The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Your mind would be quite set at rest if you could see me lying like a large & lazy porpoise beneath unnecessary blankets, with a bored vacuity on my face, looking forward to the operation as a break in the monotony … Your lover for this side & tother side of eternity.5

  The Times was sensitive in dealing with its young sub-editor’s situation: the chief sub-editor sent down a young man from Room 2 to tell Greene that he was not to worry; he was promised six weeks’ leave with pay and the cashier promised to post his salary to him each week; it was also promised that after the operation his colleagues would take turns to visit him.

  He wrote daily to Vivien: on the day of his operation – ‘I’m feeling rather like an Egyptian mummy being swathed in disinfecting bandages! The condemned man made a good breakfast … Only seven more hours before the scaffold.’6 Since chloroform was to be used, he promised that he would go under thinking of her and he wrote her a poem, a poor piece, only a further indication of his romanticism and of his obsessional love for her. As the chloroform took effect, he tried to retain his vision of her, but finally lost it, and he made a vow: ‘But if I lose you trampled in the route,/Let me sleep on forever & be true/Than wake to find I had forgotten you.’

  The operation went without difficulty and two days later he was longing for the simple pleasures of life: ‘I am feeling quite wellish & am longing for some sausages & mashed [potatoes] – which I shan’t get’;7 he thanked Vivien for her prayers (‘how I value your Masses’); he asked her forgiveness for not writing the day after the operation (‘I only wrote a little letter on Tuesday & not at all on Wednesday. Forgive me … Anaesthetics, except plain gas, sometimes make me a bit illish’).

  If the poem is a disappointment, Greene’s fanciful letter is touching as he explains how he will persuade the authorities to allow Vivien to visit him:

  I shall have to malinger & say ‘I shall never get strong until I am fetched my heart’s desire.’ And they’ll say ‘What is his heart’s desire?’ & bring grapes & pears & oranges & other fruit. And I shall still malinger, saying ‘I want my heart’s desire’. And they’ll fetch me books – Shelley, Landor, Burns, Bridges, Hardy & Robert Browning, but I shall shake my head & say ‘I want my heart’s desire’. And they’ll go to Blackwell & say ‘Can we borrow Vivien for a week, because we think that Graham will malinger until he has her’. And when I can speak again out of a very deep & beautiful content, I shall say, ‘Why were you so long in finding my heart’s desire?’ And they’ll say ‘How could we guess you meant Vivien, when you asked merely for your heart’s desire, because we know that she is also your body’s desire & the desire of your mind & your lips & your eyes’. And I shall blink & say ‘Yes, you are right I’m sorry. You see I didn’t know you knew.’8

  He longed for her embraces and admitted that he would not be able to use force for fear of breaking his stitches – and how comic it was ‘being sewn up with brown cord like a sponge bag’.9

  By the 14th of the month he had the twelve cross-stitches taken out and the following day he felt feeble for the first time. Eight days later (22 October 1926) the bandages were removed and he commented upon the result: ‘I’ve cast off my bandages to-day, though my tummy looks rather like a Jacob’s ladder, the place where the stitches were not having disappeared yet.’ He then did a drawing of them:

  Being in hospital did not stop him writing reviews for the Glasgow Herald. He feared they might turn to someone else if he did not meet his deadlines. He complained that he was not reviewing well but then he was writing in pencil from his hospital bed. They were typed by Vivien and sent to Glasgow: ‘I don’t want to keep the G. H. waiting’, he wrote to her, ‘as I make about 10/- a week on them, which is not to be despised.’10 Greene did not admire his work for the Glasgow Herald. After thanking Vivien for having typed ‘all that review trash’, he went on to tell her that he did not need carbons: ‘I don’t care to see again the fruits of a servile slavery to Mammon.’ He need not have worried, for the Glasgow Herald soon decided to dispense with his services.

