Night and Day paid comparatively small damages of £3,500, but the legal costs amounted to another £1,500, ‘enough to make the Company insolvent’.
According to the critic John Atkins such was the ferocity of Greene’s attacks on the American film industry in the Spectator and Night and Day that it collectively ganged up on him and was waiting for him to go too far: ‘One false step and they would move heaven, earth … to put an end to it … He would certainly go too far, if not next week, then the week after’, and he did so in reviewing Wee Willie Winkie.34 Ian Parsons in his 1976 letter suggested as much: ‘I seem to have heard that the film people pursued a vindictive action against Graham personally, as the author of the article, or tried to.’ Greene put forward a less sensational view: ‘He [Atkins] is completely wrong in saying that there was any ganging up against [me] … 20th Century Fox went beyond the limits for an ordinary action for libel by writing to an editor and trying to get [my] criticisms stopped in future.’35 The editor in question was Derek Verschoyle of the Spectator. But, from a letter written to Hugh a month after Night and Day’s demise we can see how nasty that film company had become: ‘The Fox people went round to Gaumont-British to try and get them to withdraw all tickets [free tickets to see previews] from me, thus breaking me as a critic, but G.B. told them to go to hell.’ Something of his hidden anger and determination over this affair comes out as he completes the sentence with: ‘and I’m popping up in the Spectator again in the Spring and, my God, won’t I go gunning.’36
He did go gunning when he returned from Mexico. The first Twentieth Century Fox film reviewed by him was Sally, Irene and Mary rightly dismissed in a paragraph. But he saw red when on 5 August 1938 he had to review another Fox film, this time supposedly based on his cousin Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel, Kidnapped:
I doubt if the summer will show a worse film than Kidnapped; the only fun you are likely to get from it is speculation, speculation on the astonishing ignorance of film-makers who claim to know what the public wants. The public will certainly not want this Kidnapped, where all the adventures which made them read the book have been omitted. Is it even honest to bring in Stevenson’s name? … Apart from the title and the circumstances of David Balfour’s kidnapping, there is practically nothing of the original story here. Alan Breck’s character, with its cunning and vanity, is not so much altered as lost – he is shouting over and over again, ‘To Edinburgh’ or ‘The Redcoats’: he is only a set of teeth like those exhibited in the windows of cheap dentists … As for the girl with her great dewy eyes, her dimples and her tartan and her kissing mouth, she represents, I suppose, the love interest – as if there wasn’t love enough in the original story to wither these wistful caresses and misunderstandings and virginal pursuits.37
Graham had not retreated in face of the enemy and of course the enemy was not the American film industry as such. If Greene waged a vendetta at all it was against the worst aspects of Hollywood. Those films he could praise, he praised.
fn1 Dated incorrectly by Greene as 26 December 1937.
fn2 If the journey had taken place Theodora Benson would have given Greene a run for his money for she was tough and outspoken and had written about her journeys – Chip, chip, my little horse: the story of an hair-holiday (1934) and The Unambitious Journey (1935). Many of her books were written in collaboration with Betty Askwith.
fn3 Godfrey Winn’s ‘Sincerity Page’ in the Daily Mirror often seemed to discerning readers to be largely about his little dog, Mr Sponge.
39
Brighton Rock
In art, we shed our sicknesses.
– JOSEPH CONRAD
WHEN IN 1953 Martin Shuttleworth and Simon Raven interviewed Greene for the Paris Review, they came with some preconceptions and a blunt approach. He was then living in a first floor flat at the bottom of St James’s Street, London, which seemed to arouse their suspicions as much as did the surrounding area – ‘black with smartness, the Rolls-Royces and the bowler hats of the men are black, the court shoes and the correct suits of the women are black – not the sort of area in which one expects to find a novelist.’ (Today it is black with taxi cabs only.) The flat also troubled them, with its snugness, its books, great padded armchairs: no suggestion of an obsession or anything out of the ordinary – not even the Henry Moore pastel, ‘for so many people have Henry Moores these days’ – except perhaps for ‘a collection of seventy-four different miniature whisky bottles, ranged on top of a bookcase’.
What worried his interviewers most was that he seemed to be so much happier than they had expected and the whole atmosphere (and the whisky bottles) seemed to be the production ‘of something much more positive than that very limited optimum of happiness’ that he had described in The Power and the Glory: ‘The world is all much of a piece; it is engaged everywhere in the same subterranean struggle … there is no peace anywhere where there is life; but there are quiet and active sectors of the line.’ And the contrast between his setting and that of so many of his novels was marked. They quoted the suicidal Scobie in The Heart of the Matter: ‘Point me out the happy man and I will show you either egotism, selfishness, evil or else an absolute ignorance.’
And so they suggested that his ruling passion, what they described as his ‘absorption with failure, pursuit and poverty’, was simply a fabrication on his part. His response was, ‘I think that you have misjudged me and my consistency. This flat, my way of life – these are simply my hole in the ground.’ ‘A moderately comfortable hole.’ ‘Shall we leave it at that?’
But they pressed him further: ‘many of your most memorable characters, Raven for instance, are from low life. Have you ever had any experience of low life?’ ‘No … I have never known [poverty],’ he responded, honestly. ‘I was “short” yes, in the sense that I had to be careful for the first eight years of my adult life, but I have never been any closer.’1 One wonders whether, in interviewing Shakespeare, they would have questioned him on his experience of living in a Scottish castle, fighting on the battlefield at Agincourt, stabbing an old man by mistake through an arras or – intentionally – a king, or being thrown out by his daughters in his old age. They were not acknowledging the writer’s ability to research his fictional world carefully and the sympathetic interchange that can take place between his emotion and experience and that of his characters even though the circumstances are different; and that he can project the pattern of his obsessions – which was the case when Greene came to write Brighton Rock – into the life of fictional characters. Such critics fail to acknowledge the oddity and variety of this novel’s origins, and the pathways down which it was to take Greene.
*
Brighton Rock was intended to be another successful thriller. Greene wrote to his mother in August 1936, when A Gun for Sale had been on the bookstalls for a month: ‘A Gun seems to have been doing pretty well. I’m trying to follow up with another thriller, scene set at Brighton.’ Certainly he was planning to deal with areas of human life that he did not ‘know’, the working and criminal class life of Brighton, the race-course gang feuds, the world of the Ravens and Pinkies.
But he had the curiosity and the desire to learn about people outside his own class, ‘to discover what lies behind the dark, thick leaf of the aspidistra that guards like an exotic fungus the vulnerable gap between the lace curtains’, and he was exact in his observations and had a great respect for the smallest detail. This was a real desire poetically expressed in the Evening News in 1930 as ‘the hope that life would leave me ears … leave me eyes – “This wonder and this white/Astonishment of sight”.’
His strong voyeuristic streak was his first means of access to the experience of others. ‘The disreputable geography of London is a fascinating study,’ he wrote to Vivien (probably in August 1926), about his intention to explore unsavoury streets: ‘It is funny how things run in streets. Half the blackmail or swindling cases live in Gerrard Street … a quite openly avaricious street in the usual way. But if I
was a swindler I’d live in St John’s Wood … not in a street which everyone knows is disreputable. In the same way the more violent criminals seem inclined to hang out in Charlotte Street. Then there’s Bouverie Street … That, according to [Herbert], holds the pub where the Sabini gang have their headquarters. Quite likely that’s true. He used to run up against weird people.’
One notices that he is already trying to think like a criminal, in an amateur way, and imagining himself linked up with the criminal world, as an earlier letter to Vivien shows: ‘I must tell you of the incident that befell me yesterday afternoon, of the drunken jockey, who would be straight with me as long as I was straight with him which remark forced me out of mere joy in Buchanism to give him a false name and address, on his parting shake of the hand, and his straight it is, Mr Gough. We shall meet again. And my fear now that the Sabini gang will be on my steps since the horrid realisation that he was not drunk at all. If I am found with my throat cut call the police to enquire of Jockey Caley, Greenery Cottage, Park Lane, Newmarket!!’2
He appears to have been given a hot tip, because he adds humorously: ‘In Friday morning’s paper look at the Gatwick races. If a horse called Owen wins or gets a place, expect the news of my murder. If not, we’ll meet again! Of course, I might get off with a dislocated jaw or a broken nose. Could you love me 2 inches with a broken nose?’
