The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  As we walked from the hotel to his home, the rain fell heavily upon the black umbrella which he held high above my head. He explained that since it had rained for three days it would be fine tomorrow. It was.

  The Avenue Pasteur, less impressive than its name, was a modern block of flats: his name on a plain brass plate was one of many. In the small entrance hall, a mirror stretched across one wall, reflecting my face as I stared into it. Greene, a man with little personal vanity, ignored it. He got into the elevator.

  The main room of his flat was modest in size, thirty feet by twelve. There was a bamboo sofa and two bamboo chairs. Above the sofa was an abstract (flowers) given to Greene by Fidel Castro. White bookshelves filled two walls, and on another wall was a muffin-coloured print of Lunardi making his ascent in a balloon in 1789. Near the window a table performed the dual function of dining table and writing desk. There was a black-and-white television set, used mostly to watch the 7.45 p.m. news from Paris. There were some personal touches – eight pictures but no photographs – and if our living rooms are places which reflect our personalities, was Greene’s an accident or a calculated revelation of character?

  I am inclined to think it was neither – just a statement of what its inhabitant needed in order to live and to work. None of the trappings proclaim a successful writer, merely the basic necessities for writing and living – nothing superfluous, a statement of fact. As Greene wrote of Scobie’s room in The Heart of the Matter: ‘to a stranger it would have appeared a bare, uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home. Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation … Scobie built his home by a process of reduction’.

  Writing at his dual-purpose table, Graham Greene faced into the light through a window which shows a fine view of the marina, a few yachts in the winter sun (it had stopped raining) and on the far side of the basin the low-slung, immensely powerful sixteenth-century Fort Carré, mountain-solid.

  No sooner had we sat down than Greene wanted to start our interview (a desire to put unpleasant chores behind him). He offered me a drink and I asked him to mix me his own special brand of Martini. After this there was nothing to be done but set up my tape-recorder (I never relied solely on memory) and begin my questions. Greene’s face closed down.

  As an interviewer I find that it is often the subject’s face that has a significance almost as great as his words. From our first meeting, I was struck by the fact that Greene’s was a truly mysterious face, his looks can change so much. The front view of him is strong and still. What strikes you are his slightly bulging, blue, speculative eyes, the eyebrows raised in a perpetual questioning. It is a handsome, compelling face, with a stern strength which Anthony Palliser caught in his study for the National Portrait Gallery, but let him turn sideways and his face in profile has changed again. One notices a small up-turned blue-veined nose. The bags under his eyes are ‘like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life’, and there are deep lines running from nose to chin. But when he smiles or laughs he becomes an excited boy, lifting himself out of a trough of sadness – something recalled, a surprise pondered upon, and his face is transformed.

  On other occasions I was to meet a different Greene. When staring at the ground, he can look positively wooden – a hopeless emptiness at the core, a haunted look – and his mood can be intimidating by reason of your sense of his withdrawal. Sometimes it is as if he were deaf and did not hear. He stonewalls and does not reply to your question or to the implied suggestion behind your words. Yet in retrospect, I think when he does not respond or his responses are brief, the questions disturbing, this is the time he is listening most intently.

  During the following three days, Graham sat quite still on the sofa for long periods, except when I pressed him too hard (‘You are grilling me, Norman’) and then he would lean back hard in his chair, looking hunted.

  The first afternoon rolled on: I would ask another question and he would, almost always, answer briskly and without any evident emotion, but when his friend Yvonne came quietly into the flat with her dog, Sandy, and offered us drinks, he came quickly alive: his pleasure was sparkling, the interview could be terminated and he could relax into friendship. Later, Yvonne got me on my own and said, ‘You know you mustn’t be disturbed. Graham knows he has to be questioned but it is painful for him.’

  On the morning of the last day of my visit, Graham was excited, perhaps because it was 10 a.m. and he felt the scrutiny was almost over, but also because he had had two dreams in the night. He began the conversation at once in high glee and I was conscious of that curious Greene accent, a kind of gurgle in the throat. Words like ‘bad’ are pronounced ‘bed’, hand ‘hend’, background ‘beckground’, attic ‘ettic’, and such words bitten off, the jaws grinding them out:

  I had two dreams last night. Both of them were about ideas for novels and I felt very relieved for having ideas for novels. The first one I’ve forgotten completely. But the second one was about a rather odd house, rather ruined house and the story moved from room to room, each room contributing to the story, until the reader became aware that the attic was never visited. So in the final chapter the attic was visited and the attic was full of old newspapers with headlines and those headlines were going to be very significant and would give the final gist of the novel.

  We spoke that morning about his religion and his 1949 visit to Padre Pro who reportedly had stigmata. In Malcolm Muggeridge’s diaries, he recorded how Greene had just returned from Italy that year and was full of his having seen Padre Pro, describing his stigmata ‘in his usual lurid way’. According to Muggeridge, Graham had told him that ‘miracles were done constantly by Pro’ (though Graham denies this) and that ‘heavenly and devilish forces in creation were now exceptionally active in preparation for busting up the universe by means of the hydrogen bomb’.1 Certainly, there is no doubt of the impact made on Greene by his meeting with Pro. Discussing this thirty-four years after the event, I found him still exercising his characteristic sense of recall.

  On going to Italy in 1949, Graham first had an audience with the Pope in Rome and then travelled to the Franciscan monastery where Pro was saying Mass. He spoke to me about him in some awe:

  The Vatican disapproved of him and so he had to say Mass in this Franciscan monastery on a side altar at five o’clock in the morning so as to discourage pilgrims. So we went and there were … about a dozen women waiting outside … The doors opened and what surprised me was that they went straight to the confessional and not to the altar where he was going to say Mass. Once you got there you were supposed to stay on without breakfast and Pro stayed on and heard all of their confessions.

  And the curious thing was that I’d been told that it was a very long Mass. He spoke it clearly (he didn’t gabble it like some priests do) and I thought it wouldn’t take more than 55 minutes, and then finally we came out and found that it had taken two hours. I couldn’t see where I had lost the sense of time.

  I can recall the stigmata, the dried blood sticking out. It would dry and then it would bleed again and then dry again. He also had to have his feet padded because they also bled. So the blood dried and then it starts again and then there will be a period when it gets rather old. I was as near to him as I am now to you and those hands looked terrible, sort of circular pieces of dried blood.

  Normally he hid this by wearing mittens but at Mass you aren’t allowed to wear anything on your hands. And so he would try continually to pull down his sleeves to hide it but the sleeve would slip back.

  I asked him if he had met Pro personally and he answered: ‘No. I got a message and was invited to meet him but I said, “No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to change my life by meeting a saint.” I felt that there was a good chance that he was one. He had a great peace about him.’

  There was one other moment, in our three days of talks, when Greene became excited. I asked him if he was still hounded by God (as is his atheist character Bendrix at the conclusion of The End
of the Affair), and he answered: ‘I hope so. I hope so. I hope He is still dogging my footsteps.’ Bendrix, in some senses, reminds me powerfully of Greene. He told me that that novel had its beginnings in a phrase from Baron von Hugel and he quoted: ‘If we will not own it as a means, it will grip us as our End.’ God grips the reprobate Bendrix at the end. It is a desperate fight. And it comes about quite casually when he discovers that ordinary corrupt human love has not finally satisfied his mistress, Sarah, and he faces up to the extraordinary possibilities of sainthood. Greene read the relevant passage to me from the French version, translating into English as he went. His reading was filled with unusual emotion:

  For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you – with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell – can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint.

  We can see that even Bendrix is under the sway of what he cannot control. He may still mouth his hatred of God at the end of the novel; he may still speak of foiling God’s plans – ‘I’ll rob Him of what He wants in me’ – yet he has begun to enter a phase of life which borders on the miraculous.

  Listening to Greene, I was deeply moved, partly because Greene himself was moved. I felt that he was approaching Cardinal Newman’s notion that God has a special commitment for each of us, though we may not know what the mission is, or the way God may approach us. And I felt that in his private moments Greene, often in perplexity, must wrestle with the problems of mission.

  *

  The phone rang. It was a call from Switzerland and while he took it I looked round his flat searching for some impression which I could carry away with me, something reflecting the room and the man, and I seized upon a tall cylindrical wastepaper basket beside his table. It was encircled by brass bands and topped by a secure and heavily padded black lid. It, at least, made a statement.

  There was one other impressive object, so tiny as to be almost ignored. It was a carving, a 3,000-year-old piece of stone no larger than a small hand. It had a fat, legless body and a sombre inward-looking face. The face was a mask of composure, and there was within a knowledge which was deeply disturbing. The same carving appears in the portrait of Greene in the National Portrait Gallery.

  I left Antibes feeling that I had met Graham Greene to a limited degree on his home ground, but I still had a long way to go to an understanding of him – a distance of over eighty years.

  PART 1

  Childhood

  1

  Beginnings – Comfort and Fear

  Childhood knows the human heart.

  – EDGAR ALLAN POE

  THE BERKHAMSTED GAZETTE and Hemel Hempstead Observer of 8 October 1904 carried the following announcement: ‘On October 2, at St John’s, Berkhamsted, the wife of Charles H. Greene [was delivered] of a son.’ The second of October was a Sunday; the weather, after a cold and cloudy September, was fair; and according to his mother’s entry in a sixpenny booklet entitled ‘All About Baby’ (produced by Steedman’s of Walworth, Surrey, who manufactured soothing powders for children cutting their teeth, and illustrated with line drawings of some plump and rather sinister-looking young children), the boy was born at 10.20 a.m. and weighed 7½ lbs. He was the fourth child of Charles Henry Greene and his wife Marion Raymond Greene. According to his younger sister, Elisabeth Dennys, it had been a difficult birth: ‘My mother had had a number of miscarriages and she had been appalled to find herself pregnant again.’ She was to bear two more children.

  The future novelist was born into three small worlds – the town of Berkhamsted, one hour north of London by train, the family home attached to the school, and Berkhamsted School itself – the last being a world into which he was gradually absorbed. His father, who was thirty-nine, was second master at the school and housemaster of St John’s house, and his mother, then thirty-two, apart from looking after her family, was responsible for the catering at St John’s where Graham Greene was born and where, at first, he lay, ‘Behind the tight pupils/That have never opened on the world of chairs and walls’.1

  On Sunday 13 November, five weeks later, the boy was baptised in the school Chapel by the headmaster, Dr Thomas Charles Fry, he whom the school’s historian was to call ‘the magnificent’ and whom the baby he baptised was, much later, to describe as ‘my father’s sinister, sadistic predecessor’. The Chapel, dedicated in 1895, cost between £7,000 and £8,000, paid for by Edward Greene, Dr Fry’s father-in-law, uncle to Charles Henry Greene and owner of the Greene brewery at Bury St Edmunds.2 It had floors of polished marble and mosaic, electric lighting and seating for 320 people. Peter Quennell in The Marble Foot described it as ‘repulsive red-brick … approached by a range of ill-proportioned cloisters’, but the Chapel marked the beginning of a generous patronage to the school which was continued by Edward Greene’s nephew (also called Edward Greene), the brother of Charles Henry Greene.

  The baby was called Henry after his father and Graham after his uncle Sir Graham Greene and Graham Balfour, a descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson, his mother being first cousin to Stevenson. The small group assembled for the baptism must have been rather lost in the Chapel. One of the baby’s godfathers was Colonel Henry Wright. Colonel Wright’s wife, the baby’s great-aunt Maud, had introduced Robert Louis Stevenson to his ‘first great love, Mrs Sitwell’.3 The Wrights lived at 11 Belgrave Road, and on visits to London the Greene family usually had lunch with them. Afterwards, the Colonel would produce ‘a vast chamberpot’ from the sideboard cupboard (for the relief of his guests, presumably): ‘a relic of Victorian manners’.4 He was not present at the christening, Charles Henry Greene being proxy for him. The other godfather was a Mr Herbert, who was to be housemaster of St John’s at Berkhamsted when Henry Graham Greene was a boarder there.5 Henry Graham’s mother noted in her Steedman’s booklet that, among others, her daughter Molly and her sons Herbert and Raymond, as well as Mrs Fry, her sister-in-law Alice, and Mr Simpson, a master at the school, were present.

  Henry Graham Greene was later to write: ‘Everything one was to become must have been there, for better or worse … Here in Berkhamsted was the first mould of which the shape was to be endlessly reproduced’.6 The family influences (and it was a family proud of its traditions) were of course represented by the parents, Charles and Marion Greene, and their children. Marion had been a Greene before her marriage, coming from the Bury St Edmunds side of the family, and was her husband’s first cousin once removed. The baby’s Aunt Alice was a progressive and must have been on leave from the school she ran in South Africa. She was a friend of General Smuts and Olive Schreiner. Maud Wright, and Dr Fry’s wife, Julia, originally a Greene, completed the family group. Graham Greene’s mother was naturally to be an important influence in his life; his father, Dr Fry, Mr Herbert and Mr Simpson were representatives of the school that was to have such a traumatic effect on him; the literary heritage was there in the relationship with Robert Louis Stevenson; and the school and town were the physical settings of his formative years.

  Behind the Greenes present at the Chapel stood the long line of Greenes living and dead, who by their existence alone would create in the boy his strong sense of what it meant to belong to that family and against whom he was later to rebel. This strong consciousness of belonging to a family with a long lineage is described by Graham’s elder brother Raymond, in an unpublished typescript, as being that of a typical English middle-class family: ‘within our knowledge no foreign blood has contributed to theirs since the Norman Conquest’.fn1 The Greenes were varied in character, ambitions with degrees of success, proud of their history, which included banking, brewing and trading with offshoots into education, literature and the arts, plus a certain amount of real eccentricity. Benjamin Greene III, born in 1780, was to found the Greene King brewery at Bury St Edmunds and bought sugar estates in the West Indies: he and his brother John married two sisters, daughters of
Elizabeth Carleton Smith, heiress of the banker Zachariah Carleton. Benjamin Buck Greene (son of Benjamin Greene III) was to become a director and later Governor of the Bank of England (1850–75). The widow of Benjamin Buck Greene’s son, Frederick (born 1841), one Lucy Greene, who lived in Jersey, would ‘summon her cousin Maud Churchill Greene’ to come and attend her whenever she was ill. She never paid her and left half a million pounds, not to Maud, but to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

  *

  Beyond the ‘world of chairs and walls’ which was the baby’s home society was Edwardian, though only by three years, Queen Victoria having died in 1901. On the whole, Victorian standards and conditions still prevailed, particularly at Berkhamsted School as we shall see, though it was the beginning of a period of change. There were already electric trams running in the town and the Berkhamsted Gazette concluded that local workmen were drinking less because they were carried with such rapidity in the trams past places of temptation on their way home from work. By the time Henry Graham Greene was six there was a cinema in most towns in England; when he was ten the First World War began; when he was thirteen there was the Russian revolution; when he was twenty-two there was the General Strike in Britain. In the year of his birth 5,000 Frenchmen attended a demonstration to commemorate the second anniversary of the death of Émile Zola and a small notice in The Times reported that Charlotte Brontë’s husband (she had died fifty years before) was ‘still living, in honoured old age, in an Irish village’.

  In the same year, Kipling’s Traffic and Discoveries, H. G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, John Galsworthy’s The Island Pharisees and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo were published, and Belgian atrocities in the Congo, which Conrad had written about some years earlier in Heart of Darkness, were still inspiring letters to The Times. Conrad was to influence Graham Greene as a writer. D. H. Lawrence was nineteen that year, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were twenty-two. On the day before Graham Greene was born, Captain Scott, still six years from his fatal expedition to the South Pole, was at Balmoral Castle showing lantern slides and delivering a lecture to King Edward VII on the work of the Antarctic Expedition.