|
English
novelist, short-story writer, playwright and journalist, whose novels treat
moral issues in the context of political settings.
Greene is one of the most widely read novelist of the 20th-century, a superb
storyteller. Adventure and suspense are constant elements in his novels and
many of his books have been made into successful films. Greene was a
candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times, but he never
received the award.
'No human being can really
understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.'
Graham Greene was born in
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, as the son of Charles Greene and Marion Raymond
Greene. His father had a poor academic record but became the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, following Dr. Thomas Fry.
Greene was educated at Berkhamstead School and Balliol
College, Oxford. He had a natural talent for
writing, and during his three years at Balliol, he published more than sixty
poems, stories, articles and reviews, most of which appeared in the student
magazine Oxford Outlook and in the Weekly Westminster Gazette. In 1926 he
converted to Roman Catholicism, later explaining that 'I hand to find a
religion to measure my evil against.' When critics started to study the religious
faith in his work, Greene complained that he hated the term 'Catholic
novelist'. In 1926 Geene moved to London. He worked for
the Times of London
(1926-30), and for the Spectator, where he was a film critic and a
literary editor until 1940. In 1927 he married Vivien Dayrell-Browning. After
the collapse of their marriage he had several relationships, among others in
the 1950s with the Swedish actress Anita Björk, whose husband writer Stig
Dagerman had committed suicide a year earlier. During the 1920s and 1930s
Greene had, according to his own private reckoning, some sort of of
relationship with no less than forty-seven prostitutes. In 1938 Greene began
an affair with Dorothy Glover, a theatre costume designer; they were closely
involved with each other until the late 1940s. She started a career as a book
illustrator under the name 'Dorothy Craigie' and wrote children's books of
her own, among them Nicky and Nigger and the Pirate (1960).
Greene worked during
World War II in an intelligence capacity for the Foreign Office in London, directly under Kim Philby, a future defector to
the Soviet Union. One mission took Greene to
West Africa, but he did not find much excitement in his remote posting -
'This is not a government house, and there is no larder: there is also a
plague of house-flies which come from the African bush lavatories round the
house,' he wrote to London.
Greene returned to England
in 1942. His old friend, Philby, Greene met again in the late 1980s in
Moskow. After the war he travelled widely as a free-lance journalist, and
lived long periods in Nice, on the French Riviera. With his anti-American
comments, Greene gained access to such Communist leaders as Fidel Castro and
Ho Chi Minh, but the English writer Evelyn Waugh, who knew Greene well,
assured in a letter to his friend that the author 'is a secret agent on our
side and all his buttering up of the Russians is 'cover'.'
Greene received numerous
honours from around the world, and published two volumes of autobiography, A
SORT OF LIFE (1971), WAYS OF ESCAPE (1980), and the story of his friendship
with Panamanian dictator General Omar Torillo. - Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland,
on April 3, 1991. In the service the priest declared, 'My faith tells me that
he is now with God, or on the way there.' As a writer Greene was very
prolific and versatile. He wrote five dramas and screenplays for several
films based on his novels. In the 1930s and early 1940s he wrote over five
hundred reviews of books, films, and plays, mainly for The Spectator. Although
Greene knew that some critics considered his novels entertainment, his own
models were Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. In his personal
library was a large collection of James's work.
Greene's first published
book was BABBLING APRIL (1925), a collection of poetry. It was followed by
two novels in the style of Joseph Conrad. The title for THE MAN WITHIN (1929)
was taken from Sir Thomas Browne's (1605-l682) 'There's another man
within me that's angry with me.'
'In Stamboul Train
for the first and last time in my life I deliberately set out to write a book
to please, one which with luck might be made into a film. The devil looks
after his own and I succeeded in both aims, though the film rights seemed at
the time an unlikely dream, for before I had completed the book, Marlene
Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express, the English had made Rome
Express, and even the Russians had produced their railway film, Turksib.
My film came last and was far and away the worst, though not so bad as a
later television production by the BBC.' (from Introduction, in Stamboul
Train, 1974)
After the unsuccessful
attempts as a novelist, Greene was about to abandon writing. His first
popular success was STAMBOUL TRAIN (1932), a thriller with a topical and political
flavour. One of its characters, Quin Savory, was a parody of J.B. Priestley -
Greene depicted nastily the writer as a sex offender. Next year he attacked
another well-loved writer, Beatric Potter, in an article called 'Beatrix
Potter: A Critical Estimate'. Also the American actress, Shirley Temple got
her share when Greene wrote that she was trying to excite old perverts. This
time Greene had to pay for his remark.
THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT
(1939) included a strange piece of Anti-Semitic characterization, in which
the mysterious Forbes/Furstein, a rich Jew, s to destroy traditional
English culture from within. However, in 1981 the author was invited to Israel and
awarded the Jerusalem Prize. Greene's religious convictions did not become
overtly apparent in his fiction until THE BRIGHTON ROCK (1938), which
depicted a teenage gangster Pinkie with a kind of demonic spirituality.
Religious themes were explicit in the novels THE POWER AND THE GLORY (1940),
THE HEART OF THE MATTER (1948), a story of a man trapped between the
emotional demands of two women, and THE END OF THE AFFAIR (1951), which
established Greene's international reputation. These novels had much in
common with the works of such French Catholic writers as Georges Bernanos and
François Mauriac.
In his review of The
Heart of the Matter George Orwell attacked Greene's concept of 'the
sanctified sinner': 'He appears to share the idea, which has been
floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué
in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is
reserved for Catholics only.' The novel was set in Sierra Leone
where the author had spent a miserable period during the war. The hero of the
story, Major Scobie, dies saying: 'Dear God, I love' The rest is silence.
Greene was perpetually concerned with the problem of grace, with the shape of
God's mercy, and saw Catholicism not as a creed for the triumphant, but
rather for the desperate. The End of the Affair was partly based on
Greene's affair with Catherine Walston, whom he had met in 1946. She was
married to one of the richest men in England, Henry Walston, a
prominent supporter of the Labour Party. Catherine was the mother of five
children. Greene's relationship with her continued over ten years and
produced a book, AFTER TWO YEARS (1949), which was printed 25 copies. Most of
the copies were later destroyed. In The End of the Affair Catherine was
'Sarah Miles' and Greene the popular novelist 'Maurice Bendix', who narrates
the story and tries to understand why Sarah left him. He discovers that when
he was injured in a bomb blast during the war, Sarah promised God that she
would end the affair if Maurice is saved. Sarah dies of a
pneumonia. Maurice's response to his divine rival is: 'I hate you
as though You existed.'
Greene's ability to
create debate and his practical jokes brought him often into headlines. He
recommended Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as his 'Book of the Year' in the
Sunday Times and praised the men involved in the Great Train Robbery.
In a letter to the Spectator he proposed a scheme to bankrupt the
British postal system. In the 1950s Greene's emphasis switched from religion
to politics. He lived at the Majestic hotel in Saigon and made trips to Hong
Kong and Singapore.
In 1953 he was in Kenya,
observing the Mau Mau upraising.
The Asian setting
stimulated Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN (1955), which was about American involvement
in Indochina. The story focuses on the
murder of Alden Pyle (the American of the title). The narrator, Thomas
Fowler, a tough-minded, opium-smoking journalist, arranges to have Pyle
killed by the local rebels. Pyle has stolen Fowler's girl friend, Phuong, and
he is connected to a terrorist act, a bomb explosion in a local café. The
Quit American was considered sympathetic to Communism in the Soviet Union
and a play version of the novel was produced in Moscow. OUR MAN IN HAVANNA (1958) was born
after a journey to Cuba,
but Greene had the story sketched. The novel was made into a film in 1959,
directed by Carol Reed, and during the filming Greene met Ernest Hemingway,
and was invited to his house for drinks. THE COMEDIANS (1966) depicted Papa
Doc Duvalier's repressive rule in Haiti,
and THE HONORARY CONSUL (1973) was a hostage drama set in Paraguay. THE
HUMAN FACTOR (1978) stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for
six months. In the story an agent falls in love with a black woman during an
assignment in South Africa,
but falls in a trap after a brief reprieve from loneliness.
THE THIRD MAN (1949), is among Greene's most popular books. The story about
corruption and betrayal gave basis for the film classic under the same title.
Successful partners on The Fallen Idol (1948) and Our Man in
Havanna (1960), Graham Greene and the director Carol Reed achieved the
peak of their collaboration on this film. In the story Holly Martin (Joseph
Cotten) arrives in Vienna
to discover that his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has died in a car
accident. It turns out that Lime was involved in criminal activities, and
Lime's girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) suspects that his death may not
have been accidental. A porter recalls a mysterious third man at the scene of
the death. One evening Martins sees a man obscured by the shadows, who
suddenly disappears - he is Lime. The meet and Lime rationalizes his villainy
in a speech at a fairground Ferris wheel: 'In Italy for 30 years the Borgias,
they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo,
Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly
love, five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce.
The cuckoo clock.' Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) threatens to deport
Anna and Martins betrays Lime to secure her freedom. In a chase through the
sewers Martins kills Lime, and Anna leaves him after the funeral. - Music,
composed by Anton Karas, became highly popular.
Note: Greene's agent
novels - THE TENTH MAN, OUR MAN IN HAVANNA, HUMAN
FACTOR among others - are partially based on his own experiences in the
British foreign office in the 1940s and his lifelong ties with SIS. As an
agent and a writer Greene is a link in a long tradition from Christopher
Marlowe, Ben Johnson and Daniel Defoe to the modern day writers John Le
Carré, John Dickson Carr, Somerset Maugham, Alec Waugh and Ted Allbeury.
Greene's uncle Sir William Graham Greene helped to establish the Naval
Intelligence Department, and his oldest brother, Herbert, served as a spy for
the Imperial Japanese Navy in the 1930s. Graham's younger sister, Elisabeth,
joined MI6, and recruited his Graham into the regular ranks of the service Note: Greene's mother was a first cousin of
author Robert Louis Stevenson. Another Graham Greene is a Native American who
was nominated for the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for Dances
With Wolves (1990)- See also: Lennart Meri, Eric Ambler
For further reading: Graham Greene's Conradian
Masterplot by Robert Pendleton (1995); Graham Greene: The Man Within by
Michael Shelden (1994); Graham Greene: The Enemy Within by Michael
Shelden (1994); Conversations with Graham Greene, ed. by Henry J.
Donaghy (1992); Graham Greene: A Study of the Short Fiction by Richard
Kelly (1992); The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry (1990); Graham
Greene: A Revaluation, ed. by Jeffrey Meyers (1990); The Life ofGraham
Greene: Vol. 1 1904-l939 by Vincent Sherry (1989); A Reader's Guide to
Graham Greene by Paul O'Prey (1988); Graham Greene by Richard
Kelley (1985); Saints, Sins, and Comedians by Roger Sharrock (1984); The
Other Man by Marie Francoise Allain (1983); Graham Greene, ed. by
Samuel Hynes ( 1973); Graham Greene by David Lodge (1966); The
Labyrinthe Ways of Graham Greene by Francis Leo Kunkel (1960); Graham
Greene and the Heart of the Matter by Marie Mesnet (1954)
Selected bibliography:
- Babbling April, 1925
- The Man Within, 1929 - film 1947,
dir. by Bernard Knowles
- The Name of Action, 1930
- Rumour at Nightfall, 1931
- Stambul Train, 1932 - suom. Idän pikajuna - film 1933,
dir. by Paul Martin
- It's a Battlefield, 1934
- The Old School, 1934 (ed.)
- England Made Me, 1935 - film 1972,
dir. by Peter Duffell
- The Bear Fell Free, 1935
- The Basement Room, 1935
- Journey Without Maps, 1936
- A Gun For Sale / This Gun For Hire, 1936
- film 1942, dir. by Frank Tuttle; film 1957, dir. by James Gagney
- The Brighton Rock, 1938 - suom. Kiveä
kovempi - film 19478, dir. by John Boulting
- The Lawless Roads, 1939
- The Confidential Agent, 1939 - film 1945,
dir. by Herman Shumlin
- The Power and the Glory, 1940 - suom.
Voima ja kunnia - film 1947, dir. by John Ford
- British Dramatists, 1942
- The Ministry of Fear, 1943 - film 1944,
dir. by Fritz Lang
- The Little Train, 1946
- Nineteen Stories, 1947
- The Heart of the Matter, 1948 - suom.
Mutta suurin kaikista - film 1953, dir. by George More O'Ferrall
- Why Do I Write, 1948
- After Two Years, 1949 (with Catherine
Walston)
- The Third Man, 1949 - suom. Kolmas mies
- film 1949, dir. by Carol Reed
- The Little Fire Engine, 1950
- The Best of Saki, 1950 (ed.)
- The Lost Childhood, 1951
- For Christmas, 1951
- The End of the Affair, 1951 - suom.
Jutun loppu - film 1954, dir. by Edward Dmytryk; film 1999,
dir. by Neil Jordan
- The Little Horse Bus, 1952
- The Living Room 1953 (play)
- Essais Catholoques, 1953
- The Little Steamroller, 1953
- Twenty-One Stories, 1954
- The Quiet American, 1955 - suom.
Hiljainen amerikkalainen - film 1958, dir. by Joseph Mankiewicz
- Loser Takes All, 1955 - film 1956,
dir. by Ken Annakin ; film Strike It Rich, 1990
- film script: Saint Joan, based on
George Bernard Shaw's play, 1957, dir. by Otto Preminger
- The Potting Shed, 1957 (play)
- Our Man in Havanna, 1958 - Miehemme
Havannassa, suom. Arvo Turtiainen - film 1961, dir. by
Carol Reed
- The Complaisant Lover, 1959 (play)
- A Burnt Out-Case, 1961 - Loppuun palanut
- In Search of a Character, 1961
- The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, 1962-63
(ed., 4 vols.)
- A Sense of Reality, 1963
- Carving A Statue, 1964 (play)
- The Comedians, 1966 - suom. Näyttelijät
- film 1967, dir. by Peter Glenville
- Victorian Detective Fiction, 1966
- May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other
Comedies of the Sexual Life, 1967
- Collected Essays, 1969
- Travels With My Aunt, 1969 - Tädin
kanssa maailmalla - film 1972, dir. by George Cukor
- A Sort of Life, 1971
- The Virtue of Disloyalty, 1972
- Collected Stories, 1972
- The Pleasure Dome, 1972
- The Honorary Consul, 1973 - Kunniakonsuli
- film 1983, dir. by John MacKenzie
- Lord Rochester's Monkey, 1974
- An Impossible Woman, 1975 (ed.)
- Alas, Poor Maling, 1975 (television
play)
- The Return of A.J.Raffles, 1975 (play)
- The Human Factor, 1978 - Inhimillinen
tekijä - film 1979, dir. by Otto Preminger
- Dr. Fisher of Geneva or The Bomb Party, 1980
- Ways of Escape, 1980
- The Great Jowett, 1980 (play)
- Yes and No, and For Whom the Bell Chimes, 1980
(play)
- Monsignor Quixote, 1982
- J'Accuse - The Dark Side of Nice, 1982
- Yes and No, 1983
- A Quick Look Behind, 1983
- For Whom the Bell Chimes, 1983
- VictorianVillainies, 1984 (ed. byt Hugh
Greene)
- Getting to Know the General, 1985
- The Tenth Man, 1985
- Graham Greene Country, 1986
- The Captain and the Enemy, 1988
- Why the Epigraph?, 1989
- Yours, Etc., 1989
- The Last Word, 1990
- The Destructors, 1990
- Graham Greene: Reflections 1923-88, 1990
(ed. by Judith Adamson)
- Reflections, 1991
- A World of My Own, 1992
- The End of the Party, 1993
- The Graham Greene Film Reader, 1993
- Collected Plays, 1995
Other
film adaptations:
- Went the Day Well?,
cir. by Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942
- The Fallen Idol, dir.
by Carol Reed, 1947
- Across the Bridge, dir.
by Ken Annakin 1957
- tv adaptations (British
TV, 1975) of short stories by Graham Greene, undet the title Shades of
Greene
Screenplays
- The First and the Last
(21 Days), 1937
- The New Britain, 1940
- The Brighton Rock
(Young Scarface), 1947 (WITH tERENCE rATTIGAN)
- The Fallen Idol, 1948
(with Lesley Storm and William Templeton)
- The Third Man, 1948
(with Carol Reed)
- The Stranger's Hand,
1954 (with Guy Elmes and Giorgio Bassani)
- Loser Takes All, 1956
- Saint Joan, 1957
- Our Man in Havanna,
1960
- The Comedians, 1967
|
