The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  There was a growing friendship between Read and Greene at this time. Lady Read has described Greene as ‘a precocious schoolboy with tremendous depths … and these are the depths one doesn’t enquire into … he has always remained exactly the same – casual and amusing and rather shy. He must have been quite different from my husband but they talked the same language and were amused about the same things. They were always amused by the literary in London – they both loved almost anything funny. They laughed a lot together. They were both very free men – they were nobody’s slave and nobody’s fool either. They always enjoyed each other’s company.’22 Read celebrated their friendship with an odd little verse written in red ink:

  Shall it be Graham or be Greene?

  There’s nothing betwixt or between.

  Shall it be Graham or be Greene?

  Neither is Christian or intime,

  But one is milk the other cream.

  So Graham let it be, not Greene.

  The non-biased political but witty approach of Night and Day can be seen in a number of reviews and articles. Evelyn Waugh had a go at the young Arthur Calder-Marshall’s book, The Changing Scene: ‘Mr Calder-Marshall is still in his twenties, but this does not prevent him from describing in the most cocksure manner the social conditions of the pre-war era … he talks of proletarian fiction as though it were the very recent discovery of a few of his friends. He does not seem to have learned that all the great stories of the world are proletarian: has he ever heard of Piers Plowman or the Pilgrim’s Progress, or of the enormous, various and opulent folk-lore’; and after taking Calder-Marshall to task over his belief that rich Lords are blood parasites and newspapers and cinemas tools of exploitation, Waugh adds a compassionate note: ‘One other thought I would commend to Mr Calder-Marshall. He must not despair of growing up … the opinions of the young are not necessarily the opinions of the future.’ Evelyn Waugh himself was then only thirty-four.

  Russian Communist leaders were dealt with in the same manner. Nigel Balchin, whose fame with The Small Back Room and Mine Own Executioner was yet to come, in an article called ‘Trotsky or Notsky’, wrote that Trotsky returning to Russia ‘still disguised as a Communist’, created the Red Army. ‘This, clearly, was a masterstroke. For he must have seen, with his uncanny foresight, that a strong Red Army would frighten the life out of Germany, bring about Fascism there, and so provide him with somebody to plot with and somebody to offer the Ukraine to.’23

  On the other hand, Elizabeth Bowen, the drama critic, whom Greene once described as having ‘a fine, restless, tricky talent, occasionally superbly successful’, strongly recommended A. S. J. Tessimond’s anti-capitalist Song of the City and the Aristocrates whose theme was the ‘building up [in prisoners in the Gulag camps] of a new morale, and the breaking down of that individualistic spirit that makes a man Man’s enemy’. Both were performed at the Unity Theatre. A further sign of even-handedness appeared in P. Y. Betts’s ‘The Snob’s Guide to Good Form’ which ended on the following note: ‘To sum up – break as many rules as you like, but be sure to find out first which rules it is good form to break. This is the whole art of being a Snob.’24

  Foremost among the artists who worked for the magazine was Feliks Topolski, and Night and Day put his remarkable talent on the map. He had come from Poland two years earlier to London to cover the Jubilee. He has recalled his immediate success:

  I was very spoilt because I had early success in Poland … they were pushing me to come to London and they started to push me as an artist, with me relaxing and following girls, and not being able to say a word in English. They were rushing about announcing what a genius had arrived here, and indeed, within that year of 1935, within a few months, a book was published of my drawings, an exhibition was held, and simply there was no way of not noticing me. My work was all over the place.

  Ian Parsons brought him into Night and Day, ‘a man who became a friend and was involved in the whole structure of Night and Day’. His brilliant drawings, without exception, presented the Polish artist’s view of the absurd preoccupations and social life of the British upper class, preserving typical gestures and situations so that they freshly reveal the 1930s to us – gentlemen at the races, at the ballet, in the foyer (a woman’s face once caught never to be forgotten), in a satirical light. As was stated in the magazine: ‘Feliks Topolski … is conducting a little regular field-work in these islands and … lays bare, as with a scalpel, the essential whatever-it-is of Britain’s most cherished institutions.’

  The magazine’s appeal was to the educated and sophisticated. Hugh Kingsmill and Malcolm Muggeridge, for example, embarked on a series of Literary Pilgrimages, signing their brilliant accounts ‘H.K.’ and ‘M.M.’. The tone was of two friends visiting literary sites and the discussions that ensued.

  In Paris they sought out a Madame Blanchet, elderly, grey-haired and serene and thought they detected ‘a suggestion of Wordsworth in her brows and eyes’, not surprisingly because she was his great-great-granddaughter, coming in line from his illegitimate daughter, Caroline, who was the result of his affair with Annette Vallon. They recalled how Wordsworth returned to France with his sister to tell Annette that he was going to be married and walked by the sea with the nine-year-old daughter he had never seen before, commemorating the event in a sonnet: ‘Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here’, but making no mention of the fact that Annette had been left to bring up the child, ‘through the grim years of the French Revolution and the First Empire’. They noted that in documents the French rarely got his name right – he was Mr Williams, Wortsworth, Williams Wordsworth, and M. Williams, and on her death Annette was registered as ‘Marie Anne Vallon, known as Williams’. They concluded that Wordsworth ‘had not the candour to cut his moral losses; the deserter became a prig, the deserted kept her kindliness and courage.’

  *

  At the end of October, the magazine’s fourth month of publication, Greene’s review of the nine-year-old star Shirley Temple’s film, Wee Willie Winkie, appeared in Night and Day. It was a forceful piece and was to have traumatic consequences for Night and Day and for himself. In the Spectator, in May 1936, he had already praised her appearance in The Littlest Rebel: ‘I had not seen Miss Temple before … as I expected there was the usual sentimental exploitation of childhood, but I had not expected the tremendous energy which her rivals certainly lacked.’25 On 7 August that year he reviewed Captain January, and was already re-assessing the child star in terms of her surprising maturity: ‘Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigour and assurance, but some of her popularity seems to rest on a coquetry quite as mature as Miss [Claudette] Colbert’s and on an oddly precocious body as voluptuous in grey flannel trousers as Miss Dietrich’s.’

  This theme was developed in his review of Wee Willie Winkie:

  Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is a complete totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.

  It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.

  If anyone had cause for complaint it was her admirers, castigated here as ‘middle-aged men and cler
gymen’ and also as her gasping ‘antique audience’. Greene’s review did not appear in America, but stories printed suggested that Greene believed Shirley Temple was a midget with a seven-year-old child of her own. Perhaps this is one reason why Twentieth Century Fox decided on a libel action.26

  Too late, Night and Day became extremely careful. John Marks, returning a proof to Stevie Smith, told her that the character Montague Cohen in her poem had an original living in Golders Green. She changed the name of the place to ‘Bottle Green’. And Greene gave a caution to Evelyn Waugh, who replied: ‘Very sorry you scented libel. The chap is a confessed thief so I don’t know what he can complain of. If you’ll let me have it back I will soften the phraseology. I think that kind of work needs snubbing … What ho S. Temple!’ Recalling that time a year later on 24 September when Prime Minister Chamberlain was having his second meeting with Hitler, Greene put the libel case into perspective – ‘last year the Shirley Temple libel action – and possible ruin – seemed unimportant because Lucy was ill.’27

  The libel case did not appear before the King’s Bench until 22 March 1938, by which time Night and Day had produced its last issue (23 December 1937) and Graham was almost at the end of his epic Mexican journey through the swamps of Tabasco and the mountainous region of Chiapas, but the case caused a stir. It was recorded in The Times Law Reports:

  Libel on Miss Shirley Temple: ‘A Gross Outrage’

  Temple and Others v. Night and Day Magazine,

  Limited and Others

  Before the Lord Chief Justice

  Sir Patrick Hastings appeared for the plaintiffs and after describing the plaintiff as a child of nine years with a world-wide reputation as an artist in films, Hastings went on to speak damagingly about the review and cleverly made the occasion more sinister by refusing to read it out fully in court:

  In his view it was one of the most horrible libels that one could well imagine. Obviously he would not read it all – it was better that he should not – but a glance at the statement of claim, where a poster was set out, was quite sufficient to show the nature of the libel written about this child.

  Of course, it is better to hint than to show and it seems to have worked wonders on the Lord Chief Justice. Hastings went on: ‘This beastly publication was written, and it was right to say that every respectable distributor in London refused to be a party to selling it [this was true of W. H. Smith & Sons only]. Notwithstanding that, the magazine company with the object no doubt of increasing the sale, proceeded to advertise the fact that it had been banned.’

  Of course, every publication must take advantage of the possibility of increasing sales, but the fact is that the distinguished King’s Counsel, D. N. Pritt, had advised Night and Day (wrongly as it turned out) that in his opinion the article was not libellous. Relying on the barrister’s verdict, Night and Day naturally publicised the article during the week that the issue in question was on sale.

  There were, ultimately, apologies all round; even Greene was forced through the magazine’s counsel to apologise. To Elizabeth Bowen, Graham wrote from Mexico: ‘I found a cable waiting for me in Mexico City asking me to apologise to that bitch Shirley Temple.’ Their counsel, Valentine Holmes, ate humble pie – deepest apology to Miss Temple for the pain not caused but which would most certainly have been caused to her by the article if she read it. Everyone seemed to rat on Greene – ‘There was no justification for the criticism of the film, which was one which anybody could take their children to see … So far as the publishers of the magazine were concerned, they had not seen the article before publication and the printers “welcomed the opportunity of making any amends in their power”.’ And Godfrey Winn, a popular writer for women’s magazines, put in his threepennyworth. He thought the review ‘a queer one, because it was not a criticism of Shirley’s clever acting at all, but one which introduced potential audience reactions – reactions which were entirely alien to Shirley’s lovable and innocent humour’.

  One has to say that this was mild of Godfrey Winn since Greene had very unfavourably reviewed a film about a day in the life of Winn, setting it against a documentary about the Hurdanos, ‘Spanish people inbred, diseased, forgotten’ while Mr Winn wakened ‘prettily to order, kissing his dog [the famous Mr Sponge] upon the pillow’, getting into his car, (‘some flowers and a kiss from his mother’), kneeling by a bed to be introduced as ‘Uncle Godfrey’ to the new-born baby of one of his readers: ‘What message for these [‘the goitred and moron and hunger-tortured faces’ of the Hurdanos] from Uncle Godfrey?’ wrote Greene, ‘the eyes look out at us so innocently, so candidly, so doggily, they might be the eyes of the famous Mr Sponge.’fn3, 28

  The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, clearly incensed by the article, took a hard line. He spoke from the bench:

  His Lordship – Who is the author of this article?

  Mr Holmes [for the defendant] – Mr Graham Greene.

  His Lordship – Is he within the jurisdiction?

  Mr Holmes – I am afraid I do not know, my Lord …

  His Lordship – Can you tell me where Mr Greene is?

  Mr Mathew [for the co-defendant] – I have no information on the subject.

  His Lordship – This libel is simply a gross outrage, and I will take care to see that suitable attention is directed to it.

  Greene later recalled that he kept on his bathroom wall, until a bomb removed the wall, the statement of claim, ‘that I had accused Twentieth Century Fox of “procuring” Miss Temple “for immoral purposes”.’ Lord Hewart sent the papers in the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions, so that ever since Greene has been traceable in the files of Scotland Yard, and he might have been prosecuted for criminal libel. From the Hotel Canada in Mexico City he wrote on 22 April 1938, ‘it looks as if I shall be arrested when I land if the L.C.J.’s bite is as bad as his bark.’ His publisher was so worried that he offered to send money for his upkeep so that he need not return to England until things had quietened down. Greene, ever willing to take a risk, took the next cargo boat home.

  He had written to Hugh in January 1938, the month after Night and Day had foundered: ‘I’m glad you agree about S.T. [She] is going to cost me about £250 if I’m lucky’, but his critical judgment was not swayed by his anger, for he added, ‘But see Captain January. That’s her great film.’29 He was not lucky. Twentieth Century Fox were awarded £3,500 in damages, £500 of which was to be paid by Greene – a sum roughly equivalent to £15,000 today and a considerable amount for him to find at that time.

  *

  There was a further charge against Greene, suggested by Victoria Glendinning while writing the life of Elizabeth Bowen. She sent the draft of her account of the libel case to Greene for his approval: ‘Night and Day was ruined by a libel action brought against Graham Greene on account of an article about Shirley Temple.’ In reply he wrote: ‘For your information Night and Day was not really ruined by the libel action. Unfortunately the charge for advertisements was far too high for the circulation and it was in financial difficulties. In fact, the Number containing the so-called libel sold better than any other issue.’ Though Greene then admits that ‘in the search for money the case may have had a certain influence. Probably the paper would have had to have closed anyway.’

  In spite of its brilliant talent, the magazine did not catch on. It was, perhaps, too much like the New Yorker although as the weeks passed on it seemed to develop a character of its own. But it was very much a London orientated magazine – though attempts were in the offing to advertise it in Manchester and Birmingham, it was unlikely to have succeeded in the provinces. And it did seem clannish with its articles by ‘in boys’ for other ‘in boys’, and its hopes to appeal to ‘discriminating’ people were not fulfilled – presumably there were not sufficient of them willing to spend 6d. a week for the pleasure.

  At the end of August 75,000 leaflets were printed offering a trial three-month subscription for only five shillings, but the magazine was losing money to
the tune of £200 a week. A month before the Shirley Temple review appeared, the company felt that, given this situation, they probably could not continue beyond Christmas, and two days after the review, before there had been any adverse reaction to it, Ian Parsons announced at a General Meeting that the Board thought that ‘publication could not be effectively continued unless a large amount of fresh capital was procured’. Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary on 18 November: ‘Greene rang up to say that Night and Day is on its last legs; would I put them into touch with [Viscount] Evan Tredegar, whom I barely know, to help them raise capital. They must indeed be in a bad way.’30

  Contributors were asked to take less than their promised four guineas and Theodora Benson agreed to accept three guineas for ‘Rise and Fall’ (an ominous title in the circumstances) as it was ‘shorter and lousier than the things you gave me four guineas for’.31 Waugh was not willing to take less: ‘I received your telegram this morning after the enclosed article had been written. As it had been definitely commissioned … I am afraid I must hold you to your offer, whether you print it or not.’

  Just before his death, Ian Parsons expressed the belief that the libel case brought the magazine down: ‘The paper had had a hard struggle to survive but had just begun to turn the corner in terms of circulation and I think would have survived with the addition of some offered further capital from certain shareholders, had not this blow struck us.’32 But, alas, in December, though they needed £8,000 more capital to continue, only £3,000 conditional offers had come in. Perhaps the libel case proved the last straw – as Ian Parsons wrote: ‘Of course, one cannot accept further capital with an unsettled libel action on one’s hands, and as you can imagine it took many weeks of parleying between London and Hollywood before we knew how much the whole thing was going to cost us. Sad end of story. The shareholders lost their money and the staff their jobs.’33