Chapter 1
Graham Greene, Writer and Man
The Writer
With the exception of money earned as an occasional spy, journalist or editor, Graham Greene was that rare breed of writer who lived entirely off book advances, royalties, and payments for commissioned articles. Unlike many prominent twentieth-century authors, he never served as visiting professor of literature or creative writing. If he had failed to become a writer, Greene said, he would have been happy running a used bookshop. He even visited them in his dreams in search of elusive tomes (Greene 1990, p. 323). One of the justifications for the present metafictional study is that Greene wrote so much about authorship and creation. Perhaps his most famous work, The End of the Affair (1951), concerns a novelist's affair with a woman who wants to become Catholic. Sarah dies before she can complete the process, then the writer learns that she was Catholic all along. As an infant, her mother had her baptized in secret, hoping that 'it would "take." Like vaccination' (1951, p. 136). Greene himself joined the Church after graduating from Oxford, though he reverted to an agnostic position for the last 20 years of his life. If religion never completely took, literature did. He fell in love with adventure novels as a boy and much of his adult life reads like one. For decades, he travelled the world, returning home to write novels set in the exotic locales he had visited. In the final years of his life, his travelling days behind him, he wrote one last book, The Captain and the Enemy (1988), a version of a boys' adventure novel complete with smugglers, secret codes, hidden gold, and disguised identities.
Greene was a prolific writer who adhered to the same strict writing regime ascribed to two of his fictional novelists, Maurice Bendrix from The End of the Affair and Argentine Jorge Julio Saavedra in The Honorary Consul (1973). He aimed to write 500 words per day. If he was on a roll, he sometimes exceeded 1000 words, but he was just as likely to stop in mid-sentence once he had reached his goal (Sherry 1989, p. 308). Almost every morning by 6:30, he was poised over lined foolscap, Parker 51 fountain pen in hand. Two hours later, he counted the words, scribbled the total in the margin and went on with his day, returning to his desk in the late afternoon to edit his work. He resisted using a typewriter because writing, he said, 'is tied up with the hand' (Greene 1990, p. 323), though he did exchange the Parker for a Dictaphone in the early 1950s. Otherwise, the regimen changed very little between 1929 and 1988 (Greene R. 2020, p. 266). During that time, he wrote more than 25 novels, hundreds of book and movie reviews, political journalism, plays, short stories, children's literature, and film scripts.
Early on Greene struggled to make it as a writer. He tried too hard to churn out best-sellers until, after 10 years of hits and misses, he got things right in Brighton Rock (1938), a tightly written thriller with a focus on evil. He initially called it an 'entertainment', though he dropped the tag during composition, as he found the novel taking a serious turn. In a March 1985 letter, he explained why he labelled some of his books as entertainments, then stopped the practice:
I thought some of my books were more adventure stories and less serious than the others. I found more and more that the distinction was a bad one and that the two types of book came closer and closer to each other. I abandoned the distinction altogether in the case of Travels with My Aunt, which I thought was on one side quite a funny book and could be described as an entertainment but on the other hand it was a book that described old age and death.
(Greene R. 2007, p. 385)
The whole idea, he concluded, had been a mistake which he was happy to correct. In a postscript to the above letter, Greene revealed that he had wanted to use a pseudonym, Hilary Trench (alternatively spelled Tench),1 for A Gun for Sale (1936), a thriller completed two years before Brighton Rock. When Heinemann informed him that the largest advance a 'new' author could receive was £50, he opted to publish the book under his own name, subtitling it 'an entertainment' (Greene R. 2007, pp. 385-386; Allain 1983, p. 148). For a writer dependent upon advances, it made more sense to divide his books into separate categories than to use a pseudonym. Many writers have chosen the other route, including contemporary British novelist Julian Barnes, who created an alter ego, Dan Kavanagh, for a series of dark detective works. Perhaps he was trying to discourage readers from associating him with Duffy, his brutal, bisexual detective, or he wanted to protect his reputation as a highbrow literary novelist. We may never know, as Barnes has yet to publicly acknowledge the pseudonym (Dugdale 2014).
The Man
Henry Graham Greene was born on 8 October 1904 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, 30 miles northwest of London. His father, Charles Greene, a schoolmaster, has been described as shy and gentle; his mother, Marion Raymond Greene-Charles's first cousin and a relative of Robert Louis Stevenson-distant and imperious (Sherry 1989, p. 39). The fourth of five children, Graham lived largely in his imagination as a child, preferring to read about adventures rather than have them. He disliked sports, going to great lengths to avoid playing them, which made it difficult to engage fully in the life at Berkhamsted School where his father was headmaster. Much has been made of the door separating Charles Greene's study from the school as a division between enemy camps. Was the headmaster's son on the side of the boys or the authorities? Greene recalled his father's appearance in work clothes 'on the home side of the green baize door' as 'a breach of neutrality' (Greene, A Sort of Life, 1971, p. 28). This division contributed to the creation of a writer who liked to straddle the text so that he could step inside when he wanted to offer his own commentary. Learning to hedge his bets and play for both sides also helped him later in life as a spy and in dealings with political strongmen.
When Greene was a teenager, he was tormented by two fellow pupils, leading him to self-harm and the consideration of suicide. His alarmed parents sent him to London to live with amateur psychoanalyst Kenneth Richmond for a six-month period during which he recovered his equilibrium while discovering the magic of writing. Following Richmond's instructions, he recorded his dreams each morning, then read them aloud. His psychological troubles never disappeared, and 30 years later he requested shock therapy to counter bouts of depression. His doctor demurred, advising him to dig into his childhood memories and record the results. Some of those early remembrances appear in the opening chapter of A Sort of Life.2 The dreams, meanwhile, seeped into the fiction. Greene often incorporated detailed dreams revelatory of characters' psychological states and his own obsessions. In A Gun for Sale (1936), the villain Raven takes a chorus girl hostage. By coincidence, her fiancé is the detective searching for him. She recognizes Raven as a troubled soul, commiserates, and tells him a story to take his mind off dark dreams. In the story, a fox mocks a cat for only having a single skill-tree-climbing-to help him escape from dogs, while the fox has a whole bag of tricks. Just then a hunter appears with hounds, seizing the fox before he has time to open his bag as the cat climbs to safety (p. 154). Raven claims not to know any stories, though he's 'educated all right' and has read 'something about psicko', presumably psychoanalysis. 'I couldn't understand it all', he admits,
but it seems if you told your dreams . . . It was like you carry a load around you; you are born with some of it because of what your father and mother were and their fathers . . . seems as if it goes right back, like it says in the Bible about the sins being visited. Then when you're a kid the load gets bigger; all the things you need to do and can't; and then all the things you do. They get you either way. (p. 160)
According to Raven, telling one's dreams is a form of confession, though 'when you've confessed you go and do it all over again. I mean you tell these doctors everything, every dream you have, and afterwards you don't want to do it. But you have to tell them everything' (p. 160). Greene too found that recording his dreams helped relieve an anxious mind and heart, a function Catholicism also served for many years.
Something else that Greene's London adventure taught him was that running away could be an effective means of dealing with problems, as the title of his second memoir, Ways of Escape (1980), suggests. Alcohol and adultery helped too but when he needed a release, he would remove himself from the situation for days, weeks, and even months. Ironically, his protagonists are never let off so easily, as guilt prevents them from enjoying their escape. This idea is expressed in The Tenth Man (1985),3 a forgotten Greene novella from World War II about a French prisoner of war chosen by lot to be sacrificed so that nine other men will be spared. Unwilling to accept his fate, Chavel convinces Janvier to take his place in return for all of his property. After Janvier dies, his relatives find themselves well off, while Chavel's...
