Greene was aware that most writers who see themselves as entertainers have two crippling disadvantages: ‘stories written purely for entertainment are almost invariably dull’; and ‘all the fountains are coloured, all the mirrors are distorting, all the voices speak through megaphones, and the rifles in all the shooting booths are wrongly sighted.’25 Because the writer as entertainer has as his aim flattery and excitement, his stories are often so packed with violent incident that there is no room left for anything but simplified and sentimentalised characters. The truth is that there is no truth, but the mind ‘persistently demands in a story something it can recognize as truth’.26
Neither did Greene believe that the writer should be bent on mere political impartiality at the cost of truth. Speaking of Rearden Conner’s novel, Shake Hands With The Devil, which dealt with the Irish Revolution at its harshest phase, he notices that ‘an atrocity committed by English troops has to be carefully balanced by an atrocity committed by Irish irregulars … This is propaganda against fanaticism, not an impartial presentation of fanatics.’27
His strongest criticism was reserved for the ‘popular novelists’, two of whom, Warwick Deeping and A. J. Cronin (medical doctors who had turned to novel writing), attracted his most contemptuous attention. He comments on Deeping’s Two Black Sheep: ‘The style is sometimes illiterate, sometimes comically involved (“Taxis and private cars made of the night a bowl of black glass that was shivered upon the pavement of progress”); and the metaphors and similes are often delightfully grotesque as when Mr Deeping describes “a pile of cloud glowing like a bosom”.’28 Cronin he sees both as ‘a perfect example’ and ‘an awful example’ of the popular novelist. The guarantee to the reader of his novels is that: ‘There will be nothing to shock, nothing to disturb you, nothing to give you ideas.’ And so we have the missionary seduced by a loose woman, the boxer with a seductive Irish voice, a sardonic, embittered doctor won back to hope in life by the love of a good woman. Literary phrases run riot: ‘Slowly before their eyes the day languished as with love, swooning towards the arms of the dark’; silence is ‘lingering yet chaste’, principal characters have ‘visions which words cannot formulate’ but their physical appearance is minutely described – ‘chiselled’ features, ‘strong’ teeth, sometimes ‘firm’ teeth, sometimes ‘perfect’ teeth, almost always ‘white’ teeth; they ‘hiss’ words, their eyes ‘blaze’. Such writers are said to have a narrative gift but it is ‘difficult to understand how a narrative gift can ever be said to exist apart from any merit of style, story or character.’29
Such popular writers often avoid the awful necessity of finding the precise words to describe emotion. Reviewing Francis Brett Young, he quotes him as writing: ‘It is impossible to paint the tortures of jealousy and of humiliation that she endured’ and Greene concludes that if he finds it impossible to describe the chief emotion of his character, ‘I cannot see why the story should have been attempted at all.’30
We can see very plainly where Greene stands and what, since he considered his first three novels failures, he has come to believe, and even what he is trying to do in It’s a Battlefield. Dealing with Hans Carossa, who had made a reputation as an autobiographer and had then turned novelist, Greene suggests Carossa failed because in a novel he had to do what he had never before done – that is to invent relationships which have no existence outside the author’s brain. He admits that the characters are emotionally real to the author, ‘but he cannot find the descriptions, the dialogue, the intonations which will make them real to others.’31
What stylistically he was after was a prose bare and lucid, and without obvious literary echoes, not an imitation of but a development of eighteenth-century prose, giving a cool look at the world in the 1930s. What Greene says of Edith Wharton’s stories, collected under the title Human Nature, almost exactly applies to the new professional Greene: ‘her study, and her attitude, admirably maintained, is cool, aloof, a little withering. Human nature, in fact, does not come well out of the ordeal of being closely regarded by so shrewd and unsympathetic a critic.’32 This is the voice of the man who wrote It’s a Battlefield.
His approval of Julian Green’s The Strange River suggests what his own standards are: ‘The tone of the book is immediately and unerringly struck’, and later, comparing Green with others, he admits: ‘I cannot help preferring that firm line which Mr Julian Green draws round his subject, a line which is never crossed even by the thoughts of his characters.’33
fn1 Marie C. Stopes (1880–1958), pioneer advocate of birth control, wrote Married Love in 1918. It caused a storm of controversy.
31
It’s a Battlefield
Almost an act of self-destruction.
– GRAHAM GREENE
IN SPITE OF his denigration of the popular novel and his determination not to produce one, the account he sent to Mary Pritchett, now his agent in America, of It’s a Battlefield suggests that the novel had all the ingredients of a best-selling thriller. The novel was unfinished then and he was perhaps trying to help her to sell the book:
It is, roughly speaking, a panoramic novel of London. The central point is the bus driver condemned to death for the murder of a policeman at a political meeting, and the effect on his wife & brother & their relationship. But from this central point the story radiates out to all the people affected, so that there are scenes at Scotland Yard, with the Flying Squad at the capture of a murderer near Euston, at a match factory in Battersea, at a café in Little Compton Street, at a literary party, at a bishop’s palace [this last is no longer in the novel], at a political meeting, at an insurance office, at a newspaper office.1
However, what he goes on to say suggests that the thriller elements were controlled by a serious creative design, though his hope still is that the novel will sell well: ‘but the story continually returns to its central points – the condemned cell & the home of the condemned man. I’m afraid this gives a rather confused idea, but the book is really quite closely shaped & patterned. The treatment is mainly ironic & objective, but becomes a little more subjective as the story works inward to those central points. It is not gloomy (!), except in places; some of it is definitely comic. On the whole it is remarkably clean! & I should think would be serialisable.’
Mary Pritchett on 6 May 1933 responded as gently as she could: ‘I like the part of the new book which you have sent me tremendously – it is good writing, and a good story … Your writing is so good that certain kinds of readers will not appreciate it until you have become noted! … It seems to me the book has only one thing which makes it less certain of success than Stamboul Train, and that is that so far the sombre predominates.’
In his diary (19 August 1932) Greene writes that the novel was to describe: ‘a large inclusive picture of a city which should use my experience as much as my imagination, the connecting link … the conviction of a man for the murder of a policeman. Is it politic to hang him? and the detectives go out through the city listening.’ The experience that went into the making of the novel was not his intimate, personal experience, except perhaps for his dreams; but on a subconscious level, it was responsible for the ‘sombre’ predominating.
A major source from his ‘literary’ experience, which influenced the conception, characterisation, movement, even at times the style of the novel, was the writer he so much admired but tried to avoid as a model. His diary shows that some three weeks before the inspiration for the novel came to him, he had been re-reading Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. The ‘large inclusive picture of a city’ must have derived from that novel. Conrad wrote in his Preface: ‘Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself.’ The city in both novels was London, and while the attitude to it was individual to each writer, there are many parallels between the two novels. It is surely significant that Greene’s hero is called Conrad Drover.
Conrad’s The Secret Agent centred on an anarchistic bomb plot and drew characters ranging from the upper classes – the Lady Pat
roness, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, the Home Secretary and his private secretary – to the seedy, lower-class Verlocs. The basis of It’s a Battlefield was the dispersal by police of a Communist demonstration during which a policeman was accidentally killed, and it also ranges over society from an Assistant Commissioner of Police, an overworked Cabinet Minister and his private secretary, a patroness, Lady Caroline, to the lower-class Drovers and Kay Rimmer, a worker in a match factory.
The main theme of the novel was to be ‘the injustice of men’s justice’, and the subject, which he says, significantly, was ‘the fruit of anxiety-ridden weeks’, was suggested by a dream.2 The dreams which were to be of creative value to him in writing It’s a Battlefield stemmed from private anxieties. In them he committed murder, was to be imprisoned for the crime and had difficulty in disposing of the body, and the dreams appear to have reflected a deeply felt guilt over the course he had taken with his career: ‘the dangerous cul-de-sac’3 into which he had led his wife by leaving his steady job on The Times.
The first of these dreams occurred in June 1932, even before he had completed Stamboul Train: ‘Dreamed last night that I was being sent to prison for five years and woke depressed with the farewell to V. & the thought that she would be over 30 when we would live with each other again.’4 On 4 January 1933, on an evening when he was terribly worried about his finances, he had gone to bed early, at 9.30 p.m. This was the night that he dreamt he had murdered J. B. Priestley and was taken away in a Black Maria. His diary continues: ‘This dream did not worry me. A worse dream was that I had murdered someone and deposited his body in a suitcase at a railway cloak room. I wanted to get it away again before it began to smell.’ This he combined with a poem he had written in his diary on 21 November 1932 about a murdered woman dealing with it from the clinical police point of view:
This the analysis of blood-stain –
‘on woollen beret of a common make’;
the experts complain
that the fingers left no mark
On the park chair
or the young breast;
microscopic stare
at uncertain past,
Grass inspected, note-book entry,
‘torn bodice and lace’;
Over the body the solitary sentry
of her certain peace.
The result was an episode in the novel in which the Assistant Commissioner of Police goes with the Superintendent to arrest the ‘body in the trunk’ murderer – a mad member of the Salvation Army. The body was that of a prostitute and had been found in a trunk at Paddington Station. Although Greene did some meticulous research for this novel, the ‘trunk murder’ derives solely from his dreams – there was no such murder, as far as The Times records, until June 1934 (his novel was published in February) when, under the headline ‘WOMAN’S BODY IN A TRUNK’, a special correspondent reported: ‘The discovery of the dismembered body of a woman in a trunk in the left luggage office at Brighton Railway Station last night caused the local police without delay to call in the aid of Scotland Yard. Inside was the body of a woman of between 40 and 45 years of age and about 5ft 2in in height. The head, arms and legs were missing.’
However, although this event was extraordinarily well done in the novel, Greene decided that it did not fit in with its theme, ‘the injustice of men’s justice,’ and he cut the scene out when revising the book for a paperback edition in 1940. Later he realised that ‘Without the mad murderer of the Salvation Army, the battlefield of the title lacked the sense of violence and confusion. The metaphor became a political and not an ironic one.’5
*
His aim to present ‘a large inclusive picture of a city’ must have caused him some worry – how could he make it inclusive given the limits of his experience? How could he deal with characters, such as those of the working-class, of whom he had had limited experience? He had in Stamboul Train dealt with a melodramatic assortment of people – a chorus girl, a Jewish businessman, a female journalist, a revolutionary, a colonel in the secret police, a house-breaker. But his aim now was realism, not melodrama.
The physical setting of the novel – the city of London – would have presented no problem. He knew London, was fascinated by it, had lived in Battersea before his marriage and visited his aunt Nono there while writing the novel. There is a detail and authenticity to the characters in that setting. It is not only Conrad Drover who crosses Battersea Bridge, for behind him stands Graham who many times made this journey: ‘the trams came screeching like a finger drawn on glass up the curve of Battersea Bridge and down into the ill-lighted network of streets beyond; on the water the gulls floated asleep.’6
On a visit to Milly Drover, his sister-in-law, Conrad sees a police boat on the river: ‘A police boat went gently down the stream, burning a red light, and disturbed a sleeping gull which beat up through the rain to the level of the bus windows, then sank again on rigid wings into the dark and the silence, while the sheets of rain fell between.’7 Six years previously, Greene wrote to Vivien from Battersea, ‘The river’s lovely at that time [about midnight]. Chelsea Bridge, with the light of the police boat creeping fearfully quietly along the edge. You can’t see the boat at all only the light, until it’s right up underneath you, and then you just get one glimpse of two mysterious muffled figures sitting very stiff like Egyptian Kings in the stern & then it’s gone again. Absolutely no noise, but the stir in the water.’8 This was at the time of the General Strike and Graham was working early and late and saw London at all hours; ‘I’m beginning to know London at dawn very well. It’s an attractive time.’9
Greene then was clearly going back over the full range of his experiences in Battersea, and the description of violence in the novel when police dispersed the Communist demonstration which led to the accidental murder of a policeman may come, in part, from Graham’s experiences as a special constable during the Strike.
Milly Drover explains that her husband accidentally killed the policeman to prevent him clubbing her:
‘The policeman was going to hit me,’ she said. ‘Everyone was excited.’ She began to shake all over as if she were again in the centre of the mob near Hyde Park Corner …
The crowd turned and ran as the mounted police came down the Row with drawn staves. The man by the Achilles statue struck out with his banner at two policemen who pulled him to the ground and twisted his arms behind his back. He shouted for help, but the crowd was fighting to get away from the wedge of police who were driving them towards the gates. The great green plains of the Park were dotted with shabby men running away.
‘They won’t do anything for him,’ Milly said, flinching again at the raised truncheon and the fear of a pain which never came. The policeman was on his knees bleeding into the turf and crying and gasping, and the crowd was suddenly very far away and the three of them were alone with the grass and a park chair and a sense of disaster. The policeman’s face was wet with tears.10
But contemporary with his writing of the novel there were many demonstrations, some organised by the Communist Party who were rapidly attracting recruits from the poverty-stricken unemployed. The most spectacular was the Hunger March of 1932 when 3,000 people set out from the provinces to walk to London, supported on their way by field kitchens and cobblers to mend their boots. The Glasgow contingent took five weeks to reach London. They then joined in Hyde Park a further 100,000 and violent confrontations with the police were inevitable.
The Times reported that: ‘Both mounted and foot police made baton charges … In Hyde Park … there were at least 100 mounted police … they helped substantially the large force of foot police who were striving to keep the vast crowd within bounds … with drawn batons mounted men charged and repeatedly swept all before them as they went up and down. Chief Inspector Oger and a special constable were badly injured and a passerby hurt.’11
Whether or not Greene witnessed this event, he certainly witnessed a demonstration in London organised by Sir Oswald Mosley, leadin
g the British Union of Fascists: ‘Mosley had organized a provocative procession of his black-shirts through the East End with its strongly Jewish population … I went along to watch; I wanted to see what would happen. The crowd panicked and tried to escape from the batons. I really did panic then, by contagion, I suppose.’12
By having a policeman not simply injured but killed, Greene provides the keystone for his plot and theme, and by the policeman dying with ‘his face wet with tears’ he increases the pathos and maintains an even-handed stance. Yet we cannot doubt where Greene’s sympathies lay. There was a general feeling at the time that by becoming active in a political party one could do something about the terrible social conditions, which perhaps accounts for Greene’s growing interest in politics. In his diary on 11 August 1933, a week after finishing his novel, he wrote: ‘Joined the I.L.P. My political progress has been rather curved.’ He was referring to the fact that he had canvassed for the Conservatives in Oxford in 1923; was close to the Liberals in 1924; joined the Communists in 1925 – though that was a joke membership; had been a special constable during the General Strike, and had now become a member of the Independent Labour Party – more extreme than the modest Labour Party. He told his mother that he had begun to establish a branch of the I.L.P. in Oxford and that the Party Chairman, Jimmy Maxton, a gifted orator who thought the Labour Party thoroughly counter-revolutionary, was going to speak at the opening meeting.
*
Two areas of the novel required deliberate seeking out of information: the prison scenes and the match factory scenes. On 7 October 1932 when he was in London to learn of the Book Society Award, Greene recorded in his diary: ‘Went to Wormwood Scrubs and saw over the prison. In great white letters on the walls, staring out over a flat common ringed with railway lines, the words “Youth Fight or Starve” & the Communist hammer and sickle.’
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 58