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Graham Greene

 
Who2 Profiles:

Graham Greene, Writer

Graham Greene
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  • Born: 2 October 1904
  • Birthplace: Berkhampsted, Hertfordshire, England
  • Died: 3 April 1991
  • Best Known As: Author of The Honorary Consul and The Third Man

Name at birth: Henry Graham Greene

Graham Greene was a popular and critically acclaimed author during the 20th century, a British writer known for stranger-in-a-strange-land stories such as 1955's The Quiet American. By his own claim, Greene wrote both "entertainments" and "serious novels," many of them political thrillers. An editor, essayist, playwright and novelist, Greene's other famous works include Brighton Rock (1938), Our Man in Havana (1958) and The Honorary Consul (1973). He had a long association with the movies, and was involved in This Gun for Hire (1942, with Alan Ladd), The Third Man (1949, starring Orson Welles) and Loser Takes All (1956).

Graham's mother was a cousin to British writer Robert Louis Stevenson.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Henry Graham Greene

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(born Oct. 2, 1904, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Eng. — died April 3, 1991, Vevey, Switz.) British author. After studying at the University of Oxford, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. Beginning c. 1930 he worked principally as a freelance journalist for several decades, during which he traveled widely. Stamboul Train (1932; also titled Orient Express; film, 1934) was the first of his "entertainments," thrillers with considerable moral complexity and depth; others included A Gun for Sale (1936; also titled This Gun for Hire; film, 1942), The Confidential Agent (1939; film, 1945), and The Third Man (1949; film, 1949). His finest novels — Brighton Rock (1938; film, 1948), The Power and the Glory (1940; film, 1962), The Heart of the Matter (1948; film, 1954), and The End of the Affair (1951; film, 1999) — all have distinctly religious themes. Several of his novels set in "third-world" nations on the brink of political upheaval were also adapted as films.

For more information on Henry Graham Greene, visit Britannica.com.

The works of the English novelist and dramatist Graham Greene (1904-1991) explore different permutations of morality and amorality in modern society, and often feature exotic settings in different parts of the world. A storyteller with a spare and elegant style, he divided his literary output into two categories. The first identified his long, serious works as "novels", while the second, which he called "entertainments", were shorter, taut-paced political thrillers with boldly-defined characters designed to satisfy the reader whose main concern is plot rather than theme. He also wrote screenplays and dramas, but they have not stood the test of time as steadfastly as his fiction, which has been translated into 27 languages.

Graham Greene was born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, in England. He was one of six children born to Charles Henry Greene, headmaster of Berkhamsted School, and Marion R. Greene. He did not enjoy his childhood, often preferring to skip classes rather than endure the baiting of his fellow students. When Greene suffered a mental collapse, his parents sent him to London for psychotherapy administered by a student of the famous Sigmund Freud. While he was living there, he became a voracious reader and began to write poetry. Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein became lifelong mentors to him before he returned to high school.

After graduating in 1922, Greene went on to Oxford University's Balliol College. When he was a junior in 1924, he contacted the German embassy and offered to write some pro-German articles for an Oxford paper. Intrigued, an embassy official accepted his offer, and sent him on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Rhineland, where Germany and France were vying for superiority in the creation of a separatist republic. As promised, Greene returned from Germany and wrote an article favoring Germany in the Oxford Chronicle of May 9, 1924.

His next attempt to enliven his studies brought him to a flirtation with the Communist party, which he abandoned after a mere six weeks, though he later wrote sympathetic profiles of Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Otherwise, Greene spent his vacations at Oxford roaming the English countryside. Despite all these efforts to distract himself from his studies, he graduated from Oxford in 1925 with a second-class pass in history, and a slender, badly-received volume of poetry with the effusive title Babbling April.

The following year Greene decided to convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, the religion of his fiancee. The shift brought him a new perspective in his search for the origins of human morality and amorality.

The same year he began his professional writing career as an unpaid apprentice for the Nottingham Journal, moving on later to become a subeditor for the London Times. The experience was a positive one for him, and he held this position until the publication of his first novel, The Man Within (1929). Here he began to develop the characteristic themes he later pursued so effectively: betrayal, pursuit, and the yearning for death.

His next works, Name of Action (1931) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931), were not well-received by critics, but Greene regained their respect with the first book he classed as an entertainment. Called Stamboul Train in England, it was published in 1932 in the United States as Orient Express. The story revolves around a group of travelers on the Orient Express, a setting mysterious enough to permit a large helping of melodrama and grotesque character-building. Journey without Maps, published in 1936, was a travelogue, detailing Greene's fascination with the lush and decadent outposts of colonization.

Major Themes

Twelve years after his conversion, Greene published Brighton Rock (1938), a novel with a highly melodramatic plot full of sexual and violent imagery that explored the interplay between abnormal behavior and morality.

The entertainment The Confidential Agent was published in 1939, as was the work The Lawless Roads, a journal of Greene's travels in Mexico in 1938. Here he had seen widespread persecution of Catholic priests, which he documented in his journal along with a description of a drunken priest's execution. The incident made such an impression upon him that this victim became the hero of The Power and the Glory, the novel considered by Greene to be his best.

Later Life

During the years of World War II Greene slipped out of England and went to West Africa to do some clandestine intelligence work for the British Government. The result, a novel called The Heart of the Matter appeared in 1948, and greatly appealed to American readers.

Steadily, Greene produced a succession of works that received both praise and crtiticism. He was considered for the Nobel Prize but failed to become a candidate. Still, many other honors were bestowed upon him, including a 1966 accolade from Queen Elizabeth as a Companion of Honor, and the Order of Merit, a much higher honor, in 1986.

In 1979 Greene underwent surgery for intestinal cancer, but had no lasting ill-effects. However, in 1990, he was stricken with an unspecified blood disease so debilitating that he decided to move from his home in Antibes, the South of France, to Vevey, Switzerland, so that he could be closer to his daughter. He lingered until the beginning of spring, then died on April 3rd, 1991, in La Povidence Hospital.

Further Reading

Full-length studies of Greene include John A. Atkins, Graham Greene (1957; rev. ed. 1966); Francis L. Kunkel, The Labyrinthine Ways of Graham Greene (1959); Lynette Kohn, Graham Greene, The Major Novels (1961); A. A. De Vitis, Graham Greene (1964); and David Lodge, Graham Greene (1966). For a variety of opinions on Greene's work see Robert O. Evans, ed., Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations (1963). François Mauriac, Men I Hold Great (1951), discusses Greene.

Additional Sources

Shelden, Michael, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within, Random House, 1994.

New York Times, (April 4, 1991).

Greene, Graham (1904-91). One of the most versatile, prolific, and popular writers of the mid-20th cent., Greene was born at Berkhamsted (Herts.), where his father was headmaster of the public school, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He converted to catholicism at the time of his marriage in 1927. Greene published a book of verse, Babbling April, in 1925, and followed with a historical novel, The Man Within, in 1929. Next he produced a series of thrillers (‘entertainments’) starting with Stamboul Train (1932) and continuing to The Third Man (1950), made into a remarkable film. Increasingly Greene explored the world of catholic guilt in Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951). His themes of ambiguity, betrayal, and seediness reflected and appealed to his own times.

Columbia Encyclopedia:

Graham Greene

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Greene, Graham (Henry Graham Greene), 1904-91, English novelist and playwright. Although most of his works combine elements of the detective story, the spy thriller, and the psychological drama, his novels are essentially parables of the damned. Greene's heroes realize their sins and achieve salvation only through great pain and soul-searching agony. A Roman Catholic convert (1926), he was intensely concerned with the moral problems of humans in relation to God. Some of his 26 novels have been ranked as thrillers, and Greene himself called such works as Stamboul Train (1932; U.S. title, Orient Express) and The Ministry of Fear (1943) "entertainments" to distinguish them from his more serious efforts. His major works, which include Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951), mark him as a novelist of high distinction.

Greene was a superb journalist, a sometime British spy, and a world traveler, often courting danger in various international wars and revolutions and participating in local high and low life in dozens of famous and obscure corners of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Many of his novels are set in locations with which he had personal experience, sites often of topical journalistic interest: The Quiet American (1955) a prescient account of early American involvement in Vietnam; Our Man in Havana (1958), set in Cuba; A Burnt-Out Case (1961), in the Belgian Congo just before its independence; The Comedians (1966), in François Duvalier's Haiti; and The Captain and the Enemy (1980), in Panama. His fine sense of comedy is displayed in the short-story collection May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967) and the novel Travels with My Aunt (1969). Greene also wrote several plays, including The Living Room (1953) and The Potting Shed (1957), both thinly disguised religious dramas, and The Complaisant Lover (1959), a witty and intelligent play about marriage and infidelity. He also is noted for his essays, travel books, film criticism, and film scripts, including the mystery melodrama The Third Man (1950).

Bibliography

See his autobiographies (1971, 1980) and his posthumously published A World of My Own: A Dream Diary (1995); S. Hazzard, Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000); R. Greene, ed., Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (2008); biographies by M. Shelden (1994) and N. Sherry (3 vol., 1989-2004); studies by H. J. Donaghy (1983), A. A. De Vitis (1986), and J. Meyers, ed. (1990).

Quotes By:

Graham Greene

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Quotes:

"Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation."

"God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed -- that is the meaning of evolution."

"Failure too is a form of death..."

"If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?"

"Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil --or else an absolute ignorance."

"Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

See more famous quotes by Graham Greene

AMG AllMovie Guide:

Graham Greene

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Biography

Oxford-educated author/essayist Graham Greene published his first major novel, Stamboul Train, in 1932; two years later, the novel became the first of a multitude of Greene works to be adapted for the screen. Incredibly prolific, Greene divided his books into two classifications. His "Entertainments" were his bread-and-butter mysteries, espionage thrillers and psychological melodramas, examples of which include This Gun for Hire and Our Man in Havana; and his "Novels" were such deeper and (to him) more meaningful works as The Power and the Glory (filmed by John Ford as The Fugitive in 1948) and Brighton Rock. From 1935 to 1940, he was film critic for The Spectator, gaining fame for championing such "populist" entertainers as Laurel and Hardy. During this period, he also served as literary editor of Night and Day.

While Greene adapted many of his own fictional works for films--with particularly laudable results in the cases of two Carol Reed-directed pictures, The Third Man (1949) and The Fallen Idol (1949), the latter project earning the writer an Academy Award nomination--Greene was generally unhappy with the movie versions; the 1958 filmization of The Quiet American, completely distorted Greene's spin on the tinderbox political situation in Southeast Asia in favor of a flag-waving pro-American stance, and in the TV-series version of The Third Man, the wholly amoral and nihilistic Harry Lime was converted into a grown-up boy scout. In 1972, a collection of Graham Greene's Spectator movie reviews were gathered together in the British anthology The Pleasure Dome (published in the U.S. as Greene and Film); and in 1990, a full-length assessment of his screen work, titled Travels in Greenland: The Cinema of Graham Greene, was written by Quentin Falk. Graham Greene's screen credits should not be confused with those of the Native American character actor of the same name. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Graham Greene

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Graham Greene
Born Henry Graham Greene
2 October 1904(1904-10-02)
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England
Died 3 April 1991(1991-04-03) (aged 86)
Vevey, Switzerland
Occupation Writer
Nationality British
Period 1925–1991
Genres Literary fiction, thriller

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene was notable for his ability to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity.

Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.[3] Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage.

Greene suffered from bipolar disorder,[4] which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".[5]

Contents

Early years

Graham Greene's Birthplace in Berkhamsted
Blue plaque commemorating Greene's birthplace

Henry Graham Greene was born in 1904 in St. John’s House, a boarding house of Berkhamsted School on Chesham Road in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, where his father was housemaster.[6] He was the fourth of six children; his younger brother, Hugh, became Director-General of the BBC, and his elder brother, Raymond, an eminent physician and mountaineer.

His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were second cousins; both members of a large, influential family that included the owners of Greene King brewery, bankers and businessmen. Charles Greene was Second Master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry, who was married to Charles' cousin. 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 of Berkhamsted. Graham also attended the school as a boarder. Bullied and profoundly depressed he made several suicide attempts; including, as he wrote in his autobiography, by Russian roulette and by taking aspirin before going swimming in the school pool. In 1920, aged 16, in what was a radical step for the time, he was sent for psychoanalysis for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day student. School friends included Claud Cockburn the satirist, and Peter Quennell the historian.

In 1922 he was for a short time a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[7]

In 1925, while an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, his first work, a poorly received volume of poetry entitled Babbling April, was published.[8] Greene suffered from periodic bouts of depression whilst at Oxford, and largely kept to himself.[9] Of Greene's time at Oxford, his contemporary Evelyn Waugh noted that: "Graham Greene looked down on us (and perhaps all undergraduates) as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry".[9]

Early career

After graduating with a second-class degree in history,[8] he worked for a period of time as a private tutor and then turned to journalism – first on the Nottingham Journal,[10] and then as a sub-editor on The Times. While in Nottingham he started corresponding with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Catholic convert, who had written to him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene was an agnostic at the time, but when he began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it in A Sort of Life, he "ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held". In his discussions with the priest to whom he went for instruction, he argued "on the ground of dogmatic atheism", as his primary difficulty was what he termed the "if" surrounding God's existence. However, he found that "after a few weeks of serious argument the 'if' was becoming less and less improbable".[11] Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926 (described in A Sort of Life) when he was baptised in February of that year.[12] He married Vivien in 1927; and they had two children, Lucy Caroline (b. 1933) and Francis (b. 1936). In 1948 Greene separated amicably from Vivien. Although he had other relationships, he never divorced or remarried.

Novels and other works

Greene's first published novel was The Man Within (1929). Favourable reception emboldened him to quit his sub-editor job at The Times and work as a full-time novelist. The next two books, The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932), were unsuccessful; and he later disowned them. His first true success was Stamboul Train (1932) which was taken on by the Book Society and adapted as the film Orient Express (1934).

He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day, which folded in 1937. Greene's film review of Wee Willie Winkie, featuring nine-year-old Shirley Temple, cost the magazine a lost libel lawsuit. Greene's review stated that Temple displayed "a dubious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen".[13] It is now considered one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of children for entertainment.

Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres: thrillers (mystery and suspense books), such as The Ministry of Fear, which he described as entertainments, often with notable philosophic edges, and literary works, such as The Power and the Glory, which he described as novels, on which he thought his literary reputation was to be based.[14]

As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between entertainments and novels increasingly problematic. The last book Greene termed an entertainment was Our Man in Havana in 1958. When Travels with My Aunt was published eleven years later, many reviewers noted that Greene had designated it a novel, even though, as a work decidedly comic in tone, it appeared closer to his last two entertainments, Loser Takes All and Our Man in Havana, than to any of the novels. Greene, they speculated, seemed to have dropped the category of entertainment. This was soon confirmed. In the Collected Edition of Greene's works published in 22 volumes between 1970 and 1982, the distinction between novels and entertainments is no longer maintained. All are novels.

Greene also wrote short stories and plays, which were well-received, although he was always first and foremost a novelist. He collected the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter. In 1986, he was awarded Britain's Order of Merit.

Greene was one of the most "cinematic" of twentieth century writers; most of his novels and many of his plays and short stories would eventually be adapted for film or television.[15] The Internet Movie Database lists 66 titles based on Greene material between 1934 and 2010. Some novels were filmed more than once, such as Brighton Rock in 1947 and 2011, The End of the Affair in 1955 and 1999, and The Quiet American in 1958 and 2002. The early thriller A Gun for Sale was filmed at least five times under different titles. He also wrote several original screenplays. In 1949, after writing the novella as "raw material", he wrote the screenplay for the classic film noir, The Third Man, featuring Orson Welles. In 1983, The Honorary Consul, published ten years earlier, was released as a film under its original title, starring Michael Caine and Richard Gere. Michael Korda, the famous author and Hollywood script-writer, contributed a foreword and introduction to this novel in a commemorative edition.

In 2009 The Strand Magazine began to publish in serial form a newly discovered Greene novel entitled The Empty Chair. The manuscript was written in longhand when Greene was 22 and newly converted to Catholicism.

Travel

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

Throughout his life Greene travelled far from England, to what he called the world's wild and remote places. The travels led to him being recruited into MI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the organisation; and he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War.[16] Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6.[17][18] As a novelist he wove the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels.

Greene first left Europe at 30 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 for by Longman's, thanks to his friendship with Tom Burns.[19] 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 Holy Office informed Greene that The Power and the Glory was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene, Pope Paul VI told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should not pay attention to the criticism.[20] Greene travelled to Haiti which was under the rule of dictator François Duvalier, known as "Papa Doc", where the story of The Comedians (1966) took place. The owner of the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, where Greene frequently stayed, named a room in his honour.

Gravestone at Corseaux, Switzerland

Final years

After falling victim to a financial swindler, Greene chose to leave Britain in 1966, moving to Antibes, to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known since 1959, a relationship that endured until his death. In 1973, Greene had an uncredited cameo appearance as an insurance company representative in François Truffaut's film Day for Night. 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 organised 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 that he lost.[21] In 1994, after his death, he was vindicated, when the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, was imprisoned for corruption and associated crimes.

He lived the last years of his life in Vevey, on Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, the same town Charlie Chaplin was living in at this time. He visited Chaplin often, and the two were good friends.[22] His book Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980) bases its themes on combined philosophic and geographic influences. He had ceased going to mass and confession in the 1950s, but in his final years began to receive the sacraments again from Father Leopoldo Durán, a Spanish priest, who became a friend. He died at age 86 of leukaemia[3] in 1991 and was buried in Corseaux cemetery.[22]

Greene's literary agent was Jean LeRoy of Pearn, Pollinger & Higham.

Writing style and themes

The literary style of Graham Greene was described by Evelyn Waugh in Commonweal as "not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry, and of independent life". Commenting on this lean, realistic prose and its readability, Richard Jones wrote in the Virginia Quarterly Review that "nothing deflects Greene from the main business of holding the reader's attention."[23] His novels often have religious themes at the centre. In his literary criticism he attacked the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster for having lost the religious sense which, he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters, who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin".[24] 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 divine grace, could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the world Greene depicts; and Catholicism is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin, and doubt. V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist since Henry James to present, and grapple with, the reality of evil.[25] Greene concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives – their mental, emotional, and spiritual depths. His stories often occurred in poor, hot, and dusty tropical backwaters, such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.[26]

A stranger with no shortage of calling cards: devout Catholic, lifelong adulterer, pulpy hack, canonical novelist; self-destructive, meticulously disciplined, deliriously romantic, bitterly cynical; moral relativist, strict theologian, salon communist, closet monarchist; civilized to a stuffy fault and louche to drugged-out distraction, anti-imperialist crusader and postcolonial parasite, self-excoriating and self-aggrandizing, to name just a few.

The Nation, describing the many facets of Graham Greene[27]

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 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,[25] and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by Joseph Pearce.[11]

Catholicism's prominence decreased in the later writings. According to Ernest Mandel in his Delightful Murder: a Social History of the Crime Story: "Greene started out as a conservative agent of the British intelligence services, upholding such reactionary causes as the struggle of the Catholic Church against the Mexican revolution (The Power and the Glory, 1940), and arguing the necessary merciful function of religion in a context of human misery (Brighton Rock, 1938; The Heart of the Matter, 1948). The better he came to know the socio-political realities of the third world where he was operating, and the more directly he came to be confronted by the rising tide of revolution in those countries, the more his doubts regarding the imperialist cause grew, and the more his novels shifted away from any identification with the latter."[28] The supernatural realities that haunted the earlier work declined and were replaced by 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, years before the Vietnam War, in The Quiet American he prophetically attacked the naive and counterproductive attitudes that were to characterise American policy in Vietnam. The tormented believers he portrayed were more likely to have faith in communism than in Catholicism.

In his later years Greene was a strong critic of American imperialism, and supported the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met.[29] For Greene and politics, see also Anthony Burgess' Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene.[30] In Ways of Escape, reflecting on his Mexican trip, he complained that Mexico's government was insufficiently left-wing compared with Cuba's.[31] In Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be .... impossible bedfellows".[32]

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

—Graham Greene

Despite his seriousness, Graham Greene greatly enjoyed parody, even of himself. In 1949, when the New Statesman held a contest for parodies of Greene's writing style, he submitted an entry under the pen name "N. Wilkinson" and won second prize. His entry comprised the first two paragraphs of a novel, apparently set in Italy, The Stranger's Hand: An Entertainment. Greene's friend, Mario Soldati, a Piedmontese novelist and film director, believed that it had the makings of a suspense film about Yugoslav spies in postwar Venice. Upon Soldati's prompting, Greene continued writing the story as the basis for a film script. Apparently he lost interest in the project, leaving it as a substantial fragment that was published posthumously in The Graham Greene Film Reader (1993) and No Man's Land (2005). The script for The Stranger's Hand was penned by veteran screenwriter Guy Elmes on the basis of Greene's unfinished story, and cinematically rendered by Soldati. In 1965 Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition pseudonymously, and won an honourable mention.

Graham Greene International Festival

The Graham Greene International Festival is an annual four-day event of conference papers, informal talks, question and answer sessions, films, dramatised readings, music, creative writing workshops and social events. It is organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and takes place in the writer's home town of Berkhamsted, on dates as close as possible to the anniversary of his birth. Its purpose is to promote interest in and study of the works of Graham Greene.[33]

Works

References

Notes
  1. ^ Miller, R. H. Understanding Graham Greene. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Print.
  2. ^ Pendleton, Robert. Graham Greene's Conradian Masterplot. Suffolk: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1996. Print.
  3. ^ a b Graham Greene, The Major Novels: A Centenary by Kevin McGowin, Eclectica Magazine
  4. ^ Extract from Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene, The Times, 13 September 2007.
  5. ^ "Graham Greene: A Life In Letters – Book Reviews – Books – Entertainment". Sydney Morning Herald. 30 November 2007. http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/graham-greene-a-life-in-letters/2007/11/30/1196394602841.html?page=2. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  6. ^ Cook, John (2009). A Glimpse of our History: a short guided tour of Berkhamsted. Berkhamsted Town Council. http://www.berkhamsted.gov.uk/download/Heritage%20Leaflet.pdf. 
  7. ^ Graham Greene Biography, Encyclopedia of World Biography
  8. ^ a b "Graham Greene Biography". Notablebiographies.com. http://www.notablebiographies.com/Gi-He/Greene-Graham.html. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  9. ^ a b Michael Shelden, ‘Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–1991)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2008 accessed 15 May 2011
  10. ^ "Graham Greene". Biogs.com. http://www.biogs.com/famous/greenegraham.html. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  11. ^ a b Joseph Pearce. "Graham Greene: Doubter Par Excellence", CatholicAuthors.com. Retrieved 7 January 2011.
  12. ^ Greene converted after vigorous arguments with Father Trollope in which he defended atheism. The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990. Introduction by John Updike, p. xiv.
  13. ^ In his review, Greene wrote, "The owners of a child star are like leaseholders—their property diminishes in value every year. Time's chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity. Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has a peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant's palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood that is only skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire. See Atkinson, Michael (21 August 2009 ) "Our Man in London." Moving Image Source.
  14. ^ "Greene, Graham | Authors | guardian.co.uk Books". Books.guardian.co.uk. 22 July 2008. http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,,-78,00.html. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  15. ^ "Series Details". Cinema.ucla.edu. http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/calendar/calendardetails.aspx?details_type=2&id=147. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  16. ^ Christopher Hawtree. "A Muse on the tides of history: Elisabeth Dennys". The Guardian, 10 February 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  17. ^ Robert Royal (November 1999). "The (Mis)Guided Dream of Graham Greene". First Things. http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3226. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  18. ^ "BBC – BBC Four Documentaries – Arena: Graham Greene". BBC News. 3 October 2004. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/graham-greene.shtml. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  19. ^ Graham Greene, Uneasy Catholic Times Literary Supplement, 22 August 2006.
  20. ^ "EUROPE | Vatican's bid to censure Graham Greene". BBC News. 3 November 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1005484.stm. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  21. ^ On the Riviera, A Morality Tale by Graham Greene
  22. ^ a b "Graham Greene finds no Swiss cuckoo clocks". Swissinfo.ch. 19 May 2006. http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/extraordinary_exiles/Graham_Greene_finds_no_Swiss_cuckoo_clocks.html?cid=12832. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  23. ^ "The Improbable Spy". Vqronline.org. http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1979/spring/jones-improbable-spy. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  24. ^ "First Things". Angelfire.com. 9 October 2004. http://www.angelfire.com/journal/ggbtps/FrstThing.htm. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  25. ^ a b The Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Crisis Magazine, May 2005.
  26. ^ "Regions of the Mind: The Exoticism of Greeneland". Dur.ac.uk. http://www.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/AndrewPurssellArticle.htm. Retrieved 2 June 2010. 
  27. ^ Not Easy Being Greene: Graham Greene's Letters by Michelle Orange, The Nation, 15 April 2009
  28. ^ "The Quiet American", Marxmail.com, 11 August 2003.
  29. ^ Kirjasto.
  30. ^ in Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 2, No. 2, (Apr. 1967), pp. 93–99.
  31. ^ P.xii of John Updike's introduction to The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990.
  32. ^ As cited on p. xii of John Updike's introduction to The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990.
  33. ^ Graham Greene International Festival 2010
Further reading
  • Allain, Marie-Françoise, 1983. The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene. Bodley Head.
  • Bergonzi, Bernard, 2006. A Study in Greene: Graham Greene and the Art of the Novel. Oxford University Press.
  • Bosco, Mark, 2005. Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination. Oxford University Press.
  • Brennan, Michael G., 2010. Graham Greene: Fictions, Faith, and Authorship. Continuum. 173 pages; focuses on Catholicism as a pervasive influence on G's creative imagination.
  • Cassis, A. F., editor, 1994. Graham Greene: Man of Paradox. Loyola University Press.
  • Cloetta, Yvonne, 2004. In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene, translated by Euan Cameron. Bloomsbury.
  • Diemert, Brian, 1996. Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s. McGill-Queen's University Press.
  • Duran, Leopoldo, 1994. Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, translated by Euan Cameron. HarperCollins.
  • Gilvary, Dermot and Darren J. N. Middleton, editors, 2011. Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene: Journeys with Saints and Sinners. Continuum.
  • Greene, Richard, editor, 2007. Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. Knopf Canada.
  • Hazzard, Shirley, 2000. Greene on Capri. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
  • Kelly, Richard Michael, 1984. Graham Greene. Ungar.
  • Kelly, Richard Michael, 1992. Graham Greene: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne.
  • Lewis, Jeremy, 2010. Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family. Jonathan Cape.
  • Phillips, Gene D., 1974. Graham Greene: Films of His Fiction, Teachers' College Press.
  • O'Prey, Paul, 1988. A Reader's Guide to Graham Greene. Thames and Hudson.
  • Shelden, Michael, 1994. Graham Greene: The Man Within. William Heinemann. Random House ed., 1995, ISBN 0679428836
  • Sherry, Norman, 1989. The Life of Graham Greene: Vol. 1, 1904–1939. Random House UK, ISBN 0224026542. Viking, ISBN 0670813761. Penguin reprint 2004, ISBN 0142004200
  • Sherry, Norman, 1994. The Life of Graham Greene: Vol. 2, 1939–1955. Viking. ISBN 0670860565. Penguin reprint 2004: ISBN 0142004219
  • Sherry, Norman, 2004. The Life of Graham Greene: Vol. 3, 1955–1991. Viking. ISBN 0670031429
  • Watts, Cedric, 1996. A Preface to Greene. Longman.
  • West, W. J., 1997. The Quest for Graham Greene. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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