IF, AS is all too possible, the life of Graham Greene is turned into a television series, the incidental music will be ready to hand – the Pacific 231 of Honegger and The Walk to the Paradise Garden (from the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet) by Delius. These two works seem to be the only ones to have answered moods of the great novelist – the striving, grinding, relentless part of his temperament best satisfied by dangerous travel, and the compassionate, tender, near-sentimental that informs his emotional make-up.
But the non-literary arts in general do not seem to have meant much to him, except for the cinema. The architecture in his books is confided to police stations that look like the threats of weak men, decaying tropical bungalows, seedy tenements and the like. Pictures are usually photographs with regretful associations. But when pictures move they enchant him. Perhaps his most notable technical achievement has been to apply the technique of the cinema scenario to the novel, and his novels have, inevitably, nearly all become films – though rarely very satisfactory ones. This is really a tribute to his literary powers, for only mediocre books become great films.
Greene has sought in his writing a kind of verbal transparency which refuses to allow language to become a fictional character in its own right, but his artistry is of a highly literary kind, acknowledging the presence of Henry James, Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad among his masters. Norman Sherry, Greene’s own choice as quasi-official biographer, is a Conrad specialist, and, with Sherry’s looking for a subject ‘after a ten-year stint on Conrad’, there was an acceptance of discreet flattery in the handshake Greene offered to seal the assignment. But there was also a recognition that here was a biographer who does his work the hard way. Sherry had rigorously followed Conrad’s path round the world, and he was ready to do the same for Greene, though the latter warned him that he wouldn’t be able to get into Saigon.
Greene has always been almost fearfully reticent about such elements of his life as have not been alchemised into fiction. In old age he proved himself willing to unbutton and show scars as well as muscle. His courtship of and marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning are set out fully with the aid of intimate letters not previously made public (for the breakdown of that marriage – which seems in prospect tragic – we must wait for the second volume). His conversion to Catholicism is seen to be in the first place a way into Vivien’s heart, though the subsequent course of his faith transcends such mere accommodation. The love story is touching. For Greene it was a genuine éducation sentimentale. Vivien said that the Greenes were ‘a very cool family. I never noticed any great affection between them. I can never imagine any child sitting on his mother’s knee, being told a story or anything like that. They were not demonstrative.’ She taught her lover how to hug and blow kisses. She devised a kissing code for letters: ‘White stars and red stars. A red star is much more passionate than a white one. The most passionate kiss on paper would be enormous with rays coming out and dark with ink.’
Photographs show how beautiful Vivien was. Greene addresses her as ‘Lovely and adored by Pussina Love-Cat’. Yielding to the feline terminology she introduced into their discourse. Greene was Tom or Tiger or Tyg, Tig, Wuff or Wufth. It is all very charming, and apparently it could not last. One divines in Greene an attitude proper to a creature of great saintliness, the adoration of the sinner. Throughout his books there is a kind of nostalgia for sainthood, but the flesh gets in the way. He has been, by several accounts, a man not easily given to sexual fidelity, and none of his novels glorifies marital love in the Angel in the House manner. The Greene of popular mythology is a desperate wanderer in sinful places, solitary but not celibate. He occasionally meets innocence, but it is a displaced rose among plantains of evil.
Evil came into his life early. At Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster, he met it in a boy named Carter who, with his accomplice Wheeler, ‘turned Graham’s life into a hopeless misery’. Carter was mature enough to perceive the division of loyalties in the headmaster’s son and put pressure on him to side with ‘the forces of resistance’. The language of the mature Greene, recalling the juvenile torture, has a force which must seem excessive unless we accept, with George Russell, that in the lost childhood of Judas Christ was betrayed. ‘The sneering nicknames were inserted like splinters under the nails.’ He could sympathise with his rebellious schoolfellows, despite the family loyalty: ‘Inexorably the others’ point of view rose on the path like a murdered innocent.’ Eventually he was to side with the rebel, the dissident, even the heretic. None of his fictional heroes is an establishment figure.
The conviction that evil exists, an ultimate entity not to be confused with mere wrong-doing, lies beneath Greene’s acceptance of Catholic theology. If the devil exists, God must also. But it was to be quite a time before his fiction became informed with those Catholic principles which, to free thinkers, have been a lot of fuss about nothing and, to cradle Catholics, a somewhat factitious intrusion of absolute values into narratives that deliberately breathe the banality of the popular shocker. The literary ambition was in Greene from the beginning, but it found its first outlet in journalism – a subliterary genre very much in the service of the banal. Greene was an efficient journalist and, if real literature had not got in the way, could have climbed high on the sub-editorial ladder of The Times. He was a brilliant editor of the short-lived but admirable Night and Day, which closed when Greene libelled Shirley Temple (‘dimpled depravity’ etc) and, through the innocent candour of a good critic, involved the enterprise in financial ruin.
Sherry recounts how he went to visit Greene in Antibes and was told by the author ‘in his precise and practical way’ that there was no heating in the hotel he had elected – only 127 francs a day – and he’d better bring a hot water bottle. There are hotels in Antibes fully heated, though they cost more, and one gets a hint here of money being important to Greene, even in a vicarious connection. No writer forgets his early struggles, and, that desperate libel judgment apart, the young novelist suffered from scant rewards for painful literary endeavours. On the strength of the success of The Man Within, he resigned form The Times. The success was not repeated in subsequent novels. With Stamboul Train moreover a libel suit loomed. Unlike the later one preferred by the guardians of Shirley Temple, this was a matter of a man seeing himself in a fictional character. J.B. Priestley took umbrage at Greene’s portrait of a popular author; he and Greene shared Heinemann as a publisher; Heinemann preferred to take the part of one of their best-sellers rather than that of a ‘literary’ author of doubtful prospects. It was part of the pain of Greene’s apprenticeship. But, as if pain were not always ready to strike from without, Greene seems to have sought it with a kind of gloomy relish. How else explain that incredible jungle-trek he made, with his cousin Barbara, through the Liberian jungle, or, later, the Mexican trip which was to yield the genuine masterpiece of The Power and the Glory?
Norman Sherry, having made those trips himself, is qualified, with the help of the appropriate Greene books, to depict the anabases in full colour. The great novelist joins the men of action, reminding his readers that books aren’t made out of other books but out of the sweat and fatigue of actual involvement in life. With his black carriers, in whom he found real incorrupt innocence he learnt that the true jungle was civilisation. The title of his book Journey Without Maps speaks the truth: Greene, striding through head-high elephant grass with Barbara exhausted in a hammock behind, encountered fever and devil-dancers, and Sherry guesses that a kind of family competitiveness helped to fire it. Graham’s brother Raymond, a successful doctor, climbed the Himalayan mountain Kamet in 1931. The African jungle was a fair, if flat, analogue.
Raymond’s successes are neatly balanced by the failures of one of the other three brothers, Herbert. Perhaps, in Grahamian terms, they cannot really be called failures. The Greene cousin Tooter described Herbert as ‘financially utterly untrustworthy, he gambled and got everyone else gambling’. Graham deplored his bounderdom as early as 1926: ‘My eldest brother’s ‘broken out’ again. His is a case where I can’t help feeling that suicide far from being sinful would be meritorious. It’s fearfully depressing and hopeless for my people.’ It was a good thing that he was not a Catholic apparently, which seems to imply a curiously relativist approach to morality. ‘I think in his case the sin is in not shooting himself.’ In 1938 Graham wrote to Hugh Greene (the future Director General of the BBC): ‘Did you see Herbert’s front page news story in the Daily Worker, Dec. 22, “I was a Secret Agent of Japan”?’ Here is a case of an admirable fictional character having the effrontery to operate in real life. That his seedy experiences were useful to his younger brother there can be no doubt. Not being an exemplar of sin, Herbert could be taken as a mere rogue acting outside the covenants of the social system. When Graham expresses his abhorrence in the terms of fraternal outrage, he is really on the side of Ida in Brighton Rock. This ought to be considered unworthy.
Sherry spends much time on Brighton Rock, which we take as the first genuinely Greenean novel in that it makes the morality of social expediency confront the theological dichotomy of good and evil. It is based on a principle which many, including myself, regard as dangerous to merely doing the right thing. T.S. Eliot gave authority to this view in his essay on Baudelaire, in which he pronounced that most people we know, including poets and statesmen, ‘are not men enough to be damned’. The young gang-leader Pinkie, though a mere boy, is man enough. ‘Hell lay around him in his infancy.’ This must have been a difficult book for Greene to write, since its milieu is remote from that of a Berkhamsted headmaster’s family. If he touched earth in Africa, he hardly did so in England. The ‘literary’ writer is not, without great implausibility, able to plant arcane references in a story about race-course gangs and decent holiday rock-suckers. We do not need Professor Cedric Watts to tell us (in Sherry’s footnote) that ‘the pseudonym Kolley Kibber’ – under which the murderee Hale operates as the donor of five-pound notes to readers of a popular daily paper who recognise him – ‘is adapted from the eighteenth-century actor-manager and Poet Laureate Colley Cibber (1671–1757)’. The literary Greene finds a kind of safe anchor in such references. And yet the curious power of the novel, which persists fifty years after its first appearance, lies in its fusing of theology and the theological overtones of literature in a narrative about sordid low life. We hear too much about Greeneland, but there seems to be no other name for this transmogrification of dear safe breezy Brighton.
As 1939 approaches, Greene visits Mexico to confirm that Pinkie’s religion is proscribed, along with the wine that is potentially the blood of Christ. He hated the place but found heroism among the persecuted adherents to the faith. In the Prologue to The Lawless Roads, which preceded the remarkable novel The Power and the Glory, Greene relates the Mexican hell to the hell of his boyhood. Evil is eternal. Carter ‘who practised torments with dividers’ (Pinkie too remembers dividers, though it is hard to associate him with geometry lessons), is still around, along with the Judas Wheeler. In the novel, good and evil very curiously interpenetrate. In the antagonism between Carter and Greene, ‘there was an element of reluctant admiration, I believe, on both sides. I admired his ruthlessness, and in an odd way he admired what he wounded in me.’ And so the atheistic lieutenant and the whisky priest are drawn into a sort of empathy through the recognition of opposed rigours. Greene is now ready to make some of the dangerous statements which, in the eyes of simple-minded Catholics, gravely impair his orthodoxy. ‘The greatest saints have been men with more than a normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have sometimes narrowly evaded sanctity.’ I should be grateful for some historical examples.
Greene returned from Mexico fearful of arrest because of the Lord Chief Justice’s vicious moralising over the Shirley Temple case. But he met nothing worse than the shock of ‘the grit of the London afternoon, among the trams, in the long waste of Clapham Road, a Baptist Chapel, Victorian houses falling into decay in their little burial grounds of stone and weed, a coal merchant’s window with some fuel arranged in an iron basket, a gas showroom’. He wondered how a world like this could end in anything but war. The connection is not clear. The contrast between the genteel mass in a Chelsea church and the memory of a Mexican woman dragging herself up the aisle on her knees is all too clear. ‘We do not mortify ourselves. Perhaps we are in need of violence.’ Another dangerous statement. We look forward to many more in the second volume of this exemplary life.
Norman Sherry has done justice to his subject, not an easy one. The second volume cannot be shorter than the first which is very long but not too long. A long life and a triumphant literary career. As for the man within, we need not delude ourselves into thinking that we will ever get the whole truth. A man’s soul is for the gloom of the confessional, not the bright light of biography.
Daily Telegraph, 8 April 1989
Review of The Life of Graham Greene (volume 1, 1904–1939)
by Norman Sherry (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989)