In 1951 Greene, reviewing Eric Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev, describes what the cinema had taught Ambler: ‘The cinema has taught him speed and clarity, the revealing gesture. When he generalizes it is as though a camera were taking a panning shot and drawing evidence from face after face.’22 This is what it also taught Greene. It is the influence of the cinema which led him to reduce the characters to two in order to highlight a scene. In his diary he writes: ‘I think I’ve got some significance into the barn scene, I hope not too obviously, but I’m afraid it’s not really strong enough to carry the whole book, which must remain a rather pointless adventure story.’23
This is the scene where Dr Czinner (is this a homophone for sinner?) is dying, his only companion the chorus girl Coral Musker. Almost fifty years later in Ways of Escape Greene explains what he was trying to do in such scenes.
He tells us that in those days he thought in terms of a key scene and that he would even chart its position on a sheet of paper before he began to write: ‘“Chapter 3. So-and-so comes alive.” Often those scenes depended on the isolating of two characters – hiding in a railway shed in Stamboul Train, in an empty house in A Gun For Sale.’ It was as though, he tells us, he wanted to escape from ‘the vast liquidity of the novel and to play out the most important situation on a narrow stage’, where he could direct every movement of his characters. ‘A scene like that halts the progress of the novel with dramatic emphasis, just as in a film a close-up makes the moving picture momentarily pause.’ He could watch himself following this method even in as late a novel as The Comedians, and though he had long ago abandoned using a sheet of paper, if he had used it he would have written ‘Scene: Cemetery. Jones and Brown come alive.’ The logical climax of the method appears in The Honorary Consul: ‘where almost the whole story is contained in the hut in which the kidnappers have hidden their victim.’24
He had been working on Stamboul Train for about two and a half months when his publishers delivered a bombshell. His yearly sum of £650 from them was to be cut. He wrote to his mother: ‘V. and I are going up to town for one night in order to be at an “Anti-Depression Party” given by Heinemann’s and Doubleday’s. It will be our last extravagance for some time, as from April until the delivery of the new MS. [Stamboul Train] I’m being cut to £400 a year.’25 To his brother Hugh he had admitted how things were financially: ‘Frankly, we are on the verge of bankruptcy, and we had someone to stay last week, whom we didn’t want to see nearly as much as you, and we can’t afford to put you up for four nights; we have been toying since we lost £250 a year to make p.g.’s [paying guests] the rule at 2/6d a night, but it’s difficult. Do come for two nights, if you can manage to stay a day longer at Crowborough and go to R[aymond] a day earlier. One can manage two nights without increasing housekeeping.’26
Apart from writing daily, he joined Vivien in doing competitions in newspapers: ‘Owing to the financial situation I have been bitten by the competition craze. I went in for an essay competition in the Everyman, prize a holiday to Leningrad.’ Twenty days later, on 23 June 1932, he reported in his diary: ‘No prize for me for Leningrad essay or for V. for Quebec essay.’ He also failed to win £100 in a Daily Mail competition. Then he began to think seriously of finding an academic post abroad through the influence of Edmund Blunden.
Blunden visited him at Chipping Campden and Greene liked him immensely. They had a cold lunch: cold sausages and ham, bread and cheese, and beer, cider, parsnip and cowslip wine. Greene’s friend Fred Hart, a retired naval commander, usually brought him cowslip wine and often took Vivien to antique shows (Vivien was a passionate collector in the making but unable, at this time, to buy). While Graham worked daily on his novel, the beautifully mannered old sailor would call for Vivien – ‘Convinced’, wrote Graham in his diary, ‘more than ever that Fred Hart is in love with V., a trying position for an elderly, old-fashioned and terribly upright man.’
He found Blunden quiet, humble and shy and to his surprise discovered that Blunden’s strongest urge was a desire to help people: ‘He insisted on lending Hugh his fare to get a train back to Oxford: apropos of my fall in sales he said with complete ingenuousness: “I must see whether the Book Society can help you.’” Moreover, he offered to write to Professor Sito in Tokyo on Greene’s behalf to get him a job in case Heinemann ceased to support him financially after I August when the money was scheduled to stop.27
During the last financially depressing six months of 1932, his attacks of asthma became more frequent. On the first day of July he had a very bad night: ‘High wind and rain. Woke up at 4.30 terribly asthmatic.’ The following day his diary reads, ‘Every night now I wake up in the early morning with asthma.’
