TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041591/0415990.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5KB | 107 lines

                                                                                THE ARTS, Page 68

A Life on the World's Edge

Graham Greene: 1904-1991


By PAUL GRAY


    He did not plan on a long life. As a boy, he toyed with
suicide, employing, among other means, a dull knife, hay-fever
drops and a mild overdose of aspirin; he also survived several
sessions of Russian roulette. Grown older, evidently in spite
of himself, he left his native England as often as possible to
court danger and disease, wherever and whenever they might prove
most virulent: Africa, Mexico, Indochina, Cuba, Haiti, Central
America. None of these places killed him; instead they furnished
material for many of his more than 50 books, including novels,
short story collections, travel writings, plays, essays, auto
biography, biography and children's tales. So Graham Greene's
death last week, at 86, prompts not only sadness and tributes
but also a question: What would the contemporary world look like
if he had got his wish and not lived to describe it?

    For no serious writer of this century has more thoroughly
invaded and shaped the public imagination than did Graham
Greene. Millions who have never read him are nonetheless
familiar with his vision. Versions of Greene-scenes can be found
in daily headlines or wherever entertainment flickers: the
dubious quest, undertaken by a flawed agent with divided
loyalties against an uncertain enemy; the wrench of fear or of
violence that confronts an otherwise ordinary person with a
vision of eternal damnation or inexplicable grace.

    Greene did not dream up this terrain of momentous border
crossings and casual betrayals, and he could be peevish with
those who praised his inventiveness: "Some critics have referred
to a strange violent `seedy' region of the mind (why did I ever
popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and
I have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world
blinkered. `This is Indochina,' I want to exclaim, `this is
Mexico, this is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately
described.' " But on his journeys the author carried a
transforming talent and temperament that rendered all the
places, no matter how meticulously portrayed, not only seedy but
unmistakably Greeneland.

    Birth and circumstances drove Greene to a life on the
edge. Congenitally unhappy with what he later called his
manic-depressive self, he found himself a double agent at a
tender age, a student at the Berkhamsted School, where his
father reigned as headmaster. Naturally, his classmates made his
life miserable, and Greene sought retreat in voracious reading.
But the drama served up by his favorite authors (among them John
Buchan and Joseph Conrad) reminded Greene that he had been born
at an unpropitious time. "We were," he wrote, "a generation
brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous
disillusionment of the First World War." At Oxford, he dabbled
in writing and later drifted into newspaper work, eventually
becoming a subeditor at the London Times.

    There he might have stayed had it not been for his
stubborn conviction that he could become a writer and his
marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whom he had met at Oxford.
She was a Roman Catholic, and in 1926 Greene had converted to
her faith. He later recalled his feelings after formally being
received into the church: "There was no joy in it at all, only
a somber apprehension." Greene never took his religion lightly,
and the Catholicism that would come to stamp his fiction served
both as a stern gauge by which to measure the behavior of
fallen mortals and as a powerful source of divine mercy.

    Greene's first published novel, The Man Within (1929),
enjoyed a modest success and was made into a film. This pattern
was to be repeated throughout his career, for Greene and the
movies virtually grew up together. He learned the economies of
filmed narration -- the quick cuts, the disembodied perspective,
the interpolated conversations -- used them in his books and
then saw them re-employed in adaptations of his own work on the
screen.

    His greatest fiction spanned the years 1938 to '51:
Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End
of the Affair (1951) and, most hauntingly, The Power and the
Glory (1940). The pilgrimage of the nameless "whiskey priest,"
on the run in a Mexican state from a sectarian tyranny, remains a
thrilling adventure of despair and irrational redemption.

    For all his worldly success, Greene retained the attitudes
dictated by his childhood: a dislike for the strong -- hence his
increasing postwar opposition to the U.S. -- and a sympathy for
the underdog, a category that came to include everyone from
Fidel Castro to Kim Philby, a onetime friend and also a British
intelligence officer who famously spied for and then defected
to the Soviet Union. The last 30 or so years of his life were
spent in a modest apartment in an undistinguished building in
Antibes, on the French Mediterranean. Long separated (but never
divorced) from his wife, Greene wrote conscientiously some 300
words every day, among them the opening sentence of the second
volume of his autobiography: "What a long road it has been."