The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  But it came too late to affect Greene’s future for he had already privately approached Charles Evans of Heinemann with what he called his ‘Great Scheme’ – understandable given the success of The Man Within. Putting the worst construction on his own action, as he often does, Greene describes in A Sort of Life how he wrote Evans a ‘blackmailing letter’ telling him that he must choose between The Times and novel writing for he could not do both; Greene clearly intended to leave The Times: ‘Nothing has transpired yet with the Great Scheme’, he wrote to his mother. ‘I had a lovely lunch last week with Evans & Doran [of Doubleday and Doran] at the Savoy. But no word of business.’3 The reason for this, Greene surmised, was that while Evans wanted to free him from The Times, cautious old Doran wanted to wait and see how The Man Within did in America.

  By 3 October the American reviews (all consistently good) had come in and Greene was put at once on a salary basis by Heinemann to tide him over and give him a chance to write full-time. He wrote to his mother: ‘Evans … made me a definite offer of £650 a year in advance of royalties on The Man Within & the next two books for two years payable monthly after I cease other work.’4 He added: ‘I’ve decided to accept it. There’s a risk but not, I think, a big one.’ He was to be proved wrong.

  Approaching The Times with his resignation was difficult. He spoke first to his immediate chief, George Anderson, who told him that in a few more years he could be the correspondence editor – a job of which he had already had some temporary experience – and advised him that his future at The Times was promising, as indeed it was. He had been brought into personal contact with the editor himself: ‘Closeted with the editor every afternoon at four o’clock I argued the merits of the letters and we decided which was to lead the page.’5 Greene felt exalted by the contact. He recalls to this day persuading the editor to accept a letter from the painter Walter Sickert which, because it looked as if it had been written with a matchstick, had offended Dawson’s tidy mind.

  Anderson’s arguments did not dissuade him and though the night editor ‘positively begged [him] to reconsider’6 Greene was determined to leave. For one thing, his book had already earned him £800 and had only recently appeared in America. With his usual succinct firmness he wrote to Lints Smith: ‘my chief ambition lies in that direction. I have decided to accept [Heinemann’s] offer.’7 Yet his letter of resignation was not all firmness for he ended with the hope (it was a form of hedging his bets) that he would be able to ‘retain some small connection with the paper by means of Court Page articles’, adding that Mr Brumwell had been kind enough to suggest that he should occasionally try his hand at light leaders.8

  Finally, the editor himself (a majestic figure in those days) tried to dissuade Greene from leaving – surely a measure of his success at The Times: ‘Dawson … took the conversation urbanely into his own hands,’ Greene wrote, ‘he said he understood that I had written a novel, and he congratulated me on its success – his wife had demanded a copy from her circulating library. The Times, he assured me, would have no objection if I continued to write novels in my spare time. The art critic, Mr Charles Marriott, had done so for many years, and even the dramatic critic, Mr Charles Morgan, had published one or two. Indeed the time might have almost come to try me out with an occasional third leader.’9 Something of the editor’s irritation comes out in his final words. ‘If his mind were really made up he could only say it was a rash and unfortunate decision.’ Prophetic words!

  Greene knew he had given his best to The Times and knew also what he had received in return. He was quite sure that there was no better career for a young novelist than to be for some years a sub-editor on ‘a rather conservative newspaper’: ‘The hours from four till around midnight, give him plenty of time to do his own work in the morning when he is still fresh from sleep – let the office employ him during his hours of fatigue. He has the company of intelligent and agreeable men of greater experience than his own: he is not enclosed by himself in a small room tormented by the problems of expression; and, except for rare periods of rush, even his working hours leave him time for books and conversation (most of us brought a book to read between one piece of copy and another). Nor is the work monotonous … And while the young writer is spending these amusing and unexacting hours, he is learning lessons valuable to his own craft. He is removing the clichés of reporters; he is compressing a story to the minimum length possible without ruining its effect.’10

  So often Greene gives us the impression that his actions are a bit of a lark and there was no emotional disturbance, but his wife’s account of those days11 gives us some notion of his anxiety while working for The Times and trying to write in his spare time: ‘Graham felt that he could never be a novelist unless he gave his whole time – he simply could not do it. Working up to midnight and then coming back in the tube, resting and then writing a couple of hours and going back to The Times. I used to have sandwiches and a Thermos waiting for him when he came in every night. Tea or Horlicks, ham or salad sandwiches. It was too exhausting, he couldn’t possibly work like that.’

  A contemporary of his in Room 2, Leslie Smith, recalls that a good deal of The Man Within was written in Room 2: ‘He actually began his career as a novelist in that room. I well remember our talking about it all. So he left Printing House Square & all his friends were delighted & relieved when there was no need for any looking back.’12

  Douglas Jay, who joined The Times as a sub-editor on 21 October 1929 (the date of the Wall Street crash, and three months before Greene left) described Greene to me as he was then: ‘He was good-looking, very distinctive looking. My main memory of him was that he had a worried look, and I used to glance at him particularly in the Tube and think “Is that just the cast of feature or is he really worrying terribly about something?” And to this day I never found the answer.’13

  Perhaps the answer lay in his having given up a perfectly splendid job for an uncertain future. He was, no doubt, saving himself from dullness, and he was doing what many journalists on The Times longed to do, spreading his wings and flying elsewhere. No one had actually resigned before. Yet Greene was to discover that the next few years were to be extremely precarious, and that his editor was right, his was a rash and unfortunate decision. Looking back, forty years later, Greene, the least nostalgic of men, has a fond remembrance of his life as sub-editor: ‘So I left the coal-grate and the faces under the green eyeshields, faces which remain as vivid to me now when the names of their owners are forgotten as those of close friends and women I have loved. In the years to come I was bitterly to regret my decision. I left The Times the author of a successful first novel. I thought I was a writer already and that the world was at my feet, but life wasn’t like that. It was only a false start.’14

  Graham Greene left The Times at the end of 1929. He spent the next fourteen months in London, living the life of a full-time writer at 8 Heathcroft, the ‘love basket’ – which was what it continued to be. A letter written on the third anniversary of his marriage gives an impressive indication that his love had not lessened:

  This is a hasty scrawl before you come in. I love you infinitely more on Oct. 15, 1930 than on Oct. 15, 1927, 28, 29. I do hope you are still just as happy. My grumbles are for trivial things. Underneath them I’m ecstatically happy all the time because I’m married to you, beautiful miracle … Darling, darling, goodbye. I’m afraid of you catching me writing & suspecting. I love you so. Your lover always.

  Surprisingly, the letter is unsigned. Perhaps he heard Vivien at the door and had to hide his note.

  Marriage initially mellowed Greene. And because, on his marriage, relations with his parents entered a new phase, he felt the need to acknowledge his debt to them: ‘I’m very happy at present, and I realise that a huge proportion of it I owe to you both. I hope I become a success, if only so that all you’ve both done for me isn’t wasted. There comes a time when gratitude wells up to a height above flood level, and as it’s hard, owing to some kink in my nature,
to speak it, I have to write it.’15

  He must have felt at this time that he was on the crest of a wave. His first published novel was a runaway success and he was now known as a writer and courted – the London Evening News, which was publishing a series of interviews with clever young men and women about what they expected from life, included Graham Greene. Given his relative immaturity at twenty-five, his expectations ‘after sustained effort’, were in part predictable: to be rich and successful and have houses in London, Somerset and Rhodes. His personal extravagances were to have his own private cinema and to walk the Great Wall of China. But basically he returned to a negative desire which reflected again his fundamental need – that his life should not be dull, ordinary or mechanical. Looking at his life as it had developed he recognised that all the happiest moments in the past seemed to him to have been exciting and a little insecure – ‘a sinister grouping of figures at night in a back street of Essen under the occupation; an aggressive crowd in an Irish village beyond a blown-up bridge … the sense of a very tenuously held peace.’16

  This of course would be eye-catching stuff in a newspaper interview, but it does reflect his recognition of his needs as a writer to find his material in foreign and dangerous areas. He went on to set a novel in Trier (The Name of Action) and Spain (Rumour at Nightfall) but this was only a partial recognition of his needs. He also said during the interview, again with insight, that success would mean that he would have the leisure ‘to become thoroughly acquainted with such strange and slightly sinister suburbs as Brixton and Streatham Hill’. What is also telling here, however, is the fact that these ‘suburbs’ were ‘strange and slightly sinister’. He is still looking at life outside his class as something to be explored and therefore a suitable subject for treatment in writing another best-seller. The seedy sides of London and Brighton were to provide him with the settings of It’s a Battlefield and Brighton Rock – but not until several years later. What he had to come to terms with was his mistaken fascination with Joseph Conrad’s Arrow of Gold – a romantic world hopelessly barren for him. It took time before he recognised that he had a sensitive nose for the odour of spiritual decay, for man’s sense of betrayal.

  He began writing The Name of Action ten months before he was to leave The Times and one month after the acceptance of The Man Within. As usual he planned to visit the setting for his new novel and wrote to his mother about taking a week in Trier in March to get local colour,17 but this did not come off. He was then living in London as an up-and-coming novelist, no longer as an anonymous sub-editor, and his time was so taken up with parties given by his British and American publishers and his literary agent, having lunch or dinner with a constant stream of new writers and taking an increasingly professional interest in films and the making of films, that he let slip the short holiday due him from The Times.

  *

  In August, he had a second chance to visit Trier but instead decided on an Hellenic cruise. He thought it was a justifiable extravagance and in excitement wrote to his mother to say he was sailing on 27 August on an Hellenic Club ship for a three weeks’ cruise. His father, who had often visited the Hellenes, was asked by Graham if he knew some of the people who might be aboard the ship and was also asked for a list of clothes he should pack: ‘Dinner jacket not tails, I imagine?’18 Also a brown-coloured postcard has survived from Athens which Greene sent to his senior colleague in Room 2 at The Times, Colonel Maude. On one side was a picture of the Temple of Theseus and on the other Greene had written, rather cryptically: ‘One old stone after another. But really rather lovely. And a glorious bathe in a hot clear emerald sea at Aegina. Very, very hot, but not too ecclesiastical.’19 But it was not simply a holiday, for during the cruise he visited Constantinople, spending twenty-four hours there. The brilliant last chapter of Stamboul Train, which he wrote three years later, could not have been completed without this short visit.

  He was not to visit Trier until a month before he completed The Name of Action and although, having spent only one night there, he was again moved by its magic: ‘It’s the loveliest place I’ve ever been to; I think it must have been my home in a previous incarnation’20 – his failure to renew his impressions of the town earlier was to be fatal for the novel.

  Characteristically, in order to complete The Name of Action, he took himself off in March 1930 to the King’s Arms in Woodstock, Oxford, and finished it on the 23rd, though he fled elsewhere to do the revisions as there had been two deaths, as he told his mother, ‘the landlord and his mother, in the last fortnight, and I saw a bat in the street this evening.’21 He revised the novel in the home of his old landlady at Oxford, Mrs Higginson. By 5 April, the book was more or less finished.

  In submitting the manuscript, he proposed to his publisher two uninspired titles, ‘Falls the Shadow’ and ‘Heretics in Love’. Neither was satisfactory and it was left to Clemence Dane to provide the title: ‘I’ve got the name of the book at last or rather C.D. got it: The Name of Action (“… and lose the name of action”. Hamlet).’ The manuscript was dedicated to his wife and on the endpaper he wrote:

  For Vivienne

  Because of her increasing

  loveliness

  followed by:

  ‘Because the mountain grass

  Cannot but keep the form

  Where the mountain hare has lain’

  And after writing,

  ‘Manuscript of “The Name of

  Action” Begun March 1929;

  Finished July 1930

  published October 6, 1930’

  he returned again to his wife:

  For Vivienne

  ‘Thou art so true: that thought of thee suffice,

  To make dreams truth; and fables histories’

  The novel completed, Greene was commissioned by the Graphic magazine, in which had appeared his ‘Murder for the Wrong Reason’, to visit Oberammergau, the village in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, to write about its Passion Play, which had been produced by the villagers once every ten years since 1634 in fulfilment of a vow of thanksgiving for the end of the Black Death. The production is strictly amateur and the responsibility of the local villagers. Five thousand people attended that year (1930) with their hats, high heels, nasal voices and most of all umbrellas, for the performance took place in torrential rain: ‘At the scene on Golgotha, Nature added what stage craft could not do … the sky darkened from bright sunlight, and as the body was being taken from the Cross, rain began … lashing into the covered inner stage, beating against the long white cerements and whirling the cloaks of the women watching at the foot of the Cross …’22

  At Oberammergau he found a telegram waiting for him from his publisher Charles Evans: ‘Your book magnificent. Congratulations.’ ‘So that’s cheering,’ he wrote laconically on a postcard to his mother. Forty years later, recalling the enthusiastic telegram, he asked, ‘How could I tell how bad it really was? Evans must have known, but he was determined to keep it dark for the time. He had a reputation for discovering young writers, and he couldn’t admit a mistake too quickly.’23 Perhaps so, though publishers are human and make genuine mistakes, but still thinking of that telegram in his middle seventies, Greene was less condemnatory of his publisher: ‘Perhaps he was as innocent and romantic as his author.’24

  Between books, in spite of his trip to Oberammergau, Greene was very restless that summer. In June he was excited at the prospect of a visit to Iceland. He had approached the Graphic asking them to commission an article on that country, for Iceland was celebrating the millennium of its parliament, the Althing: ‘I’m going to Iceland!!’ he told his mother. ‘Leave Leith in a steamer about the size of a channel boat on June 17. Arrive Reykjavik on June 24, and leave again on June 30.’ Then he discovered he could not get a return passage in time for publication of his book, so his trip fell through.

  In early July he saw Paul Robeson as Othello – ‘he was very, very, good’ – and he spent the following weekend with Clemence Dane at Axmin
ster. Clemence Dane had, in the early 1920s, written plays which achieved long runs (in particular her near classic, A Bill of Divorcement and her ingenious reconstruction of the dramatist’s life in Will Shakespeare), but more to the point she was, with others, involved in deciding on a novel for the monthly Book Society choice. She admired Greene and he, his eyes wide open, knew what he was doing spending the weekend with an attractive older woman: ‘I hope she may induce the Book Society to do something for me.’

  It was not to be: ‘Alas! The Book Society, in spite of Clemence Dane, have not taken the book, so fame and fortune must wait awhile yet. I was really rather disappointed.’25 If we take into account Graham’s usually cautious tone when writing to his mother, it is probable that he had in fact suffered a deep disappointment over his novel’s failure.

  Then his brother Raymond, who was distraught because his first wife had recently left him, suggested they should go to Moscow together but the expense was too great. Instead, they settled for a trip to Burgundy, ‘to Dijon, “the gastronomical centre of the world”! We are going third class so as to have more money to spend on food and wine! The German Railways, to whom I wrote when we were thinking of Russia, have sent me a free pass to Königsberg in East Prussia, but as it’s only for one it’s not much use.’26

  Just before his visit to Burgundy, he made a literary pilgrimage to Thomas Hardy country. Hardy had died two years before: ‘We went over to Dorchester one day and bardolized, walking out to Stinsford Church (Mellstock) where Hardy is buriedfn2 and to Bock-hampton his birthplace, a tiny hidden village where a by-road comes to an end and fades out into moor.’27