The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  The first reference to his entertainment comes in a letter Vivien wrote to Laurence Pollinger just before Greene left Lagos on 9 March 1942. Vivien asked if it was true ‘that Paramount is going to make A Gun for Sale with Veronica Lake?’ and then passed on a message from Greene: ‘Tell Laurence I’ve started on an Entertainment & hope to let him have it by the autumn.’ But protective of her husband, Vivien added, ‘It is frightfully hot & the rainfall is 147 inches & mosquitoes & cockroaches (two & a half inches long) make life horrible in the evenings and it is a great effort to write letters even.’50

  By 22 May Greene was ‘two thirds through an entertainment which should be ready by August’.51 Incredibly, in June he had almost finished it, though it was without a final title: ‘Title as usual a problem: the only one I can think of The Worst Passion of All (referring to pity) seems a bit too serious.’52

  As he was coming to the end of the book, Greene feared that the continued successful U-boat action against Allied shipping would result in the loss of his manuscript: ‘I’m terrified of trusting a MS. to the ocean. Can one insure against war risk at Lloyd’s? One would have to insure for 700 pounds. Perhaps you’d find out for me. Otherwise I’d better hang on to it till I come home myself.’fn2, 53

  Greene’s letter took three weeks to arrive and Pollinger replied that it was his understanding that parcels posted either by steamer or airmail could not be insured against war risk and that Greene should post by airmail. Also, he assured Greene that it was likely that the 37.5 per cent paper ration would be cut at the end of the month and that in 1943 fewer and fewer books would be published: ‘Therefore, it’s in your best interests to get the entertainment into Charles’ [Evans] hands just as soon as possible, otherwise he will not have the paper for it.’54

  ‘You don’t quite get my difficulty about the entertainment,’ Greene responded. ‘I can’t get it typed here, and seems a crazy thing to send the only MS., unless I can insure. One can insure against war risk – every bookseller does it, and I did it with my baggage. Will you find out from Lloyd’s what they’d charge to insure a m.s. coming by air mail? I shall want to insure for 700 pounds if the book is going on contract.’55 And five days later, he was telling Pollinger that the entertainment, God willing, would be ready for dispatch in August if the insurance could be fixed: ‘About 65,000 words; only titles in my mind so far The Worst Passion of All … and The Man Who Forgot which is a bit banal.’56

  By 4 August Greene excitedly told Pollinger that he had a good title for the entertainment: The Ministry of Fear. ‘It will run probably to a shade under 70,000. I’ve finished 60,000 and have a clear run ahead.’ The tone of Greene’s letter is happy; he surely realised that he was writing the best of all his entertainments: ‘There’s a good cinematic idea in it.’ In a letter of 12 August, he returned to this, asking Pollinger to ‘drop a word into Paramount’s ear, now that they’ve had a bit of success with This Gun for Hire [the American title of A Gun for Sale] that The Ministry of Fear has got a good filmable and new central situation, and it is not trash like The Confidential Agent was.’57 The excitement of almost finishing The Ministry of Fear led him to think of starting and perhaps finishing another novel, incredible in the circumstances of war: ‘I hope to get a novel done or nearly done by the time I get leave or the sack next year.’ This was not to be.

  Greene completed The Ministry of Fear and sent it off, but in parts, so that if one part went missing at least two parts might be saved. Moreover, he did not send the manuscript but a typescript. Somehow this slow and inexpert typist had been able to transcribe a complete manuscript, even though he was at times excessively busy with intelligence work.

  By 20 September Greene was able to write to his literary agent: ‘Here is about the first third of the book. I send it in bits, partly for security and partly because Heinemann may want to start setting.’ He was going up-country for another week, yet was able to calculate that it would take another four weeks to complete the typing. His anxiety about his typescript is shown in his next letter: ‘A third of the Ministry went off to you, a fortnight ago. Cable me if it doesn’t come.’58 There was no need to worry. Pollinger was able to send a cable twenty-six days later: ‘FIRST THIRD FEAR RECEIVED.’59 On 27 October, the second instalment arrived, and the last on 12 November, by which time Greene sent an extra copy by surface mail:

  Will you have it bound up and let the film people see it … unless you think it better to wait and let them have page proofs? Will you acknowledge it by cable as surface copy to me ‘Police Freetown’? I hope to see you fairly early next year. I haven’t sent you a blurb, and if the quinine ridden brain doesn’t function in time, I would much rather not have a blurb at all. [Here is a further example of Greene’s independence; if he is unable to write the blurb, it is not to be written.]60

  By 10 December Pollinger could report to Vivien that two copies of Graham’s new book, The Ministry of Fear, had reached him: ‘One is being read by Charles Evans [head of Heinemann] and the other I am showing to the film magnates here.’ Only five days later, Pollinger sent Greene a cable: ‘EVANS DELIGHTED WITH MINISTRY FEAR.’

  As far as the film people were concerned, as early as 3 September Pollinger was reporting to Greene: ‘Paramount have been told about THE MINISTRY OF FEAR and seem to be calling every other day asking if the typescript has reached me.’ Two days after Evans’s delight over Greene’s new novel, Paramount made an offer: ‘I first talked to Frank Farley of Paramount … Film Rights: The sale of THE MINISTRY OF FEAR to Paramount at 3,250 pounds is through and I now await their agreement.’61

  On learning the good news (what an accomplishment: film rights to the novel accepted by Paramount before publication), Greene sent Pollinger a cable on 17 December: ‘ACCEPT. I SUGGEST PAYING FIFTEEN INSTEAD OF TEN COMMISSION DIVIDED YOU AND MARY.’ Pollinger cabled Mary Pritchett, who replied: ‘PLEASE TRY ARRANGE PARAMOUNT PAY MY COMMISSION HERE CONGRATULATIONS GRATITUDE GREETINGS’,62 and Pollinger added: ‘To say that I personally appreciate your thought and action in regard to this matter of commission is to put it mildly. Let me say simply and sincerely: “Thank you”.’63

  Greene was becoming the renowned author most of us have known all our lives. Pollinger ended his letter by saying, ‘We are as busy as a dozen hives of bees, and business is good. Never before have I worked so hard, but I am enjoying it!’64

  Greene must have felt that his professional life as a writer had come to some point of success in spite of the war. Two great religious novels had appeared, Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory (and this last had won him the Hawthornden); the tropics and his activities as SIS Freetown had not prevented the completion of The Ministry of Fear. This entertainment is by any standards a remarkable novel, the best novel about the blitz written during the Second World War. Moreover, it brought him financial success even before its publication. With Paramount’s offer of £3,250, he must have felt that he’d jumped ahead of the game, that he was on his way to making his family secure, possibly even that his purpose in life was achieved. On Christmas Eve, he wrote to Vivien that he’d had ‘an apocalyptic dream’:

  I was going into a house which I knew was on the point of falling down: I remember saying aloud, ‘People with experience of London cellars say they felt no fear if they knew their work was done. Now I have had many indications that my work is done.’ Then the house began to collapse. I knew that outside there was an earth-quake & it was no use going out but all the same I made for the door and first got out before the house collapsed. I didn’t feel in the least afraid. Outside there was wild stony chaos: mountains seemed to be collapsing & great rocks falling and one knew for certain this was the end of everything. One had just time to say ‘God forgive my sins’ and then the rocks and the wind came down on one and as it were blew one into vacancy, and on into wakefulness … The most interesting point of the dream was the conviction that one had done all one could do alive and that the indications were all set for death.65

 
; *

  It was not his own death but his father’s that should have exercised his mind. Charles Greene retired from the headmastership of Berkhamsted School in June 1927 because of diabetes. Over fifteen years of retirement, his condition had worsened. A letter from a school friend of Elisabeth Greene recalled meeting her mother and father at Crowborough in their retirement: ‘Your mother was a bit remote, very serene, and probably looked older than she was because of her white hair done in a bun. I remember she had a good sense of humour. Your Father always reminded me of a Teddy Bear with twinkly eyes, though I think we only saw him at meals and for the paper games, and I was probably incapable of carrying on a coherent conversation with him.’66

  When a young boy at Berkhamsted, Greene didn’t like his father, but he felt an increasing warmth towards him during his retirement. There was a sense of nobility, of simplicity and unworldliness about Charles Greene that was felt by almost everyone who knew him. Greene portrayed him in retirement in his abandoned novel Across the Border.

  But Mr. Hands wasn’t listening … his old tired grey face had peculiar nobility. For nearly seventy years he had been believing in human nature, against every evidence … He was a Liberal, he thought men could govern themselves if they were left alone to it, that wealth did not corrupt and that statesmen loved their country. All that had marked his face until it was a kind of image of what he believed the world to be.67

  The love that Greene’s parents bore each other lasted throughout their long lives. Greene’s play, The Potting Shed, first produced at the Globe Theatre on 5 February 1958, presents the image of his mother: ‘Mrs. Califer was his mother to the life, though the dialogue quoted didn’t actually occur in real life,’ asserted Vivien Greene. Greene suggested that the sources for Mr and Mrs Califer were the Webbs (Sidney and Beatrice), but Vivien felt he was only telling half the truth: ‘Mrs. Califer cared for her husband and put him before her own children, as did Marion Greene.’68 The fact that Greene wrote regularly to his mother throughout her life suggests that there was genuine love between mother and son, and that Vivien’s judgment might be questionable.

  Greene recalled his father’s last diabetic years: ‘always beside [my mother’s] place at table there stood a weighing machine to measure his diet, and it was she who daily gave him his injections of insulin’.69 Vivien, who lived with them during the early part of the war, recalled that Marion Greene petted her husband and looked after him even before his diabetes: ‘She was very unmaternal to her own children. [Elisabeth, her youngest child, denies this] Charles was the child really.’70 She read to him, but always censored her reading so that the world could remain both romantic and unsullied. In a late novel, The Human Factor, the relationship of Castle’s mother and father is based on Greene’s own parents: ‘People did confess sometimes to his mother, who was much loved in the village, and he had heard her filter these confessions to his father, with any grossness, malice or cruelty removed. “I think you ought to know what Mrs. Baines told me yesterday.”’71 Both Greene and his wife Vivien remembered examples of Marion, when she was reading a thriller aloud to Graham’s father, and especially when she was reading her son’s latest novel, providing Charles with selected bowdlerised passages so as not to disturb him. But a letter Vivien wrote to Greene eight months before the death of Charles shows that the last years were hard for Marion Greene: ‘poor Mumma unable even to go to Lewes Women’s Institute meeting as she cannot leave him for half a day. She sounded tired and as if the coughing and illness had got her down a bit.’72

  Charles Greene died on 7 November 1942, when Greene was still in Freetown:

  I think that my parents’ was a very loving marriage … their love withstood the pressure of six children and great anxieties … I was in Sierra Leone, running ineffectually a one-man office of the Secret Service, when my father died. The news came in two telegrams delivered in the wrong order – the first told me of his death – the second an hour later of his serious illness. Suddenly, between the secret reports to be coded and decoded, I unexpectedly felt misery and remorse, remembering how as a young man I had deliberately set out to shock his ideas which had been unflinchingly liberal in politics and gently conservative in morals.73

  Charles Greene had never disputed by so much as a word Greene’s decision to become a Catholic. Greene had a Mass said for him by Father Mackie, the Irish priest in Freetown. He thought that if his father could have known he would have regarded the gesture ‘with his accustomed liberality and kindly amusement’. In payment for the Mass, Father Mackie asked Greene to provide a sack of rice for the poor African parishioners. Rice was scarce and severely rationed, but Greene was able to buy a sack clandestinely through his friendship with the Commissioner of Police. At least, Greene felt, his method of payment would have pleased his father.74

  Because letters by sea during the war took a long time to arrive, Greene was only able to write back to his mother three weeks after his father’s death. Perhaps it was his own guilt – being away from home, volunteering for service abroad when he need not have done – that brought him home soon after:

  I have only heard today about Da’s death … I feel it was rather a selfish act taking on a job abroad at this time, and I ought to have been home … I can’t write about how sorry and sad I feel: he was a very good person in a way we don’t seem able to produce in our generation. I wish he could have seen the end of this wretched war and better times, but I’m glad all happened so quietly and suddenly … I’m glad too that I belong to a faith that believes we can still do something for him and he can still do something for us. It will be such a long time after that you’ll get this letter, and that will hurt … I can’t write more now, but I think I shall be seeing you before very long.75

  Greene then added a postscript: ‘This may seem Popish superstition to you, or it may please you, that prayers are being said every day for Da in a West African church & that rice is being distributed here in his name among people who live on rice & find it very hard to get.’

  When Greene came to write The Heart of the Matter, long after his experiences in Sierra Leone, he made use of the cruel accident of being informed of his father’s death first and of his illness an hour later in successive telegrams delivered in the wrong order. The telegrams in the novel are about the death of Scobie’s daughter: ‘“I had a child,” Scobie said, “who died. I was out here. My wife sent me two cables from Bexhill, one at five in the evening and one at six, but they mixed up the order. You see she meant to break the thing gently … The cable said, Catherine died this afternoon no pain God bless you. The second cable came at lunch-time. It said, Catherine seriously ill. Doctor has hope …”’76

  Marion Greene’s letter to her daughter Elisabeth about her husband’s death is stoic and moving:

  He had bad night, breathing bad. I read to him from 6–7 a.m. and then he thought he might get to sleep. I fell off but I don’t think he did. I rang up Dr. E. who said he would come as soon as he could but had an operation … Da had some breakfast. He was very thirsty and had tea later. About 11. he insisted on going to the lavatory. I begged him not to lock the door. He did not come out and I went in and found him on the floor. Mrs. T., Noreen and I got him onto the floor of my room and covered him up but could not lift him onto the bed … He never recovered consciousness but I thought it was a diabetic coma … but Dr. E. and Raymond think as he fell like that it was thrombosis of the brain. When Dr. E. came he was dead. That was about 1. He died without a struggle, was lying just as I left him to come downstairs, I was not in the room, but he looked just asleep. I am so glad he did not know he was leaving me and so thankful he was taken before I was. We had such a perfect life together. There can never have been a more unselfish, good man.77

  Charles Greene was cremated at Charing in Kent, a village they both thought beautiful:

  A lovely afternoon. The trees are lovely this year. They took him down to their little chapel on Thursday afternoon. I put a bunch of roses and white h
eather in his hands. He looked so young, except of course for white hair … How pleased Da would have been with the news [The second Battle of Alamein marked the turning of the tide for Britain in its war against Germany]. I always took notes for him from the Wireless till that last morning.78

  A passage in The Potting Shed is a little too sharp, but could well describe Marion Greene’s marriage to Charles: ‘For nearly fifty years I’ve looked after his laundry. I’ve seen to his household. I’ve paid attention to his – allergies. He wasn’t a leader. I can see that now. He was someone I protected. And now I’m unemployed.’79

  *

  Greene swore in Ways of Escape that for the first six months in Freetown he was a happy man, for he was in a land he loved: though the evidence of his letters suggests his happiness and his love were intermittent. Yet in retrospect, he felt able to quote Kipling: ‘“We’ve only one virginity to lose. And where we have lost it there our hearts will be.” … At thirty-one in Liberia I had lost my heart to West Africa.’80

  Greene’s liking for West Africa is best expressed in Hargreaves’s conversation in The Human Factor.

  It’s what the politicians call a realistic policy, and realism never got anyone very far in the kind of Africa I used to know. My Africa was a sentimental Africa. I really loved Africa … The Chinese don’t, nor do the Russians, nor the Americans … How easy it was in the old days when we dealt with chiefs and witch doctors and bush schools and devils and rain queens. My Africa was still a little like the Africa of Rider Haggard.81

  And the Africans liked the eccentric British. One provincial commissioner Greene knew, ‘Old Sayers’, came once a year to Freetown in a caravan with his black children and his mistress: ‘The only reason that they were not married was that the mistress was a Catholic, probably converted by Irish missionaries. She wouldn’t marry him because he was divorced. Everyone accepted this.’82