Graham Greene can indubitably claim to rank among the twentieth century most popular and serious novelists. For almost sixty years he has been a prolific writer of short stories, essays and, above all, consummate novels of adventure.
His exotic backgrounds – from Vietnam to Havana to Haiti and Sierra Leone – have made places located in the far-flung corners of the world familiar to his readers. He has provided each locality with a moral atmosphere that is distinctly his own. 
A convert life
Graham Greene, born in Berkhamstead, England, on October 2, 1904, was the fourth of six children. His father, Charles Henry Greene, was a history and classics master who, in 1910, became headmaster of Berkhamstead School.
As a highly sensitive, imaginative youth from a respected upper middle-class family, Greene had the opportunity to develop “more exotic emotional problems than are characteristics of children of lower classes”. He hid the fact that he could read from his parents fearing lest they would admit him to preparatory school. He began to live a convert life, secretly reading books of adventure and mystery which his parents did not appreciate. As a child, Greene developed inordinate fears of the dark, of birds and bats, of drowning, and of the footsteps of strangers. He also experienced recurrent nightmares about “a witch who would lurk at night in the nursery at the linen cupboard”.
Berkhamstead School
In 1912, as he approached his eighth birthday, Graham Greene enrolled in Berkhamstead School. He was to spend the next ten years there, the last five of which proved to be a hellish confinement for him. As the headmaster’s son he felt alienated from the other boys and was bewildered by his sense of divided loyalties which he was never able to resolve. To make matters worse, two schoolboys rendered his life miserable. In his biography, Norman Sherry has written that these two boys exercised a powerful control over Greene at a critical time in his development. They took pleasure in attacking Greene’s naïveté.
Greene’s situation was aggravated by the fact that he was the headmaster’s son. His home was attached to the school which was entered from home through a green baize door in his father’s study. The door became a symbol for Greene of the border between innocence and experience and he makes use of it in several short stories as well as in The Ministry of Fear(1943) where it divides the ‘arcadian’ clinic and the ‘hell’ of the sick bay: “Ahead of him was the green baize door he had never seen opened, and beyond that door lay the sick bay. He was back in his own childhood breaking out of dormitory…”.
To cope with ‘the horror’ both as a schoolboy and later in life, Greene devised various “ways of escape”. Travel, danger and friendship have all offered him a temporary haven but it is fiction – first as a reader, then as a writer – which has allowed him to escape most effectively.
Greene has on several occasions mentioned his belief that one’s personality is determined in the first sixteen years of life, that ‘in the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed’.
Several of the characters in his novels and short stories assert the biographical importance of childhood reading. Henry Pulling, in Travels with My Aunt, thinks that ‘one’s life is more formed… by books than by human beings’, and blames his inability to love on the absence of the right books in his father’s study.
In 1922, Greene entered Balliol College, Oxford, to study history. His academic career was not particularly distinguished. He edited the Oxford Outlook and during his last year there published a volume of verse, Babbling April (1925).
The first published Novel
In the aftermath of his graduation, he started a career in journalism, working for the Nottingham Journal and then The Times in London. The plot of his first published novel – a historical romance – The Man Within (1929) deals with smugglers on the Sussex coast in the nineteenth century. It was appreciated by readers and critics alike. Encouraged by its success and by an offer from its publishers of £600 a year for three years in return for three novels, Greene gave up his job as sub-editor on The Times to become a professional novelist. Two more historical romances followed – The Name of Action (1930), and Rumour at Nightfall (1931). Both novels were financial and artistic failures.
However, with the change to contemporary realism in his next book, Stamboul Train, Greene portrayed a secular world in almost wholly socio-political terms typical of the 1930s.
Stamboul Train: An Entertainment (1932; published in the United States as Orient Express: An Entertainment, 1933) brought him the success he desired. The novel marks the beginning of an entirely new phase in Greene’s fiction – his début as a writer of contemporary thrillers, the genre in which he was to achieve his best work over the following decade. It was Greene who later wrote, the first time in his life that he deliberately set out “to write a book to please, one which with luck might be made into a film”.
