*
Greene started his third novel, Rumour at Nightfall, on 5 September 1930.28 He had a month’s freedom to work on it without concern for the outcome of his second. Four days before the publication of The Name of Action, on 6 October, he wrote to his mother of their anticipated celebration: ‘I look forward to the 6th too. V. and I are celebrating by having dinner at the Ivy and going to “Charlot’s Revels”. The book is nicely got up … Did you see the first advertisement in the Lit Supp. this morning?’
They were not to know they were celebrating a failure. According to Greene his novel sold barely 2,000 copies. Five days after publication, he confessed to his mother that he did not know how the book was going but admitted, ‘the reviews are awful! The whole thing is pretty deadly depressing.’ And the depression continued. By 20 October more reviews had come in: ‘So far [he wrote to his mother] The Times is the only valuable review I’ve had … The Oxford Mail’s is the most understanding … but it cuts no ice.’ The trouble was that most reviewers compared The Name of Action unfavourably with The Man Within and at this time he had come to feel that The Man Within was more and more terrible. He admitted he was getting rather tired of kind friends who ‘tell me they like this but of course they much prefer the other.’ He was convinced that while his first was a moderately bad book, his second was a moderately good one. Even with his mother he argued against the view that his heroine Elizabeth in The Man Within was a success: ‘I don’t think she’s a character at all, but a sentimental complex. But though I sez it as shouldn’t I think Anna-Marie Demassener [heroine of The Name of Action] quite adorable.’29
In 1980, at the age of seventy-six, when he drove himself to re-read The Name of Action, he admitted that a few months afterwards he had forgotten what happened finally to his heroine – ‘so little does she live or matter’. And of his hero, Oliver Chant, he admitted that he was ‘only a daydream in the mind of a young romantic author, for it takes years of brooding and of guilt, of self-criticism and of self-justification, to clear from the eyes the haze of hopes and dreams and false ambitions.’30 Almost a decade earlier he had had to conclude that not ‘a single book of mine has failed to give me at least once a momentary illusion of success except The Name of Action.’31
In England, reviews of his novel were uniformly critical apart from that in The Times Literary Supplement, but even there the critic admitted that ‘we are left with precisely the same impression of living in the peculiar, highly wrought world of our author’s imagination rather than in any recognisable era of human life.’ The Bookman thought the novel ‘did not justify any salvo of cheers … a guileless tale, the narrative hollow and factitious’. The New Statesman set the seal on the novel’s failure – ‘his story is half in Cloud-cuckoo land and half in Ruritania and fits ill with his style.’ The Nation and the Athenaeum praised the book (but who would wish to be so praised?): ‘the warm chastity of pure Gothic with a little Byzantine to add wonder to our delight.’ Evelyn Waugh’s review (they were not friends then) was remarkable only because he reviewed the book under the title of The Name of Reason.
There was one unexpected fillip, though ultimately it came to nothing. Catherine Nesbitt, the actress, was excited about the dramatic possibilities of The Name of Action. Her husband, Cecil Ramage, a leading light of the OUDS, had roughed out a play, the dialogue mostly drawn from the book. Greene went to dinner with them:
I liked him, and she was perfectly sweet. They seemed very fond of each other … She was very anxious to get the play put on & play Anna-Marie. He has, what seems to me, rather wild dreams of a cast. Ernest Milton as Kapper, and Cedric Hardwicke as the Dictator. She wants to get a Sunday night performance done by the Arts Theatre and then see if the bait catches. There the matter for the moment rests … I don’t believe myself it will make a good enough play, and I think they are both too sanguine.32
He was later in A Sort of Life to recognise the difficulties involved in writing a second novel: ‘the first is an adventure, the second is a duty’. More philosophically, after the success of Stamboul Train three years later, he wrote: ‘A first novel is usually the result of many years’ saturation; a second novel often uses a too immediate experience … The intensity of a first novel cannot be repeated; the novelist … must learn to set every precious scrap of personal experience where it will receive the greatest number of converging rays.’33 In the same year, writing in the Spectator about the second novel of F. C. Boden whose first novel had been highly praised, he returned to the problem: ‘he should not be unfairly judged by its successor. A first novel sometimes absorbs too much of a writer’s vitality: he has not learnt to harbour his resources, and when it is a success he is driven to write another before he is ready.’34 The failure of Greene’s second novel had gone deep.
In spite of the bad reviews he pushed on with his third, Rumour at Nightfall, and since its setting was Spain he felt he must take some lessons in Spanish. ‘The Spanish affair’, he wrote to his mother, ‘is rather comic. All in class with a blackboard! I haven’t had time to do my homework and the class is tonight.’35 His real mood, however, is revealed in a letter to his brother Hugh: ‘I’m learning Spanish, not for any “slow sweet name’s sake”, but for the third novel of mental gloom.’36
In the midst of his depression over the reception of his second novel, he wrote a very moving story entitled, ‘The End of the Party’. To his mother he admitted simply, ‘I’ve got a very short story called “The End of the Party” (about hide & seek in the dark!) coming out some time in the [London] Mercury.’37
There were practical reasons for writing short stories – they took little time, and they did bring in needed currency. Earlier in 1930, he had sent a story entitled ‘Proof Positive’ to the Manchester Guardian for a Ghost Story competition and had won the first prize of ten guineas.
‘The End of the Party’ draws on his deepest emotions, being about a boy, Francis Morton, sensitive, vulnerable to criticism, afraid of the dark and the flight of bats, who dies from shock and fear when, during a game of hide-and-seek, he is touched suddenly in the dark. It is interesting that the girl whose contempt he fears is called Mabel Warren. The name is used again for the hard, sadistic, lesbian journalist in Stamboul Train.
‘The End of the Party’, having appeared in the London Mercury in January 1931, was later included by Edmund O’Brien in his collection of the best short stories of the year, but the editor of the London Mercury, J. C. Squire, did not pay for the story until 24 June the following year and then only after Greene’s agent threatened legal action.fn3
Financial pressures due to his small monthly sum from his publishers, his lack of success as a novelist and the high rental for ‘the basket’, resulted in the Greenes’ renting out Heathcroft for £8 a week and seeking cheaper accommodation in the country.
The move had also been encouraged when Vivien read Adrian Bell’s Corduroy (about the pleasures of living in the country), which had made a great impression on her: ‘As we had to move and we had to go somewhere that was cheap, we went there’ – ‘there’ being Chipping Campden which they had first visited in February 1931 to see a cottage, ‘Little Orchard’, owned by a friend which, Greene thought, ‘sounded too good to be ignored’. It was a two-storeyed, stone-built, thatched cottage with a ‘wildish garden’, no electricity, oil lamps and a stove which, Vivien commented wryly, was called ‘cook-and-heat’: ‘It did neither effectively. It all depended on the wind and I hadn’t cooked at all before we married.’
fn1 Had Anderson (conveniently?) forgotten about Greene’s stint in Nottingham?
fn2 Thomas Hardy’s body was buried in Westminster Abbey; his heart in Stinsford Churchyard.
fn3 The London Mercury’s failure to pay their contributors became a scandal, righted somewhat by an action brought successfully in November 1932 by Miss Mackenzie against Squire and the magazine for non-payment.
27
Down and Out at Chipping Campden
Life is sh
ort and so is money.
– BERTOLT BRECHT
THEY LEFT LONDON for Chipping Campden by train on 2 March 1931 in the company of a toy Pekinese, newly bought by Greene for Vivien. They had seen one some months earlier, a puppy of fourteen weeks with a beautiful smoky fur, belonging to Raymond’s wife, Charlotte (the Raymond Greenes were then living in Oxford where Raymond had a medical practice), and this led Greene to buy one. According to him, the puppy ‘behaved like an angel on the journey’, though he observed, characteristically, that it was ‘sleeping uneasily and snoring a little.’1 It was to have a short life and a rather tragic end.
They had been ready at 7 a.m. for the furniture removers, but the van was an hour late and in fact did not reach the cottage until 5.45 p.m., so that the unloading of the furniture had to be done by the light of borrowed lamps. Moreover the curtains had not arrived and the lino had not been laid. They gave up the idea of spending the night there, boarded the dog out and went to an hotel. Greene remembered mice running up and down in the wainscoting and the dying coals in the grate ‘fluttered like bats’,2 an image usually indicating anxiety on his part. The next day Vivien got down to staining the cottage floor with Greene crouched in a corner out of the way, reading.
True they had substantially reduced their expenses by moving – the cottage cost only £1 a week – but they had also dramatically reduced their standard of living and quality of life.
Chipping Campden, some miles north of Oxford and situated in the Cotswold Hills was a very old market town.fn1 It was built of local stone, and even the public telephone box in the town square had the stone’s colouring to make it blend in. There was a quality of stillness (which persists today), of light, the sound of church bells and the smell of jam-making, and inns with names like Live and Let Live.
The cottage, ‘Little Orchard’, was up a short street called Mud Lane, at the end of the High Street. At the bottom of Mud Lane was a pump, said to be haunted by the ghost of a dancing bear. During their first night in the cottage they discovered that the Aladdin paraffin lamps smoked when left alone for a few minutes and they spent a disturbed night. They missed the sound of traffic and were kept awake by the hooting of an owl in the darkness. Greene wrote to his mother, ‘I have little news in this dim and distant spot’, and their isolation clearly troubled him. He warned his mother that he might kidnap her to stay with them, though his plan was to live at Chipping Campden only one year and to buy a two-seater car and learn to drive (which he never did).
His letters to his mother suggest that Vivien liked Chipping Campden, or at any rate was making the best of it and moving into local society: ‘V. is gradually entangled in rural activities’; ‘V. plunged into a new experience, acting as judge of the fancy dress parade [at a local fête] … She’s enjoying it so much that she hasn’t come home yet – 9.45. p.m.’3 But she found shopping in a country village confusing. She recorded in her diary: ‘The fish shop sells china on one side and flies on the other. The best eggs come from Foster the paraffin man, the best strawberries from Keyle the coal merchant. Fruit and vegetables from Turners Garage. Papers and magazines from the ironmonger.’4
Their first visitor, Hugh Greene, must have had impressed upon him the primitiveness and isolation of the young couple’s living conditions: ‘We haven’t too much room. If the divan bed hasn’t come, do you mind the sofa? Also, there are a few wood lice, but we’ve nearly got them under.’5 To his mother Greene wrote: ‘Hugh and I did a long walk to Stow-in-the-Wold & I won more than 2/- off him at Rockaway … We were woke on the first night by hearing him being sick out of the window. We think it was the cider he had for supper after the railway journey. The Peke was being sick at about the same time as Hugh.’6
This letter was written on 28 April 1931, the day after he ‘finished the new novel – the first version anyway … a long book, over 90,000 words’ (his previous one had been just under 70,000). It had taken him seven months to reach this point. The novel was begun in September 1930 in London, but the pressure on him to produce a novel had led to his ‘writing 24,000 words this month [April 1931] in spite of the move’ – ‘I’ve been working too hard,’ he told his mother.
He thought of a singularly unsuitable title, The Phantom in the Hair, taken from an undistinguished poem by Coventry Patmore. By the time the proofs came to him in mid-August 1931 he still had not found a satisfactory title and, in some desperation, chose one previously put forward by his publisher for his preceding novel, a suggestion he had not then taken up – Rumour at Nightfall.
As a full-time writer, he took to going on long walks, possibly to work off his energy, no doubt to think of his work, and perhaps as a means of escape from work and the cramped conditions at ‘Little Orchard’. He walked with Vivien, though she, being much shorter, must have had difficulty in keeping up with his long-legged strides:
We used to go for tremendous walks, tremendous for me. Graham would work in the mornings in a pathetic little study, rather cold, upstairs … Then in the afternoon, he’d go for long walks and sometimes I’d go with him. He’s a tremendous walker, and very fast. And I remember his … noting snow on a hill or a wonderful tree or something – and I wasn’t responsive, and he bent down, and said, ‘But you can’t see over the hedge.’7
Sometimes Greene would go off on his long hops and Vivien would travel by bus or train to his destination, then they would spend the night together in a pub or small hotel and return.
He walked with his literary agent: ‘Mrs Higham is coming down for the weekend a fortnight after Easter’, he wrote to his mother, ‘while I meet her husband at Bicester and we walk home spending a night on the way.’8 But his favourite walking companion was always Hugh, though in later years it was mostly for visits to secondhand bookshops.fn2 But he was also perfectly happy with his own company and gives the impression of being something of a Wordsworthian solitary. Whenever he had reached a point when he could not continue with a novel, or had completed one, he would go on a tramp: ‘After Woodstock I went to Stow-on-the-Wold, a lovely barren little place. The next day I did a long stretch along the top of the Cotswolds of over 20 miles to Tewkesbury, and the next day I went down to Gloucester. I’m rapidly qualifying for the kind of village postman’s record of mileage, not counting short strolls, I’ve walked 127 miles this month,’ he told his mother.9
*
He had taken the risk of giving up a secure and promising career with The Times; the risk of accepting a salary from his publishers on the understanding that he would produce saleable novels; the risk, financially forced on him, of removing himself from the London literary scene and into the country. He was to take yet another but more inexplicable risk.
In 1930 he had begun writing the biography of John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, who was born on 10 April 1647 and died at the age of thirty-three. Wilmot was a dissolute courtier at the Restoration court of Charles II, a lecher and a drunk, but also a poet who could treat himself and his world with satiric coolness and who helped to establish the tradition of English satiric verse and assisted Dryden in the writing of Marriage-à-la-Mode. He anticipated Swift in his ‘Satyr Against Mankind’ with its scathing denunciation of rationalism and optimism, contrasting human perfidy and the instinctive wisdom of the animal world. He wrote to his friend Henry Savile: ‘Most human affairs are carried on at the same nonsensical rate which makes me … think it a fault to laugh at the monkey we have here, when I compare his condition with mankind.’ He was to turn to Catholicism and make a death-bed repentance.
In a pencilled note to his mother on 24 September 1930, Greene wrote: ‘I did a little work at the Bodleian on the Earl of Rochester.’ He had started Rumour at Nightfall and was awaiting the publication of The Name of Action. In a letter to Hugh from the British Museum, undated, but probably written about November 15th, he said: ‘I hope by Christmas that I shall be better off & able to give you two [presents] in one [it was Hugh’s birthday]. You find me, as it were, deeply engaged working on
my magnum opus “Strephon”: The Life of the Second Earl of Rochester: – that is to say I am waiting in patience while half a dozen books of varying shades of indecency are brought to me. I’ve forgotten my ink so I can’t go on with my third novel – now 1/7th done!’10
His commitment to the research involved was serious: even while he was revising the first draft of Rumour at Nightfall he was working on the biography. He wrote to Vivien from the British Museum in early June 1931, again waiting for books to be brought to him: ‘I’m going to Le Million this evening, rewarding myself for several minor discoveries here this morning’, and ended his short note: ‘There are a pile of books coming down the aisle to me, so goodbye, darling angel.’
He was within walking distance (for him) from Chipping Campden to Rochester’s birthplace and place of burial, and in the same June he set off: ‘I went off walking Wednesday and Thursday, spending Wednesday at Chipping Norton and visiting Spelsbury, where the Rochesters are buried and Adderbury where his country house remains.’ He was following the route taken by the Parliamentary Army during the Civil War – ‘over the final ridge of the Cotswolds, to Chipping Norton’, and his personal experience of this journey appears in the opening of his biography – ‘the level wash of fields … divided by grey walls, lapping round the small church and rising to the height of the gravestones in a foam of nettles before dwindling out against the black rise of Wychwood. A row of almshouses … an ancient stone shaped like a hawk in the middle of a field, innumerable heads of dandelions sparkling like points of dew in the sun – these are all that are likely to catch a traveller’s attention. In the church vault the Rochester family is obscurely buried.’11
He visited Hinchingbrook House, home of the Earls of Sandwich, one of whom had married one of Rochester’s daughters. ‘A lovely house with a terrible Victorian front door; a beautiful garden terrace exactly as in Pepys’ day.’ He spent the night there and met the Earl: ‘When I drove up two footmen and a butler to receive me, but no water laid on in the bedrooms. The Earl much younger than I’d expected – at any rate in appearance 50 at most; strong trace of Rochester blood in the extraordinarily heavy eyelids & rather protuberant eyes.’12
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 49
