the Beacon.’ And they agreed. And just before midnight we got there. It’s the highest point of the Chilterns and a great windy whaleback, very grim at night, and the road to it passes through woods, until it comes out with a sudden white sweep on the edge of the downs. And we told ghost stories as we walked and thoroughly frightened each other. And sitting rather chillily close on the top of the Beacon, we forgot that we were a sophisticated girl of twenty one and still more sophisticated youths of nearly twenty, and at midnight I scrawled a rhyme on a scrap of paper, and we made our marks and we buried it in a little cairn of stones, and we got home very tired at 2.30 a.m.45

  The schoolboy who was so solitary and disturbed, at Oxford threw himself whole-heartedly into a busy social life. The loneliness of personality, essential to a writer, was taking a rest. It is not surprising that the main object, getting a degree in history, was rather pushed to one side. He was cocking a snook at convention, challenging accepted principles, and experiencing life outside the bounds of society’s protection, which involved hardship and danger (on a minor scale as yet), secrecy and disguise.

  fn1 Macleod received an honourable mention in Graham’s thriller The Ministry of Fear. ‘And just at that moment the news began – “and this is Joseph Macleod reading it.” The stranger crouched back in his chair and listened.’ (p. 23.)

  fn2 Betty Loveday’s husband, Raoul, had been a secretary of the Hypocrites’ Club. He ‘left the university suddenly to study black magic and died in mysterious circumstances at Cefalu in Aleister Crowley’s community.’ Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning, 1964, p. 180.

  fn3 Written by W. W. Jacobs, the popular short story writer and humorist. Jacobs grew up in the dockland at Wapping but in later years lived at Berkhamsted, visited the School and was known to the Greene family. A contemporary of Graham’s, S. R. Denny, recalls Jacobs living above the prep. school: ‘He was a pink-eyed, unobtrusive little man who could be seen every noon making his way to the town for his morning draught.’

  fn4 ‘Do let me most seriously advise you to take to drink. There is nothing like the aesthetic pleasure of being drunk and if you do it in the right way you can avoid being ill next day. That is the greatest thing Oxford has to teach.’ Evelyn Waugh to Tom Driberg, Letters of Evelyn Waugh, p. 10.

  9

  The Art of Spying

  Adventure is the vitalising element in histories, both individual and social.

  – WILLIAM BOLITHO

  ‘ESPIONAGE IS AN odd profession,’ Greene wrote,1 and as a profession it has fascinated him. He has dealt with it in his novels from the comic point of view in Our Man In Havana and from the serious point of view in The Human Factor and he has shown a sympathy with Kim Philby. As a profession whose purpose was to obtain secret political or military information about one country on behalf of another, he did not condemn it. It was either a farce from both points of view or an indication of commitment either to a particular loyalty or to money of such strength that it wiped out all other concerns. He also conceded that there was another form of espionage – ‘for some it is a vocation, with an unscrupulous purity, untouched by mercenary or even patriotic considerations – spying for spying’s sake.’2 This last defines his own fascination with a form of espionage which evinced itself as early as his return from the Richmonds in his analysis of his parents’ dreams.

  His parents’ life was limited to that of their own class which allowed a specific range of friends and of accepted social activities. Servants and tradesmen were, of course, beyond the pale. Graham admits that his mother was socially prejudiced
. During the First World War, although the Greene family had been happy to patronise the tripe-seller in Berkhamsted since they needed food, Marion Greene was deeply offended when the tripe-seller’s daughter, living in Castle Street, married an officer in the Inns of Court O.T.C.,3 and Ave Greene remembered that when as a girl she had enjoyed the excitement of riding into Berkhamsted on a cart, she had been sharply punished after Marion Greene had verbally chastised Ave’s mother for allowing her daughter to indulge in such unladylike behaviour.4 What Graham felt the need to do was to enter into ‘espionage’ not for spying’s sake but in order to obtain a knowledge of the lives of others so necessary to a novelist and especially this novelist born into the irksome restrictions of his class. He was forced to take the plunge and ‘dive below the polite level to something nearer common life’.

  It was at University that he took his first tentative steps in this direction when he and Claud Cockburn travelled from Oxford to Tring with their barrel organ, so well disguised that they were unrecognisable even in Berkhamsted among parents, relatives and friends. This episode was of great significance – it was the first venture to include all the basic elements of Greene’s later ‘spying’ travels – a blueprint for the future novelist in search of material.

  Anonymity, disguise, secrecy, the experiencing of other lives and conditions, however unpleasant that experience, were all involved. Implicit was a concern for the oppressed and rejected. ‘Graham is a real crusader for the underdog – absolutely true,’ Claud Cockburn said. ‘If a man’s having a raw deal, Graham would honestly rush out into the street and get killed.’5 With customary honesty, Greene wrote: ‘I was easily aroused to indignation by cruelties not my own.’6 He discovered early, certainly by the time he was eighteen, that when under the necessary element of danger, when fear arose in him, whether it came from the possibility of losing a loved one or from going into dangerous unmapped places with the determination of a Victorian explorer, he could do incredible things.7