The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Greene approached Evelyn Waugh, seeing him as dramatic critic of the magazine, but Waugh proved not an easy fish to catch. From St James, Piccadilly, he wrote in a rather laid-back manner: ‘I thought that at the moment you would be racing Theodora Benson across the Gobi desert. It is nice of you to think of me in connection with your new paper & I like the idea of dramatic criticism. The trouble is that I can’t bind myself to be in London every week. Could you find a second chap to do it, irregularly, turn & turn about with me … How does that suit you?’10 He also tried to determine the payment he would receive: ‘I will give you a contract to do 25 criticisms a year at £250.’ He ended on a sombre note: ‘I remember being approached in 1929 by a London New Yorker that never materialized. Is yours soundly backed?’11

  Along the bottom of this page of Waugh’s letter Greene has written –

  Osbert

  Lancaster.

  Isherwood.

  Waugh.

  – presumably the first three writers he turned to for contributions. Waugh switched from drama to fiction, perhaps because Night and Day would not pay £10 a review and reviewing fiction had an added advantage: ‘Yes, the pay is rather disappointing’, he wrote, ‘but I’m getting spliced & want as many regular jobs as I can get. Six guineas a week will be worth it (a) if this was the understanding that it would be raised to ten if the paper became a success. (b) I could have, either to keep or sell, all the review books. That is to say you’d circularize to publishers saying you are a new weekly, etc., that I was doing the book page & that books were to be sent direct to me. This would save trouble in selection, all to my library and supplement the wages very considerably. Is that o.k.?’

  It was not ‘o.k.’, but Evelyn Waugh was not willing to let go on this: ‘I am sure you will realise that the English New Yorker is a purely commercial proposition – not like the Tablet [Catholic newspaper] for which we are both willing to work for joke wages. My suggestion was for an average of £2 a week in books. I quite see that some weeks this would be difficult. You can then make it up when there is a spate. You say the review books are worth £800 a year, so I don’t see the difficulty. But if your boss [John Marks] won’t agree to this, I’m afraid that it simply isn’t worth my while.’

  Greene finally brought Waugh into the Night and Day corral, Waugh conceding, ‘Yes, I see the difficulty. I had no conception that the output of new books was so big. If you can promise to supplement the six guineas wage with an average of £2 weekly in selling value of books (half price non-fiction: one third fiction) that will be perfectly o.k. I quite see that the literary editor must decide what books are given chief notice.’

  The additional £2 from the sale of books brought Waugh’s wage to £8, double the payment of other contributors. He was worth it and we can see something of his liveliness when he later opted not to review a popular Francis Brett Young novel, probably They See a Country. To Greene he wrote: ‘There’s nothing to take hold of in Brett Young – just flabby longwinded stuff. Not enough character to attack. A cushion not a bubble to prick.’12 Waugh’s letter ended with the query, ‘When do you come out?’

  The magazine came out on 30 June 1937. Greene wrote to Charles Evans of Heinemann, ‘you’ll be receiving an invitation to a party at the Dorchester on the 30th to celebrate the first number of Night and Day.’ There was a guest list of celebrities, each of whom was presented with a copy of the first weekly issue with its brilliant cover drawn by Feliks Topolski. A. P. Herbert, on this occasion, made the public address.

  *

  Early that June Greene became involved for a short time in the Spanish Civil War. Basically it was a conflict between Catholicism and atheism – churches were gutted, 12 bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks and about 300 nuns died. George Orwell recorded that ‘almost every church [in Barcelona] had been gutted and its images burnt’, and Hugh Thomas tells us that the ears of priests were often passed round – monks had their eardrums perforated by rosary beads being forced into them, the mother of two Jesuit priests had a rosary forced down her throat, 800 people were thrown down a mine shaft. The cry was: ‘Do you still believe in this God who never speaks and who does not defend himself even when his images and temples are burned? Admit that God does not exist and that you priests … deceive the people.’13 From Hitler’s Germany on Franco’s behalf, planes bombed Spanish towns.

  There was great pressure from the left-wing on young writers in Britain to join the Republican forces in Spain. In June 1937, at the time Greene was involved in the first issue of Night and Day, the Left Review sent out a questionnaire to writers and poets: ‘This is the question we are asking you: Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the people of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?’ The results were published in a booklet entitled Authors Take Sides. The poets Auden, Spender, and C. Day Lewis supported the Republicans. C. Day Lewis’s poem, ‘First Hymn to Lenin’, provided the slogan: ‘Evolution the dance, revolution the steps’, and Auden wrote in his poem, ‘Spain’, ‘Death? Very well, I accept, for I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain’; and he, with two thousand other young men, joined the International Brigade against Franco, and many died. The Spanish poet Lorca was shot by Nationalist partisans. Alan Jenkins, then twenty-three, unemployed and living in Soho, wrote: ‘Soho was full of young writers and out-of-work film extras who were asking each other: “Have you seen Tony? He’s been under fire.” And then: “Are you going? Why not – are you a Trotskyist or something?”’14

  Personal pressure was certainly put on Greene. In a review of Authors Take Sides, Anthony Powell asked: ‘Where is … Mr Graham Greene?’, and later Valentine Cunningham wrote: ‘One would like to know whether Graham Greene, a leftist Catholic who wrote the not unsympathetic The Confidential Agent (1939) about Spain, was asked [by the Left Review] and refused to respond, or responded too cagily for the compiler’s pleasure.’ A week after the Powell review, Greene responded in an article in the Spectator by setting side by side Tennyson’s and his friend Hallam’s visit to Spain during the rash and unsuccessful conspiracy of General Torrijos and other Spanish exiles against the restored Bourbon monarch, Ferdinand, and the florid rhetoric of Authors Take Sides. Tennyson and Hallam were out to be amused (though a companion of theirs was shot by a firing-squad) but they did at least cross the Pyrénées, and he concludes, ‘the dilettante tone [of Hallam] has charm after the sweeping statements, the safe marble gestures, the self-importance [of Authors Take Sides]: “I stand with the People and Government of Spain.”’

  This was only one aspect of his view of the Spanish Civil War. In a letter of 14 January 1987, he writes that one reason he did not respond to the questionnaire was that, although he was against Franco, he was not 100 per cent for the Republicans, chiefly because of their brutality and the murder of nuns. But he did side with the Basques. The rebel General Mola threatened to raze their province, Vizcaya, to the ground if submission was not immediate and began bombing the defenceless town of Durango. The Nationalists blockaded the port of Bilbao, but a certain British Captain, ‘Captain Roberts’, went in with his merchant ship, the Seven Seas Spray, ‘the captain and his daughter standing on the bridge, the hungry people of Bilbao massed excitedly on the quayside and cried, “Long live the British Sailors!”’15 But the historic Basque city of Guernica was bombed and strafed by the Germans every twenty minutes, incendiary bombs were dropped and the fleeing population was machine-gunned.

  Greene’s sympathy for the Basques lay in the fact that while they were on the side of the Republicans they were not fighting for a Communist or anarchist state, for they were Catholics and their army was attended by 82 priests who would celebrate Mass and be present at the last moments of the dying. Arthur Calder-Marshall felt that as a Catholic convert Greene faced a different quandary from that of Evelyn Waugh whose sympathies lay with Franco, as an enemy of Communism. Greene’s sense of right and wrong lay with the Popular Front movement, but as a Catholic he had to side
with the Catholics, and when General Mola’s troops surrounded Bilbao, he tried to get there: ‘A restlessness set in then which has never been quite allayed: a desire to be a spectator of history, history in which I was concerned myself.’

  His intention was to make a broadcast about the besieged Basques, flying in from Toulouse to Bilbao, and presumably backed by the B.B.C., who must be the ‘they’ in the following: ‘After they’d sent me hurtling down to Toulouse at a few hours notice, I found myself stuck.’ This is from an undated letter to his mother. His own account of the event forty years later is as follows: ‘I carried a letter of recommendation from the Basque Delegation in London to a small café owner in Toulouse who had been breaking the blockade of Bilbao with a two-seater plane. I found him shaving in a corner of his café at six in the morning and handed him the Delegation’s dignified letter sealed with scarlet wax, but no amount of official sealing wax would induce him to fly his plane again into Bilbao – Franco’s guns on his last flight had proved themselves too accurate for his comfort.’16 But Greene’s letter to his mother suggests that what prevented him flying into Bilbao was the limited time he had at his disposal: ‘Their aeroplane had been taken over by the Spanish Govt. and I should have had to wait at least a week while another one was bought in London and sent to Bayonne. As I expect to start work on the new magazine in a week, it was no good waiting.’

  In any case, what had been described as Bilbao’s defences – ‘a ring of iron’ – had their weaknesses betrayed by the man who had planned them, Major Goicoechea. The Basques’ leader, Colonel Vidal, was a failure: ‘His battalions did not know where he was. He did not know where his battalions were’, George Steer wrote of the fall of Bilbao on 19 June 1937. The result was a rout. Apart from Greene, only two other writers, Mauriac and Maritain, both Catholics, supported the Basques – the Vatican did not.

  But if Greene did not reach Spain, ironically his eldest brother, the black sheep of the family, did. On 16 January 1938 Greene wrote to Hugh: ‘Did you see Herbert’s front page news story in the Daily Worker, Dec. 22, “I was a Secret Agent of Japan”?’ He told Hugh that it was Claud Cockburn who wrote the article for Herbert and what made Greene jubilant was that Herbert, who had for years borrowed from his own family, was paid nothing for the article by Cockburn, who also succeeded in borrowing five shillings from Herbert. The headlines to the article: ‘I WAS IN THE PAY OF JAPAN: A SECRET AGENT TELLS HIS STORY TO THE DAILY WORKER’, have more bite than the story itself, though Herbert does appear to have got himself on the payroll of the Japanese naval intelligence which was operating secretly in London.

  He had approached the Japanese in 1934 and no doubt played on the fact that he had contacts – it must have embarrassed his uncle, Sir Graham Greene, to have had it stated in his nephew’s article that he was for years one of the highest officials of the British Admiralty. Herbert’s con appears to have been successful – he had carefully planned meetings with a Captain Oka who went by the code name ‘Arthur’ in England, and having emphasised his dislike of Americans and his important contacts, he persuaded Captain Oka, in the Japanese Club in Cavendish Square, to take him on his unofficial staff, with an outfit allowance of £200 and payment of £50 a month. His claim that his information (imaginary) came from ‘a retired commander in the Navy, now unfortunately dead’ obviously gave Captain Oka some doubts and Oka wrote on 19 December 1934 that ‘any information without the source from which it came is really of no value at all.’

  The article was intended to provide publicity for Herbert’s book, Secret Agent in Spain, for he apparently was also taken on as a spy by the rebel side, and told his story because he was double-crossed during his second journey there. He tells a good yarn and appears to have spent his spare time in the Florida Hotel in Madrid with well known journalists – Henry Buckley of the Daily Telegraph, Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express. He tells us that he had been warned by ‘a very high official [most likely his uncle], seated in a small room in the British Admiralty over-looking the Horse Guards Parade: “Greene, if you are not more careful you will some day find yourself in the Thames.”’

  Many years later Hugh Greene said that he thought Herbert simply supplied the Japanese with information on naval matters which he gleaned from technical magazines – which they could have picked up themselves. But he did get himself into M.I.5 files. During the war, Hugh was approached by a friend in M.I.5. They met in the Nell Gwynn pub in the Strand and he was shown some burnt bits of paper. A bomb on one of their buildings had destroyed some of their files and they were trying to reconstruct such burnt pieces of paper. One of them referred to a Mr Herbert Greene and his connection with the Japanese. Hugh told him that he thought Herbert had done some very harmless work for the Japanese.

  Herbert, Hugh said, was ‘a bit of a crook and he was clever enough to know that he could get away with letting the Japanese have material which had already been published’.17 Probably what Greene wrote of Unknown Liberia – ‘a very fishy production, full of obvious lies’, applies also to Herbert’s book, but Herbert was important to Graham not only as the source of Anthony Farrant in England Made Me, but as the vacuum-cleaner salesman in Our Man in Havana who successfully cons British Intelligence into paying him for drawings of parts of vacuum cleaners supposed to be connected with military installations.

  Herbert begins the Secret Agent in Spain: ‘This is not a story of violent adventure; it happens to be true. I could easily tell you of how I blew up munition dumps, captured University City and escaped on the morning of my execution from St Anton Prison.’ Herbert could indeed have done this.

  But unquestionably Herbert did visit Spain and was thought to be a spy, according to Claud Cockburn. Claud was friendly with Ernest Hemingway at the time of the battle for Madrid and on one occasion Hemingway pointed to a tall man with glasses and said he was going to shoot the man, for he had discovered that he was a spy for the other side. Claud looked closely and then turned to Hemingway saying, ‘Don’t shoot him, he’s my headmaster’s eldest son.’

  *

  After three months, Night and Day published a selection of readers’ letters entitled Pen Pricks and Praise for Night and Day. The editors had honestly looked for genuine rejections – ‘I might say frightfully weak, old chap. Cheer up, it may catch on, God knows queerer things have happened’; ‘Jokes very poor, illustration rotten … Give us real humour … or in my opinion – early demise.’ Others could and did praise it as ‘badly needed in Great Britain. It is very intelligent.’ It was also light, frivolous, holding little sacred, even itself. Reading all the issues now from 1 July to 23 December 1937 is a joy, and not for nostalgic reasons either. Articles and illustrations are of an exceptionally high standard. Of course, since there were no sacred cows it was bound to be a disturbing magazine.18

  Essentially, it was flippant, outrageous and, at a time when, leading up to the Second World War, there was increasing political polarisation, its policy, as expressed by Patrick Ransome, was ‘a strictly non-Party one, and any political article must depend entirely on its wit to secure inclusion’. Thus John Marks, the editor, rejecting a poem by William Douglas Home, explained that he felt that ‘if it appeared with the rest of the magazine – which is essentially flippant – it might run the risk of being misunderstood by our readers’.19 Witty and satirical, it appealed to the sophisticated and discriminating, and realising this the editors tried to turn this limitation of sales into an advantage: ‘Discriminating people who subscribe to NIGHT AND DAY as from the first number will have something to boast to their grandchildren about – assuming, of course, that discriminating people have grandchildren. We’re not sure about this.’ In the first issue the editors, stating who would review books, theatre and film, said, ‘For the rest, a wealth of talent, some of it anonymous, some of it not, invigilates over a mad world, annotating its absurdities as they come to light.’

  Credit must go to Greene as Literary Editor for bringing into the magazine some of the most
talented of the time, many of them not then well known: ‘is there any paper which can rival our roll of honour?’ he asked in 1985. ‘It reads like the death of a whole literary generation: Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Herbert Read, William Empson, Nicolas Bentley, John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, Stevie Smith, A. J. A. Symons, John Hayward, Hugh Kingsmill, William Plomer.’20 He could have added Peter Fleming (a better writer than his younger brother Ian), Christopher Hollis, Antonia White, Gerald Kersh, Christopher Isherwood and Malcolm Muggeridge.

  Greene played his part in invigilating over a mad world by turning upside down his contributors’ talents. T. O. Beachcroft, the short story writer, was put to writing on amateur athletics; the novelist from the Northern Transvaal, William Plomer, then living in London, wrote on All-in wrestling, seeing it in terms of a theatrical performance and noting that, ‘the sudden geranium flow of blood … makes a face more luminous than grease-paint can’; the poet Louis MacNeice, writing about the Kennel Club, described Afghan hounds as ‘baboons dressed up in pyjamas’, a chihuahua as ‘an insect in a comic strip’ and Alsatians as abominations; the novelist and critic, Walter Allen, set himself up, as he put it, ‘as the soccer expert with an article on Aston Villa, tracing its origins to the bible class of Aston Villa Wesleyan Chapel, Birmingham’.21 William Empson, perhaps the greatest academic of his day, wrote on ‘Learning Chinese’ (which he had done very successfully): ‘I made a curious discovery in turning over Giles’s dictionary … that the character for the male organ is a combination of signs meaning the Imploring Corpse, or the Corpse in Pain.’

  Greene was rash enough to approach the art critic Herbert Read (Professor of Fine Arts at Edinburgh University from 1931 to 1933 and then editor of the prestigious Burlington Magazine) to step outside his discipline and write for Night and Day regular reviews of detective stories. Read promptly accepted, sending in as his first contribution a dismissive criticism of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon and following with a review of Peter Cheyney which was a criticism of Cheyney’s style, written as a parody of it: ‘His hero is Lemmy Caution, G-man, the toughest guy in the fiction racket who … don’t at all disdain the dames. “There’s something fascinatin’ about ’em. They got rhythm. They got technique – and how!” There are two janes in this little story – Henrietta and Paulette. They’ve both got what it takes – and then a bundle!’