Twelve years later, in Brighton Rock this same shelter is where Hale is found dead – a piece of Brighton Rock having been pushed down his throat. And it is in Brighton Rock also that Cubitt, on the run from Pinkie, sits in a glass shelter staring out to sea. Like Greene he lights a cigarette and tries to share his cigarettes with an elderly gentleman wrapped in a heavy overcoat who is sharing the shelter: ‘“I don’t smoke,” the old gentleman said sharply and began to cough; a steady hack, hack, hack, towards the invisible sea.
‘“A cold night,” Cubitt said. The old gentleman swivelled his eyes on him like opera glasses and went on coughing … the vocal chords dry as straw. Somewhere out at sea a violin began to play: it was like a sea beast mourning and stretching towards the shore … The mist blew in, heavy compact drifts of it like ectoplasm.’23
Meanwhile in Oxford, Vivien, who painted and sketched well, had done a drawing of Eve & the Serpent and Greene was longing to see it.
After convalescing at Brighton, Greene returned to The Times and on his first day back (17 November) he fainted:
Will you [he wrote to Vivien] forgive this pencil because I’m lying on my bed? A most silly, stupid thing has happened. I do feel a damned fool. I turned up at the office, feeling quite fit at four o’clock & I went on feeling perfectly fit, until 7.45 when suddenly without warning I got a stab in the small of my back, which made me leap in my chair, much to the surprise of my neighbour. It passed, & I started going on with a telegram about a burst reservoir in Yorkshire. Then it came again like the very deuce. Beat any shooting tooth I’ve ever had. I felt twisted up inside, & things began going round. I thought this was silly & concentrated on you to steady myself. And to my surprise everyone’s head was upside down looking at me, & I began to think that I was going to faint, until I realised that I was lying flat on the floor without a collar, & somebody holding my wrist & another person holding my head up. I’ve never felt such an utter fool before. Dr Wilson, the medical leader writer, came along & transported me to R[aymond]’s in his car, & I spent the night there. It’s a fearful nuisance. I’m so afraid of losing standing by being told I’ve got to go back into the country. I’m tired to death of being semi-fit.24
Fifty years afterwards, Colonel Maude recalled: ‘I remember Graham coming in one evening and promptly collapsing and fainting and we laid him out on the top of a “what-not”, a two-decker affair … He was then as I remember very delicate, apart from the fact that he had fainted, he seemed to me to be pushing himself too hard, he wasn’t strong in those days.’
As usual, Graham was circumspect about what he told his mother of his health: ‘my first incursion back to work ended in disaster. I was “took ill” at the office & spent the night at R[aymond] & C[harlotte]’s. Nothing much.’25 While he kept his fears to himself, something of a convalescent’s irritation comes out in his letters: ‘What an overrated, wet, beastly, contemptible, narrow, meagre place this country called – God save the mark – Great Britain is. Patriotism certainly is not enough. If I thought there was one spot in this decrepit and decaying land, where there was some sun, I’d take a week off and go to it.’26 He just would not admit that he was sickly. Having presumably visited Vivien, he wrote on the train from Oxford to London: ‘Fragile! Rot! Anyone would look a bit pulled about after an operation.’fn3, 27 His method of keeping fit was to avoid Berkhamsted: ‘I should be constantly reminded that I wasn’t quite fit. Much the best way to get fit is to go completely away & forget the fact entirely.’
But on returning to Battersea, he found a telegram from Raymond advising him to go back to the hospital for a further examination and his mother wrote to him asking him to see his psychoanalyst, Kenneth Richmond, again. He was not then aware of ‘the time-bomb’ ticking in his mother’s desk – Richmond’s letter to his father of 1921, suggesting that his son suffered from epilepsy – which was soon to explode. In A Sort of Life, Greene compresses the events of the next few months, making a dramatic incident of the affair, but his letters suggest a more long-drawn-out period of doubt leading to a climax of anger and despair.
