The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Writing from France to Robert Nichols in February 1930, Aldous Huxley asked: ‘Have you read a novel called The Man Within by Graham Greene? I think it’s most remarkable … Much better (between ourselves, for it’s frightful heresy!) than Virginia [Woolf’s] To the Lighthouse … It’s the difference between something full and something empty; between a writer who has a close physical contact with reality and one who is a thousand miles away and only has a telescope to look, remotely, at the world.’36 Such an assessment could perhaps have been made about Greene’s first realistic novel, Stamboul Train, written three years later, but hardly about The Man Within.

  There were more objective assessments. The New York Times considered that: ‘Once he achieves … a less isolated and poetic approach to the inner workings of human character he will be a really significant novelist.’ And J. B. Priestley, writing in the Evening News, while giving a meed of praise, rapped the author’s knuckles. He saw the novel (justifiably, I believe) as an example of a plot which did not ring true. He thought the writing too mannered, the tale an ultra-romantic dream where reality never breaks in (though this surely is not true of the brilliant central chapters dealing with the trial at the Lewes Assizes) and he made a typical Priestley point: ‘When we have put the book down, it is as if we had just walked out of a hot-house.’ This criticism was to have an interesting sequel three years later on the publication of Stamboul Train.

  Greene himself was to admit that if he had been a publisher’s reader then, as he was to become later, he would unhesitatingly have turned down The Man Within, and his successful beginning as an author was due to the man who did not turn the novel down – Charles Evans. Originally an elementary school teacher, he had been in charge of Heinemann’s modest educational list before becoming head of the firm after the death of Heinemann, and eighteen months later head of Doubleday after the death of Pawling. According to Cecil Roberts, the novelist, Evans’s enthusiasm for The Man Within knew no bounds, and Roberts played a part in helping it along: ‘One day when I called on Charles Evans I found him very excited by a new discovery. He gave me a proof copy of Greene’s first novel … and sought my opinion. I read it. I thought it rather poor … but I wrote to Evans saying I thought it was good. I wished not to hurt him or his new author.’fn5

  Evans was always kind to his new ‘stars’, as the literary agent David Higham wrote: ‘Charles Evans had the air of a child almost, a certain simplicity, a naivety of which he was never ashamed, and beneath all that a warm and genuine heart, a generous one, too. One day in 1929 a note came up to me in my office at C[urtis] B[rown]. It read (from memory): “The bearer of this note is a young author whose first novel I have just taken and who has, I believe, a considerable future. He ought to have an agent and I should like that agent to be you.” I rang reception at once. The young author who came up was Graham Greene.’37

  Greene has said that nothing in a novelist’s later life can equal the moment when a first book is accepted. Triumph is unalloyed by any future doubt. Yet in the office of the publisher Greene remained objectively observant, for he later recalled that the bald and lean Charles Evans’s hands and legs were never still – ‘he did everything, from shaking hands to ringing a bell, in quick jerks.’38 As he came out of the Heinemann offices into Great Russell Street he was in a daze and, in the flush of success, felt that success is not slow but sudden.

  *

  It must seem to readers today that The Man Within is not recognisably a ‘Greene’ novel and indeed Greene himself, looking back, considers it the work of a stranger, of a very young, sentimental man, which now has no meaning for him whatsoever. He cannot understand the reason for its success still less his uncle Edward’s comment at the time of publication that the book could only have been written by a Greene: ‘I thought of the novel, the story of a hunted man, of smuggling and treachery, of murder and suicide and I wondered what on earth he was driving at. I wonder still.’39 But surely Edward Greene was right. He might more accurately have said that only Graham Greene could have written it. Greene in his comment suggests the ingredients that made it a best-seller – and he might have added the saintly and betrayed heroine. It is obviously prentice work: the story is slight with much repetitive action, the setting and characters often unrealised and the dialogue sometimes maladroit. Apart from the middle chapters dealing with the Assize courts, the reader enters a romantic and unrealistic world populated by unlikely smugglers who show in their bearing and their aesthetic interests that they are of gentle birth.

  Without interpreting the novel as autobiography one can say that its drive came from the various traumatic experiences Greene had before he reached the age of twenty-three and that it gathers those experiences together in a fictional form.

  Andrews, the hero of the novel, betrays the smugglers’ leader, Carlyon, whom he worships for his romantic and heroic nature, because he needs to escape from the life of smuggling which he hates. His reward is a life of fear. He worships Elizabeth for her courage, beauty and sanity, but he fails her also, so that she commits suicide to save herself from the smugglers while he dashes about the countryside looking for help – again because he is afraid to face the smugglers alone. The worship of heroism and purity, the selfish need to escape from dangerous and unpleasant situations even if it means betraying those one worships, the corrosive effects of fear and betrayal, the conflict between lust for and admiration of physical purity are the conflicts which torment Andrews and which lead him to suicide. At the end of the novel, when he is a captive, he steals back his own knife from the arresting officer: ‘slowly his hand stole out unnoticed on an errand of supreme importance.’

  Andrews’s saviour in his flight from the people he has betrayed is Elizabeth. Her home on the Downs, ‘this small warm room and its white occupant’, is isolated and secure: ‘But this is Paradise’, says Andrews.40 Andrews’s love for Elizabeth becomes ecstatic and religious and the sexual side of their relationship is approached by Andrews with awe: ‘I want to tell you now that I love you as I’ve never loved anyone or anything in the world before … I’ll ask for you only when we’re married and that as a favour which I don’t deserve … You are holy.’41

  Andrews’s love for Elizabeth rather uncannily reflects Greene’s love for Vivien in its devotion and worship. A few months before their marriage, Greene wrote to Vivien from Euston Station: ‘Darling, it seems almost incredible that in less than an hour, I shall see you coming along a real pavement, tangible and beautiful and wise.’ Just as Elizabeth’s cottage was the secure home of a saintly person, so the first home of Greene and Vivien was to be ‘Paradise’. He wrote to her: ‘the basket’s not at all itself without you because it only came into existence because of you and it’s not fair to leave it without a creator, like Paradise bereft of God. I’m sorry if it’s blasphemous, but one can’t really be very blasphemous in praise of a saint, and I quite sincerely believe you are one.’42 ‘I want to live with you as long as you live and die with you when you die,’ he told her. ‘I’ve pursued you into the Church and I want to pursue you into eternity.’43

  In The Man Within, Andrews watches through a keyhole while Elizabeth, in order to allay Carlyon’s suspicions that Andrews may be in the cottage because there is a second cup on the table, claims it as her own and drinks from it. Andrews feels a wave of love and humility, and in spirit kneels to her. In a similar way, Greene praised Vivien because she once told a little lie on his behalf: ‘when you ask “could I love you as much” after your mysterious misdeed … don’t you see that … my whole feeling is a need to kiss your hands in reverence and worship … for you to tell a small untruth for me is a great thing.’44 Greene admired Vivien’s serenity, sanity and purity, the qualities Andrews admired in Elizabeth, and Greene, as did Andrews, expressed his love in terms of worship, for Vivien was ‘all beauty and all mystery and all wonder’, and his dream was that there would be, after the wedding, ‘the slow realizing of no goodbye at the end of the journey and you … to b
e worshipped as holy with sacrament.’45 In each case there is the sense of amazement at the possession of such a love: ‘The face which [Andrews] raised to her was like that of one dazed and stunned by an unexampled good fortune.’46

  Vivien came into Greene’s life at a crucial time. He had a history of attempted suicides; he had had a devastating experience at school; he had undergone psychoanalysis; and his years as an undergraduate at Oxford had been largely without fixed purpose. He had had periods of excessive excitability which, when in a manic phase, made him hyperactive, highly energised and given to impulsive acts; he had had no anchor, apart from his ambition to be a writer, until he met Vivien Dayrell-Browning. It would seem, as with Andrews and his Elizabeth, that she was able, through her personality and religious conviction, to give him stability, to channel the energy, the excitability and the sexual drive, at least for a time. Because of his need for her he turned his attention to providing a home for them, earning money for them, and he followed her into the Roman Catholic Church, accepting its proscription of suicide – a mortal sin which would consign the sinner to hell for evermore. He was to face this acceptance in 1947 in his justly famous and precisely entitled The Heart of the Matter.

