England Made Me

Alternate Title: The Shipwrecked

Published 1935

Accountants and adventurers, rogues and respectability. Anthony and Kate Farrant are twins and quite close. Kate has a well-paid job in Stockholm as the secretary of Krogh, one of the richest men in Europe. Anthony is a skilled, but creative, accountant and has gotten fired from every job he has landed. Each time he got the sack, he would inform his family that he “had resigned” because of a (never specified) question of honor. Kate encourages him to come to Stockholm, where she is sure she can get him a job. Even though they have been apart for many years, Anthony is the only person she really cares about and she has worked hard to be in a position to bring him to her. As Anthony has neither prospects nor money, he follows her back to Sweden and to Krogh. They stop over in Gothenburg on the way.

In his thoughts, Krogh compares himself to the obvious model Greene had in mind, Ivan Kreuger, the Swedish industrialist who built up a massive industrial empire in the early decades of the 20^th century that imploded in the 1930s. Money is short in the 1930s. Krogh is on the cusp of getting his company listed in the US, which will open up a vast new source of funds. But, in the meantime, he has to keep up the appearance of his company’s financial strength in Europe. He shifts debts into a subsidiary and is about to sell that subsidiary to an English company. Then, his European operations will look financially sound, the listing in the US will go through, and he’ll have all the credit he needs to keep the money-go-round going.

However, Krogh has found it increasingly difficult to ward off journalists as he goes around Stockholm. His face is too familiar to move around incognito. So, after Anthony demonstrates that he is an excellent shot in a shooting game at a fair, Krogh is happy to grant his mistress’s request and give her brother a job as his bodyguard. Anthony is excited to have a well-paid job and wear a fancy suit. He accompanies Krogh to the opera and, when they are both thoroughly bored, he convinces Krogh to come away to revelry. Anthony is the type of fun-loving friend that Krogh has never had. Krogh hasn’t had so much fun in years. Anthony keeps Krogh’s mind off his business worries.

A dalliance with a young lady from Coventry he met in Gothenburg distracts Anthony at his new job. Loo (the unfortunate abbreviation of Lucia) and her parents are in Stockholm now and Anthony is desperate to maintain the connection, as if out of homesickness. She tells him that his job is unrespectable.

To add to Anthony’s malaise are the suspicions of Minty, a down at the heel journalist originally from England, who became friends with Anthony in order to have a source of intel on Krogh. Minty has guessed that Krogh is having to play games in order to shore up the prospects of his American listing, but he’s not sure what games they are. He explains the general situation to Anthony, who, connecting Minty’s explanation to things he has heard Krogh say, decides that his job is indeed not respectable and decides to resign the same day and return to England the next.

But neither his sister nor Fred Hall, Krogh’s old friend and fixer, want to see him go.

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One amusing fact is that we never find out what exactly Krogh does. We know that he made a lot of money off of a new industrial cutter, that one of his subsidiaries manufactures paper products, and that he loans money to governments, but we also hear about “Krogh’s you can buy for a few pence in any general store.” Given that Ivan Kreuger made his fortune selling matches, I suppose that is the best guess for Krogh’s.

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Greene uses names of streets, neighborhoods, and towns in this book (and in It’s a Battlefield) to create a sense of place. The use of specific street names for London is common in English literature. If you read enough books set in England, you’ll probably feel, as I do, a vague acquaintance with London (a place I have never visited) and yet have no idea where the specific streets or neighborhoods are. Even more damning, I have no idea what these places represented and I suspect that gentrification in London has made some of the implications of a particular place name-dropped by Greene historic.

In this book, Greene performs this same geographic treatment on Sweden. At the town level, beyond reference to Gothenburg and Malmö as points of transit, we get: labor agitation at the paper-works in Nyköping, Krogh’s poor childhood on Lake Vätten, a night out in Saltsjöbaden, breakfast at Drottningholm (the latter two places part of greater Stockholm). A level closer in: Krogh walks along Fredsgatan and watches the trams screech past on Tegelbacken, Anthony and Loo walk up and down Vasagatan, near the train station when Loo is about to leave Stockholm. These details of central Stockholm provide reminders that the story takes place in Sweden. Yet, the manners and memories of the characters are so resolutely English that Sweden doesn’t seem quite real in this book, more a backdrop of Sweden hung for an English novel.