The Unquiet Englishman Read online

  In later years he said repeatedly that he did not feel the emotional side of his faith until he witnessed the persecution of Catholics in Mexico. But his letters at the time suggest that there was an emotional component to his struggle – at least in a negative sense. On 7 December 1925, he wrote to Vivien describing his racing thoughts: ‘Darling, I’ve got nothing to say & yet I daren’t stop. I feel there’s something awful in sealing up the envelope, not being able to add to this. I feel as if I must go on talking, talking, talking to you hard, until I’ve got back control. Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. On & on & on.’ In this letter he describes his rage against God, and his despair: ‘Don’t you ever wonder, in moods, now & again, what the use of going on is? Religion doesn’t answer it. One can believe in every point of the Catholic faith, & yet at times like this hate the initiator of it all, of life I mean. Justice can be just as hateful as injustice, more so often enough, because injustice puts us on a level with the wielder of it, whilst justice is more hateful because it emphasizes our own inferiority.’42

  Greene says that he decided in January 1926 that he would enter the church – this is not actually true as he had already told Vivien in September that he intended to do it. Presumably, in January he put aside lingering doubts and made his final decision. He teased his mother about it – ‘I expect you have guessed that I am embracing the Scarlet Woman’ – and about his choice of baptismal name, hinting that he might go for Joan. The new name would, in any event, allow him to get rid of his first name, ‘Henry’, which he hated. In the end, he chose Thomas – not for Aquinas, but for the doubting apostle.43 For all the teasing, he knew he ‘was laughing to keep his courage up’.44

  He also decided that he should end his newspaper apprenticeship and return to London. By 21 January, Greene had had twenty-six lessons with Father Trollope and was only halfway through the full instruction.45 Father Trollope accelerated the lessons, and made arrangements for Greene to see in London the man by whom he had himself been received into the church, Father James Christie of the Brompton Oratory.46

  On 28 February47 Greene made a general confession, but not to Father Trollope as it would have been too embarrassing. It covered the sins of his whole life and it was ‘a humiliating ordeal. Later we may become hardened to the formulas of confession and sceptical about ourselves: we may only half intend to keep the promises we make, until continual failure or the circumstances of our private life, finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens.’48 That was the voice of a man in his sixties, who had as a matter of conscience withdrawn from the sacraments rather than make empty promises to reform his life. But on this first occasion he took the promises seriously and carried them down ‘like heavy stones’ into a dark corner of the cathedral for his baptism, which was observed only by a woman dusting the chairs. He came out of the cathedral not joyful but full of ‘sombre apprehension’, unsure what these ceremonies might entail for his hoped-for marriage to Vivien. He was not then sure whether involvement with God might lead him, as it had led Trollope, to the priesthood. That fear would later seem quaint, even absurd, but in February 1926 he had no idea where his faith might take him.49

  6

  MARRIAGE

  London was in turmoil, and Graham Greene was thrilled. Hired as a sub-editor on The Times just two months before, he found himself at one of the flash points of the General Strike. With coal miners fighting against reduced wages and longer hours, the Trades Union Congress called the long-anticipated strike, which lasted from 3 to 12 May 1926. The government seized paper supplies in an effort to prevent the TUC from publishing its strike newspaper, The British Worker. Most of the country’s newspapers were unable to publish, but The Times put out a reduced edition – the only paper that continued to be issued without interruption.

  Overnight on 4–5 May, Greene worked a sixteen-hour shift. With all the print workers on strike, the editorial staff produced a single-sheet issue of the newspaper using three Roneo machines. The papers were loaded under police guard. The next night, strikers poured petrol into the basement and set fire to a large roll of paper. Then, as Greene and others were loading newspapers into private cars parked along Victoria Street for transport out of London, there was a ‘scrimmage’ with strikers, with one man getting concussion after being hit with his own bundle of papers. The next night, some MPs came to help, but there were only peaceful pickets and the loading of cars was better organized.1

  Greene had taken a room at 141 Albert Palace Mansions near Battersea Park, but for much of the strike he stayed with Raymond in Pimlico, and was seldom in bed before 5 a.m. He also signed up as a special constable ‘for curiosity’, as he said, rather than any wish ‘to support the establishment’,2 patrolling Vauxhall Bridge with a regular policeman. The feared revolution never took place as the government was well prepared and the middle classes were opposed to the General Strike. By 12 May 1926, the leaders of the TUC had lost hope and called off the strike. When it was over, Greene was given a silver matchbox by the Times management, and he lamented the end of free beer at the office.3

  The Times recruit found himself, as a newspaper man putting out the news, a strike-breaker. At Oxford he had had his dalliance with communism, but in the midst of the strike he wrote to Vivien, who disapproved of the left: ‘Darling, you talk as if I was labour. I’m not. I’m really conservative now – especially after labour tried to burn us all.’4 In A Sort of Life, he tells us that just a few years later he would have taken the side of the strikers: like many others of the middle classes, the sight of hunger marchers had opened his eyes.5 And yet, in the 1980s, he took yet another view: since The Times was obliged to fight off both the strikers as well as Churchill and the extreme right, he did not regret his loyalty to the newspaper.6

  Now that he had a job, he and Vivien could make firmer plans for a wedding, but as the summer went on, her mother objected to the proposed marriage, as did Vivien’s close friend in Oxford, Stella Weaver.7 The idea of the celibate marriage was fading away, but Greene expressed a preference not to have children. He also suggested to Vivien that the creative and sexual instinct were closely related, and on one occasion compared the erotic contact of bodies to receiving the Eucharist.8 He may just have been trying to convince her of the artistic and spiritual benefits of sleeping with him.

  But these were discouraging months for his writing career. One of his sonnets won a competition judged by Humbert Wolfe in the Saturday Review,9 but his collection of poems, Sad Cure, went from publisher to publisher without finding a home. He took some comfort from a note sent by J. C. Squire when he rejected the manuscript, and saw a little hope when Jonathan Cape said no to the poems but asked to see his prose. Sad Cure never did find a publisher. Meanwhile, he completed ‘The Episode’ at the beginning of August and borrowed £5 from his mother to have two copies typed.10 A. D. Peters, who had put a great effort into ‘Anthony Sant’, told him at the end of September that this new novel was simply not publishable. Greene submitted it to William Heinemann, where it got lost in the slush pile until late April. When the managing director, Charles Evans, wrote to apologize for the delay he said he had received contrary readers’ reports, but he too rejected the novel in the end.11

  Some books are written from the heart. Greene’s third novel came from his appendix. Walking in Battersea at the end of September, he felt a lingering pain in his side grow suddenly sharper, so went into the office of a down-at-heel doctor, who gave him some medicine and sent him on his way – all at a cost of six shillings. That evening things were still bad, so he called Raymond, who had him examined and then admitted at Westminster Hospital, where he was himself studying anatomy and physiology. Graham spent 2 October 1926, his twenty-second birthday, in Chadwick Ward, with his appendectomy taking place three days later. The Times gave him six weeks’ medical leave, three of which he spent in
hospital, the rest in Berkhamsted.

  While in hospital, Greene saw some terrible things, including the unexpected death of a nine-year-old boy named Royston who had undergone surgery on a broken leg. The boy’s mother was distraught and cried out: ‘ “Why did you go without saying goodbye to your mother? . . . Sister, Sister, don’t tell me we’re parted.’” This was followed by the death of an old man whose skull had been fractured in a car accident. Greene asked Vivien: ‘Are people who write entirely & absolutely selfish, darling? Even though in a way I hated it yesterday evening – one half of me was saying how lucky it was – added experience – & I kept on catching myself trying to memorise details – Sister’s face, the faces of the other men in the ward. And I felt quite excited aesthetically. It made one rather disgusted with oneself.’12

  During his time in hospital, Greene began to plot out a new novel. Like ‘The Episode’, it would be romantic and historical. He had been reading Lord Teignmouth’s and Charles Harper’s historical work, The Smugglers, and was struck by an ugly letter written to revenue officers by an informant who called himself ‘Goring’; it revealed the activities of a Sussex gang and the means to capture them: ‘Do but take up some of the Servants, they will soon rout the Masters, for the Servants are all poor.’13 Greene saw a challenge in making such a character sympathetic.

  Once he was back in Berkhamsted, he started writing. He would remember decades later, when other better sentences from better books were forgotten, the opening of The Man Within: ‘He came over the top of the down as the last light failed and could almost have cried with relief at sight of the wood below.’ He wrote these words on lined foolscap while half-listening to his mother discuss chores with a parlour maid.14 This novel contained much that would stay with Greene through his career, especially the figure of the hunted man and the problem of the ‘Judas’. Just as Greene had shopped Lionel Carter to his father, so does Francis Andrews, his main character, inform on his friend, the similarly named Carlyon. The parallels are broad, of course, and The Man Within should not be read as a close autobiography. Greene wrote only a few paragraphs at first, then worked fitfully on it over the next eighteen months. With two failed novels behind him, he felt that this book had to succeed or he must forget about a writing career.

  On his first night back at The Times, around 17 November,15 he fainted and was given another week of medical leave. He decided to go to Brighton, where one night as he was sitting alone in a shelter on the front a deluded man introduced himself as ‘Old Moore’ of the almanac. In retrospect, Greene thought he should have suspected an omen. He had received an odd letter from his mother telling him to visit Kenneth Richmond when he returned to London. At the end of their six months of psychoanalysis, Richmond had told Greene, very amicably, that they should go their separate ways to avoid any sense of dependency. By 1926, Richmond was no longer practising psychology and instead teaching a system of shorthand.

  When Greene visited him, Richmond offered to help find a publisher for the unpublishable ‘Episode’, then got to the point. He reminded Greene how he had once fainted at the dinner table during their period of psychoanalysis. In fact, Greene had fainted before that; he had lost consciousness on a total of three occasions. Richmond had taken him to see the leading neurologist George Riddoch,16 who diagnosed epilepsy (see p. 21). The matter was revealed to Charles and Marion, but not to Graham himself. In Britain and many other countries, the disease was legal grounds for a marriage to be annulled or prohibited. While Greene was angry at the concealment, it was the likelihood of losing Vivien that devastated him. Indeed, he had earlier compared his pursuit of her, quite accurately, to ‘monomania’.17

  The next day, he went to an Underground station and watched the trains passing as he got ready to jump. He could not finally bring himself to do it, and after a while ‘took the moving staircase to the upper world’.18 He sought out Father Christie at the Brompton Oratory. In A Sort of Life Greene calls him Talbot. Greene felt that under no circumstances should he have children, yet wanted to be married according to the church. A man of considerable education,19 Father Christie was an enlightened priest for the time and Greene found him a person of great sympathy, but his hands were tied. He took Greene out in a taxi and they rode back and forth between the Brompton Road and Bayswater, ‘just as we crossed and recrossed the same lines of argument’.20 Marriage was not forbidden, but contraception most certainly was. This was a scorching experience for Greene, and was likely on his mind when he signed letters of protest in 1968 against Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, which upheld the prohibition against artificial contraception.

  Another visit to Riddoch saw the diagnosis confirmed, but Raymond thought it was all nonsense, as did the Times medical correspondent Dr McNair Wilson, who had witnessed the recent fainting episode and saw no evidence that it was an epileptic seizure. By mid-February, Riddoch conceded that he had been ‘too hasty’.21 In future, Greene would faint from time to time,22 but it was no longer attributed to epilepsy.

  Relieved about his own health, Greene saw that the time was coming to worry about his father’s. At sixty-one, Charles Greene had passed the normal age of retirement for his post, but his appointment had been extended at the request of the governors of the school. However, he was suffering from diabetes and could not remain. An advertisement for the headmastership appeared in January 1927, and he left the school finally in Trinity Term.23 This was momentous for Graham, as his father and mother left Berkhamsted altogether for a house in Crowborough, Sussex, which they named Incents, after the founder of the school. Within two years, Uncle Edward had sold the Hall as well, and Berkhamsted was no longer home to the Greene family.

  Graham Greene felt that his parents had always been generous towards him, and after a visit to them in the following year wrote in a letter that despite his ‘terribly undemonstrative nature’ he needed to thank them: ‘I hope I become a success, if only so that all you’ve both done for me isn’t wasted. There comes a time when gratitude wells up to a height above flood level, & as it’s hard, owing to some kink in my nature, to speak it, I have to write it.’24

  *

  Meanwhile, with his thoughts very much on the longed-for marriage, he set up a home for himself and Vivien. At the end of March 1927 he moved into a flat at 8 Heathcroft, Hampstead Way, which they would share after the wedding, nicknaming it ‘The Basket’. Having a private bathtub was a particular treat after years in boarding houses. Meanwhile, Vivien’s mother, a very difficult character, was making a last stand, advising her daughter that sex was hell and that giving birth would probably kill her. At this time, Vivien was living with the Weavers in Oxford. Greene did not particularly like Stella Weaver, and at one point spoke of her as a ‘reptile’,25 but he was very grateful that she told Vivien to ignore her mother’s outbursts.26 Stella, a thirty-three-year-old Catholic, was happily married and pregnant herself, so spoke with authority. The twenty-two-year-old Vivien was very much in love and wanted the marriage to go ahead – she had wept at the thought of breaking the engagement during the epilepsy scare. A formal announcement appeared in The Times on 5 July 1927, conspicuously omitting the name of Vivien’s estranged father.

  On 15 October 1927, Graham and Vivien were married at St Mary’s, a tiny Catholic church in Hampstead. According to a newspaper account, Vivien wore ‘an ivory satin Florentine robe, draped with silver lace and cut with a square neck. The satin train was also trimmed with silver lace. A wreath of orange blossom and silver leaves secured her long tulle veil, and she carried a sheaf of Madonna lilies, tied with silver tissue. The train bearer, Miss Elisabeth Greene, wore a rose-pink taffeta frock, trimmed with silver.’ Vivien was given away by her maternal grandfather, Alfred Green-Armytage, and Raymond was best man. Among the guests was Father Christie,27 a sign that Graham bore no ill will about their conversation on epilepsy and contraception. In an odd gesture, Vivien’s mother, attempting to dictate terms for the consummation, sent a letter for Graham to read on th
e wedding night – he read it and tore it up.28 Graham and Vivien took a two-week honeymoon in the South of France, spending much of their time swimming. When they returned to ‘The Basket’ on 29 October, they found that Stella had filled it with flowers.29

  7

  RATS IN THE THATCH

  ‘I can think of no better career for a young novelist than to be for some years a subeditor on a rather conservative newspaper,’ Greene wrote long after.1 Apart from providing a modest income, the hours – four in the afternoon until eleven at night – left him plenty of time to get on with his fiction. It also gave him the company of older men who worked together cheerfully – Greene says no one was ever sacked from The Times.2

  The chief sub-editor, George Anderson, a quiet Scot with a sarcastic wit, was somewhat remote, and was heard to say ‘I am not a social man’.3 He pushed Greene hard, especially in the first part of a shift. When the pubs opened at half-past five, Anderson would don his bowler hat and disappear from the office for about thirty minutes, returning with his face a little redder and his manner more genial. Greene later learned that he had once been a poet and guessed that literary disappointment lay behind the sarcasm. He loved roses and would usually have one on his desk or in his buttonhole. Greene says that in his three years with the newspaper he went from hating Anderson to almost loving him. In contrast, Anderson’s assistant, Colonel A. H. Maude (grandfather of the Conservative MP Francis Maude) was kind to a fault and would never challenge a young sub-editor with a difficult task.4