The measure of the priest’s failure is Padre Miguel Pro. Although he is not named, a mother reads a story of martyrdom very like his to her children. The episode in which the whisky priest spends a night in police custody without being identified resembles one in the life of Pro. At the end of the novel, some pamphleteer transforms the priest’s death into a heroic martyrdom, a tale which seems to win a young boy to the faith even though he had earlier been drawn to the lieutenant as a man of action. And yet for all that, the priest goes to his death with a sense of failure. He has no idea how to repent – perhaps a reflection of the author’s own reality. He expresses his sense of failure in terms that again seem to echo Léon Bloy: ‘He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted – to be a saint.’36
Heinemann was more hopeful of the book’s success than was Greene. Published in early March 1940, its original print run was 12,600 copies and it sold five thousand in the first five weeks.37 In the United States, it was published under the title Labyrinthine Ways, a phrase from Francis Thompson’s poem ‘The Hound of Heaven’, since another author had recently used ‘The Power and the Glory’ as a book title. A visually impressive but rather pious film, directed by John Ford, was released in 1947 as The Fugitive. In time, Viking removed the confusion over titles by adopting ‘The Power and the Glory’ for its editions.
The publication of this novel was a landmark in Greene’s career. It was very well reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, American reviewers were now looking upon Graham Greene as one of the most important writers of his generation. For example, the influential Saturday Review of Literature made these claims: ‘ . . . the atmosphere and detail of this book are convincing. So are the variegated people. So are the squalor and the heat and the venality of man, the sloth and the violence. And Mr. Greene has told the story of a truly spiritual struggle, in the breast of a miserable sinner, who can yet do brave things, in a fashion that sets this novel of his a little above and apart from his others. Also, he has now proved himself one of the finest craftsmen of story-telling in our time.’38
In June 1942, Greene, by then serving abroad, learned by telegraph that he had received the Hawthornden Prize for his novel – an award delayed by the circumstances of the war. He wrote to his mother that even though the prize had gone in the past to writers he despised, it pleased him: ‘I suppose at the bottom of every human mind is the rather degraded love of success – any kind of success. One feels ashamed of one’s own pleasure.’39
17
BOMBS AND BOOKS
‘He was staying near the Ministry [of Information] in a little mews flat where I spent an occasional evening with him, the invariable supper dish being sausages, then still available. Whatever his circumstances, he had this facility for seeming always to be in lodgings, and living from hand to mouth. Spiritually, and even physically, he is one of nature’s displaced persons.’1 That was how Malcolm Muggeridge recalled Graham Greene’s way of life in the second year of the war. He was trying to get some money together to support Vivien and the children once he was called up, so having signed a £2000 scriptwriting contract with Korda, he took a job as head of the writers’ section in the Ministry of Information, which allowed him to leave the Officers’ Reserve. Located in the University of London Senate House, the ministry set up a huge bureaucracy to manage awkward facts and expound useful falsehoods. Famously, George Orwell drew from it his inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Greene saw it as trivial, and his short story ‘Men at Work’, published in 1941, satirized it as a self-contained universe of committee meetings. Mainly, he commissioned patriotic books and pamphlets, and suppressed some others deemed harmful to the war effort.
According to Muggeridge, also employed at the ministry, Greene took a ‘professional’ approach to his job, ‘coolly exploring the possibility of throwing stigmata and other miraculous occurrences into the battle for the mind in Latin America to sway it in our favour’.2 Greene was only a little ahead of his superiors in thinking his work useless. At the end of September, the Director-General of the Ministry of Information, Frank Pick, a former transport administrator responsible for, among other things, London’s Tube map, ‘Pick-axed’ him – his position was eliminated.3 The following year Greene was invited to return but refused.
