The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  Uniquely, Stamboul Train had not been published before the Book Society lunch honouring its author took place, and Greene is under the impression that he did not attend anyway, but his diary and an undated letter to his mother show that he did and that in spite of the four previous very trying days he was able to cope with it. On 2 December, he and Vivien caught the 7.15 train to London and went to the Regent Palace Hotel, Greene and Vivien soon separating. As usual Graham sold copies of books he had reviewed to Foyle’s, this time for 35/-. He then went down Charing Cross Road buying ‘two Juveniles [?] for V.’ and James’s Roderick Hudson for himself. Next he went into a news cinema for half an hour, had a quick double whisky and took a taxi to the Park Lane Hotel where the Book Society lunch was being held:

  A huge gathering. Authors & committee sat at the top table so that the members could watch them eat. I was between Mazo de la Roche,fn1 a simple middle aged woman, and Sir Robert Donald, owner of Everyman, a simple elderly man with whom I talked chiefly politics. Professor Gordon, Priestley, Charles Morgan and Walpole spoke. A dull lunch but a certain exaltation in the crowded room, about 400 people.30

  He wrote to his mother immediately afterwards: ‘The dismembered book comes out on Thursday; a week late. Ironically I had to drink the toast to Literature coupled with the name of Mr J. B. Priestley on Friday. I didn’t see him except when he rose to speak. It was a gigantic lunch … We all had to sit in a row to be stared at by the members. The same atmosphere as the Zoo at feeding time.’31 The report of the lunch in The Times shows that Priestley had Priestley-type things to say – that the standard of reviewing was higher than twenty years ago; that the quality of the writing today was such that reviewers were ‘compelled by sheer conscience to praise many more books’; that the present age would probably lack outstanding figures in literature but also had ‘a great body of people capable of producing good literature.’32

  The Priestley affair must have proved to Greene once again how vulnerable he was. Having worked so hard to produce a best-seller, having achieved a coveted award, fate (slightly assisted perhaps by himself) had dashed the cup of success from his lips. His application for a post at Chulalungkorn University, Bangkok, had gone astray and on 4 January he wrote letters to Kenneth Bell and the famous Sligger, asking for testimonials. That same night he had a dream which gives us some notion of the upset caused by the Priestley business: ‘Terribly worried over finances. Feeling tired out. Went to bed at 9.30 & had my first really long night’s sleep for months. Dreamed I was in prison. My dreams during the last four weeks have continually reflected crime. One night I dreamed that I had murdered Priestley & was arrested at the Times Book Club & taken away in a Black Maria.’33

  Greene had his revenge on Priestley through his reviews. Writing of Priestley’s undistinguished novel of 1933, Albert Goes Through with Lady Eleanor Smith’s Christmas Tree, he allows Priestley to come out ahead, but in such a way as to belittle both: ‘Mr Priestley’s gentle satire of the cinema is hardly original; one remembers Mr Elmer Rice’s very much more finished Purdau; but it is intended for a less sophisticated public. If these novelists feel bound to put on paper caps at Christmas or dress as Santa Claus to amuse their public, I prefer Mr. Priestley’s way to Lady Eleanor Smith’s.’34

  And when in his well known autobiography Midnight on the Desert Priestley speaks of ‘tap-tapping’ away at it, ‘in the rain and fog of London Streets’, and while he is sitting in the desert, curtains drawn, to dull the bright sunlight, Greene dismisses him as follows:

  ‘Tap-tap away’: the sound of a typewriter is mesmeric, and I can well believe that a great part of Mr Priestley’s work is done under its spell. The huge vague cosmic words pour out: ‘cold hell,’ ‘eternal zero,’ ‘freezing universe,’ ‘flashes of lightning into the inmost recesses of the human heart.’ Nothing (in spite of the reviewers who call him a reporter) is vividly or exactly rendered: ‘… there are miracles of fire in the sky. Night uncovers two million more stars than you have ever seen before; and the planets are not points but globes.’ Tap, tap, tap, out it pours from the machine: graceless sentences: (It is one of Mr Priestley’s illusions that he has a ‘professional trick of rather easy and pleasant exposition’). Tap, tap, tap: too fast for the elementary courtesy of quoting a contemporary poet correctly: too fast for grace or exactitude: too fast, much too fast for ideas.35

  A year later, writing on the popular novel, Greene lumps Walpole, Brett Young and Priestley together: ‘We are aware of rather crude minds representing no more of contemporary life than is to be got in a holiday snapshot.’36 The same year, 1938, when Brighton Rock appeared, he was still shooting Priestley down, but not so that Priestley could take him to court, with a reference to ‘a well-known popular author [displaying] his plump too famous face in the window of the Royal Albion [Hotel]’.37 Up to the Second World War Greene was still having a go at Priestley. Admitting that his novel, Let the People Sing, was written to appeal to an enormous, mixed audience, he concedes that it would therefore be unfair to complain that the effects are broad, the sentiment lush, and the theme far from subtle – ‘if it were not that all his novels seem to have fulfilled the same condition’. As for Priestley’s dialogue, its chief function is to cover the paper with so many hundred words – ‘long, loose, repetitive, it is tied to the character like the balloons in a caricature, by certain easily recognisable characteristics, which have long ceased to bear any relationship to real people.’38

  Greene’s dislike of Priestley suddenly evaporated after the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk during the Second World War. At this crucial point in the struggle against Hitler when Britain was up against it and Hitler’s army had swept through France, J. B. Priestley came, it was thought by many, to the rescue of the British at this low, disastrous moment of their lives. He began what were to be his famous Sunday evening ‘postscripts’ on radio, following the nine o’clock news when millions listened. Britain needed the Priestley voice and the Priestley stolidity and Graham Greene made full recompense in his acknowledgment of this in a review entitled ‘A Lost Leader’:

  There were many of us who, before war made such disagreements seem trivial, regarded Mr Priestley with some venom. We felt that as a novelist he represented a false attitude to the crumbling, untidy, depressing world; that he had clothed himself in the rags of a Victorian tradition. He was continually speaking for England and we very much doubted whether The Good Companions or Let the People Sing represented England at all. Then, after the disaster of Dunkirk, he became a voice: a slow, roughened voice without the French polish of the usual B.B.C. speaker; we had been driven off the Continent of Europe with a shattering loss of men and material: in a few weeks we had watched the enemy obtain what he had failed to win previously after four years of war,fn2 and the voice on Wednesday, June 5th, began to lead the way out of despair: ‘Now that it’s over, and we can look back on it, doesn’t it seem to you to have an inevitable air about it – as if we had turned a page in the history of Britain and seen a chapter headed “Dunkirk”?’

  Priestley became, Greene tells us, in the months following Dunkirk, a leader second only to Churchill:

  We shall never know how much this country owed to Mr Priestley last summer, but at a time when many writers showed unmistakable signs of panic, Mr Priestley took the lead. When the war is over we may argue again about his merits as a novelist: for those dangerous months, when the Gestapo arrived in Paris, he was unmistakably a great man.39

  Graham Greene was to learn later in his career how dangerous the libel laws of those days could be to a writer. At least Priestley acted in good faith, but later Greene was to be faced with other libel suits which had little justification.

  He recalls that a friend of his was once approached by a solicitor’s clerk at the door of his flat with a copy of a novel wherein his friend’s name appeared, suggesting that he should institute proceedings. In those days publishers had little zest for fighting: ‘They were
always prepared to cut their losses and make a small settlement.’40 Greene was fortunate at the time of publication of Stamboul Train, for there was an American girl who could have taken him to court and ‘to the cleaners’. In the novel Janet Pardoe is kept by the lesbian journalist Mabel Warren. In 1932 lesbianism was not to be spoken of. He must have been relieved to receive an uncomplaining letter from a ‘woman somewhere in Pennsylvania’, he told his mother, ‘saying that her name is Janet Pardoe: “Am considered rather attractive, as was your character, but, hope not the empty-headed, self-centered, parasitical person your Janet was.”’

  *

  The delayed Stamboul Train appeared in the bookshops on 8 December. That day, Vivien gave Graham a recording of Delius’s Walk to the Paradise Garden which, now that they no longer needed to play on the gramophone Honegger’s Pacific 231, became their favourite. Then the reviews began to pour in. There was an excellent one in the Spectator from L. A. G. Strong (whom Greene was to replace as the fiction reviewer in the following year). Strong had been a friend and an admirer for many years. The Observer spoke well of Greene, indeed, in The Times Literary Supplement advertisement, under the heading ‘LAST MINUTE Choice of Christmas Books’, we are told that ‘The Observer predicts “wide success” for the new novel by the author of The Man Within’. The review was written by Gerald Gould, a maker (and breaker) then of reputations, and while the review pleased Greene he noted in his diary: ‘a grudging and patronising review’. He was ecstatic about a review in Time & Tide which he thought (wrongly) was written by Aldous Huxley: ‘To my joy and surprise a glowing review by Aldous Huxley (under the name of Francis Iles).’41 His spirits were down the next day, but then rose in the afternoon on reading an excellent review by Kate O’Brien in the Referee. On 23 December he admits to good reviews pouring in and adds ‘the only really bad ones Priestley & Compton Mackenzie’.

