The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Shortly before he and Vivien moved to Oxford, while on a short visit to London, Greene went to the Swedish Agency to enquire about a holiday in Sweden (16 June). He also began seeking introductions to people who could show him round Stockholm. He approached David Higham about this, and he also wrote to Mary Pritchett: ‘You don’t know anyone nice in Stockholm I suppose whom I could go and see? I’m going by myself so I shall get horribly bored.’ David Higham certainly did his best at a garden party arranged by Heinemann’s in Kingswood on 12 July, which was well-attended. R. B. Cunninghame Graham and Lord Dunsany were there, and so was Louis Golding, whom Greene (in his student days) had persuaded to contribute to the Oxford Outlook (‘Louis Golding, talking continuously about his own books’). The novelist L. P. Hartley was ‘sitting in an immaculate overcoat in the warm sun, quiet, affected, exaggeratedly Balliol; a Russian American with a square yellow face like a Chinese lion-dog and a little white sun hat advised: “When you’ve got nothing, just sit still. Something turns up. I landed at Harbin with 13 dollars and I spent 12 dollars on a cable. I didn’t worry. I just sat still.” … At the cocktails Arnot Robertson, shrill, malicious, amusing, bawdy: presently became involved with Theodora Benson and her Askwith partner. By this time I was a little drunk and presently they drove me back to London just in time to catch the 7.35 to Oxford.’

  During the party he was introduced by David Higham to the novelist Elizabeth Sprigge, ‘about 30, cool, remote, handsome’, so that she might give him introductions in Scandinavia as she was well able to do. He was ‘paralysed; having just written a bad review of her latest novel’, which was about to appear in the Spectator – he had written to his mother of the ‘terrible lot of Heinemann novels for review lately – all tripe’. Elizabeth Sprigge’s novel, The Old Man Dies, was interesting because the main character was presented through the conversation of relatives, but he found her style ‘irritatingly chatty; the characters discuss at great length for the benefit of the reader what they themselves know already’ and worse still, the novel depended for its success on dialogue and ‘dialogue is what she is least able to write’.

  Next day, sober and having assessed the situation, he wrote to Elizabeth Sprigge accusing himself of ‘moral cowardice in not confessing the review’ and asking her to do no more about the introductions.3 Matters did not end there. In the same review he had criticised Beatrice Kean Seymour’s Daughter to Philip for being very long, very shapeless, very unfinished. In his opinion, at least two hundred pages and half a dozen characters could have been cut out, and the novel was unwritten: ‘It has not passed the stage of conception; it has not been criticised and refined and worked over.’ Beatrice Kean Seymour complained about the review to Charles Evans of Heinemann, who took the astonishing view that Greene should not review books he could not praise, and David Higham advised him not to review the latest by J. B. Priestley, another Heinemann author, since his contract for It’s a Battlefield had not yet been signed. He gave way over the Priestley novel, but he did not give up over Sweden and introductions: ‘I’ve got to the last chapter of It’s a Battlefield,’ he told his mother, ‘and it looks as if I shall be free about 12th [August]. I wish Hugh could get a job fixed … and come with me. I’ve got a lot of introductions in Stockholm and Copenhagen.’ He wrote to Hugh in the same vein, but Hugh had no job and no money, and even Greene’s enticing information that ‘the Gotha Canal Company are letting me have a free ticket, excluding food’, had no effect.

  Greene of course wanted a travelling companion, but he was also concerned about his brother who was going through a bad patch. He had taken his final examinations at Oxford that month: ‘Hugh very pleased and excited by his viva which was a very short and complimentary one,’ Greene noted; ‘his hopes of a first dangerously soaring.’4 His instinct had been right. ‘Poor Hugh,’ he wrote on 28 July, ‘he got a second. He’ll be terribly disappointed’,5 and to Hugh he wrote: ‘It would have been a superhuman feat to have got a first as well as run the Film Society, but that doesn’t make it less maddening.’

  Rather like Graham, Hugh had let other things get in the way of his studies. He switched from Classics to English Literature after making friends with Edmund Blunden, Fellow and Tutor in English Literature (in his view one of the better decisions of his life), and had hopes of becoming a don. But he became President of the Oxford Film Society and led a fast life which included an affair with the ‘beautiful, frail’ wife of the manager of the Electra Cinema where the Film Society congregated on Sunday evenings. She was, alas, to die of consumption, but the manager did not seem to object to the affair, having, according to Hugh, other fish to fry. It was, however, to become somewhat public, when the commissionaire at the Electra ‘strode one evening into the crowded George bar where [he] was waiting for her, snapped to attention, saluted and bellowed in his best parade ground voice, “Mrs Roberts will be twenty minutes late, sir.’”6

  A 1932 letter to Greene includes a poem which indicates Hugh’s mood at the time: ‘There are lips and laughter, where the lamps are Right/And lifting feet that ripple into rhyme/What do you do alone above the soil?/What do you do? I plough [university slang for failing exams].’ So two brilliant brothers achieved seconds.

  Undeterred and needing to get away when his novel was finished, Greene suggested an alternative to Hugh – a week in Burgundy – and ‘if we do Burgundy, you must be prepared, passport and all, to leave with about 12 hours’ notice.’ Probably Greene was recalling the visit the two of them had made to Burgundy two years earlier during which he had played a prank. As Hugh explained: ‘we were in an old fashioned third class carriage with the partition between the carriages only going half way up, and as I remember it there was somebody with his elbow and his hand laid out on the partition fast asleep in the next carriage, and just before we got out at the station, Graham very quietly fitted a French-letter on one of his fingers.’7 But obviously Burgundy would not have suited Greene’s purpose.

  *

  Greene eventually had his way. He and Hugh were to go to Sweden and, characteristically, he began organising down to the most minute detail. By that time Vivien was five months pregnant and it was arranged that she should stay with his mother: ‘I shall dispatch V. from London to you “with care” on Tuesday, 15 [August] … You’ll make her take exercise won’t you?’ Thanking his mother for taking Vivien he adds, ‘She’s anxious to be taught how to knit’ – for obvious reasons. His mother was given their itinerary: ‘Hugh and I leave at 6.20 pm on the 16th. We get to Gothenburg on the 18th at 7. am and I plan to stay the night there. Then the next day we catch the Canal Boat at 10. am (the 19th) and go gently up the Canal: one gets out and goes for walks at the locks; arrive at Stockholm bang opposite the Town Hall on the 21st at 6.pm.’ Greene intended to spend five days in Stockholm and then push on to the island of Gothland to Visby, a mediaeval town with several miles of old wall still standing and five ruined cathedrals, then on to Copenhagen. He anticipated being home by 7 September.

  As a traveller, not only did he note meticulously that their arrival at Stockholm would be ‘bang opposite the Town Hall on the 21st at 6.pm’, but also, with Hugh’s financial problems in mind, he advised that he should get Sweden and Denmark added to his passport at once and ‘while he’s about it, if I were he, I should add to his application every country in Europe he can think of: each application for an addition costs 1/-, but you can have as many countries as you like added at one time for that 1/-.’ Moreover, ‘It may possibly get quite cold by the end of the month [August] – one forgets Stockholm is about as far north as the very tip of Scotland, so I shall take some warm underclothes.’ ‘One’ might forget but Graham Greene never, though he was wrong about the need for the warm underclothes. ‘August is not the best time of year to see Stockholm for the first time – what with the heat and the humidity’, he recalled in Ways of Escape.

