Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (91 page)

Greene’s adolescence was troubled. There was a breakdown and psychotherapy, but he survived to go up to Oxford in 1922, where, in later life, none of his brilliant contemporaries (Waugh, Connolly, Henry Green, Betjeman) recalled him as other than a slight chill in the room. Like other unhappy undergraduates, he took
solace in poetry. In his final year he vanity-published
Babbling April
(1925), the title alluding to T. S. Eliot’s ‘cruellest month’. Wastelands would be a lifelong interest. The other poet most admired by Greene was Lord Rochester, the rakehell who, after a life of epic sin and debauchery, converted to eleventh-hour Catholicism on his deathbed. Rochester came to embody, for Greene, that paradox of Charles Péguy’s which is the epigraph to
The Heart of the Matter
: ‘The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity.’ The more sinful, the closer to God.

At Balliol, Greene read history, developed a strong head for drink, took a good ‘second’, and fell in love with a girl working in the local bookshop (Blackwell’s), Vivienne Dayrell-Browning (1905–2003). A Catholic convert, Vivienne encouraged Greene to come across before they married in 1927. There would be two children, born in the 1930s, but not much happiness.
Babbling April
fell stillborn from the press. On leaving Oxford, Greene kept body and soul together by journalism. Had he stuck at it, it pleased him to recall in later life, he might – who knows? – have risen to the dizzy height of Letters’ editor on
The Times
. On the side Greene – always a meticulous budgeter of his time – wrote a trio of Rafael Sabatini-style historical romances.
The Man Within
(1929) was accepted by Heinemann (his publisher for life, as they would be) and struck the public fancy, selling a whopping 13,000 in hardback. On the strength of these sales, and the contract that came with them, Greene turned to fiction full-time.

However, the two novels that followed missed the mark. Like John Buchan, Greene resolved to jump-start his career with a ‘shocker’. His fourth effort,
Stamboul Train
(1932), chronicles murder, espionage and sexual shenanigans on the Orient Express as the train thunders, first-class, through various Ruritanias. Greene was not, as yet, a widely travelled writer. This ‘entertainment’, as Greene would classify his thrillers, did the trick. It sold hugely and was optioned by the movie industry. Greene now knew that if ever his ‘novels’ fell short he could make up his income with coarser fare. He followed up with the even more lurid
This Gun for Sale
(1936). In
Stamboul Train
Greene indulged a vein of malicious mischief, which came to be one of his hallmarks in fiction. His fellow Heinemann author, J. B. Priestley, was recognisably defamed as the sexual pervert, Q. C. Savory, and a libel suit was narrowly avoided. Why did Greene do such things? In 1938, as film reviewer on
Night and Day
, he incurred massive libel damages for his employer (shipwrecking the magazine only six months after its launch) with his review of
Wee Willie Winkie
and the allegation that Shirley Temple’s backside figured in middle-aged men’s masturbation fantasies. So it may have done, but it was naughty to say so in print.

Now a high-earning man of letters, Greene and his family moved to a large town house by Clapham Common (it is where Sarah and Henry live in
The End of
the Affair
– Greene loved such in-jokes). Greene’s first Catholic novel (or was it an entertainment? He was never sure) was
Brighton Rock
(1938) a tale of razor gangs, mortal sin and eternal damnation in Brighton – a town, famous for its dirty weekends, which the author knew considerably better than Stamboul.
The Power and the Glory
(1940), set in a post-revolutionary, Catholic-persecuting Mexico, which he had visited in the late 1930s, took Greene further into daring fictional experiments with theology. Could one be a fornicating ‘whisky priest’ and still administer the sacraments to God’s satisfaction? Greene followed up with the two novels which are routinely judged his best. In
The Heart of the Matter
(1948), set in wartime Sierra Leone, the hero Scobie embraces mortal sin (suicide) to validate his forgivable sin (adultery), also, as it happens, embezzling an insurance company in the process. Is Scobie a good man? In
The End of the Affair
(1951) set in a wartime England, God is conceived as a jealous lover – the great co-respondent in the sky. Is He a good God?

In 1943 Greene had published the first of his espionage novels,
The Ministry of Fear
. He knew the world he was writing about. On the outbreak of war he had been recruited by the Ministry of Information (Orwell’s ‘Minitruth’). Later in the war, he was transferred to MI6 and posted to Sierra Leone for two years. His unit was charged with counter-espionage and one of his direct superiors was Kim Philby – later unmasked as the leader of the ‘Cambridge Spies’. Greene was fascinated by Philby and, after the traitor’s flight to Moscow, wrote the fine novel,
The Human Factor
(1978) in which the moral dilemmas of Philbyesque treachery are scrupulously – if ambiguously – anatomised.

Greene separated from his wife in 1946. He had fallen in love with the rich, beautiful wife of a British politician, Catherine Walston (1916–1978), the original for Sarah in
The End of the Affair
. Like Sarah, she proved, finally, elusive. Loyalty to her Labour politician husband and five children, rather than the intrusion of the Almighty, seems to have ended the affair.

No novelist, until John Grisham, has more successfully adapted into film than Greene; and no work of his adapted more successfully than the screenplay-novella
The Third Man
(1949), a movie which – marinated in deepest
noir
– cooks all the Greenian themes to a point just short of parody. Vienna, the ruined imperial city, occupied by four competing armies, in which the only community is via the sewers, is Greeneland’s
locus classicus
. In later life, now a literary eminence, Greene travelled widely – finding, as his novels reflect – hearts of darkness and ugly Americans everywhere.
The Quiet American
(1955) eerily foretells the Vietnam debacle;
The Burnt-Out Case
(1961) follows Conrad’s Marlow to an upriver Congolese leper colony.
The Comedians
(1966) is set in Papa Doc’s Haiti, where the state religion is voodoo, bastardised Catholicism. Meanwhile, in his later years, Greene himself lived luxuriously
in his apartments on the French Riviera and Paris, or his villa on Anacapri, or the Ritz, invariably, when passing through London. If the sublunary world was hell, he saw it through the glaze of a five-star hotel window and the stained window of an idiosyncratic – or, as he called it, paradoxical to the end – ‘atheistic’ Catholicism.

My new best friend.
Nick Hornby, on first reading Patrick Hamilton

Hamilton was born into a wretched enclave of the Edwardian middle classes. His father was an unsuccessful author, failed barrister and a drunk, sozzling his way through a £100,000 inheritance. Bernard Hamilton’s first marriage had been with a prostitute whom he tried, vainly, to ‘save’. His second wife, Patrick’s mother, was a painter and writer, but the marriage was unhappy, as were the three children’s spectacularly unfulfilled lives. Patrick was born in Sussex, and educated at a series of good schools, including Westminster. He was not one of its prize products. As a child he suffered poor health (aged fifteen, he caught the epidemic Spanish influenza) and grew up neurotic, shy and myopic. His impressionable early years were passed during the First World War – not something to add gaiety to any boy’s life. University was not an option – bright as Patrick manifestly was, he simply could not pass the exams – and the family money was running short. His father, whose malign shadow haunted his children throughout their lives, wanted him to go into business, but from the first he was determined to be a writer or actor. His mother and sister supported him financially, but reluctantly.

His stage career failed, although he picked up a shrewd sense of what worked with audiences. Hamilton’s first efforts in authorship were poetry in the then fashionable Georgian style, but fiction turned out to be his true
métier
. Aged only twenty, he published his first novel,
Monday Morning
(1925), forming in the process a lifelong friendship with the publisher, bibliophile, and himself an occasional novelist, Michael Sadleir. It was an auspicious start and other novels followed, in the depressive-realistic style of Gissing or the jaunty comic style of W. W. Jacobs (Hamilton heartily loathed modernism):
Craven House
(1926),
Twopence Coloured
(1928),
The
Midnight Bell
(1929),
The Siege of Pleasure
(1932). Hamilton had a gift for the resonant title, and the books went down well with library readers.

His breakthrough came not with fiction but with the hit stage play,
Rope
in 1929. It was a long-time earner for him (more so when Alfred Hitchcock adapted it, brilliantly, for the screen in 1948). A bleak melodrama, centred on a psychopathic murderer, the plot hinges on a fine
coup de théâtre
– a corpse secreted throughout the action (unknown to the audience) on stage. Hamilton followed up with another hit, the Victorian psychological thriller,
Gas Light
(1938), revived for the West End theatre in 2009. Its action depends on the vagaries of the gas-mantle. The gimmick, used on stage, is that the brightness, or dimness, of any one light depended on how many people in the house were turning the utility on or off in other rooms.

