The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Vivien recalled her true feelings about the Linton house episode:

  They [Catherine and Graham] were going to live in Linton … Before, when I was looking for a house, Graham rang me up at Beaumont Street, and said, ‘I’ve bought a house at Linton near Cambridge.’ And I was very upset – I hadn’t been asked – nothing. And it was far away – I knew nobody there, and I had lived so much of my life in Oxford, and it was very important to know the grocer you were registered with. [This was at a time when there were serious food shortages.] And I was horrified. It was a rather pretty Queen Anne on the outside, but the back was awful. It was very medieval and had never been touched – great draughty doorways and up and down steps. I couldn’t think how I was going to manage alone with the two children and I didn’t know a soul. I said ‘I don’t see how I can manage it at all.’ And quite suddenly he realised he was going to be deeply involved with Mrs Walston and having me at Linton near them was the last thing he wanted. So he immediately sold the house and we never went anywhere near it.48

  Vivien was an intellectual and an omnivorous reader, but she could be nervous when she wasn’t sure of herself. While sometimes condescending to those beneath her, she was rather uncertain of herself with those above her socially and Catherine Walston always set her teeth on edge. Her husband was well aware of her nature and how others reacted to her. In The Heart of the Matter, Scobie (modelled on Greene) is disturbed by young Fraser calling Scobie’s wife Louise (partly modelled on Vivien) ‘Literary Louise’. Aware of her ‘kindly Lady Bountiful manner’, Scobie goes on to speak compassionately about Louise in a way that Greene thought applied to Vivien: ‘He knew every one of her faults. How often he had winced at her patronage of strangers. He knew each phrase, each intonation that alienated others. Sometimes he longed to warn her – don’t wear that dress, don’t say that again, as a mother might teach a daughter, but he had to remain silent … What right have you, he longed to exclaim, to criticize her? This is my doing. This is what I’ve made of her.’49

  Yet the affair did not really become serious until Greene and Catherine went to Achill together in April 1947 to ‘her’ island (or rather the cottage on Achill which belonged to her and not to her husband). Achill was to be their escape from the world into their own particular Paradise.

  In Greene’s first novel, The Man Within, the hero’s love for Elizabeth reflects uncannily young Greene’s love for Vivien. The book is full of a youngster’s devotion, even worship, and Elizabeth (Vivien in life) is seen as a saintly person. What Greene admired in Vivien before his marriage was her serenity, sanity and purity. She alone was able to give him a sense of peace. In The Man Within, the hero, Andrews, finds a private paradisal cottage, isolated on the Sussex Downs where Elizabeth lives. But there is a serpent wriggling in the love nest.

  Andrews loves his Elizabeth yet also finds it necessary to escape from her strong sense of sanctity. Referring to his own weakness of character, Andrews admits that he would be creeping out of the house to visit prostitutes before he’d been married a month. Here is Greene’s nature.

  Greene’s love for Catherine was real, but it was also an escape from his manic London phase. In a sense it was a replica of the fictional love described in The Man Within, though Greene, no longer young and inexperienced, was now on the threshold of middle age. The originator of the seedy world called Greeneland had at times a desperate need to disappear from such a world, and what fitted his need psychologically was escape to a cottage like the one of The Man Within. The cottage at Achill had a corrugated roof, no running water and only a cold tap outside. It was not as Vivien imagined it to be (Catherine, with extraordinary chutzpah, wrote to Vivien about it): ‘I can’t quite visualise you on the earth floor in Ireland. It sounds as if it might be cold in February.’ But then, responding to what would have pleased her (though not her husband), Vivien added: ‘I think there must be the softest white lambskin rugs on it. With love from both of us.’50

  *

  ‘All arrangements made for April,’ Greene wrote to Catherine. And love was to happen at Achill, an intense love described in his poem ‘I Do Not Believe’, which was written for Catherine but not published until 1983, five years after her death:

  I can believe only in love that strikes suddenly

  out of a clear sky;

  I do not believe in the slow germination of friendship

  or one that asks ‘why?’

