Although the novelist grappled with the meaning of faith and with the global politics of his time, his true achievement is one of pure sensibility.
“The first thing I remember is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet.” So opens an early chapter of a memoir by Graham Greene, who is viewed by some—including Richard Greene (no relation), the author of a new biography of Graham, “The Unquiet Englishman” (Norton)—as one of the most important British novelists of his already extraordinary generation. (It included George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen.) The dog, Graham’s sister’s pug, had just been run over, and the nanny couldn’t think of how to get the carcass home other than to stow it in the carriage with the baby. If that doesn’t suffice to set the tone for the rather lurid events of Greene’s life, one need only turn the page, to find him, at five or so, watching a man run into a local almshouse to slit his own throat. Around that time, Greene taught himself to read, and he always remembered the cover illustration of the first book to which he gained admission. It showed, he said, “a boy, bound and gagged, dangling at the end of a rope inside a well with water rising above his waist.”
Greene was born in 1904, the fourth of six children. His family was comfortable and, by and large, accomplished. An older brother, Raymond, grew up to be an important endocrinologist; a younger brother, Hugh, became the director-general of the BBC; the youngest child, Elisabeth, went to work for M.I.6, England’s foreign-intelligence operation. As was usual with prosperous people of that period, the children were raised by servants, but they were brought downstairs to play with their mother every day for an hour after tea.
The family lived in Berkhamsted, a small, pleasant satellite town of London. It had a respectable boys’ school, of which Greene’s father was the headmaster. Greene was sent there at age seven, and thanks to his position as the director’s son he was relentlessly persecuted by his classmates. They then suspected him of telling on them to his father and therefore, it seems, went after him harder.
As an adolescent, he began attempting suicide—or seeming to—always with almost comic ineptness. Once, according to his mother, he tried to kill himself by ingesting eye drops. He also appears to have experimented, at different times, with allergy drops, deadly nightshade, and fistfuls of aspirin. Most often remarked on was his fondness for Russian roulette, although his brother Raymond, whose gun he borrowed on these occasions, said there were no bullets in the cabinet where the weapon was kept. Greene must have been shooting with empty chambers.
When he was in high school, his parents sent him to his first psychotherapist. Others followed. Eventually, he was declared to be suffering from manic depression, or bipolar disorder, as it is now called, and the diagnosis stuck. But the scientific-sounding label makes it easy to overlook other factors that might have been at work. Greene once recalled to his friend Evelyn Waugh that, at university (Balliol College, Oxford), he had spent much of his time in a “general haze of drink.” In his writing years, he often lived on a regimen of Benzedrine in the morning, to wake himself up, and Nembutal at night, to put himself to sleep, supplemented with great vats of alcohol and, depending on what country he was in, other drugs as well. On his many trips to Vietnam, he smoked opium almost daily—sometimes as many as eight pipes a day. That’s a lot.
The essential point about the manic-depressive diagnosis, however, is that Greene accepted it—indeed, saw it as key to his personality and his work. Richard Greene writes that his biography is intended, in part, as a corrective to prior biographers’ excessive interest in the novelist’s sex life. But, considering how much time and energy Graham Greene put into his sex life, one wonders how any biographer could look the other way for long. Greene got married when he was twenty-three, to a devout Catholic woman, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, and he stayed married to her until he died, in 1991, but only because Vivien, for religious reasons, would not give him a divorce. After about ten years, the marriage was effectively over, and he spent the remainder of his life having protracted, passionate affairs, plus, tucked into those main events, shorter adventures, not to mention many afternoons with prostitutes. Richard Greene, despite his objections to biographical prurience, does give us some piquant details. Of Graham and one of his mistresses, he writes, “This relationship was reckless and exuberant, involving on one occasion intercourse in the first-class carriage of a train from Southend, observable to those on each platform where the train stopped.”
Meanwhile, when Greene felt he had to explain such matters to his wife, he summoned his bipolar disorder. As he wrote to her:
So, you see, it wasn’t his fault.
Greene did not, of course, feel like sticking around to dry Vivien’s tears or help raise the son and daughter they had had together. (He didn’t like children; he found them noisy.) So he took an apartment of his own, and Vivien stayed home, carving doll-house furniture. In time, she became a great expert on doll houses, and established a private museum for her collection.
What Greene wanted to do with his life was write novels, and, after a rocky start, he turned them out regularly, at least twenty-four (depending on how you count them) in six decades. He also did a fantastic amount of journalism, mostly for The Spectator. Richard Greene estimates that, in time, Graham wrote about five hundred book reviews and six hundred movie reviews. One of the latter created his first little scandal. Of Twentieth Century Fox’s “Wee Willie Winkie” (1937), starring Shirley Temple, he said that Temple, with her high-on-the-thigh dresses and “well-developed rump,” was basically being pimped out by Fox to lonely middle-aged gentlemen in the cinema audience. Fox promptly sued and was awarded thirty-five hundred pounds in damages. Ever after, Greene was known to part of his audience as a dirty-minded man. (Not to Temple, though. In her 1988 memoir, she treated the whole thing as a tempest in a teapot. She also made it clear that, at the movie studios, child actors were indeed subject to unwelcome attentions.)
In Richard Greene’s telling, Graham’s bipolar disorder afflicted him not just, or even mostly, with overexcitement and depression but above all with a terrible boredom, which he could alleviate only by constant thrill-seeking. That’s what caused him to play with guns; that’s what made him get into fights and defame Shirley Temple; that’s what sent him to bed with every other woman he came across.
Finally, and crucially, this tedium is what made him spend much of his life outside England, not just away from home—from roasts and Bovril and damp woollens—but in the distant, hot, poor, war-torn countries whose efforts to throw off colonial rule formed so large and painful a part of twentieth-century history. He went to West Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone), Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Mexico. He spent years, on and off, in Central America. And he saw what the locals saw; at times, he experienced what they did. Bullets whizzed past his head. In Malaya, he had to have leeches pried off his neck. In Liberia, he was warned that he might contract any of a large number of diseases, which Richard Greene catalogues with a nasty glee: “Yaws, malaria, hookworm, schistosomiasis, dysentery, lassa fever, yellow fever, or an especially cruel thing, the Guinea worm, which grows under the skin and must be gradually spooled out onto a stick or pencil—if it breaks in the process, the remnant may mortify inside the host, causing infection or death.” Unwilling to miss the Mau Mau rebellion, Graham Greene spent four weeks in Kenya. In Congo, he stayed at a leper colony, where he saw a man with thighs like tree trunks, and one with testes the size of footballs.
How, and why, did he end up in these places? Very often, he had an assignment from a newspaper or a magazine. As a sideline, he also did some information-gathering for M.I.6. (Nothing serious—he might merely send back a report on which political faction was gaining power and who the leader was.) Basically, any time an organization needed someone to go, expenses paid, to a country that had crocodiles, he was interested. He was collecting material for his novels, most of which would be set in these faraway places.
Greene got out of town in another way as well. The family he was born into was Anglican, but they didn’t make a fuss about it. As he told it, he had a vision of God on a croquet lawn around the age of seventeen, but he let this pass until four years later, when he fell in love with Vivien, a Catholic who wasn’t at all sure she wanted to marry him, what with his being a Protestant and also, as he seemed to her, a rather strange person.
Leaving a note in the collection box at a nearby Catholic church, he asked for religious instruction, and was assigned to one Father George Trollope, whom he liked, as he wrote to Vivien, for “his careful avoidance of the slightest emotion or sentiment in his instruction.” Some might have taken the wording of that endorsement as a bad sign, but what Greene wanted, apart from Vivien, was just, as he told her, “something firm & hard & certain, however uncomfortable, to catch hold of in the general flux.”
So did others. There was a minor fashion for conversion to Catholicism among British artists and intellectuals in the years between the two world wars. Evelyn Waugh converted around the same time as Greene. (Later, Edith Sitwell and Muriel Spark also “poped.”) This was part of the backwash from the rising secularism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the Second World War, the Catholic Church would provide a suitably august arena for the transition to another sort of religion: doubt, anxiety, existentialism.
Greene didn’t wait for that. He converted when he was twenty-two, and was observant for a few years. As he pulled away from Vivien, though, he also let go of the things he had acquired with her, for her—above all, religious practice. Later, he said that after he saw a dead woman lying in a ditch, with her dead baby by her side, in North Vietnam, in 1951, he did not take Communion again for thirty years. But neither, ever, did he achieve a confident atheism. “Many of us,” he said, “abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens.”
Although Greene may have turned religion down to a low simmer in his life, in his novels he raised it to a rolling boil. In “Brighton Rock” (1938), his first big hit, the hero is a seventeen-year-old hoodlum named Pinkie. (Wonderful name, so wrong.) Pinkie would be an ordinary little sociopath were it not for the fact that he is a Roman Catholic, and obsessed by sin. Again and again, he recalls the noise that, as a child, he heard across the room every Saturday night, when his parents engaged in their weekly sex act. Pinkie forces himself to marry a naïve girl, Rose, because she is a potential witness in a murder that he has engineered. The wedding night—and, for that matter, most of what takes place between Pinkie and Rose—is pretty awful, as is much else in the novel, once it gets going. Actually, the book raises our neck hair in the opening sentence: “Hall knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.” At that point, we don’t even know who Hall is.
“They” are the gang of thugs that Pinkie leads, and before the day is out they do indeed eliminate Hall, after which they kill several other people. This violence is mixed with sex, in a hot stew, which Greene makes more repellent with the setting of Brighton—a tacky seaside resort, full of weekend pleasure-seekers down from London, shooting ducks and throwing candy wrappers on the pavement. In Greene’s Brighton, even the sky is dirty: “The huge darkness pressed a wet mouth against the panes.” Sin ultimately crushes Pinkie, and, we are led to assume, Rose, too. As Greene himself pointed out, he was, if not a good Catholic, at least a good Gnostic, a person who believed that good and evil were equal powers, warring against each other.
But the book that fixed him in the public mind as a Catholic writer, “The Power and the Glory,” came two years later. Its unnamed hero is a Mexican “whisky priest” in hiding in the south of the country in the nineteen-thirties, during a Marxist campaign against the Roman Catholic Church. There is no end, almost, to the horrors the priest endures—heat, hunger, D.T.s. He finds dead babies, their eyes rolled back in their heads. Eventually, he is arrested and put in prison, among a close, dark, sweaty mob, including a couple fornicating loudly in a corner. You are sure he will survive, this holy man. He doesn’t. You don’t so much read this book as suffer it, climb it, like Calvary.
Greene’s procedure—marrying torments of the soul to frenzies of the flesh—reaches a kind of apogee in “The End of the Affair” (1951). Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, is consumed with rage over the fact that his lover, Sarah, has left him, and he hires a private detective to find out whom she chose over him. On and on, in fevered remembrance, he calls up details of their love affair: the time they had sex on the parquet in her parlor, while her husband was nursing a cold upstairs; the secret words they had (“onions” was their code name for sex); the secret signs. But eventually, after Sarah dies, Bendrix discovers that the new lover she left him for was God, at which point the novel goes from steamy to blasphemous. “I hate You,” Bendrix tells God. “I hate You as though You existed.” Finally, he’s reduced to conducting a kind of virility contest with his Maker: “It was I who penetrated her, not You.” Ugh.
Some of Greene’s colleagues, not to speak of the Church, began to find his combining of religion and sex unseemly. George Orwell delivered a more withering critique. Greene, he wrote, seemed to believe
This cult of the sanctified sinner, Orwell thought, probably reflected a decline of belief, “for when people really believed in Hell, they were not so fond of striking graceful attitudes on its brink.”
Still, plenty of readers found the mix of the spiritual and the carnal rather a thrill. When “The End of the Affair” was published, Time put Greene on its cover, with the tagline “Adultery can lead to sainthood.”
One readership that found all this good and evil and sex and murder quite alluring was Hollywood. Bad behavior was fun, after all, and Greene’s narratives, thanks to those hundreds of films he had reviewed, were already cinematic. Has any novelist been better at plotting than Greene? He can shuttle with ease back and forth among three plotlines at a time, and none of them ever stops charging forward. The suspense is huge. You think, “No, they can’t shoot the priest,” or “No, Pinkie can’t assault Rose from beyond the grave,” and, surprise, you’re wrong. As for the camera action, the story is often told, or filmed, from separate points of view; big scenes are likely to end in wide shots, and so on.
Of Western “art” novelists, Greene may well be the one whose works have been most often adapted to film. Several of his novels were dramatized not once but twice or three times, and some of the films are better than the novels. It is hard to read “Brighton Rock” and not see, in your mind’s eye, Richard Attenborough, who played Pinkie in the first cinematic version. What a piece of work is man, you think, as you look at Attenborough’s beautiful young face. And Pinkie is rotten to the core. This paradox makes both the film and the book more textured, knotted. The book-movie relationship becomes even more interesting in the case of “The Third Man.” The book was actually a by-product of the film Greene had agreed to write—something he produced to get a feel for atmosphere before applying himself to the script—and it will never be entirely free of the shadow, both literal and figurative, cast by Orson Welles in his indelible performance as the villain.
The colossal popularity of Greene’s more down-market novels and their cinematic adaptations made him rich—for the movie rights to his 1966 novel, “The Comedians,” he was paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the equivalent of almost two million today—but, apparently, it also embarrassed him. Like many people of his time, he didn’t respect films as much as he did literature. Plus, the film studios wanted changes, big changes. Greene had given novels like “Brighton Rock,” “The Power and the Glory,” and “The End of the Affair” unforgiving endings, which were true to his view of the world, and the studios made them nicer, more comestible. Suicides became accidents; terrible cruelties were turned into something not so bad after all.
Greene solved his problem—stoop or not?—by claiming that his fiction fell into two categories. There were his “novels,” his serious work, and then there were his “entertainments,” as he called them—thrillers, comedies, forms he clearly esteemed less. These latter books, he implied, were things that he did in his spare time: “The Quiet American” (1955), about the war in Vietnam; “Our Man in Havana” (1958), set in Cuba shortly before Castro’s revolution. The fact that both of these were made into wonderful movies, with famous actors—Michael Redgrave in “The Quiet American,” Alec Guinness in “Our Man in Havana”—did not, in his mind, make them more legitimate. On the contrary.
His output does not always conform to the hierarchy he imposed on it. There are duds among the serious “novels,” while “Our Man in Havana”—a dazzling blend of menace, humor, and resignation—is one of the finest things he ever wrote.
But his greatest achievement, “The Heart of the Matter,” is certainly, in his terms, a novel—indeed, a Novel. Published in 1948, between “The Power and the Glory” and “The End of the Affair,” it is, like them, tightly underpinned by Roman Catholicism, but it has none of the chest-banging or the tawdriness into which that subject sometimes led Greene. It is a chaste business. Henry Scobie, a dutiful, observant Roman Catholic, works as a deputy police commissioner in a small, quiet, corrupt town in West Africa in the early years of the Second World War. Scobie has a wife, Louise, whom he can’t stand and whom, at the same time, he feels sorry for. (They had a daughter, who died when she was nine.) And so, when Louise says that she can’t stay in this stupid town one minute longer, he borrows money from a local diamond smuggler—he knows this is going to lead to trouble, but he does it anyway—to send her on vacation in South Africa. While she is away, a French ship is torpedoed off the coast, and Scobie has to go help minister to the survivors. Among them is a nineteen-year-old girl, Helen, newly married, whose husband was killed in the torpedo attack. Helen has no one, nothing. Her sole possession is an album—given to her by her father—containing her stamp collection. She clasps it to her chest. She will speak to no one, until finally she does speak—to Scobie.
Whereupon he falls in love with her, or seems to. In Greene’s work, it is hard to tell, when two people go to bed together, whether it is love that took them there, or even desire. It could be pity. As Greene has already told us, that is Scobie’s reigning emotion toward his wife, and other things as well. Looking at the sky one night while tending to the French refugees, he wonders, if one knew the facts, “would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?”
So he enters into an affair with Helen, but soon she is screaming at him that he doesn’t love her and is going to leave her, whereupon, of course, Louise returns from her vacation, fully informed by the town gossips as to what Scobie has been up to in her absence. (It’s like “Ethan Frome.” Trying to escape from one nagging wife, the hero ends up with two.) He seizes upon a desperate solution: he will fake a heart ailment and then take enough sedatives to kill himself. That way, each of his two women will be free to find a more satisfactory mate. As for him, he will be damned to Hell for all eternity, but he’s willing. In the end, it doesn’t quite turn out that way. It turns out worse, and that’s Greene for you. But in the twentieth century pity was hard to write about. That this dark-hearted man managed to—even that he tried—is surely a jewel in his crown.
“The Unquiet Englishman” is what might be called a Monday-Tuesday biography. On one page, it tells you what Greene did on a certain day in, say, June of 1942. On the next page, it tells you what he did the following day, or three days later. This method surely owes something to the fact that Richard Greene, a professor of English at the University of Toronto, edited a collection of Graham Greene’s letters. In other words, he knew what Greene did every day, and thought that this was interesting material—as it could have been, had it contributed to a unified analysis of the man. Mostly, however, the book is just a collection of facts. Trips without itineraries, sex without love, jokes without punch lines—we look for the beach, but all we see are the pebbles. Neither are we given much in the way of literary commentary. That is not a capital offense. Many good literary biographers have excused themselves from the task of criticism. But, if we don’t get the man or his novels, what do we get?
Graham Greene was an almost eerily disciplined writer. He could write in the middle of wars, the Mau Mau uprising, you name it. And he wrote, quite strictly, five hundred words per day, in a little notebook he kept in his chest pocket. He counted the words, and at five hundred he stopped, even, his biographer says, in the middle of a sentence. Then he started again the next morning. Richard Greene’s book often feels as though it were composed on the same schedule. Many of his chapters are only two or three pages long. This engenders a kind of coldness.
To be fair, it should be said that many people found Graham Greene hard to know, and Richard Greene does make a contribution to our understanding of his subject. In place of earlier biographers’ interest in Graham’s sex life, he set out to cover the writer’s life as a world traveller—specifically, a traveller in what was then known as the Third World, and therefore an observer of international politics. This biography, the jacket copy says, “reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself” and shows Graham Greene as an “unfailing advocate for human rights.” I don’t think that Richard Greene ever quite makes the case for Graham’s status as a freedom fighter, but, despite what his publicists felt they had to say, he doesn’t peddle this line too hard. Eventually, the book says, Graham settled into what might be loosely described as “a social democratic stance,” and that sounds closer to the truth. In Panama, he hung around with a gunrunner named Chuchu. In El Salvador, he brokered the occasional ransom. He hated the United States, but, outside the United States, that is not a rare sentiment.
I think that Graham Greene’s distinction as an observer of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean is less as a political thinker or activist and more just as an artist, a recorder of the way a taxi-dancer in Saigon comports herself if she wants to snag an American husband; the way the Americans and English and French, the journalists and officers, sit around on hotel patios drinking pink gins and complaining about the bugs; the way a Syrian diamond smuggler handles an English policeman whom he is hoping to blackmail—and then what happens when the bombs start to go off. The same is true of the novels Greene set in less far-flung climes; the spiritual and political crises they tackle fade in the memory, and it is his effortless feel for the everyday that stays with us. That is the heart of Graham Greene’s matter: not profundity—how hard he reached for it!—but an instinct for the way things actually look and what that means. ♦
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