Greene, (Henry) Graham

Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904-1991), English novelist, playwright, essayist, travel writer, screenwriter, and author of short fiction.

Born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the son of a headmaster, Greene was educated at Balliol College, Oxford University. While still a student, he published a collection of poetry, Babbling April (1925). In 1926 he converted to the Roman Catholic Church, an act that would have a profound impact on his fiction. He worked for The Times (1926-1930) and then as a freelance writer. In 1935 he was film critic for the Spectator, and in 1940 was appointed its literary editor. He worked for the British Foreign Office in west Africa (1941-1943) and after World War II travelled widely.

Greene's earliest novels were The Man Within (1929), The Name of Action (1930), and Rumour at Nightfall (1931). His popularity came, however, with Stamboul Train (1932), a spy thriller published in the United States as Orient Express. This and subsequent novels such as England Made Me (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936), and The Ministry of Fear (1943), Greene later categorized as “entertainments”. He regarded Brighton Rock (1938) as his first legitimate novel. It was also the first in which reviewers identified recognizably Catholic themes. Set in the criminal underworld of the respectable seaside town, it focuses on Pinkie, a small-time racketeer. Like many of Greene's central characters, Pinkie is an alienated figure, operating in a violent and corrupt environment. Despite this context, Greene grants his character moments of visionary intensity, that centre on Pinkie's morbid horror of sex: “He watched her with his soured virginity, as one might watch a draught of medicine that one would never, never take; one would die first—or let others die.”

The fate of the novel's protagonists demonstrates “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God”, and Greene's fiction became increasingly concerned with themes of moral and spiritual struggle in a degenerate world. The Quiet American (1955) questions American involvement in Vietnam; Our Man in Havana (1958) is set during the last days of the Batista regime in Cuba, and tells the story of Wormold, an Englishman recruited to spy for MI6. Wormold cheats his employers by offering them diagrams of vacuum-cleaner parts as plans of a secret atomic installation. His small contribution to a larger world of deception and cruelty positions him “on the frontier of violence, a strange land he had never visited before”.

Subsequent major works include Loser Takes All (1955); A Burnt-Out Case (1961); The Comedians (1966); The Honorary Consul (1973); The Human Factor (1978); and The Tenth Man (1985). Greene's works are characterized by vivid local detail, exotic and often seedy settings (in Mexico, Liberia, Haiti, Vietnam), and a detached portrayal of characters under various forms of social, political, or psychological stress. His later fiction finds dwindling hope for the possibility of humanity's moral salvation. In Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1980), the eponymous character considers the nature of God, concluding that “judging from the world he is supposed to have made, he can only be greedy for our humiliation”. The 1982 novel Monsignor Quixote, which confronts Marxism with Catholicism, is gentler in tone, however.

Greene's contact with the cinema was comprehensive. An influential critic, his writings on film were collected as Mornings in the Dark (1993). The Third Man (1950), another spy thriller directed by Carol Reed, was written especially for filming. As well as reviewing, he scripted, produced, and even acted (in Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine, 1976). Eighteen films were made of his work, and cinema was a strong influence upon his pacy plots and sharp dialogue. As an essayist, he compiled Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1952) and Collected Essays (1969), the latter mostly comprising studies of other writers. In the 1950s he wrote a series of children's stories and produced his most successful plays, The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957), and The Complaisant Lover (1959). His travel writing focuses on dangerous and exotic areas of the world, and includes Journey Without Maps (1936), an account of his travels in Liberia, and The Lawless Roads (1939), describing journeys in Mexico. A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980) are his autobiographies. The former suggests that, like many of his characters, he had contemplated suicide. From 1966 Greene made his home on the French Riviera and spent much time travelling. He died in Vevey, Switzerland, on April 3, 1991.