The New Criterion

Norman Sherry
The Life of Graham Greene,
Volume Three: 1955-1991.
Viking, 906 pages, $39.95

Graham Greene, as Eliot wrote of Baudelaire, had “a true form of acedia, arising from the unsuccessful struggle towards the spiritual life.” Damnation, for him, was “an immediate form of salvation” from the ennui of modern existence. Like Baudelaire, “he could not escape suffering and could not transcend it, so he attracted pain to himself.” Greene frequented opium dens in Indochina and whorehouses around the world. His life was punctuated by suicide attempts, multiple mistresses, and emotional crises. His art was the poetry of departure, the fiction of flight, the search for hell. He preferred to be wretched rather than contented, a Catholic without God. He did not seek religion for consolation but for guilt, which twisted through him like a dagger. Sinning intensified his misery and fired his imagination.

Greene’s women were both the sin and the hell that punishes it, and fear of damnation heightened the sexual thrill. Preferring tormented love to emotional fulfillment, he protracted his affair with Catherine Walston (a major part of this book) to continue the pain they caused each other. He tried to entice her out of England with trips to “Brazilia or Tahiti or Capri or anywhere,” and lied to her about his loneliness and celibacy: “one may prefer to be alone if one can’t be with the person one loves.”

Norman Sherry evades the fascinating aspects of Greene’s life and concentrates on the trivial. He remarks that “Catherine was special,” and that Greene was deeply troubled when the husband of his last mistress, the rather commonplace Yvonne Cloetta, interfered with his sexual needs. Sherry never explains why Catherine wound up as an alcoholic—was it marital guilt, the break with Greene, or sleeping with her household priests?—or how Yvonne’s husband finally discovered, after thirteen years, that Greene was his wife’s lover. Sherry asks some teasing questions—but doesn’t answer them. Who was the son of Rupert Brooke that Greene found in Tahiti? What transpired at Greene’s dinner with the illustrious Mary McCarthy, Kenneth Clark, and Anthony Powell? How exactly was Liz Taylor “hell” during the filming of The Comedians? What did Greene mean when he confessed that “I’ve betrayed very many people in my life”? Why did a friend say that his eyes had “mysterious little twists of malice”?

Greene could be obtuse, not only about women, but also about money and politics. He was—like Conrad, Hemingway, and Orwell—cheated, even wiped out, by the thief who managed his finances. Courted by dictators, he was blind to the Communist atrocities in Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua. He defended the spy and traitor Kim Philby and notoriously declared: “If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union”—an idea best contemplated from Antibes. Philby (the model for Maurice Castle in The Human Factor) lived in both countries and was a lot happier as a mole in Washington than pensioned off in Moscow.

Greene adopted Lawrence’s motto—“When in doubt, move”—and became a perpetual traveler. Lawrence moved from place to place in search of good health; Maugham restlessly sought new material; Greene took agonizing trips to escape boredom, to suffer, to see the worst things everywhere. In 1959, he went to a Congolese leprosarium, observed the patients without fingers or toes, and became “quite accustomed to the sweet gangrenous smell of certain leprous skins.” In 1964, I visited a leprosarium in Jinja, Uganda, and found that the lepers receiving medical treatment were much better off than the disfigured beggars on the streets of Kampala. Greene exaggerates the horrors in A Burnt-Out Case.

His typically sinful characters—the seedy expatriate, the anguished priest, the corrupt cop, all psychologically maimed—inhabit a decayed, forlorn landscape. Greene himself, who could never resist a fight, was physically and mentally damaged by his battles late in life: his conflict with the gangsters of Nice, recounted in J’Accuse; his rejection by the perennially misguided Nobel prize committee because he was too left-wing or too pessimistic or too unpopular with the most influential Swede; his defense of Communist dictatorships; his public quarrel with Anthony Burgess (when Burgess makes a valid criticism, Sherry merely remarks: “What a cad Burgess could be”); and his heated dispute with the judges of an Irish literary award.

Since the front-page reviewer in the New York Times Book Review called the book “incomparable … invaluable … masterly … fascinating,” it’s worth examining this example of the biographer’s art to see if it merits this high praise. Sherry managed to transform Greene’s adventurous life into a boring one. He dedicates the book to a small crowd of ten people (there ought to be a limit) and has eight pages of sycophantic acknowledgments, in which everyone, including his hairdresser and janitor, is wonderful, marvelous, and brilliant. The first chapter describes the reaction to Greene’s death, not throughout the world, but in phone calls from newspapers to Sherry. All this is duly repeated in the penultimate chapter. He twice mentions his London club, prints some of his own little poems, and includes a photo of himself riding on an ass.

His style, as Stevenson said of Walt Whitman, is so careless that it seems “he had not taken the trouble to write prose.” He frequently states the obvious: that Greene, being unable to divine the future, “could not know …” The book is tediously repetitive, with whole paragraphs reprint-ed verbatim; filled with clichés; sloppy and sometimes unintelligible; bombastic and bathetic. He assures us that “I was, we all are, a close witness to death’s perpetual annihilation of the womb-born.”

When a biographer has to pay for each word he quotes, he uses them carefully. As Greene’s authorized biographer, Sherry could quote for free, and stuffs half his text with a few thousand direct quotations, feebly linked with words like “And to Peter Smith… . And the follow-up… . But here’s the rub… . The next communication is a postcard from Vienna.” Sherry admits that Greene was a dull and repetitious correspondent and “stresses for the umpteenth time that he is still thoroughly in love with Catherine,” but he quotes hundreds of these letters. When Greene sees Stevenson’s home in Samoa, he tells Catherine, like any commonplace tourist: “I visited Valima [sic] … very beautiful & a famous waterfall.” Yet Sherry, who says Greene must have sounded to her like a “broken record” or a “sick moose,” absurdly claims that Greene wrote “some of the most passionate love letters in the language.” Awash in letters and diaries, Sherry falls into the trap of trying to account for almost every day in Greene’s life. There’s no thematic connection between chapters, no clear structure, no dramatic narrative and—with sudden and confusing shifts backward and forward in time—no clear chronology.

Sherry adds hundreds of notes at the bottom of the page that he couldn’t squeeze into the long-winded text, and some contain the worst of his many errors. Conrad’s Victory takes place in Surabaya, Java—not in Bangkok—and Conrad never refused a knighthood. Hemingway did not kill himself because “he’d destroyed his enormous talent by drinking.” Maugham did not leave a trail of unpaid hotel bills. Sherry, who followed Greene’s path throughout the world, has a very shaky grasp of geography. He thinks Broadway and New York are in different places; that the Rocky Mountains start in Montreal; that Lerici is near Milan. And Liz Taylor surely bought her jewels in Bulgari—not in Bulgaria! The editing of this book is disgraceful.

Sherry does a good job of describing the political situation when Greene, following his almost infallible instinct, turns up in Cuba, the Congo, and Panama just as they are about to explode, but he slides once again into banality, noting that in Haiti “Duvalier’s reign was one man’s long night of cruelty.” Sherry, having lost his way, cannot distinguish between what is and is not important or interesting. He belabors a minor incident, worth a paragraph, for ten pages and devotes eighteen pages to Greene’s play, Carving a Statue, a minor failure. He traveled all the way to Corrientes, Argentina, to interview an Englishman and dutifully records his contribution: “I met Greene once. We shook hands. That’s all.”

When discussing crucial theological issues, Sherry can be both shallow and misleading. He claims that “Graham’s early unhappiness at Berkhamsted [School] ultimately provides his source for a belief in hell.” Schoolboy cruelty, though nasty, does not inspire the fear of eternal damnation. He twice calls Greene manic-depressive, though Greene was not manic. Unlike Robert Lowell, he was always in control of himself and never became violent and dangerous. Sherry says that biography “is characterized by revelation,” but reveals precious little, apart from Greene’s sordid sexual adventures, that is new.

I’d rate Greene, among his close contemporaries (all born between 1903 and 1905), as inferior to Waugh but better as a novelist than Orwell, Isherwood, Powell, Koestler, and C. P. Snow. His film criticism is superb, his African travel books evocative, his reportage on Kenya, Indochina, and Malaya incisive, his life of the Earl of Rochester fascinating, his autobiographies evasive but intriguing. His Catholic trilogy—The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair—has impressive political as well as theological content. The Third Man, both as novel and film, is perfect. Our Man in Havana is a witty send-up of the spy game. The Human Factor, set in South Africa, is his most prescient late novel.

Sherry assumes Greene’s greatness as a writer and does not attempt to evaluate his achievement. He’s much more interested in finding the real-life sources of Greene’s fictional characters than in discussing the meaning of the novels. He offers pointless parallels: “just as on the fictional Medea [in The Comedians], there was also a party on the ship bound for Freetown,” or meaningless models: “Greene’s man in Havana, Wormold, was inspired by two wartime agents: Paul Fidrmuc … and Juan Pujol García,” which tells us nothing about Greene’s creative imagination. Sherry’s literary judgments are meaningless or absurd. He says that Greene admired Ford Madox Ford for “his sheer involvement in his themes,” instead of showing how Ford influenced Greene’s fiction, and that “the first hundred pages of [The Heart of the Matter] were the best hundred pages I had read in my lifetime” (when else could he have read them?).

When a writer spends half a lifetime on a biography, he usually (as Lawrance Thompson did with Frost and Carlos Baker did with Hemingway) comes to hate his subject. Though Sherry, to his credit, still idolizes Greene, he also resents the fact that his own life has been devoured by his subject. He started it nearly thirty years ago, had a fifteen-year gap between the first and third volumes (losing most readers along the way), and has finally completed the bloated monster of 2,251 pages, weighing eight pounds and costing $105 for the set. (At least Sherry has finished the thing. The scholarly bibliography of Greene, announced in the Oxford University Press catalogue in 1990, has been abandoned.) Sherry compensates for his surrender to Greene by egotistically inserting himself into the biography. (Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens and Edmund Morris’s Reagan had the same fault.) Greene may well have told the obsessive Sherry what Johnson told Boswell: “You have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am thoroughly sick of both.”