The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  If Greene has not changed politically since writing Stamboul Train – ‘You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace’ – he has strengthened in his convictions. Condor, the journalist in It’s a Battlefield, comments, ‘They hanged this man and pardoned that; one embezzler was in prison, but other men of the same kind were sent to Parliament … [and] it was not systematic enough to be called injustice.’35 Lady Caroline Bury expresses the same sense of injustice and sympathy for the down-trodden in the 1930s: ‘Do you believe in the way the country is organized? Do you believe that wages should run from thirty shillings a week to fifteen thousand a year, that a manual labourer should be paid less than a man who works with his brains? They are both indispensable, they both work the same hours, they are both dog-tired at the end of their day. Do you think I’ve the right to leave two hundred thousand pounds to anyone I like?’36 Greene’s experiences of extreme financial insecurity had finally put paid to any lingering Conservatism.

  Conrad Drover’s feelings of injustice, uncertainty and frustration drive him to futile decisions and actions. He buys a rusty revolver from a pawn-broker and his obsession with buying a gun is fed by Milly Drover’s comment, ‘You’d be no use with a gun’; he has thoughts of the people he might shoot – the manager of his firm and a plump man laughing outside the Berkeley Hotel along with a smiling, yellow-faced man – the private secretary and the Assistant Commissioner. They are amused at the sight of ‘a pram on a taxi’ (Greene had eight years earlier seen such a sight), but the amusement here came on the day Conrad’s brother was condemned to death and as a result, Conrad becomes increasingly obsessed and neurotic. He follows the Assistant Commissioner to Lady Caroline’s house and fires at him – but the rusty trigger did not move – in any case the gun was loaded with blanks. He is struck by a car and thrown a dozen yards. In agony, he is taken to hospital, his body broken, and dies.

  In imaginatively re-creating Conrad Drover’s last hours Greene returns to aspects of his own experience in Westminster Hospital, though the irony is Greene’s own. Conrad dies uselessly while his brother is reprieved.

  fn1 Sitwell, related to the literary Sitwells, had, at one time, courted Greene’s aunt.

  32

  ‘The skeletons of other people’s people’

  Sin is the writer’s element.

  – FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

  WITHIN THE TERRITORY of It’s a Battlefield falls the area of sexual relationships; Greene’s treatment of these, marital and non-marital, would seem to reflect his own problems at this time. The Surrogates’ marriage was a failure, the Drovers’ marriage has lasted five years: ‘I know they were happy,’ says Kay Rimmer. ‘They were so dull together, they couldn’t be anything else but happy.’ Surrogate finds some consolation with Kay, who is happily promiscuous. And Conrad Drover sleeps with his sister-in-law, her husband being in prison. Sexual relationships in the novel fail when they are based on love; lust makes everything simple, ‘It was only love that complicated the act.’ This problem concerned Greene at the time.

  On 28 November 1932 his diary shows that he was considering the question, not which was best – wife or lover – but which was best – lover or prostitute? He crossed out the word ‘prostitute’ and replaced it with ‘grue’: ‘It is the grue’s responsibility to satisfy, but the lover has to be satisfied. There is something to be said in favour of the affair with a paid companion.’ Greene’s diary at this time reveals that he had already put this conclusion into practice though his love for Vivien had not diminished. His next novel, England Made Me, is dedicated to Vivien, ‘with ten years love 1925–1935’.

  Nevertheless, he did lust after other women. He records in his diary, on 30 July 1932, going on a long walk with Hugh and seeing two American girls who were staying at the Coach and Horses in Chipping Campden – ‘one of them small, dark, well-dressed, slight enough to show her lovely rump, beautiful small hands; she raised my lust extraordinarily’. Later on the same day he strolled out with Vivien before supper, ‘hoping in vain to see the American girls at C. Horses’. On the night of 2 August he dreamed ‘strangely, of Gwen Howell, whom I loved with such unreasoning passion in 1924–25.’ Two days later, driving out with Captain and Mrs Cox, Vivien, Nigel Dennis and his sixteen-year-old niece, to Warwick and then to Stratford, he was attracted by the sight of bathers in ‘alluring costumes cut to the small of the back, three delightful beach pyjamas, and one lovely fair-haired girl punting a paralysed man coolly and gracefully up the river: against a strong tide but without strain.’ ‘Perhaps’, he adds, ‘the sight of all the exposed bodies was the cause of my dreaming of Annette and my using her in the “Italian manner”?’1

  Annette appears to be one of two girls he was irregularly involved with, the other being a prostitute he refers to as ‘O’. For Annette, or ‘A’ as he sometimes calls her, he seems to have had some feeling. The first reference to her in his diary is on 6 July 1932 when he was working on the last chapter of Stamboul Train: ‘Annette comes to mind often with the stirrings of lust.’ But their relationship had begun much earlier, after he had been in Chipping Campden about seven months and when Rumour at Nightfall was completed and he was researching the Rochester biography in the British Museum, for on 15 March 1932, he records in his diary that after having gone to the Bond Street Bureau to look for a kitten for his wife, no doubt to console her after the death of their Pekinese, he went after lunch ‘to A’s, but to my disappointment A. was in bed. Stayed and talked for three quarters of an hour and drank Liebfraumilch which I had brought with me. Toasted an 18 months acquaintance.’

  The entries in his diary for 7 October are curious. That was the day on which he went to London to discover whether or not he had won the Book Society Award. Two separate pages cover the events of the same day giving two different versions. In one he goes quietly to bed. The second version begins as the first – ‘Caught 7.15 to London’ – but adds that he telegraphed ‘A’ to expect him at 6.15. After he heard from Frere Reeves at Heinemann’s that the Book Society meeting was in progress at Walpole’s house, we know no more, since the rest of the page is torn out of the diary. Perhaps the evening of that day was spent less quietly than the first version suggests.

  Throughout the writing of It’s a Battlefield it would seem that on business trips to London he would visit Annette or, more rarely, ‘O’. On 12 March 1933 he risks sending a letter to ‘A’ by way of his favourite cousin: ‘Wrote to Tooter enclosing a note to A mentioning a possible time for meeting on Wednesday.’ Three weeks later, after lunch at Antoine’s, he ‘went to A. where I stayed an hour’. The writing which follows is indecipherable, but one fact to be noted is that he always visits ‘A’ at her home and then leaves – he does not take her to Antoine’s for lunch – perhaps he could not have afforded it. This was the day he at last bought Vivien a sweet long-haired tabby kitten in Bond Street: ‘Caught the 6.5 home, the kitten in a cardboard box. Let her out for the amusement of a family in the carriage and then found it difficult to get her back in the box. I had enlarged one of the holes too much, so that she kept on forcing her head through the lid. Also a stink filled the carriage as she relieved herself in the box.’2

  Relying on short notes in his diary, with passages scribbled over or torn out, it is difficult to assess the importance of his relationship with Annette, though it is significant that he ends with a fear that he might have lost her. On 24 May he attended his mother-in-law’s cremation and: ‘Afterwards went down to Piccadilly and met in Brunswick St. ‘O’ and visited 2687 Regent, a very fine but very empty façade.’ On 12 July he called again on A to whom he had earlier sent a telegram warning her of his arrival: ‘bought a lovely papier-mâché tea caddy for V’s birthday … then to a pub and then to A’s. No answer. Went and had another drink and returned: no answer. Went to Imhof’s [a gramophone record shop] to try and get a record of “Invitation au Voyage” but couldn’t get the one I wanted. Took a taxi and returned to A’s. A woman in the flat oppos
ite said A had gone to a nursing home: I suppose for the stone.’3 On 2 August, after visiting the Swedish Travel Bureau, he ‘saw Anna Sten in “The Tempest” went to Cook’s to see about passport. Walked hither and thither. In Bond Street met O. whom I’d been hoping to see. Definitely unsatisfactory.’4

  Conrad Drover’s love for Milly Drover goes back to before the time she married his brother. Drover spends the night at his sister-in-law’s house, making up a bed for himself downstairs: ‘He put two chairs together and arranged a sheet and two blankets.’ Afterwards hearing Milly and Kay talking, he thinks, ‘How simple [Kay] seemed to make it … how simple this going to bed. It was only love which complicated the act.’5 Later Conrad accepts Milly’s invitation to her bed. For some aspects of this incident, Greene was drawing on his own experience, going back to his days in Nottingham when during a visit to London in January 1926, he stayed at the home of Raymond and Charlotte. Since there was only one spare bed, occupied by Charlotte’s sister, Greene had to spend the night of 18 January 1926 on a bed made up of two armchairs – as Conrad Drover had done. Drover’s thought that, ‘He felt no guilt at all; this did not harm his brother’,6 could have applied in the circumstances.

  But in spite of diary entries or passages of illicit love in his novels we must not conclude that Greene’s love for Vivien had faltered. On a picnic with the Coxes on 12 July 1932, he records: ‘V & I were separated from the others and walked very happily alone together by the stream.’7 Vivien’s importance comes out in all sorts of small ways: ‘Home to Campden, an empty blank feeling house without V.’8 Then on the occasion of Vivien’s going off to Oxford for a few days, he records a visit to Captain Cox and seeing a rare pamphlet – only twenty copies then extant – written by Mark Twain in Elizabethan English and purporting to be a conversation between Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Raleigh and Bacon and others – ‘several pages of gross lavatory humour’ (which Greene always objected to) but he adds that it is a remarkable example of underground literature. On returning home, his last entry in his diary is, ‘Found a postcard from V. in my bed. She is the sweetest and best person imaginable.’9 Shortly after that there were some important events – Vivien became pregnant and both her parents died suddenly.

  *

  Neither Vivien nor Greene wanted children and tried to avoid having them. Vivien has said that if she had had no children she would not have missed them. ‘You know, if it happened, it was God’s will.’ And we know something of Greene’s feelings before Vivien became pregnant, in his description of a couple he saw round Enstone: ‘we passed a double bicycle, a girl and a young man in khaki shorts, with a kind of pram attached with a baby in it. My heart warmed to them for their courage. They were not going to be kept under by a child.’10

  Greene’s cousin, Countess Strachwitz, put it more strongly: ‘They didn’t want children. For years they said they were never going to have children. They were going to just live for each other. Even when their eldest one was expected, they were very distressed about it, and even thought of having it adopted. But once it was born they didn’t.’

  We can follow their feelings about the pregnancy through Greene’s diary. It begins with an outing of a couple of days to London on 25 March 1933, when he and Vivien stayed at the Kenilworth Hotel. Failing to get a boat to Greenwich from Westminster Pier, they travelled there by bus, ‘a long squalid drive’. On returning to town, they went to see Kamet Conquered – ‘A lot of close-ups of Raymond’. On the following day they went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, had tea and supper at the Kenilworth and then went to see Eddie Cantor in The Kid from Spain. His final comment is – ‘an orgiastic night’, and he obviously feared the consequences. On 7 April, the day after he had bought the kitten for his wife, he comments: ‘Funny how I feel even a minute kitten as an intrusion and a responsibility until I get used to her. Her very smallness is painful to me.’ By 15 April he had become ‘very anxious lest V. should have begun child’. He expressed his anxiety again the following day and on 17 April writes: ‘V. still late. I’ve got to prepare myself now, just as we’ve got straight with hope of a prosperous year, for a baby. I feel hopeless.’ The following day he came back to the same subject: ‘V. has obviously dropped her month and next month will decide if there’s to be a baby. I can’t bear the idea of her suffering, and any child will be an intrusion. I’m trying to resign myself to it and not to let V. see that I’m worried.’

  On the 21st he found a female doctor, Dr Turner, who saw Vivien: ‘It looks as if it’s going to be a baby. Thank God V. seems quite happy about it, and I pretend to be. I don’t think V. is pretending.’ On the same day he was asked by Peter Fleming of the Spectator to do a 40,000 word biography of Thomas Chatterton, the boy poet who killed himself with arsenic when eighteen. The money would have been welcome at that point, ‘God knows I shall need the £40 offered in advance of royalties’, but he wrote in his diary, ‘Alas! I can’t accept; Chatterton is too dead a subject.’ Nevertheless, he went to the Oxford Union Library next day to read up on Chatterton but this only confirmed his decision. To his mother he wrote that ‘it went badly against the grain to have to refuse. But I couldn’t [do it]. Such an abysmally dull dog.’ He added that there was no more news except the arrival of ‘a form to fill in from “Who’s Who”!’11

  Later that month he recorded in his diary: ‘V. heard that her mother had fallen down and broken her leg, and so plans to go to the nursing home to-morrow’ (25 April). What Vivien found at the nursing home was her mother sitting up in bed, waving a telegram and saying, exultantly, ‘I’m a widow, I’m a widow!’ – such jubilation at the death of a husband, but Marion Dayrell-Browning was a remarkable woman. Her husband had had an affair with a factory girl; she had left him – an unusual thing to do in those days. Her correspondence with her daughter gives a vivid insight into her personality. Admitting that she cared only for her two children, she wrote:

  I cared for nothing else … now the things I wanted so much are all coming to me and I’m free – best of all and independent. Whew – that awful caged feeling I had with S.B. like being in a small dark room … I’ve locked up the drawer in my mind where every memory of it is only too damn clear & try to start at Oct. 30, 1915 when I burst the door & left him.

  Telling her daughter that she has sent her a frock, she adds: ‘I feel sure you’ll like it – good style and material though simple (like me!) washes and will not fray – wear guaranteed!’12

  Ironically, her relief at her husband’s death was to be short-lived. She had, apparently, been ‘jumping on to or off a bus and broke her hip or leg and was badly treated and got embolism’ and on her second visit, Vivien found her mother in a lot of pain and saying, ‘Why should it happen to me?’ Vivien had not told her mother she was pregnant: ‘I didn’t tell her. I thought she would be annoyed and I was a little frightened of her. She was very efficient indeed.’13 She and Vivien were not really good friends because Vivien found her bossy and she had forced Vivien as a girl to break off completely with her father. Vivien never forgave her for that: ‘My mother made me when I was 15 write this extremely unkind letter to him. He wrote to me from Rhodesia [where he died alone] and she made me write a letter [rejecting him]. It was a dreadful thing to have done, dreadful, dreadful, dreadful …’14

  At this point, an unexpected piece of luck came to the Greenes which enabled them to take a holiday in Wales to improve Vivien’s health for the ordeal of giving birth. Mary Pritchett had sold the Orient Express to Twentieth Century Fox.fn1 In his diary, 2 May 1933, he records: ‘A lovely & exciting day. A cheque for £1,738.3.8d from New York for the film rights. I felt quite dazed all morning. It meant security for the first time since I left The Times.’ Vivien and Greene went for a whole morning’s walk: they ‘had seldom been so happy. If she has a child we can well afford it now. We went over Dover’s Hill to Weston & then by footpath to Aston and home through the Nightingale Woods’ and they finished up having lunch at the King’s Arms.

&nbs
p; They travelled by train, taking the 9.1 to Cheltenham (‘V. felt very sick in train’) and then a through train to Swansea, arriving at 1.59 and being met by a car which took them to Honton and a ‘sea beach, a house right on the sand. There was no road to it and the suitcase had to be carried along the top of the sandhills.’15 After tea, they scrambled happily among the rocks, but on returning to the house found two telegrams had arrived simultaneously. Greene opened them in the wrong order. The first one reported that Vivien’s mother was dead; the second that she was seriously ill.fn2

  He writes in his diary of Vivien’s reaction: ‘Vivien, terribly broken, a horrible high cry. Got her up to her bed and telephoned to the nursing home and from them got the telephone number of her doctor uncle, Vivien. At last got through to him. A clot of blood had gone to the brain from the leg. Cremation Thursday. I told him Vivien was pregnant and asked him to write and dissuade her from going up to town. I knew it was no good trying to dissuade her for the moment. She calmed down a little and had supper and went to bed early and slept.’ The following day, Uncle Vivien’s letter arrived and set Vivien off crying again. Greene now got the local doctor to tell her that it would be silly for her to go to the funeral. Vivien at last was persuaded and Greene went in her place.

  The cremation made a strong impression on him, and, as usual when an experience is new, he was hypersensitive to his surroundings and sharply alert: