The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  There is a battle for Pinkie’s soul between the powers of Good and Evil, as there was in the case of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, but in Brighton Rock it shows itself through his recollections of his childhood experiences of the Catholic Church ritual. A curious aspect is that as he moves towards acts of increasing evil he unconsciously recalls religious phrases: ‘He began softly to intone – “Dona nobis pacem”.’ ‘He won’t’, says Rose. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Give us peace.’ A sentimental, romantic film inexplicably makes him weep, his mind giving him a vision of ‘limitless freedom: no fear, no hatred, no envy. It was as if he were dead and were remembering the effect of a good confession, the words of absolution: but … he couldn’t experience contrition – the ribs of his body were like steel bands which held him down to eternal unrepentance.’59 Which is what he is doomed to.

  He reaches the Peacehaven Hotel (there was a Peacehaven Hotel along the coast from Brighton) and persuades her to write a suicide note. ‘Say you couldn’t live without me, something like that.’ As he brings himself closer to the killing of Rose, the pressure on him grows and the supernatural battle for his soul proceeds: ‘He found that he remembered it all without repulsion; he had a sense that somewhere, like a beggar outside a shuttered house, tenderness stirred, but he was bound in a habit of hate … Going down stairs to her and getting his story right for the authorities: “He hadn’t known she was all that unhappy, he would say, because they’d got to part she must have found the gun in Dallow’s room and brought it with her.’” Pinkie’s determination to do evil does not waver. Nevertheless there is this sense of more than human powers hovering – ‘the huge darkness pressed a wet mouth against the panes and again he felt the prowling presence of pity.’ They drive away from the hotel. God’s angel, this time in the form of wings, comes to him:

  An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in; the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it … If the glass broke, if the beast – whatever it was – got in, God knows what it would do. He had a sense of huge havoc – the confession, the penance and the sacrament – and awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain.

  The words of the Mass touch him for the last time: ‘He was in the world and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.’ But he gives her precise instructions: ‘“All you need do is pull on this. It isn’t hard. Put it in your ear – that’ll hold it steady.”’ ‘“When it’s over, I’ll come back an’ do it too”’ … He says, ‘“It’ll be too dark for me to see much.”’

  Such is the power of this scene that one feels that Greene is living out his own instructions to himself when, at twenty, he tried Russian roulette. Instructions to oneself are terrible enough, but turn those instructions around, apply them to another, act out the part of the devil’s advocate and they become evil indeed: ‘Put it in your ear – that’ll hold it steady.’ The inner journey of a novelist sometimes means mentally roaming in consort with the evil of a psychotic killer: ‘Answer how well or ill he steered his soul’, wrote the authors of The Witch of Edmonton, ‘By Heaven’s or by Hell’s compass.’

  As he tried to persuade Rose to shoot herself near the cliffs, Dallow (his one loyal friend) and Ida (his persistent enemy) appear together with the police. Pinkie takes out a bottle of vitriol he always carries:

  ‘Where’s that gun?’ Pinkie said again. He screamed with hate and fear, ‘My God, have I got to have a massacre?’ …

  She could see his face indistinctly as it leant in over the little dashboard light. It was like a child’s, badgered, confused, betrayed: fake years slipped away – he was whisked back toward the unhappy playground. He said, ‘You little …’ he didn’t finish … he left her, diving into his pocket for something. ‘Come on, Dallow,’ he said, ‘you bloody squealer,’ and put his hand up. Then she couldn’t tell what happened: glass – somewhere – broke, he screamed and she saw his face – steam. He screamed and screamed, with his hands up to his eyes; he turned and ran; she saw a police baton at his feet and broken glass. He looked half his size, doubled up in appalling agony; it was as if the flames had literally got him and he shrank – shrank into a schoolboy flying in panic and pain, scrambling over a fence, running on.

  ‘Stop him,’ Dallow cried: it wasn’t any good: he was at the edge, he was over: they couldn’t even hear a splash. It was as if he’d been withdrawn suddenly by a hand out of any existence – past or present, whipped away into zero – nothing.60

  The major question put in the novel is the nature of God’s mercy, both on earth and in the after-life, working on the assumption that there is one. It is presented through the phrase, ‘Between the stirrup and the ground’, which occurs on at least six occasions, the first one being when Pinkie (an unlikely fellow to have known it) says to Rose, ‘You know what they say – “Between the stirrup and the ground, he something sought and something found”.’ ‘Mercy’, she says. ‘That’s right: Mercy.’ This is a quotation from a poem by William Camden (1551–1623): ‘Betwixt the stirrup and the ground/Mercy I asked, mercy I found.’ But mercy, both human and divine, is a questionable factor in the world of Brighton Rock. After Pinkie’s death, Rose goes to St John’s (an actual Catholic church in Brighton) to confess, but she does not want absolution: ‘I want to be like him – damned.’ The priest gives her the example of Péguy: ‘There was a man, a Frenchman … who had the same idea as you. He was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn’t bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation … This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too … You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.’61

  Rose is convinced that Pinkie is damned. Not only did he die without absolution, but: ‘He knew what he was about. He was a Catholic too.’ The priest’s response is, ‘Corruptio optimi est pessima.’ (The corruption of the best is the worst.) ‘Hope and pray,’ he tells her. ‘If he loved you, surely, that shows there was some good …’ And so she goes home looking forward to playing the record Pinkie made on their wedding day and hearing the message she had not yet heard. She goes with hope, but she is walking ‘towards the worst horror of all’. What Pinkie had recorded was, ‘God damn you, you little bitch, why can’t you go back home forever and let me be?’62 So much for hope.

  *

  Brighton Rock was written as a thriller and described by Greene as one of his ‘entertainments’, but its religious theme, its examination of the Roman Catholic religion, makes it his first Catholic novel, his first enquiry into the ways of man and God, and the novel obviously was inspired by his own conversion and his own questioning of those ways. It was to lead on to The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair.

  Rose Macaulay, after reading the novel, wrote to a friend: ‘I wonder if you have yet finished Brighton Rock. The end is horrifying; the suicide pact, the horrible death, and then poor little Rose left alone with that awful gramophone record … Pinkie is allowed to die in mortal sin, without time to save himself by absolution as he had counted on. This is certainly poetic justice.’63 Marghanita Laski, almost twenty years later, concluded that ‘the ending is most memorable, the most painful any novelist has ever written.’64 In whatever way Greene has reassessed his religious beliefs over the years, it is certain that the new dimension his conversion brought to his view of man and God brought also a new dimension to his fiction.

  He finished writing the novel soon after the closing down of Night and Day. He and his friends had lost their jobs, and his income was worryingly reduced. He must have felt bitter. Mexico was ahead, but it was not then certain that a publisher would stake him for the trip. On 17 January 1938 he wrote to his publisher about Brighton Rock:

  The novel in its last 5,000 words has turned round and bit me. (I’ve never had such a bother with a book: I suppose because I’ve never been able to concentrate on it for two months together), so I’m goin
g off to a country pub, I hope, tomorrow evening to finish it.

  As usual Greene decided on the title for the novel: ‘I’ve made Frere quite happy about the title which I’m convinced is a good one.’ In Ways of Escape, he records that the Brighton authorities ‘proved a little sensitive to the picture I had drawn of their city, and it must have galled them to see my book unwittingly advertised at every sweetstall – “Buy Brighton Rock”.’65

  fn1 Professor Cedric Watts has suggested that the pseudonym Kolley Kibber is adapted from the eighteenth-century actor-manager and Poet Laureate Colley Cibber (1671–1757).

  fn2 The man was Ernest Friend Smith, aged 67. The incident happened in Madeira Drive; not in the thirties but in April 1928. He was attacked by three men, thrown into a car, taken to the Downs, battered and robbed. He died weeks later.

  PART 8

  Mexico

  40

  ‘I want to get out of this bloody country’

  Boredom – so often the mask of fear.

  – MONICA FURLONG

  SOON AFTER HIS twenty-first birthday, Greene wrote to Vivien, ‘as long as I can remember I’ve had a certain instinct that I should be killed before I was 32. I can’t remember the time when I wasn’t certain. Like the Apostolic Succession, it fades into the mists.’ Perhaps that was why he went to Liberia when he was thirty-one – in order to test the validity of this instinct. It was not valid: in this case his mediumistic powers failed him. In the month of his thirty-third birthday a sketch of him done by Geoffrey Wylde appeared in the London Mercury. What is remarkable about this is that though Night and Day had then closed down and he was without a job, his reputation as a novelist, poet and literary editor was such that the sketch simply carried his name and the date when it was done – no other information seemed necessary.

  The sketch shows a man with the touch of youth still about him – the youthfulness that had led him to rush the boy he was tutoring round the garden in an old pram and, after a rather alcoholic lunch with Patrick Ransome (who had shares in Night and Day and who was confined to a wheel-chair), led him to run him ‘at top speed in his chair down Cecil Court while he shrieked at the astonished shoppers with laughter and fear’. But the Wylde drawing reveals other aspects of Greene.

  There is the transparency of his eyes as he leans backwards and to his right side (waistcoated with the bottom button, according to custom, unbuttoned). Young in the face, he is not young in the eyes, which are wide-awake, expectant, with a strange fixed look as if he were anticipating future experiences and terrors. Elizabeth Montagu, who knew him in Vienna at the time of the making of The Third Man, recalled going with him to the night-clubs which spawned in Vienna: ‘Hideous they were … where did such hags come from? – this was February 1948, and four years into peace. Hour after hour in such dives. It was always late and I longed to prop my eyes open with a matchstick – such hags: I couldn’t understand his interest. He looked old for his age and strained – he still had to grow into his face.’

  The critic and novelist Walter Allen met Greene when he was editor of Night and Day. He had gone with an introduction to their offices in St Martin’s Lane hoping to persuade Greene to let him be their soccer correspondent: ‘He was not yet famous, was still merely “promising”, but I read everything he had written … Of my near contemporaries he excited me more than anyone except Auden, and … they had more in common than I [then] realised. They shared an obsession with frontiers, spies, and betrayals … With both of them, whether in the flesh or on the page, I knew I was in the presence of powerful idiosyncrasy. Meeting Greene for the first time, with his account in Journey Without Maps of his march through Africa vivid in my mind, I remember thinking: how could this man have made such an expedition? He was very tall and thin; one felt a gust of wind would blow him over. His face was lined, as though he were under strain or perhaps in some pain, and his smile seemed somehow reluctant, as though he were using facial muscles not much exercised. His voice, which was [a] lightish tenor, was not so much high-pitched as curiously strangled.’1

  When Greene was twenty-one, he had written to Vivien:

  I have three determinations:

  1. And most important. To marry you.

  2. To make a lot of money.

  3. To edit the Spectator.

  By the age of thirty-three he had achieved the first of these aims, and although he had not been editor of the Spectator, he had been literary editor of Night and Day, and enjoyed it: ‘It was for all four of us who made up the staff a happy experience. I cannot believe that any paper has been so completely free from personal antagonisms.’ He had not made a lot of money but he had worked on films with Korda, and apart from the three documentaries previously mentioned he wrote the commentary for The Future’s in the Air (January 1937) which celebrated the Empire Air Mail.

  But in December 1937 Night and Day collapsed, he was faced with a libel case and Brighton Rock was giving him trouble. He complained to Hugh on 16 January 1938: ‘My damned novel is giving me worse hell than any other … my nerves as a consequence are in tatters.’2 He was tired of England: ‘I want to get out of this bloody country’, but it seemed that his plans for Mexico were falling through – he had no way of escape.

