Everything Greene has written about this period suggests the pleasure of his years at The Times and the usefulness of the experience:
It seemed to me only too likely that I would not survive the period of trial, but finally the leisurely life of the home subeditors … calmed my nerves and I began to realize I was as safe as though I had entered the Civil Service. No one on The Times was ever known to be sacked or to resign. I remember with pleasure – it was a symbol of the peaceful life – the slow burning fire in the sub-editors’ room, the gentle thud of coals as they dropped one by one in the old black grate.24
Of his colleagues at The Times he admitted that no other group of men so planted themselves in his memory, nameless though they may have become: ‘Perhaps this is always the case with a young man’s first real job: the impression in the wax will never go quite so deep again.’25
The sub-editors worked on the first floor of the offices in Printing House Square where the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, had his room. He had an oval face ‘which reminded one of Thomas Cranmer, large, dark, unfriendly eyes’, but he had also a gift for immediately establishing a warm relationship.26 Room 2 was the home sub-editors’; Room 3 the messenger boys’; Room 4 the Foreign Editor’s. In Room 2 there were always ten to a dozen sub-editors at work, with one or two away each night. Apart from Greene, all but two are now dead.
The deputy chief sub-editor was Colonel Maude. He admired Greene as a young man, remembered him clearly and kept throughout his life a file on Greene’s meteoric career. Greene describes him in A Sort of Life as ‘a man of great courtesy, very tall and slim with a soft blond moustache’ and when I met him at ninety-one he still stood tall and straight, his hair white, a beautifully mannered courteous man, friendly-eyed and shrewd: he talked excitedly of that period over half a century ago. In Room 2 there were Buxton, Gardiner and Jacob de Boinod. According to Maude, Boinod got a Rugger blue in spite of severe war injuries (he had a silver plate in his head). Without remembering his name, Greene recalls in A Sort of Life the youngest sub-editor, apart from himself, who was so fastidious he could eat nothing touched by human hand. In the canteen he would only take a cup of tea and Greene would tempt him with a tin of sardines. Greene connected his fastidiousness with his responsibility for the Court page. Leslie Smith, a contemporary of Greene, suggested this might have been a young man called Stokes who was known for his fastidiousness and curious feeding habits: ‘He was plump & drank a lot of olive oil to keep him so – he thought it gave him ‘presence’.27
Another survivor, G. L. Pearson, recalled arguments Greene had with Stokes: ‘About that time, Greene was a rather new and very ardent Catholic, and one of his Room 2 colleagues curiously enough was an equally ardent and more bigoted Southern Irish Protestant. Naturally they argued that if he should happen to sub-edit material which had a pro-Protestant, or in the other case pro-Catholic, flavour, he would slash it ruthlessly.’28 Stokes left The Times for the Church. Soon after Greene became a sub-editor, Pearson moved from Room 2 but he used to meet Greene in the canteen at supper and he recalled him as immature, ‘an undergraduate flapping his wings rather than the young journalist.’29 But Greene’s keenness won him the friendship of his colleagues and he was quickly accepted.
