The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Back to the crematorium where I met Vivien [brother of deceased] Bob [another brother] Tinty, Toto & Pat. A very pretty girl from the Hampstead Flat [where Vivien’s mother had lived]. An atmosphere of high spirits roused by Bob who was laughing heartily a great deal of the time; in the place itself an air of heartless sentimentality, gardens and flowers and columbariums and 20 funerals a day and a man shouting along the piazza, ‘Any more for the 4.30’. A very short cut service presented by an old emaciated vulture-like clergyman who recited the same preposterous address to the mourners as he does 20 times a day; an air of irreligion posing as undogmatic Christianity. The coffin laid on a moving shelf and at the appropriate words a decorative door opens, one hears the roar of the furnace; the coffin rather grimly, because in appearance of its own volition, slides through the door and the door closes behind it. Bob’s comment on the whole affair, ‘Like shelling peas’. Scientific efficiency behind the façade of mechanical sentimentality. A uniformed man later insisted on showing the women the columbarium and the ashes of Pavlova [the Russian ballerina cremated in 1931], obviously after a tip. He also came ingratiatingly over to Bob, Vivien, Paul, Pat and I, but Bob drove him off: ‘Go away. We’re busy.’ At the end of the service the emaciated vulture shook hands with Tinty and Toto who were in the front row. The undertaker’s man told Pat that hospitals would not take wreaths and the vulture immediately descended in a flutter of surplice. ‘Perhaps you would like me to have them for my war memorial.’ Imagine. The wreaths of 20 funerals a day.16

  Greene was to make creative use of this cremation in his next novel, England Made Me, also in Brighton Rock, and in The End of the Affair (1951).

  In The End of the Affair, Greene has his hero Bendrix arrive too late at the Golders Green crematorium (which was where Mrs Marion Dayrell-Browning was cremated) for Sarah’s cremation. ‘The crematorium tower was smoking, and the water lay in half-frozen puddles on the gravel walks. A lot of strangers came by – from a previous cremation, I supposed: they had the brisk cheerful air of people who have left a dull party and can now “go on” … As we reached the chapel everyone was leaving … I had an odd conventional stab of grief – I hadn’t after all “seen the last” of Sarah, and I thought dully, so it was her smoke that was blowing over the suburban gardens … I went to the door of the chapel and looked in. The runway to the furnace was empty for the moment, but as the old wreaths were being carried out, new ones were being carried in.’17

  *

  Just before the arrival of the cheque from Twentieth Century Fox, Vivien had visited Oxford to seek a flat, for the regular book reviewing was beginning to give them confidence that they could leave the depths of the country. Vivien found a possible flat in Banbury Road for £85 a year inclusive and she took an option for a week, but once the largest cheque Greene had ever received arrived, the estate agent took them to see more expensive modern flats in Woodstock Close: ‘Can’t get used’, he wrote in his diary, ‘to the idea of our being well off and able to afford £150.’ He described it in detail to his mother, and even the lift and the refrigerator were of special interest to him:

  It’s a top, third floor flat, outside there’s an electric lift. Beautifully light. Tradesmen come up a kind of fire escape at the back to the kitchen door, and there’s also a service lift … One large bedroom, one large drawing room, one room for dining room and study. A nice sized kitchen with a little electric refrigerator installed. A lovely bathroom with a square bath with black glass sides. Constant hot water. Hot towel rail. Heated linen cupboard. And along the hall a lovely let in cupboard with great sliding doors … Nobody has had the flat before us, so that it is speckless. Beautiful unstained oak doors and staircase. Fascinating windows which are hinged so that they can be cleaned from inside.18

  As early as February, when a thaw set in and when the sun was out and the stream behind ‘Little Orchard’ was rushing down, Vivien and Graham had walked down to the railway station and back and he confides in his diary that if he went to Oxford he would miss the country: ‘the quiet aesthetic pleasure of merely walking down the High Street to the chemist’s; it is not an active aesthetic pleasure now, except on more than usually lovely days, but a complete absence of anything ugly, noisy or hurried to offend.’19

  One of the last things Greene did before he left Chipping Campden was to respond to a letter from Walter Greenwood, author of Love on the Dole. He had reviewed Greenwood’s novel in the Spectator on 30 June 1930 and praised it strongly. Love on the Dole made a tremendous impact as a record of the life of the unemployed in the 1930s: ‘Several novels have been written lately on unemployment with hatred as the driving force: the occasion has made the novelist. But Love on the Dole is not a tract; it is a novel beautifully constructed by a born novelist … Mr Greenwood writes with vivid clarity; a gesture, a turn of speech, a cough, and the whole man lives. Judged by the highest standard, this is an impressive, a deeply moving book.’

  As soon as Greene had read the novel and before his review appeared, he wrote to congratulate the author. Greenwood quickly wrote back: ‘Heard from Walter Greenwood’, he wrote in his diary, ‘… a pathetic letter referring to the hard life he had had, his broken engagement, etc. Living now on 30/- a week wages at Salford. Glad I had written.’20 The following day he wrote to Naomi Mitchison asking whether something might not be done for Greenwood through the Authors’ Society.

  The last days in Chipping Campden came. Printed cards notifying friends and relatives and others of their move had already been sent out:

  Mr & Mrs Graham Greene

  have moved to

  9 Woodstock Close

  Woodstock Road

  Oxford

  Telephone: Summertown 58173

  from Little Orchard

  Campden, Glos.

  On 22 June Vivien left for Oxford to be ready to receive the removers and Greene stayed to supervise them at the Chipping Campden end. But later that day he went to a literary party in London given by Mrs Belloc Lowndes. He did not enjoy it: ‘Everybody sitting at little gold tables with only tea to drink; as soon as one had a sip one moved on. First had a terrible American woman whose name I didn’t catch; was talked to for a long while about someone’s books – her accent was incomprehensible; I thought we were talking about Cabell [James Branch Cabell] but it turned out in the end to be Garnett [David Garnett].fn3 Charles and Dwye Evans turned up and Charles Morgan. Dwye said: “I haven’t read the paper. Who got the Hawthornden [literary prize] yesterday?” No one of us knew. Presently Morgan said dryly: “As a matter of fact I did.”’ In the previous year, having read a new novel by Ford Madox Ford, Greene had written in his diary: ‘Finished Ford’s Novel. What a book. A “lovely” book from the technical point of view; his complicated time juggling better than Conrad’s. One is inclined to exclaim “genius”, but the critics will not; they all go hunting the safe, literary stylists like Charles Morgan, who have no originality to speak of but a pretty style, dead as last year’s leaves. But Ford’s is as full of life as a flea.’fn4, 21

  After the party he had supper, ‘and wandered dubiously about and went to Paddington early in the morning not getting back to Campden until 3 in the morning.’ It was his last night in Chipping Campden: ‘walked up from the station in bright moonlight, one light beaming in Station road, Campden at its loveliest. Audrey Cox put her head out of the window and said goodnight.’

  He was up at eight next morning and started for Oxford. On Sunday, 25 June they moved into the new flat. It must have been a busy day for him, especially since Vivien was pregnant, yet he found time to do a four hundred word review for John O’London’s Weekly and on the following day he was back to work on It’s a Battlefield: ‘A lot of re-shuffling of the novel. Cut out 2,000 words of prison interpolations. Cut out 400 of Communist meeting and wrote about 500 in. Wrote a completely new scene for the Commissioner.’ Wherever Graham Greene lives he will sit down and write – that is his way of settling into a new environment.

 
; *

  The Greenes had been living in their new home in Oxford for five weeks when, on 4 August, Graham quietly recorded in his diary the completion of It’s a Battlefield, eight days in advance of his estimated time of completion: ‘Finished my book, 67,500 words.’ He did not find an appropriate title until late on into the book, a title, that is, which would embody the view of society he was trying to portray. That view developed from his personal experience, the trivial event of the delivery of the morning newspaper being delayed: ‘Yesterday,’ he recorded in his diary as early as 18 June 1932, ‘the papers didn’t arrive till about 10.30. The reason is in this morning’s paper: a bad accident to the L[ondon] M[idland] and S[cottish] express between Crewe & Birmingham; 3 dead, 52 seriously injured. The effect on us, delayed papers, might be compared to the last & faintest ring a stone makes thrown into the pond. The first & clearest ring is death and physical pain: the next mental pain. Our ring is slight discomfort and irritation.’ This vision of human life as a series of concentric circles of experience ranging from the tragic to the trivial and linked only by an accidental and brief ‘knock-on’ effect is the origin of his vision for It’s a Battlefield which he was to begin three months later. The inner circles of death and physical and mental pain are those of the Drovers, Conrad, Jim and Milly. The outer circle belongs to the journalist Condor and the Assistant Commissioner, doing his duty and untouched by personal tragedy.

  Such a vision of society required an appropriate technique, as Greene was aware. T. S. Eliot in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ had found his own solution, leaping from one subject and scene to the next. But this technique in a novel can be too abrupt, breaking up rather than blending together, as we see on page 85 (the first page of section 3) when in rapid succession we have a few lines on Mr Surrogate, then on the match factory, then on Condor the journalist.

  On 13 January 1933, having written what he called the ‘Mr Surrogate scene’, he records in his diary that he suddenly thought of ‘a new piece of carpentry: ‘The simultaneity of the various shots [note the film imagery] to be emphasized by interpolated shots of the prison which all run straight on, though interrupted by the larger scenes. This to be carried on throughout the book, except when dealing with “Inner Circle”.’ And in effect this is what he did, the longer ‘shots’ of the Drover family’s tragedy bringing out their pathos and ineffectuality, the shorter ‘shots’ of those removed from the tragedy emphasising their concern with expedience and personal success, throwing the Drovers’ situation into greater tragic relief.

  Structurally, the novel is a circle, beginning and ending with the outer boundary of the vortex, the detached stability of the Assistant Commissioner, holding it together. There are no divisions into chapters, only five sections following each other without any formal separation.

  The conviction that what he was portraying was a battlefield came as late as 1 July 1933, when he jettisoned the provisional titles of ‘Opus V’ and ‘A New Novel’: ‘Almost decided on It’s a Battlefield as a title with a beautifully suitable quotation from Kinglake’s Crimea’. The quotation was apt since Kinglake saw the Crimean battlefield as a number of small, isolated circles:

  In so far as the battlefield presented itself to the bare eyesight of men, it had no entirety, no length, no breadth, no depth, no size, no shape, and was made up of nothing except small numberless circlets commensurate with such ranges of vision as the mist might allow at each spot … In such conditions, each separate gathering of English soldiery went on fighting its own little battle in happy and advantageous ignorance of the general state of the action; nay, even very often in ignorance of the fact that any great conflict was raging’.fn5

  The idea of life as a battlefield in which individuals, ignorant of the extent of the whole war, fought their own separate battles, is the metaphor which embodies the theme of the novel, but the Kinglake quotation was found too late to have been the inspiration for this theme.

  Out of the difficulties of writing this experimental novel, the characteristic Greene novel was to come, but his notion of what the modern novel should be was strengthened, after he had finished It’s a Battlefield, by reviewing a story called The Gates of Hell.22 It was a spy story, of the kind he was to excel in – The Confidential Agent (1939) and The Ministry of Fear (1943). Two quotations from The Gates of Hell present the basic Greene concept of life. The author is describing what he calls ‘the Black Front’:

  … a front that is within and around us. We live in dry trenches, camp shoulder to shoulder, but in front of us lie all the Dragons – the pleasures of the flesh, the tendency to compromise, and tepidity, materialism, liberalism, deification of the State, nationalism, individualism, superman-snobbery; in a word, all the philosophical and political illusions that we have been fighting wildly and confusedly for two thousand years.

  In particular, the passage which follows has an authentic Greeneian ring:

  The enemy is encamped not only in front of us, but within us, so that our battle-front is doubled … And the saddest part of it is that we are all merely a fragment of a sector of the infinite firing-line; we never see the shots; somewhere or other we find ourselves placed in the firing-line; we battle for a few decades; and then in some way or other we go down under the fire.

  How close this is to It’s a Battlefield: ‘we are all merely a fragment of a sector of the infinite firing line’. How close to the philosophy and structure of the distinctive Greene novel.

  *

  There is an interesting postscript to It’s a Battlefield. In 1968, an unknown Malian writer, one Yambo Ouologuem, wrote a novel entitled Le Devoir de Violence. It won the Prix Renaudot and was described as a ‘horrifying saga of violence, degradation, cannibalism and eroticism’. Moreover it was acclaimed throughout the European and English-speaking world. It was translated by a distinguished translator into English and entitled Bound to Violence. On 12 March 1972, Robert MacDonald, an admirer of the novels of Graham Greene, and also a student of recent African literature, was struck by the similarities between certain pages of Bound to Violence and pages of Greene’s It’s a Battlefield. He contacted Greene and wrote an article about Yambo (referred to on one occasion by Greene as ‘Little Black Yambo’) asserting that he had simply lifted the scene between Surrogate and Kay Rimmer in Surrogate’s house and Africanised the details, Surrogate becoming Chevalier, the Administrator, and Kay Awa, the magnificent black woman, being shown round his home, shown his bedroom, the books he has written, the portrait of his dead wife. Apart from the introduction of a verandah and such details as oil lamps, the scene is identical to that in It’s a Battlefield. Later in his novel, Yambo inserted unchanged Greene’s description of the injured Conrad Drover’s sufferings.

  Greene was more amused than angry. The Bookseller wrote: ‘It is understood that Graham Greene has no intention of making a battlefield of the matter.’ In the United States, where Harcourt Brace Jovanovich were in the process of bringing out a paperback edition of Bound to Violence, William Jovanovich, who said cancellation costs would be about $10,000, was quite firm. He determined that the book would not be reprinted in any form and he also determined that all existing copies in their possession would be destroyed. The New York Times quoted him as saying: ‘Even if Mr Greene were to say that he just wants an acknowledgement, we would still go ahead and destroy the copies … If I cannot warrant it, I cannot publish it.’ So Greene did not take any legal action, but Mr Alan Hill, chairman of Heinemann Educational Books, received a telephone call from Graham Greene about it when the news of the ‘borrowings’ reached him. He said: ‘Greene came on the telephone to me. There was a dry, old-paper feel about his voice. You could almost tear it.’

  No doubt it became a skeleton in Yambo’s cupboard or, as Greene wrote in another context, ‘the skeletons of other people’s people’.

  fn1 Fox Film corporation bought Orient Express outright from Greene for $7,500.

  fn2 Greene in his autobiography, A Sort of Life, te
lls us that when he was in Sierra Leone (during the war), running an office of the secret service, he also received two telegrams in the wrong order – the first telling him of his father’s death, the second of his father’s serious illness.

  fn3 In the book, The Third Man, Graham Greene’s hero, Holly Martins, at a literary lecture for the Cultural Institute, to which he is mistakenly invited to lecture though he is only an unsuccessful writer of Westerns who has never seen a cowboy, naturally praises Zane Grey, the most successful writer of cowboy stories. The master of ceremonies quickly corrects him thinking he could only mean the eighteenth-century poet Gray. Perhaps the notion of such an error comes from the confusion reported above.

  fn4 During 1962 and 1963, Greene edited four volumes of Ford Madox Ford for The Bodley Head and wrote an introduction to volumes one and three. ‘No one in our century’, he writes, ‘except James has been more attentive to the craft of letters.’

  fn5 A. W. Kinglake (1809–91). His History of the War in the Crimea, in 8 volumes, was written over a period of 25 years.

  33

  England Made Me – and the Black Sheep of the Family

  In life the loser’s score is always zero.

  – w. H. AUDEN

  ‘DIRECTLY THIS BOOK’S finished,’ Greene told Mary Pritchett, ‘I’m off to Sweden for three weeks.’ This was no idle statement and did not refer to a holiday trip. It is an indication of Greene’s restlessness, physical and mental, of his creative energy and his need to plan ahead; he had already decided that ‘the next book was going to be divided between London and Stockholm’. London as a setting is no surprise, but Stockholm is – he had never been there. Why Stockholm?

  The answer lies in a review he wrote for the Spectator in March 1933 of the biography of ‘the Match King’, ‘the Napoleon of finance’, the Swede Ivar Kreuger. Kreuger controlled three-quarters of the world’s match trade, which sounds incongruous but was very lucrative. He juggled with astronomical figures, lending large sums to governments in exchange for monopolistic concessions – $75 million to the French, $125 million to the German government. He was a great man, ‘and presently he is a little less than ordinary, lying on his bed with a bullet through the heart.’1 His forgeries, discovered after his suicide, were, like everything else he did, massive. Four months after this review, Greene wrote in his diary: ‘Almost decided on going to Stockholm next month as Kreuger will probably be model for one of the principal characters in next novel.fn1, 2 (It is an odd coincidence that he was writing about a match factory in It’s a Battlefield.)