The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Was the diagnosis right? With the hindsight of forty years, free from any recurrence, I don’t believe it, but I believed it then. I remember next day standing on an Underground platform and trying to summon the will and the courage to jump. It was not my new Catholicism which restrained me. There was no theological despair in what I felt. I was simply tired out by the thought of starting a completely different future than the one I had planned. One in which I would be bound to my own company for life.

  Time did prove the diagnosis wrong, but he believed it then, and an entry in his diary five years later (19 July 1932) shows that he had at least two further faintings. He had been reading E. H. Carr’s life of Dostoievsky and he naturally took note of Dostoievsky’s attacks of epilepsy. Carr stated that in common with some narcotic drugs and perhaps certain forms of recurrent insanity, epilepsy produces in its victim, at the moment prior to the attack, ‘a sense of spiritual exaltation & triumph, a feeling of power to transcend the limits of the material world.’ Greene’s comment on this is: ‘I am said to be mildly epileptic, but this was not my experience. My faintings are preceded always by physical revulsion, not physical pain however:fn7 the last medically recognised fit was in 1929 when I was having a steel splinter taken out of my eye. I fainted (an epileptic seizure?) in 1930 during the hospital scene of the film “All Quiet on the Western Front”.’

  And then his fears were suddenly ended. His brother Raymond, now qualified, was sceptical of Dr Riddock’s diagnosis. Moreover, Dr McNair Wilson of The Times stated that he had seen no symptoms of epilepsy. The nightmare was over and the rest of 1927, as he put it, had a clear field for good, and he had an idea for a special Christmas present for Vivien.

  He asked her to send him a dummy – an imitation book with blank pages – from Blackwells and in it he transcribed the verses he had written since the publication of Babbling April. Thus Vivien would have a volume of verse written especially for her.46 In his preface he wrote:

  As one who has but a poor store to give and lacks the wealth to make his worship plain, throws down his mingled pile of sticks and stones … So do I throw these scattered verses down, some bad, some mediocre, best but fair, but all belonging to you and only you.

  It was a very private book, an assurance asserting that his love would never have an end. On the first page were quotations from his favourite poets; ‘As common chests encasing wares of price’ (Thomas Hardy); ‘All measure and all language, I should pass/Should I tell what a miracle she was’ (John Donne); and lovely lines from de la Mare: ‘… Not tears I give, but all that he/Clasped in his arms – sweet charity:/All that he loved, to him I bring/For a close whispering …’ Beneath the de la Mare he placed a pressed flower. It is now brown with age – the stem is held in place by a taper of paper on which Greene wrote: ‘It is enough of honour for one lifetime/To have known you better than the rest have known.’ His plans for that winter were of walks with Vivien at Berkhamsted:

  We will go the winter walk … It’s best when the country’s frozen, because otherwise it’s fearfully muddy. It has a heavy & enjoyable melancholy like black treacle or Gray’s Elegy. And then one comes in very hungry in the dusk, when the High St lamps are being lit, & there’s a slight evening mist. And there’s a big log fire blazing in the drawing room & plates & plates of rock buns and cups & cups of hot tea!

  But just before Christmas, Greene had his pocket picked: ‘Something awful’s happened. I can’t come to Oxford on Saturday … I’ve had £11 either lost, stolen or strayed … I’m literally penniless. I think my pocket was picked on the tube, when we were standing crushed together like sardines.’47 That night he had a dream which suggests not only the intensity of his love but also his uncertainty about the future:

  Last night I dreamed we were in a railway carriage on a long journey. I had wandered away along the corridor. We were passing through a foreign country towards the sea. We entered great mountain regions, & the guard suddenly came along & said that the danger was close at hand. I understood that he meant that we’d got to run the gauntlet of a volcanic eruption, & that there was a strong chance of us all being destroyed. I hurried back along the corridor to the carriage where you were because I wanted us to be killed together, if we were going to be killed, & not at opposite ends of the train, so that my spirit should have to waste no precious minutes of eternity in finding yours.

  fn1 In letters written from his hospital bed, Greene often referred to Big Ben: ‘It makes an awful noise in the night’; ‘I lie & look at Big Ben so impatiently. It’s saying 11 o’clock now – 30 hours & my love will be due.’ (8 October 1926.)

  fn2 Two weeks after leaving hospital he learned that the walls of his stomach were very thin. Thus his appendix had been in hourly danger of perforating.

  fn3 In the train to London from Oxford he reported a conversation to Vivien which catches the flavour of the flapper of the 1920s: ‘A mysterious female, who apparently knew me, got into the carriage coming down here, & said “Iole’s having a coming-of-age dance on December 21st. Can you come?” I didn’t know who she or Iole was, but I said brightly “Is she really coming of age? How fearfully exciting. I should love to come, only I’m afraid I shall probably be at work that day. Can I leave it open?” She said: “Oh do. I’ll send you a proper invitation”, & then we talked politics. I wonder who she – & Iole is – are!’ (24 November 1926.)

  fn4 The title is from Hamlet (Act IV, Scene 5).

  fn5 Actually, Dr Riddock.

  fn6 Father Christie was at Brompton Oratory for almost fifty years and died in the 1930s. He was famous for being ‘Prefect of the Little Oratory’ (spiritual father for laymen associated with the Oratory). He was reputed to have received a great many converts into the Church. Christie’s photograph suggests he was an unimaginative and cold man.

  fn7 But see here

  24

  Marriage at Last

  At least I have loved you;

  Though much went wrong,

  This was good,

  This was strong.

  – SARAH TEASDALE

  HIS ILLNESSES OVER, Greene looked to 1927 as being ‘a clear field for good’ and he wrote to Vivien in January: ‘All I want is work, work, work, so that I can marry you and take a slice of eternity before my time.’1 And reflecting on the failure of ‘The Episode’, he deplored ‘the awful waste of a year’s time when I might have been practising short articles & getting nearer to marrying you.’ His failure to find a publisher for ‘The Episode’ had to a surprising degree taken away his writing confidence: ‘I want to get out of this patch of Sargasso Sea, where I’m too stuck even to write two lines of bad verse.’2 He was already thinking about other writing outlets: ‘There are two films I want very much to see in town – “The Lodger” at the Marble Arch & “Hotel Imperial” at the Plaza. Apart from marrying you, I think the most wonderful thing in the world would be to write & produce a really first class film – something as good as Manon Lescaut. Ooo!’3

  He is constantly spurring himself on at this time: ‘I’ve got large imperial plans on which I’ve started. I’m chucking the novel altogether as ballast. No more breakfasts in bed.’ It is not certain what the ‘imperial plans’ were, but they seem to have involved trying to write for the Saturday Review and doing a script for a film studio: ‘I’ve been dashing about town this morning picking up the threads of my new scheme. Only they are being recalcitrant. Gerald Barry, the editor of the Saturday Review isn’t back from the country & I’ve got to go there again to-morrow. This afternoon I’m going to talk to Maxwell, managing director of British National Pictures, & then this evening I’m going to see the first night of “Metropolis”, Fritz Lang’s new film.’4

  Nothing came of these plans or of others – writing a play with Vivien, for example: ‘Do think of a good plot for a play – shocker preferably. If we could write one together, there’s a chance at the moment of getting it performed by “The Playroom Six”. I say we. You’d have to do the writing. I find myself no
w incapable of writing anything other than Times English.’5 The following month, May 1927, he thought of writing short detective stories:

  Ooo darling, Methuen are offering two prizes of £250 & £150 & royalties for the best detective story (first one by the author) sent in by May, 1928. Judges: H. C. Bailey, A. A. Milne & Ronald Knox. We must go in – I thought of a plot – I’m afraid at Mass – which I thought was remarkably good, but now in the cold light of a railway carriage it seems a bit far fetched. I’m going to write up though for particulars. I’ve got an old Catholic priest in mind for the sake of Knox!fn1

