The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Finally, on the practical side, there was the need in the process of seeking copy to be funded. At first it was not easy, and he simply travelled in hope. The barrel-organ incident provided him with material which took him a long time to convert into cash. Six years later (while working for The Times as a sub-editor) an article on that escapade appeared and no doubt Graham received a modest sum for it. Later, when he was more successful, he would persuade leading newspapers to send him out to some political trouble spot and in return would offer vivid articles about his experiences. Specific parts of the material for articles, those which registered his most crucial concerns, would find their way into his novels. A good example of his method of work is The Quiet American (1955), of which Frances FitzGerald could argue in Harper’s, even thirty years after its appearance, that ‘there has been no novel of any political scope about Vietnam since Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American’.8 The novel is based on four separate visits to Vietnam, and material in articles appearing in leading periodicals in France, Britain and America do double duty by being subtly introduced into the novel itself.

  All these considerations come out in his first important trip abroad. He tells us in A Sort of Life that this was to Paris and gives, in separate publications, two conflicting dates, Christmas 1922 and Christmas 1923.9 In fact, his first visit abroad (apart from a convalescing trip to Lisbon with his aunt Eva), was to Ireland at the end of his first year at Oxford in June 1923. To his mother he wrote: ‘On Friday I’m going to Ireland for a week. I’ll be perfectly safe.’ He always played down danger when writing to his mother, but there were dangers in Ireland, then as now, and his instinct for trouble spots revealed itself for the first time, as did his reporter’s eye for significant and telling detail.

  In 1922 the Irish desire for independence forced the British to give them self-governing dominion status. Michael Collins, who became the state’s first Prime Minister, was denounced by de Valera and other Republicans, and was assassinated in August 1922. Retaliation followed. On 20 December, the Daily Mail reported: ‘seven men executed in Dublin’, which brought the total of executions for being in possession of arms ‘without proper authority’ to nineteen. Ireland was thus lively enough to attract young Greene as soon as he was free at the beginning of his first long vacation.

  Establishing the pattern which was to hold good for his future journeys as a writer seeking material, he first made contacts in the area to be explored. To his mother he wrote: ‘I’ve got an introduction to a Free State senator, also I’ve got at one of the big Sinn Fein Johnnies through the Irish Nationalist here. Moira O’Neill is putting me up.’10 Second, he sought an outlet for articles, with remuneration to help defray his costs: ‘I hope to have more energy with this than with the barrel-organing, as the Daily Express hold out hopes of taking a series of articles on the State of Ireland under the Free State.’11 As it turned out the Daily Express did not publish his articles, but his old stand-by, the Weekly Westminster Gazette did (‘Impressions of Dublin’ 25 August 1923) and paid for his journey (‘a free holiday from the W.W.’),12 a journey which demonstrated again his stamina and determination. He was to write to his fiancée two years later about the long walks he had done. ‘I told you of my Irish 32 miles with a pack’, and with typical modesty added ‘under the influence of funk’,13 and of ‘drunken republican innkeepers’. There was certainly something to be scared about since any young man with his British accent would have been immediately recognisable to the Republicans. Nevertheless, he walked from Dublin to Waterford making enquiries, finding out how strong Republican feeling was, at a time dangerous to all meddling Englishmen.

  His article is not good, but it shows promise of the future novelist in its observation and style. He notes a mother suddenly leaving her baby in the railway carriage just before the train’s departure; an old gentleman in a top hat ‘slowly stirring like a piece of disused machinery’; deplorable food – ‘liver the colour of good gorganzola cheese’; beggars ‘as numerous as in a Continental port’; the midnight painting of slogans, ‘The greater number of them … written up at nightfall by young girls, still at the “flapper” age, the only active Republicans in the city’ (how the word ‘flapper’ recalls the style and feeling of the 1920s!). The fundamental impression is of unchanging Irish republicanism. ‘If they are put in jail, they hunger strike and become martyrs. Thirteen women are qualifying for this heavenly crown.’

