The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  The proofs of Stamboul Train arrived on 17 September and Greene worked on them for the next ten days, but he was depressed by what he saw as the sentimentality and banality of the novel, what he called its ‘staring unreality’. Then he heard from Mary Leonard that ‘Hugh Walpole was “delighted” with Stamboul Train’ – a simple message, but with important implications, for Walpole was not only a writer of best-sellers in the 1930s, but also chairman of the Book Society. The Society, established in 1928, was the brain-child of Arnold Bennett, who enlisted the support of Frere-Reeves (later known simply as Frere), a director of Heinemann who was to replace Charles Evans as Managing Director. Frere asked Walpole if he would agree to be chairman of the Society and Walpole replied that he was ‘proud to be asked’.16 He also said he would love to have a finger in the ‘Book of the Month suggestion’. The committee of the Book Society (which had a 10,000 membership) selected one particular book each month, which guaranteed a large sale for the chosen author.

  Walpole formed a committee made up of Professor Gordon, and the writers Clemence Dane, Sylvia Lynd, and J. B. Priestley, who was a friend of his. Priestley left the committee early in 1932 and his place was taken by Edmund Blunden. So that, of the committee, the chairman admired Stamboul Train, Edmund Blunden was a close friend of Hugh Greene and had met Graham, Clemence Dane had done her best to get The Name of Action chosen earlier, and the secretary, Rupert Hart-Davis, was also a friend of Graham. Hart-Davis wrote to tell him there was ‘hope that Stamboul Train will be the December choice of the Book Society’. J. B. Priestley, no longer able to influence the committee’s decision, was to review Stamboul Train harshly.

  Greene had himself, earlier, taken a sceptical look at the Book Society’s choices. Reviewing Casanova’s life and Lieutenant Maglic’s account of his escape from an Italian prison, which he preferred, he commented: ‘But Time is as arbitrary in its choice as the Book Society, and Lieutenant Maglic’s story will probably be forgotten at the end of the publishing season. Casanova has been chosen.’17 And he thought little of another of their choices, Margaret Irwin’s Royal Flush: ‘The past swims into the characters’ minds just at the wrong time when the present would really be absorbing.’18 Nevertheless he did not object to Stamboul Train being a possible choice, since the suggestion had already stimulated Doubleday into agreeing future pay arrangements with Heinemann for him.

  On 27 September 1932 he wrote in his diary: ‘Frere-Reeves hopeful of the Book Society, but I do not dare hope, or rather I hope but do not believe in the actuality of the hope.’ There is, though, a happier note in his diary entries, or a more relaxed one: ‘V. went over to Stratford. Made myself for the first time bacon and eggs. Did proofs.’19

  On 7 October 1932, when the Book Society committee was in session, he visited London again, recording in his diary:

  Caught the 7.15 to London. Went to Hemming & Hemming’s and took a room. Went to the Observer and saw the assistant editor, who promised to bear me in mind when there should be a vacancy on the staff. Found it difficult to forget, but more difficult to hope for anything, that the Book Society might be meeting … a sandwich lunch at the Leicester Lounge … bus back & to Heinemann’s where the atmosphere was very changed from my last visit; once again a favourite author, I had tea with Charlie Evans & heard that the Book Society was in session. Frere-Reeves rang up but found they were meeting in Walpole’s [what follows is indecipherable but probably reads ‘Walpole’s flat’] no news could be got. Went down …

  The rest of this entry has been torn out, so that we do not know where he ‘went down’ to, but a second entry curiously for the same date begins:

  … then went back to Hemming’s to see if there was a message. A telegram in the rack at once caught my eye. I opened it and the first word I saw was ‘Congratulations’. It was Rupert telling me that “Stamboul Train” had been chosen for December. I have seldom been more happy than that evening but I behaved with an odd dream-like sobriety – went and had dinner with a bottle of beer at Good Housekeeping, walked about London dreamily for half an hour, finished a poem of which the first two verses had been written about a year before and had a gin and ginger in a pub in Piccadilly while I wrote it down, and then went to the film Mädchen in Uniform, afterwards quietly to bed.

  The poem, entitled ‘Family Portrait’, and very reminiscent of Hardy’s ‘The Family Face’, he sent to the Spectator. It was not accepted.

  The next day he tramped London from nine in the morning looking for celebratory presents for Vivien and in Church Street found an eighteenth-century whist counter set and a Victorian flower book. He also rang up Rupert Hart-Davis and arranged lunch at Mary Borden’s flat. The meeting between Greene and Rupert Hart-Davis must have been very interesting, with many things to be talked over, and some indication of what was discussed is suggested in a letter Greene later wrote to Hugh:

  I was interested to hear about Blunden. But his story doesn’t coincide at all, at all, with what Rupert told me of the meeting. According to him Walpole, [Clemence] Dane, [Sylvia] Lynd were firm for it; Gordon strongly opposed it and said it would offend their readers, and then Blunden spoke up rather weakly and said he admired the quality of the writing, but could quite see what Gordon meant. There was a moment of wavering then, but a vote was taken before it had time to grow.20

  The dedication of Stamboul Train is: ‘For Vivien with all my love’, but the typescript has this dedication: ‘For Rupert Hart-Davis/This White Elephant/in affection and gratitude/from Graham Greene.’ After lunch with Hart-Davis, he went to Praed Street and found a second-hand copy of Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed – his gift to himself – and a little Victorian notebook for Vivien. The last line of his diary for 8 October was: ‘Home & told the great news.’

  Speaking of this time, Vivien recalled that with their grant from Heinemann being stopped, or worse, all losses on previous books being deducted, it was a very hard life indeed at Chipping Campden, so that the idea of getting this prize – the Book of the Month – seemed absolutely marvellous. ‘I remember Graham being tremendously elated – one of the few times I’ve seen him really excited and joyful. He was not often elated, no.’21

  For the next fifty days Greene wrote reviews but did nothing on what he called his Opus V (It’s A Battlefield). It seemed he couldn’t get started. He was, of course, as he records in his diary, ‘very tired, after the reaction from constant anxiety.’22 He was as usual reading widely and perhaps reading with his next book in mind, since it was about a workers’ meeting getting out of hand and the murder of a policeman by a gentle bus driver. His wife had bought him Henry James’s Princess Casamassima, a novel about anarchists and aristocrats in London. He writes in his diary, 14 October: ‘Finished “The Princess C.” the last sixty pages or so superbly dramatic – the discovery of the body with the wonderful Jacobean phrase – “something dark, something ambiguous, something outstretched”.’ We have already noted that he was reading G. D. H. Cole’s An Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos, ‘a brilliant and lucid account of an economic situation – from the Socialist standpoint which is the one I wish to understand’, he wrote in his diary. He received an unexpected income-tax demand and admits in his diary that he would have been sent ‘frantic’ if it had not been for the hope the Book Society had raised in him. He had an overdraft at the bank then of £20.

  After the excitement of the Book Society meeting, Greene found it impossible to work at Chipping Campden. He planted forty-five wallflowers in the garden; he cleaned with petrol the greasy covers of the Edith Wharton book he had bought. He was in a very nervous state which he described in his diary for 25 October: ‘Woke with my nerves wretched. Have been sleeping badly of late. The noise of mice in the thatch, the flutter of moths against the glass, are enough to wake me & keep me awake terrified. V. went into Cheltenham to shop & have her hair waved. I bought Cenasprin & after lunch my nerves rawer than ever from the stupid, stubborn, disobedient behaviour o
f the dog, took two [tablets] and lay down on my bed & read & slept.’

  The next day the nerves in his mouth were so ‘wretched’ he decided to see a dentist. The dentist did a temporary filling in one tooth but put his general condition down to neuralgia, yet Greene recorded: ‘Whatever it was, it was more active than ever this evening, keeping my nerves stretched.’ He tried in vain to read J. B. Priestley’s novel Faraway – ‘a piece of sheer impertinence even to his public, so padded and slackly written and childishly constructed.’ He did not know that he was occupying J. B. Priestley’s mind a great deal at that time and that Priestley would be taking action against him very soon.

  On 3 November their Pekinese dog had two fits and by the evening two more. He was foaming through locked jaws and snapping at the air. Greene felt that this was the end.

  He gave the dog a bromide and then telephoned the vet to take Pekoe away to destroy him. Greene records his feelings in his diary: ‘The bromide worked quickly and he sat and dozed on my knee in the attitude of a Trafalgar square lion, till the vet came. All the hour of waiting I could have cried. The dog’s sleep gave me the opportunity to whisper; I could not have talked aloud without my voice breaking. I have always hated sentimentality over dogs and now I am ashamed of my own. V. carried him quite quiet to the vet’s car and he went calmly and we back in the dark to a peculiarly empty cottage. We couldn’t eat or sit there and went to Audrey’s.’23

  The next day was miserable; they both remembered all the dog’s endearing qualities – his begging with waving paws, his frantic rolls on the floor at the word ‘die’, his cavorting, ball in mouth, and his tremulous whimper when one returned to him after a few hours’ absence. Greene was glad the vet had come the same night: ‘We could never have parted with a calm Pekoe this morning.’

  Incredibly, he was accosted the following day in the square by the local policeman, Sergeant Tonks. The following conversation ensued:

  ‘I was going to come and see you, sir, and ask whether you have a licence for your dog.’

  I lamented with upraised hands, ‘Alas, Sergeant, the dog is no more. It had to be destroyed. So sad. We are so miserable.’

  A long pause and a glance out of his black beady eyes.

  ‘Did you have one, sir?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve destroyed everything. I don’t want to be reminded of the brute. Basket, brushes, everything.’

  He moved his enormous bulk away, with a disgusted glance.

  ‘So ends’, Greene recorded in his diary, ‘a successful 15/- fraud on the government, but I would much rather have Pekoe back.’

  He was still not writing and still not sleeping: ‘Feeling very tired and a little strange. I haven’t slept solidly for a week now.’ And he was still not writing his new novel. Benito was coming in most nights to play chess: ‘Benito came in the evening and beat me twice at chess and kept me up till nearly one arguing about socialism, which resulted for me in a very bad night.’ On 27 November, a Sunday, he went to early Mass with Vivien and in the morning made notes for a review for the Oxford Magazine of the work of three poets, Lawrence, Blunden and Auden. He records, apparently casually, in his diary that Stamboul Train was to appear on 1 December with the Book Society lunch to follow on 2 December. But three days before publication he wrote in his diary: ‘My God: I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. A wire from Charles [Evans] at 11 to ring him up immediately. I do so. J. B. Priestley threatens to bring a libel action if Stamboul Train is published.’24 Vivien recalled the arrival of Charles Evans’s telegram and Greene going to the telephone box in the square to phone him, since they had no telephone in the house, with no expectation of the bombshell that was to explode, of Greene nearly fainting in the telephone box on being told what was happening, of their fears of a libel suit, payment of damages, etc.: ‘It was a dreadful time. Very frightening.’ Apparently Priestley had read a review copy of the novel which had been sent to the Evening Standard, and had concluded that the popular novelist, Mr Savory, in the novel was based on him.

  Speaking to Charles Evans from the phone box in the square at eleven o’clock, Greene suggested that Heinemann should fight the libel action, but Evans made it clear that if they were to lose one of their authors they would much prefer to lose Greene than Priestley. It was laid down that Greene had to share the cost of the changes Priestley required and the changes had to be made immediately from the public telephone box, without time for reflection. After a discussion Evans said that he would talk the changes over with Priestley and that Graham should phone him again at 3.30 p.m. What a despairing time, in the interval, Greene must have spent. Back promptly at the telephone box, he learnt that Priestley wanted references to Dickens, to a pipe, to blunt fingers, to come out. Priestley also objected to the comment, ‘sold a hundred thousand copies. Two hundred characters.’ An undistinguished piece of dialogue, ‘You believe in Dickens, Chaucer, Charles Reade, that sort of thing’, had to be altered with ‘Shakespeare’ inserted instead of ‘Dickens’. ‘It was almost’, wrote Greene afterwards,25 ‘as though Mr Priestley were defending Dickens rather than himself.’ Graham wrote to Hugh:

  STAMBOUL TRAIN is not appearing till the 8th. On Monday Priestley appeared at Heinemann’s and said that if it was published as it stood he would bring an action for libel. He remained adamant and I had a frantic day on the phone arranging for alterations. 1300 copies were all printed and bound and they all have to be unstitched and some pages printed over again.

  Yours in exhaustion.

  A letter to his mother was more careful – disturbed but not too disturbed: ‘I spent all yesterday on the telephone to Heinemann’s. Fearful contretemps and all. Priestley had been in and said that if the book was published as it stood, he would bring an action for libel! His family had all recognised him in it, and the fact that neither his publishers nor his friends on the Book Society seemed to have spotted him, did not make him waver … Altogether while it has its funny side, yesterday was almost too frantic and exciting. Of course the book doesn’t have to be reprinted. They can unsew it and reprint the necessary pages but still …’26 In fact twenty pages had to be reprinted. In his diary he comments that he could have laughed if all his hopes did not rest on Stamboul Train, but the experience must have been excoriating what with the shock, the libel threat, Heinemann’s attitude to him, the costs involved in making the changes, the delay in publication and certainly the humiliation of having to deal with the situation on the spot, ‘the spot’ being a public telephone box.

  Greene was to deny strongly that Priestley was the model for Savory: ‘I had never met Mr Priestley and had been unable to read The Good Companions which had brought him immense popularity three years before.’27 In Ways of Escape he repeats that he had never met Priestley, even though one might have anticipated that he would have had some contact with Heinemann’s premier author.

  Just before leaving London for Chipping Campden, Graham wrote to his mother in an undated letter: ‘Did you hear about Heinemann’s wonderful “Columbus” party to say fond farewell to J. B. Priestley who is off to America. It was last Monday and altogether lovely. There was about 240 people and champagne flowed continuously, without check, from 4.30, at any rate until we left at about 1.45. By 1. all the waiters were tipsy! It must have cost hundreds of pounds. Lovely refreshments. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.’

  It seems likely that the guest of honour would be present, and that therefore Greene would at least have seen him from a distance. Also, he must have heard and read a great deal about Priestley – a letter has survived in which he speaks of Arnot Robertson complaining loudly at a party about Priestley. And although he may not have been able to read Priestley’s enormously successful Good Companions, we know he had read Faraway and held it in contempt. In Ways of Escape, moreover, he gives the reasons for Priestley’s taking the character of Savory as a portrait of himself: ‘I had described Savory as a popular novelist in the manner of Dickens, and Priestley had recently published … his novel The Good C
ompanions, which led some reviewers to compare him with Dickens’,28 which is why Priestley wanted the Dickens reference taken out.

  It would be very natural, at that time, when his promise as a writer seemed to have fizzled out and when his financial problems were great, that Greene should have felt a twinge of jealousy for the Yorkshireman who was such a success without having, in Greene’s eyes, any talent, and that he should see him as a target for satire. He records in his diary on 29 June 1932 that he is going through Stamboul Train and slightly touching up Mr Savory and adding cockney touches. And he was to argue that for Mr Savory he had had the socialist politician, J. H. Thomas, in mind, ‘when I gave him a touch of the cockney’, and in giving him a pipe he had in mind Stanley Baldwin, twice Prime Minister then and to have a third term of office. But there is a remark in Greene’s diary, so crossed out that it could be deciphered only with difficulty, that suggests he was taking a calculated risk: ‘my policy of course is to be perfectly indiscreet’.

  Greene was also under the impression that Priestley’s friends on the Book Society committee had not recognised him in Mr Savory, though again this is doubtful. Priestley would not have threatened his own publishers (as well as Greene) with a libel case and Heinemann would not have reacted so strongly had there not been some consensus of opinion that Priestley had a case. Indeed, Hugh Walpole, Chairman of the Book Society, would have been very sensitive to such a situation since two years earlier he had found himself being satirised in the character of Alroy Kear in Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale. According to his diary he: ‘Read on with increasing horror. Unmistakable portrait of myself. Never slept.’29 He phoned his friend Priestley about it and, though Priestley had already spoken to Charles Evans about the similarities, he was able to save Walpole’s face by means of a letter from Maugham to himself denying Alroy Kear was based on Walpole, though it was known that he was and Walpole himself knew it. Walpole was not the kind of person to embark on a libel suit, but Priestley, the robust Yorkshireman, was.