The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  In the two months after his return, he corrected the proofs of England Made Me, wrote a story entitled ‘The Bear Fell Free’, worked on Journey Without Maps and tried his hand at a ‘shocker’ – A Gun for Sale (This Gun for Hire in America). He wrote another short story, ‘The Jubilee’, and completed ‘The Basement Room’, which he had begun on board ship to escape the tedium of the return from Liberia. The News Chronicle, he told his mother, had ‘commissioned a five-day serial (£50) [The Basement Room] and I’m just finishing it’. ‘The Bear Fell Free’ was ‘supposed to have come out on Monday’. ‘Did you see’, he asked her, ‘the review in the Lit Supp? England Made Me comes out on June 17.’ He even acted as a judge of short stories at the annual Eisteddfod of the City of London Literary Institute. And there was much social activity:

  On the 25th, we had dinner with Rupert and Comfort [Hart-Davis], on Sunday we went to a wearing party at Highams, on Monday we had lunch with Arnot Robertson, yesterday I had lunch with Winifred Holtby, on Thursday we are having lunch with Ede at the Tate and are giving a sherry party (Antonia White is coming: I haven’t met her yet). And so it goes on. In spite of it all, I’m getting a tremendous amount of work done.8

  In a postscript he added, ‘Lucy now crawls about at a terrific speed.’ Incredibly, as early as 1935, someone gave a lecture, the first of many, on his work: ‘On the 24th, my French agent’, he wrote to his mother, ‘came to dinner and gave me a cheque for serial rights of “Stamboul Train” (apparently the lecture on me is being given in the Sorbonne!).’9 His short story, ‘The Bear Fell Free’ is a sport, experimental and brittle in style with much use of interior monologue; its theme is betrayal, but this time of a man by a woman, based on the type of 1930s woman he was probably beginning to meet. It also seems to have some slight reflections of his own experiences. The hero, Tony Farrell, after five sherries accepts a dare to fly across the Atlantic. Farrell, like Anthony Farrant in England Made Me (both characters probably based on Herbert Greene), has about him the sweet smell of failure, and the dare ends in his death. The teddy bear mascot which his girlfriend Jane had thrown into the rear of the tiny plane falls free before the plane crashes, and Jane tells Tony’s friend, Carter, ‘Yes, I gave him the teddy bear. We were crazy about each other … Yes, I was terribly sad, but after all, Mr Carter, it’s better than the suspense’, and she invites Carter to return the bear to her, having in mind a desire to meet him and, presumably putting down the phone (this is not clear because of the story’s technique), she runs naked back to bed, laughing, adorable: ‘That was Carter, darling. You remember him at the party. All ex-officer. I’ve got such a lech for him, darling.’

  This story was published in book form by Grayson Books. Grayson himself chose stories by twelve authors (a story a book) whom he saw as likely to become famous – among them H. E. Bates, H. A. Manhood, James Hanley, Arthur Calder-Marshall, T. F. Powys and Sean O’Faolain. The books were signed volumes and beautifully produced. In those days it was possible to make a profit on limited editions – 285 signed and numbered and 250 offered for sale at 10s.6d. each. They are now collectors’ items.

  The story ‘The Jubilee’ shows Greene writing with an eye to catching the public’s interest through a contemporary event. On 6 May 1935, the Silver Jubilee of King George V’s accession to the throne was celebrated. By 1935 the depression had begun to ease and King George was suddenly taken to the hearts of the British people. Everywhere Jubilee committees sprang up to organise local celebrations and to hang out lively banners across streets, to decorate lamp-posts and public buildings. At night the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace were floodlit and every house had its Union Jack and coloured streamers. On the 6th, the Royal Family drove in state to St Paul’s to attend a Thanksgiving Service. London was crammed with visitors, and there was a tremendous crowd of people outside the Palace cheering endlessly and waiting for the King to come out on the balcony.

  That night Trafalgar Square was packed with tipsy revellers singing First World War songs, ‘Tipperary’, ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding’ and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. The celebration was, of course, commercially exploited. Everything was called Jubilee; there were Jubilee dresses, Jubilee hats, and especially Jubilee stamps (the King was a keen philatelist).

