Graham Greene

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This article is about the writer. For the actor, see Graham Greene (actor).

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (October 2, 1904 – April 3, 1991) was a prolific English novelist, playwright, short story writer, travel writer and critic whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene combined serious literary acclaim with wide popularity. Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a "Catholic novelist" rather than as a "novelist who happened to be Catholic", Catholic religious themes are at the root of many of his novels, including Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, Monsignor Quixote, A Burnt-Out Case, and his famous work The Power and the Glory. Works such as The Quiet American also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics.

Contents

[edit] Life and work

[edit] Childhood

Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the fourth of six children — his younger brother Hugh became the Director-General of the BBC, and older brother Raymond an eminent doctor and mountaineer. Their parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion née Raymond, were first cousins and members of a large and influential family that included the owners of the Greene King brewery, and various bankers and businessmen. Charles Greene was "second master" at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry (who was married to another cousin of Charles).

In 1910 Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster, and Graham attended the school as a pupil. Bullied and profoundly unhappy as a boarder, Greene made several attempts at suicide (some of them, Greene claimed, by playing Russian roulette — though Michael Shelden's biography of Greene discredits the truth of these incidents), and in 1921 at the age of 17 he underwent six months of psychoanalysis in London to deal with depression. After this he returned to the school as a day boy, living with his family. Schoolfriends included Claud Cockburn and Peter Quennell.

He went to Balliol College, Oxford, and his first work (a volume of poetry) was published in 1925, while he was an undergraduate, but it was not widely praised.

[edit] Early career

After graduation, Greene took up a career in journalism, firstly in Nottingham (a city which recurs in his novels as an epitome of mean provincial life), and then as a subeditor on The Times. While in Nottingham he started a correspondence with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Roman Catholic (by conversion) who had written to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene converted to the faith in 1926, and the couple were married the following year. They had two children, Lucy (born 1933) and Francis (born 1936; died 1987). In 1948 Greene left Vivien for Catherine Walston, but they remained married.

[edit] Novels and other works

Greene's first published novel was The Man Within in 1929, and its reception emboldened him to give up his job at The Times and work full-time as a novelist. However, the following two books were not successful (Greene disowned them in later life), and his first real success was Stamboul Train in 1932 — as with several of his books, this was also adapted as a film (Orient Express, 1934).

His income from novels was supplemented by freelance journalism, including book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day, which closed down in 1937 shortly after Greene's review of the film Wee Willie Winkie, starring a nine-year-old Shirley Temple, caused the magazine to lose a libel case. Greene's review claimed that Temple displayed "a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men", and is now seen as one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of young children by the entertainment industry.

His fiction was originally divided into two genres: thrillers or mystery/suspense books, such as Brighton Rock, that he himself cast as "entertainments" but which often included a notable philosophical edge, and literary works such as The Power and the Glory, on which his reputation was thought to be based.

As his career lengthened, however, Greene and his readers both found the "entertainments" to be of nearly as high a value as the literary efforts, and Greene's later efforts such as The Human Factor, The Comedians, Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American, combine these modes into works of remarkable insight and compression.

Greene also wrote many short stories and several plays, which were also, on the whole, well-received, although he was always first and foremost a novelist.

Greene's long, successful career and very large readership (for a serious literary novelist) led his fans to hope that he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. However, although he was apparently seriously considered in 1974, he never received the prize. His broad popularity may have counted against him among the scholarly elite, while the centrality of religious themes in his work may have alienated some of the judges.

[edit] Writing style and themes

Greene had one of the most recognizable writing styles of twentieth century English authors. His novels are written in a lean, realistic style with clear, exciting plots (avoiding modernist experiments, which might partially account for his popularity) and often utilising a cinematic visual sense in his descriptions. Yet he also concentrated on portraying the internal life of his characters, their mental, emotional and spiritual depths. They are usually deeply troubled by internal struggles, world-weariness and cynicism and living in seedy, sordid or rootless circumstances. Greene tended to set his novels in poor, hot, dusty or tropical backwaters in countries such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Haiti or Argentina. This has led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.

Greene's were probably the first literary novels written in English in the twentieth century which had at their centre religious themes (though they had similarities with the French novels of François Mauriac). Catholicism is usually explicitly present. Greene in his literary criticism attacked most modern literature for having lost any religious sense or themes, which resulted, he argued, in dull, superficial characters who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin." Only by recovering a religious element, the consciousness of the drama of the struggle within the human soul carrying infinite consequences of salvation and damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and grace, could the novel recover its drama and power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the fallen world Greene depicts, and Catholicism is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin and doubt. Indeed, V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist since Henry James to present, and grapple with, the reality of evil.[1]

Although the novels very often portray powerfully the Christian drama of the struggles of the individual soul, from a Catholic point of view Greene has also been criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction — sin is so omnipresent in his world that sometimes the vigilant struggle to avoid sinful conduct seems to be portrayed as doomed to failure and, hence, not central to holiness. His friend and fellow Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh attacked this as a revival of the Quietist heresy. This aspect of his work was also criticised by the leading theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar as giving sin a "mystique". His characters, although their inner suffering and struggles with doubt reflect a central Christian reality (human fallenness), rarely exhibit other realities of the Christian life, simple, uncomplicated faith and true inner peace and joy. To the latter point, Greene responded that constructing a vision of pure faith and goodness in the novel was beyond his talents. Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view by Edward Short can be found at Crisis magazine: [1], while a Catholic critique is presented by Joseph Pearce: [2].

In his later writings, Catholicism decreased in prominence. The sense of supernatural realities which haunted his earlier works declined and seemed to be replaced with a more "humanistic" viewpoint, a change reflected by his public criticisms of orthodox Catholic teachings. Left-wing political critiques took on a greater importance in his fiction (for example, his attack on American policy in Vietnam in The Quiet American), and the tormented believers he portrayed were now more likely to have faith in Communism than Catholicism. Critics usually agree, however, that his most profound works are the earlier ones in which Catholicism plays a major role.

Unlike other "Catholic writers" such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, Greene's politics were always essentially left-leaning, though some biographers believe politics mattered little to him. In his later years he was a strong critic of what he saw as American imperialism, and he supported the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met.[2]

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

– Graham Greene

[edit] Travel

Throughout his life, Greene was obsessed with travelling far from his native England, to what he called the "wild and remote" places of the world. His travels provided him with opportunities to engage in espionage on behalf of the United Kingdom (in Sierra Leone during the Second World War, for example). Greene had been recruited to MI6 by the notorious double agent Kim Philby. He reworked the colourful and exciting characters and places he encountered into the fabric of his novels.

Despite his love of travel he left Europe for the first time late in life when he was 36 in 1936, when he traveled to Liberia which resulted in the non-fiction travel literature Journey Without Maps. A 1938 trip to Mexico to see the effects of a campaign of forced anti-Catholic secularisation was funded by the Roman Catholic Church. This resulted in the factual The Lawless Roads (published in America as Another Mexico), and the fictional The Power and the Glory. The novel was censored by a Vatican office in 1953, though in a later private audience with Greene, Pope Paul VI told him to forget about the troubles. Greene would later travel to Duvalierist Haiti, which became the scene of his 1966 novel The Comedians. The owner of the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, where Greene was a frequent guest during this time, would later name a room in the hotel after Greene.

There is so much weariness and disappointment in travel that people have to open up — in railway trains, over a fire, on the decks of steamers, and in the palm courts of hotels on a rainy day. They have to pass the time somehow, and they can pass it only with themselves. Like the characters in Chekhov they have no reserves — you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.

– Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads (1939)

Many of his books have been filmed, most notably 1947's Brighton Rock, and he also wrote several original screenplays, most famously for the film The Third Man.

[edit] Final years

Greene moved to Antibes in 1966, to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known for several years, and this relationship endured until his death. In 1981 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to writers concerned with 'the freedom of the individual in society'. One of his final works, J'Accuse — The Dark Side of Nice (1982), concerns a legal matter embroiling him and his extended family in nearby Nice. In the pamphlet, he declared that organized crime flourished in Nice and that the upper levels of civic government had protected judicial and police corruption in the city. This led to a libel case, which he lost [3]. He was vindicated after his death, however, when in 1994 the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin was convicted of several counts of corruption and associated crimes and sentenced to prison.

In the last years of his life, Greene lived in the small resort city of Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. He had ceased attending Mass and going to Confession some time in the 1950s, but in his last years it seems he sometimes received the sacraments from a Spanish priest who became a friend, Fr. Leopaldo Duran. On his death at the age of 86 in 1991, he was interred in the nearby cemetery in Corsier-sur-Vevey.

October 2004 saw the publication of the third and final volume of The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry, Greene's official biographer. The writing of this biography created a story in itself in that Sherry followed in Greene's footsteps, even coming down with diseases that Greene had come down with in the same place. Sherry's work reveals that Greene continued to submit reports to British intelligence until the end of his life. This has led scholars and Greene's reading public to entertain the provocative question, "Was Greene a novelist who was also a spy, or was his lifelong literary career the perfect cover?"

[edit] Trivia

Greene greatly enjoyed parody. In 1949, when the New Statesman publication held a contest for parodies of Greene's distinctive writing style, he submitted an entry under a pseudonym and won second prize. (The first prize, he was surprised to learn, was awarded to an entry by his younger brother Hugh.) The resulting work, The Stranger's Hand, was later finished by another writer and brought to the screen by Italian film director, Mario Soldati. In 1965, Greene entered a similar New Statesman parody contest, again under a pseudonym, and won an honourable mention.

Greene's short story "The Destructors" was featured in the movie Donnie Darko, where a character confused him with Bonanza's Lorne Greene.

Greene's novel Brighton Rock is quoted in "The West Wing" Season 2 finale episode "Two Cathedrals". President Bartlett quotes Greene saying, "You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." He then goes on to say, "I don't know whose ass he was kissing, but I think You're [God] just vindictive."

Greene is the subject of a John Cale song, fittingly entitled 'Graham Greene'.

[edit] List of major works

See List of books by Graham Greene for all works.

[edit] Further reading

  • Paul O'Prey, A Reader's Guide to Graham Greene, Thames and Hudson, 1988
  • Kelly, Richard Michael, Graham Greene, Ungar, 1984
  • Kelly, Richard Michael, Graham Greene: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne, 1992.
  • Duran, Leopoldo , Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, translated by Euan Cameron, HarperCollins
  • Shelden, Michael , Graham Greene: The Enemy Within, (pub. William Heinemann, 1994), Random House ed. 1995: ISBN 0-679-42883-6
  • Sherry, Norman (1989-2004), The Life of Graham Greene: vol. 1 1904-1939, (pub. Random House UK, 1989, ISBN 0-224-02654-2), Viking ed. 1989: ISBN 0-670-81376-1, Penguin reprint 2004: ISBN 0-14-200420-0
  • Sherry, Norman, The Life of Graham Greene: vol. 2 1939-1955, (pub. Viking 1994: ISBN 0-670-86056-5), Penguin reprint 2004: ISBN 0-14-200421-9
  • Sherry, Norman, The Life of Graham Greene: vol. 3 1955-1991, (pub. Viking 2004, ISBN 0-670-03142-9)
  • The Graham Greene Film Reader

[edit] External links

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