The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Also while at Ambervale, to escape the ‘oppression of boredom’ he walked over the hills to Chesterfield and found a dentist:

  I described to him the symptoms, which I knew well, of an abscess.

  He tapped a perfectly good tooth with his little mirror and I reacted in the correct way. ‘Better have it out,’ he advised.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but with ether.’

  A few minutes’ unconsciousness was like a holiday from the world. I had lost a good tooth, but the boredom was for the time dispersed.11

  This is a macabre indicator of character, but what was the background to this incident? The letters to Vivien show that he was in poor health at this time – he speaks of Derbyshire not agreeing with him; of dosing himself with aspirin; of promising not to indulge in Veronal. He had a serious boil in his mouth which turned out to be a cyst about the size of a hazel nut which the local doctor realised needed more than lancing and would have to be cut out. Physically low, he was suffering from monotony – ‘the cord of monotony is stretched most tight,’ a quotation from G. K. Chesterton which was on Greene’s lips at this time. ‘I feel’, he wrote to Vivien, ‘like a mummy suddenly crumbling up inside, because the damp has got to it.’ It was with such feelings predominating that on 8 September he walked before breakfast the eight miles to Chesterfield to have his undecayed tooth out.

  *

  At this time, even though he was disappointed in the work he was producing, he was still dragging himself to the writing table in the billiard room of the Ambervale Hotel – where his invariable presence became a stock joke. To cope with his sense of failure as a writer, he resolved ‘to do a minimum of 500 words a day’ – the habit first begun in his digs in Smith Street just before he went to Ashover. He promised himself to write 500 words daily for three days only.fn3 Perhaps it was his method of keeping at bay depressions which descended arrow-swift upon him. He had no belief in himself as a writer, and was conscious only of lack of talent: yet he still hoped for popularity: ‘I felt intensely depressed when I went up to bed last night, and struggled through the allotted span of the novel … I’d been reading through things I’d written & I felt that I’d never be able to do anything which was even low second class. And I even envied Alfred Noyes for his safe position in the third rate:’fn4 ‘I’ve finished about 13,000 words of the novel … oh it’s so bad … there’s not a properly sane individual left in it now.’12 Perhaps the lack of sanity in his created characters reflected his own bizarre feelings. And while he felt strongly his own personal unworthiness set against that of Vivien – ‘You are so wonderful, & I’m so paltry. I crawl about on the ground’ – he persisted in writing:

  I’m so tired of writing second rate verse. Why can’t I write you a really fine poem, which would be worthy of you? I shouldn’t mind then, if I never wrote another word in my life. But it doesn’t come & I go on jangling words, & at times I feel the whole thing’s hopeless, & I shall never ever have the advantage of popularity which Noyes has got. And even William Watson has written one first class poem … If only I could do something, something for you.13

  Greene did in fact write a poem for Vivien. At the beginning of the year, he had written a last poem to Gwen Howell expressing his distracted love. That poem’s first line began with the odd assertion: ‘If you were dead, it would not matter’. The poem for Vivien parallels this, is more detailed, and is a further indication of his troubled condition:

  If you lay dying in a very quiet room,

  No sound to break the long & lapping stillness,

  And no one there but I, to watch the encroaching gloom

  Cast its first shadows over your adventurousness,

  I should not weep or mutter prayers or bow my head;

  I should not even hold your hand & rest in quiet,

  To catch the fading syllables of breath, instead,

  Standing at window, watching the colours riot

  Over a case of apples in the yard, I’d say,

  ‘The sun is warm. The lane is scarlet with the hips,’

  And turning round to catch once more your eyes at play

  Find hovering death aquiver on your lips.

  And because death closing your breath, had closed my brain,

  Adventure done & all long voyaging, left only calm,

  Like a poor music box, no hand to alter, tells the same old tune again,

  I’d stand & say to all that came, ‘The sun is warm.’

