The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  But more than fear was involved in his journey, and in his purpose and experience he perhaps comes closest to Joseph Conrad’s experience in the Congo – there are many parallels between his journey in Liberia and Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. Both were writers seeking new experiences; both urgently needed to make some money – Conrad by becoming master of a Congo river-steamer, Greene by writing a travel book. Each had an urge based on an ideal: Conrad’s recollection of his childhood fascination with the map of Africa and the great explorers; Greene’s desire to experience real ‘seediness, not the seediness he knew from the outside’ (the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the ‘tarts’ in Bond Street) but a more interesting variety. ‘There seemed to be a seediness about [Liberia] that you couldn’t get to the same extent elsewhere and seediness has a very deep appeal.’98 They both started their journeys with confrontations with bureaucracy, Conrad in the headquarters of the S.A.B. in Brussels, ‘the sepulchral city’, Greene with the Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberian consulate in London, and both made journeys of ever growing discomfort, fear and eventually illness. Both experienced more than they had bargained for – an insight into what Conrad called ‘the fascination of the abomination’, a confrontation with the primitive.

  Conrad himself felt the attraction of the dirt, disease, barbarity and primitiveness of Africa, so that he could not condemn entirely Kurtz, the man who succumbed to the fascination; and Greene could find some sympathy for the Liberian politicians who had not succumbed: ‘I could not be quite fair to them, coming … from an interior where there was a greater simplicity, an older more natural culture, and traditions of honesty and hospitality … It seemed to me that they, almost as much as oneself, had lost touch with the true primitive source. It was not their fault. Two hundred years of American servitude separated them from Africa.’99

  Greene, in spite of his experiences – the old man being beaten with a club outside the prison at Tapee-T?, the naked, clay-covered widows at Tailahun, the ‘wooden-toothed devil swaying his raffia skirts between the huts’ – retained a belief in primitive virtues and saw the evils as ‘like the images in a dream to stand for something of importance to myself’.100

  He did not want to stay in Africa; he had no yearning for a mindless sensuality, but the deep appeal of the seedy was due to the fact that it is nearer to the beginnings of human development – ‘it hasn’t reached so far away as the smart, the new, the chic, the cerebral’ – and also, ‘it is only when one has appreciated such a beginning, its terrors as well as its placidity, the power as well as the gentleness, that the pity for what we have done with ourselves is driven more forcibly home.’101

  It is possible that Greene’s desire to go to Africa, to find out the worst, to reach rock bottom and to seek out the primitive, was inspired by his reading, immediately before his journey, the novel, The Inner Journey, by Kurt Heuser. The young hero, Jeronimo, seeks to escape his past and also expresses a fascination with the ‘true native’ of Africa and he sees Africa in terms similar to those of Greene. In the urban world we grow unhappier and ‘what ails us is nothing else than our continuous submission to chaos, because our deepest desire is to submit … the same impulse that makes us yearn for release and death, in our weak moments … the will to self-destruction …’ And Greene points out in a 1952 review that both Mary Kingsley and Mungo Park went to Africa to seek death, and Mungo Park found it. This desire for self-destruction, in spite of a powerful desire to succeed as a writer, is part of the paradox of Graham Greene. He has a strong desire – it is still with him – to take a leap into the unknown, a journey in the dark, this last being his original title for Journey Without Maps.

  There was, however, a further dimension to his journey: a Freudian journey back to one’s beginnings, but ‘a more costly, less easy method, calling for physical as well as mental strength’.102 On a subconscious level it was a retreat from civilisation in a search for the ‘ancestral threads which still exist in our unconscious minds’. Only through experiencing the primitive as the French novelist Céline described it, ‘Hidden away in all this flowering forest of twisted vegetation, a few decimated tribes of natives squatted among fleas and flies, crushed by taboos and eating nothing at all but rotten tapioca’, could one escape from the rationality of civilised man. As Greene wrote: ‘when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can, from what we have come to recall at which point we went astray.’103 From this experience follows his description of one of the first sounds he heard on his return to England – ‘the wail of a child [in a tenement] too young to speak, too young to have learned what the dark may conceal in the way of lust and murder, crying for no intelligible reason but because it still possessed the ancestral fear, the devil was dancing in its sleep’.104

  Praising a documentary on Abyssinia in a 1935 film review, he ended with these firm words – which could have been written by Greene only after his Liberian experience: the film ‘leaves you with a vivid sense of something very old, very dusty, very cruel, but something dignified in its dirt and popular in its tyranny and perhaps more worth preserving than the bright slick streamlined civilization which threatens it …’105

  Journey Without Maps was published on 11 May 1936. A year and a half later, the book was withdrawn because of a libel case and remained out of print for almost a decade. Greene wrote to his brother Hugh about it:

  The other fly in the ointment is a libel action. I don’t know whether you remember the drunk party at Freetown in Journey Without Maps. I called the drunk, whose real name was quite different, Pa Oakley. It now turns out that there is a Dr P. D. Oakley, head of the Sierra Leone Medical Service. The book’s been withdrawn (luckily all but 200 copies have been sold), writs have been served, and he’s out for damages! Anxious days.106

  By 1946, Greene had himself become a publisher at Eyre and Spottiswoode and he rescued his travel book. To Louise Callendar of Heinemann he wrote: ‘After the libel action from the Sierra Leone Doctor the book was withdrawn and has never been in print since. My own view is that it would be only equitable for you to surrender the rights back to me personally, in which case I should probably give a licence for three years to either Pan Books or Penguin.’107 He sold to Pan Books.

  When Peter Fleming came to review Journey Without Maps in the Spectator, he struck the right note in describing Greene’s account of his journey; he speaks of his ‘unillusioned honesty which stamps all his impressions’ and, comparing him with Ernest Hemingway (whose Green Hills of Africa appeared in 1935), he speaks of both authors seeking Africa as ‘fugitives from western civilization’; and while he admits that ‘that note of disgust which pervades all [Greene’s] writings sounds … all the time in our ears’, yet he feels that in Greene’s descriptions of the interior we are looking through his eyes, ‘whereas in the other book we are always being forced to look into Mr Hemingway’s’.108

  *

  At the beginning of Journey Without Maps Greene gives a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes describing an individual’s life as a child’s dissected map which, if we lived long enough, we could reassemble so that our life was ‘intelligently laid out before’ us. To some degree, the continent was an important piece in the jigsaw of the map of his life – or rather several pieces, as a letter to his cousin Barbara in 1975 suggests:

  By God! I think you are right. 40 years. I would have loved to split a bottle with you – preferably not champagne – it should be whisky with warm filtered water & squeezed limes.

  To me too that trip has been very important – it started a love of Africa which has never quite left me & that led to Freetown in the war, & Kenya & the Mau Mau afterwards, & the Congo & the Cameroons when I stumbled on Yvonne. Altogether a trip which altered life.109

  fn1 President Barclay lived for another twenty years, dying of cancer in 1955.

  fn2 This supper with the Harleys must have been on 14 Februar
y 1935 since their deceased son was born on 14 February, according to Methodist records.

  36

  14 North Side

  Knowledge can be acquired only by hard work.

  – W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  ALTHOUGH ON HIS return to England Greene must have been debilitated by the journey and the fever, he almost immediately began to reorganise his life. He was faced with the fact that he and his family were living on uncertain royalties from his novels. In an effort to find some permanent income he again approached his former employer, The Times. He was now an established book reviewer, had had his fourth novel, Stamboul Train, made into a film, had his sixth novel in press and had branched out as a traveller and explorer. But it would seem that The Times demanded an apology for his defection. He wrote to his mother: ‘The Times plan will not, I think, come off; it necessitates a letter on my part which I don’t feel inclined to write saying that I see now I was mistaken in leaving them.’1 He was not likely to grovel in this way.

  However, he did feel that he needed to leave Oxford and live in London, the centre of the publishing world, and he went to look at flats and houses at Clapham Common. ‘I was terribly struck by the place,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘most beautiful, of the Hampstead period, with lovely air and nice shops and only about twelve minutes from Leicester Square by tube and close to Aunt N[ora].’ He went to see Derek Verschoyle’s sister. She and her husband had bought ‘a most beautiful Queen Anne house in a lovely row opposite the common and done it up absolutely like a museum piece; the most beautifully decorated house I’ve ever been in.’2 The Robertsons (the owners) wanted to let the house furnished from the end of July as Mr Robertson had given up a business job in town in order to become a master at Sherborne. The rent was £5 a week, quite a substantial sum in 1935, and beyond Greene’s means, but Mrs Robertson was so taken with him that she promised that, if he could get rid of his flat in Oxford and if she had found no suitable tenant, she would let him have the house for the same rent he was paying at Oxford. And it turned out that way.

  He had decided on the house without Vivien’s help, but when, arriving with Lucy and the luggage, she first saw No. 14 North Side, she was delighted with his choice:

  It was almost entirely panelled throughout – mostly pale grey, except the bedroom and the front sitting room. There was a big square entrance hall of stone … there was a room where we kept china and things in. The kitchen and an adjoining room were semi-basement and a door from the kitchen (glass) led into a small garden, part paved, quickly turned into a sand pit and garden slide. And then there was this wonderful staircase which is called a flying staircase. Someone said the flying staircase might be by Vauban but this seems unlikely.fn1 On the first floor there was a drawing room (pale grey panelling) and I got stripes – cherry and white – for the chairs and sofa. I had some papier mâché tables. And then the front was a sort of living room, sitting room and very pretty. The curtains were pale green with lilies of the valley on them. It was very elegant. Most of the rooms had shutters and window seats. And then, on that landing, there was a room for the maid and a bathroom. And the nursery. Oh, yes, and then next to the nursery was the night nursery. That’s it.3

  Lady Read, the wife of Herbert Read, described it as ‘a most enchanting house – like a Mozart opera – with the double step.’

  Greene wrote to his mother: ‘The whole appearance of Clapham Common is lovely, like a wide green plateau on a hilltop above Battersea, with the common stretching out of sight in one direction, and on three sides surrounded by little country-like shops and Queen Anne houses, a pond and in the middle of the Common, the 18th century church to which the Clapham set belonged. The house was built in 1730 and was used by Macaulay’s father as a school for black children.’4

  Something of his pride in the house is shown when, in 1938, having decided that his American publishers, Doubleday, were not selling enough copies of his books and he moved to Viking, he invited his contact with them, director Ben Hubsch, at that time staying at 55 Jermyn Street, to a party at his home. He sent Hubsch the following neat sketch and accurate directions (though printed the handwriting is recognisably Vivien’s) as to how to find 14 North Side – and reminding him to wear a black tie!

  Number 14 North Side was to play a significant part in their lives. It was to be the last house they lived in together and it was to be destroyed by a bomb during the blitz on London in the Second World War. J. Maclaren-Ross recalled walking one day off Clapham Common with a friend in 1956 and his companion pointed to a gutted ruin with a façade of blackened brick and said, ‘That used to be a Queen Anne house before the blitz. Beautiful place I believe. It belonged to Graham Greene.’ ‘I know,’ replied Maclaren-Ross, no doubt with some satisfaction, ‘I lunched there once. In 1938’, and his friend was suitably impressed.

  The bombing of that house was to be used creatively by Greene in two works – first in his novel The End of the Affair, and then in a curious and bizarre short story, ‘The Destructors’, about a gang of boys who pull down, brick by brick, a Queen Anne house.

  Now settled in London, he pressed on with his career on several fronts. Having contacted a lecture agency, in May he gave a lecture at the League of Nations’ Union lunch club. It went off well and some well known writers came to hear him. He told his mother, ‘Rose Macaulay was at my table & Winifred Holtby introduced herself.’ He also gave a short but important lecture to the Anti-Slavery Society, who were anxious to hear his account of conditions in Liberia as letters in their files from Sir John Harris to Greene and to his father reveal. One letter states that the Society had left open the date of their annual general meeting until they knew when Greene would return. That they should do so when two personages of political eminence, Lord Lugard and the Maharaja of Nepal, were scheduled to speak, gives an indication of the importance to them of Greene’s journey to Liberia and the information about slavery they anticipated he would bring back.

  The meeting was arranged for 18 June at Caxton Hall, Westminster, and despite his parents’ keenness to attend, Greene, who is never happy about lecturing, dissuaded his father and told his mother that the affair would not be amusing. If it was not amusing, his lecture was shrewd. He began with honeyed words about his supporters in the Society, telling them that the first thing that Barclay, the President of Liberia, had said when they met in the interior was, ‘Do you know Lady Simon and a man called Sir John Harris?’

  The greater part of his speech was given over to describing the difficulties of his journey and a consideration as to whether conditions of slavery existed there. He explained the fact that deep in the interior there is no restraint of law and that the law-givers are the supreme breakers of the law. He concentrated on District Commissioner Reeves, in charge of the district near the border of Sierra Leone.

  Greene also told the story of the infamous Colonel Davis, the man responsible for the atrocities on the Kru coast, whom he found holding an enquiry into alleged cruelties of others at Tapee-Ta: ‘One was naturally surprised, therefore, to find Colonel Davis still in a position of authority, the facts [of the atrocities] having been proved to the last degree.’ Greene is all too human here. Either he had thought again about the Kru atrocities and come to the conclusion that Davis was guilty, as had been stated in the British Blue Book, or he was paying lip-service to the views of Simon and Harris, or simply felt that he could no longer sustain the view, strongly expressed in his diary after meeting the ‘Dictator of Grand Bassa’ at Tapee-Ta, that Davis was not guilty. After all, he was back in England and away from the influence of that powerful, exhilarating American mercenary.

  But Greene did put forward his firm criticism of the half-educated, the so-called ‘civilised’ blacks of the coast – the term ‘civilised’ could be applied in Liberia only to those who ‘could write their own name and read it when it is written’, as opposed to those natives of the interior, a courageous, honest people who on a short acquaintance made one ‘absurdly fond of them�
�. Greene stressed that those villagers with their own industries – dyeing, weaving, making of knives, making of scabbards – did not need ‘either the semi-European civilization of the coast, or even the complete white civilization such as we have known it lately’.

  For some time after his return from Liberia, Greene reviewed whatever came up about West Africa, and he had not been back much more than a week when Gorer’s Africa Dances appeared. Immediately Greene took the offensive over what he considered Gorer’s irresponsible assertion of ‘sex-obsessed missionaries’: ‘For every sex-obsessed missionary you will find half a dozen who are trained anthropologists studying native customs with more authority than Mr Gorer possesses.’5 The following year a book written by two men and called Unknown Liberia came to Greene’s notice. He wrote to his mother: ‘I’ve just been reviewing a book for the Spectator … a most fishy production, full of obvious lies, photographs stolen from other books, a strong suspicion that they never really went into the interior or made the journey at all.’6 When Greene made this apparent in his review he drew further attention to it by means of the title to the review, ‘Two Tall Travellers’.7

  His letters to his mother, to Hugh, and to literary agents, his articles, book and film reviews, after he had established himself in London, all reveal a growing sense of confidence, and one wonders whether this was not in part due to the fact that he had, in Liberia, experienced what few of his contemporaries in London had experienced: he had undertaken a journey into the unknown, come close to the primitive origins of mankind, journeyed without maps and had, like those who had survived the horrors of the First World War, come through – by means of his own determination and grit. Certainly, he now had a surge of creative energy which was nothing short of phenomenal.