The life-long opportunist
Alan Judd
GRAHAM GREENE: THE MAN WITHIN by Michael Shelden Heinemann, £20, pp. 480 This revealing and comprehensive account, the first to embrace the whole of Greene's busy life, ends by noting how after his death his friends and admirers
did their best to make him look gentle and humane . . . He charmed many people, and showed kindness and generosity to some. But trying to find moral excellence .. . is not a helpful way to honour him. There is too much evidence to the contrary. Only his best writing can plead a case for the value of his life . . . Art will have the last word.
It is hard to see how any biographer can come to a radically different conclusion.
This daunting requirement for moral excellence arises because so many of Greene's novels sail under the colours of moral and spiritual issues. Also, his pen- chant for publicity led many to regard him as some sort of international moral arbiter. For much of the time he was joking, and all the time self-serving. He carried his child- hood resentment of authority to the end, excepting only one or two tyrants and thugs who flattered him.
Originally an admirer of the man and his work, Shelden ends by pointing us firmly towards the latter, but even there he has to qualify. He regrets that Greene squandered time and energy in his later years by writing self-important letters to the press, turning out tired books and plays, playing practical jokes and indulging in political posturings on behalf of causes he didn't trouble to understand. He had no real commitment to anything outside himself. These later years contrast sharply with those of Henry James, Greene's own model of excellence, who 'took the path of most resistance in old age'. It is to earlier works, principally Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory, that Shelden nails his own colours.
His accounts of the novels are formidably thorough and he comments usefully on variations between editions. Brighton Rock was one of several novels from which Greene excised in later editions his more virulent anti-Semitic references. Shelden draws comparisons between the famous Brighton trunk murder, Greene's wide acquaintance with prostitutes, his guilty dreams of killing and his frequent depiction of violence against women. Most of all, however, he notes the nastiness of Brighton Rock: 'Rarely has nastiness been served so well. The unpleasant truth is that the author hates us.'
That last sentence is an important insight. Greene's hatred of school is well known, as is his melancholia. Less well known is the possibility that he tried to hang himself when he was 14 (the later stuff about Russian roulette was one of many adroit pieces of myth-making), that his taste for often funny, cruel, practical jokes was life-long, that he invented a game called Hating People and that in his per- sonal and public relations he cultivated betrayal with the assiduity of one who loves it. He had the charm of the perpetual ado- lescent and it was easy to become involved with him, as his mistresses found; it may have been less easy to like him in any nor- mal way and it was certainly dangerous to trust him. He usually travelled with his teddy bear.
Fortunately for us, Shelden is as redoubtable a tracker as Greene is a myth- maker. His analysis of the novels gives solid basis to some of the less known themes of Greene's life, which another biographer might have portrayed sensationally. The evidence for Greene's homosexual leanings — at least — is carefully teased out and would be persuasive on its own, even with- out the witnesses who speak of a series of Italian boys at his house on Capri. His books are studded with punning references and in-jokes, but Shelden is modest about his own discoveries, confident that succes- sive biographers will find more. Occasion- ally you sense him smiling in admiration at the wiliness of his subject, such as when he notes how successfully Greene projected his publicity-shy image during the course of a hundred or so interviews. Greene's relations with the Catholic church are viewed with a sceptical eye. He seems to have converted in order to per- suade his wife to marry him and thereafter there is no sign that he significantly modi- fied his life in order to conform with Catholic teaching. It was sometimes pleas- ing to be known as a Catholic writer in a Protestant country and it was useful to have rules to break:
As soon as Greene became a famous Catholic novelist, the church was stuck with him just as God is stuck with the whisky priest.
Greene makes dramatic use of his romantic fascination with sin and damnation but has little to say of grace and redemption. Orwell shrewdly posited a lack of real belief:
Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved to Catholics only . . . when people really believed in Hell, they were not so fond of striking graceful attitudes on its brink.
Similarly, Greene seems to have had a fondness for MI6 but nevertheless used it for what he could get out of it, calling it `the best travel agency in the world.' Thanks to William Waldegrave, Shelden gives an informed account of Greene's wartime years in Sierra Leone, showing how he used them in The Heart of the Mat- ter, and he clearly identifies the inspiration of Our Man in Havana as the double agent Garbo, who fooled the Germans in wartime Lisbon. He speculates interestingly whether Greene had indications of Philby's treachery, showing in the process that The Third Man was based partly on Philby and was partly plagiarised. He may give undue weight to that unconvincing contrivance, The Human Factor, but is clear that Greene's contacts with MI6 continued after the war, though their extent is undefined.
It is further to Shelden's credit that he manages without direct quotation from Greene's books, which the estate has for- bidden. One consequence of this is that we are prevented from knowing what Greene died of. Another is under-estimation of his literary criticism. He was a good critic and his abilities deserve weighing in the balance.
Finally, what of that balance? For a non- Greeneian who finds Brighton Rock thin and unreal and Pinkie weak, and in other books a moral shallowness and a jejune concept of evil, Greene is defmitely not in the class of Conrad, let alone Dostoevsky. But during decades when some thought novels 'legitimate' only if they had a particular political view and others retreat- ed into solipsism, Greene wrote in a limpid, accessible style, of individuals and predicaments with which millions could identify. Whether or not he is a first-class novelist, this is a biography which even non-Greeneians can relish. It should also prove an essential quarry for all who follow in Shelden's footsteps.
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