In the village, he met a mestizo, a man of combined indigenous and European descent; he had ugly teeth and a strange laugh, and worked as a typist clerk. Many years later, the biographer Norman Sherry encountered this man, Don Porfirio Masariegos.53 A character modelled on him would dog the whisky priest’s tracks and eventually hand him over to the police lieutenant.
Yajalón was meant to be merely a stage on his journey, but Greene was stuck there for almost a week waiting for a plane. He eventually gave up hoping for it to arrive, so set out with a guide in torrential rain for another three-day journey by mule through the mountains. On the first night they were welcomed into a gathering of huts by people who had no interest in being paid for hospitality. They took just a swig of his brandy for fellowship: ‘I felt myself back with the population of heaven.’54 At dusk on the second day, he saw a grove of tall black crosses tilted in various directions, an expression of the syncretistic forms of Christianity to be found among the indigenous people: ‘ . . . a dark tormented & magic cult. But what harm in that? We are too inclined to forget that Christianity is magic – the man raised from the dead, the devils cast out, water turned into wine, an earth religion – the clay mixed with spittle, the body raised again. Perhaps those dark crosses had more in them of original Christianity than our aseptic rational variety.’55
In San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas’s old state capital among the mountains, he had again the luxury of a hotel room and bedsheets. He had begun his travels in Mexico on Ash Wednesday, and was now wondering whether there might be a Catholic uprising during Holy Week.56 Exploring the cobbled streets, he found five churches open but without priests; following the example of other worshippers he tried to pray kneeling on the stone floor with his arms extended in the form of a cross, but found it hard to bear after a few minutes.57 He was directed to a ‘Mass house’ where on 13 April he attended his first ‘bootleg’ Mass, the priest appearing ‘in a natty motoring coat & a tweed cap’ and the woman of the house very proud: ‘she had sheltered God in her house’.58
The next day, Holy Thursday, Greene went again to this house and the priest spoke of sacrifice. Emerging from Mass, he found there had been an ‘invasion’ of indigenous people who had come into the city to venerate the statues of the crucified Christ in the churches, some bringing flowers and lemon blossoms. He was seized by a longing for God, and wrote in his journal: ‘To be a saint is the only happiness. O Christ, if one could set one’s ambition at goodness – so that financial worry meant nothing more than failure at tennis, cricket, something on which one had not set one’s heart.’59 It is an extraordinary statement for the usually ironic Greene; he is perhaps recalling the saying of Léon Bloy: ‘There is but one grief in the world – not to be a saint.’60
He spent the rest of Holy Week in San Cristóbal de las Casas before going by crowded bus to the new capital of Tuxtla and then by plane out of Chiapas to Oaxaca, where he found it strange to see a functioning church with Mass notices and exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The rest of the journey was miserable as he had contracted dysentery. Greene travelled to Puebla by train, and then back to Mexico City on 21 April 1938, where after five weeks out of touch he picked up his letters, including news of the Shirley Temple action and a solicitor’s bill.
Father Tagle from the Secretariado brought him to meet Bishop Miranda and they went for a drive, during which Miranda told Greene stories about Padre Pro, how he himself had been imprisoned at the time of the execution and how others had been killed at the hands of the government. In a shrewd piece of staging, he had chosen for their driver a man whose sister, María de la Luz Camacho, a twenty-seven-year-old lay catechist, had been killed in Garrido’s raid on the church in Coyoacan in 1934; at her funeral the Archbishop of Mexico City, indicating that the church had moved beyond the methods of the Cristeros, declared her the first martyr of Catholic Action.61
Amid fears of a European war, Mexico was old news. The bishops knew this, and so treated Greene with kindness and respect as someone who could tell their story to a distracted world. Before leaving Mexico City he was invited to the jubilee celebration of the former apostolic delegate, where he met more of the church leadership. But Greene needed to return to England, so with the rains falling he began his voyage back to Europe in a German liner. Many of his fellow passengers were on their way to Spain to fight for Franco.
