The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Greene was delighted and told his mother that Edith Sitwell’s autograph might some day be valuable, and that he might now have a chance of getting into her poetry magazine Wheels. But as there were no issues after 1921, she could not publish anything of Greene’s.

  Greene wrote in the Oxford Outlook, ‘In Miss Edith Sitwell we find the style of the Decadents [‘Wilde and his insane school’], broadened in outlook, shorn of its madness, and intensified in emotion and beauty, there is no more room for progress here.’2

  At the end of his freshman year, Greene was elected President of the Modern Poetry and Drama Society, and as a result met many of the literary celebrities of the day. He told his mother that he hoped to invite ‘Drinkwater & de la Mare down’. He also made friends with the writer, Clemence Dane, and a useful contact she turned out to be. With a direct honesty, though a little patronisingly, Greene wrote: ‘My poetry society had Clemence Dane to tea … a very handsome woman and much younger than I had expected … I can’t conceive how she ever wrote a play like William Shakespeare. A woman who can talk of different people as “such a dear”.’

  A number of female writers took an interest in young Greene – Naomi Royde-Smith, in the 1920s, as we have seen, who published him in the Weekly Westminster Gazette; in the 1930s, Mrs Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc and author of the thriller The Lodger; and the famous hostess of the famous, Lady Ottoline Morrell.

  *

  The Dean of Balliol (‘Sligger’) was Graham Greene’s tutor for a time. Once, having listened to a debunking essay by Greene on the younger Pitt, he was silent for a while, ‘then he sniffed, then he kicked a coal, and then he said, “You ought to get on as a journalist, Graham,” with bitter scorn.’3 The Dean was right – Greene did get on as a journalist at Oxford. Shy he may have been, but at Oxford he showed a flair for publicity.

  The most obvious outlet for his talents was the Oxford Outlook, a magazine established by Beverley Nichols in 1919. He recalls: ‘As soon as I went to Oxford I decided, in company with a little band of equally impertinent young men, that what Oxford needed was a new literary magazine which should reflect the new spirit of the university after the War … It was to be called the Oxford Outlook and people were to pay half a crown for it.’4 Greene, in his time, became acting editor and his first contributors were Edmund Blunden and Louis Golding. Louis MacNeice, W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Rex Warner and Emlyn Williams all published early work in the Oxford Outlook, some receiving their first acceptances from Greene when the editor, C. H. O. Scaife, was out of the country. He brought to this position initiative, energy – and some misgivings, for, not satisfied with simply editing the magazine, he took it over, changed its image and tried, incredibly, to make it pay – ‘I don’t know what the other editor will say when he returns from America at our changes,’ he wrote to his mother. He not only worked with tremendous enthusiasm and a dedicated attention to detail, but showed a singular ability in promoting the Oxford Outlook.

  On 15 October 1923 he wrote to his mother: ‘I am editing [the Outlook] this term and wish to make it partly political, as this will give it a larger circulation. Unfortunately, the owner is averse, but if I get a Trevelyan article, I think he would agree.’ G. M. Trevelyan, well known then for his work on Garibaldi,5 was, fortuitously, a friend of Greene’s father and so Graham set the wheels in motion: ‘Do you think Da could get George Trevelyan to write some short thing on Italy, on the Corfu businessfn1 or something of that sort?’

  Thanks to Greene’s efforts, the November issue was a remarkable one. Many of the contributors were his contemporaries and friends: ‘The Outlook is getting on fairly well, though it’s hard to get anybody to write prose. We’ve got a poem in rhyme by Quennell, the best thing he’s done.6 … I’ve done a piece of verse to J. G. Walker [and] I’ve brought in Claud Cockburn to do the political side, so that it will be quite an O[ld] B[oy] magazine.’ Greene’s piece of verse, ‘The Coming’, inscribed to ‘J. G. Walker’, disturbed one student friend. Joseph Gordon Macleod in 1977 recalled: ‘It was about a man with a stern face looking at a sunset, and I was somewhat jealous because I remembered a sunset with Graham, and the poem was inscribed to J.G.W. I told Graham of my jealousy, wishing the initials had been mine – J.G.M. He didn’t answer.’ J. G. Walker was the name of the baby recently born to his elder sister Molly. The poem was accepted also for the magazine The Golden Hind (April 1924) by the playwright Clifford Bax (who recommended to Greene his first literary agent, A. D. Peters) and it also appeared in Greene’s first book of verse, Babbling April. The poem can be seen, in some ways, as prophetic:

  And while we other poets sit at winter dusk

  And softly whisper each our little dreams,

  You’ll rise and with the ardour of your youth

  Stride from the warm glow of the flickering fire

  To carve your dreams in facts across the world.

  In his November issue, Greene went in for some big names. Apart from pressing his father on the Trevelyan article – ‘If Da can get some sort of promise from T. I should be glad to hear by Friday, as we have a meeting then’ – he received a story from the novelist Louis Golding on the promise that he review Golding’s latest book,7 and a poem from Edith Sitwell: ‘I’ve just received a rather beautiful poem from dear Edith. It’s part of a very long poem called ‘The Sleeping Princess’ … so we shall have two celebrities.’ The Sitwell extract is entitled ‘La Rousse’: ‘When reynard-haired Malinn/Walked by the white wave/The Sun, a chinese mandarin,/Came dripping from the wave.’

  Thomas Hardy’s play, The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall – he was then in his eighty-fourth year – was reviewed: ‘written by a great man … it will always have an unfortunate immortality’, and indeed, it is no more than a dramatic curiosity.

  Apart from finding suitable contributors, Greene was concerned with increasing the sales of the Outlook, and he was not naïve when it came to summing up a person and arranging financial matters. Of Linaker, the owner of the magazine, he wrote: ‘A delightful man, so candidly unscrupulous’, and although Greene had ‘no financial responsibilities in the paper’, he took the finances in hand:

  It is not in best condition [he wrote to his mother] … so far I’ve succeeded in raking up four more pages of advertisement, which will help considerably. So far the losses have averaged seven pounds an issue, the four extra pages bring them to £2.10.0 and we have a covering guarantee of £5.5.0 an issue this term from Frank Gray. Result all serene.

  I think I shall risk some of the remainder of the subsidy on posters, which we’ve never had in the past, and with their help I hope we may cover expenses on the first number, while Quennell is still a big draw.

  When it came to selling the November issue, Greene first approached the members of his own family: ‘Would you [his mother] and Aunt Eva send your subscriptions c/o Oxford Chronicle stating that you wish to become subscribers for a year’, and in the same letter he says that he has ‘written to Aunt Nono and asked her to ask Uncle Frank’. Being a relative of Graham had its disadvantages!

  Dissatisfied with the attitude of the Outlook’s owner, he took steps to replace him: ‘Blackwell … is thinking of buying [the Outlook], and pushing it … If we can get one or two juicy promises to impress him … I think he’d stump up.’ And Greene succeeded in persuading Blackwell to take over the production and risks of the Oxford Outlook in the following term, and have it produced ‘in a really first class format’.

  He expected ‘ructions’ on the editor’s return from America and humorously considered that the editor would resign ‘in hopeless wrath at our shocking materialism’8 but, though the editors Scaife and Greene were sometimes at loggerheads, they did not fall out. After Scaife’s return Greene could write, ‘we haven’t flown at each others’ throats.’ In fact, Greene had his own way for he adds: ‘We are bringing in two more people, one as Advertisement Editor, and the other as Subscription Manager, on a 10% commission basis.’ Of the publisher,
Linaker, Greene confessed to his mother that he ‘made a great show of humouring our childish desire for advertisement’. But it was more than play and Greene, deadly serious, succeeded in introducing on to the Oxford streets sandwich men to advertise the issue.

