Graham Greene (22 page)

[…]

The marriage staggered on for another four years, when Graham’s relationship with Catherine Walston led to a final separation. Vivien refused to grant a divorce in the belief that sacramental marriage is indissoluble. The sentiment Graham expresses here, that a wife might be better off with such a husband dead, reappears as part of Scobie’s motive for suicide in
The Heart of the Matter.

Aug. 18 1943 Dear Elisabeth,

[…]

I’ve just had a week’s holiday in South Wales with my family – rather cold, but a lovely place – a few pubs, a ruined castle, woods
sloping down to a wide muddy estuary, a few 18th century houses: sands & caves a bus ride away.

Have you heard that I’m now contracted to be a full-blown publisher immediately the war’s over: after 18 months training I am to have full charge of Eyre & Spottiswoode, which should be fun – but is anything fun when one gets down to it?
The Ministry of Fear
has sold 15,000 before reprinting which is monetarily satisfactory. I quite enjoy my work now – which is more varied & interesting than what I did at first, but all the same one does long for an end of this boring war.

Your letters to Mumma fill me with claustrophobia. Malcolm is back, for a while anyway. I wish we could do something together.

God knows what a dull letter this is, but one’s brain becomes progressively more torpid, & the tightrope one walks gets tighter & tighter.

Much love,
     Graham

Greene met the novelist and illustrator Mervyn Peake
(1911
–68) in Chelsea in the spring of 1943. In June, Chatto and Windus rejected the long, unfinished manuscript of
Titus Groan
when Peake refused to make cuts. Greene suggested that Peake should meet with Douglas Jerrold, the managing director of Eyre & Spottiswoode, to discuss the novel and an illustration project. By the end of August he had written the last chapters and sent the whole manuscript to Greene
.

Reform Club [c. October 1943]

Dear Mervyn Peake, You must forgive me for not having written before, but you know it’s a long book!

I’m going to be mercilessly frank – I was very disappointed in a lot of it & frequently wanted to wring your neck because it seemed to me you were spoiling a first-class book by laziness. The part I had
seen before I, of course, still liked immensely – though I’m not sure that it’s gained by the loss of the prologue. Then it seemed to me one entered a long patch of really bad writing, redundant adjectives, a kind of facetiousness, a terrible prolixity in the dialogue of such characters as the Nurse & Prunesquallor, & sentimentality too in the case of [Keda] & to some extent in Titus’s sister. In fact – frankly again – I began to despair of the book altogether, until suddenly in the last third you pulled yourself together & ended splendidly. But even here you were so damned lazy that you called Barquentine by his predecessor’s name for whole chapters.

I’m hitting hard because I feel it’s the only way. There is obviously good stuff here but in my opinion you’ve thrown it away by not working hard enough at the book – there are trite unrealised novelettish phrases side by side with really first class writing. As it stands I consider it unpublishable – about 10,000 words of adjectives & prolix dialogue could come out without any alteration to the story at all. I want to publish it, but I shall be quite sympathetic if you say ‘To Hell with you: you are no better than Chatto’ & prefer to take it elsewhere. But at least I can claim to have read it carefully, & I do beseech you to look at the M.S. again. I began by putting in pencil which can easily be rubbed out brackets round words & phrases which seemed to me redundant, but I gave up after a time.

Write & let me know how you feel about all this. If you want to call me out, call me out – but I suggest we have our duel over whisky glasses in a bar.

Yours,
     Graham Greene

Peake was shocked, but this letter marked a turning point in his career as he finally accepted the importance of ‘the blue pencil approach’. Delayed by revisions and the wartime shortage of paper
, Titus Groan
finally appeared on
22
March 1946
.
²⁰

Editorial Unit:
| 43 Grosvenor Street, | London, W.1. |
22nd July, 1944

To: Mr. Webber.

From: Mr. Graham Greene.

It will perhaps interest you to hear the reactions of a Londoner to your fantastically inefficient and childish ideas of organising a fireguard, though it will probably seem odd to you that anyone should take fire-guard duties seriously. But you should remember that in London we have had some experience of fires.

Understanding that one had to report not later than half an hour before black-out, I arrived at 25 Gilbert Street last night about 10.15. I was told to go to 47 Mount Street. I went to 47 Mount Street and found the house locked. Half an hour later I tried again and found a guard there. He had an office chair to sit on – nothing else, not even a blanket. I returned to Gilbert Street to raise Cain and found I had been sent to Mount Street by mistake: I went back to Mount Street for the final time and collected my things. By this time I was getting a little irritable. I was then told that my room as fire-guard was No. 2552. The passages were in darkness; there was no black-out in the rooms and no-one knew where 2552 was. After a long search with the help of a watchman, I found it at the top of the building, at the head of a twisting iron emergency ladder. No fire-guard had apparently ever in fact slept in this absurd death-trap and I set up my bed on the floor below in room 2541. To this room on the third or is it the fourth floor? – one had to carry one’s own bed, blankets, mattress, pillow – a dubious example of courtesy and consideration to fire-guards.

There were no instructions as to where one found the tools of one’s trade – stirrup pump, etc., no directions where water was available, no issue of torches in case the electric-light failed. Incidentally there seemed to be no other fire-guard on duty.

However, I must admit that the Gilbert Street fireguard is a little better off than the wretched guard in Mount Street whose treatment is really scandalous.

If at any time you care to ring me up at 49 Grosvenor Street, I
will be delighted to tell you what you can do with your fire-guard duties.

Despite this outburst, Greene continued to work as a fire guard.
²¹

Eyre & Spottiswoode (Publishers) Ltd., 15 Bedford Street W.C.2
| [31 October? 1944]

Dear Narayan,

I am delighted to welcome you as an author to Eyre & Spottiswoode, and I very much enjoyed reading your new book. I think Pollinger has already written to you saying that I want to change the title to ‘The English Teacher’. The present title sounds in English ears rather sentimental and gives a wrong idea of the book.

We are taking over the cheap rights of ‘Swami and Friends’ and ‘The Bachelor of Arts’ and I hope that when the paper situation is eased after the war we shall be able to put these back into print.

It seems a very long time since I heard from you and I hope that you can spare the time one day to let me know how you are. I still hope when all this foolishness is over to see you one day in England.

Yours ever
     Graham Greene

15 Bedford Street | W.C.1 [January 1945]

Dear Evelyn,

Just a line which please don’t bother to answer – to say how immensely I enjoyed
Brideshead
. I liked it even more than
Work in
Progress
which was my favourite hitherto, & I find it grows in memory.

Yours,
     Graham

Graham later wrote: ‘
…
I, for one, had been inclined to dismiss
Brideshead Revisited
. When he had written to me [
27
March 1950] that the only excuse for it was Nissen huts and spam and the blackout I had accepted that criticism – until the other day when I reread all his books, and to my astonishment joined the ranks of those who find
Brideshead
his best, even though it is his most romantic.’
²²

Eyre & Spottiswoode | 14, 15, 16 Bedford Street| Strand,
London, W.C.2 | Tuesday [20 March 1945]

[…]

Had a grim evening with the Peakes. I’ll tell you about that and their persecution by a dotty old widow of an oldtime painter. I should hate to live in Chelsea. So dirty and the real fume of creepy evil. On Sunday I was lying late in bed and there was a huge crash, followed by a terrific rumble and the sound of glass going. The loudest I’ve heard. From bed I could see a pillar of smoke go up above the roofs. Actually it was quite a long way away and a very lucky rocket. Just inside Hyde Park at Marble Arch where the tub thumpers would have been later in the day. I went and looked. The blast had missed the Arch and swept though the poor old Regal which was on the point of reopening after being flybombed and knocked out the windows in the Cumberland. American soldiers fat with their huge meat ration stood around grinning and taking photos (which we are not allowed to do). I wandered around making anti-American cracks!

[…]
     Graham

Graham devoted considerable effort to The Century Library, his firm’s modern reprint series. Here he comments on George Orwell’s suggestions for the series
.

Eyre & Spottiswoode (Publishers) Limited | 27th August 1945

Dear Orwell,

Forgive the delay in replying to your letter, but I have been away for a long weekend.

I am glad you have managed to get hold of the Merrick books and as soon as you let me know which you think we should include in the Century Library I will get on to the publishers. There will be no need whatever to keep the Introduction which was supplied in the collected edition.
²³

I am delighted to have suggestions from you for other books as I have very little time for seeking around myself. I will have a look at Barry Pain.
²⁴
I read two W. L. Georges recently and they were pretty poor stuff, but I will find a copy of
Caliban.
²⁵
I should have thought that Guy Boothby
²⁶
was dropping a little too low – much lower than Richard Marsh who, I do think, can be very good indeed. I am not sure when
The Beetle
was published but I think it was before the century.
²⁷
However, there are several Marshes published later and I certainly agree we ought to have one.

Hornung’s books, other than
Raffles
have generally struck me as too homosexually sentimental. I tried the other day
The Camera
Fiend
and
Witching Hill
, both of which I had liked as a boy, but they ring no bells at all now.
²⁸

Do give me a ring when you get back from your holiday and let us have lunch together.

Yours,
     Graham Greene

As a publisher, Greene had to promote his firm’s books with reviewers, including Betjeman, who was then reviewing for the left-wing
Daily Herald.

Eyre & Spottiswoode (Publishers) | 22nd August, 1946.

Dear John,

I am not going to pretend that you will like, from a literary point of view, this book I am sending you,
The River Road
by Mrs. Parkinson Keyes, but I think it may amuse you as a curious example of popular favour. For about ten years now, Mrs. Parkinson Keyes’ books have been selling in enormous quantities. In fact we cannot print enough to meet the demand. I do not think any of us feels able to explain this odd popularity. She does not tell an exciting story, the sexual element is there but is not really very pronounced and she gives in vast detail the every-day life of America. From this book, for example, one could almost learn how to run a sugar plantation and yet, as I say, she sells in a way that even Priestley would envy. I would not, in the ordinary course of events, send you this book but it occurred to me that during the ‘Silly Season’ you might be amused to do something on the ‘Popular Novel’!

Yours ever,
     Graham

John Boulting
(1913
–85) and his twin brother Roy
(1913
–2001) founded Charter Film Productions in 1937. Working from a script by Greene and Terence Rattigan
(1911
–77), John Boulting directed Richard Attenborough in
Brighton Rock (1947).

18th September, 1946

Dear John,

I have finished reading through Terence Rattigan’s outline treatment of
Brighton Rock
, and I agree with you that it provides a good skeleton to work on. There is no point in criticising small details of dialogue or scene at this stage, and I think my only major criticisms are as follows: –

(1) I think the boy Pinkie has got to be established as the solitary central figure of the film, and we must to some extent reduce the importance of Ida so as to throw him in solitary relief.

(2) This arises partly out of (1) and partly out of what you may consider a personal fad. I never feel that films that start on long shots are satisfactory. I feel the American practice of nearly always starting on close-up is much more imaginative. How often one has seen an English film which begins with a long shot of a holiday resort: to my mind the opening shot suggested here would stamp the film unmistakably as pre-war British. My own rough idea of the opening of the film is to present by a succession of close-ups the atmosphere of Brighton waking up for Whit Monday – curtains being raised or shutters drawn back in the shops: the day’s newspaper poster featuring Kolley Kibber being squeezed under the wire framework of a poster board: the fun cars on the pier being polished: all the shots close-up or semi close-up and culminating in a close-up of the boy spread-eagled in his clothes on the brass bedstead: entrance of Dallow: a newspaper spread in front of the boy’s eyes by Dallow with the headlines about Kolley Kibber: the boy sitting up in bed: cut stop. I express this very roughly and loosely but perhaps you will see the kind of tempo I feel the film should begin on. In this way the boy is established
before Hale who is after all a minor character disposed of very quickly.