  *

  Greene’s second excursion into ‘espionage’ was a trip to the Ruhr a year later. He had read a book by Geoffrey Moss called Defeat which dealt with a complicated political situation, an aftermath of the First World War. Moss described an attempt by the French to set up a separate republic (known as the Revolver Republic) in one of the occupied zones of Germany, the Ruhr, because of Germany’s failure in 1922 to continue to pay ‘indemnities’ to France and Belgium.fn1 To make up a Separatist army, the French brought into the area ‘German criminals … from Marseilles and other ports – pimps, brothel-keepers, thieves from French prisons – to support the collaborators.’14 They created flying pickets who moved from place to place, shouting for an independent Rhineland which would break away from the rest of Germany. Moss describes the murder of a policeman by a crowd – an event first reported in The Times of 30 September 1923:

  I had just re-entered the hotel, thinking everything was over, when perhaps the most horrible incident of Düsseldorf’s ‘Red Sunday’ occurred. Twenty French Cavalrymen led by a dozen men of the ‘Reinwehr’ galloped up to a Green policeman and disarmed him. When this was done, the Separatists turned on the disarmed man with leaden pipes and beat him to death. The doomed policeman covered his face with his hands and sank to the ground. A score or more blows were rained on him during the half-minute it took to kill him. The French remained impassive and when it was over the Separatists shook hands with them.

  This was just the situation to arouse the wrath of Cockburn and Greene: ‘We decided to go and do something about it. When you say to Graham, “Let’s go somewhere”,’ Cockburn explained, ‘and you mean next month, he means tomorrow afternoon.’15 They had no money to finance the trip, so Claud wrote articles to collect a little in advance and Graham took a daring step in order to go abroad without expense: ‘Just on a blind & impudent off-chance I wrote to the German Embassy,’ he told his mother, ‘described pro-French feeling in Oxford, & offered to write a series of articles in the University papers, if they would put me up in the Ruhr. I got a letter back from Count Bernstorff … saying that he would be down in Oxford and would come and see me.’16 Graham describes the Count’s subsequent visit:

  Coming back one early evening to my rooms in Balliol I found my armchair occupied, my only bottle of brandy almost finished and a fat blond stranger who rose and introduced himself, ‘Count von Bernstorff.’ He was the first secretary of the German Embassy … a man who loved luxury and boys and who frequented a shady club called the Abyssinia in Archer Street, Soho. No one could have foretold that hidden in those folds of flesh was a hero who was to run a Jewish escape-route from Germany to Switzerland during the last war and be executed in Moabit prison.17

  His days after that seemed to be filled with Germans, and Greene jubilantly wrote to his mother: ‘I am going to be supplied with a chain of introductions.’18

  Although it was inspired by a genuine concern about what was happening in the Ruhr, this trip was in effect another Balliol escapade, undergraduates taking on – and doing it very successfully – the Establishment, and deriving much fun from it. The two worlds – that of the undergraduate ‘getting an opportunity of going abroad without expense’ and the more serious world of actual human suffering and bravery – come together, a foreshadowing of the tragic underwritten by the comic which was to be a characteristic of some of Greene’s novels.

  The handing over of the money for the journey illustrated the German secret service’s extravagant secrecy and the undergraduate appreciation of its futility. Greene recalls tha
t he received the money at Carlton Gardens, Count Bernstorff handing him a packet and advising him to burn the envelope – which, of course, he kept for some years as a souvenir. Inside were twenty five pound notes, more than sufficient ‘for a fortnight’s holiday down the Rhine and the Moselle’.19 But Cockburn’s detailed recollection of this event is more farcical and telling:

  It was arranged that we were to be financed for the trip but it was all to be secret. So they turned on one of these ridiculous sort of secret service types, who made everything far more absurd than it needed to be. Instead of just handing over the money, Graham and I were to be at a musical comedy and this man would meet us. So there we were sitting, Graham and I and this agent, who had arrived wearing a sort of Hitlerian mackintosh, and this peculiar trio and two women sitting in the front row of the dress circle. Suddenly this man produced this satchel – which of course he dropped like all secret service men – and started to distribute the marked notes. More attention could not have been drawn to our activities – those strange notes being passed back and forth. However, finally we managed to collect sufficient notes to take off and we got to Essen.20

  The absurdity of German intelligence was matched only by similar absurdities in British intelligence as Graham would discover during the Second World War. No wonder his novel Our Man In Havana (1958) is such a delicious farce bordering on tragedy.

  The pair arrived in Essen with a third man, Greene’s cousin. Tooter was taken along because, according to Greene, neither Claud nor he could speak German21 (though Claud Cockburn insists that he ‘spoke German damn nearly as well as Tooter’).

  They visited Cologne, Essen, Bonn, Trier and Mainz. At Cologne they met a Dr Hennings, owner of a great dye factory, who took Claud and Graham to Leverkusen and gave them a huge dinner. To his mother he was expansive about Hennings: ‘He’s a very charming man, very English in appearance, not at all ostentatious’,22 but in his autobiography written almost half a century later, while Graham recalls the meal accurately, ‘a gargantuan feast in Leverkusen’, his attitude towards his host was less friendly. Hennings, it seems, ‘talked glibly of Germany’s starvation’.23

  Essen was more dangerous. Greene remembered the menace there where most of the factory workers were on strike – the badly lit streets, the brooding groups.24 To his mother he commented: ‘Everybody glowered at us, and there was a very delightful sensation of being hated by everybody … all foreigners were taken for French officials. In the evening we went to a Cabaret show, where … a dancer did a symbolic dance of Germany in chains, ending in an exultant breaking of her fetters.’25 In his autobiography he adds a touch he must have felt he had to withhold from his mother – the dancer was a ‘rather fat naked lady’.26 What exactly the naked lady was doing in symbolic dance apart from breaking chains we do not know, but its crudity remained in Graham’s mind, for in a letter written three years later to his future wife he speaks of how much coarser were German cabarets than French.

  The trio flirted with fear and, while on their journey, began to plan a thriller together in the manner of John Buchan; they sought danger most earnestly, as Cockburn remembered, but they came to no harm:

  So we got there and Graham, again with his tremendous sense that he must do something. It was a very dangerous place, the French trigger-happy, and the thugs from the separatists and so on. My plan was to stay in the hotel, examine the situation and in broad daylight go out and see what was going on. Not so Graham – ‘It’s at night things happen’ – and so, against my will, we set out. We walked through the streets of Essen and under some awful railway bridge. It looked like some recipe for murder, shots going off at intervals. I suggested that it was more prudent to survive and get back home with our story, but it was no use. I think Graham had a pistol, so we trekked on under endless railway bridges and underpasses and God knows what and I was scared shitless. Graham striding boldly along, oblivious to danger.27

  In Bonn they took rooms in a little Gasthaus in the market place, built about 1649, for 2s.6d. a night – ‘one could get replete on 1/6d’28 – and they followed Senegalese soldiers about in the hope (unfulfilled) of seeing a rape.29 At Trier, where there was a much greater sense of occupation – the streets full of Spahis – the editor of the local paper ‘for an hour and a half … poured atrocities into [their] ears’ and at Mainz ‘the streets [were] full of drunken French soldiers’. It was in Heidelberg, out of the occupied zone, that they met Dr Eberlein who admitted to them that he was a kidnapper involved in murder commissions: ‘He recruited young men to drive fast cars across the frontier into the French zone where they seized mayors and officials who were collaborating with the French authorities and bundled them back into Germany to be “tried” for high treason.’30

  *

  For some months after his German trip, Greene was certainly preparing himself to become a secret agent, his intention being to return to the French zone of Germany, get in touch with the Separatist leaders and try to obtain information about their plan for the future. ‘It was’, he comments in A Sort of Life, ‘a heady thought for a boy of nineteen.’ Count von Bernstorff and the Berlin Foreign Office obviously had him marked out as a possible recruit and kept in touch with him, as Greene’s letters to his mother at that time show:

  After lunch, Bernstorff suddenly put his head round the door, and he & his cousin & sister came to tea. They had all motored down for the day. Also, one of the Secretaries from the Austrian Embassy came. (27 April 1924)

  Count Bernstorff turned up last Sunday, & was hopeful of a new trouble in the Rhineland soon. (15 October 1924)

  A man from the Berlin Foreign Office … A real pre-war Prussian … I felt all through lunch … that he was trying to discover [my] weak points. However, his weak point was adiposity, and I quite broke his spirit and dominated him thoroughly by dragging him round Oxford at the speed of an express. (17 October 1924)

  He also mentioned to his mother the possibility of his returning to Germany: ‘I’m wondering vaguely whether I will not go for a few weeks in the long vac. to my nice little cheap pub in Bonn.’ And he was certainly, at this time, taking lessons in German from a woman in North Oxford, ‘finding old fraulein Wurchshack an excellent teacher. She races through the grammar, & concentrates most on the conversation.’31 The fact that Graham was becoming as thick as thieves with the German Embassy was beginning to disturb his father.

  But his parents had little to worry about for Greene was not destined to become a professional secret agent then. The problems of the Ruhr were solved: ‘The Dawes Planfn2 was formulated … agreements were reached … and one insignificant recruit to the ranks of espionage was told to fall out – his services no longer required.’32

  It had been an adventure, however, and for Greene surely a sortie into a future Greeneland, and it left the three students with memories. Greene was to recall in the Oxford Chronicle (June 1924) seeing ‘a small Spahi with ragged beard and khaki cloak lounging beneath the Porta Nigra, the great Roman gateway that had stood there for sixteen hundred years’. He retained one strong impression – a walk in Heidelberg to a restaurant on the top of one of the hills: ‘It was very lovely and quite creepy coming down again through the pinewoods in a rather tenuous moonlight.’33 Writing to his future wife, two years afterwards, he recalled that Heidelberg evening: ‘When I think of the loveliest times in my life, there always comes first a long, long visit of times with you – and then a few odd scattered days, like the pinewoods at night above Heidelberg.’

  Tooter’s recollections were more fundamental, more comic: ‘Don’t forget we were very young men at University … [and] there was a great craze for limericks at that time … I remember that Claud Cockburn coined one for us which went something like this’:

  While in a boat with Eva

  She went into a sexual fever

  She opened her thighs

  And to my surprise

  A man on a bank called, ‘Beaver!’34

  fn1 After the First Wor
ld War, indemnities, known as reparations, were imposed on Germany. In April 1921, these were fixed at £6,600,000,000. Germany paid a first instalment but, with inflation, suspended payment in 1922. This led French and Belgian troops to move into the Ruhr basin (the manufacturing region on the right bank of the Rhine) in January 1923, to the passive resistance of the Ruhr workers. The occupying forces encouraged Separatists to proclaim an independent Rhineland Republic on 21 October 1923. Its first (and last) President, Dr Heinz, was assassinated in January 1924. The French gained little benefit from their occupation but did not wish to lose face. They withdrew, after 2½ years, on the eve of the Locarno conference in October 1925.

  fn2 A report on German economic conditions providing a scale of payments for reparations coupled with large foreign loans to Germany, thus enabling Germany to meet its treaty obligations for the next few years.

  10

  Apprenticeship

  It’s the white stag, Fame, we’re hunting …

  – EZRA POUND

  THE IMPORTANCE OF Oxford for Greene was not the academic seal of approval it could give, it was the freedom of an apprenticeship into whatever area of skill he chose. In his case not only ‘espionage’, but also making literary contacts, editing, publishing, and selling what he had edited and published, and making an excursion into the newest medium, radio, which he succeeded immediately in manipulating for his own purposes.

  One of his most important literary contacts was Edith Sitwell. He had come to admire her and had made her a friend. He wrote in March 1923 of being ‘converted to Sitwellianism’ and in June he wrote to his mother that he had read Edith Sitwell’s last volume of poetry and was ‘absolutely out middle stump’.1 This must have been Bucolic Comedies (1923): ‘When/Sir/Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell/Where Proserpine first fell/Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea/(Rocking and shocking the barmaid).’ As usual it was no sooner the word than the blow: ‘I never realised she could write like that,’ he told his mother, ‘I thought I’d strike while the iron was hot, so I posted off an essay on her to the WWG.’ Although the Weekly Westminster Gazette decided not to publish the essay – they had had enough Sitwell for the time being – they promised to send him Edith Sitwell’s next book of verse to review, ‘and you can embody this article in that review’. Best of all, the editor sent Greene’s essay to Miss Sitwell. She then wrote to Graham: ‘I am not used to people understanding anything whatever about my poetry, excepting perhaps an occasional image, and that only partially, as they do not understand the spiritual impulse behind the image. You have understood it all. Your comprehension appears to be absolutely complete’ (19 June 1923). And she thanked him for defending her poetry at a time when she felt herself to have been vulgarly abused in the Weekly Westminster.