Greene’s energy is again apparent for not only had he organised this event (and enjoyed the consternation it caused), but wrote it up in an article, and was able to make his B.B.C. contribution do treble duty. His poem appeared in the Weekly Westminster two days after the broadcast – ‘I’m rather glad, as their rate of pay has gone up,’ he wrote to Hugh – and it was also part of his Newdigate entry.fn3
But there was yet a fourth dimension to his contribution. It was, as Rowse recorded in his diary, an extract from ‘a 250-line poem on Byron … He … dealt with Byron from the point of view of women and love, and to that extent it is a much truer picture than that I give.’14 The poem was called ‘The Godly Distance’:
I could have been so happy had I kept
A certain godly distance from the world …
Not dust, but only memory of dust,
No love, but reminiscences of love …
But out I peeped and met a witch’s eyes.
‘I do not want,’ I cried, and felt her hair,
‘I have enough,’ and oh, I longed for lips.
‘Poetry is mine and mastery, I need no more.’
A finger gleamed and so I swayed to you.
I drove along the road, I walked the lane,
I felt the ecstasy, I knew the pain.
Rowse, who also described Greene’s extraordinarily youthful appearance at this time – ‘curly flax-gold hair and the odd strangulated voice … those staring, china-blue eyes, wide open to the world’ – was right to be struck by Greene’s poem, for he had chosen it for a particular and secret reason. ‘My sentimental blank verse lines had nothing to do with Byron – they were directed at Berkhamsted.’15 In fact, this poem was a private message to his first love. Listening to the broadcast at Berkhamsted, as his sister Elisabeth (then eleven) recalled, were a group of people: ‘My parents didn’t have a radio in 1925 and we all (Da, and Mumma, Hugh and myself and I suppose the governess) went to the matron’s room to listen to the broadcast on her wireless – she was the only one in the school who had one!’ It was Elisabeth’s governessfn4 who was the object of Greene’s first passionate love and who sat listening, as she had been warned to do: ‘Poor young woman,’ Greene explained much later, ‘it never occurred to me what embarrassment she must have suffered, seated before the radio set with my father and mother.’16 In A Sort of Life, he does not mention her by name, but she was called Gwen Howell. She was governess at Berkhamsted for about eight months, a tumultuous period for both Miss Howell and young Graham Greene.
fn1 According to Elisabeth Greene, Gwen Howell was not actually a governess: ‘Up till the time she came there had been nannies (always called nurses then) and she was pure heaven. I adored her and life became much less boring. [She would] oversee nursery meals, take one out, oversee bed time and getting up, that sort of thing.’ (Letter of 24 April 1982.)
fn2 In 1864 Corfu was ceded to Greece, but in 1923 after the murder of an Italian boundary delegation, Italian forces bombarded the chief port Kerkira.
fn3 Brian Howard was used by Evelyn Waugh in part as the model for Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, more fully as the source for Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags. Michael Davidson recalls him in the 1940s in London: ‘Another drunken poet who came to the Swiss was poor Brian Howard, a haunted soul hungry for tragedy, racked by the tormenting ecstasies of seeking “the divine friend much desired”. He too was tiresome when drunk; but a vivid, susceptive person beneath the obfuscations of escape. And Brian, like so many of that delirious generation, later took his own life’ (The World, the Flesh and Myself, 1962, p. 208).
fn4 A prize of 20 guineas known as ‘The Newdigate’ for English verse entries and confined to Oxford undergraduates. It was first awarded in 1806 and won by, among others, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, John Buchan and Julian Huxley.
11
Love and Death – a Flirtation
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
– J. M. BARRIE
ON 19 MAY 1924, Greene wrote to his mother, ‘I’m glad Miss Howell is satisfactory’, and mentioned that he was looking forward to going down to Sheringham for the vacation, but in his autobiography he recalls how reluctant he was to join his family on the Norfolk coast. If he had had enough money he would probably have gone to France but he had got himself in debt at Oxford and at least at Sheringham he could live at his parents’ expense. His debts were what you would expect: ‘so many barrels of beer, so many books, shelf upon shelf of them, which had nothing to do with work. At Blackwell’s bookshop credit seemed to a newcomer endless (though they liked a little bit sometimes on account), but drinks were ordered through the college buttery and appeared on battels, as college bills were called (there was no credit given there) and … there had often been taxis at midnight.’1
So events came together and Greene met the ‘satisfactory’ Miss Howell during the family holiday at Sheringham, and fell in love with her. Fifty years later he recalled the very circumstances – the stretch of beach, his mother reading and the angle from which he examined Gwen Howell’s body: ‘She was lying on the beach and her skirt had worked up high and showed a long length of naked thigh.’ After that, he lived only for moments with her.2 His love was intense, but was to be short-lived – ‘the reality of a passion should not be questioned because of its brevity. A storm in the shallow Mediterranean may be over in a few hours, but while it lasts it is savage enough to drown men, and this storm was savage.’3
During vacations he would visit Gwen Howell in the nursery at Berkhamsted, ‘where she sat alone and the slow fire consumed the coals behind an iron guard’.4 It would seem, at first, not to have been such a sudden attraction on Gwen’s part. Elisabeth recalls, when she was twelve, Graham coming up to the nursery in search of Gwen Howell: ‘She and I used to hear Graham coming up and we used to hide together in the big school laundry basket that stood between the nursery passage and the entrance to the boys’ dormitory. We giggling and listening to Graham putting on gramophone records in the nursery – Pasadena and Last Night on the Back Porch and something I thought very funny which went like “If you were the bug in the cabbage of life”.’5
Graham’s experience of first love is surely reflected in The Ministry of Fear (1943): ‘All the way upstairs to his room, he could smell her. He could have gone into any chemist’s shop and picked out her powder, and he could have told in the dark the texture of her skin. The experience was as new to him as adolescent love: he had the blind passionate innocence of a boy: like a boy he was driven relentlessly towards inevitable suffering, loss and despair, and called it happiness.’6
To please Gwen, he took his first dancing lessons and went to ‘hops’ at the King’s Arms in Tring. To keep up appearances he had to dance occasionally with the wife of some master at the school and ‘surrender her to other arms. Sometimes in the dark schoolroom out of term, on the excuse of teaching [his] brother and sister to waltz and foxtrot, [they] had dances of [their] own when half-kisses could be exchanged without the children seeing.’ He did not remember the first kiss or ‘the hesitations and timidities which surely must have preceded the kiss’7 but when in The Ministry of Fear he wrote: ‘When he thought of her it was with an absurd breathlessness. It was as if he were waiting again years ago outside … and the girl he loved was coming down the street and the night was full of pain and beauty and despair because one knew one was too young for anything to come of this …’,8 he must have had Gwen in mind.
In a diary entry of 2 August 1932, seven years later while living with his wife in the Cotswolds, Graham recorded: ‘At night I dreamed, strangely, of Gwen Howell, whom I loved with such unreasoning passion in 1924–25.’ In providing Arthur Rowe in The Ministry of Fear with a past, Graham went back to his love for Gwen Howell:
He was in the main street of a small country town where he had sometimes, when a boy, stayed with an elder sister of his mother’s. He was standing outside the inn yard of the King’s Arms, and up the ya
rd he could see the lit windows of the barn in which dances were held on Saturday nights. He had a pair of pumps under his arm and he was waiting for a girl much older than himself who would presently come out of her cloakroom and take his arm and go up the yard with him. All the next few hours were with him in the street: the small crowded hall full of the familiar peaceful faces – the chemist and his wife, the daughters of the headmaster, the bank manager and the dentist with his blue chin and his look of experience, the paper streamers of blue and green and scarlet, the small local orchestra, the sense of a life good and quiet and enduring, with only the gentle tug of impatience and young passion to disturb it for the while and make it doubly dear for ever after.9
A poem he wrote at this time records how he would sit in the room below Gwen’s, his family around him, and while pretending to read, listened to the sound of her moving about on the floor above:
If you were dead, I should not listen
To every sound of your foot upstairs.
I should not hide where the wet leaves glisten,
Hunting my mind’s thoughts, coursing its hares,
Dreaming that other [my italics], who will see
The whole of your body’s secrecy.
And what of Gwen Howell and ‘that other’? She was ten years older than Greene and died in 1974, but her husband, Conway Spencer, has explained something about their situation at that time.10 He met her in Malta in 1918 when she was in the WRNSfn1, and they became engaged. In 1920 she returned home and her fiancé, who worked for Cable and Wireless, was posted to Aden, then Mauritius and then Rodriguez Island in the Indian Ocean. There were family objections to the engagement and it was broken off. Contact was difficult – there were only four mails a year to Rodriguez. Although the engagement was renewed, they had been separated for about five years when Gwen went to Berkhamsted as governess, but her fiancé was due to return to England in February 1925. Greene’s many verses to Gwen, his bombardment of love letters (during term they wrote to each other every week) and especially his broadcast in January 1925, were part of a struggle to win her away from her fiancé, ‘who had become a stranger to her’.11 Gwen had her own struggles – once she spoke of marriage, but what could a student at Oxford do about that? He could only urge her to break off the engagement – to be free.
Her husband recalled that on his return ‘there was uncertainty in picking things up again … it was all a very quick business and the marriage was scheduled to take place at St George’s Church, Bloomsbury on 25 February 1925.’ Many years later, Elisabeth Greene visited Gwen Howell, who told her that the day before her wedding her mother made her burn all Graham’s letters.12 Graham’s mother went to the wedding; Graham did not. His bitterness was expressed in poetry:
It is not that he gains your craftiest smile,
The second best was good enough for me.
Nor that his craving mind will hold awhile
The transient secret of your intimacy.13
Greene had lost the battle but on recovering was to fall more deeply in love again some months later. The following year he won his first prize, apart from his school award, for a poem published in the Saturday Review (25 September 1926). The sonnet appeared under the name of H. Graham, and suggests that he was emotionally free of Gwen:
First Love is but the learning of a lesson,
A fumbling, faltering, missing of the lips,
Blind with the wonder of a new oppression
That drives to exile old cool fellowships …
How could we know, who were so young, dull-witted,
Dazed by a happiness too full of pain,
That these our gestures fitted and refitted
Would lose their passionate errors and attain
Perfect control of voice, lips, hands and eyes …
Nevertheless, such was his love for Gwen Howell that when his play The Living Room was a success and he received a letter from her (‘I was a man of over fifty and she, by now, well into her cruel sixties’),fn2 he recognised her handwriting on the envelope and his ‘heart beat faster’.14
*
It was at this time that he began playing Russian roulette. According to his own evidence, he played this game on six different occasions within a period of six months, but if suicide was his intention he was unsuccessful.
He had read about Russian roulette in a book by the Russian writer, Ossendowski, which described how White Russian officers tried to escape boredom: ‘One man would slip a charge into a revolver and turn the chambers at random, and his companion would put the revolver to his head and pull the trigger. The chance was … five to one in favour of life.’ It may well have been Ossendowski’s book that led Greene to play Russian roulette (though the only episode even approximating to Greene’s occurs in his Man and Mystery in Asia), but the possibility of playing it came from the accident of his finding a revolver in his elder brother’s cupboard. Talking about it in 1981, Graham seemed at pains to find fault with, not his own behaviour, but his cousin’s:
I discovered the revolver. And it had live ammunition – a cardboard box of bullets. And the most astonishing thing, Raymond was given it by a cousin St George Lake who was killed in France. And before he went back to France the last time, he gave this revolver to Raymond, and Raymond could only have been – supposing he was killed in 1917, say, I would have been 13 and Raymond would have been 16. At the most he could only have been 17. It was the most extraordinary thing to do. St George gave me a helmet with a possible bloodstain on the inside, which I kept for many years.15
Raymond was away climbing in the Lake District when Graham took his first gamble:
I slipped the revolver into my pocket, and the next I can remember is crossing Berkhamsted Common towards the Ashridge beeches … Beyond the Common lay a wide grass ride known … as Cold Harbour … and beyond again stretched Ashridge Park, the smooth olive skin of beech trees and the last year’s quagmire of leaves, dark like old pennies … I slipped a bullet into a chamber and, holding the revolver behind my back, spun the chambers round … I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear and pulled the trigger. There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position. I was out by one.16
Graham emphasises the casual way in which he began playing this dangerous game, but the urge to play it must have had its roots deep in his psyche, and the timing of it is particularly significant. In his essay, ‘The Revolver in the Corner-Cupboard’ (1946), he says it began in the autumn of 1922, but twenty-five years later he gives a different date, autumn 1923.17 In his autobiography he describes how he gave up the game quite suddenly during a Christmas vacation and told his parents that a friend had invited him to Paris.18 Working backwards from this piece of information, we can give a more accurate dating. He went to Paris in the first week of January 1925, as a letter of 12 January testifies,19 so that his first experiment probably took place in July 1924 – when he was in love with Gwen Howell.
He was then living a full life – he was in love and fighting for his love; he was deeply involved in activities as an Oxford undergraduate; he was planning a programme for the B.B.C.; and he was editor of the Oxford Outlook; yet, after the summer vacation of 1924, he took the revolver back with him to Oxford in order to continue playing the game:
There I would walk out from Headington towards Elsfield down what is now a wide arterial road, smooth and shiny like the walls of a public lavatory. Then it was a sodden unfrequented country lane. The revolver would be whipped behind my back, the chamber twisted, the muzzle quickly and surreptitiously inserted in my ear beneath the black winter trees, the trigger pulled.20
Greene is describing his own actions with the objectivity of a narrator in a work of fiction. It is as if someone else is doing this to him or that the revolver had a will of its own exacting that penalty from this particular ear.
It was a long-drawn-out gamble with death and, furthermore, to others it looks like an obvious de
sire to commit suicide. This is what Greene denies. For him it was always a gamble with a five to one chance of failure. But what could have been his motive?
Claud Cockburn has suggested that: ‘He wasn’t trying to get out of life, he was trying to get more kick out of life. After all, if you take LSD, the chances are that it is going to kill you, but equally there is a possibility you’ll suddenly have some fantastic new experience, and I think it was like that for Graham. I think it was premature LSD.’21 Greene’s experiment was not, however, the same as taking LSD – it could have resulted in instant death – but he was trying to get more out of life, and what he got were moments of extreme excitement. He brings out the nature of his ‘experiment’ in his poem, ‘The Gamble’:
I slip a charge into one chamber,
Out of six,
Then move the chambers round.
One cast of the dice for death,
And five for life.
Then, eyes blind and fingers trembling,
Place the revolver to my head.
And pull the trigger.
Will it be mist and death
At the bend of this sunset road,
Or life reinforced
By the propinquity of death?
Either is gain.
It is a gamble which I cannot lose.22
He could not lose because, incredible though it may seem, whatever the outcome he won the battle against boredom, ‘boredom … which had reached an intolerable depth … boredom … as deep as love and more enduring’.23 (It was not only boredom – he has a neurotic terror of passivity.) He either died or experienced ‘an extraordinary sense of jubilation, as if carnival lights had been switched on in a dark drab street. My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities. It was like a young man’s first successful experience of sex – as if among the Ashridge beeches I had passed the test of manhood.’24 Graham didn’t feel he had passed such a test when faced with Carter at school. There his attempted suicides were attempted escapes from the misery Carter caused. Alone on Ashridge Park or in a country lane near Elsfield, he was testing his own courage.
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 21