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Graham Greene

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This article is about the writer. For the actor, see Graham Greene (actor).
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Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene, OM (October 2, 1904 – April 3, 1991) was a prolific English novelist, playwright, short story writer and critic whose works explore the doubtfulness of modern man and ambivalent moral or political issues in a contemporary setting. Greene combined serious literary acclaim with wide popularity. Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a mere "Catholic novelist", his religion informs most of his novels, and many of his best works (e.g. Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory) are explicitly Roman Catholic in content and preoccupations. His later works show a greater interest in international politics, e.g. The Quiet American.

Life and work

Childhood

Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the fourth of six children – his younger brother Hugh became the Director-General of the BBC, and older brother Raymond an eminent doctor and mountaineer. Their parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion née Raymond, were first cousins and members of a large and influential family that included the owners of the Greene King brewery, and various bankers and businessmen. Charles Greene was "second master" at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry (who was married to another cousin of Charles).

In 1910 Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster, and Graham attended the school as a pupil. Bullied and profoundly unhappy as a boarder, Greene made several attempts at suicide (some of them, Greene claimed, by playing Russian roulette - though Michael Shelden's biography of Greene discredits the truth of these incidents), and in 1921 at the age of 17 he underwent six months of psychoanalysis in London to deal with depression. After this he returned to the school as a day boy, living with his family. Schoolfriends included Claud Cockburn and Peter Quennell.

He went to Balliol College, Oxford, and his first work (a volume of poetry) was published in 1925, while he was an undergraduate, but it was not widely praised.

Early career

After graduation, Greene took up a career in journalism, firstly in Nottingham (a city which recurs in his novels as an epitome of mean provincial life), and then as a subeditor on The Times. While in Nottingham he started a correspondence with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Roman Catholic (by conversion) who had written to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene converted to the faith in 1926, and the couple were married the following year. They had two children, Lucy (born 1933) and Francis (born 1936; died 1987). In 1948 Greene left Vivien for Catherine Walston, but they remained married.

Novels and other works

Greene's first published novel was The Man Within in 1929, and its reception emboldened him to give up his job at The Times and work full-time as a novelist. However, the following two books were not successful (Greene disowned them in later life), and his first real success was Stamboul Train in 1932 – as with several of his books, this was also adapted as a film (Orient Express, 1934).

His income from novels was supplemented by freelance journalism, including book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day, which closed down in 1937 shortly after Greene's review of the film Wee Willie Winkie, starring a nine-year-old Shirley Temple, caused the magazine to lose a libel case. Greene's review claimed that Temple displayed "a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men", and is now seen as one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of young children by the entertainment industry.

His fiction was originally divided into two genres: thrillers or mystery/suspense books, such as Brighton Rock, that he himself cast as "entertainments" but which often included a notable philosophical edge, and literary works such as The Power and the Glory, on which his reputation was thought to be based.

As his career lengthened, however, Greene and his readers both found the "entertainments" to be of nearly as high a value as the literary efforts, and Greene's later efforts such as The Human Factor, The Comedians, Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American, combine these modes into works of remarkable insight and compression.

Writing style

Greene had one of the most recognisable writing styles of twentieth century English authors. Greene's novels are written in a lean, contemporary, realistic style, often featuring characters troubled by self-doubt and living in seedy or rootless circumstances. He tended to set his novels in poor, hot, dusty or tropical backwaters in the Third World - Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Haiti, Argentina - leading to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.

Catholicism is usually explicitly present in Greene's novels. Greene in his literary criticism attacked most modern literature for having lost any religious sense or themes, which resulted, he argued, in dull characters who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin." Only by recovering a religious element, the consciousness of the infinite meaning of human actions leading to an eternal destiny of salvation or damnation, could the novel recover its drama and power. Catholicism in his books is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin and doubt.

In his later writings Catholicism decreased in importance as Greene's own faith declined, with left-wing political faiths taking on a greater importance in his fiction, although critics usually agree that his most profound works are the earlier ones in which Catholicism plays a major role.

Unlike other "Catholic writers" such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, Greene's politics were essentially left-leaning, though some biographers believe politics mattered little to him. In his later years he was a strong critic of what he saw as American imperialism, and he supported the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met. [1]

Travel

Throughout his life, Greene was obsessed with travelling far from his native England, to what he called the "wild and remote" places of the world. His travels provided him with opportunities to engage in espionage on behalf of the United Kingdom (in Sierra Leone during the Second World War, for example). Greene had been recruited to MI6 by the notorious double agent Kim Philby. He reworked the colourful and exciting characters and places he encountered into the fabric of his novels. A 1938 trip to Mexico to see the effects of a campaign of forced anti-Catholic secularisation was funded by the Roman Catholic Church. This resulted in the factual The Lawless Roads (published in America as Another Mexico), and the fictional The Power and the Glory. The novel was condemned by the Vatican in 1953.

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, The Lawless Roads (1939)

Many of his books have been filmed, most notably 1947's Brighton Rock, and he also wrote several original screenplays, most famously for the film The Third Man.

Trivia

Greene greatly enjoyed parody. In 1949, when the New Statesman publication held a contest for parodies of Greene's distinctive writing style, he submitted an entry under a pseudonym and won second prize. The resulting work, The Stranger's Hand, was later finished by another writer and brought to the screen by Italian film director, Mario Soldati. In 1965, Greene entered a similar New Statesman parody contest, again under a pseudonym, and won an honorable mention.

