The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

Christ was betrayed.

  fn1 Quisling was a Norwegian politician whose name became synonymous with collaborator and traitor during the Second World War. Quisling was sentenced to death on 17 September 1945 by a Norwegian court and executed in Oslo on 24 October 1945.

  fn2 An indication of Raymond’s prefectorial manner has survived in a note, written seventy years ago while he was head of house, and preserved by J. B. Wilson:

  You may remember that I said that you could use the Pres’ Room when invited to do so. I should have been perfectly willing to grant permission if anyone had troubled to ask me. In my absence leave can be obtained from one of the other prefects.

  When you do use the room, I should be obliged if you would remove all signs of your presence. This outburst is caused chiefly by the fact that there were crumbs etc. all over the place and a large hunk of jam on the top of my books.

  R.G.

  fn3 two-spiked instruments for measuring.

  fn4 According to Claud Cockburn every boy had to wear on Sundays a black coat and striped trousers, though the black coats were relaxed during the war and boys wore blue coats. After the war, black coats were reintroduced. Cockburn recalls Graham’s father catching him in blue instead of black: ‘He gave me a lecture and finally said, climaxing a rhetorical enunciation, “Cockburn, would you go through life in a coat not black?”’

  fn5 Lionel Arthur Carter was born 12 May 1904; he died 17 May 1971.

  fn6 My judgment was similar to Claud Cockburn’s: ‘He was a great shambling man of total goodwill. He wished everybody well and thought that other people wished everybody well, too.’

  6

  Psychoanalysed

  Without nervous disorder there can be no great artist.

  – PROUST

  IN A SORT of Life Graham describes the panic in his family after he ran away: ‘Raymond … was hastily summoned home for consultation; my father found the situation beyond him … My brother … suggested psycho-analysis as a possible solution, and my father – an astonishing thing in 1920 – agreed.’1 Moreover Raymond suggested the psychiatrist – Kenneth Richmond. I doubt, however, that Graham was treated by Richmond in 1920 or that he went to Richmond at the time he was most suicidal.

  To begin with, he writes of his experiences at St John’s as lasting ‘for some eight terms – a hundred and four weeks’,2 and we know from his mother’s notebook that he went to St John’s as a boarder in September 1918 so that the eight terms would take us to the end of the Easter term 1921, not 1920. His crisis must have taken place just before the summer term 1921. This date is more likely from Raymond’s point of view since he did not start his medical studies at Oxford until the autumn term of 1920, and by the end of the Easter term 1921 he would have completed two terms and could have been in a position to advise. The determining factor is a report in The Berkhamstedian which records that on the evening of 4 June 1921, the St John’s Dramatic Society presented Lord Dunsany’s play The Lost Silk Hat, with H. G. Greene playing the part of the poet. It would seem therefore that, his tormentor having departed, Greene returned to St John’s, though not as a boarder, for the summer term 1921 – or part of it – and acted in a play, and his psychoanalysis began at the end of that term – his earliest surviving letter to his mother from Kenneth Richmond’s house is dated by her 1 July 1921. We can conclude that, given the changed situation at St John’s and some improvement in Greene’s mental state, his parents decided to postpone the psychiatric treatment.

  Raymond Greene recommended Kenneth Richmond to help his brother not only because he had gained a reputation at Oxford for his successful treatment of disturbed schoolboys, but also because he had a strong literary bent – a suitable mentor for a future writer. Yet Richmond might have been considered a strange choice, and it is unlikely that Greene’s parents had any idea what the treatment would involve. It is uncertain whether Graham, at that point, really needed psychiatric treatment; but it is clear that Raymond Greene had hit on a winner with Richmond and his wife Zoe, because they were worlds apart from the Charles Greenes and Berkhamsted School.

  Richmond had had several unpropitious starts in life. He and his mother had tried running a private school, but his mother suddenly decided against it and left her son with a building of boarding house proportions. His next venture followed logically from this. He and his wife Zoe established a boarding house there, which was only moderately successful. Then their lives turned in another direction – Richmond became a psychiatrist. It came about by chance. He had been reviewing for the Observer, The Times, the Weekly Westminster and the magazine Land and Water, and in 1917 he reviewed a book by Maurice Nicoll entitled Dream Psychology. Nicoll, who acknowledged his great debt to Jung, was becoming well known as a pioneer in psychological medicine and was so impressed by Richmond’s review that he visited him in Cornwall and made the singular suggestion that Richmond would make a natural psychiatrist – natural indeed since he was without training or qualifications. It was Nicoll who sent him his first client, a dear friend of his, an American actress. She went to the Richmonds as their first paying guest. A friendship developed between her and Zoe, and through her the Richmonds were brought into close contact with Carl Jung, when, some years later, the actress was hostess to Jung during his visit to London.

  Richmond and his wife had already become spiritualists, being greatly influenced by W. H. Myers’s Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. They accepted that some people were mediums who were sensitive to vibrations from the spirit world and could receive messages, and that a ‘control’ was needed – a spirit guide, a soul who had gone ahead, and who would convey messages. Zoe told me (she was then ninety-six but still forceful and with a lively mind) how her husband became a medium. She had an only brother called Miles and had ‘a strong positive fixation to him’, but he died during the First World War:

  He was a darling. And he came to me immediately he died to say he wasn’t dead, and we walked up and down the beach I remember and then he said he would be able to teach us things and he did through Kenneth and that’s how Kenneth became a medium. And that has gone on, you see. I don’t mean to say my brother told him … Somebody told him what to say to his patients because they mostly got well.3

  In the same interview she was very insistent about the source of her husband’s help in treating patients:

  Z.R.: ‘Anyhow, he was told exactly each time how to treat each patient.’

  N.S.: ‘By whom?’

  Z.R.: ‘By communicators. You see, we had begun our experiments in spiritualism.’

  The closest Graham comes in A Sort of Life to suggesting that the Richmonds were spiritualists is in the following passage: ‘On Sundays … Richmond and his beautiful wife Zoe went to a church in Bayswater of some esoteric denomination, where the minister asked the congregation to decide by vote whether they would prefer that evening a sermon or a lecture on a psychological subject.’4 Zoe explained that this was the spiritual church, The Seekers: ‘They used to be in Queen’s Gate. They had a marvellous medium – the man we went to see. He had a doctor communicator and he used to heal people through the doctor. They used to teach healing.’5

  Richmond was quiet, reserved, intuitive, very intense and given to agonising over another’s pain. A man of wide intellectual interests, he was a close friend of many of the leading writers of the day. He was thirty-six when Graham went to him (Graham thought he was in his early forties), and he had, four years earlier, been afflicted by a sense of failure and lack of purpose: he had had to fight his own battle against depression and find his own way out of darkness. He suffered much of his life as an alcoholic, though this rarely showed and his patients were not aware of it. Perhaps most significant, in dealing with Graham as a patient, was the fact that he was the rejected son of Canon Wilfred Richmond of Winchester. Canon Richmond, when he was no longer young, had married a seventeen-year-old girl who did not want to marry him, never loved him or their only child Kenneth. At the age of fifteen, Richm
ond escaped from his tormentors at public school by getting drunk and consequently being removed. He must have been deeply sympathetic to Graham’s situation.

  Graham believed that his analyst ‘belonged to no dogmatic school of psycho-analysis … was nearer to Freud than Jung, but Adler probably contributed.’6 Thinking back to those days, Graham asked himself, ‘was there a couch, the stock-subject of so many jokes? I can’t remember.’ But there would not have been a couch since Richmond was a practising Jungian. Zoe Richmond was quite adamant that her husband was not Freudian. ‘Oh certainly not Freudian,’ said she firmly, ‘he was a Jungian.’7 Jung’s method was to have a face-to-face interview between patient and psychiatrist, sitting opposite each other – two human beings attempting to solve a problem between them, as friends, a problem shared and therefore halved. Freud’s method of consultation, in contrast, was to have the patient stretched out on a couch with the psychiatrist slightly behind him listening to what the patient had to say, and rarely taking part. A basic difference between Jung and Freud lay in Freud’s insistence on the sexual basis of neurosis. This Jung opposed. He felt that only if we can discover our own myth as expressed in dreams, can we become more complete personalities.

  It was as a Jungian that Richmond placed importance on dreams. He believed, like Jung, that the motivation always derives from the unconscious and that dreams are part of the unconscious making itself manifest in sleep and therefore having meaning, reflecting a hurt, rejection or mental disturbance. But the dream has to be decoded. There are recognisable elements, but the key to understanding is there only if the signs can be read correctly. As a good spiritualist he listened to his own inner voice and acted according to its promptings.

  Jung thought that only a psychiatrist who had his own problems could heal: ‘In the end, only the wounded physician heals.’ Whether or not Richmond healed Greene, whether or not Greene was in need of healing, Richmond was well-qualified, in his own way, to heal him.

  *

  Graham went to the Richmonds at 15 Devonshire Terrace, London, late in June 1921 and his description of Richmond’s physical appearance is sharp and accurate:

  [He] had more the appearance of an eccentric musician than anyone you might suppose concerned with curing the human spirit. A tall stooping figure in his early forties, he had a distinguished musician’s brow with longish hair falling behind without a parting and a face disfigured by large spots which must have been of nervous origin.8

  Ave Greene, Graham’s cousin, also went for treatment, near the end of Graham’s stay, and Richmond’s facial disfigurement troubled her: ‘He had spots all over his face and sores. He said, “I can make those spots go by self-hypnosis.”’9 According to Zoe, her husband suffered from psoriasis: ‘Do you know what that is like? Well, when you get out of bed it looks as if you had upset a packet of Lux [white soap flakes]. All the skin comes off in bits just like Lux. And when he was bad and he got out of bed it sort of spread over on to the floor.’10

  Ave Greene never really knew why she had been sent to Richmond but she hazarded a guess:

  Graham was unhappy and suicidal. My family never told me why I had to go there. I knew Graham had to go because he was unbalanced and I felt then that I’m being sent because I’m unbalanced. And so the two of us were unbalanced people … My father and Uncle Charlie were very close, and he felt if his brother sent his dippy son to Richmond, perhaps he’d better send his dippy daughter.11

  Richmond’s treatment was simple and regular. Every morning, at eleven o’clock, Graham would present himself at Richmond’s study and relate to him the dream he had had the previous night. Graham describes his experience:

  There he would always be, sitting behind the desk with his marred musician’s face, stop-watch ready, waiting for my coming … I would begin to read out my dream, and he would check my associations with his watch. Afterwards he would talk in general terms about the theory of analysis, about the mortmain of the past which holds us in thrall. Sometimes, as the analysis progressed, he would show little hints of excitement – as though he scented something for which he had been waiting for a long while.12

  These daily sessions of dream analysis were a worry to both Graham and Ave, because if they could not recall a dream they were asked to invent one. Ave Greene recalled: ‘To begin with I could never remember my dreams, so Graham and I used to get together and I’d say, “Look, can you remember your dreams?” and he’d say, “No.” And so he and I used to concoct dreams, but very likely he could remember his dreams more vividly than I could. And so, he and I used to sit together and concoct our dreams, and then I’d go and be interviewed by Richmond and tell him all my dreams. I loathed every moment of it.’13 Whenever Graham had to invent a dream it always began with a pig. (Perhaps one reason was that at the end of the summer term in which he started going to Richmond for treatment, he attended the Berkhamsted School fête where one side-show was bowling for a pig.)

  A review by Graham in the Spectator in 1941 of a diary kept by a Dutch boy refugee suggests something of Richmond’s method as an analyst: ‘We watch all the repressions of experience which will help to form the adult character painfully initiated. Here are the vivid scraps of childhood-horror which the psychoanalyst, stop-watch in hand, may later have to lead his patient back to by way of dreams or faulty memories.’14

  In spite of the ‘hints of excitement’ on Richmond’s part, the patient was not provided, according to Greene, with any response to, or analysis of, his dreams or associations: ‘so far as my own dreams and associations went, he told me nothing; he patiently waited for me to discover the long road back for myself. I too began to feel the excitement of the search.’15 It was Richmond’s way to work slowly with a patient. He did not foster introspection in the direction where a patient’s difficulties lay until he thought the inflammation of the hurt or crisis had subsided. He was always reluctant to proceed too fast and too far. It was, in his view, of paramount importance that the patient recognised the problem for himself and how it could be solved. His way was, according to his wife, never to force anything, to allow the person to learn about himself, make his own discoveries:

  That’s what he transferred to Graham you see, this life-giving thing. You had to decide all by yourself. That was the whole treatment. To listen to the God in you, and you are told what to do. Kenneth would have told Graham to listen to his own voice – listen to the God in him. That’s the whole point of Jung’s analysis – to unite your conscious mind with an unconscious God in you.16

  While we know that Richmond was ‘extraordinarily good’ at interpreting dreams, we have no record of his interpretations and although Graham kept a dream diary at the time it has not survived; yet he recalled some of his dreams in A Sort of Life. In one of them there were colours of great beauty and towers and pinnacles and then a bodiless voice intoning, ‘Princess and Lord of Time, there are no bounds to thee.’17 The Princess of Time haunted Graham’s sleep. In her service was ‘a troop of black-skinned girls who carried poison flowers which it was death to touch’. Writing of this dream in Journey Without Maps Graham admits he could still recall the dull pain in his palms and his insteps when he deliberately touched the flowers.18 He was always trying to escape her, for she was a symbol both of kindness and destructiveness. Once he was incited in a dream to kill her. He was given a book of ritual, bound in limp leather, and a dagger, but she survived into many later dreams. Indeed, any dream which opened with terror, with flight, with falling, with unseen presences and opening doors usually ended with her presence both ‘cruel and reassuring’.19

  Another was a nightmare in which Graham, pursued by sinister Chinese agents, took shelter in a hut with an armed detective. At the point when he began to feel secure, he looked down at the hand of the detective and saw that he had the long nails of a Chinaman.20 This kind of nightmare recalls Greene’s statement to Ronald Matthews: ‘The world of nightmare is a world without defences because each defence may be nullified.’


  Other dreams at a later date followed: a man with his throat cut dragging himself across the carpet to the bed; the old woman with ringworm; the man with gold teeth and rubber surgical gloves.21

  We do not know what Richmond would have had to say after being told of such recollections. However, it is possible to discover something of his beliefs through a study of his writings, in particular, from a biography purporting to be about a man called W. E. Ford written by Richmond and his friend J. D. Beresford.22 According to his wife Zoe, this biography is in fact about Kenneth Richmond’s life and views. The portrait of him is of great interest for he held views on education and on the nature of psychological crisis in advance of his time.

  To begin with, he was in every way different from Graham’s father. He was not on the side of respectability and social correctness. These were not spiritual forces. While the Greene household was highly literate there were limitations on what could be discussed. In the Richmond household there were no such limitations and for sound psychological reasons. Inhibition only succeeds, Richmond felt, in driving things underground. How refreshing it must have been for Graham to discover an adult who held the view that faults of character become magnified and ingrained by perpetual ‘don’ts’. Also, Richmond was utterly opposed to boarding schools, seeing them as artificial orphanages. Finally, he did not equate sex with sin.

  *

  Graham’s account of his treatment is so light-hearted as to deny the importance of his breakdown, and he expressed doubts as to his need for analysis. He conveys no feeling that he was ill, close to despair or even suicidal. He could be playing down the severity of his breakdown but he did appear at the time to be quite normal. When Ave Greene went to Richmond for treatment, she did not think Graham was ill – to her he seemed absolutely normal. But we have to remember that Ave Greene went to Devonshire Terrace in December 1921 when Graham’s treatment was nearing its end. If he had recovered by then, he would have seemed ‘absolutely normal’.