The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  But if Greene shows an excess of juvenile romanticism, he was no juvenile when it came to keeping a record of the wedding presents they received:

  Business first, dear heart. I have asked a Mrs Walde for a large green lacquer tray. I hope this doesn’t conflict with Loulie. I have asked Raymond & Charlotte for a Staines coffee maker. Mrs Laws is sending us little ladles for soup or fruit. The Balfours’ coffee set has arrived, but it was addressed to me, so you needn’t trouble to write. I have heard from Cavalaire & they’ve kept the two rooms we want. Hugh is letting us spend up to ten shillings. Will you order the Dulac picture? Your mother says it’s in a shilling number, not a 5/-, so 9/- can go to a frame. Aunt N[ono] is giving us a singing kettle for my birthday. Would you mind if we lunched with her & aunt M[aud] on Saturday? Could you? They want to see us before we become ‘ooked.’fn4, 44

  A few days earlier he had received £5 from Sir Sidney Sitwell, his cousin and a relative of Edith Sitwell. Vivien’s mother gave them a cigarette box made in wood that looked like a tortoise shell and when you lifted the lid it played Polish tunes – ‘like a box out of Hans Andersen,’ thought Greene. His younger sister Elisabeth gave table mats made by herself.

  The largest present was from Uncle Edward, ‘Eppy’. Edward Greene we have already met and it was his kindness on countless occasions which, one suspects, slightly nettled Graham and his family since he was the wealthy Greene. Edward sent Graham £50, a stupendous sum in 1927. ‘Uncle Eppy’s letter was so sweet & sentimental. I should have liked to have hugged him. He says “You shall have the car to take you to Victoria, a very appropriate name for a young man who has secured a bride like Vivien, far too good for him. No man is good enough for a bride on his wedding day – he can only pray to become so one day.”’45 Money was terribly important to buy necessary furniture. His mother gave him £20, and they were banking on receiving a cheque from Stella and Reggie Weaver. Greene felt that with the money they ought to be able to furnish one whole room.

  He continued, however, to be unhappy about the influence of Stella Weaver on Vivien, who had been taken out in pouring rain by Stella:

  Stella is a selfish self-centered cad to take you out. You are being married in three weeks … Darling, for God’s sake, don’t be a weakling who’ll do whatever S. or myself or your mother wants … If anything happened to you, I think I should commit what’s supposed to be the one unforgiveable sin … I love you terribly, & I can’t bear to see you taking risks of smashing up both our happiness for Stella’s whim … I dread the idea of you going back to S’s the week-end before the marriage. She’d take you out in a raging storm & keep you up late every night & you’d meekly comply. It’s a dangerous habit to get into. I’ll be only too quick to take advantage of compliance – so don’t give me the chance.’46

  There was more trouble with Stella Weaver before the wedding, as she refused to let her daughter be bridesmaid: ‘If you want L. as bridesmaid you are going to have her as bridesmaid whatever … [she] says’ – but in fact Stella’s daughter was not a bridesmaid. Vivien had three bridesmaids – Greene’s sister Elisabeth and the Misses Marjorie and Betty Fry.

  *

  When a colleague at The Times went off on three weeks’ holiday and said to Greene, ‘Oh, well, when I see you next, you’ll be a married man,’ a ‘thrill of excitement and anticipation’ passed through him.47 He also quoted to Vivien the poem in The Unknown Goddess as exactly expressing his disguised feelings on his wedding day: ‘I shall look perfectly calm, if anything calmer/than before, when we pass the works of Messrs Hunt/ley & Palmer./And, while my heart will be wild like a groom at his/wedding,/when the bride lifts her veil, I’ll merely mutter/“Reading”’.48

  For himself he knew that on the day, however wild his heart, he would be controlled by a consciousness of what he curiously called ‘hoards of disapproving faces’, and he quoted a poem on Stonehenge: ‘They sit there forever on the dim/horizon of my mind, that Stonehenge circle of elderly disapproving faces/Faces of the Uncles & Schoolmasters who frowned on my youth.’

  Perhaps he felt that he would always have to fight these disapproving faces, but there was one person he singled out for special comment; ‘You must tell Stella to look cheerful and optimistic during the ceremony. Think of turning round when it’s over, drunk with joy at having you at last, to see somewhere in a pew Stella with a long, sad face …

  He was living entirely for 15 October 1927: ‘I’m going to light a candle, turn out the gas, get into bed & have your stars the last thing before I blow the candle out, & in the dark I shall dream that you are close in my arms & your lips near.’49

  Although he did not feel himself to be a good Catholic – ‘It’s hard for someone like myself to realise the sacrament of Mass’ – he allows himself rhetorical exaggeration when thinking of the sacrament of marriage ‘when I see you lift your veil … the feeling [will] change … to a holy & dark rapture.’50 He saw their love in miraculous terms: ‘if you cut your finger, I should half expect one of my own fingers to bleed … It’s very nearly, I suppose, what the Church calls “one flesh”.’ And he promoted Vivien to sainthood: ‘I can believe that miracles will be done at your grave. Only you should be the patron saint of lovers & depose that nonentity St Valentine.’51 On occasions his emotion was so strong that he wrote of awakening at 2.45 a.m. and imagining that he was visiting Vivien in her bedroom and kneeling beside her bed under the crucifix and kissing her lips, and he added, ‘you didn’t wake up. I’m glad I’ve been in your room so that I can imagine it clearly.’52 And he set out to be the apotheosis of husbands:

  It will be such fun doing odd jobs for you, turning on your bath water, cutting your bread, helping you tidy up, ringing up the butcher and the greengrocer, tucking you up in bed! What fun arranging holidays too with maps and timetables, sitting on the floor with them spread out. O we are going to be so happy!53

  He insisted in letters that Vivien would look marvellously lovely as a bride and he offered to try ‘fearfully hard’ to make her happy, not a compromising sort of ‘quite’ happy but the exact kind of happiness she wanted at any particular moment.54 He was in seventh heaven – ‘are you really & truly going to come and live with me & be me “ook” ‘, and just before their marriage he wrote: ‘In a fortnight (D.V.) we shall be driving along the edge of the Mediterranean at this hour’, so he was precise to the last. He promised to love her more every year: ‘How God knows, for every corner of me now is filled with the love & the want of you.’ It is the sheer hyperbole of his letters that strikes one: ‘You are the most wonderful event in my life & would be in any one’s. October 15 will be a greater day than Cana, because all the water in the world will be turned into wine.’

  They were married at Saint Mary’s Church in Holly Place, London N.W. The service began at eleven o’clock on Saturday, 15 October. Graham’s elder brother Raymond was best man and his sister Elisabeth train-bearer. The Morning Post, under the heading ‘Mr Graham Greene and Miss Dayrell-Browning’ reported:

  The bride was attired in an ivory satin Florentine robe, draped with silver lace and cut with a square neck. The satin train was also trimmed with silver lace. A wreath of orange blossom and silver leaves secured her long tulle veil, and she carried a sheaf of Madonna lilies, tied with silver tissue. The train-bearer, Miss Elizabeth [sic] Greene, wore a rose-pink taffeta frock, trimmed with silver.55

  The young train-bearer thought the service very long, never having attended a Roman Catholic wedding before. Looking back after fifty-six years, she remembered what impressed a child:

  I had to carry a little bag into which I had to put some coins handed to me by the bride or groom. Also a little bell was tinkled throughout the service which caused my small nephew John to hopefully think that a meal was in the offing – what funny things one remembers.56

  The bride and groom left in Edward Greene’s car for Victoria at 2 p.m. and were in Paris seven hours later where they spent their first night, travelling on to Marseilles
the following day and staying at the Hotel Terminus. As Greene had planned they left Marseilles by motor coach, following the coastline of the Mediterranean on an exciting, hair-raising journey winding round precipices with sheer drops of several hundred feet down to rocks and the sea.

  They stayed at Cavalaire in the only hotel on the beach and champagne was 2s.6d. a bottle. Greene thought it was the loveliest honeymoon anyone ever spent. They hired little flat-bottomed boats with transparent keels and, rowing into little bays and coves, explored the area. They sometimes bathed naked. They loved their rooms with the Mediterranean a few yards outside and the Maures mountains rising behind the hotel. The mimosa was in flower and they found a profusion of palms and pines and cacti. The hotel meals were an endless source of excitement.

  Years later, Vivien recalled one strange incident. Her powerful mother had given her a letter on sex instruction which was sealed but which was to be handed by Vivien to Greene. He read it and promptly tore the letter up so that she never knew what her mother had written.57

  On their return journey, they stopped at Avignon and spent the whole of Friday in Paris when life caught up with them again as they ran out of money. They found the Times office and Graham rooted out a friend called Lumley who cashed them a cheque. They crossed the Channel – it was very choppy – on a Saturday afternoon, and returned to ‘the basket’ to find that Vivien’s mother had filled the flat with flowers, which they both found deeply touching.

  They were back, married and living together in London, and life as a sub-editor stretched ahead.

  November passed without much happening. As the end of 1927 approached, the weather in London became severe: ‘We’ve been having an awful time. No hot water (pipe’s frozen) & dirty water remaining permanently in the sink as the outside pipe … was frozen & the water couldn’t run away.’58 When there was a thaw and the hot water returned, the pipe burst in the roof and flooded their little kitchen. That night it rained and then froze – the result was ‘ice on the roads, no buses, no milk or paper, because no cart could keep its wheels or man his feet.’59

  They finished the year off by going to the show, ‘One Damn Thing After Another’, and Greene suggested to his mother that she should look out for a piece he had written for The Times in the unsigned Court page: ‘If a Court page called “The First Pantomime” appears it’s me!’60

  fn1 Greene’s first published detective story ‘Murder for the Wrong Reasons’ appeared in The Graphic (5, 12 & 19 October 1929). It is the worst he ever wrote.

  fn2 The announcement appeared in The Times in July unchanged but for the additional phrase after ‘Hampstead’ of ‘and grand-daughter of Mr A. Green-Armytage of Bristol.’ Vivien’s father is rather pointedly not mentioned.

  fn3 We must assume that on their honeymoon they had separate bedrooms.

  fn4 Hooked. A real cockney would more likely have said [h]itched.

  PART 6

  Battlefield

  25

  ‘Pussy’ and ‘Tiger’ and The Man Within

  There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, you can suffer for her, or you can turn her into literature.

  – LAWRENCE DURRELL

  ‘I WAS MARRIED and I was happy,’ Greene wrote. ‘In the evenings I worked at The Times, and in the mornings I worked on my third novel.’1 It was an intense relationship between two very different personalities, and it was this closeness that impressed their friends and relatives.

  Helga Guinness, Sir Hugh Greene’s first wife, recalled, ‘He called her pussy and she called him tiger,’2 and perhaps their names for each other were appropriate. Graham’s cousin, Ben, and his wife, looking back fifty years to Greene’s and Vivien’s courtship, thought the young couple had been ‘too involved’ with each other and that ‘those sort of relationships do burn out’. They remembered that Greene and Vivien were always arm in arm, or touching each other, or ‘going behind screens in a room and hiding their heads together’.3

  The Greenes’ need for physical closeness was confirmed by David Higham, Greene’s literary agent. He visited them at their flat in Heathcroft during the early days of their marriage and they were ‘terribly, terribly affectionate, a state of affairs which slightly ceased later, perhaps naturally, I don’t know. There was a bit too much effusive affection in that flat, I thought. It was at Heathcroft that I remember the relationship best. I once said to my wife, “I can hardly get out of the place between the kisses.”’4

  According to Helga, Vivien was clever, ‘but had no common sense. She was always an oddity in a way – especially in the clothes she wore. Odd in the sense that she didn’t wear a watch, that she would cook by the sun (that is to say cook when it suited her). When driving a car she would say “to you” “to me”, meaning “I’m turning left” or “I’m turning right”.’ She also was fascinated by Victorian dolls: ‘They were to be found everywhere in the house, upstairs, downstairs, even in the loo.’5 And commenting on Greene, Helga thought he had no common sense, though she granted he was very clever: ‘He was not a logical man. Indeed neither of them was logical in this world. He was not logical about politics, he was not logical about his religion.’

  The strength of Greene’s obsession with Vivien is supported by Helga’s comment: So far as Graham was concerned, while she was it she was it and black could be white.’6

  The Greenes were often out and about. They went to Oxford in February 1928 for the Oxford Union Dramatic Society’s production and in the same month had ‘a lovely view of [General] Haig’s funeral from the roof of Westminster Hospital’, where Raymond was a doctor.7 In March they had ‘a bust’, dining at the Florence and going to see Fred Astaire and his sister in Funny Face afterwards. Greene wrote to his mother: ‘It was extraordinarily good & Leslie Henson incredibly funny. The Astaires as always superb.’8 His letters to his mother at this time reflect his obsession with the cinema. In February they went to see Edna Best in The Constant Nymph and ‘Anthony Asquith’s film’. In September 1928 he advised his mother, ‘If a film called The Fugitive Lover comes to Crowborough see it. It’s excellent.’9 He also advised her to see The Informer – ‘a terribly good film’, and said of the Russian film The Last Days of St Petersburg: ‘It had been put on for a run without any particular advertisement at the obscure Scala up behind Goodge Street. We arrived a quarter of an hour before the time of showing to find a tremendous queue. None of Pudovkin’s films has been shown before publicly, & one never knew that his fame had spread so generally.’10

