The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)
Page 19
George Neal, serving in the British army in Freetown at the time that Greene was an intelligence officer there, remembers meeting him twice in the Cotton Wood bar (though Greene did not offer him his name and Neal only recognised him when Greene’s fame made recognition possible). On one occasion, Greene (not willing to ask his colleagues about the whereabouts of various brothels) asked Neal, who gave him the address of the brothel, which Greene visited. Neal offered me evidence of the location: ‘The description [in The Heart of the Matter] of the approach and location of the brothel is word perfect.’18
What Neal remembers is that Greene was not attracted to black women, but was clearly in need, and we know from various comments that he was unhappy with the white women in Freetown: ‘The consistent sexiness of the middle-aged begins to get one down. The excitement over women who even in their prime were nothing much.’19 He was also depressed by the social life in Freetown and, as he stressed in a letter to his brother, still in love with Dorothy Glover: ‘I have become terribly one-idea’d.’ So for sexual release he was left with the black girls, but he feared even the nicest of them. What worried him about them was disease. Sitting in a park on his first arrival he noticed the young girls coming out of school: ‘the lovely small native girls’, but added, ‘who have got to grow up to syphilis (98%)’.
Nicholas Elliott, a senior intelligence agent on his way to Lagos whose ship called first at Freetown in June 1942, recalled Greene lamenting that there were no French letters in Freetown. Elliott did a collection for him among the passengers and handed him eleven condoms. Greene now had the means of avoiding disease but, like Wilson, it was a reluctant adventure.
The inside of the brothel does not measure up to the lovely small native girl who passed Wilson in the rain. He is faced first with a passage which years before had been whitewashed but where rats had torn holes in the plaster and the walls ‘were tattooed like a sailor’s arm, with initials, dates … even a pair of hearts interlocked’.20 He notes that on either side of the passage are little cells nine feet by four with curtains instead of doorways and beds made out of old packing cases spread with a native cloth.
Thinking the place deserted, Wilson intends turning at the end of the passage and leaving, but then discovers that the last cell is occupied: ‘in the light of an oil lamp burning on the floor he saw a girl in a dirty shift spread out on the packing-cases like a fish on a counter … She lay there on duty, waiting for a customer. She grinned at Wilson, not bothering to sit up and said, “Want jig jig, darling. Ten bob.”’21
The unsavoury nature of the girl in a dirty shift, her bare pink soles dangling over the packing-case bed, make him deny he wanted a ‘jig jig’ and he turns to leave, but finds his escape blocked by a big Mammy. He offers to come back after a drink but the Mammy, blocking the way out, sends the prostitute off for drink. The Mammy puts up the price to a pound and continues to block his way – she rules ‘in the dark regions’. It is here that Wilson realises that ‘a man’s colour had no value: he couldn’t bluster as a white man could elsewhere: by entering this narrow plaster passage, he had shed every racial, social and individual trait …’22 Weakly Wilson asks, ‘Let me by,’ but she doesn’t move, only occasionally repeating ‘Pretty girl jig jig by-and-by.’ He holds out a pound and she pockets it but goes on blocking his way. He tries to push by but she thrusts him backward ‘with a casual pink palm, saying “By-an-by. Jig jig”’:
Down the passage the girl came carrying a vinegar bottle filled with palm wine, and with a sigh of reluctance Wilson surrendered. The heat between the walls of rain, the musty smell of his companion, the dim and wayward light of the kerosene lamp reminded him of a vault newly opened for another body to be let down upon its floor. A grievance stirred in him, a hatred of those who had brought him here.23
Greene certainly would have vehemently disagreed with Cyril Connolly when Connolly wrote: ‘No one was ever made wretched in a brothel.’ Curiously, Greene continued to visit brothels in every foreign country he went to. His attraction (and hatred and fear) to such places is similar to Father Damien’s reluctant passion to live among the lepers – which Greene himself did in the late 1950s.
*
Another central incident in the novel, Scobie’s trip up-country to investigate the suicide of Pemberton, a young district officer, is the result of hearsay and gossip remembered by Greene and cleverly worked into the story. For the purposes of plot, the Catholic priest needed to be morally bound by the rules: ‘“Suicide,” Father Clay said. “It’s too terrible. It puts a man outside mercy.”’24 In Greene’s journal we can see Father Clay’s origin in Father B, whom Greene met in the interior: ‘Poor little red-head north country boy neglected by his fellows. “I walk up and down here.”’ Father B is transferred without change to The Heart of the Matter. ‘Father Clay was up and waiting for him in the dismal little European house which had been built … in laterite bricks to look like a Victorian presbytery. A hurricane-lamp shone on the priest’s short red hair and his young freckled Liverpool face. He couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time, and then he would be up, pacing his tiny room …’25
This source is discovered by comparing journal and novel. More difficult to uncover is the source of Pemberton and his suicide, since Greene neither spoke nor wrote about it. Greene deliberately avoided making Pemberton a Catholic so that when Scobie the Catholic commits suicide, he does so in the full knowledge of his own personal guilt.26 Pemberton lives an isolated life in a small village which has only one other white man, the red-headed priest. He hangs himself in his house by means of a picture cord which is still twisted over a brass picture hanger when Scobie inspects his room.27
In the novel the town is called Bamba. No such town exists, but Pejuhun could be described as Greene describes Bamba, as controlling ‘one of the main routes across the border’. During Greene’s stay in Sierra Leone two European suicides took place in Pejuhun. The district officer in charge during one of Greene’s visits was C. J. Mabey, whom Greene visited in Pejuhun in his capacity as a military intelligence officer.28
One of the suicides – that of a retired medical doctor – doesn’t fit the novel, but the second does. He was not a district officer like Pemberton, but worked for the PZ company. In the novel, Pemberton is in debt and has signed bushels of IOUs. Scobie can see how badly his office has been kept – ‘filing cabinet was unlocked: the trays on the desk were filled by papers dusty with inattention’.29
My informant, who lived in Youmi, close to Pejuhun, described a situation quite similar to Pemberton’s: the young man gambled, got deeply into debt, misappropriated company funds and decided he could not face the consequences. However, the model for Pemberton did not hang himself in his bedroom. He was found hanging from a tree in the bush, and his dog led the searchers to the scene. The unfortunate young man is buried near Youmi. When I stayed in Pejuhun, in the company of Father Peter Queally, the local paramount chief showed us the tree from which the PZ man hanged himself.
A Canadian living in Freetown told me in 1980 that he had heard from a number of authentic sources that Greene visited the home of the original suicide soon after the event. If this is the case, Greene’s life mirrored Scobie’s more closely than we could ever have suspected.
*
On returning to Freetown in June from a visit to the Protectorate, Greene heard the news that he’d been awarded a literary prize. Laurence Pollinger wrote proudly to Vivien on 9 June: ‘The Hawthornden prizes for 1940 and 1941 have just been awarded and Graham’s The Power and the Glory gets it for 1940. Isn’t this exciting? Shall you be cabling him?’ Vivien responded to Pollinger: ‘How absolutely thrilling! I spent 16/- in cabling & am taking the children to a circus (which has fortunately arrived here).’30 In the same cable Vivien also told Greene about the wonderful news that Paramount was to make a film of his book A Gun for Sale. Pollinger himself wrote to Greene about ‘this good news’. Everyone was excited – but not Greene. His response to Pollinger was lukewa
rm:
I was glad to hear that I’d won the Hawthornden; a hundred pounds is always useful. Otherwise the sole value, I feel, is advertisement among the middlebrows. One can’t take an honour shared with Charles Morgan and Christopher Hassall very seriously!fn1 I don’t know whether in these days of paper shortage it’s very possible to seize the chance of advertisement, but I feel Heinemann ought to do a little about it – after all it’s building up for the next book and helps to fill the rather long gap.
He ended his letter with the following sentence: ‘Write to me one day. One likes to have news of our dingy civilisation in this even dingier hole.’31
To his mother, he took a different tack at first: ‘It’s funny how things always seem to go well when I’m away; I’ve just heard about winning the Hawthornden prize and the film of A Gun for Sale. Vivien tells me it’s an extremely good film.’32 But the prize gave this curious man a sense of shame:
One can’t have the presentation and the speeches and so on of the Hawthornden, though the prizewinner always looks a little silly. And it’s odd that one feels pleased … There’s no real distinction in the prize: a few good books have won it, and a great many very bad ones – like Charles Morgan’s. I suppose at the bottom of every human mind is the rather degraded love of success – any kind of success. One feels ashamed of one’s own pleasure.33
In war-torn England, Vivien, her own home destroyed by bombing and her husband in foreign parts, was still very much in love: ‘I pressed my red and blue taffeta evening dress yesterday and put it on to celebrate your letter coming.’34 She had two children to attend to. Francis, then six, in the bath one night, asked a question his mother couldn’t answer – they had been to see Peter Pan: ‘What was Captain Hook’s name before he lost his arm?’ and another day asked: ‘When Our Lord died, did his halo go out?’35
Vivien’s longing for a proper married life was overwhelming:
Darling, darling love, we do love you. Won’t it be nice when we don’t have to look forward to weekends again but all live together … Perhaps that alarms you. You will have been on your own for so long that family life is a bit claustrophobic? I believe I can see the whites of your eyes and your ears laid back, but think of the nice home made bread and the cubs thirsting for information …36
She came back to the same subject twice the following month: ‘We live from day to day contentedly, but I do feel so impermanent and do so long after all these wasted years to have my own things round me.’37 ‘I do pine for my companion and next to that I pine for a little cat-basket of my own, nicely lined with compartments for kittens and an annexe for Toms when they turn up from foreign parts.’38 In a letter to Greene on 14 April, Vivien told him of an argument she’d had with her friend Stella Weaver, who had criticised Greene, but in whose house she was living and whose powerful personality sometimes overwhelmed her. She had not allowed the criticism to stand: ‘I prefer to be with my husband – he walks and I walk with him. We like doing things together.’ And she added, ‘After a slight underlining of this theme, I left it … it will be so nice when you are home and will plan and decide everything.’ Vivien liked a dominating husband, something Greene did not like to be. In the following month of May, life was stirring in nature and in her: ‘There is no one ever possible to be one millionth as precious and beloved,’ she wrote.39 ‘Dear precious love for ever, you are so dear to me … keep well for starting our new and much longed for cat-and-dog basket again.’40
And Greene kept Vivien’s love alive, giving her hope their love would continue, for though few letters have survived, what he wrote when sending his wife a Christmas present was: ‘For My Dearest Love, Christmas 1941, the 14th [of marriage] & the only sad one.’ He also deliberately misquoted lines from Edmund Blunden, ‘“Oneness & Togetherness/A Conquest over Space no less”, a misquotation you’ll recognise.’ Vivien did recognise it and recalled the occasion Greene had first used the phrase. It was in 1937. After ten years of marriage, Greene had bought Vivien a Roman missal dated 1815 and inscribed it with Blunden’s lines correctly quoted: ‘A Conquest over time no less.’
Vivien brings the war years back in her letters, in particular, the severity of food rationing. Taking a holiday during July at Wadebridge in north Cornwall, she told her husband how prostrate she would be on arriving, dizzy with the new ration books and their host of special regulations:
I have both sets of rations books, that is
1. The main ration book for each person 3
Pink ration book (for things on ‘points’) 3
Yellow ration book for jam, soap etc. 3
2. The new main ration book for each incorporating the Pink and Yellow 3
The ‘Personal Ration Cards’ for wool, sweets and others 3
3. Clothing cards for three 3
Identity cards for three 3
—
21 separate documents
plus three railway tickets. Poor poor minnow.41
She betrayed her pleasure in small things, such as buying a gramophone: ‘I am quite excited because I am going to fetch the gramophone from the store by taxi which is the only way to get it, and take it to be put in order and I am going to join the Record Society when I get back and make a small collection of records for myself too. Won’t that be nice?’42 On i August, Vivien’s birthday – she was thirty-seven – she keenly felt her isolation:
I will stop now precious love, with so much love, & telling you again how I miss you & pine for you & get tired of being alone & having no one to go about with. It is years & years now since we went to a film or an exhibition or a party together as a matter of course because we belonged to each other … You mustn’t mind the birthday wail of a lone cat … Bless you thousands of times my own love – say you pine a bit & miss me especially ‘of an evening’.43
She day-dreamed of things that held no spell for Greene: ‘O to be in Charleston in an ice cream parlour with a magnolia tree in one’s garden and sunshine coming in through striped sun blinds, the children pale brown and in pretty cottons, a white pekinese in a basket, one’s hair just set by a good hairdresser, a nice dinner party to look forward to.’44
In the last surviving letter Vivien sent to Freetown, she had gone to London and was waiting for a train to take her back to Oxford and her children:
Station cavernous but better lighted than I expected. Sat in waiting room till midnight. Very quiet. Woman cleaner swept the floor and went away. Presently I went out. There was a square formation of sailors sitting on the platform surrounded by gunny sacks, talking quietly. A policeman in a steel helmet told me they were waiting for the 2.30. In front of the gates of platform eleven were about a thousand soldiers, behind them a small queue of civilians: quite soon it moved and by 12.30 we were in the train, the troops on the platform having disappeared. Under the only light, at the barrier, a Military Policeman stood.45
Though no letters to or from Dorothy while Greene was in Sierra Leone have survived, there are two references to letters made in his journal when he was in Lagos: ‘Very depressed & lonely. Depressed letter from D. made it worse.’ ‘Another letter from D. Perhaps the next after she knows I’ve arrived will be happier.’ We can be certain, however, that her passion for Greene moved her to write. Six months later, in the same letter in which Hugh Greene refers to the possibility of Greene meeting Doris Temple, he also speaks of Dorothy: ‘I see Dorothy for a drink every now and again. We’ve been working out an illustrated book, “Sights of London”, to be published in Paris after the war. Among the characters: a milkman off Vine Street: a woman watching a flock of sheep in York Way behind King’s Cross: an old man in Flask Walk, etc. Further details unfortunately impossible at this stage.’46 Greene spoke of Dorothy to Hugh as if she were no more than a drinking companion. She was, in fact, much more to both of them. Here is Greene’s reply to Hugh’s news of Dorothy: ‘Doll wrote me about the bawdy book she’s planning with you as evasively as you. I long to hear more. I wish you’d told me how she was lo
oking, whether she seemed well, could down her pint of Irish as readily, etc. Give her my love.’ You notice that in writing about Dorothy, he calls her ‘Doll’ (both brothers did), after Doll Tearsheet in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, and, like Doll, Dorothy was fond of her ale. Dorothy and Hugh were very close, as he always insisted during my interviews with him. Greene would probably not have objected to his favourite brother’s congress with Dorothy, it was after all during the heady days of war.
But Greene was deeply in love with Dorothy, though, as usual, unwilling to share his intimate feelings even with the brother he was closest to. We can get some idea of his marital problems from a private letter he wrote to his sister in Cairo. Elisabeth Greene was in love with Rodney Dennys, but at this time their engagement was broken off – though they were later to marry happily and successfully. Greene wrote from Freetown: ‘Things can be hell I know. The peculiar form it’s taken with me the last four years has been in loving two people as equally as makes no difference, the awful struggle to have your cake and eat it, the inability to throw over one for the sake of the other … This of course is confidential.’47
In under three months his tour of duty in West Africa would finish, and Greene would be returning to England with nothing solved: his passion for two women, one his wife, the other his mistress, remained intense. He had always thought that war would bring death as a solution to his problems of divided love in one form or another – ‘in the blitz, in a submarined ship, in Africa with a dose of blackwater’,48 but against his wishes, he remained alive.
*
In spite of numerous activities of a secret kind, Greene, calm on the surface and seemingly unhurried, was writing what was to be his most brilliant thriller, set in the London blitz. No doubt working furiously, he writes calmly enough to his mother in April: ‘I try and do a minute portion of my own work every day – on a slack day more than a minute portion, so that I shall have something finished when I leave here.’49