The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Graham GREENE plays Russian roulette
Fear of boredom drove the novelist to seduce a governess and flirt with Russian roulette, says Richard Greene
‘We lived in those years continuously with the sexual experience we had never known… And in between the periods of sexual excitement came agonising crises of boredom.’ So wrote Graham Greene in his memoir, A Sort of Life (1971), recalling the early 1920s, when he fell for a series of women in a “twilight world of calf love”.
Apart from fantasies about his tennis-playing cousin Ave, he had, back home in Berkhamsted, taken to exchanging kisses with his younger siblings’ somewhat tyrannical nurse. She sought to improve the experience by giving him his first razor. One evening, he came to the nursery, found his mother there, but went ahead anyway with a kiss on the young woman’s lips “to show that I was not ashamed of what I did on other occasions”. She was soon sacked. He had also conceived a passion for Clodagh O’Grady, the golden-haired daughter of his father’s secretary. He went up to Oxford in 1922 and fell in love with a waitress. But something more painful was in store.
Like most students Greene overspent on books and beer. He lived for his first two terms at 52 Beechcroft Road in north Oxford, so there were late-night taxis to pay for. Before long, he was broke, and decided very reluctantly that he must spend the summer not in Paris but with his family in the seaside town of Sheringham in Norfolk. With them came his younger siblings’ governess, named Gwen Howell, about 10 years Greene’s senior.
At first, he paid no attention, but then one day, as he writes in his memoir, he saw Gwen lying on the sand, her skirt pulled up showing “a long length of naked thigh. Suddenly at that moment I fell in love, body and mind. There was no romantic haze about this love, no make-believe.”
It was, for him, “an obsessive passion”, for her, a flirtation. Although they did no more than kiss, she became afraid of the strength of his feelings. He took dancing lessons so that they could go to “hops”. She was tenuously engaged to a man who worked abroad for Cable & Wireless. With his return anticipated, she wept as she told Greene she would have to leave Berkhamsted to be married. Their dalliance had lasted about six intense months, “though even today”, he would write in the memoir, “it seems to have endured as long as youth itself ”. From Oxford, he continued to exchange letters with Gwen each week, and 30 years later when she wrote to him asking for tickets for his play The Living Room, the sight of her handwriting on the envelope caused his heart to race.
There is nothing remarkable about a young man falling in love with an unattainable woman. However, Greene’s mental state was more than ordinarily troubled. Since early 1922, he had begun to experience the terrible boredom that would afflict him all his life and that he would do almost anything to relieve. This was likely a symptom of manic depression, although he would later blame psychoanalysis: “For years, after my analysis, I could take no aesthetic interest in any visual thing: staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful I felt nothing. I was fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath.” By the autumn of 1923 he was also engrossed in his impossible passion for Howell, but “the boredom was as deep as the love and more enduring”.
One relief was alcohol – he told Evelyn Waugh in a letter that much of his time at Oxford passed in a “general haze of drink” – more than he consumed at any other time in his life. His memoir tells us that he also played a reckless game. He says that he discovered in the deal cupboard of the bedroom he shared with his elder brother Raymond a revolver – “a small ladylike object with six chambers like a tiny egg stand” – and “a small cardboard box of bullets”. He set out across Berkhamsted Common as far as Ashridge Beeches.
There, he says, he loaded a bullet into the gun and spun the chambers round. He says his intentions were to escape rather than to commit suicide, and that he was intent on the gamble: “The discovery that it was possible to enjoy again the visual world by risking its total loss was one I was bound to make sooner or later.” He writes: “I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear and pulled the trigger. There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position. I was out by one.”
His survival thrilled him: “My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities. It was like a young man’s first successful experience of sex – as if among the Ashridge beeches I had passed the test of manhood. I went home and put the revolver back in its cornercupboard.” But when the holiday ended, he took the revolver with him back to Oxford. There, three times, he chose a country lane to play. The thrill diminished, and by Christmas 1923, after six games in all, he gave up Russian roulette.
This is one of the most famous episodes in Graham Greene’s life. However, it may not be entirely true. Certainly, his mother rejected the whole story. Raymond, the owner of the gun, reportedly maintained that there was no box of bullets in the cupboard. It is reasonable to believe that this story is at least embellished, that Greene did play Russian roulette but with blanks, or, more likely, empty chambers. Indeed, the poems in
Greene saw her lying on the sand, showing ‘a long length of naked thigh [and] fell in love’
his first book Babbling April (1925) provide a little evidence on the subject. One describes a bullet being loaded into the chamber, but another suggests that the game involved a good deal of fantasy:
How we make our timorous advances to death, by pulling the trigger of a revolver, which we already know to be empty.
Even as I do now.
And how horrified I should be, I who love Death in my verse, if I had forgotten To unload.
In the course of his life, Greene did many things at least as dangerous as Russian roulette, and perhaps that is the point of the
‘I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear,’ he writes, ‘and pulled the trigger’
story. It is not simply a tall tale but a personal myth, a story that allows Greene to explain a recurrent pattern:
A kind of Russian roulette remained, too, a factor in my later life, so that without previous experience of Africa I went on an absurd and reckless trek through Liberia; it was the fear of boredom which took me to Tabasco during the religious persecution, to a léproserie in the Congo, to the Kikuyu reserve during the Mau-Mau insurrection, to the emergency in Malaya and to the French war in Vietnam. There, in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver from the corner-cupboard in the lifelong war against boredom.
Graham Greene wagered his life again and again and just could not lose it: he died of natural causes at 86. Howell was only the first of his romantic disappointments – each of his great loves ended in shipwreck until his seventh decade, when he found peace in an unconventional relationship with Yvonne Cloetta, a married woman 18 years younger than himself.
The need to be on the move and to experience risk gave birth to some of his greatest works, among them, The Power and the Glory inspired by Mexico, The Heart of the Matter by Sierra Leone, and The Quiet American by Vietnam. A constant traveller to the world’s most troubled places, Greene’s struggle against boredom was an affair that never ended.
Extracted from Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene by Richard Greene (Little, Brown, £25), published on Sept 3