"Perfection of the life or of the work": lives of Graham Greene.

Davis, Robert Murray

After William Makepeace Thackeray read a very favorable biography of John Wilson, he told a friend that Wilson "did nothing worth record" and had enjoined his daughters, "'Mind, no biography' of himself."(1) And that was before inquiring minds really wanted to know. Seventy years later, in Death in the Afternoon, the Old Lady who plays straight person to Hemingway says, "You know I like you less and less the more I know you." His reply: "Madam, it is always a mistake to know an author."(2)

Those who undertake the biographer's task might agree, because writing biographies, especially of recent authors, is more demeaning, physically and morally, than any other branch of literary scholarship. Unless the biographer is on the scene right after the preacher, like Emmeline Grangeford, it may not involve literal stoop labor, but one has to scramble through masses of paper scattered inconveniently over the globe. Worse, the biographer has to go around bothering friends, relations, descendants, and casual acquaintances and in general behaving like a snoop and busybody.

Another disadvantage is that writing a biography requires not merely diligence but qualities of art and character which few possess: sympathy, understanding, subtlety, the narrative skill to move from scene to summary and back again, the ability to illuminate a character, idea, or context.

Each era has its characteristic brand of biography. The kind of biography that worried Thackeray, the "Life and Letters" typically compiled by the eldest son, was monumental in intention and thus as ponderous as a tombstone and as frank as most epitaphs. Damaging material was in many cases destroyed by the subject himself or by the grieving widow, loyal friends, and the biographer.

This kind of Victorian squeamishness gave way to debunkers like Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians employed rudimentary psychology and state-of-the-art irony to point out the clay on which the marble reputation stood. More important than his tone was his narrative method: he lifted the weight of documentation. The result, in England at any rate, was a series of sprightly biographies written between other assignments by clever young men with few scholarly credentials and no filial piety at all who used art to conceal lack of original material: Evelyn Waugh on Rossetti, Peter Quennell on Byron, Graham Greene on Lord Rochester - though the last was so interesting that it could not be published until forty-three years after its composition.

In America, beginning about the late 1950s, the situation of the literary biographer changed markedly, in part because more and different kinds of material became available. Heirs, correspondents, and even authors had stopped destroying documents on the sound commercial principle that the papers were worth a lot of money, either in tax breaks or, once the University of Texas at Austin entered the market, in good hard American dollars. Moreover, gossip ceased to be a private vice and became almost a public duty, so that co-respondents as well as correspondents became much franker.

The typical literary biography of what might be called the heroic period - Leon Edel on Henry James, Mark Schorer on Sinclair Lewis, Richard Ellman on James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, Carlos Baker on Ernest Hemingway - was anything but evasive, artful, amateurish, or polite. Written by scholars rather than scions, these books resemble the naturalist novel in being saturated in details about every scrap that the subject wrote or had written or remembered about him. This kind of biography requires the widest possible access, which means the acquiescence of research librarians and the active cooperation of whatever friends and family members survive the subject.

At first glance, the position of the authorized biographer seems enviable. He or she is given assurances, in some cases more valuable than in others, of the estate's imprimatur, and this will open many doors. But the authorized biographer is presumably expected to begin and often to continue with a sympathetic if not a friendly attitude toward the subject. In contrast, the free-lance may be denied certain kinds of access, but she or he has the opportunity, which sometimes seems like the obligation, to take a more critical view of the subject.

Two recent biographies of Graham Greene illuminate the contrast. Norman Sherry was "authorized" in the strict sense of the term, for Graham Greene chose him after an interview. Michael Shelden wrote the authorized biography of George Orwell, but his book on Greene would have appalled the subject and did appall Sherry, who called Shelden "a literary terrorist."(3) The contrast between the two biographies has received considerable attention, and the arguments about the need for charity and forbearance need not be rehearsed here.(4)

More interesting is the right of the author to dictate the way he will be perceived. Greene admired Sherry's book Conrad's Western World and probably thought he would produce a similarly thorough, rather pedestrian, and fact-filled account of Greene's life. Greene obviously hoped to continue to control the way he would be perceived. He had done so quite successfully for decades, living selected portions of his private life in public ever since Journey Without Maps (1936), in which he established himself as counterexample to materialistic Western civilization. In the fifties and later he became public witness for large sections of the Third World, the man on the spot to observe troubles he largely attributed to American meddling.

