The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Some of Greene’s friends and relatives – not themselves under the spell of love – have given a rather different impression of Vivien and Greene’s love for her. While Eric Guest confirmed that ‘She had the most wonderfully creamy complexion, and was handsome’, Greene’s cousin, Ben Greene, described her this way:

  She was very velvety, with a feline manner, but I shouldn’t have thought claws: she had a rather too consciously sweet manner for me and I like dry drinks, but she was beautiful, and I think desirable … but there was more than that in her, much more, and of course I felt discomfort with her, only because she was a deeply religious Catholic and I don’t know anything about it and don’t want to.

  Ben’s sister Ave, recalling the days of Greene’s heady love for Vivien, said, ‘Graham was probably very under-developed. He was completely infatuated and it was like a schoolboy thing – he had a crush on her.’ And ‘Tooter’ Greene concluded, ‘Graham, as I remember him, then as now, was always looking for what was not there.’

  There is a bittersweet taste to some of his letters, as though he regretted being in her power:

  It must be rather fun collecting souls, Vivienne. Like postage stamps. Last addition to collection Undergraduate Versifier, a common kind. Fair specimen, but badly sentimentalised. Colouring rather faded. Will exchange for Empire Exhibition Special Stamp, or ninepence in cash … you will never be more than mildly interested in that blasted non-existent soul of mine. This letter will help you analyse the specimen won’t it … I’ve never really been in love before, only suggested myself into a state of mild excitement in which I could draw fifteen bob out of the Westminster Gazette for a piece of verse. I can’t do that now … I can’t think nearly clear enough to fit anything into a metre. You wouldn’t expect me to write verse, when I was blind drunk would you? … You can’t sympathise I suppose, any more than I can with the excitement and scurry of ants.

  Vivien’s reply has not survived, but on 28 May, Greene returned to the subject of his ‘blasted non-existent soul’ which she must have taken up:

  Soul. Forgive my heavy sarcasm. When I’m just going to die, I daresay I shall find the Earth saltless, & I daresay that I shall turn a trifle religious, as a kind of insurance, in case there is something in it. I know I shall, as I did do once when I thought I was in danger of a sudden finish. You see I haven’t the courage of my non-faith. I’m sorry I was dogmatic about my lack of soul. I’ll give you even chances that I may have one, in which case it’s a small dirty beast not worthy of your trouble. And that’s only 30% sarcastic.

  Greene ought to have been working for his final examinations yet he was distracted by love and regretting the time he had wasted:

  I went out to Abingdon this afternoon, and am now making a pious resolution to do two hours work after tea. I wish I could do all the stuff I should have done in the last two years, so I could get a first and stay on in Oxford. I keep on being haunted by the fact that in a month’s time I shan’t be here and you will be here … I wish you weren’t so frantically good at weaving spells, Vivienne.

  Returning from an unsuccessful interview – possibly with Asiatic Petroleum – he wrote: ‘When will you cheer me up again? As a Catholic you ought to like doing good deeds. And I do need cheering up, something terrible. I’ve just come back from town & I feel I shall never, never, never be a successful businessman. And it’s a horrid feeling.’23

  On 5 June, only six days before his final examinations began and before leaving to visit his parents (‘I’ve got something a bit unpleasant to go through then, which I can’t tell you about’), it is the need to see her which obsesses him:

  I want to see you again just once before I go home. It’s selfish of me when you … promised all those days running after Finals. But quite literally I can’t bear not seeing you, if it’s only for half an hour … I’m just appealing for mercy. You must have lunch or tea or dinner or something free today or tomorrow … Do Please. It’s no use my trying to tell you how desperately I want you to. The lucky fellow Macleod looked in here [Balliol] for a drink a moment ago – he’s in love with someone who’s in love with him. It’s no use my trying to go to bed. You gave me such a glorious time tonight that I’m down in the depths again now …

  Do come out today if possible even if you’ll be bored. I want you to come so frightfully badly, & I’m ashamed of myself. I didn’t think I’d ever need any one so badly.

  Greene then attached a piece of verse he had written explaining why he had been unable to write poetry since he had met Vivien. It is a curious piece: ‘Consciousness comes creeping down the stair/In the dark well of Mind … formed but of a morning and an afternoon’; and he questions: ‘How dare I bring this thing into the light,/Place it in a Pawnshop, where the world may see?/Constable, Sergeant, O God there, in the night,/Bring your own manacles & handcuff me.’ Following this passage came a final plea: ‘Won’t you be merciful and make it lunch between office and office this morning? I shall be in Balliol all this morning, if you can send James with an answer. I’m awfully ashamed to have crashed like this, from my self-centredness, but I can’t help that.’

  Her reply that she would see him brought an immediate response: ‘You glorious, marvellous, most beautiful, most adorable person in the world. You are simply the symbol of the Absolute.’

  It appears he pressed for that meeting in order to propose marriage, perhaps inspired by Macleod’s success,24 but he was not accepted and his letters on 6 and 8 June give some insight into what must have been a fraught encounter.

  Greene’s self-deprecation suggests a deep personal uncertainty. ‘I must have seemed pretty futile in my burblings, but I haven’t had much practice you see. I’ve never loved anyone before enough to want to marry them.’ But part of this disparagement is a reaction to Vivien’s response to his proposal: ‘You’ve made me feel an awful brute, Vivienne. I don’t in the least want to be the first person to depress you. And for God’s sake, don’t be. There’s nothing you’ve got to “repay” me. It’s all on the other leg. And what does anything matter, if we are never going to see each other again, after the next fortnight?’ And he goes on, with some percipience:

  You know it’s all rot about things being quickly over when one’s young. It’s the middle-aged who don’t feel as deeply. They couldn’t go on feeling things hard for twenty years and live. And besides it’s not a question of how many months one feels things at their strongest, it’s a question of what one gets away to in those months, and whether one can get back afterwards. I don’t want anyone to be ‘gentle’ to me, I feel I want someone to hit me, so that I could hit back, or else get into a rugger scrum or something. When I get really excited or frightened, then I can think about nothing but my own skin.25

  Perhaps the most poignant indication of the emotion of that meeting was his comment: ‘I’m awfully glad you didn’t cry the other night; I was just keeping hold of my own feelings, and I couldn’t if you had. And that would have been ridiculous.’

  We can trace some of Vivien’s reasons for refusing to marry him in these two letters. ‘Of course,’ he wrote, ‘it’s not the danger that’s the objection, because if I could make you love me, it would seem … paltry. When I really think about myself, I realise the impossibility of that. I know I’m soiled goods, even though I’ve been trying to put on paint since I met you. And I’m grateful for what you’ve done for me, even though I know the paint won’t last, when I can’t see you again. Probably I shouldn’t be in Oxford now, if I hadn’t met you. The thin ice was showing visible and audible signs of cracking.’26 The suggestions of ‘danger’ that come through here are Greene’s imperfection – instability, rather – in Vivien’s eyes. Instability there certainly was in his emotional state and in his prospects for the future – the uncertainty of that future could be a danger for her. His protestations suggest that he had tried to ‘paint over the cracks’ and remain stable. But there is also a suggestion that she was afraid of marriage:

  If you are f
ond of me, I don’t see why you won’t do what I want. I know you are fond of everybody (except Cockburn! …). But even though you are fond of everyone, are you never going to marry anyone? Couldn’t you say there’d be a chance of your consenting, if you still like me at the end, say, of a year? Marriage doesn’t mean seeing just one person all day long. You’d see far less of me than you do of someone like Mott [editor at Blackwell’s] or Blackwell.27

  But Vivien’s basic objection to marrying him would seem to be a matter of her religious beliefs and his unsatisfactory attitude towards those beliefs.

  I do recognise that you have your own work to do, I mean your religion’s more important than mine … I do admire … you for it, even though I have pretended to laugh sometimes. You might not approve of my principal reason for becoming a Catholic, before I know anything about it. There’d be no reason to be frightened, which was what you said the other night. Isn’t it just possible (and I’m not laughing, or being wily, but asking a question on something which you know more about than I do), isn’t it possible that the breaking of your crucifix meant that perhaps you weren’t right?28

  No doubt Vivien had many good reasons for not accepting his proposal of marriage, but Greene had hit upon the nub of the matter – religion. The young atheist had fallen in love with the young convert, and already was beginning to interpret the symbols of the Catholic faith.

  Although Vivien had decided to end their relationship ‘after the next fortnight’, Greene, being, as he described himself, ‘a cowardly opportunist’, did not give up. His reason told him that it was much better not to see Vivien again but he could not bear that. He wanted to put off ‘the worst miserableness’ as long as he could.

  Returning to Oxford after three days of swotting at Berkhamsted, his arrangement with Vivien was that they should continue to meet until, as a note from Vivien said, the final goodbye ‘on Friday 20th by the river at Wolvercote’, and a small present from her was waiting for him: ‘But what a lovely seal, Vivienne. It appeared so opportunely and in place, as I was reading all about the 1810s. The plain but beautiful Jemima on the letter back, the Prince Regent bowling down the Brighton road, and Jane Austen young women chatting to Jane Austen young men in Jane Austen parsonages.’

  He refers to their brief separation: ‘Can you realise how awful this long absence has been? With the continual heat dancing on tropical leaves, like a solid mass of May flies, and the stench of decay coming up from the Orinoco.’ But he was mainly ‘on edge to hear about the 13th … Will you make it five minutes to seven at Carfax? Because the bus goes very punctually at 7. And pray, pray that it may be fine. And remember to give God the exact date this time, because I’m not sure that he hasn’t antedated it again.’ The next day, a Sunday, they met again:

  Do you mind very much my being disreputable this evening? I have to tea with people down in the town, and shan’t have time to … change … Anyway the Elizabethan Singers is quite a bourgeois show … Eight o’clock outside the Y.W.C.A. I spent five minutes … in sensible, sober consideration, wondering quite inhumanly and without prejudice, in pure aesthetic argument, which was the most beautiful – you or the sunset behind us on the road from Wytham. Of course I decided on you. The strange thing is that I can’t be very depressed, when I’m with you, even though you insist on not marrying me. It’s strange that just seeing you is so satisfactory.

  Perhaps he had an inkling that she would not hold to the date of their final separation, and he must have been encouraged in this when she sent him flowers during the final week of his examinations: ‘You darling! And roses are my favourite flower they really are. With them as a gage I shall do frightfully well in the battle tomorrow … I shall be gloriously happy tonight … 7.45 at the corner of Balliol then.’ (6.45 p.m., 16 June 1925.)

  The next day, after examinations and after the history dons had given dinner to students going down, Greene admitted in a letter written half an hour before midnight that during the whole time he was thinking about Vivien. The next day there were more examinations, yet his mind was firmly on how to arrange another meeting with her: ‘we could catch the 6.2 to Didcot and get up on the Berkshire Downs. And in case there wasn’t any hotel or anything, I could bring strawberries and bananas and apples and oranges and lump sugar and soft sugar, and we could picnic on the Downs. I think they are just a stroll from the station. And I won’t chatter, if you don’t want me to. Can’t you manage it? Say yes.’

  He finished his examinations at 5 p.m. on Thursday 18 June and sent Vivien the following telegram at 5.07 p.m.: ‘New plan. Meet me 6.30. Do please. Graham.’ In two days’ time, they were, by her decree, to part for ever. Because examinations and his student days had ended, when they said goodbye at Wolvercote she allowed him to kiss her – after three months of intense wooing – but Vivien’s intention was to make the parting final. The full strength of his hopeless love comes out in the first letter he wrote on returning to Berkhamsted:

  You were quite right about saying goodbye outside Oxford. I couldn’t have stood the bus journey back. And it is of value to have been the first person you’ve kissed. But it doesn’t make me feel a bit pleased with myself. It only makes me wonder how somebody like you can exist, who’s willing to do something you don’t want to do, just because a friend of yours is so mundane that he can’t do without it. And even if I can’t say as much, I can say that I’ve never kissed anyone I’ve wanted to really badly before, or held off for so long, for fear of offence. You are so precious that I am afraid of doing or saying anything which might prevent me seeing you … It’s all so silly that I should love someone, whom I should want to marry, whatever conditions she might choose to make, but just the someone who wouldn’t marry me on any conditions. It’s bad luck at the least.

  He describes in this letter a dream he had about her on the train: ‘I was on top of a bus with you at Carfax, and I could actually feel you there … your voice in my ear. It made me feel extraordinarily queer when I woke up, because there were no sense values left to show which was the dream, the train or the bus. Both had touched all my senses. But the train won in the end … my head’s just buzzing with you the whole time “Vivienne, Vivienne, Vivienne,” like the endless train wheels that go round and round when one’s under gas.’

  Once at Berkhamsted, Graham asked Vivien to see him again: ‘Make it as soon as you can. And it will be the You-Graham, because now the Oxford one’s gone, it’s the only one that’s left.’ At the same time, his style is calmer – perhaps the Oxford Graham had gone – and his mind is already turning to different things: ‘I wish I could work at something or other … but I can’t. All the beginnings of novels and things … were started before I met you, and they don’t seem to be me at all. And I haven’t got any new ideas … I wish you could supply me with some plots … It would be fun to have Vivienne Dayrell and Graham Greene on the title page. I should feel I’d got hold of a bit of you then.’

  Although he could still write: ‘Goodbye, dear love for ever, I’m yours every scrap of me for ever … Do tell me that you’ll let me see you again soon’, he could also write: ‘I’ve succeeded at last in getting to work on a novel. I’d only done about two pages of it last January, and so I’ve just altered the plot completely to fit in with my new state of mind. I really think it’s good so far, much better than that awful thing which is reposing in your office now. When I’m working at that, I can nearly forget you altogether. But as I cannot do more than 1500 words a day, it only fills out three or four hours. But that’s better than nothing.’29

  One has the impression he is settling down and coming to terms with his passion, and perhaps even with his loss of Vivien. Not only is his style more collected, his imagery is powerful but more cerebrally controlled – neater:

  I know that I’m 80% mundane, and therefore I shall probably marry someone some time. And I shall probably also be in love with her. But I shall not love anyone more than you, because one can feel perfectly well when one has reached the ul
timate point of an emotion. It’s like putting one’s hand on a wall, but a wall that is so thick that there’s nothing on the other side … I’ve been quite a lot in love [before], but I’ve never got as far as touching that wall, which is the end. I don’t suppose one does it often in a lifetime, and so I dare say I shan’t again.30

  There is also a sense of depression in his assessment of his talents and his prospects, which could be the result of exhaustion, mental and emotional, after those last months at Oxford:

  I don’t think I shall ever do anything much. If I do it’ll be all your doing, because you made me want to do something big, as a kind of way of keeping in touch with you. Otherwise I shall just sink into a crowd of nonentities abroad, and you’ll forget all about me … If I go on publishing things, or do anything else more worthwhile, it will be simply a signal to remind you not to forget me entirely, a ring on your mental telephone.31

  Judging from his letters to his mother, Greene does not appear to have told her at this time of his love for Vivien, but there is one reference which suggests that by 18 May, the pressure of Vivien’s Catholicism was having some effect on him. He wrote: ‘Yesterday I was very energetic. Not only did I sit through a long R.C. service, which was rather fun!! but also went for a long walk’ and he added rather cryptically: ‘I went out with someone to Eynsham for lunch.’ It could be this visit to a Roman Catholic church that he described to Vivien in a letter of 30 May 1925:

  I went and lit the candles, although I felt fearfully nervous, as I thought I ought to be doing genuflexions and things. And there was a very bourgeois looking woman praying, and she watched me out of the corner of the eyes. And I felt like a disguised heretic being examined in the rites of the Church by a hooded Inquisition. I explained (mentally) that the candles were yours, in case I got Grace or something queer on false pretences, and then I wished for the usual thing that I wish for every time I eat my first fruit, or go under the alternative ladder, or swallow a plum stone.