The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  What an awful Budget! One really feels that someone ought to have been hanged on a lamp post. Dialogue with a porter at a minute country halt near here:

  Porter: They do say as ’ow George [The King] may be going like Alphonso’s gone. [In 1931, King Alfonso XIII left Spain rather than face civil war and street demonstrations.]

  Self: O, well, I suppose he’ll be quite glad to retire.

  Porter: Ah, but where to?

  Self: To his country house at Sandringham, perhaps.

  Porter: (Mysteriously): Perhaps ’e’d go where ’is dog went.

  Self:?

  Porter: Six feet under ground!

  ‘Quite good for a country halt, is it not?’29

  His mother’s objections to the porter’s remarks must have touched a sensitive nerve, for Greene’s response, stemming no doubt from his own financial difficulties, was quite explosive:

  No, I don’t say that I agree with the porter. What I object to is the politicians’ cant about patriotism. Both Conservatives and Socialists having by their ever criminal muddle landed us in a mess, they appeal to our patriotism to get them and ourselves out of it. I feel that floodlights should be turned on the once applauded quotation: ‘Patriotism is not enough.’ Economy too is not going to be more than a temporary expedient; these taxes will lead to less expenditure by people, less trade, and we shall be in a worse holefn4 than ever in two or three years. My only remedy is for all whose work can be done anywhere in the world to naturalise themselves as subjects of King Zog of Albania,fn5 live five months a year only in England (so as not to be liable to income tax), four months in France (for the same reason) and three months in Germany! Thus escaping all direct taxation. It’s time that we formed an Honourable Order of Rats to escape from this peculiarly useless, unaesthetic, disagreeably run and obviously sinking ship. Up with the flag of Albania and God save King Zog! One contemplates a choice of interesting and beautiful names – Rafechvitch Pzzchuygl or perhaps Thurchygl Ig. Of course one’s nom de plume would be Graham Greene.30

  The new government’s increase in income tax must have increased Greene’s anger, for, in Vivien’s view, they were really ‘terribly poor, certainly much poorer than anyone of our own social equality. The rent was £50 a year,’31 though they could afford a servant, but this was traditional and no middle-class family then was without one, though it might mean going without certain essentials. Even so, they were forced to take the cheapest part-timer on the market – a certain Miss Greenall from a ‘pathetic family’, Vivien told me, ‘illegitimate and the father lived with his daughters. Dreadful.’32

  Down-at-heel though villages like Chipping Campden were, they were better able to survive the depression than town communities – they could at least grow their own vegetables. Vivien’s journal kept during the summer of 1932 gives us an impression of village life:

  Greenall said this morning ‘We had a long day yesterday. Up at four o’clock pea picking, then round to Mrs Huish and then here and then to Mrs H. again, and in the afternoon currant picking – two pots, that’s 1/8d, and in the evening we did washing and then we filled up the copper and then we boiled blackcurrants for jam till 11 at night. There wasn’t a bit of dinner in the house – not a scrap of bread, so we had to turn to, all of us.’ Her father is a sweep, drawing unemployment pay, which is about to cease.

  A gardener called Buckland when hungry would eat snails:

  ‘Between Christmas and March I reckon on two or three feeds. You see that scum (tipping up the snail) well they feeds on that all winter and it gets hard as hard and after March they begin travelling. So if you cook ’em after Christmas the water they’ve been boiled in is green – o all green, and green as you could wish and that’s all herbs you see – all good. That water’s good for coughs, consumption too.’

  Vivien continued in her journal: ‘We don’t know how we shall live in a month’s time: they don’t know how they’ll live in a week’s time.’ And her comments about class differences are shrewd:

  Greenall’s brother is unemployed but somehow manages to keep a huge silver-plated motorbicycle wreathed with tubes when there isn’t any food in the house; and we buy books instead of winter underclothes. It is a hold on life because luxuries are a sort of hostage to promise that the time will come when we won’t be sick with worry over ways and means and rent and taxes and will have the peace of mind to enjoy them. Everything is clouded by a dull discomfort that changes imperceptibly into real pain.

  As he became more successful, Greene’s inherent vulnerability decreased and he became more certain of himself and more aloof. At Chipping Campden, and presumably throughout their courtship and marriage, Vivien, by her own account, tried to make him more relaxed and responsive. The Greenes were, she said, ‘A very cool family. I never noticed any great affection between them. I can never imagine any child sitting on his mother’s knee, being told a story or anything like that. They were not demonstrative … As a family they were awfully locked up and I think it was because they didn’t have petting as children.’ Vivien’s strategy was to ‘teach Graham everything about being demonstrative. Warm hugs of friendliness or blowing kisses or things like that.’ It was she who invented their games, and their number code and the stars which proliferate their letters: ‘Stars are kisses. White stars and red stars. A red star is much more passionate than a white one. The most passionate kiss on paper would be enormous with rays coming out and dark with ink.’

  Because of her love of cats, Vivien brought them actively into their language: ‘I’ve always used cat terminology. I’ve always been very devoted to the whole cat tribe so I’d sign myself Whiskerspuss, or Pussy, or Pusskins, or Puzzuck meaning wife. And Graham often called himself Tom or Tiger or Tyg, Tig, Wuff or even Wufth.’33 One of his letters ends: ‘Goodnight Pussina Minnow of Wuffles.’

  Naturally, their Pekinese was drawn into this fantasy: ‘When we were at Chipping Campden, I used to tie a letter to our Pekinese’s collar – we called him Pekoe … because he was tea-coloured – and send it to Graham if I was in the garden and Graham in his study. Pekoe would turn up some time or other and sometimes there would be a toffee attached to his collar. There were other games.’

  Some of these letters written in the spring of 1931 are still in Vivien’s possession. One of hers, presumably written in the garden, reads:

  Honoured Sir,

  Just a short note as the Postman is waiting. I am well and longing for the return of my Husband from prison, from which I hope he will be released at the end of next month [from his study, presumably when he had completed his novel]. I can see his prison as I write – pleasant stone structure with one window open. Well, I miss him, love him very very much. I am getting Lord Sandwichfn6 to frank this for me.

  Your loving and obliged humble ‘Ook

  PER PEKOE POST

  Written on the obverse and tucked into the dog’s collar, Greene’s reply was:

  Honoured Madame,

  In case you starve while your devoted husband is away I send you one toffee. Please suck it in memory of your devoted admirer.

  They ignored the name of their cottage at Chipping Campden and called it, between themselves, ‘the Country basket’ or ‘Cat’s Campden’. On her twenty-sixth birthday (1931), Greene gave his wife a first edition of one of his books and wrote her a letter at thirty minutes past midnight, no doubt when she was asleep, from the ‘Cat’s Basket’:

  Lovely and adored Pussina Love-Cat, I do so love you and hope that you’ll have a happy birthday. There ought to be piles of ‘Orient pearls and Indian sand’ heaped at your paws, scents from the south, raw gums from the West. But there is only a rather solid book with all my love and devotion.

  I love you so much – four times as much, he added with exactitude, as last week, recalling [what follows are four white stars. Presumably this note was also to be carried ‘per Pekoe post’]: The Peke has just been caught red-padded:

  One may speak of a First Edition

  at
an exorbitant price,

  an ancient Pot (Phoenician),

  Performing Mice,fn7

  Or a Morning Star,

  a pedigree Colly,

  or a Ziegfeld Follyfn8

  (Naked or near,

  of a vintage year);

  What I prefer,

  when all is said,

  is the deep soft fur

  of a Cat in a double bed.

  Although he must at that time have been deeply worried about his work and his prospects, according to Vivien they were happy. ‘We had a gramophone which wound up. We had “Pacific 231” – a wonderful record it seemed to us then – a Pacific train engine. And one record, “Walk to the Paradise Garden”, we played a good deal. It was very sweet and nice … it was that sort of atmosphere – very tender and happy and there was a good deal of intimacy, or as much’, she added, ‘as any writer, or come to that mathematician, or come to that any musician can have. There is always something he keeps back. I think any creative person has got to – where is the creation coming from unless it’s something very deep inside themselves which they don’t share with anyone?’

  Vivien often returned, when talking to me of their life, to their use of cat language:

  V.G.: You see I had to teach Graham to be frivolous and take things light-heartedly and I’m very fond of tigers, always have been and am still. I’ve a great scrapbook which I made of cutouts of tigers from newspapers. I belong to the Protection of Tigers League because now there are so few left in the world. I’m devoted to cats because they are the only people that we can meet so to speak socially. We can’t meet tigers socially and the cats are the next best thing because they are the wildest of domesticated animals and the tiger is the least domesticated. It is the ultimate in the wildness and the non-human and mysterious.

  N.S.: Is Graham the cat or the tiger?

  V.G.: That is the extraordinary thing that has only just struck me – perhaps that was a quite unconscious understanding of his undomestic nature. That he was the wildest of creatures and the least domesticated. Our language was a kind of domesticating the undomesticated creature, but a pretty impossible task I think.34

  Apart from walking to rid himself of tension and worry, like his father before him Greene took to chess. The Greenes became friends with Herbert Finberg, a convert to Catholicism. He had started the Alcuin Press in the High Street, Campden, doing fine printing, and was very musical. He would come in most nights and play chess with Greene, sometimes play gramophone records – the gramophone being wound up for every record – staying until midnight. Greene’s 1932–33 diary often records Finberg’s visits: ‘played three games of chess after dinner with Benito.fn9 Played very badly and lost all.’35

  *

  In spite of the influence on him of Swinnerton’s review, the blast of criticism directed at Rumour at Nightfall, and the fact that, the sales of his first novel reached 8,000 and those of his third only 1,200, Greene did not for some time recognise where he was going wrong. Reading Henry James’s preface to The Wings of the Dove, in the bath one afternoon, he was so struck by one passage that he copied it into his diary. It says much for his percipience that he was able to extract a kernel from James’s ‘nut’, but less for his percipience in that it almost confirmed him in the error of his ways. James’s theory was that the writer (speaking of course for himself) should establish ‘centres’, points of view each commanding part of the main subject, so that they would create ‘solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to effect and to provide for beauty.’

  Greene seized on this concept, applying it to Rumour at Nightfall: ‘Solid blocks – that was my aim in Rumour at Nightfall; I had sacrificed too much before to the single point of view. The fault of Rumour was the thinness of the final block, but I still think it was a fine attempt.’36 He resolved that the next novel after Stamboul Train (then being written) would be accorded the ‘solid block’ technique. It was to be about a brother (a fraudulent medium) and his uncorrupted sister and there would be ‘a solid block for the medium, a solid block for his lieutenant, and then a block again for the medium: the sister seen only through their eyes [shades of Eulelia, the heroine of Rumour at Nightfall] but she must share the honours fairly with her brother; indeed in the second part she must play him off the stage.’

  Fascinated by the concept of these ‘blocks’ he rounded on Stamboul Train because of its lack of them: ‘My dissatisfaction with the present [novel] is that it is not built at all in blocks; it is fluid.’ He did not then recognise that this ‘fluidity’ was to be for him, to quote another Jamesian pronouncement, ‘the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet.’ It was not until well after the publication of Stamboul Train, when he was reviewing fiction in the Spectator and had become utterly opposed to novelists who wrote as he once did, that he commented: ‘A few years later I would be attacking Charles Morgan, like a reformed rake, for the sin I had abandoned.’37 And he records in A Sort of Life another important revelation: ‘Discrimination in one’s words is certainly required, but not love of one’s words – that is a form of self-love, a fatal love which leads a young writer to … excesses.38

  He says elsewhere that it takes ‘years of brooding and of guilt, of self-criticism and of self-justification, to clear from the eyes the haze of hopes and dreams and false ambitions.’ That is well said, but it did not take Graham Greene years – only months – to recognise what was wrong with his two failed novels. Discovering how he turned himself round makes a fascinating subject for an enquiry.

  fn1 Its name derives from Old English meaning a market town in a valley of camps.

  fn2 Alas not now, since Sir Hugh died in 1987.

  fn3 In the following example the passage is treated as if it were a direct quotation from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss: ‘Mrs Glegg has doubtless the glossiest drawers and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness.’

  We can see how cleverly Greene has turned the original into a salacious parody: ‘Mrs Glegg had on her fuzziest front, and garments which appeared to have had a recent resurrection from rather a creasy form of burial; a costume selected with the high moral purpose of instilling perfect humility into Bessy and her children.’

  fn4 In his excitement Greene made a spelling error – he wrote ‘Whole’ not ‘hole’.

  fn5 Zog I was king of Albania, 1928–39. His personal name was Ahmed Bey Zogu. He was ousted by Mussolini, on the eve of the Second World War, and went into exile. He hoped to return after the war but a Communist regime was established under Enver Hoxha in 1945. Zog died in 1961.

  fn6 Lord Sandwich, 1718–92, was Postmaster General in 1768.

  fn7 The ‘performing mouse’ appeared one day in their kitchen cupboard, eating their breakfast cereal and staring at them completely without fear.

  fn8 Florenz Ziegfeld, 1869–1932, the American theatre manager, perfected the American revue spectacle. His Follies, based on the Folies Bergère, was established in 1907, an annual production until 1931. His name was synonymous with extravagant theatrical productions.

  fn9 Finberg admired Benito Mussolini and Greene gave him his nickname. In 1932 Mussolini was still widely respected because he increased the efficiency of the Italians. After the invasion of Abyssinia, Mussolini’s reputation abroad diminished.

  28

  Stamboul Train/Orient Express

  I have travelled so much because travel has enabled me to arrive at unknown places within my clouded self.

  – LAURENS VAN DER POST

  STAMBOUL TRAIN WAS a landmark in Graham Greene’s career as a novelist, for in writing it he discovered his true talent – his ability to observe. Strangely, he has had some harsh things to say about this novel, condemning it not only for its ‘fluidity’ and lack of ‘blocks’ but also admitting th
at he has never been able to re-read it: ‘The pages are too laden by the anxieties of the time and the sense of failure.’ The latter comment is understandable, the former is not, for he drew on some of his deepest pleasures as well as his despairs in writing it. Taken altogether they helped him to produce a prototype, ultimately to be perfected, for his later fiction.

  The ‘fluidity’ of Stamboul Train derived naturally from the fact that its setting was a train journey and there can be few things more fluid than that. The railways were the most popular means of travel at the time, and involved a sense of community with fellow passengers and casual encounters with strangers that today’s isolation in private cars excludes. From his childhood, train journeys had been part of the excitement of holidays and visits to relatives and were later to be a significant aspect of his courtship of Vivien. Trains took him to her and from her and some of his most brilliant and revealing letters to her were written on trains. A train journey to visit her put him into a time capsule when, in a closed environment, he could observe, anonymously, his travelling companions and their eccentricities. Cut off from his current problems he could extend his experience of other people’s lives, and have the excitement, the suspense, yet the surety of meeting her at the end of the journey. A train journey, for him, therefore, though not then recognised, involved all the necessary ingredients of a novel: travel, adventure, suspense and final climax. Train journeys reflected every aspect of life.

  ‘The lunches I’ve most enjoyed’, he wrote to Vivien, ‘are the ones in the restaurant car coming to you. Looking out of the window, and watching the country fly past, and then a distant straight line of hedge, with telegraph poles above, like giraffes nibbling at the clouds, straight on and on towards Oxford.’1 In January 1930, when he was in the middle of Name of Action, he took a train journey to Germany: ‘Going I spent the night in the train between Ostend and Cologne. After Cologne, where I changed, the sun rose just as the train came alongside the Rhine, the water becoming the colour of this page. There was also a ruined castle on a hill at the exact psychological moment, the whole affair being too like a stage back cloth for words.’2 In another train letter he writes: ‘The man opposite me, who’s just got in, is tearing his railway ticket into little tiny bits. Does he know what he’s doing? What will happen at Willesden when the inspector comes round? … He’s thrown the scraps of ticket under the seat. Is it an old one merely? He’s very red in the face and elderly and picks his teeth with a safety pin. Perhaps he’s going to have an apoplectic fit.’3 And trains could have an image of luxury missing from his life then: ‘On number one platform there was an express for Fishguard with a long restaurant car with beautiful shiny white linen and the glitter of glass. I wanted badly to be with you, off to catch the Fishguard-Waterford boat [to Ireland].’ It is hardly surprising that one of Vivien’s and Graham’s favourite records was, as she said, Honegger’s ‘Pacific 231’, with its insistent sound of the wheels of a train, which was the background to his writing of Stamboul Train.