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The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

Page 39

by Norman Sherry


  He hears her small scraping voice from the bed repeat ‘Father’. He watches her blue and bloodshot eyes watching him. He can see her breast struggling for breath to repeat the word. He acts out the part of a father, telling her not to speak. He remembers how he used to make, with the help of a handkerchief, the shadow of a rabbit’s head:

  ‘There’s your rabbit,’ he said, ‘to go to sleep with. It will stay until you sleep. Sleep.’ This sweat poured down his face and tasted in his mouth as salt as tears. ‘Sleep.’ He moved the rabbit’s ears up and down, up and down. Then he heard Mrs Bowles’s voice, speaking low just behind him. ‘Stop that,’ she said harshly, ‘the child’s dead.’17

  Later in the novel, he institutes another pact: ‘O God … if instead I should abandon you, punish me but let the others get some happiness.’18

  Vivien Greene said to me how absurd this business of bargaining with God was, that it was not the way of a real Catholic. But in a letter from Greene published in Dieu Vivant, 17 November 1950, Greene speaks openly about Scobie’s prayer over the dying child:

  one did have in mind that when [Scobie] offered up his peace for the child it was genuine prayer and the results that followed. I always believe that such results, though obviously a God would not fulfil them to the limit of robbing him of a peace for ever, are answered up to a point as a kind of test of a man’s sincerity and to see whether in fact the offer was one merely based on emotion.19

  In an undated letter to his wife about The Heart of the Matter, Greene recorded that ‘this book has been the devil to do, worse than the P and G and that was a brute’. But if it was ‘the devil to do’, it stands along with The Power and the Glory as one of his two preeminent works in the trinity completed with his next work, The End of the Affair. Daniel George writing in the Daily Express felt justified in regarding The Heart of the Matter as a masterpiece; for George Painter in the Listener, Greene was now ‘a great Catholic writer (for such, in The Power and the Glory and his present novel, he has securely become)’; for George Malcolm Thomson in the Evening Standard, Greene had produced a novel ‘of distinguished quality and power’. And finally Lionel Hale in the Observer conceded: ‘What a writer this is! If he chose ever to rest on his laurels how safe he would be!’ This was a possibility Greene never entertained.

  *

  Immediately after the war, and before he met Catherine, Greene felt he would probably never write anything of significance again. However, with the publication of The Heart of the Matter on 27 May 1948, and the appearance of two films, The Fallen Idol (September 1948) and The Third Man (August 1949), he had finally achieved great success and renown, but they brought him little happiness.

  Greene, who hated fuss and always wanted to go unnoticed (in his early school photographs he always seemed to be hiding), was suddenly a media figure. His name appeared everywhere, he was a person to be seen, wondered at, and his autograph was avidly sought: ‘At Heathrow the trouble began. Associated Press girl reporter, autograph album of buffet girl, photo on the steps of plane. I want to hide. I want to build a house of bricks with Harry [Walston] & disappear.’20 He might have had the world at his feet, but he still saw life with fiercely jaundiced eyes.

  He wrote to Catherine on 21 June 1948, a little under a month after The Heart of the Matter had appeared, ‘Really apart from you & a few things connected with you, life doesn’t offer much. Perhaps if one was a failure, instead of a vulgar success, one would have success to look forward to.’21 In his melancholy, Greene never allowed himself to win. ‘The hours run out: I count them and wonder how few are worth the bother of counting or living.’22

  The pressure of fame genuinely troubled Greene: ‘“Fame” is an unholy bore. It would have seemed exciting at 24 … but yesterday I wanted to finish A Lear of the Steppes … & the captain of the aircraft would sit & talk: at Amsterdam I was quietly reading when the manager of the hotel & staff appeared with autograph albums: at Hamburg, getting into a car, a microphone was shoved under one’s nose: at every nightclub The Third Man is played.’23

  It wasn’t only the newspapers that publicised Greene. In reviewing French and German notices, one critic described Greene as an extraordinary innovator:

  To England belongs the credit of producing an author who has done more than most to make European Catholics question their whole outlook on faith and holiness … Until recently it was scarcely possible to pick up at any rate a German Catholic review without an article devoted to Graham Greene; now he is generally accepted as having introduced a new type of sanctity to the world; his whiskey-priest is compared, not with characters of fiction, but with saints who actually lived in the past. The recognition of the unorthodox saint of fiction has also led to a new appreciation of holiness in paths hitherto unnoticed even by those who knew that the way to heaven was hard.24

  However, Greene’s deep-seated concern was not controversy or fame, but the possibility that he might lose Catherine: ‘Will you still love me if I’m excommunicated? Because you do love me … What a lot you do for me – getting me a home, giving me hope …’25 Whenever he had to be away from her, in the United States or Europe, he became terribly worried. When not in personal contact, he felt unable to fight for Catherine’s continued love and thought that without his presence she would get too disturbed over their situation as godfather and goddaughter who were also lovers and that she would then leave him.26

  As a devout Catholic, Catherine knew that she had sinned and felt that she could not just go to confession and soon afterwards repeat the sin. They both knew what to do, and although they made efforts to end the affair, they didn’t succeed. With Greene at his most persistent and obsessive, she knew the solution was not easy to come by.

  Knowing Catherine would be at a retreat when he ended his visit to America and fearing Catholic pressure, Greene used scabrous language: ‘I hope the little shits won’t gather around you too much in the next three weeks.’27 In the same letter he repeated this slightly differently: ‘I love you & trust you & hope the priests & the shits won’t work on you when I’m away.’

  All the time the novel was selling enormously. Greene received letters of support, such as one from Adele Rudd, an avid reader of Greene. Her letter quoted a letter from a Jesuit priest in America: ‘I am thrilled by The Heart of the Matter. Greene is powerful and penetrating. The book is startling but certainly true to life. I have little patience with Catholic critics who refuse to admit Catholics commit such sins.’ And the Jesuit added: ‘It is selling by the thousands here.’

  If it was selling well in America, it was shooting to the top of the bestseller lists in England. Greene’s publisher Heinemann did an initial printing of 10,000 copies, which sold out in six days after George Malcolm Thomson chose it as the Evening Standard Book of the Month. A second edition of 10,000 was rushed out in eight days. By the middle of June (the book had only appeared in the bookshops at the end of May) the second edition was exhausted and a third edition, a further 10,000, was ready by the end of the month. Meanwhile orders were coming in from all over the country.

  The book received a further fillip. In July the Government of Eire banned it on the grounds that it was ‘indecent in tendency’. Whilst it was true that the Catholic clerics on the Irish Censorship Board had opposed the ban in the first place, the laity were in the majority and the ban stuck until the publishers appealed. Of course, the banning helped to sell copies. The ban was lifted early in October, though the controversy continued.

  So Greene had his ‘vulgar success’. When invited to Paris six months later in January 1949 by his publisher Robert Laffont, Greene was genuinely surprised at the response:

  You can’t believe how famous I am here. Passed through customs and police in two minutes at Le Bourget … It’s all too fantastic. My books in every shop – a whole display in the Rue de Rivoli. Three different people writing books on me for three different publishers. The Professor of English at the Sorbonne has asked me to lecture & says that he can fill t
he hall twice over.28

  What pleased Greene was that he had vanquished his bête noire, the novelist and drama critic Charles Morgan. Like Greene, Morgan was a winner of the Hawthornden, but Greene thought so little of his work that the fact that Morgan was a prior winner of the Hawthornden prevented Greene from taking pleasure in the award: ‘Three of [Morgan’s] past graduate pupils writing theses on me, one on “L’Univers de G.G.,” one on “Le Malheur dans Les Oeuvres de G.G.” & one on “The Technique of the novels of G.G.” Priests flock reverently around.’ Greene adds: ‘I’d really be rather enjoying it if I believed it, but I don’t quite … common sense tells me it’s all a joke that will soon pass.’29

  21

  Boston Tea Party

  Although it swings from fun to gloom

  It may evade its rightful doom.

  – NOËL COWARD

  HAVING ACHIEVED IMMENSE success as a script writer with The Third Man, Greene emerged as a playwright in the summer of 1949 with a dramatisation of The Heart of the Matter. Basil Dean was to direct the play in New York and Boston with the assistance of the producers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein and it was scheduled to open on Broadway in the autumn. Although Greene had originally intended to write the script in collaboration with Dean in New York, circumstances forced them to work in England.

  In an effort to keep a check on inflation, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, had instituted a programme of austerity with strict taxation and a voluntary wage freeze. The Bank of England turned down Greene’s proposal for the financing of his stay in America, viewing it as a bad risk. On 21 June Greene wrote to The Times:

  one department of the Bank of England still appears to regard [writers] as an inferior race, or at least as distinct outsiders … I asked the Bank of England for the usual business man’s allowance of 10 pounds a day to keep me in New York during the period of writing. Royalties had already been advanced to me by Rodgers and Hammerstein to enable me to visit New York for the preliminary consultations last year, and it is unreasonable to expect further advances before the play is written.

  Even if the play were unsuccessful, by the terms of the contract the dollars earned could not fail to equal the small amount the Bank of England was asked to sanction. If the play were a success, the dollars accruing to this country would be incalculable. The Bank of England, however, tells me that it cannot gamble on an unknown quantity to the extent of 350 pounds, the amount asked for … The Bank of England has offered to sanction a daily allowance of 4 pounds, on which it is impossible to live and work in New York under present conditions. I have therefore had to cancel my contract. One wonders how many other authors have been prevented in the same way from earning dollars for this country.1

  Greene’s letter to The Times led to questions being asked in Parliament. In answer, Sir Stafford Cripps denied that Greene had stated in his application that he had a contract or that the dramatic version had to be written in New York under the terms of the contract or that royalties had been advanced to him already: ‘or even if the play were unsuccessful the dollars earned would reimburse his expenditure’.2

  Greene replied promptly (ever ready to do battle) though his manner was modest. He wanted to correct the impression conveyed by Cripps: ‘In all but the omission of the word “contract”, Sir Stafford Cripps has been misinformed. My application stated definitely that I wished to visit New York by arrangement with Messrs Rodgers and Hammerstein, the theatrical producers, in order to dramatize my book The Heart of the Matter for them. The Bank of England replied that they were only prepared to allow me a maximum amount of 4 pounds a day; when they were satisfied that the application was a genuine one. There was no question … of their allowing a larger amount.’3

  Life expressed the opinion of many when it noted that it was extraordinary that the Bank of England thought Greene’s venture too risky an enterprise to let such a small sum of money leave the country – ‘[it] strikes us almost speechless’.4 Three months after the ‘affaire Greene’, in September 1949, Cripps devalued the pound.

  Now that Greene and Dean had been forced to write the play in England, they put up in a hotel to hammer out the script. Greene pushed himself hard and by 7 September he looked forward to the appearance of a secretary – ‘a change from Dean’s face’ – and hoped to have the first draft of the play completed by Thursday lunchtime.5 Nineteen days later, apart from having taken Evelyn Keyes to see The Third Man, Greene ‘worked, worked, worked with Dean’. Evelyn Keyes had fallen in love with Greene, but he felt nothing sexual towards her and avoided any relationship: ‘One sticky evening, but last night was pleasant & friendly & unemotional.’6

  On 26 September, feeling pressured to complete the play, Greene told Catherine that he was back on benzedrine ‘to try to get this bloody thing finished this week. I’ll stop it in good time so that you won’t have to suffer from my nerves.’ But during the whole time he was writing the play, he had his mind centred on writing The End of the Affair. ‘I want more than anything to get on with the “I” book, but it’s not a book I can write in driblets.’ Still work on the play went on: ‘I’m rather flat out … At work all day trying to flog a dead horse into life, & I’m feeling the effect of 3 days benzedrine running.’7 Not only did Greene have to contend with the after effects of the benzedrine, but also with a nerve-racking drama played out in an adjoining room:

  tonight a woman was having a hysterical seizure next door while we were trying to work. I’ve never heard anything so ghastly. Poor devils. Dean after half an hour insisted on calling the manager. He was right because the manager packed the man, who had never spoken above a whisper while she shrieked the abuse at him, to a separate room. Awful how after twenty minutes she was cooing down a telephone to her girl friend as though nothing had happened. And the friend of course would never have believed in the shrieking maniac & imagined her husband exaggerated.8

  Dean and he were hard at it: ‘A lot [of] benzedrine, & only 2 hours sleep … No benzedrine yesterday, ten hours sleep last night with the help of a tablet.’ On 30 September he reported to Catherine that he had ‘a revolutionary idea for the play’, but he did not give any details.

  On his forty-fifth birthday, 2 October 1949, Greene wrote to Catherine that he was racing her to the end of life. Although still working doggedly to complete the play, Greene celebrated the day by going to early Mass at Farm Street. He received a book of poems from the poet Kathleen Raine: ‘One was dedicated “For Graham”. Not a love poem thank God, but quite a good one. It seemed … hermaphroditic having a poem dedicated to one.’fn1, 9 Greene was also remembered by Vivien and Dorothy; Vivien sent him Burton’s Travels in West Africa, and Dorothy Glover an anthology of John Clare’s poems.

  Greene had hoped that Ralph Richardson would take a part in his ‘new’ play, but after having lunch with Richardson, he discovered it was not to be: ‘Lunch with Ralph Richardson was a disappointment – he seemed rather lukewarm about the play. What he really wanted was me to write a film for him & Myrna Loy. I said I could do nothing before December. November is absolutely booked – you [a holiday in Italy] & the novel [The End of the Affair]. I long for both, the first always, the second sometimes. But I love the combination.’10 Later that day, he took Evelyn Keyes to see Richardson in The Heiress and came to the conclusion that he didn’t want him in his play, which was ‘nearly finished’: ‘A final grand reading by Dean on Tuesday.’11

  Greene finished the play on his birthday about 6.30, and had a double gin with Basil Dean to celebrate; then suddenly he saw that the first act was all wrong, and that it needed to be reshaped.12 But however tired of writing Greene might be, he was more troubled by the depression he would experience on finishing the play (as he inevitably did after any exhausting piece of writing) and the approaching emptiness in his life after returning from his holiday with Catherine: ‘I think it would be more sensible to go [abroad] after Italy in that dreary patch when one spell of happiness is over and there’s n
othing to look forward to.’ He then admitted: ‘I’m always a bit unbearable those days.’

  Thinking of Paris, Greene realised ‘with horror’ that about three out of the five times he had gone there alone since the war ‘he had picked somebody up’. But Catherine had changed all that: ‘second strings aren’t any good and a monastery’s the only possible substitute for you! … I want you and nothing but you for the rest of my life.’13 Like Bendrix’s love for Sarah in The End of the Affair Greene’s passion for Catherine ‘had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.’14

  When he was in Italy with Catherine in November it appears that events conspired to make the holiday less paradisal than anticipated, as an undated letter to his mother suggests:

  The weather in Italy was rather awful & Rex & Barbara Warnerfn2 stayed with us nearly the whole time which we did not intend. Towards the end we went across to Naples for a day’s house shopping – & were stuck for four days because the boats didn’t sail.15

  But he must have enjoyed Italy more this time than last, for he had expressed reservations about their previous trip in March to his mother:

  I have been most of my time in Anacapri – which I don’t like very much: I may sell the villa again – apart from a few days in Rome & in Florence (Florence bored me). Now I have been staying for a few days in Ravello near Amalfi with the Huntingdons (she is Margaret Lane who wrote the life of Beatrix Potter) & I’ve enjoyed that a lot.16

 

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