  One must assume that Greene’s story was written with the May Jubileefn2 in mind and that it was called ‘The Jubilee’ for the same reason that dresses and hats were. Yet in spite of the commercial opportunism it is recognisably by Graham Greene. Greene is willing to seize a chance, but not to write a pot-boiler. ‘The Jubilee’ was not his only work influenced by this contemporary event. The novel, called in manuscript ‘The Shipwrecked’, received a different name: ‘I’ve changed the title of the novel,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘to England Made Me to fit the Jubilee.’

  *

  The hero of ‘The Jubilee’, the fastidious, ageing gigolo, Mr Chalfont, living in a small bed-sitting room off Shepherd’s Market, had not, with the rest of London, blown whistles or thrown paper ribbons, or danced to harmoniums in the street. He had stayed locked away in his room in case he met people he had known in better days. When he does go into the London streets looking for game (women of a certain age attracted to tall, well-preserved gentlemen), he is careful to hide his poverty: ‘He had learned to hold his hand so that one frayed patch on his sleeve didn’t show, and the rather exclusive club tie, freshly ironed, might have been bought that morning.’

  Entering a pub, he is unexpectedly ‘picked up’ by Amy, not at all his kind, but a vulgar, outspoken, ex-prostitute who, unlike Mr Chalfont, had made a killing during the Jubilee. She had opened a spurious tourist bureau, had provided ‘private’ entertainment and made £5,000. Mr Chalfont’s day is over. The world has moved on. To succeed you need to be vulgar and uneducated – the old school tie is no longer enough and Amy could say: ‘It was really my jubilee … I saw … how I could extend my business. I opened at Brighton too. I cleaned up England in a way of speaking.’

  It is this tough, down to earth manner, no airs and graces, eye on the main chance new type whom the old colonials, or those who pretend to such a background, now have to rely on. Amy leads Mr Chalfont out of the pub to have her fun: ‘Cheer up, my dear … a girl likes a cheerful face.’ And suddenly she becomes raucous and merry, slapping Mr Chalfont on his back, pinching his arm: ‘Let’s have a little Jubilee spirit, dear.’

  Thus was the vulgar Amy born, to reappear more fully developed in Brighton Rock three years later as the inimitable, big-breasted, good sport, Ida Arnold.

  *

  It must have been a tremendous fillip for Greene when the News Chronicle commissioned a five-day serial of ‘The Basement Room’ – one of his finest stories which was later made into a successful film, The Fallen Idol, the screenplay done by himself. While ‘The Jubilee’ dealt with the impact of the new world on the old, ‘The Basement Room’ was derived from the theme of lost childhood. It features the green baize door, always for Greene the means of entry into unknown, alien and feared worlds, the world of searing experiences. What lies beyond the baize door (in an embassy) is the basement room inhabited by the butler Baines and his wife. The boy Philip Lane, left in their care while his parents are abroad, begins there his premature initiation into the adult world, with a growing recognition of the manipulative nature of adults, of the nature of evil, when he enters that room: ‘Philip Lane went downstairs and pushed at the baize door; … he set foot for the first time on the stairs to the basement. Again he had the sense: this is life. All his seven nursery years vibrated, with the strange, the new experience … He was apprehensive, but he was happier than he had ever been. Everything was more important than before.’ Baines becomes the boy’s hero – he is devoted to him and fascinated by the stories of his experiences in West Africa. While Baines is of the uneducated classes, his attitude towards the blacks in the interior (in 1935 it was common to call blacks ‘niggers’) is identical to Gre
ene’s and Greene is making use of observations recorded in Journey Without Maps:

  ‘Did you ever shoot a nigger?’

  ‘I never had any call to shoot,’ Baines said. ‘Of course I carried a gun. But you didn’t need to treat them bad. That just made them stupid.’ ‘Why,’ Baines said, bowing his thin grey hair with embarrassment over the ginger pop, ‘I loved some of those damned niggers. I couldn’t help loving them. There they’d be laughing, holding hands; they liked to touch each other; it made them feel fine to know the other fellow was round.’

