by Lara Feigel
Unlike Vivien, who was a goddess to be adored (‘my love, you are a saint’ Graham had assured her in 1925), Dorothy was a fellow-adventurer and drinking companion. In later years, Vivien was dismissive of Dorothy, who was ‘square and small’ and was quite a lot older than Graham, ‘and looked it’. Malcolm Muggeridge described Dorothy as ‘a person who, on the grounds of attractiveness, was absolutely a non-starter’. But in The Heart of the Matter Scobie falls in love with his mistress, Helen, precisely because she is plain. He has no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful, the graceful and the intelligent, all of whom can ‘find their own way’. Instead, it is ‘the face that would never catch the covert look, the face that would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference’ that demands his allegiance.
Dorothy’s lack of physical vanity made her easy to spend time with. The cartoonist David Low recalled her as ‘happy, small, rather stoutish, not smart but very friendly – she radiated friendliness. She gave you a sense of feeling at home in her company – she had a nice laugh.’ Her good humour contrasted with Vivien’s anxiety; her bravery contrasted with Vivien’s cowardliness. ‘From the first raid,’ Greene said later, ‘she was courageous, oh yes, and showed no fear of any kind.’ David Low recollected meeting Graham and Dorothy after a raid, when papers from a bombed office were flying all over the street, and watching as the lovers picked up the fragments and read them to each other, roaring with laughter. He also remembered watching the chief warden taking a government official on a tour of the Bloomsbury shelters and coming across Graham and Dorothy entwined in the shadows. ‘Just look at that pair,’ said the official in disgust. ‘But,’ responded the chief warden, ‘that is Mr Greene, one of our best wardens, and his nice wife.’
Dorothy was thirty-nine, a theatrical designer who in her youth had danced in the chorus of theatrical revues. According to Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham was ‘devoted’ and ‘extraordinarily good’ to Dorothy. Certainly, he set about helping her with her career, sending a play she had written to his agent. He also authored a series of picture books with illustrations by Dorothy and even managed to get her employed as his secretary at the Ministry of Information. For the first time, Graham was in a relationship that combined physical acceptance with the collaborative partnership of a marriage. Unlike Vivien, Dorothy could accept the seedier side of Graham’s sexuality. An enthusiast of cheap lodging houses, Graham took Dorothy to a lodging house in a road opposite Paddington Station on the first night of their affair. He could also take her to nude reviews, although Muggeridge recollected that Greene was careful during the Blitz to make ‘a special act of penitence and other appropriate liturgical preparations in case death came upon him unawares’. On one occasion Muggeridge accompanied Greene to the Windmill Theatre to gaze ‘balefully at the nudes; rather pinched and ravaged in the footlights’ glare, yet still bound by law to keep absolutely still’. Muggeridge thought that the spectacle appealed to Greene ‘for its tattiness and seediness’ – the guise in which he most liked the Devil’s offerings to be presented. Greene explained to his friend how the cognoscenti knew just where to sit to get the best view, and how, as the front rows cleared, spectators at the back pressed forward to take their places; ‘wave upon wave, like an attacking army’.
On the night of 18 October, Graham and Vivien’s Clapham house was bombed. It was not a heavy night of bombing, but south London was badly hit in the early morning. A pub was demolished near the Greenes’ house, leaving forty people trapped. Arriving to check on the house the next morning, Graham was confronted by fire engines stationed outside it. Writing to his mother he reported that he had arrived to collect some belongings at 8.30 a.m. and found a scene of devastation. There had been no fire and no flood and the structure was still standing, but the workshop in the garden was destroyed and the back of the house had been struck by a blast. It was impossible to get beyond the front hall. He was still hoping to save some of his books and Vivien’s ornaments but he told his mother that it was ‘rather heartbreaking that so lovely a house that has survived so much should go like that’. Vivien was devastated. Visiting the ruin to rescue some possessions, she walked ‘in tears on the edge of the front room looking down at the deep frightening cavity two floors below and all the rafters and rubble and dirt’.
Graham was distressed to lose some of his books (he did manage to rescue some by making a chute and pushing them down) but he soon found that he was largely relieved by the loss of the house itself. ‘It’s sad because it was a pretty house,’ he reported to his agent in America, ‘but oddly enough it leaves one very carefree.’
There had been a large mortgage on the house so Graham was rescued from a heavy financial burden. But it was evident to Vivien and to Malcolm Muggeridge that Graham felt released by the loss chiefly because it portended the destruction of his marriage, offering the promise of release from moral responsibility. Looking back on the bombing he wrote that he ‘simply felt relieved that I didn’t have to be backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards all day, and lose my lunch every day, whenever there had been a raid and there were raids most days, to see that the thing was there’.
Henry Yorke, who was more cautious about material wealth than Greene, would have been more distressed if the Yorkes’ house in Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge had been bombed. But he was content only to be there one day in three and happy, too, that Dig and Sebastian were safely absent in Herefordshire, where they were staying with Dig’s family. Henry had married Adelaide (‘Dig’) Biddulph, a distant cousin, in 1929. Initially he had been courting her younger sister Mary (known as ‘Miss’), while his friend the novelist Anthony Powell was in love with Dig (although Powell was aware that he had neither the money nor the status to satisfy her titled parents). ‘To the great scandal of the servants Mary and I spent the night together at Forthampton,’ Yorke boasted to Powell in 1928; ‘Her wisdom is terrific.’ But he was also involved in exchanging letters with Dig, falling in love by correspondence. In 1928, ‘Miss’, perhaps tired of waiting for Henry, became engaged to a guards officer, Monty Lowry-Corry. Henry took Dig to Oxford to meet his undergraduate friends, who were all agreed as to her beauty and general niceness. The following April, he wrote to tell Evelyn Waugh, who had not yet met Dig, that he was getting married. He informed his friend that his future wife hid ‘a stupendous intellect behind an enormous capacity for idleness and an appearance of innocuousness’. Henry and Dig were married in July.
Henry and Dig Yorke on their wedding day, 1929
Dig herself, though always good-natured, cultured, sociable and polite, was almost as inscrutable as Henry. In a 1960 account of a holiday the couple spent in Ireland at the time of the Munich crisis in September 1938, Yorke gives a brief portrait of the marriage. Walking from one creamy Irish beach to another, the couple are companionable but restrained. ‘We had been married for years, were fond, just did not say much to one another, so stayed comfortably quiet.’ Settling on a beach, there is a brief moment of intimacy when they hold hands, but they are interrupted by an ‘aged crone’ who undresses and then wanders naked into the sea. Years later, Yorke could still recall enough of the scene to describe the well-preserved, unwrinkled belly of the woman, and the ‘bush of hair black and enormous’. At the time, he reports, the Yorkes themselves ‘did not say a word’. The woman leaves and Dig tells Henry that she would now like her tea. They wander inland, avoiding another naked couple they have seen on the neighbouring beach, and Dig announces to her husband that she is ‘beginning to find Ireland creepy’.
What emerges in this account is a commitment both to the unsaid and to the status quo of the marriage. There is a sense that their companionable silence can continue in the face of any amount of embarrassment or emotional upheaval. In 1939 Yorke wrote in Pack My Bag that he saw mutual shyness as ‘the saving grace’ in all relationships: ‘the not speaking out, not sharing confidences, the avoidance of intimacy in important things’ made living, ‘if you can find friends to play it that way, of s
o much greater interest even if it does involve a lot of lying’.
This seems to have been the day-to-day reality of the Yorkes’ marriage. From the start, Henry had affairs, and even resumed the sexual relationship with Dig’s sister. Dig was prepared to ignore these for the sake of propriety. She had been brought up as an upper-class hostess in a family where emotions were rarely discussed or prioritised and were secondary always to manners. ‘It seems so gauche,’ Dig announced in 1939 when told that anti-aircraft gunners seemed unable to hit their targets. As a result the Yorkes were better equipped to stay together in the long term than the Greenes. It was easier to have mental and physical privacy in a large house with servants than in a rural cottage, and Dig was well prepared for a marriage in which her position as a wife was more important than the continual and complete adoration of her husband.
According to the daughter of one of Henry’s mistresses, Dig pretended that any unpleasant events were not actually occurring and concealed any negative emotion behind a manner of ‘the most brilliant feyness’. For his part, Henry treated Dig with a respect that Graham Greene was increasingly failing to show to Vivien. It was clear to all but the most innocent of his mistresses that Henry had no intention of leaving Dig, and when Dig was with Henry in London the Yorkes entertained as a unit, inviting Henry’s mistresses to the house as guests. This did not, however, prevent Henry from falling in love, sensuously, passionately and self-indulgently. And in wartime, there was no shortage of girls ready to die, night after night, in those arms that would soon perhaps be dead.
At the beginning of the Blitz, Henry Yorke was in the midst of an intense and sexually charged friendship with Rosamond Lehmann. Lehmann was a successful novelist herself and was a radiant presence on the London literary scene. Stephen Spender later described her as one of the most beautiful women of her generation: ‘tall, and holding herself with a sense of her presence, her warmth and vitality prevented her from seeming coldly statuesque’. Rosamond had been married to Wogan Philipps since 1928, and for the last four years had been involved in a fervent and painful love affair with Yorke’s friend, the caddish and charming writer and academic Goronwy Rees. The affair had begun during a weekend with Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen’s Court in Ireland, when Goronwy was ostensibly in love with Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth was deeply hurt by the behaviour of both guests, complaining to her friend the philosopher Isaiah Berlin that Goronwy had visited Rosamond’s bedroom in the night and upset Elizabeth’s innocent niece, who was forced to listen through the thin partition wall.
Rosamond Lehmann, c. 1943
Goronwy was generally believed to be fairly heartless. The poet Louis MacNeice once complained that Goronwy’s famous charm ‘takes an ell if you give it a millimetre’, stating that he ‘would have made a wonderful travelling salesman’. But, at least at the start, Goronwy seems to have been as infatuated with Rosamond as she was with him, and it was through Goronwy that Rosamond met Henry Yorke, whom Goronwy brought to stay with her in 1937. Now that her affair with Goronwy was losing momentum on his part if not on hers, Rosamond was finding consolation in this new friendship. She and Henry met frequently for evenings in London in 1939 and 1940, with Henry concealing the meetings from his wife. On 11 September 1940, a few days into the Blitz, Henry wrote to Rosamond that he looked on their two days spent together before the bombing began as ‘a goal to get back to again if chance allows because it was the best of life’. ‘Yes, it was the core of life,’ Rosamond wrote in reply; ‘I’m so glad we had it.’
It is unclear whether this was actually a sexual relationship. Rosamond later claimed that she had never gone to bed with Henry, though she had a tendency subsequently to deny sexual encounters, also claiming that nothing had happened with Goronwy Rees at Bowen’s Court. Either way, she was ultimately preoccupied with Goronwy throughout this period, and neither she nor Henry seems to have had any intention of falling in love. Rosamond told Henry gratefully at this time that he was ‘one of the few disinterested affection-givers (I don’t know how to put it!) that I know’. For his part, Henry was more able to surrender himself in love affairs with younger women, perhaps because they were more easily impressed by the roles he assumed. He and Rosamond drifted apart in the autumn of 1940 and the following January he admitted to her that he had been avoiding her in the autumn because ‘war is entirely unnatural and I can’t see anything but pain in meeting people one cares for’. Instead he had been busy writing ‘like a beaver’ and seeing new friends, ‘most of them very young’.
There were two very young women on the scene during the autumn of 1940: Ann Glass and Rosemary Clifford. Henry’s affair with Rosemary Clifford began in the summer of 1940, when she seems to have been engaged in war work that brought her to the Davies Street fire station. That August she was working in Whitehall, missing their proximity – ‘it’s like swimming in a stagnant pond when you’ve been used to the sea’ she wrote on 25 August – but dreaming happily about Henry in his absence. She had just tried to imagine him by climbing onto the roof in Park Street behind Park Lane, where she thought she could smell his hair on the wind. ‘Have I told you I miss you?’ she asked him, ‘because I do – which is a nuisance. If we should meet again – I’m dark and rather grubby.’
Meanwhile Henry had begun his pursuit of Ann Glass, whom he had first come across at the beginning of the war as a teenage debutante and recently met again. ‘You are now old enough for me to ask you out,’ he informed her, and out they went, to one bar, restaurant and nightclub after another. A few months into the affair Ann looked back on a typical evening together, wishing they were ‘back in the Lansdowne or the Conga or a sort of heavenly mixture of both, suspended above time in a golden dream of swing and brandy and enchanted conversation’. Ann was working for MI5 by day and that autumn her parents had taken a room for her at the Dorchester Hotel, where Henry visited her. Ann and Rosemary were probably not the only girls Henry was ‘dying with’ at this time. In Pack My Bag he characterised himself as someone who had always enjoyed first experiences too much, adding that this applied to people as well.
How wonderful they seem the first few times, how clever, how beautiful, how right; how nice one seems to them because so interested, how well it all goes and then how dull it becomes and flat.
Having affairs with several girls at once was one way to assuage the flatness.
Ann and Rosemary themselves were both aware of each other’s presence in Henry’s affections and, too young and too impetuous to have mastered Dig’s insouciance, they were periodically jealous. ‘Darling, This is very tiresome having to write because I can’t put it beautifully like Miss Glass,’ Rosemary declared, thanking Henry for her copy of Pack My Bag in November; ‘but you know if I tried to tell you I should have to put my head in a pillow and become embarrassed.’ ‘Would you like to know how you look when you’re asleep?’ she asked, by way of summoning him back to bed; ‘your face loses all its creases and becomes very serene.’
The atmosphere of these affairs finds its way into Yorke’s novel Caught, where the sheaved heads of pretty young girls collapse on the blue shoulders of pilots, drowsy with drink and sex, ‘gorged with love, sleep lovewalking’. When the servicemen depart to fight overseas, the firemen inherit the girls they leave behind ‘hunting for more farewells’, seeking another man with whom they can spend their last hours, to whom they can murmur ‘darling, darling, darling it will be you always’, the ‘I-have-given-all-before-we-die, their dying breath’.
Richard falls sensuously and easily for Hilly, a driver at his fire station, enticed by ‘the bloom, as he said to himself, of a thousand moist evenings in August on her soft skin and, on the inner side of her lips, where the rouge had worn off, opened figs wet on a wall’. He takes her to a half-dark nightclub filled with the ‘naked, fat round shoulders’ of chalk-white girls, where jazz singers croon of the foreign land of the south which becomes ‘everyone’s longing in this soft evening aching room’. When the lights go out, ‘to hav
e what little he that minute had’, he kisses her on the mouth and is answered by the feel of ‘opened figs, wet at dead of night in a hothouse’. ‘Oh darling,’ he says, ‘low and false’, ‘the months I’ve waited to do that.’ He strokes the inside of her right arm, his lips still wet from hers, caught up in ‘this forced communion, this hyacinthine, grape dark fellowship of longing’. Hilly herself opens up, enfolding his fingers in her hand, her eyes filling with tears as she settles down ‘not, as she told herself, for long, to love Dickie’.
From this point, Richard and Hilly go to bed together on his days of leave. As their bodies meet, Richard experiences relief that is ‘like the crack, on a snow silent day, of a branch that breaks to fall under a weight of snow’ as his hands move ‘like two owls in daylight over the hills, moors and wooded valleys, over the fat white winter of her body’. In bed, in love, he experiences what he has previously found only when drunk and comes to want nothing more.
The small warm movements of her were promises she made, and which she was about to fulfil. He had no further questions. He had the certainty of her body in his arms. He grew hot.
Writing to his publisher John Lehmann, Henry Yorke referred dismissively to this as Richard’s ‘silly thing with Hilly’. But it is misleading to see this affair, any more than Henry’s own, as merely a frivolous distraction from the real business of firefighting, parenting and writing. Some of the most evocative and beautiful descriptive language in Caught goes into these accounts of Richard and Hilly. Both Richard and Henry himself were self-indulgent and sentimental in their love affairs, and both were under no illusions about their own commitment to these women. However there is still a seriousness to the sensuality; a sense that it is at these moments, playing the role of the maudlin hero, that they are most vitally alive.