The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  His call up delayed, Greene promptly offered his agent a suggestion for a future volume of essays. He called this The Heroic Age and it was to include chapters on Rider Haggard, Stanley Weyman, G. A. Henty, and crime and detective novels (touching on Raffles and Guy Boothby), but alas no wartime publisher wanted it. He then tried out the notion of an anthology: ‘It would attempt to give the general view of life as seen by a Catholic mind … The reader might find on one page a passage of Crashaw and on another such a murderer’s statement as I printed on p. 14 of Lawless Roads,fn5 a passage from St. Augustine’s City of God might jostle a coroner’s report on a suicide.’36 Greene intended a general picture of the world ‘full of horror, grotesqueness, courage, meanness, spirituality, the shadow of the City of God would as it were fall across the whole’. This also was turned down.

  Then Tom Burns, a director of Longman’s, suggested that Greene write the biography of Father Joseph Damien, the Belgian leper missionary who had himself died from the disease. Greene had long been interested in this martyr to Christian compassion and dedication, but discovered, under conditions of war, there wasn’t enough material available.

  In spite of writing and trying his hand at different forms, he was ever in need of finding himself a more adventurous life, and he responded with excitement, in a letter to Vivien, to Bishop David Matthew’s ‘wild idea’ that he could get Greene ‘sent to Central or South America to look for German submarine bases!’ When this fell through, he expressed the wish to be sent either to the army training centre (Aldershot) or the front (‘the Siegfried Line’).37

  Greene kept busy: he filled the Spectator with his incidental pieces (twenty-one book reviews and thirty-eight film reviews during 1939 alone); he won first prize for a competition in the Spectator, using the pseudonym Hilary Trench (last used when he was writing in the Oxford Outlook as an undergraduate in 1925). The prize was for the best letter to the Divisional Petroleum Controller claiming a supplementary petrol ration in the style of a famous writer. Greene chose Henry James:

  Dear Sir,

  The papers ‘inform’ – if one can use in connexion with our dear delightful old backward English Press a word which conveys the vulgar and voluble idea of news – that in less than a week’s time (our days now so hurry on under the pressure of universal calamity) a law is to be enforced which will prevent even so modest, so innocent, I was going to say so ‘green’ a creature as myself, from purchasing more than a modicum of what my compatriots call in their gross vivid style, so like their own streets all concrete foundation, glittering surface and brutal echo, gas.

  My wants are humble: far be it from me in a time of ferocious inquisition and rigid self-examination to lay claim to further benefit on grounds that are not the most urgent, the most impelling: I simply beg you as one bred in the bureaucratic corridors, acquainted as my poor friends are not with the mœurs, conditions and relations responsible for the inconceivably portentous questions handed to me yesterday, to tell me tout doucement whether I, aged, infirm, out of the vast crowded political canvas as I am, may yet retain – practically and not as a mere fond memento of the kindest, the most amiable of ladies – a small gay gorgeous object that goes, so I am told, in the huge hideous undiscriminating world by the abrupt name of a ‘lighter’.

  Believe me, very truly yours,

  Henry James

  Greene wrote to his wife afterwards: ‘Note in the Spectator that your clever Tom has won a guineas-worth of books.’

  * * *

  fn1 In the same letter he provided his wife with an account of his activities: ‘I’m very snug: work in the morning, then go out and see people; and have my three halves, and wander round.’

  fn2 Rules, a popular restaurant in Maiden Lane, was a favourite with Hugh and Graham Greene. Until recently a huge caricature of them both, done by the cartoonist Low, hung above what was known as the ‘Greene table’.

  fn3 Greene’s sister Elisabeth was in my company during the interview and did not disagree with Muggeridge’s judgment.

  fn4 Greene hated being purred over or stroked or having his ‘fur burnished’ or being called ‘Sourpuss the Jamesian’, though Greene’s love of James was central and he often mimicked James’s style in letters.

  fn5 ‘I went upstairs. My husband was lying on his back. I pulled back the bedclothes, and holding the knife in both hands I made sure to get him in the right place … It seemed as if someone hit my hands down with a mallet. The knife went in as if his body was rotten. He sat up in the bed and hollered out, “Hi, hi, hi.”’

  3

  The Ministry and the Glory

  The law is silent during war.

  – CICERO

  THE FIRST SIX months of the war passed with only limited military action. In December there was the battle of the River Plate, in which the Admiral Graf Spee, a German pocket battleship engaged by British ships, sustained heavy damage and took refuge in Montevideo. Ordered to leave the safe harbour, the Graf Spee was scuttled, and the captain committed suicide. There were casualties at sea when the destroyer Exmouth was torpedoed, but the home front was comparatively safe and quiet, though in January 1940 rationing of butter, sugar and bacon was introduced. Even the IRA (who were promised by the Nazis that, if they helped Germany, the government of Ireland would be handed over to them), exploding two bombs in London in February, killed no one.1 And because there were no air-raids, family and business life, which had left London with the outbreak of war, began to return. ‘Life here’, Greene admitted, ‘is really rather restful; so pleasant to be free from all the crises of 38–9.’ What was the ‘restful’ Greene like in 1940?

  In the early months of the year there was pressure on Chamberlain to retire so that a more vigorous Prime Minister could be appointed. Walter Allen recalled the ‘Chamberlain Must Go campaign’ when Labour Party members, trade unionists and academics marched in procession through the streets of London and other cities bawling out their slogans. And he also remembered Greene suggesting two practical (and comic) ways of getting rid of Chamberlain:

  In one, you had visiting cards printed bearing the names of members of the Cabinet and then you got hold of a selection of dirty books from Paris which you parcelled and sent to Mrs Neville Chamberlain, Lady Simon, Lady Inskip and the wives of other Cabinet ministers, each parcel containing the visiting card of the ostensible sender, as it might be by Leslie Hore-Belisha or Sir Samuel Hoare. A cross-traffic of such parcels, Graham asserted, would cause the government to cave in in a matter of days.2

  Greene’s second idea was more droll. It was a daring scheme involving a Chamberlain impersonator from the Unity Theatre, half a dozen out-of-work actors made up as Chamberlain and a devilishly tricky timetable. Greene suggested that they find out the date of the next Tory meeting Chamberlain was to attend in Birmingham Town Hall. An hour before the meeting, a wire as from Chamberlain would be sent to the organisers:

  ‘Delayed stop Shall arrive Birmingham thirty minutes late stop Do not hold back start of meeting.’ By the time the first ersatz Chamberlain was on the train, the others would follow at half-hourly intervals. Thirty minutes or so after sending the first telegram, a second is despatched: ‘Urgent stop Have reason to believe Chamberlain due to arrive Town Hall now not genuine stop Arrest.’ Chamberlain would arrive with three or four other Chamberlains angrily denouncing one another as imposters, and in the confusion would be promptly arrested and clapped in handcuffs.3

  Barbara Wall, then a young married writer in London, with two babies and two novels to her credit, recalls that she was ‘infatuated’ with Graham Greene, ‘as a writer, critic, a person, everything’. She met him at a time of his increasing fame. A friend arranged for them to meet in a Bloomsbury pub at noon:

  I arrived first, sat watching the door, my heart going pit-a-pat. At a certain point, in came a tall lean man in a belted mack and a brown trilby with the brim turned down all round. He was in profile to me so I only saw the side of his face between turned-up collar and t
urned-down brim, but it had a tenseness and a bright-eyed look that made me know at once that it was he.

  What struck her then ‘was his own surprised and wondering look that anybody should want to pay him homage. He was like an astonished child, he being the startled pleased person rather than oneself.’

  They went to a restaurant together and she discovered how bad his French was and they talked about Claudel and his famous phrase ‘sin also serves’:

  Graham didn’t know this phrase and was very pleased when I told him of it – meaning as it does, that God can re-cycle sin in a mysterious way to make it work for good – the very essence of The Power and the Glory. I recall my amazement at his surprised and almost shy look at things, so totally at variance with the stereotype of the master’s attitude vis-a-vis the disciple.4

  *

  Two months before he was due to be called up into the army, Greene warned Huebsch in confidence that he’d been offered the job of looking after the authors’ section of the Ministry of Information. Accepting the post, he resigned from the emergency reserve and his chances of becoming an infantry officer abruptly ended. Greene was to stay with the Ministry of Information for only six months, but he must have felt some guilt because only eight months earlier he had criticised London intellectuals in general and one poet in particular: ‘The faint susurrus of the intellectuals dashing for ministry posts. [Stephen] Spender feathered his young nest in the Ministry of Information.’5

  The Ministry of Information was a quaint, amorphous organisation which was disliked by press and public alike. It was set up in Bloomsbury in the University College buildings in Gower Street. The place, according to Muggeridge, was ‘teeming with people with briefcases, dispatch riders roaring up to the entrance on motorcycles and commissionaires in blue’.6 Muggeridge watched the Ministry grow: ‘departments mushrooming, and old ones expanding’. He remembered the Ministry’s ‘thronging corridors, fraudulent output, and voices prophesying peace’.7

  What Greene recalled appears in a piece ironically entitled ‘Men at Work’. It was in a ‘heartless building with complicated lifts and long passages like those of a liner and lavatories where the water never ran hot and the nailbrushes were chained like Bibles’.8 The huge staff of the Ministry accumulated like a kind of fungoid life, ‘old divisions sprouted daily, new sections broke away and became divisions and spawned, in turn’. Soon the 500 rooms of the great block became inadequate, as corners of passages were turned into rooms and corridors disappeared overnight.9 Ultimately, the Ministry employed a thousand members of staff. Greene’s own room was little, dark and built of plywood in a passage.

  It was Greene’s view that the work done at the Ministry was all a game played in a corner under the gigantic shadow of war: ‘Propaganda was a means of passing the time: work was not done for its usefulness but for its own sake – simply as an occupation.’10 Neither Muggeridge nor Greene felt their work had very much use. Muggeridge remembered that he had written feature articles to raise enthusiasm for the Allied cause, though the only tangible evidence of this was a single cutting in a Ceylon newspaper under the title ‘Eternal Vigilance’.

  Also there was a general air of inefficiency at the Ministry well remembered by Greene. He recalled minutes about a pamphlet to be written on the French war effort still circulating indecisively right up to the time Germany broke the line and occupied Paris. Greene admitted to me that he did very little during his months there. But Muggeridge’s view of Greene’s performance was different: ‘He took a highly professional view of what was expected of us, coolly exploring the possibility of throwing stigmata and other miraculous occurrences in the battle of the mind in Latin America to sway it in our favour.’11

  Certain letters have survived which show him at work. He wrote to his agent Nancy Pearn that the popular Howard Spring should ‘do a pamphlet on German Press and Radio Methods for a series with the general theme of “Life under the Nazis”’. To persuade him, Greene listed others who had made their contribution, politicians and writers: Herbert Morrison, E. M. Delafield, Vernon Bartlett and H. V. Morton.fn1 He asked Spring for 7,000 words and offered a fee of only twenty-five guineas. The pamphlets were to be produced with illustrations in gravure and were intended to reach a popular market; the price was to be threepence.12 Patriotism touched Mr Spring and he offered to write his pamphlet without a fee. Greene replied with exactly the right tone for a Civil Servant, ‘The Minister, I feel sure, will much appreciate your generosity.’13

  Greene sought others to do propaganda work. He wanted Storm Jameson to write a book about Woman at War and wrote to Nancy Pearn about Dorothy Sayers:

  We are very anxious to secure a pamphlet from her pen … I should like her to take the humorous rather than the minatory line, and that is why I suggest that the pamphlet should take the form of a little detective work by Lord Peter Wimsey’s wife-mother. The object I think should be to make people laugh at the absurdity of rumours rather than warn them of their dangers.14

  While asking others to contribute to the war effort, Greene also wrote a propaganda piece. In one sense it was a straightforward morale booster entitled ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’, a story which tells how a poacher brought about the successive deaths of a small German contingent, an advance guard for a Nazi invasion. It’s a minor story but it reveals Greene’s commendable moral courage in wartime: the showing of sympathy for the enemy. After the poacher has shot the German lieutenant, he finds in the officer’s pocket a photograph of a naked baby on a hearth rug, and his stomach turns over. The poacher can never forget that he killed the baby’s father.

  It was published in Collier’s, an outlet for material produced by the Ministry of Information. The poacher, an unlikely hero, had one wall of his cottage repaired with petrol tins and slept on a bed of rags with his windows obscured by sacking. He was based on Charles Sykes, a one-time educated man who after a breakdown became a tramp and used to parade in rags through the village of Campden when Greene lived there in the early 1930s. His cottage contained a broken chair, straw where he used to sleep, and a sink.15

  On 28 May 1940 Evelyn Waugh, arriving in London and hearing the news of the Belgian surrender, went to the Ministry of Information. Greene’s desire to escape from the Ministry to more active duty is clear in a scheme he propounded to Waugh for official writers to the forces. Greene himself hoped to become attached to the Marines.16 He wanted to be engaged in a real war, a war which was becoming increasingly grim. If he could have established writers at the Front, he could have remained a writer but spent his time physically in the front line – an ideal solution for him. It was not to be.

  Barbara Wall also visited the Ministry in the company of Michael Richey (an outstanding navigator).

  Wednesday, 5 June 1940: Mike on leave, came round to see us. Mike and I went to the Ministry of Information to visit Graham Greene and Tom Burns. We hadn’t got passes but Mike said we were parachutists so we were let in. Had a nice chat with G. G. and a horrified one with Tom. Bernard [Wall] and I dined with the Graham Greenes at the Fifty [small restaurant in Charing Cross Road] and went to the Lamb and Flag [pub off Garrick St] and played darts and shove penny. Talked of little but the war.17

  France had just fallen and British troops were being evacuated from Dunkirk in barges and small vessels, what J. B. Priestley called during his famous broadcast on the night of 5 June ‘these fussy little steamers’. He spoke of the loss of the Grade Fields of the Isle of Wight ferry service: ‘This steamer, like all her brave and battered sisters, is immortal … holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.’ Those steamers through the last days of May rescued troops in their thousands, culminating in the evacuation of 68,000 on the 31st. On 4 June the rearguard left Dunkirk. That night Churchill spoke to the Commons: ‘Wars are not won by evacuation. Dunkirk is a colossal disaster,’ but then came his splendid peroration: ‘We shall not flag or fail … we shall fight on the beaches … we shall fight in the fields and in the streets
, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’ Indeed, England stood alone and for Churchill this was Britain’s finest hour. Barbara Wall’s modest comment – ‘talked of little but the war’ – must have been true for the whole of Britain that night.

  Muggeridge and Greene were not the only critics of the Ministry of Information. When Duff Cooper was appointed Minister of Information, the Spectator in an unsigned article admitted that he had a ‘bewildering task in reorganising a top-heavy institution whose functions at the start had been determined less by the work that was crying out to be done than by finding occupations for its motley crew’. The author of this article in the Spectator on 9 August 1940 knew the Ministry from the inside, knew of its sluggishness, its failure to act promptly and knew also of its overpopulated staff. The writer granted that it had important work to do, ‘to release it from the incubus of the subtle lies which the Nazis have planted and fostered and from the fears it has conjured up in millions of minds. And now that France has been overrun by the Germans France has been deluged with lies by Nazi agents … millions of French people … are longing to hear the truth.’

  Greene had recently left the Ministry of Information and it was he who wrote the unsigned Spectator article. His leaving was rather abrupt. ‘It was not a question of choice,’ he wrote to his mother in October, ‘my post at the M. of I. was abolished by Pick.’ ‘There was a man called Frank Pick,’ Greene told me in 1983, ‘who belonged to London Transport, was appointed Director General and he purged, quite rightly, the Ministry of a lot of unnecessary people, and I was one of those sacked. I was very relieved to be out of it because the job seemed such rubbish.’