The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  There was at least one well known novelist living in Nottingham, Cecil Roberts, recently editor of the Nottingham Journal. He recalled meeting Greene:

  I … invited him to call. He proved to be a tall, gangling youth of twenty-one. He had recently published a book of verse, Babbling April, which he presented to me. As I thanked him … I said, ‘I wonder if this is a presage. Young poets out of the cocoon often turn novelists – I have!’ He shook his head, diffidently. He was shy at first. After all I was an ex-editor, the author of three published novels, and fairly well established. I suppose that in his eyes I represented success. I got him to talk, most intelligently, and after a pleasant hour he left.48

  Roberts expressed a hope that they would meet again. They did not, and Roberts had it on his conscience that he was not more hospitable, for Greene ‘must have been lonely, coming recently from the vivid life of a university and now living in grim lodgings in a provincial city.’49

  Greene commented to his father about his visit to Roberts: ‘I saw Mr R. on Friday & had supper & an amusing evening with him. An educated person in Nottingham is as precious & rare a find as jam in a wartime doughnut!’50

  Greene’s letters to Vivien from Nottingham were by no means uniformly sad. Along with the rest of the world, he found pleasure and solace in the gramophone and the popular songs of the day:

  I’m writing this little note to the strains of the Ukelele Lady, on my gramophone. Do you remember the song? The Trix Sisters sang it in that revue we saw in Oxford.

  The gramophone’s playing ‘I want to be happy, but I won’t be happy’ … It’s fearfully distracting writing a letter with the gramophone going within a yard. It’s singing ‘Just tea for two, and two for tea.’

  Living in the provinces in 1925 did have its pleasures. Live entertainment was still linked to the cinema: ‘I went to a cinema, and the comic that came on first was one I’d seen in the Shaftesbury Pavilion, the last time I was waiting to meet you in London, and I wanted you more than ever.’ Lunch could provide live entertainment: ‘At 11.20 I departed [from you] rather sadly. And I had lunch at a restaurant, where there was a piano and a violin, and for a moment I felt I was at the George.’51 ‘I opened your letter & the little picture at the end caught my eye, & I read “O write & say you still love me a little when I’m semi-bobbed.” And I said to myself, “She’s been & gone & done it” & positively blanched.’52

  It turned out to be a false alarm: ‘Darling, it was a relief to find you hadn’t gone to the barber’s & got shingled or brindled or bobbed.’ Greene nevertheless issued, two days later, a comic ultimatum: ‘If you shingle, I shall grow a moustache … And in order to go with the moustache, I shall have to brush my hair back with loads of grease, pots and pots of scented stuff. And that will necessitate a pronounced waist and even stays [a corset], like Basil Murray … So you see the ruin to my character.’53

  He had a strong sense of the melodramatic for, when looking out of his ground floor window and seeing strangers, he envisaged what could be a scene in a future thriller:

  I think some of my shady political past – is it Irish Republicans, German Separatists or French Communists? – has found me out. Two villainous individuals have been patrolling in front of the house, looking in at the windows. I got up and stared out and they moved off. Now they are back, and have been joined by an official looking person in uniform. They’ve become quite brazen. The blue official has just peeped in at my window, and I heard him say ‘This must be the house’. I feel like a character in John Buchan. And I haven’t got my revolver, darling. What shall I do? This letter will probably be posted to you by a kind stranger, and it will be splashed with blood. They’ve been wandering round for seven minutes now. I wish I could play the piano. ‘He was playing Debussy, when they came for him.’ I feel like the man in Juno and the Paycock, who’s expecting the Irregulars to come for him at any moment. Darling, they’ve rung the bell. Awful suspense. They’ve only inquired about the gas. Of course it may be a blind.fn2

  Years later he would describe Nottingham as the farthest north he had ever made a home: ‘I had fallen into a pocket out of life and out of time.’54

  fn1 Although Ivy House appears in no street directory, it is almost certain that Greene lived at no. 2.

  fn2 This comic scene finds a serious parallel in A Gun for Sale when Raven, searching for the imprisoned Anne Weaver in Acky’s home, looks out of the window: ‘His eye … noted a large rather clumsy-looking man in a soft hat chatting to a woman at the house opposite: another man came up the road and joined him and they strolled together out of sight. He recognised at once: the police … he could hear the faint whistling of the old man’s breath somewhere near the foot of the stairs’ (p. 96).

