BIOGRAPHY: Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English FamilyBy Jeremy Lewis Jonathan Cape, 580pp. £25
IN 1910, Edward Greene, a businessman who had made a large fortune in the Brazilian coffee trade, returned with his young family to England to buy “the Hall”, a substantial house set in 25 acres of parkland on the edge of Berkhamsted, a small Hertfordshire town just 40 minutes from London’s Euston Station.
The main attraction of the town for Edward was no doubt the proximity of his brother Charles, who was on the point of becoming headmaster of its famous school, founded in 1543. Edward’s wife, Eva, was German, and her English was at first shaky (the couple conversed easily, however, in German, French and Portuguese). Their children’s first language was also German. With war and its attendant chauvinism just a few years away, a respectable local connection might prove important to the rather exotic “Hall Greenes”.
Between them the two Greene families had twelve children (six each), all of whom had long lives, some lived to a degree in the glare of fame, or notoriety. The best known is of course the writer Graham, the fourth child of the “School House Greenes”, born in 1904, who has already been subject to the closest biographical scrutiny. In this family biography, Jeremy Lewis tells us a little of each of the Greene children but concentrates on Graham, his brothers Herbert, Raymond and Hugh and his cousins Ben and Felix.
Raymond Greene might be described as a conventional success, though very much in the “all-rounder” way then encouraged by the higher reaches of the British education system. He was a brilliant doctor, a leading endocrinologist among whose more newsworthy activities was being appointed honorary physician of General de Gaulle and treating the thyroid problems of Guy the Gorilla at London Zoo. Athletic and handsome, he was part of an Everest expedition in 1933 and trained the Oxford boat race crew, but also found time to write occasional verse and a slim volume of memoirs.
Although only the third eldest, he also came to be recognised by his siblings as head of the family, a responsibility which could certainly not be assumed by his elder brother, a ne’er-do-well who took on the role of family black sheep at an early age and never relinquished it. Herbert Greene was one of those creatures more drawn to “schemes” than work, and since his schemes invariably came unstuck he was constantly in need of being bailed out by his family, first his father and then, increasingly, Graham. In between bouts of heavy drinking he played some murky role in the Spanish Civil War (the reviewer of his memoir of this episode found it difficult to figure out which side its hero was working for; the hero possibly too). Back in London, he offered his services to Captain Oka, an attaché at the Japanese embassy, to spy on the US navy, for which he was paid, for a time, £50 a month. When the Japanese money ran out he turned to the Russians. “Mr W Herbert Greene,” wrote an MI5 officer, “is known to us and is a most undesirable person.”
Herbert claimed that as a result of his Spanish experience his politics swung from right to left, an orientation presumed to be shared by his brother Graham and also his cousin Ben, a Quaker and an idealistic and increasingly dissident member of the Labour Party. In the late 1930s, in response to the perceived Nazi threat, Labour jettisoned its previous policies of pacifism and disarmament. In 1938 Greene quit the party and, now obsessed with preserving peace at any price, began to consort with fascists, later joining the British People’s Party, of which he was possibly the only member who was not anti-Jewish. In this he may well indeed have been morally ahead of his cousin Graham, many of whose novels and stories from this period are rancid with anti-semitic caricature. In 1940, as invasion threatened, Ben Greene was arrested. He was to remain in Brixton Prison until 1942.
As Ben was getting it wrong about Nazi Germany his cousin Hugh, the youngest boy in the School House Greene family, was getting it right, reporting from Berlin for the Daily Telegraph from 1934. The Telegraph, unlike the Times or that “Nazi mouthpiece” the Daily Mail (the description is William Shirer’s), entertained no illusions about Germany’s intentions. (Hugh wondered why those who liked to make excuses for Hitler didn’t read Mein Kampf.) Berlin in the 1930s was a bad time for humanity but a good time for foreign correspondents. The international press corps was a tightly knit group which met almost nightly in an Italian restaurant to exchange information. Set slightly apart was the flamboyant Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express, who had excellent contacts in the higher reaches of the Nazi hierarchy and lived more grandly than his colleagues (“I can only think clearly in a five-star hotel.”).
Hugh Greene was eventually to become director-general of the BBC, where he defended such risqué programmes as the satirical That Was The Week That Was, earned the enmity of clean-up-TV-campaigner Mary Whitehouse and provoked a public campaign against him by his brother Herbert, who had now taken to expressing himself in verse and was incensed by the “Americanisation” of radio and television and a proposal to drop the “bongs” of Big Ben from the main evening news (“Bring us back the Chimes that cheered us / In the darkest days we knew”).
The distinction of being the strangest Greene, however, must go not to Herbert but to his cousin Felix, who quit a successful career with the BBC to set up a religious centre in the California desert dedicated to discovering “the third morality”. This delicate martyr to spirituality moved from admiring Germany in the 1930s (arranging a trip to England for some Hitler Youth boys – “darlings, quite loveable and fresh”), through religious mysticism, to a fascination with China in the 1950s and 60s. Whatever else these experiences seemed to be about – spiritual oneness, peace, social justice – they were always primarily about Felix: “I never had a gang. I never had friends. It took coming to China to give me the experience of having a gang . . . I am sure that something very important is happening to me.” Impossibly handsome as a young man and too much loved (or so he claimed) by his mother, Felix was to turn into a Dickensian caricature, a man fixated on being good but with an almost maniacal self-regard, who turned a deaf ear to normal affections convinced that the world was clamouring for him to save it.
Lewis’s account of Graham Greene is convincing but perhaps does not add much to what we already know or suspect about this still enigmatic figure. He emerges as reserved, generous to family members (even Herbert) and other writers, tough with publishers, addicted to intrigue, both political and sexual, and perhaps more interested in Catholicism as source of metaphor than guide to life.
Jeremy Lewis, a distinguished biographer specialising in mid-20th century literary England whose previous subjects have included Cyril Connolly and Allen Lane, is very much on home ground with the Greenes. He has given us not just a highly entertaining narrative but a study of a section of that now vanished intellectual and administrative English upper middle class which used to run the place so splendidly on behalf of those who owned it but preferred not to work.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Timesjournalist and joint editor of the Dublin Review of Books(drb.ie)
