The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  I always feel a bit more cheerful in the evening, because then, instead of another day to get through, it’s another day got through, of the 17,500 odd, before I attain my three score years & ten! Isn’t it a perfectly terrifying number? Statistics fascinate but horrify one. That’s 25 and a quarter million minutes roughly.

  In 26,460 minutes, if you are punctual I shall be with you. Do be, darling, it would be awful to make it another ten – 26,469. One minute’s gone.23

  But the curious aspect of his morbidity lies in his concern with getting as quickly as possible to the end of life. And whenever he felt little chance of winning Vivien, his case hopeless – ‘[I] cling to so flimsy and crazy a hope’ – mentally destructive tendencies predominate: ‘Sometimes, the whole of my mind and my brain and even my body seems tired out with it, when you aren’t with me. And I want to sleep and sleep and sleep, and forget all about you and everything.’24

  When Vivien first met Greene, three different personalities must have been evident to her: the first what Greene described as ‘the Oxford me’, an undergraduate persona characterised by a devil-may-care, tongue-in-cheek delight in pricking Oxford pomposities, sometimes by the pose of insouciance; the second the richer, more ambiguous person described in this chapter; and the third hinted at in scattered references – the Hilary Trench personality.

  Graham had already published a poem under the pseudonym of Hilary Trench (‘If You Were Dead’) written when he lost Gwen Howell to her intended.fn1 His bitter mood is reflected also in a poem about Vivien (written at the height of a later despair).fn2 It is difficult to discover all the ramifications of the ‘Trench mood.’ Notably, Greene hits out viciously at whoever is causing him deep distress, and his mockery is bitter and unpredictable. It is a mood he feared and he often stresses that Hilary Trench is dead and buried:

  And … you need never be afraid of meeting H[ilary] T[rench] in our house [he declared to Vivien]. Poor devil, he can never come anywhere near you, even if he is alive, which he isn’t. O it’s no use writing. I’ve got to be with you to convince you that he’s dead. He’s been dying since March 17 [that is, the day they met].25

  But he did not succeed in persuading Vivien that his secret personality would not return, though he deeply regretted the sudden assumption of this secret self. ‘I don’t know what comes over me at times & makes me write horridly to you. It’s that Personal Evil you talked of I think that sends those ghastly dreams. And it whispers things & I get miserable & furious & then I hurt you.’26

  After displaying to Vivien a mood of bitter raillery, his apology took the following form: ‘I am so certain of my own innocence & H[ilary]’s death that I know you must have misunderstood.’27 Nevertheless, the Hilary Trench personality – ‘the stamp of one defect’28 – usually made its appearance after deep anxiety had been prolonged to a point where Greene could stand it no longer, and this began before he met Vivien. Clearly Greene himself thought it a disturbing inheritance: ‘Miserableness is like a small germ I’ve had inside me as long as I can remember. And sometimes it starts wriggling. And sometimes that wriggle coincides with a time when we are apart & there’s some small misunderstanding on my side. And every time it’s baulked …’29

  In his youth his depressions assumed a terrible magnitude, and he was acutely aware of the symptoms (see Chapter 15). In his story, ‘The End of the Party’, the boy Francis is afraid of going to a party because ‘they’ll make [him] hide in the dark and [he’s] afraid of the dark.’ The boy knew he would scream and scream and scream. Greene recorded in his diary the occasion when James Joyce’s daughter, later insane, said that if she were asked once more if she was Joyce’s daughter, she would scream and scream and scream. She was then asked – and would not stop screaming.

  On other occasions Greene’s notion of Hilary Trench seems less severe and is more in line with seeking both an escape from intolerable restlessness and also new experiences to use for creative purposes: ‘It seems ridiculous to think I can lop off a bit of me, which had been growing for two years in a month or two. And if I’m ungrateful to you, I’m ungrateful to H.T. too. It was no good writing about things, unless I experienced them first. Then I could never keep my depression long, because I could simply go off by myself in cheerful egoism, thinking of no one else … & come back with a huge joy & appetite at finding myself still alive. And even if I was out always for copy …’30

  Using people (how does a creative writer avoid that?) troubled Vivien, and Greene, as the following note suggests: ‘your joke about H.T. and his copy … hit on something that does hurt me, the feeling that when I publish verse I’m making money out of you.’

