Greene finished his ‘shocker’ by mid-January 1936.23 Written in the vein of Stamboul Train, it was published in July in Britain as A Gun for Sale, having come out in the United States in June as This Gun for Hire. His plan was, in future, to publish all such books under the pseudonym Hilary Trench, which he had used occasionally since his Oxford days. He would use his own name for serious fiction. He gave up on this notion once Heinemann told him that as an unknown author he could only have a £50 advance.24 However, when the book came out, the advertisement page divided his works into ‘Novels’ and ‘Entertainments’, a distinction he maintained until the 1960s, when he accepted that a good many of his stories could go into either box.
The story sets the table for Brighton Rock. As Greene had first done in A Man Within, he put a repulsive character at the heart of the novel and set about making him compelling. With a hare lip, Raven is physically unattractive. He is nervous, boastful, and apparently unbothered by the suffering he causes. Emerging from the racetrack gangs, he becomes an assassin and is hired to kill a politician, with the result that Europe is brought to the edge of a new war, while his real employer, an aged arms-maker, studies the ticker tapes and calculates the money he is about to make. The novel received excellent reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, and Mary Leonard sold the film rights to Paramount for $12,00025 – which allowed Greene to pay off much of his debt on the house.
Greene’s other book, Journey Without Maps, suffered a bizarre misfortune. Published in Britain in May and in America in November, it received excellent reviews, but then the lawyers appeared. In the early pages of the book, Greene described a loud-mouthed drunk named ‘Pa Oakley’, and he later told Hugh this name was invented. However, it turned out that the head of the Sierra Leone Medical Service was named P. D. Oakley, and he initiated a libel action. Heinemann withdrew the book. Luckily for Greene, all but two hundred copies had already been sold,26 but it remained out of print until 1946, when Pan reissued it with the character renamed.
Meanwhile, Vivien had given birth on 13 September 1936 to a boy christened Francis Charles Bartley Greene – the Bartleys being a branch of Vivien’s family. Francis would see even less of his father than Caroline did; the war came when he was just turning three. Raised chiefly by Vivien, he proved a deeply intelligent boy with scientific interests and a quick wit. In time he came to resemble his father in his concern for human rights. He eventually became a photojournalist and a traveller, with particular interests in Eastern Europe and Russia, and in environmental causes. He resembled his father in another important way: a distaste for all the trappings of celebrity, and a strong sense of privacy.
12
MY WORST FILM
An envelope reached Graham Greene at the Spectator containing ‘a piece of note paper covered with human shit’.1 This was a reward for one of his film reviews. Indeed, by the mid-1930s Greene was making both enemies and friends in the film world. At the beginning of 1936, John Grierson, a leading figure at the GPO Film Unit, which produced such gems as Night Mail, suggested Greene join them as a producer. At the same time, Greene was close to Elizabeth Bowen’s husband A. C. Cameron, one of the founders of the British Film Institute, and was serving on an advisory committee on the future of television.2
In the summer of 1936, he collaborated with the somewhat testy director Basil Dean on a script of J. B. Priestley’s story ‘The First and the Last’, in which a murderer commits suicide and an innocent man is hanged for the supposed crime. Greene had the treatment done by the end of August, and then wrote a shooting script, having to learn his craft as he went along. He wrote to his mother: ‘Every camera angle has to be described, each angle being a scene, the average film having about 550 scenes. A long business. I find it very tiring, as you have to visualise exactly the whole time, not merely what the person is doing, but from what angle you watch him doing it.’3
Devoted to films from childhood, Greene’s fiction always had a cinematic aspect, and the actual writing of scripts intensified this quality. Many years later he would say in an interview: ‘When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer’s eye – which leaves it frozen . . . I work with a camera, following my characters and their movements. So the landscape moves. When I turn my head and look at the harbour, my head moves, the houses move, the boats move, don’t they?’4
Dean persuaded the producer Alexander Korda to put the script into production in 1937. The leads were played by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, then at the beginning of their affair and in frolicsome mood. The filming was chaotic, with delays occurring, for example, when Dean noticed that in one scene a bowl contained sugar cubes rather than granulated sugar, so everything stopped while an underling went to the shops. That year saw a bad slump for the British film industry, so Korda decided to leave this film, entitled 21 Days, on the shelf, where it remained until Columbia bought it from him. It was released, or perhaps just escaped, in January 1940.5 Disclosing his own involvement, Greene gave it a bad review in the Spectator, observing that the basic story was ‘peculiarly unsuited for film adaptation, as its whole point lay in a double suicide (forbidden by the censor), a burned confession, and an innocent man’s conviction for murder (forbidden by the great public)’.6 Like a convict, he promised never to repeat his crime. In 1987, Greene wrote about the production in an essay entitled ‘My Worst Film’.7
This project marked the beginning of what became a devoted friendship between Greene and Korda. As a reviewer, Greene had slashed at Korda’s films, complaining of their ‘slowness, vulgarity, over-emphasis’.8 You cannot fault Greene for a lack of nerve: he wrote those particular words when, through Basil Dean, he was effectively on Korda’s payroll. However, if Korda had never existed, Greene might have had to invent him for one of his novels. Born in Hungary, he did his first film-making there, but after being arrested by the anti-Semitic regime of Miklós Horthy, he left his home for good and pursued a film career in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and Hollywood, carrying with him a hatred of dictatorship and fascism. In late 1931, he came to Britain to run Paramount’s operations, but a few months afterwards, with the assistance of his brothers Vincent and Zoltán, he set up his own company, London Film Productions, which remained closely tied to Paramount.
There was also a confidential side to Korda’s operation. At the beginning of the decade, Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, had established an intelligence service known as his ‘private detective agency’ intended to monitor the progress of fascism in Germany and elsewhere via reports from travelling businessmen. In this operation, he worked closely with Colonel Claude Dansey, a veteran spy famously codenamed ‘Z’. As well as being a legitimate firm distributing its products internationally, London Films provided a cover for work done by the detective agency. Indeed, the financing to begin the company came from associates of Vansittart and Dansey. When Korda set up a huge seven-stage studio in 1936, he chose to do so in the village of Denham in Buckinghamshire, where Vansittart owned a large manor house. On occasion the studio was used to train spies. Throughout the 1930s, Vansittart was able to give the government accurate intelligence on German and Italian plans and capabilities – advice that was tragically ignored. One person who did not ignore it was Dansey’s old friend Winston Churchill, who, when money was tight, took work as a scriptwriter from Korda. His parliamentary speeches and questions on the Nazi menace often drew on the findings of the detective agency.9
Greene wanted more work as a scriptwriter, so met in October 1936 with Alfred Hitchcock about possibly working for British Gaumont, but nothing came of that – indeed, Greene thought Hitchcock ‘a silly harmless clown’10 and always maintained that his work was over-rated. Greene suggests that Korda must have been ‘curious’ to meet the man who had given him such bad reviews – his ‘enemy’.11 Apart from Greene’s potential as a screenwriter, Korda would certainly have known about Hugh Greene’s reporting on Germany and
about Graham’s own reputation as a traveller – he may have looked like a prospect for Z. There is no evidence that Greene was approached, but perhaps his qualifications were noted.
Greene made at least three visits to Denham in mid-November. He met Korda himself on the 17th and was asked if he had an idea for a script. Off the top of his head, he described an opening scene in which a man is standing on a platform at Paddington Station with blood pooling around his feet. When asked what happened next, Greene said it would take too long to explain and still needed to be worked out. It was enough. An agreement was reached.12 What they really wanted was a character in a series of thrillers, but that did not happen. They gave him £175 to develop something over the next three weeks. If they could use it, he would have four weeks’ work on the film at £125 per week. Korda would also have the right to call on Greene for six months of work in each of the next three years, with a salary rising eventually to £225. During the later part of the contract, Korda could sell Greene’s services to Hollywood, and they would split the increase in salary.13
Most of Greene’s important work for Korda would be done after the war, so the possibilities of this contract were not realized. He did write his script about the bleeding man under the working title ‘Four Hours’. It was released in 1940 as The Green Cockatoo, with John Mills playing the lead. The critic Quentin Falk observes the film might have served as a trailer for Brighton Rock.14 Here, a man who has been stabbed by racetrack gangsters tells a naive young woman to find his brother at the Green Cockatoo pub, then dies. Holding a bloody knife that has fallen out of his coat, she is accused of murdering him and flees. She finds the brother who shields her from the gangsters and the police, and the film ends with the two in love. The film was panned and forgotten.
13
SHIRLEY TEMPLE
In late 1936, Greene found a job he wanted. Three years earlier, Ian Parsons, a partner at Chatto & Windus, had offered him a position at the publisher and been turned down. Now he sounded him out again, about a sophisticated new magazine. The offer of £600 per annum was one of the reasons Greene postponed a planned visit to Mexico. Drawing its title from Cole Porter’s song, Night and Day was incorporated on 1 April 1937, publishing its first issue on 1 July and its last on 23 December. Modelled on the New Yorker, this astonishing but short-lived magazine was intended to challenge Punch as the leading humorous publication in Britain.1
Graham Greene was literary editor and John Marks the features editor, but in general they worked together. Marks is otherwise known as the translator of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, and Greene recalled him showing up the worse for wear whenever the French writer was in London, as he insisted on late nights watching striptease. The art editor, Selwyn Powell, presided over a group of contributors that included the expressionist artist Feliks Topolski. The travel writer Peter Fleming, writing as ‘Slingsby’, contributed the ‘Minutes’ to each issue, describing, for example, the chaos surrounding the first issue: ‘our colleagues, haggard and unshaved, were for ever slumping forward on their desks with a groan, we didn’t feel too good ourself’. He claimed that one person kept telephoning the office just to answer the receptionist’s ‘Night and Day’ with ‘you are the one’ and then ring off.2 A solicitor named Patrick Ransome represented the owners, and he caused a certain anxiety whenever he came out of his office. However, Greene recalled a boozy lunch ending with him pushing Ransome in his wheelchair at top speed along the road, ‘while he shrieked at the astonished shoppers with laughter and fear’.3
Greene recruited Evelyn Waugh as a book reviewer and Elizabeth Bowen as a drama critic. John Betjeman contributed five instalments of the ‘Diary of Percy Progress’. Osbert Lancaster was the art critic and Hugh Casson wrote about architecture. Herbert Read was induced to review detective fiction and, according to Greene, ‘his humour streamed suddenly and volcanically out’.4 Read had devised a comic persona named James Murgatroyd and was proposing a series along the lines of Diary of a Nobody just as the shutters went up. On 1 November 1937, Ian Parsons told the board that the magazine could not continue to operate without new capital. The effort to raise it failed, and the magazine was discontinued just before Christmas.
Greene reviewed films for Night and Day, writing only on books for the Spectator during that time. In the first issue of the new magazine, he discussed a film called The Frog in which the plot relies on a gramophone recording of a criminal’s voice – presumably that detail leaked directly into Brighton Rock, which he was then writing. However, his most famous review was of Wee Willie Winkie on 28 October 1937. Refusing to believe that Shirley Temple was supposed to be interesting to other children, he took the position that the film-makers were pimping out her body to perverts: ‘Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.’5 Unsurprisingly, the good ship Lollipop cleared the decks for action.6
Having earlier had to placate J. B. Priestley and P. D. Oakley, Greene ought to have known libel law. What caused him to say these things? The year before he had written an essay for Sight and Sound about the work of the film reviewer, in which he observed that the public did not care about film technicalities, so the only way a reviewer could challenge the cinema to improve was with laughter: ‘a flank attack upon the reader, to persuade him to laugh at personalities, stories, ideas, methods, he has previously taken for granted. We need to be rude . . . ’7 That is one explanation: he just overdid it.
The other explanation is somewhat speculative. Although often absent, Greene was a father and seems to have been troubled by what would now be called the sexualization of children. Indeed, he would soon portray a tragically precocious child, the daughter of the whisky priest, in The Power and the Glory. It is likely that Greene really did think Temple was being exploited, and he chose to make the point in a disastrously flippant way. Towards the end of his life Greene and Temple, by then an American ambassador, became friends. Her memoir essentially corroborates Greene’s view of the studios as full of sexual menace for child actors.8
The newsagent W. H. Smith refused to carry the issue. Meanwhile, the dorsal fins of various solicitors could be seen circling the magazine’s St Martin’s Lane offices. The statement of claim said that Greene had accused Twentieth Century Fox of ‘procuring’ Shirley Temple ‘for immoral purposes’. Greene stuck the document on his bathroom wall, where it remained until a bomb struck during the Blitz.9 The case came to the High Court on 22 March 1938 with the notoriously hard-nosed Chief Justice in a mood to protect innocence and celebrity. The defendants were Greene, the magazine, Chatto & Windus, and the printing firm. A settlement was announced involving formal apologies and the payment of £3500 in damages. Graham Greene was not in the court and the irate Chief Justice wanted to know where he was, but the barristers had no information for him. He thought this settlement an insufficient response to a ‘gross outrage’ and notified the Director of Public Prosecutions so that it could be considered for a charge of criminal libel.10 Greene had wisely removed himself to Mexico.
14
REAL BRIGHTON
In a year in which so much happened, it is hard to believe that Greene was also working steadily on Brighton Rock, one of the most admired novels of the twentieth century. Since returning from Liberia, Greene had completed A Gun for Sale. He had also had two false starts. Around May 1936, he wrote several thousand words of ‘Fanatic Arabia’, set in a town like Berkhamsted and with a partly Jewish main character.
He got much further with ‘The Other Side of the Border’, which, though unfinished, was published in Nineteen Stories in 1947. Despite swearing off the influence of Joseph Conrad in matters of style, Greene constructed his plot along the lines of Heart of Darkness: the main character, Hands, has a job interview and is sent to Africa on behalf of a mining company, but, in thi
s case, to Sierra Leone and Liberia rather than to the Congo. One of the reasons Greene abandoned the novel was that Hands resembled Anthony Farrant of England Made Me, both characters modelled, to a degree, on Greene’s brother Herbert. When the short story was finally published, Greene remarked that he could no longer remember how the proposed novel was supposed to end.1 However, during his trip to Mexico in early 1938, he had actually put together a short outline for a seventy-thousand-word novel, to be called ‘The Leader’. Hands would engage in slavery and set up a fascist state in West Africa. To his surprise, his ‘methods’ would be approved by a committee of European investigators. Descending into alcoholism and insanity, he would die, but the mining would go on without him, as would the fascist state he established. This promising story was pushed out of the queue by Greene’s other work, and he never returned to it.
‘Brighton Rock I began in 1937 as a detective story and continued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as an error in judgment.’2 This is one of those intriguingly unhelpful sentences in which Greene’s introductions and autobiographies abound. The book was actually begun by the end of the summer of 1936. In the midst of writing it, he discovered one of the great themes in his fiction and seized upon it – the mercy of God, which he would continue to explore in The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair. As he grew older, he wanted to write more earth-bound fiction and especially to shake off the ‘Catholic novelist’ tag, which first took hold with Brighton Rock; Greene would often say that he was ‘not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic’.3 A memorable phrase, it is more accurate as a description of the second half of his career than of the first. Indeed, it seems that the middle-aged Graham Greene was trying to cover his intellectual and artistic tracks.
The Unquiet Englishman Page 13