  Because our love came savagely, suddenly,

  like an act of war,

  I cannot conceive a love that rises gently

  and subsides without a scar.51

  Greene’s love would certainly not ‘subside without a scar’, for what was he to do with a wife whom he’d once described as ‘the most important thing in life & the one thing it would be utter terror to lose’ – and a mistress in Gordon Square who lived her life for him? Dorothy had shown herself, during the blitz, to be a heroine. She had a more masculine courage than Vivien, and was the closest Greene ever came to having a lover, a drinking partner and a friend, in one person.

  At first he carried on as if no problem existed. The idea of giving up either wife or mistress was unthinkable. He could not, to use Vivien’s phrase, simply push them both out of the train. However, trouble was brewing, and he knew he’d have to lie.

  Initially he involved himself in what he always knew was a vain struggle to maintain the lies. Of course, they were neither frequent nor necessary so far as Vivien was concerned. He visited his wife and children at Oxford only at weekends. His mistress was a different case, though he strenuously tried to avoid immediate discovery.

  Dorothy (called ‘my girl’ or simply ‘MG’) was often the topic of Greene’s correspondence with Catherine: ‘She [Dorothy] is taking the line that this new Catholicism of mine won’t last but that she’ll play it [out] as long as I will.’52 Soon Dorothy became suspicious: ‘a bit of a row blew up before I left – she said I had changed so much in Ireland’, but discovery of his new affair was, at first, containable: ‘she still believes that it’s simply that I’ve come under the influence of a pious convert!’53 Catherine was pious and a convert, but Dorothy had underestimated her terribly.

  Having slept with Catherine, Greene continued to desire her obsessively. Whatever he now did with Dorothy recalled Catherine: ‘I missed you so much on Sunday. Mass wasn’t the same at all. We went to 12 o’clock [Mass] at St. Patrick’s Soho and had a drink afterwards at the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane.’54 Greene felt restless. He tried to ring Catherine unsuccessfully from Charing Cross and went to bed depressed, but woke up ‘blissfully’ happy because he’d recalled their time on Achill and her saying to him, ‘I like your sexy smell.’ Then the next day Greene had a letter from her (‘how beautiful your handwriting is’) and got her on the phone: ‘Result I feel cheerful and I’ve written 1,000 words!’55

  Catherine’s character and wealth did not make her an easy conquest for the famous novelist. He was never certain of her love – after all, she had had many lovers – and he often tried to persuade her that she did love him. ‘And you love me – you do, you know, and I’ll see you on Thursday.’56

  Time after time Greene returned to those halcyon days on Achill: ‘Oh how I want the peace of Achill and you, darling. I hate everything here.’57 When at the cottage, the Atlantic would blow in through the top of the door, and there was a feeling of freshness and dampness on the skin when they went out in the night in their pyjamas. Perfectly ordinary things took on a symbolic importance when he described their days there – the list appears in numerous letters: ‘I miss bread-making, candles, motor licence, graveyards more than I can say.’58

  Later, when Catherine was returning to Achill alone, Greene wrote a note to remind her of three things – ‘that I’m still terribly in love with you, that I miss you (your voice saying “Good morning, Graham” at tea time) and that I want you.’ He remembered the sound of the rusty gate as it swung open; orange juice at three in the morning after
sex; Catherine dressed in her pyjama top nursing the fire and filling the turf bucket; Catherine’s whistling and the clink of washing up as he tried to work in the next room, and her bread-making.59 It was the physical things and the memories of them that brought Greene a sense of peace, ‘the most beautiful word in the language’.60

  When Catherine suggested that they take John Hayward, their crippled friend, to Achill on their next visit, Greene worried: ‘I felt your plan was doubtfully wise. I still think they won’t understand the three of us, but I’m quite prepared to do what you want in this case. It seems a pity if one has to give up going to Achill together. It’s got under our skin. Only yesterday I was longing to push the rusty gate and see it swing.’ He went on to describe his depression:

  I feel very dry and dark nightish. I hope we get to Achill but it’s as you wish … how I long for a spot of peace again, Cafryn [in letters Greene often shortened her name]. Sometimes I feel homesick for [Achill] … Don’t let’s give it up.61

  *

  If Greene sometimes felt ‘dry and dark nightish’ in the early days of his love for Catherine, and if she was an escape from intolerable conditions in his personal life – what were those conditions? There is a passage in The Heart of the Matter (there are many such passages) which reflects Greene’s character:

  He laid his pen down again and loneliness sat across the table opposite him. No man surely was less alone with his wife upstairs and his mistress little more than five hundred yards away up the hill, and yet it was loneliness that seated itself like a companion who doesn’t need to speak. It seemed to him that he had never been so alone before.62

  Greene had his own wife and mistress in mind here (the last third of The Heart of the Matter was written after he’d met and fallen in love with Catherine): and was using his life as an intelligence officer in Freetown as the basis for Scobie’s life. He transferred his problems with his wife and mistress to an African setting. In spite of the fact that Vivien led a solitary life in Oxford (with her two young children) while her husband was abroad, Louise, Scobie’s wife, is based in part on Vivien’s character as Greene saw it; Helen, Scobie’s mistress in Africa, on his mistress Dorothy in London – the five hundred yards were three thousand miles and in another country.

  The marital conditions described in The Heart of the Matter did not exist while Greene was in Africa, but developed after he returned to England. They represent the stage of his life just prior to the entrance of Catherine. The world war had ended: the private war between Vivien and Greene had begun. Moreover, there was growing unhappiness between Greene and Dorothy. His seven-year-old love affair was turning sour and causing both of them deep anxiety. The core of Greene’s unhappiness was in his nature, that mixture of extreme sensitivity and sexual desire for females who came within his orbit. Guilt was the single most powerful emotion in Greene and he came to feel that he was bad for both his wife and his mistress. This guilt irrevocably bound him, through a sense of pity and responsibility, to both women when love died.

  In discussing Greene’s sense of guilt, Vivien commented: ‘I’ve said to him often: “If only you’d forget your guilt you’d treat me more nicely.” It’s because of that that he’s nastier to me. He’s got no sense of guilt with [the] others. There’s no vows. Guilt makes you hate yourself, and then that rebounds on the person.’63

  A study of his autobiographies, A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape, and his unpublished letters to Catherine, reveals the state of his marriage and his relationship with his mistress Dorothy. But to begin to understand his personal experiences it is necessary to read his fiction, in particular The Heart of the Matter. Novels declare themselves as fictions not as personal histories, though they mine the personal terrain. Greene always felt that so long as he presented his intimate experiences as fiction his secrets would remain unrecognised, and this appealed to his guarded nature.

  The first part of The Heart of the Matter bears witness to his marital troubles: the second to his disturbed relationship with his mistress. By the time Catherine came on the scene, Greene was as unhappy and as suicidal as Major Scobie.

  Like Scobie, Greene realised that ‘No man could guarantee love for ever.’ Once love had fled, what remained was the responsibility to maintain happiness in those he once loved, but the burden became oppressive.64 Scobie looks at his wife Louise, her ‘eyes bloodshot with tears’ and sees the visible signs of his failure as a husband. Greene was troubled by what Vivien had become because of their marriage: ‘Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience … He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face.’65

  What disturbs Louise is that Scobie no longer loves her. Recognising that Vivien knew that he no longer loved her, Greene, like Scobie, determined not to admit this:

  I shall try to talk about anything under the sun to postpone seeing her misery (it would be waiting at the corners of her mouth to take possession of her whole face) … People talk about the courage of the condemned walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery … I’ll talk and talk, but all the time I shall know I’m coming nearer to the moment when I shall say, ‘What about [your day] darling?’ and let the misery in.66

  Although the subject matter (Scobie’s failure to obtain money for his wife’s holiday) was not drawn from Greene’s life, The Heart of the Matter may reveal the probable form of the arguments between Greene and Vivien:

  ‘Ticki, why are you such a coward? Why don’t you tell me it’s all off?’

  ‘All off?’

  ‘You know what I mean … I’m not a child, Ticki. Why don’t you say straight out – “you can’t go”?’

  … Reluctantly he had recourse to the hated nickname. If that failed, the misery would deepen … ‘Trust Ticki,’ he said. It was as if a ligament tightened in his brain with the suspense. If only I could postpone the misery, he thought, until daylight. Misery is worse in the darkness.67

  The misery grows; Louise cries dumbly before him. He tries to console her, but then they have reached a new level: ‘Louise said, “I’ve known it for years. You don’t love me.” She spoke with calm. He knew that calm – it meant they had reached the quiet centre of the storm: always in this region at about this time they began to speak the truth at each other.’68

  The truth meant a great deal to Greene, for lies had the taint of mortality about them. There came a time, within two years of meeting Catherine, when he went to enormous trouble to rid himself (often causing chagrin and pain in others) of the white lies he felt he was forced to tell.

  But at this stage lying was a necessity and seemed justified: ‘The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths. He involved himself in what he always knew was a vain struggle to retain the lies. “Don’t be absurd, darling. Who do you think I love if I don’t love you?”’69

  Louise’s devastating answer has been expressed by Vivien in interviews: ‘“You don’t love anybody.” “Is that why I treat you so badly?” He tried to hit a light note, and it sounded hollowly back at him. “That’s your conscience,” she said, “your sense of duty. You’ve never loved anyone …” “Except myself, of course. You always say I love myself.”’70

  With deadly accuracy Louise replies:

  ‘No, I don’t think you do.’

  He defended himself by evasions. In this cyclonic centre he was powerless to give the comforting lie. ‘I try all the time to keep you happy. I work hard for that.’

  ‘Ticki, you won’t even say you love me. Go on. Say it once.’

  … ‘And yet you want to go away from me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know you aren’t happy either. Without me you’ll have peace.’

  This was what he always left out of
account – the accuracy of her observation. He had nearly everything, and all he needed was peace … If he had become young again this was the life he would have chosen to live; only this time he would not have expected any other person to share it with him …

  ‘You are talking nonsense, dear,’ he said, and went through the doomed motions of mixing another gin and bitters. Again the nerve in his head tightened; unhappiness had uncoiled with its inevitable routine – first her misery and his strained attempts to leave everything unsaid: then her own calm statement of truths much better lied about, and finally the snapping of his own control – truths flung back at her as though she were his enemy. As he embarked on this last stage, crying suddenly and truthfully out at her while the angostura trembled in his hand, ‘You can’t give me peace … You haven’t any conception,’ he accused her, ‘of what peace means.’ … For he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, Arctic and destructive in the moment before the world was struck … Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language: My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you: O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. In the Mass he pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of longing in.

  Louise said with the old tenderness, ‘Poor dear, you wish I were dead … You want to be alone.’

  He replied obstinately, ‘I want you to be happy.’71

  Louise makes a statement regarding Scobie’s conversion which, in part, rings true of Greene: ‘Ticki, I sometimes think you just became a Catholic to marry me. It doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it?’72 Although Greene’s faith was very important to him, Louise’s comments express Vivien’s opinion: after Greene’s death Vivien said that she did not believe her husband was a true Catholic. Like Louise, Vivien gave her husband the nickname of ‘Ticki’ – it was only one of the many nicknames Vivien used in verbal play with her husbandfn3, 3 and gave me reasons why she used nicknames, acknowledging the effect it had on Greene – he disliked this habit of hers. What Vivien did not know was that Greene was also aware of why she used them: ‘These things’, says Louise, ‘creep on you before you know where you are. Suddenly you are calling someone Bear [Vivien called her daughter Bear] or Ticki, and the real names seem bald and formal, and the next you know they hate you for it.’73