The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  There is no suggestion here that he was on the road to conversion – but the figure in the background of the incident is Vivien. In the same letter he had written: ‘I’ll do anything you want (almost. I won’t go into a monastery, even if you ask me to).’

  Perhaps Claud Cockburn, who remained a friend of Greene all his life, was the one person who understood Greene’s dilemma at this time:

  I knew him before Vivien. Quite early on, Graham said to me that he had fallen madly in love with this girl, but she wouldn’t go to bed with him unless he married her. So I said, ‘Well, there are lots of other girls in the world, but still if that’s the way you feel, well go ahead and marry her. What difference does it make?’ And then he came back and said (this went on over quite a number of weeks), ‘The trouble is that she won’t marry me unless I become a Catholic.’ I said, ‘Why not? If you’re really so obsessed with this girl, you’ve got to get it out of your system.’ He was rather shocked, because he said, ‘You of all people, a noted atheist.’ I said, ‘Yes, because you’re the one that’s superstitious, because I don’t think it matters. If you worry about becoming a Catholic, it means you take it seriously, and you think there is something there.’ I said, ‘Go right ahead – take instruction or whatever balderdash they want you to go through, if you need this for your fuck, go ahead and do it, and as we both know, the whole thing is a bloody nonsense. It’s like Central Africa – some witchdoctor says you must do this before you can lay the girl.’ And then to my amazement, the whole thing suddenly took off and became serious and he became a Catholic convert. So then I felt perhaps I’d done the wrong thing.32

  14

  The World Well Lost

  Women are like dreams – they are never the way you would like to have them.

  – LUIGI PIRANDELLO

  ‘I’m seeing B.A.T. [the British American Tobacco Company] at 3 o’clock tomorrow … afternoon,’ he wrote to Vivien. ‘Please send your black cat which I return herewith (X) to sit on the manager’s shoulder. Do please will hard that the man likes me and takes me on. You see I really do believe that you are a talisman.’1 He was desperately hoping he would get the job.

  Apart from hoping Vivien had talismanic powers, he took the precaution of having with him a special photograph of himself: ‘I posed at Gillman’s, stuck my jaw out, & looked as though I’d just ordered a lot of coolies to be thrashed. Quite the White Man’s Burden touch.’2 Having deliberately created the right photographic image, he felt he would have ‘to live up to [it] at the interview’.

  The B.A.T. is still in Millbank overlooking the Thames. Graham was daunted ‘by the great concrete slab … with the uniformed porter like an officer of some foreign country demanding credentials’, and in the lift were ‘several middle-aged men … carrying files carefully like babies.’3 Aided by a reference from his Balliol tutor Kenneth Bell (‘though not properly developed, there are in him qualities of leadership’),4 and Vivien’s support, he was able to send her a telegram after his interview: ‘You Angelic Talisman believe have pulled it off.’ And Vivien would have been deeply interested since her father worked for the Company in Rhodesia and was to die there in harness.

  Archibald Rose, a director of the firm, whom Greene described to Vivien as being like ‘a nice Miss Nesbitt rich uncle from India, who remembers when he was young’, took to Greene. Rose touched on all the points which would interest an adventure-seeking young man and made working in China sound fascinating: ‘Right up in the interior and no indoor office work hardly, but riding about the place inspecting things, never doing the same thing for more than a week.’ And whereas the director of Asiatic Petroleum objected to Graham’s interest in writing, Archibald Rose stressed that ‘people with outside interests … found the loneliness least trying’.

  There were numerous applicants but once Greene was invited by Sir Bruce Porter for a stiff medical examination (‘they won’t afford first class sailing tickets to men who are going to get cholera at the first opportunity’) he knew the B.A.T. wanted him. But the fact that he was now set to go to China was not a clear victory for Greene, for his going could only help to bring his relationship with Vivien to an end. Vivien herself continued their meetings only reluctantly.

  Greene next tried to persuade Vivien to spend the night at Aylesbury so that they could meet, but the impropriety of such a meeting, which Graham recognised, made it impossible: ‘I know those ghastly people. They carry a great Why on their foreheads, like the Jews Ephods … I’m sure their (whoever they are) objection was to your staying the night alone there. I must say I had a few faint qualms about it, one is so soaked from the age of one upwards in the “poor defenceless female attitude”.’

  Their final meeting was planned for London, the time arranged to the minute: ‘It seems too good to be true that I’m going to see you at the entrance of Piccadilly Circus Tube at 4.15 on Saturday.’ He was very anxious and doubted, in spite of their firm arrangement, that they would meet: ‘You know, I half believed I was never going to see you again, and that’s why I was so unhappy. Saturday will break the evil spell.’ Facing three years in China, he was not going to allow his exile to end their relationship: ‘When we do … say goodbye, I shall be really certain I am going to see you again, after only 3 years. Unless you go off into a convent [a real possibility in Vivien’s case] and then I shouldn’t trouble to return home at all.’

  Letters following his acceptance of a post with the B.A.T. reveal Greene’s erratic changes of mind. If he could not have Vivien, well why not China, and something of the end-it-all mood that previously led to his playing Russian roulette surfaced again. Moreover, neither of them contemplated a long life: ‘I simply can’t stand the thought of England for any time,’ he wrote to Vivien. ‘I want to get well away from the place, because I can’t help longing for you, when you are anywhere near. And that’s fairly miserable at times. China would be a splendid sort of suicide-without-scandal-touch. And I agree with you that one doesn’t want to go on much longer.’5

  Yet nine days later when Greene was preparing to visit Oxford for his viva voce he was in raptures about seeing Vivien again: ‘I give wild inward hoots of joy, whenever I think of it. Once it came out loud by accident, and puzzled parents asked what was the matter. So I had to say it was a twinge of rheumatics. And I can’t keep still at all. I go for long walks and think about it. All the grasshoppers were out yesterday on the Common, all the gorse aflame with them, crackling like a bush fire.’

  The night he met Vivien in Oxford, the sky was rent by lightning and her nonchalance in the face of it moved Greene deeply: ‘it was just as brave as for someone else to pass through a barrage of shrapnel’. And how little he was asking from life: ‘I think my idea of Heaven is sitting still in a half dark, feeling your hand there’ – and how much: ‘and sometimes talking about anything which comes into the head. And with nothing to worry about for ever.’ Greene wrote the above at 11.25 p.m. in Oxford on 21 July and as soon as he was a wake next morning, he put pen to paper and his letter takes us close to one aspect of his desire for suicide:

  How wonderful it would have been to have been struck by the lightning, and gone out on a real point of joy. To have reached the absolute pinnacle of happiness, and then have fallen over the edge without knowing any of this horrid climbing down. Why can’t one be satisfied with a patch of happiness without feeling depressed afterwards … You dear, you dear, I won’t write any more. I shall start getting hopeless and morbid, if I do.6

  Before leaving, Greene dropped his letter off at Blackwell’s as the new day was dawning, so Vivien would find it on arriving at work. His emotions swung about most violently and he could write jubilantly, ‘China’s much the best place for me and I’d bring you home all sorts of Chinese silks, and the very best of China tea.’ And he concocted a beautiful, though juvenile fairy tale with Vivien as the sleeping princess: ‘I’d like to live in “Afternoon” because of the mysterious stairs, which climb up under the sign. The sort one def
ends with a rapier from a whole pack of dirty pirates, who can only come up two-a-breast. But then I simply can’t surrender the turret window of Afternoon, and the great blue front door … And sometimes in the evening you’d let me walk in your garden, though you would always escape indoors. But one evening you would have fallen asleep over an Andrew Marvell, & I should find you still there, under the ash, with the rose bush behind your right shoulder, & a long black finger of shadow between us from the tall tree.’

  Even a visit to the dentist is put to service: ‘Did I slip secretively into your mind about twenty or a quarter to eleven? You see I had to have some teeth out and had gas. I got your face beautifully focussed with you sitting in your little cubby hole at Blackwell’s and kept that picture of you clear, and it was still in my mind, when I woke up. So I wondered whether I’d been able to project my astral self … across to you.’7

  Returning to Berkhamsted, he learned that he was to start work at the B.A.T. on 4 August.

  Their last meeting in London had come and gone. Their last meeting in Oxford was over but still Greene couldn’t bring himself to believe that this was the end. He asked Vivien to see him once more: ‘Don’t say you won’t see me and talk about my own good’, and he ended his letter with words which would touch most hearts: ‘I should love you now, if you developed a squint and a hunchback and red hair or anything.’ He then telephoned her (something rarely done in the 1920s), hopes high, but she sent a firmly worded telegram: ‘Not this time Graham. Sorry.’ His reply expresses his anguish: ‘I was feeling a bit hysterical and off my head, and then I was wildly jubilant, after telephoning, and then when I got your wire I must have been pretty unbearable. I wreaked all my annoyance on my poor family and was quite impossible … It was partly the weather. I can’t stick this oppressive heat. It seems to eat away at the brain. I can’t imagine why more murders aren’t committed in it.’8

  What made him realise more fully that he was leaving was selling his books (‘getting on for five hundred’) except for about half a dozen. He was letting go volumes he loved – ‘de la Mare’s and Masefield’s and Conrad’s all disappearing’. He felt rather like the people in the last act of The Cherry Orchard, ‘their homes sold, the furniture covered up in dust sheets’. He was stunned by the thought that he was losing Vivien for three years as soon as his initial training was over. Cryptically he adds, ‘or if I got my original intention before I met you, for ever’, which I take to mean if he had been successful at Russian roulette, he would not have been alive.

  Greene was frightened that Vivien, once he was away in China, would rarely write: ‘If you write to me, it’ll be only a very long conversation in a very darkened cinema, and the lights will go up again, and there we shall both be still …’ Moreover, he was disturbed by the impression that Vivien was saying goodbye for ever: ‘If I come back, you’ve promised to let me see you, even if it’s only for long enough to tell me that you don’t want to see me again … and even if you’ve got married … in the interval.’9

  Greene’s letters, painful in their indecision, alternate between wanting and not wanting to leave for China according to the type of letter – kind or indifferent, warm or cold – he received from Vivien. Although he considered it a real possibility that Vivien would marry another while he was away, he refused to countenance the same possibility for himself: ‘Don’t make any silly remark about my coming back married. A letter once a month from you, six thousand miles away, is enough to fill my mind until the next one comes. There’s no room for anything else. You see, you are the whole world. No one else counts.’

  Greene originally wanted to go to China because he was sick to death of all the silly small things which were continually getting on his nerves in England: ‘I wanted a job where I could get just physically fagged out every evening and not think at all.’ But then he met Vivien and he could not countenance losing her for three days let alone three years. Without her he found England ‘a pretty restless sort of disjointed, second rate show.’10

  He went up to London to look for cheap rooms before beginning work and found them in Smith Street off the King’s Road. He was left with one further week of his vacation. In Berkhamsted the weather was atrocious: ‘It’s pouring with rain and there’s nothing to do, but sit and think about you … I keep on saying to myself “Why the devil did I ever answer that first letter?”’11 At the same time he was visualising receiving Vivien’s letters when he was in China: ‘I always … read your letters when I’m by myself. I suppose at Christmas I shall have to go and hide from my interpreter in a paddy field or a pagoda or something …’12

  Greene’s family began preparing for a month’s holiday in Filey, Yorkshire, and he wrote to Vivien: ‘Peace is just beginning to descend again after the awful turmoil of shunted boxes, and misplaced umbrellas, and where’s the green trunk? I’m feeling most unfamiliarly glad, because now I’m all alone with you, and I can smell the jasmine at my elbow …’ He felt guilty that he was disappointing his family by his readiness to enter business: ‘My father still murmurs that of course I could always chuck up the B.A.T. after a year and come back to take the Consular, and my mother has been very seedy, and looks depressed, and I feel like a rat leaving a sinking ship.’

  Greene’s interest in being a businessman turned out to be a deliberate pose on his part, which they recognised, and something of his wilfulness is revealed by his involvement in business in the first place, even though everything he had done in the last few years pointed to his becoming a writer. To begin with, his family never believed he would get the job, but the more they insisted on looking on him as a promising young littérateur, the more he felt the need to pose as a businessman. When he got the job, his parents became worried, anxious and disappointed. But it was not only his family who questioned the advisability of becoming a businessman abroad. Vivien herself wondered if he would not miss the subject he had graduated in – history. Graham answered her question lightheartedly, turning his response wittily in Vivien’s direction:

  I think History’s rather fun, but my masters and tutors say I’m not very good at it. They say I’m too vague, but that’s not true at all. I know all the facts and dates and things of the last hundred years. I’m thinking of writing a history and have been making up a time chart of events. I really know rather a lot, though I’m best on the 20th Century, I think. Here goes.

  1815 Wellington won the battle of Waterloo.

  Then lots of [indecipherable] and corn bills, and Catholic Emancipation, and the Peterloo massacre and Reform Bills, and the Industrial Revolution, but I’m not quite sure of the dates.

  1857 The Indian Mutiny and then sometime in the eighteen sixties The Crimean War and the Poet Laureate publishes Maud, and the Alhambra becomes a Music Hall, but I’m not absolutely certain of the dates.

  And then lots of people publish lots of things, and sometime at the end of the century comes Kipling and the Boer War. Now I begin to know even more.

  1901 Death of Victoria.

  1902 End of the Boer War.

  1905 Aug. 1. Vivienne Born.

  1914 Great War.

  1918 Armistice.

  1925 March 17. I met you.

  March 21. I had tea with you.

  April 4. I saw Three Women with you.

  April 17. I went to The Ship with you.

  and that’s where my knowledge of contemporary history becomes really detailed.13

  Letters to his mother at this time are calm and show no sign of the love-stricken young man, for he rarely shared his private emotions with his family. He wrote at least one sober letter to Vivien: ‘I saw in yesterday’s Express that of the three thousand men usually employed in China by the B.A.T. all but fifty are on strike … seem to be cutting down my time in London … Rose is fitting me into [the] Liverpool [tobacco factory] on the 17th of this month.’

  Two days before he began working at the B.A.T., Greene sent Vivien a poem, the first lines of which ran ‘Lord Love when will you weary of thi
s war/Fighting with banners and a few high words?’14

  The B.A.T., however, was no sanctuary for the love-sick. It was rather an initiation into a life of soul-destroying dullness: ‘I feel I’ve earned my salary to-day by the utter boredom of things. The new people have got literally nothing to do but sit on stools & pretend to look through months’ old balance books, which convey nothing. Apparently we never shall have anything to do not even at the factory but just stand and watch machines from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.’

  He had to break off writing to Vivien to listen to a talk about China by Lord Gaysford, but Gaysford’s talk did not inspire him. He discovered his contract would be for four not three years: ‘Three years without you sounded bad enough, four is hellish.’ Also, he realised that his salary would initially be only £50 a year. Moreover, ‘Lord G. went the wrong way about making the show attractive, emphasising the smallness of personal danger, when the only attraction left seems a fading hope of petering out before the four years are up.’

  Greene was troubled as well by the lack of social standing and breeding among his companions: ‘There is one conceited & unintelligent individual, who, from his exaggerated Oxford trousers is, I imagine from Durham University. At my own desk there is a hearty fellow, ploughed in Cambridge finals, & quite a good sort, but there is one terrible young man, who has been in a bank the last five years, & sticks to me like a limpet. He knows everything about book keeping, motor bicycles & wireless, talks about “johnnies” & says your “label” when he means your name. He’ll take the devil of a lot of shaking off.’