  But his novel received severe criticism from certain members of the Book Society itself. He and Vivien were staying in London in a flat belonging to Mary Borden. He had invited his agent David Higham and Rupert Hart-Davis to dinner. Rupert told him that a good many copies of Stamboul Train were coming back to the Book Society from members. One lady wrote: ‘Are none of your members pure in heart?’ and another, ‘This may be like life, but if it is, I don’t want to read about it.’42 These letters were supported by a review which appeared prematurely in the Liverpool Post on 1 December: ‘This is an episode which, even if it has any relation to truth, which I doubt, is quite gratuitous in its frankness. Why do novelists indulge in this sort of stuff?’ In 1980 an old lady recalled reading Stamboul Train on its publication: ‘It was a Book Society choice. I thought it was the dirtiest book I had ever read. If you compare it with the modern books – it is quite clean!!’fn3

  By 1930 standards (though not by today’s) Greene’s novel was sexually explicit and it was this aspect which troubled Professor Gordon, who thought it would offend Book Society readers. And of course there are many scenes of sex, or approaching sex, in the novel: Myatt walking along the corridor of the train observes a man, ‘who shared [Coral Musker’s] seat, put his hand cautiously on her ankle and moved it very slowly up towards her knee’,43 while she slept; Myatt’s dream recalls a previous experience of being with his friend Isaacs in his Bentley, and the seeking of girls, ‘shopgirls offering themselves dangerously for a drink at the inn, a fast ride, and the fun of the thing; on the other side of the road, in the dark, on a few seats, the prostitutes sat, shapeless and shabby and old, with their backs to the sandy slopes and the thorn bushes, waiting for a man old and dumb and blind enough to offer them ten shillings.’44 And in his dream, Myatt sees Coral Musker who wants him, a Jew, and the ‘short barbarous enjoyment in the stubble’;45 and poor Coral Musker with her simple, inherited working-class philosophy: ‘There’s only one thing a man wants’ – knowing that ‘one never got anything for nothing. Novelists like Ruby M. Ayres might say that chastity was worth more than rubies, but the truth was it was priced at a fur coat or thereabouts.’46

  But it was probably Miss Warren’s passion for Janet Pardoe which disturbed many readers in the 1930s. Mabel Warren with her ‘coarse hair, red lips, and obstinately masculine and discordant voice’; ageing, plain Miss Warren, infatuated by Janet who was slim, dark and beautiful. Janet is fed and clothed by Mabel but later, when Mabel sees that she is going to lose her, she begins to look for a possible substitute in Coral Musker: ‘Coral in pyjamas mixing a cocktail, Coral asleep in the redecorated and rejuvenated flat.’ Perhaps also it was not only the sexual aspects but the cynical nature of most of the characters that caused revulsion.

  In the last few lines of the novel, Mr Stein’s niece, Janet Pardoe, and Myatt are seen dining together and watching a stage show. Momentarily, Myatt thinks of Coral Musker, a virgin until he had slept with her on the Orient Express, but her face eludes him: ‘She was fair, she was thin, but he could not remember her features.’

  Myatt saw Mr Stein pressing his way between the tables, pipe in hand … He knew that he only had to lean forward now to ask [Janet] to marry him and he would have arranged far more than his domestic future; he would have bought Mr Stein’s business at Mr Stein’s figure, and Mr Stein would have a nephew on the board and be satisfied … Mr Stein waved his pipe again … Myatt said, ‘Don’t go back to her [Miss Warren]. Stay with me.’ … She nodded and their hands moved together. He wondered whether Mr Stein had the contract in his pocket.47

  By Greene’s standards his book was not overtly sexual. What would have seemed much more sensual to him would have been a passage from Guy de Maupassant which he transferred to his diary:

  Reading Maupassant’s short stories in translation. Some delicious little sexual morsels. Enjoyed particularly ‘The Window’ where the hero lifted up the petticoat of the lady he is courting & kisses her buttock mistaking her for her maid, leaning out of a window. ‘With infinite caution I took hold of the two edges of the petticoat & lifted it quickly. Immediately I recognised, round, fresh, plump and smooth, my mistress’s secret face …’48

  Six months previously, the circus had come to Chipping Campden, and Greene, writing of the popularity with low comedians of jokes about the bum, went on to say, ‘yet in the case of women it can be the most beautiful & alluring part’.49

  *

  In Ways of Escape, Greene writes of the courage and understanding of his wife, ‘who never complained of this dangerous cul-de-sac into which I had led her from the safe easy highroad we had been travelling while I remained on The Times’,50 but it would seem that the move to Chipping Campden, together with his newly-developed view of the novelist’s right – and need – to use his own and others’ experience more ruthlessly, sowed the seeds of the break-up of their marriage. They had the ideal Hansel and Gretel existence he had wanted – love in a cottage, what his character Andrews in The Man Within had prayed for – a sanctuary, a home (the Cat’s basket), isolated, secure. But the reality was an isolated and very rural cottage in an unstimulating environment, far from London, the literary centre; reality was uncomfortable living and smoking paraffin lamps; and their security depended on his efforts and things were going wrong with his plans. Close contact with Vivien in those circumstances seemed to reduce his reverence for her. She was perhaps no longer ‘all beauty and all mystery and all wonder’.

  fn1 Mazo de la Roche (1885–1961) Canadian novelist who wrote Jalna (1927), the first of a series of novels about the Whiteoak family. Whiteoaks (1929) was successfully dramatised.

  fn2 Presumably during the First World War, 1914–18.

  fn3 Greene’s aunt, Miss Helen Greene, disapproved of Stamboul Train, telling Muriel Bradbrook, former Mistress of Girton College, that she felt the need to banish her nephew’s photo from her sitting room to a bedroom.

  30

  1933

  Writing criticism is to writing fiction as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

  – JOHN UPDIKE

  ON 30 SEPTEMBER
1932, while Greene’s youngest brother Hugh was still at University, and his eldest, Herbert, was as usual out of work, Greene was being shown in the Heinemann offices the evidence of the disastrous sales of his last two books and told there would be no further advances and no royalties on further books until all losses had been recovered. Only the second eldest, Raymond, seemed on the verge of successfully hunting ‘the white stag Fame’ for he was already involved in the preparations for the 1933 Everest expedition, of which he was to be chief medical officer.

  The leader was Ruttledge, but the team of fourteen included men with whom Raymond had climbed Mount Kamet in 1931: ‘[F. S.] Smythe, Binnie and [Eric] Shipton are coming too,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘so we still have a Kamet clique.’ In spite of working long hours as a general medical practitioner, Raymond was doing much physiological work in preparation for Everest, using himself as a guinea pig in the study of man’s acclimatisation to altitude. He consulted leading physiologists, Haldane, Douglas and Priestley, and spent many hours in a low-pressure chamber at Oxford, suffering agonising earache and some days of deafness when a careless technician ‘crashed’ him from a simulated 20,000 feet to earth in a few seconds. He concluded, as a result of his experiments, that no climber should ascend more than a thousand feet a day and that there should be a proper acclimatisation stop at each camp. He was also designing lightweight oxygen equipment. ‘Perhaps,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘it [the Expedition] will yet save the situation for the whole family.’

  The year 1933, in which his brother Raymond tackled Everest, was important for Graham too. It had its depressions and financial difficulties, but it also saw the birth of a first child; above all, it was a time when Greene made significant experiments as a novelist.

  January began mildly. By the middle of the month the weather had radically changed, though its harshness did not stop Greene working and walking, as entries in his diary reveal: ‘A thin layer of snow when we got up, and a dim yellow light all morning. The sky very heavy with snow … Flu very bad, all over the village’ (17 January); ‘500 words after early Mass. Went for a walk after lunch with Tooter but was driven back by a heavy storm’ (19 February); ‘500 words. We had an early lunch and then I went for a ten mile walk, up to the Cross Hands, along the Five Mile Way, down into Blockley and home. On the ridge of the Five Mile Way a snow storm blew up. It was quite terrifying, as the land on either side of the ridge was blotted out by fine grey snow, while the storm raced up behind. But after blinding minutes it was gone, the sun shining, and a blue clear sky. Passed the lake in Northwick Park where Mrs Keiton drowned herself the other day, walking out from one of the council houses in Broad Campden after dark on one of the bitterest nights of a cold month’ (21 February).