Quotes from Richard Greene

Amid fears of a European war, Mexico was old news. The bishops knew this, and so treated Greene with kindness and respect as someone who could tell their story to a distracted world.

After some arm-twisting from the French, the United States, notionally opposed to colonialism, not only acquiesced in the French claim to Vietnam but transported thousands of French soldiers there by sea.

provided the French with money and weaponry, were hardening into a Cold War frame of mind: they saw the Viet Minh as just another kind of communist and failed to understand the degree to which they were inspired by nationalism and open to friendship with them.

Just as in San Antonio Greene distrusted the comforts of America, in Mexico he sees piety as a distraction from human reality. The once-pampered priest understands himself more as his clerical garments wear out and his shoes lose their soles so that his feet are exposed to dirt, stones, and snakes.

However, once the priest has been arrested, the two sit together beside the corpse of the bank robber in a hut and speak amicably while outside there is hard rain – a scene which for the first time crystallizes the dialogue between Catholicism and communism that would be so much a part of Greene's later work.

He wrote to his mother that even though the prize had gone in the past to writers he despised, it pleased him: 'I suppose at the bottom of every human mind is the rather degraded love of success – any kind of success. One feels ashamed of one's own pleasure.'39

Greene shipped out from Liverpool on 9 December 1941 in a 5000-ton Elder Dempster cargo vessel

Greene's passion for West Africa is not reducible, however, to a flight from marital troubles or an effort to stave off depression. As we have seen, he distrusted the veneers of a comfortable life and felt that reality was only knowable under conditions of privation. His quest for absolutes required such conditions, and if Greeneland, a term he disliked, has a central place it may just be the little house in Freetown, which he came to regard as home.18

The praise Greene most valued, however, came not in a review: Faulkner himself wrote in a letter to his British publisher, the contents of which were soon passed on, 'I have also read Mr Greene's THE END OF THE AFFAIR; not one of yours, but for me one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language.'9

The nightmare that Greene came across in Phat Diem – including a mother and child dead in a ditch – is described in the opening paragraphs of this book. He was a journalist at a small but very ugly battle that the French did not want the world to know about, so with an offer of him spending a day with the navy they persuaded him to board a boat back upriver to Nam Dinh, where his escort simply abandoned him. But he had seen what he had seen.

The most likely explanation of Greene's desire to leave MI6 for a less demanding position lies in a scriptwriting contract he signed with MGM on 3 February 1944, providing him with twelve weeks of work in each of two years at the handsome rate of £250 per week.

Just before he left Vietnam, Greene had a skirmish with American consular officials obstructing his plans to visit California and New York in February 1952. The McCarran Act of 1950, passed over Harry Truman's veto, attempted to keep people who had been communists or fascists out of the country.

Greene had disclosed to a sympathetic American diplomat in Brussels that while at Oxford he had been a member of the Communist Party for a period. He then repeated the disclosure to a Time magazine reporter, and a 'plastic curtain fell'. To enter the country he required the special permission of the Attorney General, a process taking three weeks, and his visits were limited to four weeks.1

work. He has encouraged and backed me up for nearly twenty years now, although we have never met. But it seems to make no difference. I consider Graham Greene not only the finest writer, but the finest and most perfect friend a man can have in this world.'16 For his part, Greene thought Narayan a worthy candidate for the Nobel Prize,17 and in 1974 wrote: 'Since the death of Evelyn Waugh Narayan is the novelist I most admire in the English language.'18

disease itself, & the disease, which has been going on ever since my childhood & was only temporarily alleviated by psycho-analysis, lies in a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also one's material. Cure the disease & I doubt whether a writer would remain. I daresay that would be all to the good.'16

Many rather damaged priests and laypeople came to regard Graham Greene as someone who could help them with their personal problems; he hated this reputation and wished they would seek psychiatrists.

Evelyn Waugh proposed that the conclusion of the book affirms the mystery that 'no one knows the secrets of the human heart or the nature of God's mercy'.

more earth-bound fiction and especially to shake off the 'Catholic novelist' tag, which first took hold with Brighton Rock; Greene would often say that he was 'not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic'.3 A memorable phrase, it is more accurate as a description of the second half of his career than of the first. Indeed, it seems that the middle-aged Graham Greene was trying to cover his intellectual and artistic tracks.

The city of San Antonio itself struck Greene as pleasant but symptomatic of America, in that its depths were no different from it surfaces:

America, for Greene, was the great spiritual deception – the heresy of well-being.

Despite leading a 'disordered' life, Greene had a surprising effect on Catholics. Hovering on the edges of the church, his old friend Edith Sitwell, who converted some years later, wrote to him in 1945: 'I said before, but I repeat it, what a great priest you would have made. But you are better as you are.'12 She felt that he understood sin and redemption in a way the clergy did not.

Greene felt that a disaster had set in for the English novel after the death of Henry James; whereas traditional novelists had always conceived of their characters as being somehow under the eye of God, where their actions had an eternal consequence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions. This is a problem philosophers have worried about since the days of John Locke,

Catholic theology of the time, which made much of what the Jesuit Karl Rahner called the 'anonymous Christian', one who might live a graced life without believing church doctrine.