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Graham Greene |
A journey to Greeneland
A Study in Greene
by Bernard Bergonzi
Oxford University Press, £16.99 order this book
Novelist and playwright Graham
Greene combined serious literary acclaim with wide popularity.
GRAHAM GREENE is one of those rare writers, like Charles Dickens and Harold Pinter, who have given their name to a literary territory or mood – in Greene’s case, ‘Greeneland’.
Because so many of his later novels were set in exotic locations such as Cuba and Vietnam, it is easy to forget that the classic Greeneland is England, or the seedier parts of central London to be precise.
In fact, as Greene confessed in 1938 to a fellow habitué of the Fitzroy Tavern – on the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street – writer and dandy Julian Maclaren Ross: “I try to restrict myself to home ground if I can… I think an English writer should write about England.”
As Bernard Bergonzi shows in his new critical book on Greene’s work, A Study in Greene, Bloomsbury was a particular source of inspiration, large parts of it then being down-at-heel and louche. The Confidential Agent features a shabby private hotel in what is now the university quarter, while in The Ministry of Fear, the main character Arthur Rowe lives alone in a bed-sit in Bloomsbury.
Greene knew the area well, not least when he was literary editor of the short-lived magazine Night and Day, which recruited an extraordinary stable of young writers including Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Muggeridge and Christopher Isherwood, as well as the bohemian illustrator Feliks Topolski. This led to some boisterous editorial conferences and parties.
During World War II, Greene worked at the Ministry of Information in what had been – and would be again – London University’s Senate House building in Malet Street. This provided him with the creative ammunition to write a fairly scathing sketch about the ‘Ministry of Propaganda’, published by John Lehmann in Penguin New Writing.
More lasting in its effect was the description he left in The Ministry of Fear of the effect of the Blitz on the area. Not for him melodramatic prose of other writers who eulogised the bulldog spirit of the British in the face of the Hun’s onslaught, but rather something low-key, melancholic, poignant: “In Gower Street they were sweeping up the broken glass. And a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveller had forgotten to snuff.”
The effect is highly visual and countless critics have called Greene’s technique ‘cinematic’. As a film reviewer before the war, the author had plenty of opportunity to be influenced by Hollywood, and several of his novels and stories were themselves turned into memorable films.
But as Bergonzi astutely points out, film-makers themselves had earlier been influenced by the descriptive powers of 19th-century novelists, including Dickens, Balzac and Dostoyevsky, so there was a longstanding cross-fertilisation of genres. Greene non-plussed some of his readers by dividing his own output into two distinct categories, the less serious of which he classified as ‘entertainments’, though later he renounced this distinction. Certainly, some of his work is more overtly popular in style than the rest, borrowing heavily from the plotlines and style of detective fiction and adventure stories, and including more humour than his sometimes rather dark ‘Catholic’ novels.
There has been speculation in the past that Greene’s fondness for the entertainments may have cost him the Nobel Prize for Literature, though Bergonzi wonders whether a somewhat unflattering portrayal of a Swedish academic in England Made Me scuppered his chances in Stockholm.
Bergonzi himself divides the Greene oeuvre into two separate groups, but in his case, this is essentially by date of composition. In the critic’s view, the earlier books are the best, with Brighton Rock commending itself as outstanding. Certainly, this is a novel that continues to intrigue and shock, though I imagine I am not alone in finding The Power and the Glory of more lasting value.
The author identifies some of Greene’s obsessions, several of which relate to colour. ‘Green/Greene’ is one of them. Several of his female characters are called ‘Rose’. He liked to make sly references which only a few of his readers would understand.
Greene also relished sending pseudonymous letters to the Press, one of his alter egos being ‘Mrs Henry Montgomery’. He entered a Spectator competition for a parody of his own work, and won second prize; the first prize went to his equally pseudonymous brother Hugh.
This is not the first time Bergonzi has written at some length on Greene, who figures prominently in the prolific English professor’s earlier work, Reading the Thirties. Moreover, Greene has been the subject of exhaustive biographical study, not least in Norman Sherry’s colossal three-volume life. But the value of this little tome, which is essentially an extended critical essay, is that it gives the reader not only some new insights into Greene’s fiction, but encourages one to go back and read some of it again.
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