In my quest to read all of Graham Greene’s novels in chronological succession, I come immediately to a roadblock: his second and third books, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, are out of print, and have been ever since Greene’s publisher sold out of their first pressing long ago. The books have been repudiated by their author and will likely remain out of print forever. I’ve gone on, therefore, to his fourth novel Orient Express (also known as Stamboul Train). But it almost seems unfair not to at least learn about those intervening books, especially because the level of quality rises so greatly from The Man Within to Orient Express. So I sought out Norman Sherry’s biography and read up on the period of Greene’s life covering his first four novels.
Upon its publication, The Man Within was a smash, selling more than 10,000 copies—considered a best-seller at the time. Greene basked in the limelight while it lasted. One passage in Norman Sherry’s biography points to an interview in which he clearly indicated his enjoyment:
[Greene] must have felt at this time that he was on the crest of a wave. His first published novel was a runaway success and he was now known as a writer and courted—the London Evening News, which was publishing a series of interviews with clever young men and women about what they expected from life, included Graham Greene. Given his relative immaturity at twenty-five, his expectations ‘after sustained effort,’ were in part predictable: to be rich and successful and have houses in London, Somerset and Rhodes.
(As an aside, the character Q. T. Savory, from Orient Express, is a novelist full of his own success and lampooned with great humor by Greene. Greene was sued by a contemporary, J. B. Priestly, for libel. Priestly had written a critical review of The Man Within, but the two did not seem to know each other terribly well and Greene did not admit that Savory is based on Priestly—actually if you read the chapter on this in Sherry’s biography, Priestly comes off looking like a parody of Savory! At any rate, based on Greene’s enjoyment of his own success, followed by his subsequent run of flops, I’d suggest that a more seasoned and humbled Greene may very well have been lampooning his former self.)
For a moment Greene was the toast of the town, and he seemed to take for granted that that would continue, despite his own growing misgivings about the quality of the novel for which he was being celebrated. He quit his day job as a journalist for the Times and became a full-time novelist, taking a monthly salary from his publisher as an advance on royalties. It seemed a safe risk for all parties, but things took a turn.
In The Man Within, as I noted in my post about that book, Greene had yet to find his own voice. The book’s lead character, Andrews, spent more time telling the reader how cowardly he was rather than really showing it. Reviewing the novel upon its publication in 1929, the New York Times prophetically had similar things to say: “Once he achieves… a less isolated and poetic approach to the inner workings of human characters he will be a really significant novelist.” Greene might not have objected to that criticism, and probably thought he was rising above his debut with his follow-up, The Name of Action. Yet when that book was published in 1930, the reviews were nearly all bad. Sherry notes that the critics were doubly damning because they felt it was worse than his debut:
The trouble was that most reviewers compared The Name of Action unfavourably with The Man Within and at this time he had come to feel that The Man Within was more and more terrible. he admitted he was getting rather tired of kind friends who “tell me they like this but of course they much prefer the other.” He was convinced that while his first was a moderately bad book, his second was a moderately good one. Even with his mother he argued against the view that his heroine Elizabeth in The Man Within was a success: “I don’t think she’s a character at all, but a sentimental complex. But though I sez it as shouldn’t I think Anna-Marie Demassener [heroine of The Name of Action] quite adorable.”
Greene’s third novel, Rumour at Nightfall, fared no better. Based solely on the reviews Sherry reprints, I get the impression that Greene had yet to learn the lessons pointed out in the New York Times’ review of his first book. The New Statesman said of Rumour, that Greene had “a good story to tell. But he is so resolutely and laboriously romantic that one can believe scarcely a word he says. The (psychological) drama is dressed up in all the colours of carnival; the emotions of his characters are largely theatrical; he achieves definition of falsification”; and the New Republic lamented that “these characters stagger under the overwhelming weight of their own mental questionings and probings… Mr. Greene’s forte is his ability to cover places and objects with atmosphere laid on heavily, like paint.”
Both of these critiques could be leveled at The Man Within without changing a single word. Looking again at Greene’s author’s note preceding the reprint of The Man Within, his claim that an author should be granted “one sentimental gesture” to his earliest effort becomes noteworthy for the emphasis on one. All of these novels are obviously of a piece in his mind.
The two novels were not only critical failures, but commercial as well. Combined, they sold around 2,000 copies. Greene and his wife Vivien had already been forced to leave London and move into a more affordable house in the country. While there he spent a great deal of time on a his fourth book—not a novel, but a biography of John Wilcot, the second Earl of Rochester who lived in the seventeenth century. After a great deal of research and writing, his publisher rejected the manuscript outright.
By 1932, at age 28, Greene was at his lowest point, with three failures in four years. His publisher had been paying him a monthly salary all this time, but finally threatened that if his next book was not up to their standards, their payments would stop altogether. Orient Express could not have happened at a better time. Greene had finally let go of his rudimentary psychological portraits and instead made a more realist account of his characters, allowing plot and action to tell the bulk of his story.
More on Orient Express later this week.
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