The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Following Richmond’s treatment, Greene had continued to record his dreams, and as he came towards marriage, he had his share of nightmares:

  We were in Turkey or somewhere & there’d been some sort of silly muddle & you had been certified absolutely by mistake as insane. That, by Turkish law, made you liable to arrest. Everyone knew it was a mistake, but red tape made it necessary to carry out the arrest, so they came along & arrested you to take you off for confinement in a Turkish warship. Somebody said cheerfully to the officer ‘I suppose it will take a couple of years to get her released’ & he said ‘Oh no, one year ought to do it.’ I felt desperate. We’d done all that could be done – sent to the British consul & started the processes of putting things right – but we were going to be separated for a year. They wouldn’t even tell me where you’d be confined. Any letters of mine had to go through the officer & he thought you’d be allowed to write. I said ‘She’ll be looked after & entertained all right?’ He said ‘Oh well, of course, strictly she’d be never allowed outside her one room but a year’s a long time. Perhaps she’ll be allowed outside now & then.’ I got more & more desperate & anxious & at last I had a brilliant idea & said ‘Show me the warrant.’ So he handed it over & they gave your address as Berkhamsted which they spelt Berkhamstead. So I said ‘Look here you can’t arrest her on this warrant. The spelling of this name’s wrong.’ Then there were great arguments & I stuck to it, & he grew doubtful & started telephoning to solicitors, & I argued & argued & put off the arrest minute by minute & woke up. And it was when I woke up, far more than in the dream, that I felt completely horrified at the thought of a year away from you, not knowing where you were or what was happening to you. And I lay & felt quite sick with horror although I was awake & knew it was a dream.21

  Another dream finds them in a public park walking round the raised rim of a lake. Vivien deliberately falls in to test his love. Because he refuses to do a spectacular rescue, there is bitter silence between them. Then at the house they find a lot of drunken Germans with their mistresses and Greene has to clear them out. Then he rushes into a room bolting the door because a young man approaches with a revolver, and feeling Vivien is in danger makes him affectionate towards her again. The young man turns out to be a jealous rival and starts shooting through the door at the point where he imagines Greene is standing, but misses. Greene, standing on one side, an ancient revolver in his hand (with one charge), tells Vivien to open the door and let the rival in. Instead Vivien goes out and remonstrates with the man who lays aside his revolver and becomes amenable. Greene also lays aside his revolver and, as a gesture of trust, turns his back on the rival. The young man apologises for trying to kill Greene, an apology which he accepts. It seems that Vivien had acted in the young man’s revue and he had imagined, since Vivien looked radiant the night before, that it was because she loved him and his revue, and it was a great shock to discover that she was instead in love with Greene.

  All of this suggests a degree of uncertainty on his part regarding the fulfilment of his relationship with Vivien, and it would seem that the strain of unconsummated love took its toll of him: ‘Remember that you have a ravenous wanting animal waiting in London who can’t bear to be separated for too long & starts biting his own tail when he is.’22 In his desperation he persuades himself that even when married he would not see enough of Vivien: ‘what a devilish little I shall ever see of you, really no more than an endless succession of week-ends, as now. Because in the mornings as now, there’ll be work as far as I’m concerned, only more need of it than ever. Breakfast to breakfast and weekend to weekend. And then at the end of life perhaps nothing at all and the whole of life wasted.’23

  This was one mood (‘I can see nothing but a waste of emptiness in front now’) but its opposite also appeared when he compared his situation in 1927 with those of his contemporaries: ‘I met Causton in Fleet St yesterday … he’s working at Reuter’s on awful night shifts at a rotten wage. And Scott’s getting £160 in a dubious position with the Amalgamated Press, & Gorham – the ex-assistant editor of the W. W. – is sub-editing on a wretched broadcasting weekly. Gosh, I am lucky (touch wood!). But that luck is outweighed a million times by the luck of having you. That I wonder at every day of my life.’

  ‘You’ll always’, he wrote to her, ‘be the most important thing in life to me & the one thing it would be an utter terror to lose.’24 Marriage to him was ‘the biggest thing that can ever happen to me … Even death becomes rather insignificant beside it.’25 She was ‘much more exciting than drunken republican innkeepers in Ireland, or directors of Krupps, or cabarets & communists in Paris or murder commissions in Heidelberg. You are far and away immeasurably the most exciting thing that’s ever happened & more rapturous & expectant in feeling than when the curtain rose on St Joan.’26 And he wished that he could ‘go to sleep now [this was in June 1927] … & wake up only at the moment when you raise your veil.’27

  *

  On occasions that year, Greene’s absorption with Vivien was distracted by family matters. His brother Raymond was having ‘a rotten time with his throat’ and had to have an operation followed by three months’ speaking only when absolutely necessary and then in a whisper. Greene’s younger brother Hugh was miserable during his first term at Berkhamsted as a boarder and his eldest brother Herbert’s wife had had a serious operation. ‘I seem the only one in luck,’ Greene concluded, ‘&a luck that’s never been equalled in the world before.’28 He told Vivien, ‘No man’s ever been as lucky as I am, & no man, if he was Alexander & Shelley & Damien rolled into one, would be worthy of you.’29

  It was also the year in which his father’s long reign as Headmaster of Berkhamsted came to an end. He had been quite severely ill in the summer of 1926, and it was feared that he would have to retire early. He was suffering from diabetes, and his wife Marion was most attentive to his needs – there was a great love between them.30

  Charles Greene’s last Founder’s Day before retirement was in June 1927, and Graham sent an account of it to The Times. It was entitled ‘Tribute to the Headmaster of Berkhamsted’ and recorded that Charles Greene was presented with a bound address expressing the school’s loss and its gratitude for his friendship and help. His son’s bête noire, Dr Fry, was there. In the evening there was a performance by the band of the Scots Guards in the Deans’ Hall and an announcement was made that two windows would be placed in the School Chapel in Charles Greene’s honour. Greene gave a farewell speech and admitted that ‘his time had been so happy that if he had his life to live over again he would return to Berkhamsted.’ Old Boys I have spoken to have to this day a touching memory of ‘Charles’ standing in the cloisters by the door of Deans’ Hall with moist eyes, sadly shaking hands with nearly 600 boys as they filed out. In spite of his original intention to become a barrister, clearly Charles Greene loved the school where he had spent almost forty years.

  No doubt Graham was moved by his father’s retirement, but if so, there are no references to this in his letters to Vivien. What was uppermost in his mind was his longing for her – if only she could have left Oxford and visited Berkhamsted for this special occasion to show everyone ‘that I was going to have the loveliest wife man ever had since the moon came down to Endymion’.

  Charles Greene’s retirement inevitably brought a move from the house that had been the centre of family life for so long. Marion and Charles Greene retired to Crowborough in Sussex, and this change affected Graham and made his relationship with Vivien even more important:

  I am so fearfully glad that I’ve got you now particularly. Because at the age I am now I should probably have dived off the deep end, & because now that Berkhamsted is so to speak going, & everyone is moving & changing & disappearing, I feel so extraordinarily lucky to have found something ten million times more valuable to take the place of beechwoods & associations … I do literally … thank God for you every night. You have been … an answer to prayer. I began to pray, I suppose for the first time for a
good many years, that August & September when I was in Derbyshire & you in Italy & Oxford. You’d given me a one in forty chance … So – it seems queer because I was far from being a Catholic or really anything at all & it was only six months after the silly article in ‘The Outlook’ – I used to pray desperately nearly every night to Our Lady that I might win you.31

  The need to win her: the struggle to succeed. ‘It’s extraordinary to think that the first part of a two & a half years’ struggle is within six weeks of coming to an end,’ he wrote at the end of August. ‘How weird it will seem. Another struggle will never come to an end – that of keeping your love … Both struggles are joyful struggles, though I shall be glad when the first is over.’32 Although his vision of this year had been at the beginning one of ‘a clear field for good’, ‘work, work, work’, it had turned out to be a year when he was not writing his third novel but concentrating his energies on marrying Vivien.