To his mother on 3 July 1932 he wrote: ‘My hay fever has been very bad; not so much in the eyes or nose as asthma. I slept well last night for about the first time for a week and it’s a bit better today. I don’t go out at all except to Mass. I’ve practically finished “Express”, and am leaving the last few pages till my hay fever is better.’
*
His ‘sea-change’ from romanticism to realism had its reverberations in his married life, and we can begin to see this in his diary record of what he and Vivien did in Chipping Campden on Vivien’s twenty-seventh birthday, which fell on a Bank Holiday. He describes their visit to the local swimming baths to watch rural celebrations – races, climbing up a greasy pole, and diving: ‘All the Campden worthies looking on, and Mr Jones, the retired police inspector and local councillor, short, fat, straw-hatted, went round among the nubile, swelling forms with entrance lists and a pipe.’ The scene reminded Graham of Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, in which the character Mrs Wimbush, based on the hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, spent time watching through field glasses the villagers bathing in the lake in her park.
Later, over tea, birthday presents were given. Vivien received a Victorian mug, a necklace case from Graham’s mother, a morning tea set and a beautiful papier-mâché blotter (which had belonged to Vivien’s great aunt) from her own mother and from Graham a book on papier mâché – then all the rage. In the evening, in Victorian style, Graham read aloud George Moore’s A Letter to Rome. The last sentence of that day’s entry ends on a sad note: ‘We became a little embittered arguing about Aldous Huxley.’28
Obviously the subject of Huxley came up because Graham had been reminded of Crome Yellow while watching the swimmers in the baths. But why should they argue about him and could the argument throw light on our understanding of the change taking place in Graham during his last-ditch attempt to write a saleable novel?
In July 1979, Vivien recalled that argument and returned to the image of the splinter of ice in the heart:
I remember him saying – we were talking about an Aldous Huxley book – and he said something about [Huxley’s] wife would have been annoyed. I think she would have been right to be annoyed. Huxley described the death of his child from meningitis, how the eyes become all red, you know, terrible agony through the ears and brain, and Graham said, ‘Oh I heard that his wife was absolutely outraged that he should describe all this.’ But Graham felt that Huxley had obviously felt it very much and couldn’t see why she should have been angry. I remember him approving that and saying ‘Yes, that’s quite right.’fn2
He was originally warm and I could make him laugh, that sort of thing – but as he developed into a better novelist the splinter in his heart grew, he became icier. He said writers shouldn’t marry and I dare say that’s quite true.
From then on everything could be grist to the writer’s mill. Nothing was to be sacred, all could be used, because all was in life. A decision of this kind must inevitably bring about a moving away from middle-class taboos for the sake of creation. He knew he would need to surrender himself to actions, judged by his parents’ standards, as irresponsible. And it was Greene’s allegiance to his art that took him far beyond the restrictive bounds into which he was born. Most writers in their thoughts, actions and writings have to go b
eyond the limits of their own class or fail. Graham Greene’s face now, in his mid-eighties, is that of one who has seen too much, but perhaps most of all it is the face of one who has been on close terms with his own thoughts, both those that refine and those that corrupt.
In 1935, reviewing Mrs Conrad’s book on the life of her husband Joseph Conrad, Greene returned to the argument he had had with Vivien over Aldous Huxley: ‘The trouble is that a writer’s home, just as much as the world outside, is his raw material. His wife’s or a child’s sickness.’29 Necessarily, Greene made use of his own real life and the lives of those close to him (though suitably modified, changed or expanded so as to allow him to retain the secrecy of his sources – and Greene has a developed taste for secrecy) because such material was essential to his fiction.
Necessarily he needed to widen his horizons, and gain knowledge of a larger cross-section of society, a knowledge on which the success of Stamboul Train depends. Thus he gradually began to travel in a direction that was to take him far beyond Vivien’s settled, middle-class and conventional world, a journey she could not take. His seeking out of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual and the deviant took him in many directions, as his diary shows:
A hot day. In the High Street the workmen remaking the road all stopped work for several minutes to watch a very small Pekinese being raped by a fox terrier. Released after the first coup, she flirted her tail and ran coquettishly down the street. When I came out of the bank, work was still interrupted. A black terrier was making a third and was being warned off by the successful lover. There was an air of content on the Pekinese’s face. Later I met them again outside the post office. A second coup was in progress, and the black terrier was watching. Several very small boys watched and laughed with some secrecy … It was the same Pekinese … I saw inspected a few days ago by a collie. The collie had to lie down flat on the pavement so as to be able to sniff at her tail.30
Eight months later it was two cats:
Returning I saw two cats copulating close to the front door; I have never seen a cat copulating publicly like a dog. Five minutes later I looked out of the window and they were still at it. The female cat with its eyes half closed, giving little whistles of satisfaction, but she became conscious of my stare and broke away and fled to a distant corner where they were soon at it again.31
Lafourcade’s biography of the poet Swinburne brought to Greene’s attention Swinburne’s ‘sadistic vices’, and interested him in the whipping establishment in the Euston Road the poet used to frequent: ‘I must remember to look up at the Bodleian “The Whippingham Papers”, published anonymously in 1888’, he noted.32 And on being told by Nina Hamnett that a statue of Ezra Pound by Gaudier-Brzeska was refused by the museums because it was in the form of a sexual organ and that it then stood in a back garden in Kensington, he made a note to write to his friend Jim Ede (author of the recently published book, Savage Messiah) ‘asking its provenance’.33
*
The ups and downs in bringing Stamboul Train to a conclusion put him under great nervous strain. On 11 June he is cheered and writes in his diary with his usual precision, ‘1000 words & finished the Subotica chapter. 69,000 odd completed & only one short chapter to go.’ ‘There’s good stuff here’ – and he was right.
The next day he spent at Oxford visiting both his brothers, Raymond and Hugh. When he returned to ‘Little Orchard’, though very tired, he read aloud to Vivien the last part of the Subotica chapter and was depressed by it. He felt he had failed to lift it out of the rank of good thrillers. He was depressed too about the next book he had to write and the chances of Heinemann continuing their contract. Depression continued. Two days later he wrote: ‘Very depressed about my work and the future.’ The following day (16 June) brought an income tax demand for £60. He had only £30 left in the bank. He was driven in desperation to work and went through the first three parts of the novel for the third time in typescript. The end of the fourth part, which he had tried in vain to rewrite the previous day, came to him. He decided on two possible outcomes for the novel: ‘Coral must have a heart attack, which Miss Warren [the lesbian journalist] absorbed in her triumph does not recognise; the other ending with Coral living and going back with Miss W. is a little too factitiously cynical.’ But it was this second version that Greene decided to use. His diary entry for the end of June was, ‘Very depressed all day with nothing to read.’
On 10 July 1933, he records writing 1,000 words despite a tiring morning in Oxford spent ‘in waiting at various points for V … My nerves horribly on edge.’
As Greene summoned up his creative energies for the short but fundamental last chapter of Stamboul Train, entitled ‘Constantinople’, he had a curious dream which he found ‘half encouraging’ and yet he was depressed by it. He dreamt of receiving a copy of a new book from Heinemann written by himself but printed on bad paper and badly bound with a bad title: ‘I opened it and had the sense of strong, firm writing better than anything I had ever done, and was tormented at the thought of its format standing in the way of it being reviewed or read.’ Five days later, while still struggling with the conclusion of Stamboul Train and some two weeks away from finishing the novel, he recorded (28 June 1932), ‘V. went off walking to Snowshill with Fred Hart and I had tea alone’, and he read a few essays in G. K. Chesterton’s Sidelights but they ‘clattered like old machinery’ and made him want something deep, quiet and mysterious, so he returned to a novel he had vowed never to read again – Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ‘It makes one despair of the book I am finishing, of any book I am now likely to write, but at the same time filled me with longing to write finely. Ideas stirred sluggishly at the bottom of my mind, but not ideas for the novel I had set myself to do after “Express” is finished. I want more than ever to read Heuser’s “Inner Journey”, hoping for something of this dark pregnant kind.’34
On 7 July 1932, his diary records that he read ‘to V.’ all that he had completed of the Constantinople chapter: ‘It read well … Ideas for the completion stir.’
What follows is not exactly kept to in the novel but the tone of the ending of the novel is exactly caught:
The theatre Myatt visits should be near the railway station. In an interval he should suddenly be faced by some phrase, some look, which shows him the inevitability of his marriage to Janet Pardoe [previously companion of Mabel Warren]. It is time for the last train from Subotica. He gives the past one chance over the future, the future wins and he’s uncertain whether he is glad or sorry.35
Yet he did not rush to complete the novel because he was expecting his literary agent in Chipping Campden: ‘I’m waiting to finish “Express” until I hear from David Higham on the subject of Constantinople.’ This is a curious diary entry, and when I asked him about it, he wrote: ‘I don’t know why I wanted to speak to David Higham about Constantinople … perhaps I wondered whether he could arrange something which would enable me to visit Constantinople before finishing the book. As it was I had to do it without any knowledge.’36
Obviously Higham was not able to arrange anything. But Greene did very well. Having no experience of Stamboul and its station in the old part of Constantinople where his characters were due to end their journey, he switched to the arrival of tourists and travellers, among them his characters Myatt, Janet Pardoe and Savory, at an international hotel ‘which has sunk a little in the world’. Myatt takes Janet Pardoe to the more fashionable Pera Palace for dinner and then to a cabaret at the Petits Champs ‘near the British Embassy’, on the European side of the town. References to places obviously of interest to the tourist are not inappropriate in this novel about travellers – the Blue Mosque, lined with twenty-one thousand blue tiles, the Roman cistern, the fishing boats in the Golden Horn flashing ‘like pocket torches’. That familiarity with the native life of his settings, which was to become his trade-mark, came later. But he found one book which helped him to create the background of the city: ‘Received from Corbual [?] Libraries Constantino
ple: Settings & Traits by H. G. Dwight. Lovely photographs of Constantinople. It will help me with the theatre and the scenes at evening’,37 and there are references in Dwight’s book to St Sophia, the Fire Tower and the long stretch of water up the western side of the Golden Horn, the Pera Palace and the Petits Champs, but not much more.
Perhaps a more important source for him was John Dos Passos’s Orient Express, which is not a ‘train travel book’, though it begins with travellers leaving the Channel boat at Ostend, going through customs, having their passports stamped and then boarding the Orient Express: ‘I can read the bronze letters on the wet side of the sleeping car …’ writes Dos Passos. ‘A gust of wet air slaps me in the face … bringing a smell of varnish and axlegrease.’38 The weather at Ostend for Greene was also wet, but he did not need to rely on Dos Passos here – he had had his own experience: ‘If you’re writing of a thing you want to see it with your eyes. You don’t want to discuss it with somebody else.’39 But it is possible that an influence lies in the idea of a novel set on the Orient Express (and Stamboul Train was to be entitled Orient Express in America)fn3 and there would seem to be an influence in the scene in the novel in the Petits Champs with its crowded tables, which Myatt and Janet Pardoe visit – a Frenchwoman prances on the stage singing a song about ‘Ma Tante’, and afterwards a man turns cartwheels and then a troupe of British girls in shorts, called the Dunn Babies, dance and sing, ‘Come up here’, which encourages some English sailors to clap and one of them to begin pushing his way to the stage between the tables. Turks sit unmoved drinking coffee. Dos Passos stayed at the famous Pera Palace Hotel, visited the Petits Champs, but also a restaurant in the Taxim Garden where he saw an international vaudeville taking place on a stage among the trees:
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 53