  18

  Thomas the Doubter

  Doubt is part of all religion.

  – ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

  ‘I TOOK THE name of Thomas – after St Thomas the doubter and not Thomas Aquinas – and then I went on to the Nottingham Journal office and the football results and the evening of potato chips.’1 Greene’s casual, unemotional style in describing a moment of great importance, his acceptance into the Roman Catholic Church, is typical. We do not need to rely solely on Greene’s later statements about this in A Sort of Life, recollected in tranquillity forty-five years after the event. Letters written when he was undergoing instruction before becoming a Roman Catholic give his more immediate response.

  ‘Vivien was a Roman Catholic [he writes in A Sort of Life], but to me religion went no deeper than the sentimental hymns in the school chapel.’2 Even if he had never met Vivien there was little chance that Greene would have returned to the Protestantism of his father. Protestant church-going had brought him, as a child, neither pleasure nor a sense of belief, as we can see from a passage in the typescript of A Sort of Life which was cut before publication:

  Contacts with the Anglican beliefs of my family and school were less happy. I had a habit of fainting at early morning chapel, unable to draw sufficient breath through the fumes of black broadcloth suits all around, and sometimes in the holidays – especially at Christmas – my parents liked to attend an outlying church at Potters End, where the rector was inclined … to recite the interminable Anglican litany. Never had one’s knees felt more the agony of the bone, and the repeated prayer, ‘We beseech Thee to hear us O Lord,’ would have been more heartfelt if one had believed in any being at that moment more powerful than the rector himself … I was confirmed at school, but only because it was expected of me – the touch of the Bishop of St Albans’ hand I found embarrassing, even though an older boy … urged on me the seriousness of the occasion.3

  In The Lawless Roads, written after his conversion, he says that the Anglican church could not supply the same intimate symbols for heaven, ‘only a big brass eagle, an organ voluntary, “Lord, Dismiss Us with Thy Blessing” ‘.4 His conversion, he stresses in his autobiography, was due to the emptiness of life in Nottingham and to his sense of duty towards the woman he hoped to marry: ‘Now it occurred to me, during the long empty mornings, that if I were to marry a Catholic I ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held. It was only fair, since she knew what I believed – in nothing supernatural. Besides, I thought, it would kill the time.’5 Greene’s honesty (whatever its consequences) is so pronounced it would be irresponsible to ignore these statements, even though made so many years after conversion. Killing time has been an important activity for him.

  At University he did not go to church, understandably since he was an atheist. As we saw in Chapter 8, Lord Tranmire had never heard arguments in favour of atheism put forward better than by Greene, and ‘The Improbable Tale of the Bishop of Canterbridge’, published only a few months before he met Vivien, reveals an atheistical contempt for belief in God. In the early days of his love for Vivien, Greene made fun of her belief that humans have souls. He first denied he had one and then admitted that if he had, it was ‘a small,
dirty beast’.

  But Greene did not have the character to be a permanent atheist, as Cockburn was probably aware when he advised Greene to convert if Vivien wouldn’t marry him otherwise. ‘You’re the one that’s superstitious, because I don’t think it matters.’ How right Cockburn was. Five months after meeting Vivien, Greene had his first religious dream – nightmare he called it:

  Three of us, Cockburn, York-Lodge and myself were standing in a room, and at C’s suggestion we were trying to do Black Magic. I scoffed but agreed to try for the excitement. We just stood and thought and suddenly I became very frightened and my mind became all dark save for little sparks of fire. And the sparks darted up more & more, & I grew into a frenzy with them & snatched a picture from the wall to dash on the ground. Then I glanced at it, & suddenly shoved it back on the wall, with a huge sense of escape, & woke up terrified.

  It might be thought from this that Greene’s arguments in favour of atheism were simply those of a young man pleased to play so effectively the devil’s advocate, yet standing behind his powers of ratiocination were emotional fears which must have made him suitable material for conversion.

  Also there has survived a short, humorous, undated manuscript poem by Greene written surely at the time he was contemplating entering the Catholic Church:

  Put out your right foot:

  Pray the shoe’s tight:

  The C. of E.’s crumbling –

  Rome may be right.

  We know from his numerous letters to Vivien that there was little he would not do to win her heart and clearly his decision to become a Catholic made an enormous impression on her:

  Oh

  G

  R

  A

  H

  A

  M!!!

  How perfectly marvellous … Madly excited,

  was her response. But how did he come to his decision?

  On his second day in Nottingham he wrote to Vivien: ‘Will you tell me what my moves should be in trying to become a Catholic? Do I just call at a priest’s house & say “I want to be a Catholic”?’6 But he realised he would have to take the first step himself. And his next letter shows that not only killing time, or being dutiful to Vivien, was the spur for his conversion: ‘I admit the idea came to me, because of you. I do all the same feel I want to be a Catholic now, even a little apart from you. One does want fearfully hard, something fine & hard & certain, however uncomfortable, to catch hold of in the general flux.’7

  ‘One day,’ he recalls, ‘I took Paddy for a walk to the sooty neo-Gothic Cathedral – it possessed for me a certain gloomy power because it represented the inconceivable and the incredible. There was a wooden box for inquiries and I dropped into it a note asking for instruction.’8 In a letter to Vivien he speaks of having ‘written at random to the Bishop’s Guild here.’

  Soon a Father Trollope responded but before meeting him Greene went to a Roman Catholic service and was deeply disappointed. He felt he could have no reverence for the pale young priest in the pulpit: ‘He spoke & looked as though he had a very limited intellect … Oh dear, I’m afraid this is a very bad beginning for someone who wants to be a Catholic.’9 Even when he met Father Trollope he had the harsh reservations of a critical young man whose sense of cultural superiority, in visiting inferior people in inferior provinces, was still strong: ‘I was not struck by him. He was a little gross in appearance, & there was also a most trashy novel from Boots library, lying in his room.’10

  Though he was sure he would not allow Father Trollope to shrug him off (‘The priest will find it fearfully hard to snub me, darling. My answer to “Why do you want to be a Catholic?” is … “I can’t tell whether I do want to be, until I’ve been instructed.” He won’t find any sentimental emotionalism to snub in me’),11 he feared that the wrong person instructing him might prevent his becoming a Catholic:

  I went to Mass this morning & came in for the Bishop’s Visitation. You know, Personality seems to me to count an awful lot in belief. If the person, who upholds the doctrine, seems much too small for them, one doubts the doctrine. It’s illogical of course. So Father Trollope makes me feel entirely un-Catholic. I felt an innate respect for the bishop this morning, & therefore for his faith. He’d got one of the most charming old faces I’ve seen, & at the same time a shrewd & intelligent one.

  The bishop did not give a sermon but explained his own responsibilities, and gave lists of statistics about conversion, and mixed marriages, and duties. Greene, who has always been fascinated by statistics, found the speaker and the details impressive: ‘it did show how extraordinarily thorough & businesslike the Church rules are. And that’s a thing I had not realised before.’12

  Suddenly, two days later, when he again turned up for instruction, his attitude towards Trollope changed, chiefly, one suspects, because he discovered Trollope’s father knew a distant, though to him distasteful, member of the Greene family: ‘I have quite changed my mind about Father Trollope. I like him very much. I like his careful avoidance of the slightest emotion or sentiment in his instruction.’ The strange coincidence was that Dr Fry had been Trollope’s father’s greatest friend.13 Trollope himself, originally a Protestant, made his conversion in spite of strong family opposition: ‘Dr Fry, that former ogre of Berkhamsted, had persuaded his family, who lived in Lincoln under the shadow of the deanery, to oppose his conversion, and then he was driven further by some inner compulsion to the priesthood.’14

