Biographies & Memoirs

9

Conclusion: Greene’s place in literary history

Greene did not claim to stand in the first rank of authors; he recognised the superiority of (for instance) Conrad and James. He could not rival Conrad’s Olympian wisdom, his beauty of description, or his searching technical innovations. He lacked James’s civilised delicacies and elaborate subtleties. Nevertheless, Greene’s range was immense, and he succeeded in gaining both critical acclaim and a vast international readership. He produced novels, tales, plays, poems, film-scripts, critical and political essays, autobiographical works, travel books, biographical studies. They vary greatly in quality. Some of his works were slight or casual; others are intense, complex, and seem likely to endure. He could combine the grippingly readable and the revealingly intelligent. He is one of those writers who offer a distinctive vision or world-view: just as we speak of the Dickensian world or the Kafkaesque, so Greeneland is his characteristic imaginative terrain. Of course, as we have seen, he could be an astute critic of Greeneland, too. The dark vision of the earlier works gives way to the comedy of many later ones, just as the intensely religious preoccupation of some of his most famous novels gives way to works more secular or sceptical in basis.

In those writings, which spanned seventy years, he became one of the finest literary commentators on religious, cultural and political tensions in the twentieth century. He offered searching analyses of the tensions between the religious and the secular outlooks, and between political commitment and political scepticism. Paradoxes preoccupied him: the paradox of the sanctified sinner, for example; the concept of faith without belief; the knowledge of loyalty which entails treachery; the possible reconciliation of communism with Catholicism.

His works portray the stresses of modern life in numerous geographical regions: Europe, Africa, Asia, Central and South America. He was a literary citizen of the world, seeking to build imaginative bridges between continents. He displayed energy and courage in his quests. Certainly there were flaws in his judgement: we have noted the anti-Semitism of various early works, his glamorisation of some modes of corruption, his marked animosity towards North American influences, and an inclination to hero-worship which led him to flatter some dictators. Whether as an adulterer, as a practical joker, or as an agent of the SIS, Greene was experienced in modes of duplicity. As a patron of brothels, strip-clubs and opium-dens, he promoted the corruption he depicted. On the other hand, he repeatedly spoke up for the person or cause that seemed to be the underdog in a given situation; he displayed courage in opposing complacencies of orthodoxy, and a bold frankness in exposing the problems of belief and the stresses of sexual desire. In many respects, he was his own best critic: not only in his critical comments, often severe, on his writings and personal characteristics, but also implicitly, as a later work counterbalanced a bias in an earlier work, or as some of his later declared beliefs contradicted his earlier ones. In his life and his writings, he epitomised so many large-scale problems and divisions in twentieth-century culture and ideology.

Much of his fictional work is characterised by lucid intelligence, descriptive verve, and deftly perceptive analyses of characters and situations. The Brighton of Brighton Rock, the Mexico of The Power and the Glory, the Congo of A Burnt-Out Case, the Saigon of The Quiet American: he imprints them unforgettably on the imagination; and in each case he depicts vividly the downtrodden who suffer in a world of injustice and inequality. There are some traditional romantic qualities in his work: sympathy for the rebel or outcast, distrust of the mind-forg’d manacles, and scorn directed towards the materially successful and dominative. There is romanticism, too, in his depictions of the sometimes-fatal intensities of sexual love. So much of his darker writing is impelled by the romantic sense of the lost Eden; by the appalled yet fascinated recognition that the world has repeatedly been sullied and blighted by erring and egoistic humans. Again, he portrays with knowledgeable sympathy such individuals as Czinner in Stamboul Train or Dr Colin in A Burnt-Out Case, who strive, against heavy odds, to make the world a better place.

Greene’s work appeared in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television, in the theatre and the cinema. He was an astute publicist, a resourceful entertainer and an indefatigable moral historian. One of his greatest positive qualities was the exploratory energy implicit partly in his travels, partly in that love of literature which he conveyed so well in critical essays, and partly in the love of language which irradiates his best novels and tales. The distinctive linguistic intelligence and humane sensitivity which characterise so much of his work, and which are most fully evident in The Power and the Glory, should ensure that Graham Greene’s wide and appreciative readership will endure for many years to come.

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