The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  The most likely explanation of Greene’s desire to leave MI6 for a less demanding position lies in a scriptwriting contract he signed with MGM on 3 February 1944, providing him with twelve weeks of work in each of two years at the handsome rate of £250 per week. The studio would have an option on Greene’s services on similar terms for a third year. There was also an elaborate set of options on the screen rights of any literary works Greene might produce during the term of the contract – these would prove to be a separate source of trouble. However, the key point here is that MGM wanted to get Greene working as soon as possible, so included a requirement that once hostilities ended he ‘will use his best endeavours to obtain his release and discharge from compulsory national service at the earliest possible date’. He was also required to keep MGM apprised of the steps he was taking to obtain release and act on any suggestions they might give.32

  It seems that Kim Philby’s conduct played, at most, a minor part in Greene’s departure from Section V. Greene did take the job offered by the Foreign Office, but they reneged on the promise of sending him to France. Working from their Editorial Unit at 43 Grosvenor Street, he assembled an anthology of English writers to be distributed in France, and returned to his old duties of fire-watching.

  On the whole, Greene’s work in MI6 broadened his imagination, even though he was never a significant figure in the intelligence services. David Cornwell, the former MI6 officer who writes as John le Carré, was a friend and protégé of Greene’s; they fell out over Greene’s public remarks on Philby’s defection, but he remains grateful and sympathetic to him. In an interview for this book, he explains that some writers, notably Somerset Maugham, have made a considerable contribution to intelligence work but Greene was not among them: he was probably ‘quite effective’ in Africa, but on the whole, the secret world mattered more to him than he did to it. In Cornwell’s view, intelligence work appeals to writers as it is close to their own process, and they find it has a lasting hold on them:

  . . . watchfulness, the secrecy of your perceptions – you keep them to yourself – and the sense of alienation, of being an observer within society rather than a member of it. And I think that was very much in Graham. There are people, I count myself among them, who are writers first and everything else second, who go through these strange corridors of the secret world and find an affinity with them and it never leaves them. There’s a kind of inside-out thinking that never leaves you. It has to do with the manipulation of people, and with self-examination – so if I am constantly wondering what will procure you as my friend, my informant: what do you eat? What are your appetites? How can I get hold of you? – then by the same token I am asking the same questions of myself: what will I actually fall for? I think it invests you, while you are in this mode, with a superior power which is thoroughly unhealthy. And I don’t think Graham ever shook it off. Even when he was being oppositional, he imagined he was changing world history.33

  Cornwell believes that service in MI6 affected Greene’s way of seeing the world and himself, and that he later tended to confuse his pre-eminence as a writer with a degree of political standing that he did not really possess. It is an interesting point, though difficult to prove. One day Greene would look back on his childhood flight to Berkhamsted Common and claim that his hope had been to live in concealment, ‘an invisible watcher, a spy on all that went on’.34 His early life and reading disposed him to believe such personal narratives. His time in the secret world may have made them indelible.

  21

  MRS MONTGOMERY

  Separated only by office furniture and some piles of paper, Graham Greene and Douglas Jerrold worked together at Eyre & Spottiswoode for three years. It was said that Jerrold had a large body and small head, causing him to resemble ‘an inflated hors d’oeuvre’.1 A fairly prolific author, Jerrold’s books were unreadable. As a publisher he was irascible, but in fairness, he was in constant pain from an arm wounded at the Somme.2 According to Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the firm’s authors, Greene and Jerrold did manage to inhabit the same office in Bedford Street without quarrelling.3

  The two had made a gentleman’s agreement in 1942 for Greene to join the firm, and they confirmed it by contract the following year, giving him then a director’s annual fee of £100 even if he was called up, and an entertainment budget for the same amount so long as he was present in London. In the summer of 1944, with the war’s end in sight, they made a new agreement for him to receive an annual salary of £1000, rising by annual increments to £1500, and Jerrold, who wanted to retire, told him that he would be in sole charge in about eighteen months.4 The firm had been the King’s Printer with a lucrative monopoly on publication of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. It was Greene’s job to develop the fiction list, while Jerrold handled non-fiction.

  Greene and Jerrold were both Catholics, but, as Muggeridge observed, very different sorts of Catholic. Jerrold had admired Mussolini, considered Franco a living saint, and been a supporter of the British Union of Fascists – however, he did not support Hitler or espouse racist theories. He edited the English Review and later the New English Review Magazine as platforms for very conservative ideas on faith and politics.5 For his part, Greene, though a centrist, was interested in the left and would eventually claim that Catholicism and communism had much in common.

  Jerrold regarded Graham Greene with a mixture of respect, amusement, and scepticism. He thought that Greene was at pains to conceal being ‘an absolutely first-class man of business’. Indeed, as Jerrold later wrote, he would come into the office early and behave as if he had a hangover which he had to dispel with a trip to the pub as soon as possible. When asked how some engagement had gone the previous evening, ‘he always replied with a look of intense pleasure, “It was perfectly ghastly.” ’ His bearing would then change: ‘he would settle down to the serious business of the day, telephoning with rapid succession to his bank, to his stockbroker, to his insurance agent, to his literary agent, to a film company or two, and, if it was really a busy morning, to two or three editors’. Jerrold thought there was a great deal of ‘play-acting’ about Greene, what another generation would call schtick: ‘His club must be what he calls the “the seedy club”; if he goes to a party it must be “simply appalling” or “perfectly ghastly”; even a quiet cocktail with two or three friends becomes, on leaving, “a dreary little drink.” ’6

  The play-acting included practical jokes executed on a grand scale, especially the one about Mrs Montgomery: ‘Who is this “Mrs Montgomery”?’ wrote Jerrold. ‘The answer must be that there is no such person.’ Greene invented her. An irate author whose manuscript had been lost in the office, she demanded meetings ‘at impossible times in inconvenient places’. A biographer came forward with a request in the Spectator for letters of hers. She then disowned the biography as unauthorized and intrusive. Greene kept Mrs Montgomery in action for quite some time: ‘Here for once the whole of Graham Greene was at work in a harmonious universe of his own choosing – the mischievous child, the brilliant man of affairs, the creator of entertainments, the writer of film scripts, and the psychological analyst. Only the power and the glory were ephemeral.’ The last sentence captures Jerrold’s severe opinion that despite being ‘the finest living novelist’ in terms of skill, Greene was trivial in that his preoccupation with doubt and failure caused him to miss the essence of a Catholic life.7

  Before joining full time, Greene had brought a new author of enormous talent to the firm, and in so doing proved that Greeneland is not that far from Gormenghast. In the spring of 1943, Graham Greene met Mervyn Peake in Chelsea. In June, Chatto & Windus turned down the unfinished Titus Groan when Peake refused to make cuts, so Greene, having read a portion, urged him to meet Jerrold to discuss the novel and an illustration project. Peake kept writing and at the end of August sent the completed manuscript to Greene, who took some weeks to wade through it. Peake cannot have expected the response he received:

  I’m going to b
e mercilessly frank – I was very disappointed in a lot of it & frequently wanted to wring your neck because it seemed to me you were spoiling a first-class book by laziness. The part I had seen before I of course still liked immensely – though I’m not sure that it’s gained by the loss of the prologue. Then it seemed to me one entered a long patch of really bad writing, redundant adjectives, a kind of facetiousness, a terrible prolixity in the dialogue of such characters as the Nurse & Prunesquallor, & sentimentality too in the case of [Keda] & to some extent in Titus’s sister. In fact – frankly again – I began to despair of the book altogether, until suddenly in the last third you pulled yourself together & ended splendidly. But even here you were so damned lazy that you called Barquentine by his predecessor’s name for whole chapters.8

  Oddly enough, this was an acceptance letter. Greene was willing to publish if Peake would sort out the manuscript. At the end of the letter he suggested that they conduct their duel over glasses of whisky in a bar. Greene got through to Peake in a way that Chatto could not, convincing him of the importance of the ‘blue pencil method’. It took a long time to revise, and there were further delays owing to the post-war paper shortage, but the novel finally appeared in March 1946.9

  Greene remarked to his mother that the whole company was paid for by the sale of books by the American popular novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes, whose appeal mystified him.10 They could not publish enough copies of her books, which, in his view, weren’t exciting or sexy, though one might learn from them how to run a sugar plantation.11 Such bestsellers allowed him to publish authors whose appeal was more limited, among them R. K. Narayan, whose novel The English Teacher he accepted in October 1944. During his employment at Eyre & Spottiswoode, the firm published three new books by Narayan, but soon after Greene’s departure in 1948 the firm dropped the Indian novelist.

  One of Greene’s main responsibilities was the Century Library, a reprint series of modern fiction that allowed him to revive many of his old favourites that had fallen into neglect, among them Herbert Read’s The Green Child, which had been first published in 1935 and now appeared with an introduction by Greene. In choosing the titles for this series, Greene took advice from a number of writers, including George Orwell. Another advantage of his position was that he could commission Dorothy to design book covers, as she certainly needed the work.12

  It was also time for Greene himself to start writing again. The liberation of France brought with it steady news about the resistance, collaborators, and Nazi atrocities, so Greene pitched a story called The Tenth Man to Alexander Korda for development into a film script. On 6 November 1944 he signed a contract with MGM, separate from the agreement of the preceding February; it would pay him £1500 and assign the copyright in the work to MGM.13

  The story opens in a prison where the Nazis are planning to shoot one man in ten as a reprisal for killings by the local resistance. A group of thirty is told by a German officer to choose three from among themselves for execution at dawn. One of those chosen by lot, a lawyer named Louis Chavel, offers all he has to anyone who will take his place. A young man accepts the offer, documents are hastily drawn up, and he goes to the firing squad. Upon release, the disgraced Chavel returns, in disguise, to his own home, as he has nowhere else to go, where the young man’s mother and sister have taken up an uneasy residence. The sister thinks her brother did a stupid thing and wishes to spit in the face of the man who offered him the deal. Having false papers that might lead to his execution as a collaborator, Chavel stays on in the house as a manservant and falls in love with the sister. His end comes when a down-at-heel actor appears on the doorstep in the character of Chavel, with a scheme to recover his property. In a confrontation with the false Chavel, the true one is shot.

  Greene wrote the story as the basis for a script. The style is stripped down, though there are some finely written passages about the ownership of time. It is tightly constructed and well paced. He delivered the story to MGM, where it vanished into an archive or perhaps an oubliette. When it came to light in the 1980s Greene claimed to have forgotten it.14 It is hard to know what to make of this – perhaps his memory did fail him by that time.15 MGM made a number of copies of the typescript, and occasionally these made their way to the open market and Greene would snap them up – at least two came into his possession in 1966–7.16 He often referred to his main agreement with MGM as a ‘slave contract’. According to one of several side agreements, The Tenth Man belonged entirely to MGM, and its publication would not return another penny to Greene. In 1983, the publisher Anthony Blond acquired the rights to the lost novella from MGM. At first Greene dug in and said he would declare publicly that the story was written solely for film work and was being published now against his wishes.17 However, Blond had no intention of causing Greene harm and entered into an agreement with his then publisher, the Bodley Head, for a joint publication in 1985, an arrangement that paid Greene about £22,000 in royalties in the following year18 – a handsome profit on a title he had sold long before. Despite his efforts to suppress it, Greene felt that this ‘child I don’t recognize’was ‘very readable’, and he preferred it to the novel of The Third Man.19

  There was to be more trouble with MGM. Under an agreement from 1946, the studio had an option on three of Greene’s books within five years. Greene wanted to work with Alexander Korda, not MGM. In March 1947, they were persuaded not to consider Nineteen Stories an option work – this allowed Korda to buy the rights to ‘The Basement Room’ as the basis for The Fallen Idol. In 1947, Greene submitted The Heart of the Matter, which MGM declined. Next, he submitted part of the treatment of ‘The Stranger’s Hand’ and a synopsis of the remainder; since it was not a completed work, MGM refused to regard it as one of the works it was owed. In early 1951, Greene came up with the extraordinary notion of submitting The Little Fire Engine, a children’s book he had written in collaboration with Dorothy, to be the basis of a cartoon; Pollinger’s solicitor advised him not to try it, and, indeed, when the studio heard of it they threatened to sue. Greene then sent them ‘The Point of Departure’ (The End of the Affair) in a messy typescript, with many handwritten notes and revisions, to curb their enthusiasm – by the end of May it, too, was rejected. He finished off his obligation to the studio with his play The Living Room, which it turned down the following year.20

  22

  HOT IRONS

  By the war’s end, Greene’s visits to Oxford were infrequent. His family had spent several years as guests of the Weavers at Trinity College, so in September 1944 he installed them in 6 Ship Street, a rented house near Cornmarket, where they remained until the end of May 1945, when they moved to 15 Beaumont Street, a house owned by St John’s College.1 Aside from the chasm between himself and Vivien, the children were growing older and he hardly knew them. When he did appear, he would bring small curiosities, such as an early Biro (the pen known in North America as a Bic) which fascinated the children because the ink did not need blotting.

  In adolescence, his daughter was developing a strong personality. She loved riding, but despised school. She was sent to Rye St Antony, a solemn Catholic establishment in Headington, first as a day girl, then a boarder for the sake of discipline. She wrote to her father saying she did not like the place just as the women who ran it were complaining to him about her behaviour. Greene came to sort things out, but his daughter told him, ‘I want to be expelled.’ He withdrew her from that school and sent her to one in north Oxford, before enrolling her at a convent school in the Cotswolds. Caroline describes herself as ‘not studious’, learning ‘more after school than during’.2 Although widely read, she was more practical than either of her parents and would eventually run her own ranch in western Canada. Three years younger than Caroline, Francis Greene was a reserved, bookish child, with interests in poetry, science, carpentry, and photography; he was educated by the Benedictines at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire, and then read physics at Christ Church, Oxford.

  In the last year of the w
ar, Graham would usually rush back from Oxford to Dorothy and volunteering with the ARP. Life in London was infinitely more stimulating for him, and some of the atmosphere of the Blitz had returned. After D-Day, the Germans unleashed thousands of V-1s against England. As the launch sites were overrun by Allied forces, they turned in September to the longer-range V-2 rockets. By March 1945, the two weapons had caused about nine thousand deaths, most of them in or near London.3 Greene’s fire-watching duties were in Mayfair; at one point he was so upset by the disorganization of a ‘death-trap’ post in Mount Street that he invited an administrator to come to his office: ‘I will be delighted to tell you what you can do with your fire-guard duties.’4 Despite this threat, he continued to do the work.

  On Sunday 18 March 1945, he was lying in bed at Gordon Square when he heard an enormous crash and rumble, then the sound of broken glass. Through his window, he could see smoke going up from an impact that was actually as far away as Marble Arch. Had the explosion occurred a little later, when the usual crowds had converged on Speakers’ Corner, the casualties would have been catastrophic. Greene hurried over and saw the crater near the arch and the damage to the Regal Cinema and Cumberland Hotel. He was annoyed with well-fed American GIs taking pictures, so ‘wandered around making anti-American cracks!’5 A week later, the last of the V-2s killed or injured thirty-five people at Whitefield’s Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road, a little over 300 yards from Gordon Square. Graham had gone for a walk with Hugh so did not witness the calamity. Surprisingly, his flat was undamaged apart from a coating of dust and a cupboard door knocked loose.6

  VE day came on 8 May – Hitler was dead and Germany surrendered. The long-postponed general election in July produced an unexpected victory for Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. Graham Greene went against that tide, telling his mother that he would vote Conservative in his constituency. He wished that there were a suitable Liberal candidate but could not abide socialist ‘bores’. He was not sentimental about Churchill and looked forward to him going, taking his ministers Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken with him.7 Throughout the rest of his life, Greene’s party preferences are difficult to pin down. In the 1960s, he made an annual donation of £10 to the Liberal Party.8 In later years, he lived abroad and appears not to have voted in British elections, but he said that in 1979 he would have voted for Margaret Thatcher for her ‘integrity’, as the Labour leaders seemed to be liars – he later objected to her policies, sometimes very strongly. In an interview in 1984, he said that he would vote as a Social Democrat, adding that he was not Marxist and disapproved of the hard left in the Labour Party but approved of some things that then leader Neil Kinnock said about Central America.9 In truth, Greene had little time for political parties.