  If he contemplated Vivien’s death, he considered also his own suicide by drowning at the very height of his love:

  Loving you is like being drowned in a moment of ecstasy, during a clean, swift stroke, when the whole arc of blue is caught up by the eye, & death comes & leaves eternally pictured on the mind the clean blue sweep of the sky, & indelibly carved on thought, frozen in death, your head & eyes & hair, & all things nearly worthy to be your rivals, shade & scent & sun. And the mind dwells on these eternally, knowing there is to be no awaking.

  In his later novels his style is pithy and controlled; in these letters his language is more extravagant: ‘My angel, I haven’t got to the top of the hill yet, & I may never get to the top, though I’m going to fight hard … And there’ll be no question of getting to the top and seeing the view, & then turning back the way I came. There’d be the blinding ecstatic moment on the summit, with the wind in my ears, & the sun on the sea, & then I’d start down the other side. And on the downward slope the poppies would blink red fox eyes through the corn, & a lark would sweep singing from a yellow gorse bush.’14 The images become confused but his seriousness is never in doubt: ‘& then there’d be the endless country on the other side to explore, with a fresh adventure & a fresh period every day, until the end of all, swimming out through the warm, dusking sea to the red ball of the sun setting.’ He could even be comic:

  I love you more than John Donne, more than the Pennines, more than pinewoods; more than ‘No No Nanette’fn5 & Joseph Conrad & wet laurels; more than St Joan & Claud Cockburn; more than shrimps, raspberries & cream, & song in the dark; more than dusk in Piccadilly from the top of a bus,fn6 than the sun on the Needles below Southampton, or Leslie Henson.fn7 I love you more than I love this wretched self even.

  But, more important, he was moving slowly towards Catholicism:

  Darling, I could worship with you, if you had your arms round me … You see, when I see that Catholicism can produce something so fine all through, I know there must be something in it.

  Vivien returned from Italy on 7 September. Greene tried to arrange a meeting for the 15th but she resisted. His anxiety shows in his enquiring about a certain Dick Ellis. Also, there are references to older men interested in Vivien. He draws a pathetic picture – the unathletic young graduate set against someone who excels in games: ‘Is he a young hearty athlete who will discuss Rugger prospects, or one of the ancient hearty, I haven’t played Rugger for three & a half years, though I did used to like it …’ Honest as ever, he added: ‘I was never much good.’

  Greene must have felt that no matter what he said or did, Vivien would not accept him. He had, after all, agreed to her notions of married life, in which the principal component was companionship: ‘I entirely agree with what you say about marriage, neither person should be tied to the other. Marriage doesn’t mean it necessarily. Why should we follow tradition? My darling we’d be originals.’ Vivien’s reluctance to see him was all too apparent: ‘You are anxious, aren’t you that I shouldn’t pick up any stray scraps of hope from your letters. You didn’t want to see me on the 15th, & I want it so much myself, because I don’t know at all whether I may not be packed off to Glasgow or somewhere any day. You put love in inverted commas, as if I was a poor fool ready to misunderstand every word you uttered. I thought that I had made it clear before, while I was still B.A.T.ing that I was satisfied, more than satisfied with your kind of love; can’t you believe that I understand & love you a great deal in your own way too, an awful great deal? But of course if you’d real
ly rather not, it shall be the 26th … I’ve been looking forward to the 15th all the time you’ve been in Italy, marking off a calendar of days.’15 The above was written at 9.30 a.m. By 1.30 p.m., he had written a second letter and a third by 7.30:

  I’m in one of those moods when one feels simply futile & a waste & no good to anyone, merely an expensive luxury for my parents. If I’d gone to China I should have been unhappy & hated the job but I should have been doing something. Though the only thing worth doing at the moment seems to be to go & get killed somehow in an exciting manner. Then at least there is one clean, certain sensation. Don’t take any notice of all this morbidity … I’m getting to know these moods. I’ve had them nearly as long as I can remember, & have found different cures. At sixteen I made myself ill for three weeks by drinking quantities of stuff out of red labelled bottles – very childish & laughable. And then later I got out of it by my Irish tour for the W[eekly] W[estminster] – & then there was the trip in the Ruhr, in the hope of getting into trouble with the French, Cockburn (that’s why I like him) being of much the same temperament as myself. And then there were the Paris Communists in January [what follows is crossed out but is easily read] & last, about what I told you in the Cinema. They were all just, cowardly, if you like, cures for this beastly mood … this is a beastly sort of letter to write … but I can’t help it.

  This letter, and the two which follow, offer us an insight into Greene’s psychology which future letters do not reveal, for he becomes more guarded in later years. From them we can see that examples of courage in later life probably stem from a desire to take risks, to invite disaster, to bring about death by misadventure. His is a brilliant mind, yet he has a compulsion when suffering from depression to put his mind totally to sleep, to let events determine fate: ‘One can’t help envying the people of my age in 1914. Everything at any rate was absolutely settled for them. Nothing they could do could alter their fate. They were either going to die or live, & they could just drift with the crowd. I should like the Germans better than ever, if only they’d start a show [war] now again.’ Greene likes war on the curious ground that he can have his life determined for him. But also, the strenuous nature of war, the sense of living dangerously, of feeling preternaturally alive, appeals to something deep in him.

  In a fourth letter to Vivien that same day the character of Greene’s depression becomes apparent:

  God … I haven’t felt as bad as this since January [the time when he suffered from his hopeless passion for Gwen Howell and tried Russian roulette]. I suppose if I analyse it, it’s liver or something, but my mind’s like a bubble & it’s getting bigger & bigger, & if it bursts I feel I shall simply shriek & shriek & not be able to stop. I’m feeling so blastedly hopeless … as if that one in fifty chance has gone. It’s been your last two letters. I felt that … you were feeling less fond of me than ever before & the bubble gets bigger, & I want, oh God, how I want to be dead, or asleep or blind drunk or anything so that I can’t think. Not merely not think of you drifting away into a one in a million chance but not think of anything at all … if my intuition’s right, & there’s not even a one in fifty chance, say so for God’s sake straight away. But don’t think it’s you that are making me worried like this. I got like this, long before I knew you. What you’ve done is to make it come seldom instead of often. If I hadn’t met you, I shouldn’t have known how long it would go on for … It’s easy enough for depression to find a cause. If it weren’t you, it would be something else.

  Perhaps in response to this letter of pain, Vivien decided to see Greene the day his tutoring ended. When he said goodbye to his charge and the family – ‘a long pathetic farewell to mothers, aunts, great aunts, & grandfathers’ – of Chestermans at Ashover Grange, he took a taxi to Chesterfield station.

  Desperate to meet Vivien he caught an early train to Oxford and began at once another train letter describing his trip through the Black Country:

  The Black Country’s looking very beautiful this afternoon, great blast furnaces & fires & slag heaps, with the sun on them … I think, dark & mysterious like the Black Forest; one expects each chimney to be the one & only Dark Tower. But I have seen no Childe Roland yet, setting the slug horn dauntless to his lips.fn8

  His excitement is that of a boy:

  1.40. Leicester. Only a little more than an hour before Oxford … I’ve almost been to sleep. I kept on waking up during the night owing to excitement. At 5.30 there was a most wonderful sky, which I could see from where I lay in bed like a burning forest.

  Darling, what fun it must be to build a bridge, a great steel bridge, with giant girders, like a God’s meccano outfit.

  Worried about being short of money, Greene thought of his friend, Kenneth Bell, the Balliol tutor: ‘When I get to Oxford I shall have to rush round & borrow some money, because I’ve no cheques left, & the bank will be closed. Perhaps my tutor will be back.’ Graham admired Kenneth Bell enormously:

  I got a card from my tutor, Kenneth Bell, in France, offering to exert influence on practically every paper in the British Empire from the Scotsman to the Toronto Globe. But I refuse to go to Toronto. I might just as well go to China as there, as far as seeing you is concerned. Kenneth’s a delightful individual. He accepts anything one does with immense enthusiasm, as though it were the one thing in the world, ideally suited. He bubbled over with joy at the idea of my being in the B.A.T. and now, directly he hears I’ve chucked it, and am going in for journalism, he sends an enthusiastic card, beginning ‘Damn Tobacco and China’ and offering his assistance in the new direction. I’ve never known a man I’ve admired more. Chucked up his Balliol fellowship, when war came, did extraordinarily well in the Artillery, although previously he’d had no scientific training, returns and is the most brilliant lecturer in Oxford on the Tudor period, full of ideas, swears like a Billingsgate fish porter, and married to a very fascinating, though not beautiful wife.fn9

