No other writer has packed Greene’s one-two punch. His books sold more than 20 million copies, and most of his 24 novels were made into movies (among them, “The Quiet American,” “Our Man in Havana,” “The Comedians” and “Travels With My Aunt”) that were seen by millions more. It may have been this mass appeal that cost him the Nobel Prize he surely deserved. Maybe the Swedish Academy couldn’t bring itself to bestow its honors on a writer who had once divided his own work into two categories: serious writing and “entertainments” (which were, in fact, first-rate yarns of crime and intrigue). Greene saw no shame in mass appeal. In “The Third Man,” a character derides the American writer Zane Grey as an “entertainer,” too “popular” to discuss, and the protagonist shoots back, “Why the hell not?”
Hell is a concept that crops up a lot in Greene. For the writer, much of modern life was indeed hellish, and like a 20th-century Dante he traveled many circles of this earthly inferno, checking in at wars, revolutions and catastrophes in Africa, Indochina, Mexico, Czechoslovakia and Haiti. During World War II he did intelligence work for the British government in West Africa (supervised by double agent Kim Philby, with whom he stayed friendly after Philby’s defection). He set “The Honorary Consul” in Argentina; “The Comedians” in Duvalier’s Haiti; “A Burnt-Out Case” in a Congolese leper colony.
“I travel because I have to see the scene,” he once said. “I can’t invent it.” But for all his self-deprecation, the truth is that Greene was a master storyteller, one of the first to write in a cinematic style with razor-sharp images moving with kinetic force. He created a world that’ come to be known as Greeneland, a vision of 20th-century life that’s seedy and dispiriting, yet also somehow romantic and erotic, even in the cheesy seaside setting of “Brighton Rock,” with its satanic teenage gangster Pinkie, who’d rather kill than make love.
Greene’s characters exist in a constant state of torment–as did Greene. The son of a public-school headmaster in Hertfordshire, he was a troubled boy and was set to a psychoanalyst at 16. For Greene it was a kind of paradise. He lived “like a lord” at his analyst’s home, having breakfast in bed and talking about his dreams, which were sometimes almost clairvoyant. “What a pity that Graham became a writer,,” his analyst’s wife later said. “He could have made such a good medium!”
But analysis didn’t cure his mysterious despair, which reached a bizarre climax when he was a student at Oxford. With a revolver he found in his brother’s drawer, he played Russian roulette, loading one of the six chambers and pulling the trigger with the gun against his head. He did this several times over a period of months. “I discovered then that I was manic-depressive,” he said. “I needed a flick of the whip to keep me going.” The real whip came with his conversion and the prospect of damnation, which gratified the famous sense of sin that’s at the center of his most powerful novels. In “The Heart of the Matter” the “bad” Catholic, Scobie, a police officer in colonial Africa, commits suicide because he can’t comprehend the suffering that God allows his creatures to endure. In “The End of the Affair,” Sarah comes close to sainthood through her embrace of “ordinary corrupt human love.” And while the drunken, fornicating priest in “The Power and the Glory” (arguably Greene’s finest novel) seems doomed, even he ultimately finds grace.
No Greene novel is perfect; sometimes the religious drama becomes an abstraction that’s imposed on the human drama. And for some critics, his combination of Catholicism and left-wing ideology was an unacceptable paradox, but for Greene they were the two sides of the same moral coin. In 1979 he confessed he still “nurtured this dream, perhaps a naive one, of communism with a human face.”
“Every creative writer worth our consideration,” said Greene, “is a victim: a man given over to an obsession.” Greene’s obsession was the inescapability of sin. “The basic element I admire in Christianity,” he said, “is its sense of moral failure.” When asked toward the end of his life, “Are you still hounded by God?” he replied: “I hope so. I’m not very conscious of His presence, but I hope He is dogging my footsteps.” The journey is over, but Greeneland remains.
