Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  Greene's selective autobiographies, A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape, were wonderful in their way, but I also felt they suffered from being somewhat elliptical. Greene had the strongly self-dramatizing streak that characterizes travelers more than it does novelists, and I never quite believed those seemingly well-polished stories about Russian roulette, failure, and school bullying. As for the nervous breakdown, it seemed to me that Greene's interest in dreams would sooner lead him to a psychiatrist, out of sheer curiosity, than would a nagging neurosis. Greene tells many stories about how he hated and suppressed certain books he wrote in his early years, and I felt these stories, too, to be exaggerations for effect.

  Sherry's biography not only substantiates these facts in Greene's life but adds detail to them. The manic-depression and suicide attempts were real, the sense of failure was repeated, and the suppressed novels apparently quite dreadful. After struggling with poetry and even publishing a book of it, Babbling April, Greene turned to journalism and fiction, made a success of his first novel, The Man Within, and then suffered the ignominious fate of writing one dud after another, culminating in his writing a life of Lord Rochester that lay unpublished for more than thirty years. Down and out is not merely a glib phrase to describe Greene's early writing life, for at various times he pondered the alternatives to writing—perhaps teaching in Bangkok or Norway or Japan or Burma—and he saw the folly of his having chucked his well-paid subeditor's job at The Times.

  With the writing of what he felt was his potboiler, Stamboul Train, Greene achieved popular success, but it was to be short-lived. This first volume of Greene's life tells two stories: Greene's courtship and marriage, and his first ten years as a novelist. Vivien said that Greene had a splinter of ice in his heart—it was that which made him so effective and truthful a writer. By the end of the first volume Greene appears to be coming to the end of marriage and just beginning to find real fame as a writer. The splinter of ice is now a daggerlike icicle.

  Greene's decision in 1935 to walk through the hinterland of Liberia was crucial. The unexpected feature of it was that he chose as a traveling companion his cousin Barbara. This young socialite proved amazingly equal to the task, nearly as tough and resourceful as Graham, and her own account of the trip, Land Benighted (reprinted as Too Late to Turn Back), should be read alongside Journey Without Maps. Going to Liberia proved to Greene that he could endure hardships, that he could be brave and take risks, that there was an attraction in squalor and seediness. Having put his mind to it, he had convinced himself that he had something of Jim Hawkins as well as Stevenson in him. One of Greene's most attractive traits was his willingness to put himself on the line. In the quietest sort of way he was a man of action, making the most of any experience. At the end of this first volume, after his five weeks—only—of travel in Mexico, he produced two of his best books, The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory.

  The unhealthiest aspect about a burning curiosity to know every last detail of a writer's life is that it often signals an utter indifference to a writer's work. Do we understand Greene's books better or like them more after knowing (as Sherry tells us) about the brothels and prostitutes in San Antonio in 1938, complete with names and addresses, adding, "No doubt some of those girls were still living there when Greene went to explore the street"? I am not convinced of this. Yet I found this biography fascinating in the same way that Greene must have found Lord Rochester fascinating, and I read it with the same enthusiasm that animated Greene when he went to a freak show in San Antonio to see two dead gangsters (mummified), Siamese-twinned sheep, and "a frog baby born to a lady in Oklahoma"—in other words, impure enthusiasm.

  The Conspicuous Absentee

  "I'm afraid that at the moment my health is pretty lousy," Greene wrote to me from his hospital bed in Vevey. "I am not supposed to drink at all, which is painful, and my days seem taken up with blood transfusions, vitamin injections and four different kinds of pill. I suppose one could expect worse at my age."

  True—he was eighty-six years old. But even reading that dire description, I felt he was still indestructible, and I did not seriously fear for his life. He was unlike any other writer I have known in his being physically fit, without effort. When anyone asked him how he managed to stay in such good health, he said that he ate and drank whatever he liked, and he boasted—to, among others, Fidel Castro—that he never exercised. In fact, he was an energetic walker his whole life, but he loathed outdoor types and was stuck on the idea of being dissolute. "I'm in the mood for a pipe," he sometimes said after a good lunch, meaning a puff of opium.

  Meeting him, I had the idea that he was someone who had had everything he had ever desired, and that it was perhaps this abundance that made him romanticize loss and failure. Certainly he disdained success. The idea of noble ruin greatly appealed to him, I think, because it implied struggle. He often spoke of his writer's block, yet he was immensely productive. And nearly all his fifty-four books are in print. But he did not want anyone to think that his achievement had been easy for him. I am quite sure he didn't care about not winning the Nobel Prize. In any case, he had a sworn enemy ("Over my dead body," the man supposedly said) on the judges' panel, and he was much more famous for not having won it. But since the prize is awarded on what the English call the Theory of Buggins' Turn ("Isn't it time for an Albanian?"), what is it really worth? "I see the Nobel people are at it again," V. S. Naipaul said to me the year a Nigerian won it. "Pissing on literature, as they do every year."