  Baines, boasting to Philip on the top of a bus, after a visit to the zoo, says:

  ‘I said don’t let me see you touch that black again.’ Baines had led a man’s life; everyone on top of the bus pricked their ears up when he told Philip all about it.

  ‘Would you have shot him?’ Philip asked, and Baines put his head back and tilted his dark respectable man-servant’s hat to a better angle as the bus swerved round the artillery memorial.10

  But young Philip has a deep fear of Mrs Baines’s voice; ‘like the voice in a nightmare when the small Price light has guttered in the saucer and the curtains move; it was sharp and shrill and full of malice … she was darkness when the night-light went out in a draught; she was the frozen blocks of earth he had seen one winter in a graveyard when someone said, “They need an electric drill”.’fn3 The devastating effect that the adult world has upon the boy, his inability to understand adult manoeuvring and to keep their confusing secrets, leads him, innocently, to betray his hero, with the result that sixty years later, nearing the end of his life, he has nothing to show because he must avoid preserving ‘the memory of Mrs Baines’s malicious voice saying good night, her soft determined footfalls on the stairs to the basement, going down, going down.’11

  *

  At this time his correspondence with his mother, brother Hugh and his literary agent, indicates the determination of his second onslaught on London; it entailed much entertaining and being entertained. He records: ‘Rupert and Comfort Hart-Davis came to dinner one night to meet Antonia White, and Paul Willert, a young publisher and his wife, another night, and Hamish Hamilton … They were all entranced by the house.’12 Earlier that week he had lunched with Hamish Hamilton; an offer was made to Greene in connection with a publishing scheme but the offer was not good enough. The next night he was off to a party at Antonia White’s and days later he was going to an ‘intimate’ supper at Herbert Read’s to meet T. S. Eliot: ‘This is rather terrifying like having dinner alone with Henry James.’13 Forty-five years later he recollected it in Ways of Escape as being ‘like receiving an invitation from Coleridge – “Wordsworth is coming, but no one else.’” Then his old school friend and later London Magistrate, Eric Guest, and his wife came to have sherry. Almost simultaneously Greene was off to have tea with Violet Hunt, who was pleased with a review he had done of Jessie Conrad’s reminiscences of her husband Joseph Conrad.14

  Violet Hunt had lived with Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) and was the daughter of W. A. Hunt, one of the pre-Raphaelite group of painters and a member of the Rossetti circle. She had been educated with the daughters of William Morris and Burne-Jones and, giving up the study of art, had written successful books including a volume of gossipy memoirs. She was seventy-one when Greene met her: ‘A very strange wandering old lady living in a house stacked with pre-Raphaelite objects,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘She had thought I was a female novelist writing under a pseudonym! She used to come to Clapham Common when she was a child to parties … and had met Charles Reade [author of The Cloister and the Hearth (1814–84)] at one of them. A lot of scandal … about Ford Madox Hueffer. I don’t know how one’s had time to meet anyone what with films, reviews and reading M.S. and writing the two books.’15

  ‘Reading M.S.’ was the correcting of England Made Me which was published on 17 June 1935. And he found the time to write some literary criticism: ‘Bonamy Dobrée has asked me to write a chapter on Fielding & Sterne for a book he’s editing next year for Cassell.’ This appeared in a volume entitled From Anne to Victoria in 1937.

  *

  It was in 1935 that David Higham and Lawrence Pollinger left the Curtis Brown literary agency to form their own agency with Nancy Pearn – Pearn, Pollinger and Higham – and Greene moved to them. He was interested in earning money between novels and his plan, while writing Journey Without Maps, was to get certain sections in prime condition and publish them in advance in magazines, just as he hoped to publish short stories in this way before collecting them into a book.

  His letters to his agents reveal him as being cool, clinical and business-like, keeping them up to scratch, and he had something of the Trollope mentality, writing to his mother in August that, given his tight discipline of writing a set number of words a day, he would complete the two books he was working on by a set date: ‘I’ve been frantically busy … it looks as if I shall have both Liberia and the shocker [A Gun for Sale] finished by Christmas.’ He adds: ‘Then I can start the novel for the autumn.’ This presumably was Brighton Rock which was published in 1938 – his first major pre-war novel.

  All was not success, however. By August 1935 he had sent a section of his travel book, entitled ‘Liberian Masks’, to Curtis Brown, with photographs. These were sent on to Nancy Pearn who was responsible for placing material with magazines in the new agency. Her first letter was not encouraging: ‘“Liberian Masks” declined by the Geographical Magazine … I am now holding this for the other chapters in order to show this as a whole to “Nash’s” or some other suitable medium for use as extracts … They returned at the same time the story “A Chance for Mr Lever” which by the way has been declined by “Nash’s” and “The Strand”. This therefore, we are planning to offer in other directions.’

  In reply, Greene told Nancy that the ‘Mr Lever’ story could no longer be offered since his first collection of stories, called The Basement Room, after the title story, was being brought out by Cresset Press in the autumn. ‘Mr Lever’ does appear in Greene’s first collection. It needed to, as he had collected only eight stories.

  The collection made little impact on the general public. The Times Literary Supplement reviewed it in a paragraph, commenting that Greene’s first three stories about children touched on larger worlds than their limited experience could cope with, and that he showed skill and variety ‘turning … from Pimlico nursery to Paris revolution, and from Liberian jungle to a psychic lecturer’. But the anonymous writer felt the need to balance his praise with a slight smack of the wrist: ‘Intimations of deeper emotions become apparent now and again, but fail to enforce themselves.’16

  It was a contributor to the Spectator who spoke best about Greene’s ‘intimation of deeper emotions’: ‘Mr Greene is able, especially in the title story, to catch in a few pages more of truth as it flies than some novelists catch in a lifetime.’17

  It must have seemed to Greene, by the end of 1935, that success was far off. Not only did his first collection of stories fall flat, but his June novel, England Made Me, did not do well – and never has. The Times Literary Supplement suggested, with justification, that the hero, Anthony Farrant, was the fruit of his public school training in his moral and intellectual emptiness, his automatic and protective charm – criticism of the ‘old school tie’ attitude to life is implicit all through.18 William Plomer in the Spectator took up the same point: ‘Mr Greene lays emphasis … on the importance of the often damaging influence of his school on a man’s nature.’19

  Greene’s school friend, Peter Quennell, reviewed it in the New Statesman and Nation. While telling us that it was the portrait of a cad who ‘sponges, tells lies, seduces girls, loses innumerable jobs, wears school colours to which he is not entitled’, Quennell found a more ‘unamiable trait – [he] talks an argot that proves a sad strain on the reader’s patience’. What troubled Quennell was that Anthony Farrant spoke of his clothes as ‘glad rags’. He wrongly predicted that the novel would be a popular success.<
br />
  The sales in America were catastrophic – only 930 copies – and they were not very much better in England. Heinemann, naturally, thought that it should be remaindered (which it was in 1939). Not one to take such a suggestion lying down, Greene wrote to his agent listing the sales figures, pitiful though they were, for the past eighteen months.

  Period ending 30. 6.37 … 400 copies sold.

  " " 31.12.37 … 150 copies sold.

  " " 30. 6.38 … 240 copies sold.

  He pointed out that it had seemed to sell better in the first half of 1938 than in the second half of 1937. That it was still wriggling and that therefore an enquiry might be in order.20

  Nor could the sales of his collection of short stories, The Basement Room, have been large and the reviews were too few to have attracted a substantial readership; but because the News Chronicle had serialised ‘The Basement Room’, it wasn’t long before he was asking Nancy Pearn to try to interest the newspaper in a further story. She thought that it was a little too early for the paper to run another one by him, but she did suggest he should work one out in synopsis form, and in her letter of 14 October 1935, stressed that she ‘should very much like some new short stories’ from him.

  Their correspondence reveals some of the excitement of his life then, his continual striving to write and place his work. His response to her request and the News Chronicle’s apparent interest, reflects the intense creative activity of his life. He admitted he was putting all his energies into finishing the Liberian book and the thriller by Christmas; that he had not sent her pieces out of the travel book because he was only now (20 October 1935) getting the first wedge of typescript properly revised; that he would think of a story for the News Chronicle; and he admitted there was a story which she could take over but which had already gone out to two magazines – Greene’s writing life was ever complicated: