The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 11

  Greene extolled the Windmill nudes, especially Dela Lipinska with her bawdy eyes; young, lovely, mischievous and irresistible (a rarity at the Windmill), she woos the man in the macintosh in the front row.9 He was less friendly towards the revue at the Prince of Wales:

  From two till ten every day of the week the small hooves of the Dancing Vanities beat the boards, and the Glamour Lovelies as tall as grenadiers walk lazily with a slight sneer in at one wing and out at the other. Nothing ever disturbs the arrogant poise of these monumental lovelies … their eyes remain as empty as statues.10

  His friend Muggeridge reported that before such expeditions during the blitz, Greene ‘made a special act of penitence and other appropriate liturgical preparations in case death came upon him unawares’.11

  *

  Greene loved the Windmill, and was good-humoured and full of admiration for revues plugging a simple propaganda line. But, as if his kindliness had its limits, he suddenly, and without warning, began to assail one of the original talents of the world of theatre – Noël Coward. There was no obvious reason for seeing Coward as his bête noire. Perhaps for Greene the ever-popular Coward was a suspect talent, though periodically Greene felt an almost insane urge to lash out, working off some of his bile in a review.

  The first assault took place while Greene was reviewing, and fulsomely praising, J. M. Barrie’s Dear Brutus in the Spectator on 24 January 1941. He applauded the fact that ‘Mr. John Gielgud’s production of Dear Brutus is the kind of theatrical “event” which we had almost forgotten: an all-star cast, a play which occupies in the affections of many older people the position of a minor classic …’ Greene would have liked to compare the present revival to the original, also produced during wartime (but the Spectator for some reason had failed to review Dear Brutus during its first production in 1917), to see whether the original critics ‘really swallowed the great sentimental scene between the artist-wastrel and his dream-daughter without protest’.

  Greene suspected that

  we have since those days – superficially at any rate – toughened; our literature has become less fanciful and self-pity is less prominent; but after the lapse of disappointing years when no sustained talent more important than Mr. Noël Coward’s has appeared in the theatre [emphasis added], it is possible to recognise how superbly Barrie knew his job. Mr. Coward’s works already bear the lines of time more deeply.12

  In April, reviewing Women Aren’t Angels by Vernon Sylvaine at the Strand, while telling us that ‘Mr Sylvaine’s new play is almost perfect of its kind,’ he adds, ‘and surely its kind is superior to the smart Coward comedies like too expensive cigarette cases’.13

  Only a month passed before Greene had another go at Coward. Coward had been asked by the Ministry of Information to visit America with the specific task of countering anti-British propaganda put out by the Nazis, which was ‘spreading all over America’. It was Coward’s job to ‘travel about the country to gauge the feelings of Americans in different States towards England and the British war-effort generally’. He was then invited to visit Australia and Greene quoted from Coward’s diary:

  Friday, arrival such and such a place – Civic reception – Lord Mayor very nice – wart on forehead – visited aeroplane factory, seemed fiercely efficient – Red Cross Garden Party Government House – Governor and wife charming – garden lovely – shook hands with several hundred people – matinée theatre, audience fine, sang all right but a bit woolly – drove to X camp – dinner Officers’ Mess – troop concert – Diggers terrific – too many officers’ wives in front seats – long drive home – bed – exhausted.

  Greene suggested that the Australian trip not only taxed Mr Coward’s physical powers, but taxed far more his integrity:

  Patriotism is not enough: he had to talk about England at war, and he had not seen England at war. If he had experienced the daily autumn blitz it is doubtful whether he would have said so easily: ‘During the last two months, in America, I have often felt how infinitely preferable it would be to be kept awake by bombs and sirens than by the clamour of my own thoughts.’ It would have been well to have waited to make the comparison until he had experienced both … Lack of tact was never more evident than when he rebuked – from Australia – ‘the pink parlours of Bloomsbury’ already gaping from the German bombs and declared (exhausted, it may well be, by shaking hands): ‘We must watch the future and see to it that our new young writers and poets are a little more robust …’14

  Noël Coward dealt with these attacks by sending Greene a private screed entitled ‘The Ballad of Graham Greene’ some time in June 1941:

  Oh there’s many a heart beats faster lads

  And swords from their sheathes flash keen

  When round the embers – the glowing embers

  Men crouch at Hallowe’en

  And suddenly somebody remembers

  The name of Graham Greene.

  (A literary disaster lads

  The fall of Graham Greene.)

  Oh there’s many a Catholic Priest my boys

  And many a Rural Dean

  Who, ages later – long ages later

  When all has been, has been,

  Will secretly read an old ‘Spectator’

  And pray for Graham Greene.

  (Let’s hope its sales have decreased my boys

  Because of Graham Greene.)

  Oh one asks oneself and one’s God my lads

  Was ever a mind so mean,

  That could have vented – so shrilly vented

  Such quantities of spleen

  Upon a colleague? Unprecedented:

  Poor Mr Graham Greene.

  (One’s pride forbids one to nod my lads

  To Mr Graham Greene.)

  Oh there’s many a bitter smile my boys

  And many a sneer obscene

  When any critic – a first-rate critic,

  Becomes a ‘Might have been’

  Through being as harsh and Jesuitic

  As Mr Graham Greene.

  (Restrain that cynical smile my boys,

  To jeer is never worthwhile my boys.

  Remember the rising bile my boys

  Of Mr Graham Greene.)

  At the bottom right-hand corner, Coward had typed the following explanation: ‘Perhaps it is unnecessary to state that the above was written following two very unpleasant attacks on me and my work by Mr Graham Greene in “The Spectator”’.

  But Coward followed this with a letter in verse:

  Dear Mr Graham Greene, I yearn

  So much to know why you should burn

  With such fierce indignation at

  The very fact that I exist.

  I’ve been unable to resist

  Sitting up later than I need

  To read in ‘The Spectator’ what

  Appears to be no more, no less

  Than shocking manners. I confess

  Bewilderment. I’ve seldom seen

  Another brother-writer press

  Such disadvantage with such mean

  Intent to hurt. You must have been

  For years, in secret, nourishing

  A rich, rip-snorting, flourishing

  Black hatred for my very guts!

  Surely all these envenomed cuts

  At my integrity and taste

  Must be a waste of your own time?

  What is my crime, beyond success?

  (But you have been successful too

  It can’t be that) I know a few

  Politer critics than yourself

  Who simply hate my lighter plays

  But do they state their sharp dispraise

  With such surprising, rising bile?

  Oh dear me no, they merely smile.

  A patronising smile perhaps

  But then these journalistic chaps

  Unlike ourselves, dear Mr Greene,

  (Authors I mean) are apt to sneer

  At what they fear to be apart

  From that which they conce
ive as art.

  You have descried (also with keen,

  Sadistic joy) my little book

  About Australia, one look

  At which should prove, all faults aside,

  That I had tried, dear Mr Greene,

  To do a job. You then implied

  That I had run away, afraid,

  A renegade. I can’t surmise

  Why you should view your fellow men

  With such unfriendly, jaundiced eyes.

  But then, we’re strangers. I can find

  No clue, no key to your dark mind.

  I’ve read your books as they appear

  And I’ve enjoyed them. (Nearly all.)

  I’ve racked my brains in a sincere

  But vain endeavour to recall

  If, anytime or anywhere,

  In Bloomsbury or Belgrave Square,

  In Paris or Pekin or Bude,

  I have, unwittingly, been rude,

  Or inadvertently upset you.

  (Did I once meet you and forget you?

  Have I ever been your debtor?

  Did you once write me a letter

  That I never got – or what?)

  If I knew, I shouldn’t worry.

  All this anguish, all this flurry,

  This humiliating scene

  That I’m making, Mr Greene,

  Is a plea for explanation

  For a just justification

  By what strange Gods you feel yourself empowered

  To vent this wild expenditure of spleen

  Upon yours most sincerely

  Noël Coward.

  Neither Noël Coward’s ballad nor his verse letter brought Greene’s attacks to an end. Coward’s next play, Blithe Spirit, opened at the Piccadilly a month after his ballad and verse letter were sent to Greene. It also received the chop from Greene. While admitting that Coward’s first act was magnificent, he thought his handling of death unsavoury:

  One cannot draw a picture of a normally happy marriage and try to chill the blood at the idea of the harmless, aggravating wife driving to her death in a car with which her ghostly predecessor has tampered, and then a moment after the catastrophe dissolve an audience into laughter as the new ghost sets about her rival, pulling hair and hacking shins. The sudden transitions are not only maladroit; they show a tastelessness with which Mr Cecil Parker, Miss Fay Compton and Miss Kay Hammond were powerless to cope.15

  Greene finds other examples: ‘When the curtain rises for nearly the last time, Condomine is wearing a black band on either arm – perhaps Mr Coward’s most meaningless exhibition of bad taste – a bad taste which springs from an ability to produce the appearances of ordinary human relationships – of man and wife – and an inability to feel them.’16

  Part of what Greene was objecting to here was Coward’s homosexuality, which inevitably prevented him, in Greene’s view, from really ‘knowing’ about the relationship between man and woman. But another aspect was that Coward, in Greene’s view, ran away from the blitz and the experience of death (so much the experience of every Londoner), but boasted of his patriotism abroad: ‘We’re holding the torch for England, each night in the Rainbow Room.’

  No need to follow the plot to its silly and wordy end: apart from the first act it has been a weary exhibition of bad taste, a bad taste all the more evident now when sudden death is common and dissolves more marriages than the divorce courts. It would be charitable to suppose that Mr. Coward conceived his play in the crude peaceful sunlight of Australia, between the patriotic broadcasts, and that when he has been longer in this country he will feel less blithe about this spirit world of his where dead women behave like characters in Private Lives, and a saint is ‘rather fun’.17

  The novelist Rosamond Lehmann, who was a friend of Greene’s, found his review intolerable. Her response must have pleased the disturbed heart of Coward: ‘[Greene] says … that one cannot draw a picture of a happy (second) marriage, cause the ghost of wife number one to bring about the death of wife number two, “and a moment after the catastrophe dissolve the audience into laughter as the new ghost sets about her rival …” to which the only reply is, “Can’t one!”: for Mr. Coward can and does.’ To her mind, moral indignation was altogether the wrong approach to this piece; and Coward succeeded in pulling off his fantasy without offence ‘by maintaining the subject of death at a consistent level of outrageous improbability, and not for one instant allowing genuine emotion to rear its head’. She made a wonderful point: ‘Never having to feel, we never have to shudder. If the cracks aren’t always of the highest class, they succeed each other with such dash on the part of both author and actors that they get across triumphantly; and Mr. Coward’s technical skill and brilliance are greatly to be admired.’18 She also dealt with the question of ‘taste’: ‘There is obviously no standard criticism by which to judge tastelessness … I merely wish to say that if Blithe Spirit is in bad taste, then I am led to conclude, not for the first time, that I like bad taste.’19

  Rosamond Lehmann was not alone in liking Blithe Spirit and Coward had the last laugh. The play ran for almost 2,000 performances, the longest straight run at that time of any play in London’s history. It was still running when Graham Greene was sent abroad, and while on board a small cargo vessel wrote a book about drama. In it, Greene admitted that Noël Coward had all his contemporaries beaten for craftsmanship, was indeed the best craftsman since Barrie, and was able to disguise his sentimentality (unlike Barrie). Nevertheless, he left us with a sense of Coward’s essential literary impermanence: ‘Only as the years pass and the contemporary idiom changes does his sentimentality begin to show, emerging as the dye washes off, like the colour of a stolen horse.’20

  A dozen years later, when Greene rented Coward’s house in Jamaica as a holiday home, they met for the first time. Coward commented in his diary: ‘He is very agreeable and his beastliness to me in the past I have forgiven but not forgotten.’21

  *

  Greene could be equally relentless when he was dealing with publishers, magazines and even the BBC. In June he had written a programme for the BBC entitled ‘London in Spring’. The contract department felt able to question Greene’s offering. They wrote the following autocratic Civil Service letter to Greene’s agent:

  LONDON IN SPRING as sent by Mr. Greene was not found to be suitable for broadcasting, and neither was it adaptable for our purpose. It is suggested, however, that Mr. Greene should be asked to re-write the programme, and I shall be very glad to know if you will ask him if he is prepared to do this. In that case, we would agree to pay half the original fee now, the other half to be payable on completion of the re-written programme. Perhaps you would let me know what Mr. Greene feels about this suggestion.22

  Miss Cooper, of Pearn, Pollinger and Higham, asked Greene what he would like her to say to the BBC. Greene made certain that she caught the exact tone and tenor of his meaning by writing the letter for her:

  Mr. Greene was commissioned to write a certain programme and his first sketch of it was approved by Mr. Potter. The BBC were in such a hurry over this programme that he was only allowed a few days to complete it. Its imperfections were the result of what was obviously a quite unnecessary rush. He is far too busy to work on the script again, and would certainly in any case not consent to do so without extra fee. Under the circumstances he would do no more work for this department even if offered another fee. Unless the money for work commissioned and carried out is paid very shortly, Mr Greene will have to put the matter in the hands of the Authors Society and will cancel the fortnightly Spanish talks he is doing for another section of the BBC. There is no question at all about this programme. It was commissioned and carried out. In literary matters of this kind a risk always attaches to a commission but no publisher after commissioning a book which then proved unsuitable would refuse to pay the sum contracted for.23

  *

  The fact that Greene was still in love with Dorothy Glover did not prevent him from visiting London pro
stitutes, who, around Piccadilly, wore special heels on their shoes so that they tapped like tap dancers. They shone torches on their silken legs, or showed their presence by little quick flashes of light. Greene used this experience in his novel The End of the Affair, when describing Bendrix’s adventure with a prostitute:

  It was dark and quiet by this time in the streets, though up in the moonless sky moved the blobs and beams of the searchlights. You couldn’t see faces where the women stood in doorways and at the entrances of the unused shelters. They had to signal with their torches like glow-worms. All the way up Sackville Street the little lights went on and off … A woman flashed on her light and said, ‘Like to come home with me, dear?’ I shook my head and walked on. Further up the street a girl was talking to a man: as she lit up her face for him, I got a glimpse of something young, dark and happy and not yet spoiled: an animal that didn’t recognise her captivity. I passed and then came back up the road towards them; as I approached the man left her and I spoke. ‘Like a drink?’ I said.

  ‘Coming home with me afterwards?’

  ‘Yes.’24

  Prostitutes were especially numerous in wartime London, as soldiers, sailors and airmen, separated from home and family, found sex in a doorway, or, for more money, a night in the prostitute’s room. There was also much open-air activity. Hyde and Green Parks were often invaded by an army of prostitutes turning that green and pleasant land into a battlefield of sex.

  But Greene’s days of soliciting prostitutes in the middle of the blitz were numbered. Soon he was to be engaged by British Intelligence, MI6, and, after suitable training, sent out to West Africa. No one was better suited for such a posting, for how would it be possible to find an agent who had already travelled throughout Sierra Leone and Liberia as Greene had done?

  He was returning to Africa, but first he had to be sent to a school for spies.

  PART 2

  Africa