Graham Greene

by Richard Greene

  No work of scholarship can be the final authority on Graham Greene. He himself would tell curious interviewers to read his novels if they wished to understand him. His laconic ‘I am my books’8 contains much truth. And a collection of letters that makes their author better known also confirms a sense of mystery. At best, it marks the boundaries of character, opinion and experience, but it cannot finally explain away the strangeness of a life: ‘I called out to her as she went by, “Aunt Augusta,” but she didn’t answer to the name; there was no sign that she even heard me. They danced on in their tireless passion into the shadows.’9

  A SORT OF CHRONOLOGY

  Henry Graham Greene was born in Berkhamsted near London on 2 October 1904. His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were cousins, both descended from the brewing family of Bury St Edmunds, which in another branch included the novelist Christopher Isherwood. Graham came as the fourth child; his siblings were Alice Marion or ‘Molly’ (1896–1963), the handsome and feckless Herbert (1898–1968), Raymond (1901–82), who became a notable physician and mountaineer, Hugh (1910–87), the future Director General of the BBC, and Elisabeth (1914–99), eventually the novelist’s secretary and his confidante. Charles Greene’s brother Edward, a rich coffee merchant, also lived in Berkhamsted, and his six children were close in age to their cousins. Surrounded by books and companions, Graham’s earliest years seem to have been happy; they were, perhaps, not unlike those of his brother Raymond, who remarked, ‘I saw nothing horrible in the woodshed, perhaps because we had no woodshed.’10

  Charles Greene was a master and, from 1910, the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which began, Graham wrote later, ‘just beyond my father’s study, through a green baize door’.11 His father’s views were characterised by a ‘rather noble old Liberalism’ (this page) and, while many of the masters quietly ignored his example, he promoted humane principles: ‘What an advanced man my father was as Headmaster of Berkhamsted. No prefects or fagging there.’ (this page)

  Graham’s contemporaries at the school included Peter Quennell, later a well-known man of letters, and the journalist Claud Cockburn. Another of his friends, Arthur Mayo, recalled that Graham was a friendly and outgoing boy, with an impressive loyalty to the victims of bullying.12 As the child of the headmaster, however, Graham was eventually caught between his school-friends and his father. By thirteen, he was a boarder and felt himself a Judas in St John’s House. When he was fourteen and fifteen, he was tormented by a sometime friend named Lionel Carter and betrayed to Carter by another friend, Augustus Wheeler. He was haunted by these events and was surprised at the banality of an encounter with Wheeler in Malaya in 1950: ‘And instead of saying “What hell you made my life 30 years ago,” one arranged to meet for drinks!’ (this page)

  Greene’s first volume of autobiography, A Sort of Life (1971), records his unhappiness as a student – episodes of truancy, self-mutilation by means of a pen-knife and attempts to poison, then drown, himself. After eight terms as a boarder, he ran off to Berkhamsted Common, where he planned to conceal himself as ‘an invisible watcher, a spy on all that went on’, but was apprehended after two hours by his sister Molly.13 His parents accepted his protest and allowed him to live at home again – that is, on their side of the green baize door.

  Sensing in him something like the mental illnesses that had afflicted both of his grandfathers, his parents sent him, when he was sixteen, for a six-month course of treatment with a psychoanalyst ‘of no known school’ named Kenneth Richmond in London. Trained by Maurice Nicoll, a sometime Jungian and the main commentator on Ouspensky’s and Gurdjieff’s works, Richmond was himself a spiritualist and became a leading light in the Society for Psychical Research. With Richmond, Graham began the lifelong habit of recording dreams in a diary: ‘My experience bears out the fact that one dreams at least four or five times a night when once one has disciplined oneself to have a pencil and paper beside one in bed!’ (this page) Dreams are recounted in most of his novels, and are sometimes crucial to the plots. He made selections from the diaries, which were published posthumously as A World of My Own (1992). Greene enjoyed his time in the Richmonds’ house immensely, meeting their literary friends, among them Walter de la Mare. At the end of the course, Richmond recommended that Greene be encouraged in his desire to write.

  Psychoanalysis, however, did not banish his illness. Greene claimed that in the autumn of 1923 he began to play Russian roulette with a gun of Raymond’s that was kept in a corner-cupboard in their bedroom. Raymond, however, doubted the story, since the gun, which actually belonged to a cousin who had brought it back from the war, was stored without bullets, even though Graham said they were there in a cardboard box.14 Whether the episode is factual or symbolic hardly matters – it explains with great aptness a key pattern of boredom and risk-taking that characterised Greene’s life. Many years later, after he had received lengthy treatment from a distinguished psychiatrist named Eric Strauss, Greene described himself as a manic-depressive.15 Also known as bipolar illness, manic depression involves mood swings from elation, expansiveness or irritability to despair. Symptoms can appear in adolescence, as occurred in his case. The disease can lead to suicidal depressions, drinking, risk-taking, thrill-seeking, promiscuity and a desire to seduce and be seduced.16 Such tendencies can manifest in a person who is otherwise responsible, loving and ethical. The disorder, which is hardly culpable, may have caused Greene to rush into ill-advised relationships and to be unsettled throughout his life, constantly seeking ‘Ways of Escape’ – the title he gave to his second volume of memoirs (1980), in which he also wrote: ‘Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.’ [p. xiii].

  In Michaelmas term 1922, Graham went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read history. His tutor, Kenneth Bell, was an old student of his father’s. Among Graham’s contemporaries at the university were Harold Acton, John Sutro, John Betjeman and Anthony Powell. Although they later became very close, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh moved in separate circles at university – Graham’s being heterosexual. Writing to Waugh in 1964, he recalled: ‘For a considerable period of my time at Oxford I lived in a general haze of drink. I’ve never drunk so much in my life since!’ (this page) Through those years he thought of himself as a poet, and his first book, Babbling April (1925), was a collection of verse that in later years he would not willingly mention. On one occasion he was invited with other young poets of Oxford to read on the BBC: ‘We sat in a kind of sumptuous drawing room, with beautiful armchairs & sofas, & each in turn had to get up & recite in front of a beautiful blue draped box on a table. I felt like Harold swearing on the saint’s bones.’ (this page)

  In the spring of 1925, as he was approaching the end of his degree, Greene fell in love with the fervently Catholic Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. At one point he described his passion for her, with greater accuracy than he intended, as ‘monomania’.17 For the next two years he courted her, mainly in an outpouring of hundreds of letters, and they were married in October 1927. There is no doubt that they were fond of each other, but neither was ready for this step. Graham was managing the impulses of his as yet undiagnosed condition and would quickly be guilty of repeated infidelities. Vivien (as she then began to spell her name) affected an extreme girlishness, was uneasy about sex and could be both priggish and sentimental. Their marriage had some periods of happiness, but Graham became deeply absorbed in his writing and would often go abroad. Vivien developed interests in Victorian furniture and antique doll’s houses. The couple had two children, Lucy Caroline (b. 1933) and Francis (b. 1936). The marriage effectively came to an end in 1939, but a formal separation did not occur until 1947.

  As part of his courtship of Vivien, Graham adopted her religion. While working for the Nottingham Journal in early 1926, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Within twenty years, there would b
e no more famous layman in the Church, but Catholicism was always a struggle for him – he tended to believe most easily when he was in love, for example, with Vivien in the 1920s or with Catherine Walston in the late 1940s. At other times, belief was difficult, as when he was writing A Burnt-Out Case. He wrote to Catherine Walston in 1961: ‘I feel as though I’ve come to the end of a long rope with A Burnt-Out Case & that I’ll probably never succeed in getting any further from the Church. It’s like, when one was younger, taking a long walk in the country & at a certain tree or a certain gate or the top of one more hill one stopped & thought “Now I must start returning home.”’ (this page) In old age, Graham Greene kept ‘one foot in the Catholic Church’ (this page) identifying with ecclesiastical dissidents such as Hans Küng and the Liberation Theologians in Latin America.

  Working as a sub-editor on The Times, Greene enjoyed his first literary success in 1929 with The Man Within. His publishers, William Heinemann and Doubleday, Doran, made an arrangement for him to write full-time with an annual advance of six hundred pounds for three years. The novels The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931) – turned out in quick succession – were badly written, and a biography of the notorious seventeenth-century Earl of Rochester was rejected at the beginning of 1932 as obscene. As it turned out, his publishers had paid for his apprenticeship. Living with Vivien in a cottage in the village of Chipping Campden, Greene wrote the first of his mature novels, Stamboul Train, with bankruptcy looming. When the book appeared at the end of 1932, it was a bestseller and established him as a bankable author. His next novel, It’s a Battlefield (1934), the most political of his early works, failed to sell but still won him the praise of V. S. Pritchett, Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford.18

  Graham Greene belonged to the last generation that could think of the world as containing unexplored places. His childhood reading included many stories of Victorian travellers. When he was fourteen, he wrote to the explorer William S. Bruce, criticising his book Polar Exploration, and wished fervently to visit the South Pole himself.19 As a young man, he undertook many journeys, including particularly reckless ones to Ireland in 1923 and the Ruhr in 1924. Even his early works often incorporate distant settings; for example, The Name of Action has Germany for its background, and Stamboul Train sets key events at Subotica on the border of Hungary and Serbia. Research for England Made Me (1935) brought him to Denmark and Sweden in the summer of 1933. He visited Paris frequently and was there to report on the aftermath of the Stavisky riots of 1934. In May of that year he visited Latvia and Estonia, a trip that would eventually influence the writing of Our Man in Havana.

  Greene’s most dangerous journey came at the beginning of 1935. Accompanied by his beautiful and intrepid young cousin Barbara Greene (later Countess Strachwitz) and their carriers, he undertook the jungle trek through Sierra Leone and Liberia described in Journey Without Maps (1936). He had literally no idea of what lay before him: ‘The whole trip gets more & more fantastic every day; at last I’ve managed to get a fairly large scale map; most of it blank white with dotted lines showing the probable course of rivers!’ (this page) He wrote of Liberia, as he might have written of most of his destinations: ‘There seemed to be a seediness about the place you couldn’t get to the same extent elsewhere, and seediness has a very deep appeal … It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost’.20 That nostalgia nearly killed him, as he contracted fever, treated it with quinine and whisky, and survived only by luck (and perhaps thanks to Barbara), but he was surprised by what happened when the fever was at its worst: ‘I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable’.21

  Confident of making a living with his pen, in 1935 he rented, and a year later purchased, a large house at Clapham Common – a source of particular pride to Vivien, who filled it with costly antiques. His standing as an author and reviewer was by now such that he was able to convince Hamish Hamilton to publish Swami and Friends (1935), the first novel of the distinguished Indian writer R. K. Narayan. Throughout his career, Narayan was venerated by critics but ignored by readers in Britain. In the years to come, Greene would cajole and badger agents and publishers to make sure that Narayan’s works were published and promoted as they deserved.

  Part of Greene’s own success was that he could produce books that appealed to the popular market. He had become expert in writing thrillers, among them A Gun for Sale (1936) and The Confidential Agent (1939). One of his most admired novels, Brighton Rock (1938), began in the seediness of racetracks as a murder story, but ‘turned round and bit me’ (this page) as a reflection on good and evil and the chances of clemency: ‘You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God’.22

  In early 1938 Greene visited Mexico to report on the persecution of the Catholic Church in the states of Chiapas and Tabasco. Leaving behind him in England a libel case brought by Twentieth Century Fox and Shirley Temple for his review of Wee Willie Winkie in the short-lived magazine Night and Day (in which he described the child star as having ‘a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men’),23 Greene found Mexico a desperate and unpleasant country, and it seems he could not abide Mexicans. As the years passed, this view reversed itself; Greene visited Latin America and the Caribbean many times, setting several of his most important books there. Lawless Roads (1939) is an observant but dyspeptic work that honours the courage of a people he does not like. Greene’s most admired novel, The Power and the Glory (1940), also set in Mexico’s ‘atmosphere of desertion’, describes the martyrdom of a whisky priest. Pursuing an idea ‘of frightening difficulty & hazard’ (this page), Greene crystallised for the first time the dialogue between Catholic and communist belief central to many of his subsequent works: ‘“We agree about a lot of things,” the priest said, idly dealing out his cards. “We have facts, too, we don’t try to alter – that the world’s unhappy whether you are rich or poor – unless you are a saint, and there aren’t many of those.” ’24

  The coming of the war marked the end of Greene’s marriage. He began a serious affair with a stage designer named Dorothy Glover, which continued into the late 1940s. With Vivien and the children evacuated to the country, Greene went into the Ministry of Information, working in the nights as a fire warden, often alongside Dorothy. In October 1940, the house at Clapham Common was bombed. Although saddened by the destruction, he was also relieved of a financial burden, and the end of the house seemed to promise his release from a domestic life he found unbearably claustrophobic. He confided his marriage problems to his sister Elisabeth: ‘I always used to laugh at emotional situations and feel they couldn’t any of them beat toothache. One lives and learns.’ (this page)

  In 1941, Elisabeth, who had herself joined the Secret Intelligence Service at the start of the war, recruited him, and he was sent back to Sierra Leone as an MI6 officer – a lonely, out-of-the-way posting. There, he gathered many of the impressions that would shape The Heart of the Matter (1948). While not searching cargo ships and vaguely keeping track of the Vichy forces in French Guinea, he wrote The Ministry of Fear (1943), the best of his thrillers, a work that evoked with terrible clarity the atmosphere of wartime London, a setting he would describe again in The End of the Affair (1951). Personal news reached him by cable, first that he had won the Hawthornden Prize for The Power and the Glory, then that his father had died – of diabetic complications. In Sierra Leone, he remarked: ‘I’ve had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring.’ (this page)

  Greene returned to London in March 1943. He worked under the Soviet agent Kim Philby in the Iberian section of MI6, in St Albans. His relationship with Philby was warm – Philby had great charm and was a convivial and deep drinker—and survived his defection to the Soviet Union in 1963. Nonetheless, in June 1944 Greene left the service because of Philby’s eff
orts to gain control of counter-intelligence against the Soviets. Greene says that it appeared then that Philby was motivated by personal ambition (see this page). Whether he privately suspected Philby of being a Soviet infiltrator may never be known. In later years, Greene occasionally took on assignments for the service in a collegial fashion – he was never again in their employ – but seems not to have been an important figure in the field of intelligence. His usual contact with MI6 was Elisabeth’s husband, Rodney Dennys, a senior intelligence officer who gave up that career in 1957 largely because of his dissatisfaction with the ongoing internal investigation into the possibility of a larger Soviet spy network within MI6. Dennys opted for a scholarly life in the College of Arms, where he eventually became Arundel Herald Extraordinary, but remained informally in touch with MI6. He actually knew Philby much better than Greene did and was unforgiving, having personally trained some of the intelligence officers for whose deaths Philby was directly responsible.25

  Between 1944 and 1948, Greene worked at the publisher Eyre & Spottiswoode, having been a director of the firm for several years before that. He was responsible for the fiction list, bringing to the firm such authors as Mervyn Peake, R. K. Narayan and François Mauriac. He left after a conflict with the managing director, Douglas Jerrold, and a row with Anthony Powell, whom he accused of writing a ‘a bloody boring book’ (this page).