Fergus Fleming
ENGLAND MADE THEM
Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family
By Jeremy Lewis (Jonathan Cape 580pp £25.00)
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'What twentieth-century books will survive thirty or forty years more?' Graham Greene once pondered. 'How long will anyone be read?' In his case, at least, a quick glance at Amazon shows the Greene backlist is in good health. What's more, the number of people still reading his books is almost equalled by those who want to read about Greene himself. In the nearly twenty years since he died (of leukaemia in 1991) there has been a steady stream of biographies, memoirs and 'other reading', of which the most monumental is Norman Sherry's trilogy, begun while its subject was still alive.
To the throng has now sort of been added Shades of Greene - sort of, because it covers not just the one Greene but a host of them. And what a bunch they were. Writers, travellers, mountaineers, spies, broadcasters, film-makers, architects, would-be politicians - you could hardly ask for a richer or more diverse biographical constellation. The shooting star is, of course, Graham, but there were others who shone almost as brilliantly, and Jeremy Lewis has made the most of them in this fascinating group biography.
The Greene story began in Berkhamsted, where two brothers set up separate camps. At one end of town, in an elegant mansion, lived the wealthy 'Hall' Greenes, flush with money from South American coffee plantations. At the other end were the 'School House' Greenes, not quite as swell, whose father was headmaster of the local school. Between them they had twelve children - six Halls, six School Houses - of whom, as the blurb says flatly, 'eight led exceptionally interesting, diverse and well-documented lives'.
The Berkhamsted Greenes, with their round heads and bulbous eyes, came to prominence in the interwar years. It was a period that promoted the unusual, and they fitted the bill nicely. Lewis is excellent on the way these haughty, self-obsessed cousins strode through the Twenties and Thirties. Without examining in too great detail the whys and wherefores of the time, he brings the themes to life by sleight of hand. One Greene spends two nights in Claridges courtesy of Japanese Naval Intelligence (Johnny 'Tarzan' Weissmuller was in the room next door), while on the streets outside lurk bands of mackintoshed MI5 men; another Greene pursues Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast himself, only to end in an Italian garden, with Crowley's disappointed children crying, 'Where's Beastie?' Other sidelong glances include the President of Liberia's clothes hanging to dry on a fence, and icons made from flattened Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup tins, which starving Russian peasants pinned to the walls of their homes. Perhaps the best is when a Greene observes Hitler on a railway platform, smacking his fist in his hand and shouting at Goebbels, 'Only in this way can we win!' They were talking about a motorcycle race. Goebbels was still calculating the odds when the locomotive started and 'a large SS man leant out of a carriage window, caught Goebbels under the arse, and hauled him into the train with his short little legs kicking in the air'.
Apart from Graham the book lingers longest on his younger brother Hugh. It was he, as foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, who witnessed the indignity of Goebbels. His later career included spells as a propaganda officer during the Second World War and later the Malayan Emergency, and culminated in the Director-Generalship of the BBC where, among other achievements, he was credited by Harold Wilson with helping him win the 1964 election by rescheduling an episode of Steptoe and Son. Both Graham and Hugh were School House Greenes, as was their elder brother Raymond, a doctor and mountaineer, who was a member of the 1933 Everest expedition and later became a pioneering endocrinologist. Their youngest sister Elisabeth enlisted Graham as an officer in MI6 and spent the war years working for the secret service in Cairo - and later supplied Michael Ondaatje with background material for The English Patient. Their eldest brother, Herbert, meanwhile, was a fabulist of dubious honesty who tried and failed to spy for at least three different countries before falling into a life of failed schemes, begging letters and general incompetence.
Among the other Greenes was Barbara, whose account of a journey she undertook in 1934 with Graham through Liberia was considered by some to be a far better read than the book Graham produced. She married a German and spent the war in the Third Reich, before becoming part of the diplomatic scene following her husband's appointment as ambassador. Then there was the idealistic Ben, who featured as a prominent left-winger in the Labour Party before founding the far-right British People's Party and being interned along with Oswald Mosley. Perhaps the most interesting of all was Felix, a man of remarkable beauty and uncertain sexuality, before whom women swooned. An innovative radio interviewer, writer and film-maker, as well as a talented amateur architect, he worked as the BBC's first North America correspondent before going to California to establish a spiritual retreat with Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood. A consistent contrarian, in later years he became an outspoken champion of communist China.
A group biography has obvious disadvantages. The greater the number of characters, the more elusive they become and the harder it is to follow who they are, what they're doing and why they're doing it - not helped in this case by the Greenes' multiplicity of wives and partners. On the other hand there are advantages too. It's a format that avoids the tedium of in-depth analysis and favours the telling anecdote and brief character sketch which Lewis delivers so well. In a way it also makes life simpler: if there's a point to be made it can be delivered in a couple of pages rather than a whole volume. For example, instead of wading through a blow-by-blow analysis of Graham Greene's marriage and mistresses we learn, basically, that he put it about a lot and that his philosophy, as confided to a youthful Michael Korda, was that 'the main thing is to have a lot of women, then you'll discover that looks aren't even the half of it'.
The Greenes weren't nice people, in the conventional sense. The men in particular come across as judgemental, sharp and selfish: creepy, too, at times. Lewis supplies a telling quote where one of them informs his wife (by letter) that he's willing to have children with her but only because her happiness at being a mother will give him pleasure. But whatever their faults they were undoubtedly interesting.
Jeremy Lewis tells the Greenes' story in a courtly fashion, full of style and wit. It is hard not to feel a pang as one by one they die - usually from cancer - and although Graham was outlived by three others the final focus is on him. Shortly before his death, he said: 'It may be an interesting experience. I will at least have the answers to my questions.' And then, the man who had bemoaned the shelf life of modern literature began to chafe at his own longevity. His last words were, 'Why does it take so long?'
Fergus Fleming's most recent books include 'Cassell's Tales of Endurance' and 'The Explorer's Eye' (co-ed Annabel Merullo).