as from 99 Gower St. [c. 19 October 1940]
Dearest Mumma,
Alas! our house went at 1.30 a.m. on Friday. I arrived to collect some objects at 8.30 to find a scene of devastation. There has been no fire & no flood & the structure is still standing, so something may be salvaged when the demolition people have made it safe to enter. Either a landmine at the back or else a whole load of bombs. The secret [?] workshop in the garden next door destroyed, part of the L. C. C. flats & damage all along the row, but the back of our house got the worst blast. Impossible to get beyond the hall for wreckage. I only hope some of my books & some of V’s things will be saved. But there was still an unexploded bomb nearby to go off, & the whole place is likely to tumble at much more shock. Rather heartbreaking that so lovely a house that has survived so much should go like that. And I feel over-awed without my books. No hope of salvage starting before Monday. However there were no casualties.
Much love,
Graham
Graham’s shock at the destruction of a fine old house was not the whole story. He was certainly glad to be rid of a financial worry. Stocked with costly antiques, the house had stood as Vivien’s recompense for an unstable childhood. Graham felt more and more engulfed in a middle-class way of life, from which he had sought escape since adolescence. The destruction of the house brought these differences of temperament and expectation into sharper focus.
TO ANTHONY POWELL
From April–September 1940 Graham was in charge of the writers’ section of the absurdly bureaucratic Ministry of Information. In this letter he tells the novelist Anthony Powell (1905–2000) how the new Director-General, Frank Pick (1878–1941), formerly Managing Director of London Transport and the man responsible for the development of the Tube Map, had eliminated his position as unnecessary.48
The Spectator | 99 Gower Street | London W.C.1 |
Dec. 16 [1940]
My dear Powell,
How good to hear from you. I have only had second hand news via Malcolm.49 I’ve been leading a chequered and rather disreputable life. After passing the medical board for general service I was given till last July to amass some money for my family:50 then in April I was suddenly offered a job at the M. of I. – the job A. D. Peters once had. I stayed there six months, having resigned from the Officers Reserve … an absurd hilarious time I shouldn’t have had the vitality to break. Luckily Pick axed me at the end of September, and I am now literary editing this rag … which isn’t quite as I pictured war. However London is extraordinarily pleasant these days with all the new open spaces, and the rather Mexican effect of ruined churches.
I have a private ambition to do Free French propaganda in French Guinea and the Ivory Coast from a base in Liberia, but so far I haven’t [been?] contacted. All my family are parked in Trinity: my house has been blasted into wreckage by a land mine, and I sleep on a sofa in a Gower St. mews. As I’m under a skylight I go into a basement when the barrage is heavy. A direct hit next door and escaping gas and a midnight flit has been the most exciting evening yet.
I find it impossible to write anything except reviews and middles, but there’s nothing to spend money on and I find one can live admirably on about 500 … which I suppose is a fortune to a soldier. Would it be possible for you to work off some of your bile in book reviews? I wish to God you would do some for me.
If you ever get up to town, do ring me up and have lunch. Hope you get leave at Christmas.
Yours,
Graham Greene
TO MARY PRITCHETT
The Spectator | 99 Gower Street, | London, W.C.1, |
March 18 [1941]
Dear Mary,
I’ve been very remiss in writing to you, but as you can guess life is quite crowded. I’m literary editing this paper, acting as dramatic critic, reviewing a good deal, completely failing to write any books, doing some B.B.C. scripts, and at least three nights a week act as an air raid warden from 10 till 2 in the morning, or until the Raiders Passed goes. I’m glad to say I saved practically all my books from the house, though poor Vivien lost most of her Victorian furniture and objects. It’s sad because it was a pretty house, but oddly enough it leaves one very carefree.
The whole war is good for someone like me who has always suffered from an anxiety neurosis: I turn down work right and left just for the fun of not caring. The M. of I. asked me to return the other day which gave me an opening for a cheery raspberry … If you ever feel inclined to drop a line to Vivien her address is President’s Lodging, Trinity College, Oxford. She has the thin end of things. I have a most interesting and agreeable time in London. It all seems most right and proper.
[…]
TO MARION GREENE
Wednesday, 16 April 1941, brought one of the worst raids of the war. One bomb fell on the Victoria Club in Malet Street where 350 Canadian soldiers were sleeping.51 Graham was often in the streets as bombs were falling.
The Spectator | 99 Gower Street | London W.C.1 |
April 18 [1941]
Dearest Mumma,
Just off for a weekend with the family at Blockley. You’ll have seen about Wednesday night. It really was the worst thing yet. On my beat which only consisted of about three quarters of a mile of streets we had one huge fire, one smaller fire, one H.E.52 and, worst of all, a landmine. The casualties were very heavy, as the landmine which got the Canadian soldiers’ home by the M. of I. blasted houses right through Gower St. The fires are not quite out yet. I got off with a cut hand from having to flop down flat on the pavement outside the landmine place. One thought the night was never going to end. Hardly three minutes would pass between two and four without a salvo being dropped. I feel very stiff and bruised … I think from carrying a very heavy young woman down from the top of the R.A.D.A.53 building in Gower St. and helping to carry a very fat, very vocal foreign Jew, who had had his foot crushed, to the M. of I. where they had an emergency dressing station. One’s first corpse in the Canadian place was not nearly as bad as one expected. It seemed just a bit of the rubble. What remains as nastiest were the crowds of people who were cut by glass, in rather squalid bloodstained pyjamas grey with debris waiting about for help. I was very lucky when the mine went off as I was standing with two other wardens in Tottenham Court Rd. We got down on our haunches, no time for more, and a shop window showered on top of us without cutting any of us. One felt rather pursued. I was having my hand bound up at my post under the School of Tropical Medicine in Gower St when a stick came down, and we were all over the floor again with the windows blown in.
[…]
TO MARION GREENE
Graham’s sister Elisabeth joined SIS in 1938 at Bletchley and recruited Graham and Malcolm Muggeridge to the service.54 After training at Oriel College, Oxford, Graham sailed for his first posting in early December.
The Spectator | 99 Gower Street | London W.C.1 |
Aug. 20 [1941]
Dearest Mumma,
This is just to tell you that I am going out to West Africa for the Colonial Office. I shan’t be going for two or three months as I shall be working in London first. The pay is very good, & the job interesting, & the shadow of a private’s pay – or even a lieutenant’s – is raised. I shall be able to leave plenty behind for the family. How long I shall be out there I don’t know. I hope not more than 6 months, but it might be a year – though I doubt if the war will last that long. I gave in my notice here yday.
[…]
TO JOHN BETJEMAN
On the first anniversary of the bombing of his house Graham used old letterhead with the address crossed out and a note in the margin, ‘Obit. 18.10.40 1.a.m.’ Betjeman, who was then press attaché to the British Representative in Dublin, described himself as ‘a bloody little diplomatic sunbeam’. He sent Graham a poem by Patrick Kavanagh and invited him to come over and lecture.55
North Oxford Nursing Home, | Banbury Rd. | Oxford. |
Oct. 18 [1941]
Dear John,
It was good hearing from you
in this place which is one after your own heart – diamond panes looking out on North Oxford chimney pots, fumed oak furniture, and a few roses in a tooth mug, and water pipes which whistle sullenly in the wall. I left the Spectator nearly a month ago as I felt that very soon I shall find myself in the Pioneer Corps, the haunt of middle-aged professional men like myself. But the pay they tell me is hardly enough to make both ends meet. So I joined the Colonial Office & am supposed to be going out quite soon to West Africa, the pay being good but with a sinister absence of competition.
Then for reasons only known to themselves the C.O. thought it would do me good to get a military background, so I was sent for four weeks to a college here & taught how to salute with a little stick under my arm on the march (a thing I shall never have to do.) They also tried without success to teach me to motorcycle on Shotover – this always ended in disaster. As I seemed to be surviving better than the bicycles they gave it up, & gave me flu instead. This was definitely the military background – the hideous little M.O. with dirty yellow fingers, the no heating, the lavatories on the other side of a cold quad, the struggle for water to drink, the dreadful cold soggy steak & kidney pudding on iron trays … I packed a suitcase and fled here, but they’d already added bronchitis to the flu.
How I should love to come to Dublin & see you, but I’m a bad lecturer & I don’t think this time … I’ve got to gather my strength & shave now. One of the nurses said I looked like an old man & yesterday on the way to the lavatory I caught sight of myself in a glass huddled in an old yellow overcoat like a humble character in Dostoievsky pursuing the scent of a samovar into somebody else’s flat …
I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything about Kavanagh: my successor is W. J. Turner.56
And I’m sorry too about my writing which gets worse every day here.
If W.A.57 should get delayed – I’ll write & tell you, & do fix up something.
Yours,
Graham Greene
1 The film rights of A Gun for Sale had brought in a windfall of $12,000 (NS 1: 585) and the book itself was selling well.
2 It appeared in the Spectator (11 September 1936).
3 David Higham had been a literary agent with the firm of Curtis, Brown but joined with Laurence Pollinger and Nancy Pearn in 1935 to create the firm of Pearn, Pollinger and Higham, which handled most of Greene’s business.
4 Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) directed The Secret Agent, starring John Gielgud, for the Gaumont British Picture Corporation in 1936.
5 Look Stranger! had been released the week before. Journey Without Maps had contained an epigraph from Auden’s ‘Five Songs’:
‘O do you imagine,’ said fearer to farer,
‘That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?’
6 Greene was generally dismissive of the poet Stephen Spender (1909–95), whose best-known work figures in The Heart of the Matter (30) as part of Literary Louise’s high-brow reading, ‘A lovely poem about a pylon.’ Geoffrey Grigson (1905–85), a poet and vituperative reviewer, was the editor of New Verse, the most influential poetry journal of the 1930s. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann (1901–90) had recently completed The Weather in the Streets (1936).
7 See Adamson, 27–8; Falk, 11–14.
8 George Robey (1869–1954) was a famous music-hall comedian, specialising in panto dames. Through 1937, he appeared at the Prince of Wales theatre in a non-stop revue, performing sixteen times a day. (ODNB)
9 Pa Oakley appears on p. 50 of the first edition but disappears from later editions.
10 Hugh’s infant son Graham Carleton Greene.
11 See Ways of Escape, 47–50.
12 See Bevis Hillier, ‘The Graham Greene Betjeman Knew’, Spectator (2 October 2004).
13 John Marks, joint editor, with Greene, of Night and Day.
14 RKN, 114.
15 After service in the First World War and a stint of journalism in the early 1920s, A. S. Frere (1892–1984) took a job with F. N. Doubleday, who soon purchased William Heinemann Ltd. Frere was made a director of Heinemann in 1926 and managing director, under the chairmanship of Charles Evans, in 1932. He was guilty of some indiscretions, such as claiming at a party that his firm’s leading author John Galsworthy went about erecting stiles to help lame dogs over them. Frere was an expert talent-spotter and his personal charm included a skill at tap-dancing (ODNB). He became Greene’s most important literary adviser.
16 No such book was written, but Paraguay remained a fascination for Greene; he set the last section of Travels with My Aunt (1969) and much of The Honorary Consul (1973) there.
17 The letter is addressed to Berlin, where Hugh was a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.
18 NS 1: 613–14
19 Mary Pritchett, Greene’s American agent.
20 Tom Burns (1906–95) was a publisher with Longman’s and a junior director of the Catholic magazine the Tablet, of which he served as editor from 1967 to 1982. He met Greene in 1929 and the two became lifelong friends. An account of their friendship and Burns’s own memoir of Greene may be found in Articles of Faith, xiii–xxv and 146–50.
21 Ways of Escape, 58–60.
22 See The Lawless Roads, 42-61.
23 While none bore the title ‘A Postcard from San Antonio’, several of Greene’s pieces about Mexico appeared in magazines, including ‘A Day at the General’s’ in the Spectator (15 April 1938), 330–2. Most of this material was incorporated into The Lawless Roads.
24 A novel by Sigrid Undset.
25 It is possible that Graham is referring to the French-German poet and anthologist Yvan Goll (1891–1950), who was associated with André Breton and the surrealists.
26 Spectator, 22 July 1938; Reflections, 69–72.
27 Raymond’s wife.
28 A servant.
29 The Dark Room.
30 Presumably, The Power and the Glory.
31 Graham’s review of Betjeman’s An Oxford University Chest in the Spectator (16 December 1938) contains this phrase: ‘… the hollow donnish voices mildly complain, hands are raised in little Pilate gestures with dainty North Oxford vowels …’
32 The designer and artist John Piper (1903–92).
33 A reference to the beginning of his ten-year relationship with the stage-designer Dorothy Glover.
34 A large shop in London, now owned by the John Lewis Partnership.
35 RKN, 129.
36 The Power and the Glory, 102.
37 Goronwy Rees (1909–79), a Welsh novelist and assistant editor of the Spectator.
38 Something very odd seems to have happened. Henry Ash was one of several pseudonyms Greene used when writing letters to the editor. However, there was a real Henry Ash, a draughtsman best known for his sketches of cable-laying expeditions in the 1870s and 80s. He was by now eighty-nine and living in Brighton. The letter Greene received was possibly meant for this man – and although Greene would later make much of there being another Graham Greene (see pp. 246–7), in this case he was himself merely the other Henry Ash. (See Judith Adamson, Graham Greene, the Dangerous Edge: Where Art and Politics Meet [London: Macmillan, 1990], 184–6. I am grateful to Bill Turner for information about the draughtsman.)
39 Stephen Spender had actually attempted to enlist but was twice deemed medically unfit. He joined the Auxiliary Fire Service in 1941. (ODNB)
40 Vivien’s brother Patrick, an artillery officer who fought in Italy and achieved the rank of brigadier.
41 Douglas Byng (1893–1988) and Nellie Wallace (1870–1948) were famous music hall entertainers. Wallace generally sported a threadbare boa and Byng worked in drag.
42 The Power and the Glory.
43 Catterick Camp, now Catterick Garrison, is a large military training facility in North Yorkshire.
44 Dorothy Glover.
45 Review of The Sea Tower by Hugh Walpole in the Spectator (22 September 1939).
&
nbsp; 46 See NS 2: 19–20, but note that in a letter of 15 October 1942 (this page) Greene says that the relationship is actually four years old.
47 Arnold Gyde was head of the editorial department at Heinemann and the firm’s chief publicist. (St John, passim) The Power and the Glory was actually released on 4 March 1940.
48 See NS 2: 38
49 ‘[Greene] was staying near the ministry in a little mews flat where I spent an occasional evening with him, the invariable supper dish being sausages, then still available. Whatever his circumstances, he had this facility for seeming always to be in lodgings, and living from hand to mouth. Spiritually, and even physically, he is one of nature’s displaced persons. Soon after his house on Clapham Common had been totally demolished in the Blitz, I happened to run into him. There was no one in the house at the time, his family having moved into the country, and he gave an impression of being well content with its disappearance. Now, at last, he seemed to be saying, he was homeless, de facto as well as de jure.’ Malcolm Muggeridge, The Infernal Grove (London: William Collins, 1973), 82–3.
50 Graham managed to get £2000 from a film contract with Alexander Korda. To the great disappointment of an Inspector of Taxes who menaced Vivien while Graham was serving in Africa, the payments were split between two tax years.
51 Ways of Escape, 84–8.
52 High explosive.
53 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
54 Christopher Hawtree, obituary of Elisabeth Dennys, Guardian, 10 February 1999.
55 See Bevis Hillier, ‘The Graham Greene Betjeman Knew’, Spectator (2 October 2004).
56 The poet W. J. Turner (1889–1946) took over as the literary editor of the Spectator.
57 West Africa.
4
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
TO MARION GREENE
After three months in Lagos, Graham took up his post in Freetown, where he remained until February 1943. In a drab bungalow where rats swung on his bedroom curtains and one servant chased another with an axe, he quickly wrote The Ministry of Fear, his most successful thriller. His experiences there led also to the writing of The Heart of the Matter (1948). In this letter, he complains about difficulties and inconveniences of his posting, yet his attitude towards this place was surprisingly passionate. He believed that what was essential about life was most likely to be apprehended on the move or in conditions of privation and danger. He wrote of 1942 : ‘“Those days” – I am glad to have had them; my love of Africa deepened there, in particular for what is called, the whole world over, the Coast, this world of tin roofs, of vultures clanging down, of laterite paths turning rose in the evening light’.1
Graham Greene Page 14
