The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  PART 3

  Collector of Souls

  13

  ‘Some Ardent Catholic’

  Collecting Souls … Last addition to collection, undergraduate Versifier.

  – GRAHAM GREENE

  ‘AS WE GROW old,’ Greene wrote in his autobiography,1 ‘we are apt to forget the state of extreme sexual excitement in which we spent the years between sixteen and twenty’, and he characterised the mess of those years as a mixture of lust, boredom and sentimentality. Also, he spoke tantalisingly of events or affairs almost begun: ‘a frightened longing for the prostitute in Jermyn Street, where there were real brothels in those days, an unreal romantic love for a girl with a tress of gold and a cousin who played tennis when it was almost too dark to see the ball.’2

  The cousin was Ave Greene, beautiful then and still beautiful in old age. Herbert, Raymond and Graham all entered into a rivalry for her. The emotion generated by those games of tennis is reflected in ‘Prologue to a Pilgrimage’,3 Greene recalling the ‘twilight world of calf-love’ when the ‘wind blew her skirt tightly round her knee.’4 ‘Dusk … dropped down till Anthony could see little more than a vague and mothlike flitter of white, across the shadowy net.’5 When he came to write The Ministry of Fear twenty years later this vision of Ave remained unchanged: ‘He was waiting for someone at a gate in a lane: over a high hedge came the sound of laughter and the dull thud of tennis-balls, and between the leaves he could see moth-like movements of white dresses.’6 Thinking of her, Anthony Sant, a black boy, recalls in a phrase which has masturbatory connotations that he was a ‘nigger’: ‘Yet in bed he beat his sheets in an excitement of uncertainty … she was attracted by him.’

  In a letter written to Greene in their mutual old age, Ave recalled the innocence of those tennis games, hardly realising (though in retrospect wishing she had) the intense emotion she generated in the three Greene brothers.

  As for prostitutes in Jermyn Street, Ave’s brother ‘Tooter’ told me that he used to go with Greene to London: ‘We were both young men obsessed with sex, and we went on the razzle dazzle.’ In Jermyn Street in 1977 with his brother Sir Hugh, Graham recalled that he was once in a brothel there. He patted the original building as he passed and was much taken by the notion that his older brother Raymond, already well-established as a medical man, was at a medical conference next door – on the other side of the wall in the same building.

  The ‘girl with a tress of gold’ was Clodagh O’Grady, daughter of Haddress O’Grady, a master at Berkhamsted. Many schoolboys were in love with Miss O’Grady, including Greene’s special friend, Eric Guest. Clodagh O’Grady herself has denied both her golden tresses and beauty – ‘my hair was in pigtails and I had broken my nose at the age of seven’. But Greene remembers getting his aunt Maud to pass a letter from him to the girl with golden hair.7 Alas, no early love letters survive, since, as Clodagh O’Grady told me, she destroyed them, ‘very properly, as I then thought’, when Greene married.

  While at Oxford Greene tried to persuade himself that he was in love with a young waitress at the ‘George’ in the Cornmarket,8 and H. D. Ziman, a contemporary of Greene at University and later literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, remembered that an attractive waitress he knew at Oxford ‘mentioned that she had been out with Graham, among others, and described him as “soft”. Her name was Rose.’

  Just as Greene’s feelings for Ave Greene appeared in his first novel, so his feelings for Miss O’Grady, and possibly the waitress, provided the inspiration for his 1937 story, ‘The Innocent’,9 which brings together the child’s innocent acceptance of sexuality with the adult’s worldly experience of it.

  The hero (so like Greene as to be indistinguishable) takes Lola, a girl he picked up in a bar, to his home town for a night of love-making. The hero is seeking the sense of his first years – the ‘smell of innocence’ – and he finds it when he sees children coming from the same dancing teacher’s home he had visited as a child. He remembers when no more than six how he loved his partner on those occasions with an intensity he had never felt since – ‘children’s love … has a terrible inevitability of separation because there can be no satisfaction’. He remembers also games of blindman’s buff at birthday parties ‘when I vainly hoped to catch her’,10 and he recalls in A Sort of Life: ‘the black shiny shoes with snappy elastic and the walk down King’s Road [after dancing lessons] … holding someone’s hand for fear of slipping.’11