  Scaife went down in the summer of 1924, and Greene became editor: ‘I hear today that Scaife goes down after this term, and then at last I shall be able to do what I like with the Outlook.’9 But there was trouble finally between them over the last issue of Scaife’s editorship. As he explained to his mother: ‘There’s going to be a great bust up. Scaife tried to put in some parodies of what I imagined was the Sitwells without my knowing. He sent a note to the printer telling him not to send me those proofs, but the printer sent them me with Scaife’s note enclosed. I kicked up an almighty fuss, as I didn’t want my position with Edith Sitwell damaged, and forced his hand by threatening to resign.’

  Fifty-six years later Scaife lamented that Greene ‘did one thing at the end of our association of which I deeply disapproved. It was the last number of my editorship, June 1924.’ According to Scaife, the parodies were not of the Sitwells but chiefly of Harold Acton (a brilliant student but one easy to guy and no friend at that time of either Scaife or Greene) and instead of putting his initials to the introduction, Scaife had put four asterisks which Greene corrected in an erratum – ‘For **** read C.H.O.S. [Scaife’s initials].’ ‘This’, confided Scaife, ‘left me with a low opinion of the chap.’

  *

  It was a storm in a teacup, but it does reveal Greene’s determination when it came to having his own way and not having his relationship with others harmed. Though he had been a rather difficult assistant editor, he was now looking out for ‘a nice, subdued, tame, harmless sub-editor’. In his last year at Oxford, he re-made the magazine according to his lights, changed the publisher, and pressed on furiously with his own ideas. He had Basil Blackwell to tea and tried to persuade him to allow wood-cuts to be introduced into the magazine and, for the first time, to pay contributors (excluding himself) ‘5/- a poem, and half a guinea a story or article, beginning only with the fourth contribution, so as to encourage regular people’. The business acumen revealed here is entirely Graham Greene’s.

  Blackwell agreed to illustrations, and Greene in his editorial wrote: ‘For the first time in its history, the Outlook has illustrated itself.’ During Greene’s editorship a thousand extra copies were printed: ‘We shall be the only paper in Oxford that can guarantee being in the hands of every fresher,’ he wrote excitedly to his mother on 15 October 1924: ‘We are going in for quite Napoleonic methods in order to make a splash with the Outlook this term.’

  He had yet another idea for promoting the magazine: to offer its readers ‘a free insurance against failure in examinations’. Two coupons – one from the first and one from the second issue of the term – had to be sent in before examinations (thus ensuring that two issues were bought) and in the event of failure in examinations the student would ‘receive a free champagne dinner for two at one of the Oxford restaurants’. Graham Greene’s editorial explained the scheme:

  The main purpose of these editorial remarks is to expound the Outlook scheme for Intellect Insurance; and I address them to all freshmen, except a very fortunate few. One of the disadvantages of University life is that you are compelled to take examinations in a term or two, before your mind can be expected to settle down to its best; fell instruments of torture, speciously disguised under the name of ‘Preliminaries’ or mendaciously as ‘Moderations’. With such an ordeal to face, who, even the most erudite, can feel confident? Who can be sure of success? Who can disdain the chance of a consolation prize if he finds himself left at the post? It is this consolation which the Outlook scheme hopes to give.

  The Outlook proposes to give a free dinner to all insured subscribers who fail to pass in History Prelim., Law Prelim., Divinity, or Pass Mods. A copy of the first number of this term is being sent to all freshmen: and with it an order form for the rest of the academic year. On this, those wise enough to insure with us will write their names, colleges, and the examination in which they anticipate disaster; and return the whole, with their annual subscription. The several dinners will be held at the beginning of the terms subsequent to the examination in question, on a date to be made known later; all claims to be sent in ten days before the day appointed.

  He was able to tell his mother that the Oxford Outlook had leapt into popularity.