Hamilton had a disastrously unhappy personal life, exacerbated by chronic alcoholism. In 1927, following his father’s example, he fell for a prostitute. The misery fed, creatively, into the trilogy,
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
(1935), Hamilton’s ‘black history’ of London. He married Lois Martin in 1930. With his stage successes and his growing reputation as a novelist it should have been the saving of him, but while walking through Earls Court in January 1932 he was hit by a drunk driver. His face was scarred, he lost the use of an arm and contracted a permanent limp. It coincided with the ‘Slump’, and ten years of misery for the nation. Patrick Hamilton would be ‘walking wounded’ for the rest of his life. Many people assumed, embarrassingly, that his disability was a war injury. His marriage also failed.

In the same depressed middle period of his career, Hamilton published his masterpiece:
Hangover Square, or, The Man with Two Minds: a Story of Darkest Earl’s Court in the Year 1939
(1941). ‘The Man’ is George Harvey Bone, an amiable dolt, with ‘great golfer’s wrists’, who finds himself in ‘the wrong set’: upper middle-class idlers and boozers whose days are passed doing nothing in Earls Court. Hamilton catches their in-group slang with devastating accuracy. Bone falls in love with a ‘bitch’, Netta, who exploits, betrays and humiliates him. Unluckily for her, he is schizophrenic. When the ‘click’ occurs in his brain, a deadly second personality takes over. The ‘other’ Bone drowns Netta in her bath with the apology, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hurt you did I?’ and kills her lover. He then makes his way to Maidenhead – for obscure reasons – where he kills himself. The headline in the gutter press reads: ‘Slays Two. Found Gassed. Thinks of Cat’. The novel ends in September, 1939, with Chamberlain’s declaration of war on the radio.
Hangover Square
was given the Hollywood film treatment in 1945. The result regularly, and deservedly, wins awards as the worst film-fiction turkey ever projected on to the silver screen.

Unfit for active service and now rich enough to do nothing but drink and make himself unfit for anything, Hamilton spent the war years watching the odd game of
cricket, and hobnobbing with a select group of friends in Fitzrovia (haunt of those other legendary drinkers, Dylan Thomas and J. MacLaren Ross). In his last years, writing was beyond him, though he still had money from the plays (
Gaslight
was also filmed twice, the second time with Greta Garbo in the lead). He completed one other major work of fiction,
Slaves of Solitude
(1947).

His marriage was long wrecked, although the divorce did not come through until 1953. He had lived for years as a bachelor in clubs and at the Albany, the select address in Piccadilly, and in 1954 he remarried (to Lady Ursula (‘La’) Winifred Stewart). There is some doubt as to whether, even sober, Hamilton was sexually robust. In his last years he was wholly sodden and died of cirrhosis. Everyone agrees nowadays that he is less read than he should be: but posterity, obstinately, declines to read him.

I have no sense of myself as a person exactly, just as a lot of reactions to things.

‘Xtopher’, wrote Stephen Spender in 1931, ‘is a cactus.’ Prickly, solitary, self-sufficient, hard to love, untouchable, Isherwood confirmed Spender’s judgement with his everywhere quoted catchphrase, ‘
I am a camera
with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking.’ A narcissistic camera one should add. ‘His principal subject’, says his biographer, ‘was himself.’ Selfishness is the source of the diamantine clarity of his vision, its hardness and, ultimately, its insensitivity. Magnus Hirschfeld, the Berlin sexologist, diagnosed Isherwood, unpejoratively, in the 1930s as ‘infantile … possessed of the sexuality of a schoolboy’. The artist Keith Vaughan saw him in late middle age as a ‘dehydrated schoolboy’. Humphrey Spender, who photographed him sensitively, thought Christopher incapable of loving anyone but Christopher. Not that it inhibited him from physical contact: by the early 1950s, it is calculated, he had had some 400 partners – including Don Bachardy, thirty years younger, who was with Isherwood from the early 1950s until his death. An artist, Bachardy spent Isherwood’s last days – he was dying slowly of prostate cancer – sketching his lover’s face; creating, on paper, one of the few literary death masks of modern times.