Book Review
Greene's
True Colours
The Life of Graham Greene; Volume III: 1955–1991 by Norman Sherry
Viking, 2004
(906 pages; $39.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Franklin Freeman
In 1949, Graham Greene, after an audience with Pope Pius XII, visited a Franciscan monastery with his mistress, Catherine Walston, where he heard Padre Pio say Mass. Pio’s stigmata “profoundly moved” him and he lost “the sense of time” during Mass, yet when, through a messenger, Pio invited Greene to meet him, his reaction was, “I didn’t want to change my life by meeting a saint. I felt that there was a good chance that he was one. He had a great peace about him.” Nevertheless, Greene at eighty years old still carried Padre Pio’s picture in his wallet.
One can assume that to change his life meant to Greene giving up his affair with Walston and visits to scores of prostitutes. During the 1950s, when his affair with Walston was at its most intense, Greene stopped going to confession and Communion, although he continued to attend Mass regularly. In 1960, when he was writing A Burnt-Out Case, he had almost given in to despair.
However, in the 1970s, “suffering from intense grief” about his sexual sins, Greene’s faith returned. He befriended a Spanish priest, Father -Duran, who heard his confessions, gave him Communion, and kept vigil with him as he died in Switzerland. Even then Greene had a mistress in Antibes, France. Was he a believer, a serious Catholic? Sherry contends that he was, albeit, as is apparent from his life and works, a tortured one.
Also torturous was Norman Sherry’s struggle to write his three-volume authorized biography of Greene, who chose Sherry because he admired Sherry’s books on Joseph Conrad. Sherry had traveled to the places Conrad had lived and discovered important insights into his work, insights unobtainable in libraries, and made a promise to do the same for Greene. He almost died fulfilling it. Sherry wanted “not only to trace the life and career of his subject but also, so far as possible, to penetrate the mystery of his character and personality.” Greene told him, “I will never lie to you, Norman, but I will not answer all your questions.”
Sherry began his work on Greene in October 1976 and completed it in October 2002. (Volume One was published in 1989 and Volume Two in 1995.) For him Greene is a great writer, one in the first tier, approaching -Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Greene himself ranked his place, more accurately, in the second tier.
Greene’s Mystery
Sherry ultimately admits defeat in trying to penetrate the mystery of Greene’s personality. He does explore the territory, however, which is vast, both geographically and psychologically.
This volume begins when Greene’s affair with Walston was beginning to wane (even as another, with a Swedish actress, was waxing) and when Greene was succeeding as a dramatist with his hit play, The Potting Shed, about a priest’s loss and recovery of faith. Greene hoped his work as a playwright would free him from the grinding labor of writing novels, but when another play, Carving the Statue, flopped, he turned back to fiction.
Sherry discusses in detail the writing and themes of the major plays and novels in the years covered by Volume Three, singling out The Honorary Consul (1973) as Greene’s last masterpiece. He greatly admires Our Man in Havana (1958), A Burnt-Out Case (1960), and The Comedians (1966); less so the later novels, beginning with Travels with My Aunt (1969). The Human Factor (1978) is only “brilliant in parts,” Getting to Know the General (1984) is “a curious work,” and he makes no judgment of The Captain and the Enemy (1988). He never mentions Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980) or The Tenth Man (1985), perhaps because he could think of nothing good to say about them.
Franklin Freeman is a freelance writer living in Saco, Maine, with his wife and four children.
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