  He had visits from his numerous aunts, his mother, Vivien (who had to obtain permission to be away from Blackwells), his brother Raymond, and his old cronies, friends made for life, those original members of the Mantichorean Club – Joseph Gordon Macleod, George Whitemore, Robert Scott, and Braine-Hartnell. All brought him grapes and Scott brought him a volume of Rimbaud’s verse – Rimbaud except for about two poems struck him as ‘dull & overrated. Not to be compared with my French idol Verlaine.’11

  Recovering from what was thought to be a not too serious operation, he was soon observing the activities of the ward. Indeed on the day before the operation he told Vivien: ‘There’s a man here who says “What I do miss is my ole onions. Two or three I used to ’ave. Reglar. Every mornin’.”’ (3 October 1926). Three days afterwards he commented: ‘A new patient has come in with such a mountainous wife. I’m glad I’m not considering the project of a hill of a woman: “A penny a pound for Juliet/Twopence a pound for Margaret/Margaret was a queen/And only seventeen/So twopence a pound for Margaret/”’ (18 October 1926).

  There was also a plucky old man of 75 who had been in hospital for ten months. He had had two operations for cancer and was very weak, but as Greene told Vivien, ‘He’d upset your pessimistic views of matrimony … he’s worrying to get home – they keep on fobbing him off with “perhaps next week”? … He’d got his wife on his mind, wanting to get back to her. She was as old as him. Born in the house next door … [they] were at school together & had been married fifty years. This was the first time they’d ever been long apart. She … hadn’t been able to come & see him the last visiting day … He was afraid that she might die before he got back: “We’ve always wanted to go off in the same moment,” he added. I thought of you then. Seventeen grandchildren though! How they did breed in the past’ (19 October 1926). Then there was the emergency case – an ‘arm crushed & pulled out of its socket … & all the right side crushed’ (20 October 1926).

  But the watcher was afraid of being watched and could not kiss the photograph of Vivien he had at his bedside – ‘can’t in a room with nearly a dozen alas’ – and at night there was a light shining through the ward.

  In his autobiography he remembered what he states was the first death in the ward, though in fact it was the second – an old man dying of cancer of the mouth, ‘too old to join in the high jinks of the ward, the courtship of nurses, the teasings, the ticklings and the pinches,’ and ‘when the screens went up around his bed the silence in his corner was no deeper than it had always been.’12 He saw this as ‘inevitable fate’, the death of ‘a small boy with a broken leg’ he described to Vivien as contingency. After an operation he appeared to be all right, ‘Then about 8 the house surgeon on his round seemed to find his breathing almost non-existent. There was half an hour’s rush & scurry round his bed with oxygen apparatuses, an undignified scrambling for the tail end of his life & he was gone.’ But to him the terrible thing was the mother’s reaction:

  I’ve never seen any one with all their self-control gone before. She had to be supported in & she was calling out things at the top of her voice – what made it worse it was the sort of things people say on the cinema & which one had fondly imagined real life was free of – sentimental hackneyed things: ‘Why did you go without saying good bye to your mother?’ & ‘Royston, Royston’ (the ridiculous name seemed to make it worse) & ‘What shall I do without him?’ ‘Sister, sister, don’t tell me we’re parted.’ All in a sort of scream. It was ghastly lying in bed listening to it. Then they half carried her out.

  In A Sort of Life, he recalled how, in order to shut out the sound of the mother’s cries, the patients in the ward ‘lay with their ear-phones on, listening – there was nothing else for them to hear – to Children’s Hour. All my companions but not myself. There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer. I watched and listened. This was something which one day I might need.’13 This recollection of his attitude forty-f
ive years after the incident is confirmed by his letter to Vivien at the time – the splinter of ice was certainly there, but so also a sense of disgust with himself:

  Are people who write entirely & absolutely selfish, darling? Even though in a way I hated it yesterday evening – one half of me was saying how lucky it was – added experience – & I kept on catching myself trying to memorise details – Sister’s face, the faces of the other men in the ward. And I felt quite excited aesthetically. It made one rather disgusted with oneself. It really frightened me when the child went out & the old man was brought in for a delayed death. How haphazardly it seemed to happen.14

