The Unquiet Englishman Read online

  Finished with the dormitories, Graham was well enough to appear in a school play named Lost Silk Hat in Trinity Term. Charles was still afraid of an outbreak of the old family madness, so summoned Raymond back from Oxford, where he was studying medicine, to discuss Graham’s condition. Raymond made a proposal, surprising for the time, that his younger brother be psychoanalyzed, and even more surprisingly his parents agreed. The field was very new, it was generally frowned upon by the reticent English of their generation, and it was no easy thing sorting out effective therapists from quacks. But Raymond made arrangements, and the sixteen-year-old Graham was sent by the end of June 1921 to London for a six-month course of treatment with a psychoanalyst ‘of no known school’ named Kenneth Richmond. Trained by Maurice Nicoll, a sometime Jungian and the main commentator on Ouspensky’s and Gurdjieff’s works, he was himself a spiritualist and became a leading light in the Society for Psychical Research.17

  Although actually living with his mother’s sister, Aunt Nono,18 Greene spent spent much of the rest of the year in the house of Richmond and his beautiful wife Zoë at 15 Devonshire Terrace, near Lancaster Gate. He would regard this time as possibly the happiest in his life. He was suddenly free of the school regime; he was treated as an adult, had pocket money, and was able to wander about London. In late June, he went to see the Cubist works at the Tate, and was especially struck by Christopher Nevinson’s images of the First World War. Richmond had a wide acquaintance among writers, and through him Greene met the novelist J. D. Beresford, as well as Naomi Royde-Smith, the literary editor of the Westminster Gazette, which would publish some of Greene’s early poetry, and Royde-Smith’s former lover Walter de la Mare, who happened to be Greene’s favourite poet. In a game of charades at the Richmonds’, de la Mare turned himself, very convincingly, into an asparagus. He was soon superseded in Greene’s esteem by Ezra Pound, whose Personae he purchased from a small bookshop on the Embankment. Greene attempted some lines in an imagist manner for a ballet dancer named ‘Isula . . . a future Pavlova’ he had met through the Richmonds, but did not show them to her. Nothing came of this infatuation, and she disappeared from his life.19

  Spiritualism was an important element in the Richmonds’ life and Zoë’s mother tried to convince him of the reality of angels, saying she knew officers who had seen them at Mons. Despite his spiritual experience the preceding winter, Greene was not convinced – he was already manifesting the mixture of belief and doubt that would characterize his adult life.20

  While in London, he was to keep up with his studies. He spent most mornings revising medieval history in Kensington Gardens. When he heard the church bell ring eleven, he would return to Devonshire Terrace for his session with Richmond. Greene kept a dream diary, a practice he resumed in later years. If he could not remember a dream, at Richmond’s suggestion he invented one – usually involving a pig. Richmond, holding a stopwatch, would then ask him what he associated with the main image and count the seconds till he answered.

  An embarrassing moment came when he had only an erotic dream of Zoë to report. Not wanting to cheat, he decided he had better reveal it: he was lying in bed when she came into his room naked; one of her breasts came close to his mouth and he woke. Unfazed, Richmond asked what he associated with breasts and started his stopwatch. Greene answered, ‘Tube train.’ Richmond noted, ‘Five seconds.’21

  Believing in the power of dreams to illuminate wide areas of experience, Greene later adopted J. W. Dunne’s theory, expounded in An Experiment with Time (1927), that dreams could provide glimpses of the future.22 He also absorbed Dunne’s fascination with ‘serial’ dreams, and precognitive dreams: he pointed to his own experience of dreaming at the age of five about a shipwreck on the night of the sinking of the Titanic, with the image of ‘a man in oilskins bent double beside a companion-way under the blow of a great wave’. While with Richmond, he dreamt that he was in a shipwreck on the Irish Sea, only to learn a couple of days later that the SS Rowan, on its way from Glasgow to Dublin, had gone down at the time of his dream with the loss of twenty lives.23

  The immediate benefit Greene derived from this course of psychoanalysis likely did not lie in the decoding of his dreams, but in the deep affirmation involved in the therapeutic relationship. Richmond took his feelings seriously and built up his confidence. In the long run, however, attention to dreams became an aspect of Greene’s method as a writer. He said that his early novel It’s a Battlefield originated in a dream. So too a dream helped him resolve an impasse in the plot of A Burnt-Out Case: ‘It was like coming to a river bank and finding no bridge. I knew what would happen on the other side of the bridge but I couldn’t get there. I then had a dream which seemed to me to belong entirely to the character in the book rather than to myself and I was able to insert it in the novel and bridge the river.’ In the 1960s he returned to keeping a dream journal: ‘My experience bears out the fact that one dreams at least four or five times a night when once one has disciplined oneself to have a pencil and paper beside one in bed!’24 After his death, selections from the dream journals were published as A World of My Own.

  At the beginning of September 1921, he took a holiday from treatment and went with his Aunt Eva and his pretty cousin Ave on a short voyage to Spain. The Greenes were distantly related to the Napoleonic hero Sir John Moore, subject of one of G. A. Henty’s biographies, With Moore at Corunna. They visited his grave at Corunna, a trip Greene repeated in 1976 as he was taking the journeys with Father Leopoldo Durán that gave birth to Monsignor Quixote.25 After their return, Ave joined him at the Richmonds’, as her parents had decided that she too needed to be analyzed. A few years later, Graham, Raymond, and Herbert all paid court to her, leaving their Aunt Eva unnerved for a time at the prospect of another marriage between cousins.26

  Back in London, Greene witnessed one of the great commemorations of the war. On 17 October 1921, the American Chief-of-Staff General John Pershing laid the Congressional Medal of Honor on the grave of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey. Prime Minister Lloyd George attended, as did Winston Churchill, now Colonial Secretary, and Earl Haig, in whose face the young writer thought he could discern the lineaments of militarism. Greene sat beside a man who read a dreary poem to him about the League of Nations, ‘But it was worth being bored because of the waiting period beforehand. The Abbey itself lighted up brilliantly, but outside the door nothing but a great bank of mist, with now and again a vague steel helmeted figure appearing, only to disappear again. The whole time the most glorious music from the organ, with the American band outside, clashing in at intervals. Then the feeling of expectancy through the whole people, the minds of everyone on tip-toe. It got back the whole atmosphere of the war, of the endless memorial services; I’d never realised before how we had got away from the death feeling.’27

  Efforts to unravel what was troubling Graham took a strange turn that autumn. One evening, conversation at the Richmonds’ dinner table turned to a road accident, which caused him to think of an incident involving two women thrown from a carriage on the Royston Road in Hertfordshire: a long hat pin was driven into the brain of one of them. Recalling this, he simply fainted. At school, he had fainted occasionally, but thought nothing of it. Richmond took him to a specialist who diagnosed epilepsy, a condition with a terrible stigma at the time, commonly connected with madness and demonic possession. Richmond wrote to Charles Greene explaining the diagnosis but did not tell Graham, who was simply given medication and told to consume malt.28 Richmond attempted to put Charles Greene’s mind at ease: ‘Epilepsy, in its milder forms, is much less dangerous than measles or scarlet fever. And it is often associated with genius – a divine complaint from which I think your son also suffers.’29

  The beginning of 1922 saw Greene back at Berkhamsted for his last term at school, with Richmond’s encouragement to keep writing. He was not sent to St John’s House, but lived with his family. Carter and Wheeler were gone from his life, and he spent time with Cockburn, Peter Quennell,
and Eric Guest, who later became a magistrate. A little ‘vain and knowing’, he was able to discourse on Freud and Jung. Claud Cockburn says that Greene, with the bacon cooling on his breakfast plate, would encourage other members of the family to describe their dreams: ‘ “It’s amazing,” he said to me once, “what those dreams disclose. It’s startling – simply startling,” and at the thought of it gave a low whistle.’30

  This was a much briefer time than A Sort of Life suggests. It was his last term at school. He had been reading diligently while in London, but his studies were undirected. Back in Berkhamsted he began cramming for the scholarship examination at Balliol, a college chosen because one of the dons, Kenneth Bell, was an Old Berkhamstedian and protégé of Charles Greene. Graham offered papers in medieval history, with French and Latin as languages. His subsidiary subject was English literature. Despite two attempts, he failed to win a scholarship.

  The Oxford examiners did not know what to make of Graham Greene: on one of his scholarship exams they gave him marks ranging widely – between ά- and γ+. Three examiners, including Bell and F. F. ‘Sligger’ Urquhart (Evelyn Waugh’s bête noire) inclined to the higher mark as, in Bell’s words, ‘it was highly imaginative stuff, sometimes thin and fantastic but written with real power over words. This boy had only done history for six weeks before coming in and his efforts to disguise his ignorance, though not very convincing, were extremely ingenious.’31 It was not enough, of course. But at least he won a place at the college, and was then awarded a less lucrative exhibition, which gave him £50 in his second and third years, helping him reduce the generous £250 allowance from his father. So he went up to Oxford ‘a muddled adolescent who wanted to write but hadn’t found his subject, who wanted to express his lust but was too scared to try, and who wanted to love but hadn’t found a real object’.32

  3

  BACKWARDS DAY

  ‘I have now turned violent Conservative, & wander round canvassing the unfortunate poor.’1 Graham Greene plunged into the life of Oxford University as soon as he arrived there in October 1922. He joined the Union and other organizations. With a general election looming on 15 November, he and his friends put forward a bogus candidate named Jorrocks, who made speeches in a mask and had his own campaign literature: ‘Old Wine in Old Bottles! A Plague on Promises! Personality Pays! . . . Ask the Returning Officer where to put your X for Jorrocks The Independent Independent! Only Triangular Candidate for Oxford.’

  He was with the playful Mantichorean Society when its members descended on Wallingford in costume. One, a Scottish versifier named Robert Scott, went to the vicarage and played the part of a distressed clergyman searching for a runaway wife – he was given tea and prayed with, and told to forgive the woman; for his part, he left a bunch of bananas in the piano. There was a second clergyman, a monk, and a prince in uniform with his fiancée. Greene himself set up an easel in the market and drew people’s souls for a fee; he also composed poems on the spot on any subject proposed to him. On occasion he went to the Hysteron Proteron Club for a ‘Backwards Day’: ‘the morning’, he said of one these events, ‘started with bridge in dinner jackets’ and at day’s end, after porridge, ‘we then returned backwards to Balliol’.

  Despite being a prankish undergraduate, he was now very serious about his literary ambitions. In the spring before going up to Oxford, he had had his first publication in the Berkhamstedian, a short story called ‘Tick Tock’ about a solitary old woman who at her death is assured of ‘love eternal’. The story was picked up by a London newspaper, the Star, which paid him three guineas, his first literary earnings. He could not do better than the school magazine again until Naomi Royde-Smith published one of his short stories in the Westminster Gazette in May 1922, then five of his poems over the next two years. At Oxford he quickly became involved with an undergraduate review, Oxford Outlook, which also featured David Cecil, L. P. Hartley, William Gerhardi, Edward Sackville-West, and Christopher Isherwood; he became sub-editor the next year and editor at the end of 1924, and he made a point of publishing many of his own poems.

  In his first term at Oxford he went to nearby Islip to see Robert Graves, who had been stationed for a time at Berkhamsted with the Artists’ Rifles during the war. Graves had heard of ‘great doings there. Wedding in the school chapel’, and was amused to discover that this was the recent wedding of Greene’s sister Molly to Lionel Walker.2 Soon after, his schoolfriend Claud Cockburn took Greene to meet his cousin, Evelyn Waugh. A year older than Greene, Waugh had been a fairly conventional member of Hertford College since January. At the same time as meeting Greene, he discovered the aesthetes Harold Acton and Brian Howard, and entered the phase of his life that would provide the material for Brideshead Revisited. Although Greene and Waugh became close friends in middle age, they were merely acquaintances at Oxford. Waugh thought Greene looked on his circle as ‘childish and ostentatious’, but Greene felt that the difference lay elsewhere: ‘I belonged to a rather rigorously Balliol group of perhaps boisterous heterosexuals, while your path temporarily took you into the other camp.’3

