ONE OF THE MOST REVEALING MOMENTS IN NORMAN Sherry’s massive, ongoing biography of Graham Greene (with the second volume just published, he has now devoted 1,352 pages to Greene’s first 51 years) comes at the very beginning, when Greene charges Sherry with compiling a list of his, the novelist’s, enemies.
Men of letters settle scores in their memoirs or, if too eminent to bother, seek to delegate that job to their biographer. What matters here is having sufficiently high quality enemies. You should claim to have had a feud with Salman Rushdie not Vikram Seth otherwise people might think you were a literary pygmy. Greene however did not 'charge Sherry with compiling a list of his enemies'. Pico, being of Indian ancestry, was and is a careless reader. What Sherry said was '''What stands out particularly in my meetings with Greene was his charging me, as we walked across Berkhamsted Common, that I had asked his friends for the names of his enemies.'
Since the biographies of scribblers derive much of what little interest they have from the bitter malice or impotent rage that tribe habitually direct at each other, Sherry's modus operandi was understandable. Indeed, because Greene's 'friends' were likely to list each other as Greene's 'enemies'- substantiating their allegations with tales of petty betrayals- Greene may well have been hoping to be regaled with gossip of this type (Sherry, presumably, too was a 'friend'). But, it turned out, this wasn't the case.
'I replied that no one could succeed in life without making enemies - it was in the nature of the human condition.''
It really isn't. Sherry's mistake was to think that, in literature, for a man to succeed, another must fail. But this isn't the case. Great writers shed luster on the other great writers who were their contemporaries. Things are quite different in the Academy.
Mr. Greene's delightful response? ''He countered that he did not live and work in an academic institution.'' Sherry was a Professor. He had been put in his place. Still, the fact is, Greene in his essay on Chesterton had said that, in the case of a great writer, the years inevitably produce enemies.
Every man has enemies, Sherry replies. By the time the night is over, Greene has composed, with the help of his brother Hugh, his own extensive list of his lifetime’s opponents and handed it to his biographer.
I suppose this was the British sense of fair play. Even a Professor needs to know which player is on which team.
That might be said to be the paradoxical trademark of Graham Greene: that he rarely gave himself the benefit of his unending doubt, and that he invariably gave the men he was supposed to hate his best lines.
Greene was an upper-middle class Englishman whose trademark was understatement, self-effacement and an imbecilic attempt to state the other side of the case and thus win by default. There may have been something a little sly or self-serving in this proceeding. But it wasn't paradoxical.
He saw the folly, and the frailty, of everyone around him.
No. He chose some such characters. He did not say that everybody was like that. There are plenty of decent people in his novels. Daintry, in 'The Human Factor', though a Counter-Intelligence operative, has a dainty enough conscience. It is the conduct of the Doctor which most turns our stomach.
Thus adulterers come to feel compassion for the husbands they’re cuckolding;
If the husband is a decent fellow, why should one not do so?
victims see the human side of their criminal tormentors;
a cheap way to add verisimilitude. Thus, in my own biography of Salman Rushdie, I have the young Margaret Thatcher say, after that evil Apostate has used a hardbound copy of the Holy Bible to sodomize her, 'be a pet, Salman Luv, and put the kettle on. I'm parching for a cuppa. Also, it might take your mind of them Satanic Verses you keep banging on about.'
Fowler in The Quiet American comes to mourn the death of his rival in love and opponent in politics (schadenfreude in reverse, you could say).
No you can't. Fowler knew he had done something underhand and he certainly didn't want Pyle killed. Still, he is an older man and has seen plenty of war.
Even when he was writing wartime propaganda for the British government, Greene described an Englishman’s shooting of a German lieutenant- and then finding in the dead man’s pocket a picture of his baby.
The Brits had learnt from their mistakes of the Great War. That's why the picture wasn't of the officer sodomizing his baby. The problem with depicting the enemy as demons is that 800,000 of your own young men may have to die trying to exterminate them. Anyway, today's ally might be tomorrow's enemy and vice versa. Eisenhower found it difficult to understand why Churchill insisted that the first Joint US-UK military operation be directed at the French.
That issue is one of the hardest struggles in every serious life,
not a serious or a frivolous upper middle class English, or even American, life
and one that faces us daily in the office, the bedroom, even the income tax form we sign: What to do with the person who opposes us?
Nothing. Play be the rules. If someone else breaks them, complain by all means.
We know, more or less, how to deal with our friends, but what to do with those who tempt us to awaken the devil in ourselves (a far more pernicious temptation than any external devil affords)?
Our friends tempt us to do various things which might be said to awaken the devil in us. As for the 'external devil', no such beastie exists.
Many religions counsel us to forgive those who trespass against us and to extend charity even to the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world;
None suggest that you go around stabbing people because you think they are secretly sneering at you or suspect that they may be serial killers.
Buddhists actually argue that our enemies are our best friends because they challenge us to transcend ourselves.
No they don't. They aren't stupid. That is why the Dalai Lama ran the fuck away from Chairman Mao's troops. I suppose an opponent can show you that your thoughts are unguided or chaotic and thus this 'enemy' turns out to be your 'friend'. Perhaps, Pico, being a darkie, felt he could get away with writing puerile shite about God or the Devil or the Buddha. Indeed, he may have been considered 'uppity' if he failed to do so.
Yet still the debate between mercy and justice is as unending as the one between duty and love.
Probably because Buddha is not making friends with Devil or inviting him for Netflix & Chill.
If all Greene’s novels are essays on fallenness (and self-accusations),
they aren't. He wasn't an entirely gloomy Guss. One or two characters in the serious novels may have a complicated inner life but Greene's plots were quite good which is why so many of his books translated well on to the big screen.
they are also, by the same token, arguments against the whole notion of enmity, or reminders, at least, that our enemies are no less vulnerable and right in their own minds than ourselves.
No. After the Great War, only the Bolsheviks and the Nazis spoke in such grand guignol terms.
With his famous taste for ambiguity, and refusal to see things in black and white (except in his condemnation of any institution that would treat humans as tokens, statistics or pawns), Greene made it his lifework to understand every position: one of his plays is even called Yes and No.
It was a comic 'curtain raiser'. The loquacious theater director talks while the actor answers only yea and nay. Greene was careful to avoid the ambiguity of Henry James because hadn't Russell or Whitehead or some such don exploded Psychologism? Still as a convert to Catholicism- whose priestcraft, the English had long considered to consist of self-serving casuistry, Greene may have felt obliged to point out that there were genuine moral ambiguities which must arise within any branch of the Christian Faith. On the other hand, Greene had worked for the Times and was a realist when it came to economic and geopolitical affairs. Statistics mattered. The Great War had taught Europe that. That is why British casualties were so much less in the Second War. As for understanding the 'positions' of others- the failure of the League of Nations had shown the folly of going down that road.
And as a headmaster’s son, he was a lifelong connoisseur of divided loyalties,
his brothers were also 'headmaster's sons'. Why weren't their loyalties divided? Pico is being silly. The fact is, Greene wasn't writing penny dreadfuls. Still, some of his villains are single-minded enough. I suppose Le Carre altered our reading of Greene. The fact is, it was only in the late Seventies, with 'Human Factor', that Greene produces a genuine traitor. The plain fact is, for the English Upper Middle class who came of age between the Wars, loyalty was a purely legal concept. Consider the case of the nineteenth Lord Sempill. He had passed secrets to the Japanese for money. Technically, he was a traitor. But was he really disloyal? After all, someone had to take over shitholes like India. Why not the Japanese? Still, even Churchill couldn't keep him after the fellow continued to pass secrets after Pearl Harbor. He agreed to retire from the Admiralty. This was the sort of cozy little arrangement the Americans might not understand.
knowing that for every commitment you honor, you betray another.
No you don't. Greene wasn't crazy. He set up his plots so there was some dramatic tension. But, because Greene wasn't writing about Dr. Fu Manchu, the women in his novels weren't expected to feel any great loyalty to their husbands.
As he put it in The Power and the Glory, “When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . When you saw the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
Greene imagines a man for whom he wants us to feel pity. But we don't. It isn't till the English girl, Carol, adopts, so to speak, the Whiskey-priest, that our emotions are engaged. Otherwise, Greene's novel is just Catholic propaganda, not much better than Waugh's Mexico book- 'Robbery under Law'. The sub-text has to do with the Spanish Republicans' anti-clericalism. Greene's book succeeds because he did have the imagination to see that the Socialists weren't wholly motivated by hate. England itself had persecuted the Catholic Church and, truth be told, had done well as a result. America had introduced prohibition after women got the vote. In India, at about this time, so had some Congress administrations.
To many, that kind of sympathy with the enemy could seem the worst kind of two-facedness or moral relativism:
Not to Greene's generation. They believed the German 'Hymn of Hate'- penned by a Jewish poet- which claimed that the Germans didn't hate the French or the Russians. It was only the English they utterly loathed. But that hatred cost Britain much in blood and treasure. Maybe, hate wasn't such a wonderful thing. By 1923, the Canadians were saying they wouldn't support a war against Turkey. The French and Italians had already turned tail. Soon enough, under the Locarno Pact, France would not have been able to come to the aid of Poland which henceforth would either have to trust to the League of Nations or make its own accommodation with its overmighty neighbors. In other words, since wars of principle, or abstract policy, were now off the table, one might as well exercise one's own imagination rather than send it to the glue factory run by the anti-semites or other such nutjobs.
not so much turning the other cheek as sheer turncoatism.
Appeasement would be the mot juste.
And by trying to see both sides of every argument,
He didn't. The plain fact is, Greene accepted the 'winds of change' before the Tory party did. He was merely ahead of his time from the class point of view. J.B Priestley- whose father was a headmaster of a more modest type of school than Greene's- might have thought Greene was playing catch up.
From the American point of view, Greene must be considered especially prescient. 'The Quiet American' came out in 1955 around the time National Service men were fighting Communists in Malaya. Greene, quite properly, understood that Britain could not afford to get sucked into an Indo-China war.
At that time, the Americans still thought that Asians would be able to distinguish rich and generous Uncle Sam from their former colonial masters. There was indeed a distinction. The Yanks were worse- as the Afghans and Iraqis can tell you.
Greene contrived to make enemies on both sides of every fence:
Not in England where Class was the burning issue of the day. One couldn't say on which side of that fence Greene was on. I suppose, the truth is, there was no fence.
Catholics and agnostics,
who like arguing with each other because they are both emotionally retarded.
McCarthyites and communists, all found his conviction wanting.
Greene was on the right side of history. Anti-Communism was counter-productive. The US never got around to enforcing the ban on the Communist party.
A would-be Christian who admits to putting people before principles gets accused of sentimentality by skeptics and of hypocrisy by believers.
Did he write well? The answer is- well enough. He was a professional man of letters.
Those issues found their focus in Greene’s unshakable loyalty to his old boss in British intelligence, the Soviet double agent Kim Philby: Which of us, he wrote, in introducing Philby’s memoirs, has not betrayed something even more important to us than country?
Like Waugh, Greene must have known that it was useful to have a lot of Commie spies in the administration because this would reassure Stalin that he wouldn't be stabbed in the back. I wonder whether the Brits deliberately antagonized the Americans so as to be forced to go their own way in getting a nuclear deterrent. The original plan that Baldwin & Co. had for Britain's defense involved having a kick-ass air force. The problem was this still left the country without an offensive doctrine. Only nuclear missiles would do. Being British- i.e. wholly incurious- I've no idea whether this country actually has an independent deterrent. It may be that what we have actually had is a policy of strategic ambiguity for the last hundred years.
My point is, when commenting on a writer who sets a lot of his books in foreign countries, it is wise to consider the foreign policy and military implications of the positions he takes up for his own country and class.
Yet it could be said that Greene was never a truer Christian than when forgiving even his un-Christian enemies.
It is easy to forgive un-Christian enemies by saying 'they know not what they do'. The difficulty is with forgiving the Vicar for reprimanding you for drunkenly pinching his wife's bum. Anyway, that is the reason I decided not to apply for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury.
This is not to whitewash a self-styled scapegrace
I don't believe Greene would have referred to himself as any such thing. He was tall and had worked as a sub-editor of the Times. He didn't prance around in short trousers blowing raspberries at the Pope.
who had so many treacheries and transgressions to confess (though it is to give him credit for confessing so openly to them).
Fuck did he do that was so wrong? Adultery? Everybody was at it back then.
If he could be unusually tender toward his enemies, he could be unnaturally negligent of his loves.
Most men are- if their wives are to be believed.
In his championing of the voiceless, the forgotten, the oppressed, he could conceive irrational and implacable prejudices against those he regarded as Established (Noel Coward, say).
I suppose Greene didn't like Noel Coward's relationship with Mountbatten- the 'master of disaster'. After all, no Englishman of that period wanted the Senior Service to be run by a clown nose-led by a pansy- though, to speak frankly, things may have been the other way around.
And sometimes, by his own admission, he could do the right thing for the wrong reasons, refusing to be straight with someone because he lacked the nerve.
I take it, Pico refused to be straight. Perhaps he is Noel Coward in disguise.
It is, in fact, the ultimate strength of Greene’s books that he shows us the hazards of compassion.
If you are nice to the kid being bullied at school because you feel sorry for him, the bullies turn on you. He joins them and laughs heartily at you. At least that is what happened to the silly sausage who showed compassion for me when I was about 11 year old. The truth is, as Chesterton pointed out long ago, a man can forgive anything save pity. Obviously, I exclude pity fucks because, as a man, I'm getting to do the fucking. Also, I can tell everybody about it at work the next day while the lady in question does the walk of shame.
We all know, from works like Hamlet, how analysis is paralysis and the ability to see every side of every issue prevents us from taking any side at all.
Till we are offered money. Nothing wrong in that at all. I believe Waugh's Mexico book was bought and paid for by some private corporation. Greene's book kept him in royalties to the end of his days. I suppose it really is true that Greene made more money out of pity than Waugh did out of being a prick.
The tragic import of Greene’s work is that
tedium is worse. Irony is theodicy. Atrocity is theodicy. Mother Theresa farting loudly is theodicy. But from tedium we would spare even the immortal gods.
understanding can do the same: he could so easily see the pain of the people he was supposed to punish that he could not bear to come down hard on them.
If he wasn't paid to do so, what grave dereliction was he guilty of? I suppose Pico might say 'Greene failed to tell his Mummy that she was, and looked like, shit. For this great lapse, he was forced to tear out his own eyes.'
He became hostage to his own sympathies and railed at pity with the fury of one who was its captive.
Because he spent his life washing the feet of lepers when the truth was he actually preferred show-girls but was too polite to say so.
The most sobering lesson of Greene’s fiction is that sleeping with the enemy is most with us when we’re sleeping alone;
Pico doesn't have a crafty wank when sleeping alone. He stabs himself repeatedly screaming 'die, vile strumpet!'
and that even God, faced with a wounded murderer, might sometimes feel himself agnostic.
God was faced with a murderer- Barabbas- and was most horribly slain so a second mark of Cain yet wander amongst men from visage to visage. In the Ministry of Fear, the 'wounded murderer', guilty of the mercy killing of his wife, must wander in bondage to a new lover, who would always be in danger of being revealed as a spy. Here we have a couple who sleep together, dream alone, but are condemned to an oneiric quotidian which must ever seek to elude the unsleeping truth.
Greene belonged to a class which whatever its other faults, loyally stuck to its last. He entertained, he informed, and, if, from time to time, he struck an ultracrepidarian note, it was because his craft was, after all, an art even if he had been bred up to such scrupulous book-keeping as Hindus only find becoming in bona fide Chartered Accountants.
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