  But he lost confidence again and appealed to Vivien: ‘Do help & win the £250 prize for a detective story. Help me invent deceptive clues. I’ve never tried a detective story.’ His anxiety increased; he felt that his troubles came from lack of steady writing since October 1926 when he was in hospital. He again cried out for help: ‘I’m getting restless interiorly. If only you’d help me with a plot for a detective story I might be able to settle down to work.’6 He felt at this time like a dose of Eno’s that’s lost its fizz: ‘I can’t work & I can’t read.’7 He felt nostalgic for earlier days when he worked to a pattern: ‘Last year until the Episode was finished, I got into a beautiful automatic swing and I want to get back to it.’8 On the following day he wrote to Vivien on the same subject: ‘O dear, the morning’s nearly gone & I haven’t done a stroke of work yet, & I don’t want to. I want to talk to you … Please when we are in the basket, make me work.’

  *

  ‘The Basket’ was their code-name for their future home, probably having its origin in ‘cat-basket’, reflecting Vivien’s attachment to cats. At long last, the date of their marriage had been decided, determined by the work rota in Room 2 at The Times. Sub-editors were allowed a month’s holiday a year and when Greene was asked what dates he would prefer, he said that he did not want to take more than two weeks in early summer because he needed a fortnight in October or November to get married. The response was: ‘do try and manage October as Parliament won’t be sitting and we’ll have plenty of people to spare.’9 This decision was come to in April 1927, but already during February and March there had been a search for a home (Vivien living at Oxford could not have had a lot to do with it) and plans were afoot for the wedding and honeymoon. Greene found cheap flats which were not attractive and pleasant places that were too expensive. There was a flat for £100 which they seriously considered in March but turned down because, in his precise way, Greene argued against it:

  we pay income tax & from Hampstead my tube fare, apart from any of yours, would come to somewhere about £18 a year more than Raymond’s [his brother]. That, without the income tax, would cancel the difference between our income and theirs … Unless some stroke of luck comes my way & gives me a job as remunerative as the Glasgow Herald which would make just the financial difference, it seems to me, we shouldn’t be able to afford anything more than Raymond and Charlotte are paying.10

  He found a ‘teeny flat’ in Chelsea at a price they could afford – £82 – but there was no bath. At last, in March he found a home for them: ‘When I saw the flat it was a lovely day & the sun was streaming into the bedroom – & the bathroom! I like having a bath in sunlight. I must say I’m awfully attracted by the constant hot water … This afternoon I’m going to agitate for my nine guineas!’11 He approached The Times at once for this increase in salary because, as he explained to Vivien: ‘it’s no use being dreamy & poetical about money, I’m afraid, when we are as poor as we shall be. “Safety first” is the motto for keeping kittens on the financial side – though we’ll live as dangerously & unprosaically as you like on all the other sides.’12 The manager of The Times replied that he must be under a misunderstanding to expect so large an increase, but he did concede Greene another £2.

  Greene was to move into their new home at the end of March, and a letter to Vivien, written before he left his bed-sitter at Miss King’s house in Battersea, suggests one of the difficulties they had both experienced while he was in lodgings: ‘I wish it was you [calling] and I should carry you in on my back so that Miss King would only hear one pair of feet if she was awake, & then when the “o’er-hasty sun” rose I’d let you out of the window like a sparrow.’13

  He was helped with his removals by his friend from schooldays, Eric Guest, who provided an extra trunk into which Greene put his typewriter, odd parcels and an eiderdown. He sent a telegram to Vivien in Oxford with their new address – 8 Heathcroft in Hampstead Way – and his first letter, both in his personal version of his address and his description of his first morning there, expresses his excitement and satisfaction:

  Our basket

  Somewhere about 8 a.m.

  In bed

  March 30, 1927. Wed.

  I was quite startled when I woke up this morning to the biggest & most expensive toy I’ve ever had to play with. But when I went & had a huge hot bath in our own bathroom, I felt fearfully excited.

