The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Paradoxically, Graham still felt very loving towards Vivien, and was extremely worried about her suffering in pregnancy and childbirth. He regarded their life together as precious and thought of the baby as an ‘intrusion’ to which he must resign himself.40 The house at Chipping Campden was unsuitable for a child, and Vivien had already been making enquiries in Oxford. On the day after receiving the cheque for film rights, they headed to Oxford where in the company of a shifty but bonhomous estate agent in plus fours they decided on a recently built third-floor flat at 9 Woodstock Close. It had one bedroom, was reached by a lift and had such luxuries as constant hot water and a fridge. Greene was especially curious about the windows that could be turned right around for cleaning. They agreed to take it from the end of June at a yearly rent of £130.41

  Two weeks later, Vivien received a postcard from her mother saying that she had broken her leg, and she dropped into a postscript the news that Vivien’s father was dead.42 Long estranged from him, his death seems not to have affected Vivien greatly. On 21 May she and Graham travelled to Horton, near Swansea, for a beach holiday, and on the train she became ill. Once they were settled in Horton, two telegrams were delivered to Graham together, one saying that Vivien’s mother was ‘extremely ill’ and the other that she had died. When Graham broke the news to Vivien she let out ‘a horrible high cry’ and was desolate. Graham got through to her uncle Vivian Green-Armytage, an obstetrician, who explained that a blood clot had travelled from Marion Dayrell-Browning’s leg to her brain and killed her. Graham told him about Vivien’s pregnancy and her present state, and he advised she should not travel to London for the funeral, as did a local doctor who came to examine her. After some argument, Vivien decided that she was happier to be represented at the funeral by her husband.43

  Graham and Vivien moved to Oxford on 23 June, and it was good for both of them. However, moving house is stressful, and in this case it was compounded by Vivien’s pregnancy. On 10 July, Greene described his own state of mind on a rainy day when a bus he had been travelling on struck a cyclist – the person was uninjured but there was a long delay: ‘My nerves horribly on edge; that feeling of lurking madness, of something swelling in the brain & wanting to burst; every sound, however small, made by anyone else, the chink of a plate on a fork, piercing the brain like a knife. Lay down after lunch but hardly slept at all. Felt a little better with evening. An excess of sexuality.’ Greene is describing symptoms consistent with his mood disorder.

  There was also work pressure; he was in the last stages of a novel begun the previous September. It’s a Battlefield follows Stamboul Train in looking at a troubled contemporary scene, but this novel was not exactly a page-turner – its virtues were subtler than that. It was unlikely to repeat the success of its predecessor. At the centre of the story is a communist bus driver, Jim Drover, who is awaiting execution for the murder of a policeman, and for whom there is a remote possibility of reprieve. The main character is the Assistant Commissioner of Police. A man of melancholic probity based partly on the Assistant Commissioner in Conrad’s The Secret Agent44 and partly on the novelist’s uncle, the civil servant Sir Graham Greene, the character seems a dry run for Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, though he is not given to anxiety about faith or morals. He does his job, enforces laws, trusts to the courts, distrusts politics, and refuses to think about what might ultimately constitute justice. Much against his will, he has been asked by the Home Secretary to write a report on the likely impact of a reprieve. Greene called on his brief experience of the Communist Party to render a meeting at which an intellectual, Mr Surrogate, modelled on the writer and critic John Middleton Murry, gives a speech about Drover’s probable execution as an acceptable sacrifice for the larger cause. Meanwhile, Drover’s brother Conrad sleeps with the condemned man’s wife, Milly, and is eventually reduced to stalking the Assistant Commissioner with a revolver loaded with blanks. The most effective advocate for Drover is Lady Caroline Bury, the character inspired by Lady Ottoline Morrell.

  In this novel, Greene wrote about things he knew or could find out about. Afterwards, he fretted about not knowing enough to render the meeting of communists accurately, but at least he had his experience of the party branch in Oxford and the meeting in Paris in early 1925. He drew on experience to render such places as Battersea, where he had lived, and at one point the action veers north to Berkhamsted. In the course of his research for the book, he received important help from Colonel G. D. Turner, who was married to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Margaret Wilson and whose daughter Comfort would soon marry Rupert Hart-Davis. The couple, whom Greene liked and admired, lived at nearby Blockley, and had come to visit them in Chipping Campden. Both had been Protestant lay missionaries: Margaret Wilson had served in India before becoming a writer, and she was a campaigning pacifist. Greene praised Colonel Turner as an ‘ironic humanitarian’ with little faith in English law. He had been a reforming prison governor and was now Assistant Prison Commissioner in the Home Office. Among his concerns were the reintegration of released inmates into society and finding alternatives to capital punishment. He arranged for Greene to tour Wormwood Scrubs, which allowed him to describe a very similar prison in the novel.45 His conversation may have influenced Greene’s handling of Conrad Drover, who wonders whether his brother might be better off hanged than left in prison for fifteen years. This was a point Turner made in a public lecture some years later: prisons complete the degeneration of inmates and without major reforms it is hardly a mercy to keep murderers alive.46 In this sense, the reprieve granted to Drover is by no means a cheerful outcome.

  While writing the book, Greene dreamt often about crime – including the murder of Priestley. On one occasion he dreamt that he had murdered someone and left the body in a suitcase at a train station, and wanted to remove the bag before the body began to swell.47 The novel contains a sub-plot along these lines, with a woman’s body found dismembered in a trunk in Paddington Station. Greene represents London as many battlefields – economic, legal, sexual – and, in a flourish of dark metaphor, the trunk-killer turns out to be a mad member of the Salvation Army. Greene’s London is summed up by the Assistant Commissioner’s housekeeper: ‘ “Them as knows what London is,” Mrs Simpson said, “would not be surprised to see their nearest and dearest bleeding.” ’48

  Finished on 4 August,49 the book came out in early February 1934. Greene thought that the sales were terrible, but in fact it sold 7500 in Britain and nearly two thousand in the United States.50 The reviews were respectful, but some expressed a distaste for Greene’s sensibility and his refusal to provide a happy ending. The most encouraging response would be private. Greene wrote Ford Madox Ford a fan letter about The Good Soldier, and Ford asked to see some of his work. In December 1934, the older novelist wrote from New York: ‘I can hardly express how highly I think of it – construction impeccable: writing very good indeed & atmosphere extraordinarily impressive . . . ’ It was ‘a shaft of sunlight through the gloom that seems to hang over our distant land! I wouldn’t have believed that such writing cd have come out of England.’51

  9

  MINTY STEPPED ON BOARD

  Greene was thinking of Sweden. He reviewed a biography of Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish ‘Match King’ who managed to achieve monopolies on the sale of matches in many countries. Kreuger lied about his assets and lent staggering sums of money he did not possess. He was able to lend $75 million to the government of France and for a time his personal credit stood five points higher than that of the Republic. On another occasion he lent $125 million to Germany. Among those who fell for Kreuger was J. P. Morgan, swindled in an $11 million deal. In the end, Kreuger was brought down by a forgery of £25 million worth of Italian treasury bills.1 Anticipating disgrace, he shot himself. From the moment he read the biography, Greene could see that this was a brilliant story: ‘it can never fail to be exciting, this curve up to success and down to death’.2

  Shortly after finishing It’s a Battlefield, which
included scenes in a match factory, Greene set off with his younger brother Hugh for three weeks in Scandinavia. For much of the trip they were accompanied by a British magazine writer named Schelling and her two daughters, aged sixteen and twenty, a trio wished on them by their Aunt Helen (one of Charles Greene’s sisters). Flirtation ensued. On one occasion when Hugh and the younger daughter had been gone a long time the mother believed they had drowned in a canal. Later, Graham told the elder daughter that he believed she was a virgin and got his face slapped.3 In Stockholm, Graham met a pacifist who spoke with enthusiasm of a race war involving Russia.4

  Back home, he got to work on the novel. The fictionalized magnate, whom Greene calls Erik Krogh, is not the main character. Rather he focuses on English twins, Anthony and Kate Farrant, whose love for each other borders on incest. One of Greene’s most effective female characters, Kate, is the employee and mistress of Krogh. She tries to rescue the feckless Anthony from his life as a drifter. Anthony is based partly on Greene’s cricket-playing brother Herbert, who was always finding new and curious ways to fail in life. For example, he had tried for a time to farm tobacco in Rhodesia. Inevitably, he came back to Charles for cash. According to Vivien, his mother could not bear to be in a room with him. Short of cash himself, Graham offered to pay Herbert a subsidy if it could be concealed from their father, who would certainly disapprove. Marion vetoed the idea as she was not prepared to work behind her husband’s back, but as his earnings increased, Graham did pay Herbert an allowance and became his trustee.5 This was the first of many such regular payments Graham Greene made to members of his family, needy friends, and hard-up writers.

  Like Herbert, Anthony cannot hold down a job. For years, he comes back from distant places announcing to his father that he has resigned from his latest position, usually on a matter of principle. But now the father is dead, and Kate wants to bring Anthony into a more conventional way of life by getting him a job at Krogh’s – but as she did in their childhood she is trying to tame something in him that ought to be left wild. Oddly enough, he quits this particular job on principle and it costs him everything.

  The character is not, however, a simple portrait of Herbert, but contains recognizable traces of Greene himself, such as the appendectomy at the Westminster Hospital, a relationship with a prostitute named Annette, and getting his face slapped when he speculates that a woman is a virgin. This is a tricky point: Greene’s characters often begin as portraits of himself or others but travel away from their originals, becoming distinct creations. Anthony Farrant cannot be reduced to a portrait of either Graham or Herbert, though he contains characteristics of both brothers.

  The idea of a character taking on a life of his own is nowhere better demonstrated than in England Made Me. Greene says that his story was focused on the twins, with Krogh there only to create a narrative. The minor characters were all in place: ‘Then suddenly the boat listed because Minty stepped on board.’ An Anglo-Catholic frequently invoking obscure saints, the journalist Minty, a remittance man in Stockholm, was initially needed in the plot to spot Anthony’s lies, but then he became a scene-stealer who, among other curious practices, keeps a spider trapped under his toothbrush glass. By far the most vivid character Greene had yet created, he seems to take over the book, including the funeral scene which might otherwise have focused mainly on Kate. Greene had no idea what to do with him: ‘Oh yes, I resented Minty, and yet I couldn’t keep him down.’6 Minty appealed to readers as unlike each other as Kim Philby and Evelyn Waugh, both of whom saw something of themselves in him.7

  While writing the novel, Greene was gathering essays from prominent young authors for a volume published the next summer as The Old School. W. H. Auden wrote about his experiences at Gresham’s School, Holt; Theodora Benson wrote about Cheltenham Ladies’ College; going against the grain of the book, L. P. Hartley wrote fairly respectfully of Harrow, where, as a head of house, he engaged in ‘whopping’ malefactors.8 Perhaps the most impressive essay is that of the hardscrabble Salford novelist Walter Greenwood, whose Love on the Dole Greene thought ‘brilliant’;9 Greenwood, who was nine when his father, a hairdresser, drank himself to death, wrote of a council school where beatings were the normal course: ‘To me, the Old School was a place to be avoided, a sort of punishment for being young.’10 Still at school, Greenwood worked in a pawn shop, and then left school altogether for work at the age of thirteen.

  The Old School was published by Jonathan Cape, where Rupert Hart-Davis was now a director. Greene actually tried to leave Heinemann for Cape in November 1933, but when Heinemann raised its advance on It’s a Battlefield from £200 to £350 he found he no longer had an excuse to move.11 At much the same time he considered but regretfully turned down an offer to work for the publisher Chatto & Windus because he was committed to his lease in Oxford for another six months and could not manage the commuting to London.12 So he settled down to his writing, and took on some small practical challenges, such as learning to drive in Raymond’s old car – Graham seldom drove in his life and when he did he was always a danger to himself and others.13

  On the evening of 28 December 1933 Vivien gave birth to a 7 pound 11 ounce daughter. The delivery was especially difficult and Vivien was upset that she could not present a son to Graham, who said he did not care a ‘brass farthing’ about such things except that they bothered her.14 The daughter was christened Lucy Caroline, and was referred to as Lucy until the 1950s when she decided that she preferred to go by her middle name. She is now known by her married name Caroline Bourget. Graham Greene was fond of his daughter, but not involved in her upbringing. She says that she did not really know her father until she was an adult, after which they became good friends.

  At the time of his daughter’s birth, Greene was especially restless and was looking for excitement that was not domestic. In August 1933 he had joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which had disaffiliated from the Labour Party the preceding year to take a firmer leftist line. One of the Hall Greenes, Ben, a pacifist, had become an ILP activist and was particularly anxious to see party decisions made at the constituency level in contrast to the operations of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee. By now somewhat ashamed of his role in the General Strike, Graham followed Ben’s example and threw himself into the affairs of the ILP, setting up a branch in Oxford. Declaring that ‘The growth of Fascism, the new Unemployment Bill, the police repression, all call for action,’ Greene and an associate organized a meeting on the foggy, frosty evening of 23 January 1934, addressed by the southern divisional chairman of the party.15 Characteristically, he hoped for a showdown with some of Oswald Mosley’s Fascists to give the branch a good launch. There is no evidence that this happened, but Greene was present at the famous Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936, when Mosley led a march, under police protection, through east London and was blocked by Jewish and Irish residents of the area, and other anti-Fascists. The police conducted a mounted baton charge, and as part of the massive crowd Greene experienced panic for the first time in his life, as if by ‘contagion’.16

  Always impatient with political parties, Greene’s involvement with socialism was vexed by a number of issues, including a lifelong hatred of the income tax – in 1926, he had asked Vivien to explain whether Catholics were morally obliged to pay it,17 and his subsequent efforts to resist the tax would come to a climax in 1966 when he became an exile in France. Greene’s interest in the ILP did not last long, and, eventually, he settled into what might be loosely described as a social democratic stance.

  Fascinated by riots, Greene got the Spectator to send him to Paris to report on the Stavisky Affair which rattled the Third Republic, bringing down two governments within a week. A career swindler called Alexandre Stavisky had organized a fraudulent bond issue in Bayonne; he became the subject of a manhunt and shot himself through the temple as the police burst in on him at Chamonix. It was claimed by his wife and various right-wing politicians that the police had shot him so that he cou
ld not reveal how members of the centre-left government of Camille Chautemps had been involved in his schemes. At first, the crisis contained an element of farce, as when a member of the Chamber of Deputies and a journalist fought a duel on a football ground, exchanging four shots from twenty-five paces at ninety-second intervals, precisely timed by a metronome. No one was injured and the three surgeons in attendance had to take their bandages and stretchers back home again. However, the royalist Action Française and the fascists organized riots, for which demonstrators came equipped with razors attached to sticks. Mounted police repeatedly charged the rioters and gunshots were exchanged. On 6 February, 150,000 demonstrators staged a pitched battle with police at the Place de la Concorde, resulting in a dozen deaths and many injuries.18

  Greene flew to Paris in advance of a twenty-four-hour general strike called for 12 February. His trip was organized by his French agent and translator Denyse Clairouin, who would later serve in the resistance and die in Mauthausen concentration camp.19 Having rejected an invitation to march with the National Front against the communists, Greene, Clairouin, and the American novelist Allan Updegraff drove about Paris looking for signs of trouble. On the day of the strike 150,000 met peacefully in the Place de la Nation. He wrote his article for the Spectator having seen ‘precious little’ violence.20

  ‘I’ve become simply crazy about flying,’ Greene wrote to Hugh following his trip to France.21 He soon pitched a new book to his publishers called ‘Zeppelin’ about a journey to be taken from Lake Constance to Brazil, where he would write on the civil war that had taken place there two years earlier, presenting it as ‘a caricature of patriotism’. For the project to go ahead he needed the Zeppelin firm to give him a half-price fare.22 The book was never written.