When Maclaren-Ross visited Greene at 14 North Side to discuss his adaptation for radio of A Gun for Sale, the question came up as to why Raven should speak in a Jewish manner. Raven was not Jewish, but Greene insisted that he would have a voice like that. ‘He told me that when he worked for Korda, he had been taken round various clubs in the King’s Cross area by a cameraman with underworld connections, and it was there that he had heard voices of the type he meant. “In one place the regulars only drank milk. It was owned by a great fat homosexual known as the Giant Pander … but the customers weren’t queer. Very tough looking, razor scars and all that, but quiet. Very quiet. I asked if the milk was laced with brandy or anything, but they said no. Straight milk. Made it much more sinister I thought.”’3 And no doubt Greene got the idea of his boy criminal Pinkie drinking only milk from this.
As he began Brighton Rock in July 1936, he was still seeking the ‘low life’. To his agent he wrote: ‘I see the B.B.C. are running a series called From Darkness to Dawn. Hugh Ross Williamson did the first – a night in a prison cell. Any chance of gate crashing into this lot? What I should like to do would be simply Central London, Piccadilly etc., the Corner House, the cabmen’s shelters, the dingier clubs – like Smokey Joe’s – between 2 & 6 say.’4 Brighton Rock was to take him much further than this kind of research.
*
There are several layers to Brighton Rock. To begin with it was grounded in the town and the Brighton races, and the geography of Brighton does not, any more than does its human activity as portrayed in the novel, ‘in part belong to an imaginary geographical region’, as Graham Greene claimed. He knew Brighton well, no town at that time having had such a hold on his affections, and he kept close to its topography as he did to the topography of London in It’s a Battlefield. But, vague as Henry James in tracing the sources of his material, he credits his fictional Brighton to the pressures of his fictional characters: ‘Why did I exclude so much of the Brighton I really knew from this imaginary Brighton? I had every intention of describing it, but it was as though my characters had taken the Brighton I knew into their own consciousness and transformed the whole picture (I have never again felt so much the victim of my own inventions.)’5 He came to use only those aspects of the city which were essential to his story.
He writes in Ways of Escape: ‘The Brighton race gangs were to all intents quashed forever as a serious menace at Lewes Assizes a little before the date of my novel.’ Now the Lewes case was reported in the Brighton Argus on 29 July 1936 (and in the London papers also) and immediately he wrote to Hugh: ‘I’ve got to go to Brighton Races on either Aug. 4, 5, or 6. Mrs Frere-Reeves who was going to take me, can’t manage the dates. I wonder if you and Helga feel inclined for a day of low sport on any of those days. I warn you that I shall want to spend my time in the lowest enclosure.’6 The sense of realism, the excitement and drama of the scene at the races in the novel must derive from the author’s visit to the races at that time, and his close observation of what was happening. The crowds ‘stood packed deep on the tops of the trams rocking down to the Aquarium, they surged like some natural and irrational migration of insects up and down the front; the negro wearing a bright striped tie sat on a bench in the Pavilion garden and smoked a cigar.’ Because black people in England were such a rarity then, it was natural that local working-class children would stop play, stare at him, and back slowly away. And Greene could well have seen a blind band playing drums and trumpets, walking in the gutter, scraping the sides of their shoes along the edge, just such a band as Pinkie met when he pushed the leader out of the way, swearing at him softly: ‘the whole band hearing their leader move, shifted uneasily a foot into the roadway and stood there stranded … like barques becalmed on a huge and landless Atlantic. Then they edged back feeling for the landfall of the pavement.’7 Graham pleads guilty in Ways of Escape ‘to manufacturing this Brighton of mine’,8 but the St Dunstan’s Home for blinded ex-servicemen stands on the coast two miles east of Brighton.