  The conclusion of this incident survives in the typescript of A Sort of Life though Greene deleted it. ‘When the parents had at last departed and the bed and the body had been wheeled away, the nurse began to clean with ether the other tables in the ward, rubbing away in a kind of fury as though she were effacing a memory, and the sick men one by one took off their ear-phones and lay quiet.’15

  This incident must have occurred on the day he was admitted to hospital and was himself waiting for an operation, 3 October according to the date on his letter to Vivien, and suggests therefore considerable powers of detachment on his part at what must have been a worrying time. Yet his own attitude towards the death of those two, the young and the old, reveals his strange cast of mind:

  It wasn’t the two arrivals who died I pitied. After all it’s a thing we all want 40% of the time. Eighteen months ago I should have said 70%. What one disliked was the method – the scramble with oxygen pumps, the screaming woman – & particularly being present oneself. Not being used to it. It was rather weird to think that they were veritably having a devilishly nasty time in Purgatory while one was stretching oneself out to sleep, feeling glad that the fuss was over.16

  His hospital experience was to be used seven years later in It’s a Battlefield when he describes Conrad Drover slowly dying after having been knocked down by a car:

  Then he was struck in the body and thrown a dozen yards and could not think: what has done this? nor wonder: why am I here? lying with his face over the pavement edge, watching the black water trickle down the gutter and fall through a grating, aware of pain and voices and pain, pain in the back and a worse pain in the jaw … he tried to scream, because pain was scratching now like little sharp finger-nails at his spine, and this time he heard … Pain was like a bird frantic for freedom, dashing from wall to wall of the imprisoning room; his brain was bruised with the beat of its wings …

  ‘Better not move him; his back may be broken.’ His hand touched the black water trickling in the gutter; he could see his own blood joining the water, flowing thickly off the pavement edge …

  Big Ben struck the half-hour.fn1 He was on a wheeled bed passing down long corridors, nurses walked the opposite way and stared at him and he tried to scream; he was in a small room and they held a little box in front of his face and he tried to scream. Then the pain became unbearable and he closed his eyes and opened them and Milly sat beside him and a metal flask hung above his head and a tube dropped saliva into his mouth and he felt no pain. The pain, he knew, was still there, but it was exhausted, it lay still and cramped in a corner, stiff with the bandages which confined him too; one pretended not to notice it; everyone walked softly on tiptoe not to wake it.

  They had put screens round his bed, but through a gap he could see the wards, rows of men wearily sleeping, and a sister sitting reading at a table where one light burned …17

  He never knew that he screamed in spite of his broken jaw; but with curious irrelevance, out of the darkness, after they had left him and his pulses had ceased beating and he was dead, consciousness returned for the fraction of a second, as if his brain had been a hopelessly shattered mirror, of which one piece caught a passing light. He saw and his brain recorded the sight: twelve men lying uneasily awake in the public ward with wireless headpieces clamped across their ears, and a nurse reading under a lamp, and nobody beside his bed.18

  Seeking the source of this accident is interesting because we can see how he is using his own, though secondary, experience. On 14 April 1926, he asked Vivien: ‘Did you see about that bus accident in Piccadilly Circus? I came along about two minutes later, when the police were attending to the corpse.’ Greene has amalgamated the bus accident with his own experience of hospital and with the death of an old man in hospital:

  I’m afraid we’re going to have another death in the ward to-day. An emergency case was brought in yesterday evening before they found the child was going out. An old man of about 76, who’d been in a motor accident, head fractured, one hand smashed & both legs. I don’t think they expected him to last through the night. He’s quite quiet though. I shall be glad to get away – it’s all very morbid … The daughter of the old man’s turned up & is sitting with him … They are bringing up the oxygen apparatus that means the end’s near … They are putting up a screen now …

  A little later

  He’s gone! Second death I’ve had the doubtful pleasure of seeing in a little over twelve hours. A high rate of mortality!

