At last, a biography that does justice to Graham Greene
RUSSIAN ROULETTE by Richard Greene 612PP, LITTLE, BROWN, £25, EBOOK £16.99
‘You shouldn’t be alive,” Fidel Castro declared to Graham Greene when the elderly novelist told him how many times he had played Russian Roulette with a revolver as an adolescent. It’s a phrase that readers of this new biography of Greene will find themselves shouting every few chapters.
Although Greene gave up his revolver, he spent his life trying to recreate the same thrill by travelling to the world’s trouble spots, popping up with the inevitability of a vulture in Mexico, Sierra Leone (as part of his Second World War service with MI6), Malaya, Vietnam, Kenya, Batista’s Cuba, Haiti, Paraguay and Panama when they were at their most explosive.
Aged 63, he found himself crouching behind a sand dune near Ismailia to escape being shelled after deciding to take a look at the Six-Day War: “I do seem to have a nose because I stumbled on the worst point of the worst incident in two months … I really thought I’d had my last game of roulette.”
His biographer Richard Greene (a Canadian poet and academic best known for his life of Edith Sitwell, and no relation) is a little sceptical about Greene’s claim that his life was one long dice with death. He suggests, to start with, that one of Greene’s early poems implies that the teenage Graham never actually loaded the revolver.
Later on, Greene adopted the pose of a thrill-seeker, but his biographer identifies nobler motives behind his ceaseless globetrotting: the desire to alert the world to things it should know about, such as America’s low-key involvement in Vietnam in the Fifties; the wish, as a Catholic novelist whose great theme was faith, to scour the world’s trouble spots for “the most authentic believers … the ones who had no comfort to deceive them”.
Less edifyingly, Richard Greene suggests that Graham was also “a fugitive from fatherhood”, constantly on the move to avoid tedious family responsibilities. But whatever motivated his travels, we can probably learn more about a wider range of cultures and conflicts from his biography than from that of any other figure of his generation.
The light Greene’s life throws on geopolitics is one of his biographer’s main interests, and he has little time for the “prurient and trivial” obsession with the minutiae of Greene’s sex life that has characterised previous biographies. So when he tells us about the convoluted romantic positions Greene found himself in, it’s in the less literal sense.
At one stage, we’re told, “Greene … was married to Vivien, living with Dorothy, purportedly involved with a possibly non-existent Claudette Monde, and in love with Catherine Wolston”. Although his novels drew on his own romantic life, none of his heroes ever experienced anything quite so knotty; only Iris Murdoch could really have done him justice.
Anybody who has read Norman Sherry’s official biography of Greene, a train-wreck in three volumes, will be delighted by the concision and sanity of Richard Greene’s book. He writes briskly and engagingly, with a wry wit and an endearing fondness for trivia and puns.
He is also less giddy, and less of a hero-worshipper, than most of the previous biographers. Unlike some of them, he is able to accept that Greene was so unperceptive as not to realise that his MI6 colleague Kim Philby was a traitor, and does not waste his time scouring Greene’s novels for coded signs that he knew the truth.
Since his death in 1991, Greene’s reputation has come to rest on half a dozen novels from his middle years,
Greene pops up with the inevitability of a vulture in the world’s worst trouble spots
notably The End of the Affair and The Quiet American. Richard Greene rightly insists that he “is one of the very few modern writers in English who can be valued for a whole body of work”, and urges us to look again at his later novels ( The Comedians and The Honorary Consul are the most unfairly neglected, in my view) and his journalism, short stories, essays, letters, memoirs, film scripts and travel books.
I’m not sure, nevertheless, that this biography quite does justice to Greene’s writing. Richard Greene has a lot of ground to cover in 500 pages, offering potted histories of several regimes and conflicts and often carrying their stories several decades past Greene’s involvement, and the books sometimes get sidelined.
He does make some brilliant critical observations, as when he says that, “In Greene’s most Catholic novels, there is a remarkable fleshiness, with characters belching and hiccupping, as if the idea of Incarnation were being probed to the last unsettling degree”. But often he only has the space to focus on the real-life events and people behind the books.
This is a shame, as it implies that Greene’s novels were primarily journalistic when in fact, like Dickens, he was an inspired mixture of journalist and creator, reflecting the real world but also shaping it into his own distinct imaginative universe. (British readers can perhaps get the clearest sense of his method from Brighton Rock and The Human Factor, in which our country is both shrewdly anatomised and transmogrified into a sinister nightmare land.)
Greene emerges from these pages in three dimensions, as a uniquely fascinating man, but you have to take it on trust somewhat that he also wrote uniquely fascinating books. Still, we badly needed a sympathetic but clearheaded life of Greene, and this book fills the gap admirably.