And he was filled ‘with something very nearly like horror’ that there would be no one to talk to about things which were important to him, ‘like books and there’d be nothing to keep the mind sharpened’. He feared he would fall ‘into a sort of ghastly bluntness’, which he would only realise when he had returned from China. Seeing Vivien again on Saturday, he thanked God, for he knew that there was no one else with whom he could talk things over15 – certainly not his parents who he suspected would take up an attitude of ‘I told you so’.
Greene wrote to Vivien again that Saturday night (in pencil and rather illegibly) almost at the end of his tether:
I don’t want adventure much. I only want to see you. Oh why in Hell weren’t we made relations & I could see more of you? It seems a pretty dirty trick of fate to have shoved us together only to separate us again. I know I shouldn’t be able to go on seeing a lot of you, even if I took a job in England but why in God’s name should we ever have met? It wasn’t natural. And now that we have met, I can’t even have recourse to my old methods of curing depression. Lord knows in comparison before this I didn’t need much, & then I could get blind drunk for twenty-four hours on end, or else practise the revolver trick, which was warranted to cure for quite a time. Now I can’t do either. I’ve tried to do both last term, & found I couldn’t. You’ve changed all my mind. And now I’m a coward without armour & come whining.
Greene’s letters make painful reading as we watch him striving to come to terms with a reluctant sweetheart.
Reviewing Ford’s novel The Good Soldier, which deals with a broken marriage, he wrote: ‘one cannot help wondering what agonies of frustration and error lay behind [it]’.16 Something of his ‘agonies of frustration’ is apparent in the extraordinary solution he ultimately offered Vivien of a celibate marriage:
What I long for is a quite original marriage with you, companionship & companionship only, all the Winters evenings past, & to have someone worth fighting for. And you would go on holidays when you liked, & see your mother when you liked, & I should share your companionship. I shouldn’t grumble if it was a less share than your mother had. You could work too if you wanted to. There’d be no domestic tying down, & you’d always keep your ideal of celibacy, & you could help me to keep the same ideal.
As he developed his argument for a celibate marriage, he made extraordinary comparisons: ‘Darling, it sounds fantastic, but the fantastic is often wildly practical, as when Columbus put out from Spain.’ Moreover, the whole thing would be ‘an adventure finer than the ordinary marriage’ because of a shared ideal and there would be no reason why it should ever end, because no sex was involved (though Graham put it more obliquely, arguing that it would never end because it was very different from the other form of marriage). And, taking up a phrase of Vivien’s – the need to ‘round off’ their relationship, by which she meant a clean break from each other – Greene provided her with a different meaning to the phrase: ‘Suppose God did make us come together, & the rounding off was as I’ve imagined, & that He brought us together, in order to strike out together across this new country.’ He went on to make still greater claims: ‘it would be new country, & perhaps even the kind of promised land to which people have really been aiming, though they didn’t know it, & they’ll follow us in.’
One gets the impression that Greene is himself amazed to be writing such a letter: ‘I could not have believed six months ago [when he was still an atheist], that I should write a kind of religious letter. But I can’t help it. I’ve been wanting to say this for a long time now. O my dear, if you only made it true – this monastic marriage – then it would be goodbye to business in China, & there’d be something more than money in the future.’17
Out of his despair, Greene struck the right note and unknowingly found the right formula to touch Vivien’s heart. She was intrigued by the idea of a monastic marriage: ‘You asked me why I hadn’t told you before. I don’t know, but last night it all came out … I’m not asking you to surrender any of your other greater loves, religion, family, anything. I shall always be satisfied to come third or fourth.’18
Greene then presented Vivien with a Dickensian idyll of married bliss: ‘And there’ll be winter evenings, when we can make hot buttered toast for each other (do you like roast chestnuts? I do), & there’ll be summer days with the sea sparkling blue … & days on the down, & night expresses, & evenings sometimes, when we are both sleepy and tired & we’ll just read, or I’ll write & you’ll put in a few touches to a design.’
We can see Greene not only readying himself for withdrawal from the business world: ‘Darling, I don’t want to rush you. You needn’t even tell me on Saturday, if you don’t want to. If it’s Yes sometime (& I pray God it will be), I shall send in my notice straight away to the B.A.T.,’ but also contemplating a future as a high-class journalist: ‘Then I’ll strike out for a better job, &, with you to keep me up to the mark, even the Times might not be fatal. After all (he said with ineffable conceit!) Chesterton & Belloc have been journalists. My miracle, we could do marvels together.’19
He was discovering, it seems for the first time, just how strongly he wanted to be a writer: ‘When I had plenty of time to write, I liked to despise it, now I know that, though I love you far more than writing, I love writing more than any other thing.’ He expresses, in a fanciful image, the sense of being born, of being given life itself, by this transforming love:
I feel like a character in a Hans Andersen story. For in a way I have been made out of your breath, this me. The princess very carelessly puffed a big breath on a Winter’s day (it was snowing) & the breath froze in the air & made an image, & the princess warmed it with her hands, so that it became alive. So that if you didn’t exist, I don’t feel as if I could exist either. I should vanish in a breath of mist.20
Greene’s next letter seems to indicate that Vivien had responded warmly to his suggestion of a celibate marriage since we find him trying to anticipate possible criticism from their respective families, should they commit themselves to a monastic union. Greene drew support for their special kind of love from a popular song of the time: ‘Other people won’t understand our point of view, at any rate at first. We do. Like the really good line in IT AIN’T GONNA RAIN NO MORE “How in Hell can the old folks tell –”’
He wrote to Vivien three times a day, before he left for the office in the morning, again while at work (‘we five China people are considered too delicate plants to do any work whatsoever’) and finally in the evening from Smith Street. It must have been his sheer persistence that persuaded Vivien to grant him yet another last meeting. With romantic seriousness he concocted a ruse whereby he would know, without words being spoken, that all was not lost. They were to meet at Oxford station: ‘Suppose, if there’s hope for me still, you slip a petal of some flower into my hand, when we meet on the platform?’
Greene’s desire to increase, if only by minutes, the time he has with Vivien, has something manic about it: ‘I hope the train’s not late. Don’t forget 3.4, & do get a platform ticket & come up on to the platform. It might make a difference of two or three minutes. And I can’t afford to lose anything, when I’m not going to see you afterwards for such ages.’
Though the future ‘China hands’ had very little to do, there is evidence that Graham was studying Chinese. Often, Chinese characters are scribbled in the margin of his letters. So clearly preparations for departure were proceeding. Also he was studying book-keeping: ‘I’ve copied out a typewritten script called Notes on Book-keeping … It sounds absolute gibberish. The entries on Dr. side of Cash Book are posted to the Cr. side of proper A/cs in the Ledger – “By Cash” (C.B. folio no. quoted.) The entries on Cr. side of Cash Book are posted on Dr. side of ledger – “To Cash.” Does that mean anything at all, I ask you?’
While at the B.A.T. office he began working on his second novel entitled ‘The Episode’, which, like his first, ‘Anthony Sant’, remained unpublished and now rests in the vaults of H
oares Bank in Fleet Street: ‘I shall try & go on with the novel now, though it’s rather hard with a bank clerk chattering at my right hand elbow, & a general fretful buzz of talk, & about twenty typewriters clacking.’
That night he had to go to Archibald Rose’s house for dinner along with the other ‘China’ recruits, but what he wanted to do was stay at home and hold the latest letter from Vivien tight in his hand as if it were her hand and whisper over and over again, ‘My love, we’ll be brave, be brave, be brave … what have you done to my heart, Vivienne?’ And even a heavy rainfall was given a fanciful use: ‘It’s raining hard outside, but it’s not raining here. Shall we stop the rain for ever & ever, like Joshua the moon?’
The next day brought him three letters – from his father, his tutor’s wife, Mrs Bell, and from Vivien – and his thoughts of the dinner the night before made him as confused over the decision he had to make as he had ever been: ‘There was dinner with Rose last night, when he was so charming that I felt a rather mean skunk, considering chucking the business. And then there was a letter from my father saying, “We hate your going, but of course it will be exciting for you.” And a … letter from my tutor’s wife, regretting past talks & extolling the adventure side of the whole thing.’ Vivien’s letter told him that he was ‘worrying’ her and he again felt that China was the best place for him. His mind was ‘pretty well moiled up’ for he just had to place in the balance the fact that he wouldn’t see Vivien for four years and the whole business was too ghastly to contemplate and, in some self-pity, he could even envy the treatment Vivien’s cat would receive when he was in China: ‘And when I think of William having his paws buttered by you by the fire, & that crumbly kiss. O my darling, don’t give me a definite No, just because you don’t want me to chuck the B.A.T…. You see it’s such ages till Saturday, & every hour I feel the web of this place growing round me.’
It is the nature of our response to time that the clock moves most slowly when we are involved in tedious activities, but for Greene a dull occupation has a horrifying intensity, like an unending prison sentence. Time for him also mercilessly extends itself when he is separated from that which he loves or needs. But now the approach of his departure was looming in front of him: ‘In an hour I’m going up to Rose to get my letter for Liverpool, & suppose he tells me then that he’s succeeded in arranging our passages? … The first desperation about going is the absolute loss of you …’
We can perhaps get some indication of Vivien’s rather more pessimistic argument in his reply to her now lost letter:
we are shut in by two gates even now as far as the world’s concerned. Any decision we make, even small ones, have some irrevocable effect, so that we pass into a new landscape. You say it’s irrevocable. But anything you’ve ever done is irrevocable. You can’t get back to the country you were in, before you went to Blackwell’s, even. It’s gone, though bits remain, as bits will always, through whatever gate you go.21
And all the time his sensitive, snobbish nostrils were quivering in the company of people he looked down upon, for Greene takes offence when his nerves are rubbed up the wrong way: ‘Oh chatter, chatter, chatter. I can’t, I won’t believe that all my life is going to be spent with these people. O God, the bank clerk’s reminiscing about his “pals” & his “girls”, & I want to kick him or snub him, but I can’t. I’ve got to remain friendly & say Yes? & No? & Really?’22
On 12 August, Archibald Rose brought forward the departure of the five future China hands. They were now scheduled to leave on 26 September. Greene then knew for certain that he would not even have a last weekend with Vivien: ‘They’ll only give a few days between the [Liverpool] factory and sailing.’ And in a last letter to Vivien that day, he gives some indication of his turmoil as the time came to sail. He made two lists, one stressing the advantages, the other the disadvantages, of continuing with the B.A.T.:
FOR. AGAINST.
The adventure
The B.A.T. with all its faults is a good company. If I do well, I shall do very well as far as money’s concerned.
The experience.
Will the sense of adventure last four, leave alone twenty years? Shall I like the work? I don’t like my companions so far.
Whether successful or not, it practically means giving up writing. Opposition of my people, though passive.
The experience is not much good by itself. After four years, it will be rather late to start again with something else. It practically means China for life.
And then the last bit For, Sense of Pride.
You see it’s rather difficult. The balance in my mind, now I’ve written it down, tips a little to ‘against’, if it wasn’t for that damnable Pride part, Conceit is perhaps the better word. And it seems so inconceivable that after you becoming so much to me (& perhaps I may have become a trifling bit to you), we should lose it all for ever, even friendship.
Forgive the stickiness of the paper, but I’m sucking caramels to try & get a bit calmer.
So concerned was Greene to write the above that he had not realised that he had written it on a used sheet of paper – a list of people to contact and things to do, the notes appearing upside down.
That night he bought flowers and then wrote his third and last letter of the day at 9 p.m., three hours after his previous one: ‘I got the violets from an old man outside the Empire, as I was wandering back after getting my dinner. Oh how I wish I could have you with me at dinner all these nights. He was calling “Violets. Lucky Violets” & the lucky caught my ear.’
After lunch the next day, while his future colleagues talked of Gilbert & Sullivan – ‘someone recited all the words of nearly all the songs in the Mikado’ – Greene went out ‘& played shove halfpenny in Victoria Gardens with the bank clerk & lost four pence’ but soon his irritation towards the bank clerk grew again – and no one could deny that Greene has a wealth of irritable nerves in his body:
He was on a ‘spree’ last night &, damn him, at Hampstead. It’s ridiculous but it makes me furious to hear the little swine mention Hampstead. I can never see the name anywhere, without thinking of you. You & the St Joan photograph. [Greene loved Bernard Shaw’s play ‘St Joan’ and saw Vivien as comparable with St Joan.] I’ve never been on Hampstead Heath, but I’ve got my own picture of it with you on it.
Greene knew that he had few excuses for withdrawing from his job and the reasons he could offer Archibald Rose would not be understood by him: ‘I can’t mention you; I can’t say I dislike my companions, as he’d put me down as a snob & he wouldn’t understand about my desire to write. Rose’ll think that I’ve just been playing about with the company, taking their money.’
At home that night Greene wrote a letter which gives us a picture of himself in lonely digs in Smith Street, crazily in love and faced with an impossible decision: ‘I haven’t the heart to play my gramophone now, because it would break the stillness, & while I sit very quiet & don’t look too much round me, I can believe that you are just behind my shoulder.’ But he did seem to be on the point of making a decision: ‘I’ll write [my notice] out, & seal it up. I don’t suppose I shall post it. There’s this damned pride in the way.’
The next day, a Saturday, was his last morning of work in London. He was to report to the B.A.T.’s Liverpool tobacco factory on Monday. He spent his time writing a letter to Vivien, beginning at 8.45 a.m. and continuing it on the train to Oxford – and Vivien. It began with a decision taken: ‘I’ve sent up a note to Rose & am now waiting for the “wrath” to come … I can’t say I’m looking forward to the interview. One feels ridiculously like a schoolboy being sent up to the Headmaster …’ – a curious analogy this-do the sons of Headmasters also fear Headmasters? The whole letter is punctuated, not with the time of day but by the number of hours (and ultimately minutes) he has to endure before he meets Vivien at Oxford: ‘… only six & a quarter hours before I see you … I wonder if I shall catch sight of you on the platform before I get out in the distance.’
&n
bsp; He creates a highly dramatic picture of his present plight giving a blow by blow account of his thoughts: ‘The hour of execution must be approaching very rapidly. Suppose Rose doesn’t get my note. It will be far worse to have to take the initiative & go up to his room … Poor B.A.T. what a lot of trouble I’m causing them.’
As the clock reaches 11.30, Greene notes that he will be with Vivien in four hours. We also learn that Rose has had him up to his room and that Greene has shown himself to be ‘a marvellous shillyshallyer’: ‘I’ve delayed the final decision. I know I shall feel whatever I decide is wrong.’ Rose had used shrewd arguments to persuade him to stay with the firm, pointing out that no other business would take on a man who could only stand the B.A.T. for a fortnight and he pointed out that there had been over two hundred applicants, fifty from Oxford, and five only taken on the strength. Fearing the wrong decision, Greene wrote his fears in the letter which, since it continued until the train was approaching Oxford, must have been handed to Vivien on his arrival: ‘They can’t have judged just hastily. They must have thought I was suitable, & they’ve been choosing people for years. Suppose they are right?’
Then he wonders why he is writing to Vivien when it is less than three hours before he sees her and the passage is punctuated by a further fear: ‘an awful thought has just struck me. Suppose your mother hasn’t been able to bear not seeing you, & has come down to Oxford & snatched you up … only allowed me a stolen hour or so. Suppose that’s what you tell me on the platform … it can’t & mustn’t be true. And yet sometimes my premonitions have been right.’
Greene left the B.A.T. office at 12.45 and caught the train to Oxford at 1.40 and carried on writing, this time in pencil. The swaying of the train made his writing almost indecipherable:
I’m at Reading & I’m going to see you in exactly half an hour … the whistle’s gone & we’re off. All’s well. Fate has given us a lovely day. The flowers at the seed place at Reading were looking lovely & I could almost smell them from the train … I knew Fate would do something silly. The train’s stopped. Now it’s slowly going forward, bumping restlessly.
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 27