The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  He told Vivien that he could not go further with the novel until he had ‘been to Sussex and fixed up the scene and the scenery’, and it could be that this urge, in spite of his dithering in November 1926 as to whether he should convalesce in Paris or Brighton, took him to Brighton. He knew Brighton and its surroundings well, had always been happy there as a child and relished the idea of exploring the Downs again. His first letter to Vivien from Brighton was written on 7 November and on the back of the hotel envelope (he was staying at 32 Regency Square which faces the West Pier) is a postscript: ‘Been up on the Dyke and now walked down into Patcham and am having tea. Wonderful day and wonderful colours on the downs. One wood had four distinct colours – not shades. I wish you were here. Tomorrow if fine I shall train out to Hassocks in the middle of the downs. Feeling fearfully fit.’

  While he was enjoying this period of physical convalescence he was very much mentally alive in terms of his projected novel. The following day provided him with the house his heroine Elizabeth would live in and where the novel would have its dramatic beginning and compulsive ending – though he seems also to have had in mind the possibility that he and Vivien might spend a holiday there:

  The weather yesterday was lovely, and I had the most wonderful afternoon and evening that I’ve ever had apart from you. The colours on the downs were gorgeous and I covered endless backs of envelopes with snippets [for the novel]. As it got dusk I went down into Patcham, a charming village, and found a cottage for tea, and had hot homemade cakes by the light of an old lamp and a great log fire. And wind and rain swept up outside. And I heard the most wonderful, or it seemed to me then, conversation in the passage outside. I had a sense of complete ecstasy. I wanted to shout with joy. The cottage would be ideal to stay at. The widow who keeps it has her own poultry, and being South African and judging by her cakes she ought to be able to cook. And her charge is 35/- a week in summer and 25/- a week in winter!!! Fifteen minutes from Brighton by bus and right in the Downs! … I’m afraid of seeing it all by daylight, after the wonderful last night … Returning in the dark on the top of a bus – it had stopped raining – I saw a train all sparks and flame – plunge through a wood high up on the side of a Down.19

  On the next day he writes of the South African widow as one ‘who sees the ghost of her husband in corners’, and the heroine of the novel is similarly conscious of the spirit of her recently deceased guardian, and firmly believes that spirits rise again from the dead.

  The ‘scene and scenery’ of the novel included the setting of the middle chapters, the Assizes at Lewes. While his experience of Assize courts was not great, he had, as we know, on several occasions attended the Old Bailey when he was staying at his psychiatrist’s home in London, and in May 1927 he attended a court session in the company of his friend Eric Guest. ‘I went and found Guest and strolled round the courts with him. The judges are too ludicrously Dickensian for words. We haven’t progressed since the days of Jeffrys as far as the Lord Chief Justice is concerned. He and Sherman and another judge were deciding some divorce or paternity case. He sat like a small flat dissipated toad with his chin on his belly, and every now and then exchanging a foul joke and leer with Sherman and speaking in a soft sucking dove voice.’20

  These accounts of the beginning of the novel and the research for it prefigure what was to become his established way of approaching his material. Following the initial incident or situation which sparked off his imagination, there would be careful and personal research of the setting and also his note-taking, sparse but accurate – ‘four distinct colours – not shades’. Suggestions for characters would come from people he met during his exploration of the chosen setting. And important is the sense he gives of the experience of the travel involved – riding on top of a bus, and the time it took from Brighton to London. His setting and minor characters would be established by these means, but he would in this instance look elsewhere for his major characters and his plot.

  *

  Between the research in Brighton in November 1926 and the completion of the novel in November 1928, he had had his period of illness and worry, had returned to work, found a flat for himself and Vivien, seen his father’s retirement, married, and come back to London to a very full social and working life. In spite of this he pressed on with the novel. He wrote to his mother in February 1927 of how he ‘longed to throw up hopeless ambition & go for walks instead.’21 As late as March 1928 he was still researching the setting for the novel, as a postcard to his parents shows: ‘Hope it will be fine for Lewes on Sat. We hope to walk over the Downs from Hassocks.’ His need to go over the physical setting of a novel even when involved in writing the final version was already established.

  Since he always wrote regularly to his mother, the fact that he did not write between 23 July and 21 September 1928 suggests that he was totally engrossed in the final stages of his novel, and this is confirmed in a letter of 27 September: ‘I’m afraid I haven’t written for years, but I’ve been frantically busy finishing off Dear Sanity. Yet another attempt on the publishers with at least the merits of no sickness.’22 In November, the first anniversary of his marriage gone, he had the typescript of the novel in his hands, though it brought him no happiness: ‘I’m beginning to go through Dear Sanity but having now read it at least six times it seems to me too incredibly purposeless for words. A mug’s game!’23 Nevertheless, he sent the typescript to both Heinemann and The Bodley Head. In his letter to Charles Evans at Heinemann, no doubt remembering their long delay over his previous mislaid manuscript and their subsequent rejection of it, he wrote: ‘Dear Mr Evans, you will have forgotten who I am. I sent you a novel some 18 months ago called The Episode which you were kind enough to consider at some length and, I believe, read yourself.’ And he expressed the hope that this, his latest attempt, ‘may have scored an outer’. He was, however, resigned to another long delay and told his mother that the novel was ‘unutterably bad’. There was some pleasure in not getting a quick decision for uncertainty was more easy to live with than the confirmation of another failure. In fact, he had to wait only ten days for a decision.

  He recalls that one day during the winter of 1928 he was lying in bed suffering from a bad attack of flu and listening to the sounds of his wife washing up the breakfast things in the kitchen when –

  The telephone rang in the sitting-room and my wife came in and told me, ‘There’s a Mr Evans wants to speak to you.’ ‘I don’t know anyone called Evans,’ I said. ‘Tell him I’m in bed. Tell him I’m ill.’ Suddenly a memory came back to me: Evans was the chairman of Heinemann’s, and I ran to snatch the telephone. ‘I’ve read your novel,’ he said. ‘We’d like to publish it. Would it be possible for you to look in here at eleven?’ My flu was gone in that moment and never returned.24

  Which was hardly surprising, given the events that followed, for Evans and his staff thought they had a best-seller on their hands. Grace Cranston, who worked for Heinemann in 1928, remembered well when The Man Within first arrived: ‘It was the first promising book by a new author that came to us at the Windmill Press, and it was welcomed as an omen of good books to come … Leslie Cavender, then manager of the trade department here, and an excellent book man told us all to buy a copy of the first edition – “it’s sure to appreciate in value”. In fact, there was quite a bit of excitement about the book among the staff here.’25

  Greene’s excitement can be charted in his letters to his mother. On 7 January 1929 he wrote:

  Great News! Doubleday, Doran & Co. have taken the book. £50 in advance of royalties & ten percent on all copies. They’ve promised me to send it to the Book Society of America … it sells about 80,000 copies straight away. It’s coming out in England in May. Evans this morning read me a letter from Clemence Dane in which she said that she liked the book immensely & that I was ‘a born writer’ & she thought perhaps a born dramatist too, as there was a fine play to be got out of the novel! … We still haven’t found a title. The M.S. is going to be s
ent to Tennyson Jesse as apparently she has a flair for such.26

  The book was not to be published until after the general election in June. As late as March the title had not been decided on: ‘Flight has too much of a Lindbergh suggestion. My latest idea is The Man Within quotation from Sir Thomas Browne “There’s another man within me that’s angry with me.” The voting is now between The Man Within (which both Evans and I now dislike as a hint of theology), One Within (Evans’ suggestion) & The Divided Heart (mine).’

  On 5 June 1929 Greene told his mother: ‘There’s a publicity para. in John O’London’s this coming Saturday containing several inaccuracies for which I am not responsible’, and he added: ‘The editor of John O’London’s (a terribly low brow paper but bought by masses) who has read it, predicts that “with ordinary luck it will be the publishing success of the late Spring season” … But I am earnestly pouring cold water on my hopes.’

  The paragraph in John O’London’s Weekly on 8 June 1929, in spite of some inaccuracies, obviously depended on information provided by Greene himself:

  Messrs Heinemann have great expectations of a first novel which they are to publish in a few days’ time. This is ‘The Man Within’, by Mr Graham Greene, a first cousin twice removed of Robert Louis Stevenson and Whyte-Melville.fn2 Mr. Greene, who is only twenty-four years of age, seems to be a remarkable young man. He has barrel-organed through Hertfordshire, disguised as a tramp; tramped Ireland during the Republican ‘troubles’; and worked for a tobacco firm, while publishing his verses and prose fantasies. After coming down from Oxford he became sub-editor on the Nottingham paper where Sir James Barrie began as a leader-writer and of which Mr. Cecil Roberts was at one time editor. Mr Greene was married two years ago – at the age of twenty-two. H.L.M.

  ‘The plot thickens,’ Greene wrote to his mother. ‘More than 100 copies have been sent out to the big booksellers with a special letter. They [Heinemanns] are advertising as well in the trade papers – a full page advertisement in The Publisher’s Circular this week.’27 The plot thickened still further. The novel was a publishing success, selling 8,000 copies. Two editions were sold before publication and within six months it went into six impressions and was translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. On both sides of the Atlantic the story went out that a brilliant new literary star had been born, and the literary parties began two weeks before publication day: ‘On Tuesday night we go to a party given by Doubleday, the Chairman of Doubleday & Doran, as well as Heinemann: Shy Youth will have to be my cue! I’m having my photograph taken next week at the firm’s expense.’28

  During that hot summer the parties continued and he met the writers of the day: ‘lunch with my agent [David Higham] & met Storm Jameson’; ‘On Thursday we’ve been invited to a party at one of the female portions of my agents’ to meet the Somerville novelists, Rose Macaulay, Margaret Kennedy [author of The Constant Nymph, best-seller in 1924]. Too terrifying’ (undated letters). And they went to ‘a terribly grand party at the American publishers the day before the publication, with people like the Duchess of Devonshire, Rudyard Kipling etc. floating about. We drank a lot of champagne & felt happy.’29 Then there was the great banquet held by Doubleday and Heinemann – they were in uneasy partnership – at the Savoy Hotel: ‘The party on Monday was fun,’ he wrote. ‘I was introduced to Arnold Bennett who was tipsy, Hugh Walpole, Miss Sackville-West, and Mary Borden. And other “great” figures who loomed round included Edgar Wallace, W. B. Maxwell, A. E. W. Mason & Maurice Baring! Bennett was sweet.’30

  In August 1982 Greene said that he thought Bennett was the only great author he had met (though earlier he had said the same thing about H. G. Wells) and in his introduction to Margaret Lane’s biography of Edgar Wallace he recalled that original meeting with Bennett, Walpole and Edgar Wallace, without mentioning that Bennett was tipsy: ‘I found myself a junior guest, very much “a stranger and afraid” at a great publishers’ do at the Savoy Hotel … Dinner at the long tables, set at right angles, seemed a kind of frozen geometry, but for a young man it was worse when the geometrical figure was eventually broken, and I found myself with my coffee seated beside Arnold Bennett, who, when a waiter gave me a glass of “something” … remarked sternly, “A serious writer does not drink liqueurs.’” Bennett’s comment doomed Greene, so far as liqueurs were concerned, to a lifetime’s abstinence.

  He also saw what he was certain was the first meeting between Edgar Wallace and Hugh Walpole – ‘the giant of the circulating library and the giant of the cheap edition, the writer who wanted, vainly, to be distinguished and recognized and applauded as a literary figure, and the writer who wanted, vainly too, to have all the money he needed, not to bother about debts, to win the Derby every first Wednesday in June, and to escape, to escape from the knowledge of the world which perhaps the other would have given half his success to have really shared. I remember Walpole’s patronizing gaze, his bald head inclined under the chandeliers like that of a bishop speaking with kindness to an unimportant member of his diocese. And the unimportant member? – he was so oblivious of the bishop’s patronage that the other shrank into insignificance before the heavy confident body, the long challenging cigarette holder, the sense that this man cared not a fly-button for the other’s world. They had nothing in common, not even an ambition. Even in those days I found myself on the side of Wallace.’31

  A fortnight later he was again at the Savoy with his publisher and two favourite Heinemann authors, Michael Arlen, author of the best-seller, The Green Hat (1924), and Maurice Baring: ‘Arlen wasn’t nearly as bad as one would expect & Baring was sweet. Like one of P. G. Wodehouse’s silly young men grown old and bald. Quite adorable.’32 Meeting Arlen again for lunch a week later, Graham was now blasé enough to joke about it: ‘Oh & next week I’m lunching to meet Michael Arlen. We brother best sellers, you know.’33

  In an undated letter to his wife written from Heathcroft (‘the basket’ had now become ‘the burrow’) at 11.30 p.m. when she was asleep in bed, he describes a tea party that day at Charles Evans’s home which was ‘very nice. Strawberries & cream etc. under the trees. Everybody very amiable … Cunninghame Grahamfn3 was there.’ He also accepted a number of invitations: ‘oh my dear I’ve been and gone and promised to [Clemence Dane] – “all butter” for a weekend’; ‘Old Lowndes & his wifefn4 were there. Mrs said she wanted to invite us to dinner … Mrs Doubleday very amiable.’ He travelled back with Keith Winter, Barbara Noble (The Years that Take the Best Away) – ‘too too country cousinish, lives at Brighton & Gillian Oliver (The Broomscod Collar) rather nice, staying at Golders Green. I’ve invited her to supper on Wednesday … I felt very seniorish as the last two knew nobody & their books had not been a success.’

  Opinions on the novel were, almost without exception, commendatory – in some cases ecstatic. This view was understandable to Helga Guinness, her husband and the rest of the family, because: ‘There was something special about [Graham], it was very difficult to know what it was, just that we thought so and indeed the family had always thought that he was a genius and this was a thought they had had right from his very early days when he was just a boy.’ Hugh and Helga, while feeling that Greene was a genius, did not then think he would ever become famous and popular. They thought he would remain unappreciated by the general public: ‘We thought The Man Within was a wonderful novel, very strange, very curious, and made him very different.’34

  They were, of course, quite wrong. Greene was ‘doomed’ to reach success with his first published novel. The Outlook and Independence of New York called it ‘probably the most original and possibly the strongest new talent of the year in English fiction, a remarkable study of the inward conflict of a dual nature.’35 S. P. B. Mais, writing in the Daily Telegraph, thought it was a first novel of ‘such perfect point and accomplishment that one trembled for the future of the young author.’ The Nation was also concerned about the author’s future in case this ‘perfect adventure story of a psychologi
cal treasure might have led to the author’s burning himself out in one trial’. The Newsagent and Bookshelf thought it was a wonderful story and strongly recommended it as a book to be introduced to customers who relied on a bookseller’s judgment: ‘They will be more than ever convinced that you are a good judge.’ The Oxford journal, Isis, admitted that ‘Oxford may or may not remember the author of this novel – not so long ago he was well known in Oxford journalism’ – but considered that ‘this book is a sufficiently forceful reminder.’ The Sunday Times could find ‘no flaw in this strangely fascinating book.’ The Sphere published a photograph of the young author under the title ‘A NEW STAR’, and introduced him as: ‘Mr Graham Greene, the author of The Man Within hailed upon this page by Mr Arnold Palmer as a novel of extreme brilliance.’ The Publisher’s Circular was certain that there would be ‘a big demand for this book – in style original and powerful’.

  A number of critics compared him with Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘Mr Graham Greene writes with a distinction and a subtlety that Robert Louis Stevenson (of whom he is a cousin twice removed) would, we feel sure, have applauded’ (The Times). The same point was made by the Inverness Courier while the Daily Telegraph spoke of the book as being impregnated with beauty, subtle in construction, in dramatic tension comparable with the best chapters of Treasure Island.