Train films were extremely popular with cinema audiences at that time. Greene’s novel enjoyed a “fashionable success” like Von Stenberg’s Shanghai Express, Michael Balcons’s Rome Express, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and the Russian Turksib. The film solved Greene’s financial problems and the book was much appreciated. Stamboul Train contains all the ingredients to appeal to the reader: love, murder, revolution, and the loss of a chorus girl’s virtue, all happening on the Orient Express which, with its suggestion of luxury, romance and mystery, “occupied a unique place in the popular mythology of the day”.
Dynamic use of language
Based on a trip to Liberia (1934-1935), Greene’s travel book, Journey Without Maps (1936), reveals his attempt to return to a pure and innocent landscape. Significantly, he had long conceptualized Africa as being roughly the shape of the human heart. He produced a thriller, A Gun for Sale: An Entertainment (1936; published in the United States as This Gun for Hire: An Entertainment). With the publication of Brighton Rock (1938), critics discovered that Greene was a writer whose work contained Catholic themes. The novel remains one of Greene’s triumphs particularly in its dynamic use of language which is poetic in its intensity and sensory vividness.
His most popular and most explicitly Catholic novel is The Power and the Glory (1940; reissued as The Labyrinthine Ways), published two years after his visit to Mexico to report on religious persecution in that country. His visit to West Africa, after he was recruited into the secret service, resulted in the publication of The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (1943). The Heart of the Matter (1948) is also set in West Africa. When motion-picture producer Alexander Korda wanted to make a film about the four-power occupation of Vienna, he sent Greene to that city on a research mission. The outcome was the film script of The Third Man released in 1950. The film became a classic.
The next ten years saw the publication of three more novels: The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet Affair (1955) and Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (1958), all of which were made into motion pictures. Greene also wrote three plays during this period: The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957) and The Complaisant Lover (1959). The first two plays focused heavily on Catholic themes.
In 1961, he published A Burnt-Out Case. His next novel, The Comedians (1966) is set in Haiti during the autocratic rule of Papa Doc Duvalier. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are cast in the lead roles in the film based on the novel. He also published two collections of short fiction: A sense of Reality (1963) and May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other Comedies of Sexual Life (1967). These short stories are worthy of careful consideration.
The Dangerous Edge
In 1971, Greene published the first volume of his autobiography, A Sort of Life, which extends till the 1930’s. Ways of Escape (1980) brings his life up to date. Both books focus on his literary, rather than his personal life. The Honorary Consul (1973) was one of Greene’s favourite novels, though critics have never ranked it among his best works. The Human Factor (1978) is based on the sensational defection to the then Soviet Union of Kim Philby, Greene’s former chief in the Secret Service.
In Monsignor Quixote (1982) Greene compared Catholicism to Marxism by making the main characters of the novel debate the relative merits of their beliefs. Getting to Know the General: The story of an Involvement (1985) is an account of his friendship with President Torrijos of Panama. The Tenth Man (1985) was published amid a lot of publicity. Graham Greene had forgotten about it and the manuscript came to light only when it was sold to an American Publisher by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). His last published novel, The Captain and the Enemy (1988) lacks the complexity of his earlier fiction.
Graham Greene died on April 3, 1991, of an undisclosed blood disease in a hospital in Switzerland. His last publication, a collection of short stories, The Last Word (1990), appeared a few months before his death.
Despite the various literary forms he explored, his greatness clearly lies in his fiction. Graham Greene both lived and wrote on the dangerous edge of things. In the world of his novels he has re-created the bittersweet conflict between “the fascination of innocence and the hell-haunted drama of human existence”. It is peopled with sad and suffering men and women with a profound desire for peace, some of whom occasionally startle the reader with their compassion, love and childlike simplicity.
Mithyl Banymandhub
Bibliography
- Allot, Kenneth, and Farris, Miriam, The Art of Graham Greene. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963.
- O’prey, Paul, A Reader’s Guide to Graham Greene. Worcester, England: Thames and Hudson, 1988.
- Kelly, Richard, Graham Greene. New York: Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1993.
Meyers, Jeffrey, Graham Greene: A Revaluation. London: Macmillan, 1990