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Archive for November, 2009

Graham Greene’s dream diary

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

Graham Greene was one of the outstanding writers of the twentieth century. He will be remembered for his wonderful books; books such as Our Man in Havana, Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, and The Power and the Glory.

Shortly before he died he was visited by two women at the hospital in Vevey, Switzerland. One was his daughter Caroline. The other was Yvonne Cloetta and he asked her to prepare his dream diary and to publish it following his death. This posthumous book he would call A World of My Own after a quote from Heraclitus of Ephesus (500 BC): The waking have one world in common, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.

Greene kept a dream diary for almost twenty-five years. The result ran to more than 800 pages. He began the diary in 1965 and completed it in 1989. The published selection, chosen by Greene, runs to 116 pages. It was published in 1992, the year after Greene’s death.

A few of my short stories have been drawn from [dream] memories, Greene admits. In Dream of a Strange Land he recorded his dream experience as a leper seeking treatment in Sweden. Only the sound of a shot with which the printed tale ends has been added, he reveals. Another story The Root of All Evil takes place in 19th century Germany. In this story he changed nothing after he woke.

There is another side to dreams that interests Graham Greene and this is when dreams contain what he calls scraps of the future. He points us to J W Dunne’s interesting and investigative book Experiment with Time. I note time and again incidents … a few days after the dream, Greene says. He is convinced Dunne was right when he claims that some dreams can foreshadow future events.

In his dream diary Graham Greene recorded a dream in which he found himself writing a poem for a competition in a magazine called Time and Tide. It was about my own death, he tells his readers

The Room Next Door

From the room next door

The TV talks to me

Of sickness, nettlerash, and herbal tea.

My breath is folded up

Like sheets in lavender.

The end for me

Arrives like nursery tea.

(title idea and verse construction by P-i-R)

When World War I broke out Graham Greene was a young boy. But in A World of My Own he records two dreams about the so-called Great War. The dream that interests Poet-in-Residence is the one where Graham Greene finds himself in the body of Wilfred Owen the poet. In fact he is Owen. He is wearing a steel helmet and an officers uniform and he is in a dug-out. There he begins to recite a verse he has called Givenchy to a girl in a photograph.

Givenchy

Imagine, dear, the shallow trench,

An impregnable redoubt

For this good night and more…

But suddenly the weariness of the war overcomes him and he begins, as Wilfred Owen, to weep. And as he sobs a voice cries out, “The Germans have dropped gas bombs…”

In her foreword written at Vevey in October 1991 Yvonne Cloetta writes,-

Graham –

In The Power and the Glory you wrote: ‘The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise; the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died.’

If such a place exists, you have certainly found it.

A World of My Own a dream diary

Graham Greene

Penguin Books, Reinhardt Books, Alfred A Knopf

c) 1993, 1992, 1992

http://poet-in-residence.blogspot.com/2009/07/graham-greenes-dream-diary.html

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Ways Of Escape by Graham Greene

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

Ways Of Escape is one of the most rewarding and, surprisingly, surprising reads one might encounter. On the face of it, the book is Graham Greene’s artistic, literary autobiography. A second half and companion volume for A Sort Of Life, Ways Of Escape deals chronologically with Graham Greene’s works, his inspiration and his development as an author. All of this, we may believe as we start this book, is well known, well documented, even public knowledge. Ways Of Escape reveals, however, that much of Greene’s inspiration was quite personal, often very private, and it is through this that surprise emerges.

The book catalogues brilliantly the sometimes direct, sometimes loose relationship between experience and inspiration. Graham Greene is apparently candid about the nature of his invention. Whether it is achieved via amalgamation, imitation or juxtaposition, for the author it appears to be eventually rooted in experienced reality. What Ways Of Escape communicates above all is how much Graham Greene was occupied with his writing alongside a life that seemed already utterly packed with travel, journalism, various employment and risk, so packed that people encountered along the way could never have suspected that they were being analysed for their potential as future fictional characters.

Graham Greene is self-deprecating throughout, appearing to belittle his own work, thus showing little respect for the critical acclaim of others which, by the end of the period in question, was considerable. Many of the scenes from his work that he values seem to relate strongly to, perhaps clarify his own experience. And, for Graham Greene, experience was usually vivid and sought out to be so. He samples local prostitutes freely, drinks whatever is at hand and chemically alters the reality to which he otherwise seems to remain encountered as a participant rather than as an observer.

There are indicators to Greene’s ambivalence towards religion. He expresses respect for a simple, unquestioning faith. But he despises a middle class, “suburban” Catholicism that seems to assume an ownership of God. Greene, of course, belonged to that latter group by virtue of class, education, and marriage, but one feels he yearned for a simple, stated and genuflecting responsibility to an omnipotent God. One also feels that this might be Romanticism, a desire to become an ideal to which he feels he may only aspire as a result of the mired filth of the life he perceives he lives.

He relates some of his contact with the press, as well as with film. There are brushes with the law in the form of libel actions. Throughout, one feels his respect for his fellow professionals is at best limited. He even describes the word “media” as applicable to bad journalism, clearly placing himself above the label.

But above all it is experienced reality that provides the gems. His description of bombardment in Sinai rings both true and vivid. “I remembered the blitz, but the blitz had one great advantage – the pubs remained open.” Such attention to detail alongside direct experience is what brings Graham Greene’s prose to life, and it is this rooting in the reality of experience that prods the reader into reaction. This is a masterwork by a master technician.

But it is the book’s epilogue that, for me, provided a supremely apt and yet provocative coda. Here is a man who has imagined others, given them life in print and film, a man who seems to have little confidence in his own ability or thought for his consequence. And, we learn, he is a man who might even be someone else, someone who claims to be him, an Other. The juxtaposition of this idea with a life lived is both thought-provoking and disturbing – a masterstroke by a master of his craft, even his art.

http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-ways-of-escape-by/page-2/

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‘A Sort of’ Autobiography — One of Graham Greene’s Best Books

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

By WALTER CLEMONS

A SORT OF LIFE

By Graham Greene.

he first thing I remember is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet… The dog, as I know now, was a pug owned by my elder sister. It had been run over- by a horse carriage?- and killed and the nurse thought it convenient to bring the cadaver home this way.”

Here, on an early page, as “convenient” and “cadaver” click into the corner pocket, we realize with joy that Graham Greene is writing better than he has in years. His “sort of” autobiography- odd, calm, saturnine and unexpectedly moving- is one of his best books.

“A Sort of Life” takes him from what might seem an ideally pastoral boyhood as a schoolmaster’s son in the green, Greene-dominated town of Berkhamsted (“The Greenes seemed to move as a tribe like the Bantus, taking possession”)- where in his early teens he made several inexpert attempts at suicide; to London at 16 to be psychoanalyzed, “an astonishing thing in 1920,” as he notes- an experience from which he emerged “fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath,” in numb boredom.

Six experiments with Russian roulette followed, already described in a famous essay, “The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard,” but retold better here. He insists as before that this wasn’t suicide, whatever a coroner’s jury might have ruled: “I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation, as if carnival lights had been switched on in a dark drab street. My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities.”

No infinite possibilities were realized in his career at Oxford, where he explored staying drunk from morning to night. But there is exhilaration and affection in his accounts of several careers in which he dabbled and didn’t get trapped: German espionage (“Didn’t it occur to my parents that I was keeping very strange company?” Is it at all likely, the reader wonders after reading his remote description of boyhood relations with them, that he confided in them?); a funny stint as tutor (“I had a horror of becoming involved in teaching”); and a happy period as subeditor on the London Times, which provides some of the warmest memories in the book.

It is when he leaves The Times, after acceptance of his first published novel, “The Man Within,” that bleakness descends. Success was delusory. His first novel sold 8,000 copies; his tenth, “The Power and the Glory,” more than a decade later, had a first printing of only 3,500. “A Sort of Life” ends even earlier, on the eve of publication of “Stamboul Train” (“Orient Express”) in 1932, with Greene’s appeal to an old Oxford friend for a job at Chulankarana University near Bangkok.

“His favorite reply came just too late to save me from this career of writing. I had been turned back into the pen like a driven sheep by the temporary popular success of ‘Stamboul Train.'” He concludes with a reunion many years later with his friend in Bangkok: “For a writer, I argued, success is always temporary, success is only a delayed failure. And it is incomplete… Knowing the unreality of his success he shouts to keep his courage up. There are faults in his work which he alone detects; even his unfavorable critics miss them, dwelling on obvious points which can be repaired, but like a skilled intuitive builder he can sniff out the dry rot in the beams. How seldom he has the courage to dismantle the whole house and start again.”

There is no suspicion of fake modesty in this. Greene’s novels have given him little lasting satisfaction, though he has remained unenthusiastically approving of “The Power and the Glory.” In the startling introduction to “The Heart of the Matter,” for example, he outdid even George Orwell’s scathing review in pronouncing the novel a failure- as well as cuffing the pious who had so industriously debated Scobie’s fate after death: “This was not meant to be an issue of the book, for I have small belief in the doctrine of eternal punishment.” The most he will allow “The End of the Affair” which I believe to be his masterpiece- the tenderest and psychologically most supple of his novels, and the one in which his kill-joy God is the most passionately faced- is that its first-person narration gave him practice for “The Quiet American,” a book he likes better.

He has been particularly gruff with critics who have attributed to him the creation of his own fictional landscape, “Greeneland.” Yet Randall Jarrell’s remark that Eliot would have written “The Waste Land” about the garden of Eden is just as true of Greene, who has himself written of Walter de la Mare: “Every creative writer worth our consideration… is a victim: a man given over to an obsession.” One of the primary interests of this newest book is its mapping of the terrain from which the later fictions grew.

The Berkhamsted of Greene’s childhood was as far as any place imaginable from the buzzard-guarded, sun-blinded Mexican port of the opening pages of “The Power of the Glory,” the tawdry Brighton seafront, the war-wrecked London through which Arthur Lowe stumbles with his memory blasted, the Vietnam rice-paddies, the leper colony. But the garden of his earliest recollections are only slightly less menacing.

He remembers his father’s school, “part rosy Tudor, part hideous modern brick the color of a doll’s house plaster ham- where the misery of life started, and burial ground, long disused, separated from our flower beds by an invisible line, so that every year the gardener would turn up a few scraps of human bone in remaking the herbaceous border.” A charming sketch of his Uncle Graham, “a remarkable man if only we had known it,” contains a jolt; he survived into his nineties, care for by two sisters, “and the first sign of his approaching end was when my old aunts while undressing him removed a toe with his socks.”

Uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, parents who loved each other; it is noticeable that the young Graham was solitary among them. “I associated my mother with remoteness, which I did not at all resent, and with a smell of eau de cologne.” He put her before us most clearly “in an untroubled coma before death,” when “her long white Plantagenet face reminded me of a crusader on a tomb,” and as a girl in a family album photograph taken before his birth. His father is most movingly remembered after his death: “Only when I had children of my own did I realize how his interest in my doings had been genuine and only then I discovered a buried love and sorrow for him which emerges from time to time in dreams.” He reconstructs his father’s teaching abilities from the testimony of Peter Quennell and Claud Cockburn, who were students in the school. Neither parent is ever heard to speak directly. “I seem to remember,” Greene writes, “my father sitting on the bed and interrogating me seriously and tenderly” at the time of his adolescent crisis, but he remembers no words.

The simplicity with which he writes of this estrangement, accusing them of nothing, is affecting. It seems to have been an accidental result of his removal to a dormitory in his own father’s school, where he was cut off from his family but not accepted by his fellows: “I was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature, known to have dubious associates. Was my father not the headmaster? I was like the son of a quisling in a country under occupation.” The experience was of even slighter objective content than the young Dickens’s months in the blacking factory, but of no less subjective power in teaching betrayal and desolation. That the boy’s parents were just across the lawn doesn’t discredit the experience; it deepens the irony of it.

“A Sort of Life” is sure to disappoint and annoy some readers expecting more copious confession. Much will be familiar in substance to faithful readers of Greene. (Even that dead dog in the pram made a brief appearance in “Journey Without Maps,” 1936.) The pious will find themselves rebuffed, not for the first time, by his sketchy account of conversion to Catholicism: “I cannot be bothered to remember- I accept. With the approach of death I care less and less about religious truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation or darkness.” The psychiatrically-alert will want to quiz Graham Greene about that lifelong “boredom,” unexamined and attributed with a shrug to inherited manic-depression, which has not deterred him from amassing, at the rate of only a couple of pages a day, his formidable output of some 30 books, almost all of them in print.

But detractors are invited to notice how carefully this understated memoir is built, and to trace through it the interesting thread of selective obliviousness that is one of its themes. Greene compares memory at one point to a long broken night: “As I write, it is as though I am waking from sleep continually to grasp at an image which I hope may drag in its wake a whole intact dream, but the fragments remain fragments, the complete story always escapes.” He doesn’t remember, for instance, of his first love affair with a governess, “the first time I kissed her or the hesitations and timidities which surely must have preceded the kiss,” though he remembers the moment when he fell in love with her, “the stretch of beach, my mother reading, the angle from which I examined her body.”

Suppression and narrowing of focus provide the nervous tension of his best fiction. “A Sort of Life” made me read for the first time his diffuse earliest novels, and they are pretty bad (although “England Made Me” has moments). All that’s changed with the opening sentence of “Brighton Rock”: “Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours.” Though it has some of the crudeness of an innovative work- with only Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” as forerunner, and perhaps the distant example of Dostoevsky, we watch Greene inventing his own kind of novel- “Brighton Rock” does not fail in energy, ferocity and dispatch. The ending is devastating because the speed of events has encouraged the reader to forget what’s on that pier-booth recording of Pinkie’s voice that Rose goes home finally, with the priest’s benediction, to play.

Greene returns again and again in his autobiography to forgetfulness, describing with satisfaction, for instance, his meeting in Malaya, 30 years after school, a classmate who had tormented him and whom he doesn’t recognize: “Perhaps that was my revenge- to have forgotten him so easily.”

Perhaps forgetfulness is the mark of a minor writer, if you like to rank writers that way. Graham Greene isn’t “major” and life-embracing. He is expert and narrow as John Webster is narrow, bothersome, unnerving and permanently exciting. They leave out a lot. “A Sort of Life” contains an unusual novelist’s credo that voices Greene’s limitations but is brilliantly worth remembering:

“It is better to remain in ignorance of one self and to forget easily… All that we can easily recognize as our experience in a novel is mere reporting: it has a place but an unimportant one. It provides an anecdote, it fills in gaps in a narrative. It may legitimately provide a background, and sometimes we have to fall back on it when imagination falters. Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men- he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.”

Though the hero of almost every Graham Greene novel is haunted by the past, one of the oddities of his fiction is how little personal history his characters have outside the bare minimum burden that drives them- the crime, the sin, the act of betrayal they can’t forget. Yet in coming to terms with his own early life, despite the professed limitations of his memory and his reticence on some subjects, Graham Greene writes with a generosity and flexibility that are new in his work. At a point in his long career when it seemed unlikely he could surprise us, he has done it with this moving self-portrait of a man at ease with his past.

Walter Clemons, former member of the Book Review staff, joins Newsweek this month as book reviewer.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-sort.html

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THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

Sherry followed Greene’s footsteps, at times suffering the diseases that Greene suffered and in the same place. The biography reveals that Greene continued reporting to British intelligence until his death, allowing literary scholars and readers to entertain the provocative question of whether Graham Greene was a novelist who also was a spy, or a spy for whom a life-long novelist’s career was the perfect cover.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene

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Autobiography

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

A SORT OF LIFE (1971)

WAYS OF ESCAPE (1980)

A WORLD OF MY OWN (1982)

THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE,by Norman Sherry (2004)

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The Improbable Spy

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

After more than 50 years before the reading public, Graham Greene has become an institution, the living proof that a contemporary novelist can tackle important subjects and still enjoy immense popularity. As a result, a new work by him is a major event in the international publishing season. The dust jacket of one of his novels shows the extent of his reputation: Reynolds Price calls Greene “the greatest of living English authors”; an unnamed reviewer in the Chicago Tribune goes one further: “the premier writer working today in the English language.” Brigid Brophy weighs in with praise for the “beautiful flat pulse of his prose.” Everything suggests that Greene is the most widely read serious British fiction writer outside his own country, but Greene, now in his mid-seventies, shows no sign of developing into a Grand Old Man. Rather the opposite. He is modest and objective about his own achievements, although his output has been enormous. It began with a collection of poetry, published in 1925, the year he left Oxford, and has since included travel-books, film scenarios, essays, reviews, and in-depth reporting. He has written biography and plays as well as dozens of short stories; and all this activity has been, in some degree, marginal to the main achievement, the score of novels from The Man Within of 1929 to The Human Factor of last spring.

It is difficult to pin down unerringly the source of Greene’s popularity. His appeal cuts across several classes of reader, and the link is probably his readability. For Greene, the novel still tells a story, and all his considerable craftsmanship is directed towards this end. He is uninterested in technical innovation, although he has been open to the influence of many different fashions from English historical romance and spy thriller to the French Catholic moralists—with glances at Conrad, Hemingway, and even Faulkner and the existentialists. Accents and passages can reflect these influences, but nothing deflects Greene from the main business of holding the reader’s attention. To do this, he resorts to the tricks of the cinema—swift juxtaposition of scene, character, and tone—and is often, because of this, slick and ambiguous in his effects. Many lesser writers have mastered these techniques more or less adequately; what makes Greene stand out is that from 1938, the year of Brighton Rock, he has used popular forms to explore his own very special obsessions, such as the operation of divine grace, man’s moral responsibility to himself and other people, and the nature of love and disloyalty. The serious reader likes to recognize in these obsessions the proof of Greene’s seriousness and claim to greatness. They respect his obsessions, even though the vocabulary of Greene’s Catholicism and of his mysterious brand of radicalism is not shared.

Anyone writing about Greene has to face up at once to the Catholicism, not in order to argue with it, as many Orthodox Catholics have done (Pope Paul once told Greene: “Some parts of all your books will always offend some Catholics. You should not worry about that.”). Nor to dismiss it, as some free-thinkers tend to (John Lehmann said, “The Ministry of Fear was more like life . . .than the Catholic miracle tales that invaded his work after the war”), but rather to recognize that a Catholic novelist like Greene brings restraints to the novel that the Anglo-Saxon tradition is not used to. George Orwell’s statement that “the novel is a Protestant art form, requiring the free play of mind” never seems truer than at the end of those novels in which Greene has drawn most heavily on his beliefs, such as The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter.The reader is left as uneasy by the locked gears of the novel’s progress as by the rigid optimism of Soviet socialist realist fiction. The big distinction between the two groups is that Greene’s bending of the laws of probability and human nature is to satisfy something in himself; the Soviet writer’s flagwaving is to please the party bosses. Greene may be right to claim “not to be a writer of Catholic novels, but a writer who in four or five books took characters with Catholic ideas for his novels,” but the influence is there: it is the religious sense that Greene himself believes was lost to the English novel with the death of Henry James.”With the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as if the world of fiction had lost a dimension,” Greene is the proof (there are others) that his judgment here was at fault; and, in my opinion, his sounding the religious note has been of the utmost value in reminding an increasingly agnostic century that man has existed on another level of being. This leads to the most interesting aspect of Greene’s work: that despite the special nature of his obsessions few readers feel that they are being preached at. Each novel is really a private exploration of the possibilities of certain lines of conduct which Greene later shares with his public. The Holy Office condemned The Power and the Glory and asked Greene to make changes; fellow-Catholic Evelyn Waugh refused to review A Burnt-Out Case because of its absurdities; and there is much that is ideologically dubious in Greene’s work, but for the general public this matters less than the simple fact that Greene is a superb entertainer.

At one time, he insisted on the quality of divertimento in his novels by pinning the label “Entertainment” on some of them. Given the nature of the novel, this had always seemed disingenuous. Did it mean that Greene looked on the novels outside this category as manuals of instruction? In recent years he has dropped the label with no loss or gain. Yet, in considering the mass of his work, a line of demarcation wavers through it. On the one side are the novels that operate in what might be called a free market, and they include Our Man in Havana, Travels with my Aunt, and most of the early work. The other side of the line are the works that are the products of a closed market, where Greene’s obsessions distort the values. By this rough and ready classification, The Human Factor, because it lacks either Catholic or left-wing dialectic, ought to belong to the free market, but in fact it belongs to the second. What we see operating, in place of Greene’s acquired ideologies, is his native passion, not far removed from Thomas Hardy’s, for plotting the destruction of small men and the half-baked hopes that inspire them. The fact that Greene is on the small man’s side for most of the novel does not soften the inexorable way he so shapes events that his hero ends up cornered by actions of his own devising. In some respects, the novel is a throwback to the ones Greene wrote in the thirties, a spy thriller set against important political events, in this case the fight to the death between Black Africa and the white suprematists in Pretoria. Fascism was the accepted evil of many of the 1930’s novels; apartheid is the one that dominates The Human Factor.In publishing his novel at this time, Greene once again shows his flair for producing a topical document.The Human Factor, with its commitment to liberalism in race relations, came out in Britain while the country was having one of its periodic neuroses about colored immigration. Greene’s novel has not been received as a tract, but its message is clear for those who want to take it: racial intolerance is intolerable, and hatred of it can justify anything, even treason. In essence, the novel updates E. M. Forster’s remark that forced to choose between his country and his friends, he would choose his friends. Human solidarity comes before patriotism.

The man who makes this choice is Maurice Castle, a British secret service man, who has worked in Africa and, when the book opens, is based in London. He has passed retirement age and is almost entirely uninteresting. He is a cousin of all those Greene heroes we have met in the past: faceless, undynamic men, as often as not washed up on some foreign shore and consoling themselves for their lost faith with Scotch and the attentions of the local whores or some loyal, subjugated woman. These men are not attractive, but they appeal to Greene, who likes to see in them the special closed garden for the operation of the divine will. What is ironical about Castle’s position is that he is washed up in his own country and in his home-town. This town, Berkhamsted, is also Greene’s birthplace and has been described in his autobiography, A Sort of Life.It is, on the whole, a pleasant old market town become commuters’ dormitory, but Greene turns it into another spot on the map of Greeneland: a gray place where a gray man has made his home.

Castle commutes to the espionage headquarters in London, where he deals with African material, most of it economic news of secondary importance. He has been doing this since his return from South Africa seven years before. At some time he decided to feed what tidbits he could get to the Russians and to do this he devised a code, based on standard works of literature, as though he had read Our Man in Havana and was imitating the eponymous hero. There is no suggestion that Castle is to be paid for his information or that he has any special hope for himself against the day when his cover is blown. What is more, he is not acting out of sympathy with communism. Castle, apart from one subject, is not a political animal and refrains from voting in British elections because the issues seem to him parochial.

Why, then, does he become a double agent? Because, and this is the big, poetic idea of the novel, because he has fallen in love with and married a beautiful black South African named Sarah and in doing this, as he puts it, “became a naturalised black.” As a black man by adoption, Castle wishes to see the destruction of the South African government; and the only force that can do this, in his view, is communism. So, within the African context, Castle acts as a Communist, and the novel, by offering no argument to the contrary, seems to accept that this is not a mistake. Greene stresses that Castle is a man who never forgets a good turn.”You always had an exaggerated sense of gratitude for the least kindness,” his old mother tells him. This applies to the white South African lawyer, a Communist, who had helped Sarah escape from Johannesburg to Mozambique, where she and Castle married. The reason for her need to escape was that, while serving in Castle’s spy-ring, she had begun an affair with him, in defiance of the laws of apartheid and so attracted the attention of the security police. The lawyer dies in South African prison, leaving with Castle the image of communism with a human face that was strong enough to counterbalance memories of Prague and Budapest. In gratitude, Castle takes up the dead man’s cause.

The South African situation dominates the novel, but the reader is never taken there except in flashback and conversation. The “beautiful, doomed country” plays the same role in The Human Factor as Paraguay does in The Honorary Consul.It is the place of injustice, where the main characters cannot, may not, live, and it is also their private climate. Greene’s version of South Africa offers no surprises; it is accepted as a police state and, as such, fair game for subversion and harassment.

In establishing Castle as the non-political, non-religious, non-ideological man of good will, Greene had to give him qualities of heart, even of passion. He tries hard, but the result, perhaps from lack of practice, is little more than banal. Greene lavishes much detail on establishing the Castles’ mousy life with Sarah’s child by a black professor—accepted as Castle’s—and a dog; but after years of writing about the horrors of marriage, Greene can only fumble for the essence of a happy match:

“The depth of their love was as secret as the quadruple measure of whiskey. To speak of it to others would invite danger. Love was a total risk.”

This is not, it is true, Greene’s first attempt to suggest depths of connubial bliss; he opened up the territory in The Honorary Consul, contrasting Fortnum’s love and respect for his wife, the ex-brothel girl, with Dr. Plarr’s contemptuous lust for her. All the same, Greene has not got the Castles right. Sarah, the bright, university-educated girl, is closer to Phuong, the Vietnamese girl who prepares the hero’s opium pipes in The Quiet American, than the kind of girl Greene might have had in mind. Phuong prepares the opium; Sarah doles out the whiskey. The role of whiskey in Greene novels becomes obsessive, too, and imbibers may deduce what they can from the fact that Castle is a Justerini and Brooks man.

As to the form of the novel, this falls into two almost equal halves. In the first, the reader learns, fairly casually at a pheasant shoot, where Castle’s bosses gather, that there is a leak of information from the African section. The suspicion falls on Castle’s assistant, Arthur Davis, who aspires to the high life and might therefore be in need of extra cash, however tainted. Davis is an improbably facile figure, and he is given the anti-matrimony speech that appears in most Greene novels: “Ah, those awful leftovers, the joint remade into shepherd’s pie, the dubious meatball. Is it worth it? A married man can’t even afford a good port.” Famous last words. Rash Mr. Davis pays dearly for this speech; his superiors, those grey, laconic men who figure in scores of British spy novels, decide he must be put down quietly so as to avoid a public spy scandal that would shake American confidence in the British service. Although the evidence against Davis is of the flimsiest, they get rid of him by using a new poison that produces the same effect as a lifetime’s addiction to port.