  In the story, he recovers a message he left his first love in a hole in the woodwork of a gate twenty-five years before – the scrap of paper has his initials below ‘the childish inaccurate sketch of a man and woman. It was a shock to see … a picture of crude obscenity.’12 Later that night, he ‘began to realise the deep innocence of that drawing. I had believed I was drawing something with a meaning unique and beautiful; it was only now after thirty years of life that the picture seemed obscene.’13

  Between the innocence of the child’s transitory love and the young man’s casual sexual encounters, there was the experience of true romantic love which Gwen Howell had inspired. It came again to Greene when he met Vivien Dayrell-Browning in 1925.

  *

  Their meeting came at a time when the safe life of Oxford was coming to an end and he had to face a future outside the secure bounds of home and university. And he was in a mood for change, ‘feeling frightfully bored … absolutely fed up with the amusements Oxford provides. It was just like a Paris back street.’14

  In this frame of mind he wrote an article for the Oxford Outlook which linked sex, religion and the cinema. His thesis was that most people were ‘considerably oversexed’: ‘We either go to Church and worship the Virgin Mary or to a public house and snigger over stories and limericks; and this exaggeration of the sex instinct has had a bad effect on art, on the cinematograph as well as on the stage.’15 This sweeping statement brought him a short, sharp rebuke – linguistic and religious – from Vivien Dayrell-Browning. She wrote to him that one did not ‘worship’ the Virgin Mary – one ‘venerated’ her, the correct term being ‘hyperdulia’. He replied, the letter undated, to ‘Miss Dayrell’ on Balliol Junior Common Room notepaper:

  I most sincerely apologise. I’m afraid any excuses will seem very lame. But I wrote the article in a frightful hurry, and without preconceiving it, as the paper was already in press. At the same time I was feeling intensely fed up with things, and wanted to be as offensive all round as I could … I really am very sorry. Will you forgive me, and come and have tea with me as a sign of forgiveness?

  On 6 March 1925, he wrote to his mother:

  I got a furious letter from some ardent Catholic in Blackwell’s publishing firm about a chance remark I made in my article on the cinema. So I wrote a sweet letter back apologising & asking her to tea. She’s turned out very charming & not nearly so religious as her furious letter made me believe. So once again out of the lion has come forth sweetness!

  This was not the first time Vivien had corrected his work, nor, as he was to realise, was it their first meeting. She had earlier found ‘a curious lapse … in a poem of his – he spoke of birds’ eggs pressed between blotting paper, next to a reference to something that could have been pressed between blotting paper.’16 This must have been in the poem ‘Sensations’ in Babbling April, and the emended lines were: ‘How timorously, like an old fashioned collector of/wild flowers do we gather our sensations and press/them in the damp blotting paper of our mind.’ They first met on one of Greene’s visits to Blackwell’s. He was to give the date as 17 March 1925, but it must have been earlier. Vivien was taking dictation from Basil Blackwell. Her account of this meeting – fifty-five years afterwards, when they had been separated for many years – was rather cool and detached: ‘I did not take especial notice … He wore, I think, the usual grey flannels and probably a blazer (Balliol) but I’m not sure … He had fair hair with a sort of quiff or rather wave on the top, was pale with pale blue eyes. I don’t remember anything of [his] co
nversation with Basil.’17 But Greene remembered that when he left Blackwell’s office that morning ‘and started over to Berkhamsted with [Eric] Guest’, he mentioned ‘with a sense of exhilaration that [he’d] just seen an awfully pretty girl at B.’s!’

  Their second meeting, in his room at Balliol, was decisive. He fell in love with her and that, for the young Greene, meant complete devotion. It must have been a stunning surprise that the girl he had spoken to Guest about should be the same girl to come to his room for tea. In a letter of 26 June 1925, he recalled with some ingenuousness his feelings at the beginning of their relationship:

  When I got your letter about my article in the Outlook, I was feeling frightfully bored … and I read your letter, and this seemed something fresh. And I made a vow with myself that if you were pretty, I’d suggest myself into love with you whatever else you might be. Just as a change from Oxford. That’s why I was so anxious for you to have tea with me, and there was only one small scrap of real apology in that first letter. I suppose it was the right punishment to fall really frantically in love with you, without any suggesting at all. And I deserve what I’ve got. If I’d known what was going to happen, I should never have answered that letter at all, never apologised. I daresay I shouldn’t if I’d been feeling merry at the time I got it.

  Vivien remembered having tea with him at Balliol. Later he took her to see Greta Garbo at the Super Cinema and then there was tea at the ‘Candied Friend’ which was a ‘beautiful tea shop on the first floor in High Street with home-made elaborate cakes’. Greene’s letters suggest a mind agile in recalling these meetings and remembering anniversaries. ‘Darling,’ he wrote, ‘will you think of me at – say 10.30 on Wednesday morning – I think that’s about the anniversary [of their meeting.] My dear, you were not looking plain that morning; you were at your second best I admit but your second best is a good reach above other people’s best … That morning you were merely awfully pretty, & not as you are usually awfully beautiful.’ He went over their early meetings with fervent emotion. On 13 July he wrote:

  It was in that strange time, when I only knew you a little, even though I loved you a lot. And your name was Miss Dayrell then, and I only thought of you as Vivienne to myself. And you’d just been to Paris, and I wanted you to come to a long forgotten play called The Ship, by … Ervine … and you nearly didn’t come, because you’d been to a dance the night before, and you wrote a very firm note about it (I have it still, the ink faded, the paper yellowed – it was in the days of the three-halfpenny post), and it was to Dear Mr Graham Greene, and luckily I didn’t get it till after I’d telephoned … and ‘You were a Queen in Jerusalem, and I was a heathen slave.’ … And you’d been looking more lovely than I’d ever seen you before then. And what was as good, I began to feel that evening that we really knew each other. I wonder if you began to feel that too. The result was that … I couldn’t go to bed, and walked two miles beyond my digs … wondering how long I ought to wait before asking you to come out again.

  Nine months later, in Nottingham, he checked the date of the St John Ervine play: ‘I looked up the date of The Ship. It was April 17 [1925], so that Sunday will be the tenth anniversary of my meeting you and the ninth of the certainty that I was in love with you! A whole month before I was certain … but I plead … in defence of my own slowness that until The Ship I’d only seen you twice for a few moments of business in the office, once at tea and once at The Three Women.’18

  Greene pursued Vivien with unremitting energy. He bombarded her with letters (sometimes he wrote three times a day) and telegrams. In those early days of their relationship, he was to remember vividly the briefest of meetings, such as going into Blackwell’s and having ‘G[ladys] L[oveless] say, “Come in James,” and her laughter and apology brought you out of your [cubby]hole for about three seconds. I had to feed on that for days!’19 Although his first few letters to her have an undergraduate flavour – flippant, bumptious and sometimes outrageous – his infatuation is apparent in every one. ‘If you are a fanatic, I admire your restraint. I’m a fanatic on one subject (you), and all my letters have been full of it. I can’t keep off it.’20

  There was often an imaginative lightness to their correspondence. Vivien wrote to him on 2 June 1925: ‘Do you know you’ve had a letter every day this week? I shall appoint myself chairman of a committee empowered to look into the matter & draw up a report’, which brought Greene’s reply, speaking on behalf of mythical shareholders, that they were fully satisfied with the Chairman, and he added privately: ‘I can’t say this in the Board Room, but the Chairman is the most wonderful person in the world.’

  *

  The object of his love was nineteen years old. According to Sir Basil Blackwell Vivien had begun working for him in 1920, when she was only fifteen. She was remarkably precocious, having published verse in Poetry Review when she was only thirteen and a volume of verse with Blackwell’s, The Little Wings, when she was sixteen. G. K. Chesterton wrote an introduction to this book in which he said: ‘I should not write an introduction to any work which I did not think promising and beautiful; and I think this work very beautiful and still more promising. The child who has still some touch with the fairies is not only more admirable, but really more terrible than the enfant terrible’: a rather avuncular pat on the head for the young writer. Here is an example of her work written when she was fourteen:

  Cold lucent depths where fishes swim,

  Crimson floating flowers of the sea,

  Ribbons of silver, long and slim,

  Coral caverns rosy and dim …

  These are the things I see.

  The book was dedicated ‘To Mummydar who has shown me beauty everywhere’ and her mother added the following note: ‘All the work of my young daughter contained in this first collection of her verse is original and has been written without aid of any kind. I wish to acknowledge the immediate recognition and subsequent kindness shown in respect to my little girl’s work by the Poetry Review since 1918. Vivienne’s present age is 15½ years.’

  Whatever the disclaimers, there is the suggestion of maternal influence and patronage and Vivien recalled the shame and mortification the publication of the book brought her. Her mother had collected the poems without telling her and had written the dedication herself: ‘I felt’, she said, ‘as if I should go up in flames.’

  When she was seventeen, Vivien became a convert to Roman Catholicism and Catholicism was the subject of her poem entitled Lux Mundi, published in Blackfriars magazine – one of her more mature poems to survive. The following lines are from the third stanza:

  Like acolytes the candles stood

  Ranged with their flames of restless gold,

  Above them hung the glimmering Rood,

  Below, the Body and the Blood,

  O Mystery no words have told!

  Nor have men’s hearts yet understood –

  (O strange and still Beatitude!)

  The Holy Thing their hearts may hold.

  She has remained a devoted Catholic.

  While Greene’s obsession with her can be traced through his avalanche of letters, her attitude to him has to be discovered through those same letters, for few of hers have survived. Certainly they had interests in common and she was a young woman of independent mind, though confined by the stricter conventions of the time, and obviously not a rebel. She told me: ‘My mother chose my clothes and I was never consulted and at that time I wore a hideous black hat, suitable for a woman of forty and felt ill at ease in it’, though photographs of the time show that she was attractive (what was once called ‘well-endowed’), with black hair. Greene wrote to her: ‘You carry magic with you always … it is in your eyes, & your voice, & your long dark hair, & your whiteness.’ In the same letter he described the images of her that he was taking away from a weekend spent together, ‘one of them will be you washing in the bathroom … your face so perfectly angelic when it looks pink & scrubbed & glimmery with water.’21 The impression she made on
him was best expressed in terms of a ‘Wanted’ notice which he sent to her:

  Wanted – by Me. Miss Dayrell

  Alias Vivienne, Dear one, Darling, darling heart, marvellous wonderful, adorable one, Angel, Loveliest in the world, Sweetest Heart, Dear only love for ever, sweet one, old thing, dear desire.

  Description: Hair – dark & lovely & long; eyes, grey-green & more beautiful than any other eyes; figure, perfect; complexion, wonderful; skin in texture as a rose petal; feet: very small & very adorable; disposition: sleepy. Known to her companion in crime as My Love. May be infallibly recognised by her stars [Vivien’s code word for kisses].

  Behind this adulation, one has the impression of a girl excited and flattered by Greene’s courtship of her, but not emotionally involved with him – enjoying her power, but keeping him within bounds. It was to be a long wooing. ‘His letters were most beautiful and touching and these showed me his emotions and feelings more than he could do personally and made me understand him and care for him gradually.’22

  One undated letter preserves, as in aspic, a day’s experience of love and college life for Greene:

  It was a really marvellous spring day, sky eggshell blue. And I had a riotous lunch at Thorncliffe Rd [Greene’s digs] with Braine-Hartnell (do you know him? He writes quite good poetry), George [Whitmore], [Robert] Scott & Bill [?] … About 2.30 we staggered down to the river, got into a punt & steered a strange & erratic course to Tims – I can’t imagine how we kept our balance – as it was we smashed into every other boat we met. And we got back to Balliol just in time for dinner, & the trees in the quad were beginning really to smell like early summer, & in my pigeon hole were TWO notes from you, which was enough to add a climax to the day, & the Outlook, & I tried in vain, standing rather precariously on the hall steps to understand the introductory paragraph, & B. H. tried to explain it but his brain was equally befogged, & he only made it more muddled. And dinner made us more ‘happy’ still, so much that I can’t remember what happened later. I’ve just looked up the two notes I found. Even you commented on the day – ‘What a heavenly day it was yesterday! And to-day! I’ve had to send home poste haste for summer frocks – I do hope it will be like this for Eights Week …’