The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  On Sunday 10 November 1918, James Wilson recorded in his diary: ‘Today everybody is expectant of peace soon. It’s only a matter of hours, as the Kaiser and Staff and Crown Prince have all abdicated. Charles preached … I put five pence in the bag.’ The following day he wrote: ‘Armistice signed at 11 o’clock! At twelve o’clock as soon as Charles announced on the terrace it was signed, the flag was hoisted and we all sang “God Save the King”. Then everyone went out, capless’ – a punishable offence.

  Elisabeth Greene was four at the time. She could remember the noise of the boys in the quad, their milling about and the shouting. The story prized in the family ever since was that this serious little girl suddenly spoke, above the noise, ‘Is this what they call peace?’

  Charles took an astonishing stand on Armistice Day. So strongly did he feel about the five million dead allied soldiers that he did not give the school a free holiday. He argued that ‘We simply must go on. Now is the time for effort: now is the time for the coming of the world.’ And thus he found that he had unexpectedly a revolution on his hands. James Wilson wrote in his diary: ‘… greatest rag of all. 8.30 p.m. in prep, a huge mob of Inns of Court O.T.C. and W.A.A.C.S. [Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps], burst into the old hall of the school. [The gates] had been opened for them from the inside and [they] scragged [roughed up] Cox, called for Charles to scrag him. The Inns of Court dragged all the chaps out into a huge procession along the High Street. Charles absolutely convulsed with rage.’

  Claud Cockburn remembered that night sixty years afterwards with great gusto. Because Charles Greene refused to give the school a holiday on Armistice Day, certain Berkhamsted prefects, led by a student leader called Webb, plotted with the local O.T.C. to break into the school:

  It was my first experience in revolution … for some reason, by nature of the fact of it being my bath night, I could get into a section of the building beyond the hall where the baths were. And I was to throw the key of the gates, which were heavily locked, down to the Sergeant Major or some blasted man. I did all this. And I can remember now sitting there – it was one of those foggy nights in Berkhamsted, fog rising from the canal and so on, and suddenly we heard the roar of the distant troops coming up the road. Everybody was quite confident because they couldn’t get in. And then in they burst, and we were all sitting at prep, in the Great Hall at about 7.00 p.m. So suddenly all these drunken troops and women came surging in and were planning to throw Charles Greene into the canal … and Greene and second master Cox appeared at the end of that little passage, and defended the door, and Greene was persuaded to retire to his study. Cox stood at the door, and drunken troops joined in with the students, and we surged out of school, and marched through the streets of Berkhamsted, and I can remember to this day walking down Berkhamsted High Street and I took off my shoes in order to beat on the drum with them. We then occupied the local cinema and we sprang onto the stage and sang songs and yelled and shouted. And at last the troops retired, and we, rather bedraggled, returned after this enormous elation, this tremendous night, and suddenly realised that we had to face reality. And the reality was Charles Greene who was sitting at the big desk in the Great Hall, and said, ‘You’re expelled, you’re expelled’, one after another. He expelled 122 of us – ‘This abominable thing that has happened is Bolshevism.’ And so we all went to bed expelled. I knew the awful fact that my father thought expulsion from school was an awful thing to happen, so I was quite worried in the morning. We were all brought down to the Great Hall and given a tremendous lecture by Charles Greene.

  And because it had been a night on which he had been expelled, Claud Cockburn could even remember Charles Greene’s characteristic rhetoric on that occasion: ‘This is one more exhibition of the spirit of Bolshevism which is creeping across Europe. Over there in Moscow, there sits Lenin, there sits Trotsky, there they are. The spirit of Bolshevism and Atheism is creeping across Europe. It is breaking out all over. Look at Lenin, look at Trotsky, and look at you. It may reach our shores at any minute, and here right in Berkhamsted School we have the deathwatch beetle already in the beams above us, and the prefects, even our own prefects, betray us from within, and you, Webb, and you, Cockburn: you are a part of this conspiracy of the Bolsheviks …’

  Cockburn commented: ‘In 1918, Marxism was like saying “Rabies,” you know.’ And well it might have been, for only four months previously Czar Nicholas II and his whole family had been murdered by the Bolsheviks, the Winter Palace had been taken over and their authority established only days before the Armistice was signed.

  But it turned out well for the expelled boys. Charles Greene had expelled far too many and finally almost all were reinstated. Two, according to Cockburn, remained expelled because, ‘they tried to get the soldiers to break into Charles Greene’s study and tear up his books – a really rather shitty thing to do.’

  Cockburn suggested that there was some justification for their actions. ‘These prefects had been living in expectation of being killed on the Western front some time in the next three months, so they didn’t take much interest in the preservation of civilisation or the school spirit and they got pretty rough.’

  Three years after the end of the war, when he was in London, Graham Greene went to Westminster Abbey for ‘the American ceremony’, and wrote to his mother:

  The Abbey itself lighted up brilliantly, but outside the door nothing but a great bank of mist, with now and again a vague steel helmeted figure appearing, only to disappear again. The whole time the most glorious music from the organ, with the American band outside, clashing in at intervals. Then the feeling of expectancy, through the whole people, the minds of everyone on tip-toe. It got back the whole atmosphere of the war, of the endless memorial services. I’d never realised before how we had got away from the death feeling.

  The effect of the war on Charles Greene, and the loss of so many boys, was such that he remained very conscious of history, returning to that period of war constantly in his teaching. Claud Cockburn remembered that Charles never forgot the war or the ‘peace’ that followed, giving rather profound ambling descriptions of history: ‘We used to sit there in his great history lessons, and he’d start off with Cicero or something – we had 3 hours, 2 hours were Greek and Latin, and the next hour was Ancient History – but after about the first 20 minutes of Greek, he would be back in 1919 – Treaty of Versailles and so on – he was anti the Treaty of Versailles – he thought they had made a wreck of Europe, which indeed they had, and I remember him so well sitting there … and the mortar board used to fall further and further over his face and he would lean back in the chair saying, “When I gaze into the abyss of history, when I see Monsieur Clemenceau, when I observe Mr Lloyd George, I feel that I am gazing into an abyss. I see nothing but disaster.”’16

  Claud Cockburn recalled how, when he was a prefect and sitting next to Charles Greene at lunch, he would argue the Tory point of view (for the future Communist was then a Tory): ‘Charles thought I was entirely dominated by my father’s evil imperialistic qualities, and so he’d argue about this and that, and of course he had the right to cut off argument by standing up and saying grace, so when I felt that I’d really got him, he’d suddenly say, “Well, Cockburn, I don’t know how civilisation is going to be saved – Benedictus benedicat.” But he was a man of really incredible goodwill.’ To Cockburn’s account can be added Peter Quennell’s which he wrote in a letter to Graham Greene in 1922. Quennell was then seventeen and already a publishing poet. As in the Cockburn account there is some light teasing though there is also love for Charles Greene. Graham, then at Oxford, had sent Quennell a telegram. Quennell’s reply was in the vers libre manner of his brilliant poem ‘Masque of The Three Beasts’:

  Your father was in the middle of what I think was an English period. It had become rather historical. The dear old gentleman was lying comfortably on his back – like an inverted turtle.

  – Have you noticed how like a very dear old tur
tle he is becoming?

  – and we had become gloomy but sonorous – over the future of Democracy

  And then of course entered Mrs Edmunds …

  – in a tottering hurry

  And your father stopped in the middle of a more than Ciceronian period

  – and heavy gloom and foreboding fell upon everybody –

  – and especially Peter [Quennell] when he heard it [the telegram] was for him –

  – and I pictured my father run over in Theobald’s Road

  or my Cockerel at his last gasp

  And your father made ineffectual efforts to sit up and said in a severe and entirely cold and disapproving way that I might read it at 12

  and – suddenly relenting – if I was good – that I might read it now – and immediately and at once

  lest there was an answer

  And I read it in icy stillness and while I was still glaring at it

  – in astonishment of mind

  – almost alarm –

  your father

  asked in a yet more disapproving way if there was an answer

  but there wasn’t

  And he slid back to the turtle position

  and the Ciceronian period went on – and the Democracy of Europe and its fate rolled up again like storm clouds.17

  And so it would seem that though Charles Greene was remote as a father, as a teacher, with his mild eccentricities and obsessions, he was able to inspire humour and affection and respect in his pupils, and it does seem strange that, sympathetic as he was towards Cock-burn and Quennell, he was unaware of his own son’s increasing unhappiness.

  Two months before the war ended, and uninvolved, therefore, in the rowdy celebrations at the School, Graham Greene went as a boarder to St John’s. He was within a month of his fourteenth birthday.

  5

  The Greening of Greene

  A savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties.

  – GRAHAM GREENE

  Literature springs from humiliation.

  – W. H. AUDEN

  GRAHAM GREENE’S TIME as a boarder at St John’s was traumatic for him, but also seminal for his future as a writer. He returns to it again and again in his work, beginning with his first unpublished novel, ‘Anthony Sant’ and continuing with references in England Made Me (1935), Brighton Rock (1938), The Lawless Roads (1939), The Confidential Agent (1939), The Ministry of Fear (1943), ‘The Lost Childhood’ (1951) and A Sort of Life (1971). Moreover, several compulsive themes in his novels derive from that experience.

  What could it have been about St John’s that made his stay there such a torment and brought the young Graham Greene to successive suicide attempts? In interviews he has been unwilling to go into that period in greater detail, perhaps because the pain is still there.

  On the face of it, there seems little to justify the emotive language he has used to describe the situation in which he found himself – he was a ‘foreigner’ in a ‘savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties’, he was ‘a suspect’, ‘a hunted creature’, ‘Quisling’s son’fn1 and there was ‘loneliness, the struggle of conflicting loyalties … a great betrayal’.1 In fact, he was the Headmaster’s son, had moved only a short distance from home at School House to be a boarder at St John’s where his cousins Ben and Tooter were also boarders and his brother Raymond was head boy. Raymond, Ben and Tooter went through the school without being scarred, and one might have expected that through them something of the protective family environment would have been extended. Thousands of children then, such as those whose experiences were recorded in The Times in the year of his birth and the children of the canal workers in Berkhamsted, were born to much greater physical and mental hardships. His advantages in terms of wealth and class were considerable. A decline in his living conditions and a certain amount of ragging and bullying at St John’s seem unimportant.

  His state of health before entering St John’s was not good. In 1917 he had a second attack of measles, a threatened mastoid, jaundice and, in 1918, pleurisy. His further troubles are reflected in the character of Arthur Rowe in The Ministry of Fear who was ‘often ill, his teeth were bad and he suffered from an inefficient dentist’. Some of the illnesses might have been psychosomatic, an attempt to escape from a future whose implications might have been frightening to a timid, excessively shy boy. Moreover, according to Graham’s cousin, Barbara Greene, later Countess Strachwitz, there was a family tradition of his having ‘crises’. She recalled two occasions when Graham was young on which her mother, Eva Greene, had taken her nephew with her on her travels to recover:

  My mother took Graham off twice. I know that was an expedition with my father and various uncles. Then another time she was going to meet my father at Lisbon when he was coming back from Brazil and Graham had just gone through another crisis and she just said she was taking Graham with her. I can’t remember which crisis it was. Among the older generation there was much talk. I’m sure they were quite worried about him.2

  We already know of the fears from which he still suffered as a boy of thirteen: fear of the dark – ‘no night-light to make a blessed breach’; of birds and bats which came to symbolise the dark – ‘then darkness came down like the wings of a bat and settled on the landing’; and even death – ‘the whole room seemed suddenly to darken, and he had the impression of a great bird swooping’. The footsteps of strangers caused a rapid beating of the heart, a sick empty sensation in the stomach. It is likely that he was not in a physical or mental condition to deal with the change that took place in his life.

  In ‘The Burden of Childhood’ (1950) Greene writes, ‘There are certain writers … who never shake off the burden of their childhood’ and they are those to whom life turned ‘its cruel side’ during the defenceless period of early childhood and all their later experience seems to have been related to ‘those months or years of unhappiness’. He cites the cases of three writers to support his thesis: Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and H. H. Munro (‘Saki’). He might well have added his own name to the list. For him also childhood was a burden and his experiences had parallels with theirs.

  Dickens, Kipling and Munro were uprooted from happy childhood homes and placed in hostile environments. Kipling and Munro experienced this at the age of six, since their parents lived in India and Burma respectively where the climate was not considered suitable for white children after that age, and education in England was necessary. Rudyard Kipling and his sister were left as paying guests with a retired naval officer and his wife who became ‘Uncle Harry’ and ‘Auntie Rosa’. Kipling spent five years with Aunt Rosa and wrote of the experience that the ‘wretchedness of those five years lay buried in that inaccessible hiding place, the secret heart of a child’ – ‘I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors.’ Munro was left with aunts Augusta and Charlotte after his mother’s death when his father returned to Burma. Dickens was twelve when, his father being imprisoned for debt, he was put to work in a blacking factory to relieve the family’s financial difficulties. The owner of the factory was a relative, Dickens was not ill-treated or over-worked by the standards of the day and his experience lasted only four months.

  Common to all three boys was the sense of having been abandoned by their parents, but Dickens’s experience is closest to Greene’s. What was most painful to Dickens was the fact that he was put into lodgings and left to fend for himself on six shillings a week while his family lived close by in reasonable comfort, in the debtors’ prison it is true, but on his father’s salary and with a maid to look after them. ‘No words’, Dickens wrote, ‘can express the secret agony of my soul.’ He felt ‘utterly neglected and hopeless’ and as an intelligent and well-read boy, he felt he was not only suffering physical indignities and abandonment, but was being deprived of education and a future career. When his sister received a prize at the Royal Academy of Music, tears ran down his face and he ‘prayed … to be lifted out of the humiliation and negl
ect’ in which he was. For years afterwards Dickens avoided the scene of his humiliating experience, and significantly Greene writes about Berkhamsted: ‘Memory often exaggerates, but some twelve years ago [1959], because I had started a novel about a school, I revisited the scene and found no change. I abandoned the novel – I couldn’t bear mentally living again for several years in these surroundings.’3 He went instead to a leper colony in the Congo.

  Greene’s memory does not usually exaggerate nor is he extravagant in his descriptions of places, people and events, and he is always remarkably consistent about his feelings. Once he has established a view of an experience he will be locked into that view and so we have to take seriously his comment: ‘Years later when I read the sermon on hell in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist I recognized the land I had inhabited.’4 Earlier, in The Lawless Roads, he had in fact quoted, without attribution, a line from the sermon on hell to describe his school experiences (which I italicize below) tracing in them the beginnings of his first, primitive, religious belief:

  And so faith came to one – shapelessly, without dogma, a presence above a croquet lawn, something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way. One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell, but for a long while it was only hell one could picture with a certain intimacy – the pitchpine partitions of dormitories where everybody was never quiet at the same time; lavatories without locks: ‘There by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison …’ walks in pairs up the suburban roads; no solitude anywhere, at any time.5

  Joyce’s hell, though, is so terrible that Greene’s comparison of St John’s with it is difficult to understand. For example, ‘the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that … they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it … All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum … shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer.’6 What was it about the situation at St John’s that caused him to make such a comparison?