'Salacious' Graham Greene bio eclipses centenary events

LONDON - A new Graham Greene biography that includes details of the British writer's penchant for prostitutes and voracious sexual appetite is overshadowing events celebrating the centenary of his birth this weekend.

Greene biographer Norman Sherry has published the final volume in The Life of Graham Greene, his monumental biography. The final addition to the three-volume work, first published in 1989, covers the mid-1950s until Greene's death in 1991.

Graham Greene in Paris,1984. (AP photo)

Though Sherry retraces Greene's adventurous life, far-flung travels and his writing, it is the intimate sections of the biography that are attracting the most attention.

Sherry, a professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, details the author's bouts with depression, struggles with his Roman Catholic faith and his considerable sexual exploits – calling Greene "a sexual raider" who "continued to cross the line, to break taboos" throughout his life.

"Brothels fascinated Greene," notes Sherry, before reproducing a list of Greene's 47 favourite prostitutes, whom he gave such nicknames as Russian Boots and Bond Street French.

According to the biography, Green also had many flings and several long-term affairs while married to Vivien, his wife of more than 60 years.

The product of more than 20 years of research, Sherry's biography also explores Greene's vast literary output, including magazine articles, short stories, plays and novels such as The Quiet American, The Third Man, The End of the Affair and Our Man in Havana.

Greene family objects

Understandably, Greene's family is not amused, with his daughter Caroline Bourget claiming Sherry's work contains "lots of errors, lots of mistakes."

"I wouldn't take what Sherry says as gospel," she told the Associated Press. "He's just put pages and pages of Graham's writing and some fairly banal comment. I don't think it's a biography as such."

Readers who want to know the real Graham Greene should read his books and not the biography, said the author's nephew Nick Dennys.

"He was a very empathetic and perceptive person," Dennys said. "That quality – the ability to empathize across boundaries – will last. That's something all the stuff in the biographies, the salacious details, misses."

Born Oct. 2, 1904, Greene was the author of more than two dozen novels that often feature characters treading the line between faith and desire or making moral decisions in tense political climates.

A former British secret agent in west Africa during the Second World War, he once said that his mission was to write about "a dangerous edge of things psychologically and sometimes politically."

Events to celebrate the centenary of Greene's birth include an exhibition of memorabilia at the British Library, a weeklong conference in his hometown of Berkhamstead and the staging of a musical adaptation of his Brighton Rock at a London theatre.