The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Greene did not remain unaffected. Early in the new year of 1948, Evelyn Waugh ran full tilt into his friend: ‘Mass at 12 at Farm Street where I met the shambling, unshaven and as it happened quite penniless figure of Graham Greene. Took him to the Ritz for a cocktail and gave him 6d [to check] his hat. He had suddenly been moved by love of Africa and emptied his pockets into the box for African missions.’6

  Later in the year, and soon after the publication of The Heart of the Matter, Greene was described by an unnamed interviewer in America in the Saturday Review of Literature: ‘Tall, stooped, with bleak blue eyes, he is not incautiously called “complex”. Admirers say he is shy, sardonic, sensitive, misanthropic, profoundly Christian.’7

  Complex, certainly, and in despair over Vivien, Dorothy and Catherine. Vivien had not given up hope that she could bring Greene back to his family. Dorothy was still desperately and bitterly fighting to hold on, while Catherine remained an elusive yet obsessive dream.

  A month after he had returned from Sierra Leone in 1943 and four years before his affair with Catherine, Vivien was still the ‘best, the most dear person’ he had ever known. After a visit to his family at Oxford, then living in the lodgings of the President of Trinity, Greene returned to the King’s Arms, and spent the night drinking with friends of his brother Raymond. After the party, he wrote a letter to Vivien in the early hours affirming his love ‘in vino veritas’ and adding: ‘Life is sometimes so beastly that one wishes one was dead, and I go to places like Mexico and Freetown in a half hope that everything will be finished. Sometimes I wish I could twist a ring and skip twenty years and be old with you with this ragged business over. I’ve never wanted to be old but with you I could be old and happy’ (something he was later to repeat to Catherine). After admitting he’d told a lot of lies in the last thirty-eight years (‘or I suppose in 35 years, one couldn’t lie from the cradle’), he admitted: ‘but this is true. I hate life and I hate myself and I love you. Never forget … if I ever make you unhappy really badly and hopelessly or saw life make you that, I’d want to die quickly.’8 How close these sentiments are to Scobie’s, except that Scobie acts upon his desire ‘to die quickly’.

  Now all had changed; love did not reside in the Greene household: ‘Have you ever seen a room from which faith has gone?’ Greene wrote in his play The Potting Shed: ‘You can fill it with Regency furniture … But a room from which faith has gone is quite different. Like a marriage from which love has gone, and all that’s left are habits and pet names and sentimental objects, picked up on the beaches and in foreign towns that don’t mean anything any more.’9 The reference to ‘Regency furniture’ is to the furniture Vivien liked. Greene saw her house as a museum, not a home of love, and stressed this in interview. Their differences in taste and character are reflected in a letter he wrote just before the war ended, in which he refused Vivien’s offer of a desk: ‘About the Regency desk … If it was for you, I’d say go ahead. But if it’s for me, I’d say no. The only kind of desk I can see myself writing my sort of books at is a flat one … not period or decorative … I couldn’t write a word – except a delicate essay on Charles Lamb – at a Regency desk. Sorry.’10

  Yet there was another reason for the break up of the marriage that one priest at least was unable to understand:

  What a trying time to go to Confession. At Farm Street nobody, so I went unwillingly from previous experience to the Cathedral. After 3/4 hour I got a Fr. Pilkington & gave him the whole works to be on the safe side. You’ve never heard anything so fantastic. I had to start marital relations with my wife again & it was a sin to keep the separation going. Then about ‘adultery’ – I was agreeable to say I’ll try, try, try, till the cows come home. But he wouldn’t allow that. I must promise from this moment to give up seeing you etc. Finally I said, ‘I’m sorry, Father, I’m afraid I must find another confessor’ and walked out. I even had to teach him (perhaps that is why I was short) the elementary fact of life, that you couldn’t have a woman without desire.11

  The viewpoints of his wife and mother must be set beside a poem Greene wrote to Catherine in 1949, along with seven other poems dedicated to her and privately printed. The print run was only twenty-five, and the collection was entitled ‘After Two Years’. It is not only an intense and genuine reflection of his feelings, but an accurate account of when his love for Catherine first dawned and a description of the magic of Achill:

  In a plane your hair was blown.

  And in an island the old car

  Lingered from inn to inn,

  Like a fly on a map.

  A mattress was spread on a cottage floor

  And a door closed on a world, but another door

  Opened, and I was far

  From the old world sadly known

  Where the fruitless seeds were sown,

  And they called that virtue and this sin.

  Did I ever love God before I knew the place

  I rest in now, with my hand

  Set in stone, never to move?

  For this is love, and this I love.

  And even my God is here.

  The paradox of Greene’s characters lies in the fact that out of the sinner comes the saint. In The End of the Affair hate is a source of love; in The Heart of the Matter, sin is a necessary concomitant of salvation. In this poem Greene celebrated the ‘mattress … spread on a cottage floor’, the old world gone with its easy distinctions of ‘that virtue and this sin’, on the distinctive and contradictory grounds that he had never really loved God before he knew this place of adultery: ‘For this is love, and this I love. / And even my God is here.’

  In moments of deep depression, Greene felt abandoned by God: ‘I’ve seen the mark of His footsteps going away,’12 and experienced not only a sense of hopelessness, but what Coleridge called ‘the dying away from him of all hope’. And in order to stand the strain he universalised his despair: ‘nobody who lives escapes a private agony’. He also suffered from the sense of being locked into his own egotism, a place of captivity and misery, where the only means of escape were the palliatives of drugs, drinking, sexual adventures, and dingy night clubs (the seedier the better) or else the active sectors of the line: war, that ‘ravaged and disputed territory between two eternities’.

  *

  Throughout these years Greene felt an angry longing for Catherine. Her familial and social responsibilities at Thriplow and Newton Hall forced her to ration her time with him. He was troubled by his sense that Catherine’s feelings did not match his own. Again and again his obsessiveness and jealousy ruined his love.

  There are references to his jealousy in his letters (or recalled in dreams) and diaries, but the point is put most succinctly in The End of the Affair.

  [We] used to have long arguments on jealousy. I was jealous even of the past, of which she spoke to me frankly as it came up – the affairs that meant nothing at all … She was as loyal to her lovers as she was to [her husband], but what should have provided me with some comfort (for undoubtedly she would be loyal to me too) angered me. There was a time when she would laugh at my anger, simply refusing to believe that it was genuine, just as she refused to believe in her own beauty …13

  In the novel, Greene provides us with the heroine’s private journal and this fiction reflects Catherine’s true feelings. In one interview I had with him Greene hinted that Sarah’s journal in The End of the Affair revealed either what Catherine had said to him in conversation or what she had written in her own diary. Their correspondence indicates that Catherine personally scrutinised and criticised The End of the Affair, not least because so much of it was culled from their life and love and turned into literature. Because Sarah’s posthumous journal in the novel is based on Catherine’s, Greene didn’t wish to modify the order of events without her acceptance of the changes: ‘Could you find time to look through [the revised typescript of the novel]? Nothing has been added, but … the order of the journal has been altered – one entry cut altogether.’14

/>   Catherine’s difficulty in dealing with this nervous, depressive genius is reflected in the passage in the novel dealing with the journal entry for 12 June 1944: ‘Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them … He is jealous of the past and the present and the future. His love is like a medieval chastity belt: only when he is there, with me, in me, does he feel safe.’15

  But Greene was bound to feel vulnerable. He had left Vivien, and was in the process of leaving Dorothy, but they were rarely out of his mind. He could see with terrible clarity the conflict and suffering he had caused those he once loved. He felt that he had poisoned the lives of his wife and mistress just by withdrawing his love and therefore could never quite bring himself to depart altogether. He was aware of the pain he was causing Vivien, and wrote a year after he had left her: ‘I never cease to be sorry about what I’ve done, & never cease to think of you with love.’ Greene felt that he alone was guilty, and he felt deep remorse about Dorothy.

  He could look coolly at Dorothy (with that splinter of ice in the heart) and knew her to be a little, dumpy woman whom he had befriended, loved and wished now to drop, but not unceremoniously. The exhausting battles of love and hate had to go on and they were persistent and noisy. Dorothy fought for Greene even after he’d left her. In any case his conscience dictated that it would be a gradual withdrawal. The knowledge that once love was over, he would replace it with a terribly engrossing pity made Greene’s life painful: ‘It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance.’16 Greene knew how the shock would affect Dorothy when he told her he would be leaving to live elsewhere: ‘her mouth a little open as though she were out of breath. He had the sense of an animal which had been chased to its hole.’17 He could not easily be pitiless towards her and his escape from their home was relentlessly slow.

  However much he was under Catherine’s influence, however much he wanted to please her, he understood the feelings of his wife and mistress: ‘Inexorably the other’s point of view rose on the path like a murdered innocence.’ He had sworn to Vivien that he would preserve her happiness: he had sworn similarly to Dorothy, but with Catherine he had accepted another and contradictory responsibility. He knew that the lies must end and that he would have to tell the truth without shading: he felt the wounds of the victims of his love and he raised a question: ‘Was it the butterfly that died in the act of love?’ But he knew the answer in the human world: ‘Human beings were condemned to consequences. The responsibility as well as the guilt was his’.18 ‘I dread tonight,’ Greene said to Catherine, eleven months after he had left Vivien ‘but the choice of weapons is with [Dorothy], one has to be the servant of the one who suffers most or one injures.’

  I remember Greene, his face absolutely wooden, an ingrained melancholy painfully apparent, speaking many years after the event: ‘I’ve betrayed very many people in my life.’ He selected only one for special mention: ‘I betrayed Dorothy. Particularly Dorothy.’ She had no marriage, no children (her companion, her widowed mother, in fact outlived her), and was resigned to her role in his life. What was there left for him to feel but an enormous pity? ‘He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The condition of life nurtured it.’19 And Greene, who was tied to a deep sense of guilt and pity, hated this aspect of himself, criticised it in his novels: ‘Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn’t safe when pity’s prowling round.’20 He desperately wanted to maintain happiness in those he had loved.

  Of course, Greene really believed that it was absurd to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. Though he had moments of real joy, usually connected with the completion of a novel and the transitory sense that he had achieved something, or connected with the initial, wonderful euphoria of love, in his heart he felt that a happy man was either an extreme egotist or else living in absolute ignorance.

  Greene suffered in slowly breaking off with Dorothy and even allowed himself to be humiliated by her – a most terrible thing for him to bear. As a child he had found humiliation more terrible than suicide. There was no question that Dorothy could be something of a termagant. The jealousy of the fat Portuguese captain’s mistress in The Heart of the Matter is a modification of Dorothy’s emotion, and Greene was writing there of his own condition and experience: ‘she will take away my trousers so that I cannot go out alone; every day it will be drink and quarrels until we go to bed.’21 On one occasion when she thought Catherine was in town and that Greene was going to visit her, she prevented him by hiding his trousers – Dorothy was a very spunky woman.

  Arguments between Greene and Dorothy had gone on before he met Catherine, but then they argued about Vivien: ‘“You are not protecting me. You are protecting your wife.” “It comes to the same thing.” “Oh,” she said, “to couple me with – that woman.” … “That woman,” she repeated, watching his eyes. “You’d never leave her, would you?” “We are married,” he said … “You’ll never marry me.” “I can’t. You know that.” “It’s a wonderful excuse being a Catholic,” she said. “It doesn’t stop you sleeping with me – it only stops you marrying me.”’22 Greene knew that he was turning Dorothy into a Vivien in terms of parallel misery (though Vivien never fought vulgarly). It seemed to him that ‘life always repeated, or perhaps his life repeated, the same pattern. There was always sooner or later, bad news that had to be broken, comforting lies to be uttered … to keep misery away.’23

  Greene knew that he was among the legion of sinners and in The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair he explored the depths of his own depressive character and the conflicts he, seemingly, engineered. They were conflicts which he knew he could not solve and he often came round to one solution, the solution that Scobie found – that of suicide. It appealed to him as the only way out of his absurd, grotesque and complicated love-life.

  *

  At the beginning of The Heart of the Matter Greene has a lead quotation from Charles Péguy: ‘The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity.’24 His activities give the sinner an intimate sense of the ‘terror of life, of going on soiling himself and repenting and soiling himself again’, a statement which appears in Greene’s first novel, The Man Within (1929), and reappears in a letter to Vivien written nine months after he’d left her. She had written him a soft and mitigating letter, in answer to a stern letter which suggested she was out for revenge.

  Throughout 1948 Vivien and Greene struggled over the form their separation should take: should they have a deed of separation or a judicial separation, the latter being a great deal more final than the former? Vivien had modified her stance out of dislike for vulgar argument, but also, I suspect, because she had received a letter from one friend who, although a friend of Catherine’s, was trying earnestly to be an honest intermediary. She and certain Catholic priests tried hard to persuade Vivien not to go ahead with a judicial separation, but instead to sign a deed of separation. Greene’s friends seem to have been disturbed about his suicidal tendencies.

  It was this that made them write Vivien supportive letters, for as intelligent as she was, she could never have been a natural member of the Walstons’ circle. She was neither worldly nor famous. She didn’t fit into their circle just as Literary Louise didn’t fit into the colonial society of The Heart of the Matter. The friend who knew both her and the Walstons assured Vivien that, if she behaved well, sooner or later Greene would return to her and Catherine’s true position would be revealed as that of the woman standing between a wife and husband. The same friend wrote to Vivien to say that Catherine was able to justify herself as having nothing to do with the break up of Vivien’s marriage. But, if Greene were to leave Dorothy, it would be clear that only Catherine stood between him and Vivien. Catherine had also insisted that Vivien must be told everything: �
��It’s only fair to the poor girl.’

  Only later did it become clear that Catherine’s insistence on Vivien being told as much as possible, that all Greene’s weaknesses be laid bare, was an effort to turn Vivien against him; to make Vivien abandon any moral high ground and behave badly herself. The same friend warned Vivien about Catherine’s experience in the arts of winning a man; and how, identifying Greene’s suffering with Scobie’s in The Heart of the Matter, many Roman Catholic priests were strongly supportive of him, despite his adultery.

  The Reverend C. C. Martindale, a distinguished Catholic priest, wrote to Vivien, stressing that what he was about to say of Greene was gathered from his books (‘which made me both esteem him and love him’) and added: ‘You are having to deal with a man to whom you have promised fidelity, and who has promised fidelity to you. Yet he is a tormented soul (as “Punch”, I think, called him) and will often be defeated not only by personal weakness (as we all are) but by a kind of clashing of duties.’ Having heard that Vivien was thinking of divorce, Martindale argued against it ‘because it would give him the last push down into desperation, and also, create an awful scandal and give grounds to all such critics to say that he is not only a bad Catholic, but a bad man, which he isn’t’.25 It is likely that it was Martindale to whom Greene and Catherine went for confession.