The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  He was then (and still is) squeamish about too much intimacy with others. What Greene objected to in the lodger at Hamilton Road was understandably his obvious sexual vulgarity but he also disliked the man’s ‘most unpleasant craving for company’.1 It was this aspect of character which Greene stressed when judging Vivien’s father: ‘Fearfully over-affectionate … Apparently when he returned from work he expected the whole family to rush out on to the stoep & embrace him, as though he’d been gone a year.’2

  An example of his lack of sympathy is shown in the following:

  I shall hear to-morrow whether my uncle’s pulled through. Wednesday & Thursday were to be the days of fight. The doctors have been very non-committal on his chances. What annoys me most is that it should have come & spoilt my mother’s holiday. It’s the only one she gets away from the family … This sounds fearfully cold-blooded, but one can’t feel very much for the person who’s dying … except in the pain of the method chosen.3

  His uncle did die: ‘It’s been so fearfully sudden. Alive & kicking last Saturday. He was rather brilliant & I think my favourite uncle [it was his Uncle Frank who made him, when a child, paper Chinese junks to sail in his bath], yet I don’t feel much cut up. It must be pretty beastly for my mother, as he was her only brother, her other one died at about 20.’4 But he showed enough religious concern to comment on how his uncle might be buried: ‘I see from The Times that my uncle’s funeral is at 11. tomorrow at Golders Green Crematorium. I wondered whether he’d be cremated. I can’t think either he or my aunt had anything in the way of a religious belief.’5

  One might suspect that a lack of a sympathetic identification with the plight of someone in his own family – a favourite uncle, too – facing death, would not augur well for Greene’s future as a novelist.

  Greene has, however, shown a continuing desire to go beyond the limited experiences of his class. He has gravitated towards the seedy, towards deeply-divided creatures and self-destructive heroes, towards middle class persons who have fallen from grace and live outside the bounds of family and society on the verge of despair. In this respect, we should not ignore his own sense of having fallen from grace. He observes the world seemingly without emotion, clinically in fact, and sometimes contemptuously, though as he registers his repugnance of what he sees, he often feels a guilt for his own irascible feelings. Given one’s sense that he has little love for his fellow men in general (which does not exclude his strong sympathy for individuals) his novels sometimes seem a penance for this lack. His passionate inquisitiveness is undimmed even in old age. In an early unpublished play, ‘A House of Reputation’, the madam of a brothel asks his character why he visits it since he has a pretty wife; he answers, ‘It’s only this terrible curiosity.’

  *

  Greene also has a strong sense of the passage of time and we can see an example of this when he considers – his tone is not without a strain of bitterness – his first year with Vivien:

  With me that’s a lot: Babbling April, and meeting you and falling in love and being turned down, and Finals and the B.A.T. and the Capitol and your getting a bit fond of me, and tutoring, and the Golden Cross and getting the reviewing jobs and sub-editing at Nottingham and becoming a Catholic and wouldn’t it be theatrically effective for Fate, keeping to the Aristotle unities, to end with a breaking off, and perhaps run off to China as before. And by March 17 [when it would be exactly a year since they met] perhaps you’d be able to see it as a pleasant sentimental memory … If I was Fate I simply couldn’t resist such an opportunity! and … they say that God is the great dramatist.6

  Another aspect of Greene’s character is his intense nervousness in face of lies, even when these are justified. We cannot understand Greene unless we accept this.

  There is an occasion when a single lie caused him deep remorse. At the time he was writing his second novel, ‘The Episode’, and he sent Vivien a chapter which dealt with a character asking for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage, only to be rejected. When Vivien read it, she was amazed to find fiction fact, discovering that what she was reading was an actual account of her own rejection of Greene on the canal at Wolvercote. When she objected, Greene denied he had used personal experience. He argued that he had made an outline of the scene before the Wolvercote rejection and therefore could not have had it in mind in any real sense. He had used the canal and the waves in the story, but he declared it was in every other respect totally different. And he went on to argue: ‘Since the beginning of the world, people have said they will never marry and the way in which the girl in The Episode says it, is as different from the way in which you did, as my own feelings from those of the male in the story.’

  He then went on to contrast Vivien’s obvious sincerity in refusing him, with his character’s mechanical utterances – ‘Darling, I explain & explain & explain.’7 But he was guilty, and later that day he felt he must write to Vivien once more to expunge his lie:

  It’s no use. I wrote you a letter this morning explaining & explaining; & I went to a Cinema to try & forget all about it. But I can’t. So I’ll tell you the truth. Every word of that scene, the idea of it also, came after I said Goodbye in June. In January only the first page of the novel was written, & its planned continuation was entirely different. All the explanations I’ve made were lies.

  His reason for lying was excuse enough – he was simply too afraid he would lose Vivien – but he had to tell her: ‘I was feeling so miserable at going on trying to deceive you about that beastly scene.’ And Greene was justified in his fear for there was competition for Vivien’s hand, as we can tell from scattered comments throughout his letters to her.

  On the occasion when Vivien received from Graham masses of flowers (see Chapter 13), she was disappointed because they were not from Mr ‘X’. Who, we must ask, was Mr ‘X’? During a later interview she said in passing that Mr ‘X’ was a certain Hugh. More was not forthcoming. My belief is that Mr ‘X’ was Hugh Chesterman, a children’s novelist long since dead.

  My own suspicions were first aroused by a note of unexplained acerbity in one of Greene’s letters written from Ambervale in which he referred to his young pupil’s grandfather. When I quoted the passage in Chapter 15, I deliberately left out a bracketed aside. Without the deletion it read: ‘He manufactures all England’s tape measures & his name (he would have that nasty name) is Chesterman’ [my italics].

  According to Sir Basil Blackwell, Vivien came to his firm ‘in about 1920 and, in time, became assistant to Hugh Chesterman, then editing the Merry-Go-Round [a children’s magazine].’ Chesterman, though much older than Greene, published his first children’s novel in 1926 (a year after Greene’s first book of verse) and his last in 1946.

  The importance of Chesterman’s presence is that it allows us to compare Greene’s experience of two loves which occurred within months of each other – those of Gwen Howell and Vivien. The nature of both experiences suggests an interesting psychological pattern, namely that, given certain circumstances – the sense of strong competition and the belief that there exists only a modicum of hope – Greene can be moved to an extraordinary determination to win.

  In the case of Gwen Howell, two men were interested in her – her fiancé who was out of the country, and young Graham Greene – an uneven struggle. Yet there was hope for Greene. Gwen was having serious doubts about her returning fiancé (who ‘had become like a stranger to her … once when she talked to me of her [future] marriage, she wept a little’)8 and any hope was a stimulus for Greene. But this situation took him to the dangerous edge (as his experiments with Russian roulette testify) as he struggled for Gwen’s love. Could it be that Greene can only overcome shyness when the odds seem overwhelming and fight only when the situation seems an almost impossible one? And finally, was Vivien aware of the advantage of having another man in the wings? Did she know that it was especially when there was another competitor that Greene would be truly stirred? Probably it was simply that her love for Graham was unce
rtain.

  As in the case of Gwen Howell, Greene was up against an older man, but now the situation was reversed, for it was Greene’s turn to be unable to see his girlfriend daily; he was in Ashover, or Nottingham, or London, and Chesterman and Vivien worked together in Oxford. This must have heightened his imaginings of the possibilities and created a deep anxiety. Yet the terms he uses, at twenty-one (‘cad’, ‘bounder’), to express his fears are the limiting terms of a schoolboy and, while later he excised them from his vocabulary, they indicate the standards of behaviour which he subscribed to at this time. ‘Darling, I hate being all this way away, when that cad hurts you, if it is only for a little. It’s not letters he wants. He wants to be physically and not metaphorically kicked. He’d be just the kind of bounder, who wouldn’t in the least know what to do if someone hit him hard. He’d go off and complain to B[asil] B[lackwell]. What ought to be done to him on his wedding day is too “Rabelaisian” to write.’

  It seems almost impossible to believe that the writer of this letter would one day become one of the finest novelists of his generation. What stands behind such language is popular late Victorian and Edwardian fiction; in such fictions the Englishman wins through because he is not a cad or a bounder. In another letter Greene calls Chesterman a ‘damned swine’ and in yet another he thinks, ‘Hugh ought to be horsewhipped.’9

  In his battle to win Vivien, Greene makes great play with Chesterman’s age: ‘Darling, don’t go off suddenly & marry some dotard of over thirty. All the modern psychologists demand an equality of age in marriage!!’10

  A month later he is still driving the point home: ‘went to a most dramatic film called Smouldering Fires … Excellent moral … Marry someone of your own age.’ And his fear is real: ‘O my dear, don’t let Hugh carry you off from me.’11

  And Greene recalled seeing Little Nellie Kelly with Vivien: ‘I loved that. Walking up the Woodstock Road, for the first time, I learned, what I suspected, that Hugh wanted to marry you. That made me feel desperate … I had begun to love you an awful lot that night.’12 Vivien would need no further proof of the link between love and Greene’s competitive nature. Little Nellie Kelly was a play to raise the spectre of an older and more successful man competing for Vivien since George M. Cohan’s story deals with a wealthy man throwing a party and showing a strong interest in the young heroine. Finally, Nellie decides she prefers the poor suitor, proving that love outweighs riches.

  So the pattern of conflict, of being a competitor for love, is very much one aspect of Graham Greene’s psychology of loving, and in such situations he becomes a powerful combative force. Joyfully he writes, ‘I have dispatched my ultimatum to the world, & I won’t have any interference by the League of Nations.’

  I will not let thee go.

  I hold thee by too many bands.

  Thou sayest ‘Farewell,’ & lo!

  I have thee by the hands

  And will not let thee go.13

  Once he had met her and fallen in love, Greene put much of his energy into winning Vivien: ‘My arms are round you, and how can I let go, even if all the clocks in the world start striking together.’14

  He had his misgivings about doing this (‘it’s all wrong for love to be a monomania as it’s been with me’)15 but couldn’t help himself. Greene did not know how to handle Vivien, while she unwittingly played cat and mouse with him, which kept him at boiling point: ‘It hurts a good deal when in one letter you seem to consider [marriage] as a possibility & then next day I’m almost certain to have a letter, which practically says “Never, never, never.’”16

  Moreover, another prospective candidate for love suddenly appeared – Harman Grisewood:

  My dear Vivienne … I know nothing of what hours in the day claim your attention, so may I take the liberty (& the risk) of asking you to fix a time & date … Morning – Luncheon – afternoon tea, dinner theatre – any of these but soon & for as long as you can. I’ve got lots to talk to you about & this Fate that rearranges all our meetings must be overthrown. Harman.17

  Vivien must have told Greene about Harman Grisewood, for fancifully he wrote: ‘One day possibly centuries ahead, I shall see you again. Will you be white haired and stout, or boring and emaciated, or married to Grisewood?’18 No doubt Vivien was taking note of her mother’s advice, ‘enjoy yourself and flirt hard’.19

  A month after their semi-secret engagement, Vivien dropped a bombshell by suggesting they would be happiest as brother and sister. He answered soberly enough: ‘I’m afraid it is not practicable. There is the material fact that Somerset House cannot make relations of non-relations.’ Even Greene could not accept this suggestion: ‘there is also … a limit of human endurance. And to be frank, apart altogether from practical obstacles, I shouldn’t dare accept life on those conditions. A brother & sister don’t have any privacy, or only scant crumbs of it, & my love for you, granted almost continual sight, & yet almost always other people between us … I would simply go mad …’ Her letter, as he said, knocked him to the ropes, even though he was still trying to last out the round.20

  *

  Greene’s time in Nottingham was coming to an end; he was receiving instruction to enter the Catholic Church but Vivien seems to have questioned the seriousness of his agreement to enter into a monastic marriage. One gathers that Vivien had talked over his promise of love without sex with her ‘gaffer’, Basil Blackwell. Greene tried to quiet Vivien’s fears, first by admitting that anyone who did not know him might tell Vivien that he was a knave tricking her. Others who did know him might tell them that he was an infatuated fool and that he would repent his promise of such a marriage afterwards. Greene’s answer to this argument was: ‘I shall know they are wrong.’ Denying he was an infatuated fool, he told Vivien that he had lived with the idea for five months and his mind had not wavered. He was categorical: ‘I love you. I want your companionship. I want you to look after. I know that happiness is with you, and I am perfectly prepared to sacrifice one bit of one part of my love. I don’t for one moment pretend that celibacy is a natural ideal for me, as it is for you. I’m not different from other men, but … who wouldn’t pay a farthing to gain a pound?’

  He dealt cleverly with Blackwell’s assertions that such a marriage would be blasphemy, that physical consummation is a necessity; and that not more than one in a hundred could live without it:

  Everyone knows that our scheme has been done by Catholics in the old days. The Virgin Mary was of course an exceptional case, but Joseph no one teaches was anything but an ordinary man, with the ordinary man’s desires – in fact, there is the theory, which is not denied, that he had children by his first wife. And in the past this example was copied. If B.B. talks about 99/100 men, I should have to say that I was the 1/100, which would be ridiculous conceit. But I am not so cynical. I should say that wherever you find a man who loves his wife, until he dies in old age (and I believe that there are quite a number!) you’ve got someone who, if it had been asked of him, could have done what I’m willing to do. If B.B. makes physical consummation an absolute necessity to a man, he’s going also to admit (which he’d be unwilling to do) that in a comparatively few years he’ll no longer love Mrs B.B. because the physical side would not take long to satisfy, and if that is necessary to a man what’s left when it’s gone, but to run away with another woman? And yet people don’t, and not all through cowardice or morality – but many because they still love their wife. Which means that it was not a necessity in the first place.21

  Greene was in deadly earnest but as a practical ploy it could not be bettered. Chesterman would never have made a comparable offer.

  *

  Greene was undergoing great emotional stress, converting to Catholicism in part because he wanted Vivien. But also part of the attraction of his love letters is his use of hyperbole. He saw her as having miraculous qualities: ‘My miracle worker … you’ve given trees shade, and the flowers scent, and the sun a gold it never had before.’ He felt intensely his personal unwor
thiness – ‘You are so wonderful, & I’m so paltry’, ‘Darling, I could worship with you, if you had your arms round me … when I see that Catholicism can produce something so fine all through.’

  We have seen (Chapter 15) something of Greene’s sense of personal unworthiness, and also (Chapter 17) when he was at a low ebb, his sense of being walled in or buried, even of being destroyed by walls falling in on him. Catholicism and Vivien provided a way of escaping from his personality problems. Thus Greene came to Catholicism because of his admiration of Vivien. Admiration is, however, too mild a word, for we have seen how his mind conjured up the idea of suicide by drowning at the moment when he felt he’d reached the summit of love: ‘& death comes and leaves eternally pictures on the mind … frozen in death, your head & eye & hair … and the mind dwells on these eternally, knowing there is to be no awaking.’ In becoming a convert Greene was simply following where Vivien led. His inner tension and strain alone would not have led him to conversion. It was to Vivien (and only to a lesser extent the Church) that he felt true loyalty.22 He did not begin to think deeply about the Church, or feel the pull of its allegiance, until his visit to Mexico in 1937 to write about the Mexican government’s persecution of priests and the Church.

  *

  There is a deep Celtic-like morbidity in Greene, and an unpublished poem written at this time has the quality of Hardy’s graveyard verse:

  When this bright day

  shall end with night,

  and love and even you

  are fallen from sight;

  When, bone to bone in grappling earth,

  we lie

  our love beauty and our thoughts

  awry;

  shall this bone say to that bone,

  ‘Who are you?’

  That bone answer this bone – ‘At last

  I am you.’?

  The English aspect might be said to lie in his interest in statistics: