The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  If we were shoved together in March, only to lose you in December or January or February, whatever the purpose, the means were extraordinarily cruel. If there’s a God who does that sort of thing, he’d be pretty impossible to love. Infinite cleverness, all right, but not much of Infinite Mercy.22

  Yet he was turning away from his parents’ religion. At home for Christmas, he wrote firmly that he had gone to his last Anglican service: ‘If anything would confirm me in Catholicism, it would be this morning. What a service, and what a sermon. The most awful sticky sentiment.’23 And what attracted him as much as anything to Catholicism was the Church’s belief in Hell: ‘It gives something hard, non-sentimental and exciting’ – a belief he no longer supports today.

  At the end of the year, he assured Vivien he did ‘believe … firmly for long periods’ and also ‘I have got a constant layer of Catholicism at the bottom of me now, because I feel up in arms directly I hear any argument against Catholics … I’m a good way on the road.’ Indeed he was far too far down the slipway to go back.

  Also, he was excited about the instruction itself:

  We’ve finished the Papal Infallibility subject. Next time [Trollope’s] taking the five cases, where the Protestants have argued he has shown fallibility. (Letter of 11 January 1926.)

  I’ve just got up to Beatification and Canonisation in my instructions. (Letter of 14 January 1926.)

  We did the Saints this morning … I asked him how much longer it would take, as I was probably leaving … He’ll give me a note to a priest at The Oratory [in London], where he was instructed. (Letter of 19 January 1926.)

  I’ve got to Mortal and Venial sins in instruction … no we haven’t got to Marriage and Divorce yet. (Letter of 26 January 1926.)

  Only just back … and very sleepy as I had to go and see Fr Trollope after Benediction to try and cram in an instruction, and I fell comfortably asleep in his room. Did I tell you he’s giving me a concentrated cram now, to finish me before I leave at the beginning of March. (Letter of 8 February 1926.)

  Greene paid rigorous regard to the rules. Writing to Vivien on 21 January he admitted his trials were to begin: ‘I’m told that I’ve got to begin to observe things, like Mass on Sundays and alas! Fridays. My first meatless Friday tomorrow. I can’t write, the gramophone gets in the way.’ He forgot to tell his landlady about his meatless Friday – Greene must have thought she would not be sympathetic to his impending conversion. He described the result to Vivien: ‘With great reluctance I was forced to give Paddy all the meat part of my eggs & bacon.’

  The priest was working against the clock. ‘Father Trollope’s just managed to cram in the instruction in time … he’s left one thing (owing to lack of time) for you to instruct me about … the rosary and its use’, he wrote to Vivien on 27 February.

  *

  Graham Greene was as ready as he would ever be. He had no fear of the judgment of others on his leaving the Protestant church or because the dogmatic atheist was becoming a Catholic. Indeed, he probably enjoyed the rumours. ‘I got a letter from Macleod … he said he had heard rumours exploding like little gunpowder caps over Oxford.’24 Also, he could be flippant when writing to his mother about his impending entry into the Catholic Church: ‘I expect you have guessed that I am embracing the Scarlet Woman.’25 He had made his position clear to his mother a month earlier. He was not, he assured her, marrying into a Catholic family: ‘V’s people are not R.C.’s. She’s a convert. Mr & Mrs D[ayrell] are not divorced, but separated … he’s still farming in Rhodesia … his interests are confined to cattle … Mrs D. apparently never cared for him particularly, but her family told her that she was to have no more to do with him, so she promptly ran away to Africa & married him!’ And he felt the need to assure Vivien that his family was not against his conversion: ‘I hope you are at rest about my people. I got a “sweet” letter from my father this morning, wishing me happiness etc., all the more remarkable for the fact that he practically never writes letters.’26

  As the day approached he grew very nervous: ‘that mixture of the feelings before a dentist’s and the excited feelings before making a speech. I shall be glad when it’s safely over.’ His greatest fear was his first general confession and the fact that another priest was to hear it: ‘I’m awfully afraid that I may have the “mouldy” one to confess to. It’s a drawback if one can’t feel an instinctive respect for the man. Fr Trollope asked whether I’d like someone else to confess to. What will make it a bit more embarrassing is that I’m to have it in his room, and not in the formality of a box, before the reception ceremony begins.’ In another letter the young convert admitted he was really quite frightened by Sunday’s confession: ‘I comfort myself by the thought that I shall be fleeing from Nottm … In three years of complete freedom it’s difficult not to have collected a good deal of rather sordid muck.’27

  In A Sort of Life Greene returns to the nature of that distant event:

  The first General Confession, which precedes conditional baptism and which covers the whole of a man’s previous life, is a humiliating ordeal … In the first Confession a convert really believes in his own promises. I carried mine down with me like heavy stones into an empty corridor of the Cathedral, dark already in the early afternoon, and the only witness of my baptism was a woman who had been dusting the chairs.fn2, 28

  Writing on Thursday, the day before the ceremony, he expresses his spiritually elevated and passionate need for Vivien:

  Coming back, I thought of you so hard that I felt I was bringing you from Oxford, and it was quite a disappointment to find the room empty when I got in. I’m longing so much for Saturday and Sunday AND Friday, dear love, dear only love for ever, dear heart’s desire. I’m aching for you. I need you as much as any cripple might (do you remember what you said once?). After all, you are helping the lame soul to walk, aren’t you? It’s you who are the guardian.29

  But his letters reveal a young man distressingly honest and anxious: ‘The “ceremony” takes place at 3 tomorrow. I’m told it lasts a whole half hour! Dear! Dear! I haven’t said anything about it, but don’t think I’m going into it in the wrong spirit. I do take it seriously really.’30 Vivien sent him a telegram which has not survived, though Greene described its arrival at All Saints Terrace: ‘At about 7.10 I was just disappearing in a taxi to send off my trunk, when I saw, through the little window at the back, a telegraph boy get off at the gate. And when I got back three minutes ago, there was your telegram. My darling, thank you so much … you are so good to me, and it means an awful lot to me – your thoughts. I shall come to you very excitedly on Sunday night.’31 Also Vivien sent him a small parcel with instructions not to open it until the morning of the ceremony:

  Darling, the little note was lovely. I put the parcel by my bed, and opened it directly I woke up. And I loved what you’d put inside the Missal.

  O heavens my watch has stopped. I must be off –

  Ten years later, in Journey Without Maps, Greene recalled his first general confession and his baptism. What is striking always with Greene is his clinical observation of detail:

  The cathedral was a dark place full of inferior statues. I was baptized one foggy afternoon about four o’clock. I couldn’t think of any names I particularly wanted, so I kept my old name. I was alone with the fat priest; it was all very quickly and formally done, while someone at a children’s service muttered in another chapel. Then we shook hands and I went off to a salmon tea, the dog had been sick again on the mat. Before that I had made a general confession to another priest: it was like a life photographed as it came to mind, without any order, full of gaps, giving at best a general impression. I couldn’t help feeling all the way to the newspaper office, past the Post Office, the Moroccan cafe, the ancient whore, that I had got somewhere new by way of memories I hadn’t known I possessed. I had taken up the thread of life from very far back, from so far back as innocence.32

  The remarkable calmness of his style gives equal weight to events
of a diverse nature. His baptism is described in the same breath as salmon tea and the dog being sick. Incongruities are juxtaposed.

