England Made Me is an overlooked early Graham Greene novel, set in Stockholm, a city about which, he admitted, he knew very little. Despite the overseas location, it was an attack on the English class system, rooted in public school education, underpinned by his growing disquiet with international capitalism.
Greene had reviewed George Soloveytchik’s The Financier: the life of Ivar Kreuger for the Spectator in March 1933. That August he made a brief visit to Scandinavia, much preferring Oslo to Stockholm. However the latter, caught as summer was fading, washed in drab “liquid grey” light, gave him a fitting atmosphere, spiced with a big pinch of puritan moral hypocrisy, as he wrote in an essay on the two cities. In November he began England Made Me, which was published in 1935.
In person, Ivar Kreuger was an odd, reticent man, originally a civil engineer. Before long he came to dominate the world match trade, then transformed himself into an international financier, offering eye-watering dollar loans to the French and German governments, just as world markets failed. After the Wall Street crash his empire spun out of control and it was, perhaps ironically, JP Morgan who first detected his Ponzi-like arrangements, a tottering house of cards built with post-dated cheques. In 1932, Kreuger killed himself in Paris (or, perhaps, was shot).
Greene’s central character is closely based on him. The tycoon Erik Krogh is a manipulator, a social misfit with badly chosen clothes and awkward behaviour in polite company. As Kreuger did, he buys his opera tickets in threes to avoid having to interact with people in adjoining seats. With his high domed forehead and unlined, unmarked features, Krogh’s is the inscrutable face of financial wrongdoing on a global scale.
He is master to a puppet cast of deracinated Englishmen and women; there’s hardly another Swede in the book. Ebbing and flowing around the scintillating modernist headquarters of Krogh’s empire are two concentric circles. The first is distinctively seedy and includes his bodyguard, public school educated Anthony Farrant (dishonest, but “not dishonest enough” and loosely based on Greene’s ne’er-do-well brother Herbert); the down-at-heel old Harrovian newspaper man Minty, who is looking for evidence of misdoings; and Krogh’s angry, villainous sidekick Fred Hall. Kate Ferrant, Anthony’s twin sister, is at the centre of the other circle, cerebral and (almost) unflinchingly modern; she is Krogh’s assistant and lover. Farrant owes his job to her and she maintains a protective, sexually ambiguous, relationship with him.
Greene uses Krogh’s headquarters to set the tone of the novel. The fictional building is drawn in careful counterpoint to Kreuger’s real granite and marble “Match Palace”, designed in the prevailing Scandinavian neo-classical style. It still stands.
In contrast Greene places his shy financier within a spectacular modern movement set piece, which is also immeasurably distant from Krogh’s shabby court of Englishmen, with their old school ties and family businesses, reduced to living in scruffy rented rooms, with dirty windows and drooping pot plants. Greene’s world of international finance, where Krogh’s stock offers a 10% return, is one of “glassy cleanliness, the latest fashionable sculpture … soundproof floors and Dictaphones and pewter ash-trays”.
In summer 1930, architects had flocked to Sweden to visit the Stockholm Exhibition. In an Architectural Review feature Sweden was praised for its willingness to veer away from crowd-pleasing Scandinavian classicism (by then derogatorily called “Swedish Grace”) in order to explore “the uncharted currents of the modernist maelstrom”. The same year also saw the opening of Stockholm’s spectacular Lumafabriken, an electric light bulb factory with a glass “lighthouse” tower, where the bulbs were tested. Sweden briefly found itself at the heart of functional modernism and it suited Greene’s purposes well.
Krogh’s HQ is a cube of glass and steel, the metal front steps leading up to automatic doors, and beyond these, into a translucently walled circular courtyard, where an abstract sculpted fountain is bathed by discreet lighting. Waiting for the lift one typically lightless afternoon, Krogh observes his employees, artificially lit, at work – the accountant hunched over his “machine”, the waitress drawing down the black leather blinds in the restaurant, a director standing on a chromium balcony. The lift, slow, silent and glazed like the rest of the building, travels up five floors and delivers Krogh to his private office, unheated, barely furnished and soundproof (Kreuger famously had a Silent Room in his Match Palace). There he works, in isolation, at a vast desk following the curve of the outside wall. Everything bears his monogram EK, the motif “designed by Sweden’s leading artist”.
England Made Me toys with oppositions between the popular (statues with identifiable features, the Tivoli amusement gardens, traditional-looking buildings) and the elite (statues with no discernible form, opera, modernist architecture). Krogh feels exposed in his ignorance of, and failure to appreciate, the new green stone fountain at the heart of his headquarters, suspecting he had “pandered to a fashion he did not understand”. He cannot judge whether it is good or bad, but would have preferred a nymph or goddess. Kate is his cicerone in matters of taste: this is perhaps their only real intimacy. Yet her brother has the confidence to offer Krogh advice on tailoring and ties, and is not afraid to express his dislike of the formless carving. Greene was well aware of current wider discussions around exactly who abstract art was aimed at and whether its exclusive nature was acceptable.
His fictional HQ borrows features from some of the most admired modern movement industrial buildings in Europe. In Zlín, Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Baťa, the founder of a worldwide shoe-making empire, used the central lift as his office, while the curtain-walled Van Nelle food-processing factory in Rotterdam was perpetually lit by electricity – a beacon of modernity, reflected in the water below. By contrast, Krogh’s building, for all its transparency, houses a business trapped in the coils of a system its owner could no longer control.
After Farrant leaks sensitive financial information to Minty (whom he trusts because they went to the same school), he is taken on a one-way walk to the foggy lakeside by Krogh’s fixer, Hall. As Farrant prepares himself for death, he notes how “the perfect taste, the shrewd modernity of the great building touched his mood with malice”. Krogh’s headquarters, “a great liner built on credit”, is by then heading on to the rocks of fraud; there are no ambitions to right the wrongs of society, no national and few personal responsibilities.
In a letter to his wife and architectural partner Jane Drew, written in early 1946, the leading modernist Edwin Maxwell Fry admitted that he was becoming increasingly persuaded by her view “that modern architecture has … taken too material and too mechanical a view of its powers of expression”. It seems that functionalism was also not entirely to Greene’s taste, although from the 1930s, including his editorship of the short-lived literary magazine Night and Day in 1937, he found himself standing just outside the engine room of the modern movement in Britain.
Interviewing Greene for the Paris Review in the early 1950s, Simon Raven and Martin Shuttleworth told him that England Made Me was their favourite of his novels. In reply, Greene admitted to having a “particularly soft spot” for it. “I was beginning to find my own world. In England Made Me I let myself go in it for the first time.”
