Life and Work of Graham Greene Henry Graham Greene, better known by his pen name Graham Greene, was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century. He was born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, in England. He was one of six children. 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 mother was cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson. He was educated at an English School, the head-master of which was his father. His childhood was not at all happy; he describes this period of his life as "…something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way". Graham often skipped classes in order to avoid the constant bullying by his fellow classmates. At one point Greene even ran away from home. When Greene began suffering from mental and emotional problems, his parents sent him to London for psychotherapy by a student of the famous Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Greene actually found the psychoanalysis to be very interesting and remained fascinated by dreams for the rest of his life. While he was living there, Greene developed his love for literature and began to write poetry.
In 1922 Greene became a student of Balliol College, Oxford. At the age of twenty-two he became sub-editor on the staff of a newspaper The Nottingham Guardian. It was during this period that his first novel, “The Man Within", was written. As an undergraduate at Oxford College, Greene studied modern history. In 1925, he published his first book, a collection of sentimental poetry called "Babbling April".
After graduating, Greene worked as a journalist in Nottingham and in 1926, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Greene married Vivien Dayrell-Browning in 1927 and they had two children. Greene had his first affair in 1946 with his goddaughter, Catherine Walston. He would continue to have affairs for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, Vivien and Greene separated in 1948 but never divorced.
Graham became a Catholic in 1926, his faith stemming in part from his deep conviction of evil in the world. Much of his life up to that point had been a nightmare, and no doubt because he has long kept dream journals, many of the characters in his novels incur horrifying dreams. The novels also reflect Greene's experiences with the seamy side of life. His protagonists' experiences, for example, often parallel his labors as a journalist (for a Nottingham paper), his government work, and his travels through totalitarian Mexico.
Many of his works focus upon religious themes, and the protagonist is almost always the sinner, the spiritual outcast. Greene's milieu is the fallen world, and he has been criticized for focusing on the eccentric believer, rather than on the conventional believer, and for combining theological strictures with somewhat lurid, perhaps overly personal, views of sex. "The End of the Affair” (1951), for example, is as much a study of hate as it is a study of triangular love.
From 1930 onwards his work as a novelist has been steady and continuos. In 1940 he became literary editor of the spectator and the year following entered the Foreign Office. During World War II Greene worked “in a silly useless job” as he later said, in an intelligence capacity for the Foreign Office in London, directly under Kim Philby, a future defector to the Soviet Union. One mission took Greene to West Africa, but he did not find much excitement in his remote posting – “This is not a government house, and there is no larder: there is also a plague of house-flies which come from the African bush lavatories round the house,” he wrote to London. Greene returned to England in 1942. After the war he travelled widely as a free-lance journalist, and lived long periods in Nice, on the French Riviera, partly for tax reasons. With his anti-American comments, Greene gained access to such Communist leaders as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, but the English writer Evelyn Waugh, who knew Greene well, assured in a letter to his friend that the author “is a secret agent on our side and all his buttering up of the Russians is ‘cover’.
In 1944 he wrote for an anti-fascist journal which was illegally published in France.
After the end of World War II, Greene accepted the position of director at Eyre and Spottiswoode, a publishing house. During this time, he wrote several screenplays, the most famous of which is"The Third Man" (1949). In the early 1950s, Greene traveled a great deal, taking long trips to Malaya and Vietnam. Subsequently, Greene set "The Quiet American" (1955) in Vietnam and it went on to become one of his most notable works. As he got older, Graham Greene continued to write travel pieces, novels, short stories, plays, and recollections of his own life. In 1979 Greene underwent surgery for intestinal cancer, but had no lasting ill-effects.
However, in 1990, he was stricken with an unspecified blood disease so debilitating that he decided to move from his home in Antibes, the South of France, to Switzerland, so that he could be closer to his daughter. He lived the last years of his life in Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the same town Charlie Chaplin was living in at this time. He visited Chaplin often, and they were good friends.
On his death bed, Greene was awarded the Order of Merit and appointed as a Companion of Honor by the Queen. This, along with photos of him receiving the Catholic Last Rites, prompted criticism from some factions of Catholicism. Amidst the general praise and celebration of Greene's life, there were some articles by Catholic sponsored publications that called Greene an "honor-less man" who had betrayed the basic tenets of Catholicism when he betrayed his wife. Despite the criticism by this demographic, Greene continues to be celebrated for his contributions to literature. Greene died April 3, 1991, at age 86 of leukaemia, at La Providence Hospital in Vevey, Switzerland. And was buried in Corseaux cemetery.
During his lifetime, Greene was honored by Queen Elizabeth II, but never won a Nobel Prize despite several nominations by colleagues. He was fond of traveling all over the world, seeking out such trouble spots as Vietnam, Israel, Chile, and South Africa. "I like to keep my eye on world politics," he said.
Some bourgeois critics class Greene among the 'modernists'. They substantiate their classification by the fact that Greene's works, like those of modernists, are marked by disillusion, scepticism and despair, and that the themes employed by Greene and the modernists are much the same. These critics fail to understand the real nature of Greene's pessimism, which rests upon a deeply-rooted sympathy for mankind, a sympathy not to be found in the modernists.
Though Greene, like the modernists, deals with the problem of crime, his approach to it is quite different. Unlike the modernists, who are mostly interested in the description of the crime itself, Greene investigates the motives behind the crime. He gives a deep psychological analysis of his criminals by investigating the causes that led to murder.
According to his own words, Greene wants to make the reader sympathise with people who don't seem to deserve sympathy. The author tries to prove that a criminal may possess more human qualities, that is to say, may sometimes be better at the core, than many a respectable gentleman. He doesn't, however, always succeed in giving a truthful interpretation of the motives of the crime he deals with, though in his later works his approach to the subject becomes more realistic. He shows the corrupting influence of capitalist civilisation on human nature, and tries to prove that many of the bad qualities in a person are the natural result of cruel, inhuman conditions of life.
Though crime and murder, the problem of 'the dark man', motivate many of Greene' s works, the main theme of his novels is pity for man struggling in vain against all the evils of life; his longing for sympathy, love and friendship; his striving for happiness, which is inevitably doomed to failure.
In the thirties Greene's protest against human suffering brought him to Catholicism, but he did not become a true Catholic. His novels The Heart of the Matter, A Burn-Out Case, The Comedians and many others reject the dogmas of Catholicism, and his talented realistic descriptions are more convincing than his ideology and Philosophy.
In The Heart of the Matter, a true Catholic, Scobie, commits suicide when he becomes aware of the fact that the church cannot free people from suffering. For this idea the novel was condemned by the Vatican.
Greene is known as the author of two genres – psychological detective novels or 'entertainments', and ' serious novels', as he called them. The main theme of both genres is much the same (the problem of 'the dark man', deep concern for the fate of the common people. But in the 'serious novels' the inner world of the characters is more complex and the psychological analysis becomes deeper.
Greene knew that in the eyes of his God, such promiscuity was the route to eternal damnation. But without that knowledge, he could never have become one of the greatest writers of his age.