The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

I’d start working again on that – Episode, but I’ve lost interest in it. I want to write a novel called ‘The Gaudy Ship’. Do you know the Yeats poem called, I think, The [sic] Dream. A man dreams he’s steering a boat along the edge of the sea with a dead man in it, & a crowd are running along the shore shouting & singing.

  Though I’d my finger on my lip,

  What could I but take up the song,

  And running crowd & gaudy ship

  Cried out the whole night long.

  I made a list about a month ago of plots for short stories, with their rough lengths, including one or two short sketches I’d got already done & it was enough for 30,000 words. Half a book.26

  At the same time, fearing he was not a writer by nature, he took to comparing himself with two of his contemporaries: ‘I met Christopher Isherwood [Greene’s cousin] in the Strand yesterday evening. He went down from Cambridge at the end of his second year, simply because he couldn’t stand the place, & is now private secretary to some musician or other. He’s one of those, whom I secretly envy, like Macleod, who have a fearfully strong urge to write.’27

  Three weeks later he returned to the subject: ‘I wish I was one of these people like Macleod & Isherwood who simply had to write. I’ve got the itch, but I practically never have the urge. With me it’s a sort of echoed itch from adolescence, when everyone writes, & the echo will I hope die away completely in a year or two.’28

  Sending Vivien a snippet from The Times, which he felt would have made a marvellous story if it hadn’t happened in reality, he turns to his admired Conrad:

  Conrad would have made a marvellous thing of it. There’s one mad religious-mania woman in The Golden Arrow [sic] – the best character in the book. Conrad simply makes me wriggle up in my chair with envy. The Blasted Pole! Think of a foreign sailor, who writes casually in a pot boiling essay, like this. He’s talking of the work of sailors – ‘And all that for no perceptible reward in the praise of man & the favour of gods – I mean the sea gods, an indigent, pitiless lot, who had nothing to offer to servants at their shrine but a ward in some hospital on shore or a sudden wedding with death in a great uproar, but with no gilding of fine words about it.’ It’s unfair that the man should write literature, when he’s attempting journalism, when with most people it’s a case of writing journalism when they are attempting literature.fn2, 29

  As always, he somehow found time to read widely, as his monthly lists of his day-to-day reading show. He read the latest collection of Thomas Hardy’s verse (Hardy still had two more years to live), Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs & Trifles: ‘It’s grown on me fearfully, that book. But he does write journalese, & I don’t see why people should pretend that it’s successful with him!’

  Returning from a visit to Vivien in March 1926, he boarded a train and found himself in the same carriage as John Masefield and his family:

  In the carriage with me are Mr & Mrs Masefield & Judith Masefield! Judith Masefield’s extraordinarily plain close to! Mrs is looking vivacious. John is snoozing with folded hands. If I’d just sold the film rights of Sard Harker for £10,000 I’d go first class!! He looks utterly miserable & bullied, poor little man. Judith’s studying typewritten scrolls, which look like lectures!

  Mrs M. looks terribly ruthless, with very prominent chin, & a smile of satisfaction, as much as to say ‘I’ve pushed little Johnnie into fame even though he didn’t want it, & now I’m the wife of a famous man.’!…

  I think Judith must be going to lecture on John’s works. She glares at her papers, then looks up & stares through me & mumbles under her breath …

  John is looking too intensely sad. He looks like an illustration for his own line that comes in Dauber [a poem], ‘the long despair of doing nothing well.’30

  A month later he was reading Odtaa, the latest Masefield: ‘I’ve got Odtaa … not so good as Sard Harker. Sard Harker would have been the greatest adventure story in the language if it hadn’t got the absurd ending.’31

  It is obvious that at this time, not having yet found his own ‘voice’, he was reading other writers in order to find his way: ‘If you want to read a Huxley, I’ve got a copy of Mortal Coils,’ he wrote to Vivien, ‘which has in it the best short story he’s written, “The Tillotson Banquet.” It’s awfully fine, & shows a sort of sensitiveness & sympathy, which he very seldom has. And there’s also quite a good one, about a man who’s hanged for poisoning his wife, though he never did it at all. Rather terrifying – the awful piled up evidence, which did him in!’32 Under Huxley’s influence, he planned several short stories, assessing in advance their possible readership and even the number of words: ‘I got my plot for “Figs in Lisbon” yesterday. It’s fearfully Huxleian & unpleasant – “disagreeable” as my mother would say – but it’s so subtly done that most people of the older generation won’t see it, & simply be puzzled by the absence of point. That brings my short stories up to 35,000.’33 But he adds, ‘They’ll never be written though.’

  A pointer to the fact that he would find his own way lies in his intellectual assessment of other writers. He compares, for example, the incompatibles, Huxley and Rupert Brooke, and, by implication, draws out the common factor which was to influence him:

  I’ve … been reading Huxley poems … It seems queer that he of all people in the world, should show so much the influence of Rupert Brooke. One would have thought that mentally they were miles apart. And yet I don’t know. They both had the same joy in mixing up the beautiful and the disgusting on the same page.34

  As always, there is Greene’s determination, his unceasing activity, even though he is often unhopeful as to the outcome: ‘I was sending out vain Mss all this morning, which will return later like pigeons to roost.’ One was rejected by Sir John Squire, editor of the London Mercury: ‘I got another polite personal note from the Squire yesterday. I suppose it’s an advance on the printed rejections, but I’m getting tired of the elderly litterateur’s encouragement of young promise!’ ‘I wish’, he wrote, ‘I could think of some other way of making money other than writing. I’m tired of trying that, & feeling lucky to get two quid a month!’35

  Yet he was reviewing regularly for the Glasgow Herald: ‘I’m being snowed under with books from the G.H. now. The spring season’s beginning.’ The Herald was delighted with his reviews – ‘you are doing much to lighten the serious gloom of the literary page,’ the editor wrote.36 Greene was pleased, but sorry his reviews remained unsigned. Seeking a way out of his trap he decided to try journalism and mood pieces:

  I made another good resolution this week, to do at least one journalese article a week. I’ve already done this week’s & sent it to the Daily News, silly & facetious, called Re-Visiting Oxford, next week’s will be sort of social chit-chat about poor Edith S. I don’t mind trying to capitalise her! Even if I only get one in twenty accepted, it will be practice in journalism. After all one ought to be able to earn 2 pounds 2 shillings a week like that.37

  To his mother he wrote: ‘Did you see my chit-chat paragraphs on the Sitwells in the Woman’s World of Tuesday’s Evening Standard? My embarkation on yellow journalism.’38

  ‘Poor Edith S’ had made something of a stir and a spectacle of herself as a result of her concerts at the Chenil Galleries, when she read her poems into a loudspeaker called a Sengerphone to the music of William Walton. There seemed little relationship between poet and composer, and when the same concert was given at the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street the audience jeered and Noël Coward ostentatiously left. Later Coward impersonated Edith and her brothers as Hernia, Bog, and Sage Whittlebot.

  It was not all work, though Greene was sometimes unhappy about wasting time:

  A terrible thing happened this morning, darling. I was clearing off my Episode before writing to you (doing it first, because I know I should get too reckless & discontented to do it afterwards) when Macleod unexpectedly turned up. And we talked & then we went out to lunch & then we went to see the modern French paintings at the Tate, & then we
drove through the Green Park & then round & round the statuary in front of Buckingham Palace, until we were both giddy & nearly collided with a lamp post & then I said firmly, ‘Drive me to the Embankment near Blackfriars & put me down. I have a letter which I must write’ … So now at last I can talk to you.39

  In May 1926, he turned again to his rejected first novel ‘Anthony Sant’: ‘Darling, I shall go out & post this & go for a bit of a walk & type out a Mss & then on with the Episode & try to do double quantity, as I did yesterday. I sent off the rehashed Anthony Sant to Heinemann a week ago in a vain hope. I think for one thing it’s much too short. But they were the publishers that came nearest to taking the original version – it got as far as being read by Evans, the [managing] director.’40 By the end of May, he seemed at last to be in control of his wayward second novel – ‘double quantity of Episode this morning. A nice melodramatic incident, the last four or five pages on the dark staircase’41 and two days later he was able to announce: ‘She’s on the straight … & ought to reach home by the end of next month. In the exhilaration of cleared ditches though she’s getting too melodramatic.’42 He was elated but yet at times faint of heart: ‘If it’s not taken I shall never have the energy to do another. I have a most certain feeling that like all the things I do it will fall between two stools, being neither bad enough nor good enough to publish.’43

  By 28 July, Greene had finished ‘The Episode’, was ready to have it typed, and was keen to leave for a short break in Cornwall in order to begin some fresh short stories. He had had his first novel ‘Anthony Sant’ typed by Hunts, the Oxford typing agency, but when he finished his second novel he found a typist at The Times willing to type it in her spare time: ‘I’m getting her to do a couple of copies of the Episode at about half the amount I’d have to pay Hunts.’ His financial difficulties are revealed in a letter to his mother: ‘Thanks most awfully for the offer of the raincoat, but I’d much rather buy it with the War Bond. You’ve bought me quite enough clothes lately. The greater part of The Times bonus had to go on typewriting – trying to write novels is an expensive gamble.’44 To pay for the typing he borrowed £5 from his mother but insisted that it was a loan to be paid back at a rate of 10s. a week, and he insisted on this partly because of his fears that the book would be rejected: ‘I feel it [will be] such a waste on your part, if I can’t, as is only too likely, get the book taken.’

  Forty-five years later, in A Sort of Life, recalling those early days, he hoped he repaid the loan: ‘They were five wasted pounds, and I can only hope I paid her back.’fn3, 45 Even though he had doubts about his novel being taken, he set about in typical fashion to give it a shove in the right direction. He was friendly with a City man who knew Geoffrey Faber, the publisher, and he had already decided on the publishers he would send the book to: ‘I shall have an unassisted shot at Heinemann first; then Allen & Unwin, where Anthony Bertram, a friend of my brother, whom I met once, is principal reader, & lastly Faber. And God defend the right.’46 But alas, God did not.

  The reason why Greene had an unassisted shot at Heinemann was that, by this time, his literary agent, A. D. Peters, who had been enthusiastic about ‘Anthony Sant’, had rejected ‘The Episode’. A passage in the typescript of A Sort of Life, not included in the published version, refers to this: ‘A. D. Peters had learnt wisdom from his long and unsuccessful efforts to place my first novel and he returned this to me almost too promptly for politeness, writing that he saw no chance of finding it a publisher.’47 But a letter to Vivien shows that Peters did not return Greene’s manuscript too promptly (not in fact until 29 September), though it was returned: ‘by a later post a returned Episode from Peters as he didn’t think it publishable (which means, as he took a good deal of trouble over Anthony Sant that I’m becoming less publishable as I go on).’

  The novel had unfortunate sources. One was Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling – ‘the only one of that great Scottish bore I have ever enjoyed’ – which provided the setting for the novel. He was also influenced by Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold. Themes of revolution and a Spanish background attracted him (as a schoolboy he had envied the fate of Wilfred Ewart, accidentally shot during the Pancho Villa rising in Mexico: ‘it seemed a glamorous end in a glamorous country’). But the main weaknesses of the novel were the love affair derived not from life but from Conrad’s Doña Rita (‘that unbearable woman’ as he was to describe her) and also the fact that, as a result of studying Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, he was paying too much attention to unity and point of view – ‘I don’t think [the hero] ever went nearer to Spain than Leicester Square … I called the novel rather drably The Episode, and that was all it proved to be.’48

  After an initial acknowledgment of the receipt of the novel, the publishers mislaid the manuscript: ‘It seemed’, he wrote, ‘as irrevocably lost as though I had dropped it into the coal-fire.’49

  While he awaited a decision he went into ‘a biographing mood’ again, asking Vivien whether anyone had done a satisfactory life – a ‘lay’ life – of the Jesuit poet Southwell, who was executed in Elizabeth’s reign. This biography was never written but he did not forget Southwell. Forty years later when he was honoured by the University of Hamburg and awarded the Shakespeare Prize, he censured Shakespeare and spoke up for Southwell. He argued that Shakespeare was the poet of the Establishment: he could speak of England as ‘this little world, this blessed spot, this earth, this realm, this England’, two years after his fellow poet, Southwell, had died on the scaffold. Greene commented, ‘if only Shakespeare had shared Southwell’s disloyalty we could have loved him better as a man.’

  Still anxious to take to anything that would help him as a novelist he asked Vivien if she could write shorthand: ‘I’ve always wanted to know it badly, so as to take down people’s conversations in trains, but I’ve never been able to contemplate the fearful task of learning it!’

  Six months went by, the new year came and further months followed before Greene plucked up courage to write to Heinemann. He told his mother, ‘they’ve mislaid the wretched thing.’ After eight months of waiting Charles Evans, head of the firm, wrote that he had two reports on the novel and had then intended to read it himself, ‘but in the rush of work the intention got overlaid.’50

  The bulky package came back quickly after that. At first, Greene was not too down-hearted. He felt that since the head of the firm had written to him it was an indication of how close the novel had come to being accepted, though a more likely explanation was that Evans felt the need to pacify an author whose manuscript had been mislaid. In any case, Greene decided that he would write one more novel and that, ‘if the third book proved as unsuccessful as the others, [he] would abandon this ambition for ever.’51

  Seeking excitement and probably also copy, he wrote to Vivien on 29 September 1926: ‘Oh I have one thing to look forward to. A solicitor friend is letting me serve a writ on Monday. It’s to a Co-respondent, a sailor, in a disreputable part of Shoreditch. A short while ago he cut the respondent’s throat, & as the respondent’s husband has to accompany me for purposes of identification, the chances I think are for excitement.’52

  But it is doubtful whether he was able to keep that appointment, for fate took a hand in his life.

  fn1 Greene wrote to me on 20 January 1983: ‘I feel guilty at continuing to be active. I have just come back from Panama, Nicaragua and Cuba … How are you going to keep up?’

  fn2 Greene is quoting from the article ‘Legends’ which was left unfinished at Conrad’s death. It appears in Last Essays.

  fn3 He did. Three years later when his first published novel became a hit: ‘Here is my debt to you. It was terribly useful. If I hadn’t sent the previous Mss [‘The Episode’] to Heinemann this one [The Man Within] wouldn’t have had such a good show.’ (Letter of 12 June 1929.)

  23

  In Hospital and Suspected Epilepsy

  ‘an Egyptian mummy … swathed in … bandages’

  – GRAHAM GREEN
E

  DURING SEPTEMBER 1926 Greene had suffered recurrent stomach pains, and, probably on 30 September, he consulted a doctor who proved to be ‘a dangerous man’. Greene described the event in A Sort of Life:

  I had picked him at random as I wandered down a Battersea street troubled by a sharper stab of pain than usual. His brass plate caught my eye on a house not far from the railway viaduct. Smoke coated his panes, an aspidistra drooped on his window-sill, starved of tea-leaves, and his door vibrated gently as the trains emerged from Clapham Junction. The doctor opened the door himself, a young Hindu, and showed me into a dingy consulting room where he must have been waiting with eastern patience for the sick to seek him out.

  The Hindu doctor judged his pulse (how do you judge a pulse without taking it?), took his temperature, prodded where the pain lay and gave him a bottle of already prepared medicine, charging six shillings for the consultation and the bottle.1 ‘… the Hindu doctor’, Greene wrote, ‘stayed in my mind – a symbol of the shabby, the inefficient and possibly the illegal, and he left his trace, with another doctor, on some pages of A Gun for Sale’.2 Greene turned his Hindu into a Jew equally shifty and living clearly on the borders of the criminal world, specialising, the passage suggests, in backstreet abortions. We see Dr Yogel washing his hands in a fixed basin behind a yellow desk and swivel chair, the poverty of his practice suggested by the furnitureless room (apart from a kitchen chair, cabinet and long couch); macabre indeed is the scene where Yogel sweats, though it is bitterly cold, his hand, holding a surgical knife, shaking as he prepares to operate on Raven’s harelip. The light is bad but the Doctor replies, ‘I’m used to it … I’ve a good eye.’3

  Greene’s first reaction was to write to his mother, playing down his illness as ‘a slight attack of appendicitis … the doctor didn’t want to advise an operation as it’s quite slight’, for he was well aware of the distress his mother had suffered earlier that year when her brother Frank had died of peritonitis. However, he also phoned his brother Raymond, then a houseman at Westminster Hospital who, as he told his mother, ‘arranged a free examination tomorrow [1 October] with the Westminster surgeon & will see about getting me a bed in the public ward, probably next week … I’ve written to V[ivien] putting her off Saturday, as I don’t think I’d better come down, lugging a heavy suitcase.’4 Apart from the appendix he was feeling very fit, ‘so there couldn’t be a better time’, he told his mother jocularly, ‘for having the brute out’. It would seem that the idea of getting him into a public ward during the following week was not consistent with his state of health, for the day after his examination, on his birthday – 2 October – he wrote to Vivien, who had a horror of operations and was obviously deeply concerned about him: