The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  But it was not until he had finished Rumour at Nightfall that the idea for a ‘train’ novel took shape. On 8 May 1931 he wrote to his mother: ‘I’ve been bitten by a sudden desire for “furrin’ parts” and have written to La Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits, saying that I am planning a novel for next year in which the whole of the action will take place on their Orient Express, Ostend to Constantinople, and will they let me have a return ticket for next month. It would be tremendous fun if they did.’ Which suggests a good deal of enterprise and ‘cheek’ on his part. The Orient Express, which made its first trip in 1883, was looked upon, during its long life, as the ‘King of Trains and the Train of Kings’ and in the 1920s was christened ‘The Magic Carpet of the East’. And it was unlikely that a fairly unknown novelist would be granted the privilege he was asking for: ‘A German company’, he wrote to his mother, ‘would do it like a shot, but I’m doubtful of the French.’

  He was right. The French explained that they were forbidden by their charter with the railway companies to give free passes. Since he could not afford to pay for the whole journey to Constantinople, he bought a third class ticket for the Orient Express to Cologne, or so he tells us in Ways of Escape: ‘The reader will probably notice more details on this first stretch of the line than I had the confidence to include later, for as I sat at my third class window I made notes all through the daylight hours, and you may be sure the allotments outside Bruges were just where I placed them in April 1931.’4 In support of this there is an undated letter to Vivien which describes a train journey to Cologne, bringing up the question of travelling third or second class:

  We left Dover at 4 and got to Ostend at 7.30. The train doesn’t go till 9.30. The sight of the third class carriages and the thought of a night journey made me go all of a heap. So I’ve come second! So much for my resolutions. But I will come back third.

  Lovely coffee at Cologne and a lovely journey from there. The sunrise began just as the train came down to the Rhine and shone into the water and behind a great hill with a ruined castle on top … I had a peck of supper here and I’ve eaten all the jam rolls, but the chocolate I preserve till to-night. There was only about 30 people on the boat, and there are about five people in the train, none in my carriage, so far touch wood.5

  Vivien had put up sandwiches for him, and in this way saved the expense of spending eight shillings on meals.

  *

  There were very strong pressures on him then to write a ‘pot boiler’ with the deliberate intention of appealing to the popular reading public, a novel which, with luck, might be made into a film.6 He had a further six months on the Heinemann payroll, after which he would be on his own. By the time he began writing Stamboul Train on 2 January 1932, he had been thoroughly thumped by the critics, and had had his Rochester biography rejected, and while he was writing the novel further attacks were made on Rumour at Nightfall when it was published in America.

  Something of his feelings at this time would seem to have contributed to the character of Dr Czinner in Stamboul Train, the first typical self-destructive, tormented character he created. Given his lack of success and his poverty he must have felt a stranger in his own country, as was Dr Czinner, and he was angry because of his poverty – ‘someone ought to have been hanged on a lamp post!’ What Dr Czinner saw as being wrong with society was what Greene saw as being wrong with British society in the 1930s and was what the socialists saw as being wrong. Czinner’s criticisms reflect the clichés of the day heard in the Labour Party, in working men’s clubs, in lecture halls and on street corners where the unemployed gathered: ‘when the poor were starved and the rich were not happier for it; when the thief might be punished or rewarded with titles; when wheat was burned in Canada and coffee in Brazil, and the poor in his own country had no money for bread and froze to death in unheated rooms.’7

  Knowing he is to be sentenced to death, Czinner makes a futile speech to which no one listens – the last testament of a good Communist:

  he became conscious of the artificiality of his words which did not bear witness to the great love and the great hate driving him on. Sad and beautiful faces, thin from bad food, old before their time, resigned to despair, passed through his mind; they were people he had known, whom he had attended and failed to save. The world was in chaos to leave so much nobility unused, while the great financiers and the soldiers prospered. He said, ‘You are employed to bolster up an old world which is full of injustice and muddle … You are paid to defend the only system which would protect men like him. You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.8

  Czinner must have derived from Greene’s beliefs at that time, for his diary shows that he was then reading the works of socialist philosophers: John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power and G. D. H. Cole’s The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos. The diary also reveals that he was feeling particularly vulnerable then in a capitalist society and was seeking in socialism a solution to his personal problems.

  On 12 June 1932, after he had completed a large part of Stamboul Train, he went to Oxford to see his two brothers. While there he learnt that Raymond had won a research fellowship and, with his usual watchfulness over his own motives, he questioned whether his great and genuine pleasure over this was quite so disinterested or was he taking it as a sign that good fortune had not quite deserted the Greene family?

  The Oxford University Film Society, of which his brother Hugh was the first president, put on a showing of Feodor Ozep’s The Crime of Dmitri Karamazov, which they went to see, and he was much taken with the female star, Anna Sten, and a gipsy song: ‘Mellowed by beer, the beauty of Anna Sten and the ride of Dmitri to the gipsy inn and Grushenka’s song brought tears to my eyes.’ Because he suddenly saw Anna Sten as the type of heroine for his next novel, large portions of it came to him, and he felt happy. This must have been the last indication of his attachment to the romantic in fiction. After a party given by Hugh and the manager of the cinema following the film, he had a bad night, ‘because I had talked foolishly to an undergraduate about the chances of a new Marxist party!’

  Yet his ‘bad night’ could not have been too severe since the next day found him arguing with Raymond and Abernethy (Raymond’s partner in the practice) about ‘the capital levy and the Marxist state’ and giving a good account of himself.

  These were side issues in his struggle to become a successful novelist, which, though he perhaps did not recognise it then, meant that he had to turn from romanticism to realism, from being a fairly sloppy historical novelist to one able to write with force and point about his own times. The necessity to earn money was there, driving him towards the popular: but finding his individual voice took him into a more devious route.

  His own account seems to be entirely wrong. He has argued in A Sort of Life that there was no spark of life in The Name of Action or Rumour at Nightfall because there was nothing of himself in them. He had been so determined not to write the typical autobiographical novels of a beginner that he had gone too far in the opposite direction. He had removed himself altogether: ‘All that was left in the heavy pages of [Rumour at Nightfall] was the distorted ghost of Conrad.’9 But in fact Greene was the self-conscious, young, romantic hero of his early novels, the middle-class hero in style and standards – Andrews in The Man Within, Oliver Chant in Name of Action and Michael Crane in Rumour at Nightfall. There is too much self-love, too little self-criticism in these early portraits of pleasant, anguished young men built up from Greene’s own notion of himself as a young man romantically caught in the toils of love.

  Conrad is there of course – and the worst of Conrad – what Greene once called ‘bastard Conradese tortuosity’. He would not again, in the guise of a young hero, give an indulgent and romantic account of himself.

  *

  Greene’s journey towards his goal can be traced in his reviews for the Spectator which began, along with the start of Stamboul Train, in 1932: in them, bowling at (
what had previously been his wicket) the other team’s wicket, he works towards a conclusion about the kind of novel he must write.

  The first appeared on 23 January 1932, a review of Norman Collins’s The Facts of Fiction of which only one phrase met with his approval – ‘his [D. H. Lawrence’s] books are essentially the expression of one rat in the trap’ – a reflection of Greene’s own feelings at that time. And when he writes of ‘the horde of introspective novels which have enabled their authors to soliloquize on the particular slings and arrows offending them’, he has his own early work in mind: ‘These are novels of escape: delicious daydreams in which the writer is enabled to utter all his complaints and bafflements aloud … But Andrew Cather [hero of Conrad Aiken’s Great Circle] is not a mask for the author.’10 No character in Stamboul Train is a mask for its author either.

  The necessity of the author’s keeping his distance from his characters, not making the novel a vehicle for the projection of himself, is a recurrent theme in his reviews. Of a G. B. Stern novel he comments: ‘Endless natural but unnecessary dialogue, one completely ridiculous incident; long natural descriptions which are not seen through the characters’ eyes, nor are they of dramatic significance, simply the wallowing of the author in remembered scenes.’ The emphasis comes down on objectivity and discipline. In his diary he wrote, ‘An author should keep his own likings, whether for scenery or architecture or books, out of a story; he should avoid describing anything of which he is himself passionately fond, because he will be unable to subdue it to a character’s view; the author will obtrude and take the [character’s] elbow as obviously as if the first person were used.’ He adds, ‘Women are especially prone to this.’11

  He expressed the same opinion, slightly differently but with the same firmness, a year and a half later when he was reviewing Yvonne Cloud’s Mediterranean Blues and J. D. Beresford’s The Camberwell Miracle. In the review, he rightly praises Miss Cloud and criticises Mr Beresford. He saw one of Miss Cloud’s most admirable qualities as ‘her detachment from her characters; she regards them all from the same distance.’ Personal attachment by an author to one of his characters ‘introduces into the reader’s mind emotions ruinous to his receptivity’. He cites the example of Soames in Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga: ‘The reader’s agreement, or failure to agree, with the author over the question whether Soames was nice to know became more important than the theme or the treatment of the whole book.’ And Beresford had such admiration for the character of the faith-healer in his book that the novel became ‘a dramatized essay on faith-healing, and his admiration had to be shared “against all probability” by every other character.’12

  As in no previous novel of his, detachment operates in Stamboul Train: there is also a tightening of technique and style, a rejection of turgidity and a movement towards his later characteristics: brevity and an unromantic view of life. Suddenly, in his late twenties, he appears to have matured as a man and a novelist, and an extraordinary change in perspective has taken place. In A Sort of Life he offers no explanation for the change, only pointing to two disparate aspects of his nature that existed while he was writing Rumour at Nightfall, revealed on the one hand in its ‘sentimental cardboard figures’ of his fancy and on the other in the careful notes he was making in his diary about the people he met every day, ‘between the muddy lane where [he] lived and the Live and Let Live Inn’. Yet he was ‘content to pursue [his] romantic and derivative tale to its disastrous conclusion’.13

  He is being wise after the event here, for by the time he began keeping his diary with its observations of those around him (it runs from 3 June 1932 to 13 August 1933) Rumour at Nightfall was published and Stamboul Train was well advanced. We can only conclude that failure was the spur that turned him from romanticism to a cynical realism in Stamboul Train and that turnabout later led to an equally cynical and realistic view of the life around him. Like Mabel Warren, that appalling female journalist in Stamboul Train, he takes up an unemotional, observational stance: ‘There wasn’t a suicide, a murdered woman, a raped child who had stirred her to the smallest emotion; she was an artist to examine critically, to watch, to listen; the tears were for paper.’14 ‘There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer,’ he later wrote, ‘I watched and listened’.15 This is what he had at last taught himself to do.

  *

  There are still echoes of his own experiences. Dr Czinner obviously derived from one of the itinerant teachers his father was forced to employ during the war, ‘facing a desert of pitch-pine desks, row on row of malicious faces’, remembering ‘the times when he had felt round his heart the … spurts of disguised laughter threatening his livelihood, for a master who could not keep order must eventually be dismissed’.16 Czinner is given, also without emotional overtones, Greene’s own religious experience – ‘crouched in chapel at a service in which the living man had never believed, asking God with the breathing discordant multitude to dismiss him with His blessing’.fn1, 17

  All kinds of scraps of his own experiences are put to use in this new, realistic novel (by using only scraps there was less pressure to draw on his whole nature as a character), for example Myatt carries examples of raisins from his commercial rivals and tests them compulsively (an echo from Greene’s schooldays) and as Greene moved on his train journey from third to second class, so the chorus girl, Coral Musker, moves from third class to Myatt’s first class compartment. She also, like Greene, had brought sandwiches with her to save ‘about eight shillings’;18 and her experience of life in Nottingham is based on his – ‘the electric signs flashing and changing over the theatre in Nottingham High Street … the passage of porters and paper-boys, recalled for a moment the goose market and to the memory of the market she clung.’19

  One other influence helped to make Stamboul Train his first realistic novel – the cinema: his hope was that the film rights would be sold. After going through the typescript six times he concluded that it was ‘too incredibly purposeless for words. A mug’s game. I’d rather produce a film.’ In his first article on film, published in The Times in 1928, he stated ‘words are a clumsy, unmalleable material. Of the loveliest sonnet only the outline was formed in rapture, the rest had to be carved with toil’, and he gives an example of the film’s power by referring to the work of Erich von Stroheim in the 1923 film ‘Greed’: ‘Erich von Stroheim … seized one image and conveyed infinitely more passion. The scene was a rainy day at a seaside “resort”. The lovers were shown only as two backs, receding down a long breakwater, on each side a leaden sea and a lashing rain, which failed to disturb their complete self-absorption.’

  In the same article Graham recalls an early 1923 Chaplin film (which Chaplin wrote and directed but did not appear in) where the characters are the images of despair and fatalism:

  A girl, deserted by her lover, stands on a village platform at midnight waiting in vain. The Paris express, in which they were to have gone together, draws into the station, but we do not see the train. Only across her still face the shadows of the windows pass and then stay still. There are no tears, no sub-titles and no movement save of shadows.

  His interest in films was professional – he wanted to learn. As early as 1928, as we have seen, he had joined a London Film Society in the hope of being able to take part in the production of films.20 Films were his passion from an early age. He recalls seeing Sophy of Kravonia, his first film, at the age of twelve and retaining ‘an enchanting vision of a flapping riding habit, an imperious switch, mountains, rebel guns rumbling across the keys of a single Brighton piano up the pass’.

  In Stamboul Train, and more so in It’s a Battlefield, he took up the technique of the camera with its ability to suggest emotion, character and drama, visually, economically, and to determine the pace of the drama. A 1949 story, ‘All but Empty’, refers to his habit of visiting the cinema in the afternoon when they were all but empty in order to watch critically the way a film was put together.

  Almost any extract from St
amboul Train will show how Greene parallels the use of the camera. To take one at random:

  The fire-hole door opened and the blaze and the heat of the furnace for a moment emerged. The driver turned the regulator full open, and the footplate shook with the weight of the coaches. Presently the engine settled smoothly to its work, the driver brought the cut-off back, and the last of the sun came out as the train passed through Bruges, the regulator closed, coasting with little steam. The sunset lit up tall dripping walls, alleys with stagnant water radiant for a moment with liquid light. Somewhere within the dingy casing lay the ancient city, like a notorious jewel, too stared at, talked of, trafficked over. Then a wilderness of allotments opened through the steam, sometimes the monotony broken by tall ugly villas, facing every way, decorated with coloured tiles, which now absorbed the evening. The sparks from the express became visible, like hordes of scarlet beetles tempted into the air by night; they fell and smouldered by the track, touched leaves and twigs and cabbage-stalks and turned to soot. A girl riding a cart-horse lifted her face and laughed; on the bank beside the line a man and woman lay embraced. Then darkness fell outside and passengers through the glass could see only the transparent reflection of their own features.21