Graham Greene (3 page)

In Michaelmas term 1922, Graham went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read history. His tutor, Kenneth Bell, was an old student of his father’s. Among Graham’s contemporaries at the university were Harold Acton, John Sutro, John Betjeman and Anthony Powell. Although they later became very close, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh moved in separate circles at university – Graham’s being heterosexual. Writing to Waugh in 1964, he recalled: ‘For a considerable period of my time at Oxford I lived in a general haze of drink. I’ve never drunk so much in my life since!’ (
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) Through those years he thought of himself as a poet, and his first book,
Babbling April
(1925), was a collection of verse that in later years he would not willingly mention. On one occasion he was invited with other young poets of Oxford to read on the BBC: ‘We sat in a kind of sumptuous drawing room, with beautiful armchairs & sofas, & each in turn had to get up & recite in front of a beautiful blue draped box on a table. I felt like Harold swearing on the saint’s bones.’ (
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)

In the spring of 1925, as he was approaching the end of his degree, Greene fell in love with the fervently Catholic Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. At one point he described his passion for her, with greater accuracy than he intended, as ‘monomania’.
¹⁷
For the next two years he courted her, mainly in an outpouring of hundreds of letters, and they were married in October 1927. There is no doubt that they were fond of each other, but neither was ready for this step. Graham was managing the impulses of his as yet undiagnosed condition and would quickly be guilty of repeated infidelities. Vivien (as she then began to spell her name) affected an extreme girlishness, was uneasy about sex and could be both priggish and sentimental. Their marriage had some periods of happiness, but Graham became deeply absorbed in his writing and would often go abroad. Vivien developed interests in Victorian furniture and antique doll’s houses. The couple had two children, Lucy Caroline (b. 1933) and Francis (b. 1936). The marriage effectively came to an end in 1939, but a formal separation did not occur until 1947.

As part of his courtship of Vivien, Graham adopted her religion.
While working for the
Nottingham Journal
in early 1926, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Within twenty years, there would be no more famous layman in the Church, but Catholicism was always a struggle for him – he tended to believe most easily when he was in love, for example, with Vivien in the 1920s or with Catherine Walston in the late 1940s. At other times, belief was difficult, as when he was writing
A Burnt-Out Case
. He wrote to Catherine Walston in 1961: ‘I feel as though I’ve come to the end of a long rope with
A Burnt-Out Case
& that I’ll probably never succeed in getting any
further
from the Church. It’s like, when one was younger, taking a long walk in the country & at a certain tree or a certain gate or the top of one more hill one stopped & thought “Now I must start returning home.”’ (
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) In old age, Graham Greene kept ‘one foot in the Catholic Church’ (
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) identifying with ecclesiastical dissidents such as Hans Küng and the Liberation Theologians in Latin America.

Working as a sub-editor on
The Times
, Greene enjoyed his first literary success in 1929 with
The Man Within
. His publishers, William Heinemann and Doubleday, Doran, made an arrangement for him to write full-time with an annual advance of six hundred pounds for three years. The novels
The Name of Action
(1930) and
Rumour at Nightfall
(1931) – turned out in quick succession – were badly written, and a biography of the notorious seventeenth-century Earl of Rochester was rejected at the beginning of 1932 as obscene. As it turned out, his publishers had paid for his apprenticeship. Living with Vivien in a cottage in the village of Chipping Campden, Greene wrote the first of his mature novels,
Stamboul Train
, with bankruptcy looming. When the book appeared at the end of 1932, it was a bestseller and established him as a bankable author. His next novel,
It’s a Battlefield
(1934), the most political of his early works, failed to sell but still won him the praise of V. S. Pritchett, Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford.
¹⁸

Graham Greene belonged to the last generation that could think of the world as containing unexplored places. His childhood reading included many stories of Victorian travellers. When he was fourteen,
he wrote to the explorer William S. Bruce, criticising his book
Polar Exploration
, and wished fervently to visit the South Pole himself.
¹⁹
As a young man, he undertook many journeys, including particularly reckless ones to Ireland in 1923 and the Ruhr in 1924. Even his early works often incorporate distant settings; for example,
The Name of Action
has Germany for its background, and
Stamboul Train
sets key events at Subotica on the border of Hungary and Serbia. Research for
England Made Me
(1935) brought him to Denmark and Sweden in the summer of 1933. He visited Paris frequently and was there to report on the aftermath of the Stavisky riots of 1934. In May of that year he visited Latvia and Estonia, a trip that would eventually influence the writing of
Our Man in Havana
.

Greene’s most dangerous journey came at the beginning of 1935. Accompanied by his beautiful and intrepid young cousin Barbara Greene (later Countess Strachwitz) and their carriers, he undertook the jungle trek through Sierra Leone and Liberia described in
Journey Without Maps
(1936). He had literally no idea of what lay before him: ‘The whole trip gets more & more fantastic every day; at last I’ve managed to get a fairly large scale map; most of it blank white with dotted lines showing the probable course of rivers!’ (
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) He wrote of Liberia, as he might have written of most of his destinations: ‘There seemed to be a seediness about the place you couldn’t get to the same extent elsewhere, and seediness has a very deep appeal … It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost’.
²⁰
That nostalgia nearly killed him, as he contracted fever, treated it with quinine and whisky, and survived only by luck (and perhaps thanks to Barbara), but he was surprised by what happened when the fever was at its worst: ‘I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable’.
²¹

Confident of making a living with his pen, in 1935 he rented, and a year later purchased, a large house at Clapham Common – a source
of particular pride to Vivien, who filled it with costly antiques. His standing as an author and reviewer was by now such that he was able to convince Hamish Hamilton to publish
Swami and Friends
(1935), the first novel of the distinguished Indian writer R. K. Narayan. Throughout his career, Narayan was venerated by critics but ignored by readers in Britain. In the years to come, Greene would cajole and badger agents and publishers to make sure that Narayan’s works were published and promoted as they deserved.

Part of Greene’s own success was that he could produce books that appealed to the popular market. He had become expert in writing thrillers, among them
A Gun for Sale
(1936) and
The Confidential Agent
(1939). One of his most admired novels,
Brighton Rock
(1938), began in the seediness of racetracks as a murder story, but ‘turned round and bit me’ (
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) as a reflection on good and evil and the chances of clemency: ‘You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God’.
²²

In early 1938 Greene visited Mexico to report on the persecution of the Catholic Church in the states of Chiapas and Tabasco. Leaving behind him in England a libel case brought by Twentieth Century Fox and Shirley Temple for his review of
Wee Willie Winkie
in the short-lived magazine
Night and Day
(in which he described the child star as having ‘a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men’),
²³
Greene found Mexico a desperate and unpleasant country, and it seems he could not abide Mexicans. As the years passed, this view reversed itself; Greene visited Latin America and the Caribbean many times, setting several of his most important books there.
Lawless Roads
(1939) is an observant but dyspeptic work that honours the courage of a people he does not like. Greene’s most admired novel,
The Power and the Glory
(1940), also set in Mexico’s ‘atmosphere of desertion’, describes the martyrdom of a whisky priest. Pursuing an idea ‘of frightening difficulty & hazard’ (
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), Greene crystallised for the first time the dialogue between Catholic and communist belief central
to many of his subsequent works: ‘“We agree about a lot of things,” the priest said, idly dealing out his cards. “We have facts, too, we don’t try to alter – that the world’s unhappy whether you are rich or poor – unless you are a saint, and there aren’t many of those.” ’
²⁴

The coming of the war marked the end of Greene’s marriage. He began a serious affair with a stage designer named Dorothy Glover, which continued into the late 1940s. With Vivien and the children evacuated to the country, Greene went into the Ministry of Information, working in the nights as a fire warden, often alongside Dorothy. In October 1940, the house at Clapham Common was bombed. Although saddened by the destruction, he was also relieved of a financial burden, and the end of the house seemed to promise his release from a domestic life he found unbearably claustrophobic. He confided his marriage problems to his sister Elisabeth: ‘I always used to laugh at emotional situations and feel they couldn’t any of them beat toothache. One lives and learns.’ (
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)

In 1941, Elisabeth, who had herself joined the Secret Intelligence Service at the start of the war, recruited him, and he was sent back to Sierra Leone as an MI6 officer – a lonely, out-of-the-way posting. There, he gathered many of the impressions that would shape
The Heart of the Matter
(1948). While not searching cargo ships and vaguely keeping track of the Vichy forces in French Guinea, he wrote
The Ministry of Fear
(1943), the best of his thrillers, a work that evoked with terrible clarity the atmosphere of wartime London, a setting he would describe again in
The End of the Affair
(1951). Personal news reached him by cable, first that he had won the Hawthornden Prize for
The Power and the Glory
, then that his father had died – of diabetic complications. In Sierra Leone, he remarked: ‘I’ve had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring.’ (
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)

Greene returned to London in March 1943. He worked under the Soviet agent Kim Philby in the Iberian section of MI6, in St Albans. His relationship with Philby was warm – Philby had great charm and was a convivial and deep drinker—and survived his defection to the Soviet Union in 1963. Nonetheless, in June 1944 Greene left
the service because of Philby’s efforts to gain control of counter-intelligence against the Soviets. Greene says that it appeared then that Philby was motivated by personal ambition (see
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). Whether he privately suspected Philby of being a Soviet infiltrator may never be known. In later years, Greene occasionally took on assignments for the service in a collegial fashion – he was never again in their employ – but seems not to have been an important figure in the field of intelligence. His usual contact with MI6 was Elisabeth’s husband, Rodney Dennys, a senior intelligence officer who gave up that career in 1957 largely because of his dissatisfaction with the ongoing internal investigation into the possibility of a larger Soviet spy network within MI6. Dennys opted for a scholarly life in the College of Arms, where he eventually became Arundel Herald Extraordinary, but remained informally in touch with MI6. He actually knew Philby much better than Greene did and was unforgiving, having personally trained some of the intelligence officers for whose deaths Philby was directly responsible.
²⁵

Between 1944 and 1948, Greene worked at the publisher Eyre & Spottiswoode, having been a director of the firm for several years before that. He was responsible for the fiction list, bringing to the firm such authors as Mervyn Peake, R. K. Narayan and François Mauriac. He left after a conflict with the managing director, Douglas Jerrold, and a row with Anthony Powell, whom he accused of writing a ‘a bloody boring book’ (
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).

Greene’s life underwent a revolution in 1946. Catherine Walston (1916–78), the American wife of the Labour politician, later peer, Harry Walston, approached him to be her godfather as she was being received into the Catholic Church. They began a passionate, sometimes frantic, affair, which lasted more than a decade, coinciding with the worst period of Greene’s bipolar illness. The general outlines of
The End of the Affair
(1951), in which an author becomes involved with the wife of a civil servant, were inspired by this relationship; however, the major characters have obvious differences from Graham Greene and Catherine and Harry Walston.

In early 1947, Greene took a holiday with Catherine in Ireland, during which he wrote part of
The Heart of the Matter
(1948), the book
so well received that he became a perennial, though disappointed, candidate for the Nobel Prize (always claiming, however, that he was in very good company). It also ensured that he became a Catholic celebrity. His friend, the poet Edith Sitwell, had remarked in 1945: ‘What a great priest you would have made. But you are better as you are.’
²⁶
When
The Heart of the Matter
was published, she wrote to a friend, ‘Have you read Graham Green’s new book? It may prevent me from committing suicide!!’
²⁷
But Green had to deal with more than the accolades of fellow writers; he was beset by troubled clergymen and devout neurotics looking for answers he was not qualified to give. In the meantime, his private life was in disarray. Finally separated from Vivien, who refused, on religious grounds, to allow a divorce, he found that Catherine, though willing to conduct an affair, would not marry him for fear of losing her children, and that Dorothy simply would not let him go. On several occasions he came near to suicide: ‘Perhaps the ban on killing oneself is only during the first three years of a policy.’ (
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)