Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (October 2, 1904 –
April 3, 1991) was an English
playwright, novelist, 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.
Life and work
Childhood
Graham Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the fourth of six children — his younger brother Hugh
became the Director-General of the BBC; elder brother Raymond was an eminent physician and mountaineer.
His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Greene (née Raymond), were first cousins,
members of a large, influential family that included the Greene King brewery owners,
bankers, and businessmen. Charles Greene was Second Master at Berkhamsted
School, the headmaster of which was Dr Thomas Fry
(also married to a cousin of Charles). Another cousin was the right-wing pacifist
Ben Greene, whose politics led to his internment during
World War II.
In 1910, Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster; Graham attended the school. Bullied and profoundly depressed as a
boarder, he attempted suicide several times, some, he
claimed, by Russian roulette; Michael Shelden's biography discredits that. In 1921, at
age 17, he was psychoanalysed for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day boy; school friends included
Claud Cockburn and Peter Quennell.
While an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, his first work, a volume
of poetry entitled Babbling April, was published, but not much praised.
Early career
After graduation, Greene unsuccessfully took up journalism, first in the city of
Nottingham (recurring in his novels as the epitome of mean provincial life), and then as a
sub-editor on The Times. While in Nottingham he started corresponding with
Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Roman Catholic
convert who had written him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926 (described in
A Sort of Life) and was baptised in February the same year [1], they married in 1927, and had two children, Lucy (b. 1933) and Francis (b. 1936; d. 1987). In 1948,
Greene abandoned Vivien for Catherine Walston, yet remained married to her.
Novels and other works
Greene's first published novel was The Man Within (1929), its reception
emboldened him to quit his sub-editor job at The Times and work as a full-time novelist, however, the next two books were
unsuccessful; he later disowned them. His first, true success was Stamboul Train
(1932), adapted as the film Orient Express (1934); as with this novel, many of his books would be cinematically
adapted.
He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, and book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and
Day, which folded in 1937 shortly after Greene's film review of Wee Willie Winkie, featuring nine-year-old
Shirley Temple, cost the magazine a lost libel
lawsuit. Greene's review claimed that Temple displayed a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men; it is
now considered one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of children for entertainment.
He originally divided his fiction in two genres: (i) thrillers (mystery and suspense books),
such as Our Man in Havana, that he described as entertainments; often with
notable philosophic edges, and (ii) literary works, such as The Power and the
Glory, on which he thought his literary reputation was to be based.
As his career lengthened, however, Greene and his readers both found the entertainments of nearly as high literary value as
the formal literary writing. His later efforts, such as The Human Factor,
The Comedians, Our Man in
Havana, and The Quiet American, combine these modes in compressed,
but remarkably insightful work. He also wrote the screenplay, and afterward the short story, for the now-classic film noir, The Third Man (1949).
Greene also wrote short stories and plays that were well-received, although he always was a
novelist, foremost and he collected the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial
Prize for The Heart of the Matter. His long, successful career and
great readership (for a serious literary novelist) led to hope he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; although considered in 1974, he was not awarded it. Greene's friend
and occasional publisher, Michael Korda, wrote in his memoir, Another Life (1999),
that Greene believed he was always one vote short of the prize, withheld by a judge who disliked his Catholicism and left-wing
sympathies and "who seemed determined to outlive him".
Writing style and themes
The literary style of Graham Greene was one of the most recognizable writing styles in twentieth-century English literature.
The novels are written in lean, realistic prose, having clear, exciting plots (avoiding
modernist experimentation, which might account for his popularity), and using cinematic visual
sense in description. Yet, he concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives, the mental, emotional, and spiritual
depths. Usually, they are deeply troubled with internal, existential struggles, are world-weary, and cynical, finding themselves
rootlessly existing in seedy and sordid circumstances. The stories usually occurred in poor, hot, and dusty tropical backwaters
in countries such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.
The novels of Graham Greene often had religious themes at the centre. In his literary
criticism, he attacked most modern literature for having lost the religious
sense and for lacking such themes, which he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters who: wandered about like
cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin. Only in recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of
the struggle in the soul carrying the infinite consequences of salvation and damnation, and of the ultimate
metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and grace, could the novel recover its dramatic 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.[2]
The novels often powerfully portray the Christian drama of the struggles within the individual soul from the Catholic
perspective. Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction — in the world, sin is omnipresent to the
degree that the vigilant struggle to avoid sinful conduct is doomed to failure, hence, not central to holiness. Friend and fellow
Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh attacked that as a revival of the Quietist heresy. This aspect of his work also was criticised by the theologian
Hans Urs von Balthasar as giving sin a mystique.
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, is in Crisis magazine [1], and a mainstream
Catholic critique is presented by Joseph Pearce[2].
Catholicism's prominence decreased in the later writings. The supernatural realities that haunted the earlier work declined
and was replaced with a humanistic perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of
orthodox Catholic teaching. Left-wing political critiques assumed greater importance in his novels, for example, he attacked the
American policy in Vietnam in The Quiet American; the tormented believers portrayed
were more likely to have faith in Communism than in Catholicism. Critics usually agree,
however, that his profound novels are the early ones wherein Catholicism has a major role.
Unlike other "Catholic writers" such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, Greene's politics were always left-wing, though some biographers think politics
mattered little to him. In his later years, he was a strong critic of American
imperialism, and supported the Cuban leader Fidel
Castro, whom he had met.[3] For
Greene and politics, see also Anthony Burgess Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene[4] In Ways of Escape, reflections of his Mexican trip, he complained that
Mexico's government was insufficiently left-wing when compared with Cuba's [5]. In Greene's opinion, “Conservatism and Catholicism should be .... impossible bedfellows”. [6].
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
– Graham Greene
Nonetheless, despite his seriousness, Graham Greene greatly enjoyed parody, even of himself. In 1949, when the
New Statesman magazine held a contest for parodies of Greene's distinctive writing
style, he submitted a pseudonymous entry and won second prize; the first prize was awarded to a parody entered by his younger
brother Hugh.
The resulting work, The Stranger's Hand, was later completed by another writer and cinematically rendered by the
Italian film director Mario Soldati. In 1965, Greene again entered a similar New
Statesman Graham Greene writing style parody contest, again pseudonymously, and that time won an honourable mention.
Film cameo
Greene has an uncredited (probably because of the actor of the same name) cameo
appearance as an insurance company representative in the 1973 François Truffaut film Day for Night. On the DVD
of the movie, it was reported that Greene was a big admirer of Truffaut, and had always wanted to meet him, so as it turned out,
when the small part came up where he actually talks to the director, he was delighted to have the opportunity. It was reported
that Truffaut was unhappy he wasn't told (until later) that the actor playing the insurance company representative was Greene, he
would have liked to have said hello, as he had admired Greene's work as well.
Travel
Throughout his life, Graham Greene travelled far from England, to what he called the world's
wild and remote places. The travels allowed him opportunity to spy on behalf of the United
Kingdom, in Sierra Leone during the Second World
War. Curiously, it was Soviet double agent Kim
Philby who recruited Greene to MI6. As a novelist, he wove the
colourful characters he met and the exciting places where he lived to the moral fabric of his novels.
Despite love of travel, he first left Europe relatively late in life, at 31 years of age, in
1935, on a trip to Liberia that produced the travel
book Journey Without Maps. His 1938 trip to Mexico, to see the effects of the government's campaign of forced anti-Catholic secularisation was paid by the Roman Catholic Church. That voyage produced two books, the factual The Lawless Roads
(published as Another Mexico in the U.S.), and the novel The Power and the
Glory. In 1953, the Vatican office censored The Power and the Glory,
though later, in a private audience with Greene, Pope Paul VI told him to forget about the
religious troubles of the Mexicans. Greene travelled to the Haiti of François Duvalier, alias "Papa Doc", where occurred the story of The Comedians (1966). On the lighter side, the owner of the Hotel Oloffson, in Port-au-Prince, where Greene frequently
stayed, named a room in his honour.
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 novels have been filmed, notably Brighton Rock (1947),
The Honorary Consul (1983), (a 1958 version whose plot substantially departed from Greene's and a 2002 remake that followed Greene's book more closely), and The End of the Affair (1999). Moreover, he also wrote several original screenplays, most famously for the film The Third Man
(1949).
Final years
In 1966, Greene moved to Antibes, to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known for years,
a relationship that endured until his death. In 1981 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize,
awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society. One of his final works, the pamphlet J'Accuse —
The Dark Side of Nice (1982), concerns a legal matter embroiling him and his extended family in Nice. He declared that organized crime flourished in Nice, because the
city's upper levels of civic government had protected judicial and police corruption; the accusation provoked a libel lawsuit he
lost [3]. Yet, in 1994, he was vindicated — after death — when the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, was imprisoned upon conviction for corruption and associated crimes.
He lived the last years of his life in Vevey, on Lake
Geneva, in Switzerland. His book Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party
(1989) bases its themes on combined philosophic and geographic influences. He had ceased attending Mass and confessing in the 1950s, but received the sacraments from a Father
Leopaldo Durán, a Spanish priest who became a friend. On dying at age 86 in 1991, he was buried in the Corseaux-sur-Vevey cemetery.
His official biographer, Norman Sherry, published the third, final volume of The
Life of Graham Greene in October of 2004. Sherry followed Greene's footsteps, at times suffering the diseases that Greene
suffered and in the same place. The biography reveals that Greene continued reporting to British intelligence until his life's
end, allowing literary scholars and readers to entertain the provocative question of whether Graham Greene a novelist who also
was a spy, or if he was a spy whose life-long novelist's career was the perfect cover.
References
- ^ the conversion happened after having argued with father Trollope, as Greene
was defending atheism. - The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990. Introduction by John Updike, p. xiv
- ^ Crisis Magazine.
- ^ Kirjasto.
- ^ in Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 2, No. 2, (Apr. 1967), pp.
93-99.
- ^ P.xii of John Updike's introduction to The Power and the Glory New
York: Viking, 1990.
- ^ As cited on p.xii of John Updike's introduction to The Power and the
Glory New York: Viking, 1990.
6. as cited from http://www.whysanity.net/monos/westwing3.html
List of major works
See List of books by Graham Greene for all works.
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 Man 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
External links
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