Then follows a description of the five passengers in the railcoach (and a compliment to Vivien is deftly turned): ‘Five of them. On the whole the three men look less hideous than the women … But that may be because I haven’t a standard for them to live up to while the poor females – well, it’s hopeless for them.’
Even the train is given emotions of anger because he is reaching his love too soon:
O dear, the train’s getting horribly angry. It doesn’t want me to write to you. It bumps indignantly & says that it’s selfish of me, when I’m going to see you in – nineteen minutes … soon it will be seconds … it’s going fearfully fast. It wants to see you about as much as I do.
And the river desires to see Vivien too and is in competition with the sun: ‘the river is laughing with wild excitement: “Keep out sun. Don’t you realise you are an oven”’ and it is the river who speaks: ‘only fourteen minutes to go … only fourteen minutes to go.’
Greene’s last words run at a furious pace:
9 minutes only darling. You’ll have started to the station … Here’s Cholsey, but we aren’t stopping. Final Stop Oxford shouted the porter at Reading & my heart shouted Final Stop Vivienne … only six minutes to go. We are going to be punctual. Four minutes to go.
And there the letter ends, the first of Greene’s many ‘train’ letters.
Without doubt, Greene was fascinated by trains – he wrote his best letters to Vivien in trains, both when he was approaching and leaving her. His first best-seller is based on a train journey and his first children’s book was entitled The Little Train (1946).23 Perhaps the lure of trains lies in the fact that, in those days, they had an exotic quality of escape about them: one was conscious of meeting destiny, approaching fate in the shape of the person waiting at the other end.
Greene could not possibly have left his decision over the B.A.T. much longer, as a letter to his father indicates: ‘I & the bank clerk depart for Liverpool on Sunday. I’m going down to Oxford for Saturday night & through from there … My address in Liverpool from Sunday on will be c/o Mrs Grant, 44 Manor Avenue. Great Crosby. Liverpool.’ It was not to be.
In an interview for the Paris Review Greene put the blame for his leaving the B.A.T. on the poor bank clerk who, as we have seen, disturbed and irritated him, though Greene never offered the man a critical word to his face, indeed he never gave any indication, at the time, of his dislike: ‘What finally got me,’ said Greene to his interviewers, ‘was when he said “We’ll be able to play this [double noughts and crosses]fn1 on the way out, won’t we?” I resigned immediately.’24 No doubt this was an element which weighed in the balance, but this chapter bears witness to the fact that his decision depended almost solely on his infatuation for Vivien and on her reception of him in Oxford. Clearly Vivien was kind, for while she did not at the station slip a petal into his hand as a symbol of hope, she did provide him, when later they went walking together in a wood, with a white bud (symbol of purity?). Afterwards he wrote of ‘heaven on a tree stump at the end of only a week’s purgatory’. The following day he left, not for Liverpool and tobacco planting in China, but back to his London digs. The terrors of indecision were over. He sent Archibald Rose a telegram telling him he would not be returning to his office. To Vivien he wrote: ‘If you only knew how happy you’ve made me. After all, forlorn hopes have won through sometimes, & what excitement … eternities of love.’25
It was in an exultant religious mood that he spoke of God’s part in directing him to know Vivien’s significance to him: ‘You’ve made me know that Saturday won’t be the last time. It can’t. I don’t believe God would allow it, even if I tried to make it so. He led me into the B.A.T. just so that I might learn how inexpressibly dear to me you are.’
Yet Vivien, at this stage, had offered him no more than a slim hope for the future. This seems to have been enough. Back at Smith Street he was deliriously happy, a state which lasted two whole days. Vivien sent him a note, accompanying a photograph, and he was in seventh heaven: she had asked that the note be destroyed and he had done as he was bidden: ‘I wish you hadn’t forced me to tear it up … My lashes are all clogged up … Though I’ve had to throw the writing and the paper and the envelope away into the black stream, the words haven’t gone’: and he recalled the only two previous occasions when he had felt such ecstasy – when he published a story in the Star at sixteen and when he won his exhibition at Balliol: ‘It’s a marvellous feeling – of wanting to go on living … My miracle worker … You’ve given trees shade, and the flowers scent, and the sun a gold it’s never had before.26
fn1 The American version is Tic Tac Toe.
15
Late Summer at Ambervale
I love you more than I love this wretched self.
– GRAHAM GREENE
THE WORLD LOOKED good the following day: ‘I leaped out of bed and had my breakfast, and finished off a book [of poems] called Sad Cure, and took it round the corner to be typed … It’s really the death of Hilary Trench,’ he added cryptically.
Greene continued to write to Vivien. He began his second letter of the day: ‘My lovely one, I can’t help it. I must write to you again.’ The cinema and dreams of Vivien helped to fill his London days: ‘I went and had a kind of high tea at a cabman’s place this afternoon and then went to the cinema to see Jekyll and Hyde. I saw it four years ago and thought it marvellous, but it seems very poor now. When it was over … I went for a long walk, thinking of you, up Sloane St and along Knightsbridge, past Hyde Park Corner, until Piccadilly climbed up in front to a blue Whistler mist of sky.’1
But soon, a letter from Vivien brought him low. She regretted that he was not going abroad and there are indications that she loved the letters more than the letter-writer. With such harsh knowledge Greene replied hastily: ‘All right. I’ll do my best to get a job abroad before the end of September. If I can’t get anything else, I can write to my father that I’ve changed my mind again & am going in for the Chinese consular. Then I can go to France till Christmas, & to Germany till Easter & with luck get off finally by the autumn. And as leave doesn’t come for five years, I shall have plenty of time to get over you.’ But in the same letter, he promised to write to her often because she liked his letters, but promised also, with some bitterness, that she would not be troubled again by his wanting to see her. He was deeply hurt. His last meeting with her on the previous Saturday had been ‘a perfect memory’ – this had been the day in Oxford when she had slipped into his hand the white bud of promise. His sense of betrayal welled up: ‘the white bud was a white lie, & didn’t even mean the one chance in five hundred, but was slipped in my hand because you didn’t think that business [B.A.T.] would be good for me.’
Yet Graham was willing to accept any conditions if contact could be maintained:
… if you like then you can have my letters. I’ll do anything that pleases you, & you needn’t see me on the 26th [September], if you don’t want to. And this can be Goodbye as far as seeing each other’s concerned, if you would prefer it so. Though I’ll go on writing, just as long as you like.
I’ll even give you your chance of a melodramatic cut away if I can get a job abroad. I won’t write again till this Trench mood is over.
What troubled Greene, as well it might, was a phrase from one of her letters, ‘I just love you like I love everyone else.’ Vivien was young, though more mature than Graham. She was attractive to others and was, at this time, as a letter written fifty-five years later indicates, drawn to another whom she designated ‘X’: ‘On one special occasion, I forget which, a terrific gift of flowers – masses and masses of them and afterwards I was so ashamed of myself that when I first saw them I was disappointed that they were not from X. He [Graham] had not much money, I think, and it was extravagantly generous.’2
It is necessary to know something of Vivien’s background to explain why she was so taken by Greene’s notion that the best marriage is a monastic one. Vivien did hold surprising views, part
icularly her opinion that ‘the world soils what it touches’, which probably had its origin in witnessing, as a child, the break-up of her parents’ marriage. A letter has survived from mother to daughter, dated 4 October 1925:
There were no compensations in my marriage, but you and Pat [Vivien’s brother] … I gave you two good care because I cared for nothing else & was shut up & deliberately balked of every other outlet for interest by the narrow views plus narrow pocket of a narrow little man … that awful caged feeling I had with S.B[rowning – Vivien’s father] like being in a small dark room furnished in bamboo. I’ve locked up the drawer in my mind where every memory of it is only too damn clear & try to start at Oct. 30, 1915 when I burst the door & left him [Vivien was then 10 years old]. I don’t in the least blame a man of that type for taking anything he could get when his wife refused to have anything to do with him. Yet I couldn’t stand it & for a proud person to feel continually humiliated is simply Hell with the lid off.
