The Unquiet Englishman Page 12
Long before arriving in Freetown, Greene had made arrangements for servants, but nothing had been done. With the assistance of a drunk whom he would later call ‘Pa Oakley’, he managed to get the services of three excellent ‘boys’ – a condescending term endemic to imperialism. Indeed, two were older than the Greenes. Their leader was the dignified and reputable Amedoo, who would be Greene’s personal servant and act as an intermediary with the carriers. Amedoo selected another experienced man, Souri, a Muslim, as cook and the somewhat younger Lamina Karboh to take care of Barbara; he would scatter blossoms on her bed when she seemed downhearted or their accommodation was especially shabby. Partway through the journey, Amedoo fell ill, to be replaced temporarily by an adolescent named Mark, who had a knowledge of local languages and could interpret. Of the four, at least two had had schooling: they wrote to them after they left Liberia. At the Liberian frontier, Greene hired twenty-five men as carriers, a group with its own leaders who were quick to tell the fast-striding Greene that any given day’s objective was too far.
Unexpectedly, his route led him to meetings with some of the principal players in Liberia’s drama. It is hard not to think that these were staged, as the Foreign Office had told Mr Yapp, its man in Monrovia, to point out to the president, Edwin Barclay, that the visiting author could exercise great influence on world opinion once he published his articles. Yapp also supplied Greene’s itinerary to the government,31 so Barclay could have rearranged his own travels to include a chat with the Englishman. An educated and generally honest man whose administration was stained by its repression of the Kru people, Barclay was anxious for good publicity.
When Greene reached the village of Kolahun on 3 February,32 it so happened that Barclay had himself made the hard journey there to investigate complaints about a local official named Reeves, who benefited from slavery and killed a good number of people. Of course, on the day no one took the reckless step of actually saying anything to Barclay against Reeves. Instead, Reeves invited the filthy and dishevelled Greene to a meeting with the president. Greene asked Barclay whether his authority was like that of the American president and received a perfectly candid reply: ‘Once elected and in charge of the machine, why then, I’m boss of the whole show.’33 Greene could see that Barclay was a slick politician, but rather liked him and believed that he would do good for his country.
Later Greene had another supposedly random encounter. Colonel Elwood Davis was a black man from the United States who had served as a soldier in Mexico and the Philippines before coming as a mercenary to Liberia and being given command of the armed forces. Known as the ‘Dictator of Grand Bassa’, he had been accused of atrocities in the Kru War. As Greene approached the village of Tapee-Ta on 22 February, he discovered that Davis was there as the president’s agent, looking into complaints by chiefs against district commissioners. Greene asked for an interview and was offered a few minutes as Davis had had a long day. The conversation went on for several hours and was renewed the next evening.
Swilling Greene’s whisky, the talkative Davis presented himself as a patriot and sweet-hearted lover of babies, the national director of the Boy Scouts, who could never do such things as he was accused of, for example the burning alive of women and children – that was a matter of soldiers running amok. Over his long career, Greene was often struck by the charisma of military and political strongmen, among them Fidel Castro of Cuba and Omar Torrijos of Panama. Well-dressed, handsome, and highly capable, Davis fitted the type. Finding his personality difficult to fathom, Greene at first wondered if some of the stories of atrocities had been exaggerated.34 But by the time he returned to England, he had made up his mind, writing that Davis was responsible for ‘horrors’,35 and that the facts had ‘been proved to the last degree’.36
One of Greene’s objectives in Liberia was to discover what Firestone was up to, but he was not able to add much to Christy’s findings. The Americans running the rubber plantation did not know on what terms their six thousand workers were recruited so could not be accused of running a system of slavery, but Greene was very sceptical of what would now be called a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ arrangement.37
Along his route Greene encountered a number of ‘devils’ – a term he found very awkward as it suggests a Christian cosmology. Commonly used throughout Liberia, it refers to religious leaders, figures of power who engage in ritual dances and impart traditional lore to young people. Most of those he saw were benign and generous men who, when not wearing the ceremonial tapia robes and wooden masks, typically worked as blacksmiths. However, arriving in the village of Ganta on 14 February, Greene met a missionary doctor named George Harley, who was also an anthropologist. He judged that some devils were tyrants. As leaders of secret societies such as the Poro, some were guilty of ritual murder and anthropophagy. As Lamina remarked of Ganta, a stronghold of the Poro, ‘they chop men’ here.38 Harley believed that his own life was very much at risk as he had pushed his enquiries too far. Barbara thought he suffered from ‘persecution mania’,39 but Tim Butcher maintains that ritual atrocities committed in the civil war of 1989 to 1997 indicate that the societies remain active. Graham Greene wanted to see the villagers as pure and wholesome, so did not delve deeply into this aspect of their lives.40
Having carefully assembled a medical kit, Greene left it behind in Freetown. On the trek, the carriers looked to him for medical care, and he did his best to dress venereal sores and deal with other illnesses. On one remarkable occasion, a villager came to him with hands badly damaged by leprosy. Greene could offer no real help but went through the motions of giving medicine as a form of consolation.41 It is possible that in that encounter A Burnt-Out Case, Greene’s novel about leprosy, began its long gestation.
Leaving Tapee-Ta, Greene received conflicting advice about how long it would take to get to Grand Bassa and the sea – a week seemed likely. Time was pressing, as the rainy season would leave the Greenes and their company stranded. He and Barbara had treated each other cautiously, trying not to allow quarrels to develop. Amusingly, she hated the sight of his sagging socks and he abominated a pair of taffeta shorts she wore, but now nerves were becoming frayed. Graham was ill, and Barbara was having to take command. He insisted on moving quickly but was staggering through a nine-hour walk to Zigi’s Town on 24 February. He developed a very serious fever, and there was nothing Barbara could treat it with but Epsom salts and a little whisky.
As a nurse, she knew what she was looking at. She felt calm at the expectation of Graham’s death, working out a practical plan: how to bury him, how to get to the coast and send telegrams. ‘Only one thing worried me in the most extraordinary way. Graham was a Catholic, and into my muddled, weary brain came the thought that I ought to burn candles for him if he died. I was horribly upset, for we had no candles.’ So she stayed up much of the night worrying about candles.42 Meanwhile, listening to thunderstorms, Graham was racked with yearning to be with Vivien, and his world was reduced to ‘Shadow on the mosquito net, the dim hurricane lamp, the empty whisky bottle on the chop box.’43
In the morning, Barbara expected to find a corpse, but there he was – up and dressed: ‘A kind of horrid death’s head grinned at me. His cheeks had sunk in, there were thick black smudges under his eyes, and his scrubby beard added nothing of beauty to the general rather seedy effect.’44 His game of Russian roulette had played out. The round in the chamber had fallen into place but somehow failed to discharge. Indeed, after this, Greene’s impulse towards self-destruction would never be the same: ‘I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.’ He spoke of the experience as a kind of ‘conversion’, which must fade in time: ‘the memory of a conversion may have some force in an emergency; I may be able to strengthen myself with the intellectual idea that once in Zigi’s Town I had been completely convinced of the beauty and desirability of the mere act of living’.45
With a temperature
now below normal, he renewed the march to Grand Bassa, making some use of a hammock carried on a pole: ‘It was too close to using men as animals for me to be happy.’46 Greene’s temperature rose and fell through several more days, as the rains seemed to be overtaking them. Then, a merciful piece of luck. They learned of a lorry in Harlingsville, and sent for it. On 2 March they were driven into Grand Bassa, and the trek was over.
11
RAVEN
London beckoned. Having survived Liberia, Greene returned to the conventional life of an Englishman, and after living for weeks in a tent he now had to look for a house. He and Vivien agreed that they could not stay with a child in the Oxford flat much longer. In April 1935, he found a suitable Queen Anne house for let at 14 Clapham Common North Side. Vivien did not see it but trusted in his decision.1 They moved there in early May.2
Vivien came to love that house, which they eventually purchased. After an unstable childhood, it gave her the certainty of home. Moreover, it was beautiful and historic. Narrow, with a long garden, it was part of a terrace built by the architect John Hutt. In the 1930s, it had an archway leading onto a mews. One of its finest features, their daughter Caroline recalled, was a dramatic staircase. On the third floor, the nursery overlooked the Common.3
Vivien began collecting antique furniture, an interest that would grow more specialized as she became the world’s authority on doll’s houses and would one day set up a private museum for her collection – it would be said that Graham wrote novels and ‘she created short storeys’.4
Coming to London thrust the Greenes into the ‘social whirl’. Graham gave a well-received speech to the League of Nations Union, with the novelist Rose Macaulay in attendance. A missionary priest he had met in Liberia came to lunch on 17 May. On the 24th Denyse Clairouin arrived for dinner with a cheque for serial rights in a translation of Stamboul Train. She also brought the intoxicating news that there was soon to be a lecture on his fiction at the Sorbonne. There was a dinner with Rupert Hart-Davis and his wife, and a sherry party where Greene met Antonia White, a Catholic writer whose private life was at least as complicated as his own and who would become a regular visitor to Clapham Common. Meanwhile, the News Chronicle agreed to pay £50 for a five-day serial of the ‘The Basement Room’,5 a short story that in 1948 was made into a film masterpiece as The Fallen Idol. On 18 June he made a report on his travels to the Anti-Slavery Society’s annual meeting.6
All this notice suggests that Greene’s reputation was rising. But Heinemann still could not count on his books to sell. To capitalize on public sentiment around George V’s Silver Jubilee that year, the publisher encouraged Greene to switch from his original title, ‘The Shipwrecked’, to England Made Me. The new title was apt only insofar as it referred to the characters as expatriates – Greene eventually reverted to the original title for American editions. As a sales ploy, it did not have much of an effect. Published to rather cautious reviews at the end of June, the book sold 4500 copies in Britain and less than half that in the United States.7
Greene told his mother that to meet his new expenses he was going to double his output.8 He was working not only on his Liberian book but a thriller called A Gun for Sale; both were completed and published in just over a year. He continued to review armloads of books for the Spectator, and began to write, with amusing savagery and considerable insight, about films.
For the next four and a half years, he went with his gold-coloured cards of invitation to the morning press showings of several new films each week at the Empire and Odeon cinemas, buildings of such ‘luxury and bizarre taste’ that he thought of them afterwards as the ‘pleasure dome’ decreed by Kubla Khan. Still distrustful about how directors were using sound and colour, his first Spectator review, on 5 July 1935, predicted the emergence of the ‘smelly’.9 Greene’s film criticism was sometimes an ‘escape’ from the rigours of writing fiction, and he was refreshed by it.10 Indeed, rather like a professional golfer you could not always tell when he was working and when he was playing.
He also looked for a regular job. Once again, there were discussions with The Times, but they expected him to write a letter saying he had been wrong to leave. He was not going to return if it meant crawling.11 He entered into an arrangement with Hamish Hamilton Ltd to read manuscripts, write endorsements, and bring in new books, on which he would get a 2.5 per cent commission on sales with his expenses covered. He hoped that this arrangement might develop into a permanent position and eventual directorship at the firm.12
Almost as soon as he began work for the firm, Greene made one of the most significant discoveries of his publishing career. A writer in South India had given the manuscript of his first novel to a friend named Kit Purna, then studying in Oxford, hoping that he would find a publisher for it. Purna received a series of rejections at precise six-week intervals and was instructed by the author to ‘weight the manuscript with a stone and drown it in the Thames’. Spotting Graham Greene in Oxford, Purna asked him to read it and shortly after sent off a cable: ‘Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible.’13
The author was R. K. Narayan, now regarded as one of the leading Indian writers of his generation. Greene was able to convey an offer from Hamish Hamilton on 23 August, along with some suggestions, such as calling the book Swami and Friends and allowing Greene himself to do some light editing – as he did with most of Narayan’s subsequent books. Until 1935, the author styled himself R. K. Narayanaswami; after consulting Purna on what might be acceptable in India, Greene suggested that he use R. K. Narayan since British librarians tended not to order books if they could not spell the author’s name.14 His new friend’s full name was even longer than Greene knew: Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami.
In a career that lasted more than sixty years, Narayan found many admirers, among them E. M. Forster, John Updike, and Anita Desai, but his books were never a commercial proposition. At Greene’s suggestion, David Higham took Narayan on as a client and represented him for decades.15 A series of British and American publishers took him up, usually on Greene’s recommendation, and then dropped him. Narayan loved Greene for his loyalty, and wrote in 1954: ‘I owe my literary career to Graham Greene’s interest in my work. He has encouraged and backed me up for nearly twenty years now, although we have never met. But it seems to make no difference. I consider Graham Greene not only the finest writer, but the finest and most perfect friend a man can have in this world.’16 For his part, Greene thought Narayan a worthy candidate for the Nobel Prize,17 and in 1974 wrote: ‘Since the death of Evelyn Waugh Narayan is the novelist I most admire in the English language.’18
Utterly unlike Greene’s, Narayan’s sensibility was gentle and melancholic. His stories are rarely political, but based on shrewd observation of the life of a small town to which he gives the name Malgudi. Often, he writes about children, as in Swami and Friends. Greene (and many others) believed that Narayan was a superb craftsman who found a way to treat that almost impossible subject, innocence. But there is more to this, and it is necessary to turn here to a discussion of something central to Greene’s sensibility and without which no understanding of him is possible.
In his own autobiographies, the ageing Greene performed a cynicism and world-weariness that should not be taken at face value. There is a core of nostalgia, even sentimentality, in him that he worked to conceal and discipline – though it might come out, say, in tears at the cinema. The journey to Liberia was motivated in part by a desire to see human beings in a state of innocence. Greene’s characteristically ruinous landscapes, dubbed ‘Greeneland’ in 1940 by his neighbour on Clapham Common, the novelist Arthur Calder-Marshall,19 offer a vantage for the backward glance.
Greene writes at the beginning of Journey Without Maps that Liberia had a quality that could not be found to the same degree elsewhere: ‘seediness has a very deep appeal: even the seediness of civilization, of the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the tarts in Bond Street, the smell of cooking greens off Tottenham Court Road, the
motor salesman in Great Portland Street. It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back.’20 It is a reaching back that dovetails with his experience of psychoanalysis, and even with his Catholicism, which, unlike Anglicanism, had never made its peace with modernity and capitalism. At points in Journey Without Maps, he draws a direct comparison between the supposedly primitive character of Liberia and his own yearning for childhood happiness – that is, the world before Carter, Wheeler, and the boarding house. If Narayan was about to become one of his favourite authors, it was because he spoke to something in Greene’s imagination and his emotional life that he did his very best to hide.
In 1935, Greene made another great friend, the poet and art historian Herbert Read. It seems that they were brought together by the publication of Read’s novel The Green Child, which Greene considered rather as a brilliant work of poetry, and in which he would later see affinities with David Jones’s In Parenthesis. He thought Read the gentlest man he had ever met, but also forthright. Read’s wife was a Catholic convert, and Greene thought Read himself lived at the edges of the faith. Perhaps that was part of the bond between the two men.
At the end of the summer he received a letter from Read, inviting him to dinner: ‘Eliot is coming, but no one else, and everything very informal.’ Greene compared this to receiving an invitation from Coleridge: ‘Wordsworth is coming, but no one else.’ Rather like a hermit on the run, T. S. Eliot was then hiding from his estranged and mentally ill wife Vivienne, so the Greenes were especially lucky to have this dinner with him. Vivien Greene ‘fell for him completely and made the rather grim man positively purr!’21 Eliot was able ‘to unbutton’ once conversation turned to detective stories and the adventures of the gentleman burglar Arsène Lupin.22