  In January 1929 he wrote: ‘We’ve been doing a crowd of cinemas. On Saturday we went to Thou Shalt Not a French version of Thérèse Raquin [novel by Zola]. It deals with the remorse of a pair of lovers who after drowning the husband of the woman, finally kill themselves at the feet of the victim’s mother … terribly moving in a gnomic & not pathetic fashion. We both felt quite shaken afterwards. It was the best film I’ve ever seen … This afternoon, my day off, we are going to The Patriot … The office is ravaged with flu. Two people in my room away & another on the verge.’11

  He thought of joining the Amateur Film Society: ‘It gives one an opportunity I believe of taking part in the production of films.’12 He was also writing for The Times on films: ‘On Sunday I did the Film Society show for The Times – Rien Que Les Heures’; ‘I’ve got another article on A Film Technique coming out on the Entertainments page.’13 ‘I don’t know whether you saw a third film article of mine about Sounds and Silence on July 10.’14 He was also reviewing: ‘The Film Society last Sunday & last night the first play I’ve done – the new Edgar Wallace Reasons Unknown. I see they’ve given me a top & all in a large type, while Charles Morgan’s notice of The Matriarch has gone down to the bottom! We had very good seats in the third row with a good view of Edgar Wallace. A criminal face! All the front two rows were filled with friends of his, terribly fleshy bookmakers with diamond studs & mistresses. It was great fun. I’d never been to a first night before.’15

  *<
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  In the mornings he was working on his third novel, ‘Dear Sanity’, eventually to be entitled The Man Within. It was to be his first published novel. He had many unfinished novels – ‘Fanatic Arabia’ (which begins in a bus station); a murder mystery which he thought of during Mass in May 1927 involving a murdered governess and a priest who deduced that a girl of twelve had committed the crime; a school novel about a boy blackmailing a housemaster who had protected him; a spy story entitled ‘A Sense of Security’; and a fragment entitled The Other Side of the Border, published after the Second World War.16 He had also written a short story called ‘The Widow’, published twenty years later as ‘The Second Death’ in Nineteen Stories, but The Man Within was to bring him fame.

  It took him two years to write, two years of such a variety of activities and problems that it was something of an achievement for him to have completed it in that time. In A Sort of Life, he tells us that he began to plan it as he lay in the ward at the Westminster Hospital after his appendicectomy, that is in October 1926 – ‘it began with a hunted man’, the first of his many hunted heroes. Possibly, though, the notion of a hunted man as the initial inspiration for the novel came to him before he went into hospital when he was reviewing a book of poems by Wilfred Gibson, a popular poet of the time, for the Glasgow Herald. In his review he specifically referred to one poem which interested him whose subject was a prisoner being chased over a moor by men with rifles. And in writing to Vivien about Gibson’s poem, he says: ‘I can’t get started on these beastly short stories and the worst of it is another novel’s beginning to coagulate itself against my will.’17 Certainly the strong sense in Gibson’s poem of a feeling of freedom that comes when walking on the Downs is reflected in important chapters in the novel.

  It is unlikely that he got much further than the idea of a man at bay, but while he was recuperating in hospital he read a history of smuggling, The Smugglers, by Lord Teignmouth and Charles G. Harper, and the ‘coagulation began in earnest’. Excitedly he wrote to Vivien about the projected novel: ‘It’s all about smugglers round 1830 or 50. The first sentence is (roughly): “He came over the ridge of the downs at a weary jog trot and could almost have cried with relief at the sight of the wood below.”’fn1 But what ensured that it was not to be simply an historical novel ‘all about smugglers’ was a particular letter from The Smugglers: ‘There’s a gorgeous long cold-blooded letter by an anonymous informer to the Admiralty, after a fight in which a Customs Officer was killed. Which is lucky, because the “hero” of the novel has got to be an informer.’18 The third element in the novel was surely the significance the hunted man and the betrayer had for him, in stimulating his imagination.