Greene liked and admired Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre, and they had already discussed matters over lunch. At that time Greene had spoken rather cryptically: ‘When you first spoke to me about it I turned the proposition down with little or no hesitation because at that moment I thought it possible that I should be living a great deal of my time abroad. That situation no longer exists and it is highly unlikely that the circumstances would recur.’
There is some evidence here of Greene negotiating terms but also deliberately talking himself out of a job:
I am first and last a writer … I cannot help fearing that without the necessity of writing I might abandon it altogether. This is a psychological problem for me alone and I think I would risk this particular danger. But if I am to continue writing and not to have an acute attack of claustrophobia I do think that the minimum time which I would have to spend out of the country for work would be two months in a year and I am not sure whether that would really meet the case. I think I would require a guaranteed two months and the possibility if the occasion arose of taking a further month. This from your point of view can hardly be very satisfactory. It is not a financial question as some of this period could always be regarded as unpaid holiday, but if I were you I should feel uncertain whether sufficient drive could be put into the strategy of the firm by a managing director who might be absent for such a period in any year.69
He asked to be allowed to brood on the matter until after Easter. He also encouraged his friend to ‘feel at complete liberty to approach anybody else in the meantime’. But Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre was interested only in Greene; he made a further offer: ‘He offered me very good terms for those days,’ Greene told me, ‘of 5,000 pounds a year plus a car plus a chauffeur plus three months leave a year for my own private work and it was with some hesitation I turned it all down.’70
He was right to do so. On a postcard to Greene, John Betjeman put the situation in his own inimitable fashion: ‘Old top … Dear old E&S publish better books than almost anyone. You are a great novelist. I hope you haven’t stopped writing for publishing. Our brave new world will probably stop us all. I am as good as dead. John B.’
* * *
fn1 Greene has his hero Mr Brown in The Comedians say: ‘I served in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, supervising the style of our propaganda to Vichy territory, and even had a lady-novelist as my secretary.’10
fn2 Peake, the author of the Gothic fantasy trilogy Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959), was sick and in need. He was something of a genius and Greene’s discovery.
fn3 In fact, later letters to his mother show that he continued to fire-guard. Understandably so, since under the law men between the ages of sixteen and sixty could be compelled to fire-watch for at least forty-eight hours per month.
fn4 When Greene invited Kim Philby to become a member of the Authors’ Club in Whitehall Court Greene gave as grounds, Philby later wrote: ‘(a) I was not an author and (b) it was the seediest club in London, so he said.’26
fn5 The uniform edition of Ford Madox Ford had to wait until 1962–3, when he brought out Ford in three volumes while a director of Bodley Head.
15
The Unquiet Peace
In this weak piping time of peace.
– SHAKESPEARE
ON 20 MARCH 1945 Greene recorded what must have been the last V2 to hit London:
On Sunday, I was lying late in bed and there was a huge crash, followed by a terrific rumble and the sound of glass going … I could see a pillar of smoke go up above the roofs … it was quite a long way away and a very lucky rocket. Just inside Hyde Park at Marble Arch where the tub thumpers would have been later in the day. I went and looked. The blast had missed the Arch and swept through the poor old Regal which was on the point of reopening after being flybombed and knocked out the windows in the Cumberland.1
It was a damp squib; the British Home Guard was standing down; the war was coming to a close: ‘It really looks at last’, Greene wrote to his mother, ‘as though the war may be over soon.’ But he concluded: ‘One feels one won’t have much energy for peace.’2
In the spring of 1945, the world mourned the death of President Roosevelt, but celebrated the violent demise of the dictators of the Axis forces. Italy’s Benito Mussolini, captured by Italian partisans, had his body (and that of his mistress, Clara Petacci) strung upside down from meat hooks in a Milan petrol station on 28 April. On the eve of the Russian occupation of Berlin, with troops only several hundred yards away, Hitler went through a marriage ceremony with his mistress Eva Braun, before both committed suicide in the Chancellery bunker. William Joyce made his last broadcast on the day his hero Hitler poisoned himself. He roared drunkenly into the microphone a final ‘Heil Hitler and farewell.’ Joyce, who at the height of his fame had sixteen million listeners tuned into the 31-metre band, was later convicted of treason and hanged.
The Third Reich, which was to have endured for a thousand years, had suddenly ended. Interviewed in later years, Greene, with Hitler in mind, said, ‘Even if one persists in rejecting the idea of eternal damnation, how can one deny the existence of total evil?’3
On 7 May the news of the unconditional surrender of Germany was picked up from German radio. The next day, Winston Churchill broadcast to the nation at 3 p.m., formally announcing the end of the European War and pronouncing VE (Victory in Europe) Day. Churchill then went from 10 Downing Street to the House of Commons, the mass of people literally pushing his car up Whitehall.
The blackout was over; prominent buildings were illuminated: Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral, Nelson’s Column and Buckingham Palace. The exhilaration was immense. St Paul’s was full of worshippers: ‘We give thanks to God for all that this victory means for us and for the world,’ said the Archbishop of Canterbury, advising the country not to ‘forget the millions in Europe, dispossessed, scattered, hungry and homeless’.4 High and low, rich and poor praised the day. The searchlights, which in wartime had sought enemy planes, now illuminated the night sky and helped bring pleasure to the massed crowds assembled below. King George let his young daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, mingle with the excited Britishers, concerned, as he noted in his diary, that his ‘poor darlings’ had ‘never had any fun yet’.5
Greene did not go to Oxford to celebrate VE Day with his wife. Vivien had moved from Trinity College, the home of her friends the Weavers, to 15 Beaumont Street. Greene sent his wife a curiously anaemic telegram on the day of victory: ‘LOVE AND HAPPY PEACE TO YOU – GREEN’, the final ‘e’ being missed off his name.
Vivien’s reply gives no evidence of unhappiness: ‘Your wire quite adorable and pie-worthy.’ She and Francis, then aged nine, walked through Oxford from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. to see the illuminations, floodlighting, rockets, and the fairy-lights on the private houses. A fire engine rushed up and down Beaumont Street pursued by a cheering crowd. But it was the enormous bonfires, ‘huge leaping pyres’, that drew ‘the crowds of intent faces round them’.
The most beautiful one was just outside Queens, the firelight picking out the columns and cupola and statue, the steps crowd[ed] with young men and a mass of them in the street – deep blue night sky above, and showers of gold sparks shooting up forty feet into the air. Magdalen floodlit looked as if it had been cut out of white paper, quite unreal – undergraduate piping the Road to the Isles and ‘the tune of the 51st Highland Division played on entering Cambrai’ … and a crowd clapping and cheering – a few doing a Highland fling … In Trinity Garden quad the men stood silently round a huge bonfire until again a Scottish undergraduate in a kilt played a rather sad air. The crowd very gentle, not very noisy – and having been told for six years not to be optimistic, naturally the habit clung.6
Although without her husband, she was determined to celebrate in a small way: ‘Last night I had iced coffee and cake and 9 people came in. Drawing room looked lovely and I had one window quite up [open]
and cushions on the balcony window sill … I didn’t go out except just down St. Giles again and to the Memorial bonfire …’7 There is a small reference to Graham in the last lines of her letter: ‘I so missed you to go about with. Oxford is a good place for such things as the architecture looked so lovely: no street lights, just windows, and coloured lights and firelight.’
After the victory celebrations, Greene explained to his mother why he’d not gone home to Oxford to celebrate the peace with his wife and family: ‘Having watched the blitz through I thought I’d see the peace in London but there was precious little to see but some floodlighting & still less to eat or drink. Everything very much more decorous than the Jubilee or Berkhamsted in 1918.’8
Greene took Dorothy down to St James’s Park on the evening of VE Day to watch the celebrations. In The End of the Affair this experience is transferred to Sarah Miles and her husband Henry: ‘It was very quiet beside the floodlit water between the Horse Guards and the palace. Nobody shouted or sang or got drunk. People sat on the grass in twos, holding hands. I suppose they were happy because this was peace and there were no more bombs.’ Sarah’s comments to Henry express Greene’s own view: ‘I don’t like the peace.’9
The real reason for not visiting Vivien was not given to his mother. Dorothy would have been made very unhappy by his departure on VE Day. He was living with her, but no longer deeply in love, his loyalty increasing as love diminished, and Dorothy, that courageous comrade-in-arms, had seventy-six reasons to ensure Greene’s presence in London – the seventy-six nights of the blitz endured together.
To repay Vivien for not having returned to her for VE Day, Greene took her on holiday to the Osborne estate on the Isle of Wight:
I had got leave to see O. which is closed to visitors & the old surgeon-admiral in charge just let us wander at our own sweet will by ourselves through the State Rooms. Wednesday we went over to Alwin Bay – Thursday we went to Godshill – a very bogus self-conscious village where however we had a strawberry tea & found an absurdly cheap olde antique shoppe where we got a pair of Regency candlesticks for 8/6d, a very nice 1850ish case of fruit & tea knives & forks – a dozen of each, very elegant in a very nice case for 3 guineas & a pair of Regency vases for a guinea.10
Such trips were to serve Vivien’s passion for collecting, not Greene’s, and his patience with such domestic holidays sometimes wore thin.
Vivien knew that she had to make a special effort before she moved into Beaumont Street in 1944, if she was to save her marriage: ‘My aunt had left her flat in Warwick Square and I realised that it gave him the fright of his life when I wrote and said that she – this was just near the end of the war when the bombs had finished – offered it to me at the same rent because she was moving away and that I could have it. I thought it would be lovely to be in one’s own home – there was a certain strain living with Stella Weaver. Graham provided a good many reasons why it would be a mistake and that it wouldn’t do.’11
Before the end of the war, Greene suggested to Vivien that another child might be in order:
I’d always talked about a third one to be called Mark, and here at the end of the war he [Graham] suddenly said, ‘Have Mark,’ and I felt a sort of outrage. In a physical sense the marriage ended just before the war. He said, ‘We don’t want any children in the war.’ There was no pill then. I always think how different things would have been with the pill … When he suggested having Mark, I thought to myself, ‘You’ve had all these women and you live with them and you say you love them and then come back after all these years to me, and expect to pick up everything just as it was,’ and I said to him, ‘No, no, nothing like that,’ and he said, ‘Oh very well,’ quite cheerfully.12
The war meant a great deal to Greene: he’d believed for a long time it would solve his problems. When he was twenty-one, and before his marriage to Vivien, he wrote: ‘I can’t help wishing sometimes, darling, that something would happen to solve all problems once & for all. Something like war with Turkey & Russia & Germany, which would destroy all thought of the future, & leave only a certain present.’13 He was not a pacifist: at the end of 1940 with the blitz raging in London, he wrote: ‘If war were only as the pacifists describe it – violent, unjust, horrible, useless – it would have fallen out of favour long ago.’14 When the war ended, its termination left a worm of depression: ‘I have very little nerve for peace,’ he wrote a few days before the Germans surrendered,15 and after the VE Day celebrations, he added: ‘I think everyone feels very flat with the peace.’16
There were other reasons to feel flat about postwar Britain. Returning soldiers were looking for a world fit for heroes. But conditions in England were not good. Shiploads of returning soldiers, sailors and airmen felt that they were arriving home to a defeated country: ‘A grey limbo of ruins, rubble, exhausted faces.’17 Demobilised servicemen wandered from one Government office to another getting ration cards and clothing coupons, dealing with temporary, often officious, seemingly always superior Civil Servants. There were long queues for everything, and in September 1945 it was reported, ‘Many British parents, not in financial or local reach of hotels, restaurants, clubs and canteens have found it extremely hard to feed their children properly.’18 People who could afford to eat out did well enough: those staying at home frequently had a meagre time of it.
The first few years of peace were dreary. After a diet of bombs and blackout the country now had to endure austerity, ‘utility’ goods, dried eggs and no lemons. Vivien recalled the twelve years of rationing: ‘Twelve years you did without things, even queuing for toothbrushes for the children and shoes. You couldn’t complain when the fighting was going on, but after the war it was worse, and bread rationing didn’t happen till after the war.’19 But it wasn’t the discomforts of postwar Britain that troubled Greene; it was the immense boredom peace would bring.
*
In an attempt to keep boredom at bay, Greene sought to fill his time with work. In addition to his duties at Eyre & Spottiswoode, he began reviewing for the Evening Standard in 1945. But his great days as a reviewer, for the Spectator (1933–41), were virtually over. Reviewing for a popular newspaper like the Evening Standard was limiting (too few words, too popular a style) for Greene. The day before his first review appeared on 22 June 1945, he wrote to his mother that he was starting a weekly book article ‘for three months in the Evening Standard on Fridays tomorrow! I asked for 35 gns. a week really hoping they’d say no – but alas they said yes!’20
GRAHAM GREENE ON BOOKS was the newspaper’s leader. It described Greene as the author of a dozen books, ‘every one of which has become famous’, and nearly every one of which had been translated into every European language. He was also characterised as the adapter of films made from his novels and stories. The newspaper extolled the variety of his work – his range (from Brighton Rock to the brilliant The Power and the Glory), and spoke of his worldwide reputation for style and ‘his knowledge of human values’.21
His reviews tended to denigrate various popular writers: Louis Bromfield is a producer of cellophane fiction: ‘once a man with promise, but a lifetime of too easy success … [his books] guaranteed untouched by human hand and judging from the description on the cover the publisher has not found it necessary to open the book. Another well-wrapped Bromfield has simply shot down the conveyor belt to the distributing department.’22 ‘Mr. [Nevil] Shute is too confident that his gift of readability will allow him to get away with anything. There is a sense of laziness about his talent. Too often he chooses situations … that only a fool could muff.’23
Even admired writers and friends were reprimanded for failing to do their best: ‘When we come down to Maugham, the case is different. There is such immense talent, couldn’t he, we feel, have tried for something a little more difficult, couldn’t he sometimes take a few risks …?’24 He felt impelled to refer to Dickens (an author he admired after all) as ‘That gay Deceiver’, and spoke of Dickens slandering his father in the character
of Micawber, of doing very little for his own children (less than his own father had done for him), of making too much of his own experience of a blacking factory: ‘How any Etonian of that period, embarked on a painful drudgery of eight years’ schooling would have envied Charles Huffam his brief spell in commercial life.’ Although Dickens was world famous by the age of twenty-three, he was, ‘next to Gladstone, the most unlovable figure of his age’. ‘The legend of the novelist who had learned in suffering was Dickens’ most successful deception.’25
But Greene could take a courageous stand when a work of great distinction appeared, as in the case of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: ‘In wartime there has to be a measure of appeasement … [the writer] must not give way to despondency or dismay, he must not offend a valuable ally, he must not even make fun …’
Greene castigated his old employer, the Ministry of Information, ‘that huge cenotaph of appeasement’, because when Orwell first completed Animal Farm, a Ministry official to whom he sent the manuscript took a poor view of the satire: ‘Couldn’t you make them some other animal,’ the official is reported as saying in reference to the dictator and his colleagues, ‘and not pigs?’26
The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 27