  Greene had no doubt about how he wanted to go: ‘I hope to goodness I don’t die slowly & messily like that. I should like an aeroplane crash from 15,000 feet or a bullet, I think …’19

  *

  By the 19th Greene was allowed out of bed. ‘Mr Greene will get up this afternoon’, he overheard the doctor saying, and when he did get up his legs were like melted butter but he determined not to faint or to feel ill in order to be able to persuade the authorities that he was well enough to leave in three days’ time on the Friday. In hospital he thought of places he could travel to and he had a sudden longing for Paris (‘Naphtha flares going, the big arms of the Moulin Rouge whistling round … It will be so lovely being married to you dashing off to places with you with no conventions to stop it!’).20

  Greene left hospital on Friday 22 October – ‘had breakfast out of bed &, an epoch-making occasion, had my first bath! And in a few hours I ought to be away.’ He had arranged for Vivien to come to Berkhamsted and the very thought of that made him jump for joy: ‘I want to stand up on my bed & stamp & beat my chest like a baboon, & emit Zulu war-cries.’ ‘Please catch the trains safely’, he wrote, ‘& make the engine-drivers be punctual. Go & look at them before the train starts, so that they know that they are carrying the most beautiful & the most wonderful person in the world, & therefore as the inevitable corollary the most adored by someone or other. No, on second thoughts don’t. They might go purposely slowly, so as to have you as long as possible on the train (8.30, last day in hospital).’ He came home in style in a chauffeur-driven car, sent him by his Uncle Eppy. He had been in hospital for three weeks.fn2

  To convalesce, having still some time before his six weeks’ leave of absence from The Times was up, he decided to visit Brighton or Paris. Even on the day he left for Brighton he had picked up a Bradshaw and discovered that a train left from Victoria for Paris at 8 a.m., and was again tempted, but Brighton it was to be. His father had given him a late birthday and Christmas present in one – sufficient money for his holiday. Vivien could not have gone with him to Brighton even if she could have freed herself from her job: both her mother and her friend Stella Weaver, wife of the librarian at Trinity (later President of Trinity) watched hawk-like over Vivien’s morals as the comment below suggests. It also shows how advanced Greene’s parents were: ‘I don’t know what Stella would think of my mother. She’s gone away for a few days & before going she suggested you should come for the week-end – fancy! all alone with me & my father!’21

  During the train journey to Victoria it rained heavily and he had fears of being bored to death. At Victoria he went on to Battersea to search for his passport, ‘because even if I go to B[righton] for to-night, I might want to go across [to France] next day’. He broke the lock of his trunk to find his passport but it was not there. Worst of all, Jonathan Cape had returned his novel ‘The Episode’ – it rest
ed now on Evans and Heinemann. He went to Brighton and was, as so often in his life, enchanted and excited by it. On his first night there, he met an unusual man and his depression and despair left him:

  Have you ever dreamed of meeting the man who writes the love lyrics for the Christmas crackers. Last night, about 10.30, sitting in the dark in a shelter on the front, trying to light a cigarette & waiting for something to happen, a being in a soft hat, spectacles & a muffler materialised in the opposite corner. He had a sort of echo of a forgotten twang in his voice, & darling, guess whom he claimed to be? ‘Old Moore’ – at least he’d done last year’s Almanac. That was only one of the many incredible bits of life history I heard. He said he’d lived in California till the war, in which he’d lost £46,000 which were in German shipping. His father was Spanish & his mother ‘Egyptian’ & he said he could talk Romany. His father & mother were unmarried & he was brought up in a monastery & ran away. He was 65 & ate no artificial food, lived in a little flat by himself & baked his own loaves even! He said that since the war he’d made his living by lecturing & writing, but I didn’t get his name. He claimed to be royal Romany – all in a slight American twang. Even though a consummate liar probably (though there were no material motives in his yarns), he was perfectly sweet.22