Graham Greene (11 page)

Yours sincerely,
     Graham Greene

Best known for her crime novels, Marie Lowndes
(1868
–1947) was the sister of Hilaire Belloc. Her husband, Frederick Lowndes, was a staff writer on
The Times
, where Graham had met him
.

Little Orchard, | Campden, | Glos. | April 4 [1933]

Dear Mrs. Belloc Lowndes,

So many thanks for your letter. I’m glad you liked
Stamboul Train:
I’ve never been more uncertain of a book. It was nice of you to send me the cutting which I had not seen. The book seems to be doing as well in America as one can expect: it came out the very week when the banks were closed.

We’ve been down here in the country for the last two years & are now struggling to find a flat in Oxford for a year. Do come & see us if you are ever near. Everybody seems to turn up in the Cotswolds at least once a year. Do please remember me to your husband.

Yours very sincerely,
     Graham Greene

During a holiday in Wales, Vivien learned of the death of her very forceful mother, Muriel Dayrell-Browning, who had suffered an embolism following a broken leg
.
³⁴

at Sea beach, | Horton, | Pontcynon, | Swansea, |

May 23 [1933]

Dear Uncle Bob,

I’m so sorry about this. It came as a terrible shock. Unfortunately we left Campden early yesterday morning before your first wire, & both wires were delivered together to us here just after tea.

Vivienne, actually, was terribly upset, & the worst of it is that she’s going to have a baby. She was bent on going up to town for the funeral; I was a little worried – three journeys of over five hours each within about four days, so I telephoned through last night to Uncle Vivian & explained matters.
³⁵
He said that she should certainly not
come up; it was useless to try & persuade her last night, so I waited till this morning, when I got a local doctor to see her & advise her. He said if she did travel up, she would probably feel too sick to attend the funeral. That & Uncle Vivian’s advice have persuaded her.

I do hope you feel I’ve not done wrong over this. If we had been at Campden it would have been very different; I didn’t like to bring pressure on her, for the reason that her mother & I did not care for each other & it looked as if I was carrying the feud on after her death; so I left it to the doctors. But if I had always been as fond of her mother as you all are I should have felt exactly the same. I shall come up as Vivien’s representative by a train on Thursday morning & will go straight to Golders Green. I’ll be catching an evening train home, as I don’t want to leave her alone for the night. I expect I shall see you at Golders Green.

With all my sympathy,

yours affectionately,
     Graham Greene

Little Orchard, | Campden, | Glos. | June 17 [1933]

Dear Mrs Belloc Lowndes,

How nice it is of you to remember us. I should be delighted to come to your party on Thursday. Alas! as we are moving to a flat in Oxford the next day, my wife has to be in Oxford laying the ground for our furniture. You may be amused to hear, too, that we are going to have a child in December, so she cannot leap from one spot to another with any celerity. May I enlist your kind heart in the cause of this book,
Love on the Dole
? I had it for review the other day
³⁶
& was so deeply impressed by it that I wrote to the author, a thing I have never done before. He is a man of 29, who has had a terrible life on
the dole & off it in Salford, & now works at 30/-a week. But the book is brilliant. Do read it & encourage others to read it. Yours very sincerely, Graham Greene

Graham was planning a new novel, later entitled
England Made Me
, based on the story of Ivar Kreuger, a Swedish tycoon whose vast wealth was founded on the production of matches. He shot himself just as he was about to be revealed as a swindler. With Hugh, Graham took a trip that included Oslo, Gothenburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen. They returned on
7
September
.

Strand Hotel | Göteborg | August 18 [1933] | 8.20 a.m.

Darling love, I’m almost glad you couldn’t come. Such a crossing. Not very rough, but a soft slow regular undulation for 30 hours on end which seemed much worse than the Channel. Though quite all right as long as one lay down. Yesterday by the time I’d dressed & shaved, I had to go back to bed; Hugh didn’t get up till the evening. Driven by the sporting spirit of the Wufflies I got up & had lunch (so as not to lose a bet), but then retired again till after tea. No supper. But by the evening I was getting used to it.

As for the ‘jolly girls’ – Ursula, the younger, very healthy & managing & girl-guidish … she was on the look-out for us at the barrier at Victoria & pounced; there was no avoiding them. The elder sister is quite tolerable but with a bad skin. They’ve just departed with their mother in a car;
³⁷
O darling such a lovely railway station where we took their luggage; beautiful plain modern brick with lovely proportions, & behind every buffer on every platform a little flower garden.

Hugh & I went & saw Mae West in
She Done Him Wrong –
an absolutely perfect film. The nineteeish atmosphere beautifully caught; showing up ‘[illeg]’s’ spurious literary period air. A completely original film in photography, acting, integrity: no sentiment to mar the amoral story. You must see it if you get a chance.

[…]

Ian Parsons
(1906
–80) was a partner in the firm of Chatto & Windus and went on to become chairman of Chatto, The Bodley Head and Jonathan Cape. His offer of a job to Graham presented the novelist with a dilemma
.

9 Woodstock Close, | Woodstock Rd., | Oxford. |

Oct. 11 [1933]

Dear Parsons,

Very reluctantly, because I’ve always wanted to be in a publishing office, I must lose the chance. If I had been living in London, I could have gone gently on with my own work of an evening, but as it is my evening would be spent in getting home. I have still half a year’s lease to run here, and as my wife is having a baby in December, I feel rather tied. It was very nice indeed of you to give me the chance which if I’d been in London I should have leapt at.

You spoke of an apprentice job being the one really vacant. I don’t know if it would be any good putting in a word for a brother of mine who has just gone down from Oxford and is anxious to get into a publisher’s? He was at a German university for a time and speaks German well. At Oxford he took a second in Honour Mods. and just missed a first in English. Edmund Blunden was his tutor and speaks highly of his work. His name is Hugh Greene, and his home is Incents, Crowborough, Sussex. But I daresay you’ve got dozens of apprentices to choose from.

Yours ever,
     Graham Greene

The beginning of
1933
had seen Graham with a bestseller in
Stamboul Train
, but he was still deeply in debt to Heinemann, so his decision to earn his living solely as a writer was a risky one. He was, however, able to rely on a modest income as a reviewer for the
Spectator
, of which he became literary editor at the beginning of the war
.

9 Woodstock Close, | Woodstock Rd., | Oxford. |

Feb. 28 [1934]

Dear Hugh,

Many thanks for your letter and thousands of congratulations on your job.
³⁸
I wonder what salary you are getting. Nine guineas a week? I’ve heard nothing more from Cameron, and I didn’t have a chance to pump him at dinner, but I imagine that now you will have small interest in the F.I.
³⁹
How beautifully dramatic that you should have got so good a job a few days before your time ran out.

If I see Peter Fleming
⁴⁰
I’ll show him the photo!

I’ve just been in bed with a bad cold and am overwhelmed with acres of work. I seem to have gatecrashed into the highbrow citadels with the new book, and have got the new Eliot to write an article on for
Life and Letters
.
⁴¹
Cape are publishing
The Old School
in the summer, paying me an editorial fee of £30.
⁴²

Paris was extraordinarily interesting, though I failed to see a riot. I have now become passionately addicted to flying. I have never enjoyed a breakfast more than the one I had over the Channel. I got a 25% reduction from Imperial Airways which made the price about 5/-more expensive than 2nd class Dover–Calais.

I rejoice over the news about D.

In haste,
     Graham

[
Note on the envelope:
‘Father Bede is critically ill, so I can do nothing about intros yet.’]
⁴³

9 Woodstock Close : Woodstock Road : Oxford |

Tuesday [early 1934]

Darling best dearest most adored Puss Willow. I do hope you are having a nice time & seeing plenty of people & things. Your Wuffle misses you.

I did arrears of letters this morning & this afternoon went to the bumper [?] programme: it was lovely, especially
Birds in Spring
which I hadn’t seen, &
The Three Little Pigs
. (Did I tell you that with Anna Sten there was a
Silly Symphony
called
The China Shop
with the most lovely colouring I’ve yet seen).
Whither Germany
was quite good, &
The Mayor of Hell
very seeable. A small boy beside me burst into loud sobs when a boy dies in a Reformatory.
⁴⁴
When I got back, I
played the gramophone, did my minimum, & read this long (& rather dull) Graves novel, which has suddenly descended on me at the last minute.
⁴⁵

I’m so disappointed about tomorrow, but as Mary
⁴⁶
is playing hostess & hasn’t told me where or when we are to have lunch, it’s useless trying to fix a meeting. I’d so much rather have lunch with you. If by any chance you found yourself by the entrance to the Café Royal between 12.15 & 12.30, we might snatch a cocktail together. I’ll be there on the chance, but don’t put yourself out at all if you aren’t in the neighbourhood.

Dear love, I so love & adore you. I’m going down on the chance of finding R. & E. in.
⁴⁷

All my love,

Tyg.

P.S. Dr S.’s Bill has come in. He’s only charged 17.6.6. Isn’t that a lovely surprise?!
⁴⁸

The Stavisky affair nearly brought down France’s Third Republic. A swindler named Sacha Stavisky had been found dead in Chamonix and it was not clear whether he had killed himself or been murdered by the police
.

The Right claimed that he had been killed to hide corruption in the Socialist government. On
6
February 1934, one hundred thousand royalist and fascist demonstrators fought a pitched battle with police at Place de la Concorde. Graham flew to Paris to report on the General Strike called for Monday
, 12
February. He and Clairouin drove about Paris looking for signs of trouble; in the end, he wrote his article for the
Spectator (16
February 1934; Reflections 30 –3) without seeing blood
.

9 Woodstock Close, | Woodstock Rd., | Oxford. |

March 6 [1934]

Dear Denyse – May I?

I don’t know what you will think of my rudeness in not having written before to thank you for your kindness to me in Paris, but I no sooner got home to a vile London fog than I had to go to bed with the worst cold & throat that I’ve had for years.

I so enjoyed myself, even though I missed a riot. Please don’t show Mlle Bertillon this article; I had to suit my opinions to my market!
⁴⁹
After I left the Updegraffs
⁵⁰
on the Monday night I went for a long walk & found a most interesting spot up by Belleville where I could watch the police searching people. But as you see I had precious little to make an article out of!

Yours ever,
     Graham Greene

9 Woodstock Close, | Woodstock Rd., | Oxford. |

March 11 [1934]

Dear Hugh,

Many thanks for your letter. Don’t hurry to repay me; I’m not in urgent need.

About that address: I told Mumma about it & I imagined she’d tell you. When I was in Paris I met at Denyse Clairouin’s this strange, fanatical, I should say sexually abnormal, Mlle Bertillon, a niece of the man who invented finger prints.
⁵¹
She is one of the leaders of a new French party – a revolutionary central [?] party & was the woman whom Denyse had promised to get some Munich introductions from. I said that you were in Berlin & she suggested that you should meet this woman, who is apparently an Austrian journalist.

I enclose a sheet from Arthur Rogers’ latest catalogue. Is this the Byron book you wanted?

Isn’t it maddening that Lapland is off? I’m just turning over in mind, but have said nothing to V. yet, about Moscow, not an Intourist trip but an individual one. If Nordahl Grieg is still there, it might be amusing.
⁵²

I suspect but don’t know that the book is not going very well, though I have never before had so good a press: a really respectable press from people whom I respect. Indeed I really seem to have been promoted to the sixth form! In the new
Life & Letters
which comes out at the end of this month I believe Calder-Marshall
⁵³
is doing a
fine review of it; I am doing (an unsigned) review of T.S. Eliot’s new book.

There are various things brewing about which I went up to town the other day (seeing
The Country Wife
⁵⁴
–
a really good production): Marge Tidy
⁵⁵
is progressing not at all badly with the dramatisation of
The Man Within
(what is more amusing she is showing symptoms of nymphomania); there is talk of Knoblock
⁵⁶
dramatising
The Name of Action;
& the B.B.C. are talking about special short stories for broadcasting – I met Ackerley,
of Hindoo Holiday,
⁵⁷
there – & of course the ubiquitous Felix
⁵⁸
tried to push his way to the fore.