The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  Even before the strike ended, life began to return to normal and it was possible to go ‘into the Tivoli and [hear] Paul Whiteman’s Band. And they began playing “On Top of the World”.’ But his special constable duty continued, and he was now bored by it: ‘The special constabling terribly dull so far. Victoria’s a too respectable district. This morning from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. I was guarding (with others!) a petrol dump on the embankment by Vauxhall bridge. It’s really extraordinarily tiring walking up & down fifty yards of road for four hours.’fn2, 20

  On the day the strike broke, Greene was writing to Vivien: ‘Apparently the betting in the City is 5-1 on the strike being over by Saturday. Oh it would be glorious – like a big hot bath after a long walk.’ But it wasn’t glorious. Life returned to normal without excitement or the prospect of danger. He had pulled his weight for The Times and The Times recognised this. Some of his colleagues had slipped away at 2 a.m. in the morning – who could blame them – but Greene had stuck it out and often saw the dawn rise. His three months’ trial period had been made superfluous by the strike. He was accepted now and he received, as did others, a gift from the management of a silver match-box.

  Colonel Maude told me that the inscription on each match-box was Ictus meus utilis esto. The significance of the Latin tag lay in the interpretation given to it: ‘Let my strike be a useful one.’ For the strikers it had been a disaster. Miners in the Northumberland and Durham coalfields had their wages reduced to levels lower than they had known for a decade. There was a bitter irony in their popular strike slogan: ‘Not a penny off the pay: not a second on the day.’

  The boredom of working on The Times – the daily tedium which now seemed to stretch into the future – returned:

  I’m going out to buy various necessities of life, & then I’m going for a walk, & then I’m going to have lunch, & then do a bit of work, & then go to the office & so ad infinitum, or rather for another sixty years according to my hand.fn3 Only after another forty I suppose the office would drop out & a round of golf or a sleep at the Club would take its place. One of those cheering prospects one gets occasionally!21

  In July he spoke of unbearable monotony without Vivien and the mechanical routine he was following:

  Darling … it’s wet & unsummery & miserable to-day, altogether suitable for a London that has no you in it. I must put on a macintosh & go out & buy some stamps. If I write to you any more I shall go depressing & pessimistic, because the ache’s getting bad. Things always seem so unbearably monotonous & routine-like when you aren’t on the horizon. Even the time when one isn’t at work goes by routine, letter, post office, Episode, lunch, bus, work.22

  This sense of ennui has recurred throughout Greene’s life. Of course, the missing factor in the Vivien years was Vivien: ‘I dare say the dentist will fill up some of the time we are away from each other – I almost welcome him. This week with Joseph [Macleod], Christopher [Isherwood], dentist & an aunt, will fill up. It doesn’t … stop the ache.’23 Again in July he is having second thoughts about journalism: ‘I suppose I must be off to the Times. I wonder, if I lose you, whether I shall ever stick at journalism. More than doubtful I think.’24

  fn1 In A Sort of Life (p. 126) he explained: ‘We had been up the whole previous night while the multigraph machines turned out the famous single sheet of May 5, 1926, Number 44263 … price twopence … the single sheet finally managed to include … news of the strike, a weather report, broadcasting, sport, Stock Exchange, and a Court Page of five lines.’

  fn2 ‘I don’t think I’m looking a wreck, darling!! I’m no longer doing very long hours. I turn up at office about 10 p.m., get away about 4.30 a.m., & constabularise 2 p.m.–6 p.m. Only two hours over the eight hour day.’

  fn3 If Greene had had his hand read as this seems to suggest, the prediction would seem to indicate that he would live until 1986.

  22

  ‘The beastly Episode’

  Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

  – GEORGES SIMENON

  IN FEBRUARY 1974, I was drinking with Graham Greene in a pub in Piccadilly. Was he, I asked, still a Catholic? He thought he probably was not. And later, on my asking him why he had taken to writing, he answered that it had been an accident: ‘There seemed nothing else to do … It has become a habit and it’s too late to change now.’

  There was no emotional charge behind either of these answers to what were, after all, crucial questions. The diffidence of phrasing and expression belied the fact that he was a controversial Catholic and a very successful writer, just as his amiable, good-mannered surface belied that tiny smile on his lips and his unflinching, though watery, disturbingly calm blue eyes. ‘Everybody in literary London in the 1940s knew Graham Greene,’1 Walter Allen, the novelist and critic, told me, as if there was nothing more to be known – or perhaps nothing more that could be easily known?

  As a shy person, Greene has an instinctive reticence, reinforced by breeding and up-bringing and later deliberately developed into a protective shield. It is an indication of the closeness of his relationship with Vivien that at one time his trust in her allowed him to reveal his most secret thoughts and ambitions – he could ‘talk or write’ to her ‘about things [he] could never do to any of [his] people’.2 ‘I blush when I think of the things I tell you,’ he confessed. ‘Things, wants, wishes and so on, that I’d be utterly ashamed of anyone else hearing.’3 Particularly, his confessions to Vivien show that rather than there having been nothing else for him to do than be a writer, the desire to be one was a secret passion with him: ‘To other people I go to tremendous lengths to convince them that I don’t want to write, am not interested in writing, am rather bored by poetry and so on. It’s a poor compliment to bore you with things I don’t bore other people with.’4 He described the nature of his passion: ‘I wish I didn’t have this ridiculous longing to publish things. I have always a futile and sentimental hunger to have at least a couple of volumes of verse and a couple of novels published, enough to force people to make some sort of an estimate of their value, if one was killed or something. It’s ridiculous. It’s not ambition in the proper sense. Only an utterly futile amount.’5

  As well as asking her to burn his confession, he also indicated the further lengths he was prepared to go to to protect his secret ambition. When he was on the point of joining the B.A.T., he wrote: ‘I do want to write well fearfully badly, & I don’t mind telling you that. But rather than say anything to any of my family I’d go into the B.A.T. & depart to China.’6

  His desire to write and publish had several stimuli, however. One was so as not to fall victim to the apparent contentment of his colleagues in Room 2 at The Times with their mundane and modest way of life – something which made him fear for his own future:

  Mystery, darling. Can you unravel it? How is it that all these sub-editors between 40 and 50 years old, earning if they are lucky 700 a year, seem perfectly happy – attending to their small garden at Streatham in their spare time, sending their children to school etc. &, I’m quite certain, feeling no acute disappointment with things. Cheerful thought.7

  Hopefully he asked her: ‘Do the people who would hate it [the lifestyle of his colleagues], always manage to avoid it & become automatically successful in one way or another?’8

  Another fear arose from his mistaken belief that he did not have long to live, though he spoke humorously about this:

  Whilst on morbid subjects, it may be an inducement to you to marry me, to know that as long as I can remember I’ve had a certain instinct that I should be killed before I was thirty-two. I can’t remember when I wasn’t certain. Like the Apostolic Succession, it fades into the mists. So you wouldn’t have such a terrible time. Safer really than with an old man of sixty who might live for over 20 years.9

  If he had died before the age of thirty-two, he would have met his maker in 1936. Perhaps because of Vivien’s response to this, the date of death was revised and included Vivien
(though this could not have implied a suicide pact since the letter’s tone was still humorous) when, writing of the strength his love would have twenty years on, he suddenly recalls: ‘Oh, I forgot. We’d agreed to be dead by then.’10 Responding to a further revision of the date of their dying he comments, significantly: ‘Darling you know I don’t promise to be killed or something in 1956. If I’ve succeeded in getting notorious by that time I don’t suppose I should want to. So you’d have to go alone, darling, if you insisted on going.’

  Most of this is play – he had given up Russian roulette because of his love for Vivien and he expresses no real desire for death during 1926 or, indeed, until after his marriage when depressions and thoughts of suicide did return – at least in the form of his risking death during future travels. But at this time he was certainly driven by the fear that he might die early without making a name as a writer: ‘I can’t afford to waste time. It does consciously lead me into making bad mistakes, because of a sense of hurry. Like publishing “Babbling April”.’ On the other hand, he felt that ‘without that knowledge’ (that he could not afford to waste time) he would never have written anything. The same sense of the need to hurry ‘was fearfully vexing and delaying sometimes too. Because I want to finish the “Episode” and while I’m doing it I feel I ought to be getting on with a volume of verse, and with my pet biography, and with my blank verse play … They all get in each other’s way in a sort of hustle.’11

  A hustle it certainly was and driven by the demons, time and ambition, his life had a frenetic quality, physically and mentally. On the one hand, as the above remarks show, he was anxious to produce more works of different kinds, and he was attracted to writing about writers who seemed to have had similar difficulties to himself. The ‘pet biography’ he refers to is probably a life of the Irish poet, George Darley, which he had first considered in 1925. In 1929 his first substantial contribution to the London Mercury was an essay on Darley, reprinted in his Collected Essays forty years later. Darley wrote that underwater dirge: ‘Wash him bloodless, smoothe him fair/Stretch his limbs and sleek his hair/Dingle-dong, the dead bells go/Mermen swing them to and fro.’ And his Nepenthe, Greene thought, was one of the most remarkable poems of the nineteenth century. He wrote to Vivien from the sub-editors’ room of the Nottingham Journal that Darley had ‘such a bad stammer that he was afraid of meeting new people, an itch to write, & yet no real confidence in himself at all, so that he clung pathetically to the least praise. His letters are extraordinarily tragic. He suffered from fearful headaches, & intestinal illnesses of an undignified kind & died at about 50 [he committed suicide] … Time for hot chips, darling.’ At this time, Greene was himself unconfident: ‘I should find it easier to turn Latin into a crossword puzzle than into verse,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘I can’t write verse nowadays.’

  The difficulties of Darley were Greene’s difficulties too, despite his prodigious efforts. There was the doubt of one’s own abilities, for Darley wrote: ‘You may ask could I not sustain myself on the strength of my own approbation? But it might be only my vanity, not my genius, that was strong’, and Greene stressed: ‘Darley was not a man with the courage to stand against silence. Attack might have made him aggressive, silence only made him question his own powers, the most fatal act an artist can commit.’12

  The fin de siècle poet, John Davidson, also interested him as a subject of biography, and for similar reasons – ‘his suicide at about fifty seems so extraordinary. As he’d got through so much, one would have imagined he’d have settled down to the rest. Besides a man who can write a long blank verse tragedy and call it “Smith” must have genius!’13 But he discovered that Davidson had put an embargo on anyone writing his biography.

  Perhaps with this model in mind, he considered reviving poetic drama by writing a blank verse play set in the sub-editors’ room of a provincial newspaper: ‘I shall report the ordinary conversation of various people here, with the slight metrical twist necessary, leaving it colloquial. The Irish Sports Subeditor will act the Elizabethan jester modernised, with modern “doubtful” stories substituted for the old type.’14 An unlikely enterprise. Uncertainty about his ability and ultimate success must have turned his mind to Darley and Davidson. He admitted that about four times a year a mood comes upon him and he feels, ‘with absolute certainty that some day I shall write something worthwhile’, but then, ‘I make up for the transient feeling by my certainty all the rest of the time that I never shall. I don’t know why it comes on.’

  ‘Genius is powerfully shy,’ he wrote to Vivien and came to the conclusion that what he had was a ‘hard working talent’15, which brought him to stress the importance of the regular practice of his art; and though he was probably placing too great a value on her talents, he recommended this to her also: ‘It’s much more important that you should practise regularly. You are a genius, whatever you may say, and therefore it’s of infinite importance that you should practise. Whether you want to or not. It ought to be a duty with you. Dear one, I shouldn’t mind short letters to me if I felt that you were using that time writing.’16

  He put his own advice into practice, forcing himself throughout 1926 to write each day, however busy he might be. Although in March he ‘gave warning’ to Vivien that he would not ‘write one single word on [their] wedding day & on the honeymoon’,17 we know that he did his daily stint on the day he was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church, and on 27 February 1926 he stopped in the middle of a letter to Vivien to write his minimum before lunch.

  In his letters to her there are constant references to the number of words written and the quotas fulfilled or excelled: ‘If only I could keep up my 500 minimum, which is not really exacting, I’d have the Episode done by June. If I can’t get that published, I’ll never have the energy to try again.’18 ‘I stayed in to supper & worked. I was very virtuous & did 1200 words of Episode & a review. I can’t conceive of that time a year & a half ago, when I did 2000 of a shocker every day! I deserved the cramp I got!’19 ‘I’ve … worked this afternoon. It came fearfully slowly. It took me an hour & a half to do five hundred words, & then after tea I finished off the thousand in no time. Words came in a rush.’20

  Many authors write more than 500 words a day, but with Greene his minimum was to become a duty and a daily discipline. His established habit of writing this number – not 501 or 499 – shows in his manuscripts where he has counted each word, and noted the total at the point at which he stopped. In July 1926, having written another 1,000 words of ‘The Episode’, he stopped ‘right in the middle of the longed for murder’. ‘Dearest old thing’, he answered Vivien’s query, ‘No, the murder’s wet, though quiet. A Johnnie stabbed in the back while working a Punch & Judy show.’21

  That he should have been able to stop at an exciting climax suggests an astonishing emotional control – a tap turned off at will. Moreover he had, some four months earlier, determined on the murder and the point in the novel at which it would take place: ‘There’s going to be a rather nice scene in another 20,000 words where someone’s stabbed in the back, while working a Punch and Judy show in the street.’22 His reason for placing the murder at a Punch and Judy show was that, just before leaving Nottingham, he had stopped in the market place ‘to watch Punch hang Jack Ketch … It gives a slight touch of ancientness to the too modern Nottingham.’23

  Sometimes he terrified himself with a statistical account of a life-time of writing: ‘I should work seven hours a day. After all one can’t do it all through one’s life. Terrifying thought, 500 words for another, say 40 years. 7,300,000 words, not allowing for leap years. Darling!! I should get a cramp! That’s haunting me a little now, as yesterday my arm began to ache. I do want to finish the Episode before the next bout.’24

  Such discipline and determination resulted in pressure and anxiety which is often revealed in his letters:

  To-day I’ve got to get all the way up to the Temple to lunch with George Whitman, who’s up for a Law Exam. & after that I�
��ve got to see a tailor, & then it will be time for the office. And meanwhile there’s the beastly Episode, & if I don’t work on that, conscience will say ‘How can you expect to win Vivienne, if you don’t work for her?’

  It’s already quarter to twelve, and I’ve got to telephone to somebody at 12, & I haven’t touched the Episode yet, & how I’ll get my thousand words done I don’t know.25

  Like the little girl who could not stop dancing in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, ‘The Red Shoes’, Greene could not (and still cannot) stop writing and being active.fn1

  From September 1925 to July 1926, ‘The Episode’ was a burden to Greene. He was ‘sick to death of it’, ‘couldn’t get on with it’ – and yet his future hopes of success and of marrying Vivien had been invested in it. In his frustration he turned to ideas for other works and sent Vivien the first four chapters (which have long since disappeared) of a ‘shocker’ called ‘Queen’s Pawn’, and he was planning another novel and some short stories: