Lucius – the mystery of the motive
MIKE HILL
ASON readers will perhaps recognise the name Lucius. It’s an unfinished novel written by Graham Greene in the second half of 1958; it was the subject of a talk I gave at the 2017 Festival which can be heard here via our Festival audo-archive.
That talk in turn formed the basis of an essay in Volume 3 of the bibliography Jon Wise and I published in 2022. The novel is very autobiographical, and is, as Greene wrote in A Sort of Life, ‘a school novel of a timid boy’s blackmail of the housemaster who had protected him.’
A quick recap. Lucius begins with a prologue in which a UK Foreign Secretary, Sir Luke Winter, visiting his former boarding school (clearly based on Berkhamsted School) for their annual prize-giving. While there, he is challenged by his old school matron, who asks him: ‘Do you still betray your friends?’ The question seems to relate to one of Winter’s old teachers, a man called Stonier, who, it transpires, left the school and later killed himself. The story then scrolls back perhaps forty years to Winter’s first term at school, revealing the terrible bullying the boy endured; we even hear that Winter’s real name was actually Lucius Darling, a name he changed at the suggestion of his housemaster in order to give the bullies one less thing to pick on him for. That housemaster, Stonier, realises the boy’s distress, and does his best to advise and protect him – without much success. At the same time, Lucius becomes aware of an illicit affair between Stonier and the school matron, and the seeds are sown for Lucius’s future use of that knowledge.
And there, as Christmas approaches and the first term ends, Greene abandoned the novel, having written around 23,000 words of it. So, although we know from the prologue that Lucius had ‘betrayed’ Stonier, and of Stonier’s eventual fate, we don’t find out quite how the ‘blackmail’ Greene refers to in A Sort of Life would actually have played out if the novel had been finished. Perhaps above all, we have no idea what Lucius’s motive could have been in both betraying and blackmailing Stonier – a man, after all, who had done his level best to protect the boy.
Now we have an answer to at least that last question – Lucius’s motive. ASON readers will know that Graham Greene’s own library of over 3,000 books was sold to Boston College in the USA in 1995. Many of those books are heavily annotated by Greene himself: he was an inveterate scribbler who would often have a book at hand when a thought occurred to him, and down the thought went, in the margins or on the endpapers of the book. Sometimes it was a comment on the book itself, sometimes jottings the meaning of which can’t now be established, sometimes brief observations of fellow diners at Chez Felix in Antibes. And sometimes the comments were thoughts about his current writing, ideas for the way forward with work in progress. Graham Greene’s library is thus a very rich source of information about his creative processes.
Some of Greene’s jottings were included in a small pamphlet, From the Library of Graham Greene (Gloucester Road Bookshop, 1993). One of the selected annotations reprinted there, I find, concerns Lucius, and the boy’s motive. Inside The Notebooks of Henry James, which Greene must have been reading in 1958, is this annotation:
The story of the schoolboy, scared, bullied, protected by the housemaster and matron. The housemaster explains the nature of the bully – the temptation of power – ‘It will be possible for you one day. Avoid it because you understand.’ The discovery of the relationship between housemaster and matron. The realization that this can be used, in blackmail, to exercise power, to impress his persecutors. The suicide of the housemaster who doesn’t know who his blackmailer is, the realization by the matron.’
Here we have Greene’s overall plan for Lucius. It tells us a little about how the story would have continued had it been completed – in particular, that Lucius’s attempt at blackmailing Stonier was to have been anonymous, but worked out by the matron. But more significant here is Greene’s mature reflection on the nature of bullying, and hence the rationale of Lucius’s motives. Graham Greene, himself the victim of bullying at Berkhamsted School, came to realise that it was all about the exercise of power. It is this temptation to exercise power over others through physical or mental mistreatment that Stonier was to warn Lucius about – making him aware of the nature of bullying, trying to make Lucius less vulnerable thereby, and to make him less likely to become a bully himself. The completed novel Lucius would thus have been an exercise in irony. The bullied becomes a bully, through blackmail. The power he wields through persecution is precisely ‘to impress his persecutors.’ The teacher who warns against bullying becomes himself a victim. And the timid boy grows up to be a top politician, confident and assertive, and with a new identity recommended by the man he went on to blackmail.
What a pity that Graham Greene never finished Lucius.
MIKE HILL