16
DOLL
Having desired in Mexico to become a saint, back in England Greene was anxious not to be prosecuted as a criminal. Thankfully, there was no further libel charge, and the matter of Shirley Temple receded into anecdote. Brighton Rock was released in June in New York and in July in London. In October, Greene told Narayan that it had sold six thousand copies, and later recalled a total sale of eight thousand.1 In the long run, it proved the best-selling of all Greene’s books.2
Brighton Rock certainly raised his profile in the United States, as Viking put a good deal of effort into advance publicity for its new author. The New York Times declared the novel ‘as elegant a nightmare as you will find in a book this season . . . a revival of the Poe manner – modernized with streamlined abnormal psychology and lit by neon’.3 In England, the book was enough of a hit for a Sloane Square department store, part of John Lewis, to take notice; Greene wrote to his brother Hugh: ‘A new shade for knickers and nightdresses has been named Brighton Rock by Peter Jones. Is this fame?’4
Greene could see that war was not far off. On 13–14 March 1938 came the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria. In May the Czechoslovakian army mobilized against a German threat to the Sudetenland, where there was a large German population. This crisis passed, but with negotiations ongoing through the summer, Hitler sent three-quarters of a million men on manoeuvres in August, to which Britain responded by a mobilization of the fleet. On 24 September, Czechoslovakia mobilized again, and war was imminent. The Munich Agreement of 29 September allowed Hitler to absorb large swathes of territory into the Reich, and purchased for Great Britain and France, at the cost of betraying their obligations to Czechoslovakia, an illusory promise of peace. Like many others in Britain, Graham Greene was opposed to the deal. When on 3 October Duff Cooper resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty in protest, Greene thought his action ‘magnificent’.5
In the days before the agreement, he saw that his family collected their gas masks, and he prepared them for the prospect of a long stay in relative safety outside London. He told his mother that he expected either to be conscripted and have almost no income or to go into a job in the Ministry of Information or Propaganda with a modest salary, in which case he would rent out the house and take cheaper lodgings.6 From October 1938, Greene viewed the war as merely postponed and urgently set about earning money that might ease the circumstances of Vivien and the children in his absence.
He finished The Lawless Roads in January – the death of Cedillo occurred on the 11th and is referred to in the book. It was published by Longmans, Green in March and by Viking under the title Another Mexico in June. Apart from his usual reviewing, he wrote a radio play, The Great Jowett, about the Victorian sage Benjamin Jowett who became Master of Balliol – one of the rare occasions Greene wrote about Oxford. Produced and narrated by Stephen Potter, it was broadcast on 6 May.7
At much the same time, he was juggling two novels. Thinking The Power and the Glory unlikely to be a bestseller, he began an entertainment, The Confidential Agent, which was completed in just six weeks, during which he would work in the mornings on the thriller and in the afternoons on the story of the whisky priest, which proceeded more slowly. On 18 June, he told his mother that he had written a quarter of million words in the last year and was exhausted; however, the thriller was finished.
The cost of all this productivity was terrible. Going beyond his usual resource of manic energy, he took Benzedrine – a tablet at breakfast and another at midday. He would leave Clapham Common in the morning to do his writing at a studio he had rented in Bloomsbury. The effec
ts of the amphetamine wearing off in the late afternoon, a depression would set in; with a tremor in his hand, he would return home primed for quarrels. Long after the entertainment was finished, he had to wean himself slowly off the drug, and later believed that his conduct towards Vivien under the influence of Benzedrine did more to destroy their marriage even than his infidelities.8
Perhaps. As far as we know, Greene’s liaisons with other women in the 1930s were transitory – until he met Dorothy Glover. He rented the studio in Mecklenburgh Square, later bombed, from her mother. An affair between Greene and Dorothy was evidently under way by 7 April 1939, when he told Hugh, ‘In confidence, life at the moment is devilishly involved, psychologically.’ The affair was a serious one: ‘War offers the only possible solution.’ The relationship may even have begun some months earlier, as in October 1942 he told his sister Elisabeth that it had been going on for four years,9 but he was never accurate about dates.
Surprisingly little is known about Dorothy Glover. Although as an old man Greene disposed of his papers in major sales to three American universities, he included few letters from women with whom he had been involved, apparently thinking it his duty to destroy them. Since Dorothy did not deposit his letters in an archive either, the two have kept many of their secrets.
Born in 1901 in Wandsworth, Dorothy Mary Glover was the daughter of Thomas Craigie Glover, an electrical engineer from Glasgow, and his wife Annie.10 Dorothy was evidently married, though the relationship broke up; it is not certain who her husband was, as there is more than one Dorothy Glover in the public registers. Theatrical records afford occasional glimpses of her. At the age of fourteen, she and her younger sister Eileen appeared as the boy princes in a production of Richard III at His Majesty’s Theatre in London.11 In 1931, she took small roles in three plays at the Grafton Theatre.12 In 1932–3, she was in a Bristol production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street;13 records for provincial theatre are more difficult to trace than those for London, so it is entirely possibly that she had other parts of this kind. She may also have worked as an accompanist,14 and possibly as a dancer.
When Greene met Dorothy, she was a designer of sets and costumes. By early 1940 she had written a play, described by Greene as a ‘farcical-thriller’, which was not staged,15 and she would later make her living as an illustrator and children’s author. Greene collaborated with her on at least four children’s books, of which the first, The Little Train, appeared in 1946 under her pseudonym, Dorothy Craigie, but was republished in 1957 with Greene named as author and Craigie as illustrator.16 It has been argued that Greene may have written or contributed to three other books for young people published under her name: Summersalts Circus (1947), The Voyage of the Luna I (1948), and Dark Atlantis (1952).17 With regard to at least two of these titles, the claim is impossible. Greene read The Voyage of the Luna I only when it was in typescript and Dark Atlantis after it had been printed.18
Contrary to what has been written about her, Dorothy or ‘Doll’ was short and slim, and Greene thought she was like ‘Peter Pan’ when he met her.19 Surviving photographs are from a later time, when she had grown stout. There was an intense physical attraction between them. Moreover, her forceful, outgoing personality and her conviviality – she ‘could down her pint and Irish’20 – offered a contrast to Vivien’s reserved, intellectual, and sometimes feline manner. Greene’s interest in this woman surprised some friends, but not Hugh, who may have had his own affair with her a few years later. Graham Greene’s love affair with Dorothy Glover had run its course by about 1947, but she rather clung to him. The following year, he gave her the revenues from the film of Brighton Rock,21 and later provided her with a pension.22 In 1952 she became a Catholic,23 doubtless under his influence.
Throughout 1939, Vivien could see that her marriage was in danger. She worked out that Graham was involved with someone else. With war coming and evacuation almost certain, she believed that if she was sent to the United States she might never be brought back. Although the marriage staggered on for another decade, and was never formally dissolved, it is reasonable to say that it was little more than a shell after 1939. That summer she and the children were evacuated, but only as far as her in-laws’ house at Crowborough – not a comfortable arrangement, as she was never very popular with Graham’s family. She later moved in with Stella and John Weaver in the President’s Lodgings at Trinity College, Oxford, and made some visits to the Turners, who still lived at Blockley.24 Although Graham wrote to her affectionately, he was now much more interested in Dorothy.
Having registered with the Army Officers’ Emergency Reserve, he was awaiting call-up as a second lieutenant, and wrote to Vivien about how he found ‘London very odd. Dim lighting, pillar boxes turned into white zebras in some parts. The common a mass of tents, and nobody about on North Side.’25 Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September, and Britain and France declared war two days later. By the 4th, Greene had experienced two air-raid warnings, which, though false, offered a foretaste of the aerial war. He watched barrage balloons going up – these were meant to obstruct bombing runs with long cables. He walked through central London in the blackout, and its seediness appealed to him: ‘Very lovely and impressive with all the sky signs gone and little blue phosphorescent milk bars and a hurdy-gurdy invisibly playing – rather like a Paris back-street. Newspaperman calling, “’Ave a paper tonight”, plaintively. Another one very conversational, “Reminds me of the trenches. Never knew which way you was going.” ’26
That September The Confidential Agent was published, with the American release a month later. The newspapers were full of war news, so it was difficult for a new title to get much notice, but the public was also yearning for distraction. The two factors probably balanced each other out, and the book sold a respectable five thousand copies in Britain.27 The background of the story is not specified, but it is obviously the Spanish Civil War, the outcome of which will be decided by the arrival of enough imported coal to warm houses and revive industry. A widowed academic and translator identified only as ‘D’ goes to Britain to negotiate the purchase of this coal on behalf of the socialist government. His credentials are stolen and he becomes a hunted man, framed by fascist agents for a series of crimes, including murder. He is grieved by all the trouble he causes, and the narrator remarks of him, ‘To live was like perjury’28 – possibly a glimpse into the author’s own state of mind. Wherever ‘D’ goes he spreads suffering like contagion. However, he falls in love with the daughter of a coal magnate, and even as his mission fails he is helped to escape by the generous acts of the girl’s Jewish fiancé, who enables them to sail away to an uncertain fate – the first edition offers more hope for their future than did subsequent ones, which he revised.29
The book appeared with a dedication to Dorothy Craigie, and some episodes occur in a flat belonging to a woman named Glover. There is also a gesture to Greene’s new friend Alexander Korda, whose name is used in an invented language, rather like Esperanto, to represent the heart.30 The Confidential Agent was made into a film in 1945, with Charles Boyer and a young Lauren Bacall playing the leads, and was one of the rare occasions that Greene liked a Hollywood adaptation of his work.31
On 13 September, Greene finished his draft of The Power and the Glory. In what most readers regard as his finest work, and one of his strangest, he attempted for the only time in his career a story based on a thesis: that the sacramental work of a priest is effective regardless of his own moral state.32 Theologians express this idea by the phrase ex opere operato: the sacrament is valid because the work is performed by Christ. It is surprising that a novel built on this abstract notion could ever succeed, and yet as Greene writes of the whisky priest, ‘Curious pedantries moved him.’33 For Greene, this particular idea cannot stay abstract – it almost forces its way into the material world. In Greene’s most Catholic novels, there is a remarkable fleshiness, with characters belching and hiccupping, as if the idea of Incarnation were being probed to the last unsettling degr
ee. Of course, the version of Catholicism that Greene adopted in the 1920s was fleshy; it was based on the teachings of the Council of Trent, which affirmed the true presence in the Eucharist, the earthly institutions of the church, and the necessity of charitable works against the Lutheran idea that salvation was by faith alone.
Just as in San Antonio Greene distrusted the comforts of America, in Mexico he sees piety as a distraction from human reality. The once-pampered priest understands himself more as his clerical garments wear out and his shoes lose their soles so that his feet are exposed to dirt, stones, and snakes. His descent into the common poverty of being is nowhere better illustrated than in the jail scene where he feels at home in the company of a couple having sex, a pious but embittered woman, a senile man crying out for his daughter, and others who exist only as voices in the dark: ‘This place was very like the world . . . ’34
Greene tells us that the police lieutenant was more of an invention than the other characters. A true-believing atheist and communist, he is described as a ‘priest’ and a ‘mystic’ who perceives the coldness of the universe. In his view, simoniac priests are pillaging the poor – a position with which Greene has some sympathy. However, Greene found no such principled police or paramilitaries in Tabasco: ‘I had to invent him as a counter to the failed priest: the idealistic police officer who stifled life from the best possible motives: the drunken priest who continued to pass life on.’35
The priest and the lieutenant are not treated as equivalent. By the end of the book, it is clear that he prefers the failures of the priest to those of the policeman. However, once the priest has been arrested, the two sit together beside the corpse of the bank robber in a hut and speak amicably while outside there is hard rain – a scene which for the first time crystallizes the dialogue between Catholicism and communism that would be so much a part of Greene’s later work.
The Unquiet Englishman Page 16