The Unquiet Englishman Page 8

  The editors at The Times noticed Greene’s talent. They ran several articles he had written, including an account of a walking tour in Sussex, which was a spin-off from the sixth chapter of The Man Within, where Francis Andrews is making his way across the downs to Lewes. It was a curiously written piece, employing verse rhythms to create something close to a prose poem. More entertaining was his account of how he and Cockburn had gone barrel-organing in 1923.5

  The Times also trusted him to speak his mind about the film industry. He had written about films while at Oxford, and would, of course, go on to become one of the finest scriptwriters of his time. The Cinematograph Films Act came into force on 1 April 1928 with the intention of building up a British industry through a system of quotas. Shortly after, he produced an article on how to save money in the making of films. He also argued that critics and producers were misunderstanding the medium as somehow competing with the stage: ‘The film is more truly comparable with the novel, the progress of which it has followed from action to thought . . . The object of the film should be the translation of thought back into images.’6 In June, he argued that film-makers, apart from Chaplin and one or two others, had not grasped the formal possibilities of the medium. He insisted that it needed ‘a rhythm of time and of space’, by which he meant that the pacing of action and the movement from one scene to another needed to be more tightly controlled, so that films would have aesthetic coherence.7

  Like other critics, Greene was uneasy about the coming of talkies – The Jazz Singer, with some scenes of dialogue and music, had been released in London in September 1928 and was soon followed by a murder mystery, The Terror, with continuous sound.8 Writing the following March, he suggested that since films were now a big business, experimentation was rare and the chief improvements merely mechanical. He proposed that film was especially suited to epic, fantasy, and the representation of mental process. He observed, memorably: ‘It is the part of the films, in their epic province, either to regard collective life – the life of a crowd – as an end in itself or to cause an individual of more than individual significance to emerge from the crowd.’ He thought that films could render worlds that existed nowhere, offering the Felix the Cat films as an example. In the years to come, he would remain interested in film fantasies, and would, perhaps surprisingly, have good things to say about Walt Disney.9

  In the early winter of 1928, he sent typescripts of his just-finished novel about the Sussex smugglers to Heinemann and the Bodley Head, and settled down for a long wait. Soon afterwards he was lying in bed with flu, when the telephone rang. Vivien told him it was a man named Evans. At first Greene did not feel like talking to anybody, but then realized that this was Charles Evans, the chairman of Heinemann. He hurried to the phone, and listened to the words he had been longing to hear: ‘I’ve read your novel . . . We’d like to publish it. Would it be possible for you to look in here at eleven?’

  He hurried to Great Russell Street and went into Evans’s office imagining himself surrounded by the famous authors the firm had published. Indeed, ‘The bearded ghost of Conrad rumbled on the rooftops with the rain.’ The ghosts would be of less value to Greene than some of the living, especially one of the directors, A. S. Frere – known simply as Frere. With a background in the Royal Flying Corps, then journalism, he was an engaging man (and skilled tap-dancer) who would soon become managing director of the firm and a lifelong friend. For the next fifty years, Frere was the one person from whom Greene consistently took literary advice.

  Charles Evans told the young novelist that he could not guarantee success for his book, ‘but all the same we have hopes’.10 He recommended him to the literary agent David Higham, then with the firm of Curtis Brown.11 Greene soon came to an agreement with Heinemann, and Doubleday, Doran took the American rights. He was told to get to work on another novel right away, and that he could expect to be at the top of the profession in five years – heady stuff for a twenty-four-year-old who described the book to Raymond as ‘terribly second-rate’.12 There was a search for a title and Greene came up with a telling phrase from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: ‘There is another man within me, that’s angry with me . . . ’

  The Man Within was published in Britain on 13 June 1929,13 and by the end of the month Graham reported to his younger brother Hugh, who was by then at Oxford, that it had gone into a second impression – indeed, it would soon sell eight thousand copies:14 ‘I’ve had very good reviews so far in The Times, Times Lit Supp., Sunday Times, Bystander, Piccadilly (with photo!), Spectator & Daily Telegraph. The provincial papers have been inclined to sniff. We went to a terribly grand party at the American publishers the day before publication, with people like the Duchess of Devonshire, Rudyard Kipling etc. floating about. We drank a lot of champagne & felt happy.’15

  He and Vivien had every reason to feel happy but he would later wish that he had had a mentor when writing his early fiction, and wondered what advice his cousin Robert Louis Stevenson might have given him.16 He was about to make some mistakes. To produce The Man Within, he had worked eleven hours a day: he wrote about smugglers in the morning and then went to The Times in the mid-afternoon. In the summer of 1929 he wrote a letter to Evans which was an obvious bluff. He said he could not continue to write fiction and to work as a journalist. Evans was wagering on his protégé, so came up with a plan that would allow him to write full time. In early August they had lunch at the Savoy with Greene’s American publisher George Doran, who was more cautious and wanted to see how the book did when it was published in the United States the following month. In the meantime, Evans handed over a large cheque that allowed Graham and Vivien to go on a three-week Hellenic Club cruise. At the beginning of October, the publishers presented a firm offer of £650 in advance of royalties on The Man Within and his next two books, payable in monthly instalments over two years once he left other employment. He decided to accept.

  It was not an easy thing for him to leave The Times. He loved the men he worked with, and would ever after remember them in their green eye shades. He had felt a little patronized by an editor who told him he had ‘a pretty pen’ and might attempt some leading articles, but he was certainly valued by his superiors and was being groomed to take over as correspondence editor, even though for a time he feared being shunted off to the court page. But on 7 October, he wrote his letter of resignation.17 George Anderson begged him to reconsider and arranged for him to talk to the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, but Dawson delayed their meeting again and again, presumably in the hope that Greene would just abandon the whole notion. When they did meet, Dawson pointed out that other members of staff, among them the novelist Charles Morgan, went about their writing careers in their spare time. Greene stood his ground and left on 31 December 1929.

  Financially, he had blundered: the success of his first novel turned out to be a fluke. The book has some good moments, but Greene later said that if he had been the publisher’s reader he would have rejected it.18 This was not false modesty. It is somewhat overwritten and melodramatic, and at the end of his life he allowed it to remain in print merely as a kind gesture to his younger self.

  But now the pressure was on – to be a writer he would have to keep writing. Charles Evans told him not to allow more than a year between his first and second novels. When Greene met him at a party, Arnold Bennett, having praised The Man Within in the Evening Standard, urged him to publish a book at least once a year.19 This was bad advice. He had written The Man Within in a year and a half and he was now being told to accelerate the pace. In his maturity, Greene sometimes committed three years to the writing of a novel. At twenty-five, he did not yet realize how much care was needed to write a good book.

  Once The Man Within had been accepted he decided to mine his experiences in Germany for a new story. He went back to the Continent to refresh his memories, and reported to his mother on 4 April 1929 that he had seen ten thousand French troops occupying a town of fifty thousand: ‘I feel more and more pro-Teuton ever
y day.’20 Back home, he set to work and had sixteen thousand words written by 24 May.21

  ‘I was trying to write my first political novel, knowing nothing of politics.’22 It imagines a dictatorship arising in the city of Trier once the French troops have abandoned their attempts to establish an independent state in the Palatinate. The hero, Oliver Chant, a wealthy and idealistic Englishman, decides to go there and help finance some rebels, who turn out to be rather peaceful. A Jewish poet named Kapper and his artist friend grind out political satires and cartoons in the belief that the dictator will fall once he becomes a laughing stock. Chant wants them to use his money to buy arms, which eventually they do. Meanwhile, Chant meets the dictator, Demassener, and admires the man despite his cruelty. He then sleeps with the dictator’s wife Anne-Marie, who reveals that her husband is impotent. Later Greene felt that his scenes failed to communicate suspense because they were laden with adjectives and metaphors. The revolution comes partly as a result of Kapper revealing to the populace that the tyrant is a cuckold and therefore a joke, Chant leaves the Palatinate, not with Anne-Marie but with the wounded Demassener, who is sent into exile.

  By the first week of April 1930, after a further research trip to Germany, he was ready to deliver a draft to Evans. While waiting for his response he took a commission from the Graphic to write about the passion play at Oberammergau, which Vivien longed to see, and they took a ten-day trip together in May to Innsbruck, Baden, Cologne, and Constance.23 Upon his arrival at Oberammergau, he found a telegram from Evans: ‘Your book magnificent. Congratulations.’24 Evans was not alone in praising the young author’s latest effort – the novelist and playwright Clemence Dane read the manuscript, thought it very good, and came up with a title out of Hamlet: The Name of Action.25 She suggested some revisions and then tried, unsuccessfully, to get it selected by the Book Society, which had ten thousand members and would have guaranteed the book’s success.26

  Released on 6 October 1930, The Name of Action took a trouncing from the critics. One wrote: ‘Despite a supple prose and an unconventional ending, the abuse of coincidence and theatrical props makes his narrative hollow and factitious.’27 This was typical. Greene wrote to his mother: ‘I’m getting tired of kind friends who tell me they like this, but of course they much prefer the other!! The Man Within, I’m convinced, is a moderately bad book, while this, I’m equally certain, is a moderately good one.’28

  Still, the literary world was noticing him. The society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell invited him to tea: ‘It appears that Aldous Huxley recommended her to read The Man Within! The bugbear again! I’m beginning to hate the sound of it!’29 She would encourage Greene through the next few years, when his books were cutting no ice with reviewers or readers. He and Vivien visited her occasionally at Garsington, her home near Oxford. He remained always grateful for her kindness and drew her portrait as Lady Caroline in It’s a Battlefield, a decidedly sympathetic character.

  Evans arranged for him to meet established authors such as Michael Arlen, Marie Belloc Lowndes, and Maurice Baring. Most importantly, Greene also met the historian Cunninghame Graham, an expert on the Jesuit reductions in eighteenth-century Paraguay, a subject that more than forty years later would provide part of the background for The Honorary Consul.

  In the autumn of 1930, he got to work on another novel, to which he would give the title Rumour at Nightfall. Just as he had returned to an old interest in Germany for The Name of Action, now he went back to the Spanish material that had already failed him in ‘The Episode’. The Spanish wars had served Conrad as a subject, as well as G. A. Henty, whose book With the British Legion: A Story of the Carlist Wars came out in 1902, but Greene was hurrying. He started on 5 September and finished the ninety-one-thousand-word draft manuscript on 27 April 1931.30 In a late burst of productivity in April, he wrote twenty-four thousand words.31 As it turned out, Rumour at Nightfall was by far the worst novel Greene ever published.32

  In a remote way the story anticipates The Quiet American. An English journalist, Chase, is covering the army’s attempt to capture a Carlist commander named Caveda. Meanwhile Chase and his friend Crane are both in love with Eulelia Monti, who also happens to be Caveda’s mistress. Late in the story, Crane manages to marry Eulelia very suddenly in the middle of the night. Chase changes his loyalty from the government side to that of Caveda, and arranges for the death of Crane. It is commonly thought – and the elderly Greene did nothing to discourage this – that he did not deal with Catholic subjects before Brighton Rock. In fact, The Name of Action had portrayed Catholics in the Rhineland; Rumour at Nightfall went somewhat further in its reflection on Christ’s relations with Judas. In a distant parallel with Greene’s life, Crane’s marriage leads him to Catholicism: ‘I have married her, and God knows whether I don’t share her faith.’33 In this novel, Greene, for the first time, compares a priest, however fleetingly, to Don Quixote, an idea that would lie at the heart of one of his last novels, Monsignor Quixote.34

  Again, the reviewers were unimpressed. He was particularly stung by Frank Swinnerton’s observation in the the Evening News that his characters spent all their time hinting.35 Greene believed that the sales of the book were an abysmal twelve hundred, but his bibliographers have found evidence that it sold about three thousand for Heinemann and a further thousand for Doubleday in the United States.36 So both The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall were aesthetic rather than commercial failures. He never allowed them to be reprinted, and at the end of his life he left specific instructions to his literary executor that there must be no new editions.37

  The last part of Greene’s apprenticeship as a novelist was conducted in public. If he had failed to publish The Man Within, he might have lost hope, so there is no regretting what happened. And it is worth noting that in this period there was at least one clear success, though on a small scale. In 1929 he had written a short story called ‘The End of the Party’ about twin brothers, one of whom is terrified of the dark. At a birthday party they are obliged to play hide-and-seek, in the course of which the fearful brother is overwhelmed by his panic and dies. This pared-down tale shows that Greene was actually maturing as a writer.

  Three bad novels had made their way into print, while, oddly enough, a competent biography would have to wait forty years for publication. On 15 November 1930, having recently begun Rumour at Nightfall, Graham wrote to Hugh from the British Library: ‘You find me, as it were, deeply engaged working on my magnum opus, “Strephon: The Life of the Second Earl of Rochester” – that is to say I am waiting in patience while half a dozen books of varying shades of indecency are brought to me.’38 Adding to an already excessive workload, Greene was researching the life of one of the major poets of the Restoration – a figure often thought of in the 1930s as a pornographer.

  Throughout his life, Greene was devoted to the poets of the seventeenth century and often carried with him a much-marked copy of Sir Henry Newbolt’s anthology Devotional Poets of the XVII Century, which furnished him with the phrase from George Herbert that became the epigraph to Our Man in Havana: ‘And the sad man is cock of all his jests.’39 Indeed, he made the first notes for The Living Room inside its back cover. The argument that he would make for Rochester reveals a sensitivity to this period of English poetry: ‘Rochester had inherited from Donne a poetry of passionate colloquialism. Donne’s studied roughness of metre has the hesitancy and the thoughtfulness of speech; even at its most musical his poetry is that of a man speaking. Rochester’s individual characteristic was to pour the passionate colloquialism of Donne, extended to include the rough language of the stews, into the mould of the Restoration lyric without shattering the form.’40

  The choice of Rochester as a subject also reflected Greene’s private worries. A notorious rake and unbeliever, Rochester died young and surprisingly repentant at thirty-three. Although he lived for eighty-six years, Greene had always expected to die young. He knew the frailty of his own faith and felt that he was in a constant state
of mortal sin owing to his sexual life. There is plenty of evidence, not least the obsession in Brighton Rock with a change of heart ‘between the stirrup and the ground’, that Greene thought his own best hope lay in a deathbed repentance. It had worked for Rochester; it might work for him.

  Greene’s reading of Rochester’s religious views is underpinned by what became one of the touchstones of his own life. As he grew older and more troubled about his Catholic beliefs, he felt at the same time that unbelief requires a certainty that cannot be justified. Rochester, he says, saw ‘the cracks in the universe of Hobbes, the disturbing doubts in his disbelief’.41 As the years went by, he found that he himself could never share the tidy confidence of an atheist.

  He wrote a draft of the book between June and November 1931 and sent it for comment to his old friend the historian Kenneth Bell, who sent back many suggestions and criticisms.42 Greene evidently made changes to the manuscript before submitting it to Heinemann, but they refused to publish it. He guessed that they were not interested in a prosecution for obscenity, and even John Hayward, the editor of a limited edition of Rochester’s work and later a close friend of Greene, was afraid of being charged himself. Although Greene seems to have tinkered with the manuscript for a couple of years, he did not submit it to another publisher.43 Vivian de Sola Pinto would scoop him with his biography of Rochester in 1935. Greene’s work on Rochester would not see the light of day until the Bodley Head published it in 1973.

  Halfway through his three-year deal with the publishers, Greene was alarmed about his finances, so he and Vivien moved out of London in March 1931. For a pound a week they rented Little Orchard Cottage in Chipping Campden, a Gloucestershire market town. Without electricity, it was lit by smouldering Aladdin lamps. On their first night they huddled together in a quiet broken only by the hooting of an owl. Someone then knocked at the door. It turned out to be a woman swinging a dead rat by its tail. She said, ‘I thought yu’d be interested.’ In fact, the thatched roof was infested with rats until a man with a ferret came to get rid of them.44 Vivien would later speak of this period as ‘hard times’.45 Of course, they were not the only poor people in Chipping Campden – Greene observed many tramps, as well as gypsies begging from door to door.46 Graham and Vivien actually hired a maid largely because her father could not find a job.