Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Preface
Our Man in Antibes
PART 1 – Childhood
1 Beginnings – Comfort and Fear
2 Personal Map
3 Charles and Marion Greene – and Dr Fry
4 The First World War and the School
5 The Greening of Greene
6 Psychoanalysed
7 Realism and Fantasie – a Reconciliation
PART 2 – Oxford
8 Freshman at Balliol
9 The Art of Spying
10 Apprenticeship
11 Love and Death – a Flirtation
12 A Seminal Year
PART 3 – Collector of Souls
13 ‘Some Ardent Catholic’
14 The World Well Lost
15 Late Summer at Ambervale
PART 4 – Conversion
16 In Search of a Career
17 Sub-editing in Nottingham
18 Thomas the Doubter
19 Between the Tides
PART 5 – London
20 The Times
21 The General Strike
22 ‘The beastly Episode’
23 In Hospital and Suspected Epilepsy
24 Marriage at Last
PART 6 – Battlefield
25 ‘Pussy’ and ‘Tiger’ and The Man Within
26 A False Start
27 Down and Out at Chipping Campden
28 Stamboul Train/Orient Express
29 The Book Society and the J. B. Priestley Affair
30 1933
31 It’s a Battlefield
32 ‘The skeletons of other people’s people’
33 England Made Me – and the Black Sheep of the Family
PART 7 – Liberia to North Side
34 Champagne and Fate
35 Whisky and Epsom Salts
36 14 North Side
37 The Pleasure Dome
38 Night and Day
39 Brighton Rock
PART 8 – Mexico
40 ‘I want to get out of this bloody country’
41 The Lawless Roads
42 The Power and the Glory
Picture Section
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright
About the Book
Unquestionably one of the greatest novelists of his time, Graham Greene had always guarded his privacy, remaining aloof, mysterious and unpredictable. Nonetheless, he took the surprising step of allowing Norman Sherry complete access to letter and diaries, and gave his consent to this full and frank biography in three volumes - the first of which takes Greene's life up to the beginning of the Second World War.
At the heart of the story lies a remarkable series of letters Greene wrote to his wife, Vivien, for whose sake he became a Catholic. They show us an unknown, younger Greene, impassioned and romantic. Sherry also recounts in fascinating detail how Greene struggled to turn himself into a novelist and learn his craft, and follows his subject's pre-war footsteps to West Africa and Mexico, where he was able to penetrate far into the strange and alarming territory that Greene has made his own. The book that emerges is without doubt one of the most revealing literary biographies of the decade.
About the Author
Norman Sherry, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, was already an accomplished biographer when Graham Greene, having read Professor Sherry’s work on Joseph Conrad, asked a mutual friend to introduce them. Greene was impressed by Professor Sherry’s method of ‘literary detection’, and their meeting resulted in Greene asking Professor Sherry to write his authorised biography, an exhausting but fascinating task which has resulted in The Life of Graham Greene, Volumes 1, 2 and 3.
Professor Sherry’s books on Conrad, Conrad’s Eastern World, Conrad’s Western World, and Conrad and His World, are, thirty years after their publication, still quoted by scholars as the standard texts on Joseph Conrad. Professor Sherry honed his skills as a biographer with Charlotte and Emily Brontë and Jane Austen.
Professor Sherry received an Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Life of Graham Greene, Volume One: 1904–1939. The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Two: 1939–1955 was designated as ‘One of the best eleven books of 1995’ by the editorial staff of the New York Times Book Review, who confirmed their admiration by featuring Volume Two in Books of the Century: A Hundred Years of Authors, Ideas, and Literature (1998).
Illustrations
1 Portrait of Graham Greene by Bassano, 1939
2 Graham’s father
3 Graham’s mother
4 Graham, aged 9, and Hugh, aged 3
5 Graham holding a ball
6 Graham in a goat-cart on Brighton sea front
7 Graham with his brothers and sisters, c. 1916
8 Graham outside the potting shed, 1916
9 Graham and his parents in fancy dress group
10 Dr Fry: headmaster at Berkhamsted School, 1888–1910
11 Charles Greene at his desk
12 Housemaster Dr Simpson
13 Berkhamsted School
14 The canal at Berkhamsted
15 A school production of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’
16 The funeral of the young pilot, Wimbush, March 1918
17 Summer term, St John’s, 1920
18 St John’s gym VIII
19 A school production of Lost Silk Hat, 1921
20 Kenneth Richmond, the psychoanalyst
21 Kenneth Bell, Graham’s tutor at Balliol
22 Father Trollope
23 Graham in thoughtful mood
24 Ivy House, Nottingham
25 Gwen Howell, Graham’s first love
26 Vivien, aged 17
27 Graham, aged 21
28 Volunteers during the General Strike, 1926
29 Police dispersing rioters, 1926
30 Exploring the Amazon by hydroplane
31 ‘Shock troops’ at The Times awaiting orders
32 Graham and Vivien’s wedding, 1927
33 Running from a shower of confetti
34 Graham and Vivien at Little Orchard
35 Subeditors’ room at The Times, 1928
36 Little Orchard, 1930
37 Police charge hunger marchers, 1932
38 Father Christie
39 Lady Ottoline Morrell
40 Edith Sitwell, Neil Porter and Sengerphone
41 & 42 Barbara and Graham Greene
43 Passengers bound for Sierra Leone, 1935
44 Graham and Barbara on board the David Livingstone
45 Freetown, Sierra Leone
46 Graham in Liberia
47 Crossing a rope bridge
48 Graham speaking to tribal leaders
49 The village of Pagan Mosambolahun
50 Duogobmai: The Horrible Village
51 The Big Bush Devil’s hut
52 Crossing the St Paul’s river in Liberia
53 Dr Harley and his children
54 A prisoner awaiting trial in Tapee-Ta
55 Filming Brighton Rock
56 Richard Attenborough and Carol Marsh in Brighton Rock
57 Shirley Temple in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
58 Geoffrey Wylde sketching Graham Greene, 1937
59 Graham Greene in his St James’s Street flat
60 The brothels in Matamoras Street
61 The Ruiz Cano at Frontera
62 A street in Yajalo
n, Northern Chiapas
63 Astrid and Lala Rasmussen
64 Frau Rasmussen with her two daughters
65 Ernest Raiteke
66 Astrid Rasmussen
67 The German photographer in Yajalon whom Greene met in 1938
68 Women bring religious articles to be burnt
69 The smouldering remains of religious statues
70 Tomas Garrido Canabal
71 A priest executed outside his church
72 Shuttered Yajalon church
73 Procession of saints in Chamula, Chiapas
74 & 75 The execution of Padre Pro
76 Giant crosses of the Chamula Indians
77 Graham Greene, c. 1939
78 Vivien, a few years later
LINE ILLUSTRATIONS
The Star, 18 January 1921
Graham and Vivien’s secret code
Greene’s drawing of his stitches after his appendix was removed
‘Not tears I give …’ (from letter 7 January 1927)
Marriage Service sheet
Cutting from the News Chronicle, 7 January 1935, with a picture of Greene and his cousin Barbara leaving for Liberia
Map of Liberia
Visiting card for Col Elwood Davis, Liberian Army
Postcard from Vivien to Ben Husch giving directions to 14 North Side, Clapham Common
Cover of the first issue of Night and Day by Feliks Topolski
Map of Graham Greene’s Brighton
Sketch of Greene by Geoffrey Wylde
The Blue Book
Map of Tabasco and Chiapas
Greene’s drawing of Don Pelito
for Elisabeth Dennys
with love
Many years will go by. Many great years. I shall then no longer be alive. There will be no return to the times of our fathers and grandfathers. This would, indeed, be both undesirable and unnecessary. But at last there will appear once more things that have long lain dormant: noble, creative and great things. It will be a time of final accounting … Think of me then.
– BORIS PASTERNAK
Preface
This biography had its origins in a list which Graham Greene kept – and still keeps – of the books he reads. Against my second book on Joseph Conrad, Conrad’s Western World, he had put in July 1971 two ticks, indicating special approval. Three years later the journalist William Igoe told me, over lunch, ‘There is a man who is a legend in his own time and who admires your work.’ That man was Graham Greene. When he was next in London we were introduced. I did not know then that he was under some pressure from his family and friends to appoint a biographer, but during lunch, while I was still fascinated by his singular smile and eyes so blue that they gave off a curious sense of blindness, he suddenly said, ‘You wouldn’t be able to write about me as you wrote about Conrad – you wouldn’t be able to get into Saigon’ (the setting of The Quiet American). I told him that after a ten-year stint on Conrad I was looking for another subject and he immediately backed off: ‘Oh I wouldn’t like anyone looking into my life.’ Then he added with what I am sure was the instinctive decision of a novelist, ‘If I were to have my biography written, I would choose you,’ and later, as we parted in Brook Street, he made up his mind. I was to be his biographer, and we shook hands on it.
I think he thought I would be suitable because I had shown an objective approach to Conrad and because I had vacated the library to seek my subject in the countries in which he had lived and travelled. He was fascinated by my journeys to the Far East and especially by my discoveries in West Africa about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – a part of the world he knew well from personal experience. But he still had doubts and only days later wrote to me from the Royal Albion Hotel in Brighton (where he went when he had a writer’s ‘block’) asking me not to interview certain women he had known. It was only very gradually that a mutual trust developed and I think it was expressed when we were crossing St James’s Street in London and narrowly escaped being knocked down by a taxi. He said, ‘You almost lost your subject there’, and I replied, ‘That’s not half as bad as losing your biographer.’ He laughed and I knew we had become friends.
If it is the aim of a biographer not only to trace the life and career of his subject but also, so far as possible, to penetrate the mystery of his character and personality, then there could be few more difficult subjects than Graham Greene. He is noted for his determination to protect his privacy and to keep secret what he wishes to keep secret. My doubts about being able to penetrate the personal and private world of Greene were increased when I discovered a letter written to a friend in 1977 which stated succinctly: ‘When I read Christopher Sykes’s Evelyn Waugh I felt I had done right in agreeing to Sherry undertaking me. He has the great advantage of not knowing me.’ I had to cancel out that ‘advantage’ by embarking on a search for Graham Greene much more extensive than my search for Joseph Conrad. For one thing I was never able to interview Conrad, but I was able to interview Graham Greene. He was always willing to accommodate me, though sometimes the interviews were uncomfortable and sometimes unproductive exercises for both of us. I recall the occasion at his sister’s home in Sussex, when Greene’s nephew, Nicholas Dennys, told me of how, on coming downstairs from his bedroom, he had met his uncle and caught on Graham Greene’s face a look of terror: ‘He thought the footsteps on the stairs were yours, Norman, and that an interview was to be undergone.’ Yet, though he never enquired beforehand what questions I would raise, and would answer briefly and at once – ‘I will never lie to you Norman, but I will not answer all your questions’, he said – I knew that he was re-presenting the pattern of his life as he saw it. I had to widen the perspective.
I gave up my position as Head of the Department of English at the University of Lancaster and began seeking exchange fellowships at American universities in order to research the Greene archives in Boston College Library, Georgetown University Library in Washington D.C., and the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. There was a vast cache of letters from Graham to his mother to be found in the vaults of a London bank in Fleet Street. I visited Berkhamsted School, where he was born and where his father was headmaster for seventeen years; there were many Old Boys, contemporary with Greene, not all of whom lived in England, who had to be found, interviewed, and their memories recorded. Discovering the originals of those boys who tormented him at school led me to Malaya, for I had to find the source of those experiences still painful to Greene. Always interviewing, I visited the large clan of Greene cousins. Graham’s wife, Vivien, was especially helpful, while the book could not have reached this state of completion without Graham’s sister Elisabeth’s help and the willing assistance of his late brothers Dr Raymond Greene and Sir Hugh Greene.
Greene once called me his doppelgänger and indeed I had to become that, following his tracks in many different parts of the world. (He once sent me a large map on which the places he had visited were underlined like a red rash in every continent, with the words, ‘You are my biographer, you date my journeys’.) Risking disease and death as he had done, I went to those places and in most cases found people Greene had met and put into his novels. I made journeys to Mexico (where I contracted dysentery in exactly the same mountain village, living in the same boarding house as he had done), Haiti, Argentina, Paraguay and Panama. In Liberia, a week after I had left that most corrupt of countries, during a revolution led by Sergeant Doe (now General and Head of State), the previous corrupt leader was murdered and his supporters shot or had their throats cut. I had only recently interviewed some of these men. In the interior, the stone age villages that Greene had seen in 1935 in his heroic march through that country were unchanged.
The journeys Greene made, I made, for it was a promise I had given him on our first meeting. I had to experience, as far as possible, what my subject experienced. I have not, any more than he has, reached the end of that experience, but it has taken me, as it has taken him, from the small town of Berkhamsted throu
gh the changes of history and some exotic and dangerous parts of the world, and meetings with some very extraordinary people, including one with the original of the Judas figure of The Power and the Glory, whom I tracked down in Mexico.
What stands out particularly in my meetings with Greene was his charging me, as we walked across Berkhamsted Common, that I had asked his friends for the names of his enemies. I replied that no one could succeed in life without making enemies – it was in the nature of the human condition. He countered that he did not live and work in an academic institution; he mixed only with friends. But that night, back in London and before dinner, in his room in the Ritz (an astonishingly small room) Graham, shaving, looked through his mirror at the recumbent Hugh lying on Greene’s bed and said: ‘Norman wants the names of some enemies – what’s the name of the man I disliked in Sierra Leone during the war?’ and both brothers there and then made me out a list.
Greene may not approve of my judgment of him, but that is inevitable: ‘’Tis with our judgments as with our watches, none/Go just alike, yet each believes his own’, and a biographer’s task is an impossible one, biography an imperfect genre.
This book is an imperfect report – how can one enter into the life of another person and re-create the intimate sensations of his experience? There are mysteries in every life and I am especially sensible, in Graham Greene’s, of information sought but not found, sources untapped. I have tried to make some inroads, though as John Keats wrote, ‘A man’s life of any worth is a continuous allegory and very few eyes can see the mystery.’ There lies the hope – to be those eyes; to lift the stone and let in light.
N.S.
San Antonio, Texas
1988
Our Man in Antibes
When in the winter of 1983 I was to visit Graham Greene in Antibes, he told me over the phone, in his precise and practical way, that there would be no heating in the small hotel near his home, that I would need a hot-water bottle, and that the cost would be only 127 francs a day. He was then seventy-nine and he still had a youthfulness about him, especially when a look of excitement appeared in his eyes, and there was something disarming about his manner.
I phoned Graham from the hotel and he said he would come and pick me up. When I got downstairs he was in the tiny office listening to the manageress. He was wearing a raincoat with the collar turned up, hands in his pockets. It was difficult to believe he was rising eighty.
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 1