The Unquiet Englishman Read online

  5

  CASUAL CORPSES

  ‘Did I tell you of my other excitement about a week ago, seeing a body carried up out of the Thames, as I was crossing Albert Bridge? All very dramatic, deep dusk, the two lights burning on the little quay below the bridge, & a couple of policemen carrying the covered stretcher across to the embankment steps. Then the police boat, diving back into the shadows, as though to pick out other casual corpses.’1 It was 2 August 1925, and these remarks in a letter to his mother reveal the fascination with danger, seediness, and disorder that would characterize Greene’s writing for more than sixty years.

  He had just finished at Oxford, taking a second in history. He was training in London for a position with the British American Tobacco Company, which would send him to China – a troubled country where he could expect to see plenty of corpses. But there was also the threat of boredom. He would be required to stay in that post for four years before being entitled to any leave, so he resigned.

  In the months before going down from Oxford he had looked into a variety of careers, especially ones that would allow him to travel abroad. One possibility was the Levant Consular Service, but that would first send him to Cambridge for another two years of study. He had an interview with Asiatic Petroleum for a position most likely in Calcutta. In late May he went to see Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, who could offer him nothing and suggested that if he wanted to enter journalism he should first spend some time working with a provincial newspaper. So he kept applying for jobs.2

  A year earlier the idea of a posting abroad would have been irresistible, but things had changed. In February Greene had written an article on ‘The Average Film’ for Oxford Outlook. It contained this short rant: ‘We are most of us nowadays considerably over-sexed. We either go to church and worship the Virgin Mary or to a public house and snigger over stories and limericks; and this exaggeration of the sex instinct has had a bad effect on art, on the cinematograph as well as on the stage.’3 His statement prompted a letter from a fervent and knowledgeable Catholic, the twenty-year-old Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, Basil Blackwell’s private secretary. She was annoyed that anyone would speak of the ‘worship’ of the Virgin Mary. She informed him that the correct expression was ‘hyperdulia’ – the technical term for a degree of veneration less than that owed to God. Bemused, he apologized for his error, claiming he had been in a hurry and was trying to be provocative. Ever the flirt, he asked that she come to tea as a sign of forgiveness.4 He met her on the 17 March 1925 and they had their tea together three days later. On 4 April, they went to see a film.5 Greene fell in love with her.

  Born, like him, in 1904,6 Vivien (she later simplified the spelling of her name) had long brown hair and classic features. She was clever and high-minded – a tumultuous childhood had predisposed her to be conservative and otherworldly. She and a younger brother Patrick had been born to Sydney Dayrell-Browning and his wife Marion (née Green-Armytage) on a property in Rhodesia that included an unprofitable gold mine which had to be worked 364 days a year to break even.7 Her own first memory was, like Graham’s recollection of the dead dog, violent: ‘Men were always nannies in Rhodesia then. The women carried water for miles and dug the ground; the men discussed politics round a tree and were nannies. I had a nice one called Malachi. Malachi was killing a black snake on the path in front of me. I didn’t feel sorry for it or frightened. It was just a happening.’8 Her mother, an avid horsewoman and watercolourist, was a difficult character, and her father may have been no better. They hardly knew each other before marriage, and separated when Vivien was about seven. Marion took her back to England, leaving Patrick behind – Vivien did not see him again until he was at university. Eventually, Marion required Vivien to write a letter to Sydney breaking off all contact. He lived out his years in southern Africa and was buried near Salisbury (now Harare).9

  As a child, the uprooted Vivien was bounced from school to school, and this experience, though not as traumatic as Graham’s, was unpleasant. She spent some time during the First World War at a progressive school in Hemel Hempstead, near Berkhamsted, though she and the young Graham did not meet. Her mother chose this institution housed in an old Dominican priory for the sake of its architecture, without enquiring deeply into the curriculum, which was based largely on the anthroposophical system of Rudolf Steiner. The diet there was vegetarian and sparse; she recalled, perhaps melodramatically, that the children went searching in farmers’ fields for turnips: ‘The boys had knives and peeled the turnips, which were eaten raw to stave off hunger.’10

  She finished school in South Hampstead, then went to a secretarial college. Widely read and a gifted stylist, she turned her hand to poetry. When she was just seventeen, her mother organized the publication of a collection of her poems and essays, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, but in later years Vivien found the book embarrassing.11

  As a Catholic, Vivien had a very high view of consecrated virginity, but, in any event, her early life had taught her to distrust sex and marriage. She might have been better suited to a convent than to a relationship with a man, especially one as troubled as Graham Greene. He, however, was prepared to do almost anything to please her. Within a few weeks of their first meeting she persuaded him to accompany her to church, an experience he described to his mother as ‘rather fun’12 – an odd phrase given that he would later tend to view Catholicism from the perspective of the damned.

  By the end of the month he had crept into a church to light a candle and felt himself under the inquisitorial eye of a woman supposedly at prayer.13 About four years before, Greene had had a striking perception of God on the croquet lawn but afterwards had not been much interested in matters of belief. In 1923, he had published a short story, ‘The Trial of Pan’, in which the pagan deity appears before the aged Judaeo-Christian God and pities him. Pan defends himself against the charges only by his music. At the end the courtroom is emptied, leaving a ‘white-bearded God, sitting alone in the empty hall, on a high judgment seat, under a bright blue canopy, playing noughts and crosses with himself on his blotting pad’.14 Under Vivien’s influence, he would have to think again about religion.

  Over the next two years Graham would inundate Vivien with love letters, which are now embarrassing to read – as if one were listening in on thousands of hours of adolescent phone calls. He pours out clumsy endearments, picks fights, and begs for forgiveness almost cyclically. He was not yet a mature enough writer to make a good job of love letters, and on any given day he might write three of them.

  The romance did not run smoothly. Graham was in a romantic frenzy and proposed marriage, so on 20 June she broke with him at Wolvercote, a village just north of Oxford. She wanted to preserve her ideal of celibacy and ‘round off’ their friendship pleasantly.15 The correspondence continued somewhat awkwardly. Graham went to London to be trained for the job in China, which, if he stayed with it, meant a certain end to the relationship. On 7 August 1925 he made a new offer – of ‘a monastic marriage’ involving ‘companionship & companionship only’.16 He urged her to consider that God had brought them together and that they might now embark on a new adventure. At almost the same time, he quit his position with British American Tobacco and started applying to provincial newspapers. For her part, Vivien took the offer cautiously, remarking a few weeks later, ‘The World soils what it touches.’17 On 16 September, Greene again asked for an engagement, promising to become a Catholic.18 This was an important concession, and, very tentatively, she accepted.

  Greene’s willingness, even in theory, to separate sex and marriage in his dealings with Vivien had a complicated background. Not long before A Sort of Life was published in 1971, Greene deleted some pages on the subject of the sex trade. Those pages survive in files at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. He says that he remained a virgin until around 1925 (no precise date is given), when he deliberately decided to find out about sex. First, he picked up a prostitute and went with her to a hotel near Leicester Squ
are. He said he felt no desire and was so nervous that nothing happened. On a second occasion, he went with a young prostitute to another hotel in the same area and experienced ‘release and happiness. As I sat on the bed and saw the girl naked in front of the looking-glass combing her hair, I took us both by surprise with my unpremeditated exclamation, “How beautiful you are”; I can see her now, as she turned from the glass, smiling and pleased by such a tribute rare enough after the act was over. Ten years later, on the way to the Empire cinema, I would sometimes spy her on her old beat from which she had never graduated. She was almost unrecognizable by then, she had stepped right into middle age, and no young man would ever again exclaim at the sight of her.’19

  He took a private tutoring job in Ashover, a village near Chesterfield, and for several weeks he was paid by a widow to amuse her lazy ten-year-old. Boredom continued to afflict him; he claims that to escape it he pretended to suffer from toothache and tricked a dentist into etherizing him; he says he lost a good tooth but secured a brief interlude free of the terrible mood.20 It is a good story but not to be believed, as he reported to his mother at the time that he had a cyst in his mouth and an abscessed tooth21 – there was no need to sacrifice a healthy one. But, in the evenings, back in his hotel room, he kept himself busy. He had submitted a new manuscript of poems called ‘Sad Cure’ to Basil Blackwell, who liked it but could not publish it except on a ‘mutual responsibility’ basis – that is, sharing the financial risk – since Babbling April had sold poorly. Greene declined.22

  He had also completed close to thirty thousand words of a historical novel called ‘The Episode’, set in 1871 among Carlist refugees who lived in the area of Leicester Square.23 The Carlists, a conservative and legitimist movement supporting the claims to the Spanish throne of a branch of the Bourbons descended from Carlos V, were an important faction in the nineteenth-century wars over Spanish succession – Greene’s story is set just before the third and last of these. At the time he was writing, there was still a Carlist claimant to the throne, the elderly Duke of Anjou and Madrid, who lived in exile in Paris.24

  Greene had become interested in the subject through Carlyle’s biography of the poet John Sterling, who was tangled up with the Carlists,25 but he was also following in the tracks of Joseph Conrad, whose novel The Arrow of Gold dealt with Carlists in Marseilles in the 1870s.

  His search for a job on a newspaper finally bore fruit in an unpaid position at the Nottingham Journal, beginning in November. The city itself reminded him of Dickens’s London,26 and he wrote to Vivien about the most extraordinary fog he had ever seen: ‘If I stretch out my walking stick in front of me, the ferrule is half lost in obscurity. Coming back I twice lost my way, & ran into a cyclist, to our mutual surprise. Stepping off a pavement to cross to the other side becomes a wild & fantastic adventure, like sailing into the Atlantic to find New York, with no chart or compass. Once where the breadth of the road was greater than the normal, I found myself back on the same pavement, as I started, having slowly swerved in my course across the road.’27

  Although he complained of it at the time, he was moved by the city’s air of accustomed failure and later thought of it as a second home, making it the setting for parts of A Gun for Sale and The Potting Shed. In Nottingham he lived as a boarder at the down-at-heel Ivy House on All Saints Terrace. For a companion, he had a mongrel named Paddy, who was frequently sick on the floor. Greene described the atmosphere of the newspaper office to his mother: ‘one table with the News Editor, a dear old man, at the head, & smoke & work & talk &, at about 10, eat potato chips out of paper bags’. He would start work at 5:30 p.m. and finish at half-past midnight, sorting through telegrams, correcting grammar and punctuation, and trimming copy. He enjoyed the puzzle aspect of writing headlines with a limited number of letters in various sizes of type depending on the importance of the story.28 He was particularly pleased with his handling of a large headline about a bigamous vicar and getting the type size correct.29

  Greene was also still trying to launch a writing career, consistently turning out five hundred words per day on his novel, following a discipline he maintained until old age, when he reduced the count. He contributed some reviews to the Westminster Gazette and the Times Literary Supplement.30 He made the acquaintance of Cecil Roberts, a former editor of the Nottingham Journal who had become a popular novelist – ‘Nottingham’s Tin God’, as he described him to his mother, a local literary dictator who had pull at Heinemann, where Greene wanted to have his own fiction published.31 In A Sort of Life he described Roberts, who he had gradually come to like,32 as a ‘Micawber in reverse’ for telling him how risky the future looked, and speculated on whether he was actually the son of one of the dukes in the Dukeries.33 It had not occurred to him that Roberts might still be alive. Roberts wrote a review fuming over the conjecture about his paternity and complained at length that the young Greene had had more advantages than he had had – Roberts rather specialized in putting on the poor mouth. He also asserted, wrongly, that he had only met Greene once in Nottingham.34 Greene cut the offending passages from subsequent printings of the memoir.

  Having promised Vivien that he would become a Catholic, he sought out instruction soon after his arrival in Nottingham. In A Sort of Life, he says, ‘Now it occurred to me, during the long empty mornings, that if I were to marry a Catholic I ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held. It was only fair, since she knew what I believed – in nothing supernatural. Besides, I thought, it would kill the time.’35 This statement is essential to his account of his reception into the church, and it is false. Vivien certainly did not understand him to be a confirmed atheist. Introducing that element into the story allowed him to present a more dramatic tale with a sharper struggle over belief and disbelief and a much shorter timeline for his conversion, but it also makes it much more difficult to know what actually happened.

  As soon as he reached Nottingham, he wrote asking her what exactly should he do to be received – just walk up to a priest’s house and ask for instructions? He added: ‘And, darling one, though I admit that the idea came to me because of you, I do all the same feel I want to be a Catholic now, even a little apart from you. One does want fearfully hard for something firm & hard & certain, however uncomfortable, to catch hold of in the general flux.’36

  In his memoir, he describes walking Paddy to the ‘sooty’ cathedral, which possessed for him a ‘gloomy power because it represented the inconceivable and the incredible’. He dropped a note into the wooden enquiries box37 and so made contact with Father George Trollope,38 the tall, portly administrator of the cathedral, in whom Greene at first thought he recognized the smug and well-fed priest of Protestant propaganda, but soon he saw beyond the priest’s belly and jowls to an extraordinary sincerity and devotion. Indeed, this man had sacrificed a good deal for his faith.

  Born in 1879 and educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, Trollope became an actor with the Ben Greet players, a well-known repertory company, where he learned to play many parts interchangeably – for example in The Sign of the Cross he had to play sometimes a Christian, sometimes a pagan. He said he ‘had to roar like a lion one day, be eaten by one the next’. Trollope went on to a solid career in the West End, appearing with such actors as Herbert Beerbohm Tree. He was received into the Catholic church in 1905 and ordained a priest five years later. He had a very gentle nature and his years on the stage prepared him to be an excellent preacher. His one notable eccentricity was that he refused to wear socks, as he thought that when they became damp they would give him a cold.

  Greene detected a sorrow in Trollope, a yearning for his old life.39 Plays competed with theological works for space on his bookshelves. Sadly, he could only read them now as priests were forbidden to attend theatres in their own dioceses – and Nottingham had good theatres. Still his background in the arts probably made him an ideal person to lead this potential convert through the alien ground of theology – and despite being an acto
r, he argued with precision. After their first session, Graham reported to Vivien: ‘[I] have quite changed my mind about Father Trollope. I like him very much. I like his careful avoidance of the slightest emotion or sentiment in his instruction.’40 It soon turned out that the priest had a surprising connection with Greene’s world – his father’s closest friend was Dr Thomas Fry, the former headmaster of Berkhamsted School. Trollope resented Fry for trying to turn his family against him when he converted to Rome, and he is said to have regarded the baptism of Graham Greene as a kind of revenge against Dr Fry.

  According to A Sort of Life, Greene’s problem in approaching the church had little to do with fine points of doctrine: ‘Bishop Gore in his great book on religious belief wrote that his own primary difficulty was to believe in the love of God; my primary difficulty was to believe in a God at all. The date of the gospels, the historical evidence for the existence of the man Jesus Christ: these were interesting subjects which came nowhere near the core of my disbelief. I didn’t disbelieve in Christ – I disbelieved in God.’ His years at Oxford had made him an agile debater – he said he lost this ability in time – and he went many rounds with Father Trollope, sometimes on trams or in the sitting rooms of convents as the priest went about other duties. He wrote in the memoir: ‘It was on the grounds of a dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard. It was like a fight for personal survival.’ Of course, it is hard to know whether this was precisely true at the time, or a touch of drama added decades later to what was, in fact, mostly an exposition of the details of Catholic belief and observance rather than extended debates about the existence of God. As the sessions – usually once or twice a week – continued, Greene became captivated by the priest himself in whom he detected ‘an inexplicable goodness’, which in itself became a potent argument for belief.41