  Gradually, Greene learned more about Trollope’s background and his secret passion (which Greene shared) for acting. To Vivien he wrote, ‘Father Trollope was on the London stage for ten years, before he became a Catholic.’ In A Sort of Life he returned to his memory of the man:

  at the first sight he was all I detested most in my private image of the Church. A very tall and very fat man with big smooth jowls which looked as though they had never needed a razor, he resembled closely a character in one of those nineteenth-century paintings to be seen in art shops on the wrong side of Piccadilly – monks and cardinals enjoying their Friday abstinence by dismembering enormous lobsters and pouring great goblets of wine.15

  In 1979, when Greene was shown a photograph of Father Trollope he was truly delighted that his descriptions tallied. There was in Greene’s pale but mellowed blue eyes the gentleness of nostalgia for those Nottingham days and a love for Trollope himself.

  In Journey Without Maps, Greene humorously records some of the strange places in which he received instruction:

  I was instructed in Catholicism, travelling here and there by tram into new country with the fat priest who had once been an actor. (It was one of his greatest sacrifices to be unable to see a play.) The tram clattered by the Post Office: ‘Now we come to the Immaculate Conception’; past the cinema: ‘Our Lady’; the theatre: a sad slanting look towards The Private Secretary (it was Christmas time).16

  While he and Trollope may well have travelled by tram, and Trollope may have directed a ‘sad slanting look’ towards the theatre, it could not have been towards a poster advertising The Private Secretary for it was not playing in Nottingham during Christmas 1925.

  Trollope was administrator of the Cathedral but was deeply dissatisfied with the thought of any future which could be represented as a success. He had not sacrificed enough and a few years after Greene left Nottingham he entered the Redemptionist Order: ‘What had these monks, with an obligation to dwell in all their sermons and retreats on the reality of hell, in common with this stout cheerful man who loved the smell of greasepaint and the applause at a curtain-fall? Perhaps nothing except the desire to drown. A few years later he was dead of cancer.’17 According to his obituary Trollope died when fifty-three, not of cancer, but of pneumonia while on a visit to London.fn1 Greene was to say much later that Trollope’s story carried a warning: ‘See the danger of going too far … Be very careful. Keep well within your depth. There are dangerous currents out at sea which could sweep you anywhere …’18

  The challenge of
Trollope was ‘the challenge of an inexplicable goodness’. But the struggle for Graham Greene’s soul was long:

  My primary difficulty was to believe in a God at all. The date of the Gospels, the historical evidence for the existence of the man Jesus Christ: these were interesting subjects which came nowhere near the core of my disbelief. I didn’t disbelieve in Christ – I disbelieved in God. If I were ever to be convinced in even the remote possibility of a supreme, omnipotent and omniscient power I realized that nothing afterwards could seem impossible.19

  Greene fought Trollope’s religious arguments with a dogmatic atheism – ‘I fought and fought hard’ – and he felt it a fight for personal survival. Greene’s letters with their simultaneous assertions of belief and disbelief help to reveal his complex, ambiguous nature. Sometimes he simply hopes that he has found belief: ‘I’ve suddenly realised that I do believe the Catholic faith. Rationally I’ve believed for some time, but only this evening imaginatively. I think the belief will stay. It’s quite possible after all to believe it at this early stage, because the acceptance and belief in the Church as a guide includes faith in everything I’ve still got to be taught. I suddenly realised I believe at tea today … It’s snowing again.’20

  This was followed a few days later by a black mood when he hated life and God Himself:

  The only two methods I’ve had to fight emptiness I can’t use, since I’ve loved you. I suppose in time I shall discover a new and proper way of doing it. Don’t you ever wonder, in moods, now and again what the use of going on is? Religion doesn’t answer it. One can believe in every point of the Catholic faith, and yet at times like this hate the initiator of it all, of life I mean. Justice can be just as hateful as injustice, more so often enough, because injustice puts us on a level with the wielder of it, whilst justice is more hateful because it emphasises our own inferiority.21

  Six days later he had another go at the Almighty: