The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Read online

  Years later when asked about this, Vivien answered that the reverse was true. She was rebuked by Greene for crying in front of the children on learning of the loss of her home. ‘Graham told me’, said Vivien, ‘how he’d gone to North Side and seen all the fire engines and police and it was all being sort of guarded, because he had been living in Bloomsbury with Dorothy and had simply come to fetch books and things like that and found it had been bombed. His life was saved because of his infidelity.’23 By the same token Greene, by evacuating his family, had saved their lives.

  When salvaging what remained of his possessions, Greene’s primary concern was the missing first editions of his work, which many years later turned up at Sotheby’s:

  The extraordinary thing, it was a Queen Anne house and it had a staircase supposed to have been influenced by Vauban. This great curved staircase kept up by pressure on the wall and this pressure is what held the staircase up and it remained. The floors had gone in from the backrooms and where most of my books were. In the sitting room there was a big hole there. There was only a narrow little piece of floor around and I had to abandon those books. Just that big hole and the room had lost everything except one foot of skirting going all the way round.24

  His study, however, was safe and Greene made a chute and pushed down the books he kept there.25 He was unable to rescue most of his first editions, which were signed and inscribed, and he assumed that later somebody with ladders had managed to get hold of them. But in the end Sotheby’s let him buy them back at the price they had paid for them.

  Vivien came up from Oxford with a van and took away the most valued objects; she placed Greene’s books in Trinity library and some furniture with friends. She recalled her visit: ‘I walked in tears on the edge of the front room looking down at the deep frightening cavity two floors below and all the rafters and rubble and dirt. Some furniture was dragged out of the house by thieves – my grandmother’s little davenport was one.’26 Her own books were among the broken glass at North Side; her diaries, letters, and photographs were destroyed by the bomb (as was a native harp which Greene had carried throughout his journey in Liberia).

  The loss of the house took place at the height of the blitz, a time that was doubly exhausting for Greene because, as well as working at the Spectator, he was on nightly air-raid-warden duty. There is no evidence that he found the loss of the house as heartbreaking as he suggested in his letter to his mother. Muggeridge recorded a different reaction in his diary: ‘Graham … when he heard that his house at Clapham Common had been destroyed in the blitz … experienced a sense of relief because there was a mortgage on it and it had represented a heavy financial liability.’27 Greene expressed relief to me:

  I used to go back during my lunch time, sometimes with Dorothy, to see if the house was there in Clapham Common, until it wasn’t … I think it was rather slightly absurd. I mean I simply felt relieved that I didn’t have to be backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards all day, and lose my lunch every day, whenever there had been a raid and there were raids most days, to see that the thing was there. So then it wasn’t …28

  That his reaction was relief seems clear from his comments about the loss immediately after it happened. On 4 October 1940, in reviewing the memoirs of Mrs Compton Mackenzie about life in Capri in the last year of the First World War, Greene was severely critical: ‘The collapse of a whole way of life can be read into Mrs. Compton Mackenzie’s book of gossip.’ He also asserted: ‘It makes one more reconciled to the cement floor [of the basement and air-raid shelter]: this had to happen?’ In responding to Mrs Compton Mackenzie’s distress at his review, he referred to the loss of his house, but in a curious way: ‘A few days after your letter arrived, my house (alas, a Christopher Wren one) was destroyed … but that too I expect had to happen. I admit the cement floor is hardly likely to make things better … except that I can’t help feeling discomfort does have its value.’29

  Greene’s attitude towards the loss of his house also comes out in a number of letters. To Anthony Powell he wrote starkly: ‘My house has been blasted into wreckage by a landmine’:30 to his American literary agent, Mary Pritchett, he spoke of his crowded life:

  I’ve been very remiss in writing to you, but … life is quite crowded. I’m literary editing this paper [Spectator], acting as dramatic critic, reviewing a good deal, completely failing to write any books, doing some B.B.C. scripts, and at least three nights a week act as an air raid warden from 10 [p.m.] till 2 in the morning, or until the ‘Raiders Passed [siren]’ goes.