  Forty-five years later Greene could remember very clearly the nature of his emotions as he walked away from the Cathedral:

  there was no joy in it at all, only a sombre apprehension. I had made the first move with a view to my future marriage, but now the land had given way under my feet and I was afraid of where the tide would take me … Suppose I discovered in myself what Father Trollope had once discovered, the desire to be a priest … At that moment it seemed by no means impossible.33

  Looking back today, Greene is able to smile at the unreality of his fear but feels at the same time a sad nostalgia for it. He is aware that he lost more than he gained when the ‘fear belonged irrevocably to the past’. Speaking of the humiliating ordeal of his first confession Greene shows how age (and the ‘mass of memories and associations [which we] drag around with us like an over-full suitcase on our interminable journey’) changes us and changed the hopeful young man joining the Catholic Church:

  Later we may become hardened to the formulas of confession and sceptical about ourselves: we may only half intend to keep the promises we make, until continual failure or the circumstances of our private life, finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens.34

  Four months of Nottingham had been as much as Greene could bear, though in A Sort of Life he insists that he spent only three months there and was not unhappy. In his play The Potting Shed, James Callifer, remarkably similar in character to Greene, stays for five years in digs like his. Mr Corner questions the psychoanalyst as to what is wrong with James, for Corner can see no reason for Callifer’s despair: ‘But he’s good at his job. Or he wouldn’t have stayed five years on the Journal.’35 Graham Greene, the young man with his way to make in the world, could not have stayed so long. His despair would have become intolerable. In Nottingham he often longed for suitable intellectual companionship. Writing to Vivien from Nottingham Park, in spite of the severe weather, in the middle of the afternoon of 15 February 1926, he admitted:

  O my dear, you can’t know in Oxford, how one simply aches here for someone who’s read Shelley and Keats, and who doesn’t simply talk about ailments. Even the Magdalen man’s chief topic is his landlady, who gets drunk every night, is on the verge of D.T.’s and once attacked his daughter with a hatchet.

  The half hour on Friday with the little Magdalen man is the only time during the week, when I speak to an educated person, and even we have no interests in common. I don’t think I’m a prig, but it is rather ghastly. One sees absolutely no one here of one’s own class. In the street, in the cafes, anywhere. It destroys democratic feelings at birth. Seeing you is like a leakage of air into a coffin.

  Greene was not then democratically inclined. He found it difficult to communicate with and respond to the ordinary uneducated man in the street. Yet he did feel for others less fortunate than himself, as an unpublished and unknown poem, written in Nottingham during a spare moment from sub-editing, shows: ‘I only see/Out in the streets where there’s always rain/With cracked harmoniums the unemployed.’

  A few days before he left he wrote to Vivien: ‘It’s awfully queer walking Nottm, and thinking I may never see it again after this week.’ He then adds, what only a young man could: ‘Four months is quite a large slice of existence.’

  Greene never lived in Nottingham again and he did not wish to: ‘This town makes one want a mental and physical bath every quarter of an hour’, and he left without a job in spite of desperate attempts to find one. He would go to London and see what being armed with four months’ experience as a sub-editor in the provinces would do for him. He left full of hope, and a sense of expectancy, for now he was a Catholic. His first letter to Vivien, after conversion, is entitled FIRST CATHOLIC LETTER, and his excitement is evident:

  I’ve reached the station unnecessarily early, after a tempestuous departure. Doing up odd things. I couldn’t get into my suitcase the brown paper parcels. Searching for string, discovering things in drawers. String breaking. Brown paper bursting. Gobbling an egg. Being dragged away by a too early taxi in the middle of a piece of toast. Marmalady … it’s really becoming ridiculous – fantastic – stoopid – the way I fall more in love with you every day …

  And his goodbye to Nottingham?

  Ah! that’s over … I’m wildly excited. The day is glorious, & I had to be extravagant & take a taxi from St Pancras, because of my many packages. And it was a fearfully long ride & the streets were lovely & grimy Nottingham was a hundred miles away … Thank God Nottingham’s over. It’s like coming back into real life again being here.36

  fn1 A memoir written two years after his death fills in the details of Father Trollope’s life on the London stage: ‘His first engagement was with Ben Greet’s Company, then touring in “The Sign of the Cross”, in which he played first as a pagan, and then as a Christian, roared like a lion, and was eventually thrown to the lions. After a short time in London, playing small parts at the “Haymarket”, he got his chance and made a name for himself. Strange to say, the part that brought him to the fore was that of a most awful “bounder”, and when London managers had a part of that type to fill they always sent for him. He acted with Beerbohm Tree in “Business is Business”, at His Majesty’s, and in other plays, and also with Arthur Bourchier. In all he was on the stage ten years.’

  fn2 The witness of his baptism was not a woman dusting the chairs but Stewart Wallis, an unofficial verger who helped around the cathedral.

  19

  Between the Tides

  I was never particularly in love with life.

  – GRAHAM GREENE

  IN OCTOBER 1925 Graham Greene had attained his majority but not his maturity and had certainly not fulfilled his ambitions, in spite of having eventually clearly defined them and pursuing them relentlessly and intelligently. He had, however, achieved some small victories and had obtained a good deal of valuable experience.

  He was still limited in his response to classes of society other than his own and, even within his own family, given to expressions of cold-bloodedness. Yet he was astonishingly romantic and, withal, excessively shy. He was (and is) rigorously honest but it was an honesty not coupled with a comparable candour. Temperamentally given to enthusiasms of hope – useful in a convert – he turned to Catholicism for the wrong reason and he was (and is) susceptible to the attractions of the opposite sex. In love, especially when a competitive spirit was engendered by another entering the lists, Greene’s passionate intensity was so aroused that he would raise the stakes, submit to, and argue in favour of, any condition of love’s servitude, and persuade himself to believe even in a monastic marriage. In a showdown, Greene will gamble on life or death at a throw.

  At this time he suffered from nightmares; had thoughts which, twenty years later, found their way into one of his finest novels; showed himself to have untutored but unquestioned mediumistic powers; and after intense activity had moments of such despair, followed by self-hatred, that inescapably we must conclude he carried within his breast a formidable desire for self-annihilation.

  *

  Of Greene’s social conditioning he recalls, in the preface to The Old School, how his school despised elementary schoolboys, thinking them unwashed and willing to lie more readily than boys of a higher social class. This was due, he argues, to the school masters from whom he and others learnt their snobbery and the means to express it, though surely his mother played a part also. His enforced stepping out of his class in Nottingham caused him to emphasise his inherited class values. While later he was to reject them, there he accepted them without question.

  Nevertheless, perhaps the process of change was beginning then, for we do notice the glimmerings of a social sense in his poem about what he saw in the streets of Nottingham –
the cracked harmoniums, the eternal unemployed – but he had both to witness and experience poverty in the early 1930s before he could sympathise with, or even comprehend, the life of the poor in England. At this age, he finds it easier to be satirical at their expense. For example, he describes to Vivien two men in a park sitting down and talking to each other without having been introduced.

  They began on their mutual ailments which necessitated them coming and sitting here in the sun and getting fresh air. One of them, an old man with a thick white beard, like a Tolstoy with a Nottingham accent, says, taking his pipe from his mouth ‘Rest’s the best thing’. He apparently lost his memory for four years. He doesn’t seem to mind having got it back again. The other man’s younger, about 50. He’s just as cheerful. ‘It’s all the same whatever place one goes to. Just bricks’. And they haven’t even got a distant hope of getting away, to the South Seas or somewhere. (3.30 p.m. The Park. 15 February 1926.)

  Greene reports accurately working class speech patterns but does not catch the flavour and warmth of homespun wisdom (‘It’s all the same whatever place one goes to. Just bricks’) and fails to see it as a way of dealing with impossible personal conditions. And the jibe, ‘He doesn’t seem to mind having got [his memory] back again’, is unnecessary.

  During his first attempt to find a job in London, he stayed at his brother Raymond’s home. He arrived in London at ten at night, deposited his bag and, because he had not eaten, went to a cheap restaurant in Wilton Road. There he discovered a baritone who sang ‘sadly and badly’ and again the desire to speak satirically about the less cultured and less fortunate comes upon him. In song, it seems the baritone ‘declared that he would meet his pilot face to face when he crossed the bar and then he laid him down with a will, and then he was one who marched breast forward and then the choir sang, “Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow”.’ Here the summary itself belittles the subject.