The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  First a Russian lady waves a green handkerchief in a peasant dance … Then two extraordinarily tough English girls in socks and jumpers … One of them croons in a curious bored and jerky manner as they go through the steps and kicking that shocked country parsons at the Gaiety when Queen Victoria was a girl. Then came Greek acrobats … a Frenchwoman in black with operatic arms … sings the mad scene from ‘Lucia’ … People move about the gardens … jokes are passed, drinks poured. Three girls … dart into a side path followed by three Italian sailors … youngsters in white suits … Elderly Turkish gentlemen … sitting so quiet.40

  Perhaps this description helped Greene create his Istanbul.

  *

  Stamboul Train was finished on 17 July. He revised the last chapter and then went off to London for a break without having submitted the manuscript to his publishers, perhaps because he was still unsure of his work. He told Hugh he was going up to town for a day of business, but it must have been two days, since he wrote an account of his visit to his mother on 23 July telling her that he had seen, from the pit of the theatre, Musical Chairs and, on the following morning Tallulah Bankhead in a film called Thunder Below, which ‘proved to be pure drivel … Do forgive this writing & incoherence 76,000 words in eight months plays havoc with the muscles!’

  It was obviously not only a visit for a ‘day of business’, and because some passages in his diary for those two days have been torn out, a certain mystery surrounds them. The first entry for 21 July is: ‘Went to the Herb Shop in North Audley Street & got presents for V. Looked in at Selfridge’s Book Remainders; left bag at Hemming & Hemming’s, had supper (cold lamb & new potatoes & peas, black currant tart & cream) at Stone’s [Chop Shop which was opposite the Criterion Theatre] with half a pint of Old Burton.’ Given the state of his finances this would be cheap. H. E. Bates recalls in his autobiography being taken to lunch by Greene in 1933, at a place he had found which was both cheap and excellent: ‘that splendidly Edwardian pub in the heart of London’s theatre-land, all brass and red plush and mirrors and beer engines and snug corners, The Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane. Graham, as impecunious as I was, had discovered with delight that for one-and-ninepence you could get soup, a large plate of boiled or roast beef, roast lamb or pork, some sort of pudding or cheese with perfectly magnificent celery. It was all excellent.’41

  A second diary entry is missing after his reference to seeing Musical Chairs. After seeing Thunder Below he had a cocktail at Oddenino’s which was in Regent Street; took a bus up Fleet Street to look at the new Daily Express offices – ‘all black steel and glass’; walked over Waterloo Bridge to a bookshop, but drew a blank; went to another bookshop looking for Edel’s The Prefaces of Henry James and drew a blank again; had a salmon sandwich and a cup of coffee; picked up his bag from Hemming and Hemming’s and reached the motor-coach station with ten minutes to spare. The bus was late arriving at Oxford and he missed his train to Chipping Campden. He went on by bus to Cross Hands: ‘My suitcase was light, the late sun picked lovely colours from the great panorama of sky & I was glad to be on the way back to V. with presents I felt sure she would like. The walk flashed by, I bought a bottle of cider at the Volunteer [Inn] to quench my thirst. I felt so happy that even the income tax & rates demand among my letters made no difference.’42 But what was Greene hiding when he tore out of his diary two entries about his London outing?

  *

  By 29 July he felt he had done all he could on Stamboul Train, but not before revising yet again the first two parts of the novel. On that day he went for a walk: ‘I wanted to give V. an empty home to enable her to read through “The Express”, I took sandwiches & walked into Evesham the long way (9 miles). I got in at 11.20 & had a pint & a half of beer at the Crown Vaults. Talked to a man in a kind of naval officer’s cap (he is employed in the river steamers) … Took a bus to Broadway and walked home eating sandwiches on the way.’ As usual, at the end of a month, Greene listed his achievements for the period in his diary – ‘written 2,200 words of “The Express”, and heavily revised it; 1,000 words of “Brandon’s Acre” [a novel which has disappeared from Greene’s memory; nothing of it survives] did a 750 word review for the Spectator, and so earned £5.’ The last day of July was the last day he could expect money from Heinemann, the £450 a year guarantee had ended. He sent in the manuscript of ‘The Express’ on 4 August. Financially he was at the end of his tether. He wrote in his diary: ‘Is my position at its worst? Although I have been given till Sep. 15 to pay the remainder of my income tax, I am to all intents minus about £30 with no guarantee of any money or employment after this month.’43