Puzzled by his mother’s request, but pleased to be seeing Richmond again – a man whose influence in the publishing world might advance the fortunes of his unplaced novel – he visited him on 15 November 1926. Yet he had a feeling that his mother had some particular purpose in advising the visit. In his letter to Vivien of the previous day he refers only to Richmond’s change of occupation: ‘He’s chucked his psychological work now & is managing in England a new & apparently very easy form of shorthand. I enclose a disguised advertisement about it he wrote in “The Observer” on Sunday. Apparently it’s “going” fearfully well … in six weeks you are supposed to be able to attain the maximum of 130 words a minute.’28 He discussed his novel with Richmond, who suggested a new title, Goodnight Sweet Ladiesfn4 but the main purpose of the visit – the revelation – is indicated in Greene’s cryptic and frightening telegram to Vivien, sent after he left Richmond: ‘I guarantee, darling, that there are no forceps inside me. I’ll break gently to you the terrible news unfolded to me tomorrow.’29 In his autobiography, he describes the visit, during which, presumably, links were suggested between his fainting in Room 2 and his fainting when undergoing treatment with Richmond when he was sixteen:
I remembered how the specialist (Dr Riddick)fn5 had questioned me about earlier attacks of fainting in the summer stuffiness of the school chapel. Many children, I told myself, went through such a phase.
‘Doctor Riddick diagnosed epilepsy,’ Richmond said.
Epilepsy, cancer and leprosy – these are the three medical terms which rouse the greatest fear in the untutored, and at twenty-two one is unprepared for so final a judgement. Epilepsy, Richmond went on, could be inherited: I must consider the risk carefully before marriage, and he sought to comfort me by pointing out that Dostoievsky too had suffered from epilepsy. I couldn’t think of a reply. Dostoievsky was a dead Victorian writer, not a youth without a book to his name who had pledged himself to marry.30
His letter to Vivien on 26 November suggests a mind wildly trying to find an escape from an intolerable situation and seeking that escape in ideas for travel, coupled with the fear that he might never do this before he is middle-aged: ‘How depressing time is. It goes so fearfully slowly in regard to seeing you again, & so beastly quick in regard to all the places one wants to see.’ Then follows an incredibly miscellaneous list of desired places: ‘New York, San Francisco, Edinburgh, the South Seas, Mexico City, Avignon, Peking & the Great Wall, Carcassonne, Exmoor, Sintra (for a second time), Peru & the Andes, the Pyrenees, Toledo, the Antarctic’, and, Greene’s eternal cry: ‘Will one ever make enough money to have the time to see them before one gets stale & middle-aged … I want to see as many of them as you’d agree to – Edinburgh & the Antarctic I’m afraid would be alone – while we are both youngish. And all we shall probably have for years & years is a month. Perhaps till one retires after forty years sub-editing.’31 He even considered fleeing the country on the strength of an overdraft.
Anxiety turned him in spirit away from writing: ‘I wish that there was some other way of making money in one’s spare time besides writing. I don’t quite honestly believe that writing is my metier. I don’t mean by that that I shan’t make money by it. Of the novelists now writing, even of the good novelists, I don’t think more than half a dozen are really suited.’32 And then there was what he then saw (unseriously) as his real metier – spying. Unexpectedly he had heard again from Berlin and remembered his wonderful days of being a student spy: ‘Berlin has suddenly started sending me a mysterious German review – financial & political – every week, which I can’t read … I’m sure spying is my true spare-time pursuit. Would you marry a German spy? It would be sad to have to choose between you and my metier.’33
But his re-examination by Dr Turner and then by a Dr Abrahams for a second report – ‘I am going to be examined by a Jew with a face like Disraeli’,34 he wrote to Vivien in the same le
tter – must have put his mind at rest since both doctors found him perfectly healthy, telling him that he was simply too inclined to hustle and to pressurise himself.
This must have seemed to be the end of the matter, but the time-bomb ticked on and for some reason on 18 January 1927, he was examined again by Dr Riddock. On this occasion Riddock repeated his suspicions and the shock to Greene was increased by the fact he now learnt, presumably from Riddock, that his parents had known of this diagnosis and lived with the terrible knowledge for five years. The time-bomb had certainly exploded.
Full of anguish, he was dumb-founded that his parents had been involved in such a cover-up, but forty years later he felt differently:
Poor souls, I can sympathize with them now as I read the letters which were written to them on the same day by Richmond and Doctor Riddock. Doctor Riddock’s was frightening, even in its moderation. ‘The attacks to which he is occasionally subject are, I think, epileptic; but since he has lost consciousness in three only, there is a reasonably good chance that, with suitable treatment, the condition may be arrested.’ The treatment seemed to consist of good walks and Keppler’s Malt Extract. Richmond’s letter was more encouraging, and my mother in pencil has pathetically underlined all the optimistic phrases she could find, perhaps to comfort my father – ‘quite likely to clear up completely’ … ‘no cause for alarm’ – even the phrase about Dostoievsky is trotted out and surprisingly underlined.35
Richmond had also told Greene’s parents that he and Dr Riddock agreed that ‘Graham ought not to be told what is the matter in any terms that included the word epilepsy’.36
*
It is apparent that in the midst of his anxiety and confusion his main concern was the effect this revelation might have on his hopes of marrying Vivien, and acting with considerable unselfishness, instead of writing to her first with the appalling news, he wrote, presumably soon after the examination, to Stella Weaver, her friend and mentor. He felt that Vivien should have unbiased advice and a chance to withdraw. But on the same day, though probably later, he also wrote to Vivien explaining why he had done this: ‘I thought it was best to let Stella do it, because for me it was difficult to give you unselfish advice. Dear heart … do pay attention to what Stella advises, however ghastly it is. If I don’t write tomorrow, it will be because I don’t want to sway you more than you’ll be swayed anyway by your love. Somehow we’ve got to win happiness for you out of all this muddle.’37
On the following day, a bitterly cold one, sitting in the National Gallery, the only place where he knew he could keep warm, and exactly opposite the Vision of St Eustace, he wrote to Vivien:
To-day the whole thing seems more incredible to me than yesterday. I don’t believe for a moment that Riddock ever told my people that I’d got slight epilepsy five years ago. He must have hugged the secret with Richmond. I can’t help wondering whether he may not be a crank – he was a friend of R[ichmond] who is a crank, & it was R. who told my people to take me to him. The only cause was that between the ages of 14 and 16 I had several, perhaps four, fainting attacks. Large numbers of boys have them at that age – you’ve only got to attend a school chapel to know that – either through digestion troubles or through growing too quickly, which I certainly was doing. I shall make inquiries about Riddock. He admitted himself yesterday that he could find no traces of it in my family history, & that it was excessively unlikely that I myself should have recurrence of it. I’m trying to see my way in this muddle. If Riddock is right, it was simply criminal to have kept it hidden.38
He added:
I wonder if I’ve exaggerated things. I don’t know. I’m waiting to hear what Stella says. On second thoughts I don’t see there is much use in coming to Oxford. If I once had you in my arms, I’d damn the extra risks to your happiness with me. And that’s not the right way to go about it. It’s better to argue it all out in writing, I think. So I won’t come. I think it would be fairer not to. Darling, darling, I love you and I only want to do what’s best for your happiness. If Stella thinks that it adds too much to the chances of you marrying me not turning out well, we ought to throw it up. That sounds like Hell now, but it wouldn’t in time, while if you married me & weren’t happy, there’d be no escape for you.39
Until the matter was cleared up, Greene, who had been sending letters daily to Vivien for almost two years, stopped writing and advised Vivien to stop writing to him. Also, on the advice of his brother Raymond, he decided not to visit her, cancelling a visit already arranged on the spurious grounds that he had ‘flu: ‘If I’d come down, I couldn’t have put you at ease about the situation, & as my brother said “both of you will be strained, not knowing whether it’s the last time you’ll meet as engaged people.” Besides I considered then that the chances were about 2-1 on our being separated, in which case I thought it better that we shouldn’t see each other again … That’s why on Saturday I wrote about neither of us writing.’ Greene’s view was that if all turned out well, no harm would have been done, if ill the break-up would have begun gradually.40
Saturday looked very black: his friend Arthur Braine-Hartnell visited him and they went out together, which is often Greene’s way of hiding from his troubles by a determined assault on the fleshpots of the town, striving for a false gaiety, trying by drink to put an end to thought. To Vivien he confessed:
On Saturday [night] far from sitting over a fire, preferring to coddle myself to your company, I set out to banish the idea of losing you, at any rate for one day. At 12.30, when myself & Arthur were bereft even from Lyons’ All Night (no drinks being served after 12!), I lured the innocent Arthur on a search for a ‘non-exclusive’ club, & ended up at Jimmie’s, where I danced. And by 3.30 was dancing quite intelligibly! I then rescued him from his vamp, & we walked home & smoked a last cigarette together on Albert Bridge at 4.30.41
One of the reasons for Greene’s despair was the result of his seeking assistance from Father Christiefn6 at Brompton Oratory (he calls him Father Talbot in A Sort of Life), to whom he had been passed on by Father Trollope.
