Graham Greene Against the World
Has any other novelist lived a life so steeped in political intrigue?
The English novelist Graham Greene in 1975.
EVENING STANDARD/GETTY IMAGES
New Republic, Scott Bradfield
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/scott-bradfield>/March 10, 2021
The last novelist who acted like he might save the world may have been
Graham Greene. He belonged to a generation of writers who might not
always share the same political opinions but who supported many of the
same causes: defending jailed dissidents, protesting illegal wars, and
challenging the unfairness (or even stupidity) of censoring great books.
He wrote a novel,/The Comedians
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780143039198>,/and developed its film
adaptation with the intention of helping to “isolate” Haiti’s Papa Doc
Duvalier, who contemplated having Greene assassinated in retaliation. At
one point, Greene was so celebrated that the South African State
Department asked him to negotiate the release of a kidnapped ambassador
in El Salvador. (Greene eventually came to an agreement with the rebels,
but the ambassador was killed anyway—for reasons that were never fully
understood.) By the end of his life, he was known as an international
public figure who partied with Capote, Yoko Ono, and Kissinger, as much
as a writer of entertaining, always absorbing novels, short stories,
screenplays, and essays.
The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene
by Richard Greene
Buy on Bookshop <https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/9780393084320>
W.W. Norton, 608 pp., $40.00
In the final decades of his life, Greene defied the Cold War logic of
his times by befriending politicians and intellectuals from across the
political spectrum—Fidel Castro in Cuba, Omar Torrijos in Panama, Jorge
Luis Borges in Argentina, R.K. Narayan in India, Vaclav Havel and Josef
Skvorecky in Czechoslovakia, and Pablo Neruda, when he was acting as
Chile’s ambassador to France. In the early 1950s, Greene wrote open
letters of support for Charlie Chaplin, who had been targeted by
McCarthy; and he publicly confessed his brief Oxford-era membership in
the Communist Party to challenge U.S. immigration over the McCarran Act.
All over the world, people wanted to know what Greene was doing, even
when they weren’t reading him.
When Kim Philby was reviled as a mole for the USSR at MI6 (where he had
been Greene’s drinking buddy and supervisor), Greene was the only
notable British figure to visit the disgraced Philby in Russia, or
attend his funeral in 1988. As Beatrice Severn declares near the end of
Greene’s funniest novel,/Our Man in Havana
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780142438008>/(1958): “I don’t care a damn
about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations.…
Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to
countries?” It’s hard to think of any similarly productive, commercial
novelist today who speaks so vigorously against religious and political
pieties.
Richard Greene’s book/The Unquiet Englishman
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780393084320>/is the third major biography
of Graham Greene in 40 years and provides the most readable, balanced
approach so far to both a complicated life and an intensely enjoyable
body of work; it makes use of newly available letters, diaries and
recollections concerning Greene and his closest friends. It is neither
as excessively detailed as theNorman Sherry biography
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/09/biography.highereducation>released
in three volumes between 1989 and 2005, nor as combative as Michael
Shelden’s 1994 portrait,/Graham Greene: The Man Within
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780143039211>/. (Shelden was unforgiving
about Greene’s loyalty to old friends such as Philby and the novelist
Norman Douglas, who was charged with indecent assault.) The Greene who
emerges here rarely stayed in one place for very long and was
continually dissatisfied with the world that he witnessed changing
convulsively around him.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Born in 1904 at the Berkhamsted boarding school where his father was
house master, Greene quickly grew accustomed to living secret lives,
especially through the books that absorbed him, such as John Buchan’s
spy stories (most famously,/The Thirty-Nine Steps
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780099528395>/), and while exploring the
lost kingdoms of H. Rider Haggard (/King Solomon’s Mines
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780198722953>/and/She
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780199536429>/). Then, almost inevitably,
considering the pathologies of Edwardian-era boarding schools, Greene
was soon being bullied, tormented, and co-opted by his fellow
schoolboys; and he later compared the cruel “finesse” of his tormentors
with the major figures in geopolitical conflicts. They made him feel as
if he was always betraying someone, especially his father. He grew
depressed and withdrawn, and was diagnosed as manic-depressive. Perhaps
to challenge his deep sense of failure, he indulged in suicidal games,
and claimed to have played Russian roulette several times with a gun
from the family cupboard; he even compared the “minute click” of the
chamber against his ear with “a young man’s first successful experience
of sex” (though later revised the story so many times that it may not
have been entirely true). Even if he hadn’t come close to suicide with a
gun, he was soon relentlessly and unambiguously acting out suicidal
impulses through travel.
Throughout his life, he set out for treacherous and dangerous places—to
investigate Firestone and the British government’s involvement with
forced labor in Liberia (where he nearly died of fever) to leper
colonies in the Congo Basin to research/A Burnt-Out Case
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780140185393>,/to Haiti in the midst of
political terror, to central America, and to some of the most troubled,
anti-Catholic regions of Mexico. He was quick to make new contacts with
what his own government might consider unsavory people, such as members
of Sinn Fein and the Free State in Northern Ireland, and to take on
risky tasks, like ferrying communications between anti-Fascist groups in
Germany and France. Even before he turned 20, Greene was a tough man to
pin down—either on a map or as a person. The notion of “identity” was
never comfortable for Greene, and whenever he sensed the shadow of a
firm identity descending upon him, he went looking for the nearest way
out of it. (/Ways of Escape
<https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-escape2.html>/was,
appropriately, the title of his second autobiographical memoir, in 1980.)
He was still an atheist when, at 20, he fell in love with a young poet
and devout Catholic, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning; he subsequently
accompanied her to his first Catholic service, deluged her with
multitudinous letters of affection (everything about Greene was
multitudinous), and, in order to marry her, converted. Although he spent
the rest of his life known as a “Catholic” writer, he wore that
designation loosely. He frequented brothels; he soon left his young wife
and children to live in London with Dorothy Glover, who illustrated
several of Greene’s books for children; and then he embarked on a long,
complicated series of affairs—most notably with Catherine Walston, a
married woman who provided perhaps the most both intensely happy and
deeply unhappy relationship of his life. (He was unhappy when she was
not with him and desperate to see other women when she was.) Both
Catherine’s personality and her open marriage provided models for the
relationships in one of Greene’s greatest novels,/The End of the Affair
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780142437988>,/in 1951.
He often maintained significant relationships with more than one woman
at a time; he drank heavily and continuously and moved easily from one
profession to another—as a journalist for/Th//e Times/of London, as a
film and book critic for/The Spectator,/as an editor at both Eyre &
Spottiswoode and Bodley Head, and as a novelist producing roughly a
novel every year or two. (He insisted on sitting down every day and
writing at least 500 words of fiction, which he kept track of in a
diary.) In 1941, through his sister, he procured a job in Sierra Leone
mining intelligence for MI6, with the code name Agent 59200 (the same as
Wormold’s in/Our Man in Havana/). When that profession grew too boring
and predictable, he went to Hollywood and wrote movies.
The best part about being a novelist, Greene once told a friend’s
teenage son at a party, “is that you can/spy/on people.”
The best part about being a novelist, Greene once told a friend’s
teenage son at a party, “is that you can/spy/on people. Everything is
useful to a writer, you see, every scrap.” And as his friend and fellow
spy-novelist John le Carré recalled, Greene always felt a “sense of
alienation, of being an observer within society rather than a member of
it.” Constantly roving, Greene wrote successful novels, short stories,
screenplays, travel books, and plays from the points of view of everyone
he met or could imagine: a Jewish businessman selling currant sweets; a
lesbian journalist and a chorus girl in/Stamboul Train/; a professional
killer with a harelip in/This Gun for Hire/; and a teenage Catholic
psycho-gangster named Pinkie in/Brighton Rock
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780142437971>./And then, of course, there
are the countless spies and their accomplices, such as the clumsy and
deeply loving Wormold in/Our Man in Havana,/who signs on with MI6 and
snaps blurry photos of the insides of vacuum cleaners to convince his
London bosses that he has discovered a sophisticated new weapon system.
Every Greene spy is an exercise in love—whether it is Wormold’s devotion
to his spoiled (and awful) daughter, Milly, or Maurice Castle’s passion
for his Black, South African wife in what may be Greene’s best (and
certainly my favorite) novel,/The Human Factor
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780143105565>/(1978). According to the
morals of Greene’s fictional universe, you can betray your
country—easy-peasy. But if you betray the people you love, you deserve
the worst that can happen to you.
Even the titles of Greene’s books testify to an almost unendurable
subjective human struggle:/The Man Within, It’s a Battlefield, Journey
Without Maps, The Lawless Roads, Monsieur Quixote, A Burnt-Out Case,/and
so forth. Greene saw geographical spaces in terms of spiritual struggle;
and while he often dramatized the horrors of political and military
conflicts, his primary novelistic aim was to document the deeper
conflicts occurring within the subjective life of his characters. After
many years of increasing commercial success as a novelist, Greene’s
“breakthrough” book,/The Heart of the Matter
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780142437995>/(1948), achieved
international fame by appealing to Catholics who found in it an
expression of living in a post–World War II world where God didn’t seem
to reward the faith they placed in Him.
Despite his appeal to Catholics, Richard Greene (who is no relation to
the novelist) writes, Graham Greene was more Manichaean than Christian:
“[H]e could not take the idea of a devil very seriously, and if there
was evil in the world God must be in some sense answerable for it.” If
there was a God, he believed, then it was a God who “had placed human
beings in unbearable circumstances.” To a large extent, Greene’s
cynicism about the world—and the sufferings of humanity—came close to
nihilism, or even a form of Ligotti-like anti-natal philosophy. As
Scobie tells himself in one of/The Heart of the Matter/’s most troubling
scenes: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either
extreme egotism, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” Life is awful,
Greene often said; but when it came to art—such as his own daily
production of beautiful paragraphs and scenes throughout most of his
life—well, at least art could make it/seem/worthwhile.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The least interesting character in Greene’s substantial literary output
is Greene himself; for while even his most craven, fault-ridden
characters—such as the unnamed “whisky priest” in/The Power and the
Glory <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780143107552>/—always drive
compelling stories, the Greene persona in his travel books and
autobiographies floats passively on the current of events without much
urgency. On his deathbed, when the partner of his late years, Yvonne
Cloetta, asked him if he wanted to call in his priest for last rites,
Greene reportedly replied: “You decide.” They were the most appropriate
last words Greene could have uttered.
Nobody saw politics and power with greater human clarity than Greene;
and it’s hard to read a single paragraph of his tight, controlled,
angry, and always alert prose without underlining passages to reread
again later. In/The Lawless Roads,/he wrote,//“After Mexico,” where he
traveled in the late thirties “I shall always associate balconies and
politicians—plump men with blue chins wearing soft hats and guns on
their hips. They look down from the official balcony in every city all
day long with nothing to do but stare, with the expression of men
keeping an eye on a good thing.” Greene saw things that readers hadn’t
yet seen for themselves; but once Greene showed them the things
they/should/see, readers couldn’t stop seeing them.
Greene famously divided his works into “entertainments” and “serious
fiction.” The “entertainments,” such as/This Gun for Hire/(1936) and/The
Ministry of Fear/(1943), were thrillers designed to indulge smart
readers, whereas the “serious” novels did not tidily resolve themselves.
Often, it’s not easy to tell Greene’s two types of novels apart—they
uniformly possess weight, deep texture, emotion, absurdist comedy, and
compelling characters. In fact, the only thing that really distinguishes
his “entertainments” from his “serious” novels is the extent to which
the characters suffer. And in the serious novels, they suffer a lot.
When Castle, after years of subterfuge designed to protect the wife he
loves, is exiled to Russia without her, it is hard not to feel his pain
and uselessness; but when Raven—the disfigured hit man of/This Gun for
Hire/—dies, it’s hard to feel anything but relief. Only the “good”
suffer in a Greene novel; that’s because, in Greene’s universe, the
“bad” never feel remorse, guilt, or the capacity to love. His most
unregenerate characters are innocent of self-reflection, like Alden Pyle
in Greene’s prescient novel about American “do-gooders” in 1950s
Vietnam,/The Quiet American
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780143039020>/. A CIA op trying to save a
nation of people from making their own decisions, Pyle is innocent,
handsome, and/wants/to do well. Yet, like many devout Americans who
proudly do unto others what they don’t want done unto them, Pyle causes
terrible human damage. “Innocence,” the narrator, Fowler, observes of
Pyle, “is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world
meaning no harm.” As the 2002 film adaptation made perfectly clear, this
deadly combination of American innocence and evil looks a lot like
Brendan Fraser.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
No other writer moved so effortlessly between films and fiction. Greene
wrote novels with a movie camera’s eye—showing his readers what his
characters see, in the sequence in which they see it. (The opening
of/This Gun for Hire/is a textbook example of perfect cinematic
technique; nobody ever used the semicolon better to bite off each second
of a character’s sensory experience.) At the same time, he wrote films
with a novelist’s sense of human complexity, which is probably why he
dismissed Alfred Hitchcock as a “clown.”
Greene wrote about a world we still live in, where horrible crimes are
committed every day by beaming politicians with good teeth, aided by
their government-conscripted thugs and double agents.
Holly Martin’s problem in/The Third Man/is that he genuinely loves his
boyhood friend Harry Lime, even though he suspects that there may be
depths to Harry that he shouldn’t love at all. Harry “was a wonderful
planner,” Rollo explains in the novel, but “I was always the one who got
caught.” This complexity of personal affection for evil people would
never have interested Hitchcock, just as Greene never succumbed to using
a meaningless MacGuffin to set his stories rolling. Instead,/The Third
Man/is driven by the real human tragedy of war profiteers in Berlin
selling fake antibiotics to sick people (including children). Greene’s
films are all tilting Carol Reed camera angles and swerves of light and
conjunctions of street and alleyway where people appear and reappear as
someone they might actually be; or their conspiracies emerge through the
fog and smoke of bombed cities, as in Fritz Lang’s visually fraught
version of/The Ministry of Fear./For Greene (even though he loved
popular fiction and film), the heart of a story wasn’t a clever
technical contraption. It always concerned perilous attitudes of perception.
Greene wrote about a world we still live in, where horrible crimes are
committed every day by beaming politicians with good teeth, aided by
their government-conscripted thugs and double agents. And more likely
than not, Greene told his stories through the perceptions of people who
were either bad or not so good as they (or we) might wish they were.
Deeply flawed people who were, in fact, much like Greene saw himself to be.
After 86 years of intellectually intense living (when he wasn’t writing
books, he seemed to be reading them), Greene died in 1991 without saving
the world, but after going a long way toward saving himself. He settled
down with one woman in one home in Antibes, France; his depressions and
suicidal impulses seemed to withdraw a little, and those who knew him
said he grew less angry.And while his final, short novels grew weaker
with age, they still provided many beautiful passages. For those of us
who love great fiction, those passages will surely endure—at least until
the world doesn’t.
Scott Bradfield’s most recent book is/Dazzle Resplendent: Adventures of
a Misanthropic Dog/.
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