  His publisher wrote immediately on receipt of his manuscript: ‘Heard from Charles Evans that he would try to read the novel during the week-end. I pray to God that his verdict may be favourable.’ On the following day, Sunday 7 August, he and Vivien went to Mass and on returning found on the lawn the daughters of Colonel Bender-Turner, Comfort and Mary, and Rupert Hart-Davis. ‘They had walked over from Blockley in tennis shoes and we drank parsnip wine and talked.’ Greene was much taken by the company, not least because Rupert Hart-Davis was secretary of the Book Society. Greene reports that ‘under the influence of sun and parsnip wine he promised to do his best for me.’ Hart-Davis kept his promise.

  Greene was without a novel to write. He had worked hard at ‘Brandon’s Acre’ but it petered out. By the middle of August he was at a loose end. He wrote the blurb for his ‘Express’ novel – and how intelligently Greene summed up his own work – and sent it off. He went for long walks, one of them away from the Cotswolds into Warwickshire. Whatever happened on that occasion – surely something quite minor – he nevertheless felt the need to tear out of his diary half a page.

  Also in August the playwright Ronald Mackenzie, author of Musical Chairs, was killed in a car accident in France. Greene recorded in his diary: ‘Apart from Noël Coward [Mackenzie was] the only dramatist in England with signs of distinction. So fate helps the cinema to destroy the stage, God bless it.’ At once he began writing a play entitled ‘The Editor Regrets’ but noted in his diary: ‘I do not expect to finish it’,44 which he did not. He played chess nightly with Benito and one night he went to Benito’s to hear Beethoven’s Benedictus and a song of Brahms, but he ended his diary entry with the note: ‘Very depressed about our financial position.’

  Greene has always lived on his nerves and his boredom could get to screaming point, according to his wife. His escape was either to go off somewhere or to work.45 An indication of his almost uncontrollable despair was his totally uncharacteristic losing of his temper with their servant, Nellie Greenall: ‘My temper badly upset by finding a piece of trickery on the daily maid’s part to get paid extra time for work which should have been done in her regular time. The cheating in pence of people in so bad a financial way as we infuriated me.’46

  He could not stand any longer the strain of not knowing what his future was to be and he wrote to his publisher thirteen days after sending Stamboul Train, asking for a decision. He wrote in his diary: ‘The suspense is becoming terrible.’47

  fn1 See here.

  fn2 The description of the death of a child by meningitis is in Point Counter Point. The detail is graphic – deafness, severe dilation of the pupils, one side of the face paralysed in a crooked grin, the incessant clockwork regularity of the child’s screams, and the final violent convulsions before death. Yet it was not his own child that Huxley was describing but that of a dear friend, Lady Naomi Mitchison. The Huxley critic, Kerpal Singh, recalled Lady Naomi saying to him: ‘That child was my child, our eldest. We were most upset … but I don’t believe Aldous did it with the intention to hurt.’

  fn3 Greene constantly refers to his novel in his diary as The Express.

  29

  The Book Society and the J. B. Priestley Affair

  In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences.

  – ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

  WHILE
HE WAS waiting for Charles Evans of Heinemann to respond to his letter, Greene had a visit from a rich Edinburgh man with whom he had made friends a year earlier when he was visiting the de Selincourts – he was ‘a sweet, cultured and most ugly Catholic Jew’ and he had built ‘a most lovely church for Canon Grey.’1 His name was André Raffalovitch and he arrived at Chipping Campden with Canon Grey. One wonders how Greene felt at that moment since Raffalovitch was the probable source for Eckman in Stamboul Train, an old Jew who, like Raffalovitch, was a convert to Christianity and kept ‘a chained Bible by his lavatory seat … it advertised to every man and woman who dined in his flat Mr Eckman’s Christianity.’2

  After his guests left, he went to bed oppressed by what decision the next day might bring from Heinemann’s. He was near breaking point from anxiety.3

  *

  The next day, directly he was called, he went downstairs and there ‘sure enough was a letter from Heinemann’s’:

  I took it half way upstairs & opened it with fingers which really trembled. I was astonished by the sentences I read: they were too good, I thought, to be true, & then, O God, what a lightening of heart. Charles Evans wrote: ‘I have read “The Orient Express” with very much pleasure. It is beyond doubt the best book, as a whole, which you have written so far, although there is no single part of it comes up to the best part of “The Man Within”. I think it will increase your reputation & everybody will find it easier to read than the last book, for the story is quite enthralling. I wish you could have found a way of bringing that scoundrel Grunlich to justice. This may seem a naïve remark from a blasé old novel reader such as I am, but it will show you that your people have got hold of me.’ Although the financial question had still to be decided, I felt so relieved and happy that I went into the church and thanked God.4

  As he admitted in a further note in his diary: ‘The failure of Rumour at Nightfall, the turning down of Rochester, had given me such a conviction that I had proved of no value as a writer that the praise in the letter raised my spirits extraordinarily. Hope was re-born, & a new theme for a novel, more in key with the “Express” than the Spiritualist one [the unfinished ‘Brandon’s Acre’] leapt to birth.’ This was to be It’s a Battlefield.

  Next day reaction set in. What kind of contract would Heinemann’s now offer him, given that up to that point his novels had incurred only debts and financially he was at rock bottom? His diary reveals his anxiety:

  August 20:

  A reaction from yesterday’s relief. Will Heinemann keep me for another year at the same rate as now?

  August 24:

  Still no word from Heinemann. I am getting anxious again.

  August 25:

  Still nothing from Heinemann.

  August 26:

  No news from H. I began to map out the next novel … Planning to go for a week to Crowborough from the 1st. This would enable us to get up to town with 5/- half day excursion tickets and me to see Heinemann if necessary.

  August 30:

  I woke at about 7 as the postman arrived and went downstairs for the fateful letter which proved a damp squib, Charles Evans merely writing that he had been discussing a new arrangement with Miss Leonard and naming an hour on Thursday for me to see him.

  ‘One ominous day,’ as he describes it in A Sort of Life,5 he and Vivien took excursion tickets from Crowborough to London – he to discuss his future with Charles Evans and Doubleday’s representative, Mary Leonard, Vivien to do some shopping. He had sandwiches and a Guinness at the Leicester Lounge and then visited a News Cinema (in those days they showed continuous newsreels) and then went on to Heinemann’s. ‘With Miss Leonard [later Mrs Pritchett], Charles Evans sat on my case,’ he wrote in his diary.6 He recalled that there was some sympathy from Evans but none at all from Miss Leonard. According to A Sort of Life she was that day ‘a dragon indeed:’

  The interview with Evans and Mary Pritchett proceeded on its dreary course: accounts showing the disastrous sales of the last two books were before them: the typescript of Stamboul Train lay on the desk beside the accounts – the third book in the three-year contract which had now come to an end. No further advances would be due to me until another novel was completed. I waited hopelessly while an argument went on between Evans and Mary Pritchett and then the meeting was quickly brought to a close. Heinemann, Evans said, would continue to pay me my three hundred pounds for one more year, but Doubleday would promise nothing beyond two further monthly payments, and in the meanwhile they would study the new manuscript. There were several conditions attached even to these payments – another contract for two books with all losses to be recovered by the publishers before any further royalties were paid.7

  In fact the situation was worse than this since Doubleday made no promise of two further monthly payments then, and the opinion was that there appeared to be little hope of Stamboul Train becoming a Book Society Choice because Greene had introduced a lesbian character.8 He admits in his diary that during the interview he felt close to tears as he realised he might have to write two more novels with no payment for them whatsoever.

  The interview over, according to his diary, he ‘went up and down Bond Street looking at the whores, had tea at the St James’s tea rooms and went to Victoria to meet V. and catch the bus to Crowborough’. But Miss Leonard did write, renewing the financial arrangement for two months while his American publishers considered the possibilities of Stamboul Train. Graham’s diary entry on this occasion has a very Greeneian image: ‘Suspense began again like an aching tooth, so that I must be always doing something, going for a walk, black-berrying, playing games, strolling into Crowborough for no real reason, going to a sale.’9

  ‘During the following two months, while I was still receiving payment from Doubleday,’ he writes in A Sort of Life, ‘I had to find a job at all costs anywhere. Our country peace was over, and the nights held little sleep.’10

  Barrington Ward, at The Times, ‘a cold complacent man, prematurely bald’, gave him ‘a frozen response’, payment for his temerity in leaving the paper in the first place. He tried ‘for half-time jobs on Sunday papers with no success’. The editor of the Catholic Herald treated him as a cat would a mouse, receiving him first with ‘humiliating condescension’, then recalling him to say that with his three novels and experience with The Times he was too good for the job of sub-editor with them and would never settle down – ‘perhaps,’ Greene reflected, ‘he hadn’t liked my name appearing in the same number of the Spectator with his own [he had been strategical correspondent]. I had too much pride and too little spirit left to ask him to return my railway fare, and since then I have taken a biased view of Catholic journalism and Catholic humanity.’11 He felt ‘the desolate isolation of defeat, like a casualty left behind and forgotten’, but he was cheered by the arrival on 12 September of an old Berkhamstedian called Ratcliffe (whom he had hardly seen since their schooldays) who brought with him a Norwegian poet, Nordahl Grieg, whose brother was publishing The Man Within in Oslo, because of its success.

  The unexpected arrival of that Norwegian poet, an admirer of his, down that muddy Gloucestershire lane at such a time of depression, was: ‘Unaccountable and dreamlike and oddly encouraging. Like the appearance of three crows on a gate he was an omen.’12 Hearing of Graham’s straitened circumstances, he suggested that he should try for a lectureship in Norway (though Greene thought this would not be possible for him), and gave a fascinating picture of Oslo, a town surrounded by forests, the great stoves in the houses, the rather stupid Norwegians drinking heavily, but blindly admiring England. Graham thought that life in Norway would be ideal, ‘with its personal freedom, no prudery to react from’, and, as he stressed in his diary, something he was not receiving from Heinemann, ‘kindly, cultured relations between publisher and writer’,13 for the lack of which he never forgave them.

  The Norwegian project came to nothing, but the friendship was kept up through occasional letters and three further meetings. Greene describes Nordah
l Grieg’s position as a writer in Norway as ‘somewhat the same … as Saint-Exupéry in France and Stig Dagerman in Sweden – that flavour of promise just fulfilled which comes from an early and mysterious death. Even his death was to prove legendary, so that none will be able to say with any certainty “In this place he died.” He was shot down in an air raid over Berlin in 1943.’14

  Nine days later Greene and Vivien were travelling again to London by bus. It was a Saturday and since the City was deserted at weekends, apart from tourists, it was unlikely that he had gone on business. As usual Vivien went off shopping. Graham’s aunt Nora, realising their financial plight, had given Vivien ten shillings. Greene records in his diary: ‘With typical tenderness and sacrifice, she insisted on my taking 3/6d to buy a book with. I bought “Daisy Miller”, had sandwiches at a pub behind the Palace Theatre, a Guinness at another pub, & strolled about looking for whoever, non existent on a Saturday afternoon, save the dregs of the profession.’

  Vivien went home by train but Graham went via Oxford by bus. At Chipping Norton, the lights came on, even though the late sun still shone, and in the High Street he saw a girl from the King’s Arms, ‘who was so kind the night I was there with Higham and whom I in vain tried to seduce.’ Nearly a year had passed since he had seen her and he had forgotten that she was so pretty. He walked to Moreton but was fifteen minutes late for the train and ran back to the High Street for the bus. He was put down at Cross Hands and walked home: ‘A beautiful orange sunset over Broadway & lemon-shaped moon glowing above Batsford woods. It was nearly dark and the bats were out when I came into the Watney Lane and the lights in the cottages filled me with content.’15