  It is clear that what he was luxuriating in, after months of lodgings, was the privacy and being able to organise his own life. For a week he took three baths a day – in Battersea he had used a shared bathroom which had an ancient geyser always, it seemed, on the point of exploding. And he was able, on hearing ‘letters plip-plop in the box’, without waiting to dry himself, to dash out to collect them: ‘It was a lovely sensation not having to wait & put on a dressing gown for fear of scandalising Miss King.’ Everything about the new flat excited him, from doing his own laundry and seeing about groceries to making his own breakfast, though he wasn’t doing much cooking and seems to have been living on siege rations – milk and bread and butter for breakfast, milk and sardines for lunch and elevenpenny kippers and syrup roll in the evening.

  He was looking forward to and planning for Vivien’s first visit, though he warned her he had only a few sticks of furniture – ‘there’ll be nothing at all, but a bed & a chair & possibly a gas fire’, but they would have ‘a picnic supper. I’ll buy a pie & tarts as you suggest. We shall have to wash up after tea, as I have only two plates. Ooo darling, I’m so excited.’14

  ‘One lives in a sort of shadowgraph,’ he told her in June, ‘no one seems more than silhouettes compared with you, who are beautiful & vivid & real.’ He was sure that the world would be a second rate sewer if she weren’t in it. He made ‘a bad social companion’ in those days: ‘I sit & think of you & think of you & think of you’, and certainly at the family home in Berkhamsted at weekends, when he was separated from her, he would say nothing or pretend to be asleep as the drawl of voices talked the hours away, but behind his closed eyes she walked: ‘I push the voices up & up until they only dimple the surface of hearing & then they are not heard at all & I can whisper to you in a silence how much I love you & want you & long for you & ache for you.’15 He wanted to have her with him all his life, ‘like a sort of philosopher’s stone always to turn ugliness to beauty, yes, & if you had the chance, transform Hell into Heaven. I believe Satan if he ever dared to face you would find time turned backwards & revise the judgement of the fall.’16

  Inevitably, he had the kind of doubts which afflict people on the threshold of marriage, but in his case they were heightened to an astonishing degree by emotional excitement and self-doubt:

  I wonder if you’ll be really happy with me. Sometimes I think you are too fine for love, I mean human love. It must seem rather petty & futile when you are seeing ‘things & people from the other side of the sun’. I’m afraid of spoiling your vision for you, of getting between you & what is really worthy of you. And if I do you’ll dislike me intensely later … Sometimes it seems to me that marrying you is the biggest crime I could commit. It’s sentimentality to pretend that love is enough, & that’s all I’m giving you.17

  And in an undated letter, amidst this ‘fierce hunger to have you with me again’, he admitted to ‘veering between a wild longing for October’ when they would marry and a desire to make time go slowly in order to put off the time ‘whe
n you’ll feel – like other wives! – disappointed in it [your marriage] & me.’ And in September he advises her to be prepared for the worst, ‘because I know I shall be a pretty trying person to live with continuously.’ Even Vivien caught the mood, for he replied to one of her letters: ‘Dear, dear love, it’s I who’ll disappoint you, I’m afraid. You couldn’t. Disappointment & you are a contradiction in terms.’18 One of Vivien’s fears was that Greene’s enormous love (and events ultimately were to justify her fear) would not last. Greene answered her confidently: ‘I shall love you always. Why not? One’s fond of lots of people always – how much more then you? I shall love you always … I hate it when you are away. All rapture goes with you & one’s left stranded, as it were, on mud. And I feel terribly cloddish & heavy & completely empty of the spirit of God that you bring with you. Come back to me & I’ll soon make you believe again that I shall love you as long as life & if there’s love after, afterwards.’ He signed this epistle solemnly – ‘your lover who will love you for eternity’.19

  Opposed to his ardent desire, there was Vivien’s fear of sex which she had until her marriage. Greene was probably right in believing that Vivien’s mother had poisoned her mind about sex, ‘with misrepresentations & exaggerations, so that you might never marry.’20 Because of this and the celibate marriage Vivien had at first envisaged as the only possibility, he was still, very late in the day, trying to quieten her fears: ‘Of course it’s not wicked – that side of our love. It would be a half-hearted, horrid sort of affair without it. Dear love, dear heart, it won’t grow too important. It can’t be separated from all the other parts of love. When it’s growing all the rest is growing too. And I’ve promised you that you’ll never have more of it expressed than you yourself want.’