The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Heinemann rejected the novel. Still Greene did not give up. He sent his agent a second volume of verse entitled Sad Cure and though Peters did not normally handle verse he made an exception and sent it to John Lane, where J. B. Priestley, a client of Peters, was Lane’s principal poetry reader.17 Three months later Greene was still pressing ahead with ‘Anthony Sant’ and had started to revise it. Moreover, he and Peters had a plan of campaign: ‘In the Vac. I’m going to be introduced to Gerald Cumberland, who is the principal reader for Grant Richards … I’m having my novel back and rewriting the end, as my agent thinks my chief difficulty is in the unhappy ending. Then directly after I’ve met Cumberland, he’s going to send it off to Grant Richards.’18 By August, he was less sanguine, it had after all been rejected by too many publishers and, coolly and accurately, he assessed the novel: ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that the first two thirds is good(!) but the last bit very bad.’19

  *

  There were two shadows looming in those last two terms in Oxford: finals and the need to find a job. The latter involved him in an amazingly wide range of possibilities which suggests that at a conscious level he did not understand the basic drives of his nature, except the need to earn a living. He must have astonished his mother when he told her on 8 February 1925: ‘I’ve just been offered a job at £350 a year (& commissions) in the Oxford & Cambridge Branch of the Lancashire General Insurance Agency, directly I go down … Captain Harris, the Oxford Manager, says that that ought easily to mean £800 a year but I have ma doots!’ The Times was a possibility, but in spite of his journalistic interests at Oxford he appears to have rejected this, partly because of his admired history tutor, Kenneth Bell: ‘Kenneth’s going to run through my foreign period with me … He’s very struck with the Levant Consular scheme [presumably another possibility]. He thinks I’d enjoy it far more than The Times & I agree.’20 In March he struck out in another direction: ‘A man came down from the Foreign Office the other day & I had an interview. Apparently there are lots of vacancies in the Far East.’ And in April he was trying to use the influence of his uncle Edward (head of the Brazilian Warrant Agency) for a job with Asiatic Petroleum:

  I wrote to Uncle Eppy about the Petroleum Co., & got a telegram yesterday morning, asking me to meet him at Little Wittenham … Tooter, Ave, & Aunt E[va] were there with one or two other vague people & we had lunch at the cottage. I hadn’t been in it before, its awfully nice. Uncle E. was rather surprised at my wanting to go into business. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a desire that way for some years, but imagined the salary was bad. When I heard of this man in the Petroleum Co. starting at £450, I was very attracted. Uncle E. thinks its probably run by Shell & he knows one of the big pots in that & is going to speak to him about me. I only hope he keeps my ’orrible literary past a secret!!21

  The other shadow was the final examinations and trying to catch up with neglected academic work. On 26 March he writes of having to ‘do a concentrated cram for the next month or two before Finals’, though in the same letter he says, ‘On Saturday night I danced. Also yesterday … I’m just off to see the latest Jackie Coogan [film].’ In spite of ‘all this frivolity’ he was ‘keeping up an average of five hours [study] a day’ and had ‘broken the back of [his] special subject’. He had a rehearsal for finals on 13 March and managed a B on Constitutional History and thought he ‘might pull off an alpha’ in English History. Foreign and Political Science were his weakest subjects and he was ‘hoping for a moderate 2nd now, which I certainly wasn’t at the beginning of term’.

  Graham’s final term was extremely busy, even for him. He was active on the academic side but other interests, more fundamental to his nature, continued to absorb him when he should have been concentrating on his studies. It is true that he had given up the editorship of the Oxford Outlook though not his interest in it. To his mother he wrote, ‘I’ve paid my pathetic farewell to the Outlook!’ but his next letter home expressed pleasure in its success: ‘Extraordinary! The Outlook’s sold out again, in spite of increased numbers.’22 He was looking forward with tremendous anticipation to the publication of his first volume of verse. He could not have known that it would be forty years before he would publish a second in the public domain.fn3 He wrote to his mother in March: ‘When my book does come out will you try & get a copy from the library, & ask Aunt Maudy to try & get one out of Boots [library] … I must get Aunt N[ono] to do the same’ – thus forcing both libraries to buy copies. Also he looked forward to getting ‘a little advance advertisement’ in The Berkhamstedian. Being Greene, he took a careful look at his contract: ‘I get 10% on every copy sold & the edition is to be 500 at 4/6d, so I get about 5½d on every copy sold.’ He thought that the price of the book at 4s.6d. a copy was scandalous, it being ‘very small indeed’.

  Babbling April was published on the first of May, and writing to his mother that day he added: ‘I’ve heard from the [Levant] Consular. The Selection Committee is on May 12. I may as well stand in order to have as many irons in the fire as possible.’ But on the day before his interview a first review appeared in the Oxford Chronicle. Naturally, it stressed that some of Greene’s work was first published there, ‘the first fruit of a talent which, ripening, should yield a rich harvest.’ The influence of Baudelaire and Verlaine was pointed to, but the conclusion was that Greene was not derivative: ‘He is singularly original.’ It interested Greene that: ‘Most people go definitely for “All these things belong to youth”’, which was a sonnet listing the disadvantages of youth – ‘short-lived loves that yet are over strong … Fighting beneath no banner, with no song’ – and the disadvantages of age – ‘The wheel is broken: there’s no course to lay.’ The poet, Robert Graves, then rising important, as Greene told his mother, plumped for ‘I shall be happy again, when you are gone/Happy as the insentient stone’ – both of these poems in fact recalling his love for Gwen Howell.

  Then there came a slashing attack in The Cherwell from Harold Acton, at Christ Church, and Graham was immediately involved in controversy.

  *

  The battle that followed was between two brilliant young men. Harold Acton’s stance was that of an aesthete – subtle, knowledgeable, whimsical; his review is well sustained and enjoyable. ‘Mr Greene’, he says, is ‘modest in spite of the multitude of his egos, young in spite of his homesickness for old memories.’ He belongs to ‘the Centre party, the genius of which is practical rather than adventurous … Mr Greene … prefers his glass of clear sterilised water … is always able to walk into the garden, play tennis … and bridge, enjoy his tea (especially the scones, muffins, crumpets and tea-cake) … A girl’s red lips are also in the neighbourhood. Thus happy, healthy, lucky, sane, and extremely sentimental, Mr Greene ought to impart much pleasure to reviewers … Babbling April is a diary of average adolescent moods.’

  There is much truth in this, but then Acton comes to the poem about Russian roulette. He sees here a ‘repulsive modesty’. ‘This false modesty is particularly exasperating, and is often apt to crystallise into cowardice.’ What troubled Acton was not that Greene had placed a revolver to his head, but that he did so with ‘eyes blind and fingers trembling’. Acton felt a desire ‘to throw down the book with disgust, to cry aloud: “For God’s sake, be a man!”’

  Greene’s response appeared in The Cherwell on 16 May and he argued that an ‘attack by Mr Acton is a recommendation to most readers’. Far from being dismayed at being classed with the Centre party, he accepted the classification since ‘reviewers have succeeded in making the poetry of the Centre party sell, and I must confess that I find a strong pleasure in the making of money’ – a ‘strong pleasure’ which has continued throughout life. He concludes by noting how comic it will be to most readers to see ‘Mr Acton as a professor of Manliness’.

  Acton’s reply came two days later. It is more personal and speaks of Mr Greene’s ‘journalistic nib’. He suggests he should not have written at length about Greene’s book but ‘dismissed it in a …
few appropriate words with the vast contempt I feel for Mr Greene … with personal knowledge of Mr Graham Greene’s grim stolidity … I have no doubt he employed his whole week pondering a retort through the crumbling of some bread (Hovis?) during high tea at his lodgings in the Thorncliffe Road.’

  It is doubtful that Greene was immediately disturbed by Acton’s review; rather he considered the whole business to be good publicity for his book, as his letter to his mother reveals: ‘I enclose a page from last week’s Cherwell. It was a good advertisement, as there were posters through Oxford with “The Poet’s Fight” on them.’23 The quarrel appeared in the Westminster Gazette and ‘some Olympian paras’ appeared in the Oxford Chronicle. ‘All grist’, writes Greene to his mother, ‘to the mill of advertisement.’ And yet in some ways, the emotion involved in the episode must have gone deeper. Greene could feel contempt for Acton’s supporters (‘I only knew Fernauld at second hand and disliked him at second hand extremely. Besides he was a junior subaltern in the enemy camp! Oh these intrigues!’) but Acton was a different kettle of fish. Six months after leaving university when Greene wondered, ‘what could be more unimportant than Oxford and all their little papers,’24 he could yet flare up over another review by Acton: ‘simply inexcusable. It’s not a review at all, but a piece of bad-mannered Bystander prose. I wish someone would teach him manners in the method of Lord Queensbury and Wilde … It is a piece of gross impertinence.’25

  Certainly Harold Acton had a sense of his own superiority – a conceit that had something grand about it. Here are two short extracts from letters written by him to Greene when he was editing the Oxford Outlook:

  19 July 1924

  I enclose ‘As Dimitri Karamazoff sang on the way to Chaos’ for the Outlook. Please do not print it at all if you will not give it the first and most important position in the paper, as I have little desire just at present to see poems of mine in print unless they are noticeable … this I consider an important poem.

  Monday

  I hope that you will receive this enclosed poem in sufficient time to allot it the prominent position it deserves.

  Yet Greene recognised Harold Acton’s deserved distinction when he described him as the only man in Oxford who could ‘mount the guillotine like an aristocrat’ and after University when Greene was culturally stranded in Nottingham, he looked back nostalgically to his battles with Acton. Writing to his fiancée he admitted:

  … the person I miss most now … is Harold. It was such intense fun, our mutual ‘hate’. And I do respect him. Although I wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, his attack in the Cherwell was the best & most awful criticism I’ve ever had, & my alterations I try to make in my stuff are founded on it. It would have been quite unanswerable, if he hadn’t spoilt it by personalities. I’ve got no one yet I can fight here, & feel empty as a consequence.26

  Twenty-five years later he was to write to Evelyn Waugh: ‘In Italy we saw Harold. How nice & dear he is, & how I didn’t realise it at Oxford.’27

  Alas, Greene’s attempts at publicity were not successful. In 1980, Sir Basil Blackwell admitted to me that though he ‘published 500 copies of Babbling April, [only] 62 were sold in the first year’. And Greene sympathised with his publisher: ‘Poor BB lost too much on B.A. to adventure further without financial aid.’28 Six months later when Blackwell had remained obstinately silent about a second collection of poems entitled Sad Cure, Greene confided to his mother that if Blackwell kept the manuscript much longer, he would want to scrap it, ‘even if he does take it, as I should have scrapped B[abbling] A[pril].’29

  But the limited sales of his book could not have depressed him too much. He was writing another novel, he was trying to find a job, he was studying for finals, and he was in love again.

  *

  On 18 May, with a student called Harding, Greene went to London for the Consular interview, which he found not at all frightening: ‘They tried to catch me out by shooting out a question, but I caught them out & they had to apologise!’30 After this he heard from the Asiatic Petroleum Company (Uncle Eppy had done his best for his nephew) and he was enthusiastic about joining them: ‘I should be most tremendously pleased, if I got in. I keep hearing about it from people, & apparently it’s a plum amongst businesses … if I have the luck to get taken, [it] might mean Calcutta, though I should hope for China or Egypt.’ It would seem that the prospect of travel was what attracted him and that he was trying to avoid his most obvious route: ‘I think even India would be preferable to journalism.’31 In the same letter he reported that he had heard from the Consular, that he had passed the Selection Committee: ‘I see the A.P.C. on Thursday morning … I’m seeing the Editor of The Times also on Thurs.’ Meanwhile, he spent his time either working or walking in the Oxford sun trying to get a suntan.

  Disappointments followed. ‘I’m afraid nothing will come of [the A.P.C.] though. Mr Whitehead had mentioned “talent in writing” in his testimonial, & the man pitched on that. I did my best to convince him that I’d given all that up months ago. He kept on harping on the fact that no one could have outside interests in the A.P.C., with which I most heartily agreed. I shall hear the result in a day or two, but I misdoubt me …’32 The Asiatic Petroleum Company offered, if pressed, to take him on for a couple of months’ probation in London – ‘in which time I might be able to prove to them that I had no outside interests’, but there was another problem. His elder brother, Herbert, had applied to the same company and they were reluctant to have two brothers working for them: ‘How extraordinarily silly. Surely they could segregate us a thousand miles apart. I hope Herbert gets in all right anyway. It’s more important for him than me.’33 (More important because Herbert never went on to University and therefore looked a less attractive bet – which in later life he proved with singular success to be true.) And so hopes of China, Egypt and India disappeared.

  At The Times, he saw Geoffrey Dawson, the Editor, ‘an awfully nice man’, but Dawson was taking on no one without experience: ‘He could promise me a job, if I took a year on a provincial paper first. That’s all very well, but that probably means a year without a living wage. The Yorkshire Post he thought the best paper for the purpose. Have any of our family any pull there?’34

  His hopes of an exciting life in foreign parts were fading. His talent as a writer was the stumbling block to a business career and while it promised a career in journalism, that career would have to start at the bottom of the ladder: ‘The worst part of The Times is that it means settling down definitely to spend all my time in England, as Dawson says there is a glut of foreign correspondents & what they have really great need of is leader writers on home politics, which don’t seem to me to be particularly fascinating.’35 Rather desperately, he wrote to his mother on 3 June: ‘Another plan which has been suggested to me, if I can’t get into a foreign business, is an American Lectureship. There seem to be lots of them going at their small Universities, & thought I might slip through a back door into American journalism.’

  But he had reconciled himself to a beginning in provincial journalism. He wrote to a friend on the Glasgow Herald on 25 May and probably also to the Manchester Guardian: ‘The Manchester Guardian is a very bad paper as far as the news side is concerned. It lives on its leader writers.’ He also wrote to ‘some people, who I think may have influence with the Yorkshire Post.’36 And keeping in mind his relationship on his mother’s side with the family of Robert Louis Stevenson, he decided to approach his Aunt Nono to write to Graham Balfour: ‘He might have influence with the Scotsman.’ None of these efforts came to fruition, and by 11 June 1925 his final examinations were upon him. He gave his mother a very rational assessment of his chances:

  Exams are over for the week. On Thurs. I had English Political History to 1485. I thought that that would be one of my strong papers, but I did mediocrely. In the afternoon Later Constitutional (poor, but I had expected it). Friday morning: Charters & Early Constitutional (poor but less poor than I had expected). In the afte
rnoon Economic History, which was a very pleasant surprise. I think I did a good paper. This morning [Saturday 13 June] Political Science – another pleasant reprieve … This afternoon a nice, slack & quite unimportant French Translation paper. So far I think I am a sound, but not good 2nd. Next week however is the tough time; when I may drop into the 3rds.

  Although Greene was to write that ‘no year will seem again quite so ominous as the one when formal education ends and the moment arrives to find employment and bear personal responsibility for the whole future’,37 1925 was a seminal year for him in many ways. His first novel had been turned down but his first book of verse accepted. And, had he not involved himself in so many activities at Oxford, he might have become a don (he has a don’s passion for accuracy), but apart from his concern at this time about his future, another consuming interest was developing – he was again, and much more obsessively, in love, as a cryptic telegram of 15 March 1925 shows:

  More than earth

  more than fire

  more than light

  Darling.

  fn1 ‘Why don’t we call Autumn the fall like Americans? It’s a lovely expression.’ (Letter to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, 28 February 1927.)

  fn2 Basil Blackwell made this a condition of acceptance having first found so many student authors and then lost them when the students went down.

  fn3 Greene published privately two small volumes of poetry in 1950 and 1958.