Books: Review - Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family by Jeremy Lewis

Published: 9 December, 2010
by ERIC GORDON

Felix Greene, one of a family of oddballs whose fortunes  are traced in a new biography

HE stood tall, well above the crowds of Chinese mingling in the warm autumn evening in the immense Square of Heavenly Peace in old Beijing – and he looked every inch a Westerner.

He also looked forlorn, as if he was trying to figure out what he was doing there.

He turned out to be Felix Greene, a cousin of the novelist Graham Greene, a man who had become besotted by the rich history of China as well as the Chinese with whom, as a people and their culture, he had fallen in love.

I first came across Felix Greene in the early 1960s after he had written a controversial book about China – The Wall Has Two Sides – a political travel book that had been condemned in the US as servile propaganda for the Communist regime.

Felix had been living a bohemian life in the States when he decided to turn his sights on the much-maligned Maoist regime.

He persuaded the Chinese authorities to grant him a visa – not easy to obtain in those Cold War years – and toured the country seeing things, as he thought, few westerners had been allowed to see.

Something then happened to him. He fell in love with the Chinese, their history, culture and way of life. It was a path “outsiders” had travelled since the Middle King­dom had been discovered centuries earlier.  

You have to remember that when the Communists raised the Red Flag over Peking – the old name for Beijing – in 1949, China had the second-lowest living standard in the world, plagued by famine, drought and natural disasters.

By the early 1950s enormous improvements begun to be made.

Though illiteracy remained widespread, especially in the countryside, more and more children attended school. A skeleton health service was set up. Women were being given more equal rights. 

But when I saw Felix in the summer of 1967, he had just flown in from Hanoi in North Vietnam – and he couldn’t stop describing the horrors of the massive US bombing. 

He talked about the piles of dead bodies and the destruction caused by massive daylight bombing. The pain of the memories seemed etched on his face.

We also talked about a mutual friend, Gladys Yang, a world-renowned translator of Chinese classical literature, who he had found it difficult to contact. “Is she all right?” he asked.

I brought him up to date about the Cultural Revolution – it was now 1967, and the revolution was more than a year old – and described how Gladys’s husband, Xianyi, had been branded an opponent of the regime.

No longer allowed to work as a translator, he was in disgrace. For years he had been recognised as a superb poet and translator, and had specialised with his wife in translating the Chinese classics of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Now, once or twice a week he was marched out of the office by a “militia”, wearing a dunce’s hat, and forced to tour the streets on the back of a lorry. 

Other days he would sweep the corridors and mop the toilets of the publishing house where he and I worked. At that time, my office was on the 4th floor of the Foreign Languages House, a small stone-floored bare room, furnished with three desks. I had often seen him cleaning the urinals – and when we met, we didn’t talk, except with our eyes. 

When Greene heard this he realised he had better stop trying to contact Gladys because he would only make things riskier for her. That was the last I saw of Felix. But not the last of my connection with him.

Sometime in the early 1970s, after both Gladys and Xianyi had been released from jail, they found that their son, now in his 20s, had become mentally ill, driven into a frightening world of his own by the sudden disappearance and imprisonment of his parents.

He refused to speak Chinese and would only communicate in English – his form of rebellion against the country where he had grown up.

Distraught, his parents sent him to London for psychiatric treatment and Felix put him up in his west London flat.

Later, Gladys’ sister took him into her home in Hendon where, still disturbed, his mind full of hatred towards the Chinese, he constructed a petrol bomb and blew himself up, and set fire to the house.

Felix – I discovered reading Jeremy Lewis’s biography of the exotic Greene family, Shades of Greene – had always been a bit of an oddball among a family of oddballs. 

Lewis traces the fortunes of 12 children – six each from two brothers. Hugh Carleton Greene first worked in Berlin as a correspondent for national papers in the mid-1930s and soon saw the dangers of Nazism.

Later in the 1950s, Hugh Carleton became the director general of the BBC and loosened Lord Reith’s stuffy stranglehold.

Another Greene, Raymond, became a world leading surgeon and turned the New End Hospital, attached to the Royal Free, into a famed unit where he operated on goitres and thyroid diseases. He was also a founder of the Migraine Trust. Like Felix, he was very tall, fit and lean and, like Felix, a bit eccentric. He carried a monocle over his right eye – looking a bit like a character from a Graham Greene novel. 

As for Graham Greene, he became one of Britain’s greatest and most popular writers of the last century. 

He once wrote that a good novelist could only expect a life of 20 years for his novels after his death. But Graham, who died in 1990, shows every sign of being as popular in the next 20 years as he is today. 

• Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family. 
By Jeremy Lewis. 
Jonathan Cape £25