The Unquiet Englishman Page 9

  A rustic Graham Greene is hard to imagine. Twenty years later, he would remark, ‘Nature doesn’t really interest me – except in so far as it may contain an ambush – that is, something human.’47 Still, he was an avid rambler. In May he reported to his mother that he had hiked 127 miles that month.48 He frequently took walks of about fifteen miles – probably best understood as pub crawls – with Vivien’s Pekinese. Charmingly, Graham and Vivien often left messages of affection for each other in a medallion on the dog’s collar.49 All the exercise supposedly caused the beast to go mad, and it had to be put down.

  That summer Graham suffered through bad hay fever and asthma. Still he did his best to adjust to country life; he picked apples in the garden, and grew romaine lettuces with the assistance of a gypsy gardener who gathered up snails for his own cooking. The locals would make wine out of almost anything, even parsnips. Vivien threw herself into the life of the place, and was soon organizing the church fête. Their parish priest, Father Henry Bilsborrow, was a far cry from the sophisticates of the Brompton Oratory. He shared his bedroom with an intrusive owl, and rode about on a knock-kneed horse.50 He struggled in his sermons, sometimes producing spoonerisms, such as ‘Jonah in the welly of the bale for three days’.51 Greene recalled him preaching about the missions, ‘What a glorious sight! Seven thousand Zulus coming to communion. We don’t see that in England.’52

  The most memorable of the local characters was Charles Seitz, known in the village as Charlie Sykes. He was born in Bombay, the son of a doctor. In the course of his own medical studies he suffered a mental breakdown, so he went to Canada where he worked as a cattle drover, and to South Africa where he served in the Cape Mounted Police. During the last part of his life, in Chipping Campden, he would often be seen almost hunchbacked under a weight of rags. A hard drinker, he was flea-ridden, and he often tangled with the police. He played up his madness for tourists and would pose for pictures if they paid him. Despite having several hundred pounds in the bank, he was an inveterate beggar, and lived in a cottage of two rooms, which contained only a broken chair, a pile of straw, and sixteen pairs of battered shoes. He froze to death there in a cold snap at the beginning of 1933 and his body had to be lowered down the stairs in a net. Greene was impressed by the extremes of his life, and wrote an article about him for the Spectator.53

  Their new home was isolated, but some visitors made the journey, among them a Norwegian poet and dramatist named Nordahl Grieg.54 It appears that they were introduced by Nils Lie, the Norwegian translator of The Man Within. The son of a Bergen schoolteacher, he signed on at seventeen as a deckhand on a ship bound for China and Australia and afterwards wrote of a shipboard life that was all danger at sea and all prostitutes in port. In 1924 he won a scholarship that allowed him to spend a year at Wadham College, Oxford. He went as a journalist to China during the civil war, and interviewed leaders on both sides. He spent a year and a half in Moscow studying Soviet theory, and remained a supporter of Stalin through the period of the show trials. He also fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. In the late 1930s, he and his brother Harald, a publisher, cut impressive figures in Norwegian culture. When the Germans occupied Norway he went into exile on a ship that carried the royal family and the national treasure. From England, where Graham met him again, holding court in a roomful of Norwegian exiles, he gave radio talks that were transmitted into Norway, and eventually died in a bombing raid over Berlin. His reputation as a poet faded, but interest revived in the most tragic of circumstances. After the 2011 Norway attacks, one of Grieg’s patriotic songs, ‘Til Ungdommen’ (‘To the Youth’), became a source of national consolation and was sung at memorial services and played repeatedly on the radio.55

  Greene knew almost nothing about Grieg when he trudged up the lane to the cottage in Chipping Campden, and could remember seeing him in person only twice afterwards, but felt an intimacy with him and a freedom to discuss any subject. A skilled debater, Grieg was seldom bothered when his friends disagreed with his ideas. He politely told Greene in a letter that the setting of Rumour at Nightfall was botched, and he expected the same degree of honesty in return. It was a deep friendship that sprang up suddenly. When Grieg arrived, he carried hope to the discouraged Greene ‘like a glass of akvavit’.56

  8

  THE DEVIL LOOKS AFTER HIS OWN

  ‘That year, 1931, for the first and last time in my life I deliberately set out to write a book to please, one which with luck might be made into a film. The devil looks after his own and in Stamboul Train I succeeded in both aims . . . ’ After his failures, it was imperative that Greene write a popular book.1 He would later wonder whether the film Grand Hotel, which explores the lives of travellers at a Berlin hotel, gave him the idea,2 but this is not possible as it was released a full year after he began research on his own novel about the Orient Express. The events of the novel are set in April 1932, just as Hitler was narrowly defeated by Paul von Hindenburg for the German presidency and the Nazis were making gains in other elections. Yugoslavia was in the throes of an economic and political crisis – there was a new premier and the police were arbitrarily arresting or executing people who seemed opposed to centralization.3 Word was reaching the West of grave food shortages in the Soviet Union; it became known a little later that this was a famine caused by the forced collectivization of farms. That portion of the famine which occurred in Ukraine is known as the Holodomor, a term meaning extermination by hunger, and it took the lives of 4.5 million people4 – some estimates are much higher. The European news was alarming, and the public wanted distractions, among them the fantasy of a glamorous journey on the Orient Express.5

  Greene certainly could not afford it. So he appealed around the end of April 1931 to Wagons-Lits and then to Thomas Cook for free passage to Istanbul. They refused, so he booked a third-class passage as far as the German border and from there took advantage of a generous provision that allowed authors a free pass on the state rail system. Even so, his journey ended at Cologne. He took careful notes and says that readers can be assured, for example, that the allotments he placed near Bruges were in the right place, but in the last stage of the novel he was relying on the inspiration provided by listening over and over to Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231, a composition that reproduces the driving rhythms of a locomotive. His description of the key border crossing from Hungary to Serbia at Subotica was cut from whole cloth.6

  This engaging story is focused on a handful of a strangers thrown together for the journey. Coral Musker is an impoverished dancer headed for a new job in Istanbul. She and Carleton Myatt, a Jewish merchant dealing in raisins, strike up an affair. Dr Czinner, a political exile, is heading back, incognito, to Yugoslavia to lead a leftist uprising. He is spotted by Mabel Warren, an aggressive British journalist whose love for the much younger Janet Pardoe has left her embittered. Among the minor characters are a murderer on the run and a popular novelist.

  One difficulty today with the book is the constant reference to Myatt as ‘the Jew’. Indeed, occasional uses of the word ‘Jew’ with a negative or unattractive signification appear in Greene’s writing until about the beginning of 1941. In 1988, he observed: ‘After the holocaust one couldn’t use the word Jew in the loose way one used it before the war. Myatt in fact is one of the nicest characters in Stamboul Train, both brave and sympathetic.’ Still, he made sure to cut out some instances of the word in new editions, as he did with similar references to Sir Marcus in A Gun for Sale, a character based on Sir Basil Zaharoff, chairman of Vickers, and to the gangster Colleoni in Brighton Rock.7

  Greene was alert to the persecution of Jews in Europe and wanted to write about it. Indeed, Myatt is subjected to discrimination which the book plainly deplores. Greene proposed to the editor of the Graphic that he go to Munich to report on Hitler’s rally of 3 July 1932, but was turned down. Before long, however, his brother Hugh was in a position to tell him anything he needed to know about Nazi Germany. Although an agnostic, Hugh’s journalis
m often focused on Germany’s religious groups. For example, Graham obtained introductions for him to Jesuits in south Germany, and this helped him form an impression of Catholic resistance to the Nazis, which became a theme in his reporting.8 At the beginning of 1934, Hugh became a correspondent for the Telegraph in Berlin and promptly made a visit to Dachau, which at that time contained three thousand political prisoners. He made several more trips to the camp and provided the newspaper with unflinching accounts of Nazi brutality, anti-Semitism, and territorial ambition – when other newspapers, notably The Times, were trying not to offend the Germans.9 Graham Greene saw Germany and its treatment of Jews through the eyes of his brother.

  In late 1937, Graham Greene and his friend the writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who as a journalist had broken the story of the famine in Ukraine, tried, in vain, to find a publisher for a book about the conflict in Palestine, with Greene to take the ‘pro-Jewish’ side and Muggeridge the ‘pro-Arab’.10 In the summer of 1939, Greene convinced Heinemann to commission Refugee Ship, ‘a non-fiction book, describing one of these rather appalling voyages from Constanza in Rumania on old wooden Greek boats carrying 3 or 400 Jews. They try to smuggle them into Palestine and are generally nabbed by British destroyers.’11 Ruling Palestine under the League of Nations Mandate, Britain had severely restricted immigration and in so doing blocked a route to safety for refugees from the Nazis. Some ships were able to land their passengers at places like Haifa, only for them to be placed in detention camps. Other ships were intercepted or even fired upon and sent back to their ports of origin. Some were redirected to Cyprus where the passengers were interned.12 With the coming of the war, Greene shelved this project, though perhaps an echo of his concern over Jewish refugees lingers in The Power and the Glory, when he describes the whisky priest as ‘a man without a passport who is turned away from every harbour’.13 Few in Britain shared his concern for the Jewish refugees, but attitudes were shifting – he observed with approval in early 1941: ‘anti-semitism in this country however moderate has begun to be looked on as fascist’.14

  Working on the biography of Rochester for most of 1931, he did not actually begin writing Stamboul Train until 2 January 1932.15 By the time he finished it in late July and sent it off to the publisher, he was in a spot. His three-year deal with the publishers was running out – indeed, his annual payment had already been cut by £250. He had a tax bill to pay, and he was, as he told Hugh, approaching bankruptcy.16 Apart from the payment from the publishers, which was technically an advance on future sales, the amount he earned from books and reviews in the first half of 1932 was just £16 8d.17 Both Graham and Vivien were entering literary competitions in the hope of prize money. He asked The Times to take him back; the assistant editor Robert Barrington-Ward wrote with some asperity: ‘Since your day, the tents have been folded and moved on.’18 Enquiries at the Observer, Spectator, and Catholic Herald came to nothing. He even went as far as to apply for a teaching job at Chulalankarana University in Bangkok.19

  Then, in mid-August, a letter from Heinemann arrived, which he opened with hands literally trembling. Evans wrote: ‘It is beyond doubt the best book, as a whole, which you have written so far . . . ’ Greene went to St Catharine’s Church in Chipping Campden to thank God. While there he decided that an idea he had been considering for a novel about spiritualism and incest was no good and that he should try another story in the vein of Stamboul Train – ‘a large inclusive picture of a city which should use my experience as much as my imagination’.20 This was the germ for It’s a Battlefield. Greene would return to the subject of spiritualism, however fleetingly, in The Ministry of Fear. Incest would make its appearance in England Made Me.

  Evans liked the new work, but Greene was not in the clear. Even a good novel might fail to sell. On 1 September he met with Evans and the representative of Nelson Doubleday, Mary Leonard (later Pritchett), who would become Greene’s agent in the United States and a very close friend, but on this day seemed a ‘dragon’.21 With the manuscript on the table, they reviewed his sales record. Evans was willing to extend Heinemann’s payment to Greene for one more year, under a new contract for two books with the tough provision that all losses, that is, the difference between the money he had been receiving as advances and the actual amount he was owed from sales, were to be recovered by the publisher before any royalties could be paid. Leonard agreed to no more than a two-month extension while they studied the new novel. Greene realized that he might have to write the two books for no money at all and ‘was close to tears’.22

  Downplaying one of Greene’s hopes, they told him that selection by the Book Society was unlikely since the novel included a lesbian character.23 However, Greene’s friend Rupert Hart-Davis had worked for Heinemann until 1932 and was now employed by the Book Society. Hart-Davis was intent on helping Greene and tried discreetly to advance his cause. Moreover, another of Greene’s friends, the poet Edmund Blunden, had joined the committee. On 7 October 1932 Hart-Davis sent Greene a telegram of congratulations – his book had been chosen.24 The success of Stamboul Train now seemed assured. Meanwhile, there was every chance of selling film rights. Basil Dean, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal, and RKO were are all ‘biting’.25

  However, there was rough water ahead. At the end of November, J. B. Priestley, one of the bestselling novelists of the time, laid hands on a review copy of the book, and concluded, rightly, that Greene had used him as the model for the faux-cockney Q. C. Savory, who styles himself the contemporary Dickens. At one point in the story, the journalist Mabel Warren says that within a few years Savory will be arrested for indecencies in Hyde Park.26 Priestley threatened Evans with libel action. ‘I should laugh if all my hopes did not rest on this book,’ Greene wrote in his journal.27

  Priestley wanted the publication stopped. Evans waved off Greene’s suggestion that they fight the action. As a Heinemann author himself, Priestley was more valuable to the firm than Greene was. Greene had to dictate changes from the phone box in Chipping Campden, getting rid of references to Dickens, pipe-smoking, blunt fingers, and other supposedly identifying marks. The thirteen thousand copies already printed had to be cut open and then resewn with the new pages, a process costing £400, of which, evidently, half was added to Greene’s debt to Heinemann28 – a debt not finally cleared until the publication of Brighton Rock in 1938.29 A few days later, he had to listen to Priestley give a speech at a Book Society luncheon and then join a toast to ‘Literature coupled with the name of Mr. J. B. Priestley’.30 Soon he dreamt that he had murdered Priestley at the Times Book Club.31 Perhaps not quite as satisfying as having him dead, Greene learned at the beginning of March that Priestley was no longer the chief book reviewer for the Evening Standard and seized on an erroneous piece of gossip to explain it – he had been sacked because his secretary was writing the reviews.32

  But his main consolation was that his book was selling – 16,360 by 24 February.33 Publicity brought certain penalties, including letters from obsessive readers such as Janet Pardoe of Pennsylvania, who had the same name as one of his characters: ‘Am considered rather attractive, as was your character, but, hope not the empty-headed, self-centred, parasitical person your Janet was.’34

  Greene remained anxious about money and was greatly relieved when Derek Verschoyle, the literary editor of the Spectator, asked him to review fiction for the magazine once or twice a month. At a rate of five guineas per review, Greene had hopes of bringing in £70 to £130 per year, plus the resale value of his review copies.35 He worked for Verschoyle for most of the next decade and succeeded him as literary editor when the war came. Jeremy Lewis tells us that according to oral tradition (i.e. Diana Athill’s father) Verschoyle ‘kept a .22 rifle in the office in Gower Street, and would occasionally fling open his window and, his feet propped up on the desk, take potshots at stray cats lurking in the garden or on the black-bricked wall beyond; but however unpopular he may have been with Bloomsbury cats, his convivial, heavy-drinking ways recommended him to his
colleagues.’36 Greene reviewed hundreds of books for Verschoyle, and from mid-1935 was also the magazine’s film reviewer. According to his bibliographers, Greene, over his whole career, reviewed five hundred books and six hundred films.37 There is no evidence that he shot any cats.

  Greene’s fortunes were about to turn. His film agent, the influential Elisabeth Marbury in New York, died on 22 January 1933. At the same time, Mary Leonard was leaving Doubleday to set up as an agent. Greene also wanted to distance himself from Doubleday, so threw in his lot with her: she would be his American agent, while David Higham of Curtis Brown would continue to represent him in London. Over cocktails at the Savoy, he blurted out: ‘There’s nothing like a successful book for getting one free drinks!’38 By 11 April, she had closed a film deal with Fox for $7500, a huge sum for a young author, it meant that the prospect of real hardship was gone – and just in time. In May, Vivien discovered she was pregnant.

  The marriage, though affectionate, was now strained. Graham had been involved with prostitutes, including one named Annette whom he had been seeing for about a year and a half. Vivien knew what was happening: ‘I heard a little murmur here, something – I’m very intuitive. And then this prostitute Annette had the nerve to ring up once – and I took the call. And I knew – there weren’t five syllables before I knew quite well. I think she had a sort of beat in Bond Street. But what could I do?’39