Book Review

Tenderness, guilt and ambition

Graham Greene: a life in letters

Some controversy lies behind the publication of this book. Norman Sherry, whom Greene appointed as his authorised biographer, made extensive use of the novelist's letters, especially the huge collection at the University of Austin, Texas, in the first volume of his biography, published in 1989; and, in spite of the novelist's displeasure at what he considered its excessive attention to his private life, obtained Greene's signature, just a few days before his death in 1991, to a document giving Sherry permission "excluding any other" to quote from copyright material. The meaning of the quoted phrase is ambiguous, depending on how one interprets the effect of a comma which Greene inserted after it, but Sherry invoked the document to prevent anyone else from publishing Greene's letters until now, while drawing deeply on them for the second and third volumes of his biography.

As its subtitle indicates, this collection, ably edited by Richard Greene (a Canadian scholar and no relation to the novelist), is also a kind of biography. Following the model of Philip Horne's excellent Henry James: a life in letters (1999), the selected letters are separated by substantial editorial notes explaining their contexts and identifying the persons and events referred to, a method which gives a narrative fluency to the volume and avoids the necessity for a lot of distracting footnotes.

Readers who have ploughed their way through Sherry's enormous work and who may be wondering whether he left anything interesting unquoted can rest assured. They will be glad to have some of the most important letters available in a complete form, but there is no shortage of new material. Greene himself calculated that he wrote about 2,000 letters a year, and many have turned up quite recently, including a cache of family letters concealed in a hollow book. Those to his mother, brothers and children reveal a side of Greene's character not very evident in biographies of him or readily inferable from his own writings: affectionate, tender, humorously self-deprecating, and sensitive to others' feelings.

The first letter in the volume, written to his "Mumma", Marion Greene, when he was 16, foreshadows his literary vocation in its account of fellow passengers on a sea voyage, including "a large fat profiteer who ... has practically no chin, the fat of his neck drowning it in one colossal ‘bulge'. He has cultivated a critical twist to his mouth and snorts at every dish."

Greene writes exultantly to his brother Raymond in 1928 about the success of his first published novel, The Man Within: "I hoped that one day one might be taken but never in wildest dreams to be so received with open arms ... and the funniest part of the absurd, joyful situation is that the book is quite terribly second-rate." This judgement was not of course sincere, but a device to avoid hubris which he applied to every new book throughout his life. I have always suspected that Greene's cult of "failure" as a sign of authenticity in his writings and public pronouncements concealed an insatiable desire to succeed as a writer, and there is a revealing admission to this effect in a letter to Catherine Walston written from Malacca on Christmas Day 1950, triggered by a chance encounter with a man called Wheeler who had bullied him at school: "What a lot began with Wheeler & Carter - suspicion, mental pain, loneliness, this damned desire to be successful that comes from a sense of inferiority ... ."

Catherine Walston was the model for Sarah in The End of The Affair, and the great love of a life that notoriously included many other relationships with women, some brief, some painfully protracted. Although the story is now familiar, there is an undeniable fascination in retracing in these letters Greene's obsessional courtship of Vivien Dayrell-Browning, which led him to become a Catholic, their troubled, foredoomed marriage, his passionate affair with the glamorous Catherine, who had become a Catholic under the spell of his books, and his tortuous attempts to reconcile his desires with the conflicting needs of these two women and of his long-term mistress, Dorothy Glover, and with the moral theology of the Catholic Church, of which he was, at that stage, a fervently believing member.

Although he wrings his hands and beats his breast in these letters at the emotional misery he is causing and suffering, he was aware that his literary inspiration came partly from this self-inflicted pain. As he says in a laconic aside to Catherine, "what would a novelist do without a sense of guilt?" But of the genuineness of his passion for her there is eloquent testimony in this book.

Many of those 2,000 letters a year were replies to readers of his novels, with whom he was often surprisingly patient and open. In a long letter of 1978 to a devout Dublin grandmother who confessed to having scruples when she first read his work, he quoted a remark of Pope Paul VI in a private audience that "Parts of all your books will always offend some Catholics, and you shouldn't pay any attention to that", and went on to give a fascinating account of his own theologically liberal but liturgically conservative stance in the post-conciliar Church.

There are also many letters which document Greene's practical generosity to writers he admired, such as R.K. Narayan and Muriel Spark, and to publishers, editors, agents and translators whose contributions he valued (there is a charming letter in which he asks his French agent for many years, Marie Biche, to accept a small car as a present); also his readiness to use his name, prestige and influence to help writers suffering persecution in various parts of the world. And it is pleasant to discover that he was reconciled to Shirley Temple, the innocent occasion of a ruinous libel suit against Greene when she was a child star, in their mature years.

There is far too much of interest in this book to mention here. It is indispensable reading for anyone interested in Graham Greene.

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