GREENE, GRAHAM

Novelist; b. Berkhamsted, England, Oct. 2, 1904; d. Vevey, Switzerland, April 3, 1991.

After completing public school Greene was sent to Balliol College at Oxford in 1922, where he studied modern history. In 1925, he began a career in journalism, first with the Nottingham Journal for six months and then as subeditor with the Times of London, where he stayed until 1930. His efforts at getting published were ineffectual until his third novel, The Man Within (1929), which proved a success with both readers and critics.

Among Greene's early successes were Stamboul Train (1932; American title, Orient Express ), A Gun for Sale (1936; American title, This Gun for Hire ), and The Confidential Agent (1939). During this early period Greene experienced two important changes: his conversion to Roman Catholicism and his marriage. The events were linked by the fact that his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, was Catholic. He took instructions from Father Trollope at the cathedral in Nottingham and was accepted into the Church in 1926. The next year he married Vivien, and from that marriage came a daughter, Lucy Caroline (m. Bourget), and a son, Francis. By the close of 1939, however, the marriage had begun to disintegrate, and after the war Greene and his wife separated permanently.

The publication and reception of Brighton Rock in 1938 pointed the way toward Greene's strengthening grip on stories that brought issues of faith and politics to bear on each other. Brighton Rock was followed by The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951). In each of these novels Greene depicts a character whose actions and beliefs force the reader to question the nature of the life of faith, of the ways in which saint and sinner are two halves of one being, and the difficulties that lie in the way of defining goodness and evil in conventional moral terms. In Brighton Rock that character is the malevolent teenage hoodlum Pinkie; in The Power and the Glory, the deeply flawed but committed whisky priest; in The Heart of the

Matter, the excruciatingly conscientious Major Scobie; and in The End of the Affair, the emotionally trapped and burdened Sarah Miles. In these protagonists and in others in his later fiction Greene created personalities that speak to readers of all faiths about abiding issues of religious belief and commitment.

During World War II Greene was an air-raid warden and later an agent in MI6, the counterintelligence arm of the British Secret Service. From 1941 to 1943 he served in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and from 1943 to 1944 he served in London in the Iberian section under the notorious Kim Philby. Greene remained a friend and staunch defender of Philby after the latter's defection to the Soviet Union in 1963. Greene's career in intelligence came to an end in 1944, but his fascination with it found voice in several novels, most notably The Ministry of Fear (1943), The Third Man (1950), The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), and The Human Factor (1966).

In the 1950s and 1960s Greene continued to produce novels and short stories, plays, children's books, and essays. He also wrote two remarkable film scripts (The Third Man and The Fallen Idol ), and accounts of journeys to areas of political and social crisis, such as Malaya, Kenya, Indochina, Haiti, Cuba, and the Congo. He reported on events for Life, Paris-Match, the Sunday Times, Le Figaro, and the Sunday Telegraph, and conducted a soberer but no less distinguished career as a director of the publishing firm the Bodley Head. His retirement from the business side of publishing came in 1968, but his writing career continued unabated until 1985, when he experienced a waning of his writing powers. Most of his last years were spent in residence in a small flat in Antibes, France, writing and giving occasional interviews. To the time of his death from complications caused by a blood disease at age 86, Greene remained a dedicated writer, producing late in life one of his finest books, The Honorary Consul (1973), in which he blends his usual concerns with both politics and religion in a tale of terrorism. Greene considered it his best work, though many readers continue to prefer the earlier novels of faith and disillusionment.

Although Greene came to detest the epithet "Catholic novelist," it is difficult not to think of him as one of the preeminent Catholic novelists of the twentieth century. Like his fellow authors Georges Bernanos, Ignazio Silone, and François Mauriac, Greene brought issues of faith and creed to bear powerfully on the lives of his characters. In his writings he raised important questions about the nature of evil, of God, of sin, and the relationship between conventional moral imperatives and the deeper, more profound question of the reality of evil. Although his fictional techniques strike many critics today as conventional and "high modern," it is no secret that his works continue to draw large readerships and to increase yearly in stature.

Bibliography: j. adamson, Graham Greene and Cinema (Norman, OK 1984). m. f. allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, g. waldeman, trans. (New York 1983); originally published in French as L'autre et son double (Paris 1981). m. couto, Graham Greene: On the Frontier (New York 1988). a. a. devitis, Graham Greene (rev. ed.; Boston 1986). s. hynes, ed., Graham Greene: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1973). r. h. miller, Understanding Graham Greene (Columbia, SC 1990). r. sharrock, Saints, Sinners, and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene (Notre Dame, IN 1984). n. sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. I (London and New York 1989). p. stratford, Faith and Fiction: Creative Process in Greene and Mauriac (Notre Dame 1964).

[r. h. miller]