Journeys with the possibility of intrigue were what the nineteen-year-old Greene wanted most of all. Having read the recently published Defeat, a collection of short stories by Geoffrey Moss about the state of Germany after the war, he was disgusted, like many others in Britain, to learn that in 1922 the French had tried to divide and exploit the country by setting up a separatist ‘Revolver Republic’ in the occupied Ruhr; they had assembled a loose fighting force composed of thugs from German jails and brothels to assist the collaborators. The English and Americans prevented the French from carrying out the plan, but the Germans believed they would try again. Around the beginning of March 1924, Greene wrote ‘on a blind & impudent off chance’ to the German embassy saying that many people in Oxford were pro-German and that he would like to write articles on the crisis for university publications following a visit to the Ruhr; however, he would need accommodation while there. Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff, the counsellor at the embassy, agreed to meet him during a visit he was making to Oxford.
Greene, going to his rooms at Balliol at the appointed time, found the blond, six-foot-six, twenty-stone Bernstorff already installed and polishing off the brandy. Born to a family of politicians and diplomats, he was becoming a fashionable figure in London. He was soon a regular presence at literary parties, including those of Edith Sitwell. The novelist Enid Bagnold was in love with him for many years. Prejudging Bernstorff somewhat because of his appearance and his frequenting of homosexual clubs, Greene did not then realize that this was a person of extraordinary character. An opponent of Hitler, he later found himself hated by Joachim von Ribbentrop, who served as ambassador to the United Kingdom and then Foreign Minister in Nazi Germany. During the war, Bernstorff helped to run an escape route for Jews to Switzerland and was executed in April 1945.13
Bernstorff gave Greene £25 for expenses – telling him to burn the envelope, which of course he instead kept as a souvenir – asking him to spend three weeks in Germany, and to focus on the Rhine and the Palatinate, observing that ‘the Ruhr would be a transient problem, the Rhine a perpetual one’. The embassy gave him a series of briefings and numerous letters of introduction. Meanwhile, Greene obtained letters from Oxford newspapers identifying him as a journalist. At this time, or perhaps a little later, Greene tried to play ‘double agent’ by asking the Patriot, a right-wing and pro-French publication run by the Duke of Northumberland, to make him its correspondent in Trier; his plan was to report back to the Germans, but his offer came to nothing.14
Meanwhile, Charles Greene objected to the whole plan, on the grounds that too close an association with the Germans could ruin his son’s reputation and prospects.15 Nonetheless, in early April, Greene, Cockburn, and the German-speaking Tooter made their way to Cologne. Throughout their journey a German intelligence officer appeared from time to time to monitor their progress. In Cologne they picked up more letters of introduction and met industrialists and politicians. In Essen they stayed at the private Krupp hotel and spoke with one of the firm’s directors. They discovered that the German population was angry with all foreigners, supposing them French occupiers. One evening they went to a cabaret and watched a nude dancer symbolizing Germany bursting out of her chains. They went on to Bonn, seeing few signs of trouble there. However, Trier, occupied by the French, was another story. Soldiers were everywhere – they had bullied the police and recently made a mounted charge against small groups of civilians. In Mainz they saw many drunken soldiers. In Heidelberg, Greene met a man whose organization for the relief of exiles from the Palatinate was actually in the business of kidnapping collaborators from the French zone. In the course of their travels, the three young men dreamt up a novel in the manner of John Buchan about occupied Germany.
Back in England, Greene wrote an angry article about the behaviour of the French forces, publishing it in Oxford Outlook in June. In one important respect he reproduced too closely the opinions of his sponsors: he does refer to the problem of colour prejudice, yet he accepts uncritically the complaint that the presence of black soldiers failed to respect the sensitivities of the Germans – an idea that would have been intolerable to him just a few years later.16
Germans passed in and out of his life for some time. Greene offered to carry money into the French zone for pro-German groups, but the offer was turned down. In October, Bernstorff showed up in Oxford ‘hopeful’ of disturbances in the Rhineland, and a plan was afoot for Greene to go to the French zone, contact separatist leaders, and find out about their plans. Then came a menacing man from the Berlin Foreign Office who had been going to the theatre in London: ‘You must see all kinds of plays, in order to sympathise with all types of people, for only by sympathising with them, can you dominate them.’ Greene felt that during lunch the man was trying to gauge his weaknesses, so resolved to do a little dominating of his own. He led the obese man around Oxford ‘at the speed of an express’.17 The plan for Greene to make this second journey fell apart after the Dawes Agreement, providing for the evacuation of occupying troops and softening reparation payments, took effect shortly after. This was just as well, since the nineteen-year-old Greene was on the verge of becoming a spy for the Germans. He also looked to the French embassy in London for introductions in such a manner that he would have become something of a double agent. Looking back on all this forty years later, he remarked: ‘Today, I would have scruples about the purpose I served, but at that age I was ready to be a mercenary in any cause so long as I was repaid with excitement and a little risk. I suppose too that every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses character, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.’18
The same sense of mischief and the desire for travel led Greene, along with Cockburn, to join the small Oxford branch of the Communist Party, which served both the university and the city. Neither of them had any belief in communism and their plan was to get control of the branch and perhaps to secure a trip to Leningrad or Moscow. At least one member spotted them as impostors, and their active membership lasted little more than a month. Nonetheless, they managed to get sent to Paris in early January 1925. They visited the Communist headquarters and were invited to a meeting near Ménilmontant, where they sat through a dreary reading of messages from branches abroad. Greene found it all intolerably boring and went back to his hotel to read the copy of Joyce’s Ulysses he had bought at Shakespeare and Company as soon as he had reached Paris – in later years he broke with critical orthodoxy in thinking the book over-rated. He visited the Casino de Paris to see the singer and entertainer Mistinguett, whose legs were insured for half a million francs. He also went to see cabaret acts at Le Concert Mayol, and on the way back to his hotel he was called to by the middle-aged prostitutes near La Madeleine.
Greene’s university years were filled with pranks; however, his joining the Communist Party would have consequences in the 1950s. Under American law, a person with such a history was forbidden to enter the country. Despite being, by then, one of the world’s leading novelists, not to mention a prominent Catholic, he had to fight hard for visas, and when he did step onto American soil his comings and goings were noted by the FBI, which looked upon him as a likely subversive.
4
THE REVOLVER
‘We lived in those years continuously with the sexual experience we had never known . . . And in between the periods of sexual excitement came agonizing crises of boredom.’1 Early in his time at Oxford, Greene fell for women in a ‘twilight world of calf love’. Apart from fantasies about his tennis-playing cousin Ave, he had, back in Berkhamsted, taken to exchanging kisses with his younger siblings’ somewhat tyrannical nurse. She sought to improve the experience by giving him his first razor. One evening, he came to the nursery, found his mother there, but went ahead anyway with a kiss on the young woman’s lips ‘to show that I was not ashamed of what I did on other occasions’. She was soon sacked.2 He had also conceived a passion for Clodagh O’Grady, the golde
n-haired daughter of his father’s secretary. In Oxford, he fell in love with a waitress at the George pub. But something more painful was in store.
Like most freshmen he overspent his budget on the purchase of books and beer. He lived for his first two terms at 52 Beechcroft Road in north Oxford, so there were late-night taxis to pay for. By the end of term he was broke, despite his father’s allowance, and decided very reluctantly that he must spend the summer with his family rather than go to Paris as he had hoped. The family went on holiday to the seaside town of Sheringham in Norfolk. His younger siblings Hugh and Elisabeth were past the age of needing a nurse so there was now a governess named Gwen Howell, about ten years older than Graham. At first, he paid no attention, but then one day saw her lying on the sand, her skirt pulled up showing ‘a long length of naked thigh. Suddenly at that moment I fell in love, body and mind. There was no romantic haze about this love, no make believe.’3
It was, for him, ‘an obsessive passion’, for her, a flirtation. Although they did no more than kiss, she became afraid of the strength of his feelings. Meanwhile, he took dancing lessons so that they could go to ‘hops’ during the winter holiday. She was tenuously engaged to a man who worked abroad for Cable & Wireless. With his return anticipated, she wept, telling Graham she would have to leave Berkhamsted before long to be married. It had lasted about six intense months, ‘though even today’, he would write five decades later, ‘it seems to have endured as long as youth itself’. From Oxford, he continued to exchange letters with Gwen each week, and thirty years later when she wrote to him asking for tickets for his play The Living Room the sight of her handwriting on the envelope caused his heart to beat faster.4
There is nothing remarkable about a young man falling in love with an unattainable woman. However, Greene’s mental state was still troubled. Following his return from Kenneth Richmond’s in early 1922, he had begun to experience the terrible boredom that would afflict him all his life and that he would do almost anything to relieve. This was likely a symptom of manic depression, although he claimed that it was the result of psychoanalysis: ‘For years, after my analysis, I could take no aesthetic interest in any visual thing: staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful I felt nothing. I was fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath.’ By the autumn of 1923 he was also engrossed in his impossible passion for Gwen Howell, but ‘The boredom was as deep as the love and more enduring’.5 One relief was alcohol – he told Evelyn Waugh that much of his time at Oxford passed in a ‘general haze of drink’ – more than he consumed at any other time in his life.6
He also played a reckless game. He says that he discovered in the deal cupboard of the bedroom he shared with Raymond a revolver – ‘a small ladylike object with six chambers like a tiny egg-stand’ – and ‘a small cardboard box of bullets’. He took them and set out across Berkhamsted Common as far as Ashridge Beeches. There, he says, he loaded a bullet into the gun and spun the chambers round. He says his intentions were to escape rather than to commit suicide, and that he was intent on the gamble: ‘The discovery that it was possible to enjoy again the visual world by risking its total loss was one I was bound to make sooner or later.’ He writes: ‘I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear and pulled the trigger. There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position. I was out by one.’ His survival thrilled him: ‘My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities. It was like a young man’s first successful experience of sex – as if among the Ashridge beeches I had passed the test of manhood. I went home and put the revolver back in its corner-cupboard.’7
But when the holiday ended, he took the revolver with him back to Oxford. There, three times, he chose a country lane beyond Headington to continue the game. The thrill diminished, and by Christmas 1923, after a total of six plays, he gave up Russian roulette.
This is one of the most famous episodes in Graham Greene’s life. However, it may not be entirely true. Certainly, his mother rejected the whole story. Raymond, the owner of the gun, reportedly maintained that there was no box of bullets in the cupboard. This account is indirect – Raymond speaking to his wife, who passed it on to their son Oliver Greene.8 Graham’s own versions of the story were not consistent.
As late as 1981 he claimed to have learned ‘recently’ that the bullets were not blank – with the implication that he supposed they were when he pulled the trigger.9 As we have seen, A Sort of Life is not entirely reliable on some important points. It is reasonable to believe that this story is at least embellished, that Graham Greene did play Russian roulette but with blanks, or, more likely, empty chambers. Indeed, his poems at the time provide a little evidence on the subject. One describes a bullet being loaded into the chamber, but another suggests that the game involved a good deal of fantasy:
How we make our timorous advances to death, by pulling the trigger of a revolver, which we already know to be empty.
Even as I do now.
And how horrified I should be, I who love Death in my verse, if I had forgotten
To unload.10
In the course of his life, Greene did many things at least as dangerous as Russian roulette, and perhaps that is the point of the story. It is not simply a tall tale but a personal myth, a story that allows Greene to explain a recurrent pattern: ‘A kind of Russian roulette remained too a factor in my later life, so that without previous experience of Africa I went on an absurd and reckless trek through Liberia; it was the fear of boredom which took me to Tabasco during the religious persecution, to a léproserie in the Congo, to the Kikuyu reserve during the Mau-Mau insurrection, to the emergency in Malaya and to the French war in Vietnam. There, in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver from the corner-cupboard in the life-long war against boredom.’11
Greene had close friends at Oxford, among them Joseph Macleod (pseudonym Adam Drinan), a Scottish poet of considerable gifts who was soon to be published by T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber. After leaving Oxford, Macleod qualified as a barrister and then ran an experimental theatre; however, he was best known as a news presenter on the BBC: during the Second World War he became a national figure as he managed to deliver even terrible news – such as the sinking of HMS Hood in May 1941 – in a voice that was deep, resonant, and reassuring.12 At Oxford, the two would go on evening walks and talk about their plans for the future, and Macleod would often come to Greene’s rooms and leave poems for him to publish in Oxford Outlook. One evening he appeared in a state of misery over a young woman. Greene jokingly offered him the revolver so that he could commit suicide. When Macleod appeared ready to accept, he hurriedly put it away and offered whisky instead.13
Greene and Macleod were two of the poets from Oxford who read their verses on BBC Radio on 22 January 1925. With them were Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Patrick Monkhouse, T. O. Beachcroft, and A. L. Rowse. They were placed in a room full of sofas and armchairs and directed, each in turn, to a box covered in blue fabric where they would recite. In a humorous account published in the Oxford Chronicle a week later, Greene wrote: ‘As Earl Harold at William’s court spoke over the casket of saints’ bones, I spoke over this box that I hoped contained the great heart of the British public.’ One rather exposed heart was among the audience – in one of those acts of insensitivity of which he would often be guilty, he had urged Gwen to listen, and so she sat embarrassed with his parents beside the radio, as he poured out endearments in blank verse.14
*
At Oxford, Greene was very quickly noticed as a writer of promise. At the end of Trinity Term 1923, he sent a manuscript of poetry and prose to the publisher Basil Blackwell, who responded to it in November, saying he would be delighted to produce a book of Greene’s work. Blackwell was not seeking to immortalize the effusions of Greene’s youth. What he wanted was future work, so he required ‘first refusal’ on his next two books. In May 1925,
almost two years after Greene’s initial approach, Blackwell released Babbling April, a thirty-two-page collection of poems. Three hundred copies were printed, and one came into the hands of Harold Acton. Reviewing for the Cherwell, he dismissed it as ‘a diary of average adolescent moods’. As for a poem about Russian roulette that featured trembling hands, Acton said it made him want to throw the book down and cry, ‘ “For God’s sake, be a man!” ’15 The Cherwell allowed Greene a response, and in a phrase that makes the contemporary reader cringe, he wrote that most readers would find comic the idea of Acton ‘as a professor of Manliness’.16 Soon, however, Greene accepted Acton’s view of the book, never allowing it to be reprinted. As for Acton himself, Greene became devoted to him, remarking to Evelyn Waugh in 1950: ‘How nice & dear he is, & how I didn’t realise it at Oxford.’17
By early 1925 Greene was working hard on his fiction and had drawn the interest of the agent A. D. Peters, who was building up the client list for his new firm, with a novel he had written on a rather odd subject: ‘By a mistaken application of the Mendelian theory’, Greene says, he created a protagonist who was genetic freak, the black child of white parents. He lived a lonely life at home, and one shaped by racial prejudice at school. Peters was anxious for a happy ending – to have Sant marry the prostitute he loves. After some resistance, Greene undertook a rewrite: ‘I made the young man find a kind of content by joining a ship at Cardiff as a Negro deckhand, so escaping from the middle class and his sense of being an outsider.’18 Peters had high hopes, but the manuscript was rejected by Blackwell, Grant Richards, John Lane, Heinemann, and others.
While ‘Anthony Sant’ was making the rounds, Greene pushed on with a thriller, or as he called it a ‘shocker’, about separatist Germans. He was soon able to provide Peters with twenty thousand words of it in the spring for the purposes of serialization, though again the work did not sell.19 A year later, he wrote five chapters of a country-house murder mystery, ‘The Empty Chair’, in the manner of Agatha Christie. This story was rediscovered and published in The Strand in 2009.20 Greene was a young man in a hurry, but it would take years for him to learn his craft – what he had written so far had little to recommend it.
The Unquiet Englishman Page 5