1. Greene's personal life
For over six decades Greene’s writings, both fictional and factual, were inspired and underpinned by his fascination with the essential human duality of political action and religious belief, coupled with an insistent need as a writer to keep the political personal. In September 1990, six months before his death, Judith Adamson concluded that Greene’s politics had never been associated with any ‘particular ideology’ since he firmly believed that writers should be ‘free of fixed affiliations’. He did, however, readily espouse some specific causes: He has been vehemently opposed to American intervention in the affairs of smaller nations and has taken up the causes of Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Chile, Panama and Nicaragua in particular. At the same time his has been one of the major voices raised in defence of human rights in countries like the Soviet Union. Of late he has allowed that he is something of an old-fashioned social democrat, which is consonant with his quick attachment to Omar Torrijos (described in Getting to Know the General) and his vision of what was then a moderately socialist Panama. But just as often he has talked about the ‘virtue of disloyalty’ and the ‘price of faith’, about disinterested observation and the importance of doubt.
2. Writing career of Greene
After leaving Oxford, Greene worked for a period of time as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the Nottingham Journal,[15] and then as a sub-editor on The Times. While he was working in Nottingham, he started corresponding with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who had written to him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene was an agnostic, but when he later began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it in A Sort of Life, he "ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held". Greene was baptised on 26 February 1926 and they married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, London. He published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929; its favourable reception enabled him to work full-time as a novelist. Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres (which he described as "entertainments" and "novels"): thrillers—often with notable philosophic edges—such as The Ministry of Fear; and literary works—on which he thought his literary reputation would rest—such as The Power and the Glory.
The next two books, The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932), were unsuccessful; and he later disowned them. His first true success was Stamboul Train (1932) which was taken on by the Book Society and adapted as the film Orient Express, in 1934.
Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair;[7] which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel.[16] Several works, such as The Confidential Agent, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Human Factor, and his screenplay for The Third Man, also show Greene's avid interest in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage.
He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day. Greene's 1937 film review of Wee Willie Winkie, for Night and Day—which said that the nine-year-old star, Shirley Temple, displayed "a dubious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen"—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs and Greene leaving the UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over. While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel often considered his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory.
By the 1950s, Greene had become known as one of the finest writers of his generation.
As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between his 'entertainments' and novels increasingly problematic. The last book Greene termed an entertainment was Our Man in Havana in 1958.
Greene also wrote short stories and plays, which were well received, although he was always first and foremost a novelist. His first play, The Living Room, debuted in 1953. Michael Korda, a lifelong friend and later his editor at Simon & Schuster, observed Greene at work: Greene wrote in a small black leather notebook with a black fountain pen and would write approximately 500 words. Korda described this as Graham's daily penance—once he finished he put the notebook away for the rest of the day.
His writing influences included Conrad, Ford, Haggard, Stevenson, James, Proust, Buchan, and Péguy.
Throughout his life, Greene travelled to what he called the world's wild and remote places. In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited into MI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the agency. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War. Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6. Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944. Greene later wrote an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, My Silent War. As a novelist Greene wove the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels.[citation needed]
Greene first left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 on a trip to Liberia that produced the travel book Journey Without Maps. His 1938 trip to Mexico to see the effects of the government's campaign of forced anti-Catholic secularisation was paid for by the publishing company Longman, thanks to his friendship with Tom Burns. That voyage produced two books, the factual The Lawless Roads (published as Another Mexico in the U.S.) and the novel The Power and the Glory. In 1953, the Holy Office informed Greene that The Power and the Glory was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene, Pope Paul VI told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should ignore the criticism.
Greene first travelled to Haiti in 1954, where The Comedians (1966) is set, which was then under the rule of dictator François Duvalier, known as "Papa Doc", frequently staying at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince. And, in the late 1950s, as inspiration for his novel, A Burnt-Out Case (1960), Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of leper colonies in the Congo Basin and in what were then the British Cameroons. During this trip in late February and early March 1959, Greene met several times with Andrée de Jongh, a leader in the Belgian resistance during WWII, who famously established an escape route to Gibraltar through the Pyrenees for downed allied airmen.
In 1957, just months after Fidel Castro began his final revolutionary assault on the Batista regime in Cuba, Greene played a small role in helping the revolutionaries, as a secret courier transporting warm clothing for Castro's rebels hiding in the hills during the Cuban winter. Greene was said to have a fascination with strong leaders, which may have accounted for his interest in Castro, whom he later met. After one visit Castro gave Greene a painting he had done, which hung in the living room of the French house where the author spent the last years of his life. Greene did later voice doubts about Castro, telling a French interviewer in 1983, "I admire him for his courage and his efficiency, but I question his authoritarianism," adding: "All successful revolutions, however idealistic, probably betray themselves in time."
Publishing career
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Between 1944 and 1948, Greene was director at Eyre & Spottiswoode under chairman Douglas Jerrold, in charge of developing its fiction list. Greene created The Century Library series, which was discontinued after he left following a conflict with Jerrold regarding Anthony Powell's contract. In 1958, Greene was offered the position of chairman by Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre, but declined.
He was a director at The Bodley Head from 1957 to 1968 under Max Reinhardt.
Greene was an agnostic, but was baptised into the Catholic faith in 1926 after meeting his future wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning. They were married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, north London. The Greenes had two children, Lucy Caroline (born 1933) and Francis (born 1936).
In his discussions with Father Trollope, the priest to whom he went for instruction in Catholicism, Greene argued with the cleric "on the ground of dogmatic atheism", as Greene's primary difficulty with religion was what he termed the "if" surrounding God's existence. He found, however, that "after a few weeks of serious argument the 'if' was becoming less and less improbable", and Greene was converted and baptised after vigorous arguments initially with the priest in which he defended atheism, or at least the "if" of agnosticism. Late in life, Greene called himself a "Catholic agnostic".
Beginning in 1946, Greene had an affair with Catherine Walston, the wife of Harry Walston, a wealthy farmer and future life peer. That relationship is generally thought to have informed the writing of The End of the Affair, published in 1951, when the relationship came to an end. Greene left his family in 1947, but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in accordance with Catholic teaching, and they remained married until Greene's death in 1991.
Greene lived with manic depression (bipolar disorder). He had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife, Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life," and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material". William Golding praised Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".
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