His posthumous image was clearly on his mind when he threatened legal action against Anthony Mockler for trying, in Shelden's words, "to challenge Sherry's monopoly"(5) in a manuscript which was finally published with revisions and when he asked Sherry not to interview some of the women in his life. Finally, he gave Sherry what seems to be unlimited access not only to archives, family (most important, his estranged wife), and friends, but to extensive interviews in which he reserved the right not to answer, though he promised never to lie. In turn, Sherry promised Greene that he would, as he had done with Conrad, "experience, as far as possible, what my subject experienced."(6) For the Greene biography, this involved not only logging a great many air miles but catching some of the same diseases. How this illuminated Greene or indeed the places Sherry visited is not thus far apparent, except that the Judas figure in The Power and the Glory has only a physical resemblance to the real, pathetic man.

In the seventeen years between Sherry's designation as biographer and Greene's death in 1991, he got to know the author well enough to present this portrait drawn from life:

The front view of him is strong and still. What strikes you are his slightly bulging, blue, speculative eyes, the eyebrows raised in a perpetual questioning. It is a handsome, compelling face, with a stem strength which Anthony Palliser caught in his study for the National Portrait Gallery, but let him turn sideways, and his face in profile has changed again. One notices a small upturned blue-veined nose. The bags under his eyes are 'like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life', and there are deep lines running from nose to chin. But when he smiles or laughs he becomes an excited boy, lifting himself out of a trough of sadness - something recalled, a surprise pondered upon, and his face is transformed. (1:xx)

In addition to the interviews with Greene and others, including the man who found him condoms in Freetown, Sierra Leone, during World War II, Sherry was able to consult the baby book kept by Greene's mother, his diaries, and the enormous amount that he wrote, published and unpublished, including letters, most important and shy-making of which were to the woman who was to become his wife and then to his most important mistress. No wonder, then, that Sherry announced his intentions - by which, presumably, he wishes to be judged - "not only to trace the life and career of his subject but also, so far as possible, to penetrate the mystery of his character and personality" (1:xvi).

At first, very sustained glance - the two volumes covering Greene's life to 1955 run to more than 1,300 pages - Sherry seems to have given us all the facts. The people around Greene are presented clearly and for the most part sympathetically. Sometimes he goes too far, as in the footnote about the fate of the actress who played Coral in the film version of Orient Express, who in 1970 "witnessed the fatal stabbing of her third husband by a prowler at their home in Montecito, California" (1:591). This is extreme but not asymptomatic.

Sometimes the detail gets in the way of the vision: for example, Sherry interviewed many of the people whom Greene knew in Freetown and tells us what he did for the Secret Intelligence Service (pretty much what Wilson does in The Heart of the Matter), but he gives no sense of the town's geography beyond what Greene provided in the novel. And sometimes even details get lost: Sherry tells us how Greene expected to do on his examinations at Balliol - but not, for nearly three hundred pages, how they turned out. He tells us that his wife's mother had two children, but only incidentally, and not until the second volume, the name and sex of the other.

These and other confusions are the result of Sherry's attempt to give more than a mere chronicle of events. Many of his chapters are topical: university, courtship, composition of a novel, experiences with prostitutes, affair with Catherine Walston, American production of The Heart of the Matter, and so on and on. Sometimes the confusion is deliberate: Sherry admits (1:270) that he "deliberately left out a bracketed aside" about a potential rival from a Greene letter to Vivien quoted four chapters earlier. But sometimes the confusion seems inadvertent, as in the jumble of dates in the notes to 2:386ff. As a result, we have Greene compartmentalized rather than the living man writing or the writer trying to live.

However, Sherry has not whitewashed Greene. In the first volume, to be sure, he accepted Greene's evaluation of himself as "rigourously honest," though he realized that "it was an honesty not coupled with a comparable candour" (1:266), and felt that Greene was not comprehensible without an understanding of "his intense nervousness in the face of lies, even when these are justified" (269) - apparently as in the two versions of a diary entry, one of which records a visit to a prostitute. One would think this an insuperable handicap for a Secret Service agent and for a man whose sexual life was incredibly complex. Of course, Sherry believes that the dedication of England Made Me to his wife "with ten years love" is evidence that the love "had not diminished" (1:470), though he had used the name and locale of a regular paid companion in the novel. Still, even in the first volume, published while Greene lived, Sherry began to wonder "whether experience is seeking him out or he is seeking it; whether he is also touching up his material for effect" (1:666). At this point he seems to accept Greene's assertion that he was the man; he suffered; he was there. Later, confronting Greene's statement about The Power and the Glory in 1983, preposterous on the face of it, that he would "never consent to appropriate other people's political sufferings for literary ends" (1:698), Sherry does wonder whether this extends to religious sufferings and speculates that Greene had some idea for a novel before he went to Mexico.

In the second volume, published three years after Greene's death, Sherry seeks "to move from his public reputation to an understanding of his inner vulnerabilities" (2:xiii), although the latter were certainly not ignored in volume 1. In some cases, as in Greene's relations with his estranged wife, Sherry remains sympathetic, quoting without comment Vivien's accounts of the various indignities visited upon her. He is aware of Greene's sometimes specious reasoning, and he notes of Greene's promise to commit suicide if he ever made Vivien "unhappy really," "How close these sentiments are to Scobie's, except that Scobie acts upon his desire 'to die quickly'" (2:278).

The more critical attitude is welcome, but it is accompanied by a chronic use of Greene's fiction to explain the author's inner feelings. Sherry obviously feels justified in this view by Greene's remark that "I cannot invent" (1:240), so that scenes, characters, and emotions in the novels must reflect Greene's experience more or less directly. Thus,

To begin to understand his personal experiences it is necessary to read his fiction, in particular The Heart of the Matter. Novels declare themselves as fictions not personal histories, though they mine the personal terrain. Greene always felt that so long as he presented the intimate experiences as fictions his secrets would remain unrecognized, and this appealed to his guarded nature. (2:234)

The result, at least for Sherry's immediate purpose, is that the novels turn out to be little more than material for the biographer. One cannot say that Sherry is a bad critic. He is not, on this showing, a critic at all, and the fact that Greene was a writer, even a writer "thought by many to be the greatest novelist of his generation" (2:xiii), seems incidental in this book. Indeed, at the end of the preface to volume 2, Sherry hopes "that readers will be able to say, this was a living man" (2:xv).

If Sherry is something of an advocate for Greene, Michael Shelden is a prosecuting attorney. He obviously began not by looking into Greene's face but by looking backward f tom the public reputation to find contradictions in Greene's actions over a long life. Shelden points out that the man who spoke all his life of suicide died of natural causes at the age of eighty-seven. The spokesman for the unfortunate and downtrodden accepted free trips and a Rolex watch from dictators heavily involved in suppression and drug smuggling and, on what seems solid evidence, used his vaunted anti-Americanism as a way of cultivating leftist leaders on whom he then reported to the Secret Intelligence Service. The recipient of Alexander Korda's patronage, at least in the late 1930s, exhibited a gratuitous anti-Semitism. The writer who wrote about the agonies of commitment divided between two women managed to keep several of them on the string for years, including an abandoned wife who was a convenient shield against other commitments, while frequenting brothels and possibly - the evidence does not fully convince even Shelden - soliciting young men. The entries under "sex" in the index read like a week's worth of talk shows: anal sex, flagellation, incest theme, interest in male love, possible actual homosexuality, masochism (including cigarette burns), pedophilia, prostitutes and brothels, and young girls. These are followed by "sin and repentance" (528; none of the "aspects" of this edition are included in the index to the Random House version). And all this activity by a man who carried, at least into his midfifties, a teddy bear wherever he went.

Despite the outward appearance of sensationalism, Shelden has uncovered material apparently unknown to Sherry. Most important are the Foreign Office files (about Greene's trip to Liberia) and material from his briefing by the Secret Intelligence Service (which revealed that Greene's career as a spy lasted far longer than generally supposed and was so well paid that one official regarded him as mercenary). He also reveals the mental illness of Greene's maternal grandfather, many new details about the career of Dorothy Glover, Greene's first important mistress and coauthor of the children's books attributed solely to Greene, and the sexual adventures of Catherine Walston, his second. He is far better informed than Sherry about the actual writing of the Third Man filmscript.

Shelden is also far more economical than Sherry, covering Greene's entire life in 488 pages (414 in the Random House edition), plus index and rather exiguous footnotes. For example, he disposes of Greene's brief flirtation with the British-American Tobacco Company in two paragraphs; Sherry devotes fourteen pages to it. Kim Philby? Shelden has two pages to Sherry's seventeen.

Of course, Shelden is not, as his title indicates, much interested in the outward facts of Greene's life. In fact, he does not get him born until page 22 (Random House, 19). And his narrative is even more disjointed than Sherry's, as when he interrupts his discussion of The Name of Action to present a ten-page panoramic view of "the pervasive anti-Semitism of his early career" before concluding that "it is not a valid reason for dismissing the novels as works of art. Nor can the art excuse, in any way, the malice" (154; Random House, 130).

Unlike Sherry, Shelden does regard the novels as works of art: "few writers can rival Greene's ability to capture the confusion and terror of living in such a world. His eye misses nothing," so that

It is Greene's ability to penetrate our hearts of darkness that makes him a writer of enduring importance. The visits he made to distant pans of the world were never as meaningful as his ongoing explorations of the more obscure places in the human imagination - his longest journey without maps. (14; Random House, 14-15)

Still, however generally Shelden praises the novels, like Sherry he regards them as source material for the biographer. But if for Sherry the novels are a mirror, for Shelden they are a secret code. This limits the terms of the discussion to plot summary and rather old-fashioned character analysis. Even in Shelden's treatment of A Gun for Sale, one of his longest consecutive discussions of a novel, he focuses almost exclusively on Raven. This reading, even if one accepts it, leaves far too much of the novel out of consideration. Shelden is often more perceptive in talking about the general tone of a book, as when he says, of Brighton Rock:

The author hates us [Random House: regards us as easy victims]. We are the people who sit in restaurants and pick our noses or eat too much or shout in loud voices 'Goonight. Goonight' as we get up to leave. Yet we want to be liked, and we want to like others. We want to trust Greene, we want to feel sorry for Pinkie, we want to think the world is not such a bad place after all. And while our smiling faces are busy looking for goodness and wisdom and purpose, Pinkie and Greene are cursing us for being Jews or Catholics, for being fat or crippled, for being old or female. (243; Random House, 204)

Some reviewers have objected to Shelden's harshness toward Greene. He would, I think, argue that he is meeting malice with malice, anger with anger. In fact, he ends the book by restating the indictment and then offering an escape to the notoriously elusive Greene.

There is no point in creating an idealised portrait of Greene. . . . Trying to find moral excellence in his life is not a helpful way to honour him. There is too much evidence to the contrary. Only his best writing can plead a case for the value of his life. Books made him, and books must sustain his reputation. After all the voices have been heard, Art will have the last word. (488; Random House, 407-8)

Unfortunately, it does so, in this book, only in a literal sense, and in most literary biographies not even that. If the art is more important than the life, then why not talk about the art? The reasons are obvious. Inquiring minds want to know, not about the books, which are too hard to understand, but about the author's weaknesses, which are all too comprehensible to most of us. And so publishers give larger advances for and major book reviews devote more and better space to biographies than to any other branch of literary scholarship. Scholars are as greedy and as hungry for fame as anyone. As a result, readers will keep barking their shins, or kneecaps, on enormous books about writers they only thought they wanted, like Holden Caulfield, to call up and talk to.

University of Oklahoma

1 Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1955, p. 1.

2 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, New York, Scribner, 1932, p. 144.

3 Viva Hardigg, "Graham Greene: The Ugly Englishman?" U.S. News & World Report, 117 (31 October 1994), p. 84.

4 See, for example, John Bemrose, "Was Greene a Monster?" Macleans, 107 (31 October 1994), p. 62; D. J. Taylor, "It's a Battlefield," New Statesman and Society, 7 (9 September 1994), pp. 36-37, which includes a review of Anthony Mockler's book; and Charles Trueheart, "The God-Haunted Adulterer," Atlantic, 275 (May 1995), pp. 113-16, 118.

5 Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Man Within, London, Heinemann, 1994, p. 16. This quotation and the rest of section 3 of the first chapter do not appear in the American edition, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (New York, Random House, 1995). Not only the text but also some of the photographs vary between the English and American editions.

6 Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume 1: 1904-1939, New York, Viking Penguin, 1989, p. xvi. Volume 2 covers the years 1939-55 and was published in April 1995.

Literary Necrology 1995

Kingsley Amis, English novelist and poet, London, 22 October, age 73.

Robert Bolt, English playwright and screenwriter, Petersfield (Eng.), 20 February, age 70.

Pete Calders, Catalan fiction writer and feuilletonist, Barcelona, July 1994, age 82.

Don Carpenter, American novelist and screenwriter, Mill Valley (Ca.), 27 July, age 64.

Anton Cetta, Kosovo Albanian prose writer and folklorist, Prishtina (Yug.), 4 November, age 75.

E. M. Cioran, Romanian-born French philosopher and critic, Paris, 20 June, age 84.

Danielle Chavy Cooper, francophone-literature scholar and longtime WLT reviewer, Pacific Grove (Ca.), 4 February.

Angel Crespo, Spanish poet and essayist, Barcelona, December, age 69.

Eric Cyprian, Pakistani critic and translator, Islam-abad, 22 December, age 84.

Ladis Da Silva, Goan anglophone historian and prose writer, Canada, 22 August 1994, age 75.

Donald Davie, English poet and critic, Exeter (Eng.), 18 September, age 73.

Gilles Deleuze, French philosopher and critic, Paris, 4 November, age 70.

Robertson Davies, Canadian novelist, Orangeville (Ont.), 2 December, age 82.

Stanley Elkin, American novelist and professor of modern letters, St. Louis, 31 May, age 65.

Michael Ende, German fiction writer, Stuttgart, 28 August, age 65.

Gavin Ewart, English poet, London, age 79.

Willem Frederik Hermans, Dutch novelist and short-story writer, Paris, May, age 73.

Georg Glaser, German writer, Paris, 18 January, age 84.

Patricia Highsmith, American novelist, Locarno (Switz.), 4 February, age 75.

Maki Kureishi, Pakistani poet, Karachi, 21 November, age 68.

Sony Labou Tansi, Congolese novelist and poet, Brazzaville, 14 June, age 47.

Fernando Lara Bosch, Spanish editor and publisher, Terrassa a Manresa (Sp.), 19 August, age 38.

Andre Laude, French poet, Belleville (Fr.), 24 June.

Eeva-Liisa Manner, Finnish poet, January, age 74.

Nestor Lujan, spanish writer and journalist, Barcelona, 22 December, age 73.

James Merrill, American poet, Tucson (Az.), 6 February, age 68.

Rachid Mimouni, Algerian francophone novelist and essayist, Paris, 12 February, age 49.

Heiner Muller, German playwright and theater director, Berlin, 30 December, age 66.

Paul Monette, American novelist and essayist, Los Angeles, 10 February, age 49.

Birger Norman, Swedish prose writer and poet, Stockholm, September, age 81.

Anton Pashku, Kosovo Albanian fiction writer and playwright, Prishtina (Yug.), 1 November, age 58.

S. J. Pretorius, South African (Afrikaans) poet, 31 March, age 78.

Henry Roth, American novelist, 13 October, age 89.

'Ali Akbar Sa'idi Sirjani, Iranian prose writer, in detention near Tehran, 27 November 1994, age 62.

Andrew Salkey, Panamanian-born Jamaican-educated novelist and poet and longtime WLT contributor, Amherst (Ma.), 28 April, age 67.

Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian poet and prose writer, Port Harcourt (Nigeria), 17 November, age 54.

May Sarton, American poet and novelist, York (Maine), 16 July, age 83.

Tom Scott, Scots and anglophone poet, Edinburgh, August, age 77.

Barney Simon, South African playwright and director, Johannesburg, age 63.

Zulu Sofola, Nigerian playwright and theater professor, Ilorin (Nig.), 7 September, age 60.

Terry Southern, American novelist and screenwriter, New York, 29 October, age 71.

Stephen Spender, British poet and critic, London, 16 July, age 86.

Jean Tardieu, French poet and editor, Creteil (Fr.), 27 January, age 92.

Miguel Torga, Portuguese fiction writer, Coimbra (Port.), 17 January, age 88.

Rene Wellek, Czech-born American critic and comparatist, Hamden (Ct.), 10 November, age 92.

Calder Willingham, American novelist and screenwriter, Laconia (N.H.), 19 February, age 72.

Paul Zumthor, Swiss-born French poet and fiction writer, Quebec, age 80.

ROBERT MURRAY DAVIS is Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and has published widely on modern English and American fiction. His Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is in press; A Lower-Middle-Class Education, a memoir, will be issued by the University of Oklahoma Press in the fall of 1996.