The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  The proofs of Rumour at Nightfall arrived in August 1931, and he hurried through them, hoping that Heinemann would publish the novel in September, but it was to be October or November. Waiting, he worked on the Rochester biography, suffering from hay fever and asthma: ‘It’s very asthmatic this year, making it impossible to breathe deep,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘Could you let me have the names of those papers one burns at night?’ But he worked on, doing his 500 words a day until he had finished the Rochester biography. It was to be rejected.

  Long afterwards, in A Sort of Life, but still with a hint of bitterness he wrote: ‘I had wasted time and effort on a life of Lord Rochester which Heinemann had without hesitation turned down, and I was too uncertain of myself to send it elsewhere.’13 The biography, he concluded, was ‘one of the follies which dot the landscapes of a novelist’s life as much as an architect’s.’ But he was surely wrong. Of course it was quixotic to write it then, and it is difficult to judge why Greene at this crucial point in his life, as a comparatively unknown, comparatively unsuccessful novelist, should switch from the art of the novel to that of biography, which depends hugely on historical and literary research. Heinemann and Doubleday were waiting for a novel and the ‘Great Scheme’ had not been hatched for Greene to become a biographer. The biography was not ‘a folly’ in terms of the quality of the work, in spite of being completed at a gallop. It is indeed an excellent short life, and when it was finally published forty-three years later in 1974, Greene made no substantial changes, keeping only those he would have made at proof stage in 1932. Moreover, the biography is a much more sophisticated and professional production than the three self-conscious novels he had written prior to it. There is nothing amateurish about it.

  Why did Heinemann so summarily reject it? One reason must be that they already suspected that Rumour at Nightfall would be a failure and that they could do little with a biography from an author who had failed with his last two novels. They would also have been aware that, in those days, the general public might well have been scared off by Rochester’s reputation as a pornographer. Nor would an academic audience be won over since the information Greene was able to provide on Rochester remained, inevitably, thin. There must also have been the fear that an action for obscenity might well have been brought against author and publishers, mild though the biography might seem to us now. He was warned about this by a friend he made at that time, John Hayward, editor of the Penguin Book of Verse, editorial director of Book Collector and editor of the Nonesuch Rochester, to whom he wrote from Campden on 12 October 1931, enthusiastic about his research: ‘Did you look through the Sackville Papers in the Record Office? I was thinking of examining them. Do you know what old Lady Rochester’s connection with Aylesbury was? I am interested as the father hid there after the failure of the “start”.’ (This was the failure of an insurrection against Cromwell, when Rochester’s father, the first Earl, was forced to hide at Aylesbury, and then flee from an inn into the night leaving his baggage behind.) Hayward’s advice to Greene was that he should bear in mind that if a charge of obscenity was brought against him over the Rochester biography, it might possibly be extended to include Hayward, whose text he had used, and his publishers.14

  His friendship with Hayward developed only after the Second World War, but what we know of it reveals a very sympathetic aspect of Greene’s character. In an article written on the death of John Hayward in 1965, he recalled their first meeting when Hayward, although a year younger than he, already had a reputation as a scholar, whereas Greene ‘was established nowhere at all, yet he received me generously … I had no previous experience in writing a biography, and as a novelist I had as yet produced only three bad novels and one popular novel.’15

  If his surviving first letter to Hayward approximately dates their meeting, he had not at that time even produced ‘one popular novel’, for Rumour at Nightfall (not to be popular) was still in proof stage and he was three months away from starting his ‘one popular novel’, Stamboul Train. But he must have greatly appreciated Hayward’s friendship at a time when he had had failures, was living in the country, as poor as a church mouse, far away from London.

  Hayward was physically ugly and badly crippled, but his condition only brought out a deep sympathy in Greene and a desire to defend him: ‘That powerful head ugly? that twist of the half paralysed arm, as the agile hand seized a cup or procured itself a cigarette? the wicked intelligence of the eyes? A cripple, yes, but there are few men I can remember with greater vitality … I am sure no man in London in his day was a repository of more intimate confessions.’16

  Because Hayward’s only sexual satisfaction could be in the mind, Greene would send him ‘dirty postcards’ from every part of the world, recognising that there were ‘few men with a greater appreciation of physical love’.17 A typical example is a card which Greene sent in 1963, two years before Hayward’s death. A shocked nurse and doctor are standing over an anaesthetised patient, the nurse with scissors in her hand: ‘But Nurse,’ says the doctor, ‘I said remove his spectacles!’fn3

  It is likely that scholastic, philosophical and literary drives, plus a fascination with Rochester’s life and character, pushed him into writing this biography. It could also have been another way of escape from the writing of unsuccessful novels of the imaginative kind into the factual world of research, and from the monetary troubles and rustic life of Chipping Campden. Letters to Vivien when he was working in the British Museum suggest another way of escape – it was not all research.

  One is dated simply ‘Sat 5.30 The British Museum’: ‘I’m spending to-night with Tooter. He has a bed free and we are meeting at 6.30 for cocktails and a cinema. I do wish it was you and not him. I miss you so very, very much.’ By Tuesday of the following week he had ‘finished off the whole of the museum work, including Sodom. Quite fruitful. This afternoon I spent at the Record Office, a terrible place, enabling myself to see the Sackville Papers to-morrow morning.’ Then he admits: ‘I had a mild blind with Tooter on Saturday and on Sunday after Mass he drove me down to the Bridgewater Arms and we walked about round Ivinghoe. Then I went off to Battersea to Aunt N’s. Last night I took her to Antoine’s and the “Blue Express” afterwards. I wished all the time that it was you.’

  *

  Heinemann’s rejection of his well-crafted biography must have been a terrible blow to the Greenes, but worse was to follow when the reviews of Rumour at Nightfall began to appear. The New Statesman and Nation said: ‘Mr Graham Greene … has … a good story to tell. But he is so resolutely and laboriously romantic that one can believe scarcely a word he says. The (psychological) drama is dressed up in all the colours of carnival; the emotions of his characters are largely theatrical; he achieves definition of falsification.’18 The American The Nation was puzzled: ‘Mr Greene’s mysticism, however, is so often akin to mystification that it is difficult to say just where the truth ends and the false begins.’19

  There was not much difference in what the New Republic had to say on 27 April 1932: ‘These characters stagger under the overwhelming weight of their own mental questionings and probings … Mr Greene’s forte is his ability to cover places and objects with atmosphere laid on heavily, like paint’, and the Spectator, the magazine for which Greene was later to do much of his best reviewing, commented that Mr Greene was, ‘one of those authors who have something to say but whose turgidity prevents them from saying it’.20

  The critics’ response to The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall was justified. Both are juvenile novels of escape. In The Name of Action Greene is still inhabiting a boyhood world, reminiscent of Anthony Hope’s romantic Ruritania. And his style lacks directness, being dogged by absurd images. In The Name of Action, ‘a revolver drooped like a parched flower to the pavement.’ In Rumour at Nightfall: ‘The small drift of papers lay like winter between them, across the blown petals of the carpet.’ Somewhere Greene has written, ‘No one is born a bad writer’, but if we had only these two novels
we might be justified in thinking him mistaken. The trouble with Rumour at Nightfall is that it is worse than The Name of Action, the melodrama being pitched higher.

  Many years later, in Ways of Escape (1980), he could himself look critically at the weaknesses of his early work: ‘All is vague, shadowy, out of focus … There are far too many adjectives and too much explanation of motive, no trust in the reader’s understanding and overlong description. The dialogue is ambiguous and … has to be explained to the reader. I find “he thought” ten times in ten pages.’21

  In fact, he had not yet found his true vision and voice, but at the time he defended himself to his mother, ‘Reviewers as usual are intent on blaming one for failing in doing something one has carefully and on purpose evaded.’ Even if the result was bad he would appear to have had something in mind, with the action seen from the point of view of two characters who are fairly identical, and all readers of Conrad will recognise his influence again.

  One reviewer, Frank Swinnerton, for whom Greene had little respect, nevertheless ‘opened [his] eyes to [his] fool’s progress … I knew the truth when I read it.’22 That acknowledgment, however, came much later in A Sort of Life: the review was published in the Evening News on 20 November 1931.

  Just before Swinnerton died he wrote: ‘As to Graham Greene, I never met him: but have been told that he attributes to something I wrote a change in his manner of writing which has brought fame and fortune – not very gratefully, I fear.’23 Swinnerton’s assessment of the novel was clear-cut: ‘Its setting is Carlist Spain; its characters are three in number; its story a simple triangle; and its mysteriousness infinite … Mr Greene’s [characters] spend their time in hinting. You would think they concealed a difficult profundity … [Their] actions are … simple; their talk seems to belong to another world. It is the incongruity that baffles the reader. Not one of these people can give a plain answer to a plain question. Their tongues jump heavily into irrelevance. They are not so much evasive as gravely incomprehensible, even to one another.’

  Greene was learning his lesson the hard way, and at a time when he was desperately short of money. In the middle of 1931, he told Hugh that his proposal of a walk together up the Moselle would be just unadulterated heaven, but he could not see how he could afford even a ten shilling excursion ticket to Southend. Near the end of the year he enclosed no present when sending Hugh birthday wishes, offering intead a choice: ‘bread now, jam later. A. a book now up to the value of 10/6d or B. a cheque next month for £1.’

  *

  If 1931 was the worst year of Graham’s life creatively and financially, what was it like for his brothers, Hugh, Herbert and Raymond?

  Hugh was in his final year at Merton College, Oxford; Herbert, the black sheep of the family, truly a drifter unable to hold down any job for long, was living in Crowborough with (and on) his mother and retired father; but Raymond, three years Graham’s senior, was reaching a pinnacle of popular fame.

  From April to September 1931 Raymond Greene was hardly ever out of the news and his climb to fame could be followed in The Times. Raymond was a brilliant medical doctor but climbing was his life-long passion and that year, along with at least two other well known mountaineers, F. S. Smythe (an old Berkhamstedian and leader of the expedition) and Eric Shipton, set out to conquer the Himalayan mountain, Kamet. Raymond went as physician to the expedition and he also intended to carry out experiments on the effects on the human frame of low pressures and the lack of oxygen in high altitudes.

  Curiously, there is little comment about Raymond’s exploits in Greene’s letters to his mother. In one undated letter (probably 13 September 1931) he does write of Raymond’s success, and after Raymond’s return he asked her to give him his love and congratulations: it is rather perfunctory and he makes no reference to the expedition during the months it was making headlines. His diary records that he skimmed through Smythe’s book on the expedition for references to Raymond and noted that there were a lot of close-ups of him in the documentary film, but he must have felt strongly the contrast between his brother’s success and what he saw as his own considerable failure: his Kamet, he must have felt, was insurmountable. And although they belonged to a close-knit family, Graham had always been closer to Hugh, feeling that Raymond was too snobbish, had too little time for the underdog, was too proper, too popular – and too successful. It cannot have helped that Raymond, after his latest success, returned to England from Paris by plane, an avant-garde thing to do then.

  *

  Greene recorded in his diary on 14 July 1932 that he had gone to a swimming baths that day, but expresses his dislike for the exercise because there is nothing to do but swim, but he goes on: ‘Perhaps it dates back to what I suffered in the baths at school, not physical suffering … but mental, when I was alone, except for an older boy still, called Dunkerley, in being unable to swim.’ His fear of being picked on extended into his adult years when he visited a circus at Chipping Campden with Vivien: ‘There was only one other person in the ringside seats and I was a little oppressed with the fear of that unfeeling and unanswerable humour which makes the comic man so often pick out the conspicuous for his jokes. But we were left alone.’24

  When Graham had returned to Berkhamsted after psychoanalysis his sense of competitiveness had increased, especially between Raymond and himself, and this seems to have in some degree directed the course of their lives:

  I used to have an absurd competition complex with Raymond. Raymond used to write and publish in the School Magazine, and win school prizes for verse. So I had to write too, I never succeeded in winning any prizes for verse, but then … I began to make money on it, so I felt one up there.

  R. had the same sense he confessed once, and stopped writing verse directly I began to get mine published, and his was much more promising. Then his new tack became adventure, and he became a first class mountaineer. That worried me, and so I started on my Irish and then my German stunt, and he parried with Aleister Crowley and Sicily … and then he got into the [Oxford University Mountaineering] Club and edited Oxford Mountaineering. I parried the last with the [Oxford] Outlook but his mountaineering was a thorn. You see I always had a sense that he might get killed doing it, and call me a very final ‘blast’ in the adventure line, so it was that, as well as boredom, that made me take up the revolver trick [Russian roulette]. It was very satisfactory the first time, though I felt in no end of a funk. I felt, even though he didn’t know it, I’d got to a more exciting sensation than he ever had. But then, after I’d done it at pretty long intervals, five times, it was no longer fearfully exciting, and I felt the only fair way was to meet him on his own ground, and so last Easter vac. I’d meant to go up to the Lakes with him and begin to learn climbing, then just before that vac. came I met you, and I was no longer interested in the ridiculous competition … Of course it wasn’t so consciously reasoned as this.25

  Perhaps he was right, though the termination comes too pat as a compliment to Vivien at the beginning of their relationship. He told his mother, soon after Raymond’s first wife had left him, that in his view Raymond was ‘badly warped by his last years at school and it made him extraordinarily difficult’, but when they went on holiday together to Burgundy, after the separation, he admitted that he had never before liked Raymond as much as on this trip but this was because the failure of his marriage ‘had brought down his defences and he was himself’. His sympathy could go out to Raymond because he had been left on his own in Oxford to continue his medical practice in a town of knitting gossips: ‘It’s rotten for him to be left to have his bones picked by them and listen to the obscene whispers’.26

  *

  ‘In those days at Campden’, Vivien recalled, ‘we were very frightfully poor … I had pocket money 10 shillings a week and that was for clothes and stamps – everything. And Graham was getting more and more depressed for you see he was always in debt to his publisher and it was the debt he had himself willingly arranged. That was the terrible time, ve
ry depressing, the feeling that he was not making any headway and his books weren’t selling.’ Expenses had to be meticulously noted; the mantles for the paraffin lamps, for example, were very fragile and if broken cost half-a-crown each to replace: ‘But it was a good period. It was before we had children and we were very wrapped up in each other, and struggled together … It was very idyllic in a way.’27

  Their personal difficulties took place against the setting of the ‘thread-bare thirties’28 at the time of the great depression which began with the collapse of Wall Street in October 1929, and was repeated throughout the western world. This loss of confidence caused foreign funds to be withdrawn from European countries, including Britain – gold was leaving the country at a rate of £2 million a day.

  To cope with the crisis a National Government was formed under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald. On 11 September 1931, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, introduced an emergency bill, which, among other measures, included a 10 per cent cut in the pay of government employees, and in the dole for the unemployed. Snowden suspended the gold standard and at once the pound sterling found its true level at 70 per cent of its gold value. The results were an increase in unemployment and the creation of distressed areas with, in some cases, the whole population of some villages being on the dole.

  Perhaps the fact that King George took a 10 per cent cut in his income inspired the conversation between Greene and a railway porter on Budget Day, 11 September 1931, which he recorded in a letter to his mother: