The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Greene certainly hoped to find a place in Nash’s. In an undated letter to his mother he writes: ‘My agent has sold my Korda film story [probably The Green Cockatoo] to Nash’s as a short story for £250. All it needs is about a day’s work with a secretary, altering it from its film form.’ But Greene was too busy to do such a day’s work. He had turned in to Basil Dean his adaptation of John Galsworthy’s story: ‘I expect we shall argue about it this coming week and then I’ll have to set to work on the shooting script, a thing I’ve never done before. Every camera angle has to be described, each angle being a scene, an average film having about 550 scenes. A long business. I find it very tiring, as you have to visualise exactly the whole time, not merely what the person is doing, but from what angle you watch him doing it.’

  We do not have Greene’s judgment of his ‘first’ script in 1937, but over twenty years later, in 1958, he felt his script (actually his second) was a terrible affair and typical in one way of the cinema world. Greene’s problem was that he had to adapt John Galsworthy’s story (‘a sensational tale of a murderer who killed himself and an innocent man who was hanged for the suicide’s crime’) and he found himself in an impossible strait-jacket: ‘If the story had any force at all, it lay in its extreme sensationalism, but as the sensation was impossible under the rules of the British Board of Film Censors, who forbade suicide and forbade a failure of English justice, there was little of Galsworthy’s plot left when I had finished. This unfortunate first effort was suffered with good-humoured nonchalance by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.’39

  But perhaps their nonchalance stemmed from another source. According to Basil Dean, the two ‘lovers’ in the film, Leigh and Olivier, had actually fallen in love with each other in real life: ‘By the second or third day’s shooting I knew I was in for a difficult time, for Vivien and Larry were in the first stages of their love affair, destined to bring joy and suffering to both, and to raise Larry to full maturity as one of our greatest actors. Their joyous awareness of each other took the form of much laughter and giggling on the set; it was impossible for them to take the film seriously.’40

  An important scene in the film was set in Number One Court of the Old Bailey. Vincent Korda, Alexander’s brother, had spent a week building it and the production manager had ‘peopled it with barristers, solicitors, ushers, police witnesses and members of the curious public.’41 All was ready and a satisfactory opening shot was taken in the afternoon, but then Dean was instructed by Alexander Korda to take the set down in the evening. As Dean discovered, there was method in Korda’s madness. The shooting schedules were being deliberately rearranged so that Leigh and Olivier could go to Denmark for a week to play together in Hamlet in the courtyard in Elsinore, a production arranged by the Danish Tourist Board. Korda was determined to make Vivien Leigh a star. Not content with rearranging schedules Korda directed an additional sequence, ‘to inject a more Continental atmosphere’, and changed the working title The First and the Last to Twenty-One Days.

  Poor Dean had much to complain about (and he does in his autobiography). He was not asked to see either the ‘rough cut’ or the finished picture. It was, to quote Greene about other work produced at Denham, ‘the usual Denham mouse’. It was not immediately released but was kept in Korda’s vaults, having its trade show in April 1939 and only being released a year later, by which time Gone with the Wind had made Vivien Leigh a household name.

  When it was released, Greene, with that even-handedness of his, his criticism equally as sharp for his own work as for others, pelted justifiable stones at it:

  Galsworthy’s story … was peculiarly unsuited for film adaptation, as its whole point lay in a double suicide (forbidden by the censor), a burned confession, and an innocent man’s conviction for murder (forbidden by the great public). For the rather dubious merits of the original the adaptors have substituted incredible coincidences and banal situations. Slow, wordy, unbearably sentimental, the picture reels awkwardly towards the only suicide the censorship allowed – and that, I find with some astonishment, has been cut out. I wish I could tell the extraordinary story that lies behind this shelved and resurrected picture, a story involving a theme-song, and a bottle of whisky, and camels in Wales … Meanwhile, let one guilty man, at any rate, stand in the dock, swearing never, never to do it again …42

  No doubt it was for Greene also a disillusioning experience and certainly, a year later, the enthusiasm seems to have died, for that was the time of his article ‘Film Lunch’. He himself was now one of that group writing for the screen ‘and all that’s asked in return the dried imagination and the dead pen’. Greene, commenting much later on the novelist working for the cinema, writes: ‘a writer should not be employed by anyone but himself. If you are using words in one craft, it is impossible not to corrupt them by employing them in another medium under direction.’43

  Ahead were fine film scripts by Greene and fine films – but they were indeed ahead and released after the Second World War – Brighton Rock (1947); The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949). There, part of the pleasure and part of the success was due to the close working partnership Graham Greene had with the director Carol Reed.

  Basil Dean’s remarks, and those in Sykes’s life of Evelyn Waugh, treat Alexander Korda with some contempt – and so did Greene before he knew him well. The Korda and Greene friendship was to develop though, and Greene came to have the deepest trust in him, even turning to him on one occasion when he felt suicidal: ‘So … began our friendship which endured and deepened till his death, in spite of my reviews which remained unfavourable,’ writes Greene in Ways of Escape. ‘There was never a man who bore less malice, and I think of him with affection – even love – as the only film producer I have ever known with whom I could spend days and nights of conversation without so much as mentioning the cinema.’44

  fn1 The name Heather Angel sounds like one made up for the purposes of Hollywood. She was born in Oxford, Heather Grace Angel, the daughter of a Christ Church chemistry don, and was popular with cinema audiences in the 1930s. In 1970 she witnessed the fatal stabbing of her third husband by a prowler at their home at Montecito, California. She died in January 1987, aged 77.

  fn2 Rouben Mamoulian, an American film and stage director.

  fn3 The American Dr Frank Buchman founded the movement of Moral Rearmament … It advocated the regeneration of society by ‘complete honesty, purity, and love’, the members seeking divine guidance in all their meetings for mutual encouragement and their sharing in their confession of failures.

  fn4 ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’ appeared in Collier’s, 29 June 1940. The earliest reference to the story is when Greene sent a copy to his British agent in April. The story is about an invasion of a British village by a small contingent of German troops disguised as British armed forces. If Greene was writing this in 1936, then his story must have been futuristic and an example of his mediumistic powers.

  fn5 In his review, Graham pretends Beverley Nichols is a lady: ‘A middle-aged and maiden lady, so I picture the author, connected in some way with the church: I would hazard a guess that she housekeeps for her brother … She is not married, I am sure, for she finds the sight of men’s sleeping apparel oddly disturbing: “It was almost indecent, the way he took out pyjamas and shook them …”’ To his mother, he wrote, quietening her fears: ‘The B.N. review had no repercussions except fan mail praising it (unusual for a review).’ Letter of 8 September 1936.

  38

  Night and Day

  There is no test of literary merit except survival.

  – GEORGE ORWELL

  IN A DIARY begun on 26 December 1936,fn1 Greene records that on 29 December he ‘ran into Arthur Calder-Marshall and lunched with him at a pub by Leicester Square station’. Arthur Calder-Marshall in 1977 recalled that his impression of Greene then was of a very successful writer: ‘It is all so long ago, memories are indistinct. But I remember the house he was living in at Clapham Common North, with the be
autiful Adam staircase. To the struggling author subsisting in digs on £5 a week, the Greene establishment appeared the pinnacle of affluence. Here was the Established Writer …’1

  Appearances can be deceptive. No doubt Greene had been involved with what Basil Dean called ‘those Alice-in-Wonderland studios at Denham, Bucks, surrounded by hurrying crowds of actors and technicians, all with the confident look of security in their eyes and the jingle of coins in their pockets’,2 but he had also been through a very stressful time in 1936 on a personal and professional level.

  He was anxious about his wife, who was expecting a second baby in September. Replying to his brother Hugh’s suggestion that they might have a walking holiday together, he wrote: ‘I think I might manage a short holiday in October, but it’s difficult to promise and I think it would have to be the end of the month … everything is in the air. I want to see Vivien safely and comfortably home. Spain might be exciting.’ And referring to Vivien’s ordeal over the birth of Lucy he wrote: ‘Vivien is full of envy for the ease and celerity with which Helga has produced. She had an awful time. They tried a new kind of anaesthetiser on her which broke down.’3

  In July he had begun to think of another ‘entertainment’, which was to become Brighton Rock (1938), to follow A Gun for Sale, and, incredibly, as early as May 1936 he was considering another travel book, based this time in Mexico and dealing with the Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church. This was to lead to The Lawless Roads (1939) and his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory (1940). In the same month he had an idea for what he called a ‘silly book’ – one which also involved travel and Evelyn Waugh. His idea was that he and Waugh should do a race round the world, an idea derived from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and he immediately began seeking a publisher for a book about the journey: ‘A young man in Heinemann’s was grieved by our idea; he thought it vulgar,’ he wrote to Hugh on a postcard picturing the Spread Eagle Hotel, Midhurst, ‘but Theodora Benson’s anxious to get Gollancz in on it.fn2 If you look at the map somewhere in Afghanistan offers three various routes.’ On 30 July he wrote to Hugh: ‘The Silly Book may yet come off. Evelyn Waugh went back to Abyssinia yesterday on an Italian troop ship, but Theodora wrote to him before he went and I got him on the phone, and he’s quite open to discuss the book when he comes back in September.’

  Indeed Waugh seemed interested. On his arrival in Rome he wrote to Greene from the Grand Hotel de Russie: ‘I am afraid I did not make much sense on the telephone yesterday. I had gone to bed very late & tipsy, got up early & still tipsy, was packing for an indefinite trip to Africa, and not in the best shape for talking business.’ Waugh saw possibilities in Greene’s plan: ‘I think that it should be a race not in time but economy. Each competitor to start with no luggage and a limited sum – say £100 – and the one who arrives with most cash in hand to get a prize.’ He suggested at least five competitors and offered Robert Byron’s name as a possible candidate. Warming to the subject he added: ‘In fact it might be open to anyone who cares to put up his own stake – three or four professional tourists like ourselves to get paid for. Why not in November? Don’t answer until October as I have no address.’4 The idea came to nothing: another way of escape had been blocked.

  The pressures built up as Vivien came to the end of her pregnancy. Greene’s mother, to relieve the burden, took Lucy over until after the happy event, as the following note written in August shows: ‘There’s no chance now I’m afraid of having Bear [Lucy’s nickname] back till the end of the month, I mean the end of Sept. We miss her a great deal.’ In the same letter he speaks of a rash of boils that invaded his face: ‘My run-downess culminated about a week ago in a poisoned face, which swelled up in a most embarrassing way. Painful too, like continuous tooth-ache. The day before yesterday I couldn’t stand it any longer and had a cut made by a doctor, and yesterday and today a good deal of the poison has been coming out. I think the swelling will be a lot down tomorrow, and I find I can get my toothbrush round this morning.’5

  Two days later he writes to Hugh: ‘I’m having a wretched time at the present with a poisoned face. I lurk in my tent, only creeping out after dark.’6 A week later he speaks of Vivien’s pregnancy: ‘We had a false alarm yesterday morning, but now the amoeba seems to have settled down for the winter.’ In the last sentence of the letter his two concerns come together in one sentence: ‘I shall be very glad when V’s safely through things and when my face is presentable again. I can’t shave, but haven’t yet reached the stage of looking as if I’m growing a beard. It makes seeing people very difficult.’7

  Just how painful his condition was he explains to his brother: ‘These bloody boils have been going on for more than two months, four days in seven painfully, & one has no certain feeling that one day they will stop. At the moment I have them on me, all just broken – the lips, the thigh & the scrotum – so they’ve ceased to hurt.’ This same letter records that he met Alfred Hitchcock, who was in the process of turning Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent into the film Sabotage: ‘I had to see Hitchcock, the other day … A silly harmless clown. I shuddered at the things he told me he was doing to Conrad’s Secret Agent.’

  Moreover, he had decided to change his American publishers: ‘I have broken with Doubledays more or less, & have tried to buy back from them, without success, Journey Without Maps, which Viking Press offered to take on. They, the V.P., are going to have my next book anyway, though D’s keep on sending anxious cables.’

  His lunches and his meetings with writers went on as usual: ‘I had a painful Purgatorial lunch yesterday with [Geoffrey] Grigson, [Stephen] Spender & Rosamund Lehmann, my mind clouded with aspirins. I hadn’t met S. before: he struck one as having too much human kindness. A little soft.’

  Earlier Greene had written of Grigson to his mother: ‘The assistant editor, literary, of the M[orning] P[ost] is the young avant garde critic, Geoffrey Grigson, a fierce and dangerous creature. I haven’t met him, but over the telephone the other day he claimed to be a distant cousin. He said he thought it was through a Holt Wilson connection, his father being an H.W. first cousin?’8

  And he recorded that, during his lunch with Arthur Calder-Marshall in December, Langdon Davies was in the same pub, ‘about to return to the Spanish Civil War to take moving pictures on sixteen millimetre film which he finally hopes to enlarge for public showing. L.D. one of those extreme leftwingers who give the impression of a lack of intellectual hardness at the centre. Spender another. They are very pleased with violence and ruthlessness theoretically, but with them it is less a rational policy than a sentimental reaction to their own softness.’

  On 13 September Greene’s son Francis was born without difficulty. In 1979 Vivien described the birth of her second child at Dr Pink’s in Greenwich: ‘That was marvellous – he was so kind, nine hours or so, Francis was born at two minutes to six in the morning and I had started at about nine the evening before and everybody was very supportive. All the nurses were young New Zealanders; all dressed in white, even white shoes and stockings, and so sympathetic. I remember Dr Pink saying “You’ve done it all by yourself”, instead of forceps and stitches and the rest of it. The nurse brushed my hair – it was a most marvellous thing to be lying there, flat again and exhausted, and she brushed my hair very gently away from my face. And then they brought this little bundle in, smelling delicious, violets and everything. Graham was very supportive. He was very distressed about the first birth but the other was very successful. He’d grown a beard because he had either been abroad or was going abroad, or for some reason anyway he had a beard.’ Vivien must have forgotten his boils.

  In his letter to Hugh on 31 October Greene recorded: ‘The baby is crying & I have ten books accumulated for review & this damned thriller [Brighton Rock] to write.’

  By the middle of November his boils had disappeared and by 26 December 1936 he was able to tell Hugh that he had been offered the literary editorship of the new weekly magazine, Night and Day, which Cha
tto and Windus were launching in the spring of 1937 under the managing directorship of Ian Parsons, senior director at Chatto. He wrote to his mother, ‘I may have to decide between Mexico & the literary editorship of a new paper – if it gets all its finances by Christmas. A horrid decision. I’d much rather have Mexico, but the L.E. would be worth £600 a year. I have to decide between buying this house or leaving next year: the lease won’t be renewed.’

  He decided to take up the Night and Day offer so long as Korda did not exercise his option, and he added, ‘If it wasn’t for the libel action [over Journey Without Maps] we’d be feeling on a prosperity wave.’ He had done the responsible thing – taken the bird in the hand, though it was not what he desired. As early as August that year he had written to his mother with the Mexican book in mind, ‘D.V. I shall be going off in January. I shall go via New York to pick up introductions and information.’ Instead, in December 1936 he was writing to Hugh to ask how his wife, Helga, was enjoying New York and regretting an opportunity lost and an adventure missed: ‘O dear, I’d hoped to be there this winter.’

  *

  Nevertheless, in spite of disappointment, Greene threw himself into the job of being literary editor of what was to be a short-lived, but unique magazine. Ian Parsons described him as ‘a model literary editor, hard working, completely conscientious, and with such a large circle of gifted literary friends that not only the book pages, but many of the features were of an exceptionally high order.’9