The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  On 4 March 1940 The Power and the Glory was published. This novel about a hunted, driven, desperate priest is probably Greene’s greatest. Eight days later he sent a copy to Vivien and instead of autographing it in the usual way, wrote the following on plain notepaper and stuck it into the edition:

  My darling heart, just a line in pencil to say it’s good to see you even for a few minutes. In a confused and confusing world I am certain of one thing: I can’t live without you & I can’t be happy for very long without seeing you. Whatever happens that’s true. I shall like being old with you!

  God bless you my darling one

  Your Tyg

  On the opposite page, near the dedication FOR GERVASE, Greene had written in ink, ‘but far more for you dear love – March 4 1940’. The Reverend Gervase Matthew, brother of Bishop David Matthew (both close friends of Greene), had read the book in proof and, on his advice, Greene cut out a Wordsworth quotation, leaving another by Dryden: ‘the sagacious power / Of hounds and death drew nearer every hour’.18

  Also in Vivien’s copy was the preface to the French edition of The Power and the Glory (La puissance et la gloire) with a short note from Greene: ‘This may interest you – Preface by Mauriac.’ Underlined by Greene, in the preface, was this passage – ‘C’est dire que ce livre s’adresse providentiellement à la génération que l’absurdité d’un monde fou prend a la gorge. Aux jeunes contemporains de Camus et de Sartre, proies désespérées d’une liberté dérisoire, Graham Greene révélera, peut-être, que cette absurdité n’est au vrai que celle d’un amour sans mesure.’19

  In spite of his affair with Dorothy, Greene continued to rely on his wife’s judgment. Although Vivien thought the title of the book fitted it admirably and was easy to remember, she had qualms about it. She had the uneasy feeling that it had been used before (actually by Phyllis Bentley a few months earlier). Vivien was also working on the galleys: ‘I did your proofs very snugly in the study during News & Mr Chamberlain.’20 By the 29th she could promise, ‘Proofs will be sent tomorrow – without fail.’

  His greatest novel, however, had to wait ten years for success. The print run of the first edition, according to Greene, was 3,500 copies, only a thousand copies more than his first novel eleven years before.21 He suggests the book’s modest failure was because it ‘crept out’ a month before Hitler invaded the Low Countries, but the newspaper headlines at this time were about Finland, which Russia had invaded in late November. There was great sympathy for that small, vulnerable country. Britain and France sent an expeditionary force of 100,000 men; in America Herbert Hoover raised $1,600,000, and the Spectator offered a small prize for a poem of not more than twenty-four lines, entitled ‘Finland’. The first prize went to Hilary Trench, Greene’s old alias. Though it was not one of his best efforts it does show an interesting and unexpected anti-Soviet slant:

  We were liberators: so the bands played,

  Ice on the mouthpiece and the fingers …

  They were our friends, so they gave us bullets:

  They were liberators, so they freed us,

  Here in the blizzard from the shared room,

  The awful repetitions of the how-many years plan,

  The edited texts of Lenin and the million sale of Marx.

  Here died fear, clutching a child’s toy from Petsamo …

  And the bodies stiff like logs

  Are freed at last from the loudspeaker,

  In the land where White is only snow,

  And Red is only blood.22

  Greene really had little chance, bringing out his greatest book in the middle of this vast war, of its becoming a bestseller. The day before publication the headlines were ‘FINNS SET FIRE TO VIBORG. RED FORCES IN OUTSKIRTS: CITY’S EARLY FALL EXPECTED.’

  And the news in April (a few weeks later) was the seizure of Oslo by the Germans, where they set up a National government under Vidkun Quisling, the occupation of Denmark and Sweden’s acceptance of a Nazi ultimatum. Unless books either allowed the general reader to escape from war (the popularity of Jane Austen in wartime was an unexpected phenomenon) or provided information about war or spies, the chances of their becoming bestsellers were remote. The Observer’s book advertisements show which titles, published at the same time as The Power and the Glory, Greene’s brilliant novel had to compete with: books with titles such as I Was Stalin’s Agent or Hitler Versus Germany (‘Sensational Facts’ brought to light for the first time) or The Gestapo in England (Hitler’s spy ring) were heavily advertised by publishers. There was a thirst for secret intrigues and the calamities of war; there was no interest in faraway Mexico or the tribulations of a betrayed whisky priest.

  While recognising that any publisher would have difficulties in selling The Power and the Glory in wartime, Greene knew that the novel had to be pushed now, and felt Heinemann were not doing enough: ‘The intense irritation that at intervals tempts one to leave Heinemann’s’, he wrote to his agent, ‘is overcoming one again. Apparently when Frere rang me up at the beginning of last week the book was selling better than any other Heinemann except the Maugham, but they never seize the moment to plug home. They still carry the same ad. as they did the first week, except that it’s reduced in size.’ And while Greene admitted that he hated to pester the publisher ‘because it seems self-important’, he nevertheless felt ‘this time they’ve got the chance which may not recur to get away with me’.23 Greene felt that his publishers only marginally recognised the book’s merits; by their advertising, they were giving a signal that The Power and the Glory was just another steady goodish Heinemann novel.

  Because of his sufferings in Mexico (the whisky priest’s sufferings often parallel Greene’s) he would probably never be entirely satisfied with the efforts his publisher made to sell The Power and the Glory. These sufferings were especially severe when he was travelling by mule across mountain ranges in Chiapas. It was a spell-binding landscape, but the journey took Greene to the end of his endurance: climbing to 7,000 feet in the immense, serrated, almost uninhabited wastes with only the crack and pad of the mule’s feet on stone and turf for company; the terrible heat, the brutal sun, his feelings of sunstroke; the merciless and unending bump of the mule’s back; the sense that he’d become a bundle of bones without a brain, unable to go on but having no choice. These experiences entered into the making of The Power and the Glory. He longed for the novel to have its just reward, but feared it would drop into obscurity.

  Five days later Pollinger replied: ‘I had an up and downer with Frere yesterday morning. The sales to date are about 5,000 – the sales for the last two weeks being 245 and 704. For the first three days of this week 371, so that the graph is running the right way.’24 This was no mean achievement, but if Heinemann had already sold 5,000 (the book had been on the bookstalls for five weeks), it had already sold above the print of 3,500 claimed by Greene. The print run was in fact 12,600.

  Greene’s complaints worried his publishers. They promised his agent an increase in advertising so that he’d again appear in the Observer, and they would also run a big one in the Sunday Times. ‘I think I must have stirred Frere up pretty considerably,’ asserted his agent, ‘for he came through on the phone about 5 o’clock yesterday saying that he and Charlie [Evans] were really putting their backs into selling the book.’

  The advertising shows that his publishers were now making strenuous efforts to sell the book. When they came to advertise it in the Sunday Times they quoted from Sir Hugh Walpole: ‘Graham Greene’s new novel proves that he is the finest English novelist of his generation. Simply magnificent,’ and followed up with two further quotations: ‘Beyond question his best novel. Nothing in his previous work has quite prepared us for the accomplishment in The Power and the Glory’ (The Times): ‘It filled my life for the last month more than any book since The Brothers Karamazov’ (Catholic Herald). But the war news was deteriorating daily and sales had to be made at once, not two months ahead, for by then the interest in the b
ook would have all but disappeared.

  In the end the book did not sell well during the war, though immediately after it Heinemann printed a further 18,650 copies for their pocket edition and another 23,450 copies for the uniform edition in 1949. Its best sales were in France, thanks to the introduction by François Mauriac.

  Its popularity in France led two Catholic French bishops to denounce it to Rome on two different occasions. No doubt these criticisms were kept alive in Rome because some fourteen years after the book’s publication, it was condemned by Giuseppe, Cardinal Pizzardo, of the Holy Office, on the grounds that it was ‘paradoxical’ and ‘dealt with extraordinary circumstances’.

  In 1953 Greene was summoned by Cardinal Griffin to Westminster Cathedral, where Griffin read him a letter from the Holy Office in which Pizzardo required changes to be made to the text. Greene politely refused on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in the hands of his publisher.25 Cardinal Griffin added that he would have preferred it if they had condemned The End of the Affair, and continued, ‘You and I receive no harm from erotic passages, but the young …’26 Greene responded by admitting that one of his earliest erotic experiences had been awakened by Dickens’s David Copperfield. This brought the uneasy interview to an abrupt end and Griffin’s parting shot was a copy of a pastoral letter which he had written, and which was being read in the churches of his diocese, ‘condemning’ not only The Power and the Glory but also, by implication, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, the trinity of novels upon which Greene’s reputation rests:

  It is sadly true that a number of Catholic writers appear to have fallen into this error [i.e. sin against the sixth commandment in thought and word]. Indeed, novels which purport to be the vehicle for Catholic doctrine frequently contain passages which by their unrestrained portrayal of immoral conduct prove a source of temptation to many of their readers … the presentation of the Catholic way of life within the framework of fiction may be an admirable object but it can never be justified as a means to that end the inclusion of indecent and harmful material.27

  Greene, though he spoke lightly of the event in both A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape, was in fact troubled by being called in by the highest ‘headmaster’ of them all and in his anguish confessed the episode to his friend Evelyn Waugh. Waugh supported Greene strongly and even offered, almost in a literal sense, to take up the cudgels on his behalf, this in spite of his deeply conservative nature and profound dedication to the Catholic Church. ‘Dear Graham,’ he wrote on 2 May 1954, ‘Since you showed me the Grand Inquisitor’s letter my indignation has waxed. It was as fatuous as unjust – a vile misreading of a noble book. Do you want any demonstration by the admirers of The Power and the Glory? I shall be delighted to take any part in it.’ While it was Waugh’s view that Greene wouldn’t want a demonstration, nevertheless if Greene felt that any protest was needed, Waugh urged, ‘please count on me’. His further advice was typically sardonic:

  It seems to me, as a layman, that it is the business of the Inquisitors to make every move. You have not asked for an imprimatur. It is their business to propose detailed alterations & to make themselves ridiculous in doing so. They have taken 14 years to write their first letter. You should take 14 years to answer it.

  Later, when Greene had an interview with Pope Paul VI, the Pope told Greene that among the novels of his he had read was The Power and the Glory. Greene responded that it had been condemned by the Holy Office:

  ‘Who condemned it?’

  ‘Cardinal Pizzardo.’

  He repeated the name with a wry smile and added, ‘Mr Greene, some parts of your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.’28

  *

  After Dunkirk, after the fall of France and the Low Countries, Britain braced itself for German invasion. Because of this threat, Greene moved his wife and children away from Crowborough, which was too near the south coast, to Oxford: ‘I thought there was a chance that Oxford would remain an open city and not be bombed, that there would be an invasion and I had to protect my family,’ said Greene. ‘We left July I, 1940, to Oxford, having been at Crowborough since August 1939,’ said Vivien to me. She did not have a happy time with her mother-in-law, as sentences in a letter from Marion Greene to Vivien indicate: ‘What will you do? We miss you all very much. I feel I was often cross and upset about things which don’t matter but it is old age. We miss you all.’29 In later life Vivien remembered her wartime experiences: ‘A long war, twelve years of rationing, moving house,’ but mostly ‘being an evacuee in another person’s house’.30

  Vivien agreed to move to Oxford because she believed her husband intended otherwise to send her and the children to Jamaica. She wrote to Stella Weaver, an old friend whose husband was President of Trinity. The Weavers wanted ‘some decent people in the lodgings’. So Vivien and her children went to Trinity to stay. Vivien recalled: ‘I helped run the house. There were no domestics and it is a huge house, and we were always having guests. We grew tomatoes and kept ducks.’fn2, 31 In a letter to her husband dated 27 September 1941, Vivien writes: ‘Last week we ate poor Jeremiah the duck and Ballard (the parlourmaid) recognised him on the dish although she hadn’t known he had been liquidated. It was rather awful but one gets callous by the third duck.’

  In February the Spectator’s literary editor, Derek Verschoyle, was called up and Greene was offered the post: ‘I’m so proud & happy with you as Lit. Ed.’ wrote Vivien, ‘& it is exactly your sort of job & I like the feeling of security.’ What follows indicates something of her understandably cautious middle-class nature: ‘I simply long for you to stay put in something: the changing about fills me with dread & depression.’ Her desires and hopes were not Greene’s, but in her excitement perhaps, she revealed them too directly:

  I think it would be so harmful to have the reputation of instability – (Yes, but he never stays in anything). It is what everyone begins by thinking of anyone of great talents & if they have any basis for thinking it, it is fatal. I do wish you could be an Editor, not of a daily paper but something like the ‘Sp’. It has some prestige, too.32

  She had other impossible hopes: ‘You might seriously think of putting in for a “real” Ministry that would last after the war & be a Civil Servant. I think it is necessary to make up our minds not to live precariously – i.e., not on possible film deals & so on.’34

  Vivien sometimes cautioned Greene, speaking to him as if he were an impetuous boy (which in some senses he always remained): ‘I do wonder what the show-down with the Ed. was. I hope it was a serious issue, & after all, policy & choosing contributions to a large extent, is his business.’ Greene was not the kind of man to allow a general editor to determine which contributors he as literary editor should use. But Vivien kept on – ‘it doesn’t seem the time to make changes: you may be called up soon enough’.35

  * * *

  fn1 Greene recalled to me the illustrated series of pamphlets, published by Collins. H. V. Morton provided an imaginary picture of what England would be like under the Gestapo: ‘I rewrote the whole thing because I was afraid that H. V. Morton’s style was a bit too popular to be good. It apparently so impressed Churchill that H. V. Morton was invited to go with Churchill on the meeting in the Atlantic with Roosevelt.’

  fn2 However, Francis Greene remembers there being a number of domestics; and ‘the only livestock my mother had anything to do with were pet white mice’.33

  4

  The Blitz

  Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

  – benito mussolini

  THE BLITZ ON London began on 7 September 1940. An air-raid warden recalled that first raid: ‘the miniature silver planes circling round and round the target area in such perfect formation that they looked like children’s toy models of flying boats … at a fair’.1 The miniature silver planes like children’s toy models were in fact 1,300 bombers escorted by 600 fighters, which arrived over London at five at night and did no
t leave until four in the morning. The raid was successful – the bombers did terrible damage. The London Docks and Woolwich Arsenal were set alight, but then bombs were released on the East End, Poplar, Stepney and West Ham. A. P. Herbert, on patrol by the river Thames, recalled that night: ‘after Lambeth it was nearly the light of day … The Pool, below London Bridge, was a lake of light.’ At Limehouse corner, he was witness to ‘a stupendous spectacle. Half a mile or more of the Surrey shore was burning … smoke and sparks of all the fires swept in a high wall across the river.’ Going through that wall of smoke ‘was like a lake in Hell. Burning barges were drifting everywhere … We could hear the hiss and roar of the conflagration, a formidable noise.’2

  The fires they set ablaze were larger than any ever experienced before. The chief fire officer, seeing the sea of fire ascending up to the heavens, sent a message demanding ‘all the bloody pumps you’ve got; the whole bloody world’s on fire’. On the docks they were breathing the fiery smoke of cargoes – pepper, burning rubber and burning wheat. Barrels of rum were exploding and drums of paint. Over all was the sickly smell of burning sugar. Two-thirds of all telephones were put out of order and messengers had to carry messages.3 The traitor William Joyce, known facetiously by the British as Lord Haw-Haw, broadcast from Germany on the occasion of the beginning of the blitz, telling Londoners that ‘Jews today are shaking in their shoes, but tonight there will be no more Jews.’ His prognostication was inaccurate, though on that first night the raiders killed 430 civilians and seriously injured a further 1,600: thousands were made homeless.

  The massive raid was treated humorously by newspapers, aware that the whole truth could have a disruptive effect on morale. The headlines in the Observer ran ‘Big Air Battle Over London: 65 Raiders Shot Down’ but then treated it as a lucky extra to the afternoon’s sport: