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- BOOKS, Page 69A Useful Application of FaithBy R.Z. Sheppard
-
-
- THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE, VOLUME I: 1904-1939
- by Norman Sherry
- Viking; 783 pages; $29.95
-
- If you have been waiting 40 years to learn the name of the
- obscure Mexican clerk who was the model for the Judas figure in The
- Power and the Glory, or if you lie awake wondering who originally
- owned the revolver that Graham Greene used when he played Russian
- roulette in 1923, this is the book for you.
-
- Volume I of Norman Sherry's meticulously protracted biography
- takes the English novelist step by step, from his birth in 1904 to
- 1939. Readers of Greene's memoir A Sort of Life may experience a
- mild paramnesia as they again hear of the novelist's neurotic
- childhood, his crush on his psychoanalyst's wife, his dissolute
- years at Oxford, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, his
- beginnings as a journalist, and the physical and spiritual
- wanderings that led to the writing of his popular moral thrillers.
-
- The proposed Volume II remains open-ended. Greene is 84 and
- still active (The Captain and the Enemy, his 24th novel, was
- published last year). Sherry, a professor of literature at Trinity
- University in San Antonio, has yet to tackle Greene's Africa
- service with British intelligence, his marital breakup, love
- affairs, involvements with the movie business, anti-Americanism and
- friendships with left-wing Latin American leaders Fidel Castro and
- Omar Torrijos of Panama. One should also expect deep penetration
- of the privacy that surrounds Greene's life in the south of France,
- where he has lived since the '60s. A genuine coup would be the
- identity of the Swedish Academy member who, as rumor has it, blocks
- Greene's path to a Nobel Prize.
-
- So the best is yet to come, and Sherry, who has had Greene's
- sort-of approval and cooperation, should be in the best position
- to get it. Of all the big fish still swimming in the shrinking pond
- of English letters, Greene is one of the most elusive. As Sherry
- told the British press this spring, "He will not give you anything.
- If you don't ask, you won't get, and if you do ask, you might well
- get a no."
-
- The novelist selected Sherry for the job after reading his 1971
- book on Joseph Conrad, Conrad's Western World. Greene was taken
- with the scholar's unbiased approach and willingness to travel to
- the remote and hazardous regions that inspired the author of The
- Heart of Darkness. And indeed, Sherry makes a fuss about his field
- investigations for this book: "Risking disease and death as he had
- done, I went to those places and in most cases found people Greene
- had met and put into his novels." He tells us that he developed
- gangrene in South America and got dysentery in the same Mexican
- boardinghouse where Greene was stricken. In Liberia, locale of
- Greene's first safari, officials he interviewed had their throats
- cut a week later, when the government abruptly changed hands.
-
- Macho scholarship may satisfy a personal need, but Sherry's
- tribulations do not yield much about Greene's nature. For that, the
- biographer hits the conventional paper trail: books, journals,
- diaries, letters and periodicals. His impressive accumulation
- supports what readers of Greene's writings have already had reason
- to suspect: his morbid childhood fears ripened into the themes of
- his art.
-
- Sherry's dossier reveals a physically awkward and emotionally
- withdrawn boy who became the scapegoat of his playmates. Neither
- Greene's autobiography nor his chronicler's researches fully convey
- the depths of shame and humiliation that must have marked the early
- years. Young Greene seems to have felt these emotions as a profound
- boredom that required dramatic action. His suicide attempts by dull
- knife, hay-fever drops and aspirin foreshadow the lengths to which
- he would later go in the name of love and literature. He changed
- religions to win the hand of Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a devout
- Roman Catholic. When she said that she would rather live with him
- as a sister, he suggested a celibate marriage. "Greene was in
- deadly earnest," Sherry concludes, "but as a practical ploy it
- could not be bettered." Nature took its course; a daughter, Lucy,
- was born in 1933.
-
- Greene made a useful application of his faith in Brighton Rock
- (1938). The novel began his reputation as a Catholic writer,
- although he has usually described himself as a writer who has
- merely employed Catholic ideas. Sherry takes the broader position
- that, in Brighton Rock at least, "it is certain that the new
- dimension his conversion brought to his view of man and God brought
- also a new dimension to his fiction." What readers got, and would
- later get in The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, was
- tightly plotted melodramas about evil and divine grace as a means
- of escape. Many critics have admired the craft of these books but
- have not been convinced of the quality of Greene's mercy. Sherry
- should have something to say about that quality when he sums up in
- Volume II. The current opus concentrates mostly on quantity.