  In the early 1920s, the poet Edith Sitwell and her brothers were leading figures in the modernist movement. In March 1923 Graham Greene told his mother that he had been converted to Sitwellism, which meant experimentation with prosody, a sly humour, and a touch of obscurity. In April he invited Sitwell to read poems to the Balliol College Society of Modern Poetry and Drama. She could not make it, but decided that this young man deserved her attention.4 Greene then read her new collection, Bucolic Comedies, published in April 1923, and told his mother it was absolutely ‘out middle stump’.5 He wrote an essay on her work and sent it to the Westminster Gazette. Royde-Smith told him they had had enough articles on Edith Sitwell lately, but sent the piece directly on to Sitwell,6 who wrote back to him: ‘I am not used to people understanding anything whatever about my poetry, excepting perhaps an occasional image, and that only partially, as they do not understand the spiritual impulse behind the image. You have understood it all. Your comprehension appears to be absolutely complete. And this has given me the greatest possible pleasure.’7 By June, he was drinking tea in her flat in Bayswater, and in November she gave him a poem to publish in Oxford Outlook.

  Early in June, Greene and his friends had dinner with one of his favourite novelists, John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Despite his own long association with the Scottish publisher Thomas Nelson, Buchan advised them against such careers because there is ‘no opening in a publishing office. Unless you marry the publisher’s daughter!’ He recommended journalism and described his own successes at Reuters,8 where he had become a director in 1919.

  Greene’s first effort at serious journalism followed shortly after, and it brought him to the first of his ‘trouble spots’. The Irish Civil War had been fought over the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed in December 1921, providing for a Free State in the Catholic south and allowing the more Protestant north to remain in the Union. The new Free State was to be a dominion and not a republic, and its leaders would swear loyalty to the king. Republican forces regarded the treaty as a betrayal. The ensuing conflict involved numerous atrocities. The Chairman of the Provisional Government, Michael Collins, had himself been killed in an ambush on 22 August 1922, and the war itself continued until May 1923.

  Greene had got to know members of the Nationalist Society in Oxford, who arranged for him to have contact with one of the Sinn Féin leaders, and he also managed to get an introduction to a Free State senator. In fact, he volunteered to send confidential reports to the Free State government, but his offer was ignored. The Daily Express, however, was interested in a series of five articles on the condition of Ireland.9 Accompanied by his cousin Tooter, he went to Ireland in mid-June, just after the war’s end, and spent a week hiking from Dublin to Waterford. His enduring image of the trip was ‘broken bridges all the way’. He later talked down the danger involved, but it was a mad outing, since two young men with English accents were bound to
be objects of hostility in a place where any number of spies and informers had come to a bad end. In one town they had stones thrown at them.10

  The Daily Express did not run his articles, and it appears he had difficulty placing them anywhere. Nine weeks after his return a single piece showed up in his old stand-by, the Westminster Gazette. That article is vivid but lacks focus, instead presenting a series of tableaux, among them a soldier dumping a pot of red paint on the head of a Republican slogan-painter. He concluded: ‘It is like that most nightmarish of dreams, when one finds oneself in some ordinary and accustomed place, yet with a constant fear at the heart that something terrible, unknown and unpreventable is about to happen.’11 All his life he would use the language of dream interpretation in his journalism and fiction. For Greene, the unknown and the unconscious were sometimes the same thing.

  The walking tour in Ireland was a serious matter, but Greene also had a taste for simple shenanigans. In late 1923, he and Cockburn rented a barrel organ and disguised themselves as tramps, working their way through five Hertfordshire towns where, as often as not, they were given money to take their noise down the road. They met true tramps and tinkers, who treated them as comrades and warned them of ‘skinflints’. They were well treated wherever they went, except at Abbots Langley, near Watford, where they were turned away from the inns and forced to sleep in a frosty field before discovering a half-built house, where they were alarmed in the night by a strange repeated sound: ‘We woke again before dawn in the grip of cramp, and finally left the suspicious and uncharitable town for the comparative warmth of walking between high hedges, followed on our right hand by a spectrally coughing cow – and so trundled out of the profession forever.’12