... to a Greene thought in a Greene shade

Gabriele Annan

WHY THE EPIGRAPH? by Graham Greene Viking, £30, pp.48 This is an odd book — a book for book collectors, perhaps. First of all, it is expen- sive: £30 for 48 pages, most of them only half full of text. Then it is beautiful: beautifully bound in fine olive cloth with gold lettering, and beautifully printed on thick paper the colour of clotted cream. It contains the epigraphs to all Graham Greene's books, even the ones he suppres- sed. There is a short comment on each, and that is all, except for a grumpy introduction slating readers and critics because they confuse a novel's plot with what it is about. What his own novels are about, Greene says, is summarised in each case by the epigraph he chose: so here are the epi- graphs, and when you have read them you won't have to read the books. An Olym- pian dismissal, but your attention is still solicited because Greene is throwing in `a sort of autobiography': the epigraphs are chronologically arranged, 'beginning with the innocent disclosures of immaturity and ending with the uncertainties and fears of old age'.

Greene's first published book (1925) was a collection of poems called Babbling April. The title and epigraph are from Edna St Vincent Millay:

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Springtime, yes, but not exactly innocent: there is a note of pessimism and cosmic sadness from the start. The last epigraph is for The Captain And The Enemy, pub- lished last year. It is a quotation from George A. Birmingham, whom Greene rates with Wodehouse and W. W. Jacobs among the three best comic writers of the century. I am putting Birmingham on my reading list. In fact, compiling a reading list from Why The Epigraph? might not be a bad idea. The writers quoted range from Dante to Charlotte M. Yonge: and there are bound to be unforeseeable rewards.

The Birmingham epigraph goes:

Will you be sure to know the good side from the bad, the Captain from the enemy? The sentence has a lovely rhythm and an echo from the epigraph for Monsignor Quixote (1982) which is Hamlet's There is nothing either good or bad But thinking makes it so.

Both epigraphs express uncertainty, cer- tainly, but not really the uncertainty of old age. It is more a refusal to judge, a recognition that — to quote the Thomas Hardy epigraph for The Honorary Consul (1973):

All things merge in one another - Good into evil, generosity into justice, Religion into politics.

So judgment does not belong to us: no one is free from sin. In a recent interview for the Tablet, Greene said he 'disliked the word sin. It's got a kind of professional, a dogmatic ring about it.' This is disconcert- ing. For many readers, sin is the pop-up word for Greene, and in his middle years he was much obsessed by it. The epigraph for The Heart Of The Matter (1948) seems bang-on for central Greene:

The sinner is at the heart of Christianity . . . No one is as competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. No one, except possibly the saint.

Apart from sin, and not judging it, what do the epigraphs show about Greene's concerns? Well, he seems fascinated by spying, gambling and mystery: any sort of mystery, really.

I go, but I return: I would I were The pilot of the darkness and the dream

is the epigraph for Getting To Know The General (1984).

There is indeed a certain mystery attached to this epigraph, [says Greene[. I was searching in vain for a suitable one. My favourite poet, Browning, failed me and, unwillingly, I turned to Tennyson and opened a volume of his collected poems at random. Under my eyes was a long poem, which I had never read and had no intention of reading now, yet my eye went straight to the two lines which were exactly what I needed.

I have just read the poem and had my first reading list reward. Audley Court is about a picnic. Here's the menu: . . . a dusky loaf that smelt of home,

and half cut-down, a pasty costly-made, where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks imbedded and injellied.