The Germans had been bombing Britain through the summer, with the objectives of strangling the war economy and eliminating the RAF, so to force a negotiated peace or to facilitate an invasion. In a change of tactics, they began heavy bombing of London on 7 September. The assault continued for fifty-seven nights, and in its first two months caused thirteen thousand fires. By the time the Blitz ended on 11 May 1941, 28,556 Londoners had been killed.4
Greene was spending his nights with Dorothy in a shelter accommodating two dozen people off Gower Street. Walking about after the all-clear at 5:45 in the morning, he was excited by the scenes of wreckage, though shocked by the worst of the destruction. A little later he would remark flippantly to Anthony Powell: ‘London is extraordinarily pleasant these days with all the new open spaces, and the rather Mexican effect of ruined churches.’5
Graham and Vivien knew that the Clapham Common house was likely to be hit, as this had already happened to at least one house in their row, so they made plans to remove the contents to Oxford. But they were too slow. At 1:30 a.m. on 18 October the back of the house was hit either by a group of bombs or by a parachute mine. Vivien would remark that because Graham was with Dorothy on the night of the bombing his life had been saved by his adultery. He arrived at the house at 8:30 a.m. to find it roped off. The structure was still standing, but it was impossible to move beyond the hallway because of debris. He decided to tell Vivien in person, but she was furious with him for breaking the news in front of the children. Hearing of this long after, Muggeridge supposed that her reproach, though reasonable, arose from the knowledge that when the house went the marriage was likely to go as well.6
Greene wrote to his mother: ‘Rather heartbreaking that so lovely a house that has survived so much should go like that. And I feel over-awed without my books.’7 With the help of two labourers, he was able to salvage many of his books, sending them down a makeshift chute, but most of the fine furniture that Vivien had collected was lost. He was able to pull out of the wreckage a set of Victorian chairs made of rope in commemoration of Trafalgar, a gas refrigerator, some china, and a few other household objects.8
After the initial shock, the destruction of the house had a strange effect on him, as if he had been paroled. Muggeridge noticed this: ‘Soon after his house on Clapham Common had been totally demolished in the Blitz, I happened to run into him . . . and he gave an impression of being well content with its disappearance. Now, at last, he seemed to be saying, he was homeless, de facto as well as de jure.’9 Greene would later tell Muggeridge that his sense of relief had come from getting rid of a heavy mortgage, but Muggeridge thought that Greene actually felt relieved of a moral burden.10
Derek Verschoyle had gone into service so Greene took over as literary editor of the Spectator, a ‘reserved occupation’ that kept him out of military service until the following summer. By the end of 1940, he was offered five jobs doing propaganda, including one in Lisbon, but turned them all down, preferring to stay with the magazine. He actually hoped to go to West Africa to do propaganda for the Free French.
In his Bloomsbury studio, Greene slept on a sofa directly beneath a skylight; at times it was necessary to take refuge in the basement. One evening the house next door was hit, and he had to flee a possible gas explosion.11 Soon, both he and Dorothy were working as ARP (Air Raid Precautions) wardens. For him, this meant patrolling three nights a week, from ten until two, or later, depending on the severity of the raids. He and his fellow wardens worked from Holborn Post Number 1 under the School of Tropical Medicine in Gower Street, and he kept a journal of his experiences, publishing sect
ions of it in Ways of Escape.12
He was on duty during the enormous raid of 16 April 1941, launched in retaliation for an RAF attack on Berlin a week before. Eight hospitals and several churches were hit.13 A parachute mine destroyed the King George and Queen Elizabeth Victoria League building in Malet Street where 350 Canadian airmen were sleeping. This huge explosion blew out a plate glass window directly above where Greene and two other wardens were standing in Tottenham Court Road – a distance of at least 300 yards from the main impact. They had just enough time to crouch as the shards rained on their helmets. Running to Gower Street, he and three others helped rescue an injured woman in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts building.
