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4. Final years
During World War II, Greene began to travel extensively; this travel would play a major part in the rest of his life. In fact, it was his travels and the people he met in various countries that inspired many of his plots, themes, and characters. In 1938, for example, the Roman Catholic Church funded Greene's trip to Mexico. The purpose of this trip was for Greene to observe and write about the effects of a forced anti-Catholic campaign against secularization. This event led to Greene writing The Lawless Roads (or Another Mexico, as it was known in America) and it formed the core of the fictional novel, The Power and the Glory.
During World War II, a notorious double agent, Kim Philby recruited Greene to work for England's own MI6. This stint in espionage fueled Greene's desire to travel, as well as provided him with memorable and intriguing characters. Greene became obsessed with traveling to the "wild and remote" places of the world. His travels led him to François Duvalier's Haiti, where he set his 1966 novel, The Comedians. Greene became so well-known in Haiti that the proprietor of the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, named a room in the hotel in honor of Greene. After the war ended, he continued to travel as a free-lance journalist. He spent a long period on the French Riviera, in particular, Nice. He also made several anti-American comments during his travels, thus opening doors to Communist leaders like Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, whom he interviewed. Greene's close friend, Evelyn Waugh, wrote a letter in support of Greene as "a secret agent on our side and all his buttering up of the Russians is 'cover'."
There is so much weariness and disappointment in travel that people have to open up—in railway trains, over a fire, on the decks of steamers, and in the palm courts of hotels on a rainy day. They have to pass the time somehow, and they can pass it only with themselves. Like the characters of Anton Chekhov they have no reserves—you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances (Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads, 1939).
During the final years of Graham Greene's life, he received many honors. In 1981, he was the recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, awarded to writers who are concerned with "the freedom of the individual in society." In, J'Accuse—The Dark Side of Nice (1982), one of his last works, he wrote about the travesties he saw while living in Nice. He wrote specifically about the organized crime that corrupted the very foundations of the civic government and the severe judicial and police corruption abounding in the society. His writings were not ignored, and this led to a libel case, which he lost. Vindication came in 1994, three years after his death, when the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, was finally convicted and sentenced to jail for several counts of corrupt behavior and criminal actions. Greene's affairs over the years were depicted in several novels, and in 1966, he made a move to Antibes. His purpose was to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, a woman whom he had known for many years. This relationship, unlike many others, endured his travels and continued until his death. Nearing the end of his life, Greene moved to the small Swiss town of Vevey, on Lake Geneva. Even though he confessed to still being a Catholic, he had not practiced the religion since the 1950s. Towards the end of his life he made a point of attending Mass and honoring the sacraments. On April 3, 1991, Graham Greene passed away and he was buried in Corsier-sur-Vevey in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. He was 86 years old.
Previous to this time, Greene had published two volumes of his autobiography, A Sort of Life in 1971, and Ways of Escape in 1980. In October 2004, a third volume of his life was published by Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene. Sherry followed Greene's footsteps, traveling to the same countries, and even contracting several of the same diseases that Greene had been afflicted with. Sherry discovered that Greene had continued to submit reports to British intelligence until the end of his life. This led scholars and Greene's literary audience to entertain the provocative and necessary question: "Was Greene a novelist who was also a spy, or was his lifelong literary career the perfect cover?"
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