Graham Greene (14 page)

1
Ways of Escape
, 14.

2
Clemence Dane (Winifred Ashton), 1888–1965, novelist and playwright. Graham first met her through Kenneth Richmond in 1921 (West, 13).

3
F. Tennyson Jesse, 1888–1958, novelist and crime writer.

4
Greene’s interest in Haiti began more thirty years before he wrote
The Comedians
(1966).

5
This novel about American oilmen in Mexico, published in 1926, probably influenced
The Power and the Glory
. It opens in a seaport, and its main character, Bradier, is a brutal business man with a capacity for personal loyalty; like the whisky priest, he excites both sympathy and revulsion in the reader. At the end of the book, Bradier is a self-described ‘fugitive’. It is worth noting, however, that the novel is not theological and that Bradier survives his ordeal.

6
The letter is addressed to Hugh Greene in Marburg an der Lahn. After leaving Oxford in 1933, Hugh worked as a journalist in Germany until 1939. As a first-hand observer, he kept Graham informed about the Nazis.

7
Henry Major Tomlinson (1873–1958) often wrote about the sea. His novel
Gallion’s Reach
(1927) was a success in Britain and America. Greene’s arrangement lasted for three years and was not a simple salary. As a series of large advances against royalties, Greene’s debt was not paid off until the publication of
Brighton Rock
in 1938. (St John, 295).

8
The opening of ‘Elegy IX. The Autumnal’.

9
Two films from 1929,
Atlantic
told the story of the
Titanic
, and
Hallelujah
portrayed a bad gambler becoming a good preacher.

10
An earlier novel by Joseph Hergesheimer.

11
Cream.

12
A fortress built
c
. 1000 on a cliff overlooking the Rhine at Coblenz.

13
Michael Sadleir (1888–1957) was a novelist and bibliographer.

14
Charles Fenby (1905–74), a friend of Raymond Greene’s, was editor of the
Oxford Mail
1928–40.

15
Ways of Escape
, 28.

16
Ways of Escape
, 14.

17
Ways of Escape
, 15.

18
Graham and Vivien rented for £1 per week a house without electricity and inhabited by rats (
A Sort of Life
, 145–6).

19
John Middleton Murry accused Maritain of sharply dividing mankind into his party and the devil’s (
TLS
, 23 April 1931).

20
Ways of Escape
, 15.

21
A Sort of Life
, 140–1. The letters, which I have examined, are in the possession of Francis Greene.

22
Kenneth Bell had been Graham’s tutor.

23
A Sort of Life
, 145.

24
Greene treasured his copy of de la Mare’s poems inscribed by the poet ‘Christmas 1921’. The librarians at Boston College have found in its pages fragile clippings of two more poems by de la Mare, ‘Horse in a Field’ and ‘The Strange Spirit’.

25
George Borrow (1803–81) was an English novelist who often wrote about Gypsies.

26
An invented author.

27
Paying guests.

28
Raymond.

29
A film in which a young marquis endeavours not to marry.

30
A musical starring Jack Hulbert.

31
René Clair (1898–1981) was a French director known for witty and stylish productions. Greene found ‘happy lyrical absurdity’ in his work
(Journey Without Maps
, 33).

32
A Sort of Life
, 155.

33
Stamboul Train
.

34
NS 1: 476.

35
Vivian Green-Armytage was a gynaecologist and obstetrician.

36
The review of Walter Greenwood’s
Love on the Dole
appeared in the
Spectator
(30 June 1933).

37
Graham and Hugh conducted a ‘harmless flirtation’ with the daughters, sixteen and twenty years old, of an English writer named Schelling. Once, when Hugh and Ursula were slow returning from a walk, the mother thought they had drowned in a canal. Later in Stockholm, Graham got his faced slapped by the elder sister in the same circumstances as Loo slapped Anthony’s in
England Made Me (Ways of Escape
, 30; see NS 1: 488).

38
A trial position in the Berlin office of the
Daily Telegraph
(Tracey, 36).

39
Graham’s friend Alan Charles Cameron (1893–1952), the husband of Elizabeth Bowen, was one of the founders of the British Film Institute.

