The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Why did Greene, in his novels of the 1930s and 1940s, round on the educational system that had produced him and condemn its values? In part it must have been a reaction to his own experiences of school which were followed by his personal struggles to make a living, but his verbal and public condemnation was sparked off by two books. In a Spectator review, written long before the conception of England Made Me, he wrote: ‘Gentleman – the Regiment is an embarrassing book. What begins as a satire on the dead traditions of the Army … develops into a school-boy’s daydream of Honour, Love, Back to the Wall … it is [hard] to sympathise with the naïve emotionalism of what follows. It recalls school speech days (The School … Honour of … The School), housemasters’ perorations (The House … Honour of … The House).’15

  Then in July 1933, he read Robert Graves’s autobiography which had been published in 1929: ‘Began with immense pleasure Graves’ Goodbye to All That, which I had not read before: full of the right kind of anecdote, ones which set the creative instinct going.’ Immediately, he had the subject for a novel – though one never to be written: ‘What a subject for a slightly Kafka novel: the schoolboy who had skeleton keys made for all the rooms in the school and would steal down at night and turn them upside down. In the headmaster’s study he even found a memo for his own expulsion and brought it back.’16 It is interesting that, as the son of a headmaster, his sympathies are on the side of the anarchic pupil, and in the same diary entry he goes on: ‘I want to propose a symposium to a publisher. “The Old School”, studies of the horror of the public school by about ten prominent young authors with the schools mentioned by name’, an idea which he followed up, writing to Mary Pritchett that the book would be ‘a symposium of essays, called ironically The Old School – various distinguished authors telling candidly the horrors of their schools. Among others I have Harold Nicolson, Richard Hughes, Arnot Robertson, Elizabeth Bowen, Theodora Benson, William Plomer.’

  The Old School was published in 1934 and, writing of Berkhamsted in the final chapter, Greene considers what is involved in the public school idea of ‘Honour’:

  As a training for life indeed the school was not more efficient than other public schools. It taught a moral standard quite out of keeping with adult manners. Mr Auden’s essay reminded me that we too had the silly, but for our supervisors convenient, tradition of owning up. A hypocritical tradition, for who in later life ‘owns up’ to all his petty illegalities? I remember a junior house-master addressing the assembled boys at length on the subject of Honour; the occasion was quite typical. A dirty and unmarked gym shoe had been left in the changing-room, and he called on the boy to ‘own up’. The boy, being more adult than the master, naturally did nothing of the kind. But the Honour of the whole house was at stake and the whole house was punished, an implicit encouragement to us to discover and lynch the offender. I cannot see any moral distinction between a rope for a negro and a knotted towel for a boy.17

  The basic theme of England Made Me has been worked out here – the condemnation of an out-dated code of behaviour intended to prepare an individual for life in a hard world which is demonstrated by trivial incidents in an enclosed and protected community. Minty embodies the theme in its extreme manifestation, but Anthony Farrant is more convincing, no doubt because he was based on personal knowledge. In Ways of Escape, Greene tells us that he was quite satisfied with his portrait of Anthony: ‘Hadn’t I lived with him closely over many years? He was an idealized portrait of my eldest brother, Herbert.’18

  If we separate the model from the character, we can understand what Greene meant by idealisation. Greene’s condemnation of the public school, his contrast between principles taught and worldly practice, probably drew strength from a very personal emotion, a feeling that Herbert, the black sheep, had, in spite of his disasters, initially at least, been the recipient of much sympathy and assistance from his parents. The stringent devotion to work, the determination to be successful and independent which was Graham’s creed, had been cunningly avoided by Herbert.

  We also have to take into account a second portrait of Herbert, called on this occasion not Anthony but Hands, which appears in an abandoned novel, part of which was published in ‘Penguin New Writing’ in 1947. In his Introduction to the unfinished Across the Border, he states that he probably wrote it in 1937, but it is likely that it was written after his return from Liberia when he was also writing Journey Without Maps, and felt that after trying Herbert out successfully in England Made Me he might as well try him out again more realistically.

  *

  Greene’s portrait of Anthony Farrant is of someone charming but entirely untrustworthy, characteristics which are underlined by the imagery: ‘Congratulate me, he seemed to be saying, and his humorous friendly shifty eyes raked her like the headlamps of a second-hand car which had been painted and polished to deceive … But when he turned, his smile explained everything; he carried it always with him as a leper carried his bell; it was a perpetual warning that he was not to be trusted.’19 Anthony is dishonest but not dishonest enough; he has a child’s cunning in a world of cunning men; he has a habit of sending cables to his father, from distant places in the world: ‘“I have resigned” from Shanghai, “I have resigned” from Bangkok, “I have resigned” from Aden, creeping remorselessly nearer. His father had believed to the end the literal truth of those cables … But Kate had always known too much; to her these messages conveyed – “Sacked. I am sacked.”’ The truth is that he can’t open his mouth without lying. But he is a man of ideas and schemes. He buys three hundred bags of spoilt tea for a song and sells them at the full rate. He had a plan to buy up old library novels and sell them in country villages, an idea for a shop which would pack and post Christmas parcels and one for a patent hand warmer (a stick of burning charcoal in the hollow handle of an umbrella). He is a skilled story-teller, adapting the same story to suit different audiences. There was the incident of the killing of an Indian minister when he ‘told the fellows at the club how I was on the pavement when the coolie threw the bomb. A cart had broken down and the Minister’s car pulled up and the coolie threw the bomb, but of course, I hadn’t seen it, I’d only heard the noise over the roofs and seen the screens tremble … they [the fellows at the club] paid for three whiskies and we played cards and I won over two pounds before Major Wilber came in, who knew I had not been there.’20

  Later, in Stockholm, his sister Kate comes upon him telling the same story to a girl (who has fallen for him): ‘“And then the bomb exploded,” he was saying. “The coolie simply dropped it at his own feet. They picked him up in bits all over the city … My voice had frightened him.” … “And the Minister?” a girl’s voice said. “Not a scratch.”’21

  He is utterly feckless about money, but he never sponged – only accumulated debts which were never paid: ‘What do you mean? I’m not going to sponge’, and he sincerely believed he had never sponged. ‘He had borrowed, of course; his debts to relatives must by now have almost reached the thousand mark; but they remained debts not gifts, one day, when a scheme of his succeeded, to be repaid.’22

  Hands, in Across the Border, has also had a life of ‘lost jobs … borrowed money … accumulated failures’, and he has the same need to have an audience to listen to his extravagant, dishonest stories:

  ‘Africa,’ Hands said. ‘The West Coast.’

  ‘And when are you off?’

  ‘It’s not fixed definitely.’

  ‘Those will be wild parts?’

  ‘Oh,’ Hands said, ‘there’s ivory, of course. And diamonds. Gold – You have to have men with you you can trust – in an emergency.’ … He had an audience at last: in the inner room he could just see the girl’s face listening. It wasn’t a pretty face, and it wasn’t very young. He would have liked something a bit better, but it was an audience … as he started on the long fake tale he felt happy and ready for anything because no one here knew of the lost jobs and the borrowed money and the accumulated failures. The whole wo
rld was at his feet …23

  Hands has much less appeal than Anthony, less charm, less spontaneity, is more calculating, and is closer to Graham’s brother Herbert. He is seen returning to Berkhamsted, called Denton in the story – which reflects obvious aspects of Berkhamsted Graham used again and again in his stories – to meet his father, obviously based on Charles Greene. In the train, Hands is considering how he can explain one more failure to his father: ‘“I’ve been getting in touch with various companies” – a hint of mystery and importance.’ … ‘“I’ve made contacts,” Hands said … “Are they interested – I mean have they any vacancies?” “This isn’t going to be a job of that kind,” Hands said. “This is going to be more –” the dream grew as he talked – “more of an administrative job, men under me. It’s what I’ve always wanted you know …”’24 Anthony, Hands and Herbert all ‘bore the knobs, excrescences, fungi of a dozen careers’,25 but Hands and Herbert drank, and Hands tries to hide this from his father:

  ‘You’ve had a tiring day. Shall I get out a little burgundy?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Hands said. ‘I’m in training.’

  ‘Harvest burgundy won’t hurt you.’

  ‘No, really. I’m not drinking.’ He sighed at the cabbage and a very faint smell of whisky percolated through the room. He smelt it himself: it infuriated him. How could a fellow succeed with such a father? Smelling his breath, grudging the taxi, disbelieving. He said stubbornly: ‘You know – what I’ve always needed is – well, to show I can lead men.’26

  Sir Cecil Parrott, Graham’s contemporary at Berkhamsted, recalled that ‘Herbert was a drunk and often had to be carried home every night and a coach was specially kept for him to take him home.’ In later years, when he was an alcoholic, he was perfectly frank about it. The journalist, Olga Franklin, interviewed Herbert Greene some eight years before he died: ‘Herb was very tall, good-looking like the Brothers, but conscious that he was at least an inch shorter than Graham, and very much shorter than “Little Hugh”fn4 … Herbert said he was now an alcoholic and he felt sorry if it embarrassed his brothers. He had no wish to embarrass Graham or Little Hughie or anyone else, but he was whisky-dependent now … It was impossible not to like Herbert and feel sympathy because of his honesty, frankness and simple acceptance of himself as “the family failure” … Herbert was not entirely without the family charm, talent and there was an absence of bitterness which was appealing despite his complaints.’27

  Probably Herbert’s first post was in Santos, Brazil, where a firm of coffee merchants was run by Edward Greene. It was natural that Edward would be willing to find a place for Charles’s son. He was given a chance. Tooter Greene briefly presented the facts of Herbert’s career in Brazil:

  He was a drunk and he was irresponsible where money was concerned. He got a job in Brazil through the assistance of my father but he couldn’t be trusted and had to go. I think he got a girl in the family way there. Later when he got another job in Argentina, his boat stopped at Santos and he brought the whole of the passengers to my father’s home and we had to entertain. Also, he signed chits around the town to show that he was a big man, and again my father had to pay the bill.28

  Felix Greene, Tooter’s younger brother, while having a soft spot for Herbert, admitted, ‘He was financially utterly untrustworthy, he gambled and got everyone else gambling.’29

  Letters written by Graham to Vivien before his marriage, and to his mother, show how disturbed, bitter and even savage Greene felt towards Herbert. To Vivien on 24 February 1926, in the early days of courtship, he wrote:

  I had a letter from my eldest brother the other day. I wish he wouldn’t choose me as his confidant, as he always does. I can see he’s going to do something foolish. The man’s an utter bounder. The fact that he’s been practically living on his people for the last nearly thirty years doesn’t seem to prey on him in the least. With him one has the continual choice of breaking his confidence, or watching, without doing anything, fresh trouble for my people looming on the horizon. I thought and genuinely hoped (I think he’s driven most of his family that far) that something might finish him in Argentina. I know it’s a horrid thing to say, but if he’d had the self respect of a louse he’d have done himself in by this time.

  Three weeks later he wrote: ‘My eldest brother’s “broken out” again. His is a case where I can’t help feeling that suicide far from being sinful would be meritorious. It’s fearfully depressing and hopeless for my people.’30

  Immediately after this, Herbert went out to a job in Rhodesia. He went out to one job but had to find another and back came an optimistic telegram. To Vivien, Greene wrote: ‘Herbert has said to Audrey [Herbert’s future wife] “Good job” – the firm he went out to had sold up; and they’ve had a long cable which is in code and they have to wait till my uncle gets back from London, who knows the business code. So I hope to goodness he’s settled.’31 The good new job turned out to be with Lloyd’s but lasted only two months:

  Herbert’s started again. Cables home that the Lloyd’s job has ‘come to an end’ and money needed. Poor Audrey was really hoping to be going out in a month or so. I wish to goodness he’d shoot himself – if he’d got any self-respect whatever he would – after all he’s not a Catholic – there’d be no sense of sin in it, and therefore no sin to him. But I suppose he hasn’t the pluck for that. I think in his case the sin is in not shooting himself. I think my people are getting simply desperate about him. If I was my father, I should simply send him nothing and let him get something or starve. Only I suppose he’d borrow enough money from some fool and get home. Killing would be no murder in his case!32

  And there is a letter, written to Vivien some time in 1926, in which Greene argues, on the basis of his knowledge of Herbert, that parents would only want to keep twenty per cent of those born and that if parents had the same power as the artist has over his pictures, they would destroy the rest. He admitted that an individual was not a picture: ‘Though practically every week there’s a case of a mother who’s arrested for killing her baby. The creative instinct was there, but the result wasn’t wanted.’

  Perhaps because of the trouble created by Herbert, at this point, 1935, the time of The Old School and England Made Me, he became warmly supportive of his father. He saw him now as a progressive headmaster. In The Old School he writes as follows:

  I am thinking of my own school. I do not believe that it is family pride which makes me admire the head master’s achievement (he is my father). He was an admirably progressive head master, never more so than in his later years at the school. A great many of the reforms which the progressive schools still regard as daring innovations could be found working smoothly at Berkhamsted. The masters were allowed an unusually free hand if they wished to experiment. An enthusiast was even allowed to start a system of self-government. It failed (you cannot be a socialist in a capitalist state), but he was given time and sympathy for his experiment. I remember with gratitude the admirable chamber concerts … Discipline was as humane as you could find anywhere outside a progressive school. Only house-masters were allowed to cane, neither prefects nor form-masters. It was not a really satisfactory school for sadists; only two sadistic masters come back to mind, and one of them was so openly sadistic, so cheerful a debauchee, that one could not grudge him his pleasure. Boys, like whores, prefer a man who enjoys shamelessly what he is about.

  But my father retired, a young man was appointed, and it was the young man who preferred to follow the older tradition. More time was given to games and less to work, physical training ceased to be a serious part of the curriculum, prefects were given the right to cane.33

  Perhaps his father’s increasing helplessness and sickness was another reason why Greene began to see him in a new light. In his diary for 28 March 1933, Greene writes: ‘Cheered a good deal with Da sitting in the garden.’ During his visit to Stockholm he wrote the following card to his mother: ‘I’m terribly sorry of Da’s affliction, remembering Henry James’s l
etters of suffering; he had it about the same age.’34 This could mean that Charles Greene was then suffering from shingles, angina or diabetes – this last he certainly suffered from. In A Sort of Life, Greene writes of his father: ‘In his last years he had diabetes and always beside her place at table there stood a weighing-machine to measure his diet, and it was she [Greene’s mother] who daily gave him his injections of insulin.’35 And certainly what made Graham speak so venomously against his brother Herbert at this time was the sense that his father and mother, but especially his father, were being overwhelmed by Herbert’s fecklessness, his irresponsibility and his sheer dishonesty. To Vivien he wrote:

  It’s rather gloomy being at home. More trouble about H. It’s knocked my father up physically. He’s got to see a specialist on Saturday. I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if that bounder literally killed him. I shall do my best to give him a thin time if he ever gets back to England. It makes one feel positively murderous to see a useless idiot like him killing someone who’s worth a million times more than him.

  The sheer nobility and simplicity and unworldliness of Graham’s father comes out in both England Made Me and Across the Border. When Kate speaks of leaving England and of her father’s remarks about Anthony, we must wonder if these reflect those made by Charles Greene to Graham about Herbert: ‘“I wish Anthony were with you.” He said I must be careful, there would be temptations. But he had never been tempted, he didn’t know what the word meant … He had a profound trust in human nature. But be chaste, prudent, pay your debts, and do not love immoderately.’36 It is put more strongly in the abandoned novel Across the Border: