Extract from Chapter 11 | A Sort of Life

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner – the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic. One may sometimes envy Radiguet and Alain-Fournier whom death forestalled before they embarked on the long cross-country run.

The Man Within was, it is true, the third novel I had completed, but the first two had been clumsy exercises. I had been in training only, and there still remained other possibilities – British-American Tobacco or the Lancashire General Insurance Company. With all its faults of sentimentality and over-writing The Man Within was professional. I found myself committed to the long-distance race. I sometimes find myself wishing that, before starting the second novel, The Name of Action, I had found an experienced mentor.

If Robert Louis Stevenson had been alive* he would been only ten years older than I am now, and perhaps I would have found the courage to consult him in distant Samoa and have sent him my first book. He had always seemed to me ‘one of the family’. I had lived as a boy on the fringes of his world: his relative and biographer, Graham Balfour, had come to our house, my beautiful aunt would often arrive from a stay with his friend Sidney Colvin and his wife, the former Mrs Sitwell, whom as a young man Stevenson had loved and whom he had met in the house of my great-aunt Maud of Number 11. Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played on the bagatelle board which had belonged to him. Surely from my relative in Samoa I might have received better and more astringent counsel than from my publisher, Charles Evans, who was determined to shut his eyes to the disastrous failings of his young discovery. I even received an enthusiastic telegram from Evans welcoming the typescript of the second novel – how could I tell how bad it really was? Evans must have known, but he was determined to keep it dark for the time. He had a reputation for discovering young writers, and he couldn’t admit a mistake too quickly.

I don’t think I ever really believed in the book in spite of the telegram. I know I despaired of it often, as I plodded with my unlikely hero through the streets of Trier, on my last holi day before I left The Times. In most of my novels I can passages, even chapters, which gave me at the time I wrote them a sense of satisfaction – ‘this at least has come off’. So I felt, however mistakenly, with the trial scene in The Man Within, and later with Querry’s voyage in A Burnt-Out Case, with the three-cornered love scene in The Quiet American, the chess game in Our Man in Havana, the prison dialogue in The Power and the Glory, the intrusion of Miss Paterson into the Boulogne chapters of Travels with my Aunt – I don’t think a single book of mine has failed to give me at least once a momentary illusion of success except The Name of Action. When I think of the novel now I remember only my facile use of the geography of Trier, which I had first visited on my German expedition with Claud Cockburn, the echoes of my unpublished Carlist novel The Episode (a young man caught up idealistically in a disappointing revolution), and my discovery that a simple scene of action, a police pursuit through the night streets of Trier, was quite beyond my power to render exciting. I was failing dismally at what seemed to have come so naturally to Buchan, Haggard, Stanley Weyman. My long studies in Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction had taught me the importance of ‘the point of view’ but not how to convey physical excitement.

Now I can see quite clearly where I went wrong. Excitement is simple: excitement is a situation, a single event. It mustn’t be wrapped up in thoughts, similes, metaphors. A simile is a form of reflection, but excitement is of the moment when there is no time to reflect. Action can only be expressed by a subject, a verb and an object, perhaps a rhythm – little else. Even an adjective slows the pace or tranquillizes the nerve. I should have turned to Stevenson to learn my lesson: ‘It came all of a sudden when it did, with a rush of feet and a roar, and then a shout from Alan, and the sound of blows and someone crying as if hurt. I looked back over my shoulder, and saw Mr Shuanin the doorway crossing blades with Alan.’ No similes or metaphors there, not even an adjective. But I was too concerned with ‘the point of view’ to be aware of simpler problems, to know that the sort of novel I was trying to write, unlike a poem, was not made with words but with movement, action, character. Discrimination in one’s words is certainly required, but not love of one’s words – that is a form of self-love, a fatal love which leads a young writer to the excesses of Charles Morgan and Lawrence Durrell, and, looking back to this period of my life, I can see that I was in danger of taking their road. I was only saved by failure.

The Man Within had sold 8,000 copies; The Name of Action barely passed a quarter of that figure. The reviewing of novels at the beginning of the thirties was at a far lower critical level than it has ever been since. Gerald Gould, a bad poet, and Ralph Strauss, a bad novelist, divided the Sunday forum between them. One was not elated by their praise nor cast down by their criticism, and the third novel which I had now begun was as false and even more derivative than The Name of Action.

2

I had left The Times with enough money to live on for three years, and so, to make that money go further and to give me a room in which to work, we moved into the country. We had found a thatched cottage (that pastoral Georgian dream of the industrial twenties), with a small garden and orchard, up a muddy lane on the edge of Chipping Campden. It was to rent for a pound a week (the limit of what we could afford), and we moved our few belongings there, including a newly bought Pekinese with a great passion for dustbins. There was no electric light and the Aladdin lamps smoked if we left them for a few minutes alone. We were a scared couple that first night, with no sound of accustomed traffic, only a hooting owl. After darkness fell, on the evening of our arrival, I was summoned by a knock to the back door and saw an unknown country woman standing outside, holding a dead rat by the tail.

‘What do you want?’

‘I thought yu’d be interested,’ she said, swinging it to and fro.

There certainly were rats, they pattered and rustled and squeaked in the roof and they remained noisy in our thatch until a man consented to come with a ferret and drive them out. In his tight breeches with his pointed face he looked like a ferret himself – it was said in the village that he had starved his wife to death.

After a few weeks we began to lose our fear of the strange country and life became happy enough, until the future started to cast a shadow. It was a life rich with new pleasures– the local wines, made out of almost anything vegetable, which could be bought from the brawny landlord Rathbone at the Volunteer (they had no effect on the head but a great effect on the legs), home-brewed bitter at the Noel Arms which was kept by the stepfather of a boy called Nigel Dennis, and an almost endless variety of walks, north, south, east and west, to Moreton-in-Marsh and Chipping Norton, Evesham and Broadway and Blockley and Bourton-on-the-Water. (The Pekinese, over-exercised by fifteen-mile walks, developed hysteria and had to be destroyed.) There were apples from our own garden and Cos lettuces which I had grown myself with the help of a gypsy gardener called Buckland who came once a week and put all the snails aside for his own supper.

The life of a village is intimate and dramatic. There is a sense of community. People talk. In a city there may be a suicide in the next street and you will never hear of it. It is difficult for me to understand how I could have spent hours with the bloodless creatures of my new novel, Rumour at Nightfall, which was yet another story of the Carlist rebellion, but set this time in a Spain I had never visited. It was as though I were unable to cut the cord which bound me to that still-born book, The Episode. Didn’t I sometimes in a lucid moment measure the sentimental cardboard figures of my fancy against the people I met every day between the muddy lane where I lived and the Live and Let Live Inn? I don’t remember. Perhaps – even more important – I should have measured them against my own experience, against the memories of flight, rebellion and misery during those first sixteen years when the novelist is formed.

There had been, if I was to trust my uncle, something at least of the Greene character in The Man Within, if only that irrational desire to escape from himself which had led one Greene grandfather out of the Church and the other to die in St Kitts. A writer’s knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character alive. There is no spark of life in The Name of Action or Rumour at Nightfall because there was nothing of myself in them. I had been determined not to write the typical autobiographical novels of a beginner, but I had gone too far in the opposite direction. I had removed myself altogether. All that was left in the heavy pages of the second was the distorted ghost of Conrad. Only once, and that at the very beginning, had the book moved with a semblance of life, when a colonel played the part of a priest and heard the confession of one of his men, dying from a wound. It was a clumsy rehearsal for a scene better rendered ten years later in The Power and the Glory.

* It is seldom realized how short was Stevenson’s career: he began his first attempt at a novel (and abandoned it) when he was twenty-five, and he died at forty-four.

Extract from A Sort of Life © Graham Greene, 1971