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

  Vivien could not have anticipated the dangers that would arise from such an arrangement.

  The pressure of writing two separate books told on him and to keep up the pace he used benzedrine. For six weeks he started each day with a tablet, renewing the dose at midday:

  Each day I sat down to work [on The Confidential Agent] with no idea of what turn the plot might take and each morning I wrote, with the automatism of a planchette, two thousand words instead of my usual stint of five hundred words. In the afternoons The Power and the Glory proceeded towards its end at the same leaden pace unaffected by the sprightly young thing who was so quickly overtaking it.30

  By early May (an incredible six weeks) Greene had completed The Confidential Agent.fn4 Charles Evans and A. S. Frere of Heinemann liked it and he then offered it to Viking: ‘You’ve heard from Mary [Pritchett, his agent in America] about a thriller … Evans and Frere like this and think it very saleable over here,’ but he admitted, with his usual honesty, that it was a lightweight affair: ‘I’m giving it to [Heinemann] outside my contract for 300 pounds instead of 500. I feel it’s only fair not to ask for the full advance from you.’31

  Charles Evans particularly liked the book: ‘Charlie had seized “THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT” off his desk and read and liked it very much,’32 wrote Greene’s agent, who therefore hoped to receive the full contracted sum. However, Greene’s last novel, Brighton Rock, had only earned £256 in the nine months since publication, and the publishers decided to exercise caution and pay a smaller advance.

  It did not receive immediate praise and even his friend, Derek Verschoyle, in reviewing it admitted that ‘Mr. Greene, with his eyes fatally fixed on Hollywood, has slapped his hero down against a merely formal background and handed out action neat.’33 Greene disowned it himself in a gentle way: ‘perhaps it is not really one of mine. It was as though I were ghosting for another man. D, the chivalrous agent and professor of Romance literature, is not really one of my characters, nor is Forbes, born Furtstein.’34 The book moved rapidly because he was not struggling with his own technical problems. ‘I was to all intents ghosting a novel by an old writer who was to die a little before the studio in which I had worked was blown out of existence.’35 The ‘old writer’ Greene had in mind – he died on 26 June 1939 at Deauville – was Ford Madox Ford, whom Greene admired immensely.

  In spite of his demur, The Confidential Agent is characteristically Greene. Verschoyle criticised Greene’s emphasis on violence (‘[it] has become an obsession’) and on those ‘parts of the human nature that are mirrored in the police courts’. Also, it is a world where there is ‘no nobility, no beauty (except of female appearance), no integrity unless allied to incompetence, in which trust is absent and suspicion ubiquitous, confidence and generosity unknown and greed and fear universal’.36 The review appeared soon after war had been declared, and it was war which taught us about perfidious man and his partiality for violence, a lesson Greene already knew.

  Greene’s serious doubts about the significance of the novel rose again in the 1950s when he was considering which novels to include in the Uniform Edition of his work. He wrote to John Hayward (whom he had known since 1931 and whose judgment he trusted) asking him if he would take a look at The Confidential Agent (‘written in a great hurry … because I thought war was coming and wanted money in the bank’), to see whether he should include it in the Uniform Edition. Greene’s own feeling was against inclusion (it is significant that in the manuscript Greene used not his own name but the pseudonym Henry Gough) and he promised to take Hayward’s judgment as final.37

  But if it was money that was of such importance, and if, as Verschoyle suggested, Greene had his eyes ‘fatally fixed on Hollywood’, then Greene played his cards right because Warner Brothers bought the book before publication. The film caught the spirit of the book and Charles Boyer was splendid as the world-weary Spanish loyalist. Greene especially admired Boyer’s ability to wear ‘worry like a habit on his forehead’. In an undated letter to her husband, Vivien recalled opening Vogue and seeing The Confidential Agent listed under ‘Books to Beat the Blackout’ and being thrilled.

  *

  Greene, forcing the pace, suffered for it: ‘At five o’clock I would return home with a shaking hand, a depression which fell with the regularity of tropical rain, ready to find offence in anything and to give offence for no cause.’38 He broke himself of the benzedrine habit by taking smaller and smaller doses. In looking back, he felt that ‘those benzedrine weeks were more responsible than the separation of war and my own infidelities for breaking our marriage’.39 However, although his marriage was still far from over, there were difficulties in the offing since Greene was highly sexed and his wife less so. But neither benzedrine nor his infidelities led to the break up of his marriage during the war – that process was infinitely slow.

  On 23 August 1939 communist Russia signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, disillusioning many who thought Russia the natural enemy of Germany. Immediately the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty was signed, Greene, thinking war would now come quickly, evacuated his family. He moved his wife and two children to his mother’s home in Crowborough, Sussex. Vivien recalled the event:

  We went from Clapham Common in a taxi to Crowborough. I had a kitten and a canary in a cage and my children and a German refugee called Lore. Lucy was sick in the taxi. We had the dear little cat and the children’s bird and clothes and blankets. Toys, clocks, furniture, books or valuables were left. That’s how we went to Crowborough. Graham’s mother’s house was very cold and there wasn’t much room really. The cat was never allowed in the living quarters of the house. The canary we had to give away at Crowborough.40

  The final act leading to war was Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Hearing the news, the well-known literary editor John Lehmann remembered that he had the feeling he was slipping down into a pit, clutching at grass, which did not stop his accelerating descent into darkness. Thousands of children were evacuated from London. Reluctantly, and only after a revolt by his cabinet, Chamberlain issued an ultimatum that unless German forces withdrew from Poland, a state of war would exist. There was no response from Germany and on Sunday 3 September, war was declared: ‘Everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins,’ Chamberlain said movingly. He at last recognised that the country would be fighting ‘evil things … brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution’.

  Greene continued to live at 14 North Side, Clapham Common, troubled by the sudden departure of his family, but seeing no alternative. Separation because of war was, he felt, much worse for Vivien. ‘I’ve always had a feeling for a physical anarchy,’ he wrote to Vivien, ‘to match the philosophical anarchy!’ And because they were short of money, Greene told his wife that he was being frugal: ‘I’m living very economically, 6d breakfast, 8d lunch, & 1/6d supper at the outside!’41 Perhaps he was hinting to Vivien that she too should be frugal: she had a passion for antiques and for jewellery.

  Only a few days before the declaration of war, Greene described a changed city: ‘London very odd. Dim lighting, pillar boxes turned into white zebras in some parts. The [Clapham] Common a mass of tents and nobody about on North Side. All the old shabby pound notes which would have been destroyed are being stored in the country in case the printing works (used by the Spectator) are destroyed.’42

  Once war was declared, it was believed that devastating raids would be made immediately on London: ‘My imagination’, said Churchill, ‘drew pictures of ruin and carnage and vast explosions,’ but it was a year before the Luftwaffe attempted the destruction of London. Londoners began to make preparations the day war was declared. Pubs had cardboard stuck over their windows, providing a total blackout so that German bombers flying at night received no assistance. Greene himself had an odd-job man put plywood under the skylight of 14 North Side to prevent broken glass falling into the house.

  That first day there were two false alarms wh
en the sirens sounded and policemen riding bicycles blew whistles. They had placards around their necks advising everyone to take cover. Somewhat jokingly, Greene wrote to his wife: ‘An historical document, a first war impression. I heard it on the radio, and Ronald [Matthews] rang up before it finished. So I said, “You’ve heard the war’s begun,” and he hadn’t.’ Something of Greene’s self-discipline comes out when we realise that in spite of the declaration of war he had to review H. E. Bates’s The Flying Goat: ‘Awful to sit down this morning to a review of Bates.’ But, like a true professional, he wrote it.

  Greene was struck by the fact that there was no panic of any kind and no scurrying about. He himself went out to the Prince of Wales theatre to see Douglas Byng (‘very funny’) and Nelly Wallace. He found the night very lovely and impressive ‘with all the sky signs gone and little blue phosphorescent milk bars and a hurdy-gurdy invisibly playing – rather like a Paris back-street’:

  A newspaperman calling, ‘’Ave a paper tonight,’ plaintively. Another one very conversational, ‘Reminds me of the trenches. Never knew which way you was going.’ … After the all-clear went last night it was curiously like Christmas morning: the voices of air raid wardens going home like people returning from Midnight Mass.43

  * * *

  fn1 Kruger’s passion was for a life on the Amazon, especially a simple life among the Indians – ‘a man could have ten wives if he wanted wives’, he told Greene. Greene answered that he had a wife. Kruger replied, ‘Never mind. You will never want to go home, never. You can get another wife there.’

  fn2 Greene did not officially become literary editor of the Spectator until October 1940, so it must be that the editor, Derek Verschoyle, was temporarily away from the office.

  fn3 In his preface to Three Plays, Greene writes, ‘The strain of writing a novel, which keeps the author confined for a period of years with his depressive self, is extreme and I have always sought release in “Entertainments” for melodrama as much as farce is an expression of a manic mood’ (p. xiii). An entertainment is generally a melodramatic thriller where there is an almost exclusive concentration on outward action and less on character development.

  fn4 He was not home two weeks before he told Huebsch that he’d begun a novel while in Mexico – ‘scene England & West Africa, but have laid it aside for the moment & have started a thriller instead [The Confidential Agent] with the idea of writing it simultaneously with the Mexican book, so that when I get stuck on one I can turn to the other.’ Greene laid aside the manuscript – ‘scene England & West Africa’ – so effectively that to his dying day he could no longer remember it, and the fragment has disappeared.

  2

  Enter Dorothy

  Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive.

  – GRAHAM GREENE

  THE LETTER WHICH Greene had left Vivien, on the occasion of his flight in the Wellington, his plea for forgiveness for anything he’d ever done to hurt her, she took as a reference to his wartime affair with Dorothy Glover.

  Dorothy began in 1938 or 1939, when I found it impossible to work at home because of the children. I saw an advertisement for a studio to be rented in Mecklenburgh Square. I went there where Dorothy was living with her mother. It was just a work room … it wasn’t a studio in the French sense with a bed … It was simply a room to work in. That is how we met. And she reduced the price because she thought I looked rather poor and I was a poor struggling author.1

  It is possible to date the beginning of that affair more accurately. In a letter written to Vivien on the day war was declared, Greene recounts the first air-raid warning and his immediate visual experiences – seeing a woman, in an unhurried manner, pass down the street; watching the huge barrage balloons rising in the sky; noting the odd scene of pigeons making a mass dive for shelter and his feeling that this was the end of civilisation.fn1 Behind this experience lay another secret one which he confided to Malcolm Muggeridge: ‘Greene told me that he was working in his rented work room when the war was declared and he looked out of the window. There were all the barrage balloons rising into the sky and a sort of exaltation seized him. Looking behind him, he saw Miss Glover looking out of the window too and there was the beginning of this rather weird affair.’2 Here was the truth hidden from Vivien. Greene rented the work room in early May when he began writing The Confidential Agent, which he finished in six weeks. Thus he rented it at the end of March or the beginning of April 1939, well before the first air-raid and the declaration of war. There is also one conflicting piece of information which perhaps confirms that the beginning of the affair was earlier than the first air-raid on London.

  Hugh Greene suggested in April 1939 that Graham and he should meet in Paris. Greene turned his brother down even though he longed to escape from London and felt ‘a passionate nostalgia for Paris’: ‘In confidence life at the moment is devilishly involved, psychologically. War offers the only possible solution.’3 If Greene had lived in the same house as Dorothy since the end of March or the beginning of April, this cryptic note might well refer to an affair already begun and of such seriousness that war offered the only possible solution – war and the immediate evacuation of his family, not only to his mother’s home in Crowborough, but out of the country altogether.

  Quite soon after his family’s evacuation to Crowborough, Greene tried to send them abroad. This was not to give himself a free hand with his affair, though this may have been a factor, but because he was deeply concerned for their survival. An undated letter shows him trying to persuade Vivien to leave the country:

  Rupert’s [Hart-Davis] just been on the phone to say he’s sending Comfort [his wife] & children to U.S. So if it does happen you’ll find half our world on the other side … I absolutely agree with you about Winnipeg. That’s only our last straw. Toronto is far preferable. Laurence [Pollinger] says it’s a lovely city, full of parks & lakeside, & he has a great friend there who’ll help you. You’re only a few hours too from New York & [I] might be able to transfer there.4

  The wealthy were sending their families abroad in great numbers to escape the expected German air onslaught on London. Angus Calder reports that 5,000 people left for America in the first forty-eight hours after war was declared.5 Something of the anxieties of the time is reflected in a letter written to Vivien by an unknown friend; it also shows how advanced Greene’s plans were to move his family out of the country:

  It’s all absolute Hell and I’m miserable & exhausted with the effort of a decision. However, we feel it’s best anyway to get our permits to go. We shall both go to New York & then on if we do. What is your Canadian address? A friend of ours is going at the end of this month and perhaps she will be on your ship.6

  Greene also considered Jamaica. There was a suggestion that H. V. Morton’s family would go to Jamaica and Greene’s family would follow suit.7 Greene returned to the topic of overseas evacuation on a number of occasions.

  Cable last night from Mary [Pritchett]: ‘Trying another angle getting Vivien and children here. Business connection impossible.’ That refers to my guarded message about you acting as my representative. Temporary dependence seems required, and two affidavits from host and bank. I think you ought to send a long explanatory cable too to your Canadian relatives, getting their address by phone or wire … Shall try and get U.S. immigration form today at lunch time. Such a rush. Don’t be scared or unhappy, dear heart. Here’s Mary’s address in case of need.8

  The more pressure Greene put on his wife to leave, the more she was inclined to resist, for she began to wonder (as she told me) whether she would ever be brought back.

  Vivien was right to sense danger and to feel instinctively that it came from Graham’s affair with Dorothy. Its seriousness is reflected in a scene in The End of the Affair. Sarah, wife of a leading Civil Servant in the Department of Home Security (the irony does not escape the hero Bendrix) falls in love with Bendrix and he with her. It
happens when Sarah and Bendrix are dining at Rules.fn2 At the moment of helping themselves to onions, they fall in love: ‘It wasn’t of course, simply the onions – it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable. I put my hand under the cloth and laid it on her knee, and her hand came down and held mine in place.’9

  The sense of love coming at the time both are eating onions is sufficiently bizarre to be based on a real model. After the war, when his long-standing affair with Dorothy was beginning to wane, he fell in love with a married woman, Catherine, later Lady, Walston, love revealing itself when they were eating onion sandwiches. But what follows the eating of the onions in The End of the Affair, when they leave Rules restaurant, is based on his experience with Dorothy not Catherine. Greene was moving between two lovers in his life and using the experience for fictional purposes.

  In the fictional affair ‘there was no pursuit and no seduction’ and they leave half the good steak on their plates and a third of the bottle of claret and come into Maiden Lane with the same intention. By the doorway and the grill, they kiss:

  I said, ‘I’m in love.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘We can’t go home.’

  ‘No.’

  We caught a taxi by Charing Cross Station and I told the driver to take us to … Leinster Terrace, the row of hotels that used to stand along the side of Paddington Station with luxury names, Ritz, Carlton, and the like. The doors of these hotels were always open and you could get a room any time of day for an hour or two. A week ago I revisited the terrace. [The hero is writing at the time of the blitz.] Half of it was gone – the half where the hotels used to stand had been blasted to bits, and the place where we made love that night was a patch of air. It had been the Bristol; there was a potted fern in the hall and we were shown the best room by a manageress with blue hair: a real Edwardian room with a great gilt double bed and red velvet curtains and a full-length mirror … I remember the trivial details very well: how the manageress asked me whether we wanted to stay the night: how the room cost fifteen shillings for a short stay: how the electric meter only took shillings and we hadn’t one between us, but I remember nothing else – how Sarah looked the first time or what we did, except that we were both nervous and made love badly. It didn’t matter. We had started – that was the point.10