Graham Greene
One of the authors Greene admired most was R K Narayan,
probably the foremost Indian writer in English. A favourite
of mine, Narayan's writings always manage to evoke heart-
felt longing for a return to childhood. Here is my page on
on him.
A Not So Brief Biography
"Childhood is life under a dictatorship."
Graham Greene was born on October 2, 1904 to Charles Henry
and Marion Raymond Greene, the fourth of six children. Charles
was the Head Master of Berkhamsted School. Graham's brothers
included Hugh, who went on to become a Director General of the
BBC, and Raymond, an accomplished mountaineer involved in the
1931 Kamet and 1933 Everest expeditions. One of Marion's
distant cousins happened to be a person called R. L. Stevenson.
Greene studied at the Berkhamstead School and Oxford ( in Balliol )
By all accounts, he had a pretty torrid time in Berkhamstead, having
to balance all the time between his father and his schoolmates.
He wrote quite regularly in Student Magazines, and was an editor
of The Oxford Outlook. His first work, a collection of
apparently
forgettable poems, Babbling April, was published during his
last
year at Oxford.
After graduation, he worked briefly for the Nottingham Journal. He
was baptized a Catholic in February 1926. In March, he returned
to London, as the Sub Editor for The Times.
Greene married Vivienne ( later Vivien ) Dayrell-Browning in October
1927. He had met her in early '25, after she had written correcting
a
small mistake ( Greene had talked of 'worshipping' the Virgin Mary,
and Vivienne felt he ought to have used the word 'venerated' ) in one
of his Outlook articles.
His first novel, The Man Within, came out in 1929, to public
and
critical acclaim. A lucrative contract with Heinemann followed,
for his
next three novels, enabling him to resign from The Times, and
devote
more time to his novels. The Name of Action and Rumour
at Night
fall, his next two books, did not do very well. The Greenes
moved
to the Cotswolds in 1931, and he had begun work on what was to
establish him as a significant literary figure. Stamboul Train
( also
known as Orient Express ) went on to become a commercial success,
and a film ( by Twentieth Century Fox ).
"The Critic, as much as the film, is supposed to entertain ... "
Around this time, Greene started reviewing for The Spectator.
His
film criticism career actually stretched back to his Oxford days, with
an Outlook article in 1925. He also had written a few
essays on
films for The Times. He remained an avid film goer for
a long time,
so much so that he reworked the character of , after watching Anna
Sten in The Crime of Dmitri Karamazov ( by Feodor Ozep ).
In 1935, he added films to his book reviewing work at The Spectator.
He continued to review films for over a decade, and is widely reg-
arded one of the finest critics of his time, the Shirley Temple fiasco
notwithstanding ( His review of a 1937 film, Wee Willie Winkie,
contained disparaging remarks about Ms. Temple's precocious body
and it's alleged exploitation by Hollywood movie moghuls. The review
led to a messy lawsuit, and possibly the closing down of Night
and
Day, for which Greene had written the piece ).
Vivien Greene gave birth to a daughter in December 1933, six months
after they had moved again, this time to Oxford.
"Ways of Escape"
It's a Battlefield was published in early 1934. Greene
started travell
-ing extensively in 1934 - brief trips to Germany, Latvia and Estonia
preceding an arduous journey overland through Liberia, in the company
of his cousin Barbara, which was chronicled in Journey without Maps.
He returned in April 1937; England made Me, written before he
had
left, was published soon after. A Gun for Sale came next,in
1936.
Francis Greene was born in September 1936. In 1938, Brighton Rock
came out. In the same year, Greene made a trip to Mexico, to investigate
into alleged atrocities against the Catholics. The result of the journey
was two books, The Lawless Roads in March 1939, and The Power
And The Glory, perhaps his finest book, in September 1939. The
latter won for him his first major literary prize, The Hawthornden;
the
term Greeneland first appeared, at around this time, as a description
of the atmosphere in his novels, in an Arthur Calder-Marshall article
for The Horizon.
The outbreak of the Second World War led to Vivien and the children
evacuating to Crowborough, and later Oxford. Greene worked for the
Ministry of Information, and then volunteered for the Air Raid Precautions
Squad during the London Blitz. He wrote four childrens' stories during
this time, illustrated by a friend, Dorothy Glover; the books were published
after the War. Greene also managed to have The Confidential Agent
published in September 1939. The novel was an unusual Greene offering
in that it's ending was unambiguously happy.
In August, 1941, Greene joined the SIS, and was assigned to Freetown,
Sierra Leone, in December. The job was by and large boring, and Greene
livened it up by coming up with some innovative plans to recruit spies;
one proposed a travelling brothel and another involved tricking a Left
Wing official into escaping form Freetown prison with British agents,
letting them cross over into Vichy Territory, and then luring him back
to blackmail him into becoming a double agent. Unfortunately he did not
obtain approval for these schemes. In early 1943, Greene returned to
London, to a job in Section V. He was assigned to Counter Intelligence,
Portugal, and reported to Kim Philby, who was then in charge of the area.
They became good friends - after Philby's defection to the erstwhile USSR,
his memoirs, My Silent War, contained laudatory references to Greene
and Greene wrote it's Introduction.
An interesting sidelight of Greene's tenure in the SIS is the story of 'Garcia'.
A double agent in Lisbon, he fed the Germans disinformation, pretending
to control a ring of agents all over England, while all he was doing was
inventing armed forces movements and operations from maps, guides and
standard military references. Garcia was the inspiration for Wormold
a character in Our Man in Havana.
Greene left the Service in May 1944, and joined the Political Warfare
Executive, editing a literary magazine intended for France. After the
War, Greene was commissioned to write a film treatment based on
Vienna, a city occupied by the Four Powers at the time. He collaborated
with Carol Reed in writing The Third Man, a skillful tale of deception
and drug trafficking. The film went on to win the First Prize at Cannes
in 1949
Last Updated on Jan 22, 1998
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