| “Graham Greene,” wrote a Greene scholar, “has always been a mobile writer, never easy to fix.” Perfect words. Immaculate description. And, he explained: “His [Greene’s] pursuit of fiction was criminal-centred; his extensive novels skirted heresy; his journalism championed unpopular causes; his comedies were sad; and, his politics paradoxical.” Yes, Greene was, indeed, “the electric hare who[m] the grey-hound critics are not meant to catch.” Because, at the root of “denial,” as the critic Philip Stratford rightly observed, lay a carefully nurtured ambiguity. Not only that, Greene also espoused a rare sense of “cultivated” restraint marked by literary journeys.
It was an indispensable part of his existence - the real context in his books. Hence, long years for him were, quite simply, not the question. He nurtured the nature in him - the forte of any good writer - through a host of recollections from his childhood, with a sense of Freudian alchemy.  | | British author Graham Greene smiles in this 1984 file photo. As scholars gather this week to mark the centenary of the novelist's birth on October 2, 1904, discussion of Greene's literary legacy is overshadowed by renewed interest in the author's tempestuous personal life and voracious sexual appetite. (AP) |
Greene’s literary mosaic was riveting and wholesome, but he carried “anguish” with him. A moralist and, therefore, controversial, Greene’s clearly-worded works of suspenseful, or ethical ambivalence, bordered on a delicate balance — of both gloom and salvation.
His novels were replete with a sense of outspokenness and foreboding. Besides, his writing also scrutinised self-deception, drawing upon the groundswell of its own singular mission — of sin, mental darkness, human mind, and failure — wherefrom it waited for everything to unfold with transcendent expectancy and perceptivity. Greene recognised the presence of war -- something to be put up with -- like a certain continual, but not terminal, disease. And if evil to him was like ague in his veins, he carried in his every expression a remarkable and innate sense of political topicality. A hugely germane writer, Greene grappled with everything that touched the human element — depression, capitalist monopolies, conflict, survival on the edge of the precipice, smuggling, spying and anti-Americanism. His prose was uniformly sensitive — like brush strokes. Greene sure “towed” the torch of English literature along with him like a colossus, with both authority and elegance aside from a parabolic intent. As he once wrote: “The creative writer perceives the world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of a great public world we all share.” Greene left behind him a monumental wealth of writing, all witness to his literary genius. Though he was the least parochial of writers, and, in a way, elusive, Greene not only explored the distinction between rituals and legalities, but also faith, candour and justice. | A subversive romantic, what made him stand apart from other writers in a league of his own was his characteristic individuality. Greene never ever experimented with language, sabotaged conformist sequence of events, or selected sensational themes. He effortlessly used his mind’s eye as his own radar and sextant — a guided dream. In so doing, he typified the drama of the human psyche. Greene carried with him the pedigree of RL Stevenson, the immortal creator of Treasure Island. He was very special. To cull an accolade: “The Greene novel seems to be based on a theory which is not unlike the principle of aerodynamics according to which the aircraft must maintain a specific speed, or else it will tumble down. This speed Greene achieved by his masterly selection of detail, splendid economy of words, language, and by swift and frequent change of scenes.” | Graham Greene, one of English language’s greatest writers, was born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England. He was a four-in-one phenomenon — a novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist, of the top-draw. His father was the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended for some years… His somewhat restive disposition once led Greene to also “flit” away from school… Greene was educated at Oxford. In his mid-twenties, he began to work for The Times, London, and was also a freelance writer, for a while. In 1935, he became a film critic for The Spectator; five years later, he was named its literary editor. In 1942, he began to work for the British Foreign Office, in West Africa, and, after World War II, he began to travel extensively… Greene’s novels — concerned as they are with the moral dilemma of human beings in relation to God and/or divinity — treat life’s ethical uncertainties, and complexities, in the framework of politics. They are also fundamentally fables of the doomed, where Greene’s heroes often “realise” their faults, and “achieve” deliverance through immense distress and soul-searching agony. Greene died on April 3, 1991, in Vevey, Switzerland. He was 86. |
Greene was an all-embracing writer with a pragmatic vision. [It was a different thing that he became a Catholic — to please his lady love, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, from whom he separated later, but did not divorce]. His human canvas extended far beyond his novels. Not surprisingly, Greene gave immense joy to his readers - - running into millions -- even beyond the English-speaking world. He still does. His books have been translated into 28 languages and have sold more than 30 million copies in both hardcover and paperback. How did he evaluate himself, amidst all the adulation? “Writing,” he once explained, “is a form of therapy; sometimes, I wonder how all those who don’t write, compose or paint, can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.”
However, towards the end of his long innings, Greene began to take a detached view of success, or failure, of literary and other endeavours. He once said, “One falls in all sorts of ways in life, doesn’t one, which are more important than writing books in human relations and that sort of thing…” Greene critically x-rayed his own tradition and practised his own sense of morality — of not being at home in one’s own home. He could do without the Nobel Prize against his name. It was Nobel’s loss; not his. Besides, Greene was far ahead of his time. He never condoned the ethicalities of religion, guilt and unscrupulousness. To readers, in the developing world, his works have unquestionably made profound sense, thanks to his exposition of faith, coupled with political contemplation and spiritual reasoning. | Although his background was typically British, Greene always defended popular movements struggling for freedom and democracy. And, while it would not be fair to justify that he was unaware of the pitfalls of one certain Fidel Castro whom he always admired, Greene’s faith in the unconventional politician was derived from his deeply held convictions that were visible as early as the 1940s, in his work, The Lawless Roads. Greene also wrote a number of essays, short stories and film scripts. He penned many books for children, too.
If his novel, The Man Within, 1929, bid fair to his first big success, his grand repertoire that followed — Heart of the Matter, Power and the Glory, The Third Man, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, A Burnt-Out Case, The Human Factor, The Tenth Man etc., and several other innumerable, or “lesser,” writings — made him a writer par excellence, and a novelist beyond compare. To him goes the credit of hastening one of India’s finest writers RK Narayan’s entry into the world of books, as a novelist in his own “write” and right. Greene also had a penchant for adventure, in the dangerous light of things. No small wonder that his dream from childhood was focused on playing the Russian roulette.
This trait extended to his writing - Greene was fearless with words. Yet, what was most vital to him was the human act, and its morality — of individuals as well as nations. His human canvas, therefore, speaks to us directly, in effect, of our own experiences and observations: of oppression, politics, belief and faith. Greene’s classicist outlook, so to speak, was autobiographical - - universal, and lush Green[e], forever. Writers like him are not lost or forgotten. Curiously though, Greene never really showed much concern in the abstract questions of literary theory. His novels dealt with the seamy underside of life, with or without poetic licence: to bring home the truth, and its essence, to the reader.
Of memory that is based on a primordial past: “Out of reality are our tales of imagination [and] metaphor.” Greene’s faith was also dogged in the persistence of some kind of belief: something so bitter to betray. He once took on the mafia, single-handedly, when the daughter of a close friend fell into their clutches. In so doing, he added that extra dimension to the twentieth-century novel. |
By his very own admission, Greene wrote both “entertainment” and “serious novels” — many of them with the underpinning of a politically enthralling register. What, of course, made Greene Greene was his sublime penchant for words, and brevity of expression.
To cull an example from one of his works: “What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought and how useless… He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who had missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted — to be a saint.”
To cull another gem: “When you visualise a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity — that was a quality God’s image carried with it.”Greene hated to be photographed. Nevertheless, the secretiveness he espoused in his novels was seductive. So was sin. A number of Greene’s heroes, like Scobie, believed themselves to be disaster-prone; and, they also sought their “destiny” with a kind of rapture. Another paradigm: in Brighton Rock, the murderer Pickie, is more sympathetic than the righteous avenger Ida. All the same, some of Greene’s foremost critics, in phrase and idiom, maintain that Greene spoke of sin only in his books. That’s not all. A latter-day biographer, Michael Shelden, has gone a bit far - he’s called Greene a lecherous womaniser, an alcoholic, a confirmed spy - who betrayed the trust of those who thought they were his allies. | Greene’s friend, Leopoldo Duran, author of Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, cogently refutes such “outrageous” charges. He says, “Shelden is trying to destroy Graham… the greatest writer of the twentieth century. He cannot destroy Graham. No one is able to do that… Graham may have been the victim of occasional depression… I have discovered that great men are really very simple — and, the greater they are, the simpler they are. Graham was like a big child.” A priest, Duran, who holds a Ph.D., from King’s College, London, also adds: “No one knew Graham better than I did… I knew him better than I know myself. I’m a mystery to myself — but, he wasn’t a mystery.”
Duran, however, admits that Graham was unfaithful; and, he drank “limited” amounts of alcohol… All the same, Duran, who knew Greene for 27 years, is also unfazed by Shelden’s revelation, which accuses Greene of being a closet homosexual. “Certainly not,” argues Duran. And, he asserts: “To travel with a man, to talk with him, eat with him, stay in the same house as him, over many years — that’s to know someone.” Greene, with his own sense of practical wisdom, perforce, saw it all emerging. As he once wrote: “To render the highest justice [to corruption], you must retain your innocence. You have to be conscious all the time within yourself of treachery… to something valuable...”
Call it Greene’s “empathetic gear,” or whatever — it speaks of an ambivalent play between light and dark shades of truthfulness and catastrophe, virtue and flaw, optimism and gloom, romance and pragmatism. This was Greene’s evergreen canvas, a vision like no other — and, something quite beyond “the outlands of danger.” It was also, in essence, Greene’s true greatness; and, the magnitude of his writings. Timeless. Effulgent. Eternal. Enduring. The Graham Greene Birthplace Trust is at www.grahamgreenebt.org |
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