The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  In a copy of The Living Room which he gave to Mario Soldati, Greene wrote, ‘For helping me in the battle of the Edinburgh hotel’.

  When the play went on to Brighton it had a tremendous reception. The lure of Greene’s name, the fact that this was his first play, coupled with the name of film star Eric Portman in the cast and a new star, Dorothy Tutin, made it an irresistible draw.

  Although local people still regarded Greene as having stabbed Brighton in the back in Brighton Rock, there was almost universal agreement that this was a remarkable play. The Brighton and Hove Herald’s drama critic said that Greene needed a stage to torture himself and that the real protagonist was the ‘conscience of Mr Greene tying itself in knots and taking heavy punishment in the process’.15 The critic spoke of ‘the icy uncompromising wastes of Graham Greeneland’, describing the main tenet of the play as a choice between ‘suffering our own pain or suffering the pain of others’. Another critic spoke of people being ‘hypnotised by the name of Graham Greene’. And the result? ‘An orgy of sin, suffering and tragedy in the true Graham Greene manner. It is of course, executed with considerable artistic skill and Mr Greene displays an unerring sense of theatre.’16

  After touring the provinces, The Living Room opened in London on Thursday, 16 April 1953, at the Wyndham’s Theatre. The ballerina Margot Fonteyn wrote soon after it was afloat: ‘I hear that you were a tremendous success here … All I know is that 2 people did something 27 times in 3 weeks.’17 And it was a truly tremendous success, chiefly because the character of Rose, who commits suicide, was played by the young, still untried actress Dorothy Tutin. Greene in some correspondence called his play the Tutin play, a pointer to her achievement.

  It made the front cover of the Picture Post with a superb photograph of her. Inside there was a photograph with Greene in the background, just behind Eric Portman and Dorothy Tutin. The play was a triumph: the Daily Express reported that Greene ‘writes about chill misery’, but ‘sells like hot cakes’. The journalist John Barber described Greene, ‘tall, gaunt, haggard-eyed’, and recalled how, after the first night, Greene heard cheers for Dorothy Tutin (‘a newcomer of 22 with the frailty of a lapwing in a storm’); cheers for Eric Portman and loud cries for ‘Author’, ‘Author’, and when he came up on to the stage he refused his accolades:

  Do not call me a success. I have never known a successful man. Have you? A man who was a success to himself? [Barber thought his ‘china-blue eyes were bloodshot’ as Greene went on] Success is the point of self-deception. Failure is the point of self-knowledge.18

  On Tuesday 14 April there were eight curtain calls at the end of the play. Margot Fonteyn led the crush of people to congratulate Dorothy Tutin. Greene came in and hugged her. Two nights later the play and the acting brought forth an astonishing fourteen curtain calls.

  Evelyn Waugh promised to ‘clap hands and call “Author”’,19 but his response to the play was not entirely happy. Waugh wrote to Greene that the play had held him breathless, but that Greene’s ‘hospitality before & during the performance dulled my old nut a bit and I must return in very cold blood to enjoy much that I missed. All I was able to realize was that you had written a first class play … Messrs [Raymond] Mortimer & [Edward] Sackville-West after the show were most enthusiastic. We vied in your praises.’20 His diary entry was less sanguine:

  To London with Laura for the first night of Graham’s play … Champagne first at Claridge’s. Odd party – Korda, Eddie Sackville-West … Barbara Rothschild. Went to play in high spirits which the performance failed to dispel. More champagne between acts. With result that I was rather inattentive to the final scene which presumably contained the point of the whole sad story. On reflection I felt the tone was false. The piety of the old Catholic ladies wasn’t piety. The tragic love of the heroine wasn’t tragic; her suicide clumsy.21

  On the whole Catholics did not like the play, and for obvious reasons. Vincent Cronin writing in the Catholic World criticised the young heroine Rose from the point of view of a Catholic: ‘She has, after all, given herself adulterously on the very night of her mother’s funeral, and she takes her own life (in full knowledge of what that entails) because she cannot get her own way without hurting others … Yet because she dies reciting the Our Father, her suicide is clearly meant to arouse our sympathy, when surely on all rational grounds it should arouse our shame.’22

  *

  On 22 August 1953 a totally unexpected letter appeared in The Times, which led to the birth of a society. Given Greene’s lack of partiality for clubs and societies, the letter was extraordinary:

  Sir, – May we beg the courtesy of your columns to announce the formation of the Anglo-Texan Society? The society has the general object of establishing cultural and social links between this country and the state of Texas which occupies a special historical position not only in relation to the United States but also in relation to Great Britain. It is hoped, when funds permit, to establish special premises in London for welcoming visitors from Texas and – if our ambitions are realized – of providing them with a hospitality equal to that which Texas has traditionally given to English visitors. Those interested are asked to communicate with the undersigned at 1, Montague Square, London, W1.

  We are, Sir, yours, &c.,

  GRAHAM GREENE, President

  JOHN SUTRO, Vice President

  The letter troubled Alan Pryce-Jones, who was attached to the Times Literary Supplement, and he asked Sir William Haley, editor of The Times, why he had published it. Did he think the Anglo-Texan Society was serious? Sir William replied: ‘Mr. Pryce-Jones – the names themselves were a guarantee of the seriousness of the letter.’ But if Haley had known anything about John Sutro he would have realised that he was a court jester – a wonderful man given to practical jokes, as of course was Greene.

  Greene and John Sutro had gone up to Edinburgh to see a play in which their friend Trevor Howard was acting. They were having drinks beforehand when a party of Texans arrived. The Texans had been on a conducted tour of Norway and were passing through Edinburgh:

  There were two very attractive looking girls in the party, and so I sent a note by the waiter to them asking if they would like to share our box at the theatre. And the waiter returned – a typical dour Scotch Puritan – slammed my note back on the table and said: ‘they said it’s not for them’ or words to that effect.23

  John Sutro added a further comic note to the scene. The waiter, he said, took the note originally to an old lady, who was outraged to receive it.24 Greene then arranged that he and Sutro should leave the bar at the same time as the girls, and went up to them and said: ‘“I’m sorry if you were offended but I thought perhaps you’d like to come for the play.” And they said, “Oh but we didn’t think it was true. We thought it was a joke. We’d love to come.”’ And so, accordingly, they all went to the play together: ‘We had a nice time, a perfectly innocent evening, and afterwards drove them around Edinburgh.’ Neither Greene nor Sutro could remember their names, but they were a Miss Crosby and a Miss Alexander: ‘Coming back in the train the next day we thought in memory of these sweet people we would found an Anglo-Texan Society.’25 According to Sutro, ‘We sat in the restaurant car drinking black velvets all the way. And by the end of it we said how awful it was that Texans in England had got such a bad deal and we concocted a letter to The Times, which I posted off. Graham went off to Kenya the next day and I went off to Paris. The letter went off and we thought, “Oh they will never publish it, will they.” And then two days later in Paris … the telephone rang in our flat – it was the Associated Press: “What is this about the Texans and an Anglo-Texan Society – you and Graham Greene?” And I said, “Well there it is – the bonds between Great Britain and Texas are great and it’s so sad that nothing is done.” They said, “Thank you.” And then I went back ten days later and found over ninety letters, including one from Sir Hartley Shawcross and Samuel Guinness the banker.’ Sutro couldn’t resist responding to this extraordinary ho
ax: ‘So I had a huge cocktail party at the Garrick and it was formed, notepaper was printed and we’ve never been able to stop it.’26

  Only one newspaper scented a hoax and incidentally revealed what the intelligent man in the street felt about Greene, though the passage in the New York Times (11 October 1953) had also its own tongue in cheek:

  We could not believe our eyes. We remembered only too vividly Mr Greene’s controlled but consuming anger towards us because of what he considered was a reactionary reign of terror over here … We can feel scepticism, like a calcium deposit, residing right in our bones. Mr Greene may be on the side of God, but he has created some fascinating diabolisms and plenty of hells in his time, and we wonder whether Mr Greene doesn’t have some insidious plot underfoot. Maybe like getting Texas, our richest, vastest, proudest state to secede from the union.27

  The interest was astonishing – accidentally Greene and Sutro had tapped a deeply felt need. On one occasion, ‘aided in its flight’, as Greene put it, ‘by the irresponsible genius of Sutro’, Sutro organised a vast party at the Denham studios. He was helped by the American air force and the Houston Fat Stock Show, which dispatched three steers – three ‘bawling doggies’ was the comment in the American air force’s newspaper – 2,500 pounds of prize Texan beef. Around 1,500 Texans and Anglo-Texan Society members turned up for the greatest event in Anglo-Texan relations or in Texanían terms: ‘Just about the biggest Texas blowout in the history of Great Britain.’ The United States ambassador, Winthrop Aldrich, was there and was redesignated by the governor of Texas, Allan Shivers, Texan ambassador to Great Britain. So for one day Texas was truly the Lone Star state: the ‘richest, vastest, proudest state’ had seceded from the Union, and the flag of Texas was handed over by ‘Texas ambassador to Great Britain’ to a jubilant John Sutro. What started this great event (Greene’s description) was ‘the ignoble hilarity of two tipsy travellers when they plotted their little joke’.28

  The society was also serious and did some good. A letter from the British consul-general in Houston made an offer to the President, Graham Greene, which he could not refuse:

  As you are President of the Anglo-Texan Society I feel that I should endow the society with a contribution, and have pleasure in enclosing the bill for one million dollars! If you should wish any more money, please let me know and I shall be delighted to make up any further differences between the red side of your bank account and the black side that you may require.29

  Greene was so astonished that in reply he fell back on cliché: ‘No word of mine can adequately express our appreciation of your kindness in assuming all responsibility for our debit balances.’30

  The society was still active in 1976, though sadly it no longer exists today. The flavour of old Texas is in numerous letters sent to Greene:

  As my Grandfather Carl Dyer fitted out the Schooner ‘Sarah Lee’, filled it with 200 cut-throats at his expense and went to fight in Mexico, ending up by being in charge of Santa Annafn1 after the battle of San Jacinto … I, as the last serving descendant, am naturally interested in your proposal to form the Society. From my point of view it might help me to locate the Bible Santa Anna gave to my Grandfather and also the latter’s sword.31

  Such are the vagaries of fame. When John Sutro died his obituaries made special reference to the fact that, with Greene, he had formed the Anglo-Texan Society in the 1950s to promote friendship between Britain and Texas.

  * * *

  fn1 General Santa Anna was captured by the most famous of all Texans, Samuel Houston. Santa Anna later became President of Mexico.

  32

  Among the Mau Mau

  And under the totem poles – the ancient terror.

  – LOUIS MACNEICE

  GREENE LEFT JOHN Sutro to ‘start’ the Anglo-Texan Society because he was flying to Kenya the next day to report on the Mau Mau rebellion for the Sunday Times. To Catherine he wrote: ‘My plane leaves at 3.50 and I get to Nairobi at 2.30 p.m. tomorrow … Did you see my Texas letter in the Times? I never thought I’d catch them.’1

  Nairobi did not appeal to Greene – like Kuala Lumpur. It was the seat of government and he hated it: ‘This is the dreariest of dreary holes and I long to get out of it.’2 He wanted desperately to get into the field where settlers were fighting Mau Mau, but for the first week of his month-long stay he was tied up seeing British officials. He needed their help if he was to arrange his trip up-country, but he was bored: ‘Lunch with Brigadier Gibson; Dinner with Father Tasell who talked & talked for an hour. Very tired.’3 As always he was picking up information, using his powers of observation and attention to detail (he never seemed to take notes) to present a faithful record of the facts of the case. He was so famous that everyone wanted to discuss the conditions up-country and the Mau Mau with him: the editor of the local African weekly; Anderson, owner of the daily newspaper the Standard; Michael Blundell, political leader of the settlers; the Commissioner of Police O’Borke (‘very friendly & helpful’). Among others Greene saw his old college friend Sir Robert Scott, then High Commissioner for East Africa (whom he spoke well about in Ways of Escape). He was invited to call on Scott, though they had lost touch for thirty years:

  It was indeed Robert. He sat in the enormous gleaming room completely unchanged, Gaelic, dark, brooding, somehow nervous, behind his great bare desk, fingering a pipe. At Oxford he had always fingered a pipe as though it kept him by a finger’s breadth in touch with reality, because the odd thing about this heavy blunt figure, who always seemed to speak with some reluctance, after a long pondering, with a gruff Scottish accent, was that at any moment he was liable to take flight into the irrelevant, irrational world of fantasy … For instance there had been the affair of the young barmaid of the Lamb and Flag in St Giles’s whom we all agreed resembled in her strange beauty the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.4

  He wrote in his diary: ‘26 August 1953. Robert Scott – unchanged – the bore he always was. Bare office. Adoring elderly secretary. A long way from the Lamb and Flag barmaid.’

  And so it went on: ‘To Gov. House for dinner with another Balliol man, Sir Frederick Crawford … Botched lunch with Michael Blundell. Vasey Member for Finance. Metheson to dinner at his home with Campbell of Time Life. Grim wife like a gypsy & grimmer mother who was either drunk or mad.’5 The next day, Friday, he met General Sir George Erskine, in charge of the army (‘commander-in-chief nice and cooperative’) at eleven and that evening he met Group-Captain Ayers: ‘to fix air stuff’.6 A letter to Catherine enlarged on what Greene wanted: ‘I’ve hired a car and a driver so as to be reasonably independent and the two points of real interest during that time seem to be a stay in a mission near Fort Hall in the Kikuyu Reserve, and doing night flying near Nyeri over the Aberdare mountains, spotting gang fires. I hope this comes off.’7 There were Mau Mau gangs in the Aberdares and Nyeri was one of the areas where they were most active. Sighting gang fires would indicate a Mau Mau hideout, which would be radioed to the British troops operating in the bush below.

  Just before he left to go up-country, Greene wrote a very direct letter about Kenya:

  This is a dreary & dull spot & my time is taken up by listening to people talk to me from the C. in C. (a very nice man) down. Every day I feel more pro-Kikuyu & more anti-settlers who many of them are a kind of white Mau Mau. On Monday I’m moving off into the Kikuyu reserve with a car … Kitui – Fort Hall – Nyeri – the names won’t convey much … Now I’ve got to go off to discuss my programme with the man in charge of the R.A.F. here – over whiskies. Priests, soldiers, policemen, government officials, settlers (all but the last quite sympathetic characters) leave one little time but the total effect so boring. The settlers make such a howl & yet only about 20 have been murdered: they ought to try Malaya for a change – or Indo-China. A tremendous show of revolvers which they continually mislay to the benefit of the Mau Mau.8

  Greene’s sympathies were always on the side of the persecuted, the underdog, but sometimes victims changed.
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  The Mau Mau was a secret insurgent organisation formed from the Kikuyu, the largest tribal group in Kenya, and bound by oath to expel white settlers by force. In 1952 the Mau Mau began to take reprisals against the Europeans, especially in the ‘White Highlands’, and a time of terror began for visitors and settlers alike. The Mau Mau killed not only white settlers but hundreds of loyal Kikuyu, although it was from the ranks of the poorest Kikuyu that they drew their support. As the leader of the Mau Mau, the self-styled Field-Marshal Sir Dedan Kimathi, said in a letter quoted by Greene in his article: ‘I am explaining clearly that there is no Mau Mau but the poor man is the Mau Mau and if so, it is only Mau Mau which can finishing Mau Mau, and not bombs and other weapons.’9

  ‘General’ Kimathi was a simple, vain and cruel man and, as Greene described:

  He was fond of writing letters, to the police officers, district officers, even to the Press (signed sometimes ‘Askari of the Liberation’). They varied from absurd claims to be head of a Defence Council covering the whole of Africa, from touches of pathetic vanity when he refers to his tours of Africa and Palestine (who knows the satisfaction he may get from such dreams cooped up with his followers in the caves and hideouts of the Aberdare mountains?) to moments of moving simplicity that recall the last letters of Sacco and Vanzetti.10

  For his followers, Kimathi was charismatic and a remarkable orator, who inspired tremendous personal loyalty and maintained discipline among his troops by the gun or by garrotting them. When ‘General’ Kago disagreed with Kimathi’s proposal that women coming to the camp as food carriers should stay and become sexual partners, Kimathi had him arrested, tried and sentenced to death for questioning his will. Kago would have died on the spot but for the fact that men loyal to him slashed the rope and killed the two hangmen.