He found the technical aspect of sub-editing, and the speed with which the older sub-editors worked, deeply impressive. He ‘took a quarter of an hour to correct a telegram of only a few lines’, about the Prince of Wales saying goodbye to some emigrants:
The worst part is the news which comes in from local agents in the towns round about in packets by trains. These have the same abbreviations as telegrams, very little punctuation, wd for would, & so on, & in the most ghastly handwriting, often in pencil.1
He was happy, finding the office ‘frantically Dickensian’, and scribbling to Vivien, ‘disjointedly between divorce telegrams & violent assaults, & still more violent headings of my own devising’, he catches for us the atmosphere of the place:
We sit round a table together, with the News Editor … at the head, & snip & blue pencil & talk & smoke away, like a family party. And just before ten, someone goes out & buys two penny parcels of hot potato chips to eat, & the old bald headed Irishman, who does the Sporting page, puts on the kettle & makes tea. He’s a dear, foul-mouthed perhaps, but in a Rabelaisian manner. Good solid earth, not slime, like the man in the boarding house. And then there’s a huge fat man with rather long hair, who does the Angling notes, who wanders in about 10.30 & keeps everybody from working by telling endless tall fish stories.
And it seemed that even the secretarial staff were chosen on aesthetic grounds: ‘There is a quite astonishing beauty chorus of secretaries of the “fluffy, chocolate box” kind.’
In his autobiography, Greene remembered the office building in Parliament Street: ‘One entered … through a narrow stone Gothic door, stained with soot, which resembled the portal of a Pugin chapel, and the heads of Liberal statesmen stuck out above like gargoyles: on rainy days the nose of Gladstone dripped on my head as I came in.’2 (It could not have been Gladstone’s, but Palmerston’s nose which dripped water on Greene’s head.)
Such was Greene’s initial happiness in the office that on one occasion, while correcting copy, he had an urge to break into song. His colleagues, he tells Vivien, would not have been surprised: ‘Constant telegrams of Amazing and Startling Revelations have dried up the power of surprise. The old News Editor would have looked at me over his glasses and said, “Feeling cheerful, Son?”, “Charley,” who does the bigger divorces, would gently murmur, “Nottingham Gal got you?”, “Leslie,” Chief sub & Foreign News, would merely utter a loud base laugh, “John Albert,” Parliamentary, would only grunt, and run his fingers through his hair, whilst my table companion, the little bald headed fat Irish Rabelais, Carleton, the Sports Page, would twinkle his pig eyes, and laugh.’
Also, he was appreciated, coming back very cheerful from the office when told he was picking things up well. Something of the effort Greene puts into a job shows in a letter to Vivien: ‘I have to take in an awful lot of papers now, The Nottingham Journal to see if any of my [type]heads have been altered and how. The Westminster Gazette to try and get the atmosphere, and memorize the types, and compare their different values of the news. The Times for the same.’3
Although Greene soon began to see Nottingham as a place ‘undisturbed by ambition’,4 it also made a strong impression on him which he recorded in A Gun for Sale:
There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night sky with no stars. The air in the streets was clear. You have only to imagine that it was night. The first tram crawled out of its shed and took the steel track down towards the market. An old piece of newspaper blew up against the door of the Royal Theatre and flattened out. In the streets on the outskirts of Nottwich an old man plodded by with a pole tapping at the windows. The stationer’s window in the High Street was full of Prayer Books and Bibles: a printed card remained among them, a relic of Armistice Day, like the old drab wreath of Haig poppies by the War Memorial: ‘Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you’ll never forget’ … the lit carriages drew slowly in past the cemetery … a smell of bad fish came in from the glue factory.5
There were two glue factories in Nottingham but the one which afflicted the passengers as they descended from the tram was probably Halls’ Glue & Bone works, the Trentside Works in Holme Street. The smell, reaching Greene in his digs, was not forgotten.
But it was the fog that he remembered as lying over the city ‘like a night sky with no stars,’ and in Journey Without Maps, written simultaneously with A Gun for Sale, as lying ‘heavy and black between the sun and the earth’.6 Fog becomes an important narrative element in the novel. It helps to establish between the kidnapped (Anne Weaver) and kidnapper (Raven) an intimate relationship.7 Because of it Raven is able to escape from the police – ‘a cold damp yellow fog from the river, through which it would be easy, if it was thick enough, for a man to escape.’8
During his stay in Nottingham, one particular fog lasted two days.
A most marvellous fog here to-day [he wrote to Vivien]. It makes walking a thrilling adventure. I’ve never been in such a fog before in my life. If I stretch out my walking stick in front of me, the ferula is half lost in obscurity. Coming back I twice lost my way, & ran into a cyclist, to our mutual surprise. Stepping off a pavement to cross to the other side becomes a wild & fantastic adventure, like sailing into the Atlantic to find New York, with no chart or compass. Once where the breadth of the road was greater than the normal, I found myself back on the same pavement as I started, having slowly swerved in my course across the road.
He warned Vivien, ‘If you never hear from me again, you will know that somewhere I am moving round in little plaintive circles, looking for a pavement.’ Coming back from the office after midnight, the next day, Greene lost his way twice between the tram stop and his house, a distance of thirty yards.
After only two weeks, he made a move from the boarding house in Hamilton Road; he would have left earlier but for the fact that he did not want to upset his good landlady. The first excuse he gave was that he wanted a room to himself. The landlady promptly put her own sitting room at Greene’s disposal without extra charge. He then told her that he would be bringing his dog Paddy from Berkhamsted and the trouble that would cause, but she countered that by stressing her love for dogs. ‘She’s awfully kind,’ he wrote to Vivien, ‘I don’t know what to do?’ The trouble lay of course in his dislike for the awful man with a mind like a cesspool:
I can’t very well explain that I don’t like having meals at a table with other people, & that I intensely dislike some of her guests. The man is really quite unbearable. He’s always asking what I think of the suit or the overcoat he’s wearing, & then telling me the price. He has an inferiority complex. Yesterday he said, ‘I like this boarding house. The ladies here are quite one’s social equals,’ & then turned with a sudden anxiety – ‘Don’t you think so?’ I longed to say that I thought they were quite immeasurably his superiors. Terrible man.9
However, he found new digs at Ivy Housefn1 in All Saints Terrace, ‘a grim grey row with a grim grey name’,10 but they were close to the park and only ten minutes’ walk from his office. Full board was 35s. a week and included a sitting room of his own, which he described to Vivien as ‘quite large & has bird wallpaper, the door has carved panels, leaves in the bottom ones & large figures with their names carved in parallelograms below of Diana & Ceres.’
Once winter set in, he became fed up with Nottingham: ‘O blast the fog … I can’t see a foot outside the window,’ he complained to Vivien, ‘Nottingham is horrid. Misty and with pavements deep in slush. I brought Paddy back from the vet. He rolled about in the slush and is looking cold …’ But he was more troubled by Ivy House: ‘Why baths are ever built for dwarfs I can’t imagine – it’s impossible to stretch in this one’; ‘gramophone going on eternally in the next room’, the shouting on the stairs at midnight, the lateness of meals. Moreover, he felt an evil influence in the house: ‘I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since I came into it. I get to sleep about 1, and wake up about 4, and then doze on and off till I give up trying.’11
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Nottingham and Ivy House were never forgotten and aspects of them appear in a play and a number of his novels. Whenever he needed to describe a disreputable house he returned to Ivy House: ‘I cannot invent,’ he told V. S. Pritchett.12 It appears in his play The Potting Shed (1957), in his novels A Gun for Sale (1936), Brighton Rock (1938), and It’s a Battlefield (1934). In A Gun for Sale, it is All Saints Road, ‘two rows of small neo-Gothic houses lined up as carefully as a company on parade’,13 and it is near the park, ‘a place of dull wilted trees and palings and gravel paths for perambulators.’ Greene’s furnished rooms in All Saints Terrace did double duty in A Gun for Sale, for he used them as both the digs of the chorus girl Anne Weaver and the home of Acky, the defrocked priest.14 In Brighton Rock, it is the home of Lawyer Prewitt: ‘Mr Prewitt’s house was in a street parallel to the railway, beyond the terminus … shaken by shunting engines; the soot settled continuously on the glass …’15
The passageway he traversed daily from his sitting room to the front door of Ivy House appears in A Gun for Sale:
She stumbled backwards amongst the crowded litter of the little dark hall: he noted it all with hatred: the glass case with a stuffed pheasant, the moth-eaten head of a stag picked up at a country auction to act as a hat-stand, the black metal umbrella-holder painted with gold stars, the little pink glass shade over the gas-jet.16
It is also transferred to the Brighton of Brighton Rock when Pinkie visits Brewer because he has not paid for protection:
He looked with contempt down the narrow hall – the shell case converted into an umbrella-stand, the moth-eaten stag’s head bearing on one horn a bowler hat, a steel helmet used for ferns.17
It is also part of Mrs Coney’s house in It’s a Battlefield.
Twelve years before he wrote Brighton Rock, Greene told Vivien how he had to knock on the wall of his room in Ivy House to stop another lodger playing his gramophone day and night; the walls were ‘so thin you could hear the neighbour move behind the shelves like a rat’. The experience is transferred to Lawyer Prewitt in Brighton Rock:
‘I beat on the wall.’ He took a paper-weight off his desk and struck the wall twice: the music broke into a high oscillating wail and ceased. They could hear the neighbour move furiously behind the shelves. ‘How now? A rat?’ Mr Prewitt quoted. The house shook as a heavy engine pulled out. ‘Polonius,’ Mr Prewitt explained.18
Of his characters Greene writes that they were ‘an amalgam of bits of real people’ yet he asserts that he did not take people from real life. ‘Real people are crowded out by imaginary ones … Real people are too limiting.’19 Very true, but real people were necessary in the creation of fictional ones whether they attracted or repelled him. They forced their way into his imagination through the sheer pressure of his response to them and in that sense are ‘fused by the heat of the unconscious’.
In Ways of Escape he writes: ‘I like too the character of Acky, the unfrocked clergyman, and of his wife – the two old evil characters joined to each other by a selfless love.’20 When asked in 1982, he could not recall the source of this bizarre couple who appear in the sometimes unreal world of A Gun for Sale, but they originated in Nottingham. Acky in A Gun for Sale and the crooked lawyer Prewitt in Brighton Rock have in common that they have both married and their wives have the same source – Greene’s sour and short landlady, who appears in It’s a Battlefield as Mrs Coney.
In It’s a Battlefield, Greene describes Milly, the wife of a murdered policeman, as having small jet eyes. She ‘gripped the edge of the table as though with an intolerable longing for a blow’. An incompetent woman, ‘who drives the dust from one room to settle in another’, she is very small: ‘she only came half-way to his shoulder, grey and soiled and miserably tender’ (A Gun for Sale). In Brighton Rock, Prewitt discusses his wife with the young gangster: ‘Somebody in the basement slammed the floor beneath their feet. “What ho! old mole,” Mr Prewitt said. ‘The spouse – you’ve never met the spouse … Listen to the old mole down there. She’s ruined me.’21 Mrs Coney in It’s a Battlefield is also a ‘meek suspicious woman … Her spirit, like a mole, burrowed circuitously in darkness, emerging at unsuspected places.’22 One further aspect mentioned in A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock ties the two characters together and points to Greene’s original model. When Acky’s wife plucked at detective Mather, he smelt fish on her fingers. Lawyer Prewitt is at pains to tell Pinkie the kind of food his wife provides – ‘tinned salmon, she has a passion for tinned salmon’.23 Greene is describing his Nottingham landlady, the ‘thin complaining widow’, who also invariably gave him tinned salmon for high tea. He shared it with his dog Paddy, ‘so that most days [the dog] was sick on the floor.’24 This information is re-used in The Potting Shed: ‘My landlady has a penchant for tinned salmon. My dog likes it, but it often makes him sick.’25
The landlady at Ivy House, All Saints Terrace, a Mrs Loney (how close the spelling is to widow Mrs Coney in It’s a Battlefield), was by all accounts lazy – ‘her gentlemen always clean their own shoes’, she told Greene. She was also untidy (as Greene indicates in It’s a Battlefield), watchful, and lived mostly in her basement where she was alert to the activities of her boarders. In Brighton Rock when Pinkie let himself out of Mr Prewitt’s house, he looked down and ‘met in the basement the hard suspicious gaze of Mr Prewitt’s spouse; she had a duster in her hand and she watched him like a bitter enemy from her cave, under the foundations.’26 Although Mrs Loney lived in the basement she sometimes came into the rooms she was letting, for on one occasion Greene came home unexpectedly to find her in his room writing a letter, and her habit of watching the world from her window is recorded in a letter which Greene wrote to Vivien in late February 1926. She asked his permission to use his ground floor window in order to watch, as she clearly could not do from her basement room, what was going on in her neighbour’s house across the way:
A man down the street was going to be taken to hospital. Dropsy and insanity and incurable. The ambulance at the door. My landlady said with gusto that they’d find it difficult to get him on to the stretcher. She was very excited. She said she’d never seen anything like this before, and didn’t want to miss it. She stood in the window jabbering for a quarter of an hour till they brought him out and the ambulance drove away, giving the most revolting details of his physical appearance with the dropsy.
Greene’s only intimate companion during his four months in Nottingham was his dog Paddy, ‘a rough-haired terrier with orange & brown bits’ who yet called forth sympathy: ‘I’ve never seen a dog which arouses so much promiscuous affection. The number of people who stop and pat him in the streets is extraordinary.’27 Greene took him for a daily walk in a park where when you touched the leaves they left soot on the fingers. But his dog was in poor condition: ‘I took him for a walk after Mass, he was extremely disobedient and I punished him – he was promptly sick. He’s a nervy, neurotic beast.’28 Greene’s letters to Vivien are punctuated with references to Paddy’s sickness. If he gets too excited he is sick; if he eats tinned salmon he is sick. On one occasion Paddy went down with catarrh, and Greene nursed him to sleep like a child. And during a very cold winter of 1925 and early 1926 they shuddered together in the cold: ‘My handwriting’s all awry, darling, but my hand is frozen stiff. It’s still snowing steadily today. Poor Paddy is cold and miserable. The snow must be fearfully deep outside the town.’29
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Greene’s passion for the cinema continued unabated in Nottingham and was the means of escaping from his isolation. It was also cheap entertainment, for matinee seats in the stalls cost only fourpence. Each morning was spent writing a letter to Vivien and then he would do his daily stint of 500 words (on good days treble that number). In the afternoon he could escape to the cinema pretending, as he told Vivien, that she was with him in the darkness. The films were usually cheap and popular: ‘Went to a most dramatic film yesterday afternoon Smouldering Fires with Pauline Frederick … This afternoon I’m going to
Betty Balfour in Satan’s Sister30 … just been to a Cinema, very bad, called The Wages of Virtue.’31 He is curiously priggish over Spanish Love: ‘Last night I went to a terrible film …’ It made him despair of the human race, ‘the female portion of it especially’. He left the cinema before the film ended. He seems to have developed a hatred for Rudolf Valentino and Richard Cortez: ‘One can imagine Novello as a matinee idol, because he really is extra-ordinarily good-looking, but Valentino and this man Cortez are simply gross fleshy animals, behaving like animals. But all the shop girls and stout matrons of England and America go and are thrilled.’32
Perhaps he was deliberately going overboard here, knowing that Vivien would applaud these sentiments. Indeed, she must have done so a day later, for we find Greene responding: ‘That’s exactly what I felt about Valentino & even more about Richard Cortez. I felt the female portion of mankind must be fearfully degraded to flock in crowds to get pleasure from … being embraced by him in proxy on the screen.’ Yet he was perfectly happy with the simplicities of a swashbuckling hero: ‘The new Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate. I really begin to like Doug. He’s such a refreshing change from the Cortez-Valentino lot. It was a really satisfactory film. Pirates & buried treasure & lots of fighting & ships & a princess held for ransom – altogether pleasant. It was a rather interesting experiment too, as it was all in colour, & much the most successful effect I’ve seen. It certainly emphasised the “gory” bits! It’s really worth seeing.’
Greene was struck by the fact (as was his friend Joseph Macleod) that the cinema had certain advantages for a writer. In special circumstances it produced the right mood to do creative work: ‘Cinemas have a peculiar effect. At Oxford if [Macleod] felt vaguely that he wanted to write something he would go to the cinema alone, and then go back to his digs and work at a story or something till 2 in the morning. Is it the concentrated emotion of lots of people? Because it doesn’t work if one’s not alone, for then one’s withdrawn from the general audience and can scoff at the ridiculousness of the picture. It’s all very curious.’ He admitted that when he saw a film he liked alone, he came out into the street afterwards with his head in the clouds and the absolute certainty that, one day, he would write a good poem. Marvellous schemes flitted through his head: ‘A 2,000 line verse poem founded on Browning’s lines “The breathless fellow at the altar foot/Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there”.’33 He was aware that this could not easily be part of a young woman’s experience in 1926:
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 31