The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Zoe Richmond stressed that Graham ‘was almost the easiest of all to live with … most polite and very pleased with what he’d got – he was no trouble at all.’ Though she added, ‘You have to keep in mind that I’ve always found that people are not disturbed when we meet. And if you treat them as if they weren’t disturbed, they’re not disturbed. Kenneth and I didn’t make any difference between Graham and anybody else. I mean he was just a guest of Kenneth’s.’

  There are no surviving letters to allow assessment of the physical and mental condition of Graham at this time – though there is some significance in the fact that although Marion Greene always kept her son’s letters, there survive for this period one dated 1 July 1921 and no more until October – three dated Autumn 1921 and two cards dated 25 November and 12 December respectively, the last announcing Ave’s arrival. But I think we can hazard a guess that Graham, with his public school training in good manners and his need to suppress emotion, was at least initially concealing his despair and his deeply-felt uncertainty about himself.

  Richmond, ‘the wounded physician’, must have brought Graham to a form of confession through dreams, thus releasing him from his inhibitions and habits of suppression. Also, he taught Graham to sift his own motives fearlessly, encouraging him to make use of intuition and intellect. In this way he reduced his sense of guilt.

  When Graham returned to school he no longer looked upon the rules as anything other than temporary ordinances. As a shy responsible person he would not openly revolt against his father, but his characteristic response towards authority, which his father represented, changed and this turned him ultimately into a rebel in religion and in politics. Richmond liberated Graham and helped to start him on his long road as a writer. Thus he must have felt for Richmond, as he writes in The Confidential Agent, ‘a tremendous gratitude that there was somebody in the warring crooked uncertain world he could trust beside himself’.23

  *

  It was not simply through those morning sessions in analysis that Richmond helped Graham. He and his wife, at a crucial moment in the boy’s development, introduced him to a more relaxed, uninhibited and intellectual way of life. As Graham himself wrote: ‘My life with [Richmond] did me a world of good, but how much was due to the analysis and how much to the breakfasts in bed, the quiet of Kensington Gardens, the sudden independence of my life I would not like to say, nor whether the analysis went deep enough.24

  Breakfast on a tray was brought in by a maid wearing a white starched cap, and after analysis he was free. He spent the mornings studying under the trees of Kensington Gardens. London was not a train journey away, but merely just down the street and he would go in search of youthful adventure. He could indulge his passion for the cinema and theatre and when his cousin Ave came they went to see Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, and also visited the London Assizes together: ‘It was Graham’s idea to go to the Old Bailey, because we didn’t have enough money to go to the theatre often. Graham would ask the Bobby on duty in the forecourt which were the most exciting cases on and we’d go and spend the whole afternoon there.’

  Before Ave Greene’s arrival Graham had been exploring London’s museums. On 1 July he visited the Imperial Institute, the Natural History Museum and finally the Science Museum. Next he visited the London Museum and outside St James’s Palace, on the stroke of twelve, he watched the changing of the guard. With his favourite aunt Nono he visited the Tate Gallery to see the war paintings of C. R. W. Nevinson. In October, he and his aunt bought tickets for Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers (‘our seats were excellent … a large proportion of evening dresses … Lytton and Sheffield were wonderful’), and they went to see the play Christopher Sly: ‘The show was the best I’ve ever seen. Matheson Lang acted beautifully. Florence Saunders was an extremely pretty girl … Arthur Whitby … awfully good as a strolling player … The end was wonderful. The dead body of Christopher Sly lying in the dark cellar, and slowly the light of a lantern approaching and the voices of the guards, coming nearer, singing a drinking catch, coming to let free Sly, to let him return to his tavern and bottle.’ What Graham did not mention to his mother was that Florence Saunders wore a long white silk nightdress, and moved him sexually.25 Graham, having reached puberty, was alert for possible adventures with the nursemaids out with their charges in Kensington Gardens, but his only adventure was one he could well have done without. Here is the first of his seedy characters stepping for a moment into his life and perhaps contributing to his interest in, and creation of, such characters in his later novels:

  An elderly man, with an old Etonian tie and a gaze unhappy and shifty, drew a chair up to mine and started to talk of schools. Was there corporal punishment at my school, and did I suppose there were any schools left where girls were whipped? He had an estate, he told me, in Scotland, where everyone went around in kilts, so convenient in some ways, and perhaps I would like to come for a holiday there … Suddenly he sloped away, like a wind-blown umbrella, and I never saw him again.26

  One of the Richmonds’ many callers was a ballet student. Graham was ready to fall in love with her but was too shy to make an approach. He wrote three imagist lines under the influence of Ezra Pound’s early romantic poems – he had found a copy of Pound’s Personae in a little bookshop on the embankment near Albert Bridge. While he could write enthusiastically to his mother about the girl, whose name was Isula, saying she was ‘a future Pavlova’, he could not find the courage to present her with the poem.

  Something of his attitude towards women (he was sixteen when he went to Richmond and two months into his seventeenth year when he left) is reflected in a piece he wrote at the Richmonds’ called ‘The Creation of Beauty’. He told his mother jubilantly: ‘I hope soon to blossom into the Saturday Westminster. “The Creation of Beauty: A study in sublimation”, by H. Graham Greene. Ahem! Ahem!’ And it did appear, though without a by-line. It is a story in which, after the seventh day, the chief architect of the universe comes into the presence of God unhappy because, while on God’s orders he has created man, God has given man no happiness other than a woman to love. Set against that he has given man darkness which is full of fear. He has given him sleep but in sleep there are evil dreams. Everything it seems has the power to hurt man – with the sun he will moan with the heat or cry aloud in the cold. Birds will ravage the fields, beasts will wage perpetual war. So speaks the chief architect; but God answers him:

  Can you not see, that because you have given him the beauty of woman, you have given him the beauty of the universe? He will worship the moon, because it is as pure as his love. He will worship the sun because it is aflame with the glory of her spirit. He will love the cold, because it is like his wayward mistress; he will love the heat, because it is as warm as her breast. He will write songs to the dark, because it is as deep, unfathomable and mysterious as love, and drowns him in the blackness of her hair. He will let himself down into sleep with a fear, because, though it bring evil dreams, yet will it also bring dreams of her for whom he lives. He will glory in the birds, for he will decorate her in their feathers, and, when she speaks to him, he will sing with them in the tree-tops; he will slay the beasts to clothe her in their skins, and love them for their lithe forms, which rival hers in grace, and the darting movement of the fish will remind him of the flutter of her hands. But the seas he will worship forever, for the waters are motherhood.

  If nothing came of his love for the young ballet dancer, there was another whom, at least in dreams, he could love, an older but beautiful woman – Kenneth Richmond’s wife. Here was a dilemma for a shy boy: having dreamt of Zoe Richmond he was duty bound to reveal his dream to his analyst. For the first time he feared his eleven o’clock visit, yet his passion for analysis prevented him from lying. Graham’s record of that session with Richmond is revealing of his new-found daring and of his analyst’s character:

  ‘And now,’ Richmond said, after a little talk on general theory, ‘we’ll get down to last night’s dream.’


  I cleared my dry throat. ‘I can only remember one.’

  ‘Let’s have it.’

  ‘I was in bed,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’

  He made a note on his pad. I took a breath and plunged. ‘There was a knock on the door and Zoe came in. She was naked. She leant over me. One of her breasts nearly touched my mouth. I woke up.’

  ‘What’s your association to breasts?’ Richmond asked, setting his stop-watch.

  ‘Tube train,’ I said after a long pause.

  ‘Five seconds,’ Richmond said.27

  Zoe Richmond laughed over this passage in Graham’s autobiography, and well she might, for she would know (who better than the wife of an analyst?) that here we have a clear example of the great mother dream. Graham’s mother was, as we have seen, remote to her children and closest to her husband. To Graham love, expressed through touch or kiss, did not come from her but from his Nanny.

  Then, in Kenneth Richmond’s home, he had this dream of a relatively older woman (Zoe was thirty-one) coming to his bedside to give him the supreme evidence of motherly love by offering her breast, unlike his mother, who came to the nursery to supervise while retaining immense reserve. Surely the dream’s message was his need for love, a mother’s love which was never sufficiently expressed. ‘What we offered,’ Zoe told me, ‘when Graham came to us was something very different. We all do love each other in this family. I was to Graham a mother substitute. I suppose he felt the difference and it reflected in his dream of me as a mother when in his dream I offered my breast to him. But Kenneth would also offer him a plan to see the other side; to see the un-seen world; that you can be developed from there and not from here; that God in you does tell you what to do.’28

  In spite of Graham’s describing Richmond as ‘our bizarre and spotty analyst’, he must have been for Graham something of a substitute father. His father, unquestionably a good and liberal man, had yet misunderstood what had happened to him at school, and his authority had been unable to protect Graham from the bullying.

  Zoe Richmond had her own notion of what was wrong with Graham and why he was in need of treatment, and she did not mince her words:

  People are often suicidal and unbalanced if they have impossible parents. People must be loved and the awful thing is when a son is not loved then trouble begins. In Graham’s case he was always a very sensitive person. Some people are more sensitive than others. Graham was very intellectual and very sensitive. His father had a frightful instinct against homosexuality. Graham wasn’t homosexual but he was feminine and sometimes you can’t tell the difference. To be sensitive is feminine and the unsensitive and warlike is extremely male. A lot of the patients who came to Ken were homosexuals. In Graham’s case, he wanted to commit suicide in the end because he couldn’t love himself or anybody else. And he was never openly loved and you see he was frightened of his own sensitivity. Lack of love creates the kind of disability Graham had. Graham’s father was all negative and that’s what he was bred into. The fact that his father thought Graham was involved in a homosexual ring when in fact he was being bullied – why his father was barmy. He had an obsession. I always knew it was the father’s fault.

  And Kenneth was good for Graham because they had in them, in some ways, a suitable similarity.29

  The Richmonds did much to encourage Graham’s interest in writing by introducing him to writers and editors, as his letters to his mother show. Already, before he went to Richmond, and when sixteen years of age, he had had some success as a writer. His ‘Tick of the Clock’, published in the school magazine, he had cut out and sent to the London newspaper, the Star. In a letter written to his future wife, 16 August 1925, he recalls his first literary success: ‘I was delirious with joy … when I was sixteen, when I got my first money from a paper the Star(!!) for a terrible sentimental sketch.’ The story appeared on 18 January 1921. He received a cheque for three guineas:

  I took the editor’s kindly letter and the complimentary copy up to the Common, and for hours I sat on the abandoned rifle-butts reading the piece aloud to myself and to the dark green ocean of gorse and bracken. Now, I told myself, I was really a professional writer, and never again did the idea hold such excitement, pride and confidence; always later … the excitement was overshadowed by the knowledge of failure, by awareness of the flawed intention. But that sunny afternoon I could detect no flaw in The Tick of the Clock. The sense of glory touched me for the first and last time.30

  His excitement continued when he showed the story to Kenneth Richmond. To his mother he wrote: ‘Mr Richmond was quite bucked with my Tick-Tock. He showed it to Mrs R. and asked her whether she could recognise who wrote it and she said J. D. Beresford. Hah.Hah.Hah.’ He was to meet at the Richmonds’ J. D. Beresford, a novelist crippled by poliomyelitis and author of the remarkable novel The Hampdenshire Wonder. ‘I hope to see Walter de la Mare soon’, he wrote to his mother. ‘Mrs Richmond has promised to ask him to tea, before I [return home].’ De la Mare was his favourite poet and also a remarkable short story writer with a sensibility attuned to the macabre, who was able to bring innocent and supernatural visitings delicately together. The poet came with Naomi Royde-Smith who was editor of the Weekly Westminster and whom Graham had already met in July: ‘A few evenings ago the Lady Literary Editor of the Saturday Westminster came to dinner.’ He showed Richmond his piece ‘The Creation of Beauty’ and again Richmond tried to help him: ‘Mr Richmond is going to thrust it before [The Lady Editor’s] eyes and thinks she’ll accept it.’ After he returned to school he was to bombard her with fantasies written in poetic prose.

  Undoubtedly the Richmonds helped Graham by understanding his emotional conflicts, his creativity and his ambitions and by introducing him to an adult world more exciting and stimulating than that of School and the society of aunts and uncles – an important part of the cure.

  There was one slight lapse in health. It was not thought by Graham to be of importance, yet it was to have repercussions five years later and then caused him great anguish of mind and lessened his trust in and affection for Richmond. It seemed a simple enough, even natural incident. One night, a guest at dinner was describing an accident and Graham’s imagination ran away with him. As he listened, his mind went back to a story he had heard when he was six years old, of two ladies on the Royston road in a carriage. The horse had run away, and one of the ladies had fallen out of the carriage and her long hat-pin pierced her brain. Suddenly, in the Richmonds’ dining room, Graham had a black-out and fell to the floor.

  Graham explains that his imagination had a way of showing him details of an accident not fully described and when that happened he would faint, ‘like a medical student at an operation’.31

  Richmond, disturbed by this event, took him to a Harley Street specialist friend of his, George Riddock. He then wrote to Graham’s mother and gave her the specialist’s opinion that her son was probably suffering from incipient epilepsy. It was a time-bomb which was to tick quietly away. Graham’s lack of knowledge of the diagnosis is revealed in a card he sent his mother in November: ‘Have been to Doctor Riddock, and am taking malt and another medicine which I may have to continue for 2 years.’

  Zoe Richmond suggested a different interpretation of Graham’s acute sensitivity to such events when she stressed that while the world might have gained a great novelist in him, it had lost a natural medium. Graham Greene was born, Zoe asserted, with mediumistic powers, for it was at Devonshire Terrace that he had a precognitive dream which impressed his analyst. To his mother Graham wrote:

  A night or two ago I had a shipwreck dream, the ship I was on going down in the Irish Sea. I didn’t think anything about it. We don’t have papers here as the usual thing, and it was not till yesterday, looking at an old paper, I saw about the sinking of the Rowan in the Irish sea. This made me quite excited and when I got back I looked at my dream diary and found that my dream had been Saturday night. The accident had happened just
after Saturday midnight.32

  This was not the first time Graham had had such dreams of disasters of which he could not have known. When he was seven and on the night of the Titanic disaster, he dreamt of a shipwreck: ‘One image of the dream has remained with me for more than sixty years: a man in oilskins bent double beside a companion-way under the blow of a great wave.’33 When he was twenty-one and living in Nottingham, he wrote to Vivien Dayrell-Browning recalling a third disaster:

  On Wednesday night, I did not dream of a wreck, but I was on a ship and I was going to be faced with a punishment for something, to jump overboard, and what I feared was not so much the drowning as the wind of the fall from the liner’s upper deck. In today’s [Nottingham] Journal I find that on Wednesday night there was a terrible crash off the Yorkshire coast in a storm and the Captain ordered his men to jump into the sea, as the only hope, and all but two were drowned. It’s awfully strange. Of course on an occasion like that there must be terrific mental waves of terror, and my mind seems to be particularly attuned to the terror of drowning wave.34

  Greene wondered in A Sort of Life ‘whether the analysis went deep enough’, and Zoe Richmond said, in January 1985, that his treatment was not properly finished:

  I wrote to Graham once and said I wish to goodness we had known more about things when he was being analysed because we didn’t know very much – we had just begun. I don’t think he was ever finished properly. He got all right again and went home. It’s very difficult for an analyst and the people at home don’t understand any of it. They don’t see why, if it seems all right and the patient carries on all right they should pay any more either, quite reasonably. But that’s how it is.

  Perhaps the treatment was not entirely successful. For one thing, he discovered afterwards that he could no longer take an aesthetic interest in any visual thing – staring at a sight that others assured him was beautiful, he would feel nothing.