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(Henry) Graham Greene (1904-1991) |
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English novelist, short-story writer, playwright and journalist, whose novels treat moral issues in the context of political settings. Graham Greene was one of the most widely read novelist of the 20th-century, a superb storyteller. Adventure and suspense are constant elements in his novels and many of his books have been made into successful films. Although Greene was nominated several times as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, he never received the award. In 1961, when Ivo Andric was granted the honor, Greene was a runner-up with the Danish writer Karen Blixen, who came third. "The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author—they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in." (Graham Greene in Ways of Escape, Simon and Schuster, 1980, p. 2) Graham Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the son of Charles Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, a first cousin of the author Robert Louis Stevenson. The wealth of them family came from brewing and Brazilian coffee. Greene's father had a poor academic record but he became the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, following Dr. Thomas Fry. Charles Greene had a brilliant intellect. Originally he was interested in the career of a barrister. However, he found that he had liking for teaching and he decided to stay at Berkhamsted. Often his history lessons were less lessons than comments on the crack-up of Liberalism. He loved playing chess and his favorite poet was Browning. His brother Sir William Graham Greene served as permanent secretary to the Admiralty and Ministry of Munitions (1911-1918). Greene was educated at Berkhamstead School, where he felt himself as a 'Quisling's son,' and Balliol College, Oxford. He had a natural talent for writing, and during his three years at Balliol, he published more than sixty poems, stories, articles and reviews, most of which appeared in the student magazine Oxford Outlook and in the Weekly Westminster Gazette. At the age of sixteen, Greene had a kind of nervous breakdown; he spent the six months as a patient in the household Kenneth Richmond, a psychoanalyst, and his wife beautiful Zoe; Greene fell in love with her. Anglican Church was not dogmaric enough for Greene, who believed in
Hell. In 1926 Greene converted to Roman Catholicism, later explaining
to a friend that
"I had to find a religion . . . to measure my evil against." (The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones by Adam Schwartz, 2005, p. 142)
A year
before he had entered the Communist party, and in the 1930s, he joined
the Independent Labour Party; also George Orwell was its member. Never
an orthodox Marxist, Greene felt some sympathy with Trotskyism,
"Marxism-Leninism's most sinister enemy," as defined in Brezhnev's
Russia. When critics started to pay attention to religious themes and ideas in his work, Greene complained that he hated the term "Catholic novelist" – he was "an unistructed Catholic," but differing from G.K. Chesterton, he avoided directly expressing his personal religious or moral views in his fiction. In 1926 Geene moved to London. He worked for the Times of London (1926-30), and for the Spectator,
where he was a film critic and a literary editor until 1940. In 1927 he
married Vivien Dayrell-Browning. Greene was not a good family man.
Although Greene wrote four children's books, he once stated in a
letter to Catherine Walston, his mistress and muse from 1946: ''How I dislike children." After the collapse of his marriage,
he had several relationships, among others in the 1950s with the
Swedish actress Anita Björk, whose husband writer Stig Dagerman had
committed suicide. Mostly Greene's mistresses were married women living
in different countries. Moreover, during
the 1920s and 1930s Greene had, according to his own private list, some
sort of of relationship with no less than forty-seven prostitutes. In 1938 Greene began an affair with Dorothy Glover, a theatre costume designer; they were closely involved with each other until the late 1940s. She started a career as a book illustrator under the name 'Dorothy Craigie' and wrote children's books of her own, among them Nicky and Nigger and the Pirate (1960). When she died at the age of seventy-two, in agony after a burn accident, Greene wept in despair. With the Australian painter and costume designer Jocelyn Rickards Greene had in 1953 a short but passionate affair. Among her other lovers were the philosopher A.J. Ayer and the playwright John Osborne. After the outbreak of WW II, Greene joined the the propaganda section of the Ministry of Information (MOI), parodied in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Greene was then recruited by MI6, at that time unaware of Greene youthful flirtation with Communism at Oxford. As Greene later sais,he worked "in a silly useless job" in an intelligence capacity for the Foreign Office in London, directly under Kim Philby, a future defector to the Soviet Union. One mission took Greene to West Africa, but he did not find much excitement in his remote posting – he complained to London that his resince was not a government house, and he is plagued by flies which come from the African bush lavatories round the house. Greene returned to England in 1942, and left MI6 in 1944, resigning suddenly. Greene's agent novels were partly based on his own experiences in the British foreign office and his lifelong ties with SIS. As an agent and a writer he was a link in the long tradition from Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson and Daniel Defoe to the modern day writers John Le Carré, John Dickson Carr, Somerset Maugham, Alec Waugh and Ted Allbeury. Greene's uncle Sir William Graham Greene helped to establish the Naval Intelligence Department, and his oldest brother, Herbert, served as a spy for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the 1930s. His old friend, Philby, Greene met again in the late 1980s in Moscow. When the Soviets discovered in the mid-1960s, that Greene had been an agent for MI6, his usefulness for the organization dimished. Upon returning to civilian life, Greene travelled widely as a free-lance journalist, and lived long periods in Nice, on the French Riviera, partly for tax reasons. His dubious financial advisor, Tom Roe, was arrested in 1965, and Greene realized that it is high time to leave England. He then lived in Paris for a period. With the money from the film rights for The Comedians (1966), he bought a flat in Antibes. Greene received numerous honours from around the world, and published two volumes of autobiography, A Sort of Life (1971), Ways of Escape (1980),
and the story of his relationship with Panamanian dictator General Omar
Torrijos, whose drinking buddies included the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.
Moreover, President Carter was on good terms with Torrijos.
Greene developed a true liking for the dictator, who was full of
contradiction and who could have been a character right out of his
fiction. ""I was beginning to appreciate what he had done and what he
had rieked
in trying to achieve his dream for a Central America which would be
Socialist and not Marxist, independent of the United States and yet not
a menace to her," Greene wrote in 1977, when
he met again the General. (Getting to Know the General, by Graham Greene, 1985, pp. 112-113) Torrijos was killed in 1981 in a plane crash, of which Greene had some doubts: "... I began to wonder whether to rumor current in Panama of a bomb concealed in a tape recorder which was carried unwittingly by a security guard in Omar Torrijo's plane is to be totally discounted." (Getting to Know the General, by Graham Greene, 1985, pp. 220) With his anti-American comments, Greene gained also access to such
Communist leaders as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, but the English
writer Evelyn Waugh, who knew Greene well, assured in a letter to his
friend that the author "is a secret agent on our side and all his
buttering up of the Russians is cover." (Neutral Ground: A Political History of Espionage Fiction by Brett F. Woods, 2008, p. 76) Graham Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland, on April 3, 1991, it was the same village where his old friend James Hadley Chase had died. In the service the priest declared, "My faith tells me that he is now with God, or on the way there." ('Graham Greene (1904-1991),' in Final Chapters: How Famous Authors Died by Jim Bernhard, 2015) Two days before his death Greene signed a note that gave his approval to Norman Sherry to complete an authorized biography. The first part of the book appeared in 1989. As an author Greene was very prolific and versatile. He wrote five
dramas and screenplays for several films based on his novels. The Third Man
(1949) was developed from a single, a slightly too long sentence: "I had paid my last
farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the
frozen February ground, so that it was incredulity that I saw him pass
by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the
Strand." To do research for the film, Greene went to Vienna, where a young British Intelligence Offucer told him about the black market trade in watered-down penicillin. With the £9,000 he had received from Alexander Korda, he bough a yacht and a villa in Anacapri. Later he portryed Korda in Loser Takes All (1955) – he was Dreuther, the business tycoon. In the 1930s and early 1940s Greene wrote over five hundred reviews of books, films, and plays, mainly for The Spectator.