  As editor of the Outlook Greene showed his ability not only to develop his own talents but to recognise those of others. Joseph Macleod recalled that he had a flair for this: ‘I remember he was going to ask a Christ Church man called Williams, who was interested in theatre, if he had a play – to publish an extract in the Outlook. This must have been to Emlyn Williams valuable encouragement at the outset of his theatrical journey.’ I suspect this was Emlyn Williams’s short play, Vigil, which was performed by O.U.D.S. in November 1925. Graham also published four poems by the Greek poet Cavafy (translated by Cavafy’s friend George Valassopoulis) when the poet was then almost unknown to the British public. One of the poems was called ‘Come Back’: ‘Come back often, at night, and take me/When the lips and skin remember …’10

  In 1961, in a letter to Joseph Macleod, Graham nostalgically recalled those days:

  I’ve just come back to England for a couple of nights from France and found your night letter telegram. How it brought back the days when you would leave in my room a new poem for the Oxford Outlook … I have put the night letter poem into my copy of the Ecliptic [a long 1930 poem, by Macleod] which has survived all these years and the blitz.

  And he quoted from Macleod’s poem: ‘the dust is laid and the wet sand is clean.’

  *

  Apart from the Oxford Outlook, there was the newly established British Broadcasting Company which put out its first programme from Savoy Hill, London, on 14 November 1922 with its call-sign, ‘2LO calling’. The medium was new and amateurish in those less free-spoken days of radio; for example, a 1925 directive sent out to comedians banned jokes about drink, parsons, Scotsmen and Welshmen! Anyone straying from the path of righteousness was sacked.

  Characteristically, the undergraduate Greene took on the new popular medium and the Radio Times of 22 January 1925 announced:

  The Oxford Poets’ Symposium

  Harold Acton

  Graham Greene

  Brian Howardfn2

  J. G. Macleod

  Patrick Monkhouse

  A. L. Rowse

  will each read one of their own poems

  S[imultaneous] B[roadcast]

  Afterwards Graham wrote to his brother Hugh about his first experience in front of a microphone: ‘I felt very nervous … We sat in a kind of sumptuous drawing room, with beautiful armchairs and sofas, and each in turn had to get up and recite in front of a beautiful blue draped box on a table. I felt like Harold swearing on the saint’s bones.’ And no doubt his nervousness led to his smoking. That he did smoke cigarettes then is shown in the postscript to his letter: ‘Here’s a cig. card for Elisabeth.’11 There was little chance, given the high dignified moral tone of the B.B.C. then, that six rumbustious students would not cause, even unwittingly, something of a rumpus. Acton gave no offence with his reading of a poem called ‘After’, and Macleod recalled Acton’s admirable, caressing diction: ‘The g-rass is ve-rey g-reen today.’ But, as Greene wrote to his brother, ‘the BBC got very nervous when Brian Howard started on his naked lady. They say they have to be very careful.’ Joseph Macleod believed though that the trouble came less from Brian Howard than from Patrick Monkhouse (later literary editor of the Manchester Guardian) who had substituted another poem for the one accepted which contained the word ‘Damn’. Greene wrote an account of the affair for the Oxford Chronicle, tongue in cheek, soon after the broadcast: ‘Mr Monkhouse voiced the feelings of the whole room towards that confounded box when he swore at it very loudly. “Had I the heart to call you a damned fool?” he cr
ied and proved very conclusively that he had the heart. The box seemed quite insensible to his oaths; not so the British Broadcasting Co., who were filled with visions of enraged persons breaking their earpieces. They pictured themselves damned … bankrupt, starving. The storm in their hearts was still raging when Mr Rowse proceeded to calm them … in that deep mellow voice which has so often stilled the Conservative frenzy of the Oxford University Labour Club.’12

  Only Rowse received a fan letter, from ‘an old invalid lady who had found his verses “consoling”.’13 But one listener wrote to the press and (according to Macleod) gave them ‘one accurate and deadly epithet each, and ended, “There was then an interval of five minutes’ silence. It was not enough.”’