Graham Greene (2 page)

It is redundant in writing of a human being to say that he was flawed and that on occasion he caused grief. Some of Greene’s biographers have imputed to him, without other evidence, all the moral flaws to be found in his characters. Indeed, his situation has been like that of Dame Muriel Spark, who observed: ‘There’s a lot of people think they can take my books and analyse me from them. On that principle Agatha Christie would be a serial killer.’
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Graham Greene was a man of decency and courage; he chronicled the suffering of the world’s most oppressed people and devoted his life to writing books that enriched the lives of millions. Readers may be surprised at just how ready he was to make other people’s problems his own, including John Sutro’s nervous breakdowns, Mervyn Peake’s disability from Parkinson’s Disease, the penury of the wives of the Soviet dissidents Daniel and Sinyavsky, and the incarceration and torture of the Baptiste brothers in Haiti. He gave away much of what he earned, often with a discretion and grace that removed all sense of patronage. He wrote to Marie Biche, his
French agent: ‘we have been friends for nearly thirty years & I know how much you’ve done for me during that time, so be reasonable & do something – which will hurt you – to please me. I’m scared of your reaction & afraid you’ll disappoint me, but please say Yes & allow me this year for Christmas to give you instead of a classic shirt from the Faubourg unsuitable for country wear, allow me – I ask it with trembling voice – to give you a small car – Volkswagen or what you like.’ (p. 346–7) His kindness to this particular friend continued to the end; when her health failed, he gave her the use of his Paris flat, and she remained there until her death from cancer.

While much has been said of the ‘sliver of ice’ in the novelist’s heart, there is another dimension, very private, here documented for the first time. His immediate concern for those in trouble or in grief is reflected throughout this book, as in his comments to a Russian friend whose husband had recently leapt to his death from the balcony of their apartment: ‘I don’t believe myself that death is the end of everything … Personally even when I doubt I go on praying at night my own kind of prayers. Why not try at night talking to your husband and telling him all you think. Who knows whether he mightn’t be able to hear you and now with a mind unclouded?’ (
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) Greene’s compassion was remarkable in that it was combined with a steady gaze. In the Congo, in 1959, he was confronted with ravages of leprosy, which left behind burnt-out cases by the thousand:

Greene’s views on religion and the possibility of an afterlife are an important theme in his letters. A Catholic convert, he disputed Church teaching and was repelled by the liturgical reforms of
Vatican II. He was pleased to discover that Pope Paul VI read his novels, but despised Pope John Paul II as an ecclesiastical version of Ronald Reagan. In old age, he spoke of himself as a ‘Catholic agnostic’ (
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) and took nothing at face value. It is hard to imagine a more ironic reversal than for one of the great Catholic writers of the century to dispute the validity of a spiritual experience described by one of its most distinguished sceptics. When the philosopher A. J. Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon and claimed a near-death experience, Greene wrote to Jocelyn Rickards: ‘How does he know that the experience he had during those four minutes was not an experience he had immediately his heart began to beat again and before he became fully conscious? I don’t see that there is any proof there of the memory existing for a while after death. Do get him to explain that.’ (
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) In Greene’s lexicon, doubt is not the same as disbelief – his mind gnawed at any kind of certainty including atheism. He claims, for example, that his encounter with the stigmatic Padre Pio in 1949 ‘introduced a
doubt
in my
disbelief.
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Caught between orthodoxies, Greene positioned himself just inside the church door: ‘I respect their belief and sometimes share it.’ (
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)

Most of the letters in this book are written close to the events they describe, and letters surviving from his youth add to our sense of his relations with his family and closest friends. At nineteen, he asked his ten-year-old sister Elisabeth:

How silly this is, and how far from the bleak young man he described in his memoir
A Sort of Life
and later in
Ways of Escape
, which were
written, it seems, when he had forgotten some of the vitality of his younger self and could remember only sadness. An enormous amount of family correspondence has only recently become available, so it is possible, at last, to see Greene as a son, a brother, a nephew, a father, an uncle and a grandfather. It is poignant to hear him speaking to his daughter from a leproserie:

Or to hear him address one of his young grandsons: ‘I know that life for you at this stage is not very easy (it’s not all that easy at my stage!), but I do want you to feel that you can write to me in confidence & if there is any way that I can help I’ll do my best. We are too alike to remain strangers!’ (
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) This is a man rarely revealed in the formal biographies.

The letters of Graham Greene offer another ‘sort of life’. A conventional biography moves in straight lines, while a life in letters makes its points gradually and sometimes by backward glances. However, a life in letters has a crucial advantage over a conventional biography: it is chiefly in the subject’s own voice and in his words. The editor has a hand in creating this effect by including certain letters, dropping others and offering opinions in the notes, but this book intends to clear the stage and to give the life back to its subject. Since letters are usually written in a single draft and many letters in this book were actually dictated, the prose is conversational, at times near to table-talk, but the effect is compelling, the exercise of a unique voice.

