The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  We have no account of the response of Greene’s family to the engagement but a letter about it from Vivien’s mother has survived. Marion Dayrell was intelligent, forceful, even domineering, and she had written novels (‘a few rather poor ones under a pseudonym, but her best book, Maids of Honour, under her own name’, was how her daughter described them). ‘She left her husband in Africa,’ Vivien told me, ‘worked for the War Office during the First World War translating French, German, Swahili, Dutch and some other African dialects likely to be used in German East Africa. She was very clever, a good rider, adventurous. She was governess for a time to Rudyard Kipling’s children.’2

  Mother and daughter had a passion for cats. She begins her letter by addressing Vivien as ‘My precious baby sugar-kitten’, and ended it, ‘Your own whiskerspuss’:

  I do think it has been sweet of you to tell me about G. That you did gives me an immense & fatuous pleasure because you cd. so easily have said nothing & kept me in the dark. Darling pusskin I not only feel flattered but honoured. I purr, being intensely gratified & rewarded for any small use I have ever been to you … Lots of mothers – even ever such delightful ones – would have been quite shut out. If anything could make me love you more, it is this kindness to an idiotic mother-cat who must have made so many mistakes in dealing with her adored kitten [the bite comes in what follows since her daughter was a convert and Vivien’s mother only a reluctant believer] & who moreover, having no soul, is quite unworthy.

  Darling little Viv – Graham’s a poet & says things better, but he has not one millionth of the reason for loving you that I have & he never could have … Willie [her cat] is blissfully asleep on the rug & I suppose G. is blissfully re-living his afternoon with you (You two darling sillies really had no tea!).

  Greene himself walked about in a dream: ‘I went for a walk with Paddy [his dog] in a queer state of absolutely peaceful happiness in you … I got wet to the skin, but it didn’t disturb my strange serenity.’3

  Labouring under such love he would have agreed to anything Vivien might have demanded – that the sky was green, roses purple, the earth flat, or the moon’s halo an ill omen. Even her discovering Negro spirituals was enough to bring about an excited response: ‘Darling, we have got similarities! I love the Negro spirituals, most of all I think, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” & next “Walking all over God’s heaven.”’

  *

  On 4 October 1925, at the age of twenty-one, Greene reached his legal majority. His father gave him a gold ring with a heraldic design on its surface, a griffin. He wore this on his left hand. When working for British Intelligence in Sierra Leone during the Second World War he used it as a seal for official and secret correspondence.

  Asked by Vivien what present he wanted for his twenty-first, Greene answered with a long list:

  Item. As many stars [kisses] as can be compressed into the day.

  Item. Two lips – very lovely.

  Item. A voice that can put more loveliness into a few words than Kreisler into all of Bach.

  Item. Long & dark, mysterious, very beautiful hair – not too tidy, please.

  Item. Two eyes like a pool in a magic wood, with the sun between the leaves lightening the green & mingling it with the gleam of silver birches.

  Item. Two very small hands & two very small small feet, with ten fingers & ten toes like any mortal, but what fingers & what toes.

  Item. Two legs lovelier than those of Mistinguette or Gaby Deslys, who lost King Manuel of Portugal his throne.

  Item. Skin of a lovely & perfect white – or else of a lovely & novel brown.

  Item. A lovelier & more precious home for my hand than I could ever find, though I lived for as long as the wandering Jew & sought for one all those years.4

  But Greene also persuaded Vivien to come to Berkhamsted for his birthday and he described the family she would meet:

  1 My father

  (clever, rather sweet, but more sentimental even than I am, & I never was till I met you!)

  2 My mother

  (taller I think than yours. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t feel frightened of yours! Quite unterrifying though.)

  3 My aunt

  (the one I stay with at Battersea. Unmarried. Middle aged. My favourite aunt. Rather charming & very broad-minded & up to date in her taste. You’ll like her, I’m sure!)

  4 My Oxford brother [Raymond]

  (the one engaged to C. Inclined to be a little stiff & ram-roddish.)

  5 My younger brother [Hugh]

  (of whom I’m jealous already.)

  6 My younger sister

  (horribly tall for her age. Taller than you, I believe, but not old enough yet to be terrifying.)

  7 Myself

  This was to be Vivien’s first visit and, as Greene described it, nature was told of her impending arrival: ‘We went for a walk through the beechwoods into Ashridge Park & I told every tree we passed, “Vivien’s going to come & see you.’” And when her arrival was delayed, he speaks of the beechwoods’ growing impatience: ‘They say, “We are spreading a carpet for your love’s feet, but we cannot feel her tread.” I feel conscience-stricken at having promised them these things.’5

  Also, he felt able to dispense love with wild abandon: ‘Give my love to Gladys Loveless, & to B[asil] B[lackwell] & to A.S.M[ott]. & to Hugh & to Markhouse & to Plumb & to Broad St & to each inmate of the Y.W.C.A. [where Vivien lived while working for Blackwell] & to the crossing sweeper, & to the man with the fruit cart & the top hat. And add all this love together, & multiply it by Infinity, & give the sum total to yourself.’ And he made the following declaration:

  This is to certify that whereas the aforesaid Graham Greene has on this day, October 2nd, attained his legal majority & has thus become legal master of himself & his own actions, the aforesaid Graham Greene herewith states & declares that he surrenders himself entire, with no reservation, to be the property sole & freehold, of Miss Vivienne Dayrell, to do with as she may at any time think fit.

  Signed: – Graham Greene.

  Witness: Paddy [dog] – his mark

  That month of October was to be a period of highs and lows and would eventually bring him to an acceptance of hard facts. Conscious of their youth he wrote: ‘& we won’t let other people come in between us & make us behave, darling. We won’t. The world belongs to the young, & we are going to teach it manners, & to speak only when it’s spoken to.’

  His imagined future success, outlined for Vivien’s amusement, followed traditional lines: ‘Darling, I can’t be the Uncrowned King of Arabia, but I’ll be The Right Honourable Graham Greene, youngest Conservative Prime Minister since Pitt, or Mr Graham Greene, O.M.fn1 the successor of Thomas Hardy, or Sir Graham Greene, K.C.B. War Correspondent for the Times, & secret military adviser to the Emir of Afghanistan. Which would you prefer, dear heart? Any of them can be quite easily managed.’6

  He had an idea that he would one day produce great work, and what he hoped to produce makes curious reading today:

  My great works: The life of Prince Rupert.fn2

  The Poetry of Christina Rossetti & that most final & authoritative work.

  The Carolians, in which of course will be incorporated the great essay on the Cavalier Spirit in Religion.7

  He was working hard on his novel: ‘You see, if I can’t tear up “The Episode”, I’m determined to make you like it, before I’ve done with it.’8 But vague notions of future achievement butter no parsnips. He could still be made to feel uncertain about the road he was travelling. Having at last read John Masefield’s Multitude & Solitude, he regrets not having read it when he was fifteen as he would now have been a scientist: ‘He proves with convincing power that writers are anachronisms … the thing which is of the greatest importance in any age, is the thing for which people die. So in the sixteenth century people died for religion, & in the seventeenth for constitutional government, & in the early nineteenth to a certain extent for literature. But now it’s people like the radium man in France,
& Professor Lefray who sacrifice themselves.’9

  Although admitting that he would rather go on an Antarctic Expedition (‘for that one must be either a millionaire or a naval officer or a scientist’),10 he was now coming to accept that he must find a job, however prosaic, in the newspaper world. During September he had done some reviewing: ‘I’ve got four novels from W[eekly] W[estminster] for review … it’s a start & I’m getting a life of More from the Times Lit. Supp.’ And late that month he visited the journalist ‘Touchstone’, whose advice was to make a tour of the provincial towns, as the provincial papers were clamouring for intelligent sub-editors, ‘because they could never keep them, as after a short time they all shifted to the better paid job of leader writing.’11 He settled on seeking employment as a sub-editor and threw himself into the search. He persuaded a friend to drop a line to Ramsay Muir, who he had heard was looking for a sub-editor willing to live in the provinces.

  Impatient as ever, Greene wrote to Vivien the following day: ‘I’m going to wait till the beginning of next week, & then, if I haven’t heard from Muir, I shall take a trip to Birmingham, with a letter of introduction to the Editor of the Birmingham Daily Post, & try & take the offices by storm.’

  The Scotsman also became a possibility: ‘Sir John Findlay writes and says that they pay Union salaries from the beginning.’ The Scotsman clearly attracted him, though in the margin of his letter to Vivien he fears parting from her: ‘Edinburgh is so very far away.’ He need not have worried. Later he wrote, ‘I’ve just heard that there’s nothing doing in that direction, & I’ve got to start the hunt all over again!’12 But there was some consolation: ‘My free lancing has begun to come in quicker. A proof from the Lit. Supp. of a short article called the “Growth of Truth on More & Gresham”, & two proofs from the W. W., a short article on Stendhal, of whom I know nothing, & of the sonnet “Lord Love, when will you weary of this War?” We’ll soon have the ring, darling, at this rate!’

  Greene’s next letter to Vivien hints why the Scotsman turned him down. In attempting to produce copy, he ran foul of certain (unstated) newspaper conventions of the time: ‘I know that in all my work there are inclined to be scattered sentences, which the Isis informed me offends good taste, & the Scotsman says should be left in the smoking room!!! I know it, but I put them there of set purpose, to try & get the sort of effect of a leap from the ground – contrast in other words.’13

  *

  Greene went on his rapid tour of the North. Like Quixote charging at windmills, he attacked the provincial newspapers. He tried the Yorkshire Post and the Bolton Journal. ‘The editor,’ he told Vivien, ‘Tillotson by name is a Balliol man & I have an introduction to him.’14 ‘WILL ME LUCK THIS AFTERNOON’ he telegraphed her and Vivien did try to will Graham into a post.

  He made an appointment to see Sir Charles Starmer, the great newspaper magnate of the day, for Greene was willing to beard any lion in any den if it helped win Vivien: ‘I braved Sir Charles Starmer indeed dragged him out from a Westminster Gazette board meeting, & he’s writing to the editors of [three of] his … provincial papers, The Northern Echo, The Sheffield Independent & The Birmingham Gazette.’

  At the last minute he decided on a helter-skelter Birmingham visit: ‘And from the [train] whistles we seem to be off’, he wrote in his train letter to Vivien. ‘I am told by the News of the World that Birmingham is the most immoral city in the world, which sounds exciting. I arrive before 8.’

  Alas, Greene’s northern journey ‘to the most immoral city’ didn’t pay off: ‘Birmingham didn’t want me, darling. Poor Birmingham, they little know the treasure they have thrown away.’ Yet there was hope, and it lay in Charles Starmer: ‘if the Yorkshire Post fails, I can get training on The Nottingham Journal’, another of Starmer’s papers.15 The trouble with Nottingham was that the Journal did not offer inexperienced sub-editors any salary and Greene desperately wanted independence from his parents.

  He had already visited the London editor of the Yorkshire Post and felt the atmosphere was hopeful and he later received an invitation from its editor to return – ‘if he’s taking the trouble to interview me, it means he’s willing to take someone’. After he had seen the editor, he announced, ‘The Yorkshire Post may take me for three months probation’, but Greene sounded a note of disappointment soon afterwards: ‘I didn’t much care for the editor of the Y.P. I felt absolutely no common ground.’ Yet he was willing to go to the provinces ‘in the smoke of Leeds & the nearly equal smoke of Nottingham’. Greene’s youthful contempt for the third-ratedness of things provincial comes out in his next letter:

  I haven’t heard yet from Leeds but I don’t really mind whether I go there or to Nottingham. In a way I should prefer Nottingham. I should get much more attention there – a third rate paper, run by third class people & I should arrive under the aegis of the great Starmer. Also S. says in a tactful manner ‘they might manage a small commencing salary, if you are going to assist the editor with contributions.’ I think I should almost certainly get practice in leader writing, which I should not get at Leeds, & I have no intention of sticking finally to the editing side of journalism.16

  At the last moment, Sir Charles Starmer, an endlessly friendly man, offered Greene leader writing on his Birmingham paper. In spite of Starmer’s kindness, Greene made a controlled, rational decision to go to Nottingham, for Nottingham decided to take him on as a trainee sub-editor. He knew he needed experience as a sub-editor to find a place on the staff of The Times: ‘I’m not going to endanger my future aims of The Times for a small salary in the hand’, he wrote to Vivien. Once he had made a decision, Greene’s concern was to do day-time, not night-time, sub-editing: ‘Evening papering is useless for my purpose, as the whole technique is different … I pray it will be the morning, otherwise, as far as I can see, the whole business will have to start again. Journalism ought to be a fairly select profession, if everyone has as much trouble to get into it.’17

  But ‘evening papering’ it had to be – that was the offer. At last, five months after he had graduated, Graham Greene made a start in the right direction.

  fn1 Mr Graham Greene was appointed to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth on 10 February 1986.

  fn2 The most talented Royalist of the English Civil War, known by Royalists and Roundheads alike as the ‘Mad Cavalier’, the life and vitality of the Royalist cause, headstrong, brilliant and wilful, he won many battles – and lost many. His last years were spent conducting scientific experiments and he introduced mezzotint print-making into England, describing it to the Royal Society in 1662. He also invented an improved gunpowder.

  17

  Sub-editing in Nottingham

  There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city …

  GRAHAM GREENE

  WHEN GREENE LEFT for Nottingham on 1 November 1925, the train running past his old digs in Thorncliffe Road, he had a strong desire to break down and weep. He felt concussed and half out of his mind, for it was there he had often entertained Vivien and seeing it slide past sharpened his sense of loss.

  Ten years later his strong feeling of deprivation was to be reflected in his thriller A Gun for Sale, (entitled This Gun for Hire in America), when Raven, the hare-lipped killer on the run, catches the train to Nottwich, and sees London recede, ‘like a man watching something he loves slide back from him out of his reach’.

  Greene’s letter to Vivien vividly describes his arrival at his new home in Hamilton Road, Nottingham: ‘The train was an hour late, & it was raining & dark & the streets were almost unlighted, & the taximan lost his way, & when I arrived I found it was not digs at all, where I could be alone & hold you in a thought.’

  The house in Hamilton Road turned out to be a boarding house, which meant more communal living with two elderly and civilised ladies ‘& an awful man, who had been at Oxford in 1914 for six months & considered himself a University man, & whose mind is the lowest cesspool of dirt I’ve ever come across.’ Though he’d just ar
rived, the old ladies, to make him feel welcome, invited him to play cards, which they did until it was time for them to retire. Graham found the latest intruder into his world as insufferable as the bank clerk at the B.A.T.: ‘the hearty proceeded to talk filth, which I shouldn’t have minded a bit a year ago, & it’s so damned hard not to follow suit, for fear of being considered a prig.’

  The next day he was cheered by his first impressions of the editorial office: ‘The sun is shining, & I went along to the office this morning. The editor wasn’t in, but I saw the assistant editor, a young man, who was at Magdalen & he seemed an oasis in the desert. Extremely pleasant, & gave the somewhat heartening feeling that he was really glad to see me & have me there.’ Moreover, he found the news editor to be ‘a perfectly dear old man and frightfully kindly’ and the other sub-editors ‘cheerful friendly … with strong Notts, accents’.

  Greene’s working hours were from 5.30 p.m. until midnight – ‘luckily Oxford got me used to bed at one’, but on his first evening they let him off work early to break him in gently. Greene was soon deeply involved in the intricacies of his new job:

  The telegrams come in, & one has to go through them, filling in the missing words, & punctuating & where necessary correcting the grammar, & dividing into paras, & where possible cutting out a word here & there. If they are merely local news, one has to decide whether they are of sufficient value to go in.

  The most amusing part, because it was rather like a cross-word puzzle, was doing the headlines:

  Each different type is called by a number. Leaving out the front page, there are eight different kinds. Each kind allows a different number of letters to the line, a space counting as a letter. The biggest type for the most important news & so on down. First one decides which type the particular news shall be allowed. Then one has to think out headlines to catch the eye, with the most interesting points in the news & with not more than the right number of letters. If one is very clever, one gets a lot of i’s into the headline, & then one can cram in an extra letter. If one gets too many M’s or W’s, one can’t have as many letters.