In the second part of the novel, as Davis goes to an early grave, Greene reveals that Castle is the real culprit and lets him into some really important information about a Western plan to cope with the threat of communism in South Africa. By one of those flukes that are essential to a spy novel, the South African sent to London to brief his opposite British numbers is the man who had investigated the affair between Castle and Sarah. To make sure that the long arm of coincidence can be well and truly stretched, Castle’s superiors insist that the Castles should entertain the man at their home. The South African goes out to Berkhamsted to dinner, and Castle hints to him that Davis had died in vain. The South African returns to London and starts the hue and cry that drives Castle out of the country.

Probability has, by this time, taken a holiday, and Greene saves the novel by organizing Castle’s flight from London. This is managed with the speed of a daydream, helped by the dim-wittedness of the British secret service (Greene never allows them even average savvy). In the playing out of Castle’s destiny, Greene has been indulgent. But once he gets his man to Moscow, where a severe snowstorm recalls for those with a mind for such details Dante’s Ninth Circle reserved for traitors, Greene the doomwatcher steps in and contorts the story to make sure that Castle does not get everything his own way. Castle’s mother and others prevent Sarah and her child leaving for Moscow; and as Greene is not interested in solving the Castles’ problems, we leave them, Watergate-style, twisting on a rope, puppets abandoned by the master and as uncertain as the reader what the outcome will be.

At the end of this unconvincing story, Greene seems to be saying: this is where foolish affections and gratitude get you. Men of good will beware. Castle is a traitor, but he is a traitor that the reader has sympathized with for the simple reason that there is no one else in the novel capable of rousing any feeling. In this respect, Greene has produced a variation on an old theme. Otherwise, Castle as a hero is a washout, a soft-centered bumbler. His activities have been, on the whole, trifling, and he lacks the ability of the true ideologic spy, to claim that he is in some way “on the side of history.” Why should Greene have given us such an old softie as hero? Was he trying to produce the anti-spy novel hero or to show us that the man without a real ideology is nothing and that it hardly matters what becomes of him since his actions are devoid of any real significance?

Pre-publication rumors about The Human Factor had suggested that Greene used the spy Philby as a model for Castle. There is no sign of this. In any case, Philby was a hard-headed professional, working assiduously against the interests of his own country deliberately. Castle is anti-South Africa and is too obtuse to see that in hurting the Pretoria Government he might in the long run damage his own. For a professional such as Castle to have missed this point is to make him even more naïve than he is. Castle’s offbeat relationship with communism is equally unconvincing but no more so than Greene’s own.

In his memoirs, A Sort of Life, Greene wrote that after his experiences in Vietnam during the war against the French, and because of American policy there, he found himself “in greater sympathy with communism than ever before, though less and less with the Russian version of it.” A few years before that book was published, Greene went on record as saying, in the London Times, that “if I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States of America, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union. . . .” Where does he stand? And are these deeply held opinions or are they merely attitudes? It is easy to accept that Greene is moved by poverty, exploitation, and corrupt dictatorships—the classic ills of the Third World—but does he classify as a political animal? It is hard to say “yes” on the strength of The Human Factor] It is not that anyone expects Greene to fill a novel with half-baked propaganda, but we are entitled to expect from him a greater resonance. Everything Castle does lacks common sense and gravity, and this failure in the central character exposes the defects in the framework of the novel.

What comes as a surprise is the realization that despite the sleaziness of many of Greene’s settings and his capacity for converting any given place into a landscape in Greeneland, Greene is not a realistic writer. What is important for him is the poetic idea. In Brighton Rock he had the idea of the good-natured, rather beery woman become avenging angel; in A Burnt-Out Case, Greene was moved by the notion of a great man at the end of his moral rope, as it were, burying himself alive among lepers in steamy central Africa; in The End of the Affair he worked out the battle between the loves of this world and the love of God. The reader recognizes the poet’s insights, but he expects the novelist’s working out. This demands that the writer pay frequent tribute to the great god Probability, the one who presides over the fiction writer’s desk. Nearly all of Greene’s books are flawed by the schism between the poet’s dream and the novelist’s realization. Brighton Rock shows in the first chapters an unexpected ignorance of legal methods in the wake of a murder. The mistakes in the timing of the death, post mortem examination, and funeral are so great as to undermine much that is vivid and searching that comes later. In A Burnt-Out Case, Greene establishes a marvelous mood that is half physical, half in the mind—”I am uncomfortable therefore I am”—and then lets the narrative run into the shoals of improbability. So many of the details of the novel are problematical that at the end the reader remains skeptical. Almost every one of the novels produces scenes or turns in the narrative that the reader only accepts because he has accepted the law of the poetic idea and, without knowing it, is following this more than the physical action. Sometimes, in Travels with my Aunt, for instance, the order is reversed. Greene takes his characters on a tour of some former high spots in his earlier novels, from the crematorium in Brighton Rock to the Paraguay of The Honorary Consul in a way that is never meant to be probable and then, at the end, when Aunt Augusta is dancing with the love of her life, produces such a late flowering of the poetic idea that the whole novel is in some way redeemed.

The Human Factor, as already noted, sets up the great poetic idea of a love that wipes out traditional loyalties and then unsuccessfully tries to support it with a novel that is neither genuine thriller nor comedy of errors. Suspense is missing except at the end, and the exploration of character is minimal. Nowhere is this more evident than in the character of Sarah. She and Castle are an archetypal Greene pair, the elderly man and the young woman available for bed and domestic service. Greene’s women are the least contemporary aspect of the novels. In book after book the reader is faced with the same subjugated type, incapable of sharing the battle of ideas. Nothing is less convincing than the scene in The Human Factor after Castle has confessed to his wife that he has been a double-agent. Given the hard, even pitiless, rhetoric of some female political activitists at this time, Sarah is an Aunty Tomasina.

There are so many things off key in The Human Factor that it is difficult to know where to begin. The Castle household is wrong; the setting in Berkhamsted is not right; the handling of the details of the child’s education is clumsy; the impact of such a strangely assorted couple in a conservative community is misjudged. Then, London is inaccurately placed. In some cases the mistakes are nugatory: errors that could have been put right by careful editing. In the end, so perfunctory is Greene’s English setting that one wonders why he bothered, after so many years living abroad, to return home for a fictional enterprise.

Greene’s absence from England had appeared to be an important factor in his youthfulness as a writer. Whereas his contemporaries, C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell, became involved in novel-sequences that explored the changes and developments in Britain over their lifetime and reflect in their last books something of the discouragement of trying to make sense of the senseless, Greene has made the world his province and has found exotic settings and themes which excited him in places as diverse as Africa, Southeast Asia, Haiti, and Spanish America. Greene has made himself a true man of the world, in the best sense, and has been an eyewitness for a generation of readers for whom he has made concrete the great bugbear of our time, the reality of political power that ignores the will of the people and refuses to be restrained by any moral consideration.

In The Human Factor there is no electricity between Greene’s eye and the landscape. Southeast England is too well-known to be exciting, and to see Greene trying at one or two points in the book to create an uneasy nighttime London—a city that goes to bed about eleven o’clock—is to see that there are certain tricks he has grown used to employing that do not work on the home scene. Greene is really quite limited in his atmospheric effects, and the reader of his novels must often be struck by how much a cliche the sudden storm has become—at moments of tension, of course—although realizing that it makes highly effective cinema. This is fine in Mexico, West Africa, or Vietnam, but the English, grown stoic in their oceanic climate, do not recognize rain as the stuff of melodrama.

by Richard Jones.

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1979/spring/jones-improbable-spy/

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Graham Greene on The Human Factor

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

My ambition after the war was to write a novel of espionage free from the conventional violence, which has not, in spite of James Bond, been a feature of the British Secret Service. I wanted to present the Service unromantically as a way of life, men going daily to their office to earn their pensions, the background much like that of any other profession — whether the bank clerk or the business director — an undangerous routine, and within each character the more important private life. When I had spent a few years in the Service during the war, first in West Africa and then in London, I had certainly found little excitement or melodrama coming my way.

…I began The Human Factor more than ten years before it was published and abandoned it in despair after two or three years’ work…I abandoned it mainly because of the Philby affair. My double agent Maurice Castle bore no resemblance in character or motive to Philby, none of the characters has the least likeness to anyone I have know, but I disliked the idea of the novel being taken as a roman a clef. I know very well from experience that it is only possible for me to base a very minor and transient character on a real person. A real person stands in the way of imagination. Perhaps a trick of speech, a physical trait may be used, but I can write no more than a few pages before realizing that I simply don’t know enough about the character to use him, even if he is an old friend. With the imaginary character I am sure — I know that Doctor Percival in The Human Factor admires the painting of Ben Nicholson, I know that Colonel Daintry will open a tin of sardines when he returns from the funeral of his colleague.

…I sent a copy of the book to Moscow, to my friend Kim Philby, and his reply interested me. His criticism was valid. I had made Castle’s circumstances in Moscow, he wrote, too bleak. He himself had found everything provided for him, even to a shoehorn, something he had never possessed before.

from Ways of Escape, pp.255-258

http://greeneland.tripod.com/human.htm

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Graham Greene on The Honorary Consul

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

The origin of my next novel, The Honorary Consul, written between 1970 and 1973, lies in the cave of the unconscious. I had a dream about an American ambassador — a favourite of women and a good tennis player whom I encountered in a bar — but in my dream there was no kidnapping, no guerrillas, no mistaken identity, nothing to identify it with The Honorary Consul except the fact that the dream lodged inexplicably in my head for months the figures of Charlie Fortnum and Dr. Plarr stole up around the unimportant ambassador of my dream and quietly liquidated him.

Greene almost abandoned starting his novel because a case of “life imitating art” took place: a Paraguayan consul was kidnapped, being mistaken for the ambassador. Greene however continued writing, because like in his story, General Stroessner did not care what happened to the consul, and the kidnapping was forgotten. As it happens, Greene considered this his best novel.   … The Honorary Consul was one of the novels I found hardest to write. In my experience, after a few months, an author usually feels his novel is taking control. There has been the drive at increasing speed of the plane along the runway, then the slow lift and you feel that the wheels nolonger touch the ground. But with The Honorary Consul it was only in the last chapter that I found myself at last in the freedom of the air. Now when I read the book again I have the impression that I must have been dozing at the controls, for the plane had taken to the air on the very first page when Doctor Plarr stood at night in the small port “among the rails and yellow cranes,” as I might have observed him years before while I stared through the darkness at the same scene from the deck of the Asuncion boat and the passenger whom I had identified as a smuggler told me with a skeptical smile that “the people here” always said that those who once saw Corrientes returned.

from Ways of Escape, pp.250, 254

http://greeneland.tripod.com/consul.htm

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Graham Greene on Travels with My Aunt

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

If A Burnt-Out Case in 1961 represented the depressive side of a manic-depressive writer, Travels with My Aunt eight years later surely represented the manic at its height—or depth.

… Travels with My Aunt is the only book I have written for the fun of it. Although the subject is old age and death – a suitable subject to tackle at the age of sixty-five – and though an excellent Swedish critic described the novel justly as “laughter in the shadows of the gallows,” I experienced more of the laughter and little of the shadow in writing it. When I began with the scene of the cremation of Henry Pulling’s supposed mother and his encounter with Aunt Augusta I didn’t believe for a moment that I would continue the novel for more than a few days. I didn’t even know what the next scene was likely to be – I didn’t know that Augusta was Henry’s mother. Every day when I sat down before the blank sheets of foolscap (for as symbol of my new freedom I had abandoned the single lined variety where the lines seemed to me now like the bars on a prison window) I had no idea what was going to happen to Henry or Augusta next. I felt like a rider who has dropped the reins and left the direction to his horse or like a dreamer who watches his dream unfold without power to alter its course. I felt above all that I had broken for good or ill with the past.

I was even irresponsible enough to include some private jokes which no reader would understand. Why not? I didn’t expect to have any readers. So I christened “Detective-Sergeant Sparrow, John” after that elegant scholar the ex-Warden of All Souls, Augusta’s black lover “Wordsworth” after a villainous District Commissioner whom I had met more than thirty years before in Liberia, Mr. Visconti’s son “Mario” after my friend Mario Soldati who once greeted me and gave me lunch in Milan station with similar flamboyance on my way to Istanbul. I remember I even found room for Kingsley Amis’s surname which I gave to a character on whom I can’t at the moment lay my finger. The name Visconti for Aunt Augusta’s lover was adapted from my favourite character in Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan which I had loved as a boy, and it gave me an innocent amusement when I heard Detective Sparrow describing him as a viper. Some critics have found in the book a kind of resume of my literary career—a scene in Brighton, the journey on the Orient Express, and perhaps a hint of this did come to my mind by the time Aunt Augusta arrived at the Pera Palace, but what struck me with some uneasiness, when I reread the book the other day, were the suggestions I found in it of where the future was going to take me. The boat which carried Henry Pulling from Buenos Aires to Asuncion stopped for half an hour during the night in the little river harbour of Corrientes in northern Argentina, but I had no idea that I would be landing there from a plane some years later in search of the right setting for The Honorary Consul.

from Ways of Escape, pp.246-248

http://greeneland.tripod.com/aunt.htm

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Graham Greene on The Comedians

Posted by ebrupe on 5th November 2009

My first two visits to Haiti in the fifties had been happy enough. That was the time of President Magloire, there was extreme poverty, but there were many tourists and some of the money they brought was allowed to trickle down the social scale…I met Haitian poets and painters and novelists, and one man I like above all who was the model for Doctor Magiot in The Comedians, a novel I never dreamed then that I would come to write. He was a doctor and a philosopher—but not a Communist. For a time he had been Minister of Health, but he found his hands too tied, so he resigned (something which it would have been very dangerous to do under Doctor Duvalier)…He was a very big man and very black, of great dignity and with an old-world courtesy. He was to die in exile — more fortunately than Doctor Magiot? Who can tell? It was during that period I attended the Voodoo ceremony I describe in the novel.

…In my hotel, the Oloffson (I call the Trianon in The Comedians), there were three guests besides myself—the Italian manager of the casino and an old American artist and his wife — a gentle couple whom I cannot deny bore some resemblance to Mr. and Mrs. Smith of the novel. He wanted to teach the use of the silk screen to Haitian artists, so that they could earn a better living by selling reproductions of their paintings in the States…One night the three of us braved the dark to visit the brothel I have described as Mere Catherine’s. There were no customers except a couple of Tontons Macoute. “Mr. Smith” began to draw the girls who had been dancing together decorously and decoratively, and the Tontons glared through their dark glasses at this strange spectacle of a fearless happiness and an innocence they couldn’t understand.

… The Comedians, I am glad to say, touched him [Papa Doc Duvalier] on the raw. He attacked it personally in an interview he gave in Le Matin, the paper he owned in Port-au-Prince — the only review I have ever received from a Chief of State. “Le livre n’est pas bien ecrit. Comme l’oeuvre d’un ecrivain et d’un journaliste, le livre n’a aucune valeur.”

…for five long years after my visit his Ministry of Foreign Affairs published an elaborate and elegant brochure, illustrated on glossy paper, dealing with my case. A lot of research had gone into its preparation, with many quotations drawn from the introductions I had written for a French edition of my books. Printed in French and English and entitled “Graham Greene Demasque Finally Exposed,” it included a rather biased sketch of my career. This expensive work was distributed to the Press through the Haitian embassies in Europe, but distribution cased abruptly when the President found the result was not the one he desired. “A liar, a cretin, a stool-pigeon…unbalanced, sadistic, perverted…a perfect ignoramus…lying to his heart’s content…the shame of proud and noble England…a spy…a drug addict…a torturer.” (The last epithet has always a little puzzled me.)

I am proud to have had Haitian friends who fought courageously in the mountains against Doctor Duvalier, but a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels, and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.

from Ways of Escape, pp.228-230, 232

http://greeneland.tripod.com/comedians.htm

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