No work of scholarship can be the final authority on Graham Greene. He himself would tell curious interviewers to read his novels if they wished to understand him. His laconic ‘I am my books’
⁸
contains much truth. And a collection of letters that makes their author better known also confirms a sense of mystery. At best, it marks the boundaries of character, opinion and experience, but it cannot finally explain away the strangeness of a life: ‘I called out to her as she went
by, “Aunt Augusta,” but she didn’t answer to the name; there was no sign that she even heard me. They danced on in their tireless passion into the shadows.’
⁹

Henry Graham Greene was born in Berkhamsted near London on 2 October 1904. His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were cousins, both descended from the brewing family of Bury St Edmunds, which in another branch included the novelist Christopher Isherwood. Graham came as the fourth child; his siblings were Alice Marion or ‘Molly’ (1896–1963), the handsome and feckless Herbert (1898–1968), Raymond (1901–82), who became a notable physician and mountaineer, Hugh (1910–87), the future Director General of the BBC, and Elisabeth (1914–99), eventually the novelist’s secretary and his confidante. Charles Greene’s brother Edward, a rich coffee merchant, also lived in Berkhamsted, and his six children were close in age to their cousins. Surrounded by books and companions, Graham’s earliest years seem to have been happy; they were, perhaps, not unlike those of his brother Raymond, who remarked, ‘I saw nothing horrible in the woodshed, perhaps because we had no woodshed.’
¹⁰

Charles Greene was a master and, from 1910, the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which began, Graham wrote later, ‘just beyond my father’s study, through a green baize door’.
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His father’s views were characterised by a ‘rather noble old Liberalism’ (
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) and, while many of the masters quietly ignored his example, he promoted humane principles: ‘What an advanced man my father was as Headmaster of Berkhamsted. No prefects or fagging there.’ (
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)

Graham’s contemporaries at the school included Peter Quennell, later a well-known man of letters, and the journalist Claud Cockburn. Another of his friends, Arthur Mayo, recalled that Graham was a
friendly and outgoing boy, with an impressive loyalty to the victims of bullying.
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As the child of the headmaster, however, Graham was eventually caught between his school-friends and his father. By thirteen, he was a boarder and felt himself a Judas in St John’s House. When he was fourteen and fifteen, he was tormented by a sometime friend named Lionel Carter and betrayed to Carter by another friend, Augustus Wheeler. He was haunted by these events and was surprised at the banality of an encounter with Wheeler in Malaya in 1950: ‘And instead of saying “What hell you made my life 30 years ago,” one arranged to meet for drinks!’ (
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)

Greene’s first volume of autobiography,
A Sort of Life
(1971), records his unhappiness as a student – episodes of truancy, self-mutilation by means of a pen-knife and attempts to poison, then drown, himself. After eight terms as a boarder, he ran off to Berkhamsted Common, where he planned to conceal himself as ‘an invisible watcher, a spy on all that went on’, but was apprehended after two hours by his sister Molly.
¹³
His parents accepted his protest and allowed him to live at home again – that is, on their side of the green baize door.

Sensing in him something like the mental illnesses that had afflicted both of his grandfathers, his parents sent him, when he was sixteen, for a six-month course of treatment with a psychoanalyst ‘of no known school’ named Kenneth Richmond in London. Trained by Maurice Nicoll, a sometime Jungian and the main commentator on Ouspensky’s and Gurdjieff’s works, Richmond was himself a spiritualist and became a leading light in the Society for Psychical Research. With Richmond, Graham began the lifelong habit of recording dreams in a diary: ‘My experience bears out the fact that one dreams at least four or five times a night when once one has disciplined oneself to have a pencil and paper beside one in bed!’ (
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) Dreams are recounted in most of his novels, and are sometimes crucial to the plots. He made selections from the diaries, which were published posthumously as
A World of My Own
(1992).
Greene enjoyed his time in the Richmonds’ house immensely, meeting their literary friends, among them Walter de la Mare. At the end of the course, Richmond recommended that Greene be encouraged in his desire to write.

Psychoanalysis, however, did not banish his illness. Greene claimed that in the autumn of 1923 he began to play Russian roulette with a gun of Raymond’s that was kept in a corner-cupboard in their bedroom. Raymond, however, doubted the story, since the gun, which actually belonged to a cousin who had brought it back from the war, was stored without bullets, even though Graham said they were there in a cardboard box.
¹⁴
Whether the episode is factual or symbolic hardly matters – it explains with great aptness a key pattern of boredom and risk-taking that characterised Greene’s life. Many years later, after he had received lengthy treatment from a distinguished psychiatrist named Eric Strauss, Greene described himself as a manic-depressive.
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Also known as bipolar illness, manic depression involves mood swings from elation, expansiveness or irritability to despair. Symptoms can appear in adolescence, as occurred in his case. The disease can lead to suicidal depressions, drinking, risk-taking, thrill-seeking, promiscuity and a desire to seduce and be seduced.
¹⁶
Such tendencies can manifest in a person who is otherwise responsible, loving and ethical. The disorder, which is hardly culpable, may have caused Greene to rush into ill-advised relationships and to be unsettled throughout his life, constantly seeking ‘Ways of Escape’ – the title he gave to his second volume of memoirs (1980), in which he also wrote: ‘Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.’ [p. xiii].