His reviews are still worth reading and often more lively than the
movies themselves. Hitchcock's "inadequate sense of reality"
irritated Greene, he compared Greta Garbo to a beautiful Arab mare, and
gave a warm welcome to a new star, Ingrid Bergman. When Hitchcock had troubles with the screenplay of I Confess (1953), Greene refused to help the director, saying he was interested in adapting only his own stories for the screen. In the film a priest is wrongfully accused of a murder. Although Greene knew that some critics considered his novels entertainment, his own models were Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. In his personal library was a large collection of James's work. Babbling April (1925), Greene's first published book, was a collection of poetry. It was followed by two novels in the style of Joseph Conrad, both were ignored by readers and critics alike. The title for The Man Within (1929), a historical tale, was taken from Sir Thomas Browne's (1605-1682) "There's another man within me that's angry with me." Greene began write it after an operation for appending on his sick leave from The Times. Bernard Knowles' forgotten screen version of the book, starring Michael Redgrave and Richard Attenborough, was made in 1947. Greene received a letter from Istanbul in which the film was praised for its daring homosexuality. "In Stamboul Train for the first and last time in my life I deliberately set out to write a book to please, one which with luck might be made into a film. The devil looks after his own and I succeeded in both aims, though the film rights seemed at the time an unlikely dream, for before I had completed the book, Marlene Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express, the English had made Rome Express, and even the Russians had produced their railway film, Turksib. My film came last and was far and away the worst, though not so bad as a later television production by the BBC." (from 'Introduction,' in Stamboul Train, Random House, 1974, p. ix) After failed attempts as a novelist, Greene was about to abandon writing. His first popular success was Stamboul Train (1932),
a thriller with a topical and political flavour. Greene wrote it
deliberately to please his readers and to attract filmmakers, and made
a commercial breakthrough: his agent sold the rights to Twentieth
Century-Fox for
$7,500. One of the characters, Quin Savory, was said to be a parody of
J.B. Priestley – Greene depicted nastily
the writer as a sex offender.
Priestley had just published a novel, which led some reviewers to
compare him with Dickens. In Greene's story Q.C. Savory was a
self-imporant Cockney novelist. The touchy Priestley threatened legal
action
and eventually controversial passages were removed. Next year Greene
made fun of the much-loved writer, Beatric Potter, in an article
called 'Beatrix Potter: A Critical Estimate'. Also the American actress, Shirley Temple, aged nine, got her share when Greene said in the magazine Night and Day in his 1937 review of Wee Willia Winkie: "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 dialog drops between their intelligence and their desire." (Child Star: An Autobiography by Shirley Temple, Warner Books, 1989, p. 188) Twentieth-Century officials sued Greene. This time he had to pay personally for his remark (£500). The Confidential Agent (1939), which Greene wanted to publish under a pseudonym, is a problematic work about the mysterious Forbes/Furstein, a rich Jew, plans to destroy traditional English culture from within. However, in 1981 the author was invited to Israel and awarded the Jerusalem Prize. He had visited Israel in 1967 for the first time, and spent some of the time lying against a sand dune under Egyptian fire, and thinking that the Six Day War "was a bit of misnomer. The war was too evidently still in progress." (Ways of Escape, p. 285) Greene's play, The Living Room (1953), premiered in
Stockholm in October 1952. Arthur Lundkvist, who chaired the Nobel
committee for the literature prize, dismissed the work as "Catholic
propaganda of the most vulgar type". (Stockholm: A Cultural History by Tony Griffiths, 2009, p. 54) In Britain the play was a success.
Greene's religious convictions had not become overtly apparent in his
fiction until The Brighton Rock (1938), which depicted a
teenage gangster Pinkie with a kind of distorted spirituality.
Religious themes were explicit in the novels The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), which Greene characterized as "a success in the great vulgar sense of that term," and The End of the Affair (1951),
which established Greene's international reputation. The story, partly
based on Greene's own experiences, was about a lover, who is afraid of
loving and being loved. These novels were compared with the works of
such French Catholic writers as Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac.
