The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  On 3 December he visited a second prison for copy: ‘Took a bus out to Wandsworth Prison to inspect the terrain for Opus V.’ He also visited a match factory: ‘V[ivien] went up to town for the day. I went into Gloucester & saw over Moreland’s Match factory for use in Opus V. The noise of engines, too loud for anyone to speak, gave me a headache after one hour: the employees work from 7.30 to 5 for a five day week, on a minimum of 30/- for girls. Wormwood Scrubs was infinitely preferable.’13

  Deliberately in the novel he emphasised the similarity between prison and factory conditions for the inmates, the fictional match factory portrayed as being worse (unless, of course, you were in a condemned cell). Both were governed on the ‘Block’ system of Wormwood Scrubs. People were moved from one block to another to give credit for good behaviour. As the chief warden of the prison explains: ‘That’s Block A. The new prisoners all go there. If they behave themselves they get shifted to … Block B. Block C … that’s the highest grade. Of course if there’s any complaint against them, they get shifted down. It’s just like a school.’

  And at the match factory, the manager explains: ‘that’s Block A. The new employees go there for the simplest processes. Then if they work well they move to Block B, and so to Block C. Everyone in Block C is a skilled employee. Any serious mistake and they are moved back to Block B.’ In both cases Block C has privileges including better food.

  What impressed Greene at the match factory was the noise of the machines which made communication impossible, the long hours of work, the discomfort and the danger of injuries: ‘Kay Rimmer moved a hand to the left, a hand to the right, pressed down her foot, and winked her left eye. The girl opposite winked twice. Between the spitting of the machines, before the stair [carrying the matches] could move a foot away, the message passed. “Hunting tonight?” “No, the curse [menstrual period].”’14

  He describes factory injuries: ‘A finger sliced off so cleanly at the knuckle that it might never have been, a foot crushed between opposed revolving wheels. “It never hurt her. She suffered nothing … So brave. She chatted all the way, carried on the stretcher to the operating-room.”’15 Greene had indirect experience of a finger being sliced: ‘Extraordinary the fortitude of the poor’, he wrote in his diary on 12 November 1932, ‘Greenall, our maid, tells us this morning that yesterday chopping wood she practically took off the top of her finger. I was in the house, but thank God she didn’t call to me. She put her head between her knees to prevent her fainting & then ran to the district nurse who was out, so that she went to the tobacconists to have her finger done up by Mrs Thornton.’

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  On 28 August 1932 Greene had further inspiration for the novel: ‘In church, as usual, the new novel grew in the mind, a new character, a psychological complexity, a splendid second climax, the Commissioner’s walk through the London streets, followed and conscious of being followed, and the end of the pursuit on Lady Ottoline’s doorstep.’ There are two interesting developments here – the ‘psychological complexity’, which we shall come to later, and the introduction of people Greene knew as models for his characters.

  On 1 March 1933 Greene records in his diary that he has passed the sticky patch in the novel for the moment and that he is sailing in easy waters. Then he adds: ‘The Commissioner is developing into the best & most important character in the book; he’ll have to have the last word & not Drover.’

  Some aspects of Greene’s Assistant Commissioner are derived from Conrad’s Assistant Commissioner, but Greene claimed that his uncle, Sir Graham Greene, who visited him at Chipping Campden while he was at work on the novel, was a source for the Assistant Commissioner, especially in lending ‘a little of his stiff inhibited bachelor integrity’ to the character.

  Greene’s cousin, Felix, like the rest of his family, held his uncle in high regard. He recalled that even during the Second World War, Sir Graham (and he was born in January 1857) still went to important meetings of the Committee of Imperial Defence:

  He would come down periodically, every week from Harston to go to this meeting and I one day came down with him. He had always walked from King’s Cross to 10 Downing Street, which is a long way, and this old man, still very alive, a bit lined, always walked in a particular way through the streets and on this occasion it had been after a bombing raid and there’d been an unexploded bomb in the street which he normally goes down. There was a policeman at each end to prevent people from going down there. When we came up to the policeman, all he did was to do this, a little gesture because he had this sort of air of authority and the policeman stepped aside and we walked through hoping the damned thing wouldn’t go off while we walked. But he had that absolute certainty of his own authority, the gesture slightly pushing the policeman aside as if he had the authority to go through. He was an absolute gentleman, the best kind of Civil Service chap.16

  Surely we recognise in this account Graham’s Assistant Commissioner, as we find him in the first scene of the novel walking from his office to Berkeley Restaurant, down Northumberland Avenue, round Trafalgar Square where ‘the buses roar up Parliament Street and swing in a great circle’, and a policeman at the corner of the avenue recognises him and salutes.

  At the age of eighty-nine, Sir Graham Greene fell under a tube train owing to failing eyesight. He rolled between the rails as a train was approaching and it passed over him. Raymond Greene recalled that his uncle had once commented: ‘It was most interesting. I had never before seen the underside of an electric train.’ He was ninety-three when he died. Tooter Greene said:

  Raymond and I were Trustees and in his Will he insisted that he wished to be buried at sea. He was a dry old stick but he got on well with Churchill and though it took him forty years after he had left the Admiralty to die, yet the Navy made a great fuss of him at the end of his life. I can still recall his burial at sea, it was a most moving occasion: great ships in the harbour hooting; men standing on deck saluting as the destroyer Finisterre with Raymond and myself put out to sea from Portsmouth with the urn. Each ship dipped its flag to half-mast. On the Implacable the whole ship’s company lined up at the salute.

  We went about twelve miles out beyond the Nab Light, and after a short funeral service, the urn was tipped over the side to the tune of the Last Post. Everything was very relaxed once we began to return, but I remember weeping, it was a splendid and most moving occasion.17

  In his Introduction to It’s a Battlefield, Greene not only acknowledges his uncle as a source, but mentions that he was ‘aware of Lady Ottoline Morrell in the background of Lady Caroline’. Lady Caroline, having been given the details by Mr Surrogate about Drover’s crime and imminent execution, and because of her ‘passion to help’, tries to intercede for the condemned man and fails. Behind this brief portrait lies a detailed knowledge of Lady Ottoline Morrell.

  She was renowned for her patronage of writers, artists, scholars and poets, especially those who were up-and-coming. She described herself to Virginia Woolf as having ‘an absurd overdose of “kindness”.’18 It stemmed from her recognition that she lacked a creative talent, and as a result, was ‘a magnet for egotists’.19 To her friend, Robert Gathorne-Hardy, she wrote: ‘It is so humiliating that one is so uncreative. Perhaps in another existence I may be able to.’20

  She was startling in appearance and dress, had a nasal voice, a neighing laugh, was physically ugly to some, yet she had a short affair with the painter Augustus John, Middleton Murry came under her spell, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell fell deeply in love with her, though that was in 1909 when her hair was golden – it was generally red but was sometimes dyed purple.21

  Lady Ottoline was famous for her parties attended by leading, or promising, writers and politicians – among them Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Henry James, Max Beerbohm, W. B. Yeats, Lytton Strachey, D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield and prime ministers Asquith and Ramsay MacDonald. She suddenly appeared in Greene’s life in October 19
30, though he had seen her before when he was a student at Oxford: ‘There was a painted old woman I used to see occasionally wandering about Oxford, rather a revolting spectacle. I used to wonder who she was. Now she’s suddenly cropped up in the form of Lady Ottoline Morrell and invited us to tea. It appears that Aldous Huxley recommended her to read The Man Within.’ Just before they moved from Chipping Campden, Greene and Vivien went to a number of Lady Ottoline’s regular Thursday parties at number 10 Gower Street (the home of Lady Caroline Bury in It’s a Battlefield) and at one of these met a writer they admired, Aldous Huxley.

  Vivien recalled a visit Lady Ottoline made to Chipping Campden: ‘She did look very strange. I think even now she would look very strange. There was always a crowd of small boys following her. And she came all that way, I suppose from Garsington [manor] then. I remember her coming in and I had a little girl in that day to help and she opened the door and seeing Lady Ottoline she screamed – gave a sort of yelp because Lady Ottoline was very, very tall and dressed that day entirely in white with a very large hat with large white feathers, and her husband was with her and they stayed for tea. And, this was a very sweet and touching thing, Philip Morrell took the saucer poured his tea into it and blew on it to cool it and she was so unaffected.’22

  Many writers portrayed Lady Ottoline in their work, in particular Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence. Huxley’s characters were unpleasant – as Mrs Wimbush in Crome Yellow and Mrs Aldwinkle in Those Barren Leaves; Lawrence’s was cruel – as Hermione in Women in Love. Lady Ottoline recalled that the ghastly portrait of herself haunted her thoughts and horrified her.

  If Lady Ottoline was doomed to be translated into several fictitious look-alikes, each one bearing the distinctive imprint of its creator, Greene’s portrait of her reflects, in Caroline Bury, the best characteristics as well as the eccentricities of Ottoline. And while Caroline Bury has Lady Ottoline’s ‘overdose of kindness’, with her desire to help and her reputation as a hostess she also reflects Greene’s experience of Ottoline, who is the source of important scenes and plot connections, and she contributes to the theme of the novel. When she tries to prevent the execution of Drover, the Assistant Commissioner reflects about his old friend: ‘She had never, he believed, received anything from anyone … she had given and given, time and money and nerves, “You are very brave,” he concluded.’ He tells her, linking her with the theme of the novel: ‘The truth is, nobody cares about anything but his own troubles. Everybody’s too busy fighting his own little battle to think of the next man. Except you, Caroline.’23 And he thinks, ‘it’s lucky she has got Faith, whatever she means by it, she’d got nothing else: an ageing haggard woman in a dark room crowded with the relics of a taste which had been enthusiastic, never impeccable.’24

  Greene is even kind about Lady Ottoline’s appearance, for Caroline Bury’s ‘haggard sunken face would have had its beauty recognized at once on an ancient fresco or an Eastern tomb.’25

  Greene’s precise but generous portrait of Lady Ottoline must stem from his gratitude for her praise and attempts to help him at a difficult time. On 19 November 1931 he had written to her: ‘I seemed doomed to please no one after “The Man Within”. It [Rumour at Nightfall] has been out nearly three weeks and has received only three reviews. The Lit. Supp. which has always before been both kind and prompt remains grimly silent: one does not expect anything from “The Observer” but “The Sunday Times” seems to have abandoned me. After praising extravagantly my first book, it never reviewed my second at all and looks like ignoring this one. Altogether I am feeling depressed. Books are a labour to write and a hell to publish; why does one do it? The grim spectre of a return to journalism looms on the horizon.’

  It was at this time that Lady Ottoline wrote to him praising the novel, which must have meant a great deal, especially since, three days later, Swinnerton did his hatchet job on the book. Two months earlier he had sought her help in obtaining an introduction to the editor of The Sunday Times: ‘I’m anxious to get some work on a weekly paper to make up for a fall in royalties’, and her help would certainly have been forthcoming. When he had finished his Rochester book, it was to her he confided that he had sent it off to his old tutor at Balliol to be vetted for historical blunders. He told her also of his hopes for the Rochester book which was rejected: ‘I believe it’s coming out in April. It’s not the book it ought to have been, as I was writing against time.’ Yes, Graham was kind, but surely if anyone deserved a gentle portrait it was Lady Ottoline Morrell.

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  It is the left-wing intellectual Mr Surrogate who, in the novel, asks Lady Caroline to approach someone in authority to try to prevent Drover being hanged, and Greene writes in his Introduction: ‘my idea of Middleton Murry, whom I did not personally know, was responsible in small part for Mr Surrogate.’ Again Greene was probably indebted to Lady Ottoline for some insight into the nature of the relationship between Murry and his wife Katherine Mansfield. This relationship is suggested in Surrogate’s with his dead wife to whom ‘during a long, faithful and unhappy marriage they had exposed each other … with a complete lack of reticence.’

  There was also a reservoir of gossip and hearsay about Murry and his wife to be drawn on – they appeared, after all, as Burlap and his wife in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point – and reference to Murry appears in Greene’s diary on 2 August 1932. Friends of his had come to ‘Little Orchard’ for tea and scandalous tales of Middleton Murry were recounted. When Murry was publishing his late wife’s letters; Lady Ottoline had sent him a letter which Katherine Mansfield had written to her, and later discovered he had inserted passages reflecting on himself which were not in the original.

  The gossip must have been deep since Greene writes with surprising accuracy about Murry/Surrogate, a man he ‘did not personally know’, though in transmuting Murry and his wife Katherine Mansfield to Surrogate and his wife (and after all a ‘surrogate’ is a ‘substitute’), Katherine becomes an artist, not a writer.

  Murry had a mania for public confessions, especially in the magazines, though the confessions were often geared to what he considered was expedient, and he constantly blackened his own character. ‘I suppose his instinct is to absolve himself in these bleatings’, wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘and so get permission for more sins.’26 And this is fundamental to Surrogate whose ‘inability to conceal anything had humiliated him so often that he had needed to form a philosophy of humiliation, to found his career on self-exposure. “Be humble that you may be exalted,” and from the depth of humility he would spring refreshed to the height of pride.’27

  The intimacies of Murry’s married life are also reflected in those of the Surrogates. Middleton Murry ate the soul out of Katherine yet she knew his nature well; that his ‘very frankness’ was ‘a falsity’.28 Certainly he admitted to being her inferior in many ways – she had to take the ‘active male role and he became the passive female’.29 Surrogate complains to Caroline Bury that his wife ‘did not respect his manhood’, but when Katherine Mansfield died, Murry turned that tough, outspoken, sexually promiscuous woman into a different character, enshrined and made perfect – as Aldous Huxley wrote of Burlap: ‘When Susan died Burlap exploited the grief he felt, or at any rate loudly said he felt, in a more than usually painful series of always painfully personal articles which were the secret of his success as a journalist.’30 While extolling his perfect love for his late wife, Murry had an affair with Frieda Lawrence. And so Surrogate, with the aim of seducing Kay Rimmer, the factory worker, takes her to his home and shows her the bedroom in which hangs his late wife’s portrait, she gasps with pleasure at the semi-circular bed, the silk bedspread and rose hangings, but says of his wife: ‘How you must have loved her’, and ‘for a moment Mr Surrogate longed to tell the truth, that it [the portrait] was hung there as an atonement for his dislike, as a satisfaction for his humility, because of its reminder of the one woman who had never failed to see through him.’31

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  The
‘new character’ in the novel, ‘the psychological complexity’, is Conrad Drover. He comes from a working-class home, wins a scholarship and works his way up alone to his present success, but he has two problems. He is devoted to his brother, grieving for what is happening to him, and he is in love with his brother’s wife. On the other hand, so far as his career is concerned, he is conscious of his vulnerability and without any confidence: ‘People had promoted him when he had expected dismissal; they had praised him when he had expected blame.’ His job is to see to the running of the office and to keep the clerks in order, but among them is the nephew of the managing director, ‘who was learning the business from the bottom. He wore a light suit and a public-school tie … The young man stared back insolently. He smelt of money.’ Troubled by his brother’s situation, Conrad Drover reflects that he cannot give way even for a moment since the manager might ‘begin to mistrust him, his figures and his discipline; he might decide that it was time to try the director’s nephew. Conrad was quite certain that one day that would happen.’32 The two ‘heroes’, Conrad and the Assistant Commissioner, are therefore poles apart – one certain of his status and place in society, the other in the shifting sands of the lower classes. But Graham’s inspiration for the character of Conrad derived in part from his own situation – his own sense of insecurity, and his fears of a diminishing income.

  At the time he was influenced by a Hans Fallada novel which he reviewed for the Spectator: ‘Finished Little Man What Now with intense respect,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘It disturbed me so much that in my sleep I argued furiously against the convention which pays one man in a business £10,000 and a clerk in the same business £150 for the same hours of work. I remember that I took Sidney Sitwell as my example, arguing with [mother] and Aunt Nono.’fn1, 33 In his review he wrote: ‘Everything that gives pleasure costs money. If you want a little country air – money. If you want to hear a little music – money. It all costs money; nothing can be had without money … There are chapters which pluck the nerves with the agony of those who are insecure.’34