Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he called himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety". V. S. Pritchett called him "the most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings and who understands the tragic and comic ironies of love, loyalty and belief."
Early years (1904–1922)
Henry Graham Greene was born in 1904 in St John's House, a boarding house of Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire, where his father was house master. He was the fourth of six children; his younger brother, Hugh, became Director-General of the BBC, and his elder brother, Raymond, an eminent physician and mountaineer.
His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were first cousins, both members of a large, influential family that included the owners of Greene King Brewery, bankers, and statesmen; his grandmother Jane Wilson was first cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson.
Charles Greene was second master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry, who was married to Charles' cousin. Another cousin was the right-wing pacifist Ben Greene, whose politics led to his internment during World War II.
In his childhood, Greene spent his summers at Harston House, the Cambridgeshire home of his uncle, Sir Graham Greene. In Greene's description of his childhood, he describes his learning to read there: "It was at Harston I quite suddenly found that I could read—the book was Dixon Brett, Detective. I didn't want anyone to know of my discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Ballantyne's Coral Island for the train journey home—always an interminable journey with the long wait between trains at Bletchley..."
In 1910, Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster of Berkhamsted. Graham also attended the school as a boarder. Bullied and profoundly depressed, he made several suicide attempts, including, as he wrote in his autobiography, by Russian roulette and by taking aspirin before going swimming in the school pool. In 1920, aged 16, in what was a radical step for the time, he was sent for psychoanalysis for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day student. School friends included the journalist Claud Cockburn and the historian Peter Quennell.
Greene contributed several stories to the school magazine, one of which was published by a London evening newspaper in January 1921.
Oxford University He attended Balliol College, Oxford, to study history. During this period Greene was for a short time a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. While he was an undergraduate at Balliol, his first book, a poorly received volume of poetry titled Babbling April, was published.
Greene had periodic bouts of depression while at Oxford, and largely kept to himself.Michael Shelden, 'Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–1991)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2008 accessed 15 May 2011 Of Greene's time at Oxford, his contemporary Evelyn Waugh noted that: "Graham Greene looked down on us (and perhaps all undergraduates) as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry." He graduated in 1925 with a second-class degree.
Writing career
After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the Nottingham Journal, and then as a sub-editor on The Times. While he was still at Oxford, he had started corresponding with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who had written to him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene was an agnostic, but when he later began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it in his autobiography A Sort of Life, he "ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held". Greene was baptised on 28 February 1926 and they married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, London.
The Man Within (1929) was Greene's first published novel; after its favourable reception he left his job at The Times to work full-time as a novelist. The next two books, The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932), were unsuccessful, however, and he later disowned them. His first true success was Stamboul Train (1932) which was taken on by the Book Society and adapted as the film Orient Express, in 1934.
Although Greene objected to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair, which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel. Several works, such as The Confidential Agent, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Human Factor, and his screenplay for The Third Man, also show Greene's avid interest in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage. In the early 1930s Greene moved to the left politically. He read left-wing writers like G.D.H. Cole and John Strachey; in 1933 he joined the Independent Labour Party. This move to the left is reflected in the characters and plot of his fifth novel It's A Battlefield. His later political affiliations and convictions were more ambiguous. He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day. His collected film reviews were later published as The Pleasure Dome (1972). Greene's 1937 film review of Wee Willie Winkie, for Night and Day—which said that the nine-year-old star, Shirley Temple, displayed "a dubious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen"—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs, and Greene left the UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over. While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel often considered his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory.
By the 1950s, Greene had become known as one of the finest writers of his generation.13 Must-Read Graham Greene Books earlybirdbooks.com, accessed 31 October 2020
Greene also wrote short stories and plays, which were well received, although he was always first and foremost a novelist. His first successful play, The Living Room, debuted in 1952.
Michael Korda, a lifelong friend and later his editor at Simon & Schuster, observed Greene at work: Greene wrote in a small black leather notebook with a black fountain pen and would write approximately 500 words. Korda described this as Graham's daily penance—once he finished he put the notebook away for the rest of the day.
His writing influences included Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, Charles Péguy and John Buchan.
Travel and espionage Part of Greene's reputation as a novelist is for weaving the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels. Greene himself responded to commentators who called the world of his fiction an imaginary place:
Throughout his life, Greene travelled to what he called the world's wild and remote places. In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited into MI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the agency. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War.Christopher Hawtree. "A Muse on the tides of history: Elisabeth Dennys". The Guardian, 10 February 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2011. Kim Philby, who was later found to be a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6. Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944. He later wrote an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, My Silent War.Greene's introduction to the Philby book is mentioned in Christopher Hitchens' introduction to Our Man in Havana (pg xx of the Penguin Classics edition) Greene also corresponded with intelligence officer and spy John Cairncross for forty years; the correspondence is held by the John J. Burns Library, at Boston College."The Spy Who Wrote Me: Burns Lands Graham Greene Correspondence With Soviet Agent." Boston College Chronicle, Volume 8, Number 4, 14 October 1999.
Greene first left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 on a trip to Liberia that produced the travel book Journey Without Maps. His 1938 trip to Mexico to see the effects of the government's campaign of forced anti-Catholic secularisation was paid for by the publishing company Longman, thanks to his friendship with Tom Burns. That voyage produced two books, the non-fiction The Lawless Roads (published as Another Mexico in the US) and the novel The Power and the Glory. In 1953, the Holy Office informed Greene that The Power and the Glory was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene, Pope Paul VI told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should ignore the criticism.
In 1950 his brother Hugh Carleton Greene, who was head of UK Information Services in Malaya, brought Greene to Malaya during the early phase of the Malayan Emergency. Greene returned to England via Indo-China in 1951 to visit his friend Trevor Wilson, British consul in Hanoi. There he met General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, French high commissioner and commander-in-chief of the French Expeditionary Corps. Greene returned several times and wrote newspaper articles and developed the book, The Quiet American.
In 1954, Greene travelled to Haiti. He returned in 1956. In 1957 François Duvalier, known as "Papa Doc", was elected president over Louis Déjoie. Greene returned to Haiti in 1963 staying at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, where The Comedians (1966) is set. His 1963 article in the Sunday Telegraph, "Nightmare Republic," was a first-hand account of Duvalier's dictatorship in which Greene depicted Haiti as a place of profound terror and paranoia, where the regime's brutal militia, the Tontons Macoutes, engaged in widespread torture, extortion, and violence against the population.
As inspiration for his novel A Burnt-Out Case (1960), Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of leper colonies in the Congo Basin and in what were then the British Cameroons. During this trip in late February and early March 1959, Greene met several times with Andrée de Jongh, a leader in the Belgian resistance during WWII, who famously established an escape route to Gibraltar through the Pyrenees for downed allied airmen.