Having finished the long poem ‘Sad Cure’, Graham returned to his second novel. Without a job, it must have seemed to him, and to others, that his future promised little. He had a girlfriend only marginally interested in him and he was writing ‘The Episode’, a novel he did not believe in. He was to wonder how he could have abandoned the chance of being a businessman when it offered him his only escape from the hated obsession of trying to make imaginary characters live.
And there was the problem of money. He needed a job: ‘It was Sackville Street or nothing.’ To the young men of Graham’s generation, down from University without work, recourse to Sackville Street and Gabbitas & Thring was a necessity.
Greene recalled in A Sort of Life an interview at the offices of Gabbitas & Thring, educational specialists offering graduates the possibility of teaching posts. There was about Sackville Street a ‘Dickensian mustiness’, and on either side were old-established tailors’ shops while prostitutes kept flats on the second floor. The office itself reminded him of an old family solicitor’s (‘with strange secrets concealed in the metal file-boxes’). It was not the haunt, he realised, of men with first class degrees. Gabbitas & Thring ‘were the last hope of those needing a little temporary aid. You pawned yourself instead of your watch.’
Greene, mindful of the accidental manner in which his father, intending to be a barrister, had slipped into teaching, had a horror of following the same route, of feeling the trap close: ‘I wanted nothing permanent, I explained in near panic, to the partner. Was there not, perhaps, some private tutoring job which was available just for the summer? He opened his file with an air of disappointment … As for private tutoring I was too late in applying, such men were needed immediately after the schools broke up (he whisked over page after page), there was really nothing he could offer for someone of my qualifications … I would hardly be interested in this (he had detached a page with the tips of his fingers), a widowed lady living at Ashover, a village in Derbyshire, who required someone to look after her son of eight during the holidays. I would not be asked to live in the house: I would have a room in a private hotel with all my meals, but there was no salary attached.’3 When Greene accepted the post, the interviewer, Mr Bickford-Smith, looked at him with disappointment and suspicion as if there were something disgracefully wrong in Greene’s background. However, it was just the post Greene wished to land – a temporary job, filling the vacuum which stretched ahead until Vivien, then holidaying in Italy with her mother, returned – though he had pawned himself more cheaply than a watch.
The card Greene completed has survived at the office of Gabbitas & Thring. It gives his full name (Henry Graham Greene), his age (20 years), his height (6'1"), his religion (C. of E.) and in the far right corner of the card the comment ‘not much games’. Apart from offering History and English, he also offered French, Mathematics, Latin ‘and some Classics’. Greene went to Ashover on 25 August and left on 15 September 1925. It was a curious interlude during which he again came close to a breakdown, though very little evidence of this appears in his autobiography.4
While he waited for the 25th, Greene went on writing his novel in his digs in Chelsea, and continued also his letters to Vivien. To Venice he wrote, ‘I have sent a London Pigeon to St Marks [Square], to tell you when you get there, how happy I am & how I love you, & how I am trying to work at what you want. I wonder if you’ll realise which it is of all the ones that flutter round your feet.’5
He had tea with Kenneth Richmond, as he had done earlier, in May, at which time he thought Richmond himself in need of treatment (a shrewd guess): ‘He is becoming more & more a case of “physician cure thyself”. He is much more nervy than he used to be.’6 But in August he had other concerns. To Vivien he wrote: ‘I went out to tea today with my psycho-analyst to meet some terrible female novelist, of whom I’d never heard, but I felt I better go, as her husband is a critic on The Times. As a matter of fact she was quite pleasant, and didn’t talk shop, as writers, like medical students, always seem to do … they are going to try to get me some reviewing for the Lit. Supp.’fn1, 7 This was a straightforward letter showing only that Greene was willing to use influence as it came to hand. Richmond himself was probably watching over young Greene, no doubt looking for evidence of tension or depression. And depression he certainly did suffer with Vivien away and her strong hints that she was not in love with him.
*
Greene left for his stint of three weeks’ tutoring perhaps reluctantly. First, he lost the rail ticket which was to take him to Chesterfield and Stretton. Then, while on the train, he discovered he had lost a second: ‘Darling, what’s happening to me. I’ve lost a second ticket to Stretton. It’s simply unexplainable … I’m more nervous than I was of the B.A.T.’ On arriving at Chesterfield: ‘O dear, I’ve got to wait feeling nervouser & nervouser for the Stretton train [and] then I have a drive by taxi to Ashover.’8
As usual Greene’s powers of observation (not necessarily sympathetic) were to the fore. He arrived at the Ambervale Hotel, Ashover, and sent his mother and Vivien his impressions:
This is a comic little hotel. Mostly elderly people with Manchester accents, except for a pale weedy, slang-ridden school boy, & a bobbed flapper, who is preening herself for a hotel flirtation. [The bobbed flapper was about sixteen or seventeen.] (Letter to his mother, 25 August.)
I have to sit at a table with the BF [bobbed flapper] with her mother. Her mother is fat, shy & with an accent, which her daughter escapes by the skin of her teeth. Every remark I made to the mother at dinner made her half jump out of her seat … I wish you were here and not the idiotic flapper. (Letter to Vivien, 25 August.)
There’s a rather piercingly loud air of bonhomie in the place, laughter & pokes in the ribs & raucous jokes about the weather & food … After seeing Mrs Knyvet [the boy’s mother] I got caught & had to play ghastly games with everyone till 11. Darling, they are awful people, though terribly friendly. (7.50 p.m. undated letter to Vivien.)
The boy turned out to be tractable and Greene’s biggest task was keeping his charge entertained: ‘I gave him a quarter of an hour’s Algebra so as to keep up appearances & after tea we had a furious game of hide & seek, till 6.30 when I returned here [Ambervale Hotel],’ he wrote to his mother. He tried also to teach the boy some Latin: ‘Darling you should have seen me growing lyrical over qui, quae, quod and relative clauses. After tea the child grew tired of hide & seek & so I had to pretend that we were Bruce climbing Mount Everestfn2 which meant climbing up nearly every tree in a large park, & then trying to haul the creature up after me … I have successfully settled the child down with a copy of Treasure Island.’ The following day it was ‘up on the Trossachs and exploring the Unknown Beaches of the Amazon!’ With a sense of relief he confides to Vivien, ‘my animal is going back to school on Sept. 16.’
His next venture with the boy (who was ten, not eight as Greene has it in A Sort of Life), was to build a toy theatre, but the boy’s grandfather didn’t think it suitable for a Sunday: ‘He’s an a
ncient (88), humourless man of tremendous wealth. He manufactures all England’s tape measures & his name … is Chesterman.’ Greene’s next exploit was to light a fire on the moor, and though it was a strain inventing amusements, the boy in Greene enjoyed it. He wrote to Vivien: ‘be proud of me. I may not be able to write novels, but I lit a fire at the first attempt in the open air with a strong wind blowing, in order to boil a kettle.’
Nearly twenty-one years old, Greene still retained a boyish streak: the novelist whose fictional characters are often seen as reflecting his world-weariness and cynicism had yet to be born: ‘I suddenly found myself engaged in a delicious, undignified and joyful cushion fight with my pupil.’ Three days before Greene’s services ended, the boy developed knee trouble and was unable to go for walks or climb trees or run races:
All this morning we sat in the garden & did ridiculous paper games, until we were both too bored for words. Then, as a lesser evil, I imitated the Ashover Light Railway, a tiny, shaky & very perilous railway here, bundled him [this boy of ten and this boy of twenty!] into an old pram, & rushed him about the garden, nearly killing him twice, the second time just as his mother came round the corner … the mother, aunt, great aunt & grandfather … I’m getting really fond of them.9
Outside his work as a tutor, Greene carried on a slight flirtation with the B.F. (Bobbed Flapper) which led to his inheriting a dog: ‘She went with me to the pub where the landlord showed us into a private room, where we sat gingerly on the edge of a table and kissed dryly, then took refuge in a half of bitter and a gin and lime. She offered me a mongrel wirehaired terrier as a souvenir, which was to be sent by rail from Leicester to Berkhamsted and was to prove the bane of my life.’10
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 28