Greene's short story "The Destructors" was featured in the movie Donnie Darko.

Final years

Greene moved to Antibes in 1966, to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known for several years, and this relationship endured until his death. In 1981 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to writers concerned with 'the freedom of the individual in society'. One of his final works, J'Accuse - The Dark Side of Nice (1982), concerns a legal matter that he and his extended family were embroiled in nearby Nice. In the pamphlet, he declared that organized crime flourished in Nice and that the upper levels of civic government had protected judicial and police corruption in the city. This led to a libel case, which he lost [2]. He was vindicated after his death, however, when in 1994 the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin was convicted of several counts of corruption and associated crimes and sentenced to prison. In the last years of his life, Greene lived in the small resort city of Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. On his death at the age of 86 in 1991, he was interred in the nearby cemetery in Corsier-sur-Vevey.

October 2004 saw the publication of the third and final volume of The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry, Greene's official biographer. The writing of this biography created a story in itself in that Sherry followed in Greene's footsteps, even coming down with diseases that Greene had come down with in the same place. Sherry's work reveals that Greene continued to submit reports to British intelligence until the end of his life. This has led scholars and Greene's reading public to entertain the provocative question, "Was Greene a novelist who was also a spy, or was his lifelong literary career the perfect cover?"

Bibliography

Verse

Novels

Autobiography

Travel books

Plays

Screenplays

Short stories (selected)

  • Twenty-One Stories (1954) (originally "Nineteen Stories" [1947], the collection usually presents the stories in reverse chronological order)
"The End of the Party" (1929)
"The Second Death" (1929)
"Proof Positive" (1930)
"I Spy" (1930)
"A Day Saved" (1935)
"Jubilee" (1936)
"Brother" (1936)
"A Chance For Mr Lever" (1936)
"The Basement Room" (1936) (aka "The Fallen Idol", later turned into a film directed by Carol Reed)
"The Innocent" (1937)
"A Drive in the Country" (1937)
"Across The Bridge" (1938)
"A Little Place Off The Edgeware Road" (1939)
"The Case for the Defence" (1939)
"Alas, Poor Maling" (1940)
"Men At Work" (1940)
"Greek Meets Greek" (1941)
"The Hint of an Explanation" (1948)
"The Blue Film" (1954)
"Special Duties" (1954)
"The Destructors" (1954)
  • A Sense of Reality (1963)
"Under the Garden"
"A Visit to Morin"
"Dream of a Strange Land"
"A Discovery in the Woods"
"Church Militant" (1956)
"Dear Dr Falkenheim" (1963)
"The Blessing" (1966)
  • May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)
"May We Borrow Your Husband?"
"Beauty"
"Chagrin in Three Parts"
"The Over-night Bag"
"Mortmain"
"Cheap in August"
"A Shocking Accident"
"The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen"
"Awful When You Think of It"
"Doctor Crombie"
"The Root of All Evil"
"Two Gentle People"
  • The Last Word and Other Stories (1990)
"The Last Word"
"The News in English"
"The Moment of Truth"
"The Man Who Stole the Eiffel Tower"
"The Lieutenant Died Last"
"A Branch of the Service"
"An Old Man's Memory"
"The Lottery Ticket"
"The New House"
"Work Not in Progress"
"Murder for the Wrong Reason"
"An Appointment With the General"

Children's books

  • The Little Fire Engine (n.d., illus. Dorothy Craigie; 1973, illus. Edward Ardizzone)
  • The Little Horse Bus (1966, illus. Dorothy Craigie)
  • The Little Steamroller (1963, illus. Dorothy Craigie)
  • The Little Train (1957, illus. Dorothy Craigie; 1973, illus. Edward Ardizzone)

Other

  • An impossible woman: The memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri (ed. Greene, 1975)
  • Introduction to My Silent War, by Kim Philby, 1968, British Intelligence double agent, mole for Soviets
  • J'Accuse - The Dark Side of Nice (1982)
  • Lord Rochester's monkey: Being the life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1974)
  • The Pleasure-Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935–40 (ed. John Russell Taylor, 1980)
  • The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (ed. Greene, 1974)
  • Yours, etc.: Letters to the Press (1989)
  • Why the Epigraph? (1989)

Further reading

  • Kelly, Richard Michael, Graham Greene, Ungar, 1984
  • Kelly, Richard Michael, Graham Greene: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne, 1992.
  • Duran, Leopoldo , Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, translated by Euan Cameron, HarperCollins
  • Shelden, Michael , Graham Greene: The Enemy Within, (pub. William Heinemann, 1994), Random House ed. 1995: ISBN 0679428836
  • Sherry, Norman (1989-2004), The Life of Graham Greene: vol. 1 1904-1939, (pub. Random House UK, 1989, ISBN 0224026542), Viking ed. 1989: ISBN 0670813761, Penguin reprint 2004: ISBN 0142004200
  • Sherry, Norman, The Life of Graham Greene: vol. 2 1939-1955, (pub. Viking 1994: ISBN 0670860565), Penguin reprint 2004: ISBN 0142004219
  • Sherry, Norman, The Life of Graham Greene: vol. 3 1955-1991, (pub. Viking 2004, ISBN 0670031429)
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