Graham Greene was the consummate literary professional. But a new biography shows how profound mental instability shaped his chaotic private life.
BY WILLIAM BOYD
9 DECEMBER 2020
In the early summer of last year, I found myself on the Cote d’Azur – in Antibes, to be precise – with a couple of hours to spare. Spontaneously, I decided to try to find the apartment block in the town where Graham Greene had lived for the last decades of his life – the Résidence des Fleurs on the Avenue Pasteur. I found the street and the apartment block without too much difficulty.
The novelist William Boyd tells us about the authors, from Chekhov to Heller, who most influenced his own development as a writer – and reveals the secret to a well-crafted sex scene
After writing 17 novels, do you feel as inspired now as you did 20 or 30 years ago?
Yes, I do actually. Funnily enough, I feel in the last three of four years a new surge of energy. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m getting older, but I actually feel I’m working harder than I’ve worked ever before in my life. I seem to have so many things on. It’s not by any great intent, it’s just the way things have panned out. I can’t write for as long as I used to. I used to write for five hours a day and now I’m down to about three. But I do feel very creatively energised as I approach my 60th birthday, which is reassuring. It’s strange how these things happen. It’s not just new novels, I’m also writing short stories and for film and television. I feel very busy and I enjoy that. I don’t feel under any pressure so obviously the brain is still working well.
THE END OF THE AFFAIR By Graham Greene THE ART OF GRAHAM GREENE By Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris
t 47, Graham Greene is one of England's most important practicing novelists. He is also a prominent Roman Catholic layman. A convert in his middle-twenties, he has never become orthodox; it must come as a surprise to many readers encountering his books for the first time to discover that this adroit storyteller has involved himself and his audience with some of the more complex problems that arise from the clash of dogma and drama. His attempt to divide his many works of fiction into the categories of novels ("Brighton Rock," "The Power and the Glory" and "The Heart of the Matter") and entertainments ("The Ministry of Fear" and "The Third Man") has done little to enable one to separate the writer from his theology.
From Joseph Conrad to John le Carré, intelligence historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones picks the fiction that best reveals the secrets of espionage
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Wed 26 June 2013
In 1972, a friend gave me a tip about the then-unknown Somerset Maugham papers in Yale University Library. "You're interested in labour spies," he said, "so why don't you take a look at this novelist guy who spied for the UK and USA at the time of the Russian Revolution?" I took his advice, and turned to the study of foreign intelligence.
So my selection of novels reflects the interests of a historian, and draws on both domestic and foreign espionage. They are "classics" in being of some antiquity, and because, in addition to being of literary merit, they tell us something of their era.
1. The Spy; or, A Tale of the Neutral Ground by James Fenimore Cooper (1821) A factually-based account of the exploits of Harvey Birch, a secret agent in the American War of Independence. The impecunious spy "belonged to a condition in life which rendered him the least reluctant to appear in so equivocal a character". Birch's case officer, the future president George Washington, hears complaints after the war that the retired spy might prove to be loose-tongued – the new United States had no hold on him, as it had never paid him a salary. Birch inverted that logic in his explanation of why they could rely on his silence: "Tell them I would not take the gold!"
2. The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service Recently Achieved by Erskine Childers (1903) If you enjoyed Swallows and Amazons, check this out. Negotiating the Frisian coast in his yacht Dulcibella, Arthur Davies is accompanied by his Foreign Office chum Carruthers. They obtain evidence to prove that Germany is planning an invasion of England. Childers debunkers pointed out that Frisian waters were too shallow for warships and the hinterland had no warehousing facilities to serve the needs of an invasion. A footnote: on the eve of the war, the Anglo-Irish Childers used his own yacht to smuggle German arms to Ireland to help the cause of independence. In 1922 he suffered death by firing squad in the course of the Irish civil war, telling his American-born wife on the eve of his execution that he still loved England.
3. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad (1907) Mr Verloc, the protagonist of his novel, is an avowed anarchist, but also an agent provocateur for the thinly-disguised Russian embassy in London. His controller, Mr Vladimir, tasks him with blowing up the Greenwich Observatory. The cast includes the Professor, a specialist in infernal machines who at all times carries a bomb in readiness for a suicide attack. Verloc was a precursor to the anti-hero of the modern novel.
4. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915) The John Buchan Way is a lovely undulating walk alongside the Tweed Valley. Don't let it fool you. The action in this most Scottish of thrillers takes place further west, in the remote heatherlands of Galloway. Richard Hannay pursues the Black Stone spy ring even as he is being hunted down by German spies and misguided policemen. "The Presbyterian Cavalier" to his biographer Andrew Lownie, Buchan is a little too hot in his pursuit of sinners. His account was at odds with MI5's contemporary claim that it had mopped up all German spies at the start of the war. But why let history get in the way of a good read?
5. Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W Somerset Maugham (1928) Maugham was already an established novelist when a senior intelligence figure dropped in at his Long Island residence. Would he care for a little patriotic adventure? Maugham signed up to serve in Switzerland then revolutionary Russia, where he narrowly escaped extermination by the Bolsheviks. With mind-boggling audacity, he decided that the best cover for his spying would be that he was writing a series of short stories about spies. Maugham becomes Ashenden in the rather authentic published work. Ashenden rebukes his uncouth controller, "In my youth I was always taught that you should take a woman by the waist and a bottle by the neck".
6. The Informer by Liam O'Flaherty (1925) O'Flaherty declares in this novel: "Informer! A horror to be understood fully only by an Irish mind". The book reminds us that espionage is not limited to international intrigue. Gypo Nolan, O'Flaherty's protagonist, informs on a left-wing friend in the Irish civil war for the paltry sum of £20. An unintelligent man, he is pitilessly hunted down by the intellectual Commandant Dan Gallagher. The Informer occupies a position of iconic significance in Irish literature.
7. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929) "We had another drink". One has escaped in a single bound the Wee Free manse that spawned John Buchan. One enters instead the amoral realm of a master of the short sentence not to mention short words like "moll". Hammett was the pioneer of the "hardboiled" detective novel. Earlier, until he left in disgust at their labour espionage work and became a communist, he worked for the Pinkerton detective agency. Red Harvest is a spy's repentance. Hammett's Continental Op (a thinly disguised Pinkerton operative) arrives in Personville, aka Poisonville, a town in the American West. Mining capitalist Elihu Wilsson owns it in every respect until his revolutionary workers go on strike. Wilsson introduces professional strikebreakers and one murder follows another, 20 of them committed by the Op himself.
8. Wanderer by Sterling Hayden (1963) At least in being so well written, this is a novel masquerading as autobiography. Hayden served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US wartime intelligence agency. Postwar he was a movie actor, with roles in The Ashphalt Jungle and Dr Strangelove. In his Hollywood years he flirted with communism when it was in vogue; then betrayed his comrades under McCarthyism; then denounced McCarthyism when the sheep turned in that direction. It's all in his account, and he's honest about his weakness. And about others' frailties. In Cairo where the Americans wanted to ape the British, OSS headquarters was "a bastard version of the Taj Mahal". But the Brits guarded their patch: "a secretary entered with tea – which made it quite clear that this was a British Theatre of War".
9. The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955) Greene dismissed his own spy fiction as "entertainment". He wanted us to admire The Power and the Glory not The Quiet American. Be that as it may, The Quiet American had insight into the frailties of the early 1950s CIA and the untenability of US intervention in Vietnam. Alden Pyle, its protagonist, is a recognisable prototype of the Ivy League "best and brightest" who got America stuck in a Southeast Asian quagmire. Pyle jousts with his worldly and tolerant British counterpart over the delectable Phuong. Enter the US economic attaché "who keeps his friends because he uses the right deodorants".
10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré (1974) The former CIA Inspector General, Fred Hitz, sees Tinker as underscoring "the underlying distaste, widely felt in the SIS [MI6], for the American role in intelligence-gathering" in the early Cold War. In that sense, Le Carré had his finger on the dying pulse of the special intelligence relationship. Tinker is my least original selection as most readers or moviegoers will know about George Smiley's struggle with Moscow's presiding intelligence genius Karla. "Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided".
Graham Greene: 'The Battle of Britain was won on Benzedrine'
VS Naipaul
11 April 2016
For this 1968 profile from the Telegraph archive, republished to mark the 25th anniversary of Graham Greene's death on April 4, the novelist VS Naipaul spent two days in the south of France with Greene, who said some astonishing things.
Graham Greene has been living in France for two years. The French tax authorities are less harsh on the writer; the franc is free. Travel is easier, and travel is important to Mr Greene who, at 63, still likes to feel, as he says, that he is living on a frontier.
