Graham Greene: The Man Within
By Michael Shelden
Heinemann, 1994. 537 pp., $45 (hb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
The left has got Graham Greene entirely wrong. According to Shelden's biography, Greene was no friend of international socialism, no left-wing political novelist.
From the 1930s to the 1980s, Greene spied for England's MI6 in Liberia, Malaya, Vietnam, Russia, Eastern Europe, Poland, Cuba and Nicaragua, using his literary cover to gain access to Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and the Sandinista leaders. Greene was associated with the right during the pre-war decades, forming friendships with Franco supporters, scabbing with the Times' editorial staff against their printers during the 1926 general strike and serving as a special constable.
Shelden labours to puncture the belief in Greene as some sort of progressive. Although it is true that Greene was a spy and that he shared the conservatism and anti-Semitism of the political right, Shelden's crusading fervour, on balance, does an injustice to Greene.
From the 1960s, a change in Green's outlook is evident. Beginning with his novel The Quiet American, Greene challenged US imperialism. As this novel was questioning the morality of the war against Vietnam, Greene resigned from US literary bodies in 1970 in protest at the war.
Despite the real or assumed spying that went on in other countries, Greene's novels Our Man in Havana and The Comedians were critical of the Batista and Duvalier dictatorships and of US policy in Cuba and Haiti. Haiti's dictator, Francois Duvalier, was so enraged by The Comedians that he himself rebutted the novel in a review. A later novel, The Human Factor, queried conventional political clichs about Kim Philby by crediting the virtuous motive of opposition to apartheid as underlying the spying for the Soviet Union by the novel's hero, another defecting British spy.
There were inconsistencies that Greene's class background and personal eccentricities could not surmount, however. His journeyings to political hot spots were partly a jaunty adventure. Vietnam was a giant playground with good opium and impressive brothels. Although Greene engaged in some minor smuggling to aid Castro's rebels, Batista's Cuba satisfied his cravings for sex and assorted vices. Political crises were often merely "exotic backdrops" to Greene's obsession with sex and his own and his characters' personal hells and private agonies.
Despite Shelden's painstaking hunting for obscure clues in Greene's novels in order to "blow sky high" cherished theories about Greene's progressive credentials, Greene was stimulated by serious political issues. Condensing a lifetime concern, one of his last novels, Monsignor Quixote (which Shelden calls a "sad failure"), is an engaging yet serious debate between Christianity and Marxism on how to make the world a better place, and how faith and doubt are part of this struggle.
In the novel, the Marxist mayor often get the better of the Catholic priest, and Greene's donation of the royalties to a Trappist monastery and to the guerilla resistance in El Salvador shows the duality of apolitical passivity and political engagement that Greene struggled with during most of his literary life.
Greene challenged many orthodoxies. Much of his religious concern as a so-called Catholic novelist is with the tyranny of God (and all unaccountable authority) and the redeeming features of sin (and all rebellion) for the ideal of independence. And although Greene remained an elitist (the victims of imperialist aggression and their political movements are not the central concern of his novels), he was led by a basic political integrity into conflict with US foreign policy.
Greene can't be assessed by the number of protest committees he was on. It is Shelden's own conclusion that must be the yardstick: "Books made him, and books must sustain his reputation ... Art will have the last word." In the best of Greene's work, artistic honesty and human sympathy combine to produce some quietly subversive achievements, having the last word over any harm he did as an upper class eccentric and spy.