"At a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England,
Europe and America—the last title to which I had ever aspired,"
Greene said. (Ways of Escape, p. 260) He repeatedly rejected critics' attempts to
categorize his ouvre or himself with political or religious terms,
with the exception that some of his fictions he called "novels" and
others "entertainments". Even the Holy Office found it difficult to define whether The Power and the Glory
was a work of singular literary value or indicent and harmful as Cardinal Griffin claimed when it condemned the novel. Pope
Paul VI told the author during a private audience, that "some parts of
your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should not
worry about that." (Fighting Evil: Unsung Heroes in the Novels of Graham Greene by Haim Gordon, 1997, p. 108) The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, England Made Me, and The Quiet American were banned by the Eire government. (Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds by Margaret Bald, 2006, pp. 265-266) Greene returned constantly to the problem of grace. In his review of The Heart of the Matter
George Orwell attacked Greene's concept of "the sanctified sinner": "He
appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since
Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué
in being
damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is
reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are
too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish." (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays by George Orwell, 2009, p. 348) The
novel was set in Sierra Leone, where
the author had spent a miserable period during the war. Major Scobie,
the hero of the story, dies at the end: "He said aloud, "Dear God, I
love . . . " but the effort was too great and he did not feel his body
when it struck the floor or hear the small tickle of the medal as it
span like a coin under the ice-box—the saint whose name nobody could
remember." (Ibid., The Vikig Press, 1948, p. 299) The End of the Affair was drew partly on Greene's affair with Catherine Walston. She was married to one of the richest men in England, Henry Walston, a prominent supporter of the Labour Party. Catherine was the mother of five children. "I think she was out to get him and she got him. I think it was a quite a straightforward grab," Vivien Dayrell-Browning later told to Norman Sherry, Greene's biographer. (Life of Graham Greene Volume 2: 1939-1955 by Norman Sherry, 1996, p. 227) His relationship with Walston continued over ten years and produced another book, After Two Years (1949), which was printed 25 copies. Most of them were later destroyed. Catherine had other lovers, too, including a Dominican priest. Greene left her for Yvette Cloetta, a Frenchwoman, who became his mistress for over thirty years. Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair was inspired by Catherine, the writer himself provided the model for the popular novelist Maurice Bendix, who narrates the story and tries to understand why Sarah left him. Maurice discovers that when he was injured in a bomb blast during the war, Sarah promised God that she would end the affair if Maurice is saved. Sarah dies of a pneumonia. Maurice's response to his divine rival is: "I hate you as though You existed." The Third Man is among Greene's most popular books. The story about corruption and betrayal gave basis for the film classic under the same title. Successful partners on The Fallen Idol (1948) and Our Man in Havanna (1960), Graham Greene and the director Carol Reed achieved the peak of their collaboration on this film. "I am getting terribly bored with ... everybody except Carol who gets nicer and nicer on acquaintance," Greene wrote to Catherine Walston from Vienna in 1948. (The Third Man by Rob White, 2003, p. 17) In The Third Man Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Vienna to discover that his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has died in a car accident. It turns out that Lime was involved in criminal activities, and Lime's girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) suspects that his death may not have been accidental. A porter recalls a mysterious third man at the scene of the death. One evening Martins sees a man obscured by the shadows, who suddenly disappears – he is Lime. The meet and Lime rationalizes his villainy in a speech at a fairground Ferris wheel. Welles's famous speech is very much his own inspirtion: "In Italy for 30 years the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce. The cuckoo clock." Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) threatens to deport Anna and Martins betrays Lime to secure her freedom. In a chase through the sewers Martins kills Lime, and Anna leaves him after the funeral. – Music, composed by Anton Karas, became highly popular. "The reader will notice many differences between the story and the film, and he should not imagine these changes were forced on an unwilling author : as likely as not they were suggested by the author. The film in fact is better than the story because it is in this case the finished state of the story." (The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, with an Introduction by Ian Thomson, 2005, p. 4) In the original story Martin's first name was Rollo, it was changed to Holly on Joseph Cotten's request. Welles's major contribution to the dialogue was his cuckoo clock speech. The character of Harry Lime inspired later a series on American radio, performed by Welles, short stories published by the News of the World, and the TV series of The Third Man, starring Michael Rennie. And in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994) Kate Winslet fantasized about Harry. Greene's ability to create debate and his practical jokes brought him often into headlines. He recommended Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as his "Book of the Year," a banned work at that time, in the Sunday Times and praised the men involved in the Great Train Robbery. In a letter to the Spectator he proposed a scheme to bankrupt the British postal system. Greene's emphasis switched from religion to politics in the 1950s. He lived at the Majestic hotel in Saigon and made trips to Hong Kong and Singapore. In 1953 he was in Kenya, reporting the Mau Mau upraising, and in 1956 he spent a few weeks in Stalinist Poland, and tried to help a musician to escape to the West. Greene always led an active life. At the age of 78, he published 'J'Accuse', about organized crime in Nice. However, when his friend Omar Torrijos expressed his willingness to help him in the campaign, Greene politely declined the offer. In Ways of Escape Greene told a story about the Other, who called himself Graham Greene, but whose real name was perhaps John Skinner or Meredith de Varg. In the 1950s the Other lost his passport in India, and was sentenced to two years rigorous imprisonment. A decade later he was photographed in a Jamaican paper with "Missus drink", an attractive woman. "Some years ago in Chile, after I had been entertained at lunch by President Allende, a right-wing paper in Santiago announced to its readers that the President had been deceived by an impostor. I found myself shaken by a metaphysical doubt. Had I been the impostor all the time? Was I the other? Was I Skinner? Was it even possible that I might be Meredith de Varg?" (Ways of Escape, p. 320) The Asian setting stimulated Greene's The Quiet American (1955), which was about American involvement in Indochina. The story focuses on the murder of Alden Pyle (the American of the title). The narrator, Thomas Fowler, a tough-minded, opium-smoking journalist, arranges to have Pyle killed by the local rebels. Pyle has stolen Fowler's girl friend, Phuong, and he is connected to a terrorist act, a bomb explosion in a local café. The Quit American was considered sympathetic to Communism in the Soviet Union and a play version of the novel was produced in Moscow. Greene made several journeys to the Soviet Union, where he became close to his translator and guide, Oxana Krugerskaya. One one trip, he catched a severe attack of pneumonia. Our Man in Havanna (1958) was finished after a journey
to Cuba, but Greene had the story sketched already much earlier. On one
trip he asked a taxi driver to buy him a little cocaine and got boracic
powder. The novel was made into a film in 1959, directed by Carol Reed.
During the filming Greene met Ernest Hemingway, and was invited to his
house for drinks. Papa Doc Duvalier's repressive rule in Haiti was examined in The Comedians. The Honorary Consul (1973), which the author himself preferred to all his others, was a hostage drama set in Paraguay. The Human Factor (1978) stayed on the New York Times
bestseller list for six months. In the story an agent falls in love
with a black woman during an assignment in South Africa. The book did
not satisfy Greene and he planned to leave it in a drawer – it hung
"like a dead albatross" around his neck. Interested to hear what his
friend Kim Philby thought of it he sent a copy to Moscow, but denied
that his double agent Maurice Castle was based on Philby. Travels with My Aunt (1969), which was filmed by George Cukor, took the reader on a journey round the world with an odd couple, a retired short-sighted bank manager and his temperamental Aunt Augusta, whose two big front teeth gives her "a vital Neanderthal air." Note: Another Graham Greene is a Native American who was nominated for the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for Dances With Wolves (1990) - See also: Lennart Meri, Eric Ambler - For further reading: My Man in Antibes: Getting to Know Graham Greene: A Memoir by Michael Mewshaw (2023); Between Form and Faith: Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel by Martyn Sampson (2021); A Graham Greene Memoir by Joseph & Jeannine Jeffs (2021); The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene (2021); Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene by Richard Greene (2020); The Language of Ethics and Community in Graham Greene's Fiction by Paula Martín Salván (2015); Adapting Graham Greene by Richard J. Hand and Andrew Purssell (2015); The Man Within My Head: Graham Greene, My Father and Me by Pico Iyer (2012); The Life of Graham Greene. Vol. 3: 1955-1991 by Norman Sherry (2004); The Third Man by Rob White (2003); Graham Greene's Conradian Masterplot by Robert Pendleton (1995); The Life of Graham Greene. Vol. 2: 1939-1955 by Norman Sherry (1994); Graham Greene: The Man Within by Michael Shelden (1994); Graham Greene: Man of Paradox, ed. by A.F. Cassis (1994); Graham Greene: The Enemy Within by Michael Shelden (1994); Conversations with Graham Greene, ed. by Henry J. Donaghy (1992); Graham Greene: A Study of the Short Fiction by Richard Kelly (1992); Graham Greene: A Revaluation, ed. by Jeffrey Meyers (1990); The Life of Graham Greene. Vol. 1: 1904-1939 by Vincent Sherry (1989); A Reader's Guide to Graham Greene by Paul O'Prey (1988); Graham Greene by Richard Kelley (1985); Saints, Sins, and Comedians by Roger Sharrock (1984); The Other Man by Marie Francoise Allain (1983); Graham Greene, ed. by Samuel Hynes (1973); Graham Greene by David Lodge (1966); The Labyrinthe Ways of Graham Greene by Francis Leo Kunkel (1960); Graham Greene and the Heart of the Matter by Marie Mesnet (1954) - Other film adaptations: Went the Day Well?, dir. by Alberto Cavalcanti (1942); Across the Bridge, dir. by Ken Annakin (1957); tv adaptations (British TV, 1975) of short stories by Graham Greene, under the title Shades of Greene Selected bibliography:
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