GRAHAM GREENE

''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 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 who 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, 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 a 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. 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 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.Crisis Magazine.
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.
Although the inner suffering and struggle with self-doubt of the characters reflects a central Christian reality of humanity's fall from grace, they rarely exhibit other realities of the Christian life: simple, uncomplicated faith and its 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, 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.Kirjasto. For Greene and politics, see also Anthony Burgess ''Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene''^[2] In ''Ways of Escape'', reflections of his Mexican trip, he complained that Mexico's government was insufficiently left-wing when compared with Cuba's ^[3]. In Greene's opinion, “Conservatism and Catholicism should be .... impossible bedfellows”. ^[4].
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.

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.
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 Corsier-sur-Vevey cemetery.
His official biographer, Norman Sherry, published the third, final volume of ''The Life of Graham Greene'' in October of 2004. The writing of this biography was in itself a story, Sherry followed Greene's footsteps, 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, leading literary scholars and readers to entertain the existentially-provocative question: ''Was Graham Greene a novelist who also was a spy, or was he a spy whose life-long novelist's career was the perfect cover?''

Trivia

★ The novel ''Brighton Rock'' is a particularly rich source of cultural allusions. It 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 because I think you're [God] just vindictive."₆ On Julian Cope's first solo album, ''World Shut Your Mout'', one track is called "Kolly Kibber's Birthday", after the character in ''Brighton Rock''. The Morrissey song "NOW MY HEART IS FULL" lists four more of its characters:"Tell all of my friends/(I don't have too many/Just some rain-coated lovers' puny brothers)/Dallow, Spicer, Pinkie, Cubitt."

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

★ Greene features in a song by The Volvos entitled 'Get Yourself a Good Wife' from the 1991 album ''Making it Up''.

★ Greene appears as character and narrator in the Doctor Who novel ''The Turing Test'', which gives a fictional account of Greene's time as spymaster in Sierra Leone and World War II Paris.

★ Graham Greene makes a cameo appearance in François Truffaut movie "La Nuit Americaine" (1973) as an English Insurance Broker.

References

1. 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
2. in ''Journal of Contemporary History'' Vol. 2, No. 2, (Apr. 1967), pp. 93-99.
3. P.xii of John Updike's introduction to ''The Power and the Glory'' New York: Viking, 1990.
4. 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.

★ ''Brighton Rock'' (1938)

★ ''The Power and the Glory'' (1940)

★ ''The Heart of the Matter'' (1948)

★ ''The Third Man'' (1949) (novella, as a basis for the screenplay}

★ ''The End of the Affair'' (1951)

★ ''The Quiet American'' (1955)

★ ''The Potting Shed'' (1957)

★ ''Ways of Escape'' (1980) (autobiography)

External links

★ Greeneland: the world of Graham Greene

★ The Graham Greene Birthplace Trust

★ Graham Greene Writeup in the Literary Encyclopedia

★ Biography at Authors' Calendar website

★ A Review of Graham Greene's "Lawless Roads"

★ 1989 audio interview of Norman Sherry, biographer of Graham Greene, RealAudio

★ The Paris Review Interview

★ CatholicAuthors Biography by Joseph Pearce

★ Find-A-Grave profile for Graham Greene

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