  He does himself less than justice in insisting that he always sought ways of escape. Usually he was seeking not so much a way out of a situation as a way into another, a new, more interesting, more dangerous situation, as with Liberia. There was also, as he wrote, ‘a desire to be a spectator of history’. He had failed in that aim with Spain but Mexico, if he could get there, offered the same conflict as in Spain – religion versus atheism, but in a stranger, more stimulating environment. Though he did not get to Spain, the Spanish Civil War had nevertheless been an important influence, as he wrote in Ways of Escape:

  My professional life and my religion were contained in quite separate compartments, and I had no ambition to bring them together. It was ‘clumsy life again at her stupid work’ which did that; on the one side the socialist persecution of religion in Mexico, and on the other General Franco’s attack on Republican. Spain, inextricably involved religion in contemporary life.

  It was under those two influences, and the backward and forward sway of his sympathies, that he began to examine more closely the effect of faith on action:

  Catholicism was no longer primarily symbolic, a ceremony at an altar with the correct canonical number of candles, with the women in my Chelsea congregation wearing their best hats, nor was it a philosophical page in Father d’Arcy’s Nature of Belief It was closer now to death in the afternoon.3

  It has been claimed that Greene went off to Mexico to escape the consequence of the Shirley Temple libel case, but this is not true. Night and Day stopped publication at the end of the year, but the libel case did not come up until March 1938 and Greene left for Mexico at the end of January 1938 to begin a journey he had been planning for over two and a half years. The closure of Night and Day had given him the freedom to do it; his persistence in attaining his object had borne fruit; his release from a busy but boring life had come about.

  What seems to have been an obsession with going to Mexico was first mentioned in a letter to Hugh of 24 May 1936, before Night and Day and Brighton Rock had been thought of and when he was involved in making films and writing ‘In the Night Coach’ (‘Fanatic Arabia’) and reviewing for the Spectator. To Hugh he wrote, ‘Later in the new year I may be getting off to Mexico; negotiations are on hand for a book on the Mexican Revolution and the Catholic church.’ He had already been in touch with the Catholic publisher Sheed about this: ‘Sheed promises an introduction to one of the heads of the Catholic party,’ he told Hugh, and suggested that if they could manage a holiday together it should be in Spain, since he would have to learn Spanish for the Mexican trip and would need to practise it.4 By July there were uncertainties and mysteries: ‘Mexico remains uncertain. My agent’s asked Sheed for £500 and Sheed can’t make up his mind till he’s been across to New Yo
rk again and talked with the mysterious Fr Miranda.’5

  The trip to Spain with Hugh did not take place because of Vivien’s pregnancy, but his enthusiasm for Mexico continued. In July he was cock-a-hoop: ‘I’ve just heard that Sheed has agreed to terms for the Mexican book, an advance of £500, so I shall be off after the new year [1937].’ And he was reading about Mexico with that curious delight he seemed to take in facing adverse conditions: ‘The reading is as morbid as Liberia’s. There seem to be even more diseases, and an average of one shooting a week. This is a conservative estimate by a pro-Government writer! I hope you’ll be able to give me a sofa in New York.’ In the same letter, he put to Hugh what appears to be the kernel of Brighton Rock with the warning: ‘Don’t let out the idea if you can help it. There are plenty of literary sharks ready to get ideas for thrillers, who are quicker producers than I am.’6

  A letter to his mother of 29 August 1936 gives an insight into his customary complexity of purposes: ‘I shall go via New York to pick up introductions and information and try to arrange a lecture tour for later in the Catholic states. I can’t help hoping too that something might turn up from Hollywood when I’m actually in America. If I get across to Sonora in Mexico, where they had the Indian war in 1928, I shall be only about 300 miles from Hollywood.’

  Not only was Hollywood in his sights, but Hugh appears to have been netted as well. He was then in Berlin as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and Greene seems to have hoped that the paper might finance his brother for a Mexican trip, or that, alternatively, Hugh might fund himself by writing a successful play: ‘This is all very sad about The Telegraph’s attitude to your coming to Mexico. However, a lot may happen before it becomes possible for me to go and … I shall hope for the best. Do write the play quickly and sell it for a lot of money.’7 Hugh wrote the play, which was based on a novel by Roy Horniman, but it was not produced until 1977 in Lübeck with the German title Gesellschaftspiel. It did not make money, as the film Kind Hearts and Coronets, based on the same novel, had done.