40
The essayist and travel writer Peter Fleming (1907–71) shared with Graham a long association with the
Spectator
. His younger brother was the Bond-creator Ian Fleming.

41
Graham’s review of
After Strange Gods
appeared in the April issue. In it, he makes a memorable, if uncharacteristic, claim for the superiority of moral over aesthetic criticism: ‘To be a Catholic (in Mr Eliot’s case an Anglo-Catholic) is to believe in the Devil, and why, if the Devil exists, should he not work through contemporary literature, it is hard to understand.’ Twenty years later he found himself at the wrong end of such an argument when the Holy Office sought to suppress
The Power and the Glory
(see pp. 203–6).

42
Greene edited this book of memoirs of school life, to which prominent authors including Auden, Powell and Greenwood contributed. In his own essay on Berkhamsted (247–56), he said the book was an effort to understand why a man ‘should feel more loyal to a school which is paid to teach than to a butcher who is paid to feed him’.

43
Bede Jarrett (1881–1934) was Prior Provincial of the English Province of the Benedictines 1916–32 and a well-known preacher and author; he had had a strong influence on Vivien.

44
Birds in Spring, The Three Little Pigs
and
The China Shop
, were all Disney cartoons, to which Greene had a mild addiction (see p. 114). Ukrainian-born Anna Sten (1908–93) starred in
Nana
, released in February 1934.
Whither Germany
, written by Bertolt Brecht, was a melodrama concerned with unemployment in Germany; it was banned under the Nazis. In
The Mayor of Hell
, James Cagney is a former gangster who becomes a reforming administrator in a prison.

45
Graham’s mixed review of
I
,
Claudius
, praising the character but not the prose style, appeared in the
Spectator
(4 May 1934).

46
Probably, Graham’s American literary agent Mary Leonard (later Pritchett). Graham’s devotion to her deserves notice. Mitch Douglas of International Creative Management recalls that after she had retired and Graham had retained Monica McCall, he continued to pay her a separate commission: ‘I know this for a fact because I personally processed the checks. When Mary died after I joined the firm in 1974, Greene insisted on continuing to pay her Estate a commission. However, Mary’s Estate lawyers begged him not to do that, as Mary left her Estate to around 17 entities, and the division and processing of checks would be an extraordinary task. Therefore, Greene asked if Mary had a church. She did. He decided to pay the church a commission in Mary’s memory.’ (E-mail to RG, 6 January 2006).

47
Raymond and Eleanor at 10 Holywell Street in Oxford.

48
Dr Shorrocks had attended the protracted delivery of Lucy Caroline on 28 December 1933.

49
Graham described her: ‘The middle-aged, fanatical rather bandy legged woman, Mlle B, who had given me so dubious an invitation [to protest against the Communists], turned out to be one of the leaders of the National Front which now claims 50,000 members….’ Suzanne Bertillon was a well-known journalist who had reported on the famine in the Ukraine; an anti-Soviet, she supported calls for Franco-German friendship and in 1935 wrote a famous article on whether Hitler would write a second volume of
Mein Kampf
.

50
Probably the American novelist, poet and translator Allan Updegraff (1883–1965). He was a friend of Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair and lived for many years in Paris.

51
She later wrote a biography of Alphonse Bertillon, pioneer of various forensic techniques including fingerprints and mugshots; he had been a witness in the Dreyfus trial.

52
The Norwegian poet, journalist and dramatist Nordahl Grieg (1902–43) surprised Greene with a visit to Chipping Campden in 1931. The two struck up a warm friendship, described in
Ways of Escape
, 18–22. He lived for a time in Moscow and during the war joined the RAF. He was shot down over Berlin in 1943.

53
The novelist and biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908-92) was an important and insightful early critic of Graham Greene’s fiction. Regrettably, he was the originator of the term ‘Greeneland’.

54
William Wycherley’s comedy (1675) was playing at the Ambassadors Theatre in London.

55
Not identified. Conceivably, Noël Margaret Tidy, who wrote on massage and physiotherapy.

56
Edward Knoblock (1874–1945), an American playwright who lived for many years in London and was a friend of Arnold Bennett and Edith Sitwell.

57
J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967) was a poet and memoirist, who worked as a producer with the BBC from 1928. He became the literary editor of the
Listener
in 1935 and spent twenty-four years in that job, exercising wide influence over the literary scene (ODNB).

58
Graham is probably referring to his cousin Felix Greene (1909–85), who worked with the BBC. He became notorious for his botched reporting of the huge famine in China in 1959–61 following Mao’s Great Leap Forward and for an obsequious interview with Chou En-lai. Journalists often refer to him mistakenly as the brother of Graham and Hugh.

59
The abundantly named Brigadier General Cecil Faber Aspinall-Oglander was the author of
Military Operations, Gallipoli
(1929). He generally wrote on naval subjects and may have regarded smugglers as falling under his nautical expertise.

60
A book by Sir Compton Mackenzie, published in 1929.

61
Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, who had provided the money for Graham’s jaunt to the Ruhr in 1924, was in constant peril under Hitler. A public opponent of the Nazis, he was dismissed from the London embassy and retired to private life. During the war, he ran an escape route for Jews from Germany to Switzerland; he was shot by the Gestapo c. 23 April 1945. (
A Sort of Life
, 100–1; Knut Hansen,
Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
[Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996]; see pp. 394–5).

62
Derek Verschoyle brought Greene into the
Spectator
as a reviewer, and Greene was his replacement as literary editor when he was called up for military service. Citing Diana Athill, Jeremy Lewis writes of Verschoyle: ‘he kept a .22 rifle in the office in Gower Street, and would occasionally fling open his window and, his feet propped up on the desk, take pot shots at stray cats lurking in the garden or on the black-bricked wall beyond; but however unpopular he may have been with Bloomsbury cats, his convivial, heavy-drinking ways recommended him to his colleagues.’ (‘Grub Street Irregular’, unpublished ms.)

63
Andre Sebastian Raffalovich was a member of a wealthy Russian banking family. As a young man, he wrote poetry and fiction and was involved in a number of literary circles in London. He was received into the Catholic Church and contributed heavily to Church causes, including the construction of a new chapel at Downside Abbey. He visited Graham and Vivien at Chipping Campden, and NS suggests that he was the model for Mr Eckman in
Stamboul Train (The Times
, 24 February 1934; NS 1: 426).

64
See
Ways of Escape
, 19.

65
New York Times
, 16 May 1934.

66
In the imagination.

67
The Times
(20 October 1928) reported the expulsion of a Soviet military attaché named Sudakoff from Latvia. He and his secretary had been attempting to organise anti-constitutional groups. Presumably this is the same man.

68
Peter Leslie (d. 1971) had been an Anglican clergyman but became a Catholic, an arms dealer and a spy for the SIS as presumably those things were nearer heaven. Much later, he made a gift to Greene of his collection of Henry James first editions. See pp. 301–2;
Ways of Escape
, 55–6; and
Articles of Faith
, 165–79.

69
Ramon Novarro (
1
899–1968) played the lead in
Ben Hur
(1925), with its famously huge cast of 125,000.

70
Major Giffey, a passport-control officer, was likely also engaged in espionage work as Tallinn, 250 miles west of St. Petersburg, served as a ‘listening-post’ for the Soviet Union
(Articles of Faith
, 165–79). Mockler (94) suggests that he is the model for the poker-playing attaché in
England Made Me
.

71
Unidentified. Her article appears not to have been published.

72
Greene’s query. He is actually thinking of Lord Teignmouth’s and Charles G. Harper’s
The Smugglers
, 2 vols. (1923), 1: 42–5. A man who called himself ‘Goring’ explained in detail the activities of a Sussex gang and proposed the means to capture them: ‘Do but take up some of the Servants, they will soon rout the Masters, for the Servants are all poor.’

73
Hugh was staying with their cousin Barbara Greene at 4 Ormonde Gate in London.

74
Though now largely forgotten, Sir John Harris (1874–1940) was a man of rare qualities. An Evangelical Christian, he had investigated and testified about the horrors of Leopold II’s exploitation of the Congo. He then travelled the world, often at the risk of his life, to report on enslavements of colonial peoples. From 1910 to 1940, he acted as parliamentary secretary to the amalgamated Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection societies. He served a term in Parliament as a Liberal and was knighted in 1933. (ODNB)