Adventures in Greene-land
The British establishment has produced its fair share of turncoats. From Bloomsbury to Guy Burgess, an exotic array of pacifists, gays, dissidents and double agents have revolted against the stuffiness of their upper-class parents. They have formed a spiritual (and sometimes literal) fifth column in the world of Oxbridge and Whitehall. Yet their relationship to the establishment has betrayed more than a touch of what Freud might have called Oedipal ambivalence. EM Forster, Virginia Woolf, WH Auden, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby were in revolt against an England with which they also had deep bonds. The same might even be said of George Orwell. Most of them were able to turn the qualities they had acquired from their privileged upbringing - grit, self-assurance, sangfroid, a sense of duty - against the system that bred them.
This is certainly true of Graham Greene (photo), whose extraordinary career is portrayed in this selection from the tens of thousands of letters he wrote (an average of 2,000 a year). Just down from Oxford, Greene was a strikebreaker during the general strike, having been a member of the Communist party for all of six weeks. Years later, he declared Marx's Capital to be unreadable, stayed at the Ritz, had a flat in Albany and hobnobbed with the likes of the Sitwells and Lady Diana Cooper. "My batman has forgotten my spare trousers," he writes despairingly from Kuala Lumpur.
Throughout his life, he was consistently pro-Israel and anti-Arab. The dyspeptically rightwing Evelyn Waugh was not only his favourite novelist but one of his dearest friends. Dignitaries, Hollywood celebrities and world-class statesmen showered him with invitations. One day he is dining with François Truffaut or lunching with Alfred Hitchcock; later he reports that "I went up to Rome because the Pope had sent me a message that he would like to see me". The pontiff in question was Paul VI, who enjoyed Greene's work and defended The Power and the Glory against being condemned by the Holy Office. The late Pope John Paul II, by contrast, he regarded as an ecclesiastical version of Ronald Reagan.
Greene denied that he was a "literary man" and preferred Trollope to Joyce ("a big bore"). Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis, he thought, were among the worst of modern English writers. Don Quixote he found impossible to finish. In some ways, his views were those of a complacent English clubman. Yet there was another Greene fi ghting hard to get out. He organised American writers against the Vietnam war, gave money out of his own pocket to Soviet dissidents and backed the Sand inistas in Nicaragua. He was on first-name terms with Fidel Castro, a lunch guest of Salvador Allende and a target of FBI surveillance for some 40 years. If he was forced to choose between the drug-dealing dictator Manuel Noriega and US imperialism, he once wrote in Pinteresque mode, he would opt for the former. "How tired one is of little plump men in shorts with hairless legs," he writes of colonial offi cials in Africa. The Africans, he adds wryly, may or may not be ready for independence; these colonial types are certainly not.
Greene's relation to the Catholic church was as double-edged as his dealings with the establishment. "I'm not even a Catholic properly away from you," he writes tenderly to one of his horde of lovers - a curious sentiment, since he was hardly a proper Catholic with her either. Despite lying through his teeth about his deep veneration of the Pope when The Power and the Glory was under ecclesial threat, he was a self-proclaimed "Catholic agnostic". Being a member of the church, he reflects, would pose quite a problem for him as a writer, were he not saved by his disloyalty to it.
Greene was, in short, that most honorific of Catholics, a lapsed or unorthodox one. No club in the world is as effective as the Catholic church in allotting honorary status to semi-outsiders. It is like being a country rather than a town member of some Pall Mall establishment. Greene was well aware that the prodigal son has a higher status than the loyal stay-at-home. His fiction returns constantly to the paradox that the sinner is the closest thing to the saint. Both of them acknowledge divine truth, even if the sinner does so only to turn it down. As such, they are superior to what one might call the moral middle classes. The moral middle classes know only right and wrong, whereas both saints and sinners are conscious of good and evil. Pinkie, the damned hero of Brighton Rock, is a study in pure evil, but he is also a kind of monk gone awry.
Throughout these letters Greene is perpetually on the hoof, terrified of boredom and occasionally given to wishing that he was dead. His manic hunt for excitement, which included regular games of Russian roulette, may have been an effect of bipolar disorder. He moves from Tallinn, Liberia and Sierra Leone (where he worked for MI6) to Lagos, Stockholm, Malaya, Hanoi and Haiti (where he was threatened with death by Papa Doc Duvalier). He also showers his friends with notes from Léopoldville, Moscow (where he drank with Guy Burgess), Asunción, Nicaragua, Panama and a host of other Greeneland-like locations.
Greene's life sometimes seems straight out of his fiction. There are sentences here that could easily be mistaken for quotations from The Heart of the Matter or The Quiet American. "I never get used to seeing a vulture sitting complacently on my roof as I come home," he writes from Sierra Leone. "Good Friday four years ago I went to a secret illegal mass in Chiapas," he confides elsewhere, for all the world like the underground priest of The Power and the Glory.
"Last night we were at a voodoo ceremony till three in the morning" is an impeccably well-wrought, Greenelike line in a letter from Haiti. He is extraordinarily adept at producing flawless imitations of his own prose: "I spent a night," he writes in unconscious self-parody, "with the Annamite bishop of Phat Diem, who is commander- in-chief of a small army of 2,000 to protect his diocese." Or there is this from a leper colony in Africa: "Presently, an old woman crawled into the half light like a dog out of kennel ... no fingers or toes or eyes of course ..." Greene-like events follow him inexorably around the world: he has scarcely landed in Paraguay before "there was an archbishop under arrest, a priest excommunicated (I liked him), a murdered man in a field (I photographed the body), a bomb in a church, a consul kidnapped ..." No shortage of material there.
Not all these letters concern public events. There is also Greene the lover, writing on page 54 to his wife Vivien as "Darling best dearest most-adored Pussy Willow", and on page 171 making business-like arrangements for their separation. Writing from Dakar, where he hatched a wild scheme to open a brothel on a Portuguese island off the coast, he mixes the erotic and the ecological, telling his long-standing lover Catherine Walston that she is "my human Africa ... I love your dark bush as I love the bush here". But it is not just his mistresses he is nice to. The letters are unflaggingly charming and courteous to all and sundry, eager to help struggling writers such as RK Narayan and Muriel Spark, and impressively gentle and generous with sometimes rather thick-headed fans.
There is the odd gibe here and there. Hitchcock, implausibly, is a "silly harmless clown", Stephen Spender has too much human kindness, and Shirley Temple is "a little bitch" (she was, admittedly, suing him at the time for describing her little-girl get-up as bait for paedophiles). Only Anthony Burgess really gets the rough edge of his tongue ("You are either a liar or you are unbalanced and should see a doctor"). No doubt it takes one tax-exiled Catholic novelist to know another.
"All I do is go from room to room," Greene complains as he is dying. But it was also how he lived. Modest to the end, he hopes he might be compared to Flaubert. He means not that he might join the pantheon of the illustrious dead, but that, like his French predecessor, he might be valued for "a few" good books.
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