They were all under the eye of the chief sub-editor, George Anderson, who died in 1951 aged seventy-three. During his first week Greene hated him but before three years had passed he grew almost to love him: ‘A small elderly Scotsman with a flushed face and a laconic humour, he drove a new subeditor hard with his sarcasm. Sometimes I almost fancied myself back at school again, and I was always glad when five-thirty came, for immediately the clock marked the hour when the pubs opened he would take his bowler hat from the coat-rack and disappear for thirty minutes to his favourite bar.’30 Like Greene himself, Anderson’s rather austere exterior hid, according to his obituary, a ‘persistent shyness strangely blended with a real capacity for genial companionship.’31 This hard-bitten Scots journalist was something of a martinet, but also a poet and an understanding man ready to encourage good writing. It pleased him that Greene, whenever there was a lull in Room 2, was always writing.32
It was a happy, busy, hopeful time for Greene – he liked his landlady and his sunny bed-sitter and the unexpected arrival of friends from his Oxford days: ‘Yesterday, I dashed off to Charing X Rd. to try & trace a word of three letters for a Crossword for my mother, & when I got back I found Macleod & went & had lunch with him at the Blue Cockatoo, and then it was time for the office, & the reviews still to be done.’33 It was work and play and freedom until early afternoon: ‘I’ve got to write to the Litt. Supp. & do my minimum & have a shave & see a tailor & have lunch with Robert Scott’.34 At night, when he had a free evening from The Times, he went to see musical revues: ‘to Mr Pepys last night … a fragile imitation of [John] Gay without his guts and the 17th century laid on with a trowel. The girl who’s succeeded Isabel Jeans as Nell Gwynne, was perfectly entrancing. And there was one song, sung in the puppet show in the last act, Henry VIII, his last wife, & a fortune teller, about his five previous wives … & all the chorus, which was simply glorious.’35
With seeing these revues comes a longing to escape from refined and proper behaviour:
My aunt ‘treated’ me to Riverside Nights. Mr Nigel Playfair trying to give an artistic revue & only succeeding in being too terribly ‘refayned’ … One longed thirstily for a little vulgarity … one yearned for the orchestra to leave off pseudo 18th century sugar & burst into jazz, & one ached for the cast to throw off 90% of their superfluous clothing, & start dancing uproariously with a great show of legs … But they never did. We gave a shout of joy when we came out into the vulgar blare of Hammersmith, & heard a party of drunks, singing with real spirit, & not with refinement, about ‘the Ukelele Lady’.36
April saw an attempt on the life of the Italian Fascist leader Mussolini: ‘Wasn’t it fun about Mussolini?’ he asked Vivien. ‘But what a ghastly disgrace for Lord Ashbourne to have a sister who’s as bad a shot as all that.’37
*
Greene’s letters to Vivien show that outside the slow and secure hours at The Times, the frenzy of ambition and activity which were to win him Vivien went on – but there was still some uncertainty about her commitment to him. His love for her was the foundation on which he was building his future, but perhaps his ardent sexuality strengthened her reluctance to marry.
A ‘train’ letter to her, written as he returned from a weekend visit to Oxford, gives some indication of his state of mind. On the one hand he quotes lines from Rupert Brooke which presumably refer to one aspect of the weekend they had spent together: ‘When two mouths thirsty each for each/find slaking/And agony’s forgot & hushed the crying’. On the other hand, while he was writing this letter, he was afflicted by a severe attack of hay-fever (from which he suffered appallingly at this time), but he attributes the delay of the onset of this attack to Vivien’s presence: ‘I have just let off a sneeze & hay-fever is again taking sway. I should never have believed that I could have sat in grass in June & not suffered for it. I believe if one arm was tight round you it would be possible to put the other into a flower without feeling anything. I am now sneezing after nearly every other sentence!’