My next thought was of an elderly priest, Father Talbot, of the Oratory … He was a man of very liberal views, and surely, I thought despairingly, he would have some answer to my greatest problem: that if I were epileptic, I must avoid having children. Surely there must be some cranny of canon law or moral theology that would contain a ruling for just such a case as mine.
He asked me to go out with him, and for the next hour we drove in a taxi, crossing and recrossing the same rectangle between the Brompton Road and Bayswater, just as we crossed and recrossed the same lines of argument. Under no circumstances at all was contraception permissible. ‘The church forbids me to marry then?’
‘Of course we don’t forbid marriage.’
‘Do you expect married people to live together without making love?’
‘The Church expects you to trust God, that’s all.’
Up and down, over and over, a useless embroidery – which made no pattern.
How differently he would have answered my question today, telling me, I have no doubt, to follow my conscience … Catholics have sometimes accused me of making my clerical characters, Father Rank in The Heart of the Matter and Father James in The Living Room, fail unnecessarily before the human problems they were made to face. ‘A real priest,’ I have been told, ‘would have had something further to say, he would have shown a deeper comprehension, he wouldn’t have left the situation so unchanged.’ But that is exactly what in those days, before John Roncalli was elected Pope, the priesthood was compelled to do. There was no failure in comprehension. Father Talbot was a man of the greatest human sympathy, but he had no solution for me at all. There was only one hard answer he could honestly give (‘the Church knows all the rules,’ as Father Rank said), while the meter of the taxi ticked away the repetitions of our fruitless argument. It was the Rock of Peter I was aware of in our long drive, and though it repulsed me, I couldn’t help admiring its unyielding façade.4
2
There is a reflection of this dilemma in Greene’s play, The Living Room, when Rose, who is in love with Michael Dennis but has also witnessed his wife’s pain and is deeply troubled, begs her uncle, who is a priest, for help: ‘She was just a name, that’s all … and then she comes here and beats her fists on the table and cries in the chair … I’ve seen her touch his arm. Uncle, what am I to do? Tell me what to do, Father.’ All that the priest can say is, ‘You can pray.’ And so Rose, bereft of assistance in her extreme need, commits suicide. Her uncle, Father James, later confesses: ‘I said to God, “Put words into my mouth”, but the words did not come.’
And to Michael, Father James has only one answer to give:
You’re doing wrong to your wife, to Rose, to yourself … Go away. Don’t see her, don’t write to her, don’t answer her letters if she writes to you. She’ll have a terrible few weeks. So will you …
Michael: And in the end …?
James: We have to trust God. Everything will be all right.43
How close this is to what Father Christie said to Graham. Father James ‘would only have had to touch her to give her peace.’ Unquestionably, Greene saw Father Christie’s strict following of canon law as spiritually crippling.
His letters to Vivien reveal nothing of his frustration and anxiety: ‘I saw Fr Christie yesterday, but I had other and more urgent things to talk about & forgot the Confirmation. I shall be seeing him again soon & will remember next time.’44 There is a certain tightness about this, perhaps reflecting the dichotomy between Vivien’s interest in the outward show of the Catholic Church and Greene’s battle with its dogma.
In A Sort of Life, Greene tells us that after his baptism in Nottingham he added the name of Thomas the Doubter.45 But he did not select such a name then, as we have seen. He delayed this until his confirmation, and given his deep perturbation over Father Christie’s inability to help him in this crisis, it is surely understandable that he should have expressed his doubts by selecting such a name. The best indication of his personal distress comes in A Sort of Life, especially in the typescript which is fuller than the published version:
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 42