There are the public school grounds where the crowds milled past and where: ‘the girls trooped solemnly out to hockey … through the wrought-iron main gates they could see the plebeian procession … plodding up the down, kicking up the dust, eating buns out of paper bags … up the steep hill came the crammed taxicabs – a seat for anyone at ninepence a time … It was as if the whole road moved upwards like an Underground staircase in the dusty sunlight, a creaking, shouting, jostling crowd of cars moving with it. The junior girls took to their heels like ponies racing on the turf … as if this were a day on which life for many people reached a kind of climax. The odds on Black Boy had shortened.’9
Greene must have had in mind here Roedean, which he would have passed on his way to the races, still standing today unchanged, and while no horse called Black Boy was running during the possible dates of Greene’s visit, the local newspapers reported that a Blue Boy won the Balcombe stakes two months earlier in June 1936 at Brighton. In the novel, Hale, before he is murdered by Pinkie’s mob, advises the barmaid, Ida, to bet on Black Boy – which wins. Blue Boy won at 10-1 and Ida put £25 on Black Boy at that price.
Like Pinkie and Spicer (whom Pinkie is later to murder), Graham and Hugh must have heard ‘The loudspeakers on the vans’, advising them ‘whom to put their money with’, and Graham’s eyes, with that ‘alert watchful quality, the eyeballs slightly bloodshot’,10 must have observed gypsy children chasing ‘a rabbit with cries across the trampled chalk’. Like Pinkie they would have gone through the tunnel under the course and come up into ‘the light and the short grey grass sloping down by the bungalow houses to the sea. Old bookies’ tickets rotting into the chalk: “Barker for the Odds”, a smug smiling nonconformist face printed in yellow: “Don’t Worry I Pay”, and old tote tickets among the stunted plantains.’ And they would have gone ‘through the wire fence into the half-crown [the cheapest] enclosure.’11
Then there is the case of Lobby Lud – an essential part of the plot. Lobby Lud was a made-up name for a man who worked for the popular liberal newspaper of that time, the News Chronicle. As a sales gimmick during August, Lobby Lud wandered round Brighton and through the holiday crowds, as the News Chronicle stated:
Following his Bank Holiday custom Lobby will be at Brighton today. Study his picture above and when you spot him show him your copy of today’s News Chronicle and say:
‘You are Mr Lobby Lud, I claim the “News Chronicle” prize [of £10].’
Lobby is of medium height and has grey eyes and dark complexion. He leaves a number of clue cards worth 10s. each.
Here is today’s programme:
11 a
.m. to 11.15 a.m. – At Brighton Station and proceed via Queen’s Road, Clock Tower and West Street to Promenade.
11.15 a.m. to 11.45 a.m. – To West Pier.
11.45 a.m. to 12.15 p.m. – Along promenade between the Piers, passing Savoy Cinema just after noon.
12.15 p.m. to 12.45 p.m. – Within 100 yards of Palace Pier.
12.45 p.m. to 1. p.m. – On the Aquarium Sun Terrace.
1. p.m. to 2. p.m. – Lunch near Castle Square.
2. p.m. to 3. p.m. – If still undetected Lobby will proceed via North Street, Queen’s Road to Brighton Station.
The next day, Tuesday 4 August 1936, the day Greene visited the Brighton Races, appeared the following account in the News Chronicle: ‘At Forte’s Cafe, opposite the pier [Lobby writes], I cooled myself with an ice cream and left a card under the ashtray on my table. By the Memorial a man with the “go-to-win fever” in his eyes bore down on me and finished a hectic run. He was Mr Herbert Gayler.’
The significance of this advertising gimmick for the novel was that it provided Greene with an occupation for his character Hale who, under the pseudonym Kolley Kibber,fn1 represented the Messenger newspaper in Brighton on a Whitsun Bank Holiday as their mystery man: ‘Advertised on every Messenger poster: “Kolley Kibber in Brighton today.” In his pocket he had a packet of cards to distribute in hidden places along his route; those who found them would receive ten shillings from the Messenger, but the big prize was reserved for whoever challenged Hale in the proper form of words and with a copy of the Messenger in his hand: “You are Mr Kolley Kibber. I claim the Daily Messenger prize.”’ (Brighton Rock, p. 5.)
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 80