The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Two days before Munich, his diary reflects a suspicion: ‘The Macaulay telephone exchange not working [his number was Macaulay 2529] (Deliberate?)’, and the Government’s (and his own) preparations for war: ‘Anti-aircraft guns set up on Common and trenches apparently being dug. Have planned to evacuate family by car with Eleanor [his brother Raymond’s wife] tomorrow afternoon.’8

  In spite of the fact that the schools had their future evacuation of children well planned, Greene intended to move his own family out of London himself: ‘Don’t worry too much about arrangements,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘Vivien, Lucy and Francis are going down with Eleanor tomorrow afternoon, in case Parliament declares a state of emergency right away.’ In the same letter, he commented coolly on how he saw his future if war was declared:

  I see things rather as follows:

  Immediate conscript is certain. Therefore

  a. one may find oneself in the army with or without a commission. This means small earning power and only a small allowance. In that case one must make one’s savings go as far and as long as possible. Under those circumstances I should feel very grateful if my family were boarded out either with Eleanor or you on some sharing basis: we’d contribute of course to rates, labour, etc. as well as board. And this house [14 North Side] would be shut up or let.

  b. one would find oneself in some ministry – of information or propaganda at a reasonable salary. In that case I should take as cheap a lodging as possible in town or get someone to share expenses of this house, and find a cottage, perhaps at Campden, for the children.9

  But there was no need for immediate evacuation, the day being saved (or lost, depending on your point of view) by Chamberlain’s visit to Munich. Britain and France sold out the Czechs and Chamberlain returned to London a hero, waving a piece of paper, a copy of the agreement in which Hitler renounced all belligerent intentions against Britain.

  There was a great sense of relief in Britain – many felt that Chamberlain had saved civilisation. In London streets people burst into tears and the Mall and Whitehall swarmed with joyful crowds celebrating because there was to be peace and there would never be another world war.

  Greene was not taken in. To his mother he wrote:

  I can’t say I felt any jubilation about the way things went. We’ve lost every friend we had in Central Europe, Hitler has got all the supplies necessary for war and when we fight on the next issue I doubt if we shall win. And presumably he’ll be confident enough then not to let us creep out of it. The Czechs very naturally are already preferring German friendship to ours. Altogether I feel rather gloomy.10

  But there was to be peace – for one more year.

  The difficult months of 1938 over, Greene, on what was to be the last peacetime Christmas for some years, wrote to his mother, thanking her for her presents to the children, asking her to convey his thanks to his sister and aunt for their presents, and adding: ‘I ought to write, but the proofs of the Mexican book [The Lawless Roads] were unloaded on Christmas Day and I’m hard at the grimmest job of all.’ Having children of his own, he realised how his father and mother must have felt with their children at Christmas: ‘the delicious sense of peace which must come over you when Christmas is safely over, without colds … or tears … We had a very nice Christmas dinner with Pat [Vivien’s brother] and sat drinking brandy to a late hour.’11

  Three months’ respite from the fear of impending war followed. In February, Greene was still involved with the proofs of The Lawless Roads, this time the American edition, and anxious to make changes where he felt there was a danger of libel, especially in the case of ‘the dentist at La Frontera’ called Tench in The Power and the Glory and Dr Winter in The Lawless Roads, but actually called (ominous name) Carter! In an unpublished notebook Greene wrote, ‘I always seem to come across dentists, in life and in my work. They always crop up. The first person I met in Mexico was one. He took me to a brothel and showed me his own girl’s teeth. Like most things, one doesn’t invent one’s dentist – they happen.’12

  At this point in time, Greene was not sanguine about his career. In a letter now missing, Ben Huebsch of Viking had asked Greene to forgive him. We don’t know for what peccadillo, but Greene’s answer gives a sense of the novelist’s feelings of failure. ‘Forgive you? It’s you who I hope forgive an as yet unprofitable author.’13

  By March 1939 Hitler had swallowed up the rest of Czechoslovakia and was now demanding the return of the colonies Germany had lost in the First World War. At last the message percolated through to Britain that Hitler’s desire for domination was insatiable. The Government responded by offering guarantees of support to Poland. In the next month, Greene returned the American proofs of The Lawless Roads, the book’s title being changed to Another Mexico, because his American publisher felt that the British title was too critical of their neighbour, Mexico.

  Greene was never a man who could live in uncertainty: ‘I begin to wish that the war would come … only the selfish thought that it would stop the autumn production of Brighton Rock gets in the way!’14 The play, based on the novel, was not to be produced until February 1943. The notoriety that the novel brought Greene expressed itself in a curious way. On 7 April 1939 he wrote to his brother Hugh: ‘A new shade for knickers and nightdresses has been named Brighton Rock by Peter Jones. Is this fame?’

  *

  As war again seemed inevitable, Greene (always seeking ideas and future topics) posted off to Huebsch the suggestion that he might write a blow-by-blow account of life in bombed London:

  It has occurred to me that in the event of this silly war coming off, you might be interested in a book called something like THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS which would be a personal account of conditions in a bombed London – what is happening in newspaper offices, suburban homes, accounts of raids, rumours, gossip, all the things that newspapers leave out because they don’t consider them important. It will be a very queer city indeed, down to Victorian size in population. An empty Piccadilly, what a dream! I think a fascinating and bizarre piece of reportage could be done.15

  Greene wasn’t trying to pin Huebsch down as to terms. He simply wanted to know if something of the kind would interest him and then he added, ‘these words like “interest” sound horribly cold-blooded, but one’s got to treat the whole thing with some indifference if it breaks’.16

  Huebsch replied at once: ‘That’s a fine idea of yours to write the history of the first hundred days while the history is actually in the making – or in the devastating – and we will be ready to go with you if, when the time comes (and I hope it won’t), the plan should still be feasible.’ But, practical to the last button, Huebsch added:

  Considering, however, that every big news gathering organisation would be trying to do the thing that you propose, such understanding as we may have should include arrangements for the immediate printing of your dispatches in a suitable daily or weekly; thus, if civilisation collapses before the hundred days are over we will have collected some money for you and ourselves (even though the money will be worthless after the collapse).17

  But until money did become worthless, Greene – as all writers without a fixed income must be – was ever watchful as to who owed him money. His literary agents, Pearn, Pollinger & Higham, were never allowed to be slack: ‘Dear David,’ he wrote to Higham on 16 May, ‘this is to remind you that 50 pounds was due to us from Penguin Books on 11 May.’ He added, ‘Any news from Frere or Albatross?’ To which Higham promptly replied: ‘we are after the Albatross and the Penguins – both are accursed birds to deal with I am afraid’. With Greene, a contract was a contract to be kept to under all circumstances. He had written to Higham on 1 February: ‘Albatross contracted to publish Brighton Rock [as a paperback] not later than Feb. 1 & 30 pounds & three copies are now due to us.’ He must have expressed his money worries to his wife (evacuated just before war was declared) for she wrote understandingly: ‘Darling I know about money & how one must follow it into the darkest & squalides
t cavern where it may lurk.’ Vivien’s letter ends with her usual animal imagery: ‘Precious, noblest Timmy, most gallant Mongoose of them all, nobler in stratagem than Mingo’s, more faithful & braver than Rikki-Tikki, I salute your quivering nosetip & sensitive ears scarred in many battles for your nestful.’18

  So there was Greene, in 14 North Side, Clapham Common, living his life and incidentally leaving us a description of that pre-war summer in the 1951 novel The End of the Affair.

  the daily newspaper, the daily meal, the traffic grinding towards Battersea, the gulls coming up from the Thames looking for bread, and the early summer of 1939 glinting on the park where children sailed their boats – one of those bright, condemned pre-war summers … drinking bad South African sherry because of the war in Spain … in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm … The eighteenth century church stood like a toy in an island of grass – the toy could be left outside in the dark, in the dry unbreakable weather.19

  In the middle of 1939 Greene wrote to Huebsch about his brother Hugh: ‘My younger brother who was Telegraph correspondent in Berlin has just been expelled after ten years in Germany. He thinks the optimism here is rather blind and we shall get trouble in the autumn.’20 Hugh Greene understood the Nazi menace. He had visited Dachau concentration camp prior to the incarceration of Jews, when it was mostly filled with communists opposed to National Socialism. To his mother Hugh wrote, ‘The guards were quite the most brutal and criminal looking collection of men I’ve ever seen, quite different from the prisoners … The eyes of the prisoners were horrible. I shan’t forget that …’21

  In July Huebsch decided to visit London, to discuss directly the book One Hundred Days. Greene had yet another idea for a book to discuss with Huebsch, Refugee Ship, already sold to Heinemann: ‘I want to get on one of these Greek tubs that fill up with refugees at Constanzia [in Romania] and try to smuggle their [Jewish] load into Palestine … if only I can get seven feet by three of deck space.’22 These appalling voyages were in old wooden Greek boats, each carrying 300 or 400 Jews. He saw the original work under three headings: ‘The port, the voyage, the landing – or the arrest.’ Greene was never to write it, for once war was declared, public interest in Jewish pain disappeared. An in-house memo from his agent Laurence Pollinger records that ‘PANAMA FLAG [Greene’s final title] didn’t go through owing to the war and I expect it will now be washed out or held over till after the war.’23

  A month before war was declared, Greene went on a six-hour flight on practice bombing manœuvres in a Wellington – his first such experience – from which came an article for the Spectator. He described the Wellington as ‘the noisiest bomber these pilots have handled’, passing Blackwater, Gravesend ‘with the oil tanks like white counters’. The target was in Berkshire and they flew at a maximum height of only about 200 feet at 200 mph, too low for gunfire; ‘nor could any fighter squadron in the upper air observe us as we bumped just above the hills and woods the same colour as ourselves’. Greene observed that while travelling thousands of feet up, objects below moved slowly across the window-pane, but at fifty feet above the ground ‘the world really does flash by – county giving place to county, one style of scenery to another, almost as quickly as you would turn the pages of an atlas’. In Hampshire they were so close to the turf that ‘it was like combing a head, up the forehead and over’.

  For Greene it was a good day. Even if it had been a real wartime flight, it would still have been a good day. The six-hour flight, sweeping them along to buttered toast and eggs with tea and the radio playing in the mess, led him to conclude that ‘action has a moral simplicity which thought lacks’.24 This seemed a light-hearted adventure, but Greene took it very seriously. Before departure, he left Vivien a sealed envelope at the bottom of which was written: ‘To be opened only in the event of death.’ She kept this letter unopened until 1947 when Greene and she separated. The letter is dated ‘Thursday aft.’ and affirms his love for her: ‘Darling, dearest heart for ever, this is just a hasty line to say how much I love you. Don’t let anything ever make you doubt that. And forgive anything I’ve ever done to hurt you if this flight ends badly.’

  Mostly, Greene kept his head down and worked. In a letter to his mother in the middle of June, whilst admitting that he had an ineradicable antipathy to the physical act of writing, he remarked that in the last twelve months he’d got through a quarter of a million words – ‘the travel book, a thriller for the autumn, two-thirds of a novel for the spring, short stories, a B.B.C. play [on Jowett] and weekly reviews’.

  And he had plans for travel. His brother Hugh had just been posted to Warsaw and some time earlier had interviewed Dr Goebbels. Greene, no doubt with his brother’s assistance, for they were good comrades all their lives, considered a working visit to Poland, but it was too much for him: ‘I was going to dash off to Danzig this weekend and see Hugh and Goebbels (with articles for the Spectator and Tablet), but the thought of 80 hours in a third-class carriage in the end put me off.’ And in London it was all go:

  we have a long parade of cocktail parties. Last Thursday Aunt Polly came to lunch: I met her and V. at the Aeolian Hall for the Hawthornden prize-giving … Afterwards we filled up time at an exhibition of early English water-colours and tea at Stewarts. Then V. went home, and I took Aunt P. to the Café Royal and we both drank gin till it was time to take her to the train. I enjoyed my two days walking with Hugh in spite of hay fever … Yesterday there was an A.R.P. demonstration on the Common, and a barrage balloon went up. Both [children] were excited, but Francis said, ‘Saw ballooloo afore long time.’ This must be a memory of last September.25

  With the war fast approaching, Greene had a presentiment that he would die before completing his greatest novel The Power and the Glory. He feared this would deprive his family of financial security and so wrote Vivien a second letter to be opened only in the event of his death. She kept this letter also unopened until her marriage was breaking up. She thought it would express his great love for her, a love often promised and still longed for. ‘It was not what I hoped for. All it did was to tell me how his novel was to be completed. I was so very disappointed.’26 From a literary point of view, it is fascinating to see that Greene had worked out in detail how he would end his novel long before he completed it, but perhaps he worked the conclusion of the novel out in detail so that some money could be paid for unfinished work. Indeed, he insisted upon this, suggesting Vivien could write a synopsis, which he then promptly supplied himself:

  Darling will you see that David [Higham] makes Heinemann pay up for the unfinished book – it’s novel length as it is & you know roughly how it was to end & could write a synopsis: The dying American exists, but of course he’s a trap. A long scene was to follow between the priest & the lieutenant in which their different ideas of what’s good for the people really come into the open. They are stranded all one night by rain. The priest teaches the lieutenant card tricks & they both grow to appreciate something of the other’s position. The priest is brought back to Villahermosa, he is given permission to confess – to Padre José (a good scene!) & dies believing in his own wickedness – the lieutenant gives the coup de grace. Then we have a final section of the onlookers – Captain Fellows & his sick wife in a hotel waiting for a boat (we gather without any direct statement that it’s the child after all who had died); the Spanish mother reading to her children the absurd account of Juan’s martyrdom – so different from the priest’s in its stilted piety, & last Mr Tench who heard the shots in the prison yard as he was fitting in a new tooth for the jefe ‘With the death of that little man it seemed to him for a moment that all the blood had drained out of the world.’ [This last statement does not appear in the novel.]

  Greene’s fear about their poverty led him to end his ‘final letter’ with a note on his financial position:

  I’m sorry – so sorry – to leave you in a hole, my heart. Insurance about 2,800 pounds, house value about 2,300 pou
nds. Overdraft about 1,500 pounds. Securities between us of about 2,000 pounds. Leaves 5,000 odd. I hope Brighton Rock [the play] will help there.

  Goodbye, my darling, for a while.

  Your lover.

  It was his continued fear that he’d leave his family short that determined Greene to write yet another ‘entertainment’fn3 (The Confidential Agent), working on it in the mornings, while he ‘ground’ on slowly with The Power and the Glory in the afternoons. To create a proper atmosphere for work, free from telephone calls and the cries of children, he took a studio in Mecklenburgh Square – ‘a lovely eighteenth century square in those days, but most of it, including my studio … blown to pieces two years later’.27

  Soon after renting it, he met Walter Allen, the critic and novelist, unexpectedly: ‘I was at a loss because I sensed that Greene was. What was he doing in that part of the world at that time of day? We walked across Guilford Street to a pub on the corner of Millman Street, where in the saloon bar you could hear Welsh spoken. He told me he had taken a room in Bloomsbury to write in. He planned to keep office hours. It was a secret; only his wife knew of it and the address and telephone number.’28 His wife knew and approved:

  I don’t think he wanted to see the children much – that was why he found a workshop elsewhere – they were quite good and very small. No, I think that he just needed to – and I can understand that. You want enough [freedom] to make you feel you are working and starting something fresh. You don’t want to hear doors opening and shutting, and you don’t want to step out of your room for a minute and feel you are back in a domestic setting. You want to be quite separate.29