He has always been a political writer, interested in the larger movement of events. Before the war the frontiers were European. Now these lines of anxiety run everywhere. When I met Mr Greene he was off in a few days to Sierra Leone; and he was planning an Easter visit to the West Indies to St Kitts and Anguilla. He is an expatriate, but he feels very English. And though there are moments when he regrets the passing of the Victorian peace, he wishes, like the narrator of The Comedians, his last novel, to remain committed to the whole world.
Discovering two authors’ talents, faults in ‘Greene on Capri’ by Shirley Hazzard
Tuesday, January 3, 2017 1:30am LIFEA READING LIFE By Heartwood, Everett Public Library staff
This blog post is prompted by the news that Shirley Hazzard died this past December at age 85.
It’s kind of funny to me that I read this book without ever having read Graham Greene (though he’s long been on my radar, and I’m a fan of the film The Third Man). Funnier still since I’d also not read anything by Shirley Hazzard (her Transit of Venus won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980, and The Great Fire won the National Book Award in 2003). But a few years ago, one of my book-talking buddies handed me this book and said I should read it. I must say I was quite taken by the cover, and seeing the book’s slim length, I decided to give it a try.
The eighteenth century succeeds to the twentieth on the ground floors at the bottom of St. James’s Street. The gloss and the cellophane of oyster bars and travel agencies are wrapped incongruously round the legs of the dignified houses. Graham Greene lives here at the commercial end of this thoroughfare in a flat on the first floor of a narrow house sandwiched between the clubs of the aristocracy and St. James’s Palace. Above him, General Auchinleck, the soldier who was beaten by Rommel; below him, the smartest oyster bar in Europe; opposite, the second smartest.
’Tis a strange serpent – 10 of the most entertaining drinking bouts in literature
From Viking magical mead poetry to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, here’s how writers have encapsulated an eternal boozy truth
Mark Forsyth
Friday 1 December 2017
T
here have been drunken poets and poetic drunkards ever since the dawn of time, or, to put it more properly, since the sun first rose over the yardarm of history. The Vikings believed that all poetry came from some magical mead that Odin had stolen from a giant, downed, and then regurgitated in Asgard. They even believed this of bad poetry because, according to them, Odin had regurgitated most of it, but, in the heat of the moment, some of it had leaked out of his arse.
That is the reason that some great literary drinking bouts are better than others. Some stories sum up an eternal boozy truth, some pinpoint perfectly how one particular culture saw their alcohol. Here are 10 of the best.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The first ever work of literature is about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Gilgamesh is the musclebound king of Uruk and Enkidu is a musclebound wild man who lives happily among the animals. Enkidu is completely at one with nature until a beautiful woman offers him beer.
Enkidu eats food till he was satiated. Ale he drinks, seven goblets. His spirit is loosened, he becomes hilarious. His heart becomes glad and his face shines. The barber removes the hair on his body. He is anointed with oil. He becomes manlike. He puts on a garment, and he is like a man.
And after that he can never go back to the animals. They shun him now. Alcoholhas made him a human. That’s exactly the same thing that happens at the end of Animal Farm (written a mere 4,000 years later). The animals peek in the window to see pigs drinking with the humans and “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which”. It’s alcohol that divides us from the animals.
That’s not scientifically true, by the way. Most of the higher apes love to get drunk, providing that they can get their opposable thumbs on the stuff. Darwin recorded that the best way to catch a baboon was to offer it beer and then grab it when it was hungover.
Letters, Lord Byron
When not shagging his way across Europe or swimming his way across the Hellespont, Byron liked a drink. It’s not that he was a better drinker than anybody else, but he was much better at describing it. It’s probably best to simply let him speak for himself. This is from a letter to Thomas Moore dated 31 October 1815:
“Yesterday, I dined out with a largeish party, where were Sheridan and Colman, Harry Harris of Covent Garden and his brother, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Ds. Kinnaird, and others, of note and notoriety. Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling;—and, to crown all, Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. We deposited him safe at home, where his man, evidently used to the business, waited to receive him in the hall.
Both he and Colman were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the wine had previously carried away my memory; so that all was hiccup and happiness for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the conversation.”
‘Experimental literary chaos …’ An illustration by Gustave Doré from the novel Gargantua by François Rabelais. Photograph: Corbis via Getty Images
Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare
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Shakespeare always gets things right. Though Falstaff is his most famous drunk, there’s one aspect of the business that the Bard nailed in Antony and Cleopatra.The three rulers of the known world – Antony, Octavius and Lepidus – are drinking together and Lepidus is very, very drunk. He’s so drunk that he doesn’t just say things, he insists on them.
“Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies’ pyramids are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard that.”
As though some invisible figure keeps contradicting him – something that I (and you) do after a few glasses. They’re so smashed that, when Lepidus asks Antony what Egyptian crocodiles are like, Antony replies: “It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth: it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it.”
And Lepidus is just about capable of considering this answer, nodding like he understands and saying, after some thought: “Tis a strange serpent.”
Right Ho, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
For the pure unadulterated joy of drinking, you can’t really beat Wodehouse. Indeed it’s hard to beat him for pure unadulterated joy full stop. He had wonderful phrases for it – “tanked to the uvula” or “oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled and blotto”. He also has the wonderful story of Gussie Finknottle’s first encounter with alcohol. Gussie is a shy man who is shyly in love with Madeline Bassett. But he doesn’t have the nerve to propose to her. Bertie tries to persuade him that a stiff drink will give him the requisite Dutch courage. Gussie refuses and Bertie decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice. Unfortunately Jeeves also decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice, and Gussie himself then decides that he’ll do as Bertie suggested and downs half a decanter of whisky, which he washes down with the doubly-spiked orange juice. The result is a new Gussie Finknottle, who acts as though he could bite a tiger. “Make it two tigers. I could chew holes in a steel door.”
He proposes to Bassett, who joyously accepts. But he then has to give a speech at the school prize-giving in Market Snodsbury, and his drunkenness, now begun, must run its course through the classic stages of jocose, bellicose and morose, before finally arriving at comatose, by which time Bassett has called off the engagement.
The King in Yellow, Robert W Chambers
The story of an American in Paris in the 1880s who falls in love with a Parisian girl, but is too prim, proper and embarrassed to even introduce himself. So far, so Henry James. But this hero differs from James’s, because after a few bottles of wine, and a brief attempt to start a fight with the Arc de Triomphe (“Its size annoyed him”), he realises that it would be a fantastic idea to visit her street, and, once there, that it would be a fantastic idea to climb up to her window, and a simply superb idea to break in. Finally, they come face to face, but he still hasn’t the courage to speak, and, in a beautiful tragicomic ending, he retreats, wordless, with a rose.
Gargantua, François Rabelais
Long before there was James Joyce, there was the experimental literary chaos of Rabelais. The Discourse of the Drinkers is a crazy dialogue where you can’t work out who’s saying what or why, but everybody wants to drink. “The concavities of my body are like another hell for their capacity … There is not a corner, nor cunniborow in all my body where this wine doth not ferret out my thirst.” NB: a cunniborow is a rabbit-hole.
‘Bite-of-the-nail suspense …’ Alec Guinness (right) and Ernie Kovacs in Our Man in Havana (1959). Photograph: Ronald Grant
Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh
Decline and Fall starts with the famous drunk scene where Paul Pennyfeather is debagged by the Bollinger Club, but it ends with a better one. Waugh not only captures perfectly the ability of a drunkard to repeat himself ad nauseam, but he also uses those repetitions to make the final conversation of the book into a literary symphony of theme, repetition, variation and motif. And when the drunkard is told he drinks too much, he replies: “Oh, damn, what else is there to do?”
Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
This is the only drunk scene I can think of that has edge-of-the-seat bite-of-the-nail suspense. The main character, Wormold, has to render the head of Cuba’s secret police unconscious. So he challenges him to a game of draughts played with whisky miniatures. When you take a piece, you have to drink it, thus handicapping yourself. The police chief begins to realise what’s happening and is caught in a battle between the desire to win, the desire to keep his head and the alcohol. A board game, some drinks, and the casual question: “Do you keep your gun loaded?”
The Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Vikings believed that all poetry came from alcohol, specifically from the magical Óthrerir, the Mead of Poetry. This was guarded by a giant in the middle of a mountain, but Odin managed to break in, down it in one and then fly back to Asgard in the form of an eagle and regurgitate into a cauldron. Unfortunately, he was being chased by the giant and he was in such a hurry that, though most of it came out of his mouth, some sprayed out of his godly arse. All good poetry, believed the Vikings, came from the former; all bad poetry from the latter.
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Let us end with a hangover, as these things usually do. There have been some great descriptions, but this is the greatest. Dixon finds himself “too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning”. But the line that clinches it is: “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.”
•A Short History of Drunkenness is published by Viking.