His passion for statistics is brought to bear on their love, its progress and, possibly, its difficulties: ‘I’ve just been making hasty calculations. In one fortnight’s honeymoon I should have more hours of you than the average six months now. Does that fill you with terror? It fills me with joy. It would be lovely to be able to squander hours much more easily than we dare minutes now.’ And he plots the growing intensity of their love with historical markers (with perhaps an echo of Donne):
I love you more than I did last April at The Ship, more than last May at Malton, more than June at Blenheim, more than July on the thunder evening, more than August in the Capitol [cinema] or in the wood at Didcot, more than September at the Golden Cross, more than October in the backwoods, more than Nov
ember at Nottingham, & December at Hampstead & January at Oxford [railway] platform, & February at Nottingham. And I know that in April I shall love you more even than at Berkhamsted in March.38
On the first anniversary of their meeting, in a letter dated precisely 17th March and written at 9.30, Greene recorded the fact that this time last year he did not know what Vivien looked like, knowing only that she existed: ‘But in one hour from now she lodged herself in my thought, but the lodger now is a permanent tenant. In one hour my restlessness began.’ He was ‘blinded by the sun’ of Vivien. He considers that he might save up and be able to buy a car but recalls that he would always want to travel with Vivien in taxis because ‘You are wonderful in taxis … you were miraculously beautiful on the way to the theatre.’ In what sense wonderful? Was Greene allowed to be somewhat sexually daring? This is doubtful since the letter’s following sentence says only, ‘the finger’s still feeling proud & dazzled & distrait which you kissed suddenly in the theatre.’39
He wishes that he were a Theosophist so that by accepting the belief in reincarnation he might believe in the ‘chances of a dozen lives’ with her. In his dreams he would see Vivien with a look on her face which ‘would have made St Anthony fall’ or ‘convert Brigham Young to monogamy’, thus etherialising her into a kind of goddess of orthodox Christian marriage. On receiving a telegram from her, he would delay reading it until he had gone to bed and then read it by match-light and go to sleep on it. The words of her telegram were as a ‘kind of light on the prow of the boat when we dive into the dark.’fn2 Also before falling asleep he would think concentratedly of Vivien in Oxford and admit, ‘I come to you every night, dear love, about midnight.’40 He dreamt of finding his way to Vivien, asleep in her room: ‘I’m kneeling by your bed, hoping that you’ll wake up. I’ve given you two tentative stars but you’ve only wriggled a little. You are looking very lovely.’ And he sees her again as the Sleeping Beauty in a letter which, for 1926, is rather daring since he is imagining a post marriage incident, which interestingly has a certain ‘nursery’ flavour to it and suggests they would occupy separate bedrooms:
Darling, if we were married, sometimes perhaps I should find you awake when I came in, & we could sit & have bread & milk in front of the fire, you in your dressing gown & fluffy slippers, & you’d get drowsier & drowsier & presently you’d go fast asleep. And I should pick you up (& there’d be no protests, because you wouldn’t know) & carry you into your room & put you into your bed. And in the morning you’d wake up & wonder whether you’d dreamed the bread & milk part!!41
A performance of Shaw’s St Joan suggests parallels with Vivien:
After every week end there are always two or three startlingly beautiful moments that I remember always, when the rest has become a blur of happiness. Like certain moments in St Joan – when she first unsheaths her sword in the court, & when she’s deserted in the Cathedral, & the final curtain. I’m sorry always to drag in St Joan, but she always reminds me of you.fn3, 42
Often, there is an element of hyperbole in his wooing which again suggests the wit of Donne: ‘I’m packing such a lot of love into this short letter, the envelope will bulge!’ (undated letter); ‘Darling, you are the most beautiful living thing there is now, not excluding tulips, race horses, irises, Alsatian wolfhounds, Isabel Jeans & cherry blossom’ (11 May 1926); ‘… you seem to get more and more beautiful every day. It’s quite frightening – as though the firmament might be no longer able to hold you & crack right across’ (7 April 1926). The apotheosis is reached when he sees her as the person who has moulded him:
Except for the joint work of my people in producing me, you are much the most responsible person for the present me. You’ve chipped me about & added & taken away in the most wholesale & reckless fashion. I’m quite muddled myself not knowing what’s me & what’s you.43
Opposed to this adulation are some genuine fears that their relationship might break down because of Vivien’s reluctance to marry and his own impatience for that consummation:
I just consider life some years hence with no you in it, & all this as a dim episode in the past. And that seems as impossible as imagining pigs flying. We’ve got too hopelessly mixed up with each other for anything short of death to untwist it all. Ergo if we are both alive we shall be together. Ergo since 1927 is the bounds of patience, somehow it’s going to be managed. So prepare to be sacrificed on the altar of matrimony.44
In late March, when he had been with The Times only a month, she raised the spectre of her entering a convent. He told her firmly that her letter was frightening and made him terrified of loving her knowing she had such thoughts, and knowing also that he did not count a farthing: ‘if you still have that at the back of your mind, it’s not fair simply to keep it dark. I don’t even see that it’s right that love of God should swamp out all feeling for other people … I love you more than anything in the world or outside it, but if that made it impossible for me to love anything else I should consider that my love for you was to be squashed. If you are contemplating going into some religious body you ought to tell me so as to give me a chance of forcing myself out of love as quickly as possible.’ In apology for this outburst he added, ‘Dogs always snap when woken up suddenly’,45 and on the flap of an envelope he writes: ‘It’s almost pitch dark outside – a good setting for the most disagreeable letter I’ve ever written you!’
Part of the trouble was Vivien’s fear of marriage, which he sensed: ‘Then Christmas almost on top of us. The New Year, March – a decent salary for me & at last a ring for you (I shall feel you are really engaged to me then) & then I shall begin to keep a look out for a flat – & you’ll begin to get frightened & trepidations.’46 He also knew – or thought he did – the reason for her reluctance, which was the failure of her mother’s disastrous runaway marriage. He tried to calm her fears on that score: ‘Your mother’s bad shot was taken with her eyes open, wasn’t it? There was no disillusioning about it, as she was never in love with him, was she?’47
But Vivien’s reluctance stemmed from a distaste for or reluctance to embark upon the sexual side of marriage. At the time of his conversion, as we have seen, Greene offered to enter into a unique form of marriage – a celibate one. Understandably, once he was properly engaged and once he felt he had at last made a fair start with his career, Greene began to marshal arguments in favour of the carnal side of marriage, of which Vivien had so real a fear. On 6 April Greene fired off a first salvo with a quotation from John Donne’s ‘Ecstasy’ which has always seemed so ready-made for persuading reluctant lovers: ‘Love’s mysteries in souls do grow/But yet the body is his book.’ They had been having an argument about material and spiritual love. Greene was now admitting that his love towards her was 50 per cent material and 50 per cent spiritual, and Vivien took fright, for earlier his feelings for her had been 70 per cent nonmaterial. Greene dealt with that fear firmly:
It seems to me the two kinds are inextricably mixed up. When I kiss you, it would be very wrong to call it a mere kiss of spiritual affection, & it would be equally wrong to call it a mere material pleasure. The first works through the other. I don’t think a love which did without those things would be a more spiritual one. It would be merely an unexpressed one. To misquote Browning ‘Soul helps flesh no more than flesh helps soul’ … all expression is more material than the thought. Just as the writing down of a poem is more material than just letting it run through the head. More material – not materialistic.
And I don’t see that you’ve got much cause to be frightened. You’ve instilled into me just sufficient of a sense of decency to see that you run no risk – that is to say that I should not run off with anyone else, even if I got the chance!!! My peccadilloes, darling shall be kept in Paris.48
It is apparent that to the strain of sexual frustration (which was inevitable since Vivien considered a physical relationship before marriage out of the question) was added the fear that this problem might never be resolved – even after marriage.
There is the possibility that only in Paris would he be able to indulge in sexual adventures, but in that material/spiritual argument about love he turned the tables easily – ‘people put an accent of slight scorn on “physical”, as if it’s a transient & less thing than the other. When really it’s a part of the other.’49 And learning of Vivien’s own thoughts which frightened her, he offers, among other things, insight into his own nature, and perhaps we can see here also the influence of Kenneth Richmond, his view that one should accept what one found within oneself and not be afraid of it:
Don’t be frightened of the dark you. It’s a very precious individual. I don’t know if what frightens you is that you find sometimes things, feelings, happenings that don’t seem connected with the mind. Is that it? If it is I’d argue that the part of the mind which one can watch working is the least valuable …
It’s much easier for me because I’ve never had a fixed philosophy & as long as I’ve been liable, so-to-speak, to such I’ve recognised the existence of the ‘dark’ side of myself & other people. And so when it comes it slips quietly into the place left for it. But you didn’t leave the poor thing a space, arguing cynically that all people – or at least all women – married for a variety of sensible, practical reasons, & men from animality. When there’s really no more connection with animality than the thin connection between an uneducated drunkard’s lewd scribble on a patch of wall & a Velasquez.50
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 37
