Greene, Graham (Henry) 1904-1991

views updated

GREENE, Graham (Henry) 1904-1991

PERSONAL: Born October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England; died of a blood disease, April 3, 1991, in Vevey, Switzerland; son of Charles Henry (a headmaster); married Vivien Dayrell Browning, 1927; children: one son, one daughter. Education: Balliol College, Oxford, B.A., 1925. Religion: Roman Catholic.

CAREER: Writer. Times, London, England, subeditor, 1926-30; film critic for Night and Day, c.1930s; Spectator, London, film critic, 1935-39, literary editor, 1940-41; with Foreign Office in Africa, 1941-44; Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd. (publishers), London, director, 1944-48; Indo-China correspondent for New Republic, 1954; Bodley Head (publishers), London, director, 1958-68. Member of Panamanian delegation to Washington for signing of Canal Treaty, 1977.

AWARDS, HONORS: Hawthornden Prize, 1940, for The Power and the Glory; James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1949, for The Heart of the Matter; Catholic Literary Award, 1952, for The End of the Affair; Boys' Clubs of America Junior Book Award, 1955, for The Little Horse Bus; Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award nomination for best play, 1957, for The Potting Shed; Pietzak Award (Poland), 1960; D.Litt., Cambridge University, 1962; Balliol College, Oxford, honorary fellow, 1963; Companion of Honour, 1966; D.Litt., University of Edinburgh, 1967; Shakespeare Prize, 1968; named chevalier, Legion d'Honneur (France), 1969; John Dos Passos Prize, 1980; medal of City of Madrid, 1980; Jerusalem Prize, 1981; Grand Cross of the Order of Vasco Nunez de Balboa (Panama), 1983; named commander, Order of Arts and Letters (France), 1984; named to British Order of Merit, 1986; named to Order of Ruben Dario (Nicaragua), 1987; Royal Society of Literature Prize; honorary doctorate, Moscow State University, 1988.

WRITINGS:

fiction, except as noted

Babbling April (poems), Basil Blackwell (London, England), 1925.

The Man Within, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1929.

The Name of Action, Heinemann (London, England), 1930, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1931.

Rumour at Nightfall, Heinemann (London, England), 1931, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1932.

Orient Express, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1932, published as Stamboul Train, Heinemann (London, England), 1932.

It's a Battlefield, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1934, with new introduction by author, Heinemann (London, England), 1970.

The Basement Room, and Other Stories, Cresset (London, England), 1935, title story revised as "The Fallen Idol" and published with The Third Man (also see below), Heinemann (London, England), 1950.

England Made Me, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1935, published as The Shipwrecked, Viking (New York, NY), 1953, reprinted under original title, with new introduction by author, Heinemann (London, England), 1970.

The Bear Fell Free, Grayson & Grayson (London, England), 1935.

Journey without Maps (travelogue; also see below), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1936, 2nd edition, Viking (New York, NY), 1961, reprinted, 1992.

This Gun for Hire (also see below), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1936, published as A Gun for Sale, Heinemann (London, England), 1936.

Brighton Rock, Viking (New York, NY), 1938, with new introduction by author, Heinemann (London, England), 1970, reprinted, 1981.

The Confidential Agent (also see below), Viking (New York, NY), 1939, with new introduction by author, Heinemann (London, England), 1971.

Another Mexico, Viking (New York, NY), 1939, reprinted, 1982, published as The Lawless Roads (also see below), Longmans, Green (London, England), 1939.

The Labyrinthine Ways, Viking (New York, NY), 1940, published as The Power and the Glory, Heinemann (London, England), 1940, Viking, 1946, with new introduction by author, Heinemann, 1971, reprinted, Penguin (New York, NY), 2003.

British Dramatists (nonfiction), Collins (London, England), 1942, reprinted, Folcroft (Folcroft, PA), 1979.

The Ministry of Fear (also see below), Viking (New York, NY), 1943.

Nineteen Stories, Heinemann (London, England), 1947, Viking (New York, NY), 1949, revised and expanded edition published as Twenty-one Stories, Heinemann, 1955, Viking (New York, NY), 1962.

The Heart of the Matter, Viking (New York, NY), 1948, with new introduction by author, Heinemann (London, England), 1971, reprinted, Penguin (New York, NY), 1999.

The Third Man (also see below), Viking (New York, NY), 1950, reprinted, 1983.

The Lost Childhood, and Other Essays, Eyre & Spottiswoode (London, England), 1951, Viking (New York, NY), 1952.

The End of the Affair, Viking (New York, NY), 1951, reprinted, Penguin (New York, NY), 1991.

The Quiet American, Heinemann (London, England), 1955, Viking (New York, NY), 1982, reprinted, Penguin (New York, NY), 2002.

Loser Takes All, Heinemann (London, England), 1955, Viking (New York, NY), 1957.

Our Man in Havana (also see below), Viking (New York, NY), 1958, with new introduction by author, Heinemann (London, England), 1970.

A Burnt-out Case, Viking (New York, NY), 1961.

In Search of a Character: Two African Journals, Bodley Head (London, England), 1961, Viking (New York, NY), 1962.

Introductions to Three Novels, Norstedt (Stockholm, Sweden), 1962.

The Destructors, and Other Stories, Eihosha (Tokyo, Japan), 1962.

A Sense of Reality, Viking (New York, NY), 1963.

The Comedians, Viking (New York, NY), 1966.

(With Dorothy Craigie) Victorian Detective Fiction: A Catalogue of the Collection, Bodley Head (London, England), 1966.

May We Borrow Your Husband?, and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life, Viking (New York, NY), 1967.

Collected Essays, Viking (New York, NY), 1969.

Travels with My Aunt, Viking (New York, NY), 1969.

(Author of introduction) Al Burt and Bernard Diederich, Papa Doc, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1969.

A Sort of Life (autobiography), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1971.

Graham Greene on Film: Collected Film Criticism, 1935-1940, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1972, published as The Pleasure Dome, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1972.

The Portable Graham Greene (includes The Heart of the Matter, with a new chapter; The Third Man; and sections from eight other novels, six short stories, nine critical essays, and ten public statements), Viking (New York, NY), 1972, updated and revised, Penguin (New York, NY), 1994.

The Honorary Consul, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1973, reprinted, 2000.

Collected Stories, Viking (New York, NY), 1973.

Lord Rochester's Monkey, Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, Viking (New York, NY), 1974.

The Human Factor, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1978, reprinted, Knopf (New York, NY), 1992.

Dr. Fischer of Geneva; or, The Bomb Party, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1980.

Ways of Escape, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1981.

Monsignor Quixote, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1982.

J'accuse: The Dark Side of Nice, Bodley Head (London, England), 1982.

Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1984.

The Tenth Man, Bodley Head (London, England), 1985.

(Author of preface) Night and Day (journalism), edited by Christopher Hawtree, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1985.

Collected Short Stories, Penguin (London, England), 1988.

The Captain and the Enemy, Viking (New York, NY), 1988.

Yours, etc.: Letters to the Press, 1945-1989, edited by Christopher Hawtree, Reinhardt (New York, NY), 1989.

Reflections (essays), Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews, and Film Stories, Applause Theatre Book Publishers (New York, NY), 1994.

A World of My Own: A Dream Diary, Reinhardt (New York, NY), 1994.

The Last Word and Other Stories, Penguin (New York, NY), 1999.

plays

(With Terrence Rattigan) Brighton Rock (screenplay), 1947.

The Fallen Idol (screenplay; based on Greene's short story "The Basement Room"), 1949.

(With Carol Reed) The Third Man: A Film (screenplay; based on Greene's novel; produced, 1950), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1968.

The Living Room (two-act; produced in London, England, 1953), Heinemann (London, England), 1953, Viking (New York, NY), 1957.

The Potting Shed (three-act; produced in New York, NY, 1957; produced in London, England, 1958), Viking (New York, NY), 1957.

The Complaisant Lover (produced in London, England, 1959), Heinemann (London, England), 1959, Viking (New York, NY), 1961.

Our Man in Havana (screenplay; based on Greene's novel), 1960.

Three Plays, Mercury Books, 1961.

Carving a Statue (two-act; produced in London, England, 1964; produced in New York, NY, 1968), Bodley Head (London, England), 1964.

The Comedians (screenplay; based on Greene's novel), 1967

The Return of A. J. Raffles (three-act comedy; based on characters from E. W. Hornung's Amateur Cracksman; produced in London, England, 1975), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1976.

Yes and No [and] For Whom the Bell Chimes (comedies; produced in Leicester, England, 1980), Bodley Head (London, England), 1983.

Collected Plays, Vintage (London, England), 2002.

omnibus volumes

Three: This Gun for Hire; The Confidential Agent; The Ministry of Fear, Viking (New York, NY), 1952.

The Travel Books: Journey without Maps [and] The Lawless Roads, Heinemann (London, England), 1963.

Triple Pursuit: A Graham Greene Omnibus (includes This Gun for Hire, The Third Man, and Our Man in Havana), Viking (New York, NY), 1971.

Works also published in additional collections.

juvenile

This Little Fire Engine, Parrish (London, England), 1950, published as The Little Red Fire Engine, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard (New York, NY), 1952.

The Little Horse Bus, Parrish (London, England), 1952, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard (New York, NY), 1954.

The Little Steamroller, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard (New York, NY), 1955.

The Little Train, Parrish (London, England), 1957, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard (New York, NY), 1958.

The End of the Party, Creative Education (Mankato, MN), 1993.

editor

The Old School (essays), J. Cape (London, England), 1934.

H. H. Munro, The Best of Saki, 2nd edition, Lane (London, England), 1952.

(With brother, Hugh Greene) The Spy's Bedside Book, British Book Service (London, England), 1957.

(And author of introduction) Marjorie Bowen, The Viper of Milan, Bodley Head (London, England), 1960.

The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, 2 volumes, Bodley Head (London, England), 1962.

(And author of epilogue) An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa, Moor of Capri, Viking (New York, NY), 1976.

(With Hugh Greene) Victorian Villainies, Viking (New York, NY), 1984.

Contributor to books, including Twenty-four Short Stories, Cresset (London, England), 1939; Alfred Hitchcock's Fireside Book of Suspense, Simon & Schuster, 1947; and Why Do I Write?, Percival Marshall, 1948. Contributor to Esquire, Commonweal, Spectator, Playboy, Saturday Evening Post, New Statesman, Atlantic, London Mercury, New Republic, America, Life, and other publications.

ADAPTATIONS: Screenplays based on Greene's books and stories include Orient Express, 1934; This Gun for Hire, 1942; The Ministry of Fear, 1944; The Confidential Agent, 1945; The Smugglers, 1948; The Heart of the Matter, 1954; The End of the Affair, 1955, 2000; Loser Takes All, 1957; The Quiet American, 1958, 2002; Across the Bridge, 1958; Our Man in Havana, 1959; The Power and the Glory, 1962; The Living Room, 1969; The Shipwrecked, 1970; May We Borrow Your Husband?, 1970; The End of the Affair, 1971, 2000; Travels with My Aunt, 1973; England Made Me, 1973; A Burned-out Case, 1973; The Human Factor, screenplay by Tom Stoppard, directed by Otto Preminger, 1980; Beyond the Limit, 1983; and Strike It Rich (based on the novella Loser Takes All), 1990. Several of Greene's novels have been adapted as audiobooks.

SIDELIGHTS: Graham Greene is among the most widely read of all major English novelists of the twentieth century. Yet Greene's popular success—which David Lodge in the book Graham Greene held partly responsible for a "certain academic hostility" toward the British author—came neither quickly nor easily. Of Greene's initial five novels, the first two were never published, and two others, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, sold very poorly. In his first autobiographical volume, A Sort of Life, Greene lamented that, in his earliest novels, he did not know "how to convey physical excitement": the ability to write a "simple scene of action … was quite beyond my power to render exciting." Even as late as 1944, Greene confessed in his introduction to The Tenth Man, he had "no confidence" in sustaining his literary career.

Greene's string of literary failures drove him to write Stamboul Train, a thriller he hoped would appeal to film producers. The novel, filmed two years later as Orient Express, is recognized by critics as Greene's coming-of-age work. Writing in a taut, realistic manner, Greene sets Stamboul Train in contemporary Europe; gathers a train load of plausibly motivated characters; and sends them on their journey. Retaining such stock melodramatic devices as cloak-and-dagger intrigue, flight and pursuit, hair-breadth escapes, and a breakneck narrative pace, Greene shifts the focus away from the conventional hero—the hunter—and onto the villain and/or ostensible villain. What emerges is less a formula than a set of literary hardware that Greene would use throughout the rest of his career, not just to produce further entertainments, but to help give outward excitement to his more morally centered, more philosophical novels.

Stamboul Train is the first of several thrillers Greene referred to as "entertainments"—so named to distinguish them from more serious novels. In his next two such entertainments, A Gun for Sale—originally published in the United States as This Gun for Hire—and The Confidential Agent, Greene incorporates elements of detective and spy fiction, respectively. He also injects significant doses of melodrama, detection, and espionage into his more serious novels Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory—published in the United States as The Labyrinthine Ways—The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, A Burnt-out Case, The Comedians, The Honorary Consul, and The Human Factor. Indeed, so greatly did Greene's entertainments influence his other novels that, after 1958, he dropped the entertainments label.

Intrigue and contemporary politics are key elements of Greene's entertainments, and in at least two of his thrillers Greene eulogizes the tranquility of European life prior to World War I. "It was all so peaceful," Dr. Hasselbacher muses about Germany in Our Man in Havana, "in those days…. Until the war came." And Arthur Rowe, dreaming in The Ministry of Fear, notes that his mother, who "had died before the first great war, … could [not] have imagined" the blitz on London of the second. He tells his mother that the sweet Georgian twilight—"Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass"—"isn't real life any more." Rowe continues: "I'm hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all round me…. It sounds like a thriller, doesn't it, but the thrillers are like life … spies, and murders, and violence … that's real life."

Suffering, seediness, and sin are also recurring motifs that typify Greene's work. When, in one of the very early novels Greene later disowned, a character moans, "I suffer, therefore I am," he defines both the plight and the habit of mind of many protagonists who would follow him. In A Burnt-out Case Dr. Colin sees suffering as a humanizing force: "Sometimes I think that the search for suffering and the remembrance of suffering are the only means we have to put ourselves in touch with the whole human condition." Colin also adds what none of Greene's other characters would dispute: "suffering is not so hard to find."

Greene's characters inhabit a world in which lasting love, according to the narrator of the story "May We Borrow Your Husband?," means the acceptance of "every disappointment, every failure, every betrayal." By Greene's twenty-second novel, Doctor Fischer of Geneva; or, The Bomb Party, suffering has become a sufficient cause for having a soul. When the narrator of Doctor Fischer of Geneva tells his wife, "If souls exist you certainly have one," and she asks "Why?," he replies, "You've suffered." This statement may well sound masochistic—"Pain is part of joy," the whiskey priest asserts in The Power and the Glory, "pain is a part of pleasure"; but as Greene wrote in the essay "Hans Andersen," it is really the "Catholic ideal of the acceptance of pain for a spiritual benefit." This ideal is behind the saintly Sarah's striking statement in The End of the Affair: "How good You [God] are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain."

According to Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris Allott in their book The Art of Graham Greene, "Seediness … seems to Greene the most honest representation of the nature of things." One recurring character embodying this trait in Greene's fiction, for example, appears as early as the opening chapters of The Man Within. From the "shambling," bored priest in that novel who sniffles his way through the burial service for Elizabeth's guardian; to the wheezing old priest smelling of eucalyptus at the end of Brighton Rock; to the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory; to the broken-down Father Callifer in The Potting Shed with his "stubbly worn face," "bloodshot eyes," and "dirty wisp of a Roman collar," Greene anoints a small cathedral of seedy priests. In his critical study Graham Greene, Francis Wyndham summarized an objection whose validity each reader must judge for himself: "Some find [Greene's] continual emphasis on squalor and seediness … overdone."

Also typical of Greene's characters is their predilection for sin. Greene "seems to have been born with a belief in Original Sin," John Atkins suggested in his Graham Greene, and certainly the author's characters have been tainted by it. Raven in A Gun for Sale is but one of many Greene protagonists who "had been marked from birth." Another is the whiskey priest's illegitimate daughter in The Power and the Glory: "The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in the fruit." Likewise, D. the "confidential agent": "Give me time," he thinks, "and I shall infect anything." Atkins "can almost hear [Greene's] teeth gnashing at those who omitted to sleep with someone else's wife or husband … it is difficult to read Greene's fiction without sensing a contempt for sinlessness." Atkins concluded: Greene's "concern with sin has become so intense he finds a life without sin to be devoid of meaning." But George Orwell's witty complaint about Greene in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell is the best known. Labeling his subject the leader of the "cult of the sanctified sinner," Orwell declares that Greene shows a Catholic's "snobbishness" about sin: "There is something distingue in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only."

Although Greene's conversion to Catholicism has generated an intense critical debate, only five or six of his more than twenty novels actually focus on the faith: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heartof the Matter—the so-called "Catholic trilogy"—The End of the Affair, Monsignor Quixote, and, perhaps, A Burnt-out Case. In exploring Catholicism in his fiction, Greene eschewed propaganda. He noted in Ways of Escape, his second volume of autobiography, that he was "not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic." That is, Catholicism does not provide a dogma he wishes to promulgate in his novels but instead supplies a framework within which he can measure the human situation. "I'm not a religious man," Greene once told Catholic World interviewer Gene D. Phillips, "though it interests me. Religion is important, as atomic science is."

Despite the attention paid his Catholicism, Greene explained to Phillips that religion occupied only "one period" of his writing career: "My period of Catholic novels was preceded and followed by political novels." Greene's first successful novels were written in the 1930s. In Ways of Escape Greene defines the mid-1930s as "clouded by the Depression in England … and by the rise of Hitler. It was impossible in those days not to be committed, and it is hard to recall details of one's private life as the enormous battlefield was prepared around us." Greene's earlier political novels are set in Europe, usually in England, but more recent political novels move from one Third-World trouble spot to another even as they explore the author's characteristic themes: commitment, betrayal, corruption, sin, suffering, and the nature of human sexuality, often against a backdrop of Catholicism.

In both religion and politics Greene opposed the dogmatic and the doctrinaire, sided against those who sacrifice the corrupt but living human spirit for a grand but bloodless thesis. For example, in Monsignor Quixote, however much the good-natured priest and the equally good-natured communist politician quibble, both reject the intellectual rigidities of those whose commitment to their respective causes is ideologically absolute. Politics and religion, then, are closely related. Monsignor Quixote is at once political and religious in nature; and, while nobody denies that The Power and the Glory is one of Greene's Catholic works, it can also be studied as a political novel.

Not only a novelist, Greene wrote in more than a dozen other genres, including novellas, short stories, plays, radio plays, screenplays, essays, memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, travel books, poetry, and children's literature. Although Greene made his mark primarily in the novel form, his stories, plays, and nonfiction prose have all attracted critical consideration.

About the short-story genre, Greene wrote in Ways of Escape: "I remain in this field a novelist who happens to have written short stories." Unfailingly modest in appraising his own literary efforts, Greene said in an introductory note to his Nineteen Stories, "I am only too conscious of the defects of these stories…. The short story is an exacting form which I have not properly practised." He dismissed his stories as "merely … the by-products of a novelist's career." However true this evaluation might be for Nineteen Stories, and however correct Lodge might be in calling the short story a "form in which [Greene] has never excelled," some of Greene's stories do merit reading. Even John Atkins, who in Graham Greene concurred with Lodge that the "short story is not one of Greene's successful forms," conceded that the four newer works in the expanded collection Twenty-one Stories "show an improvement" over those in the earlier volume. And in Ways of Escape Greene registered contentment with "The Destructors," "A Chance for Mr. Lever," "Under the Garden," and "Cheap in August": "I have never written anything better than" these works, he declared.

Less distinguished than his fiction, Greene's dramas provided him with, if nothing else, diversion. He recorded—indeed, almost bragged about—his lifelong attempt to escape depression and boredom, starting with Russian roulette as a teenager and culminating in a career as a restless, wandering novelist who, when his mainstay got boring, tried to escape by shifting genres. Writing plays, he declared in Ways of Escape, "offered me novelty, an escape from the everyday": "I needed a rest from novels."

As with Greene's short fiction, critics have not been overly enthusiastic about the novelist's plays, although The Complaisant Lover attracted some applause. Philip Stratford, in his book Faith and Fiction, called it an "outstanding and original achievement," while to Atkins it ranks as "vital as many of the Restoration comedies." Of Greene's plays overall, Smith pointed to a "curious lack … of memorable characters," a quality not shared with Greene's novels. On the whole most critics agreed with Lodge's assessment that "it does not seem likely that Greene will add a significant chapter to the history of British drama." Despite this dismissal, Greene's plays—which include The Living Room, The Potting Shed, and Carving a Statue—remained in print decades after their first mid-twentieth-century productions.

Greene's nonfiction prose, though not widely analyzed, has been more appreciated. Metaphorical and speculative, his travel books are distinctly literary, and record spiritual no less than physical journeys. Greene's first travel book, Journey without Maps, is representative of his work in the genre. Believing Africa to be "not a particular place, but a shape, … that of the human heart," Greene imagined his actual trip as, simultaneously, a descent, with Sigmund Freud as guide, into the collective soul of humanity in a quest of "those ancestral threads which still exist in our unconscious minds." Greene finds in Africa "associations with a personal and racial childhood"; and when in the end he returns to civilization, the conclusion he draws about his experience affirms the "lost childhood" theme about which he so frequently wrote: "This journey, if it had done nothing else, had reinforced a sense of disappointment with what man had made out of the primitive, what he had made out of childhood."

The essay collection Reflections, which brings together various nonfiction pieces such as film reviews, travel essays, and examinations of communism, Catholicism, and major literary figures, as well as A World of My Own: A Dream Diary, which presents dreams Greene recorded throughout his life, provide readers with greater insight into the novelist. Malcolm Bradbury, writing in the New York Times Book Review, concluded of the latter volume: "It's not surprising that the strange tales told here—and they do emerge as tales, not as random notes on disconnected, chaotic events—are as powerful as his fiction, and interweave with it. Greene's World of My Own—a carefully organized and edited selection from his dream diaries, which he made and introduced himself, just before his death—is equally the world of his novels, his distinctive, adventurous life as an author, his enigmatic character as a man."

Not surprisingly, commentators frequently turn to Greene's nonfiction pieces to aid their understanding of his fiction. "Fresh and stimulating," as Wyndham noted, the author's essays throw "much light on [Greene's] own work as a novelist." But the essays are worth reading in their own right. Atkins contended that "when Greene's criticism is gathered together we realize how very good it is," that Greene "has unerring good judgment in all literary matters. He can always be relied upon to see through falsity and to detect the ring of truth in others." Atkins went so far as to maintain that Greene's "criticism is much more free of fault than his fiction."

From 1935 to 1940 Greene wrote film reviews for the Spectator and in 1937 performed the same service for Night and Day. These reviews have been collected in The Graham Greene Film Reader, which also includes reviews of film books, interviews, lectures, letters, scripts he wrote for short documentaries, film stories, and film treatments. "What provides pleasure in these musings on the movies," noted Pat Dowell in the Washington Post Book World, "is the glittering nuggets of a prose stylist who writes of the young Bette Davis's 'corrupt and phosphorescent prettiness' or pens a hilariously exasperated description of the unintentionally magnificent surrealism of The Garden of Allah." Writing in the New Republic Stanley Kauffmann commented, "Overall, this assemblage of Greene's criticism is a boon."

In addition, more than twenty of his own novels and stories have been filmed, some with his own screenplays. Furthermore, Greene wrote original screenplays, including the 1949 classic The Third Man. It is, then, understandable that to the Paris Review interviewers he called himself a "film man."

Greene's cinematic prose method is evident in his first successful novel, Stamboul Train. Creating this work admittedly with one eye on the film camera, Greene intersperses passages of extended narrative with brief cuts from one character or group of characters to another. This device both sustains the novel's full-throttle pace by generating a sense of motion—appropriate to a story whose center is a speeding express train—and, with great economy, evokes the stew of humanity thrown together at a railway station or on a train. The union of film and fiction is even pondered in Stamboul Train by the character Q. C. Savory, who seems to describe Greene's own ambition to incorporate aspects of film into his fiction: "One thing the films had taught the eye, Savory thought, the beauty of the landscape in motion, how a church tower moved behind and above the trees, how it dipped and soared with the uneven human stride, the loveliness of a chimney rising towards a cloud and sinking behind the further cowls. That sense of movement must be conveyed in prose."

Although acclaimed for his work in various genres, it is as a novelist that Greene remains most respected. Indeed, some critics have cited him as the leading English novelist of his generation; in Lodge's view, among the British novelists who were Greene's contemporaries, "it is difficult to find his equal." Smith's evaluation—that Greene navigated "one of the more remarkable careers in twentieth-century fiction"—may seem by some to be understated when considered alongside the judgment of a Times Literary Supplement reviewer that Greene follows in the tradition of writers like Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. But it was, perhaps, Wyndham who came closest to explaining Greene's sustained popularity when he stated, simply, "Everything [Greene wrote] is readable."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Allain, Marie-Françoise, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, Bodley Head (London, England), 1983.

Allen, Walter, The Modern Novel, Dutton (New York, NY), 1965.

Allott, Kenneth, and Miriam Farris Allott, The Art of Graham Greene, Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 1951, Russell & Russell, 1965.

Atkins, John, Graham Greene, Roy, 1958.

Bestsellers 89, Issue 4, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Boardman, Gwenn R., Graham Greene: The Aesthetics of Exploration, University of Florida Press, 1971.

Cassis, A. F., Graham Greene: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Scarecrow (Metuchen, NJ), 1981.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 9, 1978, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 18, 1981, Volume 27, 1984, Volume 37, 1986, Volume 70, 1992, Volume 72, 1992.

DeVitis, L. A., Graham Greene, Twayne (New York, NY), 1964.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 13: British Dramatists since World War II, 1982, Volume 15: British Novelists, 1930-1959, 1983, Volume 77: British Mystery Writers, 1920-1939, 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1985, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Duraan, Leopoldo, Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant, Harper (San Francisco, CA), 1994.

Duraan, Leopoldo, Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, HarperCollins (London, England), 1994.

Evans, R. O., editor, Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations, University of Kentucky Press (Lexington, KY), 1963.

Falk, Quentin, Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene, Quartet (London, England), 1984.

Gordon, Hayim, Fighting Evil: Unsung Heroes in the Novels of Graham Greene, Greenwood Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Greene, Graham, A Sort of Life, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1971.

Greene, Graham, Our Man in Havana, Viking (New York, NY), 1958, with new introduction by author, Heinemann (London, England), 1970.

Greene, Graham, The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews and Film Stories, Applause Theatre Book Publishers (New York, NY), 1994.

Greene, Graham, with A. F. Cassis, Graham Greene: Man of Paradox, Loyola University Press (Chicago, IL), 1994.

Hill, William Thomas, The Search for Dwelling and Its Relationship to Journeying and Wandering in the Novels of Graham Greene, International Scholars Publication, 1998.

Hoskins, Robert, Graham Greene: An Approach to the Novels, Garland (New York, NY), 1998.

Hynes, Samuel, editor, Graham Greene: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (New York, NY), 1973.

Kermode, Frank, Puzzles and Epiphanies, Chilmark (New York, NY), 1962.

Kunkel, Francis L., The Labyrinthine Ways of Graham Greene, Sheed (London, England), 1959.

Living Writers, Sylvan Press, 1947.

Lodge, David, Graham Greene, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1966.

Malamet, Elliott, The World Remade: Graham Greene and the Art of Detection, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1998.

Mauriac, François, Great Men, Rockliff, 1952.

Mesnet, Maire-Beatrice, Graham Greene and the Heart of the Matter, Cresset (London, England), 1954.

Miller, Robert H., Graham Greene: A Descriptive Catalog, University of Kentucky Press (Lexington, KY), 1979.

Mueller, Walter R., The Prophetic Voice in Modern Fiction, Association Press, 1959.

Newby, P. H., The Novel: 1945-1950, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1951.

O'Faolain, Dean, The Vanishing Hero, Atlantic Monthly Press (Boston, MA), 1956.

Pendleton, Robert, Graham Greene's Conradian Masterplot: The Arabesques of Influence, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Prescott, Orville, In My Opinion, Bobbs-Merrill (Chicago, IL), 1952.

Reed, Henry, The Novel since 1939, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1947.

Rostenne, Paul, Graham Greene: Temoin des temps tragiques, Juilliard, 1949.

Shelden, Michael, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within, Random House (New York, NY), 1994.

Sherry, Norman, The Life of Graham Greene, Viking (New York, NY), Volume 1: 1904-1939, 1989, Volume 2: 1939-1955, 1995.

Stratford, Philip, Faith and Fiction, University of Notre Dame Press, 1964.

Vann, Jerry Donn, Graham Greene: A Checklist of Criticism, University of Kentucky Press (Lexington, KY), 1970.

Watts, Cedric Thomas, A Preface to Greene, Longman (London, England), 1997.

West, W. J., The Quest for Graham Greene, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Wobbe, R. A., Graham Greene: A Bibliography and Guide to Research, Garland (New York, NY), 1979.

Wyndham, Francis, Graham Greene, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1955.

Zabel, Morton Dauwen, Craft and Character in Modern Fiction, Viking (New York, NY), 1957.

periodicals

America, January 25, 1941.

Atlantic, July-August, 2002, Peter Godman, "Graham Greene's Vatican Dossier," p. 84.

Booklist, April 15, 1999, Mary McCay, review of The Third Man, p. 1542.

British Heritage, February-March, 2002, Barbara Roisman-Cooper, "Graham Greene: The Man behind the Mask," p. 48.

Catholic World, December, 1954, pp. 172-175; August, 1969, pp. 218-221.

College English, October, 1950, pp. 1-9.

Explicator, spring, 2003, David Robertson, "Greene's 'Jubilee,'" p. 168.

First Things, November, 1999, Robert Royal, "The (Mis)Guided Dreams of Graham Greene," p. 16.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), September 29, 1984.

Kliatt, July, 2002, Janet Julian, review of The Comedians, p. 49.

Library Journal, February 1, 1999, p. 138; July, 2001, p. 149; January, 2002, Nancy Pearl, review of The End of the Affair, p. 188.

Life, February 4, 1966.

London Magazine, June-July, 1977, pp. 35-45.

Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1980; January 2, 1981; March 20, 1985.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 23, 1988; October 23, 1994.

Modern Fiction Studies, autumn, 1957, pp. 249-288.

New Republic, December 5, 1994, p. 30.

New Statesman, November 27, 2000, John Gray, "A Touch of Evil," p. 51; December 3, 2001, Maureen Freely, "On Graham Greene's The Quiet American," p.55.

New Yorker, April 11, 1994, p. 46.

New York Review of Books, March 3, 1966; June 8, 1995; June 22, 1995; February 13, 2003, Pico Iyer, review of The Quiet American, p. 19.

New York Times, February 27, 1978; May 19, 1980; January 18, 1981; September 24, 1982; October 25, 1984; March 4, 1985; June 6, 1985; October 17, 1988; January 17, 1995.

New York Times Book Review, January 23, 1966; January 8, 1995.

Playboy, November, 1994, p. 32.

Renascence, winter, 1999, p. 133; fall, 2002 (special Greene issue).

Smithsonian, June, 2002, Bob Cullen, "Heart of the Matter: Graham Greene's Letters to His Paramour, Catherine Walston, Trace the Hazy Line between Life and Fiction," p. 112.

Southwest Review, summer, 1956, pp. 239-250.

Time, September 20, 1982.

Times (London), September 6, 1984; September 7, 1984; March 14, 1985; February 5, 1990.

Times Literary Supplement, January 27, 1966; March 28, 1980; March 15, 1985.

Washington Post, April 3, 1980; September 20, 1988.

Washington Post Book World, May 18, 1980; October 16, 1988; March 12, 1995.

World Press Review, December, 1981, pp. 31-32; April, 1983, p. 62.