  Greene’s reactions (wishing a loved one dead; striking out in a letter in an intolerable fashion; dreaming of suicide as a Catholic deliberately to harm the person who discovers it) are to be seen now as methods of escaping from the grip of despair coupled with the feeling that unless something drastic is done madness might follow: and any action is preferable, including suicide. From this point of view his adventure with Russian roulette and later his incessant travelling to inaccessible and often dangerous places, is not simply the desire to test himself (the uninspired weakling on the playing fields of Berkhamsted becomes the inspired adventurer off them) but to escape from a depressed condition: ‘& the bubble gets bigger, & bigger & I want, oh God, how I want to be dead, or asleep or blind drunk … so that I can’t think.’

  Greene was, then and now, a man of strong contrasting moods and when his depressions were upon him, he might well have succeeded in taking his life, as some of his friends expected him to do. Michael Meyer, the biographer of Ibsen and Strindberg, talked to me about this depressive side of Greene:

  I had never come across this black side of him until we went on our round-the-world trip together [in 1959] … but that can’t be true because I remember Edward Sack ville-West, and sitting with him in the billiard room … at the Savile Club. This would be in the early 50’s. Anyway, we were talking about Graham and I said to Edward – he’d known Graham for years – ‘What will Graham be like at such-and-such an age – 67 or 68?’ and Edward said, ‘Oh, he’ll have committed suicide by then.’31

  Greene himself admitted in a letter to Vivien: ‘I was never particularly in love with life.’ Even Greene imagery has a perverse quality to it in his letters. Speaking of coming to a decision on a certain course of action, he admits to being quite happy, ‘rather in the same way as the consumptive is happy, who can number the number of days he has to live.’32

  fn1 See here.

  fn2 See here.

  PART 5

  London

  20

  The Times

  The now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

  – JAMES JOYCE

  GRAHAM GREENE ARRIVED in London, thanking God that his time in Nottingham, where he had felt stranded on a muddy beach, miles from anywhere, was over.1 The fogs and snows of Nottingham were replaced by spring sunshine, which he frequently mentioned in letters – ‘The sun’s shining hard into my room’2 – and his lodgings in All Saints Terrace had been replaced by a good-sized bed-sitting room at 141 Albert Palace Mansions, Battersea Park. Even the landladies reflected the contrast. Mrs Coney, the sour widow in Nottingham, was superseded by Miss King, ‘old & fat & ugly’,3 but also ‘sweet’, far from melancholy, untidy, exuberant and absent-minded. Articles of furniture disappeared from his room towards the end of a month to reappear a week later; she had put them in hock to overcome a temporary difficulty.4 He wrote to his father to ask whether his mother could send him his deceased uncle’s evening dress: ‘Could … she send Uncle F.’s dinner jacket, trousers and waistcoat to me … I want to get alterations done & have them available for Friday night’5 – a strange request.

  He still had his two interdependent ambitions: to get a job, so that he would have enough money to marry Vivien, and though he had no definite expectations in London, there were possibilities. On 10 March he wrote to Vi
vien: ‘do you think I should be justified in asking a question of most vital importance, if I could show 12 guineas a week – about £650 a year?’ The concern with earning money was obsessive and in June he was writing, ‘I want [marriage] fearfully. When put in terms of sordid cash, it seems ridiculously simple.’6 On 19 July his calculations reveal some class distinctions, irritation and possibly the influence of Vivien’s mother: ‘I could marry a waitress on £400, R[aymond, his brother] can marry C[harlotte] on £500 … I can’t marry you under £600!’

  Quite suddenly, he did get a job, though after an initial disappointment. He arrived at Albert Palace Mansions to find a letter from the appointments manager of The Times saying he had been asked to recommend someone for an opening on a London weekly, and he thought this would suit Greene. Alas, the paper turned out to be the Methodist Guardian – the one weekly, as he wrote to Vivien, from John Bull to the Spectator, which was hardly suitable for a recent convert to Catholicism. But he was determined to find work and went to see Robert Lynd and afterwards the manager of the Daily News, Hugh Jones, with whom he hit it off – ‘Not only his face but his voice was familiar’ – and Jones promised to speak to his Night Editor,7 whom Greene saw that night. ‘He’s the generalissimo of sub-editors,’ he wrote to Vivien, but added, ‘I hardly have hope yet though.’8 But the next day he sent her the following telegram:

  GOOD NEWS PLEASE BE PUNCTUAL DARLING 14367

  The news was good indeed – he had been offered what he had been seeking all along, a post with The Times. A letter from the appointments manager majestically declared: ‘You will join the sub-editorial staff of The Times on one month’s trial as from tomorrow, March 10.’ His salary was to be ‘limited to a weekly sum of £5’, and the letter ended loftily: ‘If you show promise at the end of that period of being suitable your services will be retained.’9 Greene wrote to his mother: ‘The Times is really a marvellous piece of good fortune! My hours are 4 to 11, so I shall be in bed by midnight.’10 And he also explained the reason for his change of fortune: ‘Apparently the secret of why they are taking on an extra sub-editor in each department of The Times is that they are going to revert to the Northcliffe system of a five day week.’ Referring to the allowance his father had been making him at Oxford and in Nottingham, and which he would no longer need, he wrote to Vivien: ‘I had a sweet letter from my father yesterday. I suppose it must be cheering to increase your income by about £250 which he has done.’11

  Greene’s luck was not limited to his appointment with The Times. In a passage in the typescript of A Sort of Life which did not appear in the printed version, he records other offers. Apparently he had not only been accepted on trial as a sub-editor by The Times in the first week of March but also by the Daily Telegraph and the very next day by the Daily Chronicle. It was all due to his having offered himself to several papers at the same time: ‘All the doors at which I had knocked in vain six months before flew open, simply because I had spent three [four] months on the Nottingham Journal,’12 ‘Who’d have believed a month ago’, he wrote to Vivien, ‘that I should be turning down as not good enough a trial on the Telegraph!!!’13 On 1 April he wrote to her: ‘It’s very amusing but the London papers are almost running after me!!! I got a letter last night from the Daily News offering me a job! So I shall now have politely to refuse two papers!!!’ It was the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, who, instead of rebuking him, advised him to ‘turn down The Telegraph’ and told him how to word ‘his tactful rejection … without bringing in The Times who are on friendly terms with them’. There are two minor inaccuracies in the excised passage from A Sort of Life – it was not the Daily Chronicle but the Daily News which made him an offer and it was not the day after the Telegraph offer but a month later.

  In any case, it was a remarkable business and a credit to his persistence and personality, for four months on the Nottingham Journal could surely not have brought about this state of affairs alone, and his referees could not have been too influential. They were Frank Roscoe of the Education Outlook, Kenneth Bell, his tutor at Balliol and F. F. Urquhart (Sligger), the Dean of Balliol. Only Urquhart’s reference has survived in The Times’s archives and it is not impressive: ‘H.G. Greene [is] one of our young men anxious to have an interview with you. I don’t know him very well but he is certainly an able fellow with a very distinct gift [‘gift’ is crossed out and replaced by ‘power’] of writing. I think too that he would be able to write quickly and effectively.’ Certainly Kenneth Bell would have written most forcefully in Greene’s favour. To Vivien, Greene suggested that his being a Catholic helped: ‘Everything seems to be progressing, dear heart, since I became a Catholic – & I don’t believe that it’s only a coincidence’.fn1

  Greene had such phenomenal persistence that he was bound to land a sub-editing job in London. Moreover, he intended writing in his spare time and in this way increasing his meagre earnings. Geoffrey Dawson told him during his interview that the best plan was for Greene to sub-edit and to write in his free hours, adding that most people didn’t take advantage of their leisure. Reporting to Vivien, Greene added, ‘I didn’t point out that other people hadn’t got the Motive.’14

  On his very first day at The Times he began a campaign to earn an extra three guineas a week – a large sum in those days. ‘In the pursuit of reviews,’ he told Vivien, ‘I’ve written to the Spectator, have got an intro to the Observer, & directly I have a free moment I shall go round & collect some more books from the New Statesman. It ought not to be hard to attain it, when I’m on the spot, & can go & seize books in person. I had another little cheque from the Lit. Supp. this morning.’15

  There were disappointments in his search to find enough money on which to marry: ‘I don’t get my full salary for a year – then it’s nine guineas a week (£492), & after another year it becomes ten a week (£546 a year). I shall sweat hard & try & pick up before the year’s out, a job or jobs on weeklies to supply three guineas a week – because twelve guineas (£655 a year) would be worth considering.’ Is it personal pique with the system that makes him offer Vivien an unexpected freedom if the right financial conditions are met by another?

  But, you do understand, don’t you that I can’t & don’t expect you to tie yourself for that time – a year or eighteen months or even, God forbid, two years … if you ever feel the weeniest bit inclined to marry someone else, who’s got the ready money – do it. Darling, money’s a hateful thing …16

  In June he was writing: ‘Agreed that £50 a month is what we want. By either March or April I shall (touch wood) have £42 a month. And in the interval I’ve got to somehow make sure of that small difference! We won’t be beaten.’17

  Given his obsessive love for Vivien, it is interesting at this point to go back to that telegram he sent her – GOOD NEWS PLEASE BE PUNCTUAL DARLING 14367 – as it illustrates the side of his character which could be involved in secrecy in the middle of intense mental and physical activity – an extension of his broadcast directed secretly at Gwen Howell. The mixture is the same and suggests a man capable of and delighting in running at the same time the public life and the intensely private. The numerals 14367 are part of a love-code. Each number indicates the number of letters in a word, thus 143 stands for ‘I love you’ and 14367 for ‘I love you always darling’. The purpose behind the code was not simply a matter of secrecy, but of economy. As he wrote to Vivien on 10 January 1926: ‘How wonderful our code is. I was able to send you “I love you always darling” for 1d. That’s the heart not getting in the way of the head.’ Simple as it was, the code was not always easily understood and on one occasion he had to explain to Vivien that the numbers 7 and 5 stood for ‘darling heart’. He used the code even on the back of envelopes (understood by the receiver though not by anyone else).

  But their secret code went beyond numerals. On 17 February 1927 he wrote to her:

  Isn’t it fine how a private code between us grows quite naturally & unintentionally – star [kiss] & leaf & so on. Soo
n we shall be able to have the most scandalous conversations in the most public place & no one be any the wiser. It opens endless possibilities of drawing-room games. Next time we are at Berkhamsted, at tea, surrounded by staid people, I shall make scandalous suggestions & express scandalous desires to you in a cold, collected fashion across the table, everyone will wonder why on earth you are blushing.

  He was to make use of this notion of a secret code during the early part of the Second World War. When working for the Ministry of Information he wrote a story called ‘The News in English’, which appeared in June 1940. A slight story, it deals with an Englishman accused of being a traitor after being captured by the Germans. Like the famous Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce), he read over German radio biased accounts of allied defeats and the success of German air-raids on Britain, but listening to these broadcasts his wife recognises that he was using a code to tell an entirely different story, attempting to give the British authorities valuable information. She goes to see a Colonel in the War Office to explain:

  If he was away from me and he telephoned ‘The fact of the matter is’ always meant, ‘this is all lies, but take the initial letters which follow …’ Oh, Colonel, if you only knew the number of unhappy week-ends I’ve saved him from – because, you see, he could always telephone to me, even in front of his host.18

  ‘I was happy on The Times,’ wrote Greene in A Sort of Life, ‘and I could have remained happy there for a lifetime’, but he adds, significantly, ‘if I had not in the end succeeded in publishing a novel.’19 The basic urge of his talent was there underlying the present security of a job.

  In the beginning he was contented: ‘The Times is certainly pleasanter than the N[ottingham] J[ournal],’ he wrote to Vivien. ‘It’s a change to be surrounded by University people. Though I feel rather like a junior who has found his way into the 6th by accident!’20 It must have been a true comparison for him for he was younger than those he was working with. The usual age for journalists coming to London after experience in the provinces was twenty-four, and to Vivien he had written, ‘if I do manage The Times at 21 and a half I shall have a good start.’21 And to his mother, with some exaggeration: ‘I feel terribly young with two or three exceptions of people about 24–25, everyone is going grey & slightly bald!’22 The facilities alone were more attractive than those at the Nottingham Journal – no longer fish and chips in newspaper but a canteen. Joyfully he wrote to Vivien, ‘at 8 we have a whole hour off for dinner & we either go out or have dinner in the Mess, or what’s better the Canteen, where the workmen have it – very clean, nice white table cloths, flowers etc. & where it would be hard, owing to the limits of human appetites, to eat a dinner costing more than 1s.3d!! About 5 one can telephone down & have tea & cake brought up.’23