  He was particularly glad to have Hugh with him as otherwise he would have had to fall back on the Schellings as compa
nions, described by his aunt Helen, not very promisingly, as ‘two jolly girls’ – he would so much have preferred ‘two morbid girls’. However, they were to provide some interest. Writing to Vivien from the Strand Hotel, Gothenburg, on 18 August, about meeting them, he avoided mentioning anything that might cause jealousy: ‘As for the “jolly girls” – Ursula, the younger, very healthy and managing and girl-girlish. She was on the look out for us at the barrier at Victoria [Station] and pounced; there was no avoiding them. The elder sister is quite tolerable but with a bad skin. They’ve just departed with their mother in a car … This is a nice room with a panorama of docks and liners fifty yards away. I’d rather have chaos.’8

  But he wrote in Ways of Escape: ‘I remember that my brother and I carried on a harmless flirtation with two English visitors of sixteen and twenty; we went for walks in separate pairs when the boat stopped at a lock, and once, for some inexplicable reason, considerable alarm arose because my brother and the younger girl had not returned to the little liner at the proper time, and the mother – an intellectual lady who frequently won literary competitions in the Liberal weekly Time and Tide – was convinced that both had been drowned in the canal.’9 The elder girl was to make a small contribution to England Made Me in the character of Loo, the Coventry girl on holiday with her parents who has an encounter with the scapegoat hero, Anthony: ‘One evening in Stockholm, on the borders of the lake, my companion of the canal slapped my face in almost the same circumstances as those in which Loo slapped Anthony’s in my story, for I had told her that I believed she was a virgin. Afterwards we sat decorously enough in Skansen, Stockholm’s park, among the grey rocks and the silver trees. (Her reaction was the only characteristic she had in common with Loo.)’ Thirty-five years later, one of the girls, presumably the one who slapped his face, wrote to him: ‘Can’t imagine what prompted me to write to you after half the biblical span of life.’ She had little to say about their original meeting: ‘We met about thirty-five years ago in Sweden – I was the girl who wouldn’t dance a bacchante with you. I always regretted it afterwards. I wonder if you still love Delius’s “Walk to the Paradise Garden”?’

  What Greene remembered of his visit to Sweden was the ‘speckless miniature liner’ which brought his brother and him up the canal from Gothenburg to Stockholm, which he hoped would be the setting for his novel; he remembered walking in the soft summer brilliance of midnight and the silver of the birches going by, almost within reach of his hands, and the chickens pecking on the bank.10

  What Hugh recalled, apart from wandering off with the younger sister and her mother fearing that they had both been drowned, was ‘the wonderful sight of those locks coming straight down the mountainside’.

  Details which did not appear in the novel, but which fill out Graham and Hugh’s experiences, appear in an article which Greene wrote for the Spectator. The following passage shows how socially sensitive he has become, how he is reflecting on the hidden violence of a so-called pacifist:

  But in Stockholm, the moon glinted on the sentry’s bayonet parading on the palace terrace; and at midday a beating of drums and flashing of swords and prancing of chargers as the royal guard changes. Our little country, our little country, the Swedish lawyer and the Swedish publisher kept repeating with sentimental humility and a deep hidden arrogance. (In Oslo they said, our small country, our small country, meaning the latest census result, the extent of the herring fisheries.)

  In his formal house, where every piece of furniture was like a child in a charity school, well-scrubbed, in place, at attention, the Swedish pacifist supported war between races. He grew excited at the thought of Russia, spoke of the glory of a war of extermination: poison gas, germs, aerial bombardment, savouring the words; after the schnaps and the beer and the wine (Skoll, with the glass held at the fourth button of the waistcoat, while the charity children stood stiffly around) and the glasses of punch and three whiskies and sodas, he became vehement about women, ears back, eyes popping: no woman has character … made to be the mates of men …

  And there was the terrible insensitivity of a Swedish publisher:

  The publisher with the military carriage and the bristling red moustache said, If the Socialists really came to power, I should be the first to take up arms. I do not, of course, believe in God, but if our Church was threatened, I should be the first … He said, We haven’t any need of Socialism here. I will show you how the workmen live. Poor, but so clean, so contented. He thrust his way into strangers’ cottages, leant in at their windows, opened their doors, displayed their bare rooms. The young man out of work with the fine starved features played an accordion for us, as we stood in the one room he shared with his mother. You see, Red Moustache said, speaking through the music, he has been unemployed for three years, the State gives them just enough to live on, but it is all so clean, they are so contented. He threw a krona on the table, and the young man played on, paying no attention. He rapped the krona on the table, and the young man nodded and went on playing and paid him no attention.11

  Such, including ‘the extreme formality of one dinner’ they attended at Saltsjoba, was the sum of his experiences. ‘I am amazed now’, he wrote in Ways of Escape, ‘at my temerity in laying the scene of a novel in a city of which I knew so little.’ But, as we shall see, the novel did not depend solely on that brief visit and the biography of ‘the Match King’.

  They were home on 7 September and the following month Greene received, unexpectedly, an invitation from the managing director of Chatto and Windus, Ian Parsons, to join their publishing house. Obviously, this pleased Greene, and he must have given it some thought, but decided that he could not accept. If he had been living in London, he would have leapt at it, knowing that he could have ‘gone on gently with [his] own work of an evening’, but he could not leave Oxford just then with six months of the lease on their flat to run, so that he would have to spend each evening getting home and as his wife was having a baby in December, he felt rather tied.

  Not one to miss an opportunity, however, and with family loyalties influencing him, he tried to interest Parsons in Hugh, and his letter suggests a further reason why he himself might have rejected the invitation:

  You spoke of an apprentice job being the one really vacant. I don’t know if it would be any good putting in a word for a brother of mine who has just gone down from Oxford and is anxious to get into a publisher’s? He was at a German university for a time and speaks German well. At Oxford he took a second in Honour Mods. and just missed a first in English. Edmund Blunden was his tutor and speaks highly of his work. His name is Hugh Carleton Greene, and his home is Incents, Crowborough, Sussex. But I daresay you’ve got dozens of apprentices to choose from.

  Parsons was willing to see Hugh – ‘I’m sure we shall like him and very much hope that it may be possible to offer him something’, but all they offered him, since he was without experience, was a nominal salary of £100 a year for the first six months and after probation a gradual progress to £300. In any case, the interview did not go well; Hugh was afflicted with extreme shyness and no offer of a job was made, probably, given Hugh’s future career, a fortunate decision.fn2

  *

  Graham Greene began writing England Made Me, according to the manuscript, on 16 November 1933. His instinct in settling on Ivar Kreuger as a key figure in the novel (he becomes the corrupt financier, Krogh) was sound as was his determination to visit Stockholm which provided him with the appropriate setting for his theme – the corruption that arises, in his view at the time, from the inherent failure of capitalism, a socio-political and contemporary theme, following on appropriately from It’s a Battlefield: ‘the economic background of the thirties and that sense of capitalism staggering from crisis to crisis.’12 But this is cerebral. What he is really concerned with is the effect of childhood on the mature man, and this takes him back again to his own childhood, in an indirect way. The contemporary political scene is less significant than his own and his family’s expe
riences and relationships, and Berkhamsted School.

  England Made Me, an ironic title, refers to the forming of a certain type of character not so much by England, as by the English public school. In the novel, Kate, who is the twin of Anthony the no-good hero, arouses her brother’s interest in moving to Stockholm only when, responding to his enquiry, ‘And there’ll be pickings for yours truly?’ she answers, ‘Yes there’ll be pickings.’13

  Both Anthony Farrant and the incredibly seedy journalist Minty, that powerful minor figure who runs away with parts of the novel, are in their respective ways grotesques who owe their twisted characters to their schooldays. Neither can rid himself of the indelible stamp of his public school, but there are differences. Minty is an old Harrovian – the ‘school and he were joined by a painful reluctant coition’ and as a consequence of this love-hate relationship he has, in spite of jettisoning the public school ethic, retained a loyalty to the outward symbols. He uses school phrases, respects the school tie and organises in Stockholm Harrovian dinners to raise funds for the school.

  Anthony Farrant, though he has also rejected the ethic, in spite of failure, deception and fraud, has retained the veneer that was produced by his public school – useful in keeping one’s head above water. He has his one good suit and a confident manner and has ‘promoted himself’ by sporting, not the tie of his minor public school, but an Harrovian tie. Minty immediately recognises Anthony’s deception: ‘And he imagines he can sport a Harrow tie and get away with it.’14 However seedy and discredited one becomes, the school pride lives on.fn3