Graham Greene-III

A man of deep convictions and contradictions
By Ashok Chopra

ONE of the unhealthiest aspects of the age we live in is our curiosity to know the last detail of a celebrity writer's life — the same way one reads, and enjoys, the little tittle-tattle of a film star's life. This curiosity is perhaps a sign of a second-rate mind, as it is "compounded of vulgarity and anti-intellectualism" but in today's age it has become a necessary evil.

Graham Greene has been described as the Greta Garbo of the modern literary world, for he avoided public exposure and preferred to be alone. He always lived a quiet life and shunned literary circles. He seldom gave interviews to journalists, and was, indeed, seldom to be found by them. On rare occasions when he agreed to discuss his work on television, he would allow his voice to be heard, but not his face to be seen. His behaviour, in short, manifested an almost fanatical desire to protect his privacy and protect his 'cover', like one of his own fictitious secret agents, as he moved restlessly about the globe. Even "the interviews he gave were repetitive, as though he was keeping to a carefully prepared and memorised script, and one sometimes suspects that he was playing a private game with the media — giving their representatives the illusion of getting new facts". And, for man who was in the public eye for over six decades, Greene managed to protect his privacy well.

Little is known about his psychoanalysis, his conversion to Catholicism, his marriage, children and separation, his work as a spy in war-time West Africa and his personal friendships, habits and tastes. According to literary critic David Lodge, "Greene's teasing, almost coquettish, plays with the public's intense curiosity about his private life and personal paradox at the heart of writing itself — or, rather, on a set of inter-related paradoxes. Are books made out of life, or out of other books? Does the writer write his novel, or does the novel 'write the writer? Is the 'implied author' of a novel — the 'same ' as the 'real author', the actual historical individual who produced the text, but has a life outside it? Does a novel convince because it is 'true to life' or because it produces a rhetorical 'reality effect'?

"The suffocating embrace of Mother Church was only one of the things that Greene found it necessary to escape from. Others included bourgeois responsibility, boredom, depression, the mass media, the literary world, his fans. He must surely have logged more flying miles than any other writer of his stature in the world". Isolation, if only spiritual, is essential to the writer. However gregarious he may seem when "off duty", the fact is that a true novelist has neither a career nor society. When Greene once remarked that "success" was unavailable to priests or to writers, he gave the clearest indication of his almost monastic devotion to art. By becoming a writer, Greene was able to be both ubiquitous and invisible. He created not only a body of work, but also an author, Graham Greene, as mythical as the "Greeneland". "In his artful counterfeit of the 'real' world, seediness was glamour, adultery sacramental and violence the evidence of human contact. Hope and despair shared a common unflushed toilet. If God could count every hair on your head, Greene did not fail to draw his attention to the dandruff as well."

Greene led a methodological life. Every night he would very neatly arrange things in cornored piles upon the table by the living-room window. Then he would have a last drink. But, every night he would go to bed blocked. The character who took control of the story, and in whose judgement Greene put his trust, simply ceased to cooperate with him. "It's not too pleasant," he would say "except that now I have absolute confidence that during sleep a solution will come, and it practically always does. It's all from my dreams. The next morning when I start work — which I do immediately after breakfast, without even a bath or anything — I don't see what the problem was. The unconscious has solved it." In the mornings he would sit at his work-table facing a bright sun through a gauze of curtains. He would write a minimum of 300 words and then see to his correspondence, reply though talking into a mini-cassette recorder and send the tape by mail to his sister in England for typing and posting. Lunch was always at a pavement cafe where he would sit with his girlfriend. Evenings were meant for revising the morning work. Whenever alone he would dine "inside" the restaurant with a book. "A lot of my stories have come out of sitting alone in restaurants, imagining human motives." In the company of a friend or so, he would sit inside, always at the same table, "especially reserved" for him. If on a rare occasion that particular table was not available, he would "sulk" like a child, and leave the restaurant without eating. And his dinner comprised only " a bowl of sweet yellow mussles in broth and a bottle of wine."

Writing never came easily to Greene. Though a Confidential Agent was written in six weeks, usually the composition of a novel for him was hard and protracted labour over years, subject to deep depression, blocks, self-doubt and boredom. And dreams had an important role to play. Few know that for years together Greene kept a diary of his dreams. "I used to do it in periods when I'd got no book to do. It would fill up the time... with training one found that more and more one did this the more one remembered, after noting key points of the dream during the nights." Under this discipline Greene wrote over 800 manuscripts of dreams. In fine, Greene was a very complex man. If his deep interest in dreams, which nearly led him to a psychiatrist out of sheer curiosity, was a part of his life, so were the nervous breakdowns, failure and the school bullying.

The suicide attempts too were real, the manic-depressions actual, and a sense of failure repeated. Greene's first wife, Vivian is believed to have said that when they were parting ways, "he had a splinter of ice in his heart." May be it was this splinter of ice that made Greene what he was, a temperamental, eccentric, genius, the greatest novelist in the Anglo-American world, because as the Russian master Anton Chekov once said, "If you want to touch a reader's heart, try to make (the text) colder. It gives their grief, as it were, a background against which it stands out in great relief."

Whatever it is, the splinter helped.

After his divorce Greene took to writing as a way of escape from the turmoil within. He actually went on record to say that he couldn't understand what people did when they didn't write. So, the splinter did grow into a dagger as he went on to write just about everything. As is bound to happen some of these pieces had been long forgotten, but were rummaged and brought together in Reflections, introduced by Judith Adamson, wherein she says, these are "previously uncorrected travel reports, essays and reviews spanning seven decades Death in the Cotswolds portrays a man born into a wealthy family in Bombay who dies, destitute and mad, having frozen to death on a straw mattress. Critical reviews on war-time Britain, articles on events in Indo-China, Cuba, Haiti, Paraguay, Chile... introductions to books by various writers, especially R.K. Narayan... general reflections on the cinema..." and so on. Like almost everything that Greene provided, they are reflective with a mischievous sense of humour, but never with any malice. It is a great anthology.

Begin with ourselves. There's his introduction to R.K. Narayan's The Bachelor of Arts — the first one that he wrote in 1937 and introduced Narayan to the West, and the second which he provided in 1978. His introductions are rather well known but it is just as well to recall that Greene compares him, in same ways, to Anton Chekov and describes him as the only writer in the sub-continent to explain India, "my second home", to him. Others who have written on life in India, Greene dismisses, especially E.M. Forster, who wrote of A Passage to India "I tried to show that India was an unexplainable muddle by introducing as unexplainable muddle." Rabindranath Tagore's poems in translations too he dismisses as 'the bright pebbly eyes' of the theosophist!

The best of Graham Greene, as I mentioned earlier in these columns, comes out in his political novels centering around Central America, West Africa and South-East Asia, and his barbed comments on the games the Americans have played. And along with these are his reflections on life as it is. As it ought to be — but never does. Greene once said that the "epigraph for his novels and writings" should be:

(His) interests on the dangerous edge of things
The honest thief, the tender murder,
The superstitious atheist..
(To) watch these while these in equilibrium keeps the giddy life midway...

One of the most attractive traits of Greene then was his willingness to put himself, as the Americans say, "on the line". He was above all a man of action and made most of his experience but he raised the question whether "the imaginative experience isn't enough (for a writer). Why should the author have to suffer in himself the agony of his character?" The answer which Greene provides in his novels and several short pieces here is that knowing a thing and experiencing a thing are two different things, rather like eating and breathing.

One of the advantages of anthologies of this kind is that you don't have to start from page one and carry on till the end. You can go back and forth stop at any point like a journey without maps. You could do the same here except that with Greene it is rather like a slow train to nowhere. You stop at each station, savour the scene and would want to go back to it — and probably will because he makes you think — and 'laugh and cry' at the same time. And Graham Greene writes so beautifully! As only Greene could do.

A question that has remained a mystery and baffled many is why Greene was never knighted nor awarded the Nobel Prize? It is a question difficult to answer. One school of thought feels that though Greene knew the full measure of fulfilment and success, it was always on his own terms. He was the eternal rebel and opportunist. A compassionable humanist, a profound intellectual, he refused to play by the Establishment rules. Though converted to Catholism at a young age, he continued to rebel against two of the church's doctrines, euthanasia and contraception. "Contraction was never condemned by the Apostles," he insisted. When asked if he had ever thought of becoming a priest he said: "I am afraid I am much too fond of women." The contraction of saint and sinner that fascinated Greene was characterised by the whisky soaked priest in The Power and the Glory. It was a combination he also kept alive in his private life.

A man of deep convictions and numerous contradictions, Greene also had a talent to intrigue, which shocked people. For years he campaigned for the release of two Russian dissident writers. Yet, he wrote: "If I had to choose life in the Soviet Union and life in the USA, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union." Such examples galore. In short, he had a massive appetite for damnation. Naturally, his outspokenness attracted enemies. But Greene was too gritty, too passionate about the truth as he saw it, to sacrifice his beliefs for a prize, no matter how glittering. Hence, the Nobel Prize for Literature just eluded him, even as writers of more modest standing like William Golding, got it. Talking to The Guardian Greene had said; "It's a gamble, it's a lottery. There are a lot of people who deserve it too, but haven't got it. I don't feel slighted at all. I have one big enemy in the Academy (Arthur Lundquist), and it would be over his dead body that I would get it..." Yes, Greene, never got the Nobel Prize. But Nobel or no Nobel, he is the finest English novelist of the century, who will have more works of his termed as classics of the century than any other writer.

(Concluded)