Graham Greene -- A Few Notes -- July 12, 2018

Graham Greene (or what I remember from the 3-volume biography; I could be wrong in places, but I doubt I am too far off):

First real job: British spy during World War II. Got the job because of his intellect. Sent to western Africa as a spy; either failed in the field or couldn’t get along with his superior. In either event, he was sent back to work at intel headquarters in/near London.

As a spy, Graham Greene knew the infamous British double spy, Kim Philby. When Philby was exposed, Greene hurriedly and unexpectedly resigned from British intelligence; some continue to wonder if Greene knew enough to get him in trouble, or if Greene remained a spy and used his globe-trotting authorial skills as a cover. He was everywhere in the post-WWII / cold war world – Vietnam when the French were there (1956), etc.

He was known as a “Catholic novelist,” which bothered him. He said he was a novelist who happened to be Catholic. Having said that, he said his “favorite” book was The Power and The Glory.  The Heart of the Matter is full of Catholic guilt; critics write about that a lot, but I think they miss the point. More on that later perhaps. Even in The Third Man there is a bit of Catholicism, but much less, but then the book is only 75 pages long; hardly enough to get into anything.

I don’t know if one would call Graham a misogynist.  He certainly had no second thoughts – well, he did, but the thoughts didn’t change his habits – about cheating on his wives, visiting brothels more than one could imagine. While in Southeast Asia with French fighting, he spent every night, it seems in a brothel, and used drugs (opium) to drown out his feelings of sinning. He continued to use opium (which must be an interesting drug) when he returned to London but probably eventually came off. He said he used just enough to get the effect without becoming addicted. (The description of the opium dens/prostitutes in Thailand were very, very sordid in the Norman Sherry biography; at that point I almost wanted to quit reading; this was a middle-aged man – fifty, I suppose – when he was using opium to numb him before having sex. The Quiet American, published in 1956, is another autobiographical novel, as it were, where these episodes were chronicled. Despite all this, he was given a private audience with the Pope because of such books as The Power and the Glory.  

He converted to Catholicism to marry his first wife, who delayed and delayed about getting married. She seemed a saint; he cheated on her and became passionately in love with a second woman – this was during the blitz in London. He sent his wife to the safety of a village outside London, and he carried on a highly sexual affair / a passionate love affair with (probably) the real love of his life in the underground during the bombing raids, and then the two of them would spend the following hours pulling people from the rubble.

He was known as a Catholic writer. Very important point.