The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  And Kolley Kibber/Hale also had to stick closely to a programme: ‘from ten till eleven Queen’s Road and Castle Square, from eleven till twelve the Aquarium and Palace Pier, twelve till one the front between the Old Ship and West Pier, back for lunch between one and two in any restaurant he chose round the Castle Square, and after that he had to make his way all down the parade to the West Pier and then to the station by the Hove streets. These were the limits of his absurd and widely advertised sentry-go.’12

  Hale’s wanderings can be traced on the map of Brighton and Greene’s descriptions of streets and buildings are precise. For example, while he is walking along the front, Hale turns into a pub where he first meets Ida: ‘Somewhere out of sight a woman was singing, “When I came up from Brighton by train”: a rich Guinness voice, a voice from a public bar. Hale turned into the private saloon and watched her big blown charms across two bars and through a glass partition.’13 This pub is unnamed in the novel, but it was probably based on the ‘Star and Garter’, known locally as ‘Dr Brighton’s’. The ground floor lay-out resembled that in the novel and it would have been possible for someone, like Ida, to sing in one bar and be heard, and seen, in the adjoining bar.

  Greene made use of the Lobby Lud situation very skilfully, by binding it into the plot in a way that increased the tension of the novel, for Hale ‘knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they [Pinkie’s gang] meant to murder him’, because he had grassed on Pinkie’s boss, Kite, which led to Kite’s murder.

  He realises that since his movements have been advertised in the Daily Messenger Pinkie’s gang can keep track of him – he is in a trap. As he passes the Grand Hotel, twenty yards away was Cubitt, one of Pinkie’s mob, keeping a check on him. He manages to establish contact with Ida, the singer in the bar, in order to protect himself. She makes him feel secure, but as they drive in a taxi to the Palace Pier, he knows that Pinkie is following in his old 1925 Morris car. Ida wants to go to the Aquarium and Black Rock – ‘There’s always something new on the Palace Pier’ – but at the turnstile she leaves him to go to the ladies’ lavatory and it is at the turnstile that he is picked up by Pinkie’s mob – just opposite Forte’s Cafe where Lobby Lud cooled himself with an ice cream.

  Later in the novel, Pinkie’s ‘assistant’, Spicer, in order to see whether the police will begin a reconstruction of Hale’s kidnapping, goes back to the scene, and if today you were to take up the same position you would see what Spicer then saw: ‘He took up his stand between the turnstile of the pier and the ladies’ lavatory. There weren’t many people about: He could spot the bogies [police] easily enough – if they came. Over there was the Royal Albion; he could see all the way up the Grand Parade to Old Steyne; the pale green domes of the Pavilion floated above the dusty trees; he could see anyone in the hot empty mid-week afternoon who went down below the Aquarium, the white deck ready for dancing, to the little covered arcade where the cheap shops stood between the sea and the stone wall, selling Brighton rock.’14

  Old Steyne (sometimes spelt Old Steine) is still there and is one of the main central areas of the town, a cluster of roads and gardens running from the Royal Albion Hotel past the Royal Pavilion. The various hotels described in the novel add an extra interest. And what Hale observed, the drinking of cocktails, in the Grand Hotel must have been observed by Greene: Through Pinkie’s eyes we see the Royal Albion and the Cosmopolitan: ‘a well-known popular author displayed his plump too famous face in the window of the Royal Albion, staring out to sea.’15 The Royal Albion is a distinguished hotel which attracted writers – Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and Greene often went there to write when he had a writer’s block or wanted to finish a novel.

  For the original of the Cosmopolitan, where women with bright brass hair and ermined coats have their heads close together like parrots and where the gangster Colleoni lived, we have to look elsewhere. Again the view of the hotel is Greene’s filtered through Pinkie, who watches ‘young men arriving in huge motoring coats accompanied by small tinted creatures, who rang like expensive glass when touched but [were] as sharp and tough as tin.’ Colleoni asks Pinkie what happened to Kite:

  ‘You won’t want to hear the details. It wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been crossed. A journalist thought he could put one over on us.’

  ‘What journalist’s that?’

  ‘You oughter read the inquests,’ the Boy said.

  Colleoni, totally undisturbed by Pinkie’s threat, comments: ‘Napoleon the Third used to have this room … and Eugenie.’16 This suggests that Greene had the Bedford Hotel in mind as a model for the Cosmopolitan, for it was there that Charles Dickens wrote Dombey and Son; and where Louis Napoleon, Napoleon III, stayed.

  Brighton Greene knew, but not the gang life and he probably had to ‘fake’ some of this. As he confessed in Ways of Escape: ‘I had spent only one night in the company of someone who could have belonged to Pinkie’s gang – a man from the Wandsworth dog-tracks whose face had been carved because he was suspected of grassing to the bogies after a killing at the stadium.’17

  *

  The bare facts of the tale seem to go back to his time with Korda when Greene improvised a plot which led to the script of The Green Cockatoo (originally called Four Dark Hours) in which Eileen, a young West-country girl visiting London for the first time, accidentally meets Dave Connor, who has just been stabbed at the railway station by race-course gangsters he has double-crossed – his blood dripping down on to the platform. This is developed in A Gun for Sale where a gang leader called Kite tried to ‘bump off’ the leader of Raven’s gang and had his throat cut as he got out of a railway carriage: ‘I cut his throat’, says Raven, ‘and the others held him up till we were all through the barrier in a bunch. Then we dropped him by the bookstall and did a bolt.’18 This is the situation in Brighton Rock where Hale grasses on Kite (original leader of Pinkie’s race gang whom Pinkie looked on as a father) to the gangster Colleoni – who arranged his death, which also takes place in a railway station – St Pancras. And so Pinkie decided Hale had to be killed.

  The kidnapping of Hale derives from the kidnapping of a man on Brighton front in broad daylight, ‘in the thirties’. He was found on the Downs dead, as Greene records in Ways of Escape.fn2 But the idea of basing the novel on a race gang feud came from the Lewes Assize case and certainly one incident – the attack on Pinkie and Spicer by Colleoni’s mob – derives from that case. The actual attack was made by sixteen men on Alfred Solomon, a bookmaker, and his clerk, Mark Frater. Solomon was struck several blows on the head and ran away but Frater was held and attacked with a hatchet and kicked. The attack was ended by the arrival of the police. In the same way, Pinkie and Spicer are attacked – but by men carrying razors. Spicer goes down and Pinkie is kicked and slashed and the arrival of the police ends the attack – Pinkie running away. The account in the Brighton Argus (29 July 1936) records the name of the leader of the attacking gang as Spinks, known as Spinky, and it is possible that Greene derived the name Pinkie from this.

  Nevertheless, Greene asserted that ‘there were no living models for these gangsters’. He also says that ‘there was no living model for the barmaid, Ida, who so obstinately refused to come alive,’19 but it could be that Mae West was the model – he had reviewed one of her films in the Spectator before he had begun writing Brighton Rock:

  ‘Ah’m an Occidental wooman, in an Awriental mood.’ The big-busted carnivorous creature in tight white sequins sits as firmly and inscrutably for inspection as the fat tattooed women in the pleasure arcades. The husky voice drones, the plump jewelled fingers pluck, the eyes slant, and immediately we are in the familiar atmosphere … the friendly, smoky, alcoholic atmosphere of a Private Bar, hung with advertisements for Guinness.20

  Ida of course drinks only Guinness, sings songs in what Greene calls ‘a rich Guinness voice’ as Hale watches her big blown charms across two bars. ‘She wasn’t old, somewhere in the late thirties or the early forties … she was only a
little drunk in a friendly accommodating way. You thought of sucking babies when you looked at her, but if she’d borne them she hadn’t let them pull her down: she took care of herself. Her lipstick told you that, the confidence of her big body.’ The next sentence Greene invented but it smacks of a Mae West witticism: ‘She was well-covered, but she wasn’t careless; she kept her lines for those who cared for lines.’21 Ida is pleasure-seeking: ‘She was cheery, she was healthy, she could get a bit lit with the best of them. She liked a good time, her big breasts bore their carnality frankly down the Old Steyne, but you had only to look at her to know that you could rely on her. She wouldn’t tell tales to your wife, she wouldn’t remind you next morning of what you wanted to forget.’22

  If we accept that Mae West is Greene’s model then the parallels are many. Hale invites Ida to have a meal with him but she plays to her audience, as well as to Hale, with Mae West posturing:

  ‘Where shall we go, Sir Horace? To the Old Ship?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hale said. ‘If you like the Old Ship.’

