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| ISBN-13: | 9781250096388 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 709 KB |
About the Author
W. J. West is the author of The Quest for Graham Greene.
Read an Excerpt
The Quest for Graham Greene
By W.J. West
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1997 W. J. WestAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-09638-8
CHAPTER 1
Psychoanalysis and the Birth of an Author
My quest for Graham Greene often resembled one of his own favourite detective stories, as I came upon tantalising clues that he had himself planted. After a while it was possible to recognise them, a hint, a passing off of something as unimportant which in reality yielded vital insights. Not the least significant of them related to the early days of his life. In the volume of his autobiography called A Sort of Life Greene mentioned that a novel by J. D. Beresford, Revolution, had influenced him as a teenager. Quite by chance I had a copy of this book, which was filled with echoes of the preoccupations evident in Greene's fiction. How well had he known Beresford? Where were Beresford's papers?
A quick check on the chronology of the main events in Greene's life showed that he had known Beresford when the older man was actually writing the book, a brilliant success in its time that attracted reviews from figures now far more famous than he, amongst them Virginia Woolf. It seemed essential to trace Beresford's family and friends. But all enquiries at literary agents and publishers were fruitless; all his books, over sixty of them, were out of print and he was as forgotten as it is possible for an author to be. The key that allowed entry into his world came from looking at the list of his books in the British Library Catalogue. Some of these had been written in collaboration with Esme Wynne-Tyson, an early friend of Noël Coward's. But there were entries also for her son Jon Wynne-Tyson, his books published by the small press that he still ran, Centaur Press. He was able to provide much vital information, for J. D. Beresford had effectively been his step-father and he possessed many of the late author's surviving papers, most usefully for the later stages of the quest his small appointment books. He was also a fount of information about the family and gave an introduction to Beresford's daughter Elizabeth, who had become famous in her own right as the author of a long and successful series of children's television programmes, The Wombles.
The flight to Alderney where Elizabeth Beresford lives was almost an adventure in itself. With four other passengers in a very small plane whose body was no wider than a canoe, it seemed that the clouds were there to be reached out for and touched. From the air the island looked scarcely large enough for a plane to land. In the Beresford home were copies of all his books and of those written by others in his circle, including complete sets of those by Walter de la Mare, his lifelong friend, and ecstatically inscribed copies of Henry Williamson books. Elizabeth Beresford and her daughter provided more memories about someone whom they thought had been absurdly and unjustly neglected. There was also a collection of photographs, including that of Zoe Richmond illustrated here. The quest for Greene had begun in earnest.
* * *
Graham Greene was born on 2 October 1904 in Berkhamsted, where his father Charles was headmaster of the public school. He was part of the last generation in England to regard large families as the norm, as they had been for countless generations. He had two elder brothers, Herbert and Raymond, an elder sister Molly, a younger brother Hugh and a younger sister Elizabeth. But the family connection with Berkhamsted did not end there; on the other side of the town lived his uncle Edward and his family. They were known as the rich Greenes and the house had no fewer than twenty-four servants. The wealth came from South America, mainly Brazilian coffee. Edward Greene had got married in Brazil to a German girl whose family, like himself, were economic migrants. He had been brilliantly successful and the family he established was as numerous as the intellectual Greenes – as Charles Greene's family was known.
Three of Greene's cousins became involved in his life at varying times: Ben Greene, a giant at six foot eight inches, whose religious and political views were to have a great effect on Greene in the early 1920s and later in the war; Barbara Greene, with whom Greene travelled to Liberia in 1935, but who spent the war in Germany with her husband Count Strachwitz; and 'Tooter', Edward Greene, with whom he also travelled.
But the Greene family was not confined to Berkhamsted. Its money originally came from brewing, and their family firm Greene King still thrives. The West Indian plantations, which mainly grew sugar, an early source of their wealth, were still remembered in Greene's childhood. When Greene visited St Kitts in the Leeward Islands he was always on the look-out for people bearing his name, for one of his forebears was said to have fathered eleven children on the island from local families before dying at the age of nineteen. Links of this kind were a commonplace amongst old colonial families. The fortune of George Orwell's family also derived from the West Indies, and there were similar stories of concupiscent forebears.
It is unlikely that Greene's literary interests came from his father's side of the family. On his mother's side, by contrast, there was wide literary culture, the most famous literary relative being her cousin Robert Louis Stevenson. Greene was named partly after his namesake, his uncle Sir Graham Greene, one of the founders of Naval Intelligence and a great friend of Churchill's, but also partly after a Stevenson cousin, Graham Balfour.
But by far the most significant feature of Greene's childhood was that he was brought up in a school environment with the ubiquitous green-baize door, then to be found in every household of any size, in his case separating him from the school rather than from the servants' quarters. In later life he used to talk a great deal about the plight of a headmaster's son. In 1968 the television producer Christopher Burstall asked him about those days. Greene said: 'I wasn't beaten or bullied physically. But I was in a hopeless position of divided loyalties. I was Quisling's son.' But many others have been in a similar situation without ill effect, not least Greene's own brothers – his elder brother Raymond became head boy – and even his cousins, who attended the same school.
It is possible that these worries, that he was seen as a spy for his father, that nobody trusted him, were artificially exaggerated when Greene underwent a course of treatment at the hands of a man mistakenly believed to be a psychoanalyst after a breakdown of some kind when he was sixteen. Greene was undoubtedly a sensitive boy with a vivid and creative imagination, as those around him soon realised, but there may have been other, extraneous reasons for these problems. Most boys going to a boarding school would first have attended a prep school and have learned to live in close proximity to people of their own age and background. Gangs, bullying, team rivalry and other trials are all gone through harmlessly and with great rapidity. Although Greene did attend a prep school, after education at home, it was one set up at Berkhamsted by his father and he was not a boarder there. Charles Greene thus shielded his son from a crucial part of the growing-up process experienced by the boys with whom Greene mixed. A sense of isolation resulted which remained with him for the rest of his life. However, had it not been for his psychoanalysis the passage of a few years would probably have seen these difficulties completely forgotten.
Greene's conversion to Catholicism has naturally drawn some attention to his early religious life. Although it has been widely said that he became a convert simply because his wife Vivien was a Catholic and he had to do so in order to marry her – untrue in fact as the Church had no such rule – others have tried to look further back to find a reason. Vivien Greene had gone over to Rome under the influence of her mother's family and that of a saintly Dominican, Father Bede Jarrett. Nothing like that can be found in Greene's family: Berkhamsted School was an Anglican foundation and there was instruction in divinity, and school chapel with the usual Victorian hymns such as 'Abide with Me' no doubt sung lustily. But there were nonetheless signs of definite early Catholic influence. Greene recalled in later life that even as a child he had been critical of relatives who found scandal in tales of priests in Spain living with a housekeeper or said to have indulged in an affair. Their failings should not be confused with the office they held, he thought – a mature observation in such a young mind which was almost certainly learned from Robert Louis Stevenson.
Throughout his life Greene talked about the books which had influenced him as a child. During his school holidays he had the run of the school library and, for those long summer days the school was like a large country house with a particularly well chosen library of its own. Many of the books he refers to were typical children's adventure novels like Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. But he made an unexplained reference to more serious matters: 'The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct that any religious teaching.' The impact of Robert Louis Stevenson, whom Green's mother was proud to say was her first cousin, and what was then one of his best-known controversial 'open letters', on Father Damien, can be traced in Greene's later life; it affected both his view of Catholicism and the interest which finally led him to the Congo and the writing of A Burnt-Out Case.
The letter was written to a Dr Hyde, a missionary in Honolulu. It is a brilliant defence of the Catholic priest, who died among the lepers he was serving, against terrible defamation by Hyde, whom Stevenson repeatedly refers to as his co-religionist. The facts were well known to everyone in Graham Greene's youth, though they are now largely forgotten. Dr Hyde had written a letter in ruthless terms to one of his colleagues, H. B. Gage, attacking Father Damien shortly after the priest's death from leprosy. Stevenson came across the letter because Gage had sent it to the Sydney Presbyterian, where it had been published on 26 October 1889. He was profoundly upset by it and published his open letter in The Times in response. The crudest example of the malice in Hyde's letter was his statement that 'The leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.' Stevenson explained that Hyde was alluding to rumours that Damien had had a liaison with one or more of the lepers. His rebuttal of this story, even if it were true, echoes Greene's later objections to stories about priests which he heard in his own family.
When Greene mentioned Damien in A Burnt-Out Case he was not unconscious of the reference to Stevenson that this implied, although today it might have needed explaining. In fact his interest went further: he had several times thought of writing a biography of Father Damien and also one of Stevenson; biography, however, was not something that came easily to him. His own life was so complex that he despaired of ever finding enough material to write the life of anyone else. The one exception in his work, his life of the Earl of Rochester, was of an historical figure about whom all there was to be known could be found with some certainty.
Stevenson also made a pointed comment which may well have affected the way Greene saw the world, besides the obvious fact that Stevenson too travelled vastly. He said to Gage:
I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness of that place which oxen and wainropes could not drag you to behold. You, who do not even known its situation on the map, probably denounce sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your pleasant parlour.
Earlier Stevenson had attacked Hyde, as a Presbyterian missionary, for the sumptuous way he lived in contrast to the severe monastic economy practised by Damien in the leper colony.
There is one other striking example of a nascent Catholic sympathy in Greene's time at Berkhamsted. The school had formal debates on topics of the moment and in one of these, in February 1921, Greene made an impassioned contribution on the situation in Ireland. Anyone going against the Black and Tans, the quasi-military British police force named after their uniforms, would naturally be assumed to have sympathy for the Catholic cause, albeit sympathy of a political kind. Very much later in his life Greene revealed to Pierre Joannon in an interview published in 1981 in Etudes Irlandaises that his hero had been Michael Collins, who was assassinated in August 1922, more than a year after the debate. Did Greene see Collins as a hero because he had stood up to the British? Or did he admire the newly emerging statesman who had struck a deal with the British, and eventually was to be killed for it? When he spoke to Joannon Greene's own memories had perhaps faded, but in another interview he said something which seems to place the matter in a clearer light: 'I think that many people still have the same picture of the old-style IRA which existed during and after the First World War. I do admire that IRA, but the provos have turned into out-and-out gangsters, devoid of ideals ... They terrorise the Catholics.' Across fifty years his view has not changed, in his own eyes. And his evident sympathy with the Catholic population is equally clear, long before his conversion. His reaction at the time and after is of a piece with Stevenson's condemnation of his coreligionist and his support for the Catholic Damien.
Two schoolfellows of Greene's played some part in his later career. Claud Cockburn, a cousin of Evelyn Waugh, and Peter Quennell. Quennell was a friend with whom Greene had occasional contact over the years, particularly in London literary life before and after the war. Cockburn on the other hand was a close friend at Oxford, though politics came between them in the 1930s and arguments over financial matters in the 1960s. Greene found him companionable because of his natural tendency to revolt against authority, his cosmopolitan background – he had been born in China and his father lived in Belgrade – and his attractive personality. If Cockburn is to be believed, his own interests had already taken a political turn when he was at school. He claimed to have been much involved in an incident on Armistice Day in 1918 when drunken troops and revellers were let into the school, taking part in what he later called his first experience of revolution. Cockburn recalled with amusement Charles Greene's stern warnings to the school in the aftermath of these happenings about the spread of bolshevism.
Since both boys were barely fourteen when this incident occurred, and since Greene never refers to it, Cockburn may well have embroidered it, as he was to do with other stories in later years. His reporting of the Spanish Civil War included many incidents which were complete fiction, as he was to admit. No less problematic were his writings in the Daily Worker during the Second World War in support of Hitler and the Nazi–Soviet pact. More typical of his escapades with Greene was an idea they carried through during their first vacation at Oxford. They disguised themselves as travelling musicians and, armed with a barrel organ, begged their way around the home counties. Their disguise was good enough to fool the people of Berkhamsted when they passed through. It was this saga that Greene chose to refer to when Cockburn asked him to write a preface to his memoirs, published in 1981, by which time they had drifted far apart.
Whether Charles Greene actually did warn the school and his impressionable literary-minded son about the dangers of bolshevism, the mark left on Greene's mind was insignificant; Greene never once referred to it or anything like it. But there is no doubt that his father influenced him in his admiration for the work of Browning – as will be noted at several points in this book. For the moment it is enough to recall Greene's comment in his first volume of autobiography A Sort of Life, published in 1971:
If I were to choose an epigraph for all the novels I have written it would be from 'Bishop Blougram's Apology':
Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The Superstitious atheist, demi-rep
That loves and saves her soul in new french books
We watch while these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway.
This interest of his father's, with frequent reading aloud of Browning's poems in classic Victorian style, perhaps played some part in his becoming a writer. But there was another quite extraordinary development which affected him directly and profoundly as a result of the breakdown he suffered at sixteen. He had left home under some domestic stress with the idea of running away for good but was soon discovered and brought back. His parents decided to send him to stay with one of the new breed of psychoanalysts that had sprung up during the war. It was a decision which had entirely unforeseen results which they did not understand for many years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Quest for Graham Greene by W.J. West. Copyright © 1997 W. J. West. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Preface,
CHAPTER ONE: Psychoanalysis and the Birth of an Author,
CHAPTER TWO: An Oxford Political Odyssey,
CHAPTER THREE: Journalism with a Little Help from his Friends,
CHAPTER FOUR: Politics and Religion: The ILP and Father Bede Jarrett,
CHAPTER FIVE: Chaco Wars: Arms and the Guilty Men,
CHAPTER SIX: Benzedrine and the Blitz,
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Ministry of Fear and Philby's Empire,
CHAPTER EIGHT: A Publishing Affair,
CHAPTER NINE: Doctor Harry Lime and James Hadley Chase,
CHAPTER TEN: Faith-healing and The End of the Affair,
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Poland, Indo-China and The Quiet American,
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Business of A Burnt-Out Case,
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Blues for Uncle Charlie,
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A New Life in Exile,
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Father Oscar Maturet and The Honorary Consul,
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Ieuan Thomas and The Human Factor,
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Reflections from the Dangerous Edge,
Sources,
Bibliography,
Index,
By the Same Author,
Copyright,