The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  I suppose you never go to cinemas alone. It must be awfully curious, darling, to be a girl. I suppose one never goes to shows alone, or wanders about at night alone – unless one’s disreputable. Curious and curiouser. The strange universal prison of the feminine. And you can’t travel alone, suddenly pack a bag and go off somewhere. I am glad I’m not a girl … I should inevitably have fallen into vice by this time, the only means to excitement!34

  Although Greene owed a lot to Nottingham, not least for giving him his first experience of living in a seedy boarding house, his letters show that three weeks after his arrival he had become sufficiently restless and unhappy to begin seeking work in London, thus hoping to cut down what was to be in any case a short stay in the provinces. First he decided to approach The Times again: ‘I shall point out’, he wrote to Vivien, ‘that though not exactly very experienced I am very much alive! One never knows. I always believe in taking a chance.’35

  He went to London during the middle of January 1926 and stayed with his brother Raymond. On arriving, he deposited his bag and went out to eat. When he returned, he discovered his brother’s sister-in-law had arrived for the night, so he had to make do with a couple of armchairs for a bed. That night he had a vivid dream, reflecting his uncertainty over Vivien’s love which exacerbated his sense of hopelessness. He had little doubt that without a job in London at a first class newspaper, his career on no sure footing, he would have no chance of winning Vivien:

  We were on a platform and you [Vivien] were going away, and you laughed in the most heartless manner at my misery, and I grew furious and you got cold and taunting and the train came in, and an awful looking bounder considerably older than yourself came along to the carriage door and started talking to you, and you were fearfully affectionate, and gave him your photo. And then I began really to hate you, and I pushed the man away, and took hold of you, by the shoulders and forced you to look at me. And you twisted yourself away, very white and contemptuous and said ‘I won’t have this. I’m sick of you.’ So I got hold of you again and I wasn’t furious, but I simply hated you. And I said that I’d make you understand how miserable I’d been for 9 months because of you. And you struggled and I hit you, and felt like hitting you. I hated you curiously enough all the more because I know you were not really sick of me, but were feeling perverse and in the mood for hurting me. And then I thought of a revenge far better. And I said ‘I suppose you are going to marry that man?’ And you smiled and said ‘Yes, I certainly am.’ And I let go of you and said ‘Then I’m done with you and everything’ and rushed away to shoot myself. Not through love of you, but through hate. Because I felt you’d never get over the thought of having made a Catholic kill himself. I woke up then, but the dream was so strong that though I knew it was a dream, the echo of the hate I’d felt drowned the real you. And I still felt that hatred.36

  ‘It wasn’t just a nightmare,’ he explained to Vivien, ‘it was evil in its vividness.’

  Twenty years later, in The Heart of the Matter (1947), written when his marriage was disintegrating, Greene has his hero, Major Scobie, a convinced Catholic, consider the possibility of damning his soul for all eternity by committing suicide. Greene only dreamed of such an action; Scobie carries it out in an organised and cool manner.

  In spite of his dream, Greene was excited to be back in London. His visit coincided with great blankets of snow: ‘on the embankment … [I] can see for miles across endless snow covered fields’.37 Undeterred by the weather, he tackled the magnate Sir Charles Starmer at the Westminster Gazette, once more sending his name in to him. No doubt Starmer was curious as to why Greene should be back in town after he had so recently sent him to the provinces:

  I smiled disarmingly and said ‘The bad penny’ and he said rather disconcertingly ‘Yes’ and then added with a rather pathetic smile ‘And what is it you want, now.’ And I said with brazen impudence ‘A sub-editorship on the Westminster.’ And he looked rather taken aback and said ‘But you only went to Nottingham in November.’ So I pointed out that sub-editing was chiefly common sense, which was my strong point and that I’d picked Nottingham dry. And he laughed and rang up the News Editor and asked him to come down, which he did. And Starmer said ‘This young man has been at Nottingham for a few weeks, and has come to me with the bold proposal that he should join our staff. Take him away and turn him inside out.’38

  Greene reported happily to Vivien that he had been practically promised to be taken on for a month or two on probation: ‘Cheek is victorious!!’ It looked as if he had dug himself out of Nottingham at his very first try and he explained to Vivien that Hillyer, the News Editor, was helpful because he thought Greene must be a friend of Starmer and that Starmer was under the impression that Graham was a friend of his nephew – ‘a complicated web’. What was being offered to him was an exciting prospect for a young man – ‘a month with reporters, to see the battle, so to speak, from the ranks, and be sent to fires and murders … with some practice at leaders’, so that Greene should be equipped all round.39

  While in town he called on an ex-Balliol man, Maurice Gorham, who was then at the Weekly Westminster, and Gorham suggested that Graham should join an ex-student friend, Robin Turton, for a year in Hungary. Although intrigued by the idea, Greene was not going to leave Vivien at this stage.40 He returned to Nottingham feeling that success would soon be his, but a week later he wrote to Vivien: ‘Everything’s gone wrong … I’ve heard nothing from the Westminster, but had a nasty knock this morning from the W[eekly] W[estminster].’ He had received a letter from Gorham, sending back four poems they had already accepted and telling him there would be no more reviewing from them: ‘“We may meet again under the auspices of Sir Charles Starmer, but as an independent paper we are closing down.”’

  Starmer, owner of the Weekly Westminster and the Westminster Gazette, with the failure of one of his papers, had his own troubles now and Greene’s hopes were not realised. January 1926 passed without his hearing from the Gazette. In Nottingham, he was in the process of converting to Roman Catholicism, and his dislike of Nottingham returned: ‘If I go on much longer I shall snap. I’ve tired of my chain and the stable. There’s absolutely nothing worth doing in this beastly place. No excitement, no interest, nothing worth a halfpenny curse.’41 But early in February there came a second chance of success:

  Things have been annoying. I went to the Times first and was told that Freeman never came till 12. Then I went to the Westminster and Hillyer said that the Union had blocked the scheme. But added politely that he thought I should be a first rate recruit for the paper etc. and that if there was any job going, which would allow him to edge me in sideways and evade the Union, he would do his best etc. Bunk! Then I went to the New Statesman and Mrs Vincent said that [Desmond] MacCarthy was away for the weekend and she rang up his home and they said they expected him back for dinner, so I’ve got to ring up the office at 4 and if he’s dropped in during the afternoon, she’ll fix up a meeting. Then I sent a wire to my landlady and rang you up, the one bright spot. And then I went back to the Times and waited till 12.35 and apparently if Freeman did not turn up till then, he wouldn’t turn up till 3. So I shall be traipsing back soon, probably on a fruitless errand.

  That night he had a most ‘fearful nightmare’:

  I dreamed I had been followed by a man, like a terribly coarsened and decadent De la Mare and at last I turned on him & in the fight got my thumb in his right eye and pressed and pressed, till – squish! I’d blinded him. Horrid, but exultant feeling. That disabled him for a time and gave me a start, but presently he was after me again, this time with a band of friends. And he was more horrible than ever, because besides his disfigured face, he had developed a hunchback. And I twisted and turned and doubled on my tracks and at last escaped.42

  The headings in the letter below (9 February 1926) take on the character of descriptive chapters in a novel. Greene describes finding a place for lunch in a manner suggesting he was already seeking copy f
or his future thrillers:

  With my strange power (beware darling), of hitting on the shady, I went and had lunch at random and hit on a place of the most doubtful character, under the ground, beneath a most respectable hat shop, off the Strand! And then I came on here to the embankment … In front there’s a most tantalising notice. Two intriguing lines of verse (one imagines religious, with a possible reference to the Last Day):

  ‘A bell will be rung at closing time

  Dogs must be led’

  I wonder how it goes on. Is it a precious fragment, resurrected by the L.C.C., of some dead poet, who died perhaps of starvation and cold on the Embankment.

  After lunch, he was back on his errand:

  The Times – 3.15 p.m.

  Dear love, here I am waiting. Send me luck please.

  Chelsea Embankment – 6.35 p.m.

  I was interrupted by someone coming and saying that Freeman was not coming to the office today. But I’m not going to be done, so I stay also. The one bright spot, dear heart, was the New Statesman. I saw MacCarthy, who was quite sweet and have taken away two books for review. One, heavy large and dull on the English Constitution for a short notice, and one amusing Autobiography of an 11th Cent. French Abbot of the St Augustine type for a longish one. Then I went and had tea at Battersea [at the home of his aunt], and am hurriedly finishing off this letter where I used to come and write depressedly to you during the B.A.T. period. Darling, I love you so very, very much. I want to go on writing, but I can’t, because I’m meeting someone.

  And the following day he is writing at 10.30 a.m. from somewhere inside St James’s Park:

  Darling, has the Archbishop of Canterbury become a Catholic? Is there a ‘Cabinet’ meeting of the English Church to discuss a massacre of Catholics? A brace of hurrying bishops and a brace of deans have already passed me and there are more on the sky line, silhouetted against the damp mist and drizzle. It’s very cold. I don’t think I shall be able to write here for long.

  What he longed for was to be a member of a club so that he could get out of the cold. He was pessimistic, for he felt that if The Times led to nothing it would not only be check but checkmate.

  Leaving St James’s Park, he popped into the waiting room at St Pancras Station for warmth and continued writing his saga to Vivien. He knew he had a long wait. It was just after 11 o’clock and the earliest he could see anyone at The Times was half past three; he also had to return to Nottingham that night. His efforts were, he suspected, to be fruitless for he had still not seen Freeman of The Times. Depression set in. ‘O my love, is there anything more depressing than a General Waiting Room on a cold, drizzly day!! It’s nearly 2.’ Just waiting in those surroundings made him want to throw in the towel: ‘I feel absolutely hopeless … If The Times has nothing definite to say, I shall have to try the provincial papers, Manchester, Leeds, and Glasgow, and if they fail me there’s nothing left but abroad, and losing you …’ Losing Vivien was the one prospect he just could not bear: ‘Apart from you, I have no ambition, and there’s nothing but you in life which is worth anything at all’, were his last thoughts before he started again for The Times.

  By 4.40 he had trudged back to St Pancras Station in the rain, as frustrated as ever, a frustration made greater because Vivien was at last in love with him, no doubt in part because he was becoming a Catholic for her sake: ‘The Times was as vague as ever – “There’d be vacancies some time but –’ Oh my dear, I wish you were here. You couldn’t alter circumstances, but you’d be like a light in a dark room.’ He also wished that she could be in Nottingham when he returned that night. The lack of justice in their situation struck him: ‘It’s not fair that we should have been made to love each other, if we aren’t going to be allowed to marry.’

  This letter was written in different places, as each event took place or soon afterwards. The letter is written as a novelist would write it and we are at the writer’s elbow, witnesses to immediate events and his desperate reaction to them. He could see no escape and expresses his frustration in the terminology of a Luddite: ‘I want to smash something. I want to get hold of a beautiful picture or a beautiful vase & break it.’43

  *

  His second attempt at job-hunting in London having failed, Greene’s determination to fight diminished. On the train back to Nottingham he felt as if a wall was slowly being built, shutting Vivien away from him, and he wanted to hit out and smash through it – or else have the wall topple over on him. Suddenly, for the first time, in spite of his proclamations of love and desperate need to marry Vivien, he now writes that their relationship should end: ‘I can’t bear the thought of going on seeing you at intervals for short times for years on end. I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be better to end it all at a stroke.’ And then, thinking happily that they will soon see each other once more, he turns again to his doubts as to whether they should continue: ‘… should we? Wouldn’t it only make it worse? … I don’t know what to think or do. My brain’s in a quagmire.’44

  After a good night’s sleep, his spirits revived, and he returned to seeking a place in journalism. After all, there were other newspapers of almost equal importance to The Times:

  I’ve got such a lot to do – trying to salvage the wreck I’m going to write to Montagu of the Manchester Guardian … and to Mann of the Yorkshire Post. Then I’ll tackle the Birmingham Post again from a different angle, and write to my psycho-analyst, who used to know Robert Lynd, at least he showed him some of my work years ago. Lynd might supply an introduction to the Editor of the Daily News. I shall write to Kenneth [Bell] and ask him to try desperately to obtain intros. to the Telegraph and the Morning Post. These both pay as well as The Times. I shall also write to Browning, whom I knew at Balliol, who’s a leader writer on The Glasgow Herald. I’ll also ask Kenneth about the Toronto Globe, whether there is a chance in their London office.

  Graham also wrote to Count Bernstorff (his contact during his student attempts at espionage) to see whether he could give him introductions to the Daily Telegraph and the Morning Post.

  *

  Seeking introductions here and seeking introductions there – this was to be the road to success. And if all else failed, he intended to make a third attempt on London, going the rounds if need be without introductions. He was still reluctant to become attached to a ‘popular’ newspaper, but if it had to be – well: ‘I once had a riotous evening with Strube, the cartoonist of the [Daily] Express. I might look him up and get an intro. there. I once met the News Editor through my German stunt. The Express of course would be the last resort.’45 His urgency is indicated by the fact that after writing an unfinished six page letter to Vivien, he stopped to write to the Guardian, the Yorkshire Post, the Glasgow Herald, his college tutor Kenneth Bell and his psychoanalyst Kenneth Richmond, and then returned to complete his letter to Vivien.

  Always there was the hope that someone somewhere might help him escape from being ‘padlocked’ in Nottingham.

  Graham’s friends rallied round: Kenneth Bell advised him that an acquaintance called Gillie was in Warsaw for the Morning Post; his friend Browning on the Glasgow Herald told him of a vacancy there as sub-editor; Richmond, his ‘dear little analyst’, wrote saying he had written to, and now heard from, Robert Lynd and that Greene must write to Lynd at the Daily News. Greene did so at once: ‘I should like the D.N. better than any other papers except the three twopennies. Their politics always seem pleasantly sane, and they are excellent on the literary side.’46 Whether he felt hopeful or not, he ended his letter with the words: ‘I have given my landlady notice for the end of the month. It’s no use my staying in Nottingham into March.’

  What Greene remembered of Nottingham is highly selective – ‘the elderly “boots” employed at the Black Dog Inn, the unemployed girls once in the lace trade, the trams rattling downhill through the goose market, the blackened Nottingham castle, the oldest pub in England and the haggard blue-haired prostitute who “haunted the corner by W. H. Smith’s books
hop.”’ But what he chiefly recalled were his long months alone. Thirty years later, when writing his play The Potting Shed (1958), he found himself returning in spirit to those solitary days. He has it said of his hero, James Callifer: ‘He used to go along the Trent when he had the dog. Or down to the goose market.’ Also Greene recalled his sitting room in his note to Act Two:

  This is the living-room of James Callifer’s lodgings at Nottingham. The furniture is his landlady’s, and could belong to nobody but a landlady: the bobbed fringes of the sage-green tablecloth, the sideboard with a mirror, the glass biscuit-box with a silver top, the Marcus Stone engravings.

  Greene’s feelings are further reflected in A Gun For Sale when his killer, Raven, standing beside the river in the rain and the dark, feels a ‘dreadful sense of desolation’. It is a similar sense of desolation we find in a letter to Vivien: ‘I went for a walk by the cold Trent, and sat under trees, from which leaves floated chillily and read some of the new Thomas Hardy [probably Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)] and felt melancholy.’47