The charm and contradictions of a great writer – Sydney Morning Herald

Ford Madox Ford said, early on, of his work, I could hardly believe such writing could come out of England, while Joseph Conrad is the early influence Greene had to get out from under. And Conrad was to some extent still dictating the excruciating grandeurs of the style in Brighton Rock, Greenes first masterpiece, of which Greene said: Brighton Rock I began in 1937 as a detective story and continued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as an error of judgement.

This biography is brisk about the childhood and young manhood, far too confident in its assertions about manic depression and Greenes games of Russian roulette, but gradually the sheer dramatic momentum of the life wins through.

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He became a Catholic under the influence of his wife Vivien he insisted he was not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be Catholic and took to it with an impassioned seriousness. To be a saint, he said, is the only happiness. Oh Christ if one could only set ones ambition at goodness.

He thought of the rather degraded love of success as just that but it was one of his vices together with the dexadrine he took that caused the depression he tried to wash away with a tidal wave of alcohol. Richard Greene is overly slick about these matters but good at notating them.

One trouble for Greene was not so much that he was a root-rat as a love-rat. He wrote to his sister from Sierra Leone: Things can be hell, I know. The peculiar form its taken with me in the last four years has been in loving people as equally as makes no difference, the awful struggle to have your cake and eat it, the inability to throw over one for the sake of the other.

He was married to Vivien, living with Dorothy Glover, and in love with Catherine Walston (the model for the saint in The End of the Affair, played by Julianne Moore in the film) and wrote to his wife: I should always and with anyone have been a bad husband; all the madness and melancholy are just symptoms of the disease of a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also the material. Cure the disease, and I doubt that the writer would remain.

Julianne Moore in the film version of Graham Greenes The End of the Affair.Credit:

He saw writing as a form of therapy and wondered how anyone could escape from madness, melancholic panic fear without it.

At the same time he seems to have charmed the birds out of the trees. He was some kind of foreign correspondent and that was another obsession. He saw the anti-clericalism of 30s Mexico, the savage reprisals against the Mau Mau in Kenya, the contradictions and failures of American policy in Vietnam, the crimes of Papa Doc in Haiti, and he at first applauded Castro in Cuba.

One of the central tenets of this vivid, serviceable biography is the belief of John le Carre that Greene made no significant contribution to intelligence but, like le Carre himself, identified with the parallels between it and the writers vocation, constantly using life, manipulatively, like a secret agent.

Greenes politics seem to have had the same toughness and consistency in the midst of contradiction as everything else about this self-confessed great sinner who wanted to climb whatever mountain led to the Most High. He said that a writer should change his views at the drop of a hat because he should be on the side of the victims and the victims changed.

One of the virtues of Richard Greenes book is the literary verdicts and the comments on the many film and play versions he cites. He is good on The Third Man, for example, and cites Scorcese on Orson Welles face as Harry Lime. Greene, who had to endure the changed ending of the 50s film of The Quiet American, said he thought the novel might outlive Joseph Mankiewiczs incoherent film.

Graham Greene was a boundlessly fascinating figure, full of every kind of contradiction and every kind of charm. This book is no masterpiece but it captures the light and darkness of a very great master indeed.

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If you want the slightly wondering, very self-possessed tone of the man who was one of the greatest entertainers and one of the great craftsman of the 20th century, try this on the business of writing: A novel is a work in which characters interrelate. It doesnt need a plot. The novelists own intervention must be very limited The author has to go on writing. Sometimes he writes things which appear to have no raison detre. Only at the end is the reason apparent. The author intervenes to allow the plane to land. It is time for the novel to end.

He had an absolute lucidity and a weird sunniness in the face of every darkness. Read him if you despair of the ability of writing to captivate you.

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The charm and contradictions of a great writer - Sydney Morning Herald