Greene Penguins
The Writer, the Illustrator and the Publisher
James Mackay
This article was published in “The Penguin Collector” No 62 in June 2004, Greene’s centenary year. It summarises Graham Greene’s works and relationships with Penguin over a period of fifty years. Copies of “The Penguin Collector” which includes this article – with 12 full colour illustrations – can be ordered by going to publications on this web site. End note references are marked [n] and link to the relevant note (and back). Copyright remains with the author. For further information on Graham Greene visit www.grahamgreenebt.org.
Graham Greene was born on 2 October 1904, and died on 3 April 1991. Living in each of its decades, he was the greatest writer in English of the twentieth century.
He worked as a publisher before he was established as an author, and knew enough of the profession to make publishers later work hard for him. His niece[1], herself a publisher, in her address to his memorial requiem mass, reported that Greene ‘enjoyed being argumentative and upsetting (particularly to publishers).’ His relationship with them had some well-documented prickly phases. His move to Penguin in the early 1960s sprang from one of those awkward events. His staying with it was threatened by another soon after.
But for thirty years, Greene and Penguin prospered together, partly through the long involvement of a third party, the illustrator Paul Hogarth (1917 – 2001). His cover drawings gave to Greene’s Penguins a brand image of their own and a continuity of style through decades in which Penguin’s own design policy and practice became progressively less stable and less coherent. This article looks briefly at how the writer, the illustrator and the publisher worked together, and uses the books themselves to demonstrate the fruits of the three-way relationship.
Greene’s early novels, from 1929 onwards, were published by Heinemann. His link with that firm, nourished by A.S. Frere, continued for over thirty years. Though some of Greene’s works came early to Penguin, and then to Pan, it appears that his trust in Frere and Heinemann deferred their more general availability in paperback. In the fifteen years after 1945, Greene produced the sequence of novels which gave him pre-eminence, and his earlier works were reissued in a relatively cheap hardback ‘Uniform Edition’. But it was not until the 1960s that any but a few of Greene’s books entered the paperback market.
Greene and Penguin had a long courtship, with an unpromising start. In the spring of 1931, Greene and his wife Vivien were guests of Charles Wade, at Snowshill Manor on the Cotswold scarp. They ‘drank rhubarb wine which succeeded, Graham thought, in softening the vulgarity of a fellow guest, an oily young publisher named Allen Lane’[2]. So it is perhaps unsurprising that Greene, who was careful to build and then to maintain his standing high in the establishment, did not hurry to join the bandwagon of Lane’s success.
Greene’s fifth novel, It’s A Battlefield (1934), was issued as Penguin 257 in 1940, and his sixth, England Made Me (1935) and eighth, Brighton Rock (1938) as 392 and 442 in 1943. Stories by him were included in Penguin New Writing 9 (1941) and PNW 30 (1947). His travel book The Lawless Roads (1939) became Penguin 559 in 1947. But Greene criticised Penguin for its 1943 biographical ‘blurb’, and may have been upset by the omission of the final ‘E’ of his surname from the spine of 559[3].
Between 1948 and 1954, four of his books went to Pan, It’s A Battlefield and England Made Me ceasing to be Penguins, the novel Stamboul Train (1932) and another travelogue, Journey Without Maps (1936) appearing for the first time as paperbacks. The 1948 cover of the last of these displays artistic aspirations predating the generic Pan designs of the 1950s. Only Brighton Rock remained a Penguin through the 1950s, still when reprinted in 1960 in an entirely standard cover. In 1962 it became one of the first Penguin Modern Classics, a status from which it reverted in 1966 – to return after Greene’s death. Also in 1962, a book of essays, The Lost Childhood (1951) appeared as a Penguin, with a Marber grid cover.
Late in 1961, Greene had contracted with Penguin for it to publish his greatest novels. The cause of this sudden leap was reorganisation after a takeover of Heinemann, which left Frere with no real rôle and no option but to resign. Five years later, Greene wrote publicly to him, ‘When you were the head of a great publishing firm I was one of your most devoted authors, and when you ceased to be a publisher I, like many other writers on your list, felt it was time to find another home.’[4] He did not say that he had positively encouraged other authors not just to leave Heinemann, but to join the Bodley Head.
There his friend Max Reinhardt provided the trust that Greene clearly needed from his publisher. For the rest of Greene’s life, they worked together. Until her death in 2001, Yvonne Cloetta, Greene’s companion for his last thirty years, continued to rely on Reinhardt for advice and friendship – sometimes in adverse circumstances, as Greene’s character underwent post-mortem exposure and re-appraisal.
Reinhardt and the Bodley Head connection clearly opened the door to Greene at last becoming an important Penguin author. In 1962 it published five of his novels (in the range 1785-91), and in 1963 five more (1894-98). Paul Hogarth – who had a drawing published in PNW 36 (1949), illustrated The Trial of Lady Chatterley (S192, 1961), and idealised himself as a member of the International Brigades in his cover drawing for Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1699, 1962) was commissioned to do the Greenes. He said, ‘Artists at that time got a brief, and very few illustrators really read [the books], they just illustrated the brief. But I happened to have read all of Greene’s work and so the acting Art Director said, “I know you actually read, Paul, you’re one of the few artists that do, would you like to illustrate our new edition of Graham Greene’s novels?”’. That’s how it began.’[5]
Greene and Hogarth were both strongly aware, throughout their careers, of their needs to maximise the income that they could earn from their creative output. They both had what might politely be called high-cost lifestyles. They also shared a thirst for travel and a political outlook, leftish (Hogarth had been turned down as too young to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Greene had for four Oxford weeks in 1925 been a member of the Communist Party) and anti-American. So while their creative relationship remained distant, conducted through the intermediary of Penguin, for many years, it was based on shared attitudes and interests. Although Hogarth described him merely as the ‘acting art director’, it was Germano Facetti who match-made so successfully[6].
Following Facetti’s instruction, Hogarth produced three-tone drawings, using the orange and the black of the Marber grid cover and its script, and a deep turquoise. These ten books, with their then-distinctive covers, made Greene a leading Penguin author at the height of his career in his late fifties. But other careers were being built and threatened at Penguin, and painful collisions resulted.
In April 1964, Facetti was unable to defend Hogarth against rejection by Tony Godwin of his proposed drawings for Virginia Woolfs in Modern Classics. Hans Schmoller wrote a very open and friendly letter to try to heal the wounds. Godwin himself wrote explaining that prospective sales success was the key aspect of design decisions[7]. The correspondence vividly demonstrates the tensions that Godwin’s strategy had produced in the Penguin team. Hogarth joined the staff of the Royal College of Art in the same year, and, either because his interest was elsewhere or because he wasn’t asked any more, his work for Penguin dried up.
With Hogarth hors de combat and pop art the key strategy, Godwin’s young Fiction Art Director Alan Aldridge commissioned photographic covers for 1966 reprints of seven of Greene’s books. They apparently just disregarded Greene’s contractual right to approve his books’ covers, and went ahead and printed. It has already been related elsewhere that Greene condemned the charred skeleton of A Burnt-Out Case as tasteless, and that his disapproval contributed to Allen Lane’s terminal disagreement with Godwin[8]. As that escalated, in April 1967, Lane wrote that he was ‘engaged in a massive operation of correcting some trends’ and that Graham Greene was a high priority.
Greene had found some of the cover photographs ‘beyond belief’, especially Brighton Rock, Our Man in Havana, and The End of the Affair – ‘a teen girl and a beatnik’ was Greene’s agent’s description for the couple pictured. That picture rather confirmed that the photographer had, as Hogarth suggested, not read the book. But the similarity between the 1962 and 1966 Brighton Rock images suggests that it may have been the style of the cover, rather than the subject, which attracted Greene’s ire. His agent, Pollinger, worked well. Lane received a firm letter referring to Greene’s contract with Penguin, without actually threatening legal action. It was the lot of Oliver Caldecott to send on the same day an internal memo to Allen Lane telling him that he had met a (nameless) other at a party and learned that the New English Library was bidding for eight Greene titles that Penguin had not yet published[9].
The ‘trend was corrected’ by bringing back Hogarth. He was asked to produce a second set of drawings. Most, including A Burnt-Out Case retained or returned to the motifs of the first set. But the new black and white drawing on a white background took up less of a cover released from the discipline of the grid, and the author’s name much more. Graham Greene had become a brand of his own – and no doubt used his right of ‘cover approval’ to secure his image. With it, another dozen of his books appeared as Penguins over the next six years. Hogarth’s fee was £35 per drawing, and he typically delivered each, at its actual size for reproduction, within three weeks of being commissioned.
By 1973 the residual pop-art style of this cover’s script had dated, but Hogarth’s second set of drawings had not. Adapted under the direction of David Pelham, they were retained for a further five years, beneath a very simple author + title script in a strong lower-case serif typeface on a white ground. Some books appeared with just the author + title script, apparently because no drawing which received Greene’s approval could be made available within a reprint timescale. The Power and the Glory, for example, had used a second-set drawing of two fighting cocks, but was reprinted in 1974 drawing-less, before re-emerging with a third-set coloured drawing of the whisky priest and his captor.
Maintaining the series identity, the same script was used with film stills for a 1973 tie-in edition of Travels With My Aunt. However, looking for another, younger, market, a 1977 Peacock edition of Stamboul Train used an entirely different design. Its illustrator (not Hogarth) drew an obviously central European train, and added a shadowy variation of the motif of two heads which Hogarth had introduced in 1963. For the younger still, Greene’s The Little Train, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, became a Picture Puffin in 1977, and his other three children’s books soon after. American editions of course diverged in design. Other ‘one-offs’, mostly linked with films, punctuated the steady flow of Hogarth drawings, but the over-riding visual image of Greene’s work was undoubtedly that provided by Hogarth.
Promotional editions were not the only source of pressure to change the covers. Hogarth explained, ‘After a while a new art director would come in and say “Let's change this.” Frequently he wanted to change the artist but Graham wouldn’t have it. We hadn’t even met at that time, but we had a correspondence going, and he said, 'No, I want Paul to stay with my jackets.’ So what would then work out would be the scene where an editor and the art director would work presumably work together and say “Well, we'll restyle the appearance of the jacket and make a different kind of image”.’
So in the late 1970s Hogarth began a new set of drawings. ‘I started with sort of symbols, of the ceiling fan, Venetian blinds and a whisky bottle, that sort of thing .... but then I progressed to actual characterisations of the heroes and anti-heroes, which I preferred myself.’ The film shots of Maggie Smith clearly influenced Hogarth’s portrayal of Augusta in Travels With My Aunt. The drawings in this third set were in colour, and were used with an upper-case serif author + title script, still on a white background. In 1982, Cherriwyn Magill at Penguin wrote to Hogarth that ‘the new approach to Graham Greene has worked out extremely well so I shall be delighted to be continuing it’[10]. By 1985, about 30 of Greene’s works were in print in this cover design. In the second half of the 1980s, the same drawings continued, with the author + title script changed again, giving even more prominence to Greene’s name and Hogarth’s image as the selling point over the individual title. For two late Greene titles Monsignor Quixote (1983) and The Tenth Man (1985) Hogarth’s colour drawings filled the full cover, with the author’s name superimposed.
In 1985, the link between the writer and the illustrator was firmly cemented by Hogarth’s next project. He spent much of that year retracing Greene’s travels of the previous half-century, covering 50,000 miles and producing a copious set of drawings of the settings and (a generation on) the people of Greene’s novels. From Camden Town to Ditchling, to Constantinople, Haiti and Hanoi, he tracked down the locations in which Greene’s plots had flowered. Greene and Hogarth expressed in their respective forewords to the resulting book[11] mutual admiration at the stamina of the other in pursuing such an itinerary, and of the understanding which they shared, each in his own metier, of the social and situational observations of the other.
Soon after Greene’s death, Penguin ended the long rôle of Hogarth's drawings as the pictorial image of his writing. The novels were reissued in the new Twentieth Century Classics design of black-and-white photographs and turquoise spines. Some of the motifs survived the complete change in style, including almost inevitably the Pier on Brighton Rock; many others changed. A Greene story appeared in 1995 as a Penguin Sixty (146). Late in the 1990s one or two of his books briefly got the trendy covers and cachet of ‘Essential Penguins’.
The stresses between Greene’s demanding standards and, sometimes, Penguin's ineffectiveness show in numerous exchanges held in the archives. They are even visible in the books. The 1969 third reprint of the Comedians has laid-in a slip correcting 33 errors, many in French words, but including the copyright date. When Granta, in the magazine’s Penguin era, published extracts from Greene’s diary for 1938/39, it mixed up the years, and crassly displaced the Munich crisis to September 1939[12]. Greene noticed, but was perhaps too old to complain[13].
Hardback publication of Greene’s final works moved with Max Reinhardt when he left the Bodley Head. But Penguin’s paperback list retained Greene until ten years after his death. Then, they parted company. Greene’s paperbacks are now Random House Vintage Classics, printed on spongy paper, wrapped in brightly-covered jackets with simplistic graphic drawings, and sold, when not ‘3 for 2’, at the inflated prices of the post-Net Book Agreement era.
Penguinophiles will not need persuading that second-hand is better. And we are in good company with Greene: he enjoyed ‘collecting second-hand books dealing with violent death from shabby second-hand bookshops’; and late in life ‘was tickled pink that a member of his family[14] had fulfilled a long-held ambition of his own: to be a second-hand bookseller’[15]. The Greene Penguins sold in large numbers for decades, and hardly any of the editions are, in the bookdealer’s beloved phrase, ‘hard to find’. Many with Hogarth’s finest drawings languish on jumble sale tables at 25p. Members will enjoy establishing their own bibliography of the successive editions and designs. If you haven’t yet, do also read the books: as William Golding wrote, ‘Graham Greene will be read and remembered as the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety.’ That’s us.
Since his death, several biographers and memoirists have published accounts of parts of Greene’s life and especially of his loves. The final volume of Norman Sherry’s encyclopædic authorised biography, covering the years 1955 to 1991, was published in October 2004. Sherry has the difficult task of responding to those – including Mockler – who have exploited the protraction of his comprehensive research and writing to publish partial, and in some cases very contentious, accounts of Greene’s personal life. We can hope that he will also shed some more light on the long but not always cosy dealings between Greene and Penguin, and on Greene’s perspective of his relationship with Hogarth, which both clearly found rewarding.
Hogarth went on to draw covers for many other Penguins, most notably for the New Penguin Shakespeare; but his Greene covers are the best-known of all his work. They, wrote an obituarist[16] ‘express with marvellous economy either personality and occupation or atmosphere: his cover for the Comedians – a favourite with Greene himself – wittily and economically captures the seediness of a sinister pair of tonton macoute enforcers.’ Can we dream that Greene and Hogarth, through their enjoyment of this image, thus settled the intellectual score with Godwin?
End Notes
[1] His sister’s daughter Louise Dennys
(quoted in Anthony Mockler, Graham Greene, Three Lives, Hunter Mackay, 1994
p. xv).
[2] Mockler op cit p. 63.
[3] Penguin Portrait, Steve Hare (ed), Penguin 1995, pp.160-163.
[4] Graham Greene, foreword to The Comedians, Bodley Head, 1966 p.5.
[5] Paul Hogarth interviewed by Nigel Lewis at the Graham Greene Festival
1998.
[6] Letter, Facetti to Hogarth, 22 January 1962 in the Paul Hogarth Archive
at Manchester Metropolitan University, HOG/3/202.
[7] Paul Hogarth Archive at MMU, HOG/3/202.
[8] Linda Lloyd Jones in Fifty Penguin Years, Penguin 1985, pp. 74-76.
[9] Allen Lane Archive at Bristol University DM1819/27/10.
[10] Paul Hogarth Archive at MMU, HOG/1/1/4.
[11] Graham Greene Country, Paul Hogarth and Graham Greene, Pavilion, 1986.
[12] Bill Bulford (editor) Granta 17, Penguin Autumn 1985.
[13] He asked his secretary to insert in his own copy a slip indicating the
error (Gloucester Road Bookshop Catalogue 12, 2004).
[14] His nephew Nicholas Dennys, who still runs the excellent Gloucester Road
Bookshop.
[15] The Independent, 4 April 1991.
[16] Mockler op cit p. xvi & p. 200.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the Graham Greene
Birthplace Trust to use extracts from the CD of Hogarth’s 1998 interview
and assistance from Jeremy Parrett, curator of the Paul Hogarth Archive at
Manchester Metropolitan University, and Hannah Lowery at the Bristol University
Archive.
Page last updated: 2 February 2005