  The first impression you had of Greene was almost heroic: a man overwhelmingly tall, staring with a sort of imperious boredom straight over your head. But who had actually laid eyes on him? He was a conspicuous absentee, like Stevenson on Samoa ("my cousin," Greene said, and it was true; Christopher Isherwood was another cousin). Greene liked to be off in Nicaragua or India when any of his books appeared. He hated television, loathed guest appearances, and never promoted his books. He disliked celebrity, but I think he fancied being outrageous, even notorious. Any literary interview with him was done on his terms—and he deliberately made himself a bit mysterious. Once he appeared on a BBC TV interview in a darkened room, his face obscured for the duration of the program.

  "He's very, um," and then John le Carré searched for a suitable word—we were preparing a program to discuss Greene's work—"um, slippery, isn't he?"

  Greene hated public speaking, and the few times he was persuaded to do it in London, his audience was disappointed, as though they had attended a séance at which there were no rappings nor any ectoplasm produced.

  He was larger than life in a specific sense: six foot four, the handsome, even dashing young adventurer having become distinguished and statesmanly. His eyes were in a class with Madame Blavatsky's—there was no paler or more penetrating gaze in literature. They were almost unbelievably intimidating, and it is hard to imagine anyone lying into those eyes. Graham's brothers, Raymond and Hugh, were also tall, and equally robust. Hugh was a bureaucrat, Raymond an endocrinologist and a mountaineer who had known Aleister Crowley, the diabolist. But neither brother had the eyes.

  Greene's photographs show a severe face, one befitting a Companion of Honour (more sought-after than a knighthood), but those who could call him a friend knew his solemnity was a mask. He laughed often, and his laughter was deep and appreciative. He was an unusually good raconteur, and he had a fund of stories, mostly travelers' tales that had never found their way into print. A great one of these, about multiple murders in Argentina, had as its refrain, "And I was told nothing happens in Córdoba."

  Greene's comic side was so profound it verged on sadness and touched mania. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life, an otherwise highly selective book, he was frank about his mania, and he went further and described how he was a manic-depressive. He said his bipolar personality was responsible for novels as diverse as Travels with My Aunt and The Heart of the Matter, giddiness on the one hand, gloom on the other. I think his comic vein deepened as he grew ol
der.

  One of his biographers made much of the fact that Greene sought psychoanalysis, as if in seeking help he feared for his sanity. I am sure he was as much an observer on that couch as he was a patient. He was a man who seldom wasted an experience (although he traveled to Samoa and Tahiti and never wrote about those places). He did not regard madness as a weakness or a moral fault; it was another way of seeing the world, another form of inspiration. "Much madness is divinest sense," that sort of view. He was also a tremendous quoter of poetry stanzas—Browning, Kipling, and the scurrilous and obscene Lord Rochester.

  I think Greene's conversion to Catholicism was an act of rebellion against a family (and a country) that saw Catholics as exotic, suspect, and sinister. Belief also gave him a sense of sin, so his villains are not simply wrong, they are wicked and evil. The theological side of his work I find the least interesting, the most schematic. As a convert he wears his theology heavily—it is often a millstone in his novels—yet without question in the English novel of his time his religiosity set him apart.

  He liked thinking that he lived (to use one of his favorite lines from Browning) "on the dangerous edge of things"—politically, morally, emotionally. But was he living there? It seemed to me that he played it pretty safe—well heeled, connected—and that all this business of his being furtive, the spy-bore side of his personality, the opium eater, the ponderer of damnation, was a pose. Perhaps he really had played Russian roulette as a young man (he wrote several different versions of the event), but if so, he got a hell of a lot of mileage out of it. Dicing with death—I do believe it was as corny as that—is much more romantic, and it gives a biographer something to puzzle over. But, at bottom, isn't playing games of shoot-yourself-in-the-head also very, very silly?

  In his opinions and his manners, in the way he ran his literary life, in his lingo and his pleasures, he was an Edwardian—and an impressionable ten-year-old when the First World War began. Most of his literary heroes were still alive when he began to read them—Conrad, Saki, Ford Madox Ford; he was precocious enough to have ventured upon Henry James before the master died in 1916. But Greene's man-of-letters outlook was combined with an extraordinary zest for life. Edwardian though he may have been in most respects, he still relished flying to Paris or New York on the Concorde, first class at supersonic speed.

  I avoided reading him for a while, because in our early married life my first wife had a great fondness for him and his work. I was envious, irrationally demanding her attention. What about me and my writing? This was in Africa. Eventually I read him and was so bewitched I began to inhabit his world. That could not last, but I saw hope for myself as a nomadic writer, never writing about home. He inspired me and gave me heart.

  I was asked to interview Greene in London in the 1970s. We met at the Ritz and drank. I saw him several more times. Then I realized that it was an impossible task, and that writing about him as an assignment would be taking advantage of his generosity, invading his privacy, and letting the world in. In doing so, I feared losing his trust. I wanted to go on being his friend, so I turned him into a fictional character and put him in my novel Picture Palace. He laughed about it afterward, and we remained friends. He liked his mask, preferred being a fictional character.

  Just the other day, in Hawaii, I reread The End ofthe Affair. Greene's sense of place is so precise and appreciative, I began to miss south London, and to wonder, in a premonition of his death, what the world would be like without his gaze upon it. Temperamentally, he was much like the central character, Bendrix—a lonely man, capable of great sympathy, but with a sliver of ice in his heart.

  Greene's Reflections

  "It is time to close the quarry," Greene said when a huge and seemingly exhaustive biography of Rudyard Kipling appeared some years ago. After reading Reflections, a collection of essays, snippets, open letters, occasional poems, book reviews, and Sunday magazine pieces, I think it may be time to declare the Greene quarry officially closed. Surely nothing of much value can possibly remain, and some of the pieces that have been disinterred are of questionable literary value. And yet anyone who is interested in Greene ought to be interested in everything the man has written. Sixty-seven years ago, Greene wandered through Dublin, making notes on the Irish. The piece he wrote about it for the Weekly Westminster Gazette is here, one of the best in the book, with a good Greene ending about the city: "Like that most nightmarish of dreams, when one finds oneself in some ordinary and accustomed place, yet with a constant fear at the heart that something terrible, unknown and unpreventable is about to happen."

  That brooding, nameless-terror side of Greene is in great contrast to the puckishness that one also finds in his writing. I suppose puckishness and terror are a cozy way of describing manic-depression, but Greene has confirmed that his writing is, as we amateur psychiatrists say, bipolar. "Stop that fucking noise, you bugger," we find the Companion of Honour shouting at the door of a British professor in China. Greene believed the prof to be out of order; in fact, the horrible noise was that of some Chinese chatting amiably in the kitchen in their own language. Later in the same trip, Greene, requiring a little something for a weekend, asked his male guide about contraceptives.

  "In this village, for example, there would be a chemist shop?"

  "Yes. Yes. In all places."

  "Where a man can buy a sheath?"

  "Yes, yes, of course."

  "Would you mind going and buying one for me?"

  The guide hesitated a long while before he found his reply. "That I cannot do. You see, I do not know your size."

  A novelist's collection of occasional pieces can often seem like an archive for his or her fictional ideas. Many of the pieces in Reflections are like diary entries, but written for magazines and newspapers. Greene goes to a place out of curiosity; he is fascinated by the place; he writes a piece about it with all the gory details. Nearly all the places eventually form the background for a novel. So there are a number of pieces here about Vietnam, one on Haiti, one on Paraguay, several on Cuba. He makes a point of calling this "reporting," not "journalism."

  Some of the pieces are portraits—Greene's heroes. One quartet is made up of Charlie Chaplin, R. K. Narayan, Henry James, and Ho Chi Minh. Yes, it would make an odd bridge party, but a reader of Greene's work would be startled to find this foursome repeatedly mentioned. I was reassured by the fact that Greene often gets the lowdown on a place from his taxi driver ("'Money speaks,' my driver said, 'but it shouts in Mexico.'") That is what reporting is. A journalist, on the other hand, talks to a taxi driver and writes of "informed sources."

  Some of these pieces we have read before in a different and more finished form. Others, particularly those concerned with films, have not appeared before, not even in Greene's collected film criticism in The Pleasure Dome. He expresses gratitude, good sense, and some regret when speaking of all the time he spent writing screenplays and watching bad movies. But he is a wonderful film critic, and at his best here in three or four essays where he is reminiscing or reflecting on films and filmmaking.

  The scariest and saddest pieces concern Indochina, specifically Vietnam in the 1950s. One part I found more horrific than the episode it inspired in the subsequent novel, The Quiet American. Greene is on a bombing raid with a French pilot. After dropping bombs into the unknown, they head for home, into the sunset, but not before sighting a victim in a sampan.

  Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected rice fields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The gun gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks; we didn't even wait to see our victim struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home. I thought again, as I have thought when I saw a dead child in a ditch in Phat Diem, "I hate war." There had been something so shocking in our fortuitous choice of prey—we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone ag
ain, adding our little quota to the world's dead.

  Inevitably, a collection that spans so many years (1923 to 1988) contains some contradictions and awkwardnesses. In several pieces Greene takes a sideswipe at J. B. Priestley, and in another he praises him extravagantly. He expresses an opinion about thieves or Catholics or Americans, and you don't know whether he is teasing or naive or in one of his puckishly manic moods. He extols Cuba in 1963, and then three years later writes, "Things had improved since 1963."

  But the strangest effects in the book are those produced by the mere passage of time. In 1928, as an undergraduate, he wrote a piece about pushing a barrel organ across Hertfordshire with Claude Cockburn. The piece is not bad, but it is stiffly jaunty and colorless. Returning to the same episode in a book review forty years later, he gives different details, quite funny ones, about being dressed as tramps, about mistaking a cow disturbed at night for an invisible coughing figure who tried to attack them, and about how at one stage of the trip both men wore Halloween masks that were so silly and irritating that they parted company. This collection describes why Greene didn't mention those details the first time, by showing how he grew in confidence and accomplishment.