Although the sight of wreckage often excited him, Greene found this night unbearable, with salvos falling about every three minutes. Sent to the Victoria League building to rescue a trapped man, he spotted a head and shoulders resting in the debris. He later wrote about this to his mother: ‘One’s first corpse in the Canadian place was not nearly as bad as one expected. It seemed just a bit of the rubble. What remains as nastiest were the crowds of people who were cut by glass, in rather squalid bloodstained pyjamas grey with debris waiting about for help.’14
Back outside, more bombs fell and Greene dropped to the ground, a sailor on top of him. This time his hand was cut by glass so he went to the dressing station, and while being bandaged another stick of three bombs landed near by, and there was nothing for him to do but utter an Act of Contrition. As the night wore on he assisted in the rescue of other people, including an old man just out of hospital and still fitted with a catheter tube; he had been told that he would never walk again, but the bombing proved otherwise. The wretchedness of people caught in the bombing was ‘disquieting’ to Greene, as it ‘supplied images for what one day would probably happen to oneself’.15
It was an extraordinary night, affecting everyone who lived in the city. One of Greene’s friends, the Dominican priest Gervase Mathews, to whom he dedicated The Power and the Glory, was called to administer conditional absolution to people injured in the bombing and was asked by a soldier, who had been away from the sacrament for forty years, to hear his confession. Mathews told Greene that another priest had gone to a pub and crawled under a billiard table to hear the confessions of the landlord, his wife and daughter, all trapped in rubble. When challenged about what he was doing, he said, rather stiffly, ‘I am a Catholic priest and I am under the billiard table hearing confessions,’ to which came the response, ‘Stay where you are a moment, Father, and hear mine too.’ It was a Catholic among the rescue crew.16
The fires, the parachute bombs, the flying glass, and the corpses provided an improbable backdrop for discussions of the antiquarian book trade. Among Greene’s fellow ARP wardens at Gower Street was David Low, who for many years kept a bookshop at 17 Cecil Court. Since his sojourn with Kenneth Richmond, Greene had been a frequent visitor to the bookshops on and near Charing Cross Road, and Low had become a friend. Both Dorothy and Hugh shared Graham’s particular interest in collecting detective fiction, spy stories, and thrillers.17 Over many years Graham and Hugh would go on long marches across the English countryside in search of bookshops and beer.18 Graham collected, among other things, seventeenth-century plays and Thomas Nelson’s red seven-penny editions of Victorian classics. In his introduction to Low’s memoir ‘with all faults’ (1973) he remarked: ‘Secondhand booksellers are the most friendly and most eccentric of all the characters I have known. If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen.’19
Another warden, known as ‘Little’ Cole, was a ‘runner’ in the book trade, buying low and selling high between one bookshop and another. On one occasion, he and Greene were sent out to investigate a reported landmine, but did not find it; instead, he took Greene to his room and showed him his treasures. Given Greene’s knowledge of writers and Cole’s of books, they seemed a natural pair, and they discussed setting up a shop to be called Cole and Greene. But as the summer passed, Greene went on to other duties and the idea of the shop came to nothing.20
18
THE HOUSE IN THE SWAMP
It was time to fulfil an old ambition. Graham’s sister Elisabeth had joined MI6 (also known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)) in 1938, and by the beginning of the war was working in G Section, which controlled overseas posts. Having been born a decade apart, she and Graham were not close, although they did become so after the war. Elisabeth’s superior at MI6 was the dashing and influential Captain Cuthbert Bowlby, and she believed that through him she could help her brother and Muggeridge come into the Service.
It took a long time for the string to get pulled, but it was. Graham said that he was invited to a series of parties hosted by a ‘Mr Smith’, at which everyone seemed to know each other and there was unlimited liquor – this constituted part of his vetting. Scotland Yard looked into his background and noted the Shirley Temple affair as a black mark, but it was not enough to disqualify him. Greene’s knowledge of Sierra Leone and Liberia made him a compelling candidate for service in West Africa. He told his mother that he would be working for the Colonial Office – he could not say exactly what he was doing, at least not in a letter.
SIS still had no standard training programme for its officers, so the Chief of Staff, Reginald ‘Rex’ Howard, devised an individual course for Greene, elements of which would serve him in good stead when he wrote Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor. He was to visit Section I: Political, Section II: Air, Section III: Naval, Section IV: Army, Section V: Counter-Espionage, and Section VI: Economic in order to learn about the work of each and to find out what information they wanted him to gather in West Africa. Counter-Espionage was to brief him on their general approach, the methods used by the enemy, and how to maintain security. He was instructed in the use of codes, the wireless, and secret inks. Howard himself gave him an overview of objectives, the relations of SIS with government and other branches of service, methods for establishing and maintaining personal cover, as well as such pieces of tradecraft as the use of ‘postboxes’ (caches for messages), ‘cut-outs’ (communication by intermediary), and the use of double agents and provocateurs. His next instructor was Frank Foley, a remarkable man who had served as head of station in Berlin just before the war under the guise of a passport officer and arranged for thousands of Jews to receive British visas, to learn about the training of agents, and then to other experts for information on censorship and the secure use of telephones. At the end of this programme he was to meet the deputy chief, Valentine Vivian.1
As part of his cover, Greene needed to look the part of a soldier, so Howard sent him to Oriel College, Oxford, for four weeks of training in the autumn of 1941, but he made only a slightly better show than he had with the OTC at school. There were battle-dress drills at dawn,2 and he learned, more or less, to salute while marching with a swagger stick under one arm. He was taken out to Shotover to learn how to ride a motorcycle, but crashed the machines. Finally, he came down with flu and was moved to a nursing home in north Oxford, where he contracted bronchitis. While there, he saw himself in a mirror looking like a character in Dostoevsky, bundled up in an old overcoat and ‘pursuing the scent of a samovar into somebody else’s flat’.3
Greene shipped out from Liverpool on 9 December 1941 in a 5000-ton Elder Dempster cargo vessel. Along with the dozen other passengers, he was required to assist in its defence. Each day, he served a one-hour shift on the machine guns above the boat deck, watching for enemy aircraft, and another shift on the machine guns below the bridge watching for U-boats. The mood in the ship turned dark on their second day out with news that the Japanese had sunk the warships HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales in the South China Sea4 – this disaster, of course, followed on the heels of Pearl Harbor. There was a certain amount of gallows humour on board, as, apart from aeroplanes, their own vessel was carrying a cargo of TNT.5
The ship stopped first in Belfast, where Greene went
to a presbytery to have his confession heard, only to have the housekeeper try to close the door on him – ‘This is no time for Confession’ – an experience he would later work into his second play, The Potting Shed. Perhaps thinking of all that TNT, Greene stood his ground against the woman. He was received by a simple-minded young priest, who called him ‘son’ and asked what Greene felt were unnecessary questions about the convoy.6
The voyage was slow and anxious; they were near Iceland before turning south, and by the tenth day out of Belfast were just at the latitude of Land’s End. During these days, Greene was able to finish a short book called British Dramatists, a competent history of the theatre in Britain from the Middle Ages to the present. Later, he wondered if the cold watches and the conditions of the voyage were responsible for his somewhat harsh account of William Congreve. The book appeared in Collins’s much-loved Britain in Pictures series, a morale-raising enterprise celebrating the national heritage, featuring such authors as George Orwell, Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth Bowen, John Betjeman, and Cecil Beaton writing on an array of topics from birds to boxing.
Arriving in Freetown on 3 January 1942, Greene was seen off by the other passengers forming a makeshift orchestra with frying pans and forks as he boarded a launch. He was sent on to Lagos, where his immediate superior was located, for further training. Greene’s work there consisted chiefly of coding and decoding cables, a subject that fascinated him. He later found that in a historical throwback his code books contained a symbol for eunuch, which he then employed in a message to an intelligence officer in the Gambia: ‘As the chief eunuch said I cannot repeat cannot come.’7
Greene was somewhat surprised, even disquieted, by how comfortable his life was in Lagos. He reported to his mother that he had access to safe running water and lavatories, and that he shared a bungalow near the edge of the lagoon and could watch ships coming into port. The house was actually swarming with mosquitoes, and at night Greene and the colleague with whom he shared it used electric torches to hunt cockroaches, an entertainment that reappears in The Heart of the Matter. Yet, in contrast to wartime Britain, the food was excellent, including bacon, eggs, coffee, oranges, grapefruits, even Bourbon biscuits. On the night of Friday 13 February 1942, he thought he had escaped the day’s bad luck when he fell six feet into an open drain and came out of it badly scratched and covered in turds. He treated his injuries with a cold bath, Dettol, and whisky.8
The Unquiet Englishman Page 17