  ‘Hear that,’ she told them in all the bars … her own half dozen cronies. ‘This gentleman’s invited me to the Old Ship,’ she said in a mock-refined voice. ‘Tomorrow I shall be delighted, but today I have a prior engagement at the Dirty Dog.’23

  Mae West’s description of herself as ‘a girl who lost her reputation but never missed it’ could be said of Ida, and their philosophies are similar: ‘It’s better to be looked over than overlooked’ (Mae West). And just as Greene ultimately changed his opinion of Mae West so also Ida is seen as a perpetually friendly but superficial person whom no man can satisfy, as his description of her when she has won on the races and can afford to take Phil Corkery to the Cosmopolitan for a dirty weekend shows:

  Then she got up slowly and began to undress. She never believed in wearing much: it wasn’t any time at all before she was exposed in the long mirror: a body firm and bulky: a proper handful. She stood on a deep soft rug, surrounded by gilt frames and red velvet hangings, and a dozen common and popular phrases bloomed in her mind – ‘A Night of Love’, ‘You Only Live Once’, and the rest. She bore the same relation to passion as a peepshow. She sucked the chocolate between her teeth and smiled, her plump toes working in the rug, waiting for Mr Corkery – just a great big blossoming surprise.24

  The image of the gull which is used at different important moments to suggest the true nature of a person, in this case to underscore the predatory nature of Ida, ends the chapter, ‘A gull swooped screaming down to a dead crab beaten and broken against the iron foundation of the pier. It was the time of near-darkness and of the evening mist from the Channel and of love.’25 Yet it is Ida who is the avenger figure in the novel, searching out Pinkie after Hale has been killed by having a stick of Brighton rock thrust down his throat.

  The strangest aspect of the novel, however, is the development of the religious theme which changed it from a story about gang warfare into a struggle between good and evil set against a representative background of human society. As Arthur Calder-Marshall put it:

  Brighton Rock was sparked off by the fights between the Brighton Race gangs. But the theme, the conflict between the two moral worlds, that of Good and Evil and Right and Wrong, was not inherent in the plot as given by research. It was a working out of a conflict in Graham’s nature, which was posed acutely by the political situation in the 1930’s. Pinkie’s Credo in Unum Satanum (a phrase no Pinkie in real life would have coined) seems to me to have been based upon Graham’s own pre-conversion experience of evil. If Satan exists, God must.26

  Pinkie, therefore, did not need to be based on any gangster known to Greene because he is a character from a morality play – a tortured soul – just as his girl-friend is the ultimate representation of innocence totally outside the arena of evil. We have seen how Greene, very early in life, through the influence of Carter and of Visconti in The Viper of Milan, came to accept that evil is not necessarily something which comes with age and experience. It exists, it is there at any age, and he had not forgotten his experience of it, and thus also the oddity of Pinkie’s extreme youth is not an oddity to Greene. References to dividers in the story point back to Greene’s experience, each time in a context of sadism.

  When Pinkie is slashed with a razor on the racecourse by Colleoni’s men, he is ‘filled with horror and astonishment as if one of the bullied brats at school had stabbed first with the dividers’.27 Though earlier, when Pinkie is playing with Spicer like a cat with a mouse, treating him well, buying a glass of beer, insisting that he enjoy himself – ‘“You’re a fine fellow, Spicer”, the Boy said, squeezing his arm … “Go on”, the Boy said, “have a good time while you can.”28 – the Boy is seen by Greene as being ‘like a cruel child who hides the dividers behind him [as] he put his hand with spurious affection on Spicer’s arm’, and all the time we know that he intends to murder Spicer. He even enjoys the pleasures of the double entendre:

  ‘I don’t mind telling you. I’m going to make it up with Colleoni …’

  ‘I’m all for peace,’ Spicer said. ‘I always have been.’

  The Boy grinned through the broken windscreen at the long disorder of cars. ‘That’s what I’m going to arrange,’ he said.

  ‘A peace that lasts,’ Spicer said.

  ‘No one’s going to break this peace,’ the Boy said.29

  Pinkie’s schooling was not, of course, the same as Carter’s – it was the rough schooling of the extremely poor of the 1930s and was probably based on a film Greene reviewed in Night and Day on 14 October 1937 (when his novel was still uncompleted), Children at School: ‘A small child hurries down a dreary concrete passage … Cracks in the ceiling and the beams, damp on the walls, hideous Gothic exteriors of out-of-date schools, spiked railings, narrow windows, scarred cracked playgrounds of ancient concrete … the wire dustbin, the chipped basin, the hideous lavatory-seat and the grinding of trains behind the school-yard.’ It was at just such a school that Pinkie bullied at his desk and in the concrete playground. Significantly, too, it is in that review that Greene first uses the phrase, to describe the school’s conditions, ‘… hell too lies about us in our infancy’. The phrase obviously seemed appropriate to Pinkie, for when, at the end of Part Two, the police Inspector advises him to leave Brighton – ‘you’re too young to run a racket if you ask me’ – although Pinkie grins as he leaves the charge room, there ‘was poison in his veins … he had been insulted. He was going to show the world. They thought because he was only seventeen … he jerked his narrow shoulders back at the memory that he’d killed his man, and these bogies who thought they were clever weren’t clever enough to discover that. He trailed the clouds of his own glory after him: hell lay about him in his infancy. He was ready for more deaths.’30

  Greene returned to the phrase in the Prologue to The Lawless Roads when, in discussing cruelty at his school, citing the three persons he knew there who had a genuine quality of evil, he ends the paragraph: ‘Hell lay about them in their infancy.’ The phrase is, of course, a sardonic reversal of a passage in Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ which presents an idealised view of childhood:

  But trailing clouds of glory do we come

  From God, who is our home:

  Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

  – a view which Greene, with his Catholic preoccupation with original sin, must have loathed.

  In line with his socialism of that time he is seeing young lives blighted by squalid early years in overcrowded slums. As late as 1979 he felt able to say to Marie-Françoise Allain: ‘I don’t think that Pinkie was guilty of mortal sin because his actions were not committed in defiance of God, but arose out of the conditions to which he had been born.’31

  Perhaps, but Pinkie is not merely a victim of the slums. Central to this novel is the Boy’s passionate desire to commit evil. This is his private temperament and thus there is never a sense that Pinkie is Pinkie because of his social background. Part of the rich powe
r of the novel derives from the fact that Pinkie is defiant and seeks with a religious passion his own damnation. The sociological fact of slum life is better revealed in the total apathy of Rose’s parents in Nelson Place, and their willingness to sell their daughter to Pinkie for fifteen guineas. Moreover, there are elements of the human spirit that are made, not deformed, by such a background. Rose is an example of the slum having no corrupting influence on her natural purity of mind and spirit.

  Greene had foreseen the development of the religious theme as early as 9 April 1937 when he wrote to Nancy Pearn enclosing the first 30,000 words of the novel plus a synopsis. The synopsis, unfortunately, has not survived, but in his letter he writes: ‘Here is a rather confusing summary of what may or may not happen next. The real point – not to be breathed into Nash’s ears – is the contrast between the ethical mind (Ida’s) and the religious (the Boy’s and Rose’s) in thriller terms.’ This, as Arthur Calder-Marshall said, was a long way from the Brighton race-course gangs, and it would seem to be a working out of the relationship between Good and Evil, God and Satan, and the precarious and continuous balance between the two: a world view presented in what to Greene was really neutral ground – beyond his personal experience, but tapping his own fundamental view of mankind and religious beliefs. What he is demonstrating in the novel is the limitations of religious beliefs which do not accept the existence of innate evil.

  In August 1932, he records in his diary how he was given a lift by a driver of a Lyons’ van on one of his long walks. The driver was also a member of Toc H (a society for the maintenance of comradeship after the First World War), but his views did not please Greene: