Graham Greene: Political Writer

Michael G. Brennan

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137343963
• Argomento: Literatura
• Categoria: Crítica literaria europea

Graham Greene remarked that 'politics are in the air we breathe, like the presence or absence of a God' (The Other Man). This study is the first to provide a detailed consideration of the impact of his political thought and involvements on his writings both fictional and factual. It also offers the first detailed consideration of Greene's involvements in espionage and British intelligence from the 1920s until the late-1980s. It incorporates material not only from his major fictions but also from his prolific journalism, letters to the press, private correspondence, diaries and working manuscripts and typescripts, as well as consideration of the diverse political involvements and writings of his extended family network. It shows how the full range of Greene's writings was inspired and underpinned by his fascination with the essential human duality of political action and religious belief, coupled with an insistent need as a writer to keep the political personal.

1

Fictionalized Politics

Not even Greene’s critics doubt that there is a political dimension to all writing; few of them, however, have considered the political implications of reading his work.

Thomson, Graham Greene and the Politics of Popular Fiction, 7

The Greene Family

Greene’s political perspectives as a novelist and commentator on world affairs were partly defined by an insistent psychological need to distance himself from a comfortable Edwardian provincial background. (Henry) Graham Greene was born into an upper-middle class Hertfordshire family on 2 October 1904 at St John’s House, Berkhamsted School, where his father was then housemaster. He was the fourth child of Charles H. Greene and Marion Raymond Greene (1872–1959), who were first cousins once removed and members of an extensive, close-knit family circle based at Berkhamsted.¹ During the 1920s Greene prided himself upon his egalitarian socialism but the (largely unacknowledged) memory of some of his ancestors remained problematic because of their prominence as pro-slavery and anti-Catholic Emancipation capitalists.

During the eighteenth century the Greenes – dissenters who worshipped at the Howard Congregational Chapel in Bedford – had been industrious tradesmen in the woollen and drapery business. Greene’s great-grandfather, Benjamin Greene, served an apprenticeship in the brewery business and by 1801 was resident in Bury St Edmunds where he set up in partnership with another Suffolk dissenter, William Buck. Together they traded from the town’s Westgate Brewery where they were neighbours of the childless Sir Patrick Blake (d.1818) who owned a West Indian plantation on St Kitts. Benjamin Greene became one of Sir Patrick’s executors and after his death took over the management of his Suffolk and St Kitts estates. When Sir Patrick’s widow died she left Benjamin, who had acted as her trustee and adviser, one of her own plantations on St Kitts and he significantly expanded his West Indian interests by managing the estates of the Molyneaux family from Norfolk and by acquiring three of his own plantations. In 1829 Benjamin’s dynamic eldest son, Benjamin Buck Greene, travelled to St Kitts and took over the running of the family’s plantations. By the mid-1830s the now very wealthy Greene family was responsible for about one third of the island’s entire sugar exports.

The elder Benjamin Greene became a strident supporter of the commercial interests of West Indian slave proprietors. Marking the Greene family’s first venture into journalism, he purchased in early 1828 the Bury and Suffolk Herald, ensuring that an ultra-Tory line was taken during debates over the Reform Act, Catholic Emancipation and the abolition of slavery. In a series of inflammatory letters published in the spring of 1828 under a pseudonym in his own newspaper, Benjamin Greene argued that slavery was ‘neither productive of misery, nor repugnant to the duties of religion’ and suggested that the lot of West Indian slaves was no worse that the daily drudgery of Yorkshire factory and mill workers. These views were published only six years before an Act of Parliament (August 1834) abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. The naming of Benjamin’s eldest son, Benjamin Buck Greene, honoured his brewing partner William Buck, but even this association seems, in retrospect, ironic. Buck’s daughter Catherine married, in 1796, the renowned anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson.² His younger brother, John Clarkson, was appointed in 1792/93 the first governor of the ‘province of freedom’ for ex-slaves in Sierra Leone, later the location of Graham Greene’s wartime intelligence work and the setting of The Heart of the Matter (1948).

Following three libel cases generated by Benjamin Greene’s reactionary views in the Bury and Suffolk Herald, in 1836 he decided to move his family to London where he founded, with his entrepreneurial eldest son, a lucrative shipping business, Benjamin Greene & Son, specializing in sugar importation. During the next ten years Benjamin Buck Greene, who returned to London in 1837, established himself as a prominent member of the Victorian plutocracy, residing at a magnificent white stuccoed house in Kensington Palace Gardens. He served as a director of the Bank of England for 50 years and as an innovative Governor. Such a ruthlessly successful, wealthy and nationally renowned ancestor sits uneasily with the idealistic and non-materialistic socialism of Greene’s youth. Whenever he depicted wealthy capitalists in his fictions, they tended to be cast – despite the entrepreneurial materialism of his ancestors – as disturbingly unattractive types: the heartless industrialist Sir Marcus (A Gun for Sale), the corrupt matchstick millionaire Erik Krogh (England Made Me) and the dehumanized toothpaste magnate, Dr Fischer.

Benjamin Buck’s brother John (1810–67) became a solicitor and mayor of Bury St Edmunds; and another brother, Edward (1815–91), became an MP and transformed the family’s brewery business, merging it in 1887 with that of his neighbour, Frederick William King, to create the Greene King Company. He paid for the building of the huge red-brick Victorian gothic chapel at Berkhamsted School and his only son, Sir (Edward) Walter Greene (1842–1920), became a baronet. In contrast, another brother, Charles, took over, aged only 15, the management of the family’s estates on St Kitts after the return of his eldest brother, Benjamin Buck, to England in 1836. He died there of yellow fever less than four years later, reputedly having sired 13 illegitimate children which, as already noted, was facilitated by the then institutionalized rape of female slaves.

Charles Greene’s youngest brother, William (1824–81) – our author’s grandfather – proved an uncharacteristic family failure in various professions and in 1881, when in his late fifties, he abandoned his large family in Bedford to live under the aptly named ‘Mount Misery’ on St Kitts. But failure and disappointment always attracted Greene far more than success and it seems likely that William became one of the shadowy family models for his grandson’s fascination with unsatisfactory paternal figures (such as the father of Andrews in The Man Within) and unreliable brothers (such as Anthony Farrant in England Made Me, who also echoed Greene’s feckless eldest brother, Herbert). Having metamorphosed into a pathetically downtrodden expatriate comparable to the dentist Mr Tench in The Power and the Glory, William died on St Kitt’s of a fever caught within a couple of months of his arrival and was buried next to his brother Charles.³

In contrast, three of this troublesome William’s sons went on to achieve positions of social distinction and remained of considerable importance to the youthful Graham. Sir William Graham Greene served in the Admiralty’s Foreign Intelligence Department, rising through the ranks as Assistant Private Secretary to the First Sea Lord and Assistant Secretary to the Admiralty. Knighted in 1911, he served from then until 1917 as Permanent Secretary to the Admiralty and Ministry of Munitions. At the outbreak of the First World War Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, made him one of his inner circle of advisers. Well into his retirement, he continued to serve until 1940 on the Committee of Imperial Defence. He was a model for the Assistant Commissioner in It’s a Battlefield and his rambling gardens at Harston House, Cambridgeshire, appear in The Ministry of Fear and the surreal short story ‘Under the Garden’. His youngest brother, Edward (‘Eppy’) Greene (1866–1938), became a successful coffee merchant in Brazil and owned a grand Georgian hall at Berkhamsted where a lavish Christmas party was held each year for the entire Greene family. Their middle brother – Graham’s father – was Charles Henry Greene who, thwarted in his ambitions to become a barrister, entered the teaching profession and from 1910 until 1927 was headmaster of Berkhamsted School. Thanks to the comparatively modest means of his own family line, Graham was able to evince a half-disappointed pride in being a member of the ‘intellectual’ rather than the ‘rich’ Greenes.⁴

Charles Greene was a firm believer in Ezra Pound’s concept of a post-First World War ‘botched civilization’.⁵ The entry of his son Graham into the junior school at Berkhamsted coincided with the outbreak of war and for the next four years school life was tempered by Officers’ Training Corps parades, lectures for senior boys on tactics and armaments, field drills and patriotic songs. The school magazine, the Berkhamstedian, proudly reported in March 1915 that numerous old boys were ‘flocking from all over the world to join the colours and take the place of the fallen’. But Greene grew familiar from his father’s assemblies with the sombre roll call of former pupils killed in action. On Founder’s Day (31 July) 1916, his father announced that some 900 old boys were serving their country but also lamented the loss of 76 killed and 132 wounded (ultimately, 232 Old Berkhamstedians were killed during the First World War).

Charles Greene felt so strongly about the five million dead Allied soldiers that he refused to grant the school a day’s holiday in November 1918 for the Armistice. Instead, he insisted: ‘We simply must go on. Now is the time for effort: now is the time for the coming of the world.’ This contrary stance stirred a spirit of rebellion among the boys – Graham’s first personal encounter with civil revolution – as they unwillingly continued their usual school activities in the face of riotous incursions into the school from motley military groups. Outraged, Charles Greene ordered the temporary expulsion of several boys, including Graham’s friend Claud Cockburn, later a journalist and committed communist. Cockburn recalled his headmaster’s passionate denunciation (which Graham would also have heard) of the political chaos occasioned by the First World War and the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family by the Bolsheviks:

This is one more exhibition of the spirit of Bolshevism which is creeping across Europe. Over there in Moscow, there sits Lenin, there sits Trotsky, there they are. The spirit of Bolshevism and Atheism is creeping across Europe. It is breaking out all over. Look at Lenin, look at Trotsky, and look at you. It may reach our shores at any minute, and here right in Berkhamsted School we have the death-watch beetle already in the beams above us, and the prefects, even our own prefects, betray us from within.⁶

Graham, then aged 14, was strongly affected by his formerly liberal father’s post-war political views, including his frequent denunciations of Lloyd George and the Treaty of Versailles which he viewed as a catastrophe for the future of Western Europe.⁷ It was partly due to his father’s grave disillusionment, after 1918, with British politics and international affairs that a potent sense of betrayal became a dominant motif in Greene’s writings of the 1920s and, indeed, for the rest of his life. Although just too young to be called up for military service, Greene and other contemporary writers – George Orwell (b.1903), Evelyn Waugh (b.1903), John Wyndham (b.1903), Malcolm Muggeridge (b.1903), Anthony Powell (b.1905) and Samuel Beckett (b.1906) – spent the next two decades responding in their writings, both implicitly and explicitly, to the enormous social and political upheavals engendered by the First World War. As Brian Diemert observes: ‘The effects of the Great War were complex, on those men who were too young to have fought, the war inspired ambivalent feelings of revulsion at its brutality and waste, of guilt for not having fought, and of envy of those who had.’⁸ For Greene and those authors born between 1903 and 1906, the idea that the world remained in a perilous state of potential anarchy seemed an entirely logical concept.

Student Politics

The young Greene’s first recorded political comments came on 12 February 1921 in a sixth-form debate at Berkhamsted School on the motion that ‘the Government’s policy of reprisals in Ireland is unjustifiable’. In response to atrocities committed by Sinn Fein, Lloyd George had formed the ‘Black and Tans’, an auxiliary police force comprising mainly ex-soldiers, which ruthlessly opposed the Republicans. Greene’s speech condemned their violence, reminding his listeners of how ineffectual reprisals had proved during the Indian Mutiny.⁹ In autumn 1922 he went up to Oxford to study modern history at Balliol College. He dabbled briefly with both Conservative and Labour club activities, considered joining the Liberals and sent up student politics by inventing a fake independent candidate called Jorrocks for university hustings.

His cousin Ben Greene had come up to Wadham College in 1919 and provided Graham with a potent example of student political engagement. Ben never completed his degree in History but instead joined the Quakers and immersed himself in the Parliamentary Labour Party. He also became a convinced pacifist, a perspective inherited from his German mother who detested the Kaiser’s aggressive militarism. Ben lamented the loss of so many lives during the First World War and was horrified at the callous treatment of demobbed soldiers in England. Inspired to support the League of Nations by a lecture at Oxford given by the explorer Fridtjof Nansen, he travelled to Berlin to assist Quaker relief work. After experiencing at first hand the Germans’ desperate conditions, he became convinced (like Graham’s father Charles) of the gross iniquities of reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles and the loss of former German territories to Poland and Czechoslovakia. He continued to travel widely on relief work to Warsaw, Cracow and East Prussia and presciently felt that the ‘Peace Treaties, unless revised’ would prove the ‘sure causation of another war’.

In spring 1923 Ben travelled to Russia to assist the Friends’ Famine Relief Fund, working in conjunction with Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration in areas recently devastated by the struggles between the Red Army and the anti-Bolshevik Czech Legion. Although he encountered mass starvation, epidemics of malaria and floods, Ben felt a nascent optimism for Lenin’s New Economic Policy which he proposed had ‘lifted Russia out of the slough into which she sank’ and was ‘now making her one of the great powers in Europe’. In Russia, he continued, ‘one feels not that one is at the end of a civilization, as one does in Germany, but that one is at the beginning of one’. After journeying home via St Petersburg, Helsinki, Bergen and Newcastle, Ben continued to work as a researcher for the Independent Labour Party and also for Clement Atlee in his Limehouse constituency, standing unsuccessfully as a candidate for Basingstoke in the 1924 General Election. Ben’s radical activism provided his younger cousin Graham with his first personal contact with politically oriented international travel.¹⁰

In June 1923 Graham went with his cousin Edward ‘Tooter’ Greene to Ireland for a week to gain first-hand knowledge of the political situation there. Ireland had been granted self-governing dominion status by the Anglo-Irish Treaty (6 December 1921). But the Provisional Government’s first President, the revolutionary leader Michael Collins, was killed in an ambush on 22 August 1922. His murder provoked a vicious cycle of atrocities, reprisals and executions. Although the Irish Civil War had ended in late May 1923, the 18-year-old Greene was already showing a distinct taste for dangerous political hotspots. He claimed, on 9 June in a letter to his mother, that he had arranged a meeting with a Free State senator and also hoped to interview a Sinn Fein official.¹¹ It is not clear how the undergraduate Greene managed to establish such interesting political contacts, although his letter mentioned that he was planning to stay with ‘Moira O’Neill’, perhaps the Irish-Canadian poet Agnes Shakespeare Higginson, who used this pseudonym and lived in Ireland and whose Songs of the Glens of Antrim was republished by Blackwoods of Edinburgh in 1923.

At a time when it was dangerous to be an unaccompanied Englishman in Ireland, Greene walked from Dublin to Waterford, investigating the strength of Republican sentiments and the likelihood of a lasting political peace. In an article published 65 years later in the Irish Independent (1 July 1989), Greene claimed that he had written from Oxford to the Free State Government in Dublin, offering to cross the border (where armed forces were massing on both sides) and report from inside Ulster on military deployments. I...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Political Writer
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Fictionalized Politics
• 2 National and International Politics
• 3 The Alienated Englishman
• 4 South America and the Outbreak of War
• 5 War Recollected and the 1950s
• 6 A Global Commentator and British Intelligence
• 7 The Alienated Writer
• 8 An International Commentator and Occasional Novelist
• 9 Looking for an Ending
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index