October 02, 2004
A Centenary Note
Today marks the hundredth birthday of one of my all-time favorite authors: the illustrious British novelist, notorious philanderer, and enigmatic spy Graham Greene. I’ve come to him late—I read my first novel just this year, and have since plowed through several. His writing has a unique lyrical quality to it, and his characters a depth and personality that strikes close to me. I marked his birthday today at my favorite used bookstore in Washington, Riverby Books on Capitol Hill, where I found a first edition of his novel “The Captain and the Enemy.”
As today’s Writer’s Almanac explains,
[Greene] was the son a school headmaster, and was a very shy child who often tried to run away from home. After several suicide attempts in his teens, his therapist encouraged him to start writing and introduced him to several of his literary friends. Greene got a job as a journalist for the Times in London. He met his future wife when she wrote in to correct a mistake in one of his articles.
Greene’s life of adventure began when in World War II, where his infidelity saved his life during the Blitz—his house was bombed while he was at his lover’s house. During the war, he began a life-long association with British intelligence, working in Sierra Leone. Over the next half-century, he traveled frequently, writing prolifically along the way. When Norman Sherry began his three-volume biography of the literary great, Greene sent him a map demarking all of the places he had lived and visited. Sherry set out to recreate the routes, learning about Greene’s writing along the way. It took him 20 years to follow in Greene’s footsteps.
What attracts me most of all though is his obvious depth of feeling and association with his characters. Every good author feels a certain sense of attachment and joie de vivre through his or her characters, and Greene took this to the extreme. He had calling cards printed with the names of some of his more famous characters, and would hand them out in bars and other places soaked in anonymity. For brief moments, when no one was looking, he became his own writing.
As one critic noted:
Graham Greene was a great novelist of a special kind. Unlike many literary practitioners in this century, he did not experiment with language, subvert traditional narrative, or choose exotic subjects. He simply used the powerful imagination that led him to speak of his work as a 'guided dream.' That imagination—fired, at least during the great middle years, by intense moral and religious perception—made Greene's fiction the best-realized portrayal in its time of the drama of the human soul.
Most recently I read his colonialist classic “The Quiet American.” In my latest travels with Graham Greene, I saw myself in both Fowler—the cynical embittered foreign correspondent—and Aldon Pyle—the Harvard-educated do-gooder dead-set on reforming the Vietnamese government. As Fowler remarks about Pyle, “I never knew a man who had better motives for al the trouble he caused.” Sadly, I can’t help but see a bit of Pyle in some of our nation’s more recent forays onto the world stage.
“We’ll never see his like again,” Greene’s longtime biographer said, on NPR's great remembrance of Greene today.
That’s a shame, but I’m glad we did get to see him.