  But he wrote only incidentally about the loss of his home: ‘I’m glad to say I saved practically all my books from the house, though poor Vivien lost most of her Victorian furniture and objects. It’s sad because it was a pretty house, but oddly enough it leaves one very carefree.’31 Perhaps he felt justifiably bombed, after all so many had suffered this fate. After asking Mary Pritchett to write to his wife (‘She has the thin end of things’) he concluded his letter, in spite of his being daily witness to terrible nightly destruction, with two extraordinary, even bizarre sentences: ‘I have a most interesting and agreeable time in London. It all seems most right and proper.’

  Malcolm Muggeridge’s continued analysis in his diary about Greene’s loss of his Queen Anne house is shrewd:

  I said I didn’t think it was unreasonable [that Vivien rebuked him], because, obviously, Vivien felt that the destruction of their house was an outward and visible manifestation of the destruction of their marriage, and that Graham’s satisfaction at the destruction of the house was not really because it released him from a financial burden, but because he saw in it the promise of being relieved of a moral one.32

  For Vivien the loss was very real. She had lost so much with that beautiful house: it was to be the last house that she lived in with her husband on a permanent basis. She had always been fascinated by antiques and particularly by Victorian antiques but now, because of this trauma, she became obsessed by dolls’ houses: ‘The loss of that house certainly had something to do with my growing interest in dolls’ houses.’ Neither the war nor a ‘missing’ husband could take away her small homes for small dolls. These at least were hers. Like Ibsen’s Mrs Solness, the Master Builder’s wife who lost her children yet continued to keep up empty nurseries, Vivien lost her last happy marital home, but persistently bought dolls’ houses. She is considered a leading authority on seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dolls’ houses and her private museum contains one of the finest collections in England.

  *

  We have seen the sense of freedom that Greene felt in the loss of his beautiful Queen Anne house. If his short story ‘The Destructors’ is anything to go by, his relief had aspects of psychic violence about it. Written in 1954, it reflects Greene’s partiality for the anarchy and violence released by the war. Diana Cooper once concluded that Graham Greene was a good man possessed of a devil. This demon for destruction was linked to the imaginative deracination of his own house, 14 North Side. ‘I remember telling him’, Vivien recalled, ‘that in his story “The Destructors” he was writing about our house, 14 North Side. It angered him extremely. Perhaps he didn’t realise that or perhaps he was angry because I had found it out.’33

  ‘The Destructors’, when it was televised by Thames Television in 1978, brought a hostile response. Vivien placed a newspaper cutting about the film in her journal for that year. The headline was PROTESTS OVER ‘WICKED’ PLAY: ‘Many viewers telephoned Thames Television last night complaining about scenes of violence in a play called “The Destructors”. The play, a dramatisation of Graham Greene’s story, was described as wicked, corrupt and frightening by about 200 callers.’ Above this cutting, Vivien wrote in her own hand:

  The Destructors: The house was 14 North Side: when we lived there, Graham fell in love with Dorothy Glover … When the short story was published it distressed me considerably & I cried, & next time I saw Graham said how upsetting it was. He was very brusque & rough: ‘I don’t
know what you mean.’

  In a note below the cutting, Vivien added the audience ‘objected to the vandalism. I minded because the writer seemed to hate the house (our home) which was destroyed in 1941 by incendiary.’34

  *

  In the story, a gang of working-class youths with an upper-middle-class leader called ‘T’ tear down an old man’s home. The house is a Christopher Wren, Queen Anne house and, like Greene’s own, was badly damaged in the blitz. The owner, an old man the gang calls Old Misery, one day gives the boys chocolate. That is his undoing; from that moment, his only possession, the wrecked house, is doomed – evil is to be returned for good. A photograph of Greene’s bombed house fits the description of the house Greene gives in his story, the side walls similarly supported by wooden struts:

  ‘We’d do it from inside. I’ve found a way in.’ [‘T’] said with a sort of intensity, ‘We’d be like worms, don’t you see, in an apple. When we came out again there’d be nothing there, no staircase, no panels, nothing but just walls, and then we’d make the walls fall down – somehow.’35

  By lunchtime, ‘Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china. The dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges and the destroyers had moved up a floor.’ ‘T’ discovers hidden bundles of pound notes and then decides that they are not to be thieves. The gang will not share out the money, but will, in ritual celebration, burn it: ‘taking it in turns they held a note upwards and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly towards their fingers. The grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age.’ Blackie, to explain to himself why ‘T’ has taken these terrible actions against Old Misery, suggests that he must hate him, but the strange boy ‘T’ answers, ‘There’d be no fun if I hated him … All this hate and love,’ he said, ‘it’s soft, it’s hooey. There’s only things, Blackie …’36

  Such nihilism in a child was not new in Greene and unquestionably was derived from his experience of what he saw as unadulterated evil in his schoolboy enemy Carter. Carter was able to exercise authority over others to make them do his bidding, to restrict human sympathy in his fellow schoolboys. ‘T’ in this story does just this, by abiding by no rules and feeling no love.

  Yet in the characterisation of ‘T’ there is something of young Greene himself. In his youth, Greene played with working-class boys, taking with him cricket bat and wickets which they couldn’t afford in order to win them over, so the theme of the story could be said to reflect an experience in his own life. Of course, no comparable vicious actions were committed by Greene. What we are speaking of here is his living in an imaginative world, one which is anarchistic, violent and destructive.

  Even so, the name ‘T’ is a strange one. When Greene felt particularly desperate or felt the need to express unpleasant aspects of his character (either in poems or in letters to Vivien), he revealed the Mr Hyde side of his personality under the pseudonym ‘Hilary Trench’. This gloomy and morbid double personality never left him, though when he was courting Vivien he was often at pains to assert the death of Trench. Trench was nasty and brutish, and his mood was one of bitter raillery: ‘And … you need never be afraid of meeting H. T. I’ve got to convince you that he’s dead.’37 But this secret personality sometimes took over, however much he regretted the sudden assumption of his alter ego. Muggeridge put it somewhat differently:

  February 24, 1948: Greene, we agreed, is a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony. There is a conflict within him, and therefore he is liable to pursue conflict without. I remember him saying to me once that he had to have a row with someone or other because rows were almost a physical necessity to him. This pursuit of disharmony is wrong …38

  This Trench or ‘T’ was a disturbing inheritance. To Vivien he wrote: ‘Miserableness is like a small germ I’ve had inside me as long as I can remember. And sometimes it starts wriggling [inside me].’39 These insidious little worms periodically crept into his brain, gnawing away at the foundations of his belief so that he was left with ‘only things’. On such occasions, Greene felt a total sense of emptiness and hated the initiator of life – God.

  * * *

  fn1 Greene recalled this many years later when he gave Jones, that fraudulent but wonderful character in The Comedians, the following dramatic monologue entitled ‘A Warden’s Patrol’ (the popular quality of it reflecting Jones’s character): ‘The flares came down over Euston, St. Pancras, / And dear old Tottenham Road / And the warden walking his lonely beat / Saw his shadow like a cloud … Maple’s is hit, Gower Street’s a ghost, / Piccadilly’s alight …’

  6

  Trivial Comedies, Shallow Tragedies

  My life’s amusements have been just the same

  Before and after standing armies came.

  – ALEXANDER POPE

  GREENE WAS ALMOST single-handedly running the arts section of the Spectator in 1941, for as well as writing book and film reviews, he was going to whatever live theatre was on offer, especially revues, both before and during the evening blitz. Greene had always been a lover of revues, he had gone to them since childhood and enjoyed them without any sense of smugness; he understood them on their own simple terms.

  He was also aware of the difficulties of reviewing live entertainment: ‘One must write quickly before one forgets, jot notes upon one’s programme as the songs and the jokes pass on their rapid way, in at one ear and out of the other.’ Of the New Ambassadors Revue at the Ambassadors, Greene admitted remembering only a few sketches and one especially: a savage little song about English exiles escaping the war in New York (‘We’re holding the torch for England, each night in the Rainbow Room’).1 In reviewing S. N. Behrman’s comedy No Time for Comedy, he made the point that at this time in the crisis of London, ‘Trivial comedies are better than shallow tragedies. Millions of people already have learnt how to die: they don’t need any more lessons. To be gay is also a duty.’2

  His differences with his colleagues were made clear when, almost alone, he praised Wednesday After the War at the New Theatre, which was rather chillingly received by the West End audience: ‘After a great deal of heart-searching I recommend Wednesday After the War as the best musical entertainment in town.’ He admitted that the musical needed the faint smell of bottled beer from the bar and gala nights with coloured balloons floating down from the ceiling: the fish-like faces, the applause like damp hand-clasps. Somebody behind me – who probably liked his demure and Punch-like Farjeon – said, ‘It’s pretty grim, isn’t it?’ Grim? with Mr. Jerry Verno singing a song which would have set all Islington whistling:

  I’m a Home Guard man on duty,

  And I’m no blinkin’ beauty,

  With me tin-hat, with me gas-mask,

  with me gun.

  Grim? with Miss Robina Gilchrist singing charmingly the title song that contains all the nostalgia of our time, ‘Wednesday after the war’; with all the cuties waving flags and chanting, ‘Please Mr. Churchill’? This is exactly what a war-time revue should be.3

  Even revues bombed out of London the previous year were now returning like homing birds. Greene commended especially Up and Doing at the Savile Theatre: Mr Cyril Ritchard ‘in a blonde wig and a slinky gown with an unreliable Zip, hungry and horrible and prehensile as a torch-singer, or clumsy with ostrich feathers as a fandancer’, or Ritchard in red tabs, singing with jerky ferocity of the ‘Whitehall Warriors’:

  Whenever the sirens start to blow,

  I’m the one of the first to go

  Below.4

  Greene’s attitude had mellowed. The crushingly dismissive film reviewer of 1937 (when he was editing Night and Day) had all but disappeared, to be replaced by a kinder critic, imaginatively and emotionally sympathetic. He was one of the few critics to praise the many story lines of Kim Peacock’s domestic play, Under One Roof, involving the unhappy love-life of one of the daughters. She is in love wit
h a celibate clergyman, but finds herself pregnant by a married man: ‘Mr. Peacock’s play contains a whole Molotov bread-basket of incendiary situations … like an expert fire-fighter, [he] extinguishes every bomb in turn before it has time to start a fire.’ Moreover, ‘his lines are witty and savage … [but] he refuses to take even his savagery seriously and ties everything up in the last scene with a Dickensian sentiment that has the effect of a shoulder-shrug.’5

  In the same column, he praised Black Vanities: ‘Miss Frances Day … that graceless face under the battered crownless straw, those dirty ducks sagging below slack braces are the perfect foil for beauty – the thin Venetian glass figure, the undine smile, the long brittle fingers tossing a flower to an officer in a box, something for the troops to dream about as she sings Silver Wings:

  He with his wings on his tunic

  Me with my heart on my sleeve.’6

  But Greene went to more than theatre comedies and revues. With Muggeridge in tow, he went at the height of the blitz to the famous Windmill Theatre (reputed never to close) where nudes were then bound by law to keep absolutely still. The spectacle appealed to Greene for its tattiness: ‘[Greene] explained how the cognoscenti knew just where to sit to get the best view, and how, as the front rows cleared, spectators at the back pressed forward to take their places; wave upon wave, like an attacking army.’7 In his review, Greene expressed himself more prosaically: ‘The mixture-as-before goes smoothly down the throats of the lonely men in macintoshes … one man in a macintosh gets up and goes out and another takes his place … there is almost a religious air of muffled footsteps and private prayers … the rites are rather sombre.’8