  Greene, who had arranged to meet Vivien opposite Wadham College at seven, arrived in Oxford early, took a taxi to Blackwell’s where he had the driver stop, and left his train letter for Vivien without seeing her. But his evening with her must have been singularly satisfying for, two days later, writing from the Golden Cross Hotel at 8.45 a.m., he felt able to suggest a most novel form of engagement:

  My darling love, thank you so much for the dear cinema note. It stayed under my pillow all through the night, & slept when I did, which wasn’t very much … I wrote to you before the Capitol [the cinema] proposing a Marriage … can’t we have an Engagement, which the World would not call an Engagement. I would not ask that that one in fifty chance should be increased. I would wait until I was settled & then ask you whether you’d marry me …

  And the final lines of his letter show he was to go further:

  here’s a secret between us two. It’s my turn to be shy now of speaking. I couldn’t tell you aloud last night, even in the dark. Directly I know that I’m going to be settled somewhere for a few months on end, I’m going to get instruction & become a Catholic, if they’ll have me.

  fn1 This was a happy letter: ‘I’ve found … a lovely book in my digs published in 1893. Enquire within upon Everything … I Proposed to you quite wrong [sic] both in June and August … Listen: “When a gentleman presents a fan, flower or trinket to a lady, with the left hand, this … is an overture of regard; should she receive it with the left hand, it is considered as an acceptance of his esteem, but if with the right hand it is a refusal of his offer. Thus, by a few simple tokens explained by rule, the passion of love is expressed: and through this medium the most timid and diffident man may, without difficulty, communicate his sentiments of regard to a lady, and, in case his offer should be refused, avoid experiencing the mortifications of an explicit refusal.”’

  fn2 Charles Granville Bruce (1866–1931) led the Everest expeditions of 1920 and 1924.

  fn3 In this way a life-long routine was established, which was to lead to over fifty books.

  fn4 A
lfred Noyes (1880–1958) published his first book of verse while still a student. He became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church in 1925. His work has not survived early admiration and is too facile for modern tastes.

  fn5 ‘No, No, Nanette’ (1925), a musical comedy by Otto Harback and Frank Mandel. It was presented at the Globe Theatre on 16 September. It started out as a disaster and ended up as one of the most successful musicals of the 1920s, running for 321 performances.

  fn6 A description of ‘Piccadilly from the top of a bus’ appears in the unpublished novel ‘The Episode’ which he was writing when living at Ashover.

  fn7 Leslie Henson was a popular comedian during the 1920s and 1930s.

  fn8 Browning’s poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ with its final lines: ‘I saw them and I knew them all. And yet/Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,/And blew. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.’ In his novel A Gun for Sale (1936), Greene has his detective Saunders refer to Browning’s poem while he waits for the killer Raven: he repeats ‘over to himself to pass the time the line of a poem learnt at school about a dark tower.’

  fn9 In later years, Bell left his wife for a student. He lost his position at Balliol as a result. Later he became a Protestant minister. Sadly, he ended his own life.

  PART 4

  Conversion

  16

  In Search of a Career

  So harshly has expectance been imposed On my long need while those slow blank months passed.

  – THOMAS HARDY

  AFTER THE MEETING at the Golden Cross Hotel, Vivien agreed that they should become engaged, though she made more restrictive conditions. Greene was not to anticipate greater hopes of winning her hand than an 80:1 chance; the engagement had to remain a secret (only family being told), and the ring, when Graham had bought it (‘Will you tell me what single stone you’d like best? I’ll get it directly I’m in pocket’), would not be worn in public. Plaintively, Greene asked her: ‘You’ll wear [the ring] sometimes, won’t you, when you are alone with me?’1