A Life on the World’s Edge: Graham Greene (1904-1991)

He did not plan on a long life. As a boy, he toyed with suicide, employing, among other means, a dull knife, hay-fever drops and a mild overdose of aspirin; he also survived several sessions of Russian roulette. Grown older, evidently in spite of himself, he left his native England as often as possible to court danger and disease, wherever and whenever they might prove most virulent: Africa, Mexico, Indochina, Cuba, Haiti, Central America. None of these places killed him; instead they furnished material for many of his more than 50 books, including novels, short story collections, travel writings, plays, essays, autobiography, biography and children’s tales. So Graham Greene’s death last week, at 86, prompts not only sadness and tributes but also a question: What would the contemporary world look like if he had got his wish and not lived to describe it?

For no serious writer of this century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than did Graham Greene. Millions who have never read him are nonetheless familiar with his vision. Versions of Greene-scenes can be found in daily headlines or wherever entertainment flickers: the dubious quest, undertaken by a flawed agent with divided loyalties against an uncertain enemy; the wrench of fear or of violence that confronts an otherwise ordinary person with a vision of eternal damnation or inexplicable grace.

Greene did not dream up this terrain of momentous border crossings and casual betrayals, and he could be peevish with those who praised his inventiveness: “Some critics have referred to a strange violent ‘seedy’ region of the mind (why did I ever popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world blinkered. ‘This is Indochina,’ I want to exclaim, ‘this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately described.’ ” But on his journeys the author carried a transforming talent and temperament that rendered all the places, no matter how meticulously portrayed, not only seedy but unmistakably Greeneland.

Birth and circumstances drove Greene to a life on the edge. Congenitally unhappy with what he later called his manic-depressive self, he found himself a double agent at a tender age, a student at the Berkhamsted School, where his father reigned as headmaster. Naturally, his classmates made his life miserable, and Greene sought retreat in voracious reading. But the drama served up by his favorite authors (among them John Buchan and Joseph Conrad) reminded Greene that he had been born at an unpropitious time. “We were,” he wrote, “a generation brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous disillusionment of the First World War.” At Oxford, he dabbled in writing and later drifted into newspaper work, eventually becoming a subeditor at the London Times.

There he might have stayed had it not been for his stubborn conviction that he could become a writer and his marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whom he had met at Oxford. She was a Roman Catholic, and in 1926 Greene had converted to her faith. He later recalled his feelings after formally being received into the church: “There was no joy in it at all, only a somber apprehension.” Greene never took his religion lightly, and the Catholicism that would come to stamp his fiction served both as a stern gauge by which to measure the behavior of fallen mortals and as a powerful source of divine mercy.

Greene’s first published novel, The Man Within (1929), enjoyed a modest success and was made into a film. This pattern was to be repeated throughout his career, for Greene and the movies virtually grew up together. He learned the economies of filmed narration — the quick cuts, the disembodied perspective, the interpolated conversations — used them in his books and then saw them re-employed in adaptations of his own work on the screen.

His greatest fiction spanned the years 1938 to ’51: Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951) and, most hauntingly, The Power and the Glory (1940). The pilgrimage of the nameless “whiskey priest,” on the run in a Mexican state from a sectarian tyranny, remains a thrilling adventure of despair and irrational redemption.

For all his worldly success, Greene retained the attitudes dictated by his childhood: a dislike for the strong — hence his increasing postwar opposition to the U.S. — and a sympathy for the underdog, a category that came to include everyone from Fidel Castro to Kim Philby, a onetime friend and also a British intelligence officer who famously spied for and then defected to the Soviet Union. The last 30 or so years of his life were spent in a modest & apartment in an undistinguished building in Antibes, on the French Mediterranean. Long separated (but never divorced) from his wife, Greene wrote conscientiously some 300 words every day, among them the opening sentence of the second volume of his autobiography: “What a long road it has been.”