  Not surprisingly, and perhaps a little bemused, while waiting for a train to London from Berkhamsted just before his father’s retirement, he reflected, ‘When I come home & see the masters, just as young or old, completely unchanged, doing the same things & thinking the same thoughts, I feel as if I’ve only left school about a year. Heavens, what a number of sensations and actions one does cram into five years.’

  *

  As the date of the wedding approached, Greene threw himself into the preparations and his choice of image in a letter to Vivien (2 August 1927) is instructive: ‘I should like to have a sort of pedometer which would register the hours each day that I think of you. I’m sure they’d add up to 90% of when I was awake. And sometimes 90% of my sleep too.’ Nothing was too insignificant for his attention:

  Yesterday I (a) wrote four letters (b) sent out more invitations, (c) interviewed Gambil on the subject of the shelves (d) painted the shelves (e) knocked holes, according to your mother’s directions, in the drainer, (f) called at the flat, (g) called at Bolding’s about your plate glass, (h) called at Wilkinson’s about the brass (i) had lunch with Scott (j) went & was fitted at my tailors’ (k) went into the wilds of Camberwell & set Per Mundum in motion (I) visited the Canada Life Assurance (m) had dinner with Arthur.33

  He had found a carpenter (presumably Garsubil) to make some shelves: ‘An old deaf carpenter is eating his lunch in the sitting room & brooding over pieces of shelf. Occasionally he makes a deep aphorism, “Shelves is useful for books & things” & “Books is all this & that. No regular size, be they.”’ He had begun to collect a small store of tools for the house: ‘I managed to get to Woolworth’s and bought a. hammer, b. chisel, c. gimlet, d. bradawl, e. picture wire, f. eye hooks, g. paint, h. a new brush … i. a tin of Repolin, j. some emery paper, because the shelves which have arrived are very rough.’34 But his mind was always on Vivien: ‘I have nothing to say but I love you, & no ambition but to win you, & little idea of Paradise but to have you with me.’

  By May he had a list of 63 wedding guests, but a month later it had gone up to 75 and he realised that, among others, he had forgotten to include his cousin, Christopher Isherwood. The wellknown organist Witaker Wilson was persuaded to play in the church and the banns were published:

  I went to Golders Green this morning. The church isn’t at all bad inside. The rector was away, & there was a very nice young priest there. I stayed behind & asked him about the banns. The rector had forgotten. However it’s going to be done from next Sunday. He was very nice & told me things Father Valentine had never warned us about.35

  Graham drafted the announcement for the wedding: ‘Is this correct … darling! “A marriage has been arranged & will take place in October between Graham Greene, third son of Mr C. H. Greene, headmaster of Berkhamsted School, & Mrs Greene, & Vivienne, only daughter of Mrs Dayrell-Browning, of Hampstead.”’ He added, ‘I come first by custom, darling, not by choice!’fn2, 36

  His imagination had begun to work on the two weeks’ honeymoon in the south of France:

  O darling, I keep on thinking of our ‘fortnight’ and getting waves of impatience and excitement and an ache to make it real. I think – without exaggeration, don’t you? – that we shall have an exciting time. All by ourselves in a foreign land – hundreds of miles from relations!! I think one will feel tempted to behave scandalously! No one who would recognize us anywhere near. One will be able to bathe and suddenly be affectionate in the middle of a breaker, go for a gentle stroll towards the Pyrenees and then sit down and rest and exchange thick clusters of stars [kisses] by the roadside and not have to think – ‘we ought to be getting back. They’ll be waiting dinner for us.’ Linger until dusk and then go even slower back. O darling, it will be lovely tiptoeing into your room in the morning (will the sea be outside the window?) and waking you.fn3, 37

  Suddenly, he remembered that Basil Blackwell, Vivien’s employer, had advised Vivien not to regard marriage as an earthly Paradise, especially the honeymoon. Greene’s comments are sharp: ‘A fortnight as an earthly Paradise. I shouldn’t think it could be with Mrs B.B.’ From that unkind thought his imagination took off:

  But perhaps they only took three or four days – while I’d like to take three or four years of a honeymoon with you. O darling, please make the time till then go quickly. How glorious to be entirely marooned together – no social duties, no time-table, no artificial rules, no letters, no papers if we don’t want them. I’ll trust to you not to lose count of the days – otherwise I should return to the office and new faces, a few familiar ones with white hair, and they’d say ‘Who are you?’ and I’d say ‘Graham Greene,’ and they’d nod their heads like choice Chinese mandarins and say ‘the name’s familiar’, and out of an ancient file 20 years’ back, they’d find a piece of news on yellowing pages in a now unfamiliar type. And they’d say ‘there was a sub-editor Graham Greene. I knew him a little. A nice promising boy. He disappeared as you see 20 years ago. The police couldn’t trace him but he’d be a middle-aged man now and you can’t be more than 23.’ And I’d say ‘But I am Graham Greene, and I’ve been on a fortnight’s holiday with my love. She is called Vivienne and is more beautiful than anyone you have ever seen. Have I overstayed my leave?’ And they will say sadly (because though they are married, they have met no one to make time pass unnoticed and have been aware of every year) ‘By 20 years.’38

  As early as February, Greene wrote that he ‘could sit for ages dreaming of that railway journey, when the wedding’s over, an empty carriage except for us, & the roar of the train & the quiet inside, & the slow realising of no goodbye at the end of the journey, & you close, wonderful & beautiful.’39 He could dream of the announcement in The Times of their forthcoming wedding ‘as a sort of symbol of certainty’40 and delight in the fact that just before the wedding the telephone directory arrived: ‘We are in it looking very important!’ For the wedding, he bought spats (‘I little thought that I would sink to spats’) and all the while the plans for their honeymoon took shape:

  Please take care of yourself and if you have late nights have late mornings too. Mustn’t tire yourself now – when you are very nearly almost a bride! O you will look beautiful, but almost as much I’m longing for the black taffeta dress on the Chesterfield and the slinky little coat in the train. O I shall love the little motor ride to Victoria. I should like to give you a star in Hampstead, another at Belsize Park, Camden town, Chalk Farm, and a huge one in Oxford St – but I suppose you’ll keep me in my place. I get shivers of excitement. Isn’t it incredible that you and I are going to be married in six weeks?’41

  Greene gives the impression that he decided everything, for example, the amount of money that could be spent, and he handled all the details of the journey, a pointer to the fact that he would be able to work out in precise detail the logistics of his future adventurous travelling:

  I think we could have an awfully splendid honeymoon if we splash say £40–50, and we will. We’ll never have another honeymoon so it’s worth it. And we’ll have a day in Paris if you like on our
way back – unless you’d rather have it on our way there. Which? Could you let me know, in your letter? Which time would you be feeling most lively and inclined for Paris. I don’t care a hoot. We could either arrive in Paris Oct. 15. 9 p.m. and Sunday in Paris, leave Monday morning Oct. 17. 8.20 – Marseilles midnight. Cavalaire Tuesday Oct. 18 and leave Oct. 27 (Thursday), Avignon afternoon, leave about 9 Oct. 28, arrive Paris about 11 p.m. leave Saturday, Oct. 29, about 1 p.m., arrive at basket late for Supper, Oct. 29. Or we could have the whole 24 hours in Paris on our way back. Then we’d arrive at C. a day earlier (Oct. 17), leave a day earlier (October 26), arrive in Paris late on Oct. 27 and take the whole of 28 there.42

  Spending the night in Paris had been Vivien’s idea:

  O I loved your description of us in Paris & the meteors. There’ll be meteors all right in my heart if not in the sky that evening – & comets & shooting stars & even naphtha flares. It will be a queer, strange, wonderful, exciting, beautiful – rapturous dream. To wake up in the morning, sun through the window, train bells going, stretch sleepily, wonder where I am, remember suddenly that this is Paris – comic looking little men with beards & moustaches drinking coffee on the pavement underneath, talking gibberish – and then with a leap at the heart that my wife is fast asleep next door. And I should leap out of bed & jump into a bath & splash uproariously & chant minor & sentimental poetry by Rupert Brooke at the top of my voice & lose the soap & curse with mock fury & giggle & wonder whether you were awake & whether you’d be too shy to be affectionate & whether if you were you’d ‘melt’ in the train before we reached La Lavandou or wherever it was that evening.43