  Andrews’s entry into Elizabeth’s secure world is an escape – a temporary escape – from the world of the smugglers: ‘the sneers, the racket, that infernal sea, world without end.’ ‘Even in the middle of this fear and flight,’ he tells her, ‘you’ve given me more peace than I’ve known since I left school.’47 Greene’s need to ‘escape’ is an important part of his psychological make-up. He has been escaping since the age of thirteen when he ran away from school. We can take it back further to his very early escaping to the ‘French’ garden at St John’s. He escaped from the British American Tobacco Company, among other reasons, because of the rough, uneducated nature of some of his colleagues; he escaped from Nottingham because of the provincial nature of its society. And the title of his memoirs is Ways of Escape (1980). Before and after his marriage to Vivien, Greene found it necessary to escape from her physically and spiritually at times, and this is reflected in The Man Within.

  The trouble with Elizabeth, Andrews finds, is that in her there is ‘a kind of mystery … a kind of sanctity which blurred and obscured his desire with love.’ What Andrews discovers is that on occasions he needs a woman uncluttered by love. Thus once outside the secure boundary of Elizabeth’s influence, in the town of Lewes, he descends to lechery when, as he puts it, ‘the animal in him could ponder … beauty crudely and lustfully’. Greene has such a curiosity about all things in life, that it was inevitable that he would be attracted to profane love. He was always willing, especially after his treatment by the psychoanalyst, to try anything new, to seek out the unknown. He recognised the strong independence of the sexual appetite within him which led him to betray the spiritual Vivien as Andrews betrays Elizabeth.

  Andrews believes he cannot love Elizabeth physically because of a fear that he will dirty her: ‘how can I ever touch you without soiling you a little?’48 and Greene felt Vivien to be too fine for human love, so that marrying could be construed as the biggest crime he could commit.49 Andrews decides, after he has slept with the harlot Lucy, that he will seek out Elizabeth, and he dreams of taking her to London, gaining her love and marrying her – as Greene had recently married Vivien. Then comes the thought that even if he gained his desire, it would only be to soil her and cleanse himself: ‘When I had been married to her for a month … I would be creeping out of the house on the sly to visit prostitutes.’50

  Tooter Greene has said that, very early in Greene’s marriage, and also before it, they used to go to London together:

  I remember very well the occasion when after we had been with a couple of girls, the next day was Sunday, and suddenly Graham said to me, ‘I must go to confession before I go off to Spain.’ Recently, when we met at Rule’s restaurant in Maiden Lane, the whole Greene family met, some 19 of us, to celebrate Raymond Greene’s 75th birthday, it was like old times – we talked about our sexual exploits of those days.51

  In 1927 sex before marriage was frowned upon and yet the pressure on a young and highly-sexed Greene must at times have been so great that he would, Vivien being unobtainable sexually until after marriage, have capitulated to his desires. And Tooter’s admission is proof that he – that they – did. There is other evidence. In his letters to Vivien at this time, Greene is circumspect but yet there are hints of his seeking elsewhere physical consolations: ‘I don’t know why but I want you more desperately than I’ve ever wanted you before. Perhaps because I’ve behaved less well this week.’ And speaking of how Vivien is more efficacious ‘than war or flood or earthquake or even a disreputable adventure’, he goes on: ‘It will be very hard not to misbehave on Saturday [he was not seeing Vivien that weekend] so as not to want you too badly. I don’t mean drowning my sorrows in drink necessarily.’

  The pressures of suppressed sexuality no doubt led to a number of encounters with prostitutes, amateur and professional. For Andrews there is something clean – before the event – in the simple bargaining: ‘His leg felt the shape and touch of her thigh beneath the velvet … you can have me – tomorrow night … you’ve got me at a cheaper rate than any other man has done … Now feel here and here and here. Now give me your mouth.’ But there is a strong reaction afterwards and a punishing sense of sin reflected in Andrews’s attitude, ‘he had capitulated at the first hungry wail his dirty, lusting body had uttered’,52 which reflects Greene’s own reaction to sexual experiences as well as that of Andrews – the fear ‘of going on soiling himself and repenting and soiling himself again’. Such was Greene’s intensity of emotion that he often longed, like his hero Andrews, to be null and void. And just as Andrews after sex with Lucy feels the need for personal purification in order to get rid of his sense of shame and return to the pure Elizabeth, so Greene’s purity of passion for Vivien was intensified after a jaunt to London.

  The Man Within was not simply an historical novel about smugglers, hence Greene’s decision about the title – the double drama of a man fighting within himself and without was pointed to by many reviewers, and it is likely that Sir Thomas Browne’s statement: ‘There’s another man within me that’s angry with me’, originated in St Paul’s statement in the Epistle to the Romans: ‘I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.’

  fn1 He changed this very little when the book was published: ‘He came over the top of the down as the last light failed and could almost have cried with relief at the sight of the wood below.’ (The Man Within, p. 11.)

  fn2 Major George Whyte-Melville, an authority on field sports, wrote novels on fox hunting and steeplechasing. He was killed in the hunting field in 1878.

  fn3 Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936) had an adventurous life, taught fencing as ‘Professor Bontini’ in Mexico City, punched cows in Texas, and was an aristocrat living – when he lived in Scotland at all – in the ancestral home of Gartmore. He was a socialist involved in the Trafalgar Square riots of 1887, and was an inveterate traveller who, like Graham Greene later, would set off for an outlandish place because it was difficult of access; hearing of the forbidden city in Morocco he set out for it disguised as a Turkish physician; he was a South American gaucho, a wonderful horseman, a rover, adventurer and grand eccentric. He was a friend of the great, especially of Hudson, Conrad and Bernard Shaw. He looked startlingly like the Spanish painter Velásquez.

  fn4 Mrs Belloc Lowndes (1867–1947) was the sister of Hilaire Belloc. She established herself as a writer of mystery stories with The Lodger (1913), a documented novel about Jack the Ripper.

  fn5 Roberts may have felt this in 1971 but he is on record, in a volume of his autobiography, The Bright Twenties, written one year previously, as publicly endorsing Evans’s view about the new novel.

  26

  A False Start

  We all want
to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

  – KRISHNAMURTI

  GREENE WAS NOW earning 10 guineas a week at The Times thanks to the senior sub-editor, George Anderson, who had written to the manager, Lints Smith, in March 1929 arguing that Greene deserved a rise: ‘Though he came to Room 2 from Oxford quite untrained, he learned quickly, and is now one of our best and quickest sub-editors.’fn1 Moreover, the fact that Greene had had a novel published and one which was rapidly putting him into the best-seller class must have had some influence.

  During the vacation of the Court page editor, he was given the responsibility of putting that page together – ‘a deadly dull job with heaps of scope for blunders’ is how he described it to his mother, but of course Greene was quick to see the advantages of such work: ‘It gives one experience of “making up” a page with the compositors, arranging the items & so on, which is useful if one’s ambitions run journalistically, but mine do not.’1 ‘The other night [he wrote], our too terrible assistant editor called me into his august presence … he behaves like a caricature of a schoolmaster … He told me that I “wielded a pretty pen,” & why didn’t I try my hand at some light leaders. I just managed to refrain from saying that I had done my best to cure “my pen” of being pretty.’2

  There was another factor pressurising The Times to offer Greene more promising work. The Evening News had approached him to write an article for them but this would have infringed his contract with The Times. He spoke to Barrington Ward, later to succeed Geoffrey Dawson as editor, about this. An argument developed between Barrington Ward and Lints Smith, who held the view that Greene should not be allowed to write for the Evening News since that paper and The Times were in commercial competition. The matter went up to the editor and Barrington Ward told Greene that the editor had decided to offer him new and different work. To his mother he wrote: ‘I’m in suspense & excitement.’