The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  It was also a year which saw the deaths of a number of famous writers: on 22 January that of the Irish writer George Moore, though his death was not as tragic to Greene as had been those of Conrad (1924), Hardy (1928) and Lawrence (1930); but he noted on 29 January 1933, ‘George Saintsbury dead. Galsworthy seriously ill. A big clearance this fluy frosty winter of the old men of letters.’

  On 13 January a young man of nineteen, Nigel Dennis, who occasionally visited Chipping Campden where his step-father kept the Noel Arms, called on the Greenes. He was later to become a promising novelist and distinguished reviewer, but at that time was selling women’s tweeds and living in a boarding house in Earl’s Court where there was also a Russian Admiral and his daughter, a ballet dancer who sold chocolates at the theatre, and a landlady who had known George Moore twenty-five years earlier in Dublin.1 On the occasion of Greene’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1979, Dennis, looking back to his 1933 visit,2 remembered that ‘up the garden walk, came a telegraph boy. The message he brought, in lettering that is still in my mind’s eye, was from the Spectator: Mr Greene was told that six books were being held for him to review. They would be sent immediately, if he had no objection. I have no idea what happened next. I was dumbfounded which is why the memory has persisted. First, there was the astonishing discovery that a publication should want a reviewer (begging letters to literary editors were all I knew about). Second, there was a request for agreement by the reviewer – surely an astonishing courtesy? Third, and most astonishing of all, there was the promise of six books. I could hardly credit such an immense number.’ And Nigel Dennis concluded that ‘though [he] had read two of Mr Greene’s novels, [he] now recognised his stature for the first time.’

  Certainly the invitation from Peter Fleming, brother of Ian Fleming and literary editor of the Spectator, to review for them (L. A. G. Strong, their usual fiction reviewer, was ill) was an indication of his growing stature in the literary world. He had begun to review for the journal regularly, and two weeks later he was asked whether he would be prepared to review fiction twice a month: ‘a new arrangement was being contemplated. This would mean £75 to £130 a year.’3 ‘It’s more or less decided now but still a secret’, he confided to his mother, ‘that I shall do the fiction review once a fortnight at 5 guineas a time with a six months contract. It will be a great help – and there’s a possibility that I may also be given the job of film critic at 2 guineas a week.’4 Greene was to share the fiction reviewing with William Plomer and Bonamy Dobrée. Moreover, Stamboul Train was selling well. Charles Evans wrote to him on 6 January that 14,074 copies had been sold-one hundred per day had been sold ever since Christmas. Twenty days later he heard from his friend, Benito (who had been visiting Heinemann’s), that the sales had passed the 16,000 mark: ‘A wave of prosperity seems to be lifting us up,’ he concluded.5

  Yet his diary does not reflect a sense of success – quite the contrary and for a number of reasons. For one thing, although Stamboul Train was selling well, he felt he was facing financial disaster. His records of his earnings show that even when he was reviewing regularly for the Spectator, he earned hardly enough to keep the wolf from the door.

  Figures for the first six months of 1933 show that during February he wrote 1,900 words of reviews yet earned only £6-6-0. Even this was a great improvement on the previous year when during the months of November and December, he had earned from his reviewing £1-7-0 and £2-14-0 respectively. In March 1933 he earned £1-8-0 and when he began writing two important reviews per month in April his earnings leapt to £15-12-0. For the following three months earnings stayed at 10 guineas, but given his publishers’ revised conditions this was not enough. It is not surprising that he should again have begun looking for other sources of income, for more certain jobs than freelance writing.

  On 19 January Greene went to London: ‘Saw Ernest Manton, news editor of the Sunday Times, about a job. He wasn’t hopeful. Saw Charles Evans: Stamboul Train was doing well, the 15000 turned. Saw Miss Leonard and tried to see Allen Lane. Decided to apply for Burma [presumably for a post at the University of Rangoon].’6 On 23 January he took time off from the novel to send in another application for a job: ‘After lunch Captain Cox drove us into Stratford to post my application by air mail to Siam [application for a university post in Bangkok].’ Unquestionably Greene felt himself on the margin of failure and his nerves were stretched by the agony of never feeling secure. On 17 March, he wrote:

  £10 from Ivor Nicholson for the James essay; I sent it to the bank for my deposit account; after three years of 5d in it, I have now £17.11.11, £7.11.6 from my surrendered life policy.

  Yet he was regularly and successfully reviewing for the Spectator until the early 1940s and was a film critic for them from July 1935. In 1940 he succeeded H. E. Bates as literary editor when Bates left for the war, and was himself succeeded by W. J. Turner in 1942. But he was neither aggressive nor conceited: Charles Seaton, librarian at the Spectator, wrote in 1977: ‘So far as his persona at the office is concerned he is remembered as a “tall, shy figure who got on with his job quietly and without fuss”.’

  If Graham Greene was well liked at the Spectator offices, the editor Wilson Harris was not. H. E. Bates recalled that he appeared to have about as much humanity as a clothes prop. He once told him a slightly risqué joke which was received in frozen silence, ‘that would have greeted an incident of indecent exposure in the House of Lords’:

  Aloof, cold, ascetic, distant, Wilson Harris appeared to be … a kind of bloodless public school headmaster … I used to enter his study armed with proofs, books or articles like a small boy tremblingly ready to apologise that he had failed to finish his impositions, do his Latin prep. or unravel the diabolical mysteries of his trigonometry. In consequence I never felt anything but very, very small, very, very inferior, very, very unhappy.7

  Nor was much love lost between Graham Greene and Wilson Harris. Something of this is shown in his division of the editor’s name between two insignificant characters (still living on memories of their minor public school), Wilson and Harris in The Heart of the Matter. Greene later recalled their relationship: ‘Wilson Harris disliked me very much. He objected to the poems I published … He took books away from my office to read at the weekends and I noticed they were always called Married Lovefn1 or some such title.’8 And Greene makes the point that while his wife drove an ambulance during the blitz Wilson Harris slept out of London to avoid the air-raids. In The Ministry of Fear, a Mr Newey has a walk-on part and he also has to get back every evening to Welwyn before the raids start. But by this time, Graham Greene the prankster was beginning to come out of his shell. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Spectator, Geoffrey Wheatcroft recalled that not everyone liked Mr Harris: ‘When Mr Graham Greene was literary editor he showed his disdain for the editor on his birthday. His present to Harris was what was then known as a rubber article stuffed with Smarties.’

  *

  In spite of his success as a reviewer he was having trouble with It’s a Battlefield which, from its conception in the middle of August 1932 to its completion on 4 August 1933, was beset by difficulties in the writing and in his own circumstances. The manuscript of the novel shows that he did not begin writing it until 13 September. Part of the initial difficulty was that he was distracted by hearing that various film companies were interested in Stamboul Train and with hopes that his financial troubles might be at an end. Excitedly he wrote to his mother: ‘Basil Dean is reading S.T. on the way to New York, another company R.K.O. are interested, and now I hear that there are hopes in New York of the richest company of all, except perhaps Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. There really seems a chance of big money from this book.’9

  He wrote this after he had returned from his first Spanish holiday, which he took after Stamboul Train became the Book Society choice. He stayed at the Hotel Alfonso in Seville and then at the Hotel Atlantica in Cadiz. He visited Toledo, Avila, Gredos, ‘a mountain inn 4000 feet up with big
log fires’. Within hours of his arrival in Madrid, he went to his first bull fight: ‘There were six bulls killed and the first I enjoyed. During the second I suddenly thought I’d faint but I held on.’

  He records in his diary: ‘Impossible to work during these excitements.’10 In the month of October 1932 he wrote only 1,000 words of It’s a Battlefield. In November even this number was reduced – he did no more in thirty days than he normally did in one – 500 words. December was distinctly better. On 5 December, just days before the publication of Stamboul Train, he started It’s a Battlefield once again: ‘500 words sweated out for Opus V’, and it began to come more easily once his novel was published, on one occasion reaching a daily total of 900 words. January was a crucial month: altogether he wrote that month 8,500 words; the struggle was often desperate.

  By 20 January he was very low. At first it seemed he was depressed by a minor matter: ‘Greenall [the help] ruins my shoes in knocking a nail down.’ But his depression had a more significant source than a broken shoe: ‘No interest in my novel, but 500 words padded out. Thoroughly stale.’ Later that day he began reading Margaret Kennedy’s A Long Time Ago: ‘a brilliantly able lightweight novel with an excellent idea. As easy to read as a soufflé is easy to eat. How I envy her air of ease.’11 For three days he did his regular stint of 500 words but by 26 January he had to miss another day. He walked to Evesham, taking his lunch with him. There he got a copy of Anthony Powell’s Venusberg: ‘a mildly amusing, rather tiresome book in the Evelyn Waugh manner – caricature and understatement without Waugh’s narrative power.’ On the last day of a cold January he recorded in his diary, ‘500 difficult stillborn, unsatisfactory words’. He struggled on, but when it was hopeless he went for a long walk, sometimes on his own, sometimes with Vivien: ‘Took a day off work, and V. and I went by train to Adelstrop and then walked to the Rollick Stones. Snow still on the uplands. Ate our lunch under a hedge.’12

  He kept on working during January, February and March. March was particularly difficult – he wrote no more than 4,500 words that month (normally he would write 4,500 words in 9 days). On 9 March he writes in his diary: ‘An extreme reluctance to work, but hammered out 500.’ He missed the following day but things were little better on 11 March: ‘500 words ground out.’ A week later he records: ‘The brain absolutely dead, impossible to write, so I shall give myself a few days holiday.’ He gave himself two days, did a further 500 words but the following day he was writing: ‘500 very unsatisfactory words. It’s no good. I’ve got to have a holiday.’13 Vivien and he went to London, but before going, they received a telegram from Frere Reeves asking whether he would take at least £150 for serial rights in Stamboul Train from Pearson’s Weekly: ‘God,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘that it may come off; I don’t dare believe it.’ And Greene was right not to believe it. Frere Reeves overstretched himself by asking Pearson’s to raise their offer. Instead they turned the novel down.

  In spite of this, it was not the feeling that he was failing financially that was preventing him writing easily. Stamboul Train was selling well in the United States: ‘Heard that Orient Express had sold 4,300 odd by the day of publication.’14 He had had high hopes for some time that the book would be sold to a film company, and negotiations through his agent in America were still going on. It was simply that ‘Opus V’ was being written according to a new conception.

  Even during April he was still fighting staleness. On 3 April he commits his feelings to his diary: ‘Feeling depressed by the book and thoroughly stale. I think I shall have to cancel the last 2 or 3,000 and start Part II differently.’ The following day he ‘did more revisions of typescript and was a little encouraged. It’s not bad: the shape will emerge. I shall scrap the 2,000 words or so of prison scene with which I was closing Part II and shall start straight away with Mr Surrogate.’

  Suddenly on 25 April he found a way to break out and tap his reserves, coming up unexpectedly with whatever inspiration was lying dormant. He stopped his habit of long years of writing his stint in the early morning. ‘Quite unable to work during the morning’, he wrote in his diary on 25 April, ‘but did 500 in the afternoon.’ In no time at all he had pushed the number of daily words to 750 and then later to 1,000, all done after tea: ‘I’ve decided to try working after tea for a change, and it certainly worked well again today – 750 words, after a walk in the afternoon with Peggy [a dog belonging to Fred Hart which the Greenes were looking after while Hart was travelling] down the Nightingale Woods.’15

  *

  Greene knew that in starting It’s a Battlefield he had embarked on what looked like a self-destructive path; he needed desperately to produce a successful novel, yet had no illusions that this book would prove commercial: ‘My passbook increases the financial worry, nor does Opus V look like being a popular book.’16 He had a genuine contempt for best-sellers, including his own successful Stamboul Train, which his diaries and reviews reflect. But they also show that, in spite of worries and difficulties, this was a seminal period for his future work. He was trying to understand his purpose in writing this novel and was searching for the technique which would bring success. At the same time his private struggle with It’s a Battlefield affected his views of other authors. His concern was with the technical problems involved in writing a novel rather than with theory.

  On 25 July 1932, he and Vivien went to Moreton, where his agent was holidaying. They had lunch with the Highams and Mary Borden: ‘She has the prettiest American voice I have ever heard and lovely eyes.’ Over lunch Greene argued uselessly against a novel, Nymph Errant: ‘No one, with the blessed exception of V. seemed to have the slightest feeling for the technical problems of a novel; a novel in their eyes can be written anyhow (referring of course to method and not to style) so long as it “gets across”, but I cannot understand how it can “get across” to an educated person if it is written “anyhow”.’17

  David Higham had written a play at this time, later produced at the Gate Theatre, and he wanted Greene’s comments: ‘I have never read anything flatter or more muddled,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The characters proceeded from one mental state to another in jumps, and all the space between was left in the author’s mind unimpressed. And, oh the cigarette smoking and the badinage and the endless dialogue with no relation to the theme, though God knows what the theme was.’18

  Greene was concerned about how the point of view in a novel was to be presented, and he copied into his diary a quotation from The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800, referring to the sentimental eighteenth-century novel: ‘What these authors aimed at – at least the best of them – was delicacy and variety of emotional hue.’ ‘It seems to me,’ he commented, ‘that this (with delicacy left out) is my method in “The Express” where I had to surrender point of view.’19 In a sense he was to surrender point of view in It’s a Battlefield as well.

  Since he was dealing with contemporary events in It’s a Battlefield, he was interested in methods of introducing them in a novel. He criticised the working-class novelist, James Barke, because his crude treatment of current affairs shatters the novel, which is an expression of extreme class consciousness; though his hatred for the upper classes, Greene concedes, gives ‘a fine vitality to the portrait of the coal-owner’. But the weakness of writing with political bias is that it so often results in ‘speeches on dead problems and martyrdom for dead causes’, as in Upton Sinclair’s Manassas.20 Looking further, he concludes that even minor German novelists seem to possess the skill of letting contemporary affairs into their novels without sacrificing a pattern,21 while he is aware that ‘most artists who deal with contemporary life deal with it as political partisans.’22

  So, in the same review, he turns to Anton Chekhov, whose work he was reading at the time, for a definition of what a writer of fiction is; ‘Fiction is called artistic because it draws life as it actually is … a writer is not a confectioner, not a cosmetician, not an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his awareness of h
is duty and his conscience.’ Having established the artist’s contract to duty and conscience, he turns to Chekhov again for a judgment on the question of bias, political or otherwise:

  You are right in demanding that an artist should take a conscious attitude to his work, but you confuse two conceptions: the solution of a question and the correct setting of a question. The latter alone is obligatory for the artist. In Anna Karenina and in Onyeguin not a single problem is solved, but they satisfy completely because all the problems are set correctly.

  The artist, therefore, is not to provide solutions, but to present the human problem, objectively, in its correct setting; a world which is not manipulated by the writer, ‘is not to be altered with moral fables’, and it is ‘beyond the novelist’s scope to offer a remedy. He must have the habit of noting the world, not offering a cure.’23 Greene’s passion for technique is specifically revealed in another Spectator review where he argues that: ‘The failure of so many contemporary novelists is a failure to stay the course. Two or three books raise hopes which are never fulfilled because the author seems to have lacked the interest in the technicalities of his art that can alone prevent the mind dulling, the imagination losing power. Nothing else can enable an author to approach each new book with sustained intellectual excitement.’24