The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Edward Sackville-West wrote that Greene’s ‘curious confession [of having played Russian roulette] is disturbing, as any sign of desperation always is, but when Mr Greene concludes, after finally returning the revolver to the cupboard, that he simply went off to Paris, because “the war against boredom had got to go on,” we do not feel that we have been told the whole truth about the episode.’25

  What strikes one as strange is the reason Greene gives for attempting suicide: boredom, it seems. As V. S. Pritchett put it: ‘It’s a young man’s disease to be bored to death, and it carries its own agony, as terrible as anything in childhood … you feel strongly the meaninglessness of life, something like total and real boredom, something that can come upon a prodigy.’26

  Greene seems to have endorsed V. S. Pritchett’s opinion: ‘A death wish, I suppose; a sense of dissatisfaction with myself. I remember myself as an adolescent, not knowing who or what I was. I would look in the mirror and think, “What in heaven’s name am I?”’27 To Christopher Burstall,28 Greene gave a moving account of the terrors of boredom: ‘At puberty boredom was very acute. It had almost a physical feel about it, the boredom, like a balloon inside my head which swelled and swelled and swelled, until I felt it might break finally!’ To put a stop to such a physical feeling might well have been one reason for taking up Russian roulette. And there is in Greene a strong streak of perversity. Speaking of this time he wrote to Vivien Dayrell-Browning:

  I assure you that I have a very strong will. There was a time at the end of the last Christmas term, & at the end of my brief period of lucidity, when Kenneth Bell secretly approached some of my friends – I only heard it a lot later – & told them to quiet me down the next term. But, & here’s the testimony to my will, they said that they had no influence with me … I’m very proud of my will.

  We have here the perversity of a character attracted to death as the ultimate way of escape. In his 1926 poem, ‘Sad Cure’, published in The Cherwell, Graham admits, under the guise of John Perry-Perkins, how, ‘from the earliest times he could remember/The great witch doctor had been Death.’

  Two poems in the same issue of the Oxford Chronicle (January 1925) – ‘If You Were Dead’ and ‘Death and Cosmetics’ – reveal his morbid interest in death. In the latter he writes, ‘Death being but a little while away,/I salve my lips and powder up my face’, a Jacobean influence perhaps, but the poem appears under the pseudonym of ‘Hilary Trench’ which is a name used by Greene when he is at his most morbid. Moreover, these poems were published during the period of ‘lucidity’ when he was experimenting with Russian roulette.

  I questioned Greene about the curious fact that at the time of first love he took to Russian roulette:

  N.S.: I can imagine one doing this for all sorts of reasons but when you’re in love doesn’t seem to be the time to do it. You were in love with Gwen Howell then.

  G.G.: Yes, but I think it may have been just after she’d gone away that I began it. I don’t know. And the boredom – with one’s interests gone as it were – the interest of being in love gone – the boredom had full scope.

  It was not only boredom but depression, what he calls in another letter ‘this horrid climbing down’. What was intense were the heights of happiness followed afterwards by depression, the nature of which is best expressed in Brighton Rock: ‘A dim desire for annihilation stretched in him: the vast superiority of vacancy.’ Yet we have to add that there is in Greene a strong desire to dare what few others are willing to dare. His practising Russian roulette was in part a very private test of screwing his courage to the sticking place, taking himself up to the wire, what he calls in a 1925 letter ‘a final blast in the adventure line’.

  Some of his friends at Oxford knew of his attempts at suicide and some did not. Claud Cockburn, who did not know, commented that: ‘Either at school, or at Oxford, where people are much more unbuttoned, it would never have occurred to me that Graham was in that state of depression, or that he was anywhere near suicidal. The ordinary gloom, and saying, “Oh my God, what’s it all about?” all that, you know, but I was staggered when I read his own accounts of his various attempts at suicide.’29

  And Sir Harold Acton confided: ‘I don’t believe that most people who talk about suicide and write about suicide ever intend to commit it. It’s a sort of pose, an act.’30 Certainly one of Greene’s poems in Babbling April suggests that he might not have been in danger: ‘we make our timorous advances to death, by pulling the trigger of a revolver, which we already know to be empty. Even as I do now.’ But Greene explains this in his autobiography: ‘I wrote a … piece of free verse … describing how, in order to give myself a fictitious sense of danger, I would “press the trigger of a revolver I already know to be empty.” This verse I would leave permanently on my desk, so that if I lost the gamble, it would provide incontrovertible evidence of an accident, and my parents, I thought, would be less troubled by a fatal play-acting than by a suicide.’31 If we find some difficulty in accepting this perhaps we can more easily accept Greene’s statement with its implied reference to Russian roulette, when writing to his future wife about having lied to her over a small matter: ‘And sorry’s no good as a word. I’d rather have killed myself, been successful, last January than have done it.’

  Friends who knew about his attempts at suicide at Oxford did not doubt his intention. Lord Tranmire told me in a hushed voice, fifty-two years after the event, and looking very serious: ‘Graham’s room was off staircase 24. We were very worried over his attempts at Russian roulette. And in the end we made him promise he would never do it with more than two shots out of the five chambers. Robert Scott talked it over with me and he was the one, rather than I, who had to say to Graham, “Now really this has got to stop.”’32

  And it did stop, but the fascination with the great witch-doctor, Death, and the fight against boredom were to be permanent concerns and, in part, the twin forces behind Greene’s writing and travels. The psychoanalysis he had undergone in adolescence had helped but it was not of permanent value – it only suggested another cul-de-sac. Rilke, as Greene pointed out, wrote: ‘Psychoanalysis is too fundamental a help for me, it helps you once and for all, it clears you up, and to find myself finally cleared up one day might be even more hopeless than this chaos.’33 There was no ‘perfect cure’.

  fn1 Women’s Royal Naval Service.

  fn2 Greene was actually forty-eight.

  12

  A Seminal Year

  … no year will seem again quite so ominous …

  – GRAHAM GREENE

  GREENE WRITES OF the ‘odd schizophrenic life’ he lived during the autumnfn1 term of 1924, but then few young men would have had, like jugglers, so many balls in the air; few would have had the mental, physical and intellectual energy to have kept so many activities going at the same time.

  On the one hand, he was the usual student – attending tutorials, drinking coffee at the Cadena, writing an essay on Thomas More, studying the revolution of 1688, taking part in debates at the Union. At the same time, following his trip to the Ruhr, he was learning German in the hope of going into espionage, declaring his love for Gwen Howell, editing the Oxford Outlook and operating on the edge of life and death, risking all by playing Russian roulette.

  In 1925 he and Claud Cockburn joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, being paid up members for four weeks. In the whole of Oxford there were probably no more than half a dozen members. Joseph Macleod recalled the effect of his friend joining the Communist Party: ‘I couldn’t believe this. It was a surprise beyond all words. And I said “What for?” and he replied, “Well, I think it’s the only future.” It shook me to the core. Graham was more stirred and activated by individual victimisation than by class or wage exploitations.’1 In fact it was a ruse to allow Greene to visit Paris and the Communist headquarters there – another student escapade, but one which, many years later, led to his arrest when he tried to enter American territory. He was by no means a Marxist but he nee
ded an adventure to keep up the excitement level and escape from the conventional and this is reflected in a letter written a year after his visit to Paris:

  I longed to take fifty pounds out of the bank – overdrawn of course – & disappear completely like a conjuror. I always feel that when I see these advertisements for 30 pounds single class passages to Australia … Mexico would be much nicer. Alas! I’ve never done it. The nearest to that sensation was suddenly overdrawing 15 pounds & departing to Paris. But even then I decided on it three days beforehand which is too long, & let my people know two days beforehand, which was an arrant weakness in the face of convention.2

  Of course, after failing to capture Gwen Howell, after his flirtation with death through Russian roulette, suddenly going off to Paris would seem to provide another and less final means of escape. But what is missing from this letter is the suggestion that he had ever flirted with death. Doing that had, however, left him still immature, his character seemingly unchanged by his attempts at self-destruction.

  He started in January for Paris and the Communist headquarters; and something of his sense of, and hope for, further excitement comes out in a letter describing his rail journey to the coast: ‘Going to Southampton the train had to walk through floods halfway up the wheels, feeling its way along invisible rails. An exciting prelude to Paris Communism.’3

  Greene arrived at the Gare St-Lazare at 9 p.m. and went to the Hotel des Étrangers in the Rue Tronchet to a small back room smelling of urine. But it was not to be all Communism. That first night he visited the Casino de Paris to see Mistinguette, one of the most popular French music hall artistes of the first two and a half decades of the century: ‘the thin insured distinguished legs, the sharp “catchy” features like the paper faces of the Ugly-Wugglies in The Enchanted Castle’.4

  The next day he went to the Communist headquarters, where officials, though puzzled by his youth and bad French, on the strength of his being a card-carrying member, invited him to a workers’ meeting that night near Menilmontant. But the meeting bored him. It took place at the end of a cul-de-sac in the slums: ‘They kept on reading out telegrams from the platform and everyone sang the Internationale; then they’d speak a little and then another telegram arrived. They were poor and pinched and noisy; one wondered why it was that they had so much good news coming to them which didn’t make any difference at all. All the good news and the singing were at the end of an alley in a wide cold hall; they couldn’t get out; in the little square the soldiers stood in tin helmets beside their stacked rifles.’5

  Graham slipped away and probably that same night went to the Concert Mayol to excite himself ‘with naked breasts and thighs’. On his way back to the Rue Tronchet he passed the Madeleine, where prostitutes gathered, but, as he says, he was ‘too timid to make [his] first experiment in copulation … or else [the girls] were not young or pretty enough’ when compared ‘with the girls of the Concert Mayol’.6 This note appears in A Sort of Life and immediately afterwards he confesses with characteristic honesty: ‘It was certainly no sense of morality which restrained me. Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.’

  That night, from the window of his hotel, he saw a man and woman copulating: ‘they stood against each other under a street lamp, like two people who are supporting and comforting each other in the pain of some sickness’. Greene’s clinical horror yet fascination lingered in his mind and surfaced six years later in his second novel, Rumour at Night Fall:

  The courting couple came directly below his window into the light of the inn door. He could see the man’s lubricious face, the girl’s stare of stupid ignorance. A word came up to him … ‘Mañana’ – tomorrow. That was what mañana meant to them – a closer meeting … against the wall in a dark street.7

  Thirteen years after his original shocked observation, he returned again to the event and gave it as the visual experience of Pinkie in Brighton Rock:

  The new raw street … was empty except for a couple pressed against each other out of the lamplight by a wooden fence. The sight pricked him with nausea and cruelty.8

  Greene made the most of his short visit to Paris. He bought for 200 francs at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop James Joyce’s Ulysses, then still banned as a work of vice in every English-speaking country: it was a ‘huge blue copy … the size of a telephone directory’.9 Also, he had French conversation lessons with a French matron who had clearly decided that the twenty-year-old Greene was a suitable match for her daughter – whom he had not seen. He wrote to his mother of the match-making carried out ‘in a most brazen and terrifying manner’. His enjoyment of the situation comes out in the letter:

  She has described her daughter most intimately with regard to character and looks. She has even insisted on my meeting her this afternoon, and corresponding with her from England when I return. She has had the barefaced impertinence, though I assure you I gave her no encouragement, to inquire into my prospects. As though I had asked her blasted daughter in marriage! At any rate she confessed that her daughter was plus tranquille et plus timide than herself. And at the end, as she left the room, leaving me limp and helpless, a poor fly hopelessly entangled in the web, powerless even to struggle, she let out her only words of English, ‘Pardon me, but you see – I am a mozzer.’10

  But the fly escaped. ‘It’s lucky I’ll be leaving on Wednesday. She can’t possibly make me propose in three days. And yet – the Lord knows what she can’t do.’

  The rather juvenile aspect of Greene’s character at this time, a certain lack of sympathy for the feelings of others and a certain intellectual snobbery, comes out in his attitude towards a provincial literary dinner, when he shows his contempt for cultural pretenders: ‘went to dinner with the editor of the O. Chronicle yesterday. A most frightful mock. Kind of suburban salon effect, with the kind of literary conversation one gets in Babbitt. Mrs Editor was soulful and talked of the Creative Spirit (with capital letters) – she writes little essays in Home Chat … and simply adores French poetry.’ Greene’s reponse was to convince them that he was a Philistine by running down literary work for all he was worth, and talking about Einstein and the effect of Gravity on Light, and Planck and the Quantum theory: ‘I even convinced an elderly daughter of Professor Soddy (the radium man) that I was studying science!’

  *

  Another aspect of his schizophrenic life at this time was his urge to become a successful writer, though he complained to his mother of not having time to do anything during that final autumn term at Oxford, he had begun a novel and was concerned about publishing his first book of verse.

  Greene had sent Basil Blackwell a volume of prose and verse some time in May 1923. In November Greene, overwhelmed with excitement, told his mother that Blackwell ‘was very anxious to publish a volume of mine, but he would have to make one condition, that I contract to sell my next two books of whatever kind to him. I don’t think I’ll raise any difficulty about that!’fn2 Blackwell rejected Graham’s prose but accepted a small book of verse, the title of which comes from a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay: ‘Babbling April I’m thinking of calling it,’ he wrote to his mother: ‘It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April/Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.’11

  Blackwell must also have been impressed by Greene’s prose for he asked him whether he had ever thought of writing a novel. Did Graham Greene’s transparent blue eyes shine? Did the ‘gaffer’, as Blackwell was called even in his early days, know the significance of his thrown-off remark? We do not know, but Greene knew how to react. To his mother he wrote: ‘I said I’d got about a quarter of one written, and he told me to send it along for him to look at. It would be great if he took it on the strength of the quarter. It would give me the necessary urge to finish.’12 Three months later Blackwell had Scaife and Greene, as editors of the Oxford Outlook, to dinner: ‘He didn’t say anything about my original book [of poems]’, Greene reported back to his mother, ‘but he said he liked my nov
el very much and told me to hurry up and finish it.’ Blackwell had, all unwittingly, let the genie out of the bottle, and this moment for Greene confirms Novalis’s statement: ‘my conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.’

  With a typical need for privacy, Greene kept his novel a secret from all his undergraduate friends except one. Joseph Macleod recalled: ‘During our last months at Oxford, I asked him what he was going to do for a living. He said he would probably take a job under his uncle but that what he hoped to do was to write novels. This astonished me, for none of us so far as I knew had any inkling of any such interest. When I said “What kind of novels?” the reply was “Novels that pay of course. If they don’t pay, I won’t write them.” I took this literally, and for a time thought the less of him. I hadn’t realised it was a mere defensive cover for his inner being.’13

  Greene did as Blackwell bid and worked hard on the novel, entitled at this stage ‘Anthony Sant’, and the writing of it involved a difficulty he was to have with future novels – it was always the middle portion of a book which caused him the most trouble: ‘I’ve got a bad stretch in front,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘The first 20,000 words were easy enough, and the last 20,000 will be. It’s the bit in between I don’t like.’14 He completed his novel before November 1924. Alas, Blackwell’s initially warm response was not sustained and the novel was rejected. But Greene did not allow a single rejection to end the matter.

  Through the playwright Clifford Bax, the literary agent A. D. Peters was persuaded to take Greene on and soon came to believe in the young man, though Peters was unable to bring his author to success. He sent the novel first to John Lane and when it was rejected,15 to Heinemann. Greene himself tried to influence events. At Oxford he had known a student who was now at Heinemann’s: ‘I heard from Katherine Monro,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘and she has given [the novel] a good report, but says not to build on it as it